As she entered the street where Ingolby lived, she suddenly realized the difficulty before her. She might go to him, but by only one right could she stay and nurse him, and that right she did not possess. He would, she knew, understand her, no matter how the world babbled. Why should the world babble? What woman could have designs upon a blind man? Was not humanity alone sufficient warrant for staying by his side? Yet would he wish it? Suddenly her heart sank; but again she remembered their last parting, and once more she was sure he would be glad to have her with him.
It flashed upon her how different it would have been, if he and she had been Romanys, and this thing had happened over there in the far lands she knew so well. Who would have hinted at shame, if she had taken him to her father’s tan or gone to his tan and tended him as a man might tend a man? Humanity would have been the only convention; there would have been no sex, no false modesty, no babble, no reproach. If it had been a man as old as the oldest or as young as Jethro Fawe it would have made no difference.
As young as Jethro Fawe! Why was it that now she could never think of the lost and abandoned Romany life without thinking also of Jethro Fawe? Why should she hate him, despise him, revolt against him, and yet feel that, as it were by invisible cords, he drew her back to that which she had forsworn, to the Past which dragged at her feet? The Romany was not dead in her; her real struggle was yet to come; and in a vague but prophetic way she realized it. She was not yet one with the settled western world.
As they came close to Ingolby’s house she heard marching footsteps, and in the near distance she saw fourscore or more men tramping in military order. “Who are they?” she asked of Jowett.
“Men that are going to see law and order kept in Lebanon,” he answered.
CHAPTER XIV. SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
A few hours later Fleda slowly made her way homeward through the woods on the Manitou side of the Sagalac. Leaving Ingolby’s house, she had seen men from the ranches and farms and mines beyond Lebanon driving or riding into the town, as though to a fair or fete-day. Word of anticipated troubles had sped through the countryside, and the innate curiosity of a race who greatly love a row brought in sensation-lovers. Some were skimming along in one-horse gigs, a small bag of oats dangling beneath like the pendulum of a great clock. Others were in double or triple-seated light wagons—“democrats” they were called. Women had a bit of colour in their hats or at their throats, and the men had on clean white collars and suits of “store-clothes”—a sign of being on pleasure bent. Young men and girls on rough but serviceable mounts cantered past, laughing and joking, and their loud talking grated on the ear of the girl who had seen a Napoleon in the streets of his Moscow.
Presently there crossed her path a gruesomely ugly hearse, with glass sides and cheap imitation ostrich plumes drawn by gorged ravens of horses with egregiously long tails, and driven by an undertaker’s assistant, who, with a natural gaiety of soul, displayed an idiotic solemnity by dragging down the corners of the mouth. She turned away in loathing.
Her mind fled to a scene far away in the land of the Volga when she was a child, where she had seen buried two men, who had fought for their insulted honour till both had died of their wounds. She remembered the white and red sashes and the gay scarfs worn by the women at the burial, the jackets with great silver buttons worn by the men, and the silver-mounted pistols and bright steel knives in the garish belts. She saw again the bodies of the two gladiators, covered with crimson robes, carried shoulder-high on a soft bed of interlaced branches to the graves beneath the trees. There, covered with flowers and sprigs and evergreens, ribbons and favours, the kindly earth hid them, cloaked for their long sleep, while women wept, and men praised the dead, and went back to the open road again cheerily, as the dead would have them do.