CHAPTER IV.

THE MINUET.

Roland continued to develop during that and the following year, but never went further from home than once to the annual wrestling for Sir Thomas Parkyns's laced hat at Bunny, seven miles beyond Nottingham. This by the bye was his last ride upon poor old Astrology, who took a chill in the inn stable at Bunny and died in two days of inflammation of the lungs. His boyish anticipation of the life of a gamekeeper and the reversion of Jacob's office had latterly dwindled to the thinness of a habit, and had been altogether relinquished after that encounter with Lord Byron which had so restricted his liberty in the forest. Moreover the satisfaction that he had felt in his secluded rusticity began to be troubled not only by that certain distaste but also with a vague unrest. He was visited by dreams of a more brilliant and eventful future; mere dreams it is true, sojourners at the inn of his thoughts, but which tended to recur more and more frequently. His knowledge of the outer world was mainly derived from his mother's conversation and was therefore by no means up to date, though Master Trivett would sometimes bring with him besides his gossip of passing events a few numbers of the Nottingham Weekly Courant, a meagre twopence-half-pennyworth. He missed of course the political sermons by the parson of Kirkby on the first of August, the fifth of November and the King's birthday, as well as the more or less covert counterblasts of the parson of Annesley; and there was no other vehicle of news but the belated and incorrect hearsay of the illiterate farmers and peasantry, and the slow percolation through the country at intervals of several years of a new political song, or a song which might be twisted into political allusions. Yet during the supremacy of the Pelhams the for

est folk took more interest than usual in affairs of state. They would never believe that his honor Mr. Pelham was higher in office than his grace the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Steward, Warden and Keeper of the Forest of Sherwood; but their conclusions as to the general trend of events were not so far out as might be inferred from their grossly inaccurate and incomplete information. It was universally accepted save by a few cranks who affected singularity, that before long with the help of the. French, who instead of our waiting were again our active enemies, James the Second's grandson would make another attempt on the crown. A storm and a fleet scattered did but delay it. In the towns there were furious politicians ready to argue and cudgel one another to the death, but the mass of the people, though hating popery and disliking change, anticipated the coming struggle with a stolid curiosity rather than fear. It needed indeed very long sight to see what they stood to lose by any political change what

soever.

In the fall of the year 1744, when Roland was midway between his eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays, Jacob Caley the keeper died, and the appointment was given to Abel Marrott of Kirkby, the young man with whom he had fought in vindication of his mother's reputation, and for whom he had kept up an unreconciled enmity. But for every stone he put on Marrott put on two, and it was a grievous disappointment to him when at length he found himself compelled to drop all hope of ever overtaking his antagonist's fighting weight. Abel was then a rough-made big-boned six-foot fellow, with a head of bristly black hair and a stubbly beard to match. On the first day of his keepership he met Roland on Cock's Moor and warned him off his walk of the forest. A week later Fortuna's King Charles spaniel

had undertaken more than he was likely to perform.

For two days he remained, advising, catechizing, absolving, informing; now admiring Mistress Surety's garden, now Mistress Press's housewifery. He found as much to commend in Roland's defective knowledge as in his abounding faith. His conversation was encyclopædic; he not only knew where the Young Chevalier was biding, what the Emperor was saying, what Frederick of Prussia meaning, he could give his hostess the newest tattle about Lady Pomfret and her daughters, Lady Mary Montagu and her son, Lady Townshend and her flights; and could satisfy her maid all but completely concerning the latest fashion in sleeves and aprons. Above all Fortuna learnt authoritatively that knotting was the usurping queen's favorite fancy-work, as it was her own; whereupon she gave it up for tent-stitching, gave it up instanter, casting shuttle, needle and many-colored silk into the fire. Moreover the father gave Roland two or three masterly lessons in the use of the broadsword. He slept for two nights in Roland's bed, with many apologies for subjecting him to the discomfort of a shake-down on the parlor floor, then rode away as openly as he had come. He had made Roland a gift of his sword with a neatly turned exhortation to a loyal use of it, and in exchange had Fortuna's, draft for twenty pounds on her Nottingham banker.

