The Fortunate Youth | Page 7

curates and teachers, awaited the
party from the vicarage. The thick and darkened sunshine of Bludston
flooded the asphalt of the yard, which sent up a reek of heat, causing
curates to fan themselves with their black straw hats, and little boys in
clean collars to wriggle in sticky discomfort, while in the still air above
the ignoble town hung the heavy pall of smoke. Presently there was the
sound of wheels and the sight of the head of the vicar's coachman

above the coping of the schoolyard wall. Then the gates opened and the
vicar and his wife and Miss Merewether, her daughter, and Maisie
Shepherd appeared and were immediately greeted by curates and
teachers.
Maisie Shepherd, a stranger in a strange land, pretty, pink, blushing,
hatefully self-conscious, detached herself, after a minute or two, from
the group and looked with timid curiosity on the children. She was a
London girl, her head still dancing with the delights of her first season,
and she had never been to a Sunday-school treat in her life. Madge
Merewether, her old schoolfellow, had told her she was to help amuse
the little girls. Heaven knew how she was to do it. Already the
unintelligibility of Lancashire speech had filled her with dismay. The
array of hard-faced little girls daunted her; she turned to the boys, but
she only saw one--the little hatless, coatless scarecrow with the perfect
features And arresting grace, who stood out among his smug
companions with the singularly vivid incongruity of a Greek Hermes in
the central hall of Madame Tussaud's waxwork exhibition. Fascinated,
she strayed down the line toward him. She halted, looked for a second
or two into a pair of liquid black eyes and then blushed in agonized
shyness. She stared at the beautiful boy, and the beautiful boy stared at
her, and not a word could she find in her head to speak. She turned
abruptly and moved away. The boy broke rank and slowly followed
her.
For little Paul Kegworthy the heavens had opened and flooded his
senses, till he nearly fainted, with the perfume of celestial lands. The
intoxicating sweetness of it bewildered his young brain. It was nothing
delicate, evanescent, like the smell of a flower. It as thick, pungent,
cloying, compelling. Mouth agape and nostril wide, he followed the
exquisite source of the emanation like one in a dream, half across the
yard. A curate laughingly and unsuspectingly brought him back to earth
by laying hands on him and bundling him back into his place. There he
remained, being a docile urchin; but his eyes remained fixed on Maisie
Shepherd. She was only a rosebud beauty of an English girl, her beauty
heightened by the colour of distress, but to Paul the radiance of her
person almost rivalled the wonder of her perfume. It was his first

meeting of a goddess face to face, and he surrendered his whole being
in adoration.
In a few minutes the children were marched through the squalid streets,
a strident band, to the dingy railway station, a grimy proletariat
third-class railway station in which the sign "First Class Waiting
Room" glared an outrage and a mockery, and were marshalled into the
waiting train. The wonderful experience of which Paul had dreamed for
weeks--he had never ridden in a train before--began; and soon the
murky environs of the town were left behind and the train sped through
the open country.
His companions in the railway carriage crowded at the windows,
fighting vigorously for right of place; but Paul sat alone in the middle
of the seat, unmoved by the new sensation and speed, and by the
glimpses of blue sky and waving trees above the others' heads. The
glory of the day was blotted out until he should see and smell the
goddess again. At the wayside station where they descended he saw her
in the distance, and the glory came once more. She caught his eye,
smiled and nodded. He felt a queer thrill run through him. He had been
singled out from among all the boys. He alone knew her.
Brakes took them from the station down a country road and, after a
mile or so, through stone gates of a stately park, where wonder after
wonder was set out before Paul's unaccustomed eyes. On either side of
this roadway stretched rolling grass with clumps and glades of great
trees in their July bravery--more trees than Paul imagined could be in
the world. There were sunlit upland patches and cool dells of shade
carpeted with golden buttercups, where cattle fed lazily. Once a herd of
fallow deer browsing by the wