"I have come for my own, as it is my right."
"What is your own?"
"What has been yours until now, my Ry."
A grey look stole slowly up the strong face of the exiled leader, for his mind suddenly read the truth behind the young man"s confident words.
"What is mine is always mine," he answered roughly. "Speak! What is it I have that you come for?"
The young man braced himself and put a hand upon his lips. "I come for your daughter, my Ry." The old man suddenly regained his composure, and authority spoke in his bearing and his words. "What have you to do with my daughter?"
"She was married to me when I was seven years of age, as my Ry knows.
I am the son of Lemuel Fawe--Jethro Fawe is my name. For three thousand pounds it was so arranged. On his death-bed three thousand pounds did my father give to you for this betrothal. I was but a child, yet I remembered, and my kinsmen remembered, for it is their honour also. I am the son of Lemuel Fawe, the husband of Fleda, daughter of Gabriel Druse, King and Duke and Earl of all the Romanys; and I come for my own."
Something very like a sigh of relief came from Gabriel Druse"s lips, but the anger in his face did not pa.s.s, and a rigid pride made the distance between them endless. He looked like a patriarch giving judgment as he raised his hand and pointed with a menacing finger at Jethro Fawe, his Romany subject--and, according to the laws of the Romany tribes, his son-in-law. It did not matter that the girl--but three years of age when it happened--had no memory of the day when the chiefs and great people a.s.sembled outside the tent of Lemuel Fawe when he lay dying, and, by the simple act of stepping over a branch of hazel, the two children were married: if Romany law and custom were to abide, then the two now were man and wife. Did not Lemuel Fawe, the old-time rival of Gabriel Druse for the kinship of the Romanys, the claimant whose family had been rulers of the Romanys for generations before the Druses gained ascendancy--did not Fawe, dying, seek to secure for his son by marriage what he had failed to get for himself by other means?
All these things had at one time been part of Gabriel Druse"s covenant of life, until one year in England, when Fleda, at twelve years of age, was taken ill and would have died, but that a great lady descended upon their camp, took the girl to her own house, and there nursed and tended her, giving her the best medical aid the world could produce, so that the girl lived, and with her pa.s.sionate nature loved the Lady Barrowdale as she might have loved her own mother, had that mother lived and she had ever known her. And when the Lady Barrowdale sickened and died of the same sickness which had nearly been her own death, the promise she made then overrode all other covenants made for her. She had promised the great lady who had given her own widowed, childless life for her own, that she would not remain a Gipsy, that she would not marry a Gipsy, but that if ever she gave herself to any man it would be to a Gorgio, a European, who travelled oftenest "the open road" leading to his own door. The years which had pa.s.sed since those tragic days in Gloucestershire had seen the shadows of that dark episode pa.s.s, but the pledge had remained; and Gabriel Druse had kept his word to the dead, because of the vow made to the woman who had given her life for the life of a Romany la.s.s.
The Romany tribes of all the nations did not know why their Ry had hidden himself in the New World; they did not know that the girl had for ever forsworn their race, and would never become head of all the Romanys, solving the problem of the rival dynasties by linking her life with that of Jethro Fawe. But Jethro Fawe had come to claim his own.
Now Gabriel Druse"s eyes followed his own menacing finger with sharp insistence. In the past such a look had been in his eyes when he had sentenced men to death. They had not died by the gallows or the sword or the bullet, but they had died as commanded, and none had questioned his decree. None asked where or how the thing was done when a fire sprang up in a field, or a quarry, or on a lonely heath or hill-top, and on the pyre were all the belongings of the condemned, being resolved into dust as their owner had been made earth again.
"Son of Lemuel Fawe," the old man said, his voice rough with authority, "but that you are of the Blood, you should die now for this disobedience. When the time is fulfilled, I will return. Until then, my daughter and I are as those who have no people. Begone! Nothing that is here belongs to you. Begone, and come no more!"
"I have come for my own--for my Romany "chi", and I will not go without her. I am blood of the Blood, and she is mine."
"You have not seen her," said the old man craftily, and fighting hard against the wrath consuming him, though he liked the young man"s spirit.
"She has changed. She is no longer Romany."
"I have seen her, and her beauty is like the rose and the palm."
"When have you seen her since the day before the tent of Lemuel Fawe now seventeen years ago?" There was an uneasy note in the commanding tone.
"I have seen her three times of late, and the last time I saw her was an hour or so since, when she rode the Rapids of Carillon."
The old man started, his lips parted, but for a moment he did not speak.
At last words came. "The Rapids--speak. What have you heard, Jethro, son of Lemuel?"
"I did not hear, I saw her shoot the Rapids. I ran to follow.
At Carillon I saw her arrive. She was in the arms of a Gorgio of Lebanon--Ingolby is his name."
A malediction burst from Gabriel Druse"s lips, words sharp and terrible in their intensity. For the first time since they had met the young man blanched. The savage was alive in the giant.
"Speak. Tell all," Druse said, with hands clenching.
