Wild the music, wilder the dance; and he sits in his chair on the veranda, the clean, clear air and the fresh breeze blowing in from the sea, stirring the white hairs in the curls at his temples, and listens and looks with no eye or ear for aught of its beauty,—only a ribald jest as their petticoats rise, or their bosoms quiver in the fling of the dance. And she, with a crimson shawl drawn round her spare shoulders and a splash of color in her thin cheeks, holds one hand tightly pressed over her breast—to still what? What does the music rouse inside that frail frame? What parts her lips and causes her eyes to glisten and the thin nostrils to quiver? Is there aught in common between that slight figure, with its jewelled hands and its too heavy silken gown, and those tattered healthy Zingari vagabonds? Who knows?
The whole tribe are gathered round him, begging and screaming with one voice, and he throws silver lavishly to them, and thrusts his hand with a coarse jest into the open bodice of the girl nearest him. A brown hand goes to the knife of a swarthy youth with gold rings in his ears; but at a few strange words from the oldest woman in the group the girl steps back, and with the quickness of lightning the hag takes her place and answers his jest in his own tongue. The girl looks curiously, pityingly, respectfully at the other girl: she is a little more than a girl as she stands dumbly by during all this scene. Eye seeks eye, sympathy meets sympathy. What affinity is between these two creatures?
"Kan de rokra Romany?" she asks, with a smile that visits her face as the ghost of a vanished beauty; and her voice is sweetly soft as she asks it. A flash of eye, a hurried backward word thrown to the old woman who joins them on hearing it. She stands between, with a smile at their wonder, and she holds out her hand, and one slim ivory-tinted hand rests palm upward in a no less slim but browner one. The old woman peers into the lines and crosses, and as she scans them a look of wonder creeps up to her usually inscrutable face. She exchanges words in an undertone with the gypsy girl at her side.
"I speak Romany too, Deya! An evil fate, isn't it, mother?"
"A mole on your cheek, and a free Romany heart in your breast, your spirit fights to be free as the Romany chai. Seven suns rise and seven moons, and the flag is half-mast, and the cage opens and the bird—"
An impatient curse cuts short her words, and they turn to him.
"Here, you old Jezebel! Send these vagabonds of yours down there; there's plenty to eat."
The servants are bearing beer and food to the lawn.
"Shall I go blind? I dare say you know as much as those infernal doctors, eh?"
"No; your eyes, and pretty eyes they are, and many a soul they've lost, they'll last your time, my lord! I see a journey to England; it lies before you, and no return. Seven times the moon will rise, and the Romanies go to the South, but the bird—"