XXVII
THE QUEEN OF THE GROVE
The court around which the house of Helena was built had, through liberal draft upon the Princess' taste and Glaucon's purse, been prepared for the entertainment. The jet of water which ordinarily rose in the centre of the court was turned off, and the little marble basin in which the bronze lotus leaves seemed to float was now covered over with a platform extended and raised sufficiently to display the performance.
Helena's nose turned too much upward for a Greek ideal when, late in the day, she contemplated the meagre decorations. Glaucon had hired a number of men and boys to gather wild flowers from the fields; but the dread of the ubiquitous Judas had kept these gleaners within a few rods of the city gate. Lamps enclosed in bags of various-colored linen and silk were substituted for the lanterns of brass and silver and opalescent stones which anciently had been the common adornment of the houses of the well-to-do people.
But whatever was lacking in these respects was compensated by the brilliancy of the chamber which, raised three steps above the pavement, opened upon the court. This place was strewn with cushions and skins of tiger and fox, so that the floor was not unlike the body of a vast peacock lying with extended wings and tail. Amid these, and upon the divans which ran round the three sides of the chamber, reclined fair women; and hovering over them, like humming-birds seeking the sweet of flowers, stood high officers from the garrison, and a few of the richest of the Greek priests in gala dress.
Menelaos asserted the prerogative of his rank, and reclined with the fair sex. Glaucon, as chief patron of the show, and more than patron of the hostess, assumed a similar privilege.
"Is she not beautiful, my sister?" whispered the Jew as Helena, having duly saluted her guests, with a wave of the hand indicated the beginning of the entertainment.
Helena evidently overheard the compliment, and rewarded Glaucon with a smile that would have captivated any voluptuary, though he were not already infatuated, as was her present victim.
"She is very fair," replied Deborah.
"A palm-tree is not more stately among juniper bushes than Helena among women," said the enamored man.
"Rather say as graceful as a spotted serpent coiling about a palm-tree," interjected his sister. "What limbs for a dancer!"
Glaucon interpreted her comment to apply to another woman, who at the moment seemed to have materialized out of the tangled lamp rays, and appeared upon the platform in the court. This airy being stood long enough to assure the spectators that she was of real flesh and blood. Then, with hands outspread, she pivoted herself upon the slender point of her foot, and gyrated with as little apparent muscular effort as that of the wand which a juggler twirls upon his finger. Two other women joined her. Together they writhed in the set forms of a dance, which was designed to show through thin drapery the fine contour of their persons, the proportion of their limbs, and grace of motion.
"Bravo!" cried Menelaos, tossing a handful of gold coins. As they rang upon the pavement, the dancers, without stopping or marring their orderly movements, picked up the gleaming spots.
"Bravo!" echoed Glaucon. "I have never seen it better done. I remember the same figures executed by the famous Thessalian sisters at Antioch. You recall the dance, do you not?"
"I am not sufficiently versed in the art to recognize the movements," replied the Priest.
"The wine will clear your wits," responded Glaucon, nodding to the Princess for approval, which was so sweetly given that it proved sufficient intoxicant to the Jew without need of any from the cup. He clapped his hands, signalling to the servants, who filled the great goblet.
"This wine," said Glaucon, "I had sent from the capital as a gift to our fair hostess. Let her first spice it with a touch of her lips."
The Princess acknowledged the excellence of Glaucon's choice by quaffing deeply, and then passed the golden vessel to her guests.
The girls again appeared, one carrying a cythera, another a tambour, the third castanets. The first sang, to the accompaniment of her instrument, a love song. Her voice had much natural sweetness, and gave evidence of cultivation; but the notes soon became husky and harsh, as if age-worn, although the singer could scarcely have passed her first score of years. It gave proof of the dissipation which soon ends the career of women of her class, unless they are possessed of sufficient ambition and will to practise a measure of present self-restraint for the sake of longer future indulgence. The two other girls joined in the chorus with tambour and castanets, and afterwards executed a dance which was pantomimic of the song.
