THE SIBYL AND THE LOVERS.
There had been no absolute disagreement between Aurora and her lover;
yet with that keen intuition which belongs to love, and which becomes
almost superhuman when love blends with genius in a woman’s heart, she
felt that he was disturbed, that she had done something to arouse
painful thoughts, which led him, for the time, away from her. She did
not weep—he had told her that grief annoyed him—but in the shadow of
that beautiful portico her little heart might heave, unnoticed, beneath
its velvet bodice, and, spite of herself, tears would swell up into her
great, mournful eyes.
“You seem weary, little one,” he said at length, taking heed of her
drooping attitude. “Let us find a place to sit down. I also begin to
feel tired; we have been wandering in the ruins these three hours!”
He moved on, and she kept by his side, with her face averted, that he
might not see her tears. They crossed an angle of the court, and
entering one of the arches, passed through an open door into the _Sala
de los Abencerrages_. The marble basin of a fountain, now dry, occupied
the centre of this room, and upon its rounded edge the two seated
themselves.
Here the moonbeams came more faintly, penetrating the open work
cloister, and throwing fantastic shadows on the pavement. Beautiful
stalactites hung over them, peering downward, as it were, from a bed of
shadows. Portions of the walls were dim. The rest gleamed out, with all
their delicate tracery revealed, like luminous frost-work, such as you,
of a colder climate, find upon your window-panes, when the mornings are
unusually cold.
They had been sitting there some minutes, yet I do not think they had
spoken. His arm was around her, and it is impossible that he should not
have felt the swelling of her heart, for, as I have said, it was flooded
with a tender grief, brought on by that hard, hard thing to bear, the
first reproof from beloved lips. He was a man of strong feelings, but
not one to utter those feelings much in words. A degree of proud reserve
followed him even in his moments of deepest tenderness.
No man ever guessed half that was going on in his heart, and what is
stranger still, no woman ever knew the whole. There might have been
something of pride in his sensations when he saw the entire control that
he had gained over that poor, wild heart. For what human being is above
pride in that conquest which sweeps the entire life of another into his
bosom? But he was touched also with a feeling of sadness, of regret for
having moodily reproved her for what was, after all, the spirit of her
race. Still he did not speak these regrets, but drew her closer to him,
and taking her little brown hand in his, pressed it to his lips.
He felt her heart leap against his arm, but she only crept a little
closer to him, trembling all over, and smiling through her tears.
“And do you indeed love me so much?” he said, with a tone of sadness in
his voice, for he was asking himself where must all this end; and the
answer that presented itself made his better nature recoil.
She drew his hand toward her, and pressed her lips upon the palm. There
was something peculiar and child-like in this act. With all her
unreserve, it was the only outward proof that she had ever given him of
the passion that was transfiguring her whole nature.
While her lips were still upon his palm, he felt her start, listen, and
shudder all over. Then clinging to his arm with one hand, she turned her
head and looked backward over her shoulder. It was in this chamber that
the Abencerrages were supposed to have been beheaded, and a deep, broad
stain, which tradition marks out as their blood, discolors half the
marble fountain on which the lovers sat. Feeling her shudder, and
remarking that her head was turned that way, he supposed that it must be
this blood shadow which suddenly occupied her thoughts.
“Nay, how childish,” he was beginning to say; but she broke from his
arm, rushed by the fountain, and seizing hold of a slender pillar at the
opening of an alcove, all in shadow, as if stricken by some sudden fear,
stood peering into the recess.
He arose and was going toward her, when a little object, scarcely larger
than a child of ten years old, and so thin that it seemed but the shadow
of something else, passed slowly by him. He would not have believed it
human, but for the snake-like glitter of two eyes that gleamed their
rage upon him, and gave vitality to the shadow as it passed.
Aurora still clung to the column, waving to and fro as if she must have
fallen but for that support. She turned her face to his as he came up,
but the pallor that lay upon it, the fear that quivered over limb and
feature, had utterly changed her. He would not have known the face
again.
“Aurora, what is this? What terrible thing has happened?” he exclaimed,
reaching forth his arm to support her. But she shrank away, shuddering,
and still clinging to the pillar, she writhed herself behind it,
whispering hoarsely,
“It is my grandmother; she has heard us!”
The Englishman was enough affected by this to hasten into the court, and
satisfy himself that the person who had passed him was indeed Aurora’s
grandmother. He saw her gliding away through the shadowy side of the
cloisters, and it seemed to him that muttered wrath and shrill curses
were blended with the silvery rush of the fountain.
The sound struck him with strange terror. Still ignorant of the exact
danger that might threaten him or the poor Gitanilla, he could not
account for the cold thrill that passed through his frame as the curses
pierced to his ear through the sweet fall of those waters.
He went back into the _Sala de los Abencerrages_, and found my mother
crouching down by the marble basin, with her wild eyes turned toward the
entrance.
“Was it she? Did she speak?” whispered the poor child, rising with
difficulty and moving toward him.
The young man was shocked by this wild terror, so disproportioned, as he
thought, to the cause. He took both her hands in his and shook them
gently, hoping thus to arouse her from the trance of fear that seemed to
have benumbed the very life in her veins.
“Sit down by me, Aurora—sit down, child, here in your old place, and
tell me what all this means.”
He spoke with gentle authority, and without a shadow of the terror that
shook every limb of her body. The sound of his clear, bold voice seemed
to reassure her. She crept forward with timid hesitation, and allowed
him to place her by his side.
“Now tell me, child, what troubles you thus? If that vicious shadow was
indeed your grandmother, she has gone away quietly enough, no harm has
come of it.”
“You little know,” said the Gitanilla, still keeping her eyes upon the
entrance—“you little know our people, or her.”
