THE HUT ON THE HEATH.
Far away from the lofty, battlemented ancestral home of Sir Jasper
Kingsland--straight to the seashore went Achmet the Astrologer. A long
strip of bleak marshland spreading down the hill-side and sloping to
the sea, arid and dry in the summer-time--sloppy and sodden now--that
was his destination. It was called Hunsden's Heath--a forlorn and
desolate spot, dotted over with cottages of the most wretched kind. To
one of these wretched hovels, standing nearest the sea and far removed
from the rest, Achmet swiftly made his way.
The sun was high in the heavens; the sea lay all a-glitter beneath it.
The astrologer had got over the ground at a swift, swinging stride, and
he had walked five miles at least; but he paused now, with little sign
of fatigue in his strange white face. Folding his arms over his
breast, he surveyed the shining sky, the glittering sea, with a slow,
dreamy smile.
"The sun shines and the sea sparkles on the natal day of the heir of
Kingsland," he said to himself; "but for all that it is a fatal day to
him. 'The sins of the father shall be visited on the children even to
the third and fourth generation,' saith the Book Christians believe in.
Christians!" he laughed a harsh, strident laugh. "Sir Jasper Kingsland
is a Christian! The religion that produces such men must be a glorious
one. He was a Christian when he perjured himself and broke her heart.
'Tis well. As a Christian he can not object to the vengeance
Christianity teaches."
He turned away, approached the lonely hut, and tapped thrice--sharp
staccato knocks--at the door. The third one was answered. The door
swung back, and a dark damsel looked out.
"Is it thee, Pietro?"
"It is I, Zara."
He stepped in as he spoke, closed the door, took her face between his
hands, and kissed both brown cheeks. The girl's dark face lighted up
into the splendor of absolute beauty as she returned his caress.
"And how is it with thee, my Zara, and thy little one?"
"It is well. And thyself, Pietro?"
"Very well. And the mother?"
"Ah, the mother! Poor mother! She lies as you saw her last--as you
will always see her in this lower world--dead in life! And he"--the
girl Zara's eyes lighted fiercely up--"didst see him, Pietro?"
"I have seen him, spoken to him, told him the past, and terrified him
for the future. There is a son, Zara--a new-born son."
"Dog and son of a dog!" Zara cried, furiously. "May curses light upon
him in the hour of his birth, and upon all who bear his hated name!
Say, Pietro, why didst thou not strangle the little viper as you would
any other poisonous reptile?"
"My Zara, I did not even see him. He lies cradled in rose leaves, no
doubt, and the singing of the west wind is not sweet enough for his
lullaby. No profane eye must rest on this sacred treasure fresh from
the hands of the gods! Is he not the heir of Kingsland? But Achmet
the Astrologer has cast his horoscope, and Achmet, and Zara, his wife,
wilt see that the starry destiny is fulfilled. Shall we not?"
"If I only had him here," Zara cried, clawing the air with her two
hands, "I would throttle the baby snake, and fling him dead in his
father's face. And that father! Oh, burning alive would be far too
merciful for him!"
Achmet smiled, and drew her long black braids caressingly through his
fingers.
"You know how to hate, and you will teach our little one. Yes, the
fate I have foretold shall come to pass, and the son of Sir Jasper will
live to curse the day of his birth. And now I will remove my disguise,
and wash and breakfast, for I feel the calls of hunger."
The lower apartment of the hut on the heath was the very picture of
abject poverty and dreary desolation. The earthen floor was broken and
rough; the sunlight came sifting through the chinks in the broken
walls. A smoky fire of wet driftwood smoldered, under a pot on the
crook. There was neither table nor chairs. A straw pallet with a
wretched coverlet lay in one corner; a few broken stools were scattered
around; a few articles of clothing hung on the wall. That was all.
"The little one sleeps," the man said, casting a swift glance over at
the pallet. "Our pretty baby, Zara. Ah, if Sir Jasper Kingsland loves
his first-born son as we love our child, or half so well, we are almost
avenged already!"
