Mr. Chilverstone was one of those men upon whom many sorrows and
disappointments are laid. He had set out in life with a choice selection
of great ambitions, and at forty-five not one of them had fructified.
Ill-health had always weighed him down in one direction; ill-luck in
another; the only piece of good fortune which had ever come to him came
when the Earl of Simonstower, who had heard of him as an inoffensive man
content to serve a parish without going to extremes in either of the
objectionable directions, presented him to a living which even in bad
times was worth five hundred pounds a year. But just before this
preferment came in his way Mr. Chilverstone had the misfortune to lose
his wife, and the enjoyment of the fit things of a country living was
necessarily limited to him for some time. He was not greatly taxed by
his pastoral duties, for his flock, from the earl downwards, loved that
type of parson who knows how to keep his place, and only insists on his
professional prestige on Sundays and the appointed days, and he had no
great inclination to occupy himself in other directions. As the
bitterness of his great sorrow slipped away from him he found his life
resolving itself into a level--his time was passed in reading, in
pottering about his garden, and, as she grew up, in educating his only
child, a girl who at the time of her mother’s death was little more than
an infant. At the time of Lucian’s arrival in the village Mr.
Chilverstone’s daughter was at school in Belgium--the boy’s first visits
to the vicarage were therefore made to a silent and lonely house, and
they proved very welcome to its master.
Lucian’s experience at the grammar-school was never repeated under the
new _régime_. The vicar had been somewhat starved in the matter of
conversation for more years than he cared to remember, and it was a
Godsend to him to have a keen and inquiring mind opposed to his own. His
pupil’s education began and was continued in an unorthodox fashion;
there was no system and very little order in it, but it was good for man
and boy. They began to spend much time together, in the field as much as
in the study. Mr. Chilverstone, encouraged thereto by Lucian, revived an
ancient taste for archæology, and the two made long excursions to the
ruined abbeys, priories, castles, and hermitages in their neighbourhood.
Miss Pepperdine, to whom Lucian invariably applied for large supplies of
sandwiches on these occasions, had an uncomfortable suspicion that the
boy would have been better employed with a copy-book or a slate, but she
had great faith in the vicar, and acknowledged that her nephew never got
into mischief, though he had certainly set his room on fire one night by
a bad habit of reading in bed. She had become convinced that Lucian was
an odd chicken, who had got into the brood by some freak of fortune, and
she fell into the prevalent fashion of the family in regarding him as
something uncommon that was not to be judged by ordinary rules of life
or interfered with. To Mr. Pepperdine and to Judith he remained a
constant source of wonder, interest, and amusement, for his tongue never
ceased to wag, and he communicated to them everything that he saw,
heard, and thought, with a freedom and generosity that kept them in a
perpetual state of mental activity.
Towards the end of June, when Lucian had been three months at
Simonstower, he walked into the vicar’s study one morning to find him in
a state of mild excitement. Mr. Chilverstone nodded his head at a letter
which lay open on his desk.
‘The day after to-morrow,’ he said, ‘you will see my daughter. She is
coming home from school.’
Lucian made no answer. It seemed to him that this bare announcement
wrought some subtle change. He knew nothing whatever of girls--they had
never come into his life, and he was doubtful about them. He stared
hard at the vicar.
‘Will you be glad to see her?’ he asked.
‘Why, surely!’ exclaimed Mr. Chilverstone. ‘Yes--I have not seen her for
nearly a year, and it is two years since she left home. Yes--Millie is
all I have.’
Lucian felt a pang of jealousy. It was part of his nature to fall in
love with every new friend he made; in return, he expected each new
friend to devote himself to him. He had become very fond of the vicar;
they got on together excellently; it was not pleasant to think that a
girl was coming between them. Besides, what Mr. Chilverstone said was
not true. This Millie was not all he had--he had some of him, Lucian.
‘You will like my little girl,’ the vicar went on, utterly oblivious of
the fact that he was making the boy furiously jealous. ‘She is full of
life and fun--a real ray of sunshine in a house.’ He sighed heavily and
looked at a portrait of his wife. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘she is quite a
lively girl, my little Millie. A sort of tomboy, you know. I call her
Sprats; it seems to fit her, somehow.’
Lucian almost choked with rage and grief. All the old, pleasant
companionship; all the long talks and walks; all the disputations and
scholarly wrangles were to be at an end, and all because of a girl whose
father called her Sprats! It was unbelievable. He gazed at the
unobservant clergyman with eyes of wonder; he had come to have a great
respect for him as a scholar, and could not understand how a man who
could make the Greek grammar so interesting could feel any interest in a
girl, even though that girl happened to be his own daughter. For women
like his aunts, and Mrs. Trippett, and the housekeeper at the castle,
Lucian had a great liking; they were all useful in one way or another,
either to get good things to eat out of, or to talk to when one wanted
to talk; but girls--whatever place had they in the economy of nature! He
had never spoken to a girl in his life, except to little Mary Trippett,
who was nine, and to whom he sometimes gave sweets and dolls. Would he
be expected to talk to this girl whose father called her Sprats? He
turned hot and cold at the thought.
His visit to the vicarage that morning was a dead failure. Mr.
Chilverstone’s behaviour was foolish and ridiculous: he would talk of
Sprats. He even went as far as to tell Lucian of some of Sprats’s
escapades. They were mostly of the practical-joke order, and seemed to
afford Mr. Chilverstone huge amusement--Lucian wondered how he could be
so silly. He endeavoured to be as polite as possible, but he declined an
invitation to stay to lunch. He would cheerfully listen to Mr.
Chilverstone on the very dryest points of an irregular verb, but Mr.
Chilverstone on Sprats was annoying--he almost descended to futility.
Lucian refused two invitations that afternoon. Mr. Pepperdine offered to
take him with him to York, whither he was proceeding on business; Miss
Judith asked him if he would like to go with her to the house of a
friend in whose grounds was a haunted hermitage. He declined both
invitations with great politeness and went out in solitude. Part of the
afternoon he spent with an old man who mended the roads. The old man was
stone-deaf and needed no conversational effort on the part of a friend,
and when he spoke himself he talked of intelligent subjects, such as
rheumatism, backache, and the best cure for stone in the bladder. Lucian
thought him a highly intelligent man, and presented him with a screw of
tobacco purchased at the village shop--it was a tacit thankoffering to
the gods that the old man had avoided the subject of girls. His spirits
improved after a visit to the shoemaker, who told him a brand-new ghost
story for the truth of which he vouched with many solemn asseverations,
and he was chatty with his Aunt Keziah when they took tea together. But
that night he did not talk so much as usual, and he went to bed early
and made no attempt to coax Miss Pepperdine into letting him have the
extra light which she had confiscated after he had set his bed on fire.
Next day Lucian hoped to find the vicar in a saner frame of mind, but to
his astonishment and disgust Mr. Chilverstone immediately began to talk
of Sprats again, and continued to do so until he became unbearable.
Lucian was obliged to listen to stories which to him seemed inept,
fatuous, and even imbecile. He was told of Sprats’s first distinct
words; of her first tooth; of her first attempts to walk; of the
memorable occasion upon which she placed her pet kitten on the fire in
order to warm it. The infatuated father, who had not had an opportunity
of retailing these stories for some time, and who believed that he was
interesting his listener, continued to pour forth story after story,
each more feeble and ridiculous than the last, until Lucian could have
shrieked with the agony which was tearing his soul to pieces. He pleaded
a bad headache at last and tried to slip away--Mr. Chilverstone detained
him in order to give him an anti-headache powder, and accompanied his
researches into the medicine cupboard with a highly graphic description
of a stomach-ache which Sprats had once contracted from too lavish
indulgence in unripe apples, and was cured by himself with some simple
drug. The vicar, in short, being a disingenuous and a simple-minded man,
had got Sprats on the brain, and he imagined that every word he said was
meeting with a responsive thrill in the boy’s heart.
Lucian escaped the fatuous father at last. He rushed out into the
sunlight, almost choking with rage, grief, and disappointment. He flung
the powder into the hedge-bottom, sat down on a stone-heap at the side
of the road, and began to swear in Italian. He swore freely and fluently
until he had exhausted that eloquent vocabulary which one may pick up in
Naples and Venice and in the purlieus of Hatton Garden, and when he had
finished he began it all over again and repeated it with as much fervour
as one should display, if one is honest, in reciting the Rosary. This
saved him from apoplexy, but the blood grew black within him and his
soul was scratched. It had been no part of Lucian’s plans for the future
that Sprats should come between him and his friend.
