University of Virginia Library

Scene Fifth.
The Sorceress and the Quadroone-mother.

On the same eventful eve of St. Michael, ere yet the
moon had risen, the beautiful yet wicked quadroone-mother
sat alone by the trellised casement of her chamber.
The gentle airs from the garden, into which it
opened, came to her through the open lattice laden

with fragrance, and cooled her throbbing temples.
Her brow was as queenly, her noble black eye as
large and lustrous, and her dark, majestic, yet voluptuous
beauty still as striking as before. Yet thought
was busy as she leaned musingly upon her arm and
looked vacantly into the deep blue of the starry heaven.
But her thoughts were not in the direction of her
gaze. She had taken her seat by the window as twilight
stole over the scene, and insensibly became meditative.
Her thoughts, as at that hour they irresistibly
will, soon took a sad and serious complexion, and, ere
she was aware, she found herself acting over again in
imagination the deeds of her guilty life.

She had other cause, too, for sad and gloomy reveries.
Renault had cast off the filial reverence which
had hitherto so distinguished him; and, though a prisoner
in his own house, and daily in her presence,
treated her with cold and stern indifference; within
the hour she had encountered his silent, reproving, yet
contemptuous glance as he passed in and out of her
apartment. Azèlie, too, shuddered at her approach,
and avoided her.

Both, indeed, had kept aloof from her during the six
days of their imprisonment, not only to express thereby
their feelings at her criminal compact with Osma,
but to enjoy each other's society sacred from her intrusion.
The safety of the concealed Don Henrique,
as well as the privacy of Estelle's disguised visits to
their little circle, also rendered such retirement necessary.
This neglect, by throwing her upon herself and
her own resources, naturally produced in her a morose
and bitter spirit, and at times a melancholy that she
would gladly have banished. She was a guilty woman;
and the angel of sadness, which to the good and
virtuous is the parent of gentle devotion, to the bad
and vicious becomes the author of guilty fears, that
fill the remorseful mind with dismal contemplations of
its present state, and offer it dark and menacing pictures
of the future. As she sat and reflected, her soul
was filled with forebodings she could not shake off.
Thought maddened her.

She remembered, with singular distinctness, among
other reminiscences that forced themselves upon her,
an event of years long passed, as if it had taken place
but yesterday. The more she strove to divest her
mind of this unpleasant current of thought, the more
perseveringly would it flow on again in the same channel,
gathering fresh impetus from the temporary diversion
of its course; till at length, giving way to it, she
experienced a despairing pleasure in indulging the
dark and turbid torrent to its full bent. She remembered
the time—the hour—the place! Twenty-three
years had passed away, yet the whole was written in
fadeless letters of undying memory upon her mind.
She was then young—beautiful—a favoured mistress!
The Marquis de la Caronde adored her, and lavished
upon her the wealth of his heart and his hand. The
Marchioness of Caronde wore only his name. Ninine
held the cords of his will, and governed him as her
caprice pointed. At length the marchioness became a
mother, and the marquis, from paternal pride, paid to
her who had given an heir to his house the respect that
his love had hitherto denied her. Ninine felt the neglect
and jealousy that now first poisoned her love.
Thrice she attempted the infant boy's life, and thrice
the marquis detected, yet forgave her; for the child
was not many weeks old ere he yielded himself again
captive to her fascinations. A fourth time, when the
boy was half a year old, the shaft was aimed at the
fountain of its nourishment: the subtlest poison that is
was conveyed to the mother in a rose-bud! With the
opening flower, she inhaled the invisible principle of
death. Like that flower, she faded and soon died.
But the boy lived. The father's suspicions were
aroused, and he removed him secretly to a foster-mother.
Yet his love for the siren who had thrown
about him her fatal net was stronger than his horror at
the crime. In vain she set on foot every secret inquiry.
She was unable to discover the infant; and, in a
few months afterward, becoming herself a mother, in
the joy of that event forgot the cause of her disquiet.

But ambition soon enthroned itself in her soul. She
now aspired to the title and estates of the father for her
illegitimate son. Her hatred to the true heir was again
revived, and she gave herself no rest, night or day, in
her desire to discover his retreat. At length—for
what will not jealousy, envy, and ambition, united in a
woman's heart, accomplish?—when her own boy was
two years old, she discovered the object of her search,
now a fine child nearly three years of age. It was
found by one of her hirelings many leagues in the interior.
She had him secretly brought to her. The
two boys were wonderfully like each other, both bearing
their father's looks. Hers, being tall for its age,
although nearly a year younger, was equal with the
other in height. Suddenly this resemblance suggested
a thought upon which she immediately acted. The
box of poisoned sweetmeats she had prepared to give
the child was cast aside, and, drawing it to her, she
taught it to call her “Ma.” Her own son she sent
back to the hamlet in his stead, knowing that the marquis
had not seen his child for a year, and would easily
be deceived by the likeness between the two, while
the alteration that he would discover when he should
visit him would be attributed to the natural effect of
time and growth; and, lest the face of the other should
betray her, she guardedly kept him out of his sight
until she could present him without suspicion. At
length, satisfied, from her manner (studied to bring
about this very result, and establish, without farther
uncertainty, her object), that Ninine would not harm
him, he sent for the son of the marchioness, now four
years of age, and received to his arms instead that of
the quadroone.

