As Fleda wound her way through the deeper wood, remembering the things which had just been said between herself and Ingolby, the colour came and went in her face. To no man had she ever talked so long and intimately, not even in the far-off days when she lived the Romany life.
Then, as daughter of the head of all the Romanys, she had her place apart; and the Romany lads had been few who had talked with her even as a child. Her father had jealously guarded her until the time when she fell under the spell and influence of Lady Barrowdale. Here, by the Sagalac, she had moved among this polyglot people with an assurance of her own separateness which was the position of every girl in the West, but developed in her own case to the nth degree.
Never before had she come so near—not to a man, but to what concerned a man; and never had a man come so near to her or what concerned her inmost life. It was not a question of opportunity or temptation—these always attend the footsteps of those who would adventure; but for long she had fenced herself round with restrictions of her own making; and the secrecy and strangeness of her father’s course had made this not only possible, but in a sense imperative.
The end to that had come. Gaiety, daring, passion, elation, depression, were alive in her now, and in a sense had found an outlet in a handful of days—indeed since the day when Jethro Fawe and Max Ingolby had come into her life, each in his own way, for good or for evil. If Ingolby came for good, then Jethro Fawe came for evil. She would have revolted at the suggestion that Jethro Fawe came for good.
Yet, during the last few days, she had been drawn again and again towards the hut in the wood. It was as though a power stronger than herself had ordered her not to wander far from where the Romany claimant of herself awaited his fate. As though Jethro knew she was drawn towards him, he had sung the Gipsy songs which she and Ingolby had heard in the distance. He might have shouted for relief in the hope of attracting the attention of some passer-by, and so found release and brought confusion and perhaps punishment to Gabriel Druse; but that was not possible to him. First and last he was a Romany, good or bad; and it was his duty to obey his Ry of Rys, the only rule which the Romany acknowledged. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” he would have said, if he had ever heard the phrase; but in his stubborn way he made the meaning of the phrase the pivot of his own action. If he could but see Fleda face to face, he made no doubt that something would accrue to his advantage. He would not give up the hunt without a struggle.
Twice a day Gabriel Druse had placed food and water inside the door of the hut and locked him fast again, but had not spoken to him save once, and then but to say that his fate had not yet been determined. Jethro’s reply had been that he was in no haste, that he could wait for what he came to get; that it was his own—‘ay bor’! it was his own, and God or devil could not prevent the thing meant to be from the beginning of the world.
He did not hear Fleda approach the hut; he was singing to himself a song he had learned in Montenegro. There the Romany was held in high regard, because of the help his own father had given to the Montenegrin people, fighting for their independence, by admirable weapons of Gipsy workmanship, setting all the Gipsies in that part of the Balkans at work to supply them.
This was the song he sang
He repeated the last two lines into a rising note of exultation:
The key suddenly turned in the lock, the door opened on the last words of the refrain, and, without hesitation, Fleda stepped inside, closing the door behind her.
“‘Mi Duvel’, but who would think—ah, did you hear me call then?” he asked, rising from the plank couch where he had been sitting. He showed his teeth in a smile which was meant to be a welcome, but it had an involuntary malice.
“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.”
“The Gorgios have taken away your mind, or you’d understand,” he replied coolly. “Your soul calls and those that understand come. It isn’t that you know who hears or who is coming—till he comes.”
“A call to all creation!” she answered disdainfully. “Do you think you can impress me by saying things like that?”
“Why not? It’s true. Wherever you went in all these years the memory of you kept calling me, my little ‘rinkne rakli’—my pretty little girl, made mine by the River Starzke over in the Roumelian country.”
“You heard what my father said—”
“I heard what the Duke Gabriel said—‘Mi Duvel’, I heard enough what he said, and I felt enough what he did!”
He laughed, and began to roll a cigarette mechanically, keeping his eyes fixed on her, however.
“You heard what my father said and what I said, and you will learn that it is true, if you live long enough,” she added meaningly.
A look of startled perception flashed into his eyes. “If I live long enough, I’ll turn you, my mad wife, into my Romany queen and the blessing of my ‘tan’.”
“Don’t mistake what I mean,” she urged. “I shall never be ruler of the Romanys. I shall never hear—”
“You’ll hear the bosh played-fiddle, they call it in these heathen places—at your second wedding with Jethro Fawe,” he rejoined insolently, lighting his cigarette. “Home you’ll come with me soon—‘ay bor’!”
“Listen to me,” she answered with anger tingling in every nerve and fibre. “I come of your race, I was what you are, a child of the hedge and the wood and the road; but that is all done. Home, you say! Home—in a tent by the roadside or—”
“As your mother lived—where you were bornwell, well, but here’s a Romany lass that’s forgot her cradle!”
“I have forgotten nothing. I have only moved on. I have only seen that there is a better road to walk than that where people, always looking behind lest they be followed, and always looking in front to find refuge, drop the patrin in the dust or the grass or the bushes for others to follow after—always going on and on because they dare not go back.”
Suddenly he threw his cigarette on the ground, and put his heel upon it in fury real or assumed. “Great Heaven and Hell,” he exclaimed, “here’s a Romany has sold her blood to the devil! And this is the daughter of Gabriel Druse, King and Duke of all the Romanys, him with ancestor King Panuel, Duke of Little Egypt, who had Sigismund, and Charles the Great, and all the kings for friends. By long and by last, but this is a tale to tell to the Romanys of the world!” For reply she went to the door and opened it wide. “Then go and tell it, Jethro Fawe, to all the world. Tell them I am the renegade daughter of Gabriel Druse, ruler of them all. Tell them there is no fault in him, and that he will return to his own people in his own time, but that I, Fleda Druse, will never return—never! Now, get you gone from here.”
The sunlight broke through the trees, and fell in a narrow path of light upon the doorway. A little grey bird fluttered into the radiance and came tripping across the threshold; a whippoorwill called in the ashtrees; and the sweet smell of the thick woodland, of the bracken and fern, crept into the room. The balm of a perfect evening of Summer was upon the face of nature. The world seemed untroubled and serene; but in this hidden but two stormy spirits broke the peace to which the place and the time were all entitled.
