Chapter 29 - Page 2

me," she said, "and I will tell you everything." He
dropped his eyes listlessly, and had he not asked her a question
from time to time, she would have doubted whether he heard her.

"After all," she said, "a gypsy dress is my birthright, and so the
Thrums people were scarcely wrong in calling me an Egyptian. It is
a pity any one insisted on making me something different. I
believe I could have been a good gypsy."

"Who were your parents?" Gavin asked, without looking up.

"You ask that," she said, "because you have a good mother. It is
not a question that would occur to me. My mother--If she was bad,
may not that be some excuse for me? Ah, but I have no wish to
excuse myself. Have you seen a gypsy cart with a sort of hammock
swung beneath it in which gypsy children are carried about the
country? If there are no children, the pots and pans are stored in
it. Unless the roads are rough it makes a comfortable cradle, and
it was the only one I ever knew. Well, one day I suppose the road
was rough, for I was capsized. I remember picking myself up after
a little and running after the cart, but they did not hear my
cries. I sat down by the roadside and stared after the cart until
I lost sight of it. That was in England, and I was not three years
old."

"But surely," Gavin said, "they came back to look for you?"

"So far as I know," Babbie answered hardly, "they did not come
back. I have never seen them since. I think they were drunk. My
only recollection of my mother is that she once took me to see the
dead body of some gypsy who had been murdered. She told me to dip
my hand in the blood, so that I could say I had done so when I
became a woman. It was meant as a treat to me, and is the one
kindness I am sure I got from her. Curiously enough, I felt the
shame of her deserting me for many years afterwards. As a child I
cried hysterically at thought of it; it pained me when I was at
school in Edinburgh every time I saw the other girls writing home;
I cannot think of it without a shudder even now. It is what makes
me worse than other women."

Her voice had altered, and she was speaking passionately.

"Sometimes," she continued, more gently, "I try to think that my
mother did come back for me, and then went away because she heard
I was in better hands than hers. It was Lord Rintoul who found me,
and I owe everything to him. You will say that he has no need to
be proud of me. He took me home on his horse, and paid his
gardener's wife to rear me. She was Scotch, and that is why I can
speak two languages. It was he, too, who sent me to school in
Edinburgh."