The Baronet's Bride Part 4

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 pa.s.sion throbbed in every line of her face. "And there is a son--an heir?"

"There is."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed 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."

CHAPTER IV.

AN UNINVITED GUEST.

Sir Jasper Kingsland stood moodily alone. He was in the library, standing by the window--that very window through which, one stormy night scarcely a month before, he had admitted Achmet the Astrologer.

He stood there with a face of such dark gloom that all the brightness of the sunlit April day could not cast one enlivening gleam.

He stood there scowling darkly upon it all, so lost in his own somber thoughts that he did not hear the library door open, nor the soft rustle of a woman's dress as she halted on the threshold.

A fair and stately lady, with a proud, colorless face lighted up with pale-blue eyes, and with bands of pale flaxen hair pushed away under a dainty lace cap--a lady who looked scarce thirty, although almost ten years older, unmistakably handsome, unmistakably proud. It was Olivia, Lady Kingsland.

"Alone, Sir Jasper!" a musical voice said. "May I come in, or do you prefer solitude and your own thoughts?"

The sweet voice--soft and low, as a lady's voice should be--broke the somber spell that bound him. He wheeled round, his dark, moody face lighting up at sight of her, as all the glorious morning sunshine never could have lighted it. That one radiant look would have told you how he loved his wife.

"You, Olivia?" he cried, advancing. "Surely this is a surprise! My dearest, is it quite prudent in you to leave your room?"

He took the slender, white-robed figure in his arms, and kissed her as tenderly as a bridegroom of a week might have done. Lady Kingsland laughed a soft, tinkling little laugh.

"A month is quite long enough to be a prisoner, Jasper, even although a prisoner of state. And on my boy's christening fete--the son and heir I have desired so long--ah, surely a weaker mother than I might essay to quit her room."

The moody darkness, like a palpable frown, swept over the baronet's face again at her words.

"Is he dressed?" he asked.

"He is dressed and asleep, and Lady Helen and Mr. Carlyon, his G.o.dmother and G.o.dfather, are hovering over the crib like twin guardian angels. And Mildred sits _en grande tenue_ on her cricket, in a speechless trance of delight, and nurse rustles about in her new silk gown and white lace cap with an air of importance and self-complacency almost indescribable. The domestic picture only wants papa and mamma to make it complete."

She laughed as she spoke, a little sarcastically; but Sir Jasper's attempt even to smile was a ghastly failure.

Lady Kingsland folded both her hands on his shoulder, and looked up in his face with anxious, searching eyes.

"What is it?" she asked.

The baronet laughed uneasily.

"What is what?"

"This gloom, this depression, this dark, mysterious moodiness. Jasper, what has changed you of late?"