She spoke with as much emphasis as though she positively knew that what she stated was the fact. I was influenced by her; I could not help myself. Had she possessed a plain English face my good sense must have ridiculed her pretensions as a sibyl, even though she spoke things which seemed to find a dull, hollow echo in the dark recesses of my mind; but her black, eastern eyes were full of fire, and eager and piercing, with a sort of wild intelligence that was scarcely human; her speech took weight and significance from the strange, fierce, repellent expression of her face; there was a kind of fascination too in her very adjacency, in her manner of staring into my eyes, in her way of passing her hand over my face.
‘If I have a husband and children, shall I ever see them again?’ said I.
‘You forget what I said when I told you your fortune, lady,’ she answered.
‘You spoke without knowing,’ said I. ‘You have a set of tales by heart, and you call them fortunes.’
‘I am a gipsy and can read baji,’ cried the woman, with her eyes beginning to flash. ‘Many fortunes have I told in my time and many prophecies have I uttered which have come to pass. Do not I read what you are? When you were walking the deck with the lady and I was sitting there,’ said she, pointing, ‘I looked at you and said to myself, “Let me see into her eyes and let me look at her hand, and I will tell her much that is not in her memory.”’
‘Are you a mother?’ said I.
‘I have had my bantlings,’ she answered sullenly. ‘They went home long ago.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They lies dead and buried,’ said she. ‘What other homes have us poor gipsies and our bantlings got but the grave? The likes of you goes to Heaven, lady; the likes of us don’t carry our thoughts so high. I wish I was at home with my bantlings, I do, instead of living to be a lone woman crossing the seas——’ Her voice failed her; and, pulling her little black pipe from her pocket, she dashed it on to the deck with a face of fury, and then, with a harsh and hideous voice, began to sing some strange gibberish, which, to judge by the expression in her eye, might very well have been a string of curses.
Her looks and behaviour alarmed me; and, without exchanging another word with her, I rose and re-entered the saloon.