The next day was dull and low, and the roads were awful, for it had
been raining for weeks, yet the young ones set off on their trip,
without taking Granny’s message either. They just slipped out while
she was making her slow trip upstairs after lunch. Not for anything
would they have called at Lady Louth’s house. That widow of a knighted
doctor, a harmless person indeed, had become an obnoxity in their lives.
Six young rebels, they sat very perkily in the car as they swished
through the mud. Yet they had a peaked look too. After all, they had
nothing really to rebel against, any of them. They were left so very
free in their movements. Their parents let them do almost entirely as
they liked. There wasn’t really a fetter to break, nor a prison-bar to
file through, nor a bolt to shatter. The keys of their lives were in
their own hands. And there they dangled inert.
It is very much easier to shatter prison bars than to open undiscovered
doors to life. As the younger generation finds out somewhat to its
chagrin. True, there was Granny. But poor old Granny, you couldn’t
actually say to her: “Lie down and die, you old woman!” She might be an
old nuisance, but she never really _did_ anything. It wasn’t fair to
hate her.
So the young people set off on their jaunt, trying to be very full of
beans. They could really do as they liked. And so, of course, there was
nothing to do but sit in the car and talk a lot of criticism of other
people, and silly flirty gallantry that was really rather a bore. If
there had only been a few “strict orders” to be disobeyed! But nothing:
beyond the refusal to carry the message to Lady Louth, of which the
rector would approve because he didn’t encourage King Charles’ Head
either.
They sang, rather scrappily, the latest would-be comic songs, as they
went through the grim villages. In the great park the deer were in
groups near the road, roe deer and fallow, nestling in the gloom of
the afternoon under the oaks by the road, as if for the stimulus of
human company.
Yvette insisted on stopping and getting out to talk to them. The girls,
in their Russian boots, tramped through the damp grass, while the deer
watched them with big, unfrightened eyes. The hart trotted away mildly,
holding back his head, because of the weight of the horns. But the doe,
balancing her big ears, did not rise from under the tree, with her
half-grown young ones, till the girls were almost in touch. Then she
walked light-foot away, lifting her tail from her spotted flanks, while
the young ones nimbly trotted.
“Aren’t they awfully dainty and nice!” cried Yvette. “You’d wonder they
could lie so cosily in this horrid wet grass.”
“Well I suppose they’ve got to lie down _sometime_,” said Lucille. “And
it’s _fairly_ dry under the tree.” She looked at the crushed grass,
where the deer had lain.
Yvette went and put her hand down, to feel how it felt.
“Yes!” she said doubtfully, “I believe it’s a bit warm.”
The deer had bunched again a few yards away, and were standing
motionless in the gloom of the afternoon. Away below the slopes of
grass and trees, beyond the swift river with its balustraded bridge,
sat the huge ducal house, one or two chimneys smoking bluely. Behind it
rose purplish woods.
The girls, pushing their fur collars up to their ears, dangling
one long arm, stood watching in silence, their wide Russian boots
protecting them from the wet grass. The great house squatted square and
creamy-grey below. The deer, in little groups, were scattered under the
old trees close by. It all seemed so still, so unpretentious, and so
sad.
“I wonder where the Duke is now,” said Ella.
“Not here, wherever he is,” said Lucille. “I expect he’s abroad where
the sun shines.”
The motor horn called from the road, and they heard Leo’s voice:
“Come on, boys! If we’re going to get to the Head and down to Amberdale
for tea, we’d better move.”
They crowded into the car again, with chilled feet, and set off through
the park, past the silent spire of the church, out through the great
gates and over the bridge, on into the wide, damp, stony village of
Woodlinkin, where the river ran. And thence, for a long time, they
stayed in the mud and dark and dampness of the valley, often with sheer
rock above them; the water brawling on one hand, the steep rock or dark
trees on the other.
Till, through the darkness of overhanging trees, they began to climb,
and Leo changed the gear. Slowly the car toiled up through the
whitey-grey mud, into the stony village of Bolehill, that hung on the
slope, round the old cross, with its steps, that stood where the road
branched, on past the cottages whence came a wonderful smell of hot
tea-cakes, and beyond, still upwards, under dripping trees and past
broken slopes of bracken, always climbing. Until the cleft became
shallower, and the trees finished, and the slopes on either side were
bare, gloomy grass, with low dry-stone walls. They were emerging on to
the Head.
The party had been silent for some time. On either side the road
was grass, then a low stone fence, and the swelling curve of the
hill-summit, traced with the low, dry stone walls. Above this, the low
sky.
The car ran out, under the low, grey sky, on the naked tops.
“Shall we stay a moment?” called Leo.
“Oh yes!” cried the girls.
And they scrambled out once more, to look around. They knew the place
quite well. But still, if one came to the Head, one got out to look.
The hills were like the knuckles of a hand, the dales were below,
between the fingers, narrow, steep, and dark. In the deeps a train was
steaming, slowly pulling north: a small thing of the underworld. The
noise of the engine re-echoed curiously upwards. Then came the dull,
familiar sound of blasting in a quarry.
Leo, always on the go, moved quickly.
“Shall we be going?” he said. “Do we _want_ to get down to Amberdale
for tea? Or shall we try somewhere nearer?”
They all voted for Amberdale, for the Marquis of Grantham.
“Well, which way shall we go back? Shall we go by Codnor and over
Crosshill, or shall we go by Ashbourne?”
There was the usual dilemma. Then they finally decided on the Codnor
top road. Off went the car, gallantly.
They were on the top of the world, now, on the back of the fist. It
was naked, too, as the back of your fist, high under heaven, and dull,
heavy green. Only it was veined with a network of old stone walls,
dividing the fields, and broken here and there with ruins of old
lead-mines and works. A sparse stone farm bristled with six naked sharp
trees. In the distance was a patch of smoky grey stone, a hamlet. In
some fields grey, dark sheep fed silently, sombrely. But there was not
a sound nor a movement. It was the roof of England, stony and arid as
any roof. Beyond, below, were the shires.
“‘And see the coloured counties,’” said Yvette to herself. Here anyhow
they were not coloured. A stream of rooks trailed out from nowhere.
They had been walking, pecking, on a naked field that had been manured.
The car ran on between the grass and the stone walls of the upland
lane, and the young people were silent, looking out over the far
network of stone fences, under the sky, looking for the curves downward
that indicated a drop to one of the underneath, hidden dales.
Ahead was a light cart, driven by a man, and trudging along at the side
was a woman, sturdy and elderly, with a pack on her back. The man in
the cart had caught her up, and now was keeping pace.
The road was narrow. Leo sounded the horn sharply. The man on the cart
looked round, but the woman on foot only trudged steadily, rapidly
forward, without turning her head.
Yvette’s heart gave a jump. The man on the cart was a gipsy, one of the
black, loose-bodied, handsome sort. He remained seated on his cart,
turning round and gazing at the occupants of the motor-car, from under
the brim of his cap. And his pose was loose, his gaze insolent in its
indifference. He had a thin black moustache under his thin, straight
nose, and a big silk handkerchief of red and yellow tied round his
neck. He spoke a word to the woman. She stood a second, solid, to turn
round and look at the occupants of the car, which had now drawn quite
close. Leo honked the horn again, imperiously. The woman, who had a
grey-and-white kerchief tied round her head, turned sharply, to keep
pace with the cart, whose driver also had settled back, and was lifting
the reins, moving his loose, light shoulders. But still he did not pull
aside.
Leo made the horn scream, as he put the brakes on and the car slowed
up near the back of the cart. The gipsy turned round at the din,
laughing in his dark face under his dark-green cap, and said something
which they did not hear, showing white teeth under the line of black
moustache, and making a gesture with his dark, loose hand.
“Get out o’ the way then!” yelled Leo.
For answer, the man delicately pulled the horse to a standstill, as it
curved to the side of the road. It was a good roan horse and a good,
natty, dark-green cart.
