“Bos hula enweer ew’n teller na,” said he in Cornish, as he rolled over to sleep. “Truly this is the owls’ house.”
CHAPTER IV
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,