“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.