Halcyone | Page 3

those Greeks; they knew everything--so
the preface of my 'Heroes' says, and I want to learn the things they
knew--mathematics and geometry, rather--and especially logic and
metaphysics, because I want to know the meaning of words and the art

of reasoning, and above everything I want to know about my own
thoughts and soul." "You strange little girl," said the old man. "Have
you a soul?"
"I don't know, I have something in there," and Halcyone pointed to her
head--"and it talks to me like another voice, and 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