Old Cowper looked at him from the corners of his eyes, and smoked on contemptuously.
“That’s a d —— d rum way to talk to honest men,” said Sinfield, with a swarthy flush, and a dangerous gleam from his dark eyes. “How do you know we ever heard her name? I don’t care a blast!
I’m d — d if I ever saw her in my days!
You’re talkin’ like that stick, mayhap; the oak ain’t out o’ your head yet.”
And he switched his clenched hand, as if dealing a blow with his cudgel.
William saw the ridicule and folly of a new row with these fellows; and a moment’s reflection assured him of the improbability that one so cautious and astute, and, one way or other, so well-informed about their movements, should in reality have misdirected her way, and fallen into that danger.
“Well,” said William, “you may be good fellows enough, though I don’t think you have much to boast about oak-sticks; but if you do know, you may as well tell, and I’ll make it better for you than I said — I will, indeed.”
“We knows nothing, him nor me, about her. D — n it! isn’t once enough?
Don’t ye think we’d like what ye offers well enough? It takes a while at horse-dealin’ to turn that money, I’ll swear — doesn’t it, Cowper?”
And Sinfield laughed angrily.
Cowper smoked on, listlessly. William waited in vain.
“Well, we shall see,” said William, with a heavy sigh. “I’ll try the people at Tarlton, as you say.”
“You’ll give us something to drink, after all that?” said Cowper, as the Squire turned his horse’s head away, and William threw him a shilling that was loose in his pocket. And after he had got some way, looking back suddenly, he saw the two gipsies looking steadily after him, and fancied they were conversing upon the interview that had just ended.
They did not turn away, or affect to conceal it; on the contrary, they continued to follow him with their eyes, steadily, till he was out of sight.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A HOPE.
IT was nightfall when the Squire of Haworth reached the common of the little village of Tarlton, and beheld the gipsy tents and fires dimly before the darkening screen of wood, under the shelter of a green bank.
He dismounted, and led his weary horse up to the nearest tent. Every man who is good for anything knows, or at least remembers, the flutter and yearning with which he approached the place where he suspects his beloved may possibly be. Let him magnify this a thousandfold, and bring it up to the point of anguish, and he will guess what William felt as he strode across the twilight grass, toward this solitary little camp of the gipsies.
And now he was among them, his horse by the bridle. They saw a tall young man, with something fine in his bearing — pale, melancholy, and with the light of an intense anxiety in his eyes.
People less shrewd would have known that a call at such an hour indicated an unusual agitation.
A tall handsome gipsy, with very dark face, and a bright-colored handkerchief about his neck, stood with his arms folded, and his feet apart, smoking in front of the tent. William hesitated. He would rather ask the women. An instinctive trust, in such a case, in feminine sympathy determined him. As he drew near, dogs barked, and a pet fox yelped, and a startled parrot screamed from the shadow of the tents of this pet-loving people. The man drove back the dogs without disturbing his pose or his pipe, with a backward cut or two of the switch he held, in the air.
“You’d like your fortune told?” the man asked, civilly.
The Squire assented, and a sibyl of the same dark race emerged — not a young woman, nor yet old — somewhere about eight-and-thirty, a dark blackhaired matron, with a “rom” lying his length by the tent-fire smoking, and half-a-dozen wild little “charies” playing and gabbling together, and teasing a donkey.
So he crossed her hand and the fortune was told, and then again he crossed it; and they grew more confidential, and William made his tempting promises, and asked his earnest questions. She listened, and answered not, but signed to a girl who was lurking before a tent-door, and in a low tone gave her a message.
From a tent in the rear — the tent perhaps of the chief — she returned, accompanied by a mahogany-colored old woman, smiling, fierce-eyed; and the handsome girl who had summoned her, extending her arm, with the palm downward, indicated their visitor and his prophetess, and looking round the sky to guess the weather, or (as one might fancy) to read the stars, that had begun to glimmer, she stooped, and reentered the tent from which she had come.
The old woman raised her dark bony arm, regarding the sibyl with a fixed smile, and William’s dark-eyed sorceress left him, and talked for a minute or two with the crone, whose countenance changed not; though the Squire, who watched intently, saw that she made one or two gestures, that were solemn and grim, as she spoke.
The old woman departed, and the sorceress returned.
“No,” she said, in the same calm tone, “we don’t know such a person, nor no such name; but let me see your hand.”
“Is she,” thought William, “about to make a circuitous revelation of facts, by way of prediction? And does she mean thus to mark what she regards as a betrayal, and to secure the reward I promise?”
But when it came, the disclosure was only this — that the person he was most anxious to see had not gone the way he supposed, but southward, and that she would soon be in Devonshire.
No more could he expect.
With a heavy heart he wished her “Goodnight,” and rode slowly away.
“These people,” he thought, “are a freemasonry — impenetrable and peculiar.
Their suspicion of us is profound. Their fidelity to their race is plainly incorruptible. Some irreparable disgrace attaches to the least betrayal; and the worst among them cannot be tempted to tell the secrets of the others. There is that Sinfield, who would injure her gladly, if he could; but he will not, for any sum I can offer, tell me one syllable about her; and yet he must know, generally, as he did before, something of her movements.”
With the anguish of this thought, he rode his tired horse slowly through the twilight mist, toward the little inn of Tarlton.
But hope, that never leaves us absolutely or very long, soon returned, and pleased the Squire of Haworth with the same fancy that had cheered him before.
Sinfield, he thought, might have sent him on to the gipsy camp at this place, knowing that these people were possessed of the information that he sought; and they, in turn, clothed the fact he wanted in this prophetic guise, and, one day or other, might extract from his gratitude the reward they could not take on the terms on which it was offered. Thus once more the light of hope was kindled. If only he could see her face again, and plead his own cause with the wild despair and adoration of love! — she was not cruel; she would relent, and save him. Otherwise he must die!
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE WANDERER.
THE madness of the Squire of Haworth increased rather than abated, as weeks were added to weeks, and months followed months, and his wanderings led him to nothing, and hope deferred made the heart sick.
There was nothing he did not try — even advertisements in The Times, and offers of reward for information posted at country fairs. Every attempt of this kind resulted in — simply nothing. He had himself no faith in these devices, but it was worth knowing that he had left nothing untried. AU his appeals were followed by inexorable silence.
North, south, east, west — all over England, and through its most devious paths, and unexplored moors and woods, and picturesque gipsy haunts, the young Squire pursued the phantom of his love, in vain.
Sometimes, as he rode, dejected, by solitary paths, in moonlight, he would draw bridle suddenly, and listen, breathless, for a sweet voice, heard again for a moment, in fancy, and as suddenly lost, and waited and listened for in vain. Sometimes in darkening hollows, or in the shadowy forest-glades, the figure that haunted his imagination seemed to stand before him in the distance, an
d beckon him toward her.
Sometimes farther, sometimes nearer — in the picturesque ravines of Derbyshire, or in the nooks of wild and solitary Dartmoor — in his lonely travels, deep in the night, he has seen her — approached, and the illusion vanished; and under the bank or scaur where she seemed to be, he has sat down, and wept the bitter tears that are shed in solitude, and called her beloved name to the heedless rocks and bushes with a deepening sense of the irrevocable.
Heaven knows, in those days of exalted imagination and wild sorrow, how near to madness he may have been!
But Time, the consoler, works his slow but sure mercies. Not that consolation which grief, in its first wild agony, most fears — forgetfulness — or the subsidence of the first passionate affection; for who, in his wildest agony, would drink of the waters of Lethe, and think no more of the beloved and lost?
The chase is over — he will never see her more. In stilly evening, in the soft gloom, in the dark archways of the old trees, in the melancholy chasms of the ruins of Hazelden, or in the gloaming by “the hawthorn-tree” and “elver-stone,” he sees a beautiful phantom. Or when “the call” is on the air — that far-off sighing sound, by which, in the North-country, they foretell the coming storm — the lonely Squire sometimes hears, like a voice from another shore (so faint), the silvery laughter and sad tones of his love.
The tumult is ended, and the melancholy, which Hope disturbs no more, is come.
Two years have passed, and the Squire is at Haworth — at home. The broken thread of his old life is, as it were, reknit.
Have these two years, filled with a wild episode, been quite lost? They will be the best remembered of all his life, though never told to any. They will sweeten and sadden all his future thoughts; and, no doubt, they have wrought their good and enduring work upon a character elevated by suffering.
He has returned to his books and his work; graver, more thoughtful, more gentle he has grown. Otherwise, prudent people will see no change. It will just be, in their opinion, that William Haworth has returned to his senses — is quite sobered, and that his heart is once more in his sensible plans, and bent on winning his way in this arduous world.
But the romance of life is not over. While memory lives it will never die. There is no one to speak to — no one who cares, or will ever know about it, now. But it will never die, for a year or an hour, till William Haworth dies. A man’s works and his words are not always his life. The real life of the man is his dream and his love. Blessed is he for whom both are high and pure!
William is working now as hard as ever, and things go on in their old humdrum way at Haworth, duller than before. For, never to return, a vision from a wonderful land has lighted up that homely place and vanished, and the walls seem to darken and contract; and talk is tasteless, and the air drowsy. Not for a long time will any one care to laugh there; and work is work, and something always wanting.
Old Martha for a long time used to look toward the fields, and the thorn-trees, and the half-hidden gray columns among the copse, in the untold hope that some day would see her returning “home,” with her old smile and song, and her arch pranks, to make Haworth alive again.
But never more was that to be; and so, gradually, the hope died out, and Haworth was just a gray old house, as before, and the moss a wide black sea before it, and the people lonely.
Old Martha’s jealousy of the girl who had made Master Willie “daft” almost, had passed away, though it sometimes helped a little to reconcile her to her flight. Perhaps she was a little sore, too, at her leaving the old house and kind faces so easily. Also she missed her. And Mall’s heart also was heavy, and her eyes filled, when she thought of her.
William’s thoughts were for himself alone. Sweetbrier — Euphan was often thought of, but seldom named in that house. It was like a place in which the darling of the house had died.
