“Then you are going?” said I, when Belle and I were left alone.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I am going on a journey; my affairs compel me.”
“But you will return again?” said I.
“Yes,” said Belle; “I shall return once more.”
“Once more,” said I. “What do you mean by once more? The Petulengros will soon be gone; and will you abandon me in this place?”
“You were alone here,” said Belle, “before I came, and I suppose you found it agreeable, or you would not have stayed in it.”
“Yes,” said I. “That was before I knew you; but having lived with you here, I should be very loth to live here without you.”
“Indeed,” said Belle. “I did not know that I was of so much consequence to you. Well—the day is wearing away—I must go and harness Traveller to the cart.”
He does some little service for her, as harnessing the donkey and putting the bundles into the cart. The narrative proceeds, and the chapter ends thus:
“I put the bundles into the cart, and then led Traveller and the cart up the winding path to the mouth of the dingle. Belle followed. At the top I delivered the reins into her hands, we looked at each other steadfastly for some time. Belle then departed, and I returned to the dingle, where, seating myself on my stone, I remained for upwards of an hour in thought.”
Great is ellipsis—but romance cannot live by ellipsis alone. The next chapter begins, “On the following morning,” and is a spirited account of a feast of roast sucking-pig in the gypsy encampment!
There is never room for a doubt that Lavengro was by this time fairly in love with Belle. But there is also no room for doubt that Belle had realised that he was not for her, nor was she for him. Their ways lay apart. Belle’s way was the broad road of the Atlantic to America, where she hoped to conduct her life free from the disadvantages that attended the career in England of a workhouse girl with a name which, as Lavengro had told her, belonged to the nomenclatures of the ancient aristocracy. His way was through many strange lands, through a life of adventure and turmoil, to an old age of mingled glory, hypochondria, and megrims. So that Belle had resolved to nip the romance in the bud, and her last journey from the Dingle was made with the purpose of selling her donkey and cart and her silks and linens, and going to Liverpool to take ship for the New World. She returned once more, as she had promised. It was late at night; Lavengro was asleep in his tent; but he had banked up the fire, and placed the kettle over it. The little noise of her arrival woke him, and he dressed so as to go out and unharness her donkey. Now that it was all impossible, and Belle had made her irrevocable decision, Lavengro, of course, came to the point. On their last day together, he set her conjugating the Armenian verb siriel, and when he had worried her through it, told her that the English equivalent of siriel was “to love.” And, in his whimsical, moonshiny, teasing way, having driven Isopel to tears, he suddenly proposed to her that they should be off together to America, settle down in some forest, and conjugate the verb siriel conjugally!
And, as there was never a doubt that Lavengro had managed to get himself in love with Belle, so there was never a doubt that Belle was strongly tempted to acknowledge that she loved this strange fellow of six feet three with the black eyes and the white hair and the long right arm, who could beat Blazing Bosvile and make donkey shoes, and mend kettles and talk all the languages that were heard in the Tower of Babel. But well for Belle’s peace of mind that she resisted the temptation; for Lavengro, the constitutional wanderer, would have led her a pretty life when they had buried themselves in the depths of an American forest to conjugate Armenian verbs!
The next morning he set off with his friend Jasper for a horse fair, leaving Belle behind. “On arriving at the extremity of the plain, I looked towards the dingle. Isopel Berners stood at the mouth; the beams of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners again.”
For while Lavengro was away Belle departed from the Dingle, and left never a trace behind her. Now that he had lost the treasure upon which he had set so small a price, Lavengro was very sore at heart, and would have given much to recall her and to consummate his day-dreams. But all that he ever heard of her again was in a letter addressed by her to “the young man in Mumper’s Dingle.” Herein she explained why she had refused his offer, which, if he had made it in the early part of their acquaintance, she would have accepted. She proffered him some very good advice about his manners, told him she thought he was a bit mad at bottom, gave him a lock of her glorious hair, and left this maxim with him: “Fear God, and take your own part.” Which was so much to Lavengro’s liking that he made it the motto of the second portion of his life-story, “The Romany Rye”; and there it is to this day under his name, and over the imprint of Mr. Murray.
Was Isopel Berners a reality, and did Borrow meet her in Mumper’s Dingle? Or is the whole of this history an invention? Dr. Knapp’s elaborate researches do not help us much, because there is no documentary evidence about the episode. He can merely tell us that Borrow did make such a journey, did buy a tinker’s stock-in-trade, and did live in Mumper’s Dingle. So that we must look for internal evidence.
I have no doubt that Isopel Berners was a reality, and a very substantial one; I have no doubt that she was extraordinarily tall, strong, and beautiful; and that her hair was wonderfully fine. I do not insist that she was either as tall, as strong, or as beautiful as she is painted in “Lavengro”; for Shorsha had a habit of exaggerating—it was one of the many constitutional defects of his character; he could not help it.