gold of gorse and purple of heather, a shimmering haze of heat quivering above the undulating green of the moor, and somewhere, high up in the cloud-flecked blue above, the exultant, piercingly sweet carol of a lark.
“oh! how utterly perfect this is!” sighed jean.
she was lying at full length on the springy turf, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows denting little cosy hollows of darkness in the close mesh of green moss.
tormarin, equally prone, was beside her, his eyes absorbing, not the open vista of rolling moor, hummocked with jagged tors of brown-grey stone, but the sun as it rioted through a glory of red-brown hair and touched changeful gleams of gold into topaz eyes.
there was a queer little throb in jean’s voice, the low note of almost passionate delight which sheer beauty never failed to draw from her. it plucked at the chords of memory, and tormarin’s thoughts leaped back suddenly to that day they had spent together in the mountains, when, as they emerged from the pinewood’s gloom to the revelation of the great white-pinacled alps, she had turned to him with the rapt cry: “it’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!”
“do you remember——” he began involuntarily, then checked himself.
“’m—m?” she queried. the little interrogative murmur was tantalising in its soft note of intimacy.
the jean of the last few days—the days immediately following their quarrel—had temporarily vanished. the beauty of the moor had taken hold of her, and all the mockery and bitter-sweetness which she had latterly reserved for torin arm’s benefit was absent from her manner. she was just her natural sweet and wholesome self.
“’m—m? do i remember—what?”
“i was thinking what a pagan little beauty-lover you are! you worshipped the alps. how you are worshipping dartmoor.”
she nodded.
“i don’t see why you should call it ‘pagan,’ though. i should say it was equally christian. i think we were meant to love beauty. otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a lot of it about. god didn’t put it around just by accident.”
“quite probably you’re right,” agreed blaise. “in which case you must be”—he smiled—“an excellent christian.”
“positively i believe they’re talking theology!”
claire’s voice, girlishly gay and free from the nervous restraint which normally dulled its cadence of youth, broke suddenly on their ears, as she and nick, rounding the corner of a big granite boulder, discovered the two recumbent forms.
“you disgustingly lazy people!” she pursued indignantly. “everybody’s dashing wildly to and fro unpacking the lunch baskets, while you two are just lounging here in blissful idleness!”
“it’s chronic with me,” murmured tormarin lazily. “and anyway, claire, neither you nor nick appear to be precisely overtaxing yourselves bearing nectar and ambrosia.”
“i carried some of the drinks up this confounded hill,” submitted nick. “and damned heavy they were, too! i can’t think”—plaintively—“why people should be so thirsty at a picnic. i’m sure baines has shoved in enough liquid refreshment to float a ship.”
“praise be!” interpolated blaise piously.
“oh, we’ve done our share,” supplemented claire. “and now we’re going to the gipsy who lives here to have our fortunes told.”
“before lunch,” subjoined nick, “so that in case they’re depressingly bad you can stay us with flagons afterwards.”
jean sat up suddenly, her face alight with interest “do you mean that there is a real gipsy who tells real fortunes?” she demanded.
“yes—quite real. she’s supposed to be extraordinarily good,” replied nick. “she is a lady of property, too, since she has acquired a few square yards of the moor from the duchy and built herself a little shanty there. she rejoices in the name of keturah stanley.”
“i should like to have my fortune told,” murmured jean meditatively.
“i’ll take you,” volunteered blaise.
there was a suddenly alert look in his face, as though he, too, would like to hear jean’s fortune told.
“we’ll all go, then,” said claire. “you must let keturah tell yours as well, blaise.”
he shook his head.
