Collected works of j s f.., p.124
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 124
Looking further afield Lucian now saw the village through which they had driven in the darkness. It lay in the valley, half a mile beneath him, a quaint, picturesque place of one long straggling street, in which at that moment he saw many children running about. The houses and cottages were all of grey stone; some were thatched, some roofed with red tiles; each stood amidst gardens and orchards. He now saw the bridge over which Mr. Pepperdine’s mare had clattered the night before — a high, single arch spanning a winding river thickly fenced in from the meadows by alder and willow. Near it on rising ground stood the church, square-towered, high of roof and gable, in the midst of a green churchyard which in one corner contained the fallen masonry of some old abbey or priory. On the opposite side of the river, in a small square which seemed to indicate the forum of the village, stood the inn, easily recognisable even at that distance by the pole which stood outside it, bearing aloft a swinging sign, and by the size of the stables surrounding it. This picture, too, was familiar to the boy’s eyes — he had seen it in pictures a thousand times.
Over the village, frowning upon it as a lion frowns upon the victim at its feet, hung the grim, gaunt castle which, after all, was the principal feature of the landscape on which Lucian gazed. It stood on a spur of rocky ground which jutted like a promontory from the hills behind it — on three sides at least its situation was impregnable. From Lucian’s point of vantage it still wore the aspect of strength and power; the rustic walls were undamaged; the smaller towers and turrets showed little sign of decay; and the great Norman keep rose like a menace in stone above the skyline of the hills. All over the giant mass of the old stronghold hung a drifting cloud of blue smoke, which gradually mingled with the spirals rising from the village chimneys and with the shadowy mists that curled about the pine-clad uplands. And over everything — village, church, river, castle, meadow, and hill, man and beast — shone the spring sun, life-giving and generous. Lucian looked and saw and understood, and made haste to dress in order that he might go out and possess all these things. He had a quick eye for beauty and an unerring taste, and he recognised that in this village of the grey North there was a charm and a romance which nothing could exhaust. His father had recognised its beauty before him and had immortalised it on canvas; Lucian, lacking the power to make a picture of it, had yet a keener æsthetic sense of its appeal and its influence. It was already calling to him with a thousand voices — he was so impatient to revel in it that he grudged the time given to his breakfast. Miss Pepperdine expressed some fears as to the poorness of his appetite; Miss Judith, understanding the boy’s eagerness somewhat better, crammed a thick slice of cake into his pocket as he set out. He was in such haste that he had only time to tell Mr. Pepperdine that he would not ride the pony that morning — he was going to explore the village, and the pony might wait. Then he ran off, eager, excited.
He came back at noon, hungry as a ploughman, delighted with his morning’s adventures. He had been all over the village, in the church tower, inside the inn, where he had chatted with the landlord and the landlady, he had looked inside the infants’ school and praised the red cloaks worn by the girls to an evidently surprised schoolmistress, and he had formed an acquaintance with the blacksmith and the carpenter.
‘And I went up to the castle, too,’ he said in conclusion, ‘and saw the earl, and he showed me the picture which my father painted — it is hanging in the great hall.’ Lucian’s relatives betrayed various emotions. Mr. Pepperdine’s mouth slowly opened until it became cavernous; Miss Pepperdine paused in the act of lifting a potato to her mouth; Miss Judith clapped her hands.
‘You went to the castle and saw the earl?’ said Miss Pepperdine.
‘Yes,’ answered Lucian, unaware of the sensation he was causing. ‘I saw him and the picture, and other things too. He was very kind — he made his footman give me a glass of wine, but it was home-made and much too sweet.’
Mr. Pepperdine winked at his sisters and cut Lucian another slice of roast-beef.
‘And how might you have come to be so hand-in-glove with his lordship, the mighty Earl of Simonstower?’ he inquired. ‘He’s a very nice, affable old gentleman, isn’t he, Keziah? Ah — very — specially when he’s got the gout.’
‘Oh, I went to the castle and rang the bell, and asked if the Earl of Simonstower was at home,’ Lucian replied. ‘And I told the footman my name, and he went away, and then came back and told me to follow him, and he took me into a big study where there was an old, very cross-looking old gentleman in an old-fashioned coat writing letters. He had very keen eyes....’
‘Ah, indeed!’ interrupted Mr. Pepperdine. ‘Like a hawk’s!’
‘...and he stared at me,’ continued Lucian, ‘and I stared at him. And then he said, “Well, my boy, what do you want?” and I said, “Please, if you are the Earl of Simonstower, I want to see the picture you bought from my father some years ago.” Then he stared harder than ever, and he said, “Are you Cyprian Damerel’s son?” and I said “Yes.” He pointed to a chair and told me to sit down, and he talked about my father and his work, and then he took me out to look at the pictures. He wanted to know if I, too, was going to paint, and I had to tell him that I couldn’t draw at all, and that I meant to be a poet. Then he showed me his library, or a part of it — I stopped with him a long time, and he shook hands with me when I left, and said I might go again whenever I wished to.’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Mr. Pepperdine. ‘It’s very evident there’s a soft spot somewhere in the old gentleman’s heart.’
‘And what did his lordship talk to you about?’ asked Miss Pepperdine, who had sufficiently recovered from her surprise to resume her dinner. ‘I hope you said “my lord” and “your lordship” when you spoke to him?’
‘No, I didn’t, because I didn’t know,’ said Lucian. ‘I said “sir,” because he was an old man. Oh, we talked about Italy — fancy, he hasn’t been in Italy for twenty years! — and he asked me a lot of questions about several things, and he got me to translate a letter for him which he had just received from a professor at Florence — his own Italian, he said, is getting rusty.’
‘And could you do it?’ asked Miss Pepperdine.
Lucian stared at her with wide-open eyes.
‘Why, yes,’ he answered. ‘It is my native tongue. I know much, much more Italian than English. Sometimes I cannot find the right word in English — it is a difficult language to learn.’
Lucian’s adventures of his first morning pleased Mr. Pepperdine greatly. He chuckled to himself as he smoked his after-dinner pipe — the notion of his nephew bearding the grim old earl in his tumble-down castle was vastly gratifying and amusing: it was also pleasing to find Lucian treated with such politeness. As the Earl of Simonstower’s tenant Mr. Pepperdine had much respect but little affection for his titled neighbour: the old gentleman was arbitrary and autocratic and totally deaf to whatever might be said to him about bad times. Mr. Pepperdine was glad to get some small change out of the earl through his nephew.
‘Did his lordship mention me or your aunties at all?’ he said, puffing at his pipe as they all sat round the parlour fire.
‘Yes,’ answered Lucian, ‘he spoke of you.’
‘And what did he say like? Something sweet, no doubt,’ said Mr. Pepperdine.
Lucian looked at Miss Judith and made no answer.
‘Out with it, lad!’ said Mr. Pepperdine.
‘It was only about Aunt Judith,’ answered Lucian. ‘He said she was a very pretty woman.’