"He had need to love it better than his first-born daughter!" Zara
said, fiercely. "The lion loves its whelp, the tiger its cub; but he,
less human than the brutes, casts off his offspring in the hour of its
birth!"
"Meaning yourself, my Zara?" the man said, with his slow, soft smile.
"What would you have, degraded daughter of a degraded mother--his toy
of an hour? And there is another daughter--a fair-haired, insipid
nonentity of a dozen years, no more like our beautiful one here than a
farthing rush-light is like the stars of heaven."
He drew down the tattered quilt, and gazed with shining eyes of love
and admiration at the sleeping face of a child, a baby girl of scarce
two years, the cherub face rosy with sleep, smiling in her dreams; the
long, silky black lashes sweeping the flushed cheek; the abundant,
feathery, jet-black curls floating loosely about--an exquisite picture
of blooming, healthful, beautiful childhood.
Zara came to where the man knelt.
"My beautiful one! my rosebud!" she murmured. "Pietro, the sun shines
on nothing half so lovely in this lower world!"
"And yet the black, bad blood of the Gitana flows in her veins, too.
She is a Spanish gypsy, as her mother and grandmother before her. Nay,
not her mother, since the blue blood of all the Kingsland's flows in
her veins."
"Never!" cried Zara, her eyes ablaze. "If I thought one drop of that
man's bitter blood throbbed in my heart, the first knife I met should
let it forth. Look at me!" she wildly cried, "look at me,
Pietro--Zara, your wife! Have I one look of him or his abhorred
English race?"
"My Zara, no! You are Sir Jasper Kingsland's daughter, but there is no
look of the great Sir Jasper in your gypsy face, nor in the face of our
darling, either. She is all our own!"
"I would strangle her in her cradle, dearly as I love her, else!" the
woman said, her passionate face aflame. "Pietro, my blood is like
liquid fire when I think of him and my mother's wrongs."
"Wait, Zara--wait. The wheel will turn and our time come. And now for
breakfast!"
She whipped off the pot, removed the lid, and a savory gush of steam
filled the room. The man Pietro laughed.
"Our poached hare smells appetizing. Keep the choicest morsel for the
mother, Zara, and tell her I will be with her presently. There!
Achmet the Astrologer lies in a heap."
He had deftly taken off his flowing cloak, his long, silvery beard and
hair, and flung them together in a corner, and now he stood in the
center of the room, a stalwart young fellow of thirty or thereabouts,
with great Spanish eyes and profuse curling hair of an inky blackness.
"Let me but wash this white enamel off my face," he said, giving
himself a shake, "and Pietro is himself again. Sir Jasper would hardly
recognize Achmet, I fancy, if he saw him now."
He walked to a shelf on which was placed a wash-bowl and towel, and
plunged his face and head into the cold water. Five minutes' vigorous
splashing and rubbing, and he emerged, his pallid face brown as a
berry, his black hair in a snarl of crisp curls.
"And now to satisfy the inner man," he said, walking over to the pot,
seizing a wooden spoon, and drawing up a cricket. "My tramp of last
night and this morning has made me famously hungry, Zara."
"And the hare soup is good," said Zara. "While you breakfast, Pietro,
I will go to mother. Come up when you finish."
A steep stair-way that was like a ladder led to the loft. Zara
ascended this with agile fleetness, and the late astrologer was left
alone at his very unmagician-like work of scraping the pot with a
wooden spoon. Once or twice, as the fancy crossed him of the contrast
between Achmet, the Astrologer reading the stars, and Pietro the tramp
scraping the bones of the stolen hare, he laughed grimly to himself.
"And the world is made up of just such contrasts," he thought, "and
Pietro at his homely breakfast is more to be dreaded than Achmet
casting the horoscope. Ah! Sir Jasper Kingsland, it is a very fine
thing to be a baronet with fifteen thousand pounds a year, a noble
ancestral seat, a wife you love, and a son you adore. And yet Pietro,
the vagabond tramp--the sunburned gypsy, with stolen hares to eat, and
rags to wear, and a hut to lodge in--would not exchange places with you
this bright March day. We have sworn vendetta to you and all of your
blood, and we will keep our vow!"