“But what is there for me to learn? Tell me what this fear means?”
“It means,” answered the poor thing, locking her hands hard and pressing
them down upon her trembling knees—“it means that they will poison me.”
“Poison you! this is the madness of fear,” exclaimed the young man,
impatiently.
“Or perhaps stone me to death in some dark hollow of the mountains, the
whole tribe hunting down one poor creature for her love of the Busne,
Chaleco among the first.”
“Aurora, are you mad? Has this miserable little witch crazed you?”
“You will not believe me—you have not seen the poison drao scattered
into the wholesome food which an enemy is to eat—or a poor girl
strangled in her bed, and buried in some rude pass of the mountains, on
the very day when she was to have danced at her own wedding festival.”
“But this is murder!” cried the young man. “The laws of Spain will not
permit men to kill their females in cold blood.”
“Our laws are older than those of Spain,” answered the Gitanilla, with a
certain degree of pride in her tone, as if she gloried in the antiquity
of the very custom that was to crush her. “Our laws are older and better
kept than those of the Busne; traditions do not run so far back as their
origin. They are fixed and unchangeable—he who breaks them dies!”
“But what have you done, innocent child, that these laws, however
strengthened by antiquity, should fall on you?”
“I love you, a Busne—one of the race we hold accursed—our enemies—our
oppressors. I am alone with you, and have been for hours, here in these
vast ruins. But that is nothing; that they approve so long as it brings
gold; but I love you! I have said it in words, in my looks, every way in
which love can speak when it burdens the heart with its sweet joy. She,
my weird grandame, has seen this. Did I not feel that she was close by
in the ambassador’s hall?”
“But they dare not kill you for that—for the innocent affection which
you could not help—affection that has dreamed of no wrong.”
“She has seen us here, sitting together; she has heard me, heard you.
They will believe me an outcast of the tribe, and kill me as they would
a viper!”
The young man arose, walked out into the court, and began to pace up and
down the glittering pavement, hurriedly, as one seeks rapid motion when
some great mental or moral struggle is going on in the mind. Gradually
his steps became more rapid; his brow flushed, and with an impetuous
movement of one hand, as if thus dashing aside all further consideration
of a harassing subject, he sought the Gitanilla again.
“Aurora,” he said, in a hurried manner, “you shall never go back into
that nest of fiends—look up, child—you are mine now. They shall not
touch a hair of your head, or even look upon your face again! Come, what
have you to fear? I am powerful—I am rich, and I love you. I struggle
against it no longer—it is a duty now, I love you! Go with me to my own
country—I cannot give you this sky or these fairy ruins, but you shall
be surrounded with beautiful things nevertheless. You shall study,
learn; forget that miserable ravine burrowed with human fox-holes, and
swarming with murderers. Come, Aurora, look up, I long to see that cold,
dead color swept away. Smile, smile my bird, we will not part again.”
When a nation has but one virtue, how powerful that one must be. There
is much good in every human heart that God has created, and when all
that good pours itself into a single channel, it has a power and
vitality which men of more diffuse cultivation little dream of.
Aurora knew nothing of her lover’s rank, of his wealth, or the thousand
barriers that lay between his condition and hers. She was aware that
sometimes, when a Gitano becomes wealthy—a rare case—he had been known
to wed a Busne wife, but that such unions invariably made the Gitano an
object of suspicion and dislike to his own people. If this privilege
were permitted to the men, it might be—she could not tell, no case had
ever come beneath her observation—extended to the females also. But then
a betrothed female like herself—the promised wife of a count—how was
this to be hoped? All these thoughts, full of doubt and trouble, came
upon my poor mother while the Englishman stood impatiently—for his
restrained manner had entirely disappeared—waiting her reply.
“They would not let me go—I am betrothed. No one of our females have
ever married with the Busne,” she said, at last, in a voice that
betrayed the utter despondency that possessed her.
The young man started, and a flush swept over his forehead. At first he
found it difficult to speak. How very, very hard it is for a man, whose
impulses are all honorable, to express a wrong wish in words! But after
a brief struggle he became cold and grave. She must understand his full
meaning. He would not deceive—would not even persuade her. If she went
with him it must be with a full knowledge of her position, of the
impossibility that any marriage could ever exist between them.
Some men would have glossed this over, covered it with transcendental
poetry, smothered the sin with rose-leaves. He did nothing of the kind.
Knowing the wrong, he would neither conceal this conviction from himself
nor her. Therefore it was that, with a cold, almost severe conciseness,
he explained himself. True, there was little merit in this; it was
rather a peace offering to his own pride than a homage to truth. From
all that he had heard of the gipsies, he did not believe that anything
he was saying could make much difference to the Gitanilla. But it was
due to himself, and so he spoke plainly.
She understood him at last. It was with great difficulty, for the idea
entered her mind as a proposition of murder would have done. It dawned
upon her by degrees, arousing and kindling the wild Gitana blood in her
veins with every new thought. She heard him through, not without
attempting to speak, but the effort seemed strangling her. He saw that
she writhed faintly, once or twice, but heeded it not and went on.
At length she sprang up, her cheeks in a dusky blaze, her eyes full of
lightning. Her little tawny hand was clenched like a vice and stamping
her foot upon the pavement, she struggled for voice. It broke out at
last, loud and ringing, like the cry of an angry bird.
“I am a Gitana—a Gitana. Did you take me for a Busne?”
Before he could answer, or had half recovered from the surprise into
which this storm of passion threw him, she had gone. He saw her dart
into the cloister, and caught one glimpse of a shadow that seemed to
leap across the court, but even that had disappeared before he could
reach the broad moonlight.