The day of James Andersen’s funeral and of Gladys’ confirmation happened to coincide with a remarkable and unexpected event in the life of Mr. Quincunx. Whatever powers, lurking in air or earth, were attempting at that moment to influence the fatal stream of events in Nevilton, must have been grimly conscious of something preordained and inevitable about this eccentric man’s drift towards appalling moral disaster.

It seemed as though nothing on earth now could stop the marriage of Lacrima and Goring, and from the point of view of the moralist, or even of the person of normal decency, such a marriage, if it really did lead to Mr. Quincunx’s pensioning at the hands of his enemy, necessarily held over him a shame and a disgrace proportionate to the outrage done to the girl who loved him. What these evil powers played upon, if evil powers they were,—and not the blind laws of cause and effect,—was the essential character of Mr. Quincunx, which nothing in heaven nor earth seemed able to change.

There are often, however, elements in our fate, which lie, it might seem, deeper than any calculable prediction, deeper, it may be, than the influence of the most powerful supernatural agents, and these elements—unstirred by angel or devil—are sometimes roused to activity by the least expected cause. It is, at these moments, as though Fate, in the incalculable comprehensiveness of her immense designs, condescended to make use of Chance, her elfish sister, to carry out what the natural and normal stream of things would seem to have decreed as an impossibility.

Probably not a living soul who knew him,—certainly not Lacrima,—had the least expectation of any chance of change in Mr. Quincunx. But then none of these persons had really sounded the depths in the soul of the man. There were certain mysterious and unfathomable gulfs in the sea-floor of Mr. Quincunx’s being which would have exhausted all the sorceries of Witch-Bessie even to locate.

So fantastic and surprising are the ways of destiny, that,—as shall be presently seen,—what neither gods nor devils, nor men nor angels, could effect, was effected by nothing more nor less than a travelling circus.

The day of the burying of James and the confirmation of Gladys brought into Nevilton a curious cortÈge of popular entertainers. This cortÈge consisted of one of those small wandering circuses, which, during the month of August are wont to leave the towns and move leisurely among the remoter country villages, staying nowhere more than a night, and taking advantage of any local festival or club-meeting to enhance their popularity.

The circus in question,—flamingly entitled Porter’s Universal World-Show,—was owned and conducted by a certain Job Love, a shrewd and avaricious ruffian, who boasted, though with little justification, the inheritance of gipsy blood. As a matter of fact, the authentic gipsy tribes gave Mr. Love an extremely wide berth, avoiding his path as they would have avoided the path of the police. This cautious attitude was not confined, however, to gipsies. Every species of itinerant hawker and pedler avoided the path of Mr. Love, and the few toy-booths and sweet-stalls that followed his noisy roundabouts were a department of his own providing.

It was late on Tuesday night when the World-Show established itself in Nevilton Square. The sound of hammers and the barking of dogs was the last thing that the villagers heard before they slept, and the first thing they heard when they awoke.

The master of the World-Show spent the night according to his custom in solitary regal grandeur in the largest of his caravans. The sun had not, however, pierced the white mists in the Nevilton orchards before Mr. Love was up and abroad. The first thing he did, on descending the steps of his caravan, was to wash his hands and face in the basin of the stone fountain. His next proceeding was to measure out into a little metal cup which he produced from his pocket a small quantity of brandy and to pour this refreshment, diluted with water from the fountain, down his capacious throat.

Mr. Love was a lean man, of furtive and irascible appearance. His countenance, bleached by exposure into a species of motley-coloured leather, shone after its immersion in the fountain like the knob of a well-worn cudgel. His whitish hair, cut in convict style close to his head, emphasized the polished mahogany of his visage, from the upper portion of which his sky-blue eyes, small and glittering, shone out defiantly upon the world, like ominous jewels set in the forehead of an obscene and smoke-darkened idol.

Having replaced his cup and flask in his pocket, the master of the World-Show looked anxiously at the omens of the weather, snuffing the morning breeze with the air of one not lightly to be fooled either by rain or shine. Returning to the still silent circus, he knocked sharply with his knuckles at the door of the smallest of the three caravans.

“Flick!” he shouted, “let me in! Flick! Old Flick! Darn ’ee, man, for a blighting sand-louse! Open the door, God curse you! Old Flick! Old Flick! Old Flick!”

Thus assaulted, the door of the caravan was opened from within, and Mr. Love pushed his way into the interior. A strange enough sight met him when once inside.

The individual apostrophized as “Old Flick” closed and bolted the door with extraordinary precaution, as soon as his master had entered, and then turned and hovered nervously before him, while Mr. Love sank down on the only chair in the place. The caravan was bare of all furniture except a rough cooking-stove and a three-legged deal table. But it was at neither of these objects that Job Love stared, as he tilted back his chair and waved impatiently aside the deprecatory old man.

Stretched on a ragged horse-blanket upon the floor lay a sleeping child. Clothed in little else than a linen bodice and a short flannel petticoat, she turned restlessly in her slumber under Mr. Love’s scrutiny, and crossing one bare leg over the other, flung out a long white arm, while her dark curls, disturbed by her movement, fell over her face and hid it from view.

“Ah!” remarked Mr. Love. “Quieter now, I see. She must dance today, Flick, and no mistake about it! You must take her out in the fields this morning, like you did that other one. I can’t have no more rampaging and such-like, in my decent circus. But she must dance, there’s no getting over that,—she must dance, Old Flick! ’Twas your own blighting notion to take her on, remember; and I can’t have no do-nothing foreigners hanging around, specially now August be come.

“What did she say her nonsense-name was? Lores,—Dolores? Whoever heard tell of such a name as that?”

The sound of his voice seemed to reach the child even in her sleep; for flinging her arms over her head, and turning on her back, she uttered a low indistinguishable murmur. Her eyes, however, remained closed, the dark curves of her long eye-lashes contrasting with the scarlet of her mouth and the ivory pallor of her skin.

Even Job Love—though not precisely an Æsthete—was struck by the girl’s beauty.

“She’ll make a fine dancer, Flick, a fine dancer! How old dost think she be? ’Bout twelve, or may-be more, I reckon.

“’Tis pity she won’t speak no Christian word. ’Tis wonderful, how these foreign childer do hold so obstinate by their darned fancy-tongue!

“We must trim her out in them spangle-gauzes of Skipsy Jane. She were the sort of girl to make the boys holler. But this one’ll do well enough, I reckon, if so be she goes smilin’ and chaffin’ upon the boards.

“But no more of that devil’s foolery, Flick? Dost hear, man? Take her out into the fields;—take her out into the fields! She must dance and she must smile, all in Skipsy Jane’s spangles, come noon this day. She must do so, Flick—or I ain’t Jobie Love!”

The old man paused in his vague moth-like hovering, and surveyed the outstretched figure. His own appearance was curious enough to excite a thrill of intense curiosity, had any less callous eye but that of his master been cast upon him.

He produced the effect not so much of a living person, animated by natural impulses, as of a dead body possessed by some sort of wandering spirit which made use of him for its own purposes.

If by chance this spirit were to desert him, one felt that what would be left of Old Flick would be nothing but the mask of a man,—a husk, a shard, a withered stalk, a wisp of dried-up grass! The old creature was as thin as a lathe; and his cavernous, colourless eyes and drooping jaw looked, in that indistinct light, as vague and shadowy as though they belonged to some phantasmal mirage of mist and rain drifted in from the sleeping fields.

“How did ’ee ever get Mother Sterner to let ’ee have so dainty a bit of goods?” went on Mr. Love, continuing his survey of their unconscious captive. “The old woman must have been blind-scared of the police or summat, so as to want to be free of the maid. ’Tisn’t every day you can pick up a lass so cut out for the boards as she be.”

At intervals during his master’s discourse the parchment-like visage of the old man twisted and contorted itself, as if with the difficulty of finding words.

When Job Love at last became silent, the words issued from him as if they had been rustling eddies of chaff, blown through dried stalks.

“I’ve tried her with one thing, Mister, and I’ve tried her with another,—but ’tis no use; she do cry and cry, and there’s no handling her. I guess I must take her into them fields, as you do say. ’Tis because of folks hearing that she do carry on so.”

Job Love frowned and scratched his forehead.

“Damn her,” he cried, “for a limpsy cat! Well—Old Flick—ye picked her up and ye must start her off. This show don’t begin till nigh along noon,—so if ye thinks ye can bring her to reason, some ways or t’other ways, off with ’ee, my man! Get her a bite of breakfast first,—and good luck to ’ee! Only don’t let’s have no fuss, and don’t let’s have no onlookers. I’m not the man to stand for any law-breaking. This show’s a decent show, and Job Love’s a decent man. If the wench makes trouble, ye must take her back where she did come from. Mother Sterner’ll have to slide down. I can’t have no quarrels with King and Country, over a limpsy maid like she!”