After Fleda’s scornful words of release and dismissal, Jethro stood for a moment confounded and dismayed. He had not reckoned with this. During their talk it had come to him how simple it would be to overpower any check to his exit, how devilishly easy to put the girl at a disadvantage; but he drove the thought from him. In the first place, he was by no means sure that escape was what he wanted—not yet, at any rate; in the second place, if Gabriel Druse passed the word along the subterranean wires of the Romany world that Jethro Fawe should vanish, he would not long cumber the ground.
Yet it was not cowardice or fear of consequences which had held him back; it was a staggering admiration for this girl who had been given to him in marriage so many years ago. He had fared far and wide in his adventures and amours when he had gold in plenty; and he had swung more than one Gorgio woman in the wild dance of sentiment, dazzling them by the splendour of his passion. The fire gleaming in his dark eyes lighted a face which would have made memorable a picture by Guido. He had fared far and wide, but he had never seen a woman who had seized his imagination as this girl was doing; who roused in him, not the old hot desire, but the hungry will to have a ‘tan’ of his own, and go travelling down the world with one who alone could satisfy him for all his days.
As he sat in this improvised woodland prison he had had visions of a hundred glades and valleys through which he had passed in days gone by—in England, in Spain, in Italy, in Roumania, in Austria, in Australia, in India—where his camp-fires had burned. In his visions he had seen her—Fleda Fawe, not Fleda Druse—laying the cloth and bringing out the silver cups, or stretching the Turkey rugs upon the ground to make a couch for two bright-eyed lovers to whom the night was as the day, radiant and full of joy. He had shut his eyes and beheld hillsides where abandoned castles stood, and the fox and the squirrel and the hawk gave shade and welcome to the dusty pilgrims of the road; or, when the wild winds blew in winter, gave shelter and wood for the fire, and a sense of homeliness among the companionable trees.
He had seen himself and this beautiful Romany ‘chi’ at some village fair, while the lesser Romany folk told fortunes, or bought and sold horses, and the lesser still tinkered or worked in gold or brass; he had seen them both in a great wagon with bright furnishings and brass-girt harness on their horses, lording it over all, rich, dominant and admired. In his visions he had even seen a Romany babe carried in his arms to a Christian church and there baptized in grandeur as became the child of the head of the people. His imagination had also seen his own tombstone in some Christian churchyard near to the church porch, where he would not be lonely when he was dead, but could hear the gossip of the people as they went in and out of church; and on the tombstone some such inscription as he had seen once at Pforzheim—“To the high-born Lord Johann, Earl of Little Egypt, to whose soul God be gracious and merciful.”
To be sure, it was a strange thing for a Romany to be buried in a Gorgio churchyard; but it was what had chanced to many great men of the Romanys, such as the high-born Lord Panuel at Steinbrock, and Peter of Kleinschild at Mantua—all of whom had great emblazoned monuments in Christian churches, just to show that in all-levelling death they condescended from high estate to mingle their ashes with the dust of the Gorgio.
He had sought out his chieftain here in the new world in a spirit of adventure, cupidity and desire. He had come like one who betrays, but he acknowledged to a higher force than his own and to superior rights when Gabriel Druse’s strong arm brought him low; and, waking to life and consciousness again, he was aware that another force also had levelled him to the earth. That force was this woman’s spirit which now gave him his freedom so scornfully; who bade him begone and tell their people everywhere that she was no longer a Romany, while she would go, no doubt—a thousand times without doubt unless he prevented it—to the swaggering Gorgio who had saved her on the Sagalac.
She stood waiting for him to go, as though he could not refuse his freedom. As a bone is tossed to a dog, she gave it to him.
“You have no right to set me free,” he said coolly now. “I am not your prisoner. You tell me to take that word to the Romany people—that you leave them for ever. I will not do it. You are a Romany, and a Romany you must stay. You belong nowhere else. If you married a Gorgio, you would still sigh for the camp beneath the stars, for the tambourine and the dance—”
“And the fortune-telling,” she interjected sharply, “and the snail-soup, and the dirty blanket under the hedge, and the constable on the road behind, always just behind, watching, waiting, and—”
“The hedge is as clean as the dirty houses where the low-class Gorgios sleep. In faith, you are a long way from the River Starzke!” he added. “But you are my mad wife, and I must wait till you’ve got sense again.”
He sat down on the plank couch, and began to roll a cigarette once more.
“You come fitted out like a Gorgio lass now, and you look like a Gorgio countess, and you have the manners of an Archduchess; but that’s nothing; it will peel off like a blister when it’s pricked. Underneath is the Romany. It’s there, and it will show red and angry when we’ve stripped off the Gorgio. It’s the way with a woman, always acting, always imagining herself something else than what she is—if she’s a beggar fancying herself a princess; if she’s a princess fancying herself a flower-girl. ‘Mi Duvel’, but I know you all!”
Every word he said went home. She knew that there was truth in what he said, and that beneath all was the Romany blood; but she meant to conquer it. She had made her vow to one in England that she loved, and she would not change. Whatever happened, she had finished with Romany life, and to go back would only mean black tragedy in the end. A month ago it was a vow and an inner desire which made her determined; to-day it was the vow and a man—a Gorgio whom she had but now left in the woods, gazing after her with the look which a woman so well interprets.
“You mean you won’t go free from here? Because I was a Romany, and wish you no harm, I have come here to-day to let you go where you will—to go back to the place where the patrins show where your people travel. I set you free, and you say what you think will hurt and shame me. You have a cruel soul. You would torture any woman till she died. You shall not torture me. You are as far from me as the River Starzke. I could have let you stay here for my father to deal with, but I have set you free. I open the door for you, though you are nothing to me, and I am no more to you than one of the women you have fooled and left to eat the vile bread of the forsaken. You have been, you are a wolf—a wolf.”
