I really think the amount of ginger ale he had drunk must have gone to his head a little; or else it had so inflated him, mentally and physically, that he was a trifle above himself. At any rate, he volunteered to give the company an exhibition of solo-dancing; and the offer being promptly accepted, started to do—of all things—Queen Elizabeth dancing before the Scots’ ambassador, Melville.
“It is to please your English sentiment and at the same time to warm the heart of the little Daisee by laughter,” he explained to me. “This is comic; a frolic idea.”
What a scene it was! The dancers, in their odd mixture of day and evening dress, gathered round the walls under the slatting, tearing flags; the wild southeaster yelling along the veranda, so that the music, despairingly pitted against it, sounded starved and thin; in the midst of the cleared space, the Marquis, beneath a row of guttering hurricane lamps, dancing Queen Elizabeth.... He had a scarlet tablecloth about his waist and a fan in his hand; he had rouged his cheeks with a scrap of red cracker paper dipped in water; he had borrowed a pair of high-heeled shoes (big man though he was, his foot was amazingly small) and, in spite of his bulk and his pink, fat face and his twinkling trousers-legs showing below the drapery, he was the ancient coquette of England to the life. You could even see the sour face of Melville looking on as the dancer stepped and pirouetted “high and disposedly,” watching eagerly for the ambassador’s approval.... At the end he laughed a high-pitched, cackling, old woman’s laugh; struck the imaginary Melville coquettishly on the shoulder with his fan, dropped the tablecloth and became instantly a dignified nobleman of the ancient peerage of France.
Mrs. Vandaleur ran forward impulsively as he finished and begged for more. The room applauded. The Marquis danced again.
“Let a Papuan with a drum be brought,” he ordered. A boy was fetched from the grass slope outside the hall, where a number of natives had been looking on. He beat his iguana-skin drum, as if for a native dance, with the throbbing, intoxicating beat of the New Guinea drummer. The Marquis snatched a native feather crown off the wall, where it had been hung as an ornament, put it on his head and danced “The Love Dance of the Sorcerer,” looking at Mrs. Vandaleur all the time.
I must say he had used his Papuan experiences well. The dance was New Guinea, yet something more. It had sorcery in it, mystery, magic and sinister, wicked charm. You felt the sorcerer loved the lady and meant to win her; but you were not quite sure he did not mean to roast her on the fire, and pick her pretty bones, by and by.... The lookers-on applauded violently and Mrs. Daisie, whether truthfully or not, declared herself faint when he had done, and had to be supported to a chair.
“Oh, you terrible man—you dangerous sorcerer!” I heard her murmur as he gave her his arm. “How many trusting little women’s hearts have you charmed away? Do you know the power you have? I think you must be very cruel.”
“No, for I make my spelling gently; ‘fair and softly is always to be blest!’” he answered, through the yelling of the wind. Mrs. Daisie put up her hand anxiously among her curls to see, I think, if nothing was breaking away from its moorings and, being assured of this, fainted a little more in the corner to which the Marquis had conducted her. Her head grazed his shirt-front as she sank back in her chair.
“Ah! you have hurt my little face! Is it your heart that feels so hard and sharp?” she asked. The Marquis, instead of answering, lifted her onto her feet again as lightly as if she had been a baby and swung her back into the dancing-room, where now the music was beginning again.
“What happened to the wife of Bluebeard, little wicked?” he said as they dropped into the waltz.