The heiress of Greenhurst

I have spoken of the grandame who was my mother’s only relative. I have a sort of fierce pride in this old woman, and love to trace the Rommany blood that burns in my own heart, back to that weird source; for in her withered veins it grew, like old wine, strong with age and bitter with the hate which our people bore to the Gentiles.

Learned men still cavil about our origin. They gather up scraps of our language, they ferret out our habits, and torture our tradition to establish the various theories, which, after all, must remain theories; for ours is a poverty-stricken people. We have no possession, not even a history. They call us a nation of thieves, and say that even our traditions are stolen. Be it so! at least we are faithful to each other, a boast which the brotherhood of civilization cannot honestly make.

But though wise men have traced us back to Judea, and made us worshippers of idols, we who worship nothing in heaven or on earth, know by the secret sympathies that link us together—sympathies which no Gentile can comprehend—that the blood within our hearts is of another source than the idolaters of Judea.

They say that our traditions are stolen from your Bible; that from the solemn prophecies written there, we have gathered up a belief in our Egyptian origin. But my great grandmother never looked into your Bible. She would have trampled the falsehood under her feet and spit upon it, had any one hinted that in the Gentile language, lay the great secret of her race.

But her faith in the Egyptian descent of our people was like a religion. How it came to her, whether from tradition, fable, fact, or those sorcerers’ arts that made her famous among all our nation, I do not know. Save in those wild sympathies that knit our tribe together, as with bonds of iron, all over the earth, our people have no history. They came like a cloud of locusts sweeping down from the East. It may be one of the curses sent forth to infest the earth after ravaging Egypt. It may be a fragment of the lost tribes. It may be even, as some of our traditions say, that we were sent forth as a punishment for inhospitality to the mother of God and her holy child. There is a wide field for conjecture. Let your wise men guess on. With us, our Egyptian descent is a faith—all the religion that we have!

I know many languages, am learned in historic lore—learned in the great foundation of all history, the Bible. Of that which pertains to my people I have studied long and deeply; yet as my great grandmother, the Gitana, believed, so do I. To her occult wisdom, her subtle sympathies, I have brought all the knowledge to be gathered from the literature of other races.

I have searched your sacred book till my soul has been stirred to its depths with the dark prophecies that foreshadow the scattering of our tribes over the face of the earth. I find the destiny that is now upon us written out in that great book, certain, unmistakable as the thunder-cloud that heralds in a tempest. There is wisdom in that book. Our people should know it better, for much of its grandeur came from Egypt, as we did—Egypt the great mother of learning—the land which gave its wisdom to Moses, and taught the irresolute how to think, act, and suffer.

And we too are of Egypt. Does the Gentile want proof? Let him search for it in the prophecies that he holds sacred. Let him read it in the voluptuous character of our dances, in the unwritten poetry, unwritten because it grows tame and mean in any language but the Rommany. The Gitanos speak their poetry as it swells warm from the heart, for it would grow cold in the writing. Let him search for it where he pleases. We require no proof, better than the mysterious spirit within us. Our hearts turn back to the old land, and we know that it once belonged to us.

My great grandame was no common Gitana. Her husband had been a chief, or count, among the gipsies, during his entire manhood. This was no common dignity, for our people choose their own leaders, and it is seldom that one man’s popularity lasts during a life-time. The Gitano chooses his wife for her talent, her art, her powers of deception; in short, for what you would call her keen wickedness. These are the endowments that recommend the Gitana bride to her lord. It was for these qualities, joined to talents that would have given her a position in any nation, that my ancestor married his wife.

This great grandame of mine was bravely descended, and richly endowed. Talent descends most frequently from the mother, and through the female line she could trace her blood back to that arch sorceress, who wound herself around Maria de Padilla, during her heroic life, and in the end betrayed that noble woman to death, when she fled from Toledo with her son.