He got to his feet again, and the blood rushed to his face, so that it seemed almost black. A torrent of mad words gathered in his throat, but they choked him, and in the pause his will asserted itself. He became cool and deliberate.
“You are right, my girl, I have sucked the orange and thrown the skin away, and I’ve picked flowers and cast them by, but that was before the first day I saw you as you now are. You were standing by the Sagalac looking out to the west where the pack-trains were travelling into the sun over the mountains, and you had your hand on the neck of your pony. I was not ten feet away from you, behind a juniper-bush. I looked at you, and I wished that I had never seen a woman before and could look at the world as you did then—it was like water from a spring, that look. You are right in what you say. By long and by last I had a hard hand, and when I left what I’d struck down I never looked back. But I saw you, and I wished I had never seen a woman before. You have been here alone with me with that door shut. Have I said or done anything that a Gorgio duke wouldn’t do? Ah, God’s love, but you were bold to come! I married you by the River Starzke; I looked upon you as my wife; and here you were alone with me! I had my rights, and I had been trampled underfoot by your father—”
“By your Chief.”
“‘Ay bor’, by my Chief! I had my wrongs, and I had my rights, and you were mine by Romany law. It was for me here to claim you—here where a Romany and his wife were alone together!”
His eyes were fixed searchingly on hers, as though he would read the effect of his words before he replied, and his voice had a curious, rough note, as though with difficulty he quelled the tempest within him. “I have my rights, and you had spat upon me,” he said with ferocious softness.
She did not blench, but looked him steadily in the eyes.
“I knew what would be in your mind,” she answered, “but that did not keep me from coming. You would not bite the hand that set you free.”
“You called me a wolf a minute ago.”
“But a wolf would not bite the hand that freed it from the trap. Yet if such shame could be, I still would have had no fear, for I should have shot you as wolves are shot that come too near the fold.”
He looked at her piercingly, and the pupils of his eyes narrowed to a pin-point. “You would have shot me—you are armed?” he questioned.
“Am I the only woman that has armed herself against you and such as you? Do you not see?”
“Mi Duvel, but I do see now with a thousand eyes!” he said hoarsely.
His senses were reeling. Down beneath everything had been the thought that, as he had prevailed with other women, he could prevail with her; that she would come to him in the end. He had felt, but he had declined to see, the significance of her bearing, of her dress, of her speech, of her present mode of life, of its comparative luxury, its social distinction of a kind which lifted her above even the Gorgios by whom she was surrounded. A fatuous belief in himself and in his personal powers had deluded him. He had told the truth when he said that no woman had ever appealed to him as she did; that she had blotted out all other women from the book of his adventurous and dissolute life; and he had dreamed a dream of conquest of her when Fortune should hand out to him the key of the situation. Did not the beautiful Russian countess on the Volga flee from her liege lord and share his ‘tan’? When he played his fiddle to the Austrian princess, did she not give him a key to the garden where she walked of an evening? And this was a Romany lass, daughter of his Chieftain, as he was son of a great Romany chief; and what marvel could there be that she who had been made his child wife, should be conquered as others had been!
“‘Mi Duvel’, but I see!” he repeated in a husky fierceness. “I am your husband, but you would have killed me if I had taken a kiss from your lips, sealed to me by all our tribes and by your father and mine.”
“My lips are my own, my life is my own, and when I marry, I shall marry a man of my own choosing, and he will not be a Romany,” she replied with a look of resolution which her beating heart belied. “I’m not a pedlar’s basket.”
“‘Kek! Kek’! That’s plain,” he retorted. “But the ‘wolf’ is no lamb either! I said I would not go till your father set me free, since you had no right to do so, but a wife should save her husband, and her husband should set himself free for his wife’s sake”—his voice rose in fierce irony—“and so I will now go free. But I will not take the word to the Romany people that you are no more of them. I am a true Romany. I disobeyed my ‘Ry’ in coming here because my wife was here, and I wanted her. I am a true Romany husband who will not betray his wife to her people; but I will have my way, and no Gorgio shall take her to his home. She belongs to my tent, and I will take her there.”
Her gesture of contempt, anger and negation infuriated him. “If I do not take you to my ‘tan’, it will be because I’m dead,” he said, and his white teeth showed fiercely.
“I have set you free. You had better go,” she rejoined quietly.
Suddenly he turned at the doorway. A look of passion burned in his eyes. His voice became soft and persuasive. “I would put the past behind me, and be true to you, my girl,” he said. “I shall be chief over all the Romany people when Duke Gabriel dies. We are sib; give me what is mine. I am yours—and I hold to my troth. Come, beloved, let us go together.”
A sigh broke from her lips, for she saw that, bad as he was, there was a moment’s truth in his words. “Go while you can,” she said. “You are nothing to me.”
For an instant he hesitated, then, with a muttered oath, sprang out into the bracken, and was presently lost among the trees.
For a long time she sat in the doorway, and again and again her eyes filled with tears. She felt a cloud of trouble closing in upon her. At last there was the sound of footsteps, and a moment later Gabriel Druse came through the trees towards her. His eyes were sullen and brooding.
“You have set him free?” he asked.
She nodded. “It was madness keeping him here,” she said.
“It is madness letting him go,” he answered morosely. “He will do harm. ‘Ay bor’, he will! I might have known—women are chicken-hearted. I ought to have put him out of the way, but I have no heart any more—no heart; I have the soul of a rabbit.”
Ingolby’s square head jerked forwards in stern inquiry and his eyes fastened those of Jowett, the horsedealer. “Take care what you’re saying, Jowett,” he said. “It’s a penitentiary job, if it can be proved. Are you sure you got it right?”
Jowett had unusual shrewdness, some vanity and a humorous tongue. He was a favourite in both towns, and had had the better of both in horse-dealing a score of times.
