Then she stood again as though listening to something, and again I thought, as her lips moved, that I heard her whisper, 'I will, I will.'
III
I had intended to go to London at once after leaving Gypsy Dell, but something that Sinfi told me during our interview impelled me to go on to Raxton Hall, which was so near. The fact that Sinfi was my kinswoman opened up new and exciting vistas of thought.
I understood now what was that haunting sense of recognition which came upon me when I first saw Sinfi at the wayside inn in Wales. Day by day had proofs been pouring in upon me that the strain of Romany blood in my veins was asserting itself with more and more force. Day by day I had come to realise how closely, though the main current of my blood was English, I was affined to the strange and mysterious people among whom I was now thrown—the only people in these islands, as it seemed to me, who would be able to understand a love-passion like mine. And there were many things in the great race of my forefathers which I had found not only unsympathetic to me, but deeply repugnant. In Great Britain it is the Gypsies alone who understand nature's supreme charm, and enjoy her largesse as it used to be enjoyed in those remote times described in Percy Aylwin's poems before the Children of the Roof invaded the Children of the Open Air, before the earth was parcelled out into domains and ownerships as it now is parcelled out. In the mind of the Gorgio, the most beautiful landscape or the most breezy heath or the loveliest meadow-land is cut up into allotments, whether of fifty thousand acres or of two roods, and owned by people. Of ownership of land the Romany is entirely unconscious. The landscape around him is part of Nature herself, and the Romany on his part acknowledges no owner. No doubt he yields to force majeure in the shape of gamekeeper or constable, but that is because he has no power to resist it. Nature to him is as free and unowned by man as it was to the North American Indian in his wigwam before the invasion of the Children of the Roof.
During the time that I was staying in Flintshire and near Capel Curig, rambling through the dells or fishing in the brooks, it was surprising how soon the companionship of a Gorgio would begin to pall upon me. And here the Cymric race is just as bad as the Saxon. The same detestable habit of looking upon nature as a paying market-garden, the same detestable inquiry as to who was the owner of this or that glen or waterfall, was sure at last to make me sever from him. But as to Sinfi, her attitude towards nature, though it was only one of the charms that endeared her to me, was not the least of them. There was scarcely a point upon which she and I did not touch.
And what about her lack of education? Was that a drawback? Not in the least. The fact that she knew nothing of that traditional ignorance which for ages has taken the name of knowledge—that record of the foolish cosmogonies upon which have been built the philosophies and the social systems of the blundering creature Man—the fact that she knew nothing of these gave an especial piquancy to everything she said. I had been trying to educate myself in the new and wonderful cosmogony of growth which was first enunciated in the sixties, and was going to be, as I firmly believed, the basis of a new philosophy, a new system of ethics, a new poetry, a new everything. But in knowledge of nature as a sublime consciousness, in knowledge of the human heart, Sinfi was far more learned than I. And believing as I did that education will in the twentieth century consist of unlearning, of unlading the mind of the trash previously called knowledge, I could not help feeling that Sinfi was far more advanced, far more in harmony than I could hope to be With the new morning of Life of which we are just beginning to see the streaks of dawn.
'I must go and see Fenella's portrait,' I said, as I Walked briskly towards Raxton.
When I reached Raxton Hall I seemed to startle the butler and the servants, as though I had come from the other world.
I told the butler that I should sleep there that night, and then went at once to the picture gallery and stood before Reynolds' famous picture of Fenella Stanley as the Sibyl. The likeness to Sinfi was striking. How was it that it had not previously struck me more forcibly? The painter had evidently seized the moment when Fenella's eyes expressed that look of the seeress which Sinfi's eyes, on occasion, so powerfully expressed. I stood motionless before it while the rich, warm light of evening bathed it in a rosy radiance. And when the twilight shadows fell upon it, and when the moon again lit it up, I stood there still. The face seemed to pass into my very being, and Sinfi's voice kept singing in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'
I left the picture and went into the library: for I bethought me of that sheaf of Fenella's letters to my great-grandfather which he had kept so sacredly, and which had come to me as representative of the family. My previous slight inspection of them had shown me what a wonderful woman she was, how full of ideas the most original and the most wild. The moment a Gypsy-woman has been taught to write there comes upon her a passion for letter-writing.