The Gipsy Part 8

They are a strange race!"

"They are, indeed," answered her companion; "and De Vaux and I, as we pa.s.sed their encampment, could not help marvelling that no government had ever thought it worth its while to pay some attention to them, either for the purpose of reclaiming them to civilized life, or, if that were judged impossible, for the purpose of obtaining those traces of knowledge which are waning from among them every day, but which some of their better men are said still to retain."

"Do you mean their astrological knowledge?" asked Miss Falkland, with a look of no slight interest in the question.

"O, no!" answered Colonel Manners, with a smile; "I mean the knowledge of their real history, of their original country, of their former laws, of their language in its purity, and of many facts of great interest, which, though with them they are merely traditionary, yet might be confirmed or invalidated by other testimony in our own possession."

"They are a strange people, indeed!" said Miss Falkland. "Do you know, Colonel Manners, that the separate existence of these gipsies and of the Jews--coming down, as it were, two distinct streams, amid all the whirling confusion of an ocean of other nations--keeping their ident.i.ty among wars, and battles, and changes, and the overturning of all things but themselves; retaining their habits, and their thoughts, and their national character apart, in spite both of sudden and violent revolutions in society, and of the slow, but even more powerful efforts of gradual improvement and civilization. Do you know, whenever I think of this, it gives me a strange feeling of mysterious awe that I cannot describe? It seems as if I saw more distinctly than in the common course of things the workings of the particular will of the Almighty; for I cannot understand how these facts can be accounted for by any of the common motives in existence; as, in both instances, interest, ambition, policy, and pleasure, with almost every inducement that could be enumerated, would have produced exactly the opposite result."

"I shall not attempt to reason against you, Miss Falkland," replied Colonel Manners, with a smile; "and, indeed, I very much agree with you in opinion, though perhaps not in your wonder; for being a complete believer in a special providence, I only see the same hand in this that I think is discernible throughout creation."

"But tell me, Colonel Manners," said Isadore, "have you any belief in the fortune-telling powers of the gipsies?"

"None whatever," answered Colonel Manners.

"Nor perhaps have I," said Isadore; "but at the same time it is strange that in all ages and in all countries, as far as I can understand, these gipsies have pretended to this particular science, and have been very generally believed. At all events, it shows that they have an immemorial tradition of such a power having been possessed by their ancestors; and if it were possessed by their ancestors, why not by themselves?"

"But we have no reason to believe that it was possessed by their ancestors," replied Colonel Manners, "except, indeed, their own tradition, which, as you say, is evidently very ancient."

"Nay, nay, but I think we have other proofs," replied Isadore, "and very strong ones, it appears to me. It is evident from the historical part of the Bible that the most ancient Egyptians had various means of divination, and even a magical influence, the reality and power of which is admitted by the sacred writers most distinctly; and consequently, when these facts are joined to an immemorial tradition of the descendants of the same nation, it seems that there is strong reason for believing that these powers existed even after the period to which the sacred volume refers."

"I am inclined, indeed, to believe," replied Colonel Manners, "that the gipsies are descendants from some Egyptian tribe, although the fact has been contested strongly, and the French call them Bohemians--unreasonably enough. In regard to the powers of divination attributed to the ancient Egyptians, too, I believe them to have existed, because I believe the Bible not only as an inspired record, but as the best-authenticated history, without any exception, that exists; and at the same time I cannot suppose that men who had so grand, so comprehensive, and also so philosophical an idea of the Divinity, that four thousand years have not been able to produce the slightest enlargement of it, as displayed in many pa.s.sages of Holy Writ--I cannot suppose that such men would have recorded as facts anything substantially inconsistent with the majesty of that Being whom they alone knew in the age when they wrote. But you must remember that these powers, though permitted then for reasons we know not, may have ceased now, like the powers of prophecy, and many other things of the same kind; and did the gipsies possess such powers at present, depend upon it, we should find them clothed in purple in the closets of kings, instead of wandering upon bare heaths, and stealing for a livelihood."

"You are right, I know," replied Miss Falkland, with a smile, at the lingerings of credulity that still haunted her own bosom, "and I have convinced myself, and been convinced by others over and over again, that it is all nonsense; and yet,--"

She paused, and Manners rejoined, "One of our old humorous poets says,

'A man convinced against his will, Is of the same opinion still.'"

"And perhaps you think the verses still more applicable to a woman, Colonel Manners," replied Miss Falkland; "but that is not exactly the case with me. My weakness extends no farther than this:--were a gipsy to predict any great evil for my future life, it would make me very uneasy, however much I might struggle against the impression; and, on that account, I would not have my fortune told, as they call it, for the world! Would you?"

