He reached out over the coverlet, felt for a sock which he had been learning to knit and, slowly plying the needles, replied: "I only know what Jethro Fawe told me, and he was a promiscuous liar."
"I don"t think he lied about me," she answered quietly. "He told you I was a Gipsy; he told you that I was married to him. That was true. I was a Gipsy. I was married to him in the Romany way, when I was a child of three, and I never saw him again until here, the other day, on the Sagalac."
"You were married to him as much as I am," he interjected scornfully.
"That was a farce. It was only a promise to pay on the part of your father. There was nothing in that. Jethro Fawe could not claim on that."
"He has tried to do so," she answered, "and if I were still a Gipsy he would have the right to do so from his standpoint."
"That sounds silly to me," Ingolby remarked, his fingers moving now more quickly with the needles. "No, it isn"t silly," she said, her voice almost as softly monotonous as his had been when he told her of his life a little while before. It was as though she was looking into her own mind and heart and speaking to herself. "It isn"t silly," she repeated.
"I don"t think you understand. Just because a race like the Gipsies have no country and no home, so they must have things that bind them which other people don"t need in the same way. Being the vagrants of the earth, so they must have things that hold them tighter than any written laws made by King or Parliament. Unless the Gipsies kept their laws sacred they couldn"t hold together at all. They"re iron and steel, the Gipsy laws. They can"t be stretched, and they can"t be twisted. They can only be broken, and then there"s no argument about it. When they are broken, there"s the penalty, and it has to be met."
Ingolby stopped knitting for a moment. "You don"t mean that a penalty could touch you?" he asked incredulously.
"Not for breaking a law," she answered. "I"m not a Gipsy any more. I gave my word about that, and so did my father; and I"ll keep it."
"Please tell me about it," he urged. "Tell me, so that I can understand everything."
There was a long pause in which Ingolby inspected carefully with his fingers the work which he was doing, but at last Fleda"s voice came to him, as it seemed out of a great distance, while she began to tell of her first memories: of her life by the Danube and the Black Sea, and drew for him a picture, so far as she could recall it, of her marriage with Jethro, and of the years that followed. Now and again as she told of some sordid things, of the challenge of the law in different countries, of the coa.r.s.e vagabondage of the Gipsy people in this place or in that, and some indignity put upon her father, or some humiliating incident, her voice became low and pained. It seemed as if she meant that he should see all she had been in that past, which still must be part of the present and have its place in the future, however far away all that belonged to it would be. She appeared to search her mind to find that which would prejudice him against her. While speaking with slow scorn of the life which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to make him understand, too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it all seemed natural to her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did not produce repugnance in her mind when she was part of it. Unwittingly she over-coloured the picture, and he knew she did.
In spite of herself, however, some aspects of the old life called forth pictures of happy Nature, of busy animal life of wood and glen and stream and footpath which was exquisite in its way. She was in spirit at one with the mult.i.tudinous world of nature among which so many men and women lived, without seeing or knowing. It was all undesignedly a part of herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose devout citizen she was. Sometimes, in response to an interjection from Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great a poetic as dramatic instinct. As she talked, Ingolby in his imagination pictured her as a girl of ten or twelve, in a dark-red dress, brown curls falling in profusion on her shoulders, with a clear, honest, beautiful eye, and a face that only spoke of a joy of living, in which the small things were the small things and the great things were the great: the perfect proportion of sane life in a sane world.
Now and again, carried away by the history of things remembered, she visualized scenes for him with the ardour of an artist and a lover of created things. He realized how powerful a hold the old life still had upon her. She understood it, too, for when at last she told of the great event in England which changed her life, and made her a deserter from Gipsy life; when she came to the giving of the pledge to a dying woman, and how she had kept that pledge, and how her father had kept it, sternly, faithfully, in spite of all it involved, she said to him:
"It may seem strange to you, living as I live now in one spot, with everything to make life easy, that I should long sometimes for that old life. I hate it in my heart of hearts, yet there"s something about it that belongs to me, that"s behind me, if that tells you anything. It"s as though there was some other self in me which reached far, far back into centuries, that wills me to do this and wills me to do that. It sounds mad to you of course, but there have been times when I have had a wild longing to go back to it all, to what some Gorgio writers call the pariah world--the Ishmaelites."
