Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

‘Did his lordship mention me or your aunties at all?’ he said, puffing at his pipe as they all sat round the parlour fire.

‘Yes,’ answered Lucian, ‘he spoke of you.’

‘And what did he say like? Something sweet, no doubt,’ said Mr. Pepperdine.

Lucian looked at Miss Judith and made no answer.

‘Out with it, lad!’ said Mr. Pepperdine.

‘It was only about Aunt Judith,’ answered Lucian. ‘He said she was a very pretty woman.’

Mr. Pepperdine exploded in bursts of hearty laughter; Miss Judith blushed like any girl; Miss Pepperdine snorted with indignation. She was about to make some remark on the old nobleman’s taste when a diversion was caused by the announcement that Lucian’s beloved chest of books had arrived from Wellsby station. Nothing would satisfy the boy but that he must unpack them there and then; he seized Miss Judith by the hand and dragged her away to help him. For the rest of the afternoon the two were arranging the books in an old bookcase which they unearthed from a lumber-room and set up in Lucian’s sleeping chamber. Mr. Pepperdine, looking in upon them once or twice and noting their fervour, retired to the parlour or the kitchen with a remark to his elder sister that they were as throng as Throp’s wife. Judith, indeed, had some taste in the way of literature—in her own room she treasured a collection of volumes which she had read over and over again. Her taste was chiefly for Lord Byron, Moore, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, and the sentimentalists; she treasured a steel-plate engraving of Byron as if it had been a sacred picture, and gazed with awe upon her nephew when he told her that he had seen the palazzo in which Byron lived during his residence in Pisa, and the house which he had occupied in Venice. Her own romance had given Judith a love of poetry: she told Lucian as she helped him to unpack his books and arrange them that she should expect him to read to her. Modern literature was an unexplored field in her case; her knowledge of letters was essentially early Victorian, and her ideas those of the age in which a poet was most popular when most miserable, and young ladies wore white stockings and low shoes with ankle-straps. She associated fiction with high waists, and essays with full-bottomed wigs, and it seemed the most natural thing to her to shed the tear of sympathy over the Corsair and to sigh with pity for Childe Harold.

CHAPTER V

Lucian settled down in his new surroundings with a readiness and docility that surprised his relatives. He rarely made any allusion to the loss of his father—he appeared to possess a philosophic spirit that enabled him, even at so early an age, to accept the facts of life as they are. He was never backward, however, in talking of the past. He had been his father’s constant companion for six years, and had travelled with him wherever he went, especially in Italy, and he brought out of his memory stores of reminiscences with which to interest and amuse his newly found relatives. He would talk to Mr. Pepperdine of Italian agriculture; to Keziah of Italian domestic life; to Judith of the treasures of Rome and Naples, Pisa and Florence, of the blue skies and sun-kissed groves of his native land. He always insisted on his nationality—the accident of his connection with England on the maternal side seemed to have no meaning for him.

‘I am Italian,’ he would say when Mr. Pepperdine slyly teased him. ‘It does not matter that I was born in England. My real name is Luciano Damerelli, and my father’s, if he had used it, was Cypriano.’