Fleda waked suddenly, but without motion; just a wide opening of the
eyes upon the darkness, and a swift beating of the heart, but not the
movement of a muscle. It was as though some inward monitor, some gnome
of the hidden life had whispered of danger to her slumbering spirit. The
waking was a complete emergence, a vigilant and searching attention.
There was something on her breast weighing it down, yet with a pressure
which was not weight alone, and maybe was not weight at all as weight
is understood. Instantly there flashed through her mind the primitive
belief that a cat will lie upon the breasts of children and suck their
breath away. Strange and even absurd as it was, it seemed to her that
a cat was pressing and pressing down upon her breast. There could be no
mistaking the feline presence. Now with a sudden energy of the body, she
threw the Thing from her, and heard it drop, with the softness of feline
feet, on the Indian rug upon the floor.
Then she sprang out of bed, and, feeling for the matches, lit a candle
on the small table beside her bed, and moved it round searching for what
she thought to be a cat. It was not to be seen. She looked under the
bed; it was not there: under the washstand, under the chest of drawers,
under the improvised dressing-table; and no cat was to be found. She
173 looked under the chair over which hung her clothes, even behind the
dresses and the Indian deerskin cape hanging on the door.
There was no life of any kind save her own in the room, so far as she
could see. She laughed nervously, though her heart was still beating
hard. That it should beat hard was absurd, for what had she to fear--she
who had lived the wild open-air life of many lands, had slept among
hills infested by animals the enemy of man, and who when a little girl
had faced beasts of prey alone. Yet here in her own safe room on the
Sagalac, with its four walls, but its unlocked doors--for Gabriel Druse
said that he could not bear that last sign of his exile--here in the
fortress of the town-dweller there was a strange trembling of her pulses
in the presence of a mere hallucination or nightmare--the first she had
had ever. Her dreams in the past had always been happy and without the
black fancies of nightmare. On the night that Jethro Fawe had first
confronted her father and herself, and he had been carried to the hut in
the Wood, her sleep had been disturbed and restless, but dreamless; in
her sleep on the night of the day of his release, she had been tossed
upon vague clouds of mental unrest; but that was the first really
disordered sleep she had ever known.
Holding the candle above her head, she looked in the mirror on her
dressing-table, and laughed nervously at the shocked look in her
eyes, at the hand pressed upon the bosom whose agitations troubled
the delicate linen at her breast. The pale light of the candle,
the reflection from the white muslin of her dressing-table and her
nightwear, the strange, deep darkness of her eyes, the ungathered tawny
hair falling to her shoulders, gave an unusual paleness to her face.
“What a ninny I am!” she said aloud as she looked at herself, her tongue
chiding her apprehensive eyes, her laugh contemptuously adding its
comment on her tremulousness. “It was a real nightmare--a waking
nightmare, that’s what it was.”
She searched the room once more, however-every corner, under the bed,
the chest of drawers and the dressing-table, before she got into bed
again, her feet icily cold. And yet again before settling down she
looked round, perplexed and inquiring. Placing the matches beside the
candlestick, she blew out the light. Then, half-turning on her side with
her face to the wall, she composed herself to sleep.
Resolutely putting from her mind any sense of the supernatural, she shut
her eyes with confidence of coming sleep. While she was, however, still
within the borders of wakefulness, and wholly conscious, she felt the
Thing jump from the floor upon her legs, and crouch there with that
deadening pressure which was not weight. Now with a start of anger
she raised herself, and shot out a determined hand to seize the Thing,
whatever it was. Her hand grasped nothing, and again she distinctly
heard a soft thud as of something jumping on the floor. Exasperated, she
drew herself out of bed, lit the candle again, and began another search.
Nothing was to be seen; but she had now the curious sense of an unseen
presence. She went to the door, opened it, and looked out into the
narrow hall. Nothing was to be seen there. Then she closed the door
again, and stood looking at it meditatively for a moment. It had a lock
and key; yet it had never been locked in the years they had lived on the
Sagalac. She did not know whether the key would turn in the lock. After
a moment’s hesitation, she shrugged her shoulders and turned the key.
It rasped, proved stubborn, but at last came home with a click. Then she
turned to the window. It was open about three inches at the bottom. She
closed it tight, and fastened it, then stood for a moment in the middle
of the room looking at both door and window.
She was conscious of a sense of suffocation. Never in her life had she
slept with door or window or tentflap entirely closed. Never before had
she been shut in all night behind closed doors and sealed windows. Now,
as the sense of imprisonment was felt, her body protested; her spirit
resented the funereal embrace of security. It panted for the freedom
which gives the challenge to danger and the courage to face it.
