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To her own myths she had added Danish ones. "De wehr-wolf, yes, me chile! Dem nights w'en de moon shine bright and de dogs a-barkin', you see twelb dogs a-talkin' togedder in a ring, and one in de middle. Strangest, wildest practice of the slaves was the hideous misuse Christian masters allowed them to make of Chrismas Day and week. It was then they danced the bamboula, incessantly.
Well, one reading is a good deal rarer than the other. So you mean to disobey the Hawk to-night? I like you for that. But listen here did you ever hear them talk of Marquise?" "No!" "Parbleu!" swore the vivandiere in her wrath, "you look on at a bamboula as if it were only a bear-cub dancing, and can only give one 'yes' and 'no, as if one were a drummer-boy. Bah! are those your Paris courtesies?"
Soon the dancers began to gather in the booths; women in gorgeous trailing gowns, the men bearing showy batons and clad in gay shirts or satin jackets, and with a mongrel infant rabble at their heels. When the goombay a flour-barrel drum sounded, the town knew the bamboula had begun.
She dropped her head suddenly like a wounded bird, and the racy, vindictive camp oaths died off her lips. She thought of herself as she had danced that mad bacchic bamboula amid the crowd of shouting, stamping, drunken, half-infuriated soldiery; and for the moment she hated herself more even than she hated that patrician yonder.
Two, only, still looked on the Chasseur d'Afrique, and a veteran of the 10th company, lamed for life at Mazagran. "Are you a stupid? Don't you dance?" muttered the veteran Zephyr to his silent companion. The Chasseur turned and smiled a little. "I prefer a bamboula whose music is the cannon, bon pere." "Bravo! Yet she is pretty enough to tempt you?" "Yes; too pretty to be unsexed by such a life."
It was the eastern bamboula of the Harems, to which was added all the elastic joyance, all the gay brilliancy of the blood of France. Suddenly she lifted both her hands above her head.
This afternoon Epinglard is in a theorizing mood, and, after having sent for Bamboula, as he calls her familiarly, a dark-skinned model, he drapes her in a pale-yellow tulle dress, and proceeds to lament that so few Frenchwomen will wear yellow, owing to a silly popular prejudice. "Ah, madame la baronne," he continues, "you cannot conceive what lovely combinations of rose and yellow I have made.
"If those are the women that he knew before he came here, I do not wonder that he never cared to watch even my bamboula," was the latent, unacknowledged thought that was so cruel to her: the consciousness which forced itself in on her, while her eyes jealously followed the perfect grace of the one in whom instinct had found her rival that, while she had been so proud of her recklessness, and her devilry, and her trooper's slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she had only been something very worthless, something very lightly held by those who liked her for a ribald jest, and a dance, and a Spahis' supper of headlong riot and drunken mirth.
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