The Complete Short Works of Georg Ebers | Page 5

Kuni out to fill it again. In turning to do so he saw her pale face, wan with suffering, but which now glowed with a happy light that lent it a strange beauty. How large her blue eyes were! When he had picked her up in Spain she was already a cripple and in sore distress. But Groland probably knew what he was about when he released her. She must have been a pretty creature enough at that time, and he knew that before her fall she was considered one of the most skilful rope-dancers.
An elderly woman with a boy, whose blindness helped her to arouse compassion, was crouching by Raban's side, and had just been greeted by Kuni as an old acquaintance. They had journeyed from land to land in Loni's famous troupe, and as Raban handed Cyriax his own bottle, he turned from the dreaming girl, whose services he no longer needed, and whispered to the blind boy's mother--who among the people of her own calling still went by the name of Dancing Gundel--the question whether yonder ailing cripple had once had any good looks, and what position she had held among rope-dancers.
The little gray-haired woman looked up with sparkling eyes. Under the name of "Phyllis" she had earned, ere her limbs were stiffened by age, great applause by her dainty egg-dance and all sorts of feats with the balancing pole. The manager of the band had finally given her the position of crier to support herself and her blind boy. This had made her voice so hollow and hoarse that it was difficult to understand her as, with fervid eloquence, vainly striving to be heard by absent-minded Kuni, she began: "She surpassed even Maravella the Spaniard. And her feats at Augsburg during the Reichstag--I tell you, Cyriax, when she ascended the rope to the belfry, with the pole and without--"
"I've just heard of that from another quarter," he interrupted. "What I want to know is whether she pleased the eyes of men."
"What's that to you?" interposed red-haired Gitta jealously, trying to draw him away from Gundel by the chain.
Raban laughed heartily, and lame Jungel, chuckling, rapped on the floor with his right crutch, exclaiming:
"Good for you!"
Kuni was accustomed to such outbursts of merriment. They were almost always awakened by some trifle, and this time she did not even hear the laughing. But Cyriax struck his wife so rudely on the hand that she jerked furiously at the chain and, with a muttered oath, blew on the bruised spot. Meanwhile Gundel was telling the group how many distinguished gentlemen had formerly paid court to Kuni. She was as agile as a squirrel. Her pretty little face, with its sparkling blue eyes, attracted the men as bacon draws mice. Then, pleased to have listeners, she related how the girl had lured florins and zecchins from the purse of many a wealthy ecclesiastic. She might have been as rich as the Fuggers if she hadn't met with the accident and had understood how to keep what she earned. But she could not hold on to her gold. She had flung it away like useless rubbish. So long as she possessed anything there had been no want in Loni's company. She, Gundel, had caught her arm more than once when she was going to fling Hungarian ducats, instead of coppers, to good-for-nothing beggars. She had often urged her, too, to think of old age, but Kuni--never cared for any one longer than a few weeks, though there were some whom she might easily have induced to offer her the wedding ring.
She glanced at Kuni again, but, perceiving that the girl did not yet vouchsafe her even a single look, she was vexed, and, moving nearer to Cyriax, she added in a still lower tone:
"A more inconstant, faithless, colder heart than hers I never met, even among the most disorderly of Loni's band; for, blindly as the infatuated lovers obeyed every one of her crazy whims, she laughed at the best and truest. 'I hate them all,' she would say. 'I wouldn't let one of them even touch me with the tip of his finger if I could not use their zecchins. 'With these,' she said, 'she would help the rich to restore to the poor what they had stolen from them.' She really treated many a worthy gentleman like a dog, nay, a great deal worse; for she was tender enough to all the animals that travelled with the company; the poodles and the ponies, nay, even the parrots and the doves. She would play with the children, too, even the smallest ones--isn't that so, Peperle?--like their own silly mothers." She smoothed the blind boy's golden hair as she spoke, then added, sighing:
"But the little fellow was too young to remember