“I heard you singing,” she answered composedly, “but I do not come here because I’m called.”
“But I do,” he rejoined. “You called me from over the seas, and I came. I was in the Balkans; there was trouble—Servia, Montenegro, and Austria were rattling the fire-irons again, and there was I as my father was before me. But I heard you calling, and I came.”
“You never heard me call, Jethro Fawe,” she returned quietly. “My calling of you is as silent as the singing of the stars, where you are concerned. And the stars do not sing.”
“But the stars do sing, and you call just the same,” he responded with a twist to his moustache, and posing against the wall. “I’ve heard the stars sing. What’s the noise they make in the heart, if it’s not singing? You don’t hear with the ears only. The heart hears. It’s only a manner of speaking, this talk about the senses. One sense can do the same as all can do and a Romany ought to know how to use one or all. When your heart called I heard it, and across the seas I came. And by long and by last, but I was right in coming.”
His impudence at once irritated her and provoked her admiration. She knew by instinct how false he was, and how a lie was as common with him as the truth; but his submission to her father, his indifference to his imprisonment, forced her interest, even as she was humiliated by the fact that he was sib to her, bound by ties of clan and blood apart from his monstrous claim of marriage. He was indeed such a man as a brainless or sensual woman could yield to with ease. He had an insinuating animal grace, that physical handsomeness which marks so many of the Tziganies who fill the red coats of a Gipsy musical sextette! He was not distinguished, yet there was an intelligence in his face, a daring at his lips and chin, which, in the discipline and conventions of organized society, would have made him superior. Now, with all his sleek handsomeness, he looked a cross between a splendid peasant and a chevalier of industry.
She compared him instinctively with Ingolby the Gorgio, as she looked at him. What was it made the difference between the two? It was the world in a man—personality, knowledge of life, the culture of the thousand things which make up civilization: it was personality got from life and power in contest with the ordered world.
Yet was this so after all? Tekewani was only an Indian brave who lived on the bounty of a government, and yet he had presence and an air of command. Tekewani had been a nomad; he had not been bound to one place, settled in one city, held subservient to one flag. But, no, she was wrong: Tekewani had been the servant and child of a system which was as fixed and historical as that of Russia or Spain. He belonged to a people who had traditions and laws of their own; organized communities moving here and there, but carrying with them their system, their laws and their national feeling.
There was the difference. This Romany was the child of irresponsibility, the being that fed upon life, that did not feed life; that left one place in the world to escape into another; that squeezed one day dry, threw it away, and then went seeking another day to bleed; for ever fleeing from yesterday, and using to-day only as a camping-ground. Suddenly, however, she came to a stop in her reflections. Her father, Gabriel Druse, was of the same race as this man, the same unorganized, irresponsible, useless race, with no weight of civic or social duty upon its shoulders—where did he stand? Was he no better than such as Jethro Fawe? Was he inferior to such as Ingolby, or even Tekewani?
She realized that in her father’s face there was the look of one who had no place in the ambitious designs of men, who was not a builder, but a wayfarer. She had seen the look often of late, and had never read it until now, when Jethro Fawe stared at her with the boldness of possession, with the insolence of a soul of lust which had had its victories.
She read his look, and while one part of her shrank from him as from some noisome thing, another part of her—to her dismay and anger—understood him, and did not resent him. It was the Past dragging at her life. It was inherited predisposition, the unregulated passions of her forebears, the mating of the fields, the generated dominance of the body, which was not to be commanded into obscurity, but must taunt and tempt her while her soul sickened. She put a hand on herself. She must make this man realize once and for all that they were as far apart as Adam and Cagliostro. “I never called to you,” she said at last. “I did not know of your existence, and, if I had, then I certainly shouldn’t have called.”