He slept badly that night, and while he lay awake he said to himself
that it was all over. It was a mere repetition of history--a woman
always came between men. He had read a hundred instances--this was one
more. Of course, the Sprats creature would oust him from his
place--nothing would ever be as it had been. All was desolate, and he
was alone. He read several pages of the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_
as soon as it was light, and dropped asleep with the firm conviction
that life is a grey thing.
All that day and the next Lucian kept away from the vicarage. The
domestic deities wondered why he did not go as usual; he invented
plausible excuses with facile ingenuity. He neglected his books and
betrayed a suspicious interest in Mr. Pepperdine’s recent purchases of
cattle; he was restless and at times excited, and Miss Keziah looked at
his tongue and felt his forehead and made him swallow a dose of a
certain home-made medicine by which she set great store. On the third
day the suppressed excitement within him reached boiling-point. He went
out into the fields mad to work it off, and by good or ill luck lighted
upon an honest rustic who was hoeing turnips under a blazing midsummer
sun. Lucian looked at the rustic with the eye of a mocking and
mischievous devil.
‘Boggles,’ he said, with a Mephistophelian coaxing, ‘would you like to
hear some Italian?’ Boggles ruminated.
‘Why, Master Lucian,’ he said, ‘I don’t know as I ever did hear that
language--can’t say as I ever did, anyhow.’
‘Listen, then,’ said Lucian. He treated Boggles to a string of
expletives, delivered with native force and energy, making use of his
eyes and teeth until the man began to feel frightened.
‘Lord sakes, Master Lucian!’ he said, ‘one ’ud think you was going to
murder somebody--you look that fierce. It’s a queer sort o’ language
that, sir--I never heard nowt like it. It flays a body.’
‘It is the most delightful language in the world when you want to
swear,’ said Lucian. ‘It....’
‘Nonsense! It isn’t a patch on German. You wait till I get over the
hedge and I’ll show you,’ cried a ringing and very authoritative voice.
‘I can reel off twice as much as that.’
Lucian turned round with an instinctive feeling that a critical moment
was at hand. He caught sight of something feminine behind the hedgerow;
the next instant a remarkably nimble girl came over a half-made gap. The
turnip-hoeing man uttered an exclamation which had much joy in it.
‘Lord sakes if it isn’t Miss Millie!’ he said, touching his cap. ‘Glad
to see ’ee once again, missie. They did tell me you was coming from them
furrineerin’ countries, and there you be, growed quite up, as one might
say.’
‘Not quite, but nearly, Boggles,’ answered Miss Chilverstone. ‘How’s
your rheumatics, as one might call ’em? They were pretty bad when I went
away, I remember.’
‘They’re always bad i’ th’ winter, miss,’ said Boggles, leaning on his
hoe and evincing a decided desire to talk, ‘and a deal better in summer,
allus providing the Lord don’t send no rain. Fine, dry weather, miss, is
what I want--the rain ain’t no good to me.’
‘A little drop wouldn’t hurt the turnips, anyway,’ said Miss
Chilverstone, looking about her with a knowing air. ‘Seem pretty well
dried up, don’t they?’ She looked at Lucian. Their eyes met: the boy
stared and blushed; the girl stared and laughed.
‘Did it lose its tongue, then?’ she said teasingly. ‘It seemed to have a
very long and very ready one when it was swearing at poor old Boggles.
What made him use such bad language to you, Boggles?’
‘Lord bless ’ee, missie,’ said Boggles hurriedly, ‘he didn’t mean no
harm, didn’t Master Lucian--he was telling me how they swear in
Eye-talian. Not but what it didn’t sound very terrible--but he wouldn’t
hurt a fly, wouldn’t Master Lucian, miss, he wouldn’t indeed.’
‘Dear little lamb!’ she said mockingly, ‘I shouldn’t think he would.’
She turned on the boy with a sudden twist of her shoulders. ‘So you are
Lucian, are you?’ she asked.