Mr. Pepperdine exploded in bursts of hearty laughter; Miss Judith blushed like any girl; Miss Pepperdine snorted with indignation. She was about to make some remark on the old nobleman’s taste when a diversion was caused by the announcement that Lucian’s beloved chest of books had arrived from Wellsby station. Nothing would satisfy the boy but that he must unpack them there and then; he seized Miss Judith by the hand and dragged her away to help him. For the rest of the afternoon the two were arranging the books in an old bookcase which they unearthed from a lumber-room and set up in Lucian’s sleeping chamber. Mr. Pepperdine, looking in upon them once or twice and noting their fervour, retired to the parlour or the kitchen with a remark to his elder sister that they were as throng as Throp’s wife. Judith, indeed, had some taste in the way of literature — in her own room she treasured a collection of volumes which she had read over and over again. Her taste was chiefly for Lord Byron, Moore, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, and the sentimentalists; she treasured a steel-plate engraving of Byron as if it had been a sacred picture, and gazed with awe upon her nephew when he told her that he had seen the palazzo in which Byron lived during his residence in Pisa, and the house which he had occupied in Venice. Her own romance had given Judith a love of poetry: she told Lucian as she helped him to unpack his books and arrange them that she should expect him to read to her. Modern literature was an unexplored field in her case; her knowledge of letters was essentially early Victorian, and her ideas those of the age in which a poet was most popular when most miserable, and young ladies wore white stockings and low shoes with ankle-straps. She associated fiction with high waists, and essays with full-bottomed wigs, and it seemed the most natural thing to her to shed the tear of sympathy over the Corsair and to sigh with pity for Childe Harold.
CHAPTER V
LUCIAN SETTLED DOWN in his new surroundings with a readiness and docility that surprised his relatives. He rarely made any allusion to the loss of his father — he appeared to possess a philosophic spirit that enabled him, even at so early an age, to accept the facts of life as they are. He was never backward, however, in talking of the past. He had been his father’s constant companion for six years, and had travelled with him wherever he went, especially in Italy, and he brought out of his memory stores of reminiscences with which to interest and amuse his newly found relatives. He would talk to Mr. Pepperdine of Italian agriculture; to Keziah of Italian domestic life; to Judith of the treasures of Rome and Naples, Pisa and Florence, of the blue skies and sun-kissed groves of his native land. He always insisted on his nationality — the accident of his connection with England on the maternal side seemed to have no meaning for him.
‘I am Italian,’ he would say when Mr. Pepperdine slyly teased him. ‘It does not matter that I was born in England. My real name is Luciano Damerelli, and my father’s, if he had used it, was Cypriano.’
Little by little they began to find out the boy’s qualities and characteristics. He was strangely old-fashioned, precocious, and unnaturally grave, and cared little for the society of other children, at whom he had a trick of staring as if they had been insects impaled beneath a microscope and he a scientist examining them. He appeared to have two great passions — one for out-door life and nature; the other for reading. He would sit for hours on the bridge watching the river run by, or lie on his back on the lawn in front of the house staring at the drifting clouds. He knew every nook of the ruinous part of the castle and every corner of the old church before he had been at Simonstower many weeks. He made friends with everybody in the village, and if he found out that an old man had some strange legend to tell, he pestered the life out of him until it was told. And every day he did so much reading, always with the stern concentration of the student who means to possess a full mind.
When Lucian had been nearly two months at the farm it was borne in upon Miss Pepperdine’s mind that he ought to be sent to school. She was by no means anxious to get rid of him — on the contrary she was glad to have him in the house: she loved to hear him talk, to see him going about, and to watch his various proceedings. But Keziah Pepperdine had been endowed at birth with the desire to manage — she was one of those people who are never happy unless they are controlling, devising, or superintending. Moreover, she possessed a very strict sense of justice — she believed in doing one’s duty, especially to those people to whom duty was owing, and who could not extract it for themselves. It seemed to her that it was the plain duty of Lucian’s relatives to send Lucian to school. She was full of anxieties for his future. Every attempt which she had made to get her brother to tell her anything about the boy’s affairs had resulted in sheer failure — Simpson Pepperdine, celebrated from the North Sea to the Westmoreland border as the easiest-going and best-natured man that ever lived, was a past master in the art of evading direct questions. Keziah could get no information from him, and she was anxious for Lucian’s sake. The boy, she said, ought to be fitted out for some walk in life.
She took the vicar into her confidence, seizing the opportunity when he called one day and found no one but herself at home.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘the boy is a great book-worm. Reading is all that he seems to care about. He brought a quantity of books with him — he has bought others since. He reads in an old-fashioned sort of way — not as you would think a child would. I offered him a child’s book one night — it was one that a little boy who once stayed here had left in the house. He took it politely enough, and pretended to look at it, but it was plain to see that he was amused. He is a precocious child, Mr. Chilverstone.’
