GIPSY’S PARENTAGE.
A stifled moan escaped Lelia’s ashen lips and she hid her face against
Laurie’s arm, her form trembling with dismay, feeling as if her sin had
indeed found her out.
It was the most terrible moment of Lelia’s life, crouching there beside
her cold, unloving husband, expecting the suspended sword to fall at
any moment on her head.
Of course, the gipsy woman knew who had tried to kill Gipsy, and put
her in the old well. She would blurt it out presently after torturing
her victim a while, like a cruel cat playing with a mouse.
Lelia intended to deny it all, of course, but she knew that would not
help her at all. Gipsy could fasten the crime upon her if she chose.
And who could guess but that she would choose?
This was her hour of vengeance on Lelia, who had wronged and flaunted
her all her life. She would be more of an angel than Lelia believed
her if she held back her hand from her revenge.
She waited, agonizingly, for the woman to accuse her of her sin, and as
she clung to Laurie she felt his strong frame shaken, too, with deep
emotion.
He was trembling with pure joy that sweet Gipsy Darke was really alive.
His whole heart thrilled with subtle rapture.
At the same time his repugnance to Lelia’s presence was so extreme that
he would have pushed her from him if he had dared, crying out that he
hated her because she had won him by a fake pretense when she knew that
his heart was no longer her own.
He endured her touch, her nearness, with passive disgust, fixing eager
eyes on the woman, to whom the general was saying:
“Why have you not brought this information to The Crags before?”
“I kept silent, hoping that a reward might be offered. When I heard
to-day that my hopes were realized I came at once.”
“Um-hum! Now tell us how your son came to find Gipsy Darke in the
well,” continued the old general.
“He was passing through these grounds about midnight, making a
short cut to the camp, when he heard a low moaning from some thick
shrubberies. He investigated the matter and found that the body of a
young girl tied around the middle with a thick sheet, was suspended in
the well from an iron hook that had caught the clothing, leaving the
lower part of the body in the water up to the shoulders. He discovered
that the girl had been struck on the head with some blunt instrument.
The chill of the water had probably revived her from seeming death.
My son extricated her from her perilous position and brought her to
me. What was our horror to recognize in her the young protégée of Miss
Willoughby, the infant we left in the wood seventeen years ago when
driven away by the cruel Colonel Ritchie.”
“He is dead!” said the general, with a glance at Lelia’s bowed head.
“I am well aware of that, sir. He was not likely to live long after
the curse I put upon him for his brutal treatment,” the gipsy woman
answered candidly.
Lelia would have liked to spring at her like a fury, but she did not
dare; she began to fear the woman she had just now defied.
So she maintained a trembling silence while General Willoughby said
indignantly:
“Tut, tut, your curses had nothing to do with it! The colonel fell in
battle as soldiers expect to fall, defending their country. But as for
you, what excuse can you offer for deserting that helpless infant when
you left?”
“She was left there in the hope that she would be taken to The Crags
and raised by Miss Willoughby. A gipsy watched it unseen until the
expected happened, then we all went away satisfied.”
“Did the child belong to you?”
“No--nor to none of us!”
“How came you by it?”
“In this way: The girl’s grandmother, a regular beauty in her girlhood,
eloped with a rich swell down South, and her tribe ostracized her
forever. But he married her and made her very happy in the ten years
she lived with him. She left at her death one beautiful daughter.
The rich swell married again, and his second wife and her children
despised the girl with gipsy blood in her veins. They turned the
father’s heart against her so that she turned to her first lover, a
poor clerk, for sympathy. She married him, secretly, and the enraged
father disinherited her and drove her forth. There followed some months
of wedded life, then she sought us out, saying she had returned to her
mother’s tribe to die. With a beautiful infant on her breast she sank
into death, and the child was left in our reluctant care. It had blood
in its veins that could never run contentedly in a gipsy camp, so we
buried the poor young mother and deserted the child for its own good.”