Leo, in a rage, had to jam on the brake and pull up too.
“Don’t the pretty young ladies want to hear their fortunes?” said the
gipsy on the cart, laughing except for his dark, watchful eyes, which
went from face to face, and lingered on Yvette’s young, tender face.
She met his dark eyes for a second, their level search, their
insolence, their complete indifference to people like Bob and Leo, and
something took fire in her breast. She thought: “He is stronger than I
am! He doesn’t care!”
“Oh yes! let’s!” cried Lucille at once.
“Oh yes!” chorused the girls.
“I say! What about the time?” cried Leo.
“Oh bother the old time! Somebody’s always dragging in time by the
forelock,” cried Lucille.
“Well, if you don’t mind _when_ we get back, _I_ don’t!” said Leo
heroically.
The gipsy man had been sitting loosely on the side of his cart,
watching the faces. He now jumped softly down from the shaft, his
knees a bit stiff. He was apparently a man something over thirty, and
a beau in his way. He wore a sort of shooting-jacket, double-breasted,
coming only to the hips, of dark green-and-black frieze; rather tight
black trousers, black boots, and a dark-green cap; with the big
yellow-and-red bandanna handkerchief round his neck. His appearance
was curiously elegant, and quite expensive in its gipsy style. He was
handsome, too, pressing in his chin with the old, gipsy conceit, and
now apparently not heeding the strangers any more, as he led his good
roan horse off the road, preparing to back his cart.
The girls saw for the first time a deep recess in the side of the road,
and two caravans smoking. Yvette got quickly down. They had suddenly
come upon a disused quarry, cut into the slope of the road-side,
and in this sudden lair, almost like a cave, were three caravans,
dismantled for the winter. There was also deep at the back, a shelter
built of boughs, as a stable for the horse. The grey, crude rock rose
high above the caravans, and curved round towards the road. The floor
was heaped chips of stone, with grasses growing among. It was a hidden,
snug winter camp.
The elderly woman with the pack had gone into one of the caravans,
leaving the door open. Two children were peeping out, shewing black
heads. The gipsy man gave a little call, as he backed his cart into the
quarry, and an elderly man came out to help him untackle.
The gipsy himself went up the steps into the newest caravan, that had
its door closed. Underneath, a tied-up dog ranged forth. It was a
white hound spotted liver-coloured. It gave a low growl as Leo and Bob
approached.
At the same moment, a dark-faced gipsy-woman with a pink shawl or
kerchief round her head and big gold ear-rings in her ears, came down
the steps of the newest caravan, swinging her flounced, voluminous
green skirt. She was handsome in a bold, dark, long-faced way, just a
bit wolfish. She looked like one of the bold, loping Spanish gipsies.
“Good-morning, my ladies and gentlemen,” she said, eyeing the girls
from her bold, predative eyes. She spoke with a certain foreign
stiffness.
“Good afternoon!” said the girls.
“Which beautiful little lady like to hear her fortune? Give me her
little hand?”
She was a tall woman, with a frightening way of reaching forward her
neck like a menace. Her eyes went from face to face, very active,
heartlessly searching out what she wanted. Meanwhile the man,
apparently her husband, appeared at the top of the caravan steps
smoking a pipe, and with a small, black-haired child in his arms. He
stood on his limber legs, casually looking down on the group, as if
from a distance, his long black lashes lifted from his full, conceited,
impudent black eyes. There was something peculiarly transfusing in
his stare. Yvette felt it, felt it in her knees. She pretended to be
interested in the white-and-liver-coloured hound.
“How much do you want, if we all have our fortunes told?” asked Lottie
Framley, as the six fresh-faced young Christians hung back rather
reluctantly from this pagan pariah woman.
“All of you? ladies and gentlemen, all?” said the woman shrewdly.
“I don’t want mine told! You go ahead!” cried Leo.
“Neither do I,” said Bob. “You four girls.”
“The four ladies?” said the gipsy woman, eyeing them shrewdly, after
having looked at the boys. And she fixed her price. “Each one give me
a sheeling, and a little bit more for luck? a little bit!” She smiled
in a way that was more wolfish than cajoling, and the force of her will
was felt, heavy as iron beneath the velvet of her words.
“All right,” said Leo. “Make it a shilling a head. Don’t spin it out
too long.”
“Oh, _you_!” cried Lucille at him. “We want to hear it _all_.”
The woman took two wooden stools, from under a caravan, and placed them
near the wheel. Then she took the tall, dark Lottie Framley by the
hand, and bade her sit down.
“You don’t care if everybody hear?” she said, looking up curiously into
Lottie’s face.
Lottie blushed dark with nervousness, as the gipsy woman held her hand,
and stroked her palm with hard, cruel-seeming fingers.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” she said.
The gipsy woman peered into the palm tracing the lines of the hand with
a hard, dark forefinger. But she seemed clean.
And slowly she told the fortune, while the others, standing listening,
kept on crying out: “Oh, that’s Jim Baggaley! Oh, I don’t believe
it! Oh, that’s not true! A fair woman who lives beneath a tree! Why,
whoever’s that?” until Leo stopped them with a manly warning:
“Oh, hold on, girls! You give everything away.”
Lottie retired blushing and confused, and it was Ella’s turn. She was
much more calm and shrewd, trying to read the oracular words. Lucille
kept breaking out with: “Oh, I say!” The gipsy man at the top of the
steps stood imperturbable, without any expression at all. But his bold
eyes kept staring at Yvette, she could feel them on her cheek, on her
neck, and she dared not look up. But Framley would sometimes look up
at him, and got a level stare back from the handsome face of the male
gipsy, from the dark conceited proud eyes. It was a peculiar look, in
the eyes that belonged to the tribe of the humble: the pride of the
pariah, the half-sneering challenge of the outcast, who sneered at
law-abiding men, and went his own way. All the time, the gipsy man
stood there, holding his child in his arms, looking on without being
concerned.
Lucille was having her hand read--“You have been across the sea, and
there you met a man--a brown-haired man--but he was too old----”
“Oh, I _say_!” cried Lucille, looking round at Yvette.
But Yvette was abstracted, agitated, hardly heeding: in one of her
mesmerised states.
“You will marry in a few years--not now, but a few years--perhaps
four--and you will not be rich, but you will have plenty--enough--and
you will go away, a long journey.”
“With my husband, or without?” cried Lucille.
“With him----.”
When it came to Yvette’s turn, and the woman looked up boldly, cruelly,
searching for a long time in her face, Yvette said nervously:
“I don’t think I want mine told. No, I won’t have mine told! No I
won’t, really!”
“You are afraid of something?” said the gipsy woman cruelly.
“No, it’s not that----” Yvette fidgeted.
“You have some secret? You are afraid I shall say it? Come, would you
like to go in the caravan, where nobody hears?”
The woman was curiously insinuating; while Yvette was always wayward,
perverse. The look of perversity was on her soft, frail young face now,
giving her a queer hardness.
“Yes!” she said suddenly. “Yes! I might do that!”
“Oh, I say!” cried the others. “Be a sport!”
“I don’t think you’d _better_!” cried Lucille.
“Yes!” said Yvette, with that hard little way of hers. “I’ll do that.
I’ll go in the caravan.”
The gipsy woman called something to the man on the steps. He went into
the caravan for a moment or two, then reappeared, and came down the
steps, setting the small child on its uncertain feet, and holding it by
the hand. A dandy, in his polished black boots, tight black trousers
and tight dark-green jersey, he walked slowly across with the toddling
child to where the elderly gipsy was giving the roan horse a feed of
oats, in the bough shelter between pits of grey rock, with dry bracken
upon the stone chip floor. He looked at Yvette as he passed, staring
her full in the eyes, with his pariah’s bold yet dishonest stare.
Something hard inside her met his stare. But the surface of her body
seemed to turn to water. Nevertheless, something hard in her registered
the peculiar pure lines of his face, of his straight, pure nose, of his
cheeks and temples. The curious dark, suave purity of all his body,
outlined in the green jersey: a purity like a living sneer.
