“Belle faintly smiled. ‘Come,’ said I, ‘take another cup of tea.’ Belle took another cup of tea, and yet another; we had some indifferent conversation, after which I arose and gave her donkey a considerable feed of corn. Belle thanked me, shook me by the hand, and then went to her own tabernacle, and I returned to mine.”
He torments her once more with Armenian and makes her speak in such a way that the reader sees—what he himself did not then see—that she was too sick with love for banter. She bade him farewell with the same transparent significance on the next day, when he was off early to a fair. “I waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned away and never saw Isopel Berners again.” That night as he was going home he said: “Isopel Berners is waiting for me, and the first word that I shall hear from her lips is that she has made up her mind. We shall go to America, and be so happy together.” She sent
him a letter of farewell, and he could not follow her, he would not try, lest if he overtook her she should despise him for running after her.
I can only say that it is an extraordinary love-making, but then all love-making, when truthfully reported, is extraordinary. There can be little doubt, therefore, that this episode is truthfully reported. Borrow himself has made a comment on himself and women through the mouth of Jasper. The Gypsy had overheard him talking to his sister Ursula for three hours under a hedge, and his opinion was: “I begin to think you care for nothing in this world but old words and strange stories.” When, afterwards, invited to kiss the same Ursula, he refused, “having,” he says, “inherited from nature a considerable fund of modesty, to which was added no slight store acquired in the course of my Irish education,” i.e. at the age of twelve.
After Isopel had gone he bought a fine horse with the help of a loan of £50 from Jasper, and travelled with it across England, meeting adventures and hearing of others. He was for a time bookkeeper at a coaching inn, still with some pounds in his purse. At Horncastle, which he mentions more than once by name, he sold the horse for £150. As the fair at Horncastle lasted from the 11th to the 21st of August, the date of this last adventure is almost exactly fixed. Here the book ends.
CHAPTER XV—AN EARLY PORTRAIT
At the end of these travels Borrow had turned twenty-two. His brother John painted his portrait, but it has disappeared, and Borrow himself, as if fearing lest no adequate picture of him should remain, took pains to leave the material for one. It is a peculiarity of his books that people whom he meets and converses with often remark on his appearance. He must himself have been tolerably familiar with it and used to comment on it. He told his father that a lady thought him like Alfieri’s Saul; at a later date Haydon, the painter, said he would “make a capital Pharaoh.” Years before, when he was a boy, Petulengro recognised him after a long absence, because there was something in his face to prevent people from forgetting him. Mrs. Herne, his Gypsy enemy, praised him for his “singular and outrageous ugliness.” He was lean, long-limbed and tall, having reached his full height of six-feet-two probably before the end of his teens; he had plenty of room to fill before becoming a big man, and yet he was already powerful and clearly destined to be a big man. His hair had for some time been rapidly becoming grey, and was soon to be altogether white: it had once been black, and his strongly-marked eyebrows were still dark brown. His face was oval and inclining to olive in complexion; his nose rounded, but not too large; his mouth good and well-moulded; his eyes dark brown and noticeable indescribably, either through their light or through the curve of the eyelids across them. “You have a flash about
that eye of yours,” says the old apple woman, and it is she that notices the “blob of foam” on his lips, while he is musing aloud, exclaiming “Necessity!” and cracking his finger-joints. He had an Irish look, or so thought his London acquaintance, Ardry. He looked “rather wild” at times and he had a way of clenching his fist when he was determined not to be put upon, as the bullying coachman found who had said: “One-and-ninepence, sir, or the things which you have brought with you will be taken away from you.” Yet he had small hands for his size and “long white fingers,” which “would just serve for the business,” said the thimble-rigger. Though ready to hit people when he is angry, “a more civil and pleasant-spoken person than yourself,” says Ursula, “can’t be found.” His own opinion was “that he was not altogether deficient in courage and in propriety of behaviour. . . . That his appearance was not particularly against him, his face not being like that of a convicted pickpocket, nor his gait resembling that of a fox that has lost his tail.” It is as a “poor thin lad” that he commends himself to us, through the mouth of the old apple woman, at his setting out from London, but as he gets on he shows himself “an excellent pedestrian.”
Already in London he has made one or two favourable impressions, as when he convinces the superb waiter that he is “accustomed to claret.” But it is upon the roads that he wishes to shine. When the Man in Black asks how he knows him, he answers that “Gypsies have various ways of obtaining information.” Later on, he makes the Man in Black address him as “Zingaro.” He impresses the commercial traveller as “a confounded sensible young fellow, and not at all opinionated,” and Lord Whitefeather as a highwayman in disguise, and the Gypsies as one who never spoke a bad word and never did a bad thing. This is his most impressive moment, when the jockey discovers