The Horado, huge, torpid vein of the back-country, after taking tribute of a thousand miles of jungle was suddenly released into the ocean, whose clear and fertile depths it stained with the earth’s rot and detritus. Where these two encountered there was war, of meeting and retreating waters; which only ceased when the slow pressure of the turning tide exactly balanced the slow outpouring of the vast stream. Then, for a little while, there was peace. In the midst of such a peace lay the barquentine, Dorotea Dixon, waiting for high-water on the bar.
She, the soiled little trader, was briefly an illusion, a dream, built of some substance of pearl-petal and rose-gold too lovely for a name. Grier said the wet deck looked so fragile, so irridescent, that he tapped it with his heel as he stood, for the assurance that he stood on something more solid than a very bubble of the foam. The crew were silent; for the most part gazing overside at the streaks of mud-brown coiling in the sapphire; for the scornful sea never entirely mingled with the current of the river. It was all glitteringly, insubstantially, clear and vivid and still you’d have thought, said Grier, that a great glass globe had been clapped down over everything. Islets of grass, logs, nameless jungle-drift the dark river brought down and left about them in that strange belt of no-man’s-water between the flood and the flood. In the very fulness of dawn it brought the dugout.
The dugout, along with the other drift, drew silently and very slowly towards them; touched at last on the port quarter with a distinct double knock. After a curious pause and hesitation, a man rose on the rail with a rope; there was a glint of faces along the rail as the others gazed at him. Grier warned: “Careful, Mac-Awe,” but less out of consideration for the dugout, he says, than for the spell of stillness they must break. His voice, or the voices of the triumphing tide, broke it; and it was amidst a commonplace clatter, on a commonplace deck, that they lifted and laid Brennan and the native girl.
The girl was all right; Brennan, the huge bull of a man, was in a bad way. He’d little on, Grier said, but a pair of burst canvas shoes much too small for him; his shirt he’d rigged as a sort of shelter for the girl. They carried them below and put them in a cabin, having first ascertained that the girl wore a brass ring on the third finger of her left hand; for the Old Man, as Grier said, was “uncommon correct.” Then, leaving them to the Old Man and his box of medicines, they went to the work of coaxing the Dorotea up stream. First, Grier took off the man’s shoes—cut them off in strips—for his feet were bruised to the bone.
Two hours later, the Dorotea being safely warped to a tree above the jetty, Grier went down to look at the waifs again. He met the Old Man coming out of the cabin, a blue bottle in one hand and Brennan’s shirt in the other; a gaudy garment of yellow stripes, indescribably fouled and torn. The Old Man, staring grimly over the huge steel spectacles he always assumed when he opened the medicine chest, held out the shirt to Grier; Grier gazed blankly. At last the Old Man condescended to explain, to point with the bottle.
“You don’t tell me, Mr. Grier,” he burst out, “that the fellow’s any right to it.”
Grier saw that there was a celluloid collar attached to the shirt with a brass safety pin: the orthodox straight band of white a parson wears. The Old Man went on, quivering with indignation; he was, as Grier said, “uncommon correct.” Grier looked into the cabin. The girl had curled up at the end of Brennan’s bunk, sound asleep nursing his wounded feet in her arms. Something in the sight hit Grier hard; he glanced from her to Brennan’s brutal, blue-black, upturned jaw, whistled thoughtfully, and went out.
Impossible even to imagine that jowl over the parson’s collar!
But it was Brennan’s jaw—or the quality it stood for—drove him that last thirty miles between Santa Luce and the Horado.
At Santa Luce—nothing but a river-crossing—he stopped and buried his last porter. He would have delayed for nothing living. Even Buck Brennan was obliged to delay awhile for that pitiful dead. He gave Rosario a few inches of earth; rested a little; took what he could of the double load, and went on. Thinking, as he told Grier, “Well, Rosario, hombre, your resurrection won’t take no three days”... A hard brute, Buck Brennan, with a heart like a baked brick; enclosing God-knew-what of fires of powers.... He had no choice but to die where he stood or a little farther on. He jutted out that great coarse jaw of his and chose to die farther on—as far as possible. And—as far as possible—he came on the house.
