“About a week ago my people and myself” (the speaker is Ambrose, i.e. Jasper Petulengro) “were encamped on a green by a plantation in the neighbourhood of a great house. In the evening we were making merry, the girls dancing, while Piramus was playing on the fiddle a tune of his own composing, to which he had given his own name, Piramus of Rome, and which is much celebrated amongst our people, and from which I have been told one of the grand gorgio composers who once heard it has taken several hints.”
The gifted fiddler was at that time only a slim fellow of twenty-eight summers. Long years afterwards, when Piramus was a very old man and I a youth of twenty, I remember seeing him in our Lincolnshire town of Louth, where he was still tapping with his tinker’s hammer and fondling his violin in his cottage at the River Head. A story which the old man never tired of telling was that of his brother Jack’s heroism.
Upon a day, many years ago, the children of Piramus were boating on a river, and, their craft capsizing, all were flung into the stream. Jack, who happened to be on the bank, leaped in and saved all but two, the oldest and the youngest, who were drowned. In his day Piramus had excelled as a fighter, and certainly the knotty fists of the aged tinman looked as if they had done service in the bruising line.
Two visitors who loved to cheer the last days of Piramus were his daughter Sinfai and her husband, Isaac Heron, who have themselves now passed away. Whenever I think of the tall figure of Old Isaac, I recall one evening in the summer of 1876, when a camp of the Herons lay just outside of Lincoln. What appeared to be a Gypsy trial was in progress, and I remember the inward thrill on beholding those Herons in a ring, chattering like a flock of daws. Inside the circle stands a young man, bare-headed, stripped of coat and vest, and gesticulating wildly. Now he flings his arms about, and now he thrusts his fingers through his shaggy black hair. On his brow the sweat stands in beads. I can hear the name “Wilhelmina,” as it comes in a piercing shriek from his lips. The old men and women are muttering together as calmly they look on. In that throng were Isaac and Sinfai, along with some of the older Yorkshire Herons, Golias, Khulai, and others.
In after years I came to know very intimately many members of the clan Heron, and among them a niece of that weird old hag, Mrs. Herne (to use Borrow’s spelling of the name), who sent the poisoned cake to Lavengro in Mumper’s Dingle.
Having had a romantic interest in the Gypsies aroused in me thus early, I naturally looked forward to the days when I should leave home and meet the people of the kawlo rat (black blood) in other parts of the country.
CHAPTER III
NORTH-COUNTRY GYPSIES
A TYPICAL colliery village in a bleak northern county was the scene of my first curacy. Silhouettes of ugliness were its black pit buildings, dominated by a mountain of burning refuse exhaling night and day a poisonous breath which tarnished your brass candlesticks and rendered noxious the “long, unlovely street” of the parish. What in the name of wisdom induced me to pitch my tent in such a spot, I can scarcely say at this distance of time, unless perhaps it was a mad desire to rub against something rough and rude after having been reared in the drowsy atmosphere of pastoral Lincolnshire.
But if the picture which met my gaze on parochial rounds possessed no inspiring feature, you may take my word for it that the setting of the picture was undeniably charming. Close at hand lay the valley of the Wear, by whose brown and amber waters, broken by frequent beds of gravel, I used to wander, trout-rod in hand, or, wading ankle-deep in bluebells, I added to my store of nature-knowledge by observing the ways of the wood-folk—the tawny squirrel on his fir-bough, the red-polled woodpecker hammering at a decayed elm-branch, or a lank heron standing stiff as a stake on the margin of a pool.
Across the airy uplands at the back of the village runs a road which was ever a favourite walk of mine. Away in the distance, Durham’s towers lift their grey stones, and nearer across the fields, “like a roebuck at bay,” rises the castle, which together with the lordship of Brancepeth, Geoffrey, grandson of the Norman Gilbert de Nevil, received as dowry with Emma Bulmer, his Saxon bride. Right well I came to know the weathered walls of Brancepeth Castle, where in fancy I used to hear the blare of bugle (not the motor-horn), and to a dreamer it is still a place where “the swords shine and the armour rings.”