CHAPTER VII

It followed as a matter of inevitable consequence that Lucian and Sprats when they emerged from the waters of the wayside ditch had become fast friends for life; from that time forward they were as David and Jonathan, loving much, and having full confidence in each other. They became inseparable, and their lives were spent together from an early hour of the morning until the necessary bedtime. The vicar was to a certain degree shelved: his daughter possessed the charm of youth and high spirits which was wanting in him. He became a species of elder brother, who was useful in teaching one things and good company on occasions. He, like the philosopher which life had made him, accepted the situation. He saw that the devotion which Lucian had been about to pour out at his own feet had by a sudden whim of fate been diverted to his daughter, and he smiled. He took from these two children all that they gave him, and was sometimes gorged to satiety and sometimes kept on short commons, according to their vagaries and moods. Like all young and healthy things, they believed that the world had been made for their own particular benefit, and they absorbed it. Perhaps there had never been such a close companionship as that which sprang up between these two. The trifling fact that one was a boy and the other a girl never seemed to strike them: they were sexless and savage in their freedom. Under Sprats’s fostering care Lucian developed a new side of his character: she taught him to play cricket and football, to climb trees and precipices, to fish and to ride, and to be an out-of-door boy in every way. He, on his part, repaid her by filling her mind with much of his own learning: she became as familiar with the scenes of his childhood as if she had lived in them herself.

For three years the vicar, Sprats, and Lucian lived in a world of their own, with the Pepperdines as a closely fitting environment. Miss Pepperdine was accustomed to remark that she did not know whether Lucian really lived at the farm or at the vicarage, but as the vicar often made a similar observation with respect to his daughter, things appeared to be equalised. It was true that the two children treated the houses with equal freedom. If they happened to be at the farm about dinner-time they dined there, but the vicarage would have served them equally well if it had harboured them when the luncheon-bell rang. Mr. Pepperdine was greatly delighted when he found them filling a side of his board: their remarks on things in general, their debates, disputes, and more than all, their quarrels, afforded him much amusement. They were not so well understood by Miss Pepperdine, who considered the young lady from the vicarage to be something of a hoyden, and thought it the vicar’s duty to marry again and provide his offspring with a mother.

‘And a pretty time she’d have!’ remarked Mr. Pepperdine, to whom this sage reflection was offered. ‘A nice handful for anybody, is that young Sprats--as full of mischief as an egg is full of meat. But a good ge’l, a good ge’l, Keziah, and with a warm heart, you make no mistake.’

Sprats’s kindness of heart, indeed, was famous throughout the village. She was her father’s almoner, and tempered charity with discrimination in a way that would have done credit to a professional philanthropist. She made periodical visits through the village, followed by Lucian, who meekly carried a large basket containing toothsome and seasonable doles, which were handed out to this or that old woman in accordance with Sprats’s instructions. The instinct of mothering something was strong within her. From the moment of her return from school she had taken her father in hand and had shaken him up and pulled him together. He had contracted bad habits as regards food and was becoming dyspeptic; he was careless about his personal comfort and neglectful of his health--Sprats dragooned him into the paths of rectitude. But she extended her mothering instincts to Lucian even more than to her father. She treated him at times as if he were a child with whom it was unnecessary to reason; there was always an affectionate solicitude in her attitude towards him which was, perhaps, most marked when she bullied him into subjection. Once when he was ill and confined to his room for a week or two she took up her quarters at the farm, summarily dismissed Keziah and Judith from attendance on the invalid, and nursed him back to convalescence. It was useless to argue with her on these occasions. Sprats, as Boggles had truly said, was not one to be denied of anything, and every year made it more manifest that when she had picked Lucian up in the turnip-field and had fallen headlong into the ditch with him, it had been a figure of her future interest in his welfare.

It was in the fourth summer of Lucian’s residence at Simonstower, and he was fifteen and Sprats nearly two years older, when the serpent stole into their Paradise. Until the serpent came all had gone well with them. Sprats was growing a fine girl; she was more rudely healthy than ever, and just as sunburned; her freckles had increased rather than decreased; her hair, which was growing deeper in colour, was a perpetual nuisance to her. She had grown a little quieter in manner, but would break out at times; the mere fact that she wore longer skirts did not prevent her from climbing trees or playing cricket. And she and Lucian were still hand-in-glove, still David and Jonathan; she had no friends of her own sex, and he none of his; each was in a happy state of perfect content. But the stage of absolute perfection is by no means assured even in the Arcadia of childhood--it may endure for a time, but sooner or later it must be broken in upon, and not seldom in a rudely sudden way.