More than once Ingolby"s heart throbbed heavily against his breast as he felt the pa.s.sion of her nature, its extraordinary truthfulness, making it clear to him by indirect phrases that even Jethro Fawe, whom she despised, still had a hateful fascination for her. It was all at variance to her present self, but it summoned her through the long avenues of ancestry, predisposition; through the secret communion of those who, being dead, yet speak.
"It"s a great story told in a great way," he said, when she had finished. "It"s the most honest thing I ever heard, but it"s not the most truthful thing I ever heard. I don"t think we can tell the exact truth about ourselves. We try to be honest; we are savagely in earnest about it, and so we exaggerate the bad things we do, and we often show distrust of the good things we do. That"s not a fair picture. I believe you"ve told me the truth as you see it and feel it, but I don"t think it"s the real truth. In my mind I sometimes see an oriel window in the college where I spent three years. I used to work and think for hours in that oriel window, and in the fights I"ve been having lately I"ve looked back and thought I wanted it again; wanted to be there in the peace of it all, with the books, and the lectures, and the drone of history, and the drudgery of examinations; but if I did go back to it, three days"d sicken me, and if you went back to the Gipsy life three days"d sicken you."
"Yes, I know. Three hours would sicken me. But what might not happen in those three hours! Can"t you understand?"
Suddenly she got to her feet with a pa.s.sionate exclamation, her clenched hands went to her temples in an agony of emotion. "Can"t you understand?" she repeated. "It"s the going back at all for three days, for three hours, for three minutes that counts. It might spoil everything; it might kill my life."
His face flushed, crimsoned, then became pale; his hands ceased moving; the knitting lay still on his knee. "Maybe, but you aren"t going back for three minutes, any more than I"m going back to the oriel window for three seconds," he said. "We dreamers have a lot of agony in thinking about the things we"re never going to do--just as much agony as in thinking about the things we"ve done. Every one of us dreamers ought to be insulated. We ought to wear emotional lightning-rods to carry off the brain-waves into the ground.
"I"ve never heard such a wonderful story," he added, after an instant, with an intense longing to hold out his arms to her, and a still more intense will to do no such wrong. A blind man had no right or t.i.tle to be a slave-owner, for that was what marriage to him would be. A wife would be a victim. He saw himself, felt himself being gradually devitalized, with only the placid brain left, considering only the problem of hourly comfort, and trying to neutralize the penalties of blindness. She must not be sacrificed to that, for apart from all else she had greatness of a kind in her. He knew far better than he had said of the storm of emotion in her, and he knew that she had not exaggerated the temptation which sang in her ears. Jethro Fawe--the thought of the man revolted him; and yet there was something about the fellow, a temperamental power, the glamour and garishness of Nature"s gifts, prost.i.tuted though they were, finding expression in a striking personality, in a body of athletic grace--a man-beauty.
"Have you seen Jethro Fawe lately?" he asked. "Not since"--she was going to say not since the morning her father had pa.s.sed the sentence of the patrin upon him; but she paused in time. "Not since everything happened to you," she added presently.
"He knows the game is up," Ingolby remarked with forced cheerfulness.
"He won"t be asking for any more."
"It"s time for your milk and brandy," she said suddenly, emotion subsiding and a look of purpose coming into her face. She poured out the liquid, and gave the gla.s.s into his hand. His fingers touched hers.
"Your hands are cold," she said to him. "Cold hands, warm heart," he chattered.
A curious, wilful, rebellious look came into her eyes. "I shouldn"t have thought it in your case," she said, and with sudden resolve turned towards the door. "I"ll send Madame Bulteel," she added. "I"m going for a walk."
She had betrayed herself so much, had shown so recklessly what she felt, and yet, yet why did he not--she did not know what she wanted him to do.
It was all a great confusion. Vaguely she realized what had been working in him, but yet the knowledge was dim indeed. She was a woman. In her heart of hearts she knew that he did care for her, and yet in her heart of hearts she denied that he cared.
She was suddenly angry with herself, angry with him, the poor blind man, back from the Valley of the Shadow. She had not reached the door, however, when Madame Bulteel entered the room.
"The doctor from New York has come," she said, holding out a note from Dr. Rockwell. "He will be here in a couple of hours."
Fleda turned back towards the bed.
