'Looking, I saw
Where sorrow, like a shadow grim, did rise
Betwixt me and the sun.'
Autumn had come, mellow and gorgeous. The trees were turning to russet and amber and gold, and the swallows had long since flown away. The plums hung ripe and yellow upon the kitchen garden wall, and the apples were piled in rosy heaps in the orchard, ready for the cider-making.
The hop-gathering was over, and the hoppers—a motley crew—had returned to the slums of Stafford and Birmingham, the men not sorry to cease hard work, but the poor, draggled women and the little children with a wistful good-bye to the green fields, and all, I think, with a half sigh of regret for the Rector, who had toiled unceasingly among them during their brief stay, hoping, if by ever so little, to raise the hopeless lives and the sodden minds to a knowledge of higher things.
A band of gipsies was the next event. They arrived late one evening, nobody knew from where, and encamped on a patch of ground by the roadside, not very far from the Abbey (much too near, Father said, for the safety of his hen-roosts), coming like a tribe of wandering Israelites, with most of their worldly possessions on their backs. They were real gipsies, too, not the fair-haired hybrid pretenders who go about in neat caravans with muslin curtains to the windows, and wicker baskets slung on the top, but a dark-eyed, Spanish-looking crew, who put up a tent with a pole and a ragged blanket, and stewed their supper in a black caldron hung from three sticks set in the ground.
The children came across them suddenly, just as the sun was setting, and the picturesque scene stirred Peggy's sense of romance—perhaps also her budding artistic taste—to the core. The whole family was gathered together on the grass round the wood fire, the smoke of which rose up faintly blue against the russet of the beech-woods behind—handsome, fierce-eyed men, lying slouching idly on the ground smoking short black pipes; slatternly women with gay handkerchiefs tied round their black hair, bustling about with something savoury inside tin cans; ragged brown-skinned little children, gnawing at bones with savage haste; while a few disreputable dogs waited eagerly for the scraps that were thrown to them from time to time. A small cart, laden with brooms and coarse crockery, was tilted up by the hedge, while a couple of worn-out old donkeys, with clogs tied to their legs, cropped the grass close by, with dejection in their drooping ears.
'I'm sure they're talking Romany,' said Peggy, squeezing Bobby's arm hard in her excitement, and drawing him behind a bush, so as to watch the scene unobserved. 'What a queer life! Just think of getting up every morning, and not knowing where you were going to be by night, and sleeping under that dirty tent! I wonder what they have in that caldron? It smells nice, at any rate, though rather too oniony.'
'Pheasants, I should think, and rabbits that they have poached,' whispered Bobby. 'The keepers will have a lively time to-night. I wonder where they prigged the onions.'
Low as the children had spoken, the sharp ears of the gipsies had heard them, and a withered, witch-like old crone came hurrying up from the group near the fire, with an eager glitter in her eye.
'Tell your fortune, my little master? Tell your fortune, my pretty young lady? Cross the poor gipsy's hand with a silver sixpence, that the planets may work.'
'We haven't any money,' said Peggy hurriedly, a little scared when it came to meeting the tribe at such close quarters.