CHAPTER XXXII.

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.”