Was it the gold that excited them, or is there a spirit of the dance which resides somewhere in the air or in the light, and enters the bodies of its votaries? These women became ecstatic; they seemed to emerge from themselves, and to become each a living presence of Terpsichore. They closed their eyes as if they danced in sleep. Their lips were parted to inhale the intoxicating breath of their goddess, who should thus supply the energy which physical motion exhausted. The timing of their feet became as pulse-beats, rhythmic, strong, flinging them through the forms of the dance, as a fever throb whirls one through the maze of fantastic visions. They bent until their dishevelled hair touched the floor, like stalks of grain beneath the weight of golden tassels. Then, as the wind lifts the stalk and flings high its bannered top, the women became erect. With instruments above their heads, they swirled, each like a glistening whirlpool, until the spectators were dizzied.
During the performance Helena had spiced the wine more than once with her lips as she passed the cup to Glaucon.
"The dance is shamefully poor," said she. "How that girl mouthed her words, and failed to give the right accent! The click of the castanets is not timed to her motions. And the movement of her ankles—as awkward as if her legs were flail-sticks. The girls are not artists. Let them sing again, and I will show them how."
She rose from the divan and, seizing the cythera from the hand of one of the performers, rendered the song with wonderful power. Now Helena's notes floated as buoyantly as those of a lark, and anon sank into exquisite softness and depth, as blue wings sink into the azure. Then, dropping from her shoulders her outer robe, with snapping fingers in lieu of castanets, she gave the dance.
Helena's figure had evidently once been of that perfect balance which makes the impression of being without weight, and which, with the aid of proper draperies, gives the illusion of floating in the air. But her body had clearly taken on solidity, and a distribution of substance better adapted to one who would pose in stateliness than to one who would play the sylph. There is a grace of motion and another grace of inertia. Very young persons ordinarily monopolize the former; the latter is the compensation which nature gives for advancing years. Helena did not realize the grade she had attained in beautiful womanhood—not an uncommon inadvertence of her sex. Otherwise she danced with faultless art—art evidently acquired only through careful instruction and lengthened practice; the art which, according to Glaucon, was forbidden to princely personages and free-born women among the Greeks. Her performance ended in an attitude illustrative of the closing lines of the song, in which the singer accepts the embrace of her lover. Helena's face flushed with the excitement of the exercise. Her eyes flickered unsteadily through the effect of the wine. As the last note died upon her lips she reached out her hands to Glaucon.
Whether the Jew was dazed by the superb acting, or by the unexpected revelation on the part of the actress, we may not say—but dazed he seemed, for he sat stupidly still.
His irresponsive look startled, if it did not sober, the dancer. She gazed about her; put her hand to her head, as if to realize her identity; and, tripping upon the robe which she had dropped from her hand, fell into her seat.
"I must be ill," she said. "Give me—give me—some wine."
One by one her guests, with such semblance of courtesy as the Princess' condition allowed them to render, took their departure; but not until one of the dancing women was heard to declare:
"I will bet my garters that she is none other than the great Clarissa herself; for I am sure that the old Queen of the Grove of Daphne could not have done it better. Did you catch the trill?"
"Aye, and the long step and the short one. 'Beauty's Limp' they call it. Clarissa invented that, and all the girls in the Grove practised it; but they say that nobody could do it perfectly except herself."
"I think that the Princess did it splendidly, except that her flesh wobbled; she's too fat."
"What became of the Queen of the Grove?"
"I have heard that she went away with General Apollonius. I will wager my silver anklets against your bronze ones that Clarissa came down to Jerusalem when Apollonius was killed, and that she has been taken up by that fig-headed fellow who ordered the drink. The Princess! Ha, ha! She's the Queen—our Queen of Daphne! If she comes out again I will fall down at her feet, and bite off a piece of her big toe to carry back to Antioch as a memento; that is, if we ever get out of this Jewish hole."
"May the gods favor us as well as they have Clarissa!" was her companion's reply.
"Aye, when we get so heavy in the thighs, and so stiff in the joints. When that comes I, too, will sell what is left of me to a Jew. But let's have a drink."
She threw a kiss at a Greek officer leaving the court, and bent over the wine crater, singing: