The Gypsies Part 12

"_Sarishan rye_!"

"Did you ever see me before? Do you know me?"

"No, sir."

"I'm sorry for that. I have a nice velveteen coat which I have been keeping for your father. How's your brother Frank? Traveling about Kingston, I suppose. As usual. But I don't care about trusting the coat to anybody who don't know me."

"I'll take it to him, safe enough, sir."

"Yes, I dare say. On your back. And wear it yourself six months before you see him."

Up spoke his wife: "That he shan't. I'll take good care that the _pooro mush_ [the old man] gets it all right, in a week."

"Well, _dye_, I can trust you. You remember me. And, Anselo, here is my address. Come to the house in half an hour."

In half an hour the housekeeper, said with a quiet smile,--

"If you please, sir, there's a gentleman--a _gypsy_ gentleman--wishes to see you."

It is an English theory that the master can have no "visitors" who are not gentlemen. I must admit that Anselo's dress was not what could be called gentlemanly. From his hat to his stout shoes he looked the impenitent gypsy and sinful poacher, unaffected and natural. There was a cutaway, sporting look about his coat which indicated that he had grown to it from boyhood "in woodis grene." He held a heavy-handled whip, a regular Romany _tchupni_ or _chuckni_, which Mr. Borrow thinks gave rise to the word "jockey." I thought the same once, but have changed my mind, for there were "jockeys" in England before gypsies. Altogether, Anselo (which comes from Wenceslas) was a determined and vigorous specimen of an old-fas.h.i.+oned English gypsy, a type which, with all its faults, is not wanting in sundry manly virtues.

I knew that Anselo rarely entered any houses save ale-houses, and that he had probably never before been in a study full of books, arms, and bric-a-brac. And he knew that I was aware of it. Now, if he had been more of a fool, like a red Indian or an old-fas.h.i.+oned fop, he would have affected a stoical indifference, for fear of showing his ignorance. As it was, he sat down in an arm-chair, glanced about him, and said just the right thing.

"It must be a pleasant thing, at the end of the day, after one has been running about, to come home to such a room as this, so full of fine things, and sit down in such a comfortable chair." "Will I have a gla.s.s of old ale? Yes, I thank you." "That is _kushto levinor_ [good ale]. I never tasted better." "Would I rather have wine or spirits? No, I thank you; such ale as this is fit for a king."

Here Anselo's keen eye suddenly rested on something which he understood.

"What a beautiful little rifle! That's what I call a _rinkno yag-engree_ [pretty gun]."

"Has it been a _wafedo wen_ [hard winter], Anselo?"

"It has been a dreadful winter, sir. We have been hard put to it sometimes for food. It's dreadful to think of. I've acti'lly seen the time when I was almost desperated, and if I'd had such a gun as that I'm afraid, if I'd been tempted, I could a-found it in my heart to knock over a pheasant."

I looked sympathetically at Anselo. The idea of his having been brought to the very brink of such a terrible temptation and awful crime was touching. He met the glance with the expression of a good man, who had done no more than his duty, closed his eyes, and softly shook his head.

Then he took another gla.s.s of ale, as if the memory of the pheasants or something connected with the subject had been too much for him, and spoke:--

"I came here on my horse. But he's an ugly old white punch. So as not to discredit you, I left him standing before a gentleman's house, two doors off."

Here Anselo paused. I acknowledged this touching act of thoughtful delicacy by raising my gla.s.s. He drank again, then resumed:--

"But I feel uneasy about leaving a horse by himself in the streets of London. He'll stand like a driven nail wherever you put him--but there's always plenty of claw-hammers to draw such nails."

"Don't be afraid, Anselo. The park-keeper will not let anybody take him through the gates. I'll pay for him if he goes."

But visions of a stolen horse seemed to haunt Anselo. One would have thought that something of the kind had been familiar to him. So I sent for the velveteen coat, and, folding it on his arm, he mounted the old white horse, while waving an adieu with the heavy-handled whip, rode away in the mist, and was seen no more.

Farewell, farewell, thou old brown velveteen! I had thee first in by-gone years, afar, hunting ferocious fox and horrid hare, near Brighton, on the Downs, and wore thee well on many a sketching tour to churches old and castles dark or gray, when winter went with all his raines wete. Farewell, my coat, and benedicite! I bore thee over France unto Ma.r.s.eilles, and on the steamer where we took aboard two hundred Paynim pilgrims of Mahound. Farewell, my coat, and benedicite! Thou wert in Naples by great Virgil's tomb, and borest dust from Posilippo's grot, and hast been wetted by the dainty spray from bays and shoals of old Etrurian name. Farewell, my coat, and benedicite! And thou wert in the old Egyptian realm: I had thee on that morning 'neath the palms when long I lingered where of yore had stood the rose-red city, half as old as time. Farewell, my coat, and benedicite! It was a lady called thee into life. She said, Methinks ye need a velvet coat. It is a seemly guise to ride to hounds. Another gave me whip and silvered spurs. Now all have vanished in the darkening past. Ladies and all are gone into the gloom.

