“It would be little use to go home,” he said, “for if my wife is not glad to see me, it is no home to me; and she will not be glad to see me till I can find the gipsy and know how the charm can be broken.”
One night he went into a booth where there were a number of men drinking, and amongst them there was one who looked like a gipsy, a dark, savage-looking fellow who was talking loud, and boasting much of all he had done. The potter sat and listened to their talk, and presently they began quarrelling, and talking about who was the most beautiful woman in the world. The gipsy cried out that he knew the most beautiful, and that she had given him a parting gift and wished him Godspeed, and now he was going back to her, for he knew now the way to make her love him, and he meant to wed her and have her for his wife.
Upon this the others laughed and jeered, and said, was it likely that such a beautiful woman would care for such a rough, ill-favoured fellow as he, and declared they didn’t think much of her beauty if she was willing to marry him and to be his wife.
Then another man standing near said that he knew where lived the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth, though he did not believe that she would ever be wife of his, still all the same it would be hard to beat her for loveliness; and she was a clever worker too, for she it was who worked the mats that lay under his feet in the cart he drove. Upon this they all began to wrangle, and their words grew high.
“And if the beautiful woman loved you so,” cried one man to the gipsy, “how could you come away and leave her?”
The gipsy laughed. “She didn’t love me then,” he said, “but she will now, for I am taking her a charm which will make her love me more than anyone on earth. She has only to drink out of the cup I carry here, and she will be mine for life.”
Upon this they all laughed, and derided him still more.
“Then let everyone believe that what I say is true,” cried the gipsy, and from his bosom he took out a small brown bowl and waved it in the air, “and here is the cup to prove it.” And the potter’s heart almost stood still, for he recognized the cup which the gipsy girl had made for him years before.
The other man laughed scornfully. “That proves nothing,” he said. “I might take the mat out from the cart and ask it to say if I spoke the truth; but mats and cups have no tongues to speak with, though my mat can say more than your cup, for there is a rhyme on it with a pattern of a cup; moreover, the rhyme is about a gipsy too.”
“Let us see it,” cried they all.
Then the man went out to his cart and fetched in a white and brown straw mat, covered with a pattern made of cups, and he read the rhyme which was written upon it—
“From the gipsy’s cup I drank for love,
From the gipsy’s cup I drank for hate,
And when she gave me that cup again
My love was gone and I drank too late.”
On hearing this the potter jumped up, and dashed into their midst, and seized the cup.
“The gipsy speaks truth,” he cried, “when he says she is the most beautiful woman in the world, but he speaks false when he says that she will ever love him; for he has stolen that cup, and I shall take it from him, and if he tries to stop me, why then I will fight him, and let everyone see who is the better fellow of the two.”
But when the gipsy had seen the rhyme upon the mat, he stood and stared as if he were made of stone, and said no word to the potter, and indeed scarcely seemed to notice that he had taken away the cup from him. Then the potter turned to the man who owned the mat and said, “If you will sell me your mat I will pay you handsomely for it, and I beg you to tell me who made it, and where you got it, for I would like to buy some more like it.”
The traveller was much astonished, but he told the potter that it was made by a woman who lived in a village a little way off, and she sat by her doorway and wove mats, with a gipsy boy to help her; and she was the loveliest woman he had ever seen on earth, with eyes just like blue cornflowers and hair like golden corn. Then the potter took his bowl and the mat and started to go home, but the gipsy slunk out of the room and went into the night, and nobody noticed him.
Meantime the potter’s wife continued to grieve and lament, for in spite of her taking the gipsy boy’s advice, and telling all things that she loved her husband and wished him back, he did not come back to her; and though she wove her rhyme into every mat that she made, she despaired of the potter’s ever seeing one. The only thing which seemed to console her, was the little brown clay cup that the gipsy woman had thrown for her, before she died. As it had never been baked in the oven, the clay was dry and hard and cracked, and it was a sorry thing to look at, but still the potter’s wife kept it beside her,