Maria de Padilla had offended our ancestress, and she was true to her hate. My great grand-dame wore a pair of ear-rings, massive gold circlets set with great rubies. In her poverty—for in the end she became very poor—these antique ornaments were always about her person. No amount of suffering, no temptation could win them from her, even for a moment. These antique rings had been wrested from the heroine of Toledo, on the night when she disappeared with her Gitana attendant. There was a tradition, that the precious stones with which they were beset, had once been white, but that after the murder, had changed to the blood-red hue which they ever after maintained. I know not how this superstition took birth; but the craft of our Gitana ancestress seemed to descend with the rings, as they came down from that wonderful creature, always through the females, to the old Sibyl who was the grandame of my mother.

I know that the Gitanos are considered as impostors; that they are supposed to practise their arts for coarse gain, and for that only; but this is not always true. No devotee ever put more faith in her saint than the gipsy, who has long exercised her powers of divination, places in the truth of her mysterious art.

It was late in the evening, and old Papita—for thus my ancestress was named—sat in her cave-home waiting the return of her grand-daughter from the Alhambra. Perhaps upon the whole earth there is nothing more repulsive than a very old woman in any portion of southern Europe. The voluptuous atmosphere, the warm sunshine that matures female life so early, seems to mock its own precocious work, by proving how hideous time can render it. But if age makes itself so repulsive among the luxurious women of Spain, those who scarcely draw a breath of that delicious atmosphere which is not heavy with fragrance, how much more hideous must be the old age of a Gitana hid away in the dark hollows of the earth, with rude and insufficient food, clothed in rags, uncared for, held in no higher repute than the foxes who burrow in the earth like themselves, and are scarcely held apart from civilization more than they are?

There was something witch-like in the appearance of my great grandame as she sat alone in her cave that night. A meagre candle shed its light in sickly flickers around a rude niche scooped in the rock, from whence the entire dwelling was cut. The body of this light fell upon the old woman’s head, kindling up a scarlet kerchief that she wore, somewhat in the fashion of a Moorish turban, into vivid brilliancy; but casting the rough features into blacker shadow, till they seemed meagre, dark, and almost as withered as those of an Egyptian mummy. Her claw-like hands were folded over her bosom, and a ring set with some deep green stone cut with Egyptian characters, caught the light like a star; for the setting was of rough massive gold, that seemed heavy enough to break the withered finger, that it covered from joint to joint. A few embers lay upon the stone floor at her feet, the remnants of a fire that had burned low, leaving a thin cloud of smoke still floating in the vaulted roof of the cave.

A low chair of heavy carved wood, the antique plunder of some religious house, served the old woman for a seat; and before her, upon the embers, stood a small bronze vessel, which gave forth a soft odor as its contents simmered sleepily in the dying heat.

Besides these objects, there was little of interest in the dwelling. The cave was scooped from the soft sandstone cliff that forms one side of a ravine, through which the Darro passes before making its graceful sweep around the Alhambra. The walls and ceiling were blended together in a thousand irregular curves and angles, roughly chiselled, and blackened over with smoke. It had no particular form; but sunk into recesses; was cut up into hollows; bulged out in places that should have been corners, and had a dozen angles that promised some definite form, but failed in the performance.

In size it might have covered eighteen or twenty square feet. The floors were of stone, like the walls, for all was cut from one rock; but smoke and long use had so disguised the native material, that it could hardly be guessed at. A few dried herbs were hung in one hollow of the wall; an earthen pot, full of fresh flowers, stood in another; some specimens of coarse pottery occupied a shelf opposite the door, and cooking utensils of heavy iron were huddled in a corner, making the shadows in that portion of the cave still more dense.

The old Sibyl arose, took down the candle, and holding it over the bronze vessel peered into it, muttering to herself. Now the dark mummy-like aspect of her features changed; the eyes, black, firm and large, for age had no power to quench their lightning, illuminated those withered features and gave expression to every wrinkle. Her thin lips parted, and through a weird smile, that made them writhe like disturbed serpents, shot the gleam of her sharp, long teeth, white as ivory, and strong as those of a tiger.