Imagine a great forest, bare of all life but one brown ant crawling in it; imagine in the very heart of that forest a tiny ant-heap, just a spoonful of honey-colored granules in the roots of a grass-tuft. Can you imagine the ant finding the ant-hill? Yet, in the vast jungles of the Horado, the creeping atomy that was Brennan, came on the house.
There was, in one window of the house, one little bit of glass, which caught the levelling light through some aisles of the unplumbed forest, and shone like a star. It drew Brennan, though he was then past thought. It was an automaton of mere muscle that he made towards it, mounted steps that sagged like hammocks, found a door, and set his shoulders to it. The door gave, groaning. Something tangled his feet and tripped him—a rope, or a vine of the myriad that veiled the very substance of the house. He fell as it seemed to him, very slowly; and the door sank before him like a mist. He heard a bell ring outside, far overhead—it rolled like the salute of a gun, a challenge, a war-cry flung hollow of night, all ringing and booming with bells.
Out of this deep sleep he woke in a dawn full of screaming clouds of little parakeets. They flashed past the doorway and vanished, but their green and gold lingered on the rim of every motionless leaf: the forest seemed to drip glory. But the splendid moment passed. A hot wind blew, and, somewhere overhead, set a cracked bell jangling. Brennan dragged himself to his feet and went to explore.
Food he must have; he had it there, in the load he’d let fall as he fell. But before that, before anything, he had to explore the house. Hunger was urgent. But there was something around him more urgent still. What?
He found no answer for a long time in the ghost of that little native-built house fading away into grass and green and mould—a visible sort of transubstantiation, going on, to go on, for how long? Who had built it? Who had deserted it? Why? He moved cat-footed on floors wrenched apart by writhing growths, where squares of solid mildew proclaimed that matting had been. He cleared the windows with his knife—it was like cutting snakes—and watched intently as the light fell on blotched and voiceless walls. There were glasses and warped frames here and there on the walls: from all but one the ants had eaten the pictures: this one had been backed with tin, and so the Madonna of the Chair still looked out, through the veiling of the damp, with her exquisite clear benevolence. Brennan tried another room.
Here were two little iron beds side by side, bare of anything but rust; a table, and a tin box. Brennan opened it. Books and papers rewarded him—several little gray-bound Gospels, an Imitation in Latin, a “Reading Without Tears,” and Miss Braddon’s “Vixen.” He was immensely bewildered and annoyed; he guessed a clue lay here, but was not sure of it. He tumbled the books about, and a shower of little cards fluttered out and lay gaudily on the floor. There was a picture and a text on every card. Brennan stooped and read “Suffer little children,” “He that speaketh truth sendeth forth righteousness,” “Charity suffereth long and is kind.”... He swore in pure astonishment and went on. On to the room at the back that ran the house’s width; of which the outer wall had fallen, leaving a drunken fringing of roof, a drift of greenery, dissolution and growth going on like a battlefield over—over what? Six benches in a row, a little raised platform, some coloured rags hanging from a roller that must have been a map, and a blackboard.
The place had been a school.
A school, a mission-school, in the jungles of the Horado! A picture-palace or a morgue would have appeared equally unnatural, equally out of drawing. Over the rotting roof, in a little cupola of split cane, hung the bell. As Brennan stood knee-deep in rubbish, staring at the blackboard, the bell moved in some unnoticeable air and clanged hoarsely. The school-bell!.... He turned to the blind doorway. And there were the scholars.
Native children. Three or four. One naked earth-coloured boy had a broken slate under his arm. One tallish girl wore the remains of a print gown, which she had washed clean. They stood gazing at Brennan in a wild, humble way, as if they also had lost their clue. Perhaps they could help him to his, though. But with his movement they fled, vanished, melted like shadows into the leaves. He had an impression of their eyes, bewildered, faithful, like the eyes of once-beloved ghosts. In the little cupola the bell was also faithful, calling to school.
Brennan ate and drank that day from his own small supplies. Then he stretched himself on one of those little iron beds and thought.
