I swept him a curtsey. "I dreamt that I dwe-elt in mar-arble halls," I piped out in a quavering falsetto. The folly of taking things so solemnly. What was humanity but a dressed-up ape? Had not my fair saint, Isobel de Flores, painted her cheeks, and garlanded her hair? And all his answer was to clench his teeth. He turned away with a shudder.
The drum reverberated, the panpipes squealed. I signed to him to hide himself in the recess among my discarded clothes, out of sight of peeping eyes, and arranged my person on the satin and rabbit-skins.
The tent flap lifted and the mob pressed in. Stretching out in a queue like a serpent, I caught a glimpse in the pale saffron moonlight of the crowd beyond. The sixpences danced in the tray. Once more the flap descended; my audience stilled. I looked from one to the other, smiling, defiant.
"Why, Bob said she was a pale, pinched-up snippet of a thing with golden hair," whispered a slip of a girl to a smooth little woman at her side.
"Ay, my Goff! And a waist like a wedding-ring," responded a wide mouth in a large red face, peering over.
"Ah, lady," warbled the Signorina, "fair to-day and foul to-morrow. 'Believe what you are told,' clanked the bell in the churchyard. Stuffing, my pretty; ask the goose!"
So went the Signorina's last little orgy. It would be a lie to profess that she, or rather some black hidden ghost in her, did not enjoy it. My monstrous disguise, that ferment of humanity, those owlish faces, the lurking shame, the danger, the poisonous excitement swept me clean out of myself. Anything to be free for a while from "pernickety" Miss M. But that, I suppose, is the experience of every gambler and wastrel and jezebel in the world, every one of his kind. One must not open the door too wide.
But this was not all. On other nights I had been alone. Now I was fervidly conscious of unseen, hungering eyes, watching every turn, and glance, and gesture. My dingy daïs was no longer in actuality. I lived in that one watcher's mind—in his imagination. And deep beneath this insane excitement lay a gentle, longing happiness. Oh, when this vile tinsel show was over, and these swarming faces had melted into thin air, and the moonlit empty night was ours, what would I not pour out for his peace and comfort. What gratitude and tenderness for all that he had been to me, and done, and said. Why, we seemed never even to have spoken to each other—not self to self, and there was all the world to tell.
Hotter, ranker grew the fetid atmosphere. I could scarcely breathe in my monstrous mummery. But clearly, the showman was making a rich bargain of me, and rumour of a Midget that was golden as Aphrodite one night, and black as pitch the next, only thickened the swarm. At length—long expected—there came a pause. Yet another country urchin flat on his stomach in the grass, with head goggling up at me from the hem of the canvas, was dragged out, screeching and laughing, by his breeches. But I had caught the accents of a well-known voice, and, crouching, with head wrenched aside to listen, I heard the gipsy's whining reply.