Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

She was on him with a rush before he knew what was about to happen, and had lifted him off his feet and swung him on to her shoulder ere he could escape her. Lucian expostulated and beseeched; Sprats, shouting and laughing, made for a gap in the hedgerow; Boggles, hugely delighted, following in the wake. At the gap a battle royal ensued—Lucian fighting to free himself, the girl clinging on to him with all the strength of her vigorous young arms.

‘Let me go, I say!’ cried Lucian. ‘Let me down!’

‘You’d best to go quiet and peaceable, Master Lucian,’ counselled Boggles. ‘Miss Millie ain’t one to be denied of anything.’

‘But I won’t be carried!’ shouted Lucian, half mad with rage. ‘I won’t....’

He got no further. Sprats, holding on tight to her captive, caught her foot in a branch as she struggled over the gap, and pitched headlong through. There was a steep bank at the other side with a wide ditch of water at its foot: Boggles, staring over the hedge with all his eyes, beheld captor and captive, an inextricable mass of legs and arms, turn a series of hurried somersaults and collapse into the duck-weed and water-lilies with a splash that drowned their mutual screams of rage, indignation, and delight.

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.