Uttering these words in a tone of formidable finality, Mr. Love moved to the entrance and let himself out.

Their master gone, Old Flick turned waveringly to the figure on the floor. Taking down a faded coat from its peg on the wall, he carefully spread it over the child, tucking it round her body with shaking hands. He then went to the stove in the corner, lit it, and arranged the kettle. From the stove he turned to the three-legged table; and removing from a hanging cupboard a tea-pot, some cups and plates, a loaf of bread and a pat of butter, he set out these objects with meticulous nicety, avoiding the least clatter or sound. This done, he sat down upon the solitary chair, and waited the boiling of the water with inscrutable passivity.

From outside the caravan came the shuffle of stirring feet and the murmur of subdued and drowsy voices. The camp was beginning to enter upon its labour of preparation.

When he had made tea, Old Flick touched his sleeping captive lightly on the shoulder.

The girl started violently, and sat up, with wide-open eyes. She began talking hurriedly, protesting and imploring; but not a word of her speech was intelligible to Old Flick, for the simple reason that it was Italian,—Italian of the Neapolitan inflexion.

The old man handed her a strong cup of tea, together with a large slice of bread-and-butter, uttering as he did so all manner of soothing and reassuring words. When she had finished her breakfast he brought her water and soap.

“Tidy thee-self up, my pretty,” he said. “We be goin’ out, along into them fields, present.”

Bolting the caravan door on the outside, he shuffled off to the fountain to perform his own ablutions, and to assist his companions in unloading the stage-properties, and setting up the booths and swings. After the lapse of an hour he climbed the caravan-steps and re-entered softly.

He found the girl crouched in a corner, her hands clasped over her knees, and traces of tears upon her cheeks. Before leaving her, the old man had placed shoes and stockings by her side, and these she now wore, together with a dark-coloured skirt and a scarlet gipsy-shawl.

“Come,” he said. “Thee be goin’ wi’ I into the fields. Thee be goin’ to learn a dancin’ trick or two. Show opens along of noon; and Master, he’s goin’ to let ’ee have Skipsy Jane’s spangles.”

How much of this the child understood it is impossible to say; but the old man’s tone was not threatening, and the idea of being taken away—somewhere—anywhere—roused vague hopes in her soul. She pulled the red shawl over her head and let him lead her by the hand.

Down the steps they clambered, and hurriedly threaded their way across the square.

The old man took the road towards Yeoborough, and turned with the girl up Dead Man’s Lane. He was but dimly acquainted with the neighbourhood; but once before, in his wanderings as a pedler, he had encamped in a certain grassy hollow bordering on the Auber Woods, and the memory of the seclusion of this spot drew him now.

As they passed Mr. Quincunx’s garden they encountered the solitary himself, who, in his sympathy with Luke Andersen on this particular day, had resolved to pay the young man an early morning visit.

The recluse looked with extreme and startled interest at this singular pair. The child’s beauty struck him with a shock that almost took his breath away. There was something about the haunting expression of her gaze as she turned it upon him that roused an overpowering flood of tenderness and pity in untouched abysses of his being.

There must have been some instantaneous reciprocity in the eccentric man’s grey eyes, for the young girl turned back after they had passed, and throwing the shawl away from her head, fixed upon him what seemed a deliberate and beseeching look of appeal.

Mr. Quincunx was so completely carried out of his normal self by this imploring look that he went so far as to answer its inarticulate prayer by a wave of his hand, and by a sign that indicated,—whether she understood it or not,—that he intended to render her assistance.

In his relations with Lacrima Mr. Quincunx was always remotely conscious that the girl’s character was stronger than his own, and—Pariah-like—this had the effect of lessening the emotion he felt towards her.

But now—in the look of the little Dolores—there was an appeal from a weakness and helplessness much more desperate than his own,—an appeal to him from the deepest gulfs of human dependence. The glance she had given him burned in his brain like a coal of white fire. It seemed to cry out to him from all the flotsam and jetsam, all the drift and wreckage of everything that had ever been drowned, submerged, and stranded, by the pitilessness of Life, since the foundation of the world.

The child’s look had indeed the same effect upon Mr. Quincunx that the look of his Master had upon the fear-stricken Apostle, in the hall of Caiaphas the high priest. In one heart-piercing stab it brought to his overpowered consciousness a vision of all the victims of cruelty who had ever cried aloud for help since the generations of men began their tragic journey.

