“My fortune?” The young man stared at her.
“But yes!” Jeanne did not laugh. “You are in trouble. There are many things you wish to know. To be sure you must have your fortune told. And Madame Bihari, she tells fortunes beautifully, I assure you!” She went dancing, light as a fairy across the broad veranda to disappear like some woods sprite along a winding trail.
CHAPTER VI
THE GYPSY WITCH CARDS
So that evening Danby Force consented to have his fortune told. Being a practical young man who thought in terms of dollars and cents, and seldom found time for dreaming, he was not likely to take the matter seriously. Why did he consent? Perhaps it was because he liked Petite Jeanne and wished to please her. And then again there may have been in his nature, as there is in many another practical person’s, a feeling for the mysterious, the thing that cannot be entirely explained. And who can say that this race of wanderers, these gypsies, may not have hidden away in their breasts some secrets unknown to others? Surely, as we have seen, they could make a cape of royal purple such as is known among no other people. Whatever the reason, Danby Force consented to have his fortune told.
That night the great lounge of the hunting lodge presented to Jeanne a setting both weird and wonderful. She loved it. Flames in the great fireplace sent shadows chasing one another from beam to beam of the ceiling. Two candles, one at each end of the long table, casting each its yellow gleam, brought out the handsome smiling face of Danby Force, but left Madame Bihari in all but complete darkness. From the mantel above the fire came the slow tick-tock of a clock. Once, from without, the girl thought she caught the challenging cry of some wild thing, perhaps a wolf.
“There,” said Madame Bihari, looking up at Danby Force, “are the cards. You shall shuffle them, my young friend. You shall cut them with your left hand. Then you shall place them on the table in positions I shall tell you of.” Madame Bihari talked at this moment just as Jeanne had always imagined a wooden man might talk, each word spoken in the same low, slow tone.
“There are the cards,” Jeanne thought to herself. Yes, there they were. How many times she had watched Madame Bihari tell fortunes from those cards! As she closed her eyes she could see some rich and dignified dame, at the steps of a castle in France, spread out those same cards, then sit intent, motionless, expectant as Madame Bihari told her fortune.
“And how cleverly she tells them!” Jeanne whispered to herself. “There was the Chateau Buraine. Madame said, ‘It will be destroyed by fire.’ Two months later it was in ashes. And the gypsies did not set the fire. Mais no! No! They were all away at the Paris Fair.”
“Now—” Madame was speaking once more to Danby. “Now you have shuffled, you have cut the cards. You shall now lay them face-up in rows, six in the first row, then eight in a row for five rows, and last, six in a row.”
Jeanne watched fascinated as the cards were turned up. She knew those cards by heart. Each had its number. On each card was a different picture, a serpent, a sun, a moon, children at play, a house, a cloud, a tree, a mouse, a bear; yes, yes, there were pictures and each picture had its meaning, a good prophecy or a bad one. Health, happiness, riches, love, enemies, failure, deception, sickness, death—all these and many more were prophesied by these pictures.