She went to the window and opened it slightly at the top, and then
sought her bed again; but even as she lay down, something whispered to
her mind that it was folly to lock the door and yet leave the window
open, if it was but an inch. With an exclamation of self-reproach, and
a vague indignation at something, she got up and closed the window once
more.
Again she composed herself to sleep, lying now with her face turned to
the window and the door. She was still sure that she had been the victim
of a hallucination which, emerging from her sleep, had invaded the
borders of wakefulness, and then had reproduced itself in a waking
illusion--an imitation of its original existence.
Resolved to conquer any superstitious feeling, she invoked sleep, and
was on its borders once more when she was startled more violently than
before.
The Thing had sprung again upon her feet and was crouched there. Wide
awake, she waited for a moment to make sure that she was not mad, or
that she was not asleep or in a half-dream. In the pause, she felt the
Thing draw up towards her knees, dragging its body along with tiger-like
closeness, and with that strange pressure which was not weight but
power.
With a cry which was no longer doubt, but agonized apprehension, she
threw the Thing from her with a motion of both hands and feet; and,
as she did so, she felt a horrible cold air breathing from a bloodless
body, chill her hand.
In another instant she was on her feet again. With shaking fingers
she lighted the candle yet once more, after which she lighted a lamp
standing upon the chest of drawers. The room was almost brilliantly
bright now. With a gesture of incredulity she looked round. The doors
and windows were sealed tight, and there was nothing to be seen; yet she
was more than ever conscious of a presence grown more manifest. For
a moment she stood staring straight before her at the place where it
seemed to be. She realized its malice and its hatred, and an intense
anger and hatred took possession of her. She had always laughed at such
things even when thrilled by wonder and manufactured terrors. But now
there was a sense of conflict, of evil, of the indefinable things in
which so many believed.
Suddenly she remembered an ancient Sage of her tribe, who, proficient in
mysteries and secret rites gathered from nations as old as Phoenicia
and Egypt and as modern as Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in
awe, for his fame had travelled where he could not follow. To Fleda in
her earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood
facing the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had
recited to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of
the Between World. This exorcism was, as he had told her, more powerful
than that which the Christian exorcists used, and the symbol of exorcism
was not unlike the sign of the Cross, to which was added genuflection of
Assyrian origin.
At any other time Fleda would have laughed at the idea of using the
exorcism; but all the ancient superstition of the Romany people latent
in her now broke forth and held her captive. Standing with candle raised
above her head, her eyes piercing the space before her, she recalled
every word of the exorcism which had caught the drippings from the
fountains of Chaldean, Phoenician, and Egyptian mystery.
Solemnly and slowly the exorcism came from her lips, and at the end her
right hand made the cabalistic sign; then she stood like one transfixed
with her arm extended towards the Thing she could not see.
Presently there passed from her a sense of oppression. The air seemed
to grow lighter, restored self-possession came; there was a gentle
breathing in the room like that of a sleeping child. It was a moment
before she realized that the breathing was her own, and she looked round
her like one who had come out of a trance.
“It is gone,” she said aloud. “It is gone.” A great sigh came from her.
Mechanically she put down the candle, smoothed the pillows of her bed,
adjusted the coverings, and prepared to lie down; but, with a sudden
impulse, she turned to the window and the door.
“It is gone,” she said again. With a little laugh of hushed triumph, she
turned and made again the cabalistic sign at the bed, where the Thing
had first assaulted her, and then at that point in the room near the
door where she had felt it crouching.
“Oh, Ewie Gal,” she added, speaking to that Romany Sage long since laid
to rest in the Roumelian country, “you did not talk to me for nothing.
You were right--yes, you were right, old Ewie Gal. It was there,”--she
looked again at the place where the Thing had been--“and your curse
drove it away.”
With confidence she went to the door and unlocked it. Going to the
window she opened it also, but she compromised sufficiently to open it
at the top instead of at the bottom. Presently she laid her head on her
pillow with a sigh of content.
Once again she composed herself to sleep in the darkness. But now there
came other invasions, other disturbers of the night. In her imagination
a man came who had held her in his arms one day on the Sagalac River,
who had looked into her eyes with a masterful but respectful tenderness.
