Six young rebels, they sat very perkily in the car as they swished through the mud. Yet they had a peaked look too. After all, they had nothing really to rebel against, any of them. They were left so very free in their movements. Their parents let them do almost entirely as they liked. There wasn’t really a fetter to break, nor a prison-bar to file through, nor a bolt to shatter. The keys of their lives were in their own hands. And there they dangled inert.
It is very much easier to shatter prison bars than to open undiscovered doors to life. As the younger generation finds out, somewhat to its chagrin. True, there was Granny. But poor old Granny, you couldn’t actually say to her: “Lie down and die, you old woman!” She might be an old nuisance, but she never really DID anything. It wasn’t fair to hate her.
So the young people set off on their jaunt, trying to be very full of beans. They could really do as they liked. And so, of course, there was nothing to do but sit in the car and talk a lot of criticism of other people, and silly flirty gallantry that was really rather a bore. If there had only been a few “strict orders” to be disobeyed! But nothing: beyond the refusal to carry the message to Lady Louth, of which the rector would approve, because he didn’t encourage King Charles’ Head either.
They sang, rather scrappily, the latest would-be comic songs, as they went through the grim villages. In the great park the deer were in groups near the road, roe deer and fallow, nestling in the gloom of the afternoon under the oaks by the road, as if for the stimulus of human company.
Yvette insisted on stopping and getting out to talk to them. The girls, in their Russian boots, tramped through the damp grass while the deer watched them with big, unfrightened eyes. The hart trotted away mildly, holding back his head, because of the weight of the horns. But the doe, balancing her big ears, did not rise from under the tree, with her half-grown young ones, till the girls were almost in touch. Then she walked lightfoot away, lifting her tail from her spotted flanks, while the young ones nimbly trotted.
“Aren’t they awfully dainty and nice!” cried Yvette. “You’d wonder they could lie so cosily in this horrid wet grass.”
“Well I suppose they’ve got to lie down SOMETIME,” said Lucille. “And it’s FAIRLY dry under the tree.” She looked at the crushed grass, where the deer had lain.
Yvette went and put her hand down, to feel how it felt.
“Yes!” she said, doubtfully, “I believe it’s a bit warm.”
The deer had bunched again a few yards away, and were standing motionless in the gloom of the afternoon. Away below the slopes of grass and trees, beyond the swift river with its balustraded bridge, sat the huge ducal house, one or two chimneys smoking bluely. Behind it rose purplish woods.
The girls, pushing their fur collars up to their ears, dangling one long arm, stood watching in silence, their wide Russian boots protecting them from the wet grass. The great house squatted square and creamy-grey below. The deer, in little groups, were scattered under the old trees close by. It all seemed so still, so unpretentious, and so sad.
“I wonder where the Duke is now,” said Ella.
“Not here, wherever he is,” said Lucille. “I expect he’s abroad where the sun shines.”
The motor horn called from the road, and they heard Leo’s voice:
“Come on boys! If we’re going to get to the Head and down to Amberdale for tea, we’d better move.”
They crowded into the car again, with chilled feet, and set off through the park, past the silent spire of the church, out through the great gates and over the bridge, on into the wide, damp, stony village of Woodlinkin, where the river ran. And thence, for a long time, they stayed in the mud and dark and dampness of the valley, often with sheer rock above them; the water brawling on one hand, the steep rock or dark trees on the other.
Till, through the darkness of overhanging trees, they began to climb, and Leo changed the gear. Slowly the car toiled up through the whitey-grey mud, into the stony village of Bolehill, that hung on the slope, round the old cross, with its steps, that stood where the road branched, on past the cottages whence came a wonderful smell of hot tea-cakes, and beyond, still upwards, under dripping trees and past broken slopes of bracken, always climbing. Until the cleft became shallower, and the trees finished, and the slopes on either side were bare, gloomy grass, with low dry-stone walls. They were emerging on to the Head.
The party had been silent for some time. On either side the road was grass, then a low stone fence, and the swelling curve of the hill-summit, traced with the low, dry-stone walls. Above this, the low sky.
The car ran out, under the low, grey sky, on the naked tops.
“Shall we stay a moment?” called Leo.
“Oh yes!” cried the girls.
And they scrambled out once more, to look around. They knew the place quite well. But still, if one came to the Head, one got out to look.
The hills were like the knuckles of a hand, the dales were below, between the fingers, narrow, steep, and dark. In the deeps a train was steaming, slowly pulling north: a small thing of the underworld. The noise of the engine re-echoed curiously upwards. Then came the dull, familiar sound of blasting in a quarry.
Leo, always on the go, moved quickly.
“Shall we be going?” he said. “Do we WANT to get down to Amberdale for tea? Or shall we try somewhere nearer?”