Food he must have—to go on with. Food, and perhaps he’d make the Horado; follow it down: find a boat.... But his mind persistently revolted from this balanced considering of days and ways, to a mere wonder, a curiosity. This school. Who had built it, kept it? Where had they come from, and why? Where had they gone, and why? That, not his journey, was what mattered—here. He went through everything with an intent method, but he found no more than a name in the Imitation—“Bonnie West,” and a date. Who on earth was Bonnie West? Sitting on the edge of the bed, he frowned from the book in his hand to the mould-haloed Madonna on the wall till his weight sent the legs through the floor and he slid off. He swore, but defiantly.... Grier said, “He always made me understand that the house still belonged. He never had any sense of ownership, or any right there. He was perpetually guilty, as if his hosts might return and find him there, unwelcome. He was apologetic when he renewed some of his badly worn clothes from a few he found put away under the books in the tin box—a coat and a pair of shoes I believe; he used to wake in the night, he told me, shaping excuses for making so free. Buck Brennan! D.D.’s clothes they were—Devil Dodgers—parson’s clothes.”
Perhaps it was with some idea of a vague repayment that Brennan began to clean out the schoolroom.... Llianas had climbed to the roof, burst it, lapped about the little belfry. Everything he touched, he told Grier, the bell rang. And he’d a notion that the scholars still haunted the place; he felt himself continually watched, followed—weighed, perhaps, and found wanting. Once he looked up quickly from his tidying, and there they were again in the door. But again they fled and the forest swallowed them as some say a mother-snake will swallow its young. It troubled him. He thought that if he had on the parson’s coat they might have stayed, and then he would have found out everything.... He always wore it after that. And as the strange empty, preoccupied house worked on him, he added one of the straight white collars he also found in the box. But they would not return for all the wool this innocent wolf stuck on his rough pelt.
He had no heart those first days for venturing into the jungle again, even to find out where the children hid, and where he might get fresh supplies, and perhaps porters for his further journey; his necessities all lapsed curiously into the background. But the morning came when he took his gun and went out, moved from his uncommon lethargy by the need of the next day’s dinner. He told himself he was after pig. But he followed the trodden path he found leading from—and to—the mission school. It must lead to the village. He had followed a thousand such corkscrew trails. But this one ended in nothing. Just that. It was as if a hand had come down and wiped everything out, as you wipe something you don’t want read off a slate. Bare, burnt earth was there, and a leprosy of ashes. Rain had fallen in the night; he saw, in the ashes, prints of children’s feet. And went back without his pig.
After that, he was continually on the watch. He shot and cured meat, as much as he could carry for any journey. He still lingered, confident that somewhere in the jungle was the clue, the answer to the riddle of emptiness of ashes, and of the fluttering ghosts of the children, that he had set himself to solve.... Who can say what held him there? One evening, an hour from the house, he parted branches and looked on a camp.
Of himself, nothing was clearly visible in the gloom of the leaves but the white linen collar about a throat that many would have preferred in a hempen one. Of the man who sat in the daylight and the firelight, nothing was hidden as he looked up, saying, thoughtfully, “Ah! So they have sent another already....”
“When Buck went back to the house,” said Grier, “Manuel Franca went along; and when he stood at the door, and looked into the emptiness, he smiled.”
“And the roof didn’t fall on him?”
“No-o-o, nothing so inadequate; it was only palm-thatch. What did happen was that he went into the inner room where the rusty beds were as if he knew the way, picked up that little Imitation, fluttered the leaves, and, when he came to the name written inside—‘Bonnie West,’ he smiled again.”
“What has that to do with—?”
“With Buck Brennan? O, a great deal.... You ought to have talked to Buck. You see, he’d done nothing but try and think things out, and wonder who Bonnie West was and what had happened to her, until he’d made a sort of picture of it—and her. She must have seemed quite real to him. It was in the jungle, you know, anyway.....”
“Well?”
“Well, when Franca smiled, Buck took a dislike to him. So you see, it was much worse than if the roof had fallen.... Thank God. And I never saw Bonnie’s name in a book.”
