Part 58 (1/2)

At first I saw nothing, but after a while two blue eyes seemed gazing at me as through a veil of evening haze. They were looking straight at me, those beloved eyes--they were sparkling with childish happiness as they had sparkled through the vapours of the pool when she walked towards me that morning on the brink of Knockers' Llyn.

Starting up and throwing up my arms, I cried, 'My darling!' The vision vanished. Then turning round, I looked at Sinfi. She seemed listening to a voice I could not hear--her face was pale with emotion. I could hear her breath coming and going heavily; her bosom rose and fell, and the necklace of coral and gold coins around her throat trembled like a shuddering snake while she murmured, 'My dukkeripen! Yes, mammy, I've gone ag'in you and broke my promise, and this is the very Gorgio as you meant.'

'Call the vision back,' I said; 'play the air again, dear Sinfi.'

She sprang in front of me, and seizing one of my wrists, she gazed in my face, and said, 'Yes, it's ”dear Sinfi”! You wants dear Sinfi to fiddle the Gorgie's livin' mullo back to you.'

I looked into the dark eyes, lately so kind. I did not know them.

They were dilated and grown red-brown in hue, like the scorched colour of a North African lion's mane, and along the eyelashes a phosph.o.r.escent light seemed to play. What did it mean? Was it indeed Sinfi standing there, rigid as a column, with a clenched brown fist drawn up to the broad, heaving breast, till the knuckles shone white, as if about to strike me? What made her throw out her arms as if struggling desperately with the air, or with some unseen foe who was binding her with chains?

I stood astounded, watching her, as she gradually calmed down and became herself again; but I was deeply perplexed and deeply troubled.

After a while she said, 'Let's go back to ”the Place,”' and without waiting for my acquiescence, she strode along down the path towards Beddgelert.

I was quickly by her side, but felt as little in the mood for talking as she did. Suddenly a small lizard glided from the gra.s.s.

'The Romany Sap!' cried Sinfi, and she--the fearless woman before whom the stoutest Gypsy men had quailed--sobbed wildly in terror. She soon recovered herself, and said: 'What a fool you must think me, Hal! It wur all through talkin' about the Romany Sap. At fust I thought it wur the Romany Sap itself, an' it wur only a poor little effet arter all. There ain't a-many things made o' flesh and blood as can make Sinfi Lovell show the white feather; but I know you'll think the wuss o' me arter this, Hal. But while the pictur were a-showin' I heard my dear mammy's whisper: ”Little Sinfi, little Sinfi, beware o'

Gorgios! This is the one.”'

V

By the time we reached the encampment it was quite dark. Panuel, and indeed most of the Gypsies, had turned into the tents for the night; but both Videy Lovell and Rhona Boswell were moving about as briskly as though the time was early morning, one with guile expressed in every feature, the other shedding that aura of frankness and sweet winsomeness which enslaved Percy Aylwin, and no wonder.

Rhona was in a specially playful mood, and came dancing round us more like a child of six than a young woman with a Romany Rye for a lover.

But neither Sinfi nor I was in the mood for frolic. My living-waggon, which still went about wherever the Lovells went, had been carefully prepared for me by Rhona, and I at once went into it, not with the idea of getting much sleep, but in order to be alone with my thoughts. What was I to think of my experiences of that evening? Was I really to take the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes when listening to Sinfi's crwth, or rather when listening to her song, as evidence that Winifred was alive? Oh, if I could, if I could! Was I really to accept as true this fantastic superst.i.tion about the crwth and the spirits of Snowdon and the 'living mullo'?

That was too monstrous a thought even for me to entertain.

Notwithstanding all that had pa.s.sed in the long and dire struggle between my reason and the mysticism inherited with the blood of two lines of superst.i.tious ancestors, which circ.u.mstances had conspired to foster, my reason had only been baffled and thwarted; it had not really been slain.

What, then, could be the explanation of the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes? 'It is hallucination,' I said, 'and it is the result of two very powerful causes--my own strong imagination, excited to a state of feverish exaltation by the long strain of my suffering, and that power in Sinfi which D'Arcy had described as her ”half-unconscious power as a mesmerist.” At a moment when my will, weakened by sorrow and pain, lay prostrate beneath my own fevered imagination, Sinfi's voice, so full of intense belief in her own hallucination, had leapt, as it were, into my consciousness and enslaved my imagination, which in turn had enslaved my will and my senses.'

For hours I argued this point with myself, and I ended by coming to the conclusion that it was 'my mind's eye' alone that saw the picture of Winifred.

But there was also another question to confront. What was the cause of Sinfi's astonis.h.i.+ng emotion after the vision vanished? Such a mingling of warring pa.s.sions I had never seen before. I tried to account for it. I thought about it for hours, and finally fell asleep without finding any solution of the enigma.

I had no conversation of a private nature with Sinfi until the next evening, when the camp was on the move.

'You had no sleep last night, Sinfi; I can see it by the dark circles round your eyes.'

'That's nuther here nor there, brother,' she said.

I found to my surprise that the Gypsies were preparing to remove the camp to a place not far from Bettws y Coed. I suggested to Sinfi that we two should return to the bungalow. But she told me that her stay there had come to an end. The firmness with which she made this announcement made me sure that there was no appeal.

'Then,' said I, 'my living-waggon will come into use again. The camping place is near some of the best trout streams in the neighbourhood, and I sadly want some trout-fis.h.i.+ng.'

'We part company to-day, brother,' she said. 'We can't be pals no more--never no more.'