Next morning, John Derringham sat at a late breakfast with his whilom
master of Greek and discussed things in general over his bacon and tea.
It was three years since he had left Oxford, and life held out many
interesting aspects for him. He was standing for the southern division
of his county in the following spring when the present member was going
to retire, and he was vehement in his views and clear as to the course
he meant to take. He was so eloquent in his discourse and so full of
that divine spark of enthusiasm, that he was always listened to, no
matter how unpalatably Tory the basic principles of his utterances were.
He never posed as anything but an aristocrat, and while he whimsically
admitted that in the present day to be one was an enormous disadvantage
for a man who wished to get on, he endeavored to palliate the misfortune
by lucid explanation of what the duties of such a status were, and of
the logical advantages which an appreciation of the truths of cause and
effect might bring to mankind. Down in his own country he was considered
the coming man. He thundered at the people and had facts and figures at
his finger tips. His sublime belief in himself never wavered and like
any inspired view, right or wrong, it had its strong effect.
Mr. Carlyon thought highly of him, for a number of reasons.
"If women do not make a stumbling-block for you, John, you will go far,"
he said as he buttered his toast.
"Women!" quoth John Derringham, and he laughed incredulously. "They
matter no more to me than the flowers in the garden--enchanting in the
summer time, a mere pleasure for sight and touch, but to make or mar a
man's life!--not even to be considered as factors in the scheme of
things."
"I am glad to hear you say so," said Mr. Carlyon dryly. "And I hope that
jade, Fate, won't play you any tricks."
John Derringham smiled.
"I admit that a woman with money may be useful to me by and by," he
said, "because, as you know, I am always hard up, and presently when I
want to occupy a larger sphere I shall require money for my ends, but
for the time being they serve to divert me as a relaxation; that is
all."
"You are contracting no ties, dear lad?" asked the Professor with one
eyebrow raised, while he shook back his silvery hair. "I had heard
vaguely about your attention to Lady Durrend, but I understand she has
had many preliminary canters and knows the ropes."
John Derringham smiled. "Vivienne Durrend is a most charming woman," he
said. "She has taught me a number of things in the last two years. I am
grateful to her. Next season she is bringing a daughter out--and she has
a wonderful sense of the fitness of things." Then he sipped his tea and
got up and strolled towards the windows.
"Besides," he continued, "I do not admit there are any ties to be
contracted. The Greeks understood the place of women; all this nonsense
of vows of fidelity and exaltation of sentiment in the home cramps a
man's ambitions. It is perfectly natural that he should take a wife if
his position calls for it, because the society in which we move has made
a figurehead of that kind necessary. But that a woman should expect a
man to be faithful to her, be she wife or mistress, is contrary to all
nature."
"We have put nature out of the running now for a couple of thousand
years," Mr. Carlyon announced sententiously; "we have set up a standard
of impossibilities and worship hypocrisy and can no longer see any
truth. You have got to reckon with things as they are, not with what
nature meant them to be."
"Then you think women are a force now which one must consider?"
"I think they are as deadly as the deep sea--" and Mr. Carlyon's voice
was tense. "When they have only bodies they are dangerous enough, but
when--as many of the modern ones have--they combine a modicum of mind as
well, with all the cunning Satan originally endowed them with--then
happy is the man who escapes, even partially whole, from their claws."
"Whew--" whistled John Derringham, "and what if they have souls? Not
that I personally admit that such a case exists--what then?"
"When you meet a woman with a soul you will have met your match, John,"
the Professor said, and opening his _Times_, which Demetrius had brought
in with the second post, he closed the conversation.
John Derringham strolled into the garden. The place had been greatly
improved since Halcyone's first discovery of its new occupant. The
shutters were all a spruce green and the paths weeded and tidy, while
the borders were full of bedded-out plants and flowers. A famous
gardener from Upminster renowned through all the West had come over and
given his personal attention to the matter, and next year wonderful
herbaceous borders would spring up on all sides. Mr. Johnson's visits
and his council, though at first resented, had at length grown a source
of pure delight to Halcyone; she reveled in the blooms of the delicate
begonias and salvias and other blossoms which she had never seen before.
