There was little need for the swart gipsies to explain, as they stood knee-deep in the snow round the bailiff of the Abbey Farm, what it was that had sent them. The unbroken whiteness of the uplands told that, and, even as they spoke, there came up the hill the dark figures of the farm men with shovels, on their way to dig out the sheep. In the summer, the bailiff would have been the first to call the gipsies vagabonds and roost-robbers; now ... they had women with them too.
"The hares and foxes were down four days ago, and the liquid-manure pumps like a snow man," the bailiff said.... "Yes, you can lie in the laithes and welcome--if you can find 'em. Maybe you'll help us find our sheep too--"
The gipsies had done so. Coming back again, they had had some ado to discover the spot where their three caravans made a hummock of white against a broken wall.
The women--they had four women with them--began that afternoon to weave the mats and baskets they hawked from door to door; and in the forenoon of the following day one of them, the black-haired, soft-voiced quean whom the bailiff had heard called Annabel, set her babe in the sling on her back, tucked a bundle of long cane-loops under her oxter, and trudged down between eight-foot walls of snow to the Abbey Farm. She stood in the latticed porch, dark and handsome against the whiteness, and then, advancing, put her head into the great hall-kitchen.
"Has the lady any chairs for the gipsy woman to mend?" she asked in a soft and insinuating voice....
They brought her the old chairs; she seated herself on a box in the porch; and there she wove the strips of cane in and out, securing each one with a little wooden peg and a tap of her hammer. The child remained in the sling at her back, taking the breast from time to time over her shoulder; and the silver wedding ring could be seen as she whipped the cane, back and forth.
As she worked, she cast curious glances into the old hall-kitchen. The snow outside cast a pallid, upward light on the heavy ceiling-beams; this was reflected in the polished stone floor; and the children, who at first had shyly stopped their play, seeing the strange woman in the porch--the nearest thing they had seen to gipsies before had been the old itinerant glazier with his frame of glass on his back--resumed it, but still eyed her from time to time. In the ancient walnut chair by the hearth sat the old, old lady who had told them to bring the chairs. Her hair, almost as white as the snow itself, was piled up on her head à la Marquise; she was knitting; but now and then she allowed the needle in the little wooden sheath at her waist to lie idle, closed her eyes, and rocked softly in the old walnut chair.
"Ask the woman who is mending the chairs whether she is warm enough there," the old lady said to one of the children; and the child went to the porch with the message.
"Thank you, little missie--thank you, lady dear--Annabel is quite warm," said the soft voice; and the child returned to the play.
It was a childish game of funerals at which the children played. The hand of Death, hovering over the dolls, had singled out Flora, the articulations of whose sawdust body were seams and whose boots were painted on her calves of fibrous plaster. For the greater solemnity, the children had made themselves sweeping trains of the garments of their elders, and those with cropped curls had draped their heads with shawls, the fringes of which they had combed out with their fingers to simulate hair--long hair, such as Sabrina, the eldest, had hanging so low down her back that she could almost sit on it. A cylindrical-bodied horse, convertible (when his flat head came out of its socket) into a locomotive, headed the sad cortège; then came the defunct Flora; then came Jack, the raffish sailor doll, with other dolls; and the children followed with hushed whisperings.
The youngest of the children passed the high-backed walnut chair in which the old lady sat. She stopped.
"Aunt Rachel--" she whispered, slowly and gravely opening very wide and closing very tight her eyes.
"Yes, dear?"
"Flora's dead!"
The old lady, when she smiled, did so less with her lips than with her faded cheeks. So sweet was her face that you could not help wondering, when you looked on it, how many men had also looked upon it and loved it. Somehow, you never wondered how many of them had been loved in return.
"I'm so sorry, dear," Aunt Rachel, who in reality was a great-aunt, said. "What did she die of this time?"
"She died of ... Brown Titus ... 'n now she's going to be buried in a grave as little as her bed."
"In a what, dear?"
"As little ... dread ... as little as my bed ... you say it, Sabrina."
"She means, Aunt Rachel,
"_Teach me to live that I may dread
The Grave as little as my bed,_"
Sabrina, the eldest, interpreted.
"Ah!... But won't you play at cheerful things, dears?"
"Yes, we will, presently, Aunt Rachel; gee up, horse!... Shall we go and ask the chair-woman if she's warm enough?"
"Do, dears."
Again the message was taken, and this time it seemed as if Annabel, the gipsy, was not warm enough, for she gathered up her loops of cane and brought the chair she was mending a little way into the hall-kitchen itself. She sat down on the square box they used to cover the sewing machine.
"Thank you, lady dear," she murmured, lifting her handsome almond eyes to Aunt Rachel. Aunt Rachel did not see the long, furtive, curious glance. Her own eyes were closed, as if she was tired; her cheeks were smiling; one of them had dropped a little to one shoulder, as it might have dropped had she held in her arms a babe; and she was rocking, softly, slowly, the rocker of the chair making a little regular noise on the polished floor.
The gipsy woman beckoned to one of the children.
"Tell the lady, when she wakes, that I will tack a strip of felt to the rocker, and then it will make no noise at all," said the low and wheedling voice; and the child retired again.
The interment of Flora proceeded....
An hour later Flora had taken up the burden of Life again. It was as Angela, the youngest, was chastising her for some offence, that Sabrina, the eldest, looked with wondering eyes on the babe in the gipsy's sling. She approached on tiptoe.
"May I look at it, please?" she asked timidly.
The gipsy set one shoulder forward, and Sabrina put the shawl gently aside, peering at the dusky brown morsel within.
"Sometime, perhaps--if I'm very careful--"
Sabrina ventured diffidently, "--if I'm very careful--may I hold it?"
Before replying, the gipsy once more turned her almond eyes towards Aunt Rachel's chair. Aunt Rachel had been awakened for the conclusion of Flora's funeral, but her eyes were closed again now, and once more her cheek was dropped in that tender suggestive little gesture, and she rocked. But you could see that she was not properly asleep.... It was, somehow, less to Sabrina, still peering at the babe in the sling, than to Aunt Rachel, apparently asleep, that the gipsy seemed to reply.
"You'll know some day, little missis, that a wean knows its own pair of arms," her seductive voice came.
And Aunt Rachel heard. She opened her eyes with a start. The little regular noise of the rocker ceased. She turned her head quickly; tremulously she began to knit again; and, as her eyes rested on the sidelong eyes of the gipsy woman, there was an expression in them that almost resembled fright.
