"Well, I"ll be a heathen, too, if you"ll show me how; if you think I"d pa.s.s for one. I"ve done a lot of heathen things in my time."
She gave him her hand to say good-bye. "Mayn"t I go with you?" he asked.
""I must finish my journey alone,"" she answered slowly, repeating a line from the first English book she had ever read.
"That"s English enough," he responded with a laugh. "Well, if I mustn"t go with you I mustn"t, but my respects to Robinson Crusoe." He slung the gun into the hollow of his arm. "I"d like much to go with you," he urged.
"Not to-day," she answered firmly.
Again the voice came through the woods, a little louder now.
"It sounds like a call," he remarked.
"It is a call," she answered--"the call of the heathen."
An instant after she had gone on, with a look half-smiling, half-forbidding, thrown over her shoulder at him.
"I"ve a notion to follow her," he said eagerly, and he took a step in her direction.
Suddenly she turned and came back to him. "Your plans are in danger--don"t forget Felix Marchand," she said, and then turned from him again.
"Oh, I"ll not forget," he answered, and waved his cap after her. "No, I"ll not forget monsieur," he added sharply, and he stepped out with a light of battle in his eyes.
CHAPTER VII. IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE
As Fleda wound her way through the deeper wood, remembering the things which had just been said between herself and Ingolby, the colour came and went in her face. To no man had she ever talked so long and intimately, not even in the far-off days when she lived the Romany life.
Then, as daughter of the head of all the Romanys, she had her place apart; and the Romany lads had been few who had talked with her even as a child. Her father had jealously guarded her until the time when she fell under the spell and influence of Lady Barrowdale. Here, by the Sagalac, she had moved among this polyglot people with an a.s.surance of her own separateness which was the position of every girl in the West, but developed in her own case to the nth degree.
Never before had she come so near--not to a man, but to what concerned a man; and never had a man come so near to her or what concerned her inmost life. It was not a question of opportunity or temptation--these always attend the footsteps of those who would adventure; but for long she had fenced herself round with restrictions of her own making; and the secrecy and strangeness of her father"s course had made this not only possible, but in a sense imperative.
The end to that had come. Gaiety, daring, pa.s.sion, elation, depression, were alive in her now, and in a sense had found an outlet in a handful of days--indeed since the day when Jethro Fawe and Max Ingolby had come into her life, each in his own way, for good or for evil. If Ingolby came for good, then Jethro Fawe came for evil. She would have revolted at the suggestion that Jethro Fawe came for good.
Yet, during the last few days, she had been drawn again and again towards the hut in the wood. It was as though a power stronger than herself had ordered her not to wander far from where the Romany claimant of herself awaited his fate. As though Jethro knew she was drawn towards him, he had sung the Gipsy songs which she and Ingolby had heard in the distance. He might have shouted for relief in the hope of attracting the attention of some pa.s.ser-by, and so found release and brought confusion and perhaps punishment to Gabriel Druse; but that was not possible to him. First and last he was a Romany, good or bad; and it was his duty to obey his Ry of Rys, the only rule which the Romany acknowledged. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him," he would have said, if he had ever heard the phrase; but in his stubborn way he made the meaning of the phrase the pivot of his own action. If he could but see Fleda face to face, he made no doubt that something would accrue to his advantage. He would not give up the hunt without a struggle.
Twice a day Gabriel Druse had placed food and water inside the door of the hut and locked him fast again, but had not spoken to him save once, and then but to say that his fate had not yet been determined. Jethro"s reply had been that he was in no haste, that he could wait for what he came to get; that it was his own--"ay bor"! it was his own, and G.o.d or devil could not prevent the thing meant to be from the beginning of the world.
He did not hear Fleda approach the hut; he was singing to himself a song he had learned in Montenegro. There the Romany was held in high regard, because of the help his own father had given to the Montenegrin people, fighting for their independence, by admirable weapons of Gipsy workmanship, setting all the Gipsies in that part of the Balkans at work to supply them.
This was the song he sang
"He gave his soul for a thousand days, The sun was his in the sky, His feet were on the neck of the world He loved his Romany chi.
"He sold his soul for a thousand days, By her side to walk, in her arms to lie; His soul might burn, but her lips were his, And the heart of his Romany chi."
He repeated the last two lines into a rising note of exultation:
"His soul might burn, but her lips were his, And the heart of his Romany chi."
The key suddenly turned in the lock, the door opened on the last words of the refrain, and, without hesitation, Fleda stepped inside, closing the door behind her.
""Mi Duvel", but who would think--ah, did you hear me call then?" he asked, rising from the plank couch where he had been sitting. He showed his teeth in a smile which was meant to be a welcome, but it had an involuntary malice.
"I heard you singing," she answered composedly, "but I do not come here because I"m called."
"But I do," he rejoined. "You called me from over the seas, and I came.
