tanding
back from that moon, vague and spectral, the face. In this human night
and moon, great sombre eyes gleamed with a sort of fatigued beauty. This
spectre stretched out its long arms in weird gesticulations and
sometimes swayed its body as if it moved to music. And from its lips
came a soft and liquid stream of golden words that mingled with the acid
barking of the dogs, some of which crept furtively about on the
outskirts of the serene hooded circle of the listeners. This murmuring
spectre was Claire. She was girt about with silently staring Moors. And
she was in the act of delivering one of her most famous recitations,
which she had last given at a monster morning performance before
Royalties in London, on a sultry day of the season. As this fact broke
upon Renfrew's mind, he seemed for a moment to be back in the hot
dressing-room in which Claire had said: "I will marry you." He seemed to
hear her passionate exclamation: "I should like to act to-night to a
circle of savages!" The hill men of this part of Morocco may not be
savages, but they are fierce and wild and ruthless. And now they hung
upon the lips that had spoken to London, Paris, Vienna, New York--but
never before to such an audience as this. The recitation was a
description of the performance of a snake-charmer, his harangue to his
reptiles and to the crowd watching him, and his departure into the
solitude of the great desert, there to obtain, in communion with its
spirit, the power to work greater miracles, and to charm not alone the
serpents that dwell among the rocks and in the forests, but also men,
women, little children,--the power to thrust a human world into a kennel
of plaited straw, to take it out in sections at pleasure, and to make it
dance, pose, and posture, like a viper tamed into a species of
ballet-dancer. In this recitation the peculiar and almost serpentine
fascination of Claire had full liberty. She represented the
snake-charmer as a being who through long and intimate association with
snakes had become like them, lithe, fantastic, and unexpected, soft and
deadly, by turns sleepy and violent, a coil of glistening velvet and a
length of cast-iron, tipped with a poisoned fang and the music of a
hiss. His fanaticism, his greed for money, the passionate prayer to Sidi
Mahomet that flowed from his lips while his terrible eyes searched an
imaginary crowd in search of the richest man or the most excited woman
in it, his bursts of dancing hum