Prince Zilah -- Volume 1

ssian who was her father, all attracted the Prince toward her; and he experienced a deliciously d

followed the dinner and the musical exhibition given by extraordinary musicians with long, unkempt locks, Mars

officer, and, when peace was declared soon after, carried off by him to Russia. This was Tisza Laszlo, Marsa's mother. The officer, a great Russian nobleman, a handsome fellow and extremely rich, really loved her with a mad sort of love. He forced her to become his mistress; but he tried in every way to make her pardon the brutality of his passion; keeping her half a captive in his castle near Moscow, and yet offering her, by way of expiation, not only his fortune but his name, the princely title of which the Tchereteff s, his ancestors, had been so proud, and which the daughter of wandering Tzigani refused with mingled hatred and disgust. Princess? Sh

white-gloved hands: he represented to the imprisoned Tzigana the conqueror and murderer of her people. And yet a daughter was born to them. She had defended herself with the cries of a tigress; and then she had longed to die, to die of hunger, since, a close prisoner, she could not obtain possession of a weapon, nor cast herself into the water. She had lived, nevertheless, and then her daughter reconciled her to life. The child which was

arsa grew up, she told her the legends, the songs, the heroism, the martyrdom, of Hungary, picturing to the little girl th

efore this man, who was her father, she felt as if she were in the presence of an enemy. As Tisza never went out, Marsa rarely quitted the castle; and, when she went to Moscow, she hastened to return to her mot

r daughter. There is a Servian proverb which says, that when a Wallachian has crossed the threshold the whole house becomes Wallachian

ss except as The Tzigana, and this was the name which Marsa w

ana pardoning the Russian, and withou

hild, the Prince one d

become his wife, an

ghter?" said

e name of her mother, which at

ce was s

etc. The young girl, with the prodigious power of assimilation peculiar to her race, learned everything, loving knowledge for its own sake, but, nevertheless, always deeply moved by the history of that unknown country, which was that of her mother, and even her own, the land o

o exercised a powerful fascination over Marsa's imagination; and she departed joyously for Paris, accompanied by the Tzigana, her mother, who felt

d by an immense garden. Here, as formerly at Moscow, Tisza and the Prince lived together, and yet apart-the Tzigana, implacable in her resentment, bitterly refusing all pardon to the Russian, and always keeping alive in Marsa a hatred of all that was Muscov

. He summoned to his deathbed the Tzigana and her daughter; and, in a sort of supreme

stence, is the remorse of my whole life. But I am dying of the love which

then touched the Prince's forehead. But, before kissing him, her

e dying Prince, "will

, her father murdered, and this man, now lying thin and pale amid the

ried in the rear of an army with the rest of the victor's spoils, and immured within Russian walls. She felt a

life mounted to her heart, almost stifling her, and she paused, going no farther, and regarding with a haggard glance the man whose e