His swarthy face darkened with passionate vindictiveness as he arose.
"'As a man sows so shall he reap,'" he muttered between his clinched
teeth, setting his face toward Kingsland Court. "You, my Lord of
Kingsland, have sown the wind. You shall learn what it is to reap the
whirlwind!"
"Pietro! Pietro!" crowed a little voice, gleefully. "Papa Pietro!
take Sunbeam!"
The little sleeper in the bed had sat up, her bright, dark face
sparkling, two little dimpled arms outstretched.
The man turned, his vindictive face growing radiant.
"Papa Pietro's darling! his life! his angel! And how does the little
Sunbeam?"
He caught her up, covering her face with kisses.
"My love! my life! my darling! When Pietro is dead, and Zara is old
and feeble, and Zenith dust and ashes, you will live, my radiant angel,
my black-eyed beauty, to perpetuate the malediction. When his son is a
man, you will be a woman, with all a woman's subtle power and more than
a woman's beauty, and you will be his curse, and his bane, and his
blight, as his father has been ours! Will you not, my little Sunbeam?"
"Yes, papa--yes, papa!" lisped the little one.
"Pietro!" called his wife, "if you have done breakfast, come up.
Mother is awake and would see you."
"Coming, _carissima_!"
He kissed the baby girl, placed her on the pallet, and sprung lightly
up the steep stair.
The loft was just a shade less wretched than the apartment below.
There was a bed on the floor, more decently covered, two broken chairs,
a table with some medicine bottles and cups, and a white curtain on the
one poor window.
On the bed lay a woman, over whom Pietro bent reverently the moment he
entered the room. It was the wreck of a woman who, in the days gone
by, must have been gloriously beautiful; who was beautiful still,
despite the ravages years, sickness, and poverty had wrought.
The eyes that blazed brilliant and black were the eyes of Zara--the
eyes of the baby Sunbeam below--and this woman was the mother of one,
the grandmother of the other.
Pietro knelt by the pallet and tenderly kissed one transparent hand.
The great black eyes turned upon him wild and wide.
"Thou hast seen him, Pietro?" in a breathless sort of way. "Zara says
so."
"I have seen him, my mother; I have spoken to him. I spent hours with
Sir Jasper Kingsland last night."
"Thou didst?" Her words came pantingly, while passion throbbed in
every line of her face. "And there is a son--an heir?"
"There is."
She snatched her hand away and threw up her withered arms with a
vindictive shriek.
"And I lie here, a helpless log, and he triumphs! I, Zenith, the Queen
of the Tribe--I, once beautiful and powerful, happy and free! I lie
here, a withered hulk, what he has made me! And a son and heir is born
to him!"
As if the thought had goaded her to madness, she leaped up in bed,
tossing her gaunt arms and shrieking madly:
"Take me to him--take me to him! Zara! Pietro! Take me to him, if ye
are children of mine, that I may hurl my burning curse upon him and his
son before I die!"
She fell back with an impotent scream, and the man Pietro caught her in
his arms. Quivering and convulsed, she writhed in an epileptic fit.
"She will kill herself yet," Pietro said. "Hand me the drops, Zara."
Zara poured something out of a bottle into a cup, and Pietro held it to
the sick woman's livid lips.
She choked and swallowed, and, as if by magic, lay still in his arms.
Very tenderly he laid her back on the bed.
"She will sleep now, Zara," he said. "Let us go."
They descended the stairs. Down below, the man laid his hands on his
wife's shoulders and looked into her face.
"Watch her, Zara," he said, "for she is mad, and the very first
opportunity she will make her escape and seek out Sir Jasper Kingsland;
and that is the very last thing I want. So watch your mother well."