His face softened; his voice was very sad and tender, while he repeated her words.
"So long ago! and yet I see it as clear as if it had been but yesterday—the fire smouldering at the tent-door—the moonshine, silver-white on the Severn Sea—the old grandfather sitting within, shaping a wooden peg with his knife—and my little wife crouching in the corner with her black eyes wide open, like the red hind's calf I had noosed a week before in Cloutsham Ball. Long ago! Yes, Thyra, it is long ago; and every day that has gone by, every night that I have seen it all again in my dreams, scores and brands it deeper and deeper in my true gipsy heart. There is no 'long ago' for you and me, Thyra. We have been one ever since that night when you were promised me by the comely Lovels over the camp-fire. Nothing but death can part us now. My sweet lass, I will be kind and true, for mine you surely are, and always will be."
To a woman whose heart was still in her own keeping, there would have been something inexpressibly touching in the tender glance of those eyes, naturally so fierce and keen; in the gentle tones of that voice, usually so hard, imperious, and clear. She could not but contrast the gipsy's absorbing devotion with John Garnet's joyous, good-humoured carelessness, and shuddered to think how she loved the first and how she was beloved by the second! She temporised—she prevaricated—she said one thing and meant another. Was she not a woman, though a gipsy?
"There would be time enough," she protested, "to consider all these matters when the tribe moved farther West to take up their winter quarters in the 'wrestlers' country,' amongst the Cornish tors and valleys. There was much to be done first; tents to strike, a long journey to be made, to-night's job to be effaced by a speedy change of quarters; and you know as well as I do, Fin," she added, smiling sweetly in his face, "that a storm is brewing down in the West where we are bound, and the same wind that brings the Kaulo-chiriclo—the blackbird, as the Gorgios call him—back to his own nest, will blow many a 'balanser' of good red gold into the pockets of the Romany lad who runs his errands. For my part, I hope with all my heart he'll win!"
"What matters it to us?" he replied. "Let the Gorgios fight it out among themselves, and cut each other's throats for a name, like fools as they are! King George, or King Charles, or King James, none of them will put a fowl in the Romany's kettle, nor a broad piece in his palm, but for service rendered and risk run. We must help ourselves, Thyra, take what we want, and keep all we can. Our hand may well be against every man, for is not every man's hand against us? For ages we have been a race apart, and we must continue so for ever. No Romany lad may wed with the noblest lady of the Gorgios; and for the Romany lass who listens to love in another tongue, we do not shame her before our people, but we conceal her, Thyra, we hide her away, where neither father nor mother, uncle nor aunt, Romany nor Gorgio, shall ever find her again!"
His voice had grown thick and hoarse, while drops of sweat stood on the tawny face, now turned to ashen grey. Waif trembled like a leaf.
"I know it," she said; "our people never forgive, Fin, and they never forget."
There was a ring of pride in the last sentence—tribute to the absent lover, whom even now she could not bring herself to wish she might put out of her mind.
They walked on in silence. She had taken his bundle, and thus laden carried it with a step as free and untiring as his own. They were half a mile behind the other gipsies, pacing side by side in the moonshine over the lonely down. A light twinkled from a solitary farm many a mile away, and once only was the stillness broken by the honest bark of a sheep-dog. The calm pure air, the sweet summer night, the quiet, the expanse, were all suggestive of those dreams which have so large a portion in life's reality. Her thoughts were far away beyond that western horizon, with the grey horse and its rider. She absolutely started when her companion's voice roused her from the abstraction in which she was plunged.