As she neared the confines of sleep, he was somehow mingled with visions
of things which her childhood had known--moonlit passes in the Bosnian,
Roumelian, and Roumanian hills, green fields by the Danube, with peasant
voices drowsing in song before the lights went out; a gallop after dun
deer far away up the Caspian mountains, over waste places, carpeted
with flowers after a benevolent rain; mornings in Egypt, when the camels
thudded and slid with melancholy ease through the sands of the desert,
while the Arab drivers called shrilly for Allah to curse or bless; a
tender sunset in England seen from the top of a castle when all the
western sky was lightly draped with saffron, gold and mauve and delicate
green and purple.
Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and
there was a smile at her lips. If one could have seen her through the
darkness, one would have said that she was like some wild creature of
a virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the
refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame
Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive
things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and
vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the
Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage. There was that in her which
would drag at her footsteps in this new life.
For a full hour or more she slept, then there crept through the
fantasies of sleep something that did not belong to sleep--again
something from the wakeful world, strange, alien, troubling. At first
it was only as though a wind stirred the air of dreams, then it was like
the sounds that gather behind the coming rage of a storm, and again
it was as though a night-prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer.
Presently, with a stir of fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a
sound which was not of the supernatural or of the mind’s illusions,
but no less dreadful to her because of that. In some cryptic way it
was associated with the direful experience through which she had just
passed.
What she heard in the darkness was a voice which sang there by her
window--at it or beneath it--the words of a Romany song.
It was a song of violence, which she had heard but a short time before
in the trees behind her father’s house, when a Romany claimed her as his
wife:
“Time was I went to my true love,
Time was she came to me--”
Only one man would sing that song at her window, or anywhere in this
Western world. This was no illusion of her overwrought senses. There,
outside her window, was Jethro Fawe.
She sat up and listened, leaning on one arm, and staring into the
half-darkness beyond the window, the blind of which she had not drawn
down. There was no moon, but the stars were shining brightly, relieving
the intensity of the dark. Through the whispering of the trees, and
hushing the melancholy of a night-bird’s song, came the wild low note of
the Romany epic of vengeance. It had a thrill of exultation. Something
in the voice, insistent, vibrating, personal, made every note a thrust
of victory. In spite of her indignation at the insolent serenade,
she thrilled; for the strain of the Past was in her, and it had been
fighting with her all night, breaking in upon the Present, tugging at
the cords of youth.
The man’s daring roused her admiration, even as her anger mounted. If
her father heard the singing, there could be no doubt that Jethro Fawe’s
doom would be sealed. Gabriel Druse would resent this insolence to
the daughter of the Ry of Rys. Word would be passed as silently as the
electric spark flies, and one day Jethro Fawe would be found dead, with
no clue to his slayer, and maybe no sign of violence upon him; for while
the Romany people had remedies as old as Buddha, they had poisons as old
as Sekhet.
Suddenly the song ceased, and for a moment there was silence save for
the whispering trees and the night-bird’s song. Fleda rose from her bed,
and was about to put on her dressing-gown, when she was startled by a
voice loudly whispering her name at her window, as it seemed.
“Daughter of the Ry of Rys!” it called.
In anger she started forward to the window, then, realizing that she was
in her nightgown, caught up her red dressing-gown and put it on. As she
did so she understood why the voice had sounded so near. Not thirty feet
from her window there was a solitary oak-tree among the pines, in which
was a seat among the branches, and, looking out, she could see a figure
that blackened the starlit duskiness.
“Fleda--daughter of the Ry of Rys,” the voice called again.
She gathered her dressing-gown tight about her, and, going to the
window, raised it high and leaned out.
“What do you want?” she asked sharply.
“Wife of Jethro Fawe, I bring you news,” the voice said, and she saw a
hat waved with mock courtesy. In spite of herself, Fleda felt a shiver
of premonition pass through her. The Thing which had threatened her in
the night seemed to her now like the soul of this dark spirit in the
trees.
Resentment seized her. “I have news for you, Jethro Fawe,” she replied.
“I set you free, and I gave my word that no harm should come to you, if
you went your ways and did not come again. You have come, and I shall do
nothing now to save you from the Ry’s anger. Go at once, or I will wake
him.”
“Will a wife betray her husband?” he asked in soft derision.
Stung by his insolence, “I would not throw a rope to you, if you were
drowning,” she declared. “I am a Gorgio, and the thing that was done by
the Starzke River is nothing to me. Now, go.”
“You have forgotten my news,” he said: “It is bad news for the Gorgio
daughter of the Romany Ry.” She was silent in apprehension. He waited,
but she did not speak.
“The Gorgio of Gorgios of the Sagalac has had a fall,” he said.
