The Gypsy Queen's Vow

And Pet flung herself into an arm-chair, and put her feet upon an ottoman with a great display of carelessness and ankles, and stared Mr. Garnet composedly in the face.

“Cruel girl! You know your power, and thus you use it. Oh, Petronilla! my beautiful one! have I nothing left to hope for?”

“That’s a question I can’t take it upon myself to answer,” said Pet. “There’s your next quarter’s salary, though, you can hope for that.”

“Is that meant as a taunt? Oh, Petronilla! you little know how deeply, how devotedly I love you! I could give my life to make you happy.”

“Thanky, Mr. Garnet – shows a highly Christian spirit in you: but, at the same time, I guess I won’t mind it. As to your loving me, I have not the slightest doubt about it. I’m such an angel in female form that I don’t see how people can help loving me, any more than they can help the toothache. So you needn’t go telling me over again you love me, because you’ve said it two or three times already; and the most interesting things get tiresome, you know, when repeated too often.”

“Capricious, beautiful fairy! how shall I win you to seriousness? Fairest Petronilla, I would serve for this little hand even as Jacob served for Rachel!”

“Mr. Garnet, it’s real polite of you to say so, but you’ll excuse me for saying I’d a good deal rather you wouldn’t. You’ve been here six years now, and if I thought I was to undergo six more like them, I’d take the first bar of soft-soap I could find and put an immediate end to my melancholy existence.”

“Mocking still! Oh, beautiful Petronilla! how shall I reach this willful heart?”

“There’s no heart there, Mr. Garnet; it took a trip to the fast city of Gotham three years ago, and hasn’t come back since.”

“With Raymond Germaine?” he said, with a sharp flash of his eyes.

“Ex-actly; you’ve struck the right thing in the middle – hit the nail straight on the head – jumped, with your accustomed sagacity, at my exact meaning. After all, you’re not half so stupid as you look, Mr. Garnet.”

“Miss Lawless,” he broke out, angrily, “this levity is as unbecoming as it is unnecessary. I have asked you a question, which, as a lady, you are bound to answer.”

“Mr. Garnet, look here,” said Pet: “did papa hire you to knock reading, writing and spelling into me, or to make love?”

“Miss Lawless!”

“Perhaps, though,” said Pet, in a musing tone, “it’s customary with tutors when winding-up a young lady’s education, to put her through a severe course of love-making, that she may know how to act and speak properly when occasion requires. Mr. Garnet, excuse me, I never thought of it before; I see it all now. Just begin at the beginning again, if it’s not too much trouble, and you’ll see how beautifully I’ll go through with it.”

He started up passionately, and bit his lip till it bled.

“Once for all, Miss Lawless,” he exclaimed, stifling his impotent rage, and striding fiercely up to her – “once for all, I demand an answer. I love you – will you be my wife?”

“Well, upon my word, Mr. Rozzel Garnet,” said Pet, confusedly, “you have the mildest and pleasantest way of your own I ever witnessed. Here you come stamping up to me as if about to knock me down, and savagely tell me you love me! Love away, can’t you, but don’t get in a rage about it! I’m sure you’re perfectly welcome to love me till you’re black in the face, if you’ll only take things easy.”

“Miss Lawless, forgive me; I’m half-mad, and scarce know what I said.”

“I forgive you,” said Pet, stretching out her hands as if about to warm them; “go, sin no more. I thought you were a little light in the head myself; but then it didn’t surprise me, as it’s about the full of the moon, I think.”

“Miss Lawless, I did think you were too much of a lady to despise and scoff at true affection thus. If I have the misfortune to be poor, that does not make me the less sensitive to insult.”

“Now, Mr. Garnet, look here,” said Pet, rising. “I’m getting tired of this scene, and may as well bring it to an end at once. Your love I fully understand; you have several reasons for loving me – several thousands, in fact, but we won’t speak of them. As to insulting you, I flatly deny it; and if you think I have done so, just refer me to a friend, and I’ll fight a duel about it to-morrow. Scoffing at true affection is another thing I’m not in the habit of doing, neither in despising people for being poor; you know both these things as well as I do. But, Mr. Garnet, I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man in the world, and I was to go to my grave a forlorn, hatchet-faced old maid for refusing you. If it’s any consolation to you to know it, I wouldn’t marry you to save your neck from the hangman – your soul from you know who – or your goods and chattels, personal, from being turned, neck and crop, into the street. Now, there!”

