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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."
Sybilla Silver went back to the Court alone. My lady, in sullen dignity, took her daughter and went straight to her jointure house at the other extremity of the village. She stood in the confer of a lengthy suite of apartments the new Lady Kingsland's opening one into the other in a long vista of splendor. She took a portrait out of her breast and gazed at it with brightly glittering eyes.
He told me to tell my lady to meet him precisely at midnight, on the stone terrace. Before midnight the murder was done. What became of him, why he did not keep his appointment, I do not know. He left the inn very late, paid his score, and has never been seen or heard of since. "Had he any interest in Lady Kingsland's death?" "On the contrary, all his interest lay in her remaining alive.
It was almost eleven when she reached the Court, but they watched the night through in that house of mourning. Leaving the fly before the front entrance, Sybilla stole round to that side door she had used the memorable night of March tenth. She admitted herself without difficulty, and proceeded at once to Lady Kingsland's sick-room. She tapped lightly at the door.
Parmalee became immediately absorbed by the hosts of dead-and-gone Kingslands looking down from the oak-paneled walls. Miss Silver fluently gave him names, and dates, and histories. "Seems to me," said Mr. Parmalee, "those old fellows didn't die in their beds many of 'em. What with battles, and duels, and high treason, and sich, they all came to unpleasant ends. Where's the present Kingsland's?"
Harriet Kingsland's brave heart quailed only for a moment; then she plunged resolutely forward into the gloom. Slipping, stumbling, falling, rising again, the wind beating in her face, the branches catching like angry hands at her garments still she hurried on. It was a long, long, tortuous path, but it came to an end.
Again he strove to laugh, and again it was a wretched failure. Lady Kingsland's light-blue eyes never left his face. "I think you do, Jasper. Since the night of our boy's birth you have been another man. What is it?" A spasm crossed the baronet's face; his lips twitched convulsively; his face slowly changed to a gray, ashen pallor. "What is it?" the lady slowly reiterated.
"A whole year has passed, my mother," she said, slowly, "and nothing has been done. But Sybilla will keep her oath. Sir Jasper Kingsland's only son shall meet his doom. It is through her I will strike; that blow will be doubly bitter. Before this day twelvemonth these two shall part more horribly than man and wife ever parted before!"
"And wearing yourself to skin and bone, as I knew you would, with your fidgets. What's the good of taking on so? I told you I'd come back as quick as I could, and I've done so. It ain't my fault that the time's been so long it's Lady Kingsland's." "You have seen her?" "That I have. And very well worth seeing she is, I tell you.
Parmalee asked me to do him the favor of handing this note to my lady." Sir Everard Kingsland's face was the face of a man utterly confounded. "Mr. Parmalee asked you to deliver that note to Lady Kingsland?" he slowly repeated. "What under heaven can he have to write to my lady about?" "I really don't know, Sir Everard," rejoined Sybilla, "I only know he asked me to deliver it.
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