It was completely dark now, and when Luke’s oration came to an end there was no sound in the barn except a low sobbing.
“Come on, child; we must be getting home, or you’ll be frightfully late. Here! give me your hand. Where are you?”
He groped about in the darkness until his sleeve brushed against her shoulder. It was trembling under her efforts to suppress her sobs.
He got hold of her wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, my dear,” he repeated, “we must get out of this-now. Give me one nice kiss before we go.”
She permitted herself to be caressed—passive and unresisting in his arms.
In the darkness they touched the outer edge of Mr. Clavering’s hiding-place, and the girl, swaying a little backwards under Luke’s endearments, felt the pressure of the hay-wall behind her. She did not, however, feel the impassioned touch of the choking kiss which the poor imprisoned priest desperately imprinted on a loose tress of her hair.
It was one of those pitiful and grotesque situations which seem sometimes to arise,—as our fantastic planet turns on its orbit,—for no other purpose than that of gratifying some malign vein of goblin-like irony in the system of things.
That at the moment when Luke, under the spell of the shadowy fragrance of the place, and the pliant submissiveness of the girl’s form, threw something of his old ardour into his kiss, her other, more desperate love should have dared such an approach, was a coincidence apparently of the very kind to appeal to the perverse taste of this planetary humour.
The actual result of such a strange consentaneousness of rival emotion was that the three human heads remained for a brief dramatic moment in close juxtaposition,—the two fair ones and the dark one so near one another, that it might have seemed almost inevitable that their thoughts should interact in that fatal proximity.
The pitiful pathos of the whole human comedy might well have been brought home to any curious observer able to pierce that twilight! Such an observer would have felt towards those three poor obsessed craniums the same sort of tenderness that they themselves would have been conscious of, had they suddenly come across a sleeping person or a dead body.
Strange, that the ultimate pity in these things,—in this blind antagonistic striving of human desires under such gracious flesh and blood—should only arouse these tolerant emotions when they are no longer of any avail! Had some impossible bolt from heaven stricken these three impassioned ones in their tragic approximation, how,—long afterwards,—the discoverer of the three skeletons would have moralized upon their fate! As it was, there was nothing but the irony of the gods to read what the irony of the gods was writing upon that moment’s drowning sands.
When Luke and Gladys left the barn, and hurriedly, under the rising moon, retook their way towards Nevilton, Clavering emerged from his concealment dazed and stupefied. He threw himself down in the darkness on the heap of oats and strove to give form and coherence to the wild flood of thoughts which swept through him.
So this was what he had come out to learn! This was the knowledge that his mad jealousy had driven him to snatch!
He thought of the exquisite sacredness—for him—of that morning’s ritual in the church, and of how easily he had persuaded himself to read into the girl’s preoccupied look something more than natural sadness over Andersen’s death. He had indeed,—only those short hours ago,—allowed himself the sweet illusion that this religious initiation really meant, for his pagan love, some kind of Vita Nuova.
The fates had rattled their dice, however, to a different tune. The unfortunate girl was indeed entering upon a Vita Nuova, but how hideously different a one from that which had been his hope!
On Wednesday came the confirmation service. How could he,—with any respect for his conscience as a guardian of these sacred rites,—permit Gladys to be confirmed now? Yet what ought he to do? Drops of cold sweat stood upon his forehead as he wondered whether it was incumbent upon him to take the first train the following morning for the bishop’s palace and to demand an interview.
No. Tomorrow the prelate would be starting on his episcopal tour. Clavering would have to pursue him from one remote country village to another, and what a pursuit that would be! He recoiled from the idea with sick aversion.
Could he then suppress his fatal knowledge and let the event take place without protest? To act in such a manner would be nothing less than to play the part of an accomplice in the girl’s sin.
Perhaps when the bishop actually appeared he would be able to secure a confidential interview with him and lay the whole matter before him. Or should he act on his own responsibility, and write to Gladys himself, telling her that under the circumstances it would be best for her to stay away from the ceremony?
What reason could he give for such an extraordinary mandate? Could he bluntly indicate to her, in black and white, the secret he had discovered, and the manner of its discovery? To accuse her on the ground of mere village gossip would be to lay himself open to shameful humiliation. Was he, in any case, justified in putting the fatal information, gathered in this way, to so drastic a use? It was only in his madness as a jealous lover that he had possessed himself of this knowledge. As priest of Nevilton he knew nothing.
He had no right to know anything. No; he must pay the penalty of his shameful insanity by bearing this burden in silence, even though his conscience groaned and cracked beneath the weight. Such a silence, with its attendant misery of self-accusation and shame, was all he could offer to his treacherous enchantress as a tacit recompense for having stolen her secret.
He rose and left the granary. As he walked homeward, along the Nevilton road, avoiding by a sort of scrupulous reaction the shorter route followed by the others, it seemed to him as though the night had never been more sultry, or the way more loaded with the presence of impendent calamity.
CHAPTER XXV
METAMORPHOSIS
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 Ms 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 ’tother 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 sp
read 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.”
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