Farewell, my coat, and benedicite. Thou'st had a venturous and traveled life, for thou wert once in Moscow in the snow. A true Bohemian thou hast ever been, and as a right Bohemian thou wilt die, the garment of a roving Romany. Fain would I see and hear what thou'rt to know of reckless riding and the gypsy _tan_, of camps in dark green lanes, afar from towns. Farewell, mine coat, and benedicite!

VII. OF CERTAIN GENTLEMEN AND GYPSIES.

One morning I was walking with Mr. Thomas Carlyle and Mr. Froude. We went across Hyde Park, and paused to rest on the bridge. This is a remarkable place, since there, in the very heart of London, one sees a view which is perfectly rural. The old oaks rise above each other like green waves, the houses in the distance are country-like, while over the trees, and far away, a village-looking spire completes the picture. I think that it was Mr. Froude who called my attention to the beauty of the view, and I remarked that it needed only a gypsy tent and the curling smoke to make it in all respects perfectly English.

"You have paid some attention to gypsies," said Mr. Carlyle. "They're not altogether so bad a people as many think. In Scotland, we used to see many of them. I'll not say that they were not rovers and reivers, but they could be honest at times. The country folk feared them, but those who made friends wi' them had no cause to complain of their conduct. Once there was a man who was persuaded to lend a gypsy a large sum of money. My father knew the man. It was to be repaid at a certain time. The day came; the gypsy did not. And months pa.s.sed, and still the creditor had nothing of money but the memory of it; and ye remember '_nessun maggior dolore_,'--that there's na greater grief than to remember the siller ye once had. Weel, one day the man was surprised to hear that his frien' the gypsy wanted to see him--interview, ye call it in America. And the gypsy explained that, having been arrested, and unfortunately detained, by some little accident, in preeson, he had na been able to keep his engagement. 'If ye'll just gang wi' me,' said the gypsy, 'aw'll mak' it all right.' 'Mon, aw wull,' said the creditor,--they were Scotch, ye know, and spoke in deealect. So the gypsy led the way to the house which he had inhabited, a cottage which belonged to the man himself to whom he owed the money. And there he lifted up the hearthstone; the hard-stane they call it in Scotland, and it is called so in the prophecy of Thomas of Ercildowne. And under the hard-stane there was an iron pot. It was full of gold, and out of that gold the gypsy carle paid his creditor. Ye wonder how 't was come by?

Well, ye'll have heard it's best to let sleeping dogs lie."

"Yes. And what was said of the Poles who had, during the Middle Ages, a reputation almost as good as that of gypsies? _Ad secretas Poli_, _curas extendere noli_." (Never concern your soul as to the secrets of a Pole.)

Mr. Carlyle's story reminds me that Walter Simpson, in his history of them, says that the Scottish gypsies have ever been distinguished for their grat.i.tude to those who treated them with civility and kindness, anent which he tells a capital story, while other instances sparkle here and there with many brilliant touches in his five hundred-and-fifty-page volume.

I have more than once met with Romanys, when I was in the company of men who, like Carlyle and Bilderdijk, "were also in the world of letters known," or who might say, "We have deserved to be." One of the many memories of golden days, all in the merrie tyme of summer song in England, is of the Thames, and of a pleasure party in a little steam-launch. It was a weenie affair,--just room for six forward outside the cubby, which was called the cabin; and of these six, one was Mr.

Roebuck,--"the last Englishman," as some one has called him, but as the late Lord Lytton applies the same term to one of his characters about the time of the Conquest, its accuracy may be doubted. Say the last type of a certain phase of the Englishman; say that Roebuck was the last of the old iron and oak men, the _triplex aes et robur_ chiefs of the Cobbet kind, and the phrase may pa.s.s. But it will only pa.s.s over into a new variety of true manhood. However frequently the last Englishman may die, I hope it will be ever said of him, _Le roi est mort_,--_vive le roi_! I have had talks with Lord Lytton on gypsies. He, too, was once a Romany rye in a small way, and in the gay May heyday of his young manhood once went off with a band of Romanys, and pa.s.sed weeks in their tents,--no bad thing, either, for anybody. I was more than once tempted to tell him the strange fact that, though he had been among the black people and thought he had learned their language, what they had imposed upon him for that was not Romany, but cant, or English thieves' slang. For what is given, in good faith, as the gypsy tongue in "Paul Clifford" and the "Disowned,"

