A GYPSY SECRET
Hot tea and a blazing fire took the blue from Jeanne’s lips and restored
the natural faint flush to her fair cheeks.
“You say your boat was overturned?” Their hostess abruptly broke the
silence that had fallen upon them.
“Yes.”
“A rowboat?”
“Yes.”
“Was it broken?”
“I—I—” Florence hesitated. “I don’t think so.”
“Then we should go for it at once. The wind is rising. It is offshore.
The boat will drift across the bay. I have a rowboat. Perhaps you would
do well to come with me. It will be something of a task to right it.”
She had spoken to Florence. When Petite Jeanne understood that she was to
be left alone in this windowless cabin, she shuddered ever so slightly,
but said not a word.
“I will go,” replied Florence. She turned to Jeanne. “You will be more
contented here. The night air is very cold.”
They departed. Jeanne was alone. When she had made sure they were out of
hearing distance, she closed the door and dropped the massive oaken bar
in place.
Scarcely had she done this than she found herself possessed of the idea
that someone beside herself was in the cabin.
“There may be other rooms,” she told herself. She searched in vain for
doors leading to them. She looked under the bed.
Convinced at last that she was alone, she looked with wide-eyed interest
at her surroundings. The walls were made of oak paneling, very well
executed and polished to the last degree. The fireplace was massive. It
was built entirely of the strange honeycomb-like stone that is found in
places along the upper bays of Lake Huron.
“But why does she live where there is no light?” she asked herself in
amazement.
Hardly had she thought this than she became conscious for the first time
of a faint flush of yellow light lying on the floor at her feet.
On looking up to discover its source, she found herself staring at a very
broad double skylight some distance above her head.
“It’s like those one sees on the cabins of ships,” she told herself.
“Only higher up.”
Satisfied with her inspection of the place, she dropped into a commodious
chair and at once fell into a reverie which had to do with her past and
the very near future.
How strange her life seemed to her as she reviewed it here in the dim
lights of such unusual surroundings!
Petite Jeanne, as you well know from reading _The Gypsy Shawl_, was born
in France. Her family, one of the country’s best, had been impoverished
by the war. The war had left her an orphan. Possessed only of a pet bear,
she had looked about for some means of support. A friendly and honorable
gypsy, Bihari, had taken her into his family. She had learned to do the
gypsy dances with her bear.
These she had performed so divinely that in a contest she had been chosen
from many other dancers to represent the wanderers of France in a charity
pageant to be given at the Paris Opera.
After many perils, brought upon her by the green-eyed jealousy of other
gypsies, she had achieved a singular triumph on that great occasion.
As guests of this pageant, two Americans sat in a box that night. One was
a playwright, the other a producer.
As the dance progressed, as Petite Jeanne, seeming fairly to fly through
the air, passed from one movement to another in her bewitching dance, one
of these men touched the other lightly on the arm to whisper: “She is the
one.”
“The very one,” the other had whispered back.
“We must have her.”
“We will.”
That was all for the time. But now, after several months, Petite Jeanne,
as she sat in this cabin by the side of a great lake, reveled in the
dream of flitting through her gypsy dance with two thousand Americans
swaying in unconscious rhythm to her every movement, and that not one
night, but many nights on end.
“Nights and nights and nights,” she now murmured, as she clasped her
hands before her.
But suddenly, as if a cloud had fallen over all, she became conscious
once more of dim light and night. Not alone that. There came to her now a
sense of approaching danger.
The gypsies are curious people. Who knows what uncanny power they
possess? A gypsy, a very old woman, had in some way imparted to Petite
Jeanne some of this power. It gave her the ability to divine the presence
of those she knew, even when they were some distance away. Was it mental
telepathy? Did these others think, and were their thoughts carried by who
knows what power, as the radio message is carried over the ether, to this
girl’s sensitive brain? Who knows? Enough that a message now came; that
it caused her to shudder and glance hurriedly about her.
“Gypsies,” she said aloud. “There must be gypsies near, French gypsies,
my enemies.”
Yet, even as she said this, the thing seemed absurd. She had inquired of
the native population concerning gypsies. They did not so much as know
that such people existed. This section of the country, where the greater
part of all travel is done on water, and where the people are poor, has
seldom been visited by a gypsy caravan.
“And yet,” she said with conviction, “they _are_ near!”