"Without the slightest apprehension," answered Colonel Manners, laughing. "They may try their chiromancy on me, when they please, and do me all the harm they can for half a crown, which is, I believe, the stipulated sum."

"That is, because you are a man and a hero," replied Miss Falkland, in the same gay tone, "and you are bound by honour and profession to be afraid of nothing; but remember, I look upon it as an agreement--you are to have your fortune told this very day, and that will do for the whole party; for I will not have mine told, and I am sure Marian shall not, if I can prevent it."

"Oh, I will be the scape-goat, with all my heart," he replied; "but I suppose we cannot be far from their encampment, if your computation of miles be correct."

"We are close to the high-road," answered Miss Falkland; "but how far up the hill they are, you best know. However, let us wait for Edward and Marian. We must not make the babes in the wood of them; and of course they are a good way behind. Now, I dare say, while you and Edward were in America, you heard of Marian de Vaux till you were tired--was it not so, Colonel Manners?"

"No, indeed," he answered, smiling; "far from it, I can a.s.sure you.

Although I long ago found out by various infallible signs that De Vaux was in love; yet, never till circ.u.mstances had produced esteem and friends.h.i.+p, and friends.h.i.+p had become intimacy, did he ever mention his engagement, or the object of his attachment."

"And then he doubtless painted her in very glowing colours," added Isadore, trying strenuously to while away the time till her cousins came up, they having lingered behind farther than she had expected.

"Oh, of course, all lovers are like the old painter Arellius,"

answered Colonel Manners, "and always paint the objects of their love as G.o.ddesses. But I will not gratify your malice, Miss Falkland; De Vaux has too fine a sense of the ridiculous ever to render himself so by exaggerating any feeling."

"He has, indeed, too fine a sense of the ridiculous," answered Isadore; "it is his worst fault, Colonel Manners; and I fear that, like all the rest of our faults, it may some day prove his own bane; but here they come! Now, Colonel Manners, prepare to hear your fate.

Edward, here is your friend going to have his fortune told."

"You mean going to give half a crown to a gipsy," said De Vaux; "but if you are serious, Manners, I will, of course, stand by you to the last, as if you were going to fight a duel, or any other unreasonable thing.

Turn to the left and you will see the appointed place, as the newspapers call it, before you."

In this expectation, however, De Vaux was mistaken; for the gipsies and their accompaniments, men, women, and children, pots, kettles, and tents, had all disappeared. It must not be said, indeed, that they had left no vestige of their abode behind them, for half a dozen black spots burnt in the turf, and more than one pile of white wood ashes, attested the extent of their encampment; but nothing else was to be seen in the green wood, except the old oaks, and the yellow suns.h.i.+ne streaming through the rugged boughs, with a squirrel balancing itself on the branch of a fir, and two noisy jays screaming from tree to tree.

"This is a very Robin Hood like scene," said Colonel Manners, as he looked around, "and less gloomy in the broad daylight than at eventide. But here are no gipsies, Miss Falkland; and I am afraid that you must put off hearing the future fate and fortunes of Charles Manners till another time."

"I am very much mortified, indeed," replied Isadore, "and I see that you only laugh at me, Colonel Manners, without sympathizing in the least with disappointed curiosity; which,--as no one believes more fully than yourself,--is a very serious event in a woman's case.

However, I shall hold you bound by your promise, and look upon you engaged as a man of honour to have your fortune told the very first time you meet with a party of gipsies,--nay, more, to let me know the result also."

She spoke with playful seriousness; and Colonel Manners replied, "With all my heart, Miss Falkland; and, indeed, you shall find that your commands are so lightly borne by me, that I will take other obligations upon myself, and even seek out your favourites, the gipsies; for these protegees of yours seldom move far at a time, unless, indeed, all the poultry in the neighbourhood happens to be exhausted."

"Oh, that is not the case here," answered Isadore; "there is plenty yet remaining in every farm-yard, and I dare say you will find them on the common."

"I will go to-morrow, then, without fail," he answered, "for--" and he had nearly added words which would have betrayed his meditated departure; but he turned his speech another way; and all parties, well satisfied with their ramble, returned by the same path to the house.

