Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

‘Lucian Damerel.

As the greater part of this remarkable epistle was pure Greek to Mr. Pepperdine, he repaired to the vicarage with it and laid it before Mr. Chilverstone, who, having duly considered it, returned with Lucian’s kinsman to the farm and there entered into solemn conclave with him and his sisters. The result of their deliberations was that the boy was soon afterwards taken from the care of the gracious and estimable gentlemen who were not savants, and placed, so far as his education was concerned, under the sole charge of the vicar.

CHAPTER VI

Mr. Chilverstone was one of those men upon whom many sorrows and disappointments are laid. He had set out in life with a choice selection of great ambitions, and at forty-five not one of them had fructified. Ill-health had always weighed him down in one direction; ill-luck in another; the only piece of good fortune which had ever come to him came when the Earl of Simonstower, who had heard of him as an inoffensive man content to serve a parish without going to extremes in either of the objectionable directions, presented him to a living which even in bad times was worth five hundred pounds a year. But just before this preferment came in his way Mr. Chilverstone had the misfortune to lose his wife, and the enjoyment of the fit things of a country living was necessarily limited to him for some time. He was not greatly taxed by his pastoral duties, for his flock, from the earl downwards, loved that type of parson who knows how to keep his place, and only insists on his professional prestige on Sundays and the appointed days, and he had no great inclination to occupy himself in other directions. As the bitterness of his great sorrow slipped away from him he found his life resolving itself into a level—his time was passed in reading, in pottering about his garden, and, as she grew up, in educating his only child, a girl who at the time of her mother’s death was little more than an infant. At the time of Lucian’s arrival in the village Mr. Chilverstone’s daughter was at school in Belgium—the boy’s first visits to the vicarage were therefore made to a silent and lonely house, and they proved very welcome to its master.

Lucian’s experience at the grammar-school was never repeated under the new régime. The vicar had been somewhat starved in the matter of conversation for more years than he cared to remember, and it was a Godsend to him to have a keen and inquiring mind opposed to his own. His pupil’s education began and was continued in an unorthodox fashion; there was no system and very little order in it, but it was good for man and boy. They began to spend much time together, in the field as much as in the study. Mr. Chilverstone, encouraged thereto by Lucian, revived an ancient taste for archæology, and the two made long excursions to the ruined abbeys, priories, castles, and hermitages in their neighbourhood. Miss Pepperdine, to whom Lucian invariably applied for large supplies of sandwiches on these occasions, had an uncomfortable suspicion that the boy would have been better employed with a copy-book or a slate, but she had great faith in the vicar, and acknowledged that her nephew never got into mischief, though he had certainly set his room on fire one night by a bad habit of reading in bed. She had become convinced that Lucian was an odd chicken, who had got into the brood by some freak of fortune, and she fell into the prevalent fashion of the family in regarding him as something uncommon that was not to be judged by ordinary rules of life or interfered with. To Mr. Pepperdine and to Judith he remained a constant source of wonder, interest, and amusement, for his tongue never ceased to wag, and he communicated to them everything that he saw, heard, and thought, with a freedom and generosity that kept them in a perpetual state of mental activity.

Towards the end of June, when Lucian had been three months at Simonstower, he walked into the vicar’s study one morning to find him in a state of mild excitement. Mr. Chilverstone nodded his head at a letter which lay open on his desk.

‘The day after to-morrow,’ he said, ‘you will see my daughter. She is coming home from school.’

Lucian made no answer. It seemed to him that this bare announcement wrought some subtle change. He knew nothing whatever of girls—they had never come into his life, and he was doubtful about them. He stared hard at the vicar.

‘Will you be glad to see her?’ he asked.

‘Why, surely!’ exclaimed Mr. Chilverstone. ‘Yes—I have not seen her for nearly a year, and it is two years since she left home. Yes—Millie is all I have.’