Her heart beat fast for an instant, and then the presentiment came to
her that the man spoke the truth. In the presence of the accomplished
thing, she became calm.
“What has happened?” she asked quietly.
“He went prowling in Manitou, and in Barbazon’s Tavern they struck him
down.”
“Who struck him down?” she asked. It seemed to her that the night-bird
sang so loud that she could scarcely hear her own voice.
“A drunken Gorgio,” he replied. “The horseshoe is for luck all the world
over, and it brought its luck to Manitou to-night. It struck down a
young Master Gorgio who in white beard and long grey hair went spying.”
She knew in her heart that he spoke the truth. “He is dead?” she asked
in a voice that had a strange quietness.
“Not yet,” he answered. “There is time to wish him luck.”
She heard the ribald laugh with a sense of horror and loathing. “The
hand that brought him down may have been the hand of a Gorgio, but
behind the hand was Jethro Fawe,” she said in a voice grown passionate
again. “Where is he?” she added.
“At his own house. I watched them take him there. It is a nice
house--good enough for a Gorgio house-dweller. I know it well. Last
night I played his Sarasate fiddle for him there, and I told him all
about you and me, and what happened at Starzke, and then--”
“You told him I was a Romany, that I was married to you?” she asked in a
low voice.
“I told him that, and asked him why he thought you had deceived him, had
held from him the truth. He was angry and tried to kill me.”
“That is a lie,” she answered. “If he had tried to kill you he would
have done so.”
Suddenly she realized the situation as it was--that she was standing
at her window in the night, scantily robed, talking to a man in a tree
opposite her window; and that the man had done a thing which belonged to
the wild places which she had left so far behind.
It flashed into her mind--what would Max Ingolby think of such a thing?
She flushed. The new Gorgio self of her flushed, and yet the old Romany
self, the child of race and heredity had taken no exact account of the
strangeness of this situation. It had not seemed unnatural. Even if he
had been in her room itself, she would have felt no tithe of the shame
that she felt now in asking herself what the Master Gorgio would think,
if he knew. It was not that she had less modesty, that any stir of sex
was in her veins where the Romany chal was concerned; but in the life
she had once lived less delicate cognizance was taken of such things,
and something of it stayed.
“Listen,” Jethro said with sudden lowering of the voice, and imparting
into his tones an emotion which was in part an actor’s gift, but also in
large degree a passion now eating at his heart, “you are my wife by all
the laws of our people. Nothing can change it. I have waited for you,
and I will wait, but you shall be mine in the end. You see to-night--‘Mi
Duvel’, you see that fate is with me! The Gorgio has bewitched you. He
goes down to-night in that tavern there by the hand of a Gorgio, and the
Romany has his revenge. Fate is always with me, and I will be the gift
of the gods to the woman that takes me. The luck is mine always. It will
be always with me. I am poor to-day, I shall be rich to-morrow. I was
rich, and I lost it all; and I was poor, and became rich again. Ah, yes,
there are ways! Sometimes it is a Government, sometimes a prince that
wants to know, and Jethro Fawe, the Romany, finds it out, and money
fills his pockets. I am here, poor, because last year when I lost all,
I said, ‘It is because my Romany lass is not with me. I have not brought
her to my tan, but when she comes then the gold will be here as before,
and more when it is wanted.’ So, I came, and I hear the road calling,
and all the camping places over all the world, and I see the patrins in
every lane, and my heart is lifted up. I am glad. I rejoice. My heart
burns with love. I will forget everything, and be true to the queen of
my soul. Men die, and Gabriel Druse, he will die one day, and when the
time comes, then it would be that you and I would beckon, and all the
world would come to us.”
He stretched out a hand to her in the half-darkness. “I send the blood
of my heart to you,” he continued. “I am a son of kings. Fleda, daughter
of the Ry of Rys, come to me. I have been bad, but I can be good. I have
killed, but I will live at peace. I have cursed, but I will speak the
word of blessing. I have trespassed, but I will keep to my own, if you
will come to me.”
Suddenly he dropped to the ground, lighting on his feet like an animal
with a soft rebound. Stretching up his arms, he made soft murmuring of
endearment.
She had listened, fascinated in spite of herself by the fire and meaning
of his words. She felt that in most part it was true, that it was meant;
and, whatever he was, he was yet a man offering his heart and life,
offering a love that she despised, and yet which was love and passion of
a kind. It was a passion natural to the people from whom she came, and
to such as Jethro Fawe it was something more than sensual longing and
the aboriginal desire of possession. She realized it, and was not wholly
revolted by it, even while her mind was fleeing to where the Master
Gorgio lay wounded, it might be unto death; even while she knew that
this man before her, by some means, had laid Ingolby low. She was all at
once a human being torn by contending forces.