Nothing occurred during the rest of the day to disturb the tranquillity of the party. The evening pa.s.sed away in conversation, generally light enough, but of which we have given a specimen above, fully sufficient to show its nature and quality. Sometimes it touched, indeed, upon deeper feelings, without ever becoming grave; and sometimes it ventured farther into the realms of learning, without approaching pedantry. The annoyance of Lord Dewry's behaviour on the preceding night had at the time reconciled Colonel Manners in some degree to the idea of quitting a circle in which he found much to please and interest him; but no such annoyance interrupted the course of this evening, and he experienced more pain than he liked to acknowledge, when he thought of leaving behind him for ever, a scene in which the hours pa.s.sed so pleasantly. He felt, however, that the annoyance might soon be renewed, or that even if it were not, he had no right by his presence to shut out De Vaux's father from Mrs.

Falkland's house; and he resolved still to adhere to his purpose, and set out for London on the day after that which was just about to follow.

CHAPTER VII.

The ordinary and too well-deserved lamentation over the fragility of human resolutions was not in general applicable to the determinations of Charles Manners, who was usually very rigid in his adherence to his purposes, whether they were of great or small importance. But it must not be supposed that this pertinacity, if it may so be called, in pursuit of designs he had already formed, proceeded from what the world calls obstinacy. Obstinacy maybe defined the act of persisting in error; and the rect.i.tude and precision of his judgment generally kept him from being in error at first, so that he had rarely a legitimate cause for breaking his resolution. Nor was he either of such a hard and tenacious nature as to resist all persuasion, and, like the cement of the Romans, only to grow the stiffer by the action of external things. Far from it; he was always very willing to sacrifice his purposes--where no moral sacrifice was implied--to the wishes and solicitations of those he loved or esteemed. Nor is there any contradiction in this statement, though it may be inquired, how, then, did he break his resolutions less frequently than other people?

The secret was this, and it is worth while to burden memory with it: he never formed his resolutions without thought, which saved at least one-third from fracture; and though he broke them sometimes at the entreaty of others, he never sacrificed them to any whim of his own, which saved _very nearly_ two-thirds more; for we may depend upon it that the determinations which we abandon, either from a change of circ.u.mstances, or from the persuasions of our friends, form but a very minute fraction, when compared with those that we give up, either from original error or after caprice.

It has seemed necessary to give this lecture upon resolutions, because Colonel Manners very speedily found cause to abandon the determination which he formed so vigorously on the day we spoke of in the last chapter; and, that he might not be charged with inconsistency, it became requisite to enter into all those strict definitions and explanations that generally leave us as many loopholes for escape and evasion, as a treaty of peace or a deed of settlement.

One resolution, however, and one promise, Colonel Manners certainly did keep, as soon as it was possible, which was, to inquire whether the gipsies were still in the neighbourhood, and to seek them out, with the full purpose of having his fortune told. Now, it may be supposed that here was a little weakness on the part of Colonel Manners--that he did give some credit to gipsy chiromancy; nay, the reader may even push his conjectures farther, and imagine him dreaming of Isadore Falkland's beautiful eyes, and all their varieties of expression, from the deep and soft to the gayest sparkle that ever twinkled through two rows of long silky eyelashes. But the simple fact was, that he had promised to go, and that he went; and though he might think Miss Falkland extremely beautiful and extremely pleasing, as every man who had been two minutes in her company must have thought, he no more dreamed of the possibility of so fair a creature, courted and loved as he knew she must be, ever uniting herself to so ugly a man as himself--and as he sat and shaved himself that morning he thought himself uglier than ever--than Napoleon Bonaparte, in the plenitude of power and the majesty of victory, thought of a low grave beneath a willow on a rock in the Atlantic.

In regard to any belief in the gipsies' fortune-telling, there were little use of investigating closely, whether some thin fibre of the root of superst.i.tion had or had not been left in the bosom of Charles Manners. If any particle thereof did remain, it went no farther than to excite, perhaps, a slight degree of curiosity in regard to what the people would predict, more, perhaps, from feeling that it must be absurd, than from expecting any point of coincidence with his real fate; and certain it is that, whatever the gipsies might have told to Colonel Manners, he would have thought no more of after the immediate moment, except as a matter for jest, than he would of any other kind of _sortes_, whether drawn from Virgil or Joe Miller.

It was just a quarter to six on the morning after that which had seen the walk in Morley Wood, when Manners, who was, as we have said, an early riser, gave some orders to his servant concerning his horses, and went out into the new wakened world. Having observed on the preceding day, for the purpose of carrying on the jest, the exact position of the hill on which Miss Falkland conjectured that the gipsies might have quartered themselves, he took his way across the park from that side which formed, in fact, the back of Morley House; and, having a.s.sured himself beforehand that he could find means of egress in that direction, he was soon beyond the walls, and winding up a small cart-road towards the summit.

