Then, with a gesture that summoned Jean to follow her, she disappeared once more into the interior of the hut.
Jean hesitated nervously in the doorway. For a moment she was conscious of an acute feeling of distaste for the impending interview—a dread of what this woman, whose eyes seemed the only live thing in her old, old face, might have to tell her.
“Come with me,” she appealed to Blaise. And he nodded and followed her across the threshold.
The scent of a peat fire came warm and fragrant to her nostrils as she stepped out of the sunlight into the comparative dusk of the little shanty, mingling curiously with an aroma of savoury stew which issued from a black pot hung above the fire, bubbling and chuckling as it simmered.
The gipsy, as though by force of habit, gave a stir to its contents and then, settling herself on a three-legged stool, she took Jean’s hand in her wrinkled, claw-like fingers and peered at its palm in silence.
“Your way baint so plain tu zee as t’other young lady’s,” she muttered at last, in an odd, sing-song tone. “There’s life an’ death an’ fire an’ flame afore yu zee the sun shinin’ clear.... And if so be yu take the wrong turnin’, you’ll niver zee it. And there’ll be no postes to guide ’ee. Tez your awn sawl must tell ’ee how to walk through the darkness. For there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
She paused, and the liquid in the black pot over the fire seethed up suddenly and filled the silence with its chuckling and gurgling, so that to Jean it seemed like the sound of some hidden malevolence chortling defiance at her.
The old woman clutched her hand a little tighter, turning the palm so that the light from the tiny window fell more directly upon it.
“There’s a castle waitin’ for ’ee, me dear,” she resumed in the same sing-song voice as before. “I can zee it so plain as plain. But yu won’t never live there wi’ the one yu luve, though you’m hopin’ tu. I see ruin and devastation all around it, and the sky so red as blid above it.”
She released Jean’s hand slowly, and her curiously bright eyes fastened upon Tormarin.