When John Penhale carried the gypsy girl into Bosula, he thought she
would be off again in a fortnight or a month at most. On the contrary
she curled up as snug as a dormouse, apparently prepared to stay
forever. At first she followed him wherever he went about the farm, but
after a week she gave that up and remained at Bosula absorbed in the
preparation of food.
The number of really satisfying meals the girl Teresa had had in her
time could be counted on her fingers and toes, almost. Life had been
maintained by a crust here and a bone there. She was only half gypsy;
her mother had been an itinerant herbalist, her father a Basque
bear-leader, and she was born at Blyth Fair. Her twenty-two years had
been spent on the highways, singing and dancing from tavern to tavern,
harried by the law on one side and hunger on the other. She had no love
for the Open Road; her feet were sore from trudging it and she knew it
led nowhere but to starvation; her mother had died in a ditch and her
father had been hanged. For years she had been waiting a chance to get
out of the dust, and when John came along, knocked out the tumbler and
jerked her a florin she saw that possible chance.
A sober farmer who tossed silver so freely should be a bachelor, she
argued, and a man who could fight like that must have a good deal of the
lusty animal about him. She knew the type, and of all men they were the
easiest to handle. She followed up the clew hot foot, and now here she
was in a land of plenty. She had no intention of leaving in a fortnight,
a month, or ever, if she could help it, no desire to exchange three meat
meals daily, smoking hot, for turnips; or a soft bed for the lee of a
haystack. She would sit on the floor after supper, basking at the
roaring hearth, her back propped against John’s knees, and listen to the
drip of the eaves, the sough of the treetops, the echoed organ crashes
of the sea, snuggle closer to the farmer and laugh.
When he asked her why she did that she shrugged her shoulders. But she
laughed to think of what she was escaping, laughed to think that the
tumbler was out in it. But for that flung florin and the pricking of her
thumbs she would have been out in it too, crouched under a hedge, maybe,
soaked and shivering. Penhale need have had no fears she would leave
him; on the contrary she was afraid he would tire of her, and strove by
every means to bind him to her irrevocably. She practiced all her wiles
on John, ran to him when he came in, fondled and kissed him, rubbed her
head on his shoulder, swore he didn’t care for her, pretended to cry,
any excuse to get taken in his arms; once there she had him in her
power. The quarter strain of gitano came uppermost then, the blood of
generations of ardent southern women, professional charmers all, raced
in her veins and prompted her, showed her how and when. It was all
instinctive and quite irresistible; the simple northern yeoman was a
clod in her hands.
Martha had found Teresa some drugget clothes, rummaging in chests that
lay, under the dust of twenty years, in the neglected west wing—oak
chests and mahogany with curious iron clasps and hinges, the spoil of a
score of foundered ships. Teresa had been close behind the woman when
the selection was made and she had glimpsed many things that were not
drugget. When she gave up following John abroad she took to spending
most of her time, between meals, in the west wing, bolting the doors
behind her so that Martha could not see what she was doing.
John was lurching home down the valley one autumn evening, when, as he
neared Bosula, he heard singing and the tinkling of melodious wires.
There was a small grove of ashes close ahead, encircling an open patch
of ground supposed to be a fairy ring, in May a purple pool of
bluebells, but then carpeted with russet and yellow leaves. He stepped
nearer, peered round an oak bole and saw a sight which made him stagger
and swear himself bewitched. There was a marvelous lady dancing in the
circlet, and as she danced she sang, twanging an accompaniment on a
little guitar.
“Then, Lovely Boy, bring hither
The Chaplet, e’er it wither,
Steep’d in the various Juices
The Cluster’d Vine produces;
The Cluster’d Vine produces.”
She was dressed in a straight-laced bodice stitched with silver and low
cut, leaving her shoulders bare; flowing daffodil sleeves caught up at
the elbows and a cream-colored skirt sprigged with blue flowers and
propped out at the hips on monstrous farthingales. On her head she wore
a lace fan-tail—but her feet were bare. She swept round and round in a
circle, very slow and stately, swaying, turning, curtseying to the
solemn audience of trees.
