“‘On Dovrefeld, in Norway,
Were once together seen
The twelve heroic brothers
Of Ingeborg, the queen!’”
A pretty invocation, indeed, to a hawker travelling with a donkey-cart!
“None of your chaffing, young fellow,” said the tall girl, “or I will give you what shall make you wipe your face; be civil, or you will rue it.”
Lavengro admitted that he was “perhaps a peg too high,” and offered her “something a bit lower.” It was a Romany couplet. The rage of the tall girl, whilom Queen Ingeborg, may be imagined when she found herself associated with the gypsies; there is no despite of gypsies quite so deep as that of the English of the “lower orders,” as they might say at Marlborough. And, after a little more of Lavengro’s solemn chaff: “Before I could put myself on guard, she struck me a blow on the face which had nearly brought me to the ground.”
Fit exordium to the love-story of travelling hawker and hedge-tinker, to be promoted later by lessons in Armenian given by the Knight of the Solder-iron to the Damsel of the Donkey-cart. And the scene that follows—Lavengro’s fight with the Flaming Tinman, who transferred his mortal enmity for Jack Slingsby to the temporary owner of Jack Slingsby’s stock-in-trade—is a fit sequel. The heroic combat was the real beginning of the courtship. “The tall girl” saw foul play on the part of the Tinman, and immediately became “the young man’s” champion and assumed the office of his second. It was by her advice, after he had been knocked off his legs several times by the Tinman’s flashing fist, that, instead of fighting with his left, he got in the blow with his “long right” that settled the hash of Blazing Bosvile. The Tinman and his mort took themselves off after this discomfiture, leaving Lavengro and Isopel Berners in undisputed possession of the Dingle.
We learn little about Isopel in details of fact, except that she was born in “Long Melford workhouse,” and put “out to service,” where she experienced all the joys that were usually stored up in service for workhouse girls in the early part of the nineteenth century. When her mistress attempted to knock her down with a besom, Belle knocked down the mistress with her fist. So she went back to the Great House, was put in a dark cell, and fed for a fortnight on bread and water. At her next essay to serve she was no more fortunate; this time she knocked down her master for being rude to her, and had to fly the house. A travelling hawkeress, going the roads with silk and linen, took a fancy to her, and carried her on many journeys. Belle protected her from insult and violence; in return the old woman, at her death, left the girl her stock. She was thus in business on her own account, and casually travelling with the Bosviles, when she fell in with Lavengro.
In his erratic way, Borrow paints a charming idyll of the few succeeding weeks during which they lived in the Dingle: an idyll of natural beauty, and a picture of such womanly modesty and strength of character as to make Isopel Berners one of the heroines the heart cherishes. The uneducated Amazon, the feminine pugilist, who can take her own part in any quarrel, is by nature a modest girl, a woman with the finest perceptions and the most delicate instincts; she has a vein of poetry in her composition which gives her a certain affinity with the wandering philologist, who has in turn a vein of chivalry in his. While she dwells in her tent and he in his, while she goes up and down the neighbourhood on her business, and Lavengro stays in the Dingle to make new shoes for her donkey, Isopel is all the time dreaming what might have been. For all his chivalry, the young man is strange and plain-spoken, rarely paying a compliment, never making an advance, boring her with philological disquisitions, talking of things indifferent to her, pestering her with Armenian declensions, or sitting dull and silent while he sips the tea she has made for him. Here is a characteristic passage:
“I took another cup; we were again silent. ‘It is rather uncomfortable,’ said I at last, ‘for people to sit together without having anything to say.’
“‘Were you thinking of your company?’ said Belle.
“‘What company?’ said I.
“‘The present company.’
“‘The present company? Oh, ah!—I remember that I said one only feels uncomfortable in being silent with a companion when one happens to be thinking of the companion. Well, I had been thinking of you the last two or three minutes, and had just come to the conclusion that, to prevent us both feeling occasionally uncomfortable towards each other, having nothing to say, it would be as well to have a standing subject on which to employ our tongues. Belle, I have determined to give you lessons in Armenian.’”
Which he proceeds forthwith to do. What was a girl to make of a man like that? When that Lavengro’s heart was sore thereafter for the lack of Belle Berners, he had to thank his moroseness and his Armenian nouns for it.
So proceeded, without passion, without even a symptom of philandering on either side, the Romance of Mumper’s Dell—dreadfully misunderstood by the postilion who sheltered there in the thunderstorm, and by Mrs. Chikno when the gypsies encamped near by—but never advancing, so far as the two chief actors were concerned. It is continued from the last volume of “Lavengro” into the first volume of the “Romany Rye.” In the latter, for a hundred pages we are waiting upon some development of it; but it is as elusive as a pixy. We continually tremble upon the brink of a declaration. Take this scene, powerful but inconclusive. Upon the departure of Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, after their visit of ceremony: