Not long after their arrival in Paris, a serious heart trouble attacked Marsa’s father.  He summoned to his deathbed the Tzigana and her daughter; and, in a sort of supreme confession, he openly asked his child, before the mother, to forgive him for her birth.

“Marsa,” he said, slowly, “your birth, which should make the joy of my existence, is the remorse of my whole life.  But I am dying of the love which I can not conquer.  Will you kiss me as a token that you have pardoned me?”

For the first time, perhaps, Marsa’s lips, trembling with emotion, then touched the Prince’s forehead.  But, before kissing him, her eyes had sought those of her mother, who bowed her head in assent.

“And you,” murmured the dying Prince, “will you forgive me, Tisza?”

The Tzigana saw again her native village in flames, her brothers dead, her father murdered, and this man, now lying thin and pale amid the pillows, erect, with sabre drawn, crying:  “Courage!  Charge!  Forward!”

Then she saw herself dragged almost beneath a horse’s hoofs, cast into a wagon with wrists bound together, carried in the rear of an army with the rest of the victor’s spoils, and immured within Russian walls.  She felt again on her lips the degradation of the first kiss of this man whose suppliant, pitiful love was hideous to her.

She made a step toward the dying man as if to force herself to whisper, “I forgive you;” but all the resentment and suffering of her life mounted to her heart, almost stifling her, and she paused, going no farther, and regarding with a haggard glance the man whose eyes implored her pardon, and who, after raising his pale face from the pillow, let his head fall back again with one long, weary sigh.

CHAPTER VII

THE STORY OF MARSA

Prince Tchereteff left his whole fortune to Marsa Laszlo, leaving her in the hands of his uncle Vogotzine, an old, ruined General, whose property had been confiscated by the Czar, and who lived in Paris half imbecile with fear, having become timid as a child since his release from Siberia, where he had been sent on some pretext or other, no one knew exactly the reason why.

It had been necessary to obtain the sovereign intervention of the Czar—­that Czar whose will is the sole law, a law above laws—­to permit Prince Tchereteff to give his property to a foreigner, a girl without a name.  The state would gladly have seized upon the fortune, as the Prince had no other relative save an outlaw; but the Czar graciously gave his permission, and Marsa inherited.

Old General Vogotzine was, in fact, the only living relative of Prince Tchereteff.  In consideration of a yearly income, the Prince charged him to watch over Marsa, and see to her establishment in life.  Rich as she was, Marsa would have no lack of suitors; but Tisza, the half-civilized Tzigana, was not the one to guide and protect a young girl in Paris.  The Prince believed Vogotzine to be less old and more acquainted with Parisian life than he really was, and it was a consolation to the father to feel that his daughter would have a guardian.