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As he spoke now his voice was toneless. His mind was flint, and his tongue was but the flash of the flint. He looked at his daughter for a moment with no light of fatherhood in his face, then turned from her to Jethro Fawe with slow decision and a gesture of authority. His eyes fastened on the face of the son of Lemuel Fawe, as though it was that old enemy himself.
For weeks he had planned, watched and waited, filling the woods with his adherents, secretly following Fleda day by day, until, at last, the place, the opportunity, seemed perfect; and here she lay in a Romany tan once more, with the flickering fires outside in the night, and the sentry at her doorway. This watchman was not Jethro Fawe, but she knew well that Jethro was not far off.
Here was a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man, to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at another's will and at no price! This was beyond the understanding of Jethro Fawe.
His hands shall not caress her, his eyes shall not feed upon her " "His eyes will not feed upon her," interrupted the old man, "So cease the prattle which can alter nothing. Begone." For a moment Jethro Fawe stood like one who did not understand what was said to him, but suddenly a look of triumph and malice came into his face, and his eyes lighted with a reckless fire.
But awe has the outward look of respect, and old Berry who had his own form of vanity, saw that he had had a rare effect on the fellow, who evidently knew all about fiddles. Certainly that was a wonderful sound he had produced from his own cotton-field fiddle. In the pause Ingolby said to Jethro Fawe, "Play something, won't you? I've got business here with Mr.
He handed the fiddle over. "Here's the little thing that'll let you do the trick. Isn't it a beauty, Jethro Fawe?" The Romany took it, his eyes glistening with mingled feelings.
The grim, malign experience of Fleda in her bedroom with the Thing she thought was from beyond the bounds of her own life; the voice that spoke to Ingolby, and the breath that swept over his cheek were, perhaps, as real in a sense as would have been the corporeal presence of Jethro Fawe in one case and of Fleda Druse in the other.
The old man hesitated a moment, then said grimly: "I told them they must go one way and Jethro Fawe another. I told them the Ry of Rys had said no patrins should mark the road Jethro Fawe's feet walked. I had heard of this gathering here, and I was on my way to bid them begone, for in following the Ry they have broken his command. As I came, I met the woman of this tent who has been your friend.
The invocation that no patrins shall mark the road of a Romany is to make him an outcast, and for the Ry of Rys to utter the curse is sentence of death upon a Romany, for thenceforward every hand of his race is against him, free to do him harm. It was that which made Jethro Fawe shrink and cower for a moment. Fleda raised her hand suddenly in protest to Gabriel Druse.
The sharp passion which moved her now as she stood before Jethro Fawe would not have been so acute yesterday; but to-day she had lain in a Gorgio's arms to-day; and though he was nothing to her, he was still a Gorgio of Gorgios; and this man before her her husband was at best but a man of the hedges and the byre and the clay-pit, the quarry and the wood; a nomad with no home, nothing that belonged to what she was now a part of organized, collective existence, the life of the house-dweller, not the life of the 'tan', the 'koppa', and the 'vellgouris' the tent, the blanket, and the fair.
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