The Windfairies

me or my hair, so I will weave it into a cloth with this very fine flax, and I must sell it for a very large sum of money, or else I shall have nothing left to go on with.” But she couldn’t think of any pattern in which the hair looked well with the fine linen flax, till at last she hit on one in which there was a cup with a heart on the top of it. The cup she made of the gold hair, and the heart also. She worked at it for many long days, and when she had finished it she looked at it, and was very much pleased, and said indeed it was the most beautiful cloth she had ever made; and now she must make haste and take it in to the town and sell it for a great deal of money, or she and her child would begin to do badly for food and fire.

The snow was lying heavily upon the ground, as the potter’s wife stood by the window looking at her cloth, when there crawled up outside the window a poor gipsy woman leading a little boy by the hand. She had big black eyes and a brown face, but her cheeks were so thin that the colour scarcely showed in them, and the potter himself would have had much ado to recognize her as the gipsy girl who made the cup years before; and her clothes all hung upon her in rags, and her little boy was crying bitterly with the cold. She knocked against the window with her poor thin hands. “Take me in,” she cried, “and have pity on me, for I can go no further.” Then the potter’s wife opened the door, and the gipsy woman entered the room with her little boy by her side, and crouched by the fire.

“Where is the potter who lived here?” said the gipsy. “It is long years ago since I saw him, and now I have come back to pray that he would give me food, for I am starving.”

“No,” said the wife, “I know not where he is, for he is my husband, and he has left me, and right glad of it am I; but if you will stay here I will give you food and drink and attend to you, for, poor woman, you seem to me to be very ill; so stay here and I will attend to you till you are well enough to go your way.”

“There is only one way that I shall ever go,” said the gipsy, and she looked into the fire with her big black eyes, “and that is the road which leads to the churchyard. But if he was your husband, why do you say that you are glad he is away? Is he not kind to you?”

“He was very kind to me,” said the potter’s wife, “he gave me everything I wanted, and money and to spare, but for all that I could not love him, and I am glad he has gone, and left me alone with my baby girl.”

“You are a foolish woman,” said the gipsy. “If you had a husband who loved you and worked for you well, you should have loved him and cherished him. My husband beat me, and was cruel to me, and stole all I had. And now that I am dying, he has deserted me to die as I may.”

Then the potter’s wife brought her food and bid her lie down, and dried her rags of clothes, and she wrapped the little boy in her own clothes, and gave him food and put him to sleep; and as she lay, the gipsy woman watched her with her great black eyes, and at last she said, “Have you a brown cup here, a little rough brown cup? did your husband give it to you?”

The potter’s wife stared with astonishment. “How did you know I had a little rough brown cup?” she said. “There was such a one, and it stood upon the shelf, but I have given it away. I gave it to a poor gipsy man who begged it of me; he wanted it so badly that I couldn’t refuse, and he made me drink his health in it ere he took it away.”

Then the gipsy woman raised her head, and her eyes looked blacker and her cheeks blacker.

“And what was the gipsy man like?” she cried. “Had you drunk from the cup before? Can you remember?”

“I remember well,” said the woman. “I drank from it on the day when I promised I would marry my husband, and I drank from it once again when I wished the gipsy Godspeed, and soon after that, my husband left me, for I could not bear to have him near me.”

Then the gipsy cried out aloud, and said something in a language which the woman did not understand, and beat her hands.

“I think it was my husband,” she said. “Alack a day! tomorrow night I shall die, and who will take care of my little boy, and see that he does not starve? for his father would beat and ill-treat him if he found him.” Then the potter’s wife kneeled down beside the gipsy woman, and kissed her on the forehead.

“Be at peace,” she said. “If it be that you must die, die with a quiet heart, for I will keep your little boy. What is enough for two is enough for three, and he shall call my little girl sister and me mother.”

The gipsy said nothing, but she looked at the potter’s wife for long, and then she said, “And my clothes are all in rags, and I have no garment in which you can wrap me for my grave.”

Then the potter’s wife began to cry. “Be at peace,” she said, “for I have a fine cloth made of flax and my own hair, and in it you can lie clad like