"Olivia, it was astounding--incomprehensible! I should never have credited one word he said but for that. He told me the past as I know it myself. Events that transpired in a far foreign land a score of years ago, known, as I thought, to no creature under heaven, he told me of as if they had transpired yesterday. The very thoughts that I thought in that by-gone time he revealed as if my heart lay open before him. How, then, could I doubt? If he could lift the veil of the irrevocable past, why not be able to lift the veil of the mysterious future? He took the hour of our child"s birth and ascended to the battlements, and there, alone with the stars of heaven, he cast his horoscope. Olivia, men in all ages have believed in this power of astrology, and I believe as firmly as I believe in Heaven."
Lady Kingsland listened, and that quiet smile of half amus.e.m.e.nt, half contempt never left her lips.
"And the horoscope proved a horrorscope, no doubt," she said, the smile deepening. "You paid your astrologer handsomely, I presume, Sir Jasper?"
"I gave him nothing. He would take nothing--not even a cup of water.
Of his own free will he cast the horoscope, and, without reward of any kind, went his way when he had done."
"What did you say the name was?"
"Achmet the Astrologer."
"Melodramatic again! And now, Sir Jasper, what awful fate betides our boy?"
"Ask me not! You do not believe. What the astrologer foretold I shall tell no one."
"The carriage waits, my lady," a servant said, entering. "Lady Helen bade me remind you, my lady, it is time to start for church."
Lady Kingsland hastily glanced at her watch.
"Why, so it is! I had nearly forgotten. Come, Sir Jasper, and forget your fears on this happy day."
She led him from the room. Baby, in its christening-robes, slept in nurse"s arms, and Lady Helen and Mr. Carlyon stood impatiently waiting.
"We will certainly be late!" Lady Helen, who was G.o.d-mamma, said, fussily. "Had we not better depart at once, Sir Jasper?"
"I am quite at your ladyship"s service. We will not delay an instant longer. Proceed, nurse."
Nurse, with her precious burden, went before. Sir Jasper drew Lady Helen"s arm within his own, and Mr. Carlyon followed with little Mildred Kingsland.
Lady Kingsland watched the carriage out of sight, and then went slowly and thoughtfully back to her room.
"How extremely foolish and weak of Sir Jasper," she was thinking, "to pay the slightest attention to the canting nonsense of these fortune-telling impostors! If I had been in his place I would have had him horsewhipped from my gates for his pains. I must find out what this terrible prediction was and laugh it out of my husband"s mind."
Meantime the carriage rolled down the long avenue, under the majestic copper-beeches, through the lofty gates, and along the bright sunlit road leading to the village.
In stole and surplice, within the village church, the Reverend Cyrus Green, Rector of Stonehaven, stood by the baptismal font, waiting to baptize the heir of all the Kingslands.
Stately, Sir Jasper Kingsland strode up the aisle, with Lady Helen upon his arm. No trace of the trouble within showed in his pale face as he heard his son baptized Everard Jasper Carew Kingsland.
The ceremony was over. Nurse took the infant baronet again; Lady Helen adjusted her mantle, and the Reverend Cyrus Green was blandly offering his congratulations to the greatest man in the parish, when a sudden commotion at the door startled all. Some one striving to enter, and some other one refusing admission.
"Let me in, I tell you!" cried a shrill, piercing voice--the voice of an angry woman. "Stand aside, woman! I will see Sir Jasper Kingsland."
With the last ringing words the intruder burst past the pew-opener, and rushed wildly into the church. A weird and unearthly figure--like one of Macbeth"s witches--with streaming black hair floating over a long, red cloak, and two black eyes of flame. All recoiled as the spectral figure rushed up like a mad thing and confronted Sir Jasper Kingsland.
"At last!" she shrilly cried, in a voice that pierced even to the gaping listeners without--"at last, Sir Jasper Kingsland! At last we meet again!"
There was a horrible cry as the baronet started back, putting up both hands, with a look of unutterable horror.
"Good G.o.d! Zenith!"
"Yes, Zenith!" shrieked the woman; "Zenith, the beautiful, once!
Zenith, the hag, the crone, the madwoman, now! Look at me well, Sir Jasper Kingsland--for the ruin is your own handiwork!"
He stood like a man paralyzed--speechless, stunned--his face the livid hue of death.
The wretched woman stood before him with streaming hair, blazing eyes, and uplifted arm, a very incarnate fury.
"Look at me well!" she fiercely shrieked, tossing her locks of old off her fiery face. "Am I like the Zenith of twenty years ago--young and beautiful, and bright enough even for the fastidious Englishman to love? Look at me now--ugly and old, wrinkled and wretched, deserted and despised--and tell me if I have not greater reason to hate you than ever woman had to hate man?"
She tossed her arms aloft with a madwoman"s shriek--crying out her words in a long, wild scream.
"I hate you--I hate you! Villain! dastard! perjured wretch! I hate you, and I curse you, here in the church you call holy! I curse you with a ruined woman"s curse, and hot and scathing may it burn on your head and on the heads of your children"s children!"
The last horrible words aroused the listeners from their petrified trance. The Reverend Cyrus Green lifted up his voice in a tone of command:
"This woman is mad! She is a furious lunatic! Dawson! Humphreys!
come here and secure her!"
"The child! the child!" she cried, with a screech of demoniac delight; "the sp.a.w.n of the viper is within my grasp!"
One plunge forward and the infant heir was in her arms, held high aloft. One second later, and its blood and brains would have bespattered the stone floor, but Mr. Carlyon sprung forward and wrenched it from her grasp.
The two men summoned by the clergyman closed upon her and held her fast; her frantic shrieks rang to the roof. Then suddenly, all ceased, and, foaming and livid, she fell between them in a fit.
CHAPTER V.
ZENITH"S MALEDICTION.
A dead pause of blank consternation; the faces around a sight to see; horror and wonder in every countenance--most of all in the countenance of Sir Jasper Kingsland.
The clergyman was the first to speak.
"The woman is stark mad," he said. "We must see about this. Such violent lunatics must not be allowed to go at large. Here, Humphreys, do you and Dawson lift her up and carry her to my house. It is the nearest, and she can be properly attended to there."
"You know her, Sir Jasper, do you not?" asked Lady Helen, with quick womanly intuition.
"Know her?" Sir Jasper replied, "know Zenith? Great Heaven! I thought she was dead."
The Reverend Cyrus Green and Lady Helen exchanged glances. Mr. Carlyon looked in sharp surprise at the speaker.
"Then she is not mad, after all! I thought she mistook you for some one else. If you know her, you have the best right to deal with her.
Shall these men take her to Kingsland Court?"
"Not for ten thousand worlds!" Sir Jasper cried, impetuously. "The woman is nothing--less than nothing--to me. I knew her once, years ago. I thought her dead and buried; hence the shock her sudden entrance gave me. A lunatic asylum is the proper place for such as she. Let Mr. Green send her there, and the sooner the better."