Angels' Shoes, and Other Stories. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

       Table of Contents

      Launce was very happy at Great House, in a way that was a little bewildered and dream-like. The grooms and gardeners liked him, and were kindly. There were horses in the stables, great store of pups and kittens, and a boy with red hair who kept two ferrets and had been known to win sevenpence on the races. He read Latin with Uncle Will, who had forgotten his syntax, but vastly revered Horace. He had long walks and talks with Lucia on the windy terraces, and might dream of her by the hour in a newly-dug cave behind the summer-house. Mr. Launcelot, fashionably languid by day, was wont to wake up in the evening and go thundering about the country on his great bay horse. Often he took Launce on the saddle in front of him, and the boy would spend an hour of delirious delight as they swooped in great curves above the hard beaches, returning with clouded stars ahead and the foam of the in-running tide at the horse’s heels. Sometimes they would all go off together, a merry party, Uncle Will on his steady grey weight-carrier, Launce on a fat pony, Lucia on a brave old mare with a touch of the Arab. Then at the last mile Uncle Will would say, “Give her a gallop, Geoff,” and the two light-weights would flash away, the old mare running as smooth as a swallow, and Geoffrey a neck behind, bearing hard on Monseigneur’s bit—away and away, down the levels of silver sand to the far lights of Great House. Uncle Will always rode that last mile with Launce in silence. Once he said, “I wish I weren’t forty-three, boy, and didn’t ride fourteen stone.” It occured to Launce that his godfather, fighting the great bay, was a fine thing to see.

      They set the sleeping faun on an old pedestal against the sea wall, among a struggling growth of rusty wallflowers and sea-lavender, under the windows of Launce’s room and the gun-room. The boy would waken in the moonlight and watch that other boy asleep in the gusts of the night. Sometimes the waves would cover the flat beach almost to the bounds of the garden; and then in the early morning Launce would go and clear the little faun of dried weed and sand, and the bitter salt crusting of the sea. He begged a hardy rose of the gardener, and planted it at the faun’s head, but the wind uprooted it.

      Lucia found him as he was taking it from the sand. “What are you doing, little boy?” She nearly always called him “little boy” with a smile that was a caress.

      Launce found it hard to explain, and turned very red in the effort. “I thought he would like a flower.”

      “But there are little flowers here.”

      “Yes, I know. They are very sweet, but the lavender looks grey, and the wallflowers are like rust. I—I thought he would like something—different. These—these are not his flowers.”

      She was dressed for riding, and stood looking at the child gravely, tapping the stone with her whip. “What then?”

      “A red rose, Madonna.”

      “Hush,” said Lucia quickly, “hush. You must not call me that.” She laid her fingers an instant on his lips.

      Launce turned redder than ever. “I’m sorry, Aunt Lucy. I heard godfather call you that, and Uncle Will laughed. I thought it was polite.” He hoped she would laugh too, and kiss him in a pleased way, as she did when he remembered to give her her English name of Lucy.

      But she still looked at him strangely. “These little flowers are just as sweet,” she said with earnestness: “they are brave and poor, but they content the heart. Oh, yes they content the heart.”

      “Not his,” persisted Launce; “he wants roses, Aunt Lucy, red roses with the sun on ’em.” He looked up at her shamefacedly, and saw to his relief that she was smiling at last, though her eyes were shadowed.

      “How do you know?”

      Launce shuffled in the sand. There was nothing she might not have of him when she used that voice. He would have told her of his fight with the red-haired boy, of the cave behind the summer-house, even of the humiliating fact that he still kept, secretly, at the bottom of his play-box, a shapeless wooden doll called Ephraim. Now she lightly asked of him a harder thing—his dreams. Well, she should have them.

      “I think he is not really asleep, the little faun. Aunt Lucy, I think in the night, the quiet dark night, he wakes up.”

      “He wakes up—?”

      “Yes. He’s not very clever. He does not know where he is. But he can do things.”

      “What things, little boy?”

      “I don’t quite know. But he knows something, and they know too. I think I’ve seen, Aunt Lucy—I’m almost sure I’ve seen. I think he calls things. He wakes and calls. It is like music, but there is no sound. It is like dancing, but he does not move. Only he is awake, somehow, inside the stone. And last night, when the moon came out between the clouds, I saw the rabbits dance on the path, and other things, too—”

      “What things?”

      “Oh, I don’t know,” said Launce desperately. “I fell asleep on the window-sill. Little queer things out of the larch-plantation, but all alive and dancing.”

      “Dancing—?”

      “Yes,” said Launce, fired by his own fancies—“like this.” He flung two handfuls of sand in the air, and began to dance on the starved grass. He was small and slight, and he moved, in his wild fit, like an elf of the woods, a leaf in the wind. All the steps he ever knew he wove into a medley, beautiful because of the speed and grace of his little flinging body. Then, dancing fast and faster, he lost them, and there was nothing but young life leaping in the air, as the blood in the heart, the wave on the sea. “This is how the little faun dances,” he cried, shrilly. And in a moment Lucia had swept up her trailing skirts, and was dancing too.

      If the child danced like a leaf in the wind, she danced like a flame in the bracken, a swallow in the air. Launce dropped on his hands and knees to watch her, breathless, and she wove a chain of lovely movements around him as he knelt. Her feet moved like music, her green habit seemed to bear her up like a bubble with fire in the heart of it. Her wild face was flushed, exquisite under her shaken hair. But when Geoffrey Launcelot came down the path she stopped in a flash, and was once more the great lady of Great House.

      “Will can’t come,” said Geoffrey, pulling on his gloves; he had apparently seen nothing of the dancing. “He bade me offer my escort, Signora.”

      “Shall we ride, sir?” said Lucia gravely.

      Mr. Launcelot bowed. “If you will so far honour me, Signora?”

      Then, catching the subdued wonder of his eyes, Lucia laughed, and Geoffrey began to laugh, and Launce echoed them for very pleasure in the sound. “But do not call me that, Cousin Geoffrey,” said Lucia. “Do not say ‘Signora.’ ”

      “What must I say?”

      “Say ‘Cousin Lucy.’ That is English, and of the English custom. I wish to forget—the other—”

      “Thank you, Cousin Lucy.” Geoffrey did not lift his eyes from his gloves. “I told Simmons to bring the horses round to the foot of the steps. Shall we mount there?”

      A flight of broad, shallow stone stairs led from the lower terrace to the beach. They were always scoured and swept by wind and wave, half buried in sand, with shells and bent-grass in the cracks. Simmons was holding the two horses on the beach-road beneath. Launce joined him, and was warned from Monseigneur’s heels. The others followed. Geoffrey handed Lucia down the old steps as though all London town were watching, and had for his reward the touch of her foot in his hand as she sprang to the saddle.

      “Shall we take the boy?” he asked, with a look at Launce, hopping hopefully in the sand.

      Lucia glanced with a little shrug at Monseigneur. “If you think it is safe.”

      “I guarantee that, of the two, my neck is the only one like to be broken. And that,