“thanks, no,” he answered briefly. “i know my fortune quite as well as i have any wish to.”
tormarin’s curt refusal somewhat quenched the gaiety of the moment, and rather soberly they all four made their way down the slope to where, in a little sheltered hollow at the foot of the tor, the sunlight glinted on the corrugated iron roofing of a tiny two-roomed hut, built of wood.
outside, sitting on an inverted pail and composedly puffing away at a clay pipe, they discovered a small, shrivelled old woman, sunning herself, like a cat, in the midday warmth.
she lifted her head as they approached, revealing an immensely old, delicately-featured face, which might have been carved out of yellow ivory. it was a network of wrinkles, colourless save for the piercing black eyes that sparkled beneath arched black brows, while the fine-cut nostrils and beautifully moulded mouth spoke unmistakably of race—of the old untainted blood which in some gipsy families has run clear, unmixed and undiluted, through countless generations.
there was an odd dignity about the shrunken, still upright figure as she rose from her seat—the freedom of one whose neck has never bowed to the yoke of established custom, whose kingdom is the sun and sea and earth and air as god gave them to adam—and when the visitors had explained their errand, and she proceeded to answer them in the soft, slurred accents of the devon dialect, the illiterate speech seemed to convey a strange sense of unfitness.
claire and nick were the first to dare the oracle. the old woman beckoned to them to follow her into the cottage, while tormarin and jean waited outside, and when they emerged once more, both were laughing, their faces eager and half excited like the faces of children promised some indefinite treat.
“she’s given you luck, then?” asked jean, smiling in sympathy.
the gipsy interposed quickly.
“tezn’t for me to give nor take away the luck. but i knaw that, back o’ they gert black clouds the young lady’s so mortal feared of, the zun’s shinin’ butivul. i tell ’ee, me dear”—nodding encouragingly to claire, while her keen old eyes narrowed to mere pin-points of light—“you’ll zee it, yourself—and afore another year’s crep’ by. ’ess, fay! you’ll knaw then as i tolled ’ee trew.”
then, with a gesture that summoned jean to follow her, she disappeared once more into the interior of the hut.
jean hesitated nervously in the doorway. for a moment she was conscious of an acute feeling of distaste for the impending interview—a dread of what this woman, whose eyes seemed the only live thing in her old, old face, might have to tell her.
“come with me,” she appealed to blaise. and he nodded and followed her across the threshold.
the scent of a peat fire came warm and fragrant to her nostrils as she stepped out of the sunlight into the comparative dusk of the little shanty, mingling curiously with an aroma of savoury stew which issued from a black pot hung above the fire, bubbling and chuckling as it simmered.
the gipsy, as though by force of habit, gave a stir to its contents and then, settling herself on a three-legged stool, she took dean’s hand in her wrinkled, daw-like fingers and peered at its palm in silence.
“your way baint so plain tu zee as t’other young lady’s,” she muttered at last, in an odd, sing-song tone. “there’s life an’ death an’ fire an’ flame afore yu zee the sun shinin’ clear.... and if so be yu take the wrong turnin’, you’ll niver zee it. and there’ll be no postes to guide ’ee. tez your awn sawl must tell ’ee how to walk through the darkness. for there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
she paused, and the liquid in the black pot over the fire seethed up suddenly and filled the silence with its chuckling and gurgling, so that to jean it seemed like the sound of some hidden malevolence chortling defiance at her.
the old woman clutched her hand a little tighter, turning the palm so that the light from the tiny window fell more directly upon it.
“there’s a castle waitin’ for ’ee, me dear,” she resumed in the same sing-song voice as before. “i can zee it so plain as plain. but yu won’t never live there wi’ the one yu luve, though you’m hopin’ tu. i see ruin and devastation all around it, and the sky so red as blid above it.”
she released jean’s hand slowly, and her curiously bright eyes fastened upon tormarin.
“shall i tell the gentleman’s hand?” she asked, stretching out her withered claw to take it.
but he drew it away hurriedly.
“no, no,” he said, attempting to speak lightly. “this lady’s fortune isn’t sufficiently encouraging for me to venture.”
the gipsy’s eyes never left his face. she nodded slowly.
