The Gypsy Queen's Vow. May Agnes Fleming

means of dragging her down to poverty and disgrace. The woman was to keep it out of her sight while she remained, and tell her it had died, should she make any inquiries.

      “During the next week, I scarcely ever left the cottage; and when she was sufficiently recovered to use a pen, she wrote a few lines to the principal of the academy, saying she had gone to visit a friend, and would not return for a fortnight, at least. As she had ever been a petted child, accustomed to go and come unquestioned, her absence excited no surprise or suspicion; and secreted in the cottage, she remained for the next two weeks. How the old woman managed to conceal the child I know not; but certain it is, she did it.

      “The time I had dreaded came at last. My better nature had awoke since the birth of my child; and I resolved to tell her all, cost what it might, and set her free. Mother, you can conceive the bitter humiliation such a confession must have been to me – yet I made it. I told her all; how basely I had deceived her; how deeply I had wronged her. In that moment, every spark of love she had ever felt for me was quenched forever in her majestic indignation, her scorn, and utter contempt. Silently she arose and confronted me, white as the dead, superb in her withering scorn, as far above me as the heavens from the earth. All the pride of her proud race swelled in her breast, in a loathing too deep and intense for words. But those steady, darkening eyes, that seemed scintillating sparks of fire, I will never forget.

      “‘Here we must part, then, Reginald Germaine; and on this earth we must never meet again!’ she said, in a voice steady from its very depth of scorn. ‘Of the matchless wrong you have done me, I will not speak; it is too late for that now. If one spark of the honor you once professed still lingers in your breast, be silent as regards the past. I ask no more. You have forever blighted my life; but the world need never know what we once were to each other. If money is any object’ – and her beautiful lip curled with a contempt too intense for words – ‘you shall have half my wealth – the whole of it, if you will – if it only buys your silence. I will return to school, and try to forget the unutterable degradation into which I have sunk. You go your own way, and we are strangers from henceforth!’

      “Mother! mother! such was our parting; in scorn and hatred on one side; in utter despair and undying remorse on the other. That day she returned to school; I fled, to drown thought in the maddening whirl and tumult of London; and we have never met since. She is unmarried still, and the reigning belle of every gilded salon in London; but I know she never will, never can, forget the abyss of humiliation into which I dragged her down. For her sake, to injure her happiness, I would willingly end this wretched existence, but that I must live for what is so dear to the gipsy heart – revenge! With all her lofty pride, what she will feel in knowing she is the wife of a convicted felon, God and her own heart alone will ever know.”

      He threw himself into a seat, and shading his face with his hands, sat silent; but the convulsive heaving of his strong chest, his short, hard breathing, told, more than words could ever do, what he felt at that moment. And still the dusky shadow in the duskier corner sat silently glaring upon him with those red, lurid eyes of flame.

      “To tell you this story, to commit my child to your charge, I wished to see you to-night, mother,” he said, at last, without looking up. “She does not dream of its existence; she was told it died the hour of its birth, and was buried while she was still unconscious. In this pocketbook you will find the address of the woman who keeps it; tell her the count – for as such she knows me – sent you for it. Take it with you to Yetholm, mother; try to think it is your son, Reginald, and forget the miserable convict whom you may never see more.”

      Still no reply, but oh, the fixed, burning gaze of those spectral eyes of fire!

      “Mother, you must leave me now,” he said, lifting his head, and looking sorrowfully in her rigid, haggard face; “for the few hours that are left me, I would like to be alone. It is better for us both that we part now.”

      “I will not go!” said a voice so hollow, so unnatural, that it seemed to issue from the jaws of death. “I will not go. I defy heaven and earth, and God himself, to tear me from you now.”

      “Mother, it is my wish,” he said, calmly.

      “Yours, Reginald?” she cried, in a voice of unutterable reproach. “You wish that I should leave you? For fifteen years I have given you up, and in one short hour you tire of me now. Oh, Reginald, my son! my son!”

      No words can describe the piercing anguish, the utter woe, that rived that wild cry up from her tortured heart.

      He came over, and laid his small, delicate hand on hers, hard, coarse, and black with sun, wind and toil.

      “Listen to me, my mother!” And his low, calm, soothing tones were in strong contrast to her impassioned voice. “I am not tired of you – you wrong me by thinking so; but I have letters to write, and many matters to arrange before to-morrow’s sun rises. I am tired, too, and want to rest; for it is a long time since sleep has visited my eyes, mother.”

      “Sleep,” she bitterly echoed; “and when do you think I have slept. Look at these sunken eyes, this ghastly face, this haggard form, and ask when I have slept. Think of the mighty wrong I have suffered, and ask when I shall sleep again.”

      “My poor, unhappy mother!”

      “He can sleep,” she broke out, with a low, wild laugh. “Oh, yes! in his bed of down, with his princely son under the same roof, with menials to come at his beck, he can sleep. Yes, he sleeps now! but the hour comes when that sleep shall last forever! Then my eyes may close, but never before!”

      “You are delirious, mother; this blow has turned your brain.”

      She rose to her feet, her tall, gaunt form looming up in the shadowy darkness; her wild black hair streaming disheveled down her back; her fierce eyes blazing with demoniacal light, one long, bony arm raised and pointing to heaven. Dark, fierce and stern, she looked like some dread priestess of doom, invoking the wrath of Heaven on the world.

      “Delirious, am I?” she said, in her deep, bell-like tones, that echoed strangely in the silent cell. “If undying hate, if unresting vengeance, if revenge that will never be satiated but by his misery, be delirium, then I am mad. I leave you now, Reginald, such is your command; and remember, when far away, you leave one behind you who will wreak fearful vengeance for all we have both suffered.”

      “Mother, Lord De Courcy is not so much to blame after all, since he believes me guilty. I am not alarmed by your wild threats; for I know, in the course of time, this mad hate will grow less.”

      “Never – never!” she fiercely hissed through her clenched teeth. “May God forget me if I ever forget my vow! Reginald, if I thought that man could go to heaven, and I by some impossibility could be saved, too, I would take a dagger and send my soul to perdition, sooner than go there with him.”

      Upturned in the red light of the lamp, her face, as she spoke, was the face of a demon.

      “Strong hate, stronger than death!” he said, half to himself, as he gazed on that fiendish face. “Farewell, then, mother. Will you fulfill my last request?”

      “About your child? – yes.”

      “Thank you, dearest mother. If so lost a wretch as I am dare invoke Heaven, I would ask its blessings on you.”

      “Ask no blessing for me!” she fiercely broke in. “I would hurl it back in the face of the angels, did they offer it.”

      Folding her mantle around her, she knotted the handkerchief, that had fallen off, under her chin, and stood ready to depart. The young man went to the door, and knocked loudly. A moment after, the tramp of heavy feet was heard in the corridor approaching the door.

      “It is the jailer to let you out. Once more, good-by, mother.”

      She was hard, and stern, and rigid now; and there were no tears in her dry, stony, burning eyes, as she turned to take a last farewell of the son she idolized – the son she might never see again. His eyes were dim, but her tears were turned to sparks of fire.

      Without a word she pressed one hot, burning kiss on his handsome brow; and then the door opened, and she flitted out in the darkness like an evil