They all voted for Amberdale, for the Marquis of Grantham.
“Well, which way shall we go back? Shall we go by Codnor and over Crossbill, or shall we go by Ashbourne?”
There was the usual dilemma. Then they finally decided on the Codnor top road. Off went the car, gallantly.
They were on the top of the world, now, on the back of the fist. It was naked, too, as the back of your fist, high under heaven, and dull, heavy green. Only it was veined with a network of old stone walls, dividing the fields, and broken here and there with ruins of old lead-mines and works. A sparse stone farm bristled with six naked sharp trees. In the distance was a patch of smokey grey stone, a hamlet. In some fields grey, dark sheep fed silently, somberly. But there was not a sound nor a movement. It was the roof of England, stony and arid as any roof. Beyond, below, were the shires.
“‘And see the coloured counties,’” said Yvette to herself. Here anyhow they were not coloured. A stream of rooks trailed out from nowhere. They had been walking, pecking, on a naked field that had been manured. The car ran on between the grass and stone walls of the upland lane, and the young people were silent, looking out over the far network of stone fences, under the sky, looking for the curves downward that indicated a drop to one of the underneath, hidden dales.
Ahead was a light cart, driven by a man, and trudging along at the side was a woman, sturdy and elderly, with a pack on her back. The man in the cart had caught her up, and now was keeping pace.
The road was narrow. Leo sounded the horn sharply. The man on the cart looked round, but the woman on foot only trudged steadily, rapidly forward, without turning her head.
Yvette’s heart gave a jump. The man on the cart was a gipsy, one of the black, loose-bodied, handsome sort. He remained seated on his cart, turning round and gazing at the occupants of the motor-car, from under the brim of his cap. And his pose was loose, his gaze insolent in its indifference. He had a thin black moustache under his thin, straight nose, and a big silk handkerchief of red and yellow tied round his neck. He spoke a word to the woman. She stood a second, solid, to turn round and look at the occupants of the car, which had now drawn quite close. Leo honked the horn again, imperiously. The woman, who had a grey-and-white kerchief tied round her head, turned sharply, to keep pace with the cart, whose driver also had settled back, and was lifting the reins, moving his loose, light shoulders. But still he did not pull aside.
Leo made the horn scream, as he put the brakes on and the car slowed up near the back of the cart. The gipsy turned round at the din, laughing in his dark face under his dark-green cap, and said something which they did not hear, showing white teeth under the line of black moustache, and making a gesture with his dark, loose hand.
“Get out o’ the way then!” yelled Leo.
For answer, the man delicately pulled the horse to a standstill, as it curved to the side of the road. It was a good roan horse, and a good, natty, dark-green cart.
Leo, in a rage, had to jam on the brake and pull up too.
“Don’t the pretty young ladies want to hear their fortunes?” said the gipsy on the cart, laughing except for his dark, watchful eyes, which went from face to face, and lingered on Yvette’s young, tender face.
She met his dark eyes for a second, their level search, their insolence, their complete indifference to people like Bob and Leo, and something took fire in her breast. She thought: “He is stronger than I am! He doesn’t care!”
“Oh yes! let’s!” cried Lucille at once.
“Oh yes!” chorused the girls.
“I say! What about the time?” cried Leo.
“Oh bother the old time! Somebody’s always dragging in time by the forelock,” cried Lucille.
“Well, if you don’t mind WHEN we get back, I don’t!” said Leo heroically.
The gipsy man had been sitting loosely on the side of his cart, watching the faces. He now jumped softly down from the shaft, his knees a bit stiff. He was apparently a man something over thirty, and a beau in his way. He wore a sort of shooting-jacket, double-breasted, coming only to the hips, of dark green-and-black frieze; rather tight black trousers, black boots, and a dark-green cap; with the big yellow-and-red bandanna handkerchief round his neck. His appearance was curiously elegant, and quite expensive in its gipsy style. He was handsome, too, pressing in his chin with the old, gipsy conceit, and now apparently not heeding the strangers any more, as he led his good roan horse off the road, preparing to back his cart.
The girls saw for the first time a deep recess in the side of the road, and two caravans smoking. Yvette got quickly down. They had suddenly come upon a disused quarry, cut into the slope of the road-side, and in this sudden lair, almost like a cave, were three caravans, dismantled for the winter. There was also deep at the back, a shelter built of boughs, as a stable for the horse. The grey, crude rock rose high above the caravans, and curved round towards the road. The floor was heaped chips of stone, with grasses growing among. It was a hidden, snug winter camp.
The elderly woman with the pack had gone in to one of the caravans, leaving the door open. Two children were peeping out, shewing black heads. The gipsy man gave a little call, as he backed his cart into the quarry, and an elderly man came out to help him untackle.