That did not make him less popular. However, it was said he liked low company, and it was true that though he had “money in the bank,” and owned a corner lot or so, he seemed to care little what his company was. His most constant companion was Fabian Osterhaut, who was the common property of both towns, doing a little of everything for a living, from bill-posting to the solicitation of an insurance agent.
For any casual work connected with public functions Osterhaut was indispensable, and he would serve as a doctor’s assistant and help cut off a leg, be the majordomo for a Sunday-school picnic, or arrange a soiree at a meeting-house with equal impartiality. He had been known to attend a temperance meeting and a wake in the same evening. Yet no one ever questioned his bona fides, and if he had attended mass at Manitou in the morning, joined a heathen dance in Tekewani’s Reserve in the afternoon, and listened to the oleaginous Rev. Reuben Tripple in the evening, it would have been taken as a matter of course.
He was at times profane and impecunious, and he had been shifted from one boarding-house to another till at last, having exhausted credit in Lebanon, he had found a room in the house of old Madame Thibadeau in Manitou. She had taken him in because, in years gone by, he had nursed her only son through an attack of smallpox on the Siwash River, and somehow Osterhaut had always paid his bills to her. He was curiously exact where she was concerned. If he had not enough for his week’s board and lodging, he borrowed it, chiefly of Jowett, who used him profitably at times to pass the word about a horse, or bring news of a possible deal.
“It’s a penitentiary job, Jowett,” Ingolby repeated. “I didn’t think Marchand would be so mad as that.”
“Say, it’s all straight enough, Chief,” answered Jowett, sucking his unlighted cigar. “Osterhaut got wind of it—he’s staying at old Mother Thibadeau’s, as you know. He moves round a lot, and he put me on to it. I took on the job at once. I got in with the French toughs over at Manitou, at Barbazon’s Tavern, and I gave them gin—we made it a gin night. It struck their fancy—gin, all gin! ‘Course there’s nothing in gin different from any other spirit; but it fixed their minds, and took away suspicion.
“I got drunk—oh, yes, of course, blind drunk, didn’t I? Kissed me, half a dozen of the Quebec boys did—said I was ‘bully boy’ and ‘hell-fellow’; said I was ‘bon enfant’; and I said likewise in my best patois. They liked that. I’ve got a pretty good stock of monkey-French, and I let it go. They laughed till they cried at some of my mistakes, but they weren’t no mistakes, not on your life. It was all done a-purpose. They said I was the only man from Lebanon they wouldn’t have cut up and boiled, and they was going to have the blood of the Lebanon lot before they’d done. I pretended to get mad, and I talked wild. I said that Lebanon would get them first, that Lebanon wouldn’t wait, but’d have it out; and I took off my coat and staggered about—blind-fair blind boozy. I tripped over some fool’s foot purposely, just beside a bench against the wall, and I come down on that bench hard. They laughed—Lord, how they laughed! They didn’t mind my givin’ ‘em fits—all except one or two. That was what I expected. The one or two was mad. They begun raging towards me, but there I was asleep on the bench-stony blind, and then they only spit fire a bit. Some one threw my coat over me. I hadn’t any cash in the pockets, not much—I knew better than that—and I snored like a sow. Then it happened what I thought would happen. They talked. And here it is. They’re going to have a strike in the mills, and you’re to get a toss into the river. That’s to be on Friday. But the other thing—well, they all cleared away but two. They were the two that wanted to have it out with me. They stayed behind. There was I snoring like a locomotive, but my ears open all right.
“Well, they give the thing away. One of ‘em had just come from Felix Marchand and he was full of it. What was it? Why, the second night of the strike your new bridge over the river was to be blown up. Marchand was to give these two toughs three hundred dollars each for doing it.”
“Blown up with what?” Ingolby asked sharply.
“Dynamite.”
“Where would they get it?”
“Some left from blasting below the mills.”
“All right! Go on.”
“There wasn’t much more. Old Barbazon, the landlord, come in and they quit talking about it; but they said enough to send ‘em to gaol for ten years.”
Ingolby blinked at Jowett reflectively, and his mouth gave a twist that lent to his face an almost droll look.
“What good would it do if they got ten years—or one year, if the bridge was blown up? If they got skinned alive, and if Marchand was handed over to a barnful of hungry rats to be gnawed to death, it wouldn’t help. I’ve heard and seen a lot of hellish things, but there’s nothing to equal that. To blow up the bridge—for what? To spite Lebanon, and to hurt me; to knock the spokes out of my wheel. He’s the dregs, is Marchand.”
“I guess he’s a shyster by nature, that fellow,” interposed Jowett. “He was boilin’ hot when he was fifteen. He spoiled a girl I knew when he was twenty-two, not fourteen she was—Lil Sarnia; and he got her away before—well, he got her away East; and she’s in a dive in Winnipeg now. As nice a girl—as nice a little girl she was, and could ride any broncho that ever bucked. What she saw in him—but there, she was only a child, just the mind of a child she had, and didn’t understand. He’d ha’ been tarred and feathered if it’d been known. But old Mick Sarnia said hush, for his wife’s sake, and so we hushed, and Sarnia’s wife doesn’t know even now. I thought a lot of Lil, as much almost as if she’d been my own; and lots o’ times, when I think of it, I sit up straight, and the thing freezes me; and I want to get Marchand by the scruff of the neck. I got a horse, the worst that ever was—so bad I haven’t had the heart to ride him or sell him. He’s so bad he makes me laugh. There’s nothing he won’t do, from biting to bolting. Well, I’d like to tie Mr. Felix Marchand, Esquire, to his back, and let him loose on the prairie, and pray the Lord to save him if he thought fit. I fancy I know what the Lord would do. And Lil Sarnia’s only one. Since he come back from the States, he’s the limit, oh, the damnedest limit. He’s a pest all round-and now, this!”