"Good luck!" she said. "You"ll see, it will be all right."
"Certainly I"ll see if it"s all right," he said cheerfully. "Am I tidy?
Have I used Pears" soap?" He would have his joke at his own funeral if possible.
"There are two hours to get you fit to be seen," she rejoined with raillery, infected by his cheerfulness in spite of herself. "Madame Bulteel is very brave. Nothing is too hard for her!"
An instant later she was gone, with her heart telling her to go back to him, not to leave him, but yet with a longing stronger still driving her to the open world, to which she could breathe her trouble in great gasps, as she sped onward through the woods and by the river. To love a blind man was sheer madness, but in her was a superst.i.tious belief that he would see again. It prevailed against the doubts and terrors. It made her resent his own sense of fatality, his own belief that he would be in darkness all his days.
In the room where he awaited the verdict of the expert, he kept saying to himself:
"She would have made everything else look cheap--if it could have been."
CHAPTER XXI. THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
The last rays of the setting sun touched the gorgeous Autumn woods with a loving, bright glow, and the day stole pensively away into a purple bed beyond the sight of the eyes. From a lonely spot by the river, Fleda watched the westering gleam until it vanished, her soul alive to the melancholy beauty of it all. Not a human being seemed to be within the restricted circle of her vision. There were only to be seen the deep woods, in myriad tints of bronze and red and saffron, and the swift-flowing river. Overhead was the Northern sky, so clear, so thrilling, and the stars were beginning to sparkle in the incredibly swift twilight which links daytime and nighttime in that Upper Land.
Lonely and delicately sad it all looked, but there was no feeling of loneliness among those who lived the life of the Sagalac. Many a man has stood on a wide plain of snow, white to the uttermost horizon, or in the yellow-brown gra.s.s of the Summer prairie, empty of all human life so far as eye could see, and yet has felt no solitude. It is as though the air itself is inhabited by a throng of happy comrades whispering in the communion of the invisible world.
As a child Fleda had often gazed upon just such scenes, lonely and luminous, but she was only conscious then of a vague and pleasant awe, a kindly confusion, which, like the din of innumerable bees, lulled wonder to sleep. Even as a child, however, something of what it meant had pierced her awe and wonder. Once as she crossed a broken, bare mountain of Roumania she had seen a wild a.s.s perched upon a high summit gazing, as it were, over the wide valley, where beneath, among the rocks, other wild a.s.ses wandered. There was something so statue-like in this immovable wild creature that Fleda had watched it till it was hid from her view by a jutting rock. But the thing which made a lasting impression, drawing her nearer to nature-life than all that had chanced since she was born, was the fact that on returning, hours after, the wild a.s.s was still standing upon the summit of the hill, still gazing across the valley. Or was it gazing across the valley? Was there some other vision commanding its sight?
So a young wife not yet a mother loses herself for hours together in a vista of unexplored experience. Fleda had pa.s.sed on, out of sight of the wild a.s.s on the hills, but for ever after the memory of it remained with her and the picture of it sprang to her eye innumerable times.
The hypnotized wild thing--hypnotized by its own vague instincts, or by something outside itself-became to her as the Sphinx to the Egyptian, the everlasting question of existence.
Now, as she watched the day fleeing, and night with swift stealthiness coming on, that unforgettable picture of the Roumanian hills came to her again. The instinct of those far-off days which had been little removed from the finest animal intelligence had now developed into thought.
Brain and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the revelation was between Nature and herself. Nature was so vast; she was so insignificant; changes in its motionless inorganic life were imperceptible save through the telescopes of years; but she, like the wind, the water, and the clouds, was variable, inconstant. Was there any real relation between the vast, imperturbable earth, its seas, its forests, its mountains and its plains, its life of tree and plant and flower and the men and women dotted on its surface? Did they belong to each other, or were mankind only, as it were, vermin infesting the desirable world? Did they belong to each other? It meant so much if they did belong, and she loved to think they did. Many a time she kissed the smooth bole of a maple or whispered to it; or laid her cheek against a mossy rock and murmured a greeting in the spirit of a companionship as old as the making of the world.
On the evening of this day of her destiny--carrying the story of her own fate within its twenty-four hours--she was in a mood of detachment from life"s routine. As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself in visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be.
