He reached out over the coverlet, felt for a sock which he had been learning to knit and, slowly plying the needles, replied: “I only know what Jethro Fawe told me, and he was a promiscuous liar.”
“I don’t think he lied about me,” she answered quietly. “He told you I was a Gipsy; he told you that I was married to him. That was true. I was a Gipsy. I was married to him in the Romany way, when I was a child of three, and I never saw him again until here, the other day, on the Sagalac.”
“You were married to him as much as I am,” he interjected scornfully. “That was a farce. It was only a promise to pay on the part of your father. There was nothing in that. Jethro Fawe could not claim on that.”
“He has tried to do so,” she answered, “and if I were still a Gipsy he would have the right to do so from his standpoint.”
“That sounds silly to me,” Ingolby remarked, his fingers moving now more quickly with the needles. “No, it isn’t silly,” she said, her voice almost as softly monotonous as his had been when he told her of his life a little while before. It was as though she was looking into her own mind and heart and speaking to herself. “It isn’t silly,” she repeated. “I don’t think you understand. Just because a race like the Gipsies have no country and no home, so they must have things that bind them which other people don’t need in the same way. Being the vagrants of the earth, so they must have things that hold them tighter than any written laws made by King or Parliament. Unless the Gipsies kept their laws sacred they couldn’t hold together at all. They’re iron and steel, the Gipsy laws. They can’t be stretched, and they can’t be twisted. They can only be broken, and then there’s no argument about it. When they are broken, there’s the penalty, and it has to be met.”
Ingolby stopped knitting for a moment. “You don’t mean that a penalty could touch you?” he asked incredulously.
“Not for breaking a law,” she answered. “I’m not a Gipsy any more. I gave my word about that, and so did my father; and I’ll keep it.”
“Please tell me about it,” he urged. “Tell me, so that I can understand everything.”
There was a long pause in which Ingolby inspected carefully with his fingers the work which he was doing, but at last Fleda’s voice came to him, as it seemed out of a great distance, while she began to tell of her first memories: of her life by the Danube and the Black Sea, and drew for him a picture, so far as she could recall it, of her marriage with Jethro, and of the years that followed. Now and again as she told of some sordid things, of the challenge of the law in different countries, of the coarse vagabondage of the Gipsy people in this place or in that, and some indignity put upon her father, or some humiliating incident, her voice became low and pained. It seemed as if she meant that he should see all she had been in that past, which still must be part of the present and have its place in the future, however far away all that belonged to it would be. She appeared to search her mind to find that which would prejudice him against her. While speaking with slow scorn of the life which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to make him understand, too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it all seemed natural to her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did not produce repugnance in her mind when she was part of it. Unwittingly she over-coloured the picture, and he knew she did.
In spite of herself, however, some aspects of the old life called forth pictures of happy Nature, of busy animal life of wood and glen and stream and footpath which was exquisite in its way. She was in spirit at one with the multitudinous world of nature among which so many men and women lived, without seeing or knowing. It was all undesignedly a part of herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose devout citizen she was. Sometimes, in response to an interjection from Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great a poetic as dramatic instinct. As she talked, Ingolby in his imagination pictured her as a girl of ten or twelve, in a dark-red dress, brown curls falling in profusion on her shoulders, with a clear, honest, beautiful eye, and a face that only spoke of a joy of living, in which the small things were the small things and the great things were the great: the perfect proportion of sane life in a sane world.