The breaking up of the old things began one Sunday morning in summer, in the cool shade of the ancient church. Nothing heralded the momentous event; everything was as placid as it always was. Lucian, sitting in the pew sacred to the family of Pepperdine, looked about him and saw just what he saw every Sunday. Mr. Pepperdine was at the end of the pew in his best clothes; Miss Pepperdine was gorgeous in black silk and bugles; Miss Judith looked very handsome in her pearl-grey. In the vicarage pew, all alone, sat Sprats in solemn state. Her freckled face shone with much polishing; her sailor hat was quite straight; as for the rest of her, she was clothed in a simple blouse and a plain skirt, and there were no tears in either. All the rest was as usual. The vicar’s surplice had been newly washed, and Sprats had mended a bit of his hood, which had become frayed by hanging on a nail in the vestry, but otherwise he presented no different appearance to that which always characterised him. There were the same faces, and the same expressions upon them, in every pew, and that surely was the same bee that always buzzed while they waited for the service to begin, and the three bells in the tower droned out. ‘_Come_ to church--_come_ to church--_come_ to church!’

It was at this very moment that the serpent stole into Paradise. The vicar had broken the silence with ‘When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness,’ and everybody had begun to rustle the leaves of their prayer-books, when the side-door of the chancel opened and the Earl of Simonstower, very tall, and very gaunt, and very irascible in appearance, entered in advance of two ladies, whom he marshalled to the castle pew with as much grace and dignity as his gout would allow. Lucian and Sprats, with a wink to each other which no one else perceived, examined the earl’s companions during the recitation of the General Confession, looking through the slits of their hypocritical fingers. The elder lady appeared to be a woman of fashion: she was dressed in a style not often seen at Simonstower, and her attire, her lorgnette, her vinaigrette, her fan, and her airs and graces formed a delightful contrast to the demeanour of the old earl, who was famous for the rustiness of his garments, and stuck like a leech to the fashion of the ‘forties.’

But it was neither earl nor simpering madam at which Lucian gazed at surreptitious moments during the rest of the service. The second of the ladies to enter into the pew of the great house was a girl of sixteen, ravishingly pretty, and gay as a peacock in female flaunts and fineries which dazzled Lucian’s eyes. She was dark, and her eyes were shaded by exceptionally long lashes which swept a creamy cheek whereon there appeared the bloom of the peach, fresh, original, bewitching; her hair, curling over her shoulders from beneath a white sun-bonnet, artfully designed to communicate an air of innocence to its wearer, was of the same blue-black hue that distinguished Lucian’s own curls. It chanced that the boy had just read some extracts from _Don Juan_: it seemed to him that here was Haidee in the very flesh. A remarkably strange sensation suddenly developed in the near region of his heart--Lucian for the first time in his life had fallen in love. He felt sick and queer and almost stifled; Miss Pepperdine noticed a drawn expression on his face, and passed him a mint lozenge. He put it in his mouth--something nearly choked him, but he had a vague suspicion that the lozenge had nothing to do with it.

Mr. Chilverstone had a trick of being long-winded if he found a text that appealed to him, and when Lucian heard the subject of that morning’s discourse he feared that the congregation was in for a sermon of at least half an hour’s duration. The presence of the Earl of Simonstower, however, kept the vicar within reasonable bounds, and Lucian was devoutly thankful. He had never wished for anything so much in all his life as he then wished to be out of church and safely hidden in the vicarage, where he always lunched on Sunday, or in some corner of the woods. For the girl in the earl’s pew was discomposing, not merely because of her prettiness but because she would stare at him, Lucian. He, temperamentally shy where women were concerned, had only dared to look at her now and then; she, on the contrary, having once seen him looked at nothing else. He knew that she was staring at him all through the sermon. He grew hot and uncomfortable and wriggled, and Miss Judith increased his confusion by asking him if he were not quite well. It was with a great sense of relief that he heard Mr. Chilverstone wind up his sermon and begin the Ascription--he felt that he could not stand the fire of the girl’s eyes any longer.

He joined Sprats in the porch and seemed in a great hurry to retreat upon the vicarage. Sprats, however, had other views--she wanted to speak to various old women and to Miss Pepperdine, and Lucian had to remain with her. Fate was cruel--the earl, for some mad reason or other, brought his visitors down the church instead of taking them out by the chancel door; consequently Haidee passed close by Lucian. He looked at her; she raised demure eyelids and looked at him. The soul within him became as water--he was lost. He seemed to float into space; his head burned, his heart turned icy-cold, and he shut his eyes, or thought he