My great grandame in her youth was of middle size; but age had contracted her muscles and warped her sinews, leaving her limbs spare and lean till she was scarcely larger than a child of twelve years. Her head was singularly large, the forehead heavy, the eyes under it burning like coals of living fire; and this disproportion was exaggerated by the heavy red kerchief that I have already spoken of.

As the old woman lifted her person from its stooping position and rose upright, you wondered that she had power in those withered limbs to stand so erect, or carry the weight of that heavy blue saya, with its succession of crimson flounces all edged with golden lace, from which the brightness had departed years ago. You wondered, too, at the picturesque and singular arrangement of colors in her dress. It is true the old velvet jacket had lost all traces of its original lustre. The colors of the saya were dimmed and worn away; but the vestige of former dignity was there, and no age could injure that mystic seal, or the massive ruby rings that bent her thin ears with their weight, and flashed like great drops of blood falling from beneath her kerchief.

Two or three times the grandame waved her light over the bronze vessel, then thrusting the candle back into its niche, with an air of discontent she walked to the door of her cave, flung it open and looked out.

At first she held one hand over her eyes as we do when the sun strikes us suddenly, and no wonder, for what a contrast was that beautiful night with the black hole she had left!

I have seen the Alhambra by moonlight, from the very point of view which the old Sibyl commanded, and it is one of the memories which one would give up years of life rather than surrender. Down from the soft purple of that glorious sky fell the moonlight, pouring its rich luminous floods over the snows that lie forever upon the noble mountain ranges of the Alpujarras. It cast a silvery halo around each snowy peak, making the whiteness lustrous as noonday, then came quivering down their sides, and fell in a silvery torrent among the groves that girdle the Alhambra. There, subdued and softened by the masses of foliage, it divided a sweet empire with the night, leaving half those dim old towers to the shadows, and pouring its whole refulgence upon the rest, throwing a glory over some broken arch, and abandoning its neighbor to obscurity.

Ah me, there is nothing on earth so beautiful as the moonlight shining amid a grim old ruin like that. It is the present smiling away the gloom of the past.

Broken up, as it were, by those naked old towers, the light fell among the groves, throwing the trees out in masses that took a greenish hue almost as if it had been day; then the foliage became dense, and long shadows cast themselves like a dewy vapor down the hill, admitting soft gleams to flicker in here and there, like a network of pearls embroidering the darkness. Then, as if some undercurrent of light had been all the while flowing on beneath the trees, out rushed the moonbeams breaking away from the shadows, and pouring down upon the bosom of the Darro, smiling, sparkling, kindling up every drop of water as it flowed by, till you would have thought some hidden vein in the mountains had broken free, and a torrent of diamonds were sweeping between Granada and its Moorish fortress.

It is possible that the old gipsy saw nothing of this. I am inclined to think that she did not, for the scene had become familiar to her, and that night she was ill at ease. Instead of turning her gaze as you would have done upon the Alhambra and the snow ridges beyond, she threw her head back, and began peering among the stars, muttering to herself in some strange tongue, and holding up her mystic ring as if to catch direct fire from the particular star to which her eyes were uplifted.

“Not now,” she said fiercely; for the least untoward thing awoke the old woman’s wrath; and even then she longed to gather all that beautiful moonlight up, and cast it into some dark void, because its refulgence dimmed the stars which she wished to read. “Not now,” she muttered, locking her sharp teeth together, and turning her fierce eyes upon the sky with a gleam of hate—“not while the moon is wading through the snows up yonder, and putting out the bright, beautiful stars till the heavens all run together like the printed pages of a book which one has not the art to read. Not yet, not yet. I must wait till the skies are purple again, and the stars come out with fire in them. The moon, the moon, it is the friend of the Busne, never of the Gitana. Accursed be its path in the sky. May the stars, that have a language for the Egyptian, grow powerful, and smite it down from its high place.”

After uttering this weird curse, the Sibyl closed the door and slunk back into her cave, pacing to and fro, and crooning over a wild snatch of song that seemed to excite rather than soothe the fierce mood she was in.