Halcyone | Page 3

when I am alone up a tree away from people, and all is beautiful, it seems to make it tight round here,--and go from my head into my side," and she placed her lean brown paw over her heart.
"Yes--you perhaps have a soul," said the old man, and then he added, half to himself--"What a pity."
"Why a pity?" demanded Halcyone.
"Because a woman with a soul suffers, and brings tribulation--but since you have one we may as well teach you how to keep the thing in hand."
At that moment, the dark servant brought tea, and the fine oriental china pleased Halcyone whose perceptions took in the texture of every single thing she came in contact with.
The old man seemed to go into a reverie, he was quite silent while he poured out the tea, forgetting to enquire her tastes as to cream and sugar--he drank his black--and handed Halcyone a cup of the same.
She looked at him, her inquiring eyes full of intelligence and understanding, and she realized at once that these trifles were not in his consideration for the moment. So she helped herself to what she wanted and sat down again in her armchair. She did not even rattle her teaspoon. Priscilla often made noises which irritated her when she was thinking. The old man came back to a remembrance of her presence at last.
"Little girl," he said--"would you like to come here pretty often and learn Greek, and about the Greeks?"
Halcyone bounded from her chair with joy.
"But of course I would!" she said. "And I am not stupid--not really stupid Mademoiselle says, when I want to learn things."
"No--I dare say you are not stupid," the old man said. "So it is a bargain then; I shall teach you about my friends the Greeks, and you shall teach me about the green trees, and your friends the rabbits and the beetles."
Then those instinctive good manners of Halcyone's came uppermost, inherited, like her slender shape and balanced head, from that long line of La Sarthe ancestors, and she thanked the old man with a quaint, courtly, sweetly pedantic grace. Then she got up to go--
"I like being here--and may I come again to-morrow?" she said afterwards. "I must go now or they will be disagreeable and perhaps make difficulties."
The old man watched her as she curtsied to him and vaulted through the window again, and on down the path, and through the hole in the paling, without once turning round. Then he muttered to himself:
"A woman thing who refrains from looking back!--Yes, I fear she has a soul."
Then he returned to his pipe and his Aristotle.
CHAPTER II
Halcyone struck straight across the park until she came to the beech avenue, near the top, which ran south. The place had been nobly planned by that grim old La Sarthe who raised it in the days of seventh Henry. It stood very high with its terraced garden in the center of four splendid avenues of oak, lime, beech and Spanish chestnut running east, west, north and south. And four gates in different stages of dilapidation gave entrance through a broken wall of stone to a circular drive which connected all the avenues giving access to the house, a battered, irregular erection of gray stone.
To reach the splendid front door you entered from the oak avenue and crossed the pleasance, now only an overgrown meadow where the one cow grazed in the summer.
Then you were obliged to mount three stately flights of stone steps until you reached the first terrace, which was flagged near the house and bordered with stiff flower-beds. Here you might turn and look back due west upon a view of exquisite beauty--an undulating fertile country beneath, and then in the far distance a line of dim blue hills.
But if you chanced to wish to enter your carriage unwetted on a rainy day, you were obliged to deny yourself the pleasure of passing through the entrance hall in state, and to go out at the back by stone passages into the courtyard where the circular avenue came up close to a fortified door, under the arch of which you could drive.
Everything spoke of past grandeur and present decay--only the flower-beds of the highest terrace appeared even partly cultivated; the two lower ones were a wild riot of weeds and straggling rose trees unpruned and untrained, and if you looked up at the windows in the southern wing of the house, you saw that several panes in them were missing and that the holes had been stuffed with rags.
At this time of the year the beech avenue presented an indescribably lovely sight of just opening leaves of tender green. It was a never-failing joy to Halcyone. She walked the few paces which separated her from it and turning, stood leaning against the