The gipsy himself went up the steps into the newest caravan, that had its door closed. Underneath, a tied-up dog ranged forth. It was a white hound spotted liver-coloured. It gave a low growl as Leo and Bob approached.
At the same moment, a dark-faced gipsy-woman with a pink shawl or kerchief round her head and big gold ear-rings in her ears, came down the steps of the newest caravan, swinging her flounced, voluminous green skirt. She was handsome in a bold, dark, long-faced way, just a bit wolfish. She looked like one of the bold, loping Spanish gipsies.
“Good-morning, my ladies and gentlemen,” she said, eyeing the girls from her bold, predative eyes. She spoke with a certain foreign stiffness.
“Good afternoon!” said the girls.
“Which beautiful little lady like to hear her fortune? Give me her little hand?”
She was a tall woman, with a frightening way of reaching forward her neck like a menace. Her eyes went from face to face, very active, heartlessly searching out what she wanted. Meanwhile the man, apparently her husband, appeared at the top of the caravan steps smoking a pipe, and with a small, black-haired child in his arms. He stood on his limber legs, casually looking down on the group, as if from a distance, his long black lashes lifted from his full, conceited, impudent black eyes. There was something peculiarly transfusing in his stare. Yvette felt it, felt it in her knees. She pretended to be interested in the white-and-liver-coloured hound.
“How much do you want, if we all have our fortunes told?” asked Lottie Framley, as the six fresh-faced young Christians hung back rather reluctantly from this pagan pariah woman.
“All of you? ladies and gentlemen, all?” said the woman shrewdly.
“I don’t want mine told! You go ahead!” cried Leo.
“Neither do I,” said Bob. “You four girls.”
“The four ladies?” said the gipsy woman, eyeing them shrewdly, after having looked at the boys. And she fixed her price. “Each one give me a sheeling, and a little bit more for luck? a little bit!” She smiled in a way that was more wolfish than cajoling, and the force of her will was felt, heavy as iron beneath the velvet of her words.
“All right,” said Leo. “Make it a shilling a head. Don’t spin it out too long.”
“Oh, YOU!” cried Lucille at him. “We want to hear it ALL.”
The woman took two wooden stools, from under a caravan, and placed them near the wheel. Then she took the tall, dark Lottie Framley by the hand, and bade her sit down. “You don’t care if everybody hear?” she said, looking up curiously into Lottie’s face.
Lottie blushed dark with nervousness, as the gipsy woman held her hand, and stroked her palm with hard, cruel-seeming fingers.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” she said.
The gipsy woman peered into the palm, tracing the lines of the hand with a hard, dark forefinger. But she seemed clean.
And slowly she told the fortune, while the others, standing listening, kept on crying out: “Oh, that’s Jim Baggaley! Oh, I don’t believe it! Oh, that’s not true! A fair woman who lives beneath a tree! why whoever’s that?” until Leo stopped them with a manly warning:
“Oh, hold on, girls! You give everything away.”
Lottie retired blushing and confused, and it was Ella’s turn. She was much more calm and shrewd, trying to read the oracular words. Lucille kept breaking out with: Oh, I say! The gipsy man at the top of the steps stood imperturbable, without any expression at all. But his bold eyes kept staring at Yvette, she could feel them on her cheek, on her neck, and she dared not look up. But Framley would sometimes look up at him, and got a level stare back, from the handsome face of the male gipsy, from the dark conceited proud eyes. It was a peculiar look, in the eyes that belonged to the tribe of the humble: the pride of the pariah, the half-sneering challenge of the outcast, who sneered at law-abiding men, and went on his own way. All the time, the gipsy man stood there, holding his child in his arms, looking on without being concerned.
Lucille was having her hand read — “You have been across the sea, and there you met a man — a brown-haired man — but he was too old —”
“Oh, I SAY!” cried Lucille, looking round at Yvette.
But Yvette was abstracted, agitated, hardly heeding: in one of her mesmerised states.
“You will marry in a few years — not now, but a few years — perhaps four — and you will not be rich, but you will have plenty — enough — and you will go away, a long journey.”
“With my husband, or without?” cried Lucille.
“With him —”
When it came to Yvette’s turn, and the woman looked up boldly, cruelly, searching for a long time in her face, Yvette said nervously:
“I don’t think I want mine told. No, I won’t have mine told! No I won’t, really!”
“You are afraid of some thing?” said the gipsy woman cruelly.
“No, it’s not that —” Yvette fidgetted.
“You have some secret? You are afraid I shall say it. Come, would you like to go in the caravan, where nobody hears?”
The woman was curiously insinuating; while Yvette was always wayward, perverse. The look of perversity was on her soft, frail young face now, giving her a queer hardness.
“Yes!” she said suddenly. “Yes! I might do that!”
“Oh, I say!” cried the others. “Be a sport!”
“I don’t think you’d BETTER!” cried Lucille.
“Yes!” said Yvette, with that hard little way of hers. “I’ll do that. I’ll go in the caravan.”
The gipsy woman called something to the man on the steps. He went into the caravan for a moment or two, then re-appeared, and came down the steps, setting the small child on its uncertain feet, and holding it by the hand. A dandy, in his polished black boots, tight black trousers and tight dark-green jersey, he walked slowly across, with the toddling child, to where the elderly gipsy was giving the roan horse a feed of oats, in the bough shelter between pits of grey rock, with dry bracken upon the stone-chip floor. He looked at Yvette as he passed, staring her full in the eyes, with his pariah’s bold yet dishonest stare. Something hard inside her met his stare. But the surface of her body seemed to turn to water. Nevertheless, something hard in her registered the peculiar pure lines of his face, of his straight, pure nose, of his cheeks and temples. The curious dark, suave purity of all his body, outlined in the green jersey: a purity like a living sneer.
And as he loped slowly past her, on his flexible hips, it seemed to her still that he was stronger than she was. Of all the men she had ever seen, this one was the only one who was stronger than she was, in her own kind of strength, her own kind of understanding.
So, with curiosity, she followed the woman up the steps of the caravan, the skirts of her well-cut tan coat swinging and almost showing her knees, under the pale-green cloth dress. She had long, long-striding, fine legs, too slim rather than too thick, and she wore curiously-patterned pale-and-fawn stockings of fine wool, suggesting the legs of some delicate animal.
At the top of the steps she paused and turned, debonair, to the others, saying in her na?ve, lordly way, so off-hand:
“I won’t let her be long.”
Her grey fur collar was open, showing her soft throat and pale green dress, her little, plaited tan-coloured hat came down to her ears, round her soft, fresh face. There was something soft and yet overbearing, unscrupulous, about her. She knew the gipsy man had turned to look at her. She was aware of the pure dark nape of his neck, the black hair groomed away. He watched as she entered his house.
What the gipsy told her, no one ever knew. It was a long time to wait, the others felt. Twilight was deepening on the gloom, and it was turning raw and cold. From the chimney of the second caravan came smoke and a smell of rich food. The horse was fed, a yellow blanket strapped round him, the two gipsy men talked together in the distance, in low tones. There was a peculiar feeling of silence and secrecy in that lonely, hidden quarry.
At last the caravan door opened, and Yvette emerged, bending forward and stepping with long, witch-like slim legs down the steps. There was a stooping, witch-like silence about her as she emerged on the twilight.
“Did it seem long?” she said vaguely, not looking at anybody and keeping her own counsel hard within her soft, vague waywardness. “I hope you weren’t bored! Wouldn’t tea be nice! Shall we go?”
“You get in!” said Bob. “I’ll pay.”
The gipsy-woman’s full, metallic skirts of jade-green alpaca came swinging down the steps. She rose to her height, a big, triumphant-looking woman with a dark-wolf face. The pink cashmere kerchief, stamped with red roses, was slipping to one side over her black and crimped hair. She gazed at the young people in the twilight with bold arrogance.
Bob put two half-crowns in her hand.
“A little bit more, for luck, for your young lady’s luck,” she wheedled, like a wheedling wolf. “Another bit of silver, to bring you luck.”
“You’ve got a shilling for luck, that’s enough,” said Bob calmly and quietly, as they moved away to the car.
“A little bit of silver! Just a little bit, for your luck in love!”
Yvette, with the sudden long, startling gestures of her long limbs, swung round as she was entering the car, and with long arm outstretched, strode and put something into the gipsy’s hand, then stepped, bending her height, into the car.
“Prosperity to the beautiful young lady, and the gipsy’s blessing on her,” came the suggestive, half-sneering voice of the woman.
The engine birred! then birred! again more fiercely, and started. Leo switched on the lights, and immediately the quarry with the gipsies fell back into the blackness of night.
“Goodnight!” called Yvette’s voice, as the car started. But hers was the only voice that piped up, chirpy and impudent in its nonchalance. The headlights glared down the stone lane.
“Yvette, you’ve got to tell us what she said to you,” cried Lucille, in the teeth of Yvette’s silent will NOT to be asked.
“Oh, nothing at ALL thrilling,” said Yvette, with false warmth. “Just the usual old thing: a dark man who means good luck, and a fair one who means bad: and a death in the family, which if it means Granny, won’t be so VERY awful: and I shall marry when I’m twenty-three, and have heaps of money and heaps of love, and two children. All sounds very nice, but it’s a bit too much of a good thing, you know.”
“Oh, but why did you give her more money?”
“Oh well, I wanted to! You HAVE to be a bit lordly with people like that —”
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