garian plain the place where one or two miserable huts and some
crumbling walls alone marked the site of the village burned long ago by
Tchereteff's soldiers; and there, in Hungarian soil, close to the spot
where the men of her tribe had been shot down, she buried the Tzigana,
whose daughter she so thoroughly felt herself to be, that, in breathing
the air of the puszta, she seemed to find again in that beloved land
something already seen, like a vivid memory of a previous existence.
And yet, upon the grave of the martyr, Marsa prayed also for the
executioner. She remembered that the one who reposed in the cemetery of
Pere-Lachaise, beneath a tomb in the shape of a Russian dome, was her
father, as the Tzigana, interred in Hungary, was her mother; and she
asked in her prayer, that these two beings, separated in life, should
pardon each other in the unknown, obscure place of departed souls.
So Marsa Laszlo was left alone in the world. She returned to France,
which she had become attached to, and shut herself up in the villa of
Maisons-Lafitte, letting old Vogotzine install himself there as a sort of
Mentor, more obedient than a servant, and as silent as a statue; and this
strange guardian, who had formerly fought side by side with Schamyl, and
cut down the Circassians with the sang-froid of a butcher's boy wringing
the neck of a fowl, and who now scarcely dared to open his lips, as if
the entire police force of the Czar had its eye upon him; this old
soldier, who once cared nothing for privations, now, provided he had his
chocolate in the morning, his kummel with his coffee at breakfast, and a
bottle of brandy on the table all day--left Marsa free to think, act,
come and go as she pleased.
She had accepted the Prince's legacy, but with this mental reservation
and condition, that the Hungarian colony of Paris should receive half of
it. It seemed to her that the money thus given to succor the compatriots
of her mother would be her father's atonement. She waited, therefore,
until she had attained her majority; and then she sent this enormous sum
to the Hungarian aid society, saying that the donor requested that part
of the amount should be used in rebuilding the little village in
Transylvania which had been burned twenty years before by Russian troops.
When they asked what name should be attached to so princely a gift, Marsa
replied: "That which was my mother's and which is mine, The Tzigana."
More than ever now did she c
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