In her imagination
a man came who had held her in his arms one day on the Sagalac River, who
had looked into her eyes with a masterful but respectful tenderness. As
she neared the confines of sleep, he was somehow mingled with visions of
things which her childhood had known--moonlit passes in the Bosnian,
Roumelian, and Roumanian hills, green fields by the Danube, with peasant
voices drowsing in song before the lights went out; a gallop after dun
deer far away up the Caspian mountains, over waste places, carpeted with
flowers after a benevolent rain; mornings in Egypt, when the camels
thudded and slid with melancholy ease through the sands of the desert,
while the Arab drivers called shrilly for Allah to curse or bless; a
tender sunset in England seen from the top of a castle when all the
western sky was lightly draped with saffron, gold and mauve and delicate
green and purple.
Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and
there was a smile at her lips. If one could have seen her through the
darkness, one would have said that she was like some wild creature of a
virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the
refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame
Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive
things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and
vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the
Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage.
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