Ingolby kept blinking reflectively as Jowett talked. He was doing two things at once with a facility quite his own. He was understanding all Jowett was saying, but he was also weighing the whole situation. His mind was gone fishing, figuratively speaking. He was essentially a man of action, but his action was the bullet of his mind; he had to be quiet physically when he was really thinking. Then he was as one in a dream where all physical motion was mechanical, and his body was acting automatically. His concentration, and therefore his abstraction, was phenomenal. Jowett’s reminiscences at a time so critical did not disturb him—did not, indeed, seem to be irrelevant. It was as though Felix Marchand was being passed in review before him in a series of aspects. He nodded encouragement to Jowett to go on.
“It’s because Marchand hates you, Chief. The bump he got when you dropped him on the ground that day at Carillon hurts still. It’s a chronic inflammation. Closing them railway offices at Manitou, and dislodging the officials give him his first good chance. The feud between the towns is worse now than it’s ever been. Make no mistake. There’s a whole lot of toughs in Manitou. Then there’s religion, and there’s race, and there’s a want-to-stand-still and leave-me-alone-feeling. They don’t want to get on. They don’t want progress. They want to throw the slops out of the top windows into the street; they want their cesspools at the front door; they think that everybody’s got to have smallpox some time or another, and the sooner they have it the better; they want to be bribed; and they think that if a vote’s worth having it’s worth paying for—and yet there’s a bridge between these two towns! A bridge—why, they’re as far apart as the Yukon and Patagonia.”
“What’d buy Felix Marchand?” Ingolby asked meditatively. “What’s his price?”
Jowett shifted with impatience. “Say, Chief, I don’t know what you’re thinking about. Do you think you could make a deal with Felix Marchand? Not much. You’ve got the cinch on him. You could send him to quod, and I’d send him there as quick as lightning. I’d hang him, if I could, for what he done to Lil Sarnia. Years ago when he was a boy he offered me a gold watch for a mare I had. The watch looked as right as could be—solid fourteen-carat, he said it was. He got my horse, and I got his watch. It wasn’t any more gold than he was. It was filled—just plated with nine-carat gold. It was worth about ten dollars.”
“What was the mare worth?” asked Ingolby, his mouth twisting again with quizzical meaning.
“That mare—she was all right.”
“Yes, but what was the matter with her?”
“Oh, a spavin—she was all right when she got wound up—go like Dexter or Maud S.”
“But if you were buying her what would you have paid for her, Jowett? Come now, man to man, as they say. How much did you pay for her?”
“About what she was worth, Chief, within a dollar or two.”
“And what was she worth?”
“What I paid for her-ten dollars.”
Then the two men looked at each other full in the eyes, and Jowett threw back his head and laughed outright—laughed loud and hard. “Well, you got me, Chief, right under the guard,” he observed.
Ingolby did not laugh outright, but there was a bubble of humour in his eyes. “What happened to the watch?” he asked.
“I got rid of it.”
“In a horse-trade?”
“No, I got a town lot with it.”
“In Lebanon?”
“Well, sort of in Lebanon’s back-yard.”
“What’s the lot worth now?”
“About two thousand dollars!”
“Was it your first town lot?”
“The first lot of Mother Earth I ever owned.”
“Then you got a vote on it?”
“Yes, my first vote.”
“And the vote let you be a town-councillor?”
“It and my good looks.”
“Indirectly, therefore, you are a landowner, a citizen, a public servant, and an instrument of progress because of Felix Marchand. If you hadn’t had the watch you wouldn’t have had that town lot.”
“Well, mebbe, not that lot.”
Suddenly Ingolby got to his feet and squared himself, and his face became alight with purpose. His mind had come back from fishing, and he was ready now for action. His plans were formed. He was in for a fight, and he had made up his mind how, with the new information to his hand, he would develop his campaign further.
“You didn’t make a fuss about the watch, Jowett. You might have gone to Felix Marchand or to his father and proved him a liar, and got even that way. You didn’t; you got a corner lot with it. That’s what I’m going to do. I can have Felix Marchand put in the jug, and make his old father, Hector Marchand, sick; but I like old Hector Marchand, and I think he’s bred as bad a pup as ever was. I’m going to try and do with this business as you did with that watch. I’m going to try and turn it to account and profit in the end. Felix Marchand’s profiting by a mistake of mine—a mistake in policy. It gives him his springboard; and there’s enough dry grass in both towns to get a big blaze with a very little match. I know that things are seething. The Chief Constable keeps me posted as to what’s going on here, and pretty fairly as to what’s going on in Manitou. The police in Manitou are straight enough. That’s one comfort. I’ve done Felix Marchand there. I guess that the Chief Constable of Manitou and Monseigneur Lourde and old Mother Thibadeau are about the only people that Marchand can’t bribe. I see I’ve got to face a scrimmage before I can get what I want.”
“What you want you’ll have, I bet,” was the admiring response.
“I’m going to have a good try. I want these two towns to be one. That’ll be good for your town lots, Jowett,” he added whimsically. “If my policy is carried out, my town lot’ll be worth a pocketful of gold-plated watches or a stud of spavined mares.” He chuckled to himself, and his fingers reached towards a bell on the table, but he paused. “When was it they said the strike would begin?” he asked.
“Friday.”
“Did they say what hour?”
“Eleven in the morning.”
“Third of a day’s work and a whole day’s pay,” he mused. “Jowett,” he added, “I want you to have faith. I’m going to do Marchand, and I’m going to do him in a way that’ll be best in the end. You can help as much if not more than anybody—you and Osterhaut. And if I succeed, it’ll be worth your while.”
“I ain’t followin’ you because it’s worth while, but because I want to, Chief.”
“I know; but a man—every man—likes the counters for the game.” He turned to the table, opened a drawer, and took out a folded paper. He looked it through carefully, wrote a name on it, and handed it to Jowett.
“There’s a hundred shares in the Northwest Railway, with my regards, Jowett. Some of the counters of the game.”
