Launce was very happy at Great House, in a way that was a little
bewildered and dream-like. The grooms and gardeners liked him, and were
kindly. There were horses in the stables, great store of pups and
kittens, and a boy with red hair who kept two ferrets and had been known
to win sevenpence on the races. He read Latin with Uncle Will, who had
forgotten his syntax, but vastly revered Horace. He had long walks and
talks with Lucia on the windy terraces, and might dream of her by the
hour in a newly-dug cave behind the summer-house. Mr. Launcelot,
fashionably languid by day, was wont to wake up in the evening and go
thundering about the country on his great bay horse. Often he took
Launce on the saddle in front of him, and the boy would spend an hour of
delirious delight as they swooped in great curves above the hard
beaches, returning with clouded stars ahead and the foam of the
in-running tide at the horse’s heels. Sometimes they would all go off
together, a merry party, Uncle Will on his steady grey weight-carrier,
Launce on a fat pony, Lucia on a brave old mare with a touch of the
Arab. Then at the last mile Uncle Will would say, “Give her a gallop,
Geoff,” and the two light-weights would flash away, the old mare running
as smooth as a swallow, and Geoffrey a neck behind, bearing hard on
Monseigneur’s bit—away and away, down the levels of silver sand to the
far lights of Great House. Uncle Will always rode that last mile with
Launce in silence. Once he said, “I wish I weren’t forty-three, boy, and
didn’t ride fourteen stone.” It occured to Launce that his godfather,
fighting the great bay, was a fine thing to see.
They set the sleeping faun on an old pedestal against the sea wall,
among a struggling growth of rusty wallflowers and sea-lavender, under
the windows of Launce’s room and the gun-room. The boy would waken in
the moonlight and watch that other boy asleep in the gusts of the night.
Sometimes the waves would cover the flat beach almost to the bounds of
the garden; and then in the early morning Launce would go and clear the
little faun of dried weed and sand, and the bitter salt crusting of the
sea. He begged a hardy rose of the gardener, and planted it at the
faun’s head, but the wind uprooted it.
Lucia found him as he was taking it from the sand. “What are you doing,
little boy?” She nearly always called him “little boy” with a smile that
was a caress.
Launce found it hard to explain, and turned very red in the effort. “I
thought he would like a flower.”
“But there are little flowers here.”
“Yes, I know. They are very sweet, but the lavender looks grey, and the
wallflowers are like rust. I—I thought he would like
something—different. These—these are not his flowers.”
She was dressed for riding, and stood looking at the child gravely,
tapping the stone with her whip. “What then?”
“A red rose, Madonna.”
“Hush,” said Lucia quickly, “hush. You must not call me that.” She laid
her fingers an instant on his lips.
Launce turned redder than ever. “I’m sorry, Aunt Lucy. I heard godfather
call you that, and Uncle Will laughed. I thought it was polite.” He
hoped she would laugh too, and kiss him in a pleased way, as she did
when he remembered to give her her English name of Lucy.
But she still looked at him strangely. “These little flowers are just as
sweet,” she said with earnestness: “they are brave and poor, but they
content the heart. Oh, yes they content the heart.”
“Not his,” persisted Launce; “he wants roses, Aunt Lucy, red roses with
the sun on ’em.” He looked up at her shamefacedly, and saw to his relief
that she was smiling at last, though her eyes were shadowed.
“How do you know?”
Launce shuffled in the sand. There was nothing she might not have of him
when she used that voice. He would have told her of his fight with the
red-haired boy, of the cave behind the summer-house, even of the
humiliating fact that he still kept, secretly, at the bottom of his
play-box, a shapeless wooden doll called Ephraim. Now she lightly asked
of him a harder thing—his dreams. Well, she should have them.
“I think he is not really asleep, the little faun. Aunt Lucy, I think in
the night, the quiet dark night, he wakes up.”
“He wakes up—?”
“Yes. He’s not very clever. He does not know where he is. But he can do
things.”
“What things, little boy?”
“I don’t quite know. But he knows something, and they know too. I think
I’ve seen, Aunt Lucy—I’m almost sure I’ve seen. I think he calls
things. He wakes and calls. It is like music, but there is no sound. It
is like dancing, but he does not move. Only he is awake, somehow, inside
the stone. And last night, when the moon came out between the clouds, I
saw the rabbits dance on the path, and other things, too—”
“What things?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Launce desperately. “I fell asleep on the
window-sill. Little queer things out of the larch-plantation, but all
alive and dancing.”
“Dancing—?”
“Yes,” said Launce, fired by his own fancies—“like this.” He flung two
handfuls of sand in the air, and began to dance on the starved grass. He
was small and slight, and he moved, in his wild fit, like an elf of the
woods, a leaf in the wind. All the steps he ever knew he wove into a
medley, beautiful because of the speed and grace of his little flinging
body. Then, dancing fast and faster, he lost them, and there was nothing
but young life leaping in the air, as the blood in the heart, the wave
on the sea. “This is how the little faun dances,” he cried, shrilly. And
in a moment Lucia had swept up her trailing skirts, and was dancing too.
If the child danced like a leaf in the wind, she danced like a flame in
the bracken, a swallow in the air. Launce dropped on his hands and knees
to watch her, breathless, and she wove a chain of lovely movements
around him as he knelt. Her feet moved like music, her green habit
seemed to bear her up like a bubble with fire in the heart of it. Her
wild face was flushed, exquisite under her shaken hair. But when
Geoffrey Launcelot came down the path she stopped in a flash, and was
once more the great lady of Great House.
“Will can’t come,” said Geoffrey, pulling on his gloves; he had
apparently seen nothing of the dancing. “He bade me offer my escort,
Signora.”
“Shall we ride, sir?” said Lucia gravely.
Mr. Launcelot bowed. “If you will so far honour me, Signora?”
Then, catching the subdued wonder of his eyes, Lucia laughed, and
Geoffrey began to laugh, and Launce echoed them for very pleasure in the
sound. “But do not call me that, Cousin Geoffrey,” said Lucia. “Do not
say ‘Signora.’”
“What must I say?”
“Say ‘Cousin Lucy.’ That is English, and of the English custom. I wish
to forget—the other—”
“Thank you, Cousin Lucy.” Geoffrey did not lift his eyes from his
gloves. “I told Simmons to bring the horses round to the foot of the
steps. Shall we mount there?”
A flight of broad, shallow stone stairs led from the lower terrace to
the beach. They were always scoured and swept by wind and wave, half
buried in sand, with shells and bent-grass in the cracks. Simmons was
holding the two horses on the beach-road beneath. Launce joined him, and
was warned from Monseigneur’s heels. The others followed. Geoffrey
handed Lucia down the old steps as though all London town were watching,
and had for his reward the touch of her foot in his hand as she sprang
to the saddle.
“Shall we take the boy?” he asked, with a look at Launce, hopping
hopefully in the sand.
Lucia glanced with a little shrug at Monseigneur. “If you think it is
safe.”
“I guarantee that, of the two, my neck is the only one like to be
broken. And that, Cousin Lucy, is of consequence to nobody.”
Lucia was bubbling over with mischief. “I do think you take very good
care of your neck, Cousin Geoffrey,” she said kindly. “I hear of you as
a very reckless young man, but I see nothing of it. You do no very hard
things, and you always change your boots when they are wet. And I have
left my whip near the little faun—Dio mio!—”
The others echoed her startled cry. For Geoffrey, with a sudden little
laugh, faced the bay horse at the broad steps and began forcing him up
them, with hand and knee and spur—up, up, snorting and straining, to
the terrace. He swung him round the little faun, caught up Lucia’s whip,
and came down the steps again in one leaping, clattering rush that
seemed as if it must end in red ruin.
“My God, sir!” cried old Simmons shrilly, snatching at Launce.
The bay came down on his knees in a shower of sand and shingle,
staggered up and on, and was carried clear across the beach-road into
the surf. Here the rider had the mastery in an instant. And before they
could catch breath he was at Lucia’s side, splashed to the hair, on the
wet and trembling horse.
“Here is your whip, Cousin Lucy,” he said, gently.
“My God, sir!” quavered old Simmons again, running to the horse’s knees.
Lucia did not take the whip. She sat looking at Geoffrey, trembling
exceedingly. “How dare you!” she said at last, under her breath, “how
dare you!”—and then, bending forward, she broke into wild tears.
The colour went from Geoffrey’s face as if he had been struck, and
Launce, with a swift sense that the world had begun to go astray, saw
that he too was shaking. “Here’s your whip, Cousin Lucy,” he said again,
and even his voice shook.
But she struck it from his hand, struck it down in the sand, spurred the
mare, and went off full speed down the beach. Geoffrey followed her in
an instant. They saw her motion him away fiercely, saw him rein
Monseigneur back two lengths in his thunderous canter. Then the silver
shimmer of sun on leagues of grey beach and sea took them, and old
Simmons turned with a sigh. “Lord be gentle wi’ ’em,” he said, aloud.
“Come you wi’ me, Master Launce.”
The bleak gardens lay grey and quiet in the pale light. Only the crushed
and trampled wallflowers and the old steps scarred with hooves served to
show that a storm had passed. Launce, touching the little faun as he lay
in his stone sleep, started back to find the leaf-covered breast warm,
as if a heart beat there. But it was only the warmth of the sun.
That night Lucia did not go early to the drawing-room, but sat with
Launce in the little room over the gardens till he fell asleep. The moon
seemed to be reeling down the skies under a great press of steam-white
cloud, and now the room was dark, now silver-bright. Sometimes Launce
had no more of Lucia than her firm, small hand in his; sometimes he saw
her face, pale and clear as the face of the little faun in the garden
below. He was very sleepy, and there seemed to be music in the air;
drowsing, he wondered if the little faun were calling them so, out to
some unknown magic of the night. Presently there was more music in the
room beneath—the gayest, brightest little laughing tunes imaginable,
and a cheerful thumping noise. Uncle Will was apparently sitting on the
window-sill and applauding with his feet; and the tunes went flying out
of the window like little blue and golden birds.
“Sing, Geoff, sing,” cried Uncle Will in delight.
There was a silence, a changed chord on the instrument, and the high,
wild voice rang out:—
Again the child was pierced with that wordless sense of the world
astray, of loneliness, of loss. “Godfather Geoff is going away,” he said
drowsily, “he told me so,” and felt for Lucia’s hand. The room seemed to
open in the darkness, fronting a flood of silver. And he saw her face,
shining with silent tears.