“So mix’t with sweet and sour,
Life’s not unlike the flower;
Its Sweets unpluck’d will languish,
And gather’d ’tis with anguish;
And gather’d ’tis with anguish.”
The glare of sunset shot through gaps in the wood in quivering golden
shafts, fell on the smooth trunks of the ashes transforming them into
pillars of gold. In this dazzle of gold the primrose lady danced, in and
out of the beams, now glimmering, now in hazy and delicate shadow. A
puff of wind shook a shower of pale leaves upon her, they drifted about
her like confetti, her bare feet rustled among them, softly, softly.
“This, round my moisten’d Tresses,
The use of Life expresses:
Wine blunts the thorn of Sorrow,
Our Rose may fade to-morrow:
Our Rose—may—fade—to-morrow.”
The sun went down behind the hill; twilight, powder-blue, swept through
the wood, quenching the symphony in yellows. The lady made a final
fritter of strings, bowed to the biggest ash and faded among the trees,
towards Bosula. John clung to his oak, stupefied. Despite his Grammar
School education he half believed in the crone’s stories of Pixies and
“the old men,” and if this was not a supernatural being what was it? A
fine lady dancing in Bosula woods at sundown—and in the fairy circle
too! If not a sprite where did she come from? There was not her match in
the parish, or hundred even. He did not like it at all. He would go home
by circling over the hill. He hesitated. That was a long detour, he was
tired and his own orchard was not a furlong distant. His common sense
returned. Damme! he would push straight home, he was big and strong
enough whatever betide. He walked boldly through the woods, whistling
away his fears, snapping twigs beneath his boots.
He came to a dense clump of hollies at the edge of the orchard and heard
the tinkle-tinkle again, right in front of him. He froze solid and
stared ahead. It was thick dusk among the bushes; he could see nothing.
Tinkle-tinkle—from the right this time. He turned slowly, his flesh
prickling. Nothing. A faint rustle of leaves behind his back and the
tinkle of music once more. John began to sweat. He was pixie-led for
certain—and only fifty yards from his own door. If one listened to this
sort of thing one was presently charmed and lost forever, he had heard.
He would make a dash for it. He burst desperately through the hollies
and saw the primrose lady standing directly in front of him on the
orchard fringe. He stopped. She curtsied low.
“Oh, Jan, Jan,” she laughed. “Jan, come here and kiss me.”
“Teresa!”
She pressed close against him and held up her full, tempting mouth. He
kissed her over and over.
“Where did you get these—these clothes?” he asked.
“Out of the old chests,” said she. “You like me thus? . . . love me?”
For answer he hugged her to him and they went on into the kitchen linked
arm in arm. Martha in her astonishment let the cauldron spill all over
the floor and the idiot daughter threw a fit.
The drugget dress disappeared after that. Teresa rifled the chests and
got some marvelous results. The chests held the hoardings of a century,
samples of every fashion, washed in from wrecks on the Twelve Apostles,
wardrobes of officers’ mistresses bound for the garrison at Tangier, of
proud ladies that went down with Indiamen, packet ships, and vessels
sailing for the Virginia Colony. Jackdaw pickings that generations of
Penhale women had been too modest to wear and too feminine to part with.
Gowns, under gowns, bodices, smocks and stomachers of silk, taffeta,
sarsenet and satin of all hues and shapes, quilted, brocaded,
embroidered, pleated, scalloped and slashed; cambric and holland ruffs,
collars, bands, kerchiefs and lappets; scarves, trifles of lace pointed
and godrooned; odd gloves of cordovan leather, heavily fringed; vamped
single shoes, red heeled; ribbons; knots; spangled garters; feathers and
fans.
The clothes were torn and faded in patches, eaten by moth, soiled and
rusted by salt water, but Teresa cared little; they were treasure-trove
to her, the starveling. She put them all on in turn (as the Penhale
wives had done before her—but in secret) without regard to fit,
appropriateness or period and with the delight of a child dressing up
for a masquerade. She dressed herself differently every evening—even
wearing articles with showy linings inside out—aiming only at a blaze
of color and spending hours in the selection.
The management of the house she left entirely to Martha, which was wise
enough, seeing she knew nothing of houses. John coming in of an evening
never knew what was in store for him; it gave life an added savour. He
approached Adam and Eve, his heart a-flutter—what would she be like
this time?—opened the low door and stepped within. And there she would
be, standing before the hearth waiting for him, mischievous and radiant,
brass earrings winking, a knot of ribbons in her raven curls, dressed in
scarlet, cream, purple or blue, cloth of gold or silver lace—all worn
and torn if you came to examine closely, but, in the leaping firelight,
gorgeous.
Sometimes she would spend the evening wooing him, sidling into his arms,
rubbing with her cheek and purring in her cat fashion; and sometimes she
would take her guitar and, sitting cross-legged before the hearth, sing
the songs by which she had made her living. Pretty, innocent twitters
for the most part, laments to cruel Chloes, Phyllises and Celias in
which despairing Colins and Strephons sang of their broken hearts in
tripping, tuneful measures; morris and country airs she gave also and
patriotic staves—
“Tho’ the Spaniards invade
Our Int’rest and Trade
And often our Merchant-men plunder,
Give us but command
Their force to withstand,
We’ll soon make the slaves truckle under.”
Such stuff stirred John. As the lyrics lulled him, he would inflate his
chest and tap his toe on the flags in time with the tune, very manful.
All this heady stuff intoxicated the recluse. He felt a spell on the
place, could scarcely believe it was the same dark kitchen in which he
had sat alone for seventeen years, listening to the stream, the rain and
the wind. It was like living in a droll-teller’s story where charcoal
burners fell asleep on enchanted barrows and woke in fairy-land or
immortals put on mortal flesh and sojourned in the homes of men. Reared
on superstition among a race that placed balls on their roofs and hung
rags about holy wells to keep off witches, he almost smelt magic now. At
times he wondered if this strange creature he had met on the high moors
under the moon were what she held to be, if one day she would not get a
summons back to her own people, the earth gape open for her and he would
be alone again. There had been an authentic case in Zennor parish; his
own grandmother had seen the forsaken husband. He would glance at Teresa
half fearfully, see her squatting before the blaze, lozenges of white
skin showing through the rips in her finery, strong fingers plucking the
guitar strings, round throat swelling as she sang—
“I saw fair Clara walk alone;
The feathered snow came softly down . . .”
—and scout his suspicions. She was human enough—and even if she were
not, sufficient for the day. . . .
As for the girl, with the unstinted feeding, she put on flesh and good
looks. Her bones and angles disappeared, her figure took on bountiful
curves, her mouth lost its defiant pout. She had more than even she
wanted to eat, a warm bed, plenty of colorful kickshaws and a lover who
fell prostrate before her easiest artifices. She was content—or very
nearly so. One thing remained and that was to put this idyllic state of
affairs on a permanent basis. That accomplished, her cup of happiness
would brim, she told herself. How to do it? She fancied it was more than
half done already and that, unless she read him wrong, she would
presently have such a grip on the farmer he would never throw her off.
By January she was sure of herself and laid her cards on the table.
According to her surmise John took her forthwith into St. Gwithian,
a-pillion on the bay mare, and married her, and on the third of July a
boy was born. It was a great day at Bosula; all the employees, including
Martha, got blind drunk, while John spent a delightful afternoon
laboriously scratching a letter to Carveth Donnithorne apprising him of
the happy event.
Upstairs, undisturbed by the professional chatter of wise women, Teresa
lay quietly sleeping, a fluffy small head in the crook of her arm, a
tired smile on her lips—she was in out of the rain for good.
It is to be presumed that in the Donnithorne vault of Cury Church the
dust of old Selina at length lay quiet—the Penhales would go on and on.