And as he loped slowly past her, on his flexible hips, it seemed to her
still that he was stronger than she was. Of all the men she had ever
seen, this one was the only one who was stronger than she was, in her
own kind of strength, her own kind of understanding.
So, with curiosity, she followed the woman up the steps of the
caravan, the skirts of her well-cut tan coat swinging and almost
showing her knees, under the pale-green cloth dress. She had long,
long-striding, fine legs, too slim rather than too thick, and she wore
curiously-patterned pale-and-fawn stockings of fine wool, suggesting
the legs of some delicate animal.
At the top of the steps she paused and turned, debonair, to the others,
saying in her naïve, lordly way, so off-hand:
“I won’t let her be long.”
Her grey fur collar was open, showing her soft throat and pale green
dress, her little plaited tan-coloured hat came down to her ears, round
her soft, fresh face. There was something soft and yet overbearing,
unscrupulous, about her. She knew the gipsy man had turned to look at
her. She was aware of the pure dark nape of his neck, the black hair
groomed away. He watched as she entered his house.
What the gipsy told her, no one ever knew. It was a long time to wait,
the others felt. Twilight was deepening on the gloom, and it was
turning raw and cold. From the chimney on the second caravan came smoke
and a smell of rich food. The horse was fed, a yellow blanket strapped
round him, and two gipsy men talked together in the distance, in low
tones. There was a peculiar feeling of silence and secrecy in that
lonely, hidden quarry.
At last the caravan door opened, and Yvette emerged, bending forward
and stepping with long, witch-like slim legs down the steps. There was
a stooping, witch-like silence about her as she emerged on the twilight.
“Did it seem long?” she said vaguely, not looking at anybody and
keeping her own counsel hard within her soft, vague waywardness. “I
hope you weren’t bored! Wouldn’t tea be nice! Shall we go?”
“You get in!” said Bob. “I’ll pay.”
The gipsy-woman’s full, metallic skirts of jade-green alpaca
came swinging down the steps. She rose to her height, a big,
triumphant-looking woman with a dark-wolf face. The pink cashmere
kerchief stamped with red roses, was slipping to one side over her
black and crimped hair. She gazed at the young people in the twilight
with bold arrogance.
Bob put two half-crowns in her hand.
“A little bit more, for luck, for your young lady’s luck,” she
wheedled, like a wheedling wolf. “Another bit of silver, to bring you
luck.”
“You’ve got a shilling for luck, that’s enough,” said Bob calmly and
quietly, as they moved away to the car.
“A little bit of silver! Just a little bit, for your luck in love!”
Yvette, with the sudden long, startling gestures of her long
limbs, swung round as she was entering the car, and with long arm
outstretched, strode and put something into the gipsy’s hand, then
stepped, bending her height, into the car.
“Prosperity to the beautiful young lady, and the gipsy’s blessing on
her,” came the suggestive, half-sneering voice of the woman.
The engine _birred!_ then _birred!_ again more fiercely, and started.
Leo switched on the lights, and immediately the quarry with the gipsies
fell back into the blackness of night.
“Goodnight!” called Yvette’s voice, as the car started. But hers was
the only voice that piped up, chirpy and impudent in its nonchalance.
The headlights glared down the stone lane.
“Yvette, you’ve got to tell us what she said to you,” cried Lucille, in
the teeth of Yvette’s silent will _not_ to be asked.
“Oh, nothing at _all_ thrilling,” said Yvette, with false warmth. “Just
the usual old thing: a dark man who means good luck, and a fair one who
means bad: and a death in the family, which if it means Granny, won’t
be so _very_ awful: and I shall marry when I’m twenty-three, and have
heaps of money and heaps of love, and two children. All sounds very
nice, but it’s a bit too much of a good thing, you know.”
“Oh, but why did you give her more money?”
“Oh well, I wanted to! You _have_ to be a bit lordly with people like
that----.”