FullReads

“What is the matter with her?” asked Mrs. Hedgehog.

“I was curious to know myself,” said I, “and from what I have overheard, I think I can inform you. She is the tinker’s mother, and judging from what he said the other night, was not by any means indulgent to him when he was a child. She is harsh enough to his young brats now; but it appears that she was devoted to an older son, one of the children of his first wife; and that it is for the loss of this grandchild that she vexes herself.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, my dear, but–“

“Has he been flitted?”

“Something of the kind, I fear. He has been taken to prison.”

“Dear, dear!” said Mrs. Hedgehog; “what a trial to a mother’s feelings! Will they bake him?”

“I think not,” said I. “I fancy that he is tethered up as a punishment for taking what did not belong to him; and the grandmother’s grievance seems to be that she believes he was unjustly convicted. She thinks the real robber was a gipsy. Just as if I were taken, and my skin nailed to the keeper’s door for pheasant’s eggs which I had never had the pleasure of eating.”

Mrs. Hedgehog was now dying of curiosity. She said she thought the children’s spines were strong enough for anything that was likely to happen to them; and so the next fresh damp evening we sent the seven urchins down to the burdocks to pick snails, and crept cautiously towards the tinker’s encampment to see what we could see. And there, by the smouldering embers of a bonfire, sat the old woman moaning, as I had described her, with her elbows on her knees, rocking and nursing her head, from which her long hair was looped and fell, like grey rags, about her withered fingers.

“I don’t like her looks,” snorted Mrs. Hedgehog. “And how disgustingly they have trampled the grass.”

“It is quite true,” said I; “it will not recover itself this summer. I wish they had left us our wood to ourselves.”

At this moment Mrs. Hedgehog laid her five toes on mine, to attract my attention, and whispered–“Is it a gipsy?” and lifting my nose in the direction of the rustling brushwood, I saw Sybil. There was no mistaking her, though her cheeks looked hollower and her eyes larger than when I saw her last.

“Good-evening, mother,” she said.

The old woman raised her gaunt face with a start, and cried fiercely, “Begone with you! Begone!” and then bent it again upon her hands, muttering, “There are plenty of hedges and ditches too good for your lot, without their coming to worrit us in our wood.”

The gipsy girl knelt quietly by the fire, and stirred up the embers.

“What is the matter, mother?” she said. “We’ve only just come, and when I heard that Tinker George and his mother were in the wood, I started to find you. ‘You makes too free with the tinkers,’ says my brother’s wife. ‘I goes to see my mother,’ says I, ‘who nursed me through a sickness, my real mother being dead, and my own people wanting to bury me through my not being able to speak or move, and their wanting to get to the Bartelmy Fair.’ I never forget, mother; have you forgotten me, that you drives me away for bidding you good-day?”

“Good days are over for me,” moaned the old woman. “Begone, I say! Don’t let me see or hear any that belongs to Black Basil, or it may be the worse for them.”

(“The tinker-mother whines very nastily,” said Mrs. Hedgehog. “If I were the young woman, I should bite her.”

“Hush!” I answered, “she is speaking.”)

“Basil is in prison,” said the gipsy girl hoarsely.

The old woman’s eyes shone in their sockets, as she looked up at Sybil for a minute, as if to read the gipsy’s sentence on her face; and then she chuckled,

“So they’ve taken the Terror of the Roads?”