The World for Sale Part 42

With a great effort he drove apprehension and the instant's confused wonder far away, and when, come close to him, she smiled, showing the perfect white teeth, and her eyes softened to a dreamy regard of him, all he had ever felt for her in the past months seemed concentrated into this one moment. Yet he did not look like a languishing lover; rather like one inflamed with a great idea or stirred to a great resolve.

For quite a minute they stood gazing as though they would read the whole truth in each other's eyes. She was all eager, yet timorous; he was resolved; yet now, when the great moment had come, as it were, like a stammerer fearing the sound of his own voice. There was so much to say that he could not speak.

She broke the spell. "I am here. Can't you see me?" she asked in a quizzical, playful tone, her lips trembling a little, but with a smile in her eyes which she vainly tried to veil.

She had said the one thing which above all others could have lifted the situation to its real significance. A few weeks ago the eyes now looking into hers and telling a great story were sealed with night, and the mind behind was fretted by the thought of a perpetual darkness. All the tragedy of the past rushed into his mind now, and gave all that was between them, or was to be between them, its real meaning. A beautiful woman is dear to man simply as woman, and not as the woman; virtue has slain its thousands, but physical charm has slain its tens of thousands!

Whatever Ingolby's defects, however, infinitely more than the girl's beauty, more than the palpitating life in her, than red lips and bright eye, than warm breast and clasping hand, was something beneath all which would last, or should last, when the hand was palsied and the eye was dim.

"I am here. Can't you see me?"

All that he had regained in life in her little upper room rushed upon him, and with outstretched arms and in a voice choked with feeling, he said:

"See you! Dear G.o.d--To see you and all the world once more! It is being born again to me. I haven't learned to talk in my new world yet; but I know three words of the language. I love you. Come--I'll be good to you."

She drew back from him, and her look said that she would read him to the uttermost word in his life's book, would see the heart of this wonderful thing; and then with a hungry cry, she flung her arms around his neck and pressed her wet eyes against his flushed cheek.

A half-hour later, as they wandered back to the house he suddenly stopped, put his hands on her shoulders, looked earnestly in her eyes, and said:

"G.o.d's good to me. I hope I'll remember that."

"You won't be so blind as to forget," she answered, and she wound her fingers in his with a feeling which was more than the simple love of woman for man. "I've got much more to remember than you have,"

she added. Suddenly she put both hands upon his breast. "You don't understand; you can't understand, but I tell you that I shall have to fight hard if I am to be all you want me to be. I have got a past to forget; you have a past you want to remember--that's the difference. I must tell you the truth: it's in my veins, that old life, in spite of all. Listen. I ought to have told you, and I meant to tell you before this happened, but when I saw you there, and you held out your arms to me, I forgot everything. Yet still I must tell you now, though perhaps you will hate me when you know. The old life--I hate it, but it calls me, and I have an impulse to go back to it even though I hate it.

Listen. I'll tell you what happened the other day. It's terrible, but it's true. I was walking in the woods--"

Thereupon she told him of her being seized and carried to the Gipsy camp, and of all that happened there to the last detail. She even had the courage to tell of all she felt there; but when she had finished, with a half-frightened look in her eyes, her face pale, and her hands clasped before her, he did not speak for a minute. Suddenly, however, he seemed to tower over her, his two big hands were raised as though they would strike, and then the palms spread out and enclosed her cheeks lovingly, and his eyes fastened upon hers.

"I know," he said gently. "I always understood--everything; but you'll never have the same fight again, because I'll be with you. You understand, Fleda--I'll be with you."

With an exclamation of grat.i.tude she nestled into his arms.

Before the thrill of his embrace had pa.s.sed from their pulses, they heard the breaking of twigs under a quick footstep, and Rhodo stood before them. "Come," he said to Fleda. His voice was as solemn and strange as his manner. "Come!" he repeated peremptorily.

Fleda sprang to his side. "Is it my father? What has happened?" she cried.

The old man waved her aside, and pointed toward the house.

CHAPTER XXVI. THE SLEEPER

The Ry of Rys sat in his huge armchair, his broad-brimmed hat on his knee in front of him. One hand rested on the chair-arm, the other clasped the hat as though he would put it on, but his head was fallen forward on his breast.

It was a picture of profound repose, but it was the repose of death.

It was evident that the Ry had prepared to leave the house, had felt a sudden weakness, and had taken to his chair to recover himself. As was evident from the normal way in which his fingers held his hat, and his hand rested on the chair-arm, death had come as gently as a beam of light. With his stick lying on the table beside him, and his hat on his knee, he was like one who rested a moment before renewing a journey.

There could not have been a pang in his pa.s.sing. He had gone as most men wish to go--in the midst of the business of life, doing the usual things, and so pa.s.sing into the sphere of Eternity as one would go from this room to that. Only a few days before had he yielded up his temporary position as chief constable, and had spent almost every hour since in conference with Rhodo. What he had planned would never be known to his daughter now. It was Rhodo himself who had found his master with head bowed before the Master of all men.