The next Royal Oak day was not only celebrated by bell-ringing, the usual thanksgiving service at church and patriotic drunkenness out of it, but by the return to the forest of the Gipsies before mentioned, Basil Lee and his daughter, Ethan Lovett and his mother. Abel Marrott, backed by his dog, roughly ejected them from Thieves' Wood, where they had stayed for a day or two the summer before,

though there were signs that a large party of nomads had camped there quite lately. Ethan angrily demanded the reason for such a difference in their treatment.

"Because there was five an' thirty on 'em, if yo mun know," answered Abel. "Coom, scaddle! or you shall hae Tusher at your legs."

Perforce they obeyed, Basil and Alfa in a dignified silence, Ethan and Zuba cursing volubly. They new-pitched their tents half a mile from the Nook, at the Grives, a dingle deeply excavated in the hill-side towards Kirkby by the waters of a streamlet, the first tributary of the baby Erewash. The upper half of this hollow was but sprinkled with trees; in the lower birch, thorn and hazel were so thick together as to make a wood. Thereabouts from time immemorial had been the common quarrying ground of the villagers for limestone, in sign of which both its sides were partly escarped and the surface of the neighboring land was gashed and pitted and encumbered with many a heap of stony rubbish. Here and there, where the quarrying had been recent, a naked wound in the bank mound of fragments gleamed white, but for the most part the ravages of man had been grassed over, draped in moss or at least so weather-stained that they were at one with the stealthier dilapidations of nature.

or a

Two or three days after the Gipsies had settled there Roland, walking across country towards Pinxton, had his curiosity roused by hearing the squeak of a fiddle. He drew a little aside from his path to the brink of the Grives. Directly under his feet was the rude work of the quarrymen, then a grassy descent to the brook, steep but interrupted here and there by a little platform of level ground. On such a green smooth ledge just below him, near the bottom of the dell, he saw a tent, beside which a man stood and

fiddled. A little higher to the left was a clump of thorn-trees white over with bloom. But at first his attention was entirely given to the music, if "given" is the correct term for what was compulsory. That he might hear the better without being seen he stole softly down the bank, easily screening himself behind the roughness of the ground or the scattered trees and bushes.

The fiddler had his back to him but the very jig of his elbow suggested mastery. There was such an understanding between player and instrument as if both were parts of the same machine or the same living creature; and the wild lilting raptures which the one drew from the other called to the listener's mind what he had heard of witch-music; for it scarcely seemed possible that such sounds could be born of mere wood and catgut. Now they soared into the squeal of passion, now dropped plumb into a deep-voiced plaint which seemed almost to touch the ground, or they hovered in mid-air making a warbling intricacy of the sweetest notes. It was not in the least like cotillon, reel, hornpipe or minuet on his mother's harp; he did not imagine it to be dance music, and yet while his ears listened and his mind was captured and his emotions played upon in a manner that astonished, even troubled him, his very feet seemed to expect the summons. All along he heard but had no leisure to attend to a rhythmic tip-atap in time to the instrumentation.

At length for a few pulsations the music subsided into an ordinary, in comparison a colorless strain, as though to give performer and listener a minute's rest, and the tip-a-tap accompaniment ceased. Then Roland noticed what he had only seen before, that Basil and Zuba sat on the opposite bank of the streamlet, and their eyes were full of the music they had drunk. The woman was dressed pretty much as

before, but the man more meanly, his chief garment being a coarse laborer's smock. But as Roland looked at them the music soared again, as the lark does from the black moist furrow up into the sun-litten blue; and as if the maker had benefited by the short relaxation, it arose with a more extravagant fervor, a more thrilling passion, a wilder zest than ever.