Swiftly the young man told all he had seen, and described how he had run all the way--four miles--from Carillon, arriving before Fleda and her Indian escort.
He had hardly finished his tale, shrinking, as he told it, from the fierceness of his chief, when a voice called from the direction of the house.
"Father--father," it cried.
A change pa.s.sed over the old man"s face. It cleared as the face of the sun clears when a cloud drives past and is gone. The transformation was startling. Without further glance at his companion, he moved swiftly towards the house. Once more Fleda"s voice called, and before he could answer they were face to face.
She stood radiant and elate, and seemed not apprehensive of disfavour or reproach. Behind her was Tekewani and his braves.
"You have heard?" she asked reading her father"s face.
"I have heard. Have you no heart?" he answered. "If the Rapids had drowned you!"
She came close to him and ran her fingers through his beard tenderly. "I was not born to be drowned," she said softly.
Now that she was a long distance from Ingolby, the fact that a man had held her in his arms left no shadow on her face. Ingolby was now only part of her triumph of the Rapids. She tossed a hand affectionately towards Tekewani and his braves.
"How!" said Gabriel Druse, and made a gesture of salutation to the Indian chief.
"How!" answered Tekewani, and raised his arm high in response. An instant afterwards Tekewani and his followers were gone their ways.
Suddenly Fleda"s eyes rested on the young Romany who was now standing at a little distance away. Apprehension came to her face. She felt her heart stand still and her hands grow cold, she knew not why. But she saw that the man was a Romany.
Her father turned sharply. A storm gathered in his face once more, and a murderous look came into his eyes.
"Who is he?" Fleda asked, scarce above a whisper, and she noted the insistent, amorous look of the stranger.
"He says he is your husband," answered her father harshly.
CHAPTER V. "BY THE RIVER STARZKE... IT WAS SO DONE"
There was absolute silence for a moment. The two men fixed their gaze upon the girl. The fear which had first come to her face pa.s.sed suddenly, and a will, new-born and fearless, possessed it. Yesterday this will had been only a trembling, undisciplined force, but since then she had been pa.s.sed through the tests which her own soul, or Destiny, had set for her, and she had emerged a woman, confident and understanding, if tremulous. In days gone by her adventurous, lonely spirit had driven her to the prairies, savagely riding her Indian pony through the streets of Manitou and out on the North Trail, or south through coulees, or westward into the great woods, looking for what: she never found.
Her spirit was no longer the vague thing driving here and there with pleasant torture. It had found freedom and light; what the Romany folk call its own "tan", its home, though it be but home of each day"s trek.
That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new if uncompleted way. It was a sword free from its scabbard.
The adventure of the Carillon Rapids had been a kind of deliverance of an unborn thing which, desiring the overworld, had found it. A few hours ago the face of Ingolby, as she waked to consciousness in his arms, had taught her something suddenly; and the face of Felix Marchand had taught her even more. Something new and strange had happened to her, and her father"s uncouth but piercing mind saw the change in her. Her quick, fluttering moods, her careless, undirected energy, her wistful waywardness, had of late troubled and vexed him, called on capacities in him which he did not possess; but now he was suddenly aware that she had emerged from pa.s.sionate inconsistencies and in some good sense had found herself.
Like a wind she had swept out of childhood into a woman"s world where the eyes saw things unseen before, a world how many thousand leagues in the future; and here in a flash, also, she was swept like a wind back again to a time before there was even conscious childhood--a dim, distant time when she lived and ate and slept for ever in the field or the vale, in the quarry, beside the hedge, or on the edge of harvest-fields; when she was carried in strong arms, or sat in the shelter of a man"s breast as a horse cantered down a glade, under an ardent sky, amid blooms never seen since then. She was whisked back into that distant, unreal world by the figure of a young Romany standing beside a spruce-tree, and by her father"s voice which uttered the startling words: "He says he is your husband!"
Indignation and a bitter pride looked out of her eyes, as she heard the preposterous claim--as though she were some wild dweller of the jungle being called by her savage mate back to the lair she had forsaken.
"Since when were you my husband?" she asked Jethro Fawe composedly.
Her quiet scorn brought a quiver to his spirit; for he was of a people to whom anger and pa.s.sion were part of every relationship of life, its stimulus and its recreation, its expression of the individual.
His eyelids trembled, but he drew himself together. "Seventeen years ago by the River Starzke in the Roumelian country, it was so done," he replied stubbornly. "You were sealed to me, as my Ry here knows, and as you will remember, if you fix your mind upon it. It was beyond the city of Starzke three leagues, under the brown scarp of the Dragbad Hills.
It was in the morning when the sun was by a quarter of its course. It happened before my father"s tent, the tent of Lemuel Fawe. There you and I were sealed before our Romany folk. For three thousand pounds which my father gave to your father, you--"
With a swift gesture she stopped him. Walking close up to him, she looked him full in the eyes. There was a contemptuous pride in her face which forced him to lower his eyelids sulkily.