CHAPTER IV

Lucian went to sleep in a chamber smelling of lavender. He was very tired, and passed into a land of gentle dreams as soon as his head touched the pillow. Almost before he realised that he was falling asleep he was wide awake again and it was morning. Broad rays of sunlight flooded the room; he heard the notes of many birds singing outside the window; it was plain that another day was already hastening to noon. He glanced at his watch: it was eight o’clock. Lucian left his bed, drew up the blind, and looked out of the window.

He had seen nothing of Simonstower on the previous evening: it had seemed to him that after leaving Mr. Trippett’s farmstead he and Mr. Pepperdine had been swallowed up in deep woods. He had remarked during the course of the journey that the woods smelled like the pine forests of Ravenna, and Mr. Pepperdine had answered that there was a deal of pine thereabouts and likewise fir. Out of the woods they had not emerged until they drove into the lights of a village, clattered across a bridge which spanned a brawling stream, and climbed a winding road that led them into more woods. Then had come the open door, and the new faces, and bed, and now Lucian had his first opportunity of looking about him.

The house stood halfway up a hillside. He saw, on leaning out of the window, that it was stoutly fashioned of great blocks of grey stone and that some of the upper portions were timbered with mighty oak beams. Over the main doorway, a little to the right of his window, a slab of weather-worn stone exhibited a coat of arms, an almost illegible motto or legend, of which he could only make out a few letters, and the initials ‘S. P.’ over the date 1594. The house, then, was of a respectable{37} antiquity, and he was pleased because of it. He was pleased, too, to find the greater part of its exterior half obscured by ivy, jessamine, climbing rose-trees, honeysuckle, and wistaria, and that the garden which stretched before it was green and shady and old-fashioned. He recognised some features of it—the old, moss-grown sun-dial; the arbour beneath the copper-beech; the rustic bench beneath the lilac-tree—he had seen one or other of these things in his father’s pictures, and now knew what memories had placed them there.

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{38} 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 ?sthetic 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.{39}

‘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{40} 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{41} 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{42} 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.