"Allah is good to me--Flamencine," whispered the camel-driver as he drew
her close to avoid a careless dancer.
"Why, Flamencine?" demanded a carefully altered voice, from which,
however, the music had not been eliminated.
"Don't you remember?" The Arab stole a covert, identifying glance down
at the tip of one ear which showed under its masking of brown hair--an
ear that looked as though it were chiseled from the pink coral of
Capri. He quoted: "'There was a gipsy maiden within the forest green,
There was a gipsy maiden who shook a tambourine.
The stars of night had not the face,
The woodland wind had not the grace,
Of Flamencine.'"
Then the music stopped, and with its silencing came the monk, the clown,
the grandee, and others.
In the insistent demand of the many the Arab had too few dances with the
Spanish girl. There were Comanches, Samurai, policemen, Zulus and
courtiers, who, seeing her dance, discovered that their immediate
avocation was dancing with her.
Yet it wanted an hour of unmasking time when a Bedouin led a gipsy
maiden from Andalusia into the deserted library, where the darkness was
broken only by blazing logs on an open hearth.
When they were alone he turned to her anxiously. His voice was freighted
with appeal. Her face, now unmasked, wore an expression of stunned
misery.
"Dear," he asked, "how are you?"
She gazed at the flickering logs. "I should think you would know," she
answered wearily. Then, with a mirthless laugh, she spread both hands
toward the blaze. "I'm looking ahead--I can see it all there in the
fire." Her fingers convulsively clenched themselves until blue marks
showed against the pink palms.
He pushed a chair forward for her, but with a shake of her head she
declined it.
"Whoever heard of a gipsy girl sitting in a leather chair?" she
demanded. "It's more like--like some effete princess."
She dropped to the Persian rug and, gathering her knees between her
clasped hands, sat looking into the dying blaze. "For a few brief
minutes I am the gipsy girl," she added.
"And," he said, dropping cross-legged to the rug at her side, "when the
caravan halts at evening, and prayers have been said facing Mecca, and
the grunting camels kneel, to be unloaded, neither do we, the gipsies of
the desert, sit in chairs." He swayed slightly toward her, lowering his
voice to a whisper. As the soft touch of her shoulder brushed him and
electrified him, his cashmere-draped arms closed around her and held her
hungrily to him. The vagrant maiden of Andalusia and the caravan-driver
of Africa sat gazing together at the glowing pictures in the logs as
they turned slowly to ashes.
"Cara," he went on in a voice of pent-up earnestness, "we be nomads--we
two. 'The scarlet of the maples can shake us like the cry of bugles
going by.' Come away with me while there is time. Let us follow out our
destinies where gipsy blood calls us; in the desert, the jungle,
wherever you say. Let your fancy be our guide--your heart our compass.
Suppose"--he paused and, with one outstretched arm, pointed to the
fire--"suppose that to be a camp-fire--what do you see in the coals?"