His face blanched with rage; his eyes gleamed with a serpent-like light; his thin lips quivered, and for a moment he stood glaring upon her as if he could have torn her limb from limb. But there was a dangerous light in her eye, too, as she stood drawn up to her full height, with reddening cheeks, and defiant, steady gaze, staring him still straight in the face. So they stood for an instant, and then the sense of the ludicrous overcame all else in Pet’s mind, and she burst into a clear, merry peal of laughter.

“Well, upon my word, Mr. Garnet, if this is not as good as a farce; here we are, staring at each other, as if for a wager, and looking as savage as a couple of uncivilized tigers. I dare say, it would be a very nice way to pass time on an ordinary occasion; but as it’s drawing near dinner-time, and I have a powerful appetite of my own, you’ll excuse me for bidding you a heartrending adieu, and tearing myself away. If you have anything more to say, I’ll come back, after dinner, and stand it like a martyr.”

“Not so fast, Miss Petronilla Lawless!” said Garnet, grasping her by the arm, his sallow face fairly livid with rage; “since it has been your good pleasure to laugh me to scorn, and mock at the affection I have offered, just hear me. I swear to you, the day shall come when you will rue this! There is but a step between love and hatred and that step I have taken. Remember, you have made me your deadliest enemy, and I am an enemy not to be scorned! Girl, beware!”

“Well, now, I declare,” said Pet, “if this is not as good as a play and moral. I’m afraid you’re only plagiarizing, though, Mr. Garnet, for that melodramatic ‘girl, beware!’ sounds very like something I read in the ‘Pink Bandit of the Cranberry Cove.’ Confess, now, you’ve been reading it – haven’t you? – and that’s an extract from it; and, at the same time, you’ll oblige me by letting go my arm. It’s not made of cast-iron, though you seem to think it is.”

“Laugh, girl!” he said, hoarsely, “but the day will come when you shall sue to me, and sue in vain, even as I have done to-day. Then you will know what it is to despise Rozzel Garnet.”

“Why, you horrid old fright!” exclaimed Pet, with flashing eyes, “I sue to you, indeed! I guess not, my good teacher! How dare you threaten me, sir, your master’s daughter! Upon my word and honor, Mr. Rozzel Garnet, I have the best mind ever was to have you horsewhipped out of the house by my servants. A pretty chivalrous gentleman you are, to stand up there and talk to a lady like this! I declare to goodness! if I hadn’t the temper of an angel, I wouldn’t stand it!”

Still he held her, glaring in her face with his threatening eyes, and half-choked with passion.

“Let me go,” said Pet, jerking herself first one way, and then another, to free herself from his tenacious grasp. “I vow I’ll go and tell papa every blessed word of this, and if you stay another night under the same roof with me, my name’s not Petronilla. Take your claw from my arm, will you? and let me go!”

Pet jerked and pulled in vain; Mr. Garnet held her fast, and smiled a grim, sardonic smile at her futile efforts.

“Spit and snarl, my little kitten,” he said mockingly; “see what a sparrow you are in my grasp. Go you shall not, till it is my good pleasure to release you!”

With a sharp, passionate cry of rage, Petronilla darted down like lightning, and sunk her sharp, white teeth into his hand. The red blood spurted from a little circlet of wounds, and with an oath of pain and fury, he sprung back from the little wild-cat. No sooner was his hold released, than Pet darted like a flash through the door, turned the key in the lock and held him captive.

“Aha! Mr. Garnet!” she cried, exultingly; “little kittens can bite as well as snarl, you see. You caught a Tartar that time – didn’t you? You’re a model gentleman; you’re the saint that ought to be canonized on the spot; you’re the refined scholar – ain’t you? I’ll leave you, now, to discover the charms of solitude, while I go and tell papa the lesson I have taught you this morning. A little fasting and solitary imprisonment won’t hurt your blood in the least. Bon jour, Seigneur Don Monsieur Moustache Whiskerando! May your guardian-angel watch over you till I come back, and keep you from bursting a blood-vessel in your rage. If anything should happen to so precious an individual, society might as well shut up shop at once, so the gods have a care of you, Mr. Rozzel Garnet!” And off danced Pet.

In the dining-room she found her father awaiting her.

“Where is Mr. Garnet?” he asked as she entered.

“Mr. Garnet will not be down to dinner,” said Pet, inwardly determining to keep that gentleman as long imprisoned as she could.