Jowett handed it back at once with a shake of the head. “I don’t live in Manitou,” he said. “I’m almost white, Chief. I’ve never made a deal with you, and don’t want to. I’m your man for the fun of it, and because I’d give my life to have your head on my shoulders for one year.”
“I’d feel better if you’d take the shares, Jowett. You’ve helped me, and I can’t let you do it for nothing.”
“Then I can’t do it at all. I’m discharged.” Suddenly, however, a humorous, eager look shot into Jowett’s face. “Will you toss for it?” he blurted out. “Certainly, if you like,” was the reply.
“Heads I win, tails it’s yours?”
“Good.”
Ingolby took a silver dollar from his pocket, and tossed. It came down tails. Ingolby had won.
“My corner lot against double the shares?” Jowett asked sharply, his face flushed with eager pleasure. He was a born gambler.
“As you like,” answered Ingolby with a smile. Ingolby tossed, and they stooped over to look at the dollar on the floor. It had come up heads. “You win,” said Ingolby, and turning to the table, took out another hundred shares. In a moment they were handed over.
“You’re a wonder, Jowett,” he said. “You risked a lot of money. Are you satisfied?”
“You bet, Chief. I come by these shares honestly now.”
He picked up the silver dollar from the floor, and was about to put it in his pocket.
“Wait—that’s my dollar,” said Ingolby.
“By gracious, so it is!” said Jowett, and handed it over reluctantly.
Ingolby pocketed it with satisfaction.
Neither dwelt on the humour of the situation. They were only concerned for the rules of the game, and both were gamesters in their way.
After a few brief instructions to Jowett, and a message for Osterhaut concerning a suit of workman’s clothes, Ingolby left his offices and walked down the main street of the town with his normal rapidity, responding cheerfully to the passers-by, but not encouraging evident desire for talk with him. Men half-started forward to him, but he held them back with a restraining eye. They knew his ways. He was responsive in a brusque, inquisitive, but good-humoured and sometimes very droll way; but there were times when men said to themselves that he was to be left alone; and he was so much master of the place that, as Osterhaut and Jowett frequently remarked, “What he says goes!” It went even with those whom he had passed in the race of power.
He had had his struggles to be understood in his first days in Lebanon. He had fought intrigue and even treachery, had defeated groups which were the forces at work before he came to Lebanon, and had compelled the submission of others. All these had vowed to “get back at him,” but when it became a question of Lebanon against Manitou they swung over to his side and acknowledged him as leader. The physical collision between the rougher elements of the two towns had brought matters to a head, and nearly every man in Lebanon felt that his honour was at stake, and was ready “to have it out with Manitou.”
As he walked along the main street after his interview with Jowett, his eyes wandered over the buildings rising everywhere; and his mind reviewed as in a picture the same thinly inhabited street five years ago when he first came. Now farmers’ wagons clacked and rumbled through the prairie dust, small herds of cattle jerked and shuffled their way to the slaughter-yard, or out to the open prairie, and caravans of settlers with their effects moved sturdily forward to the trails which led to a new life beckoning from three points of the compass. That point which did not beckon was behind them. Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians; square-jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered, loose-jointed Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair, looked curiously at each other and nodded understandingly. Jostling them all, with a jeer and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on each other and everybody, the settler from the United States asserted himself. He invariably obtruded himself, with quizzical inquiry, half contempt and half respect, on the young Englishman, who gazed round with phlegm upon his fellow adventurers, and made up to the sandy-faced Scot or the cheerful Irishman with his hat on the back of his head, who showed in the throng here and there. This was one of the days when the emigrant and settlers’ trains arrived both from the East and from “the States,” and Front Street in Lebanon had, from early morning, been alive with the children of hope and adventure.
With hands plunged deep in the capacious pockets of his grey jacket, Ingolby walked on, seeing everything; yet with his mind occupied intently, too, on the trouble which must be faced before Lebanon and Manitou would be the reciprocating engines of his policy. Coming to a spot where a great gap of vacant land showed in the street-land which he had bought for the new offices of his railway combine—he stood and looked at it abstractedly. Beyond it, a few blocks away, was the Sagalac, and beyond the Sagalac was Manitou, and a little way to the right was the bridge which was the symbol of his policy. His eyes gazed almost unconsciously on the people and the horses and wagons coming and going upon the bridge. Then they were lifted to the tall chimneys rising at two or three points on the outskirts of Manitou.
“They don’t know a good thing when they get it,” he said to himself. “A strike—why, wages are double what they are in Quebec, where most of ‘em come from! Marchand—”
A hand touched his arm. “Have you got a minute to spare, kind sir?” a voice asked.
Ingolby turned and saw Nathan Rockwell, the doctor. “Ah, Rockwell,” he responded cheerfully, “two minutes and a half, if you like! What is it?”
The Boss Doctor, as he was familiarly called by every one, to identify him from the newer importations of medical men, drew from his pocket a newspaper.
“There’s an infernal lie here about me,” he replied. “They say that I—”
He proceeded to explain the misstatement, as Ingolby studied the paper carefully, for Rockwell was a man worth any amount of friendship.
“It’s a lie, of course,” Ingolby said firmly as he finished the paragraph. “Well?”
“Well, I’ve got to deal with it.”
“You mean you’re going to deny it in the papers?”
“Exactly.”
“I wouldn’t, Rockwell.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No. You never can really overtake a newspaper lie. Lots of the people who read the lie don’t see the denial. Your truth doesn’t overtake the lie—it’s a scarlet runner.”
“I don’t see that. When you’re lied about, when a lie like that—”
“You can’t overtake it, Boss. It’s no use. It’s sensational, it runs too fast. Truth’s slow-footed. When a newspaper tells a lie about you, don’t try to overtake it, tell another.”
He blinked with quizzical good-humour. Rockwell could not resist the audacity. “I don’t believe you’d do it just the same,” he retorted decisively, and laughing.
“I don’t try the overtaking anyhow; I get something spectacular in my own favour to counteract the newspaper lie.”
“In what way?”
