One night, at the close of a black day in midwinter, the sharpest and hardest in cold that they had ever encountered, they passed through a little town whose roadways were mostly canals, and whose spires and roofs and pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with the poetry and the majesty of a long-perished age.
The day had been bitter; there was snow everywhere; great blocks of ice choked up the water; the belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarefied air; the few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheepskin; through the casements there glowed the ruddy flush of burning logs; and the muffled watchmen passing to and fro in antique custom on their rounds called out, under the closed houses, that it was eight of the night in a heavy snowstorm.
Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give the child a hot drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. There he asked the way to the wood and the mill of Yprès.
They told it him sullenly and suspiciously: since for a wild gypsy of Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people of the north had no liking.
He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the barriers of the little town along a road by the river towards the country.
"Art thou cold, dear?" he asked her, with more tenderness than common in his voice.
The child shivered under her little fur-skin, which would not keep out the searching of the hurricane and the driving of the snowflakes; but she drew her breath quickly, and answered him, "No."
They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the gloomy night; a dead crow swung in their faces on a swaying pear-tree; the roar of the mill-stream loudly filled what otherwise would have been an intense silence.
He made his way in by a little wicket, through an orchard and through a garden, and so to the front of the mill-house. The shutters were not closed; through the driving of the snow he could see within. It looked to hima houseless wanderer from his youth upstrangely warm and safe and still.
An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth; an old woman, who span, on the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of the chimney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the shelves; from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and carved wood.
He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell that the wooden god was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal selfishness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other souls in eternal damnation.
He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth and comfort; and what the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.
"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old people, and prosperous, and alone by their fireside."
It seemed that they must be so.
Anyway, there was no other means to save her from Taric.
His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and to the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the hearth seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who was not altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a woman-child,and, above all, for a woman-child who had such a sire as Taric.
To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them, wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way to secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to place her with her mother's people.
She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.
He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the Liebana.
"Thou wilt go in there to the old man yonder, and sleep by that pleasant fire to-night," he murmured to her. "And thou wilt be good and gentle, and even as thou art to me always; and to-morrow at noontide I will come and see how it fares with thee."
Her small hands tightened upon his.
"I will not go without thee," she muttered in the broken tongue of the gypsy children.
There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from the night and the storm there, she saw; but these were naught to her without Phratos. She struggled against her fate as the young bird struggles against being thrust into the cage,not knowing what captivity means, and yet afraid of it and rebelling by instinct.
He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to him, and for the first time kissed her. For Phratos, though tender to her, had no woman's foolishness, but had taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for neither caresses nor compassionknowing well that to the love-child of Taric in her future years the first could only mean shame, and the last could only mean alms, which would be shame likewise.
"Go, dear," he said softly to her; and then he struck with his staff on the wooden door, and, lifting its latch, unclosed it; and thrust the child forward, ere she could resist, into the darkness of the low entrance-place.
Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the orchard and wood into the gloom and the storm of the night.
He knew that to show himself to a northern householder were to do her evil and hurt; for between the wanderer of the Spanish forests and the peasant of the Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust, and disdain.
"I will see how it is with her to-morrow," he said to himself as he faced again the wind and the sleet. "If it be well with herlet it be well. If not, she must come forth with me, and we must seek some lair where her wolf-sire shall not prowl and discover her. But it will be hard to find; for the vengeance of Taric is swift of foot and has a far-stretching hand and eyes that are sleepless."
And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had done what seemed to him just and due to the child and her mother; he had been true to the vow he had made answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes; he had saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the trainer, and the future of the child from the shame of the brothel; he had done thus much in saving her from her father, and he had done it in the only way that was possible to him.
Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though he had thrust some mountain-bird with pinions that would cleave the clouds, and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise with the dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for evermore.
"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless with a vague remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.
But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in all the many years that came.
For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow, lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert, on which no single star-ray shone.
The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen in their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the tempest of the winds.