Jethro’s drop to the ground broke the sudden trance into which his words
had thrown her. She shook herself as with an effort of control. Then
leaning over the window-sill, and, looking down at him, now grown so
distinct that she could see his features, her eyes having become used to
the half-light of the approaching dawn, she said with something almost
like gentleness:
“Once more I say, you must go and come no more. You are too far off
from me. You belong to that which is for the ignorant, or the low, the
vicious and the bad. Behind the free life of the Romany is only the
thing that the beasts of the field have. I have done with it for ever.
Find a Romany who will marry you. As for me, I would rather die than
do so, and I should die before it could come to pass. If you stay here
longer I will call the Ry.”
Presently the feeling that he had been responsible for the disaster
to Ingolby came upon her with great force, and as suddenly as she had
softened towards this man she hardened again.
“Go, before there comes to you the death you deserve,” she added, and
turned away.
At that moment footsteps sounded near, and almost instantly there
emerged from a pathway which made a short cut to the house, the figure
of old Gabriel Druse. They had not heard him till he was within a few
feet of where Jethro Fawe stood. His walking had been muffled in the
dust of the pathway.
The Ry started when he saw Jethro Fawe; then he made a motion as though
he would seize the intruder, who was too dumbfounded to flee; but he
recovered himself, and gazed up at the open window.
“Fleda!” he called.
She came to the window again.
“Has this man come here against your will?” he asked, not as though
seeking information, but confirmation of his own understanding.
“He is not here by my will,” she answered. “He came to sing the Song of
Hate under my window, to tell me that he had--”
“That I had brought the Master Gorgio to the ground,” said Jethro, who
now stood with sullen passiveness looking at Gabriel Druse.
“From the Master Gorgio, as you call him, I have just come,” returned
the old man. “When I heard the news, I went to him. It was you who
betrayed him to the mob, and--”
“Wait, wait,” Fleda cried in agitation. “Is--is he dead?”
“He is alive, but terribly hurt; and he may die,” was the reply.
Then the old man turned to the Romany with a great anger and
determination in his face. He stretched out an arm, making a sign as
cabalistic as that which Fleda had used against her invisible foe in the
bedroom.
“Go, Jethro Fawe of all the Fawes,” he said. “Go, and may no patrins
mark your road!”
Jethro Fawe shrank back, and half raised his arm, as though to fend
himself from a blow.
The patrin is the clue which Gipsies leave behind them on the road they
go, that other Gipsies who travel in it may know they have gone before.
It may be a piece of string, a thread of wool, a twig, or in the dust
the ancient cross of the Romany, which preceded the Christian cross and
belonged to the Assyrian or Phoenician world. The invocation that no
patrins shall mark the road of a Romany is to make him an outcast, and
for the Ry of Rys to utter the curse is sentence of death upon a Romany,
for thenceforward every hand of his race is against him, free to do him
harm.
It was that which made Jethro Fawe shrink and cower for a moment. Fleda
raised her hand suddenly in protest to Gabriel Druse.
“No, no, not that,” Fleda murmured brokenly to her father, with eyes
that looked the pain and horror she felt. Though she repudiated the bond
by which the barbarian had dared to call her wife, she heard an inner
voice that said to her: “What was done by the Starzke River was the seal
of blood and race, and this man must be nearer than the stranger, dearer
than the kinsman, forgiven of his crimes like a brother, saved from
shame, danger or death when she who was sealed to him can save him.”
She shuddered as she heard the inner voice. She felt that this Other
Self of her, the inner-seeing soul which had the secret of the far
paths, had spoken truly. Even as she begged her father to withdraw the
sentence, it flashed into her mind that the grim Thing of the night
was the dark spirit of hatred between Jethro Fawe and the Master Gorgio
seeking embodiment, as though Jethro’s evil soul detached itself from
his body to persecute her.
At her appeal, Jethro raised his head. His courage came back, the old
insolent self-possession took hold of him again. The sentence which the
Ry had passed was worse than death (and it meant death, too), for it
made him an outcast from his people, and to be outcast was to be thrown
into the abyss. It was as though a man without race or country
was banished into desolate space. In a vague way he felt its full
significance, and the shadow of it fell on him.
