The Mountebank | Page 4

beside him, and I hear his shrewd talk of far-away and
mysterious lands. His pretty French wife, who knows no English,
charmingly dishevelled, uncorseted, free, in a dubious peignoir
trimmed with artificial lace--she who moulded in mirific tights,
sea-green with reflections of mother-of-pearl, like Venus Anadyomene,
does the tight rope act every afternoon and evening--sits a little way
apart, busy with needle and thread repairing a sorry handful of
garments which to-night will be tense with some portion of her shapely
body. Between them sprawls on his side Billy, the great brown pig
whom Ben has trained to stand on his hind legs, to jump through hoops,
to die for his country....
"They don't applaud. They don't appreciate you, Billy," the clown
would say, choosing his time when applause was scant. "Show them
what you think of them."
And then Billy would deliberately turn round and, moving in a
semicircle, present his stern to the delighted audience....
There lies Billy, the pig, the most human pig that ever breathed, adored
by Ben Flint, who, not having given the beast one second's pain in all
its beatific life, was, in his turn, loved by the pig as only a few men are
loved by a dog--and there, sitting on the pig's powerful withers, his blue
smock full of wilted daisies, is little eight-year-old tow-headed Andrew
Lackaday making a daisy chain, which eventually he twines round the

animal's semi-protesting snout.
Yes. There is the picture. It is full summer. We have lunched, Madame
and Ben and Andrew and I, at the little café restaurant at the near-by
straggling end of the town. At other tables, other aristocratic members
of the troupe. The humbler have cooked their food in the vague
precincts of the circus. We have returned to all that Ben and his wife
know as home. It is one o'clock. At two, matinee. An hour of blissful
ease. We are in the shade of the great tent; but the air is full of the
heavy odour of the dust and the flowers and the herbs of the South, and
of the pungent smell of the long row of canvas stables.
I call little Andrew. He dismounts from Billy the pig, and, insolent brat,
screws an imaginary eyeglass into his eye, which he contrives to keep
contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid
manner, struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets,
thereby giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself
perfect in its burlesque. Ben Flint roars with laughter. I clutch the imp
and throw him across knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle
lustily till Madame cries out:
"But cease, André. You are making Monsieur too hot."
And Andrew, docile, ceased at once; but standing in front of me, his
back to Madame, he noiselessly mimicked Madame's speech with his
lips, so drolly, so exquisitely, that Ben Flint's hearty laugh broke out
again.
"Just look at the little devil! By Gum! He has a fortune in him."
I learned in the circus as much about Andrew as he knew himself.
Perhaps more; for a child of eight has lost all recollection of parents
who died before he was two. They were circus folk, English, trapeze
artists, come, they said, from a long tour in Australia, where Andrew
was born, and their first European engagement was in the Cirque
Rocambeau. Their stay was brief; their end tragic. Lackaday Père took
to drink, which is the last thing a trapeze artist should do. Brain and
hand at rehearsal one day lost co-ordination by the thousandth part of a

second and Lackaday Mère, swinging from her feet upwards, missed
the anticipated grip, and fell with a thud on the ground, breaking her
spine. Whereupon Lackaday Père went out and hanged himself from a
cross-beam in an empty stable.
Thus, at two years old, Andrew Lackaday started life on his own
account. From that day, he was alone in the world. Nothing in his
parents' modest luggage gave clue to kith or kin. Ben Flint who, as a
fellow-countryman, went through their effects, found not even one
letter addressed to them, found no sign of their contact with any human
being living or dead. They called themselves professionally "The
Lackadays." Whether it was their real name or not, no one in the world
which narrowed itself within the limits of the Cirque Rocambeau, could
possibly tell. But it was the only name that Andrew had, and as good as
any other. It was part of his inheritance, the remainder being ninety-five
francs in cash, some cheap trinkets, a couple of boxes of fripperies
which were sold for a song, a tattered copy of Longfellow's Poems, and
a brand new gilt-edged Bible, carefully covered in brown paper, with