The windfairies, and other tales

by Mary De Morgan

Then the potter was stricken with deadly fear, and remembered the words of the gipsy. “The first draught she will drink to your love, and the second draught she will drink to your hate,” and he knew in his heart that the words were true, and that the cup carried with it a charm.

He sat and thought and thought, and waited many days, hoping that his wife would change, and love him as before, but she remained cold and hard. Then the potter packed a wallet full of clothes, and put some money in his pocket, and he went to his wife and said, “Wife, there is a man somewhere who has done me a great wrong, and perhaps he did it unwittingly. I am going out to find him, and to make him right it, and though you do not love me, you will bide here quietly with your baby till I come back. And I do not know if that will be in months or in years.” Then the potter’s wife fell a-crying.

“I do not love you, nay, I hate you, and shall be glad when you have gone, but perhaps it may be because I am a wicked woman; and I do not know what has come over me, that now I want to fly away from you, when I used to think that I had the best husband on all this earth.” The potter sighed bitterly, but he kissed her cheeks, which felt as cold as ice, and then he said good-bye to his baby, and started on his way with the tears filling his eyes.

When the potter had gone the wife cried sorely, but still she was glad that she had not to see him, and for some time she lived with her baby happily enough. She kept the house, and mended and swept and cleaned as before, and thought little of the potter or where he had gone; but by and by all her money began to be spent, and she knew that unless the potter returned she would soon be very poor, and the winter was coming on, and she feared cold and hunger for her little one. So she went into a garret where she kept her old weaving loom, and she brought it out, and she bought flax, and sat down to weave just as she used to, when she went round the country with her sister who spun the flax. And she found that she could still weave her cloths very skilfully, and she began to sell them to the passers by, and in this way she earned her bread.

The winter set in very cold and hard, and the potter’s wife felt very sad. “But perhaps,” she said, “it is thinking of the poor things who are starving around with no homes,” for she never thought of her husband at all. And the flax began to be very dear, and she had difficulty in buying it. “Instead of doing all these cheap clothes,” she said, “it would be better to get very fine flax, and do a very very fine cloth; it will be the finest cloth I have ever woven, and I will sell it to some very rich lady.” So she bought the finest flax that money could bring her, and when she had woven a little bit of it, she sat and looked at it in her room, and she saw a tress of her own golden hair lying upon it, and she thought how beautiful it looked. Then she said—

“There is no one now who loves me or my hair, so I will weave it into a cloth with this very fine flax, and I must sell it for a very large sum of money, or else I shall have nothing left to go on with.” But she couldn’t think of any pattern in which the hair looked well with the fine linen flax, till at last she hit on one in which there was a cup with a heart on the top of it. The cup she made of the gold hair, and the heart also. She worked at it for many long days, and when she had finished it she looked at it, and was very much pleased, and said indeed it was the most beautiful cloth she had ever made; and now she must make haste and take it in to the town and sell it for a great deal of money, or she and her child would begin to do badly for food and fire.

The snow was lying heavily upon the ground, as the potter’s wife stood by the window looking at her cloth, when there crawled up outside the window a poor gipsy woman leading a little boy by the hand. She had big black eyes and a brown face, but her cheeks were so thin that the colour scarcely showed in them, and the potter himself would have had much ado to recognize her as the gipsy girl who made the cup years before; and her clothes all hung upon her in rags, and her little boy was crying bitterly with the cold. She knocked against the window with her poor thin hands. “Take me in,” she cried, “and have pity on me, for I can go no further.” Then the potter’s wife opened the door, and the gipsy woman entered the room with her little boy by her side, and crouched by the fire.

“Where is the potter who lived here?” said the gipsy. “It is long years ago since I saw him, and now I have come back to pray that he would give me food, for I am starving.”

“No,” said the wife, “I know not where he is, for he is my husband, and he has left me, and right glad of it am I; but if you will stay here I will give you food and drink and attend to you, for, poor woman, you seem to me to be very ill; so stay here and I will attend to you till you are well enough to go your way.”