Now, she begins to come into it.
An excessively strange companionship must have ensued between those two in the empty mission-house; neither asked any questions of the other, in a situation that called for many; a betrayal in itself, if both had not so studiously avoided the veriest shadow of distrust. Certain things Buck never cleared up—for instance, if Franca took him for a bona-fide padre because of the collar! It sounds impossible; but “in there,” as Grier puts it, “the priests are just anything.” Perhaps Franca was too deep in his own affairs to notice Buck much; for it took no more than a day or two for Buck to realize that he also was waiting, watching, searching for something with an intensity that defied pretence. He believed Franca had come back—ah! come back?—to find something.
Brennan also began to look for it, though he was hampered by not knowing what it was! And by the necessity of keeping up appearances. He went on tidying the schoolroom; he told Franca that his porters had deserted on the way up with most of his goods, which was moderately true; he was expecting to get new men, only they seemed to have all run away from the vicinity.
“The scholars also, they have run away?” suggested the leisurely Franca politely.
“Yes, but—”
“But I will bring them back to you.”
Brennan said that what followed was like a nasty sort of adjectived miracle. Franca idled to the door—he was always idling about, peering in cracks, feeling walls, gazing into holes with a hunger of insatiable eyes—and called. The leaves of the forest shook, here and there, as if Fear moved them. He called again. And Fear crawled on its belly from the leaves to his feet, the boy with the slate, the girl who wore the remnants of the print wrapper. They did not even tremble; they waited, like ducks for the food to scatter.
“These are all that are left, I think.”
Franca stooped forward and took something from the girl’s neck. It was a dirty little bag on a string. He looked about, smiling; then hung it on the corner of the blackboard. “They will not run far now,” he nodded to Buck. The two crept away.
Buck Brennan was a bit taken in the wind, as he would have said. And that night he woke to a low moaning like the wind, a voice of grief so faint, so uncomprehending, it was not human. He took a light and went to the schoolroom. The girl was there, a bare thing of the night, her eyes luminous as its stars. She was squatting at the foot of the blackboard, making this sound of uncomplaining loss. Brennan knew what she wanted. She wanted her little lucky-bag, and was afraid to touch it. He took it down, looked into it; his clue was not there: unless a little bone collar stud with two or three hairs wrapped around the shank was a clue? The hairs gleamed in the light, reddish—fair.... He closed the little smelly thing, and gave it to the girl. Felt, the next instant, her hands, her tears, on his great bare feet! So she was a human being, not unattractive, and wildly grateful. He laid a hand like a lion’s paw on her: but she melted from him, and he did not follow. She was not his; like the house, she belonged... To what, to whom? To a ghost, a shadow, bringing bright hair and a halo of lilac print, that looked at Buck with the eyes of a fate he might never learn. He went back to the bedroom, looked long at Franca, asleep and smiling. And began to feel that here, perhaps, was all the clue he needed.
He spent a long time next day sitting over the little books, like a jury over so many little corpses; smoking heavily, and very uncomfortable in the mildewy coat, the stiff collar, and the parson’s shoes so much too tight for him. They were all part of position into which he had been drifted, to which he so strangely yielded himself; but he preferred to leave a certain veil of doubt and obscurity over it. Into that puddle of circumstances he would never look too closely, lest he should see reflected there a bad Buck Brennan he did not know and couldn’t have lived with—an avenger, a judge, grimly appointed by some vast mockery or vaster justice.
And there, as he sat, suddenly he had his clue in his hand.
It was the half-sheet of an unfinished letter, rolled into a little spill and thrust into the rounded back of the book. He unrolled it carefully, and the hand-writing, clear and rather childish, sprang out at him in the fading grayish ink.