Perhaps to all extremely sensitive natures of Mr. Quincunx’s type, a type of morbidly self-conscious weakness as well as sensitiveness, the electric stir produced by beauty and sex can only reach a culmination when the medium of its appearance approximates to the extreme limit of fragility and helplessness.

Hell itself, so to speak, had to display to him its span-long babes, before he could be aroused to descend and “harrow” it! But once roused in him, this latent spirit of the pitiful Son of Man became formidable, reckless, irresistible. The very absence in him of the usual weight of human solidity and “character” made him the more porous to this divine mood.

Anyone who watched him returning hastily to his cottage from the garden-gate would have been amazed by the change in his countenance. He looked and moved like a man under a blinding illumination. So must the citizen of Tarsus have looked, when he staggered into the streets of Damascus.

He literally ran into his kitchen, snatched up his hat and stick, poured a glass of milk down his throat, put a couple of biscuits into his pocket, and re-issued, ready for his strange pursuit. He hurried up the lane to the first gate that offered itself, and passing into the field continued the chase on the further side of the hedge.

The old man evidently found the hill something of an effort, for it was not long before Mr. Quincunx overtook them.

He passed them by unremarked, and continued his advance along the hedgerow till he reached the summit of the ridge between Wild Pine and Seven Ashes. Here, concealed behind a clump of larches, he awaited their approach. To his surprise, they entered one of the fields on the opposite side of the road, and began walking across it.

Mr. Quincunx watched them. In a corner of the field they were crossing lay a spacious hollow,—once the bed of a pond,—but now quite dry and overgrown with moss and clover.

Old Flick’s instinct led him to this spot, as one well adapted to the purpose he had in mind, both by reason of its absolute seclusion and by reason of its smooth turf-floor.

Mr. Quincunx waited till their two figures vanished into this declivity, and then he himself crossed the field in their track.

Having reached the mossy level of the vanished pond,—a place which seemed as though Nature herself had designed it with a view to his present intention,—Old Flick assumed a less friendly air towards his captive. A psychologist interested in searching out the obscure workings of derelict and submerged souls, would have come to the speedy conclusion as he watched the old man’s cadaverous face that the spirit which at present animated his corpse-like body was one that had little commiseration or compunction in it.

The young Dolores had not, it seemed, to deal at this moment with an ordinary human scoundrel, but with a faded image of humanity galvanized into life by some conscienceless Larva.

In proportion as this unearthly obsession grew upon Old Flick, his natural countenance grew more and more dilapidated and withered. Innumerable years seemed suddenly added to the burden he already carried. The lines of his face assumed a hideous and Egyptian immobility; only his eyes, as he turned them upon his companion, were no longer colourless.

“Doll,” said he, “now thee must try thee’s steps, or ’twill be the worse for thee!”

The girl only answered by flinging herself down on her knees before him, and pouring forth unintelligible supplications.

“No more o’ this,” cried the old man; “no more o’ this! I’ve got to learn ’ee to dance,—and learn ’ee to dance I will. Ye’ll have to go on them boards come noon, whether ’ee will or no!”

The child only clasped her hands more tightly together, and renewed her pleading.

It would have needed the genius of some supreme painter, and of such a painter in an hour of sheer insanity, to have done justice to the extraordinary expression that crossed the countenance of Old Flick at that moment. The outlines of his face seemed to waver and decompose. None but an artist who had, like the insatiable Leonardo, followed the very dead into their forlorn dissolution, could have indicated the setting of his eyes; and his eyes themselves, madness alone could have depicted.

With a sudden vicious jerk the old man snatched the shawl from the girl’s shoulders, flung it on the ground, and seizing her by the wrists pulled her up upon her feet.

“Dance, ye baggage!” he cried hoarsely;—“dance, I tell ’ee!”

It was plain that the luckless waif understood clearly enough now what was required of her, and it was also plain that she recognized that the moment for supplication had gone by. She stepped back a pace or two upon the smooth turf, and slipping off her unlaced shoes,—shoes far too large for her small feet,—she passed the back of her hand quickly across her eyes, shook her hair away from her forehead, and began a slow, pathetic little dance.

“Higher!” cried Old Flick in an excited voice, beating the air with his hand and humming a strange snatch of a tune that might have inspired the dances of Polynesian cannibals. “Higher, I tell ’ee!”

The girl felt compelled to obey; and putting one hand on her hip and lifting up her skirt with the other, she proceeded, shyly and in forlorn silence, to dance an old Neapolitan folk-dance, such as might be witnessed, on any summer evening, by the shores of Amalfi or Sorrento.