If Ingolby"s sight came back! In her abstraction she saw him with sight restored and by her side, and even in that joy her mind felt a hovering sense of invasion, no definite, visible thing, but a presence which made shadow. Suddenly oppressed by it, she turned back into the woods from the river-bank to make for home. She had explored nearly every portion of this river-country for miles up and down, but on this evening, lost in her dreams, she had wandered into less familiar regions. There was no chance of her being lost, so long as she kept near to the river, and indeed by instinct and not by thought or calculation she made her way about at all times. Turned homeward, she walked for about a quarter of a mile, retreading the path by which she had come. It was growing darker, and, being in unfamiliar surroundings, she hurried on, though she knew well what course to take. Following the bank of the river she would have increased her walk greatly, as the stream made a curve at a point above Manitou, and then came back again to its original course; so she cut across the promontory, taking the most direct line homeward.
Presently, however, she became conscious of other people in the wood besides herself. She saw no one, but she heard breaking twigs, the stir of leaves, the flutter of a partridge which told of human presence. The underbrush was considerable, darkness was coming on, and she had a sense of being surrounded. It agitated her, but she pulled herself together, stood still and admonished herself. She called herself a fool; she asked herself if she was going to be a coward. She laughed out loud at her own apprehension; but a chill stole into her blood when she heard near by--there was no doubt about it now--mockery of her own laughter. Then suddenly, before she could organize her senses, a score of men seemed to rise up from the ground around her, to burst out from the bushes, to drop from the trees, and to storm upon her. She had only time to realize that they were Romanys, before scarfs were thrown around her head, bound around her body, and, unconscious, she was carried away into the deep woods.
When she regained consciousness Fleda found herself in a tent, set in a kind of prairie amphitheatre valanced by shrubs and trees. Bright fires burned here and there, and dark-featured men squatted upon the ground, cared for their horses, or busied themselves near two large caravans, at the doors or on the steps of which now and again appeared a woman.
She had waked without moving, had observed the scene without drawing the attention of a man--a sentry--who sat beside the tent-door. The tent was empty save for herself. There was little in it besides the camp-bed against the tent wall, upon which she lay, and the cushions supporting her head. She had waked carefully, as it were: as though some inward monitor had warned her of impending danger. She realized that she had been kidnapped by Romanys, and that the hand behind the business was that of Jethro Fawe. The adventurous and reckless Fawe family had its many adherents in the Romany world, and Jethro was its head, the hereditary claimant for its leadership.
Notwithstanding the Ry of Rys" prohibition, there had drawn nearer and ever nearer to him, from the Romany world he had abandoned, many of his people, never, however, actually coming within his vision till the appearance of Jethro Fawe. Here and there on the prairie, to a point just beyond Gabriel Druse"s horizon, they had come from all parts of the world; and Jethro, reckless and defiant under the Sentence, and knowing that the chances against his life were a million to one, had determined on one bold stroke which, if it failed, would make his fate no worse, and, if it succeeded, would give him his wife and, maybe, headship over all the Romany world. For weeks he had planned, watched and waited, filling the woods with his adherents, secretly following Fleda day by day, until, at last, the place, the opportunity, seemed perfect; and here she lay in a Romany tan once more, with the flickering fires outside in the night, and the sentry at her doorway. This watchman was not Jethro Fawe, but she knew well that Jethro was not far off.
Through the open door of the tent, for some minutes, her eyes studied the segment of the circle within her vision, and she realized that here was an organized attempt to force her back into the Romany world. If she repudiated the Gorgio life and acknowledged herself a Romany once again, she knew her safety would be secured; but in truth she had no fear for her life, for no one would dare to defy the Ry of Rys so far as to kill his daughter. But she was in danger of another kind--in deep and terrible danger; and she knew it well. As the thought of it took possession of her, her heart seemed almost to burst. Not fear, but anger and emotion possessed her. All the Romany in her stormed back again from the past. It sent her to her feet with a scarcely smothered cry. She was not quicker, however, than was the figure at the tent door, which, with a half-dozen others, sprang up as she appeared. A hand was raised, and, as if by magic, groups of Gipsies, some sitting, some standing, some with the Gipsy fiddle, one or two with flutes, began a Romany chant in a high, victorious key, and women threw upon the fire powders from which flamed up many coloured lights.