The judge, without troubling himself to inquire further, took his seat, and proceeded to administer condign punishment to the good things spread before him, assisted by Pet, whose appetite was by no means impaired by the pleasant scene she had just passed through, and whose stony conscience was not in the least troubled with remorse for having locked a young gentleman up without his dinner.

About ten minutes after, the judge started to leave the room, and Pet, guessing where he was going, called to him:

“Papa!”

“Well,” said the judge, pausing, and turning round.

“Where are you going?”

“To the library, Miss Lawless,” said the judge, with dignity.

“Well, look here, papa, there’s a prisoner of war in there.”

“What, Miss Lawless?” said the judge, knitting his brows in perplexity.

“A prisoner I have taken – captivated – locked up! In other words, the pupil has turned teacher and locked her master up, as mothers do refractory children, to bring him to his senses.”

“Miss Lawless,” said the judge, in his most stately manner, “I have no time to listen to your nonsense. If you have anything to say – say it. If not, hold your tongue, and learn to be respectful when you address your father.”

“Well, I never!” ejaculated Pet. “No matter how seriously, sensibly, or solemnly I talk, people say I’m talking nonsense. But that’s just my fate; everything awful and horrid is destined to happen to me; and if I say a word against it, I’m told I’m imprudent and ungrateful, and dear knows what. Now, I told you I have locked my teacher up, and you tell me you have no time to listen to my nonsense. I guess Mr. Garnet finds it an unpleasant truth, anyway.”

“Petronilla! what do you mean?” said her father, beginning to think there might be method in this madness.

“Why, that I’ve locked Mr. Garnet up in the library for not behaving himself,” said Pet, promptly.

“Locked him up!”

“Yes, sir; and served him right, too, the hateful old ghoul!”

“Locked your teacher up?”

“Yes, sir; teachers require locking up as well as pupils.”

“Miss Lawless, it’s not possible that you have been guilty of such an outrageous act!” said the judge, with an awful frown.

“Yes, it is possible,” said Pet; “and he deserves twice as much for what he did. Oh, wouldn’t I like to be a man for one blessed half-hour, that I could horsewhip him within an inch of his life!”

“Good Heavens! what a visitation this mad girl is! What has Mr. Garnet done, you dreadful girl?”

“Dreadful girl!” burst out Pet, indignantly, “there’s the way I’m abused for taking my own part. Your daughter’s teacher has been making all sorts of love to me all the whole blessed morning!” and thereupon Pet commenced with a “full, true, and authentic” account of her morning interview in the library.

As the judge listened, the scowl on his brow grew blacker and blacker till his face was like the double-refined essence of a thunderbolt. But when Pet mentioned his threats and indignity in refusing to free her, his rage burst all bounds, and his wrath was a sight to see.

“The villain! the scoundrel! the blackleg! the low-bred hound! to dare to talk to my daughter in such a way! I vow to Heaven I have a good mind to break every bone in his body! To insult my daughter under her father’s roof, and threaten her like this! Petronilla, where is the key? I’ll kick the impertinent puppy out of the house.”

“The key’s in the door,” said Pet. “I expect he’s in a sweet frame of mind by this time.”

Up-stairs, in a highly choleric state, marched the judge, and turning the key in the library-door, he confronted Mr. Garnet, who was striding up and down the room in a way not particularly beneficial to the carpet, with flashing eyes, scowling brows, and an awful expression of countenance generally, and began, in a tone of withering sarcasm:

“So, Mr. Garnet, you have done my daughter the honor to propose for her hand this morning, and when that digit was refused you, you caught her, and had the impudence to insult her in her father’s house. Oh! you’re a model teacher of youth, Mr. Garnet! You’re an exemplary young man to be trusted with the education of a young female. Come, sir, out of my house, and if ever I catch sight of you again, I’ll cane you while I’m able to stand. Off with you this instant.” And the judge, who was as strong as half a dozen broken-down roues like Garnet, caught him by the collar and unceremoniously dragged him down stairs. In vain the quondam teacher strove to free himself, and make his voice heard; not a word would the judge listen to; but upon reaching the hall door, landed him by a well-applied kick on the broad of his back, and then went in, slamming the door in his face.

Crestfallen and mortified, Mr. Garnet picked himself up, and glancing hurriedly around, beheld Petronilla standing laughingly watching him at the window. A very fiend seemed to leap into his eyes then, and shaking his fist at her, he strode off breathing words of vengeance, “not loud, but deep.”