The Romany Rye | Page 5

shall stop here till the hawk's flew away."
They turned round, and there stood a magnificent gypsy woman, carrying, gypsy fashion, a weakly child that, in spite of its sallow and wasted cheek, proclaimed itself to be hers. By her side stood a young gypsy girl of about seventeen years of age. She was beautiful--quite remarkably so--but her beauty was not of the typical Romany kind. It was, perhaps, more like the beauty of a Capri girl.
She was bareheaded--there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her head--her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a gypsy girl's hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the back of her neck and upon her shoulders. In the tumbled tresses glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels. They were small dead dragon-flies of the crimson kind called "sylphs."
To Borrow and his friend these gypsies were well known. The woman with the child was one of the Boswells: I dare not say what was her connection, if any, with "Boswell the Great"--I mean Sylvester Boswell, the grammarian and "well-known and popalated gipsy of Codling Gap," who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others "on the accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature's life." But this I do remember--that it was the very same Perpinia Boswell whose remarkable Christian name has lately been made the subject of inquiry in The Guardian. The other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, I prefer to leave nameless here.
After greeting the two, Borrow looked at the weakling child with the deepest interest, and said, "This chavo ought not to look like that--with such a mother as you, Perpinia."
"And with such a daddy, too," said she. "Mike's stronger for a man nor even I am for a woman"--a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; "and as to good looks, it's him as is got the good looks, not me. But none on us can't make it out about the chavo. He's so weak and sick he don't look as if he belonged to Boswells' breed at all."
"How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?" said Borrow's friend, looking at the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia's finely cut lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.
"Can't say," said she, laughing.
"About as many as she can afford to buy," interrupted her companion--"that's all. Mike don't like her a-smokin'. He says it makes her look like a old Londra Irish woman in Common Garding Market."
"You must not smoke another pipe," said Borrow's friend to the mother--"not another pipe till the child leaves the breast."
"What?" said Perpinia defiantly. "As if I could live without my pipe!"
"Fancy Pep a-livin' without her baccy," laughed the girl of the dragon- flies.
"Your child can't live with it," said Borrow's friend to Perpinia. "That pipe of yours is full of a poison called nicotine."
"Nick what?" said the girl, laughing. "That's a new kind o' Nick. Why, you smoke yourself!"
"Nicotine," said Borrow's friend; "and the first part of Pep's body that the poison gets into is her breast, and--"
"Gets into my burk?" said Perpinia; "get along wi' ye."
"Yes."
"Do it pison Pep's milk?" said the girl.
"Yes."
"That ain't true," said Perpinia; "can't be true."
"It is true," said Borrow's friend. "If you don't give up that pipe for a time the child will die, or else be a rickety thing all his life. If you do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a Romany chal as Mike himself."
"Chavo agin pipe, Pep," said the girl.
"Lend me your pipe, Perpinia," said Borrow, in that hail-fellow-well-met tone of his which he reserved for the Romanies--a tone which no Romany could ever resist. And he took it gently from the woman's lips. "Don't smoke any more till I come to the camp and see the chavo again."
The woman looked very angry at first.
"He be's a good friend to the Romanies," said the girl in an appeasing tone.
"That's true," said the woman, "but he's no business to take my pipe out o' my mouth for all that."
She soon began to smile again, however, and let Borrow retain the pipe. Borrow and his friend then moved away towards the dusty high-road leading to the camp, and were joined by the young girl. Perpinia remained, keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking child.
It was determined now that the young girl was the very person to be used as the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold's poem, for she was exceptionally intelligent. So instead of going to the camp the oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse, and heather towards