‘But Haidee likes them,’ he insisted. ‘That’s just the sort of thing she does like. And if she likes it, why shouldn’t she have it?’
‘You are a curious couple,’ said Sprats.
‘I think we are to be praised for our common-sense view of things,’ he said. ‘I am often told that I am a dreamer—you’ve said so yourself, you know—but in real, sober truth, I’m an awfully matter-of-fact sort of person. I don’t live on illusions and ideals and things—I worship the God of the Things that Are!’
Sprats gazed at him as a mother might gaze at a child who boasts of having performed an impossible task.
‘Oh, you absolute baby!’ she said. ‘Is your pretty head stuffed with wool or with feathers? Paragon of Common-Sense! Compendium of all the Practical Qualities! I wonder I don’t shrivel in your presence like a bit of bacon before an Afric sun. Do you think you’ll catch your train?’
‘Not if I stay here listening to abuse. Seriously, Sprats, it’s all right—about Haidee, I mean,’ he said appealingly.
‘If you were glissading down a precipice at a hundred miles a minute, Lucian, everything would be all right with you until your head broke off or you snapped in two,’ she answered. ‘You’re the Man who Never Stops to Think. Go away and be quiet at Simonstower—you’re mad to get there, and you’ll probably leave it within a week.’
In making this calculation, however, Sprats was wrong. Lucian went down to Simonstower and stayed there three weeks. He divided his time between the vicarage and the farm; he renewed his acquaintance with the villagers, and had forgotten nothing of anything relating to them; he spent the greater part of the day in the open air, lived plainly and slept soundly, and during the second week of his stay he finished his tragedy. Mr. Chilverstone read it and the revised proofs of the epic; as he had a great liking for blank verse, rounded periods, and the grand manner, he prophesied success for both. Lucian drank in his applause with eagerness—he had a great belief in his old tutor’s critical powers, and felt that whatever he stamped with the seal of his admiration must be good. He had left London in somewhat depressed and irritable spirits because of his inability to work; now that the work was completed and praised by a critic in whom he had good reason to repose the fullest confidence, his spirits became as light and joyous as ever.
Lucian would probably have remained longer at Simonstower but for a chance meeting with Lord Saxonstowe, who had got a little weary of the ancestral hall and had conceived a notion of going across to Norway and taking a long walking tour in a district well out of the tourist track. He mentioned this to Lucian, and—why, he could scarcely explain to himself at the moment—asked him to go with him. Lucian’s imagination was fired at the mere notion of exploring a country which he had never seen before, and he accepted the invitation with fervour. A week later they sailed from Newcastle, and for a whole month they spent nights and days side by side amidst comparative solitudes. Each began to understand the other, and when, just before the end of September, they returned to England, they had become firm friends, and were gainers by their pilgrimage in more ways than one.