I was in the Balkans; there was trouble--Servia, Montenegro, and Austria were rattling the fire-irons again, and there was I as my father was before me. But I heard you calling, and I came."
"You never heard me call, Jethro Fawe," she returned quietly. "My calling of you is as silent as the singing of the stars, where you are concerned. And the stars do not sing."
"But the stars do sing, and you call just the same," he responded with a twist to his moustache, and posing against the wall. "I"ve heard the stars sing. What"s the noise they make in the heart, if it"s not singing? You don"t hear with the ears only. The heart hears. It"s only a manner of speaking, this talk about the senses. One sense can do the same as all can do and a Romany ought to know how to use one or all.
When your heart called I heard it, and across the seas I came. And by long and by last, but I was right in coming."
His impudence at once irritated her and provoked her admiration. She knew by instinct how false he was, and how a lie was as common with him as the truth; but his submission to her father, his indifference to his imprisonment, forced her interest, even as she was humiliated by the fact that he was sib to her, bound by ties of clan and blood apart from his monstrous claim of marriage. He was indeed such a man as a brainless or sensual woman could yield to with ease. He had an insinuating animal grace, that physical handsomeness which marks so many of the Tziganies who fill the red coats of a Gipsy musical s.e.xtette! He was not distinguished, yet there was an intelligence in his face, a daring at his lips and chin, which, in the discipline and conventions of organized society, would have made him superior. Now, with all his sleek handsomeness, he looked a cross between a splendid peasant and a chevalier of industry.
She compared him instinctively with Ingolby the Gorgio, as she looked at him. What was it made the difference between the two? It was the world in a man--personality, knowledge of life, the culture of the thousand things which make up civilization: it was personality got from life and power in contest with the ordered world.
Yet was this so after all? Tekewani was only an Indian brave who lived on the bounty of a government, and yet he had presence and an air of command. Tekewani had been a nomad; he had not been bound to one place, settled in one city, held subservient to one flag. But, no, she was wrong: Tekewani had been the servant and child of a system which was as fixed and historical as that of Russia or Spain. He belonged to a people who had traditions and laws of their own; organized communities moving here and there, but carrying with them their system, their laws and their national feeling.
There was the difference. This Romany was the child of irresponsibility, the being that fed upon life, that did not feed life; that left one place in the world to escape into another; that squeezed one day dry, threw it away, and then went seeking another day to bleed; for ever fleeing from yesterday, and using to-day only as a camping-ground.
Suddenly, however, she came to a stop in her reflections. Her father, Gabriel Druse, was of the same race as this man, the same unorganized, irresponsible, useless race, with no weight of civic or social duty upon its shoulders--where did he stand? Was he no better than such as Jethro Fawe? Was he inferior to such as Ingolby, or even Tekewani?
She realized that in her father"s face there was the look of one who had no place in the ambitious designs of men, who was not a builder, but a wayfarer. She had seen the look often of late, and had never read it until now, when Jethro Fawe stared at her with the boldness of possession, with the insolence of a soul of l.u.s.t which had had its victories.
She read his look, and while one part of her shrank from him as from some noisome thing, another part of her--to her dismay and anger--understood him, and did not resent him. It was the Past dragging at her life. It was inherited predisposition, the unregulated pa.s.sions of her forebears, the mating of the fields, the generated dominance of the body, which was not to be commanded into obscurity, but must taunt and tempt her while her soul sickened. She put a hand on herself. She must make this man realize once and for all that they were as far apart as Adam and Cagliostro. "I never called to you," she said at last.
"I did not know of your existence, and, if I had, then I certainly shouldn"t have called."
"The Gorgios have taken away your mind, or you"d understand," he replied coolly. "Your soul calls and those that understand come. It isn"t that you know who hears or who is coming--till he comes."
"A call to all creation!" she answered disdainfully. "Do you think you can impress me by saying things like that?"
"Why not? It"s true. Wherever you went in all these years the memory of you kept calling me, my little "rinkne rakli"--my pretty little girl, made mine by the River Starzke over in the Roumelian country."
"You heard what my father said--"
"I heard what the Duke Gabriel said--"Mi Duvel", I heard enough what he said, and I felt enough what he did!"
He laughed, and began to roll a cigarette mechanically, keeping his eyes fixed on her, however.
"You heard what my father said and what I said, and you will learn that it is true, if you live long enough," she added meaningly.
A look of startled perception flashed into his eyes. "If I live long enough, I"ll turn you, my mad wife, into my Romany queen and the blessing of my "tan"."
"Don"t mistake what I mean," she urged. "I shall never be ruler of the Romanys. I shall never hear--"
"You"ll hear the bosh played-fiddle, they call it in these heathen places--at your second wedding with Jethro Fawe," he rejoined insolently, lighting his cigarette. "Home you"ll come with me soon--"ay bor"!"