Mr. Carlyon, although desiring solitude, appreciated a beautiful and
cultivated one, and the orchard house was now becoming a very
comfortable bachelor's home.
The day was much cooler than it had been of late. There was a fresh
breeze though the sun shone. John Derringham wandered down to the apple
tree and thence to the gap, and through it and on into the park. His
walk was for pleasure, and aimless as to destination, and presently he
sat down under a low-spreading oak and looked at the house--La Sarthe
Chase. A beautiful view of it could be obtained from there, and it
interested him--and from that his thoughts came to Halcyone and her
strange, quaint little personality, and he stretched himself out and
putting his hands under his head he looked up into the dense foliage of
the tree above him--and there his eyes met two grave, quiet ones peering
down from a mass of green, and he saw slender brown legs drawn up on a
broad branch, and a scrap of blue cotton frock.
"Good morning," Halcyone said quite composedly, "don't make a noise,
please, or rustle--the mother doe is just coming out of the copse with
her new fawn."
"How on earth did you get up there?" he asked, surprised.
"I swung myself from the lower branch on the other side; it is quite
easy--would you like to come up, too? There is plenty of room--and then
we could be sure the doe would not see you and she might peep out again.
I do not wish to frighten her."
John Derringham rose leisurely and went to the further side of the oak,
where sure enough there was a drooping branch and he was soon up beside
her, dangling his long limbs as he sat in a fork.
"What an enchanting bower you have found," he said. "Away from all the
world."
"No indeed, that cannot be at this time of the year," she answered.
"See, there is a squirrel far up in the top and there are birds, and
look--down there at the roots there is a rabbit hole with such a family
in it. It is only in the winter you can be alone--and not even then, for
you know there are the moles even if you cannot see them."
"Creatures are interesting to watch, aren't they?" he said. "I have an
old place which I loved when I was a boy. It is let now because I am too
poor to live in it, but I used to like to prowl about in the early
mornings long ago."
"We are all very poor," said Halcyone simply, "but I am sorry for you
that you have to let strangers be in your house--that must be dreadful."
John Derringham smiled, and his face lost the _insouciante_ arrogance
which irritated his enemies so. His smile, rare enough, was singularly
sweet.
"I don't think about it," he said. "It is best not to when anything is
disagreeable."
"Cheiron and I often tell one another things like that."
"Cheiron--who is Cheiron?" he asked.
This seemed a superfluous question to Halcyone.
"The Professor, of course. He is just like the picture in my 'Heroes,'"
she answered, "and I often pretend we are in the cave on Pelion. I
thought you would perhaps be like one of the others since you were his
pupil, too, but I cannot find which. You are not Heracles--because you
have none of those great muscles--or Æneas or Peleus. Are--are you Jason
himself, perhaps--" and her voice sounded glad with discovery. "We do
not know, he may not have had a Greek face."
John Derringham laughed. "Jason who led the Argonauts to find the Golden
Fleece--it is a good omen. Would you help me to find the Golden Fleece
if you could?"
"Yes, I would, if you were good and true--but the end of the story was
sad because Jason was not."
"How must I be good and true then? I thought Jason was a straight enough
sort of a fellow and that it was Medea who brought all the
trouble--Medea, the woman."
Halcyone's grave eyes never left his face. She saw the whimsical twinkle
in his but heeded it not.
"He should not have had anything to do with Medea--that is where he was
wrong," she said, "but having given her his word, he should have kept
it."
"Even though she was a witch?" Mr. Derringham asked.
"It was still his word--don't you see? Her being a witch did not alter
his word. He did not give it because she was or was not a witch--but
because he himself wanted to at the time, I suppose; therefore, it was
binding."
"A man should always keep his word, even to a woman, then?" and John
Derringham smiled finely.
"Why not to a woman as well as a man?" Halcyone asked surprised. "You do
not see the point at all it seems. It is not to whom it is you give your
word--it is to you it matters that you keep it, because to break it
degrades yourself."
"You reason well, fair nymph," he said gallantly; he was frankly amused.
"What may your age be? A thousand years more or less will not make any
difference!"
"You may laugh at me if you like," said Halcyone, and she smiled; his
gayety was infectious, "but I am not so very young. I shall be thirteen
in October, the seventh of October."
John Derringham appeared to be duly impressed with this antiquity, and
went on gravely:
"So you and the Master discuss these knotty points of honor and
expediency together, do you, as a recreation from the Greek syntax? I
should like to hear you."
"The Professor does not believe in men much," Halcyone said. "He says
they are all honorable to one another until they are tempted--and that
they are never honorable to a woman when another woman comes upon the
scene. But I do not know at all about such things, or what it means. For
me there is nothing towards other people; it only is towards yourself.
You must be honorable to yourself."
And suddenly it seemed to John Derringham as if all the paltry shams of
the world fell together like a pack of cards, and as if he saw truth
shining naked for the first time at the bottom of the well of the
child's pure eyes.
An extraordinary wave of emotion came over him, finely strung as he was,
and susceptible to all grades of feeling. He did not speak for a minute;
it was as if he had quaffed some elixir. A flame of noble fire seemed to
run in his veins, and his voice was changed and full of homage when at
last he addressed her.
"Little Goddess of Truth," he said, "I would like to be with you always
that you might never let me forget this point of view. And you believe
it would have won for Jason in the end--if he had been true to himself?
Tell me--I want greatly to know."
"But how could there be any doubt of that?" she asked surprised. "Good
only can bring good, and evil, evil."
At this moment, out from the copse the soft head of a doe appeared, and
at the thrilling sight Halcyone slipped her hand into her companion's,
and held his tight lest he should move or rustle a leaf.
"See," she whispered right in his ear. "She will cross to the other side
by the stream--and oh! there is the fawn! Is he not the dearest baby
angel you have ever seen--!"
And the doe, feeling herself safe, trotted by, followed by a minute son
in pale drab velvet hardly a month old.
The pair in the tree watched them breathlessly until they had entered
the copse again beyond the bend, and then Halcyone said:
"That makes six--and perhaps there are more. Oh! how I hope the Long Man
will not see them!"
John Derringham did not let go her hand at once; there was something
soft and pleasant in the touch of the cool little fingers.
"I want to hear about everything," he said. "Tell me of the Long
Man--and the fawns, and why there are only six. I am having the happiest
morning I have had for years."
So Halcyone began. She glossed a good deal over the facts she had told
Mr. Carlyon upon the subject because she did not feel she knew this
stranger well enough to let him into her aunts' private affairs--so she
turned the interest to the deer themselves, and they chatted on about
all sorts of animals and their ways, and John Derringham was entranced
and felt quite aggrieved when she said it was getting late and she must
go back to the house for her early dinner. He swung himself down from
the tree by the high branch with ease and stood ready to catch her, but
with a nimbleness he did not expect, she crept round to the lower side
and was landed upon the soft turf before he could reach her.
Then he walked back with her to the broken gate, telling her about his
own old home the while, and then they paused to say good-by.
Halcyone carried a twig of freshly sprouting oak which she had brought
from the tree, having broken it off in her lightning descent.
"Give me one leaf and you keep the other," he said. "And then, whenever
I see it, I will try to remember that I must always be good and true."
With grave earnestness she did as he asked, and then opened the gate.
"I want to tell you," she said--and she looked down for a second, and
then up into his eyes from beyond the bars. "I did not like the thought
of your coming--and at first I did not like you--but now I see something
quite different at the other side of your head--Good-by."
And before he could answer, she was off as the young fawn would have
been--a flitting shape among the trees. And John Derringham walked
slowly back to the orchard house, musing as he went.
But when he got there a telegram from his Chief had arrived, recalling
him instantly to London.
And he did not see Halcyone again for several years.