The vicar agreed. He suggested that he might be better able to judge the situation, and to advise Miss Pepperdine thereon, if he were allowed to inspect Lucian’s library, and Keziah accordingly escorted him to the boy’s room. Mr. Chilverstone was somewhat taken aback on being confronted by an assemblage of some three or four hundred volumes, arranged with great precision and bearing evidences of constant use. He remarked that the sight was most interesting, and proceeded to make a general inspection. A rapid survey of Lucian’s books showed him that the boy had three favourite subjects — history, mediæval romance, and poetry. There were histories of almost every country in Europe, and at least three of the United States of America; there were editions of the ancient chronicles; the great Italian poets were all there in the original; the English poets, ancient and modern, were there too, in editions that bespoke the care of a book-lover. There was nothing of a juvenile, or even a frivolous nature from the top of the old bookcase to the bottom — the nearest approach to anything in the shape of light literature was found in the presence of certain famous historical romances of undoubted verisimilitude, and in much-thumbed copies of Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Mr. Chilverstone was puzzled. As at least one-half of the books before him were in Italian, he concluded that Lucian was as well acquainted with that language as with English, and said so. Miss Pepperdine enlightened him on the point, and gave him a rapid sketch of Lucian’s history.
‘Just so, just so,’ said he. ‘No doubt the boy’s father formed his taste. It is really most interesting. It is very evident that the child has an uncommon mind — you say that he reads with great attention and concentration?’
‘You might let off a cannon at his elbow and he wouldn’t take any notice,’ said Miss Pepperdine.
‘It is evident that he is a born student. This is a capital collection of modern histories,’ said Mr. Chilverstone. ‘If your nephew has read and digested them all he must be well informed as to the rise and progress of nations. I should like, I think, to have an opportunity of conversing with him.’
Although he did not say so to Miss Pepperdine, the vicar was secretly anxious to find out what had diverted the boy’s attention from the usual pursuits of childhood into these paths. He contrived to waylay Lucian and to draw him into conversation, and being a man of some talent and of considerable sympathy, he soon knew all that the boy had to tell. He found that Lucian had never received any education of the ordinary type; had never been to school or known tutor or governess. He could not remember who taught him to read, but cherished a notion that reading and writing had come to him with his speech. As to his choice of books, that had largely had its initiative in his father’s recommendation; but there had been a further incentive in the fact that the boy had travelled a great deal, was familiar with many historic scenes and places, and had a natural desire to re-create the past in his own imagination. For six years, in short, he had been receiving an education such as few children are privileged to acquire. He talked of mediæval Italy as if he had lived in its sunny-tinted hours, and of modern Rome as though it lay in the next parish. But Mr. Chilverstone saw that the boy was in no danger of becoming either prig or pedant, and that his mind was as normal as his body was healthy. He was the mere outcome of an exceptional environment. He had lived amongst men who talked and worked and thought but with one object — Art — and their enthusiasm had filled him too. ‘I am to be a poet — a great poet,’ he said, with serious face and a straight stare from the violet eyes whose beauty brought everybody captive to his feet. ‘It is my destiny.’
Mr. Chilverstone had a sheaf of yellow papers locked away in a secret drawer which he had never exhibited to living man or woman — verses written in long dead college days. He was sentimental about them still, and the sentiment inclined him to tenderness with youthful genius. He assured Lucian that he sincerely trusted that he might achieve his heart’s desire, and added a word of good advice as to the inadvisability of writing too soon. But he discovered that some one had been beforehand with the boy on that point — the future poet, with a touch of worldly wisdom which sounded as odd as it was quaint, assured the parson that he had a horror of immaturity and had been commanded by his father never to print anything until it had stood the test of cool-headed reflection and twelve months’ keeping.