It was at this moment that Mr. Quincunx made his appearance against the sky-line above them. He looked for one brief second at the girl’s bare arms, waving curls, and light-swinging body, and then leapt down between them.

All nervousness, all timidity, seemed to have fallen away from him like a snake’s winter-skin under the spring sun. He seized the child’s hand with an air of indescribable gentleness and authority, and made so menacing and threatening a gesture that Old Flick, staggering backwards, nearly fell to the ground.

“Whose child is this?” he demanded sternly, soothing the frightened little dancer with one hand, while with the other he shook his cane in the direction of the gasping and protesting old man.

“Whose child is this? You’ve stolen her, you old rascal! You’re no Italian,—anyone can see that! You’re a damned old tramp, and if you weren’t so old and ugly I’d beat you to death; do you hear?—to death, you villain! Whose child is she? Can’t you speak? Take care; I’m badly tempted to make you taste this,—to make you skip and dance a little!

“What do you say? Job Love’s circus? Well,—he’s not an Italian either, is he? So if you haven’t stolen her, he has.”

He turned to the child, stooping over her with infinite tenderness, and folding the shawl of which she had again possessed herself, with hands as gentle as a mother’s, about her shoulders and head.

“Where are your parents, my darling?” he asked, adding with a flash of amazing presence of mind,—“your ‘padre’ and ‘madre’?”

The girl seemed to get the drift of the question, and with a pitiful little smile pointed earthward, and made a sweeping gesture with both her hands, as if to indicate the passing of death’s wings.

“Dead?—both dead, eh?” muttered Mr. Quincunx. “And these rascals who’ve got hold of you are villains and rogues? Damned rogues! Damned villains!”

He paused and muttered to himself. “What the devil’s the Italian for a god-forsaken rascal?—‘Cattivo!’ ‘Tutto cattivo!’—the whole lot of them a set of confounded scamps!”

The child nodded her head vigorously.

“You see,” he cried, turning to Old Flick, “she disowns you all. This is clearly a most knavish piece of work! What were you doing to the child? eh? eh? eh?” Mr. Quincunx accompanied these final syllables with renewed flourishes of his stick in the air.

Old Flick retreated still further away, his legs shaking under him. “Here,—you can clear out of this! Do you understand? You can clear out of this; and go back to your damned master, and tell him I’m going to send the police after him!

“As for this girl, I’m going to take her home with me. So off you go,—you old reprobate; and thankful you may be that I haven’t broken every bone in your body! I’ve a great mind to do it now. Upon my soul I’ve a great mind to do it!

“Shall I beat him into a jelly for you,—my darling? Shall I make him skip and dance for you?”

The child seemed to understand his gestures, if not his words; for she clung passionately to his hands, and pressing them to her lips, covered them with kisses; shaking her head at the same time, as much as to say, “Old Flick is nothing. Let Old Flick go to the devil, as long as I can stay with you!” In some such manner as this, at any rate, Mr. Quincunx interpreted her words.

“Sheer off, then, you old scoundrel! Shog off back to your confounded circus! And when you’ve got there, tell your friends,—Job Love and his gang,—that if they want this little one they’d better come and fetch her!

“Dead Man’s Lane,—that’s where I live. It’s easily enough found; and so is the police-station in Yeoborough,—as you and your damned kidnappers shall discover before you’ve done with me!”

Uttering these words in a voice so menacing that the old man shook like an aspen-leaf, Mr. Quincunx took the girl by the hand, and, ascending the grassy slope, walked off with her across the field.

Old Flick seemed reduced to a condition bordering upon imbecility. He staggered up out of that unpropitious hollow, and stood stock-still, like one petrified, until they were out of sight. Then, very slowly and mumbling incoherently to himself, he made his way back towards the village.

He did not even turn his head as he passed Mr. Quincunx’s cottage. Indeed, it is extremely doubtful how far he had recognized him as the person they encountered on their way, and still more doubtful how far he had heard or understood, when the tenant of Dead Man’s Lane indicated the place of his abode.

The sudden transformation of the timid recluse into a formidable man of action did not end with his triumphant retirement to his familiar domain. Some mysterious fibre in his complicated temperament had been struck, and continued to be struck, by the little Dolores, which not only rendered him indifferent to personal danger, but willing and happy to encounter it.

The event only added one more proof to the sage dictum of the Chinese philosopher,—that you can never tell of what a man is capable until he is stone-dead.