“that’s as may be. for tez the zaim luck and zaim ill-lack will come to yu as comes to thikke maid. there’s no ring given or taken, but you’m bound together so fast and firm as weddin’-ring could bind ’ee.”
jean felt her face flame scarlet in the dusk of the tiny room, and she turned and made her way hastily out into the sunshine once more, thankful for the eager queries of nick and claire, which served to bring back to normal the rather strained atmosphere induced by the gipsy’s final comment.
as they climbed the side of the tor once more, jean relapsed into silence. more than once, more than twice, since she had come to england, she had been vaguely conscious of some hidden menace to her happiness, and now the gipsy had suddenly given words to’ her own indefinite premonition of evil.
“for there’s darkness comin’... black darkness.”
it was a relief to join the rest of the picnic party, who were clamouring loudly for their lunch, good-humouredly indignant with the wanderers for keeping them waiting.
“another five minutes,” announced burke, “and we should have begun without you. not even lady anne could have kept us under restraint a moment longer.”
the party was quite a large one, augmented by a good many friends from round about the neighbourhood, and amid the riotous fun and ridiculous mishaps which almost invariably accompany an alfresco meal, jean contrived to throw off the feeling of oppression generated by keturah’s prophecy.
burke, having heaped her plate with lobster mayonnaise, established himself beside her, and proceeded to catechise her about her recent experience.
“did the lady—what’s her name, keturah?—tell you when you were going to marry me?” he demanded in an undertone, his dare-devil eyes laughing down at her impudently.
“no, she did not. she only foresees things that are really going to happen,” retorted jean.
“well, that is”—composedly. “she can’t be much good at her job if she missed seeing it.”
“well,” jean affected to consider—“the nearest she got to it was that she saw ‘darkness coming... black darkness.’”
under cover of the general preoccupation in lunch and conversation, burke’s hand closed suddenly over hers.
“you little devil!” he said, half amused, half sulky. “i’ll make you pay for that.”
but out here, in the wind-swept, open spaces of the moor, jean felt no fear of him.
“first catch your hare——” she retaliated defiantly.
he regarded her tensely for a moment.
“i’ll take your advice,” he said briefly. then he added: “did you know that i’m driving you back in my cart this afternoon?”
various cars and traps and saddle horses had brought the party together at the appointed rendezvous—a little village on the outskirts of the moor, and jean had driven up with blaise in one of the staple cars. she looked at burke now, in astonishment.
“you certainly are not,” she replied quickly. “i shall go back as i came—in the car.”
“quite impossible. it’s broken down. they rashly brought on the lunch hampers in it, across that god-forsaken bit of moor road—with disastrous consequences to the car’s internals. so that you and tormarin have got to be sorted into other conveyances. and i’ve undertaken to get you home.”
jean’s face fell a little. throughout the drive up to the moor blaise had seemed less remote and more like his old self than at any time since their quarrel, and she could guess that this arrangement of burke’s was hardly likely to conduce towards the continuance of the new peace.
“how will blaise get home?” she asked.
“they can squeeze him into her car, judy says. it’ll be a tight fit, but he can cling on by his eyelashes somehow.”
“i think it would be a better arrangement if you drove blaise and i went back in the car with your sister,” suggested jean.
“there’s certainly not room for two extra in the car. there isn’t really room for one.”
“there wouldn’t be two. you would drive blaise.”
“pardon me. i should do nothing of the sort.”
“do you mean”—incredulously—“that you would refuse?”
“oh, i should invent an armour-plated reason. a broken spring in the dog-cart or something. but i do mean that if i don’t drive you, i drive no one.”
jean looked at him vexedly.
“well,” she said uncertainly, “we can’t have a fuss at a picnic.”
“no,” agreed burke. “so i’m afraid you’ll have to give in.”
jean rather thought so, too. there didn’t seem any way out of it. she knew that burke was perfectly capable, under cover of some supposed mishap to his trap, of throwing the whole party into confusion and difficulty, rather than relinquish his intention.
“oh, very well,” she yielded at last, resignedly. “have your own way, you obstinate man.”
“i intend to,” he replied coolly. “how—-and always.”