Such was the field over which the quadroone-mother's
thoughts ranged as she sat by the window. She
had often sighed; but it was because she did not find
the fulfilment of her ambitious hopes in her son a reward
sufficient to compensate her for her guilt.

With the embrace with which he received the child,
the marquis had detected the deception she had put

upon him. But he remained silent upon the subject,
though she suspected his knowledge of it even up to
the day of his death. But, so long as he winked at
her wickedness, which he did, perhaps, either from fear
of her poisoning the true heir, or on account of the
blindness of his attachment to her, she paid no regard
to his knowledge of it, and, with a feeling of security
in her guilt, continued to feed ambitious hopes for her
son; and thus, until the day of their father's death,
did these two brothers grow up to manhood, nature
alone making the just distinction between the base coin
and that which was of the legitimate ore.

The thoughts of the quadroone-mother still flowed
on, downward the tide of time, and unsparing memory
again held the mirror of the past to her mental
gaze.

She remembered that, fourteen years before, she was
walking through the slave-mart, when a beautiful female
child, scarcely three years old, held in the lap of
a tall, stern woman, arrested her eye; that, pleased
with its infantine beauty, she purchased both mother and
child, and took them to her dwelling. That, at length,
as the child grew in beauty, she conceived the thought
of adopting it as her own, and by the refinements of
education fitting her to be the companion even of
princes; so that, through her promised loveliness,
when her own charms and power should fail, and her
favour with the marquis be diminished, she might live
again in her protégée, and by her powerful alliance
hold the consideration and rank her ambition coveted.
She remembered how the child's mother doted upon
it; how she refused to resign it from her own devoted
care to hers; and how, fearing her for a secret power
she possessed over her mind, she at length gave
her to drink of an herb, the property of which is to
drive those who take it to seek self-destruction in the
water.

As Ninine recalled the wild shrieks of the woman
rushing forth at midnight to plunge into the river, they
seemed to come again with startling distinctness to her

ears; shuddering, she stopped them and hid her eyes,
as if to shut out from every sense the fearful curse
upon the murderess with which her victim's last cries
were mingled. But in vain. The curse was repeated
sterner and closer to her ear, as uttered by a living
voice. She looked up. 'Twas not imagination!

It was real! The murdered woman stood before
her, and a deep and solemn curse, thrice repeated, as
she heard it fourteen years before, fell from her lips.
The murderess gazed upon this appearance from the
dead with mortal horror in her glazed stare, with parted
lips, and with the fixed and rigid immobility of stone.

The sorceress stood contemplating her a moment
with a steady look of contempt, and a triumphant
smile in her eyes, which showed it to be a moment of
the most gratifying exultation to her. At length she
spoke:

“Woman, dost thou remember me?”

Ninine slowly brought her hands together, and
clasped the fingers supplicatingly; then sinking to her
knees with a pallid countenance, in which awe, and
fear, and remorse were blended, twice in vain essayed
to move her bloodless lips in reply.

“What hast thou done with her I left with thee?”
demanded the sorceress, in a stern voice.

“She—she is—is here!” faintly articulated Ninine.
“She is thine!”

“Thou wicked woman! I know thy guilt and thy
acts of iniquity, and have watched over the child thou
wouldst have made the victim of thy ambitious heart!
Repent thee of thy crimes, for thy hour is near!”

“Mercy, mercy, dread being!”

“Didst thou remember mercy when the maiden
pleaded to thee?” demanded the sorceress, with reproving
sternness.

“Mercy, mercy! thou spirit of another world!” she
repeated, with unsubdued terror.

“Be thou in the hall of trial on the morrow to answer
truly what may be required of thee, and thou
mayst have space for repentance.”

“I will answer even to my own hurt, if thou wilt give
me hope of mercy in Heaven!”

“Mercy in Heaven ask thy priests for,” she answered,
derisively. “Mercy on earth I alone promise
thee.”

“This will give me space for obtaining Heaven's; I
will obey thee.”

“Know that thou art there to assert thine own dishonour.
Wilt thou go?”

“I will.”

“To publish thine own infamy! Wilt thou go?”

“I will, dread being!”

“Then farewell till we meet in the Judgment Hall.”

With this parting salutation, spoken in a warning
tone of voice, the sorceress disappeared as suddenly as
she had appeared, and left the quadroone-mother to reflect
upon an event which, to her guilty and superstitious
soul, seemed to have been directed by the anger of
an avenging Heaven, and portended sudden and just retribution.
That she had seen an inhabitant of the
world of spirits was the deep and abiding impression
upon her mind, already by its previous train of thought
fully open to the reception of supernatural influences.