“.... For I do think, Chubsie, Lewis is the very best man in the world. You’ll laugh; but he takes such beautiful care of me, and the work’s so interesting, and the babies are such dirty little ducks, all eyes and tummies. I don’t really feel fit to be a missionary’s wife, but I’m trying to be, and I know quite a lot of Spanish. And on Thursday, he said I was—what do you think?—an inspiration. Don’t laugh, you bad girl. Oh, Chubs, I wish I could hear you! And that brings me to the one thing—I wouldn’t tell him for the world, but I can tell you because I know you never breathe a word of what anyone tells you. This country frightens me. It’s not a bit like the winter I was in Ceylon. Just sometimes, you know; though I tell myself it’s only for two years, and I’m with Lewis, and I was willing. But it’s interesting too. Guess what he found that time he went up the Horado to the fifth tributary.—Fancy, it hasn’t even a name!—where the boys said no white man had been before. He found whole forests of rubber trees. I said, ‘Was it valuable?’ And he said, ‘Yes, immensely,’ but he’d never make use of it or tell anyone it was there, because he said rubber seemed to be one of the accursed products of the earth, and death and suffering always followed where it was. Of course I agreed. Isn’t he splendid? Then Mr. Franca came in. I must tell you about him. He’s quite splendid in a catty sort of way; but truly, I’m a little bit afraid of him too. He’s like the country...”
And that was all. But Brennan had his clue. Clue? It was a revelation, a whole dark landscape shown in one flash of leven-fire. He crushed the little spill in his fingers, and across the chasm of her fate cried to Bonnie West,—“Yes, I see, I see. But what did he do...?”
“You have it...”
Franca, just breathing the words, stood in the doorway; he leaned, not towards the paper in Buck’s hand, but away from it, as a man leans against the pull of a rope.
“You have it. You know it....”
“What do I know, I wonder?” said Buck, thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving Franca’s.
“Where he went.... What he found...”
“Yes.” Buck was more thoughtful than ever. With a single movement he took his pipe from his mouth and tilted the red-hot ash on the paper in his palm. The thin “foreign note” curled instantly in a fluff of little flame, ended in a square of fragile gray edged with dying scarlet. Buck sat watching it quietly. Franca had cried out once, no time for more. Now he stood grunting and sweating like an animal, one hand pulling and fumbling at his belt.
“No good.” Buck shook his head. “No good. You wouldn’t be such a fool.... I am—now—the only living soul that knows.”
The only living soul .... Franca went out.
That night the native girl, with her lucky-bag and her rags of faithfully guarded print, crouching in darkness, saw a great light. A lantern was held over her head, a hand hauled her mightily from her hiding place. She was dazed as by the coming of a god: she suffered a resurrection: she shook, and was still. But the god’s voice was kind.
“I like you,” said Buck Brennan, that uncommon thoughtfulness still upon him. “You’re my kind; and you’d be right pretty for a brown one if you was washed. I like you for sticking to her; the place where she was... I can’t leave you here, now them poor little fools is gone... Them poor little damn fools. You better come with me. I’ll be straight with you .... take care of you .... hand you over to the first missionary we meet, and may the Lord have mercy on my soul.” Buck was a bit confused; but neither this closing solemnity, nor the parson’s collar, nor the parson’s canvas shoes seemed quite enough .... Buck swallowed hard, suddenly dry of throat.
“Bonnie West,” he said, distinctly. “Bonnie West.... There, will that do you?”
Yes, it was the talisman of trust. The dark little wild thing rose and went with him, holding on to the tail of the parson’s coat.
“And after all,” said Grier, “how little Buck knew, how little he was able to tell! And yet enough—plenty. If the girl told him more, he kept it to himself; and I don’t know if he or anyone else but Franca knows the close of the story of the poor little good little Wests and their mission. The secure and comfortable organization that sent them out doesn’t know: I’ve asked it. They just went out: were swallowed up in the great dark land that was so unlike her winter in Ceylon, and frightened her sometimes. And Franca.... Why didn’t Buck shoot Franca and have it done with? I don’t pretend to know that either. It scarcely needs putting into words, the certainty that Franca killed, wiped out, abolished the Wests and their little mission because he didn’t want ’em to get that rubber: and then couldn’t find it himself.... Any good man would have shot the beast and thanked God for the chance. But Buck wasn’t good—only in spots. He had an erratic sense of humour, and he’d been in that house some time—with Bonnie West. The method he chose involved more risks to himself. But think of the devilish far-reaching completeness of it!