“For instance, if they said I couldn’t ride a moke at a village steeplechase, I’d at once publish the fact that, with a jack-knife, I’d killed two pumas that were after me. Both things would be lies, but the one would neutralize the other. If I said I could ride a moke, nobody would see it, and if it were seen it wouldn’t make any impression; but to say I killed two mountain-lions with a jack-knife on the edge of a precipice, with the sun standing still to look at it, is as good as the original lie and better; and I score. My reputation increases.”
Nathan Rockwell’s equilibrium was restored. “You’re certainly a wonder,” he declared. “That’s why you’ve succeeded.”
“Have I succeeded?”
“Thirty-three-and what you are!”
“What am I?”
“Pretty well master here.”
“Rockwell, that’d do me a lot of harm if it was published. Don’t say it again. This is a democratic country. They’d kick at my being called master of anything, and I’d have to tell a lie to counteract it.”
“But it’s the truth, and it hasn’t to be overtaken.”
A grim look came into Ingolby’s face. “I’d like to be master-boss of life and death, holder of the sword and balances, the Sultan, here just for one week. I’d change some things. I’d gag some people that are doing terrible harm. It’s a real bad business. The scratch-your-face period is over, and we’re in the cut-your-throat epoch.”
Rockwell nodded assent, opened the paper again, and pointed to a column. “I expect you haven’t seen that. To my mind, in the present state of things, it’s dynamite.”
Ingolby read the column hastily. It was the report of a sermon delivered the evening before by the Rev. Reuben Tripple, the evangelical minister of Lebanon. It was a paean of the Scriptures accompanied by a crazy charge that the Roman Church forbade the reading of the Bible. It had a tirade also about the Scarlet Woman and Popish idolatry.
Ingolby made a savage gesture. “The insatiable Christian beast!” he growled in anger. “There’s no telling what this may do. You know what those fellows are over in Manitou. The place is full of them going to the woods, besides the toughs at the mills and in the taverns. They’re not psalm-singing, and they don’t keep the Ten Commandments, but they’re savagely fanatical, and—”
“And there’s the funeral of an Orangeman tomorrow. The Orange Lodge attends in regalia.”
Ingolby started and looked at the paper again. “The sneaking, praying liar,” he said, his jaw setting grimly. “This thing’s a call to riot. There’s an element in Lebanon as well that’d rather fight than eat. It’s the kind of lie that—”
“That you can’t overtake,” said the Boss Doctor appositely; “and I don’t know that even you can tell another that’ll neutralize it. Your prescription won’t work here.”
An acknowledging smile played at Ingolby’s mouth. “We’ve got to have a try. We’ve got to draw off the bull with a red rag somehow.”
“I don’t see how myself. That Orange funeral will bring a row on to us. I can just see the toughs at Manitou when they read this stuff, and know about that funeral.”
“It’s announced?”
“Yes, here’s an invitation in the Budget to Orangemen to attend the funeral of a brother sometime of the banks of the Boyne!”
“Who’s the Master of the Lodge?” asked Ingolby. Rockwell told him, urging at the same time that he see the Chief Constable as well, and Monseigneur Lourde at Manitou.
“That’s exactly what I mean to do—with a number of other things. Between ourselves, Rockwell, I’d have plenty of lint and bandages ready for emergencies if I were you.”
“I’ll see to it. That collision the other day was serious enough, and it’s gradually becoming a vendetta. Last night one of the Lebanon champions lost his nose.”
“His nose—how?”
“A French river-driver bit a third of it off.”
Ingolby made a gesture of disgust. “And this is the twentieth century!”
They had moved along the street until they reached a barber-shop, from which proceeded the sound of a violin. “I’m going in here,” Ingolby said. “I’ve got some business with Berry, the barber. You’ll keep me posted as to anything important?”
“You don’t need to say it. Shall I see the Master of the Orange Lodge or the Chief Constable for you?” Ingolby thought for a minute. “No, I’ll tackle them myself, but you get in touch with Monseigneur Lourde. He’s grasped the situation, and though he’d like to have Tripple boiled in oil, he doesn’t want broken heads and bloodshed.”
“And Tripple?”
“I’ll deal with him at once. I’ve got a hold on him. I never wanted to use it, but I will now without compunction. I have the means in my pocket. They’ve been there for three days, waiting for the chance.”
“It doesn’t look like war, does it?” said Rockwell, looking up the street and out towards the prairie where the day bloomed like a flower. Blue above—a deep, joyous blue, against which a white cloud rested or slowly travelled westward; a sky down whose vast cerulean bowl flocks of wild geese sailed, white and grey and black, while the woods across the Sagalac were glowing with a hundred colours, giving tender magnificence to the scene. The busy eagerness of a pioneer life was still a quiet, orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement. In these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room to move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient. Even the disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and the sunlight.
“The only time I get frightened in life is when things look like that,” Ingolby answered. “I go round with a life-preserver on me when it seems as if ‘all’s right with the world.’”
The violin inside the barber-shop kept scraping out its cheap music—a coon-song of the day.
“Old Berry hasn’t much business this morning,” remarked Rockwell. “He’s in keeping with this surface peace.”
“Old Berry never misses anything. What we’re thinking, he’s thinking. I go fishing when I’m in trouble; Berry plays his fiddle. He’s a philosopher and a friend.”
“You don’t make friends as other people do.”
“I make friends of all kinds. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a kind of kinship with the roughs, the no-accounts, and the rogues.”
“As well as the others—I hope I don’t intrude!”
Ingolby laughed. “You? Oh, I wish all the others were like you. It’s the highly respectable members of the community I’ve always had to watch.”
The fiddle-song came squeaking out upon the sunny atmosphere. It arrested the attention of a man on the other side of the street—a stranger in strange Lebanon. He wore a suit of Western clothes as a military man wears mufti, if not awkwardly, yet with a manner not wholly natural—the coat too tight across the chest, too short in the body. However, the man was handsome and unusual in his leopard way, with his brown curling hair and well-cared-for moustache. It was Jethro Fawe.
