The Baronets Bride | Page 8

cold water. Five minutes' vigorous splashing and rubbing, and he emerged, his pallid face brown as a berry, his black hair in a snarl of crisp curls.
"And now to satisfy the inner man," he said, walking over to the pot, seizing a wooden spoon, and drawing up a cricket. "My tramp of last night and this morning has made me famously hungry, Zara."
"And the hare soup is good," said Zara. "While you breakfast, Pietro, I will go to mother. Come up when you finish."
A steep stair-way that was like a ladder led to the loft. Zara ascended this with agile fleetness, and the late astrologer was left alone at his very unmagician-like work of scraping the pot with a wooden spoon. Once or twice, as the fancy crossed him of the contrast between Achmet, the Astrologer reading the stars, and Pietro the tramp scraping the bones of the stolen hare, he laughed grimly to himself.
"And the world is made up of just such contrasts," he thought, "and Pietro at his homely breakfast is more to be dreaded than Achmet casting the horoscope. Ah! Sir Jasper Kingsland, it is a very fine thing to be a baronet with fifteen thousand pounds a year, a noble ancestral seat, a wife you love, and a son you adore. And yet Pietro, the vagabond tramp--the sunburned gypsy, with stolen hares to eat, and rags to wear, and a hut to lodge in--would not exchange places with you this bright March day. We have sworn vendetta to you and all of your blood, and we will keep our vow!"
His swarthy face darkened with passionate vindictiveness as he arose.
"'As a man sows so shall he reap,'" he muttered between his clinched teeth, setting his face toward Kingsland Court. "You, my Lord of Kingsland, have sown the wind. You shall learn what it is to reap the whirlwind!"
"Pietro! Pietro!" crowed a little voice, gleefully. "Papa Pietro! take Sunbeam!"
The little sleeper in the bed had sat up, her bright, dark face sparkling, two little dimpled arms outstretched.
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 passion throbbed in every line of her face. "And there is a son--an heir?"
"There is."
She snatched 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