“The story of his escape with that girl from the jungles of the Horado would make a saga. But he can’t tell it. The rains came on, and it took them a month to find the river; Franca fighting on behind them—in case they were making for the blessed rubber! They stole a dugout somewhere and launched it for the sea; followed a long fever-dream of bars, and beasts, swimming trees, sunken islands, reversing currents, falls, impossible portages; and all the time the knowledge that Franca was dogging them behind or waiting in an agony for them in front. Afraid to let them out of his sight.... It probably brought Buck through; as I say, he had a peculiar sense of humour; and then he had the plucky girl.... I don’t know when the brass ring made its appearance, or what ingenious ceremony it celebrated. Once, I believe, she got fever and gave out; and Buck would tie her in the fork of a tree, drag the dugout overland, launch it, go back for her, and carry her to it. No wonder his feet were bad. Think of it! And all the weary way, Franca followed.
“I tell you, that villain began to pay then, as he’d never paid in his life, and it was only the beginning. He hated Buck, as, I suppose, few ever come to be hated; and he was mad with anxiety over the personal safety of the only living being who knew where to find that rubber. What a vengeance, eh? I tell you, I saw him crawling on the jetty, before I had heard anything about him, when Buck was very bad aboard the Dorotea, and he was the hot ghost of a man. Of a man? Of a devil. He looked like a devil dying of hunger, and that’s just what he was.
“He said to me, panting as he spoke, ‘Is it true that you have the Señor Brennan aboard there?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘And is it true that the fever is heavy on him, and is he talking much in it?’ ‘No,’ I says, ‘he’s no fever, and does nothing but snore, and the fo’c’sle’s complaining.... And who may you be, so anxious to hear what he says in his sleep?’ But he crawled away with a sort of groan. Yes, Buck’s way was the best; Franca had begun to break then, torn as he must have been between his hate and his greed; but I doubt if my—well, my sense of humour!—would have been strong enough to let me take it! ... All for the knowledge of the direction that unlucky little saint of a missionary had taken when he found the rubber trees, and that knowledge in Buck’s head, and nowhere else in the world.
“Yes, it was masterly. How he must have thought, ‘Some day, he must betray it. Some day, he must go back to his rubber, some day, he must show—me—where it is...’ But Buck hasn’t!
“Queer, isn’t it? I told you he’d a fat sense of humour. He enjoys himself immensely over it. He starts suddenly on wild expeditions with a great air of secrecy over them; Franca drops everything, beats up a party too, and trails him. When he’s been led far enough, Buck turns round and comes back. It’s ruining Franca. He’s obsessed. He can do nothing but follow, follow, follow.... But the worry, and the travelling, and the hate on an empty stomach! He’s taken to drinking now, Buck tells me, and he can’t last long. What worries me is that he’ll realize the game’s up, and stick that itching knife into Buck at last.
“And the cause of it all, the rubber? I never speak of it to him. Perhaps when Franca’s beyond any chance of profiting by it.... Perhaps then.... But I don’t know, I’m not sure of Buck. He’s talked to me a good deal, of the house, and Bonnie West, and her letter in his hand. He remembered every word of that letter, wrote them down for me, but gave me no confidence, for he changed the directions.... It was not the fifth tributary; only he knows what it was, and I’ve an idea only he will ever know. I think not through Buck Brennan will the hell of the rubber trade come to the country where Bonnie West lived and died. It wouldn’t be the first sacrifice he’d made to that erratic sense of—humour.
“He hasn’t gone on any expedition this year. I think he’s inclined to domesticity. He’s been incredibly staunch to that little brown girl of Bonnie West’s. I often think of them in the cabin, and cutting the parson’s shoes off. They were far too small, those shoes for Buck Brennan.”
“William writes that he is home from Italy, Helena; that he is married to Lucia Vasotti, and that he begs us to send the child to Great House on a visit, so that it may be less lonely for Lucia—a stranger in a strange land, as he justly observes.”
