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 black-haired 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 re-entered 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 “Good-night,” 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!