Attracted by the sound of the violin, he stayed his steps and smiled scornfully. Then his look fell on the two figures at the door of the barber-shop, and his eyes flashed.
Here was the man he wished to see—Max Ingolby, the man who stood between him and his Romany lass. Here was a chance of speaking face to face with the man who was robbing him. What he should do when they met must be according to circumstances. That did not matter. There was the impulse storming in his brain, and it drove him across the street as the Boss Doctor walked away, and Ingolby entered the shop. All Jethro realized was that the man who stood in his way, the big, rich, masterful Gorgio was there.
He entered the shop after Ingolby, and stood for an instant unseen. The old negro barber with his curly white head, slave-black face, and large, shrewd, meditative eyes was standing in a corner with a violin under his chin, his cheek lovingly resting against it, as he drew his bow through the last bars of the melody. He had smiled in welcome as Ingolby entered, instantly rising from his stool, but continuing to play. He would not have stopped in the middle of a tune for an emperor, and he put Ingolby higher than an emperor. For one who had been born a slave, and had still the scars of the overseer’s whip on his back, he was very independent. He cut everybody’s hair as he wanted to cut it, trimmed each beard as he wished to trim it, regardless of its owner’s wishes. If there was dissent, then his customer need not come again, that was all. There were other barbers in the place, but Berry was the master barber. To have your head massaged by him was never to be forgotten, especially if you found your hat too small for your head in the morning. Also he singed the hair with a skill and care, which had filled many a thinly covered scalp with luxuriant growth, and his hair-tonic, known as “Smilax,” gave a pleasant odour to every meeting-house or church or public hall where the people gathered. Berry was an institution even in this new Western town. He kept his place and he forced the white man, whoever he was, to keep his place.
When he saw Jethro Fawe enter the shop he did not stop playing, but his eyes searched the newcomer. Following his glance, Ingolby turned round and saw the Romany. His first impression was one of admiration, but suspicion was quickly added. He was a good judge of men, and there was something secluded about the man which repelled him. Yet he was interested. The dark face had a striking racial peculiarity.
The music died away, and old Berry lowered the fiddle from his chin and gave his attention to the Romany.
“Yeth-’ir?” he said questioningly.
For an instant Jethro was confused. When he entered the shop he had not made up his mind what he should do. It had been mere impulse and the fever of his brain. As old Berry spoke, however, his course opened out.
“I heard. I am a stranger. My fiddle is not here. My fingers itch for the cat-gut. Eh?”
The look in old Berry’s face softened a little. His instinct had been against his visitor, and he had been prepared to send him to another shop-besides, not every day could he talk to the greatest man in the West.
“If you can play, there it is,” he said after a slight pause, and handed the fiddle over.
It was true that Jethro Fawe loved the fiddle. He had played it in many lands. Twice, in order to get inside the palace of a monarch for a purpose—once in Berlin and once in London—he had played the second violin in a Tzigany orchestra. He turned the fiddle slowly round, looking at it with mechanical intentness. Through the passion of emotion the sure sense of the musician was burning. His fingers smoothed the oval brown breast of the instrument with affection. His eyes found joy in the colour of the wood, which had all the graded, merging tints of Autumn leaves.
“It is old—and strange,” he said, his eyes going from Berry to Ingolby and back again with a veiled look, as though he had drawn down blinds before his inmost thoughts. “It was not made by a professional.”
“It was made in the cotton-field by a slave,” observed old Berry sharply, yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.
Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice sweepingly across the strings. Such a sound had never come from Berry’s violin before. It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had skill, but who had infinitely more of musical passion.
“Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!” Jethro said with a veiled look, and as though he was thinking of something else: “‘Dordi’, I’d like to meet a slave like that!”
At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look. He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill. Was the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here? Had it anything to do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter? But no—what was there strange in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle? Here and there in the West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany faces. He looked to see the effect of the stranger’s remark on old Berry.
“I was a slave, and I was like that. My father made that fiddle in the cotton-fields of Georgia,” the aged barber said.
The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order—the son of that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe. Here was a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man, to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at another’s will—and at no price! This was beyond the understanding of Jethro Fawe. But awe has the outward look of respect, and old Berry who had his own form of vanity, saw that he had had a rare effect on the fellow, who evidently knew all about fiddles. Certainly that was a wonderful sound he had produced from his own cotton-field fiddle.
In the pause Ingolby said to Jethro Fawe, “Play something, won’t you? I’ve got business here with Mr. Berry, but five minutes of good music won’t matter. We’d like to hear him play—wouldn’t we, Berry?”
The old man nodded assent. “There’s plenty of music in the thing,” he said, “and a lot could come out in five minutes, if the right man played it.”
His words were almost like a challenge, and it reached to Jethro’s innermost nature. He would show this Gorgio robber what a Romany could do, and do as easily as the birds sing. The Gorgio was a money-master, they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own way. He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in Hungary. He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband’s best friend. He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring not to look into each other’s eyes. He would play it now—a little of it. He would play it to her—to the girl who had set him free in the Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning. He would summon her here by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the music of the spheres. He would surround himself with an atmosphere of his own. His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and his lust should fill the barber’s shop with a flood which would drown the Gorgio raider. He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously. Then suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow across the strings with a savage softness. The old cottonfield fiddle cried out with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but muffled, as a hand at the lips turns agony into a tender moan. Some one—some spirit—in the fiddle was calling for its own.
Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder—the palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a minute looking into space, as though he saw a vision.
He was roused by old Berry’s voice. “Das a fiddle I wouldn’t sell for a t’ousand dollars. If I could play like dat I wouldn’t sell it for ten t’ousand. You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot—you.”
The Romany handed back the instrument. “It’s got something inside it that makes it better than it is. It’s not a good fiddle, but it has something—ah, man alive, it has something!” It was as though he was talking to himself.