Then however Roland knew that the musician was Ethan. In the midst of his delight he gave his senses a certain liberty of inattention. He perceived that the eyes of the listeners on the bank opposite did not rest on the musician, but as if he were mere accompanist looked away towards the blossomy thorn-tree with an appearance of absorbed interest; and again he heard that faint tip-a-tap in time to the fiddle. Wondering what might be the object of their gaze he went a little further down obliquely to the right, and then saw beyond the hawthorns a girl dancing in the sunshine by the door of a second tent. He took his stand behind a dogwood-tree, whose creamy flowers were still in bud, and seeing her he did not merely see nothing else, properly speaking he did not for the time being hear, smell, perceive, know anything else. The music went through his brain but as an accessory to her footing; nothing more than accompaniment was the beauty and fragrance of the trees, the pipe of an unseen bird, the splendor of the sun itself. It was not the bodily agility that caught his eyes and captured his attention. As the poetry of words ran through the music, so did the music and the poetry alike pervade the motions of the dancer. He knelt down to a gap between the lower branches of the bush, so that he might see the better and be seen the less.

Her dancing floor was a mere ledge some two yards wide let into that rustic bank, but its cloth was a living

green diapered with daisies, and within those narrow limits she expressed all the languor, tenderness and caprice, all the fervor and ecstasy of the music. Tripping, gliding, motionless save for the rhythmic tremor which ran through her body, darting, floating, swimming, even soaring as it seemed, while her feet and gesticulative hands kept perfect agreement and her eyes glanced or gleamed or languished accordantly with the story of the dance, one time she paced it with a reticent charm, a maiden delicacy which feels but is too modest to show, another time with the slow grace and balanced dignity of a high but repressed passion, which feels but is too proud to speak, anon with a languorsome tenderness which has nothing but its own depths to conceal. Finally she gave herself up to such a fury of abandonment that her flickering hands and feet mocked the pursuit of his sight, her skirts floated above her knees, her long black tresses tossed and waved and quivered as if each hair of every braid had a mad life of its own, and through them all her eyes darted glances and fire.

During this last movement she left the trodden round in which she had been dancing and had gradually drawn near to Roland's hiding-place, but with such elaboration of advance, pause and retreat as disguised her approach. Не did not move; he thought it impossible for her to be aware of his presence; besides he could not move. As soon however as the series of artful recurrences had brought her up to the dogwoodtree, through which Roland was still peering though in some trouble, she suddenly ceased from her measured fury, dropped on her knees before the very gap which served him as peephole, and looked him full in the face. The music with one wild discordant wailing note as abruptly stopped. Only then when they were face to face did it come upon Roland, that this corybant

was one with the half-child who had been scornfully rejected by him less than two years ago. She looked to have made more than a two years' growth in beauty, grace, understanding and resolution; and he felt with a halfsweet half-painful thrill that since she had changed so much he too must have changed somewhat. Her eyes were still afire, her hands tremulous, her bosom heaving with the passion of the dance. She held forth her hand, saying:

"Come and dance with me."

"I know no dance as you dance," he said with shamefaced humility. "I can but just walk a minuet."

"Come den."

He thought that Gipsy-like missing of the perfect th an added grace. He had no more words to refuse in, and the hand was still held out. As she rose he rose and suffered himself to be led round the dogwood-tree, down to the tents.

"A minuet, Ethan," said Alfa.

"What do I know of Gaujo tunes?" said Ethan contemptuously, and spat upon the ground.

"You know enough. Strike up."

Ethan evidently was minded to persist in an angry refusal, but the girl's eyes were on him. Perhaps too he hoped that the stiff Englishman face to face with the lithe Gipsy would make a ridiculous contrast. The sitters opposite looked on expectantly. He struck up, but first approached so that he was at least as near to Alfa on the one hand as Roland was on the other. He began far too impetuously.

"Too fast, Ethan," said Alfa, and gave him the time with her hand and foot.

""Tis the pace of a funeral march, not of a dance," said he. "And a funeral march it may turn out for one of us," he added under breath.

Nevertheless he accommodated his time to the dancers', who first bowing