He had sought out his chieftain here in the new world in a spirit of adventure, cupidity and desire. He had come like one who betrays, but he acknowledged to a higher force than his own and to superior rights when Gabriel Druse’s strong arm brought him low; and, waking to life and consciousness again, he was aware that another force also had levelled him to the earth. That force was this woman’s spirit which now gave him his freedom so scornfully; who bade him begone and tell their people everywhere that she was no longer a Romany, while she would go, no doubt—a thousand times without doubt unless he prevented it—to the swaggering Gorgio who had saved her on the Sagalac.
She stood waiting for him to go, as though he could not refuse his freedom. As a bone is tossed to a dog, she gave it to him.
“You have no right to set me free,” he said coolly now. “I am not your prisoner. You tell me to take that word to the Romany people—that you leave them for ever. I will not do it. You are a Romany, and a Romany you must stay. You belong nowhere else. If you married a Gorgio, you would still sigh for the camp beneath the stars, for the tambourine and the dance—”
“And the fortune-telling,” she interjected sharply, “and the snail-soup, and the dirty blanket under the hedge, and the constable on the road behind, always just behind, watching, waiting, and—”
“The hedge is as clean as the dirty houses where the low-class Gorgios sleep. In faith, you are a long way from the River Starzke!” he added. “But you are my mad wife, and I must wait till you’ve got sense again.”
He sat down on the plank couch, and began to roll a cigarette once more.
“You come fitted out like a Gorgio lass now, and you look like a Gorgio countess, and you have the manners of an Archduchess; but that’s nothing; it will peel off like a blister when it’s pricked. Underneath is the Romany. It’s there, and it will show red and angry when we’ve stripped off the Gorgio. It’s the way with a woman, always acting, always imagining herself something else than what she is—if she’s a beggar fancying herself a princess; if she’s a princess fancying herself a flower-girl. ‘Mi Duvel’, but I know you all!”
Every word he said went home. She knew that there was truth in what he said, and that beneath all was the Romany blood; but she meant to conquer it. She had made her vow to one in England that she loved, and she would not change. Whatever happened, she had finished with Romany life, and to go back would only mean black tragedy in the end. A month ago it was a vow and an inner desire which made her determined; to-day it was the vow and a man—a Gorgio whom she had but now left in the woods, gazing after her with the look which a woman so well interprets.
“You mean you won’t go free from here? Because I was a Romany, and wish you no harm, I have come here to-day to let you go where you will—to go back to the place where the patrins show where your people travel. I set you free, and you say what you think will hurt and shame me. You have a cruel soul. You would torture any woman till she died. You shall not torture me. You are as far from me as the River Starzke. I could have let you stay here for my father to deal with, but I have set you free. I open the door for you, though you are nothing to me, and I am no more to you than one of the women you have fooled and left to eat the vile bread of the forsaken. You have been, you are a wolf—a wolf.”
He got to his feet again, and the blood rushed to his face, so that it seemed almost black. A torrent of mad words gathered in his throat, but they choked him, and in the pause his will asserted itself. He became cool and deliberate.