is only the same old mumping _kennick_ which was palmed off on Bampfylde Moore Carew; or which he palmed on his readers, as the secret of the Roms. But what is the use or humanity of disillusioning an author by correcting an error forty years old. If one could have corrected it in the proof, _a la bonne heure_! Besides, it was of no particular consequence to anybody whether the characters in "Paul Clifford" called a clergyman a _patter-cove_ or a _rashai_. It is a supreme moment of triumph for a man when he discovers that his specialty--whatever it be--is not of such value as to be worth troubling anybody with it. As for Everybody, _he_ is fair game.

The boat went up the Thames, and I remember that the river was, that morning, unusually beautiful. It is graceful, as in an outline, even when leaden with November mists, or iron-gray in the drizzle of December, but under the golden sunlight of June it is lovely. It becomes every year, with gay boating parties in semi-fancy dresses, more of a carnival, in which the carnivalers and their carnivalentines a.s.sume a more decided character. It is very strange to see this tendency of the age to unfold itself in new festival forms, when those who believe that there can never be any poetry or picturing in life but in the past are wailing over the vanis.h.i.+ng of May-poles and old English sports. There may be, from time to time, a pause between the acts; the curtain may be down a little longer than usual; but in the long run the world-old play of the Peoples'

Holiday will go on, as it has been going ever since Satan suggested that little apple-stealing excursion to Eve, which, as explained by the Talmudists, was manifestly the direct cause of all the flirtations and other dreadful doings in all little outings down to the present day, in the drawing-room or "on the leads," world without end.

And as the boat went along by Weybridge we pa.s.sed a bank by which was a small gypsy camp; tents and wagons, donkeys and all, reflected in the silent stream, as much as were the swans in the fore-water. And in the camp was a tall, handsome, wild beauty, named Britannia, who knew me well; a damsel fond of larking, with as much genuine devil's gunpowder in her as would have made an entire pack or a Chinese hundred of sixty-four of the small crackers known as fast girls, in or around society. She was a splendid creature, long and lithe and lissom, but well rounded, of a figure suggestive of leaping hedges; and as the sun shone on her white teeth and burning black eyes, there was a hint of biting, too, about her.

She lay coiled and basking, in feline fas.h.i.+on, in the sun; but at sight of me on the boat, up she bounded, and ran along the bank, easily keeping up with the steamer, and crying out to me in Romanes.

Now it just so happened that I by no means felt certain that _all_ of the company present were such genial Bohemians as to appreciate anything like the joyous intimacy which Britannia was manifesting, as she, Atalanta-like, coursed along. Consequently, I was not delighted with her attentions.

"What a fine girl!" said Mr. Roebuck. "How well she would look on the stage! She seems to know you."

"Certainly," said one of the ladies, "or she would not be speaking her language. Why don't you answer her? Let us hear a conversation."

Thus adjured, I answered,--

"_Miri pen_, _miri kushti pen_, _beng lel tute_, _ma rakker sa drovan_!

_Or ma rakker Romaneskas_. _Man dikesa te rania shan akai_. _Miri kameli_--_man kair __mandy ladge_!" (My sister, my nice, sweet sister!--devil take you! don't hallo at me like that! Or else don't talk Romany. Don't you see there are ladies here? My dear, don't put me to shame!)

"_Pen the rani ta wusser mandy a trin-grus.h.i.+_--_who_--_op_, _hallo_!"

(Tell the lady to shy me a s.h.i.+lling--whoop!) cried the fast damsel.

"_Pa miri duvels kam_, _pen_--_o bero se ta duro_. _Mandy'll de tute a pash-korauna keratti if tu tevel ja_. _Gorgie shan i foki kavakoi_!"

(For the Lord's sake, sister!--the boat is too far from sh.o.r.e. I'll give you half a crown this evening if you'll clear out. These be Gentiles, these here.)

"It seems to be a melodious language," said Mr. Roebuck, greatly amused.

"What are you saying?"

"I am telling her to hold her tongue, and go."

"But how on earth does it happen that you speak such a language?"

inquired a lady. "I always thought that the gypsies only talked a kind of English slang, and this sounds like a foreign tongue."

All this time Britannia, like the Cork Leg, never tired, but kept on the chase, neck and neck, till we reached a lock, when, with a merry laugh like a child, she turned on her track and left us.