Prophecies of Robert Nixon, Mother Shipton, and Martha, the Gypsy

by Anonymous

He did look at her; and beheld a countenance on fire with rage. A pair of eyes blacker than jet, and brighter than diamonds, glared like stars upon him; her black hair dishevelled, hung over her olive cheeks; and a row of teeth whiter than the driven snow displaying themselves from between a pair of coral lips, in a dreadful smile, a ghastly sneer of contempt which mingled in her passion. Harding was riveted to the spot; and, affected partly by the powerful fascination of her superhuman countenance, and partly by the dread of a disturbance in the street, he paused to listen to her.

‘Mark me, sir,’ said Martha; ‘you and I shall meet again. Thrice shall you see me before you die. My visitings will be dreadful; but the third will be the last!’

There was a solemnity in this declaration which struck to his very heart, coming too as it did only from a vagrant outcast. Passengers were approaching; and wishing, he knew not why, to soothe the ire of the angry woman, he mechanically drew from his pocket some silver, which he tendered to her.

‘There, my good woman—there,’ said he, stretching forth his hand.

‘Good woman!’ retorted the hag, ‘Money now? I—I that have been cursed! ’tis all too late, proud gentleman—the deed is done, the curse be now on you.’ Saying which, she huddled her ragged red cloak about her shoulders, and hurried from his sight, into the deep and dreary recesses of St. Giles’s.

Harding experienced, as she vanished from his eye, a most extraordinary sensation: he felt grieved that he had spoken so harshly to the poor creature, and returned his shillings to his pocket with regret. Of course, fear of the fulfilment of her predictions did not mingle with any of his feelings on the occasion; and he proceeded to his office in Somerset-place, and performed all the arduous official duties of reading the opposition newspapers, discussing the leading politics of the day with the head of another department, and signing his name three times, before four o’clock.

Martha the gipsy, however, although he had ‘poophoohed’ her out of his memory, would ever and anon flash across his mind; her figure was indelibly stamped upon his recollection; and though, of course, as I before said, a man of his firmness and intellect could care nothing, one way or another, for the maledictions of an ignorant, illiterate gipsy, still his feelings—whence arising I know not—prompted him to call a hackney-coach, and proceed en voiture to his house rather than run the risk of again encountering the metropolitan sibyl, under whose forcible denunciation he was actually labouring.

There is a period in each day of the lives of married people, at which, I am given to understand, a more than ordinarily unreserved communication of facts and feelings takes place; when all the world is shut out, and the two beings, who are in truth ‘but only one,’ commune together freely and fully upon the occurrences of the past day. At this period, the else sacred secrets of the drawing-room coterie, and the tellable jokes of the after-dinner convivialist, are mutually interchanged by the fond pair, who, by the barbarous customs of uncivilized Britain, have been separated during part of the preceding evening.

Then it is, that the husband informs his anxious consort how he has forwarded his worldly views with such a man—how he has carried his point in such a quarter—what he thinks of the talents of one, of the character of another; while the communicative wife gives her views of the same subjects, founded upon what she has gathered from the individuals composing the female cabinet, and explains why she thinks he must have been deceived upon this point, or misled upon that. And thus, in recounting, in arguing, in discussing, and descanting, the blended interests of the happy pair are strengthened, their best hopes nourished, and perhaps eventually realized.

A few friends at dinner, and some refreshers in the evening, had prevented Harding from saying a word to his beloved Eliza about the gipsy; and perhaps, till the ‘witching time’ which I have attempted to define, he would not have mentioned the circumstance, even had they been alone. Most certainly he did not think the less of the horrible vision; and when the company had dispersed, and the affectionate couple had retired to rest, he stated the circumstance exactly as it had occurred, and received from his fair lady just such an answer as a prudent, intelligent, and discreet woman of sense would give to such a communication. She vindicated his original determination not to be imposed upon—wondered at his subsequent willingness to give to such an undeserving object, particularly while he had three or four soup tickets in his pocket—was somewhat surprised that he had not consigned the bold intruder to the hands of the beadle—and, ridiculing the impression which the hag’s appearance seemed to have made upon her husband’s mind, narrated a tour performed by herself and some friends to Norwood, when she was a girl, and when one of those very women had told her fortune, not one word of which ever came true—and, in a discussion of some length, animadverting strongly upon the weakness and impiety of putting faith in the sayings of such idle creatures, she fell fast asleep.