“She a gypsy?” The dark-faced one’s cheeks purpled with anger. “She is no gypsy! Did I not this moment see her drag the shawl from this girl’s shoulders?” She lifted a heavy hand as if to strike the little French girl. That instant a hand that was like a vice closed upon her uplifted arm.
“Put that arm down or I will break it off at the elbow!” It was the powerful Bihari.
The woman’s cheek blanched. Her hand dropped. She shrank back into the crowd.
“She is a gypsy,” Bihari said quietly to the man on the platform. “I am her step-father. She traveled in my caravan. I will vouch for her. And she can dance—you shall see.”
Perhaps Bihari, the gypsy smithy, was not unknown to the man on the stand. At any rate, Jeanne had her chance.
She had not forgotten her own bright gypsy shawl of days gone by, nor the prizes she had won while it waved and waved about her slim figure. Now, in this fantastic setting, it all came back to her.
Once again, as she stood there motionless, awaiting the first haunting wail of the violin, she felt herself float and glide like a cloud over the dewy grass of some village square in France; once again heard the wild applause as her bright shawl waved before a sea of up-turned faces in the Paris Opera.
“And I am not doing this for myself, but for that poor child with the lame knee,” she thought as her lips moved in a sort of prayer.
It is safe to say that Maxwell Street will not soon again see such dancing as was done on that rough platform in the moments that followed. Jeanne’s step was light, fairy-like, joyous. Now, as she sailed through space, she seemed some bird of bright plumage. Now, as she floated out from her bright shawl, as she spun round and round, she seemed more a spirit than a living thing. And now, for ten full seconds, she stood, a bright creature, gloriously human.
Seizing a tambourine that lay at the drummer’s feet, she struck it with her hand, shook it until it began to sing, then tossing it high, set it spinning first on a finger, then upon the top of her golden head. And all this time she swayed and swung, leaped and spun in time with the rhythmic music.