"
"Indeed," the manager answered, now beginning to be really
interested--for the Cliffords were clients too, and it behoves
a banker to know everything about everybody's business. "So Mrs.
Clifford had an ancestress who was a Roumanian, had she? Well,
I've noticed at times her complexion looked very southern and
gipsy-like--distinctly un-English."
"Oh, they call it Roumanian," Colonel Kelmscott went on in a
confidential tone, roping his white moustache, and growing more
and more conversational; "they call it Roumanian, because it sounds
more respectable; but I believe, if you go right down to the very
bottom of the thing, it was much more like some kind of Oriental
gipsy. Sir Michael Ewes, the founder of the house, in George the
Second's time, was ambassador for awhile at Constantinople. He
began life, indeed, I believe, as a Turkey merchant. Well, at Pera
one day, so the story goes--you'll find it all in Horace Walpole's
diary--he picked up with this dark-skinned gipsy-woman, who was a
wonderful creature in her way, a sort of mesmeric sorceress, who
belonged to some tribe of far eastern serpent charmers. It seems
that women of this particular tribe were regularly trained by the
men to be capering priestesses--or fortune-tellers, if you like--who
performed some extraordinary sacred antics of a mystical kind,
much after the fashion of the howling dervishes.
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