Chapter 21

Upon the Moor

Throughout the festivities which followed each other, day by day, my
Lady Dunstanwolde was queen of every revel. 'Twas she who led the
adventurous party who visited the gipsy encampment in the glen by
moonlight, and so won the heart of the old gipsy queen that she took
her to her tent and instructed her in the mysteries of spells and
potions. She walked among them as though she had been bred and born one
of their tribe, and came forth from one tent carrying in her arms a
brown infant, and showed it to the company, laughing like a girl and
making pretty sounds at the child when it stared at her with great
black eyes like her own, and shook at it all her rings, which she
stripped from her fingers, holding them in the closed palm of her hand
to make a rattle of. She stirred the stew hanging to cook over the
camp-fire, and begged a plate of it for each of the company, and ate
her own with such gay appetite as recalled to Osmonde the day he had
watched her on the moor; and the gipsy women stood by showing their
white teeth in their pleasure, and the gipsy men hung about with black
shining eyes fixed on her in stealthy admiration. She stood by the fire
in the light of the flame, having fantastically wound a scarlet scarf
about her head, and 'twas as though she might have been a gipsy queen
herself.

"And indeed," she said, as they rode home, "I have often enough thought
I should like to be one of them; and when I was a child, and was in a
passion, more than once planned to stain my face and run away to the
nearest camp I could come upon. Indeed, I think I was always a rebel
and loved wild, lawless ways."

When she said it my lord Duke, who was riding near, looked straight
before him, with face which had belied his laugh, had any seen it. He
was thinking that he could well imagine what a life a man might lead
with her, wandering about the thick green woods and white roads and
purple moors, tramping, side by side, in the sweet wind and bright
sunshine, and even the soft falling rain, each owner of a splendid body
which defied the weather and laughed at fatigue. To carry their simple
meal with them and stop to eat it joyously together under a hedge, to
lie under the shade of a broad branched tree to rest when the sun was
hot and hear the skylarks singing in the blue sky, and then at
night-time to sit at the door of a tent and watch the stars and tell
each other fanciful stories of them, while the red camp-fire danced
and glowed in the dark. Of no other woman could he have had such a wild
fancy--the others were too frail and delicate to be a man's comrades
out of doors; but she, who stood so straight and strong, who moved like
a young deer, who could swing along