VII
SINFI'S DUKKERIPEN
I
The Gypsies I had never seen since leaving them in Wales, and I knew that by this time they were either making their circuit of the English fairs or located in a certain romantic spot called Gypsy Dell, near Rington Manor, the property of my kinsman Percy Aylwin, whither they often went after the earlier fairs were over.
The next evening I went to the Great Eastern Railway station, and taking the train to Rington I walked to Gypsy Dell, where I found the Lovells and Boswells.
Familiar as I was with, the better class of Welsh Gypsies, the camp here was the best display of Romany well-being I had ever seen. It would, indeed, have surprised those who associate all Gypsy life with the squalor which in England, and especially near London, marks the life of the mongrel wanderers who are so often called Gypsies. In a lovely dingle, skirted by a winding, willow-bordered river, and dotted here and there with clumps of hawthorn, were ranged the 'living-waggons' of those trading Romanies who had accompanied the 'Griengroes' to the East Anglian and Midland fairs.
Alongside the waggons was a single large brown tent that for luxuriousness might have been the envy of all Gypsydom. On the hawthorn bushes and the grass was spread, instead of the poor rags that one often sees around a so-called Gypsy encampment, snowy linen, newly washed. The ponies and horses were scattered about the Dell feeding.
I soon distinguished Sinfi's commanding figure near that gorgeous living-waggon of 'orange-yellow colour with red window-blinds' in which she had persuaded me to invest my money at Chester. On the foot-board sat two urchins of the Lovell family, 'making believe' to drive imaginary horses, and yelling with all their might to Rhona Boswell, whose laugh, musical as ever, showed that she enjoyed the game as much as the children did. Sinfi was standing on a patch of that peculiar kind of black ash which burnt grass makes, busy with a fire, over which a tea-kettle was hanging from the usual iron kettle-prop. Among the ashes left by a previous fire her bantam-cock Pharaoh was busy pecking, scratching, and calling up imaginary hens to feast upon his imaginary 'finds.' I entered the Dell, and before Sinfi saw me I was close to her.
She was muttering to the refractory fire as though it were a live thing, and asking it why it refused to burn beneath the kettle. A startled look, partly of pleasure and partly of something like alarm, came over her face as she perceived me. I drew her aside and told her all that had happened in regard to Winifred's appearance as a beggar in London. A strange expression that was new to me overspread her features, and I thought I heard her whisper to herself, 'I will, I will.'
'I knowed the cuss 'ud ha' to ha' its way in the blood, like the bite of a sap' [snake], she murmured to herself. 'And yit the dukkeripen on Snowdon said, clear and plain enough, as they'd surely marry at last. What's become o' the stolen trúshul, brother—the cross?' she inquired aloud. 'That trúshul will ha' to be given to the dead man agin, an' it'll ha' to be given back by his chavo [child] as swore to keep watch over it. But what's it all to me?' she said in a tone of suppressed anger that startled me. 'I ain't a Gorgie,'