Great changes were coming in William Haworth’s life — one of those sudden changes of destiny which sometimes befall poor men who are richly connected. A very simple series of events, no one very unlikely by itself, and turning upon the order in which so inevitable an event as death may reach some four or five people, will make a golden transformation in the life of such a man.
It was nothing in the fairyland of “Debrett.” No title had reached him. It was simply an estate, the right to which two or three unlikely deaths had transmitted to him, with the swift zigzag of a flash of lightning.
He has not gone to India; no need now of any such emigration. New duties have grown up about him — occupations, privileges, cares. But he is unchanged — gentle, manly, generous still, the same in heart. He has long left the solitudes of Haworth, to which, however, for a month or so, he returns every autumn, and shoots a little over the moss and the heath, and fishes in the Dwyle, as in old times.
By stone and tree the midnight shadows come and go, but the beautiful phantom of his earlier youth has faded from year to year, and comes no more. Still in the deep well of memory, where secrets lie, he sees it He can look, as men look in after-years upon a miniature, unseen by any, and solitary tears roll over the face that will smile no more in the light of those features.
But in the grosser light of the world his work must now be done. Its cares and labors are upon him. These are but the intervals.
Ten years have passed since the night when, with his gun on his shoulder, after the long march over the moss, he first saw Euphan Curraple, and offered her shelter, and placed her in the care of good old Martha Gillyflower. How far away it all seems now! How it has receded into perspective!
William Haworth is married. The kindest and truest of husbands, the gentle highborn lady, his wife, adores him. One beautiful child, a little girl now more than three years old, makes their house bright.
William is now a Member of Parliament, and has taken to his House of Commons’ work with the love of distinction and contempt of labor which belong to his energetic character.
Things are changed since the old life at Haworth.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE DREAM.
THE Session is not over, although it is the first week in August. It cannot last many days longer. There will be no House tonight, and William has taken a long ride into the country. He takes the road by which his pretty wife and little girl are returning. That gentle lady, with their one little daughter, has passed the day before with a friend, some eight-and-twenty miles out of town.
William surprises the beloved travellers at the little wayside posting-house where they change their horses. Here he kisses his treasures, and they have their quiet little chat, and she thanks him with all her heart.
And then she says, as they get into the carriage, smiling in William’s face, for he has mounted his horse, and he smiles down upon her, answering: —
“You know your promise? You are to go your own pace and your own way home, and you are not to ride by the carriage, where you’ll be covered with dust; and we’ll meet there, and talk ever so much.”
“My good little darling is always thinking of other people,” he answered, fondly.
“And you must — you’ll promise?”
“I will — I do,” he laughed.
“Well then, you must ride on before.”
“Imperious little woman, I obey!”
And he smiled and nodded, and rode on.
There was nothing in particular to trouble William Haworth; but why was there, that day, the melancholy of a foreboding at his heart? As he reached the old Forest of Epping he had slacked his space. Sunset was approaching. The gold and red were in the western clouds, and the amber-and-green tints of evening in the sky, across which, with a drowsy cawing — the only sounds upon the air — the crows were sailing homeward to their cover.
Just in that transitory light, “a fairer sadder scene” he could not have fancied. He dismounted, and led his horse along the edge of the road, hoping that the carriage might overtake him, as it soon did. And so a ten minutes’ ramble was agreed on; William l
eading his horse, his pretty wife engrossed with the laughing care of the child, that was toddling and running and tumbling on the grass, as it gravely prattled to itself, or laughed, with arms extended, and hands halfopen.
There is a melancholy in the distant future as well as in the retrospect, and, looking at our children, the long vista opens, and “the summers that we shall not see” are in our thoughts.
William held his horse by the rein, on a little eminence among the old trees. Some gipsy tents showed in the foreground, at the edge of the thicker forest, and, saddened by association, the sight stole him slowly away into dreamland. And as he stood there in his reverie, among the faint sounds, over the soft lights of sunset, a sweet voice floated from the distant wood.
What is that? Like a voice from the land of spirits, the old song trembles on the evening air: —
“The hawthorn-tree
Is dear to me,
The elver-stone likewise;
The lonely air
That lingers there,
And thought that never dies.
“In evening glow
The may will blow,
The stone a shadow cast;
And stone and tree
A bield will be,
As in the summers past.
“And words as dear
Will others hear
Beneath the hawthorn-tree,
In leafy May,
At fall of day,
Where I no more shall be.”
The long note died into silence, and came no more. With a strange sense of unreality, and a wild tremor of his heart, the Squire of Haworth walked down the gentle slope, over the ferns and daisies, toward the tents. At the door of one of them he saw his wife talking with a gipsy-woman. He followed, and leaving his horse’s bridle in the hand of a man who was smoking his pipe, leaning against a cart whose shafts were in the air, he stooped, and entered the soft shadow of the wattled tent Very neat, singular, even pretty, were its arrangements, and a gleam of the evening sun, touching it, lighted a portion of the interior with a softened glow. As in a dream, William took his little child’s hand in his, and stood, and “hearing heard not and seeing saw not,” for it seemed all a vision.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 776