My ancestor's artifice was very successful when the race was run on two sides of a hedge, backwards and forwards; but if a louis d'or and a bottle of brandy had depended on my reaching the tinker-mother before the clergywoman, I should have lost the wager. We hurried after her, however, as fast as we were able, keeping well under the brushwood.
When we could see our neighbours again, the tinker-mother was standing up, and speaking hurriedly, with a wild look in her eyes.
"Let me be, Sybil Stanley, and let me speak. I says again, what has fine folk to do with coming and worriting us in our wood? If I did sell him, I sold him fair—and if I got him back, I bought him back fair. Aye my delicate gentlewoman, you may look at me, but I did!
"Five years, five years of wind and weather, and hard days and lonely nights:—
"Five years of food your men would chuck to the pigs, and of clothes your maids would think scorn to scour in:—
"Five years—but I scraped it together, and then they baulked me. You shuts the door in the poor tinker-woman's face; you gives the words of warning to the police.
"Five more years—it was five more, wasn't it, my daughter?—Sometimes I fancies I makes a mistake and overcounts. But, he'll know. Christian, my dear! Christian, I say!"
"Sit down, Mother, sit down," said the gipsy girl; and the old woman sat down, but she went on muttering,—
"I will speak! What has they to do, I say, to ask me where he has gone to? A fine place for the fine gentleman they made of him. What has such as them to say to it, if I couldn't keep him when I got him—that they comes to taunt me and my grey hairs?"
She wrung her grey locks with a passionate gesture as she spoke, and then dropped her elbows on her knees and her head upon her hands.
The clergywoman had been standing very still, with her two white hands folded before her, and her eyes, that had dark circles round them which made them look large, fixed upon the tinker-mother, as she muttered; but when she ceased muttering the clergywoman unlocked her hands, and with one movement took off her hat. Her hair was smoothly drawn over the roundness of her head, and gathered in a knot at the back of her neck, and the brown of it was all streaked with grey. She threw her hat on to the grass, and moving swiftly to the old woman's side, she knelt by her, as we had seen Sybil kneel, speaking very clearly, and, touching the tinker-mother's hand.
"Christian's grandmother—you are his grandmother, are you not?—you must be much, much older than me, but look at my hair. Am I likely to taunt any one with having grown grey or with being miserable? It takes a good deal of pain, good mother, to make young hair as white as mine."
"So it should," muttered the old woman, "so it should. It is a plaguy world, I say, as it is; but it would be plaguy past any bearing for the poor, if them that has everything could do just as they likes and never feel no aches nor pains afterwards. And there's a many fine gentlefolk thinks they can, till they feels the difference.
"'What's ten pound to me?' says you. 'I wants the pretty baby with the dark eyes and the long lashes,' says you.
"'Them it belongs to is poor, they'd sell anything,' says you.
"'I wants a son,' you says; 'and having the advantages of gold and silver, I can buy one.'
"You calls him by a name of your own choosing, and puts your own name at the end of that. His hands are something dark for the son of such a delicate white lady-mother, but they can be covered with the kid gloves of gentility.
"You buys fine clothes for him, and nurses and tutors and schools for him.
"You teaches him the speech of gentlefolk, and the airs of gentlefolk, and the learning of gentlefolk.
"You crams his head with religion, which is a thing I doesn't hold with, and with holy words, which I thinks brings ill-luck.
"You has the advantages of silver and gold, to make a fine gentleman of him, but the blood that flies to his face when he hears the words of insult is gipsy blood, and he comes back to the woods where he was born.
"Let me be, my daughter, I say I will speak—(Heaven keep my head cool!)—it's good for such as them to hear the truth once in a way. She's a dainty fine lady, and she taught him many fine things, besides religion, which I sets my face against. Tell her she took mighty good care of him—Ha! ha! the old tinker-woman had only one chance of teaching him anything—but she taught him the patteran!"
The clergywoman had never moved, except that when the tinker-mother shook off her hand she locked her white fingers in front of her as before, and her eyes wandered from the old woman's face, and looked beyond it, as if she were doing what I have often done, and counting the bits of blue sky which show through the oak-leaves before they grow thick. But she must have been paying attention all the same, for she spoke very earnestly.
"Good mother, listen to me. If I bought him, you sold him. Perhaps I did wrong to tempt you—perhaps I did wrong to hope to buy for myself what God was not pleased to give me. I was very young, and one makes many mistakes when one is young. I thought I was childless and unhappy, but I know now that only those are childless who have had children and lost them.
"Do you know that in all the years my son was with me, I do not think there was a day when I did not think of you? I used to wonder if you regretted him, and I lived in dread of your getting him back; and when he ran away, I knew you had. I never agreed with the lawyer's plans—my husband will tell you so—I always wanted to find you to speak to you myself. I knew what you must feel, and I thought I should like you to know that I knew it.
"Night after night I lay awake and thought what I would say to you when we met. I thought I would tell you that I could quite understand that our ways might become irksome to Christian, if he inherited a love for outdoor life, and for moving from place to place. I thought I would say that perhaps I was wrong ever to have taken him away from his own people; but as it was done and could not be u............