‘I am Lucian, yes,’ he answered.
‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked, with a flashing look.
Lucian stared back at her, and the shadow of a smile stole into his
face.
‘I think,’ he said musingly, ‘I think you must be Sprats.’
Then the two faced each other and stared as only stranger children can
stare.
Mr. Boggles, his watery old eyes keenly observant, leaned his chin upon
his hoe and stared also, chuckling to himself. Neither saw him; their
eyes were all for each other. The girl, without acknowledging it,
perhaps without knowing it, recognised the boy’s beauty and hated him
for it in a healthy fashion. He was too much of a picture; his clothes
were too neat; his collar too clean; his hands too white; he was
altogether too much of a fine and finicking little gentleman; he ought,
she said to herself, to be stuck in a velvet suit, and a point-lace
collar, and labelled. The spirit of mischief entered into her at the
sight of him.
Lucian examined this strange creature with care. He was relieved to find
that she was by no means beautiful. He saw a strong-limbed,
active-looking young damsel, rather older and rather taller than
himself, whose face was odd, rather than pretty, and chiefly remarkable
for a prodigality of freckles and a healthy tan. Her nose was pugnacious
and inclined to be of the snub order; her hair sandy and anything but
tidy; there was nothing beautiful in her face but a pair of brown eyes
of a singularly clear and honest sort. As for her attire, it was not in
that order which an exacting governess might have required: she wore a
blue serge frock in which she had evidently been climbing trees or
scrambling through hedgerows, a battered straw hat wherein she or
somebody had stuck the long feathers from a cock’s tail; there was a
rent in one of her stockings, and her stout shoes looked as if she had
tramped through several ploughed fields in them. All over and round her
glowed a sort of aureole of rude and vigorous health, of animal spirits,
and of a love of mischief--the youthful philosopher confronting her
recognised a new influence and a new nature.
‘Yes,’ she said demurely, ‘I’m Sprats, and you’ve a cheek to call me
so--who gave you leave, I’d like to know? What would you think if I told
you that you’d look nice if you had a barrel-organ and a monkey on it?
Ha! ha! had him there, hadn’t I, Boggles? Well, do you know where I am
going, monkey-boy?’
Lucian sighed resignedly.
‘No,’ he answered.
‘Going to fetch you,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been to your lessons for
two days, and you’re to go this instant minute.’
‘I don’t think I want any lessons to-day,’ replied Lucian.
‘Hear him!’ she said, making a grimace. ‘What do they do with little
boys who won’t go to school, Boggles--eh?’
If Lucian had known more of a world with which he had never, poor child,
had much opportunity of making acquaintance, he would have seen that
Sprats was meditating mischief. Her eyes began to glitter: she smiled
demurely.
‘Are you coming peaceably?’ she asked.
‘But I’m not coming at all,’ replied Lucian.
‘Aren’t you, though? We’ll soon settle that, won’t we, Boggles?’ she
exclaimed. ‘Now then, monkey--off you go!’
She was on him with a rush before he knew what was about to happen, and
had lifted him off his feet and swung him on to her shoulder ere he
could escape her. Lucian expostulated and beseeched; Sprats, shouting
and laughing, made for a gap in the hedgerow; Boggles, hugely delighted,
following in the wake. At the gap a battle royal ensued--Lucian fighting
to free himself, the girl clinging on to him with all the strength of
her vigorous young arms.
‘Let me go, I say!’ cried Lucian. ‘Let me down!’
‘You’d best to go quiet and peaceable, Master Lucian,’ counselled
Boggles. ‘Miss Millie ain’t one to be denied of anything.’
‘But I won’t be carried!’ shouted Lucian, half mad with rage. ‘I
won’t....’
He got no further. Sprats, holding on tight to her captive, caught her
foot in a branch as she struggled over the gap, and pitched headlong
through. There was a steep bank at the other side with a wide ditch of
water at its foot: Boggles, staring over the hedge with all his eyes,
beheld captor and captive, an inextricable mass of legs and arms, turn a
series of hurried somersaults and collapse into the duck-weed and
water-lilies with a splash that drowned their mutual screams of rage,
indignation, and delight.