The Adventures of Mr. Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus Read Free Page B

mongrel, who was barking in her sleep.
    “Thank you kindly, sir,” said Mr. Bacchus, bowing deeply and tipping his hat.
    “Take the road to the right,” he said to Hero, stepping aboard the caravan once more. “We’re going to Cathay.”
    As the caravan turned onto the Cathay road, the old man under the hawthorn bush suddenly got to his feet again and called after Mr. Bacchus.
    “Sir!” he cried, his old voice shaking. “Remember me to Xanadu! Remember me to the Khan called Kublai! Tell him I will be there! And tell him Marco Polo thinks of him often!”
    “I will,” said Mr. Bacchus, at which the old man smiled to himself and went back to lying in the shelter of the hawthorn bush and comforting the mongrel dog with a hand tanned by ocean winds, long since exhausted.
     
    ****
     
    The road to Asia the deep was a long and uneven one, and it was uncomfortable in the small caravan. Although it had been generally agreed at the beginning of the journey that the idea of going to Cathay was a good one, as the days passed, and the road became narrower, it seemed less and less attractive.
    They had been travelling on the road for about five or six days when they came to an orchard. There were hundreds of trees laid out in avenues—plum, apple, peach, fig and pomegranate—all heavily laden with ripe fruit. In the evening sky the Plough was rising, so Hero stopped the caravan and everybody climbed out to stretch their legs and to smell the sweet September air. Suddenly, the perfect silence was broken by a loud voice:
    “Thief! Thief!” it shouted. “Stop thief!” and as its first echoes died, between the trees there ran a young man with long black curls, pursued from the depths of the orchard by the orchard-keeper himself, shouting oaths and accusations. Run as he might, however, the keeper was too short and fat to catch up, until suddenly the beautiful young man tripped over the sprawling roots of a plum tree and fell headlong into the uncut grass. There he lay, quite still, and when the angry keeper at last reached the spot and raised the youth’s head by the hair his eyes were closed and his mouth gaped like that of a Lantern Fish. The orchard keeper was too angry to notice, however, and seizing up a dead branch from the ground he cried:
    “I shall beat you, boy—within an inch of paradise and back again.”
    At that moment Mr. Bacchus opened the orchard gate and marched towards the keeper.
    “You, sir!” he said, pointing his stick at the panting little man.
    “What do you want, Mummer?” growled the keeper.
    “That boy is either senseless or dead, sir,” replied Mr. Bacchus. “May I suggest you unhand him?”
    “What?” exclaimed the orchard-keeper with a horrified look, releasing the youth’s hair as if it had become snakes and bitten him. “Dead? What’s that? I didn’t touch him. Did I strike him? Did the blow fall? No!”
    By now Ophelia was kneeling beside the fallen youth, trying to turn him over.
    “Let me,” said Hero, and with one hand rolled the young man onto his back.
    The sight was not a pretty one. The youth’s white shirt was entirely stained with blood. Malachi turned pale at the sight.
    “Aten!” he muttered. “I can’t stand the sight of blood. It makes me feel dizzy,” and he scuttled up into one of the apple trees and hid there with only his twitching tail dangling down between the branches. At that moment the young man’s eyes opened. It was as if a candle had emerged from behind a veil.
    “He’s not dead,” said Hero.
    “Of course not,” said Domingo, dancing on the spot. “How could he be?”
    “But the blood!” said Ophelia.
    The young man looked down solemnly at his wounded chest and smiled.
    “Squashed fruit,” he said. “I hid the fruit inside my shirt.”
    “What’s your name, fellow?” demanded Mr. Bacchus.
    “Angelo, sir,” replied the young man, getting to his feet and retrieving the ruined fruit from inside his shirt.
    “And you are a thief,