Before Fleda entered the room she knew what awaited her; a merciful intuition had blunted the shock to her senses. Yet when she saw the Ry on his throne of death a moan broke from her lips like that of one who sees for the last time someone indelibly dear, and turns to face strange paths with uncertain feet. She did not go to the giant figure seated in the chair. In what she did there was no panic or hysteria of lacerated heart and shocked sense; she only sank to her knees in the room a few feet away from him, and looked at him.

"Father! Oh, Ry! Oh, my Ry!" she whispered in agony and admiration, too, and kept on whispering.

Fleda had whispered to him in such awe, not only because he was her father, but because he was so much a man among men, a giant, with a great, lumbering mind, slow to conceive, but moving in a large, impressive way when once conception came. To her he had been more than father; he had been a patriarch, a leader, a viking, capable of the fury of a Scythian lord, but with the tenderness of a peasant father to his first child.

"My Ry! My father! Oh, my Ry of Rys!" she kept murmuring to herself.

On either side of her, but a few feet behind, stood Rhodo and Ingolby.

Presently in a low, firm voice Rhodo spoke.

"The Ry of Rys is dead, but his daughter must stand upon her feet, and in his place speak for him. Is it not well with him? He sleeps. Sleep is better than pain. Let his daughter speak."

Slowly Fleda arose. Not so much what Rhodo had said as the meaning in his voice, aroused her to a situation which she must face. Rhodo had said that she must speak for her father. What did it mean?

"What is it you wish to say to me, Rhodo?" she asked.

"What I have to say is for your ears only," was the low reply.

"I will go," said Ingolby. "But is it a time for talk?" He made a motion towards the dead man. "There are things to be said which can only be said now, and things to be done which can only be done according to what is said now," grimly remarked Rhodo.

"I wish you to remain," said Fleda to Ingolby with resolution in her bearing as she placed herself beside the chair where the dead man sat.

"What is it you want to say to me?" she asked Rhodo again.

"Must a Romany bare his soul before a stranger?" replied Rhodo. "Must a man who has been the voice of the Ry of Rys for the long years have no words face to face with the Ry's daughter now that he is gone? Must the secret of the dead be spoken before the robber of the dead--"

It was plain that some great pa.s.sion was working in the man, that it was wise and right to humour him, and Ingolby intervened.

"I will not remain," he said to Fleda. To Rhodo he added: "I am not a robber of the dead. That's high-faluting talk. What I have of his was given to me by him. She was for me if I could win her. He said so. This is a free country. I will wait outside," he added to Fleda.

She made a gesture as though she would detain him, but she realized that the hour of her fate was at hand, and that the old life and the new were face to face, Rhodo standing for one and she for the other. When they were alone, Rhodo's eyes softened, and he came near to her. "You asked me what I wished to tell you," he said. "See then, I want to tell you that it is for you to take the place of the dead Ry. Everywhere in the world where the Romanys wander they will rejoice to hear that a Druse rules us still. The word of the Ry of Rys was law; what he wished to be done was done; what he wished to be undone was undone. Because of you he hid himself from his people; because of you I was for ever wandering, keeping the peace by lies for love of the Ry and for love of you."

His voice shook. "Since your mother died--and she was kin of mine--you were to me the soul of the Romany people everywhere. As a barren woman loves a child, so I loved you. I loved you for the sake of your mother.

I gave her to the Ry, who was the better man, that she might be great and well placed. So it is I would have you be ruler over us, and I would serve you as I served your father until I, also, fall asleep."

"It is too late," Fleda answered, and there was great emotion in her voice now. "I am no longer a Romany. I am my father's daughter, but I have not been a Romany since I was ill in England. I will not go back; I shall go with the man I love, to be his wife, here, in the Gorgio world.

You believed my father when he spoke; well, believe me--I speak the truth. It was my father's will that I should be what I am, and do what I am now doing. Nothing can alter me."

"If it be that Jethro Fawe is still alive he is free from the Sentence of the Patrin, and he will become the Ry of Rys," said the old man with sudden pa.s.sion.

"It may be so. I hope it is so. He is of the blood, and I pray that Jethro has escaped the sentence which my father pa.s.sed," answered Fleda.

"By the River Starzke it was ordained that he should succeed my father, marrying me. Let him succeed."

The old man raised both hands, and made a gesture as though he would drive her from his sight.

"My life has been wasted," he said. "I wish I were also in death beside him." He gazed at the dead man with the affection of a clansman for his chief.

Fleda came up close to him. "Rhodo! Rhodo!" she said gently and sadly.

"Think of him and all he was, and not of me. Suppose I had died in England--think of it in that way. Let me be dead to you and to all Romanys, and then you will think no evil."

The old man drew himself up. "Let no more be said," he replied. "Let it end here. The Ry of Rys is dead. His body and all things that are his belong now to his people. Say farewell to him," he added, with authority.