The hill itself was somewhat singular in form; and as it is rather characteristic of that particular county, we may as well endeavour to give the reader some idea of its appearance. It formed a portion of that steep range of upland which we have before described as princ.i.p.ally covered with fine wood; but this particular point, projecting towards the river in the form of very nearly a right angle, seemed to have cast behind it the ma.s.s of forest which still continued over the ridge of the other hills. Vestiges of the wood, too, hung in broken patches on the flanks of even this protuberance, but the summit offered nothing but a bare, open plain, full of pits and ravines, and only further diversified by a few stunted hawthorns, and one single group of tall beeches, gathered together upon a tumulus, which covered the bodies of some of those invading warriors to whom our island was once a prey. The ascent to this plain from the small gate in the park wall, by which Colonel Manners issued forth, was in length somewhat more than a mile; but it consisted of two distinct grades, or steps, the first of which was formed by a little peninsula, jutting out from the salient angle of the main hill, and completely surrounded by the river on all sides except the one which served to unite it, by a narrow neck not above three hundred yards in breadth, to the high ground we have mentioned. This small peninsula, which was itself covered with wood, rose in a rocky bank to the height of about a hundred and fifty yards above the stream; and over the narrow isthmus was carried the road which pa.s.sed the park; while the wall of the park itself, just excluding the wooded banks from the grounds of Morley House, was lowered in that part, so as to leave a full view of the picturesque little promontory from the windows of the mansion. Let the reader remember all this, for his memory may be taxed hereafter.

Branching off from the right of the high-road lay the path up which Colonel Manners took his way, and which pa.s.sed over a track upon the side of the hill, partly hedged in and cultivated, and partly left to its own ungrateful sterility. It was steep also, but Manners was a good climber; and, knowing that Mrs. Falkland's breakfast hour was half-past nine, he did not linger by the way, but soon found himself at the summit of the hill, and on the piece of waste ground which will be found in the county map under the name of Morley Common, or Morley Down. A good deal of dew had fallen in the night; and as the sun, who had not yet pursued his bright course far up the arch of heaven, poured the flood of his morning light upon the short blades of gra.s.s covering the common, the whole would have seemed crisp with h.o.a.rfrost, had not, every here and there, a tuft of longer leaves caught the rays more fully, and twinkled as if sprinkled with living diamonds, as the early air moved it gently in the beams. In different directions across the common might be seen a hundred small foot-roads, winding in that tortuous and unsteady manner which is sure to mark a path trodden out by man's unguided feet, and which offers no bad comment on his uncertain and roundabout way of arriving at his object; but, as the ground comprised many hundred acres, Colonel Manners might have been puzzled which way to take, had not his military habits at once sent him to the small planted tumulus which we have mentioned, in order to obtain a general view of the place.

Climbing up the sides of the little mound, therefore, he gazed round him; but neither gipsies nor tents were visible; and he might have returned to Mrs. Falkland's, satisfied that they were not there, had not a small column of faint blue smoke, rising from behind some bushes, at the distance of about a quarter of a mile, marked the presence of human beings in that direction, and shown that the bushes, though apparently not higher than a man's hat, masked some fall in the ground where the fire was kindled. Thither, then, Manners turned his steps, and soon perceived that another old sand-pit, with some bushes climbing up one of the sides, had given shelter to those of whom he was now in search.

Before he could even discover so much, he became aware, by two low whistles, that his own approach had been perceived; and, as he was advancing directly towards the sand-pit, where a number of the gipsies had paused in their various occupations to watch him, he saw a man issue forth from one of the huts, put something hastily into the bosom of his long wrapping coat, and then come forward to meet him. The gipsy, as he came nearer, gazed at him from head to foot, with a clear dark eye, which had in it nothing either of the dogged sullenness or cunning stealthiness that sometimes marks the male part of the race,--often the fruit both of their own vices and the world's harshness. There was something in the air and manner of the man, that to so accurate an observer as Manners, spoke a great difference between him and the general cla.s.s of his people; but, to save a repet.i.tion of description, it may be as well to say at once, that the gipsy who now appeared was the same whom we have designated Pharold.

"Good-morning!" said Colonel Manners, as the other came near; "you have hid your tents very completely here."

"Good-morning!" replied the gipsy, slightly knitting his brow, as he saw the soldier's eye running over every part of their encampment with some degree of curiosity; "Good-morning! It seems you were seeking me or mine."