“No, no, no,” Fleda repeated hoarsely, with that new sense of
responsibility where Jethro was concerned.
Jethro’s eyes were turned upon her now. In the starlit night, just
yielding to the dawn, she could faintly see his burning look, could
feel, as it were, his hands reach out to claim her; and she felt that
while he lived she was not wholly free. She realized that the hand of
nomad, disorderly barbarism was dragging her with a force which was
inhuman, or, maybe, superhuman.
Gabriel Druse could know nothing of the elements fighting in his
daughter’s soul; he only knew that her interest in the Master Gorgio was
one he had never seen before, and that she abhorred the Romany who had
brought Ingolby low. He had shut his eyes to the man’s unruliness and
his daughter’s intervention to free him; but now he was without pity. He
had come from Ingolby’s bedside, and had been told a thing which shook
his rugged nature to its centre--a thing sad as death itself, which he
must tell his daughter.
To Fleda’s appeal he turned a stony face. There was none of that rage
in his words which had marked the scene when Jethro Fawe first came to
claim what he could not have. There was something in him now more deadly
and inevitable. It made him like some figure of mythology, implacable,
fateful. His great height, his bushy beard and stormy forehead, the eyes
over which shaggy eyebrows hung like the shrubs on a cliff-edge, his
face lined and set like a thing in bronze--all were signs of a power
which, in passion, would be like that of OEdipus: in the moment of
justice or doom would, with unblinking eyes, slay and cast aside as
debris is tossed upon the dust-heap.
As he spoke now his voice was toneless. His mind was flint, and his
tongue was but the flash of the flint. He looked at his daughter for a
moment with no light of fatherhood in his face, then turned from her
to Jethro Fawe with slow decision and a gesture of authority. His eyes
fastened on the face of the son of Lemuel Fawe, as though it was that
old enemy himself.
“I have said what I have said, and there is no more to be spoken. The
rule of the Ry will be as water for ever after if these things may be
done to him and his. For generations have the Rys of all the Rys been
like the trees that bend only to the whirlwind; and when they speak
there is no more to be said. When it ceases to be so, then the Rys will
vanish from the world, and be as stubble of the field ready for the
burning. I have spoken. Go! And no patrins shall lie upon your road.”
A look of savage obedience and sullen acquiescence came into Jethro
Fawe’s face, and he took off his hat as one who stands in the presence
of his master. The strain of generations, the tradition of the race
without a country was stronger than the revolt in his soul. He was
young, his blood was hot and brawling in his veins, he was all carnal,
with the superior intelligence of the trained animal, but custom was
stronger than all. He knew now that whatever he might do, some time, not
far, his doom would fall upon him suddenly, as a wind shoots up a ravine
from the desert, or a nightbird rises from the dark.
He set his feet stubbornly, and raised his sullen face and fanatical
eyes. The light of morning was creeping through the starshine, and his
features showed plainly.
“I am your daughter’s husband,” he said. “Nothing can change that. It
was done by the River Starzke, and it was the word of the Ry of Rys. It
stands for ever. There is no divorce except death for the Romany.”
“The patrins cease to mark the way,” returned the old man with a swift
gesture. “The divorce of death will come.”
Jethro’s face grew still paler, and he opened his lips to speak, but
paused, seeing Fleda, with a backward look of pity and of horror, draw
back into the darkness of her room.
He made a motion of passion and despair. His voice was almost shrill
when he spoke. “Till that divorce comes, the daughter of the Ry of Rys
is mine!” he cried sharply. “I will not give my wife to a Gorgio thief.
His hands shall not caress her, his eyes shall not feed upon her--”
“His eyes will not feed upon her,” interrupted the old man, “So cease
the prattle which can alter nothing. Begone.”
For a moment Jethro Fawe stood like one who did not understand what was
said to him, but suddenly a look of triumph and malice came into his
face, and his eyes lighted with a reckless fire. He threw back his head,
and laughed with a strange, offensive softness. Then, waving a hand to
the window from which Fleda had gone, he swung his cap on his head and
plunged into the trees.
A moment afterwards his voice came back exultingly, through the morning
air:
“But a Gorgio sleeps ‘neath the greenwood tree
He’ll broach my tan no more:
And my love, she sleeps afar from me
But near to the churchyard door.”
As the old man turned heavily towards the house, and opened the outer
door, Fleda met him.
“What did you mean when you said that Ingolby’s eyes would not feed upon
me?” she asked in a low tone of fear.
A look of compassion came into the old man’s face. He took her hand.
“Come and I will tell you,” he said.