“And likely to remain so. Most unsuitable.”
“Hush, Helena, we must not be harsh. We will send the child, but only for a short time.”
Launce was that child, and that was the first word he had of Lucia Vasotti—her name, linked with “unsuitable.” It must have been blown to him on some wind of chance, because he was up in the dove-house at the time with three Ribston pippins and The Bride of Lammermoor. The flutter of homely wings was in his ears, the sharp fresh apple-scent on his lips, Lucia was maddening on the sunlit page before him, and “Lucia” was blown past him on the keen spring air. Until he died, that name was to him as the call of remembered music far away. Then old Pansy came and hauled him down the ladder in a hurry to be measured for two new shirts.
Launce was the only child at that time in the family, and he was used to being handed round a large circle of grown-ups for the comfort of this or that member thereof, like a foot-warmer. He remembered his Uncle William as a tall, dark man, incredibly supplied with shillings and generous of the same. Great House he did not know, but he was a child of steadfast mind. He went off very calmly, well shawled and muffled, with a small black box and two white mice in a cage. It was a day’s journey, of which he remembered little, save that the willow catkins were out and the southward-fronting gorse in bloom along the windy coast. He reached Great House just as a wild sunset was faring above the sea.
The house stood high for that level land, surrounded with a great sweep of terraces and plantations. It was built upon a fair and gracious plan, but the bitter sea and the north-east had taken their toll of it. The gardens were starved with sand, and the trees shorn off at wind-mark as with a sword. The buildings too were grey and wind-bitten, but now they swam in a strange red light. On the terrace above the beach a lady paced up and down, wrapped in a red cloak. And she moved like a moving flame in a still mist of fire.
“That is Unsuitable Lucia,” said Launce. He turned along the terrace path where the sea-shells gritted with the gravel, the mouse-cage tied up in a blue handkerchief in one hand, and his cap in the other, rehearsing the little speech that Aunt Helena had taught him last Sunday with his collect. As a result he was not very clear whether his “honoured aunt and the warm welcome that ever awaited dear William’s bride, however unexpected,” held a prominent position in the Church Service, or whether he must remind this Lucia that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, but need to be kept both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls. However, he had no time for either, for the lady saw him, and stood, holding out her hands.
“Are you Launce?”
The child went up to her; he could see that her eyes and hair would have been very dark without the red-gold light that shone in them as fire shines through smoke. Then she moved quickly and kissed him, and the vision was blotted in the folds of her red cloak, through which he saw the world as in a flame. “Are you Launce? I am your new Aunt Lucia, but you must call me Lucy, for I am English now. I shall love you, you little brown, long-nosed boy. Will you love me?”
But how could the boy answer, drowned in his first vision of what a face might be.
She laughed a little, and sent a long, ringing call up to the house—“William, O William, here is our nephew come.” And then there was Uncle William, jumping out of the window of the gun-room and running down the terraces, and saying. By Gad, now, was that big boy little Launce, and how glad he was to see him, and Mrs. Annerley had tea ready in her room. But first he’d better give the mice to Simmons.
“I’d rather have them in my room, if Aunt Lucia does not mind. They are not very mousy.”
“Afraid you’ll be lonely in the night, eh?”
“No, Uncle Will; I’m afraid they will be lonely, they are sensitive mice.”
And Lucia laughed. “Why should I mind, William, the pretty little living things in the house? There are so few of them.” She glanced at the house with a faint shiver. The sea had suddenly taken the sun, and they moved like grey ghosts in a ghostly garden. Only on Lucia’s face the light seemed to linger.
Uncle Will patted her hand as he had patted Launce. “Well, come along, laddie. You must be hungry, and Mrs. Annerley has slain the fatted calf. But go into the gun-room first. There’s someone there you see more often than you do me.”
“Who?”
“Your godfather.”
Launce went to the gun-room with a happy face, and greeted his godfather with a nod, as one boy greets another. Mr. Geoffrey Launcelot was sitting on the table, apparently busy in admiring his own legs, very effective in new gaiters. He went straight to the point, as was his custom. “How’s the brown rabbit?”
“Well, sir, thank you, and has seven little ones. I’ve given two to Bill’s boy.”
“That’s right. Always give away what you don’t want yourself. How’s Foxy?”
“He’s well too.”
“And what do you think of your new aunt?”
Launce stood gazing at him above the mouse-cage. He opened his lips to speak, but the vision came on him again, and something beat in his heart and choked his throat like the flutter of prisoned wings. He stood stammering, and felt with amazement his own cheeks grown wet with tears.
Mr. Launcelot handed him a handkerchief with an unmoved face. “Boy,” said he, “I’m sometimes damnably afraid you’re going to be a poet.”
Launce steadied his nerves with Mrs. Annerley’s veal pie. He slept in a little gaunt room looking out over the gardens. Downstairs there was music—Lucia’s laughter, the piano. Uncle Will’s hunting songs, and then young Geoffrey’s tenor, high and wild as a bugle, ringing through the hollow corridors.
He fell asleep to the unaccustomed music, and he awoke to music—the bleak music of the wind and the sea.
He was late for breakfast, but Geoffrey was even later, strolling in imperturbably after the eggs, his curly hair still sleek from the sea.
“To-day,” Uncle Will announced, “we’re going to unpack wedding presents.”
Unpack—a happy word. Launce awoke from a dream of Lucia’s morning face behind the urn.
“Well, boy?”
“I have a new knife, sir. If I might cut the strings—?”
“Come into the hall. They are all there. And you shall cut all the strings.”
The grey old hall was littered with packages and cases and straw; the wind shook the curtains, and drove along the floor a fine dust that was not dust of the earth, but sand of the sea. Launce was sent for Lucia’s red cloak, a happy errand. And when he came back they had knocked a wooden case apart and stood above the swathed contents, waiting with a smile for the offices of the new knife.
There were many strings to be cut, but at last the packing and the sackcloth fell away. And Launce cried out suddenly and was silent. He felt again that flutter as of wings in his heart.
Yesterday he had looked his first on beauty living and mortal. Now he looked his first on beauty dead and all but immortal.
A boy was there, sleeping in the honey-coloured marble that seemed to have drunk its fill of some long-remembered sun. So soft, so warm, so golden-grey it shone in the dusk of the hall, that Launce cried out again to touch it and find it cold. The boy lay with his head thrown back on his arm. Vine-leaves, broken now, were falling from his hand, clinging to his curls, and vine-leaves lay where his little goat-hooves had crushed them ere he slept. His face was neither good nor evil, only beautiful. And his happy sleep seemed so light a thing that a laugh, a song, the touch of a bird’s wing or the shadow of a falling leaf must serve to break it, and awaken him to some unknown life apart from evil and from good, the rising and setting of whose days and nights was beauty.
“Well, my lady,” cried Uncle Will in his big voice, “you know where that comes from, hey?”
With one of her swallow-swift movements, Lucia stooped above it. “The villa,” she murmured, “the gardens, the laughing sea, and the sun—” She laid her cheek suddenly to the smooth, cold cheek of the sleeping faun. “I kiss you, O beautiful, for the sea and the sun—for Italy—”
“You are an odd kitten, Lucia,” said Uncle Will, “and you have some dust on your cheek. Let me wipe it off for you. And don’t forget to tell Mrs. Annerley about those sweetbreads.”
To Launce—and another—it seemed the little faun should have smiled and wakened beneath that kiss of hers.
Launce wrote home that evening:
“My dear Aunt Helena, I am very Well. The mice are very Well. Uncle William is very Well, and will write when he can gain Leisure. Aunt Lucia is very well. I am glad to be here to prevent her from being Lonely. My dear Godfather is here too, to prevent her from being Lonely. He sends his Compliments, and did not tell me how to spell it. He has new Gaiters. He has a new Horse, which he calls Monseigneur. I do my Latin daily, and am, my dear Aunt, your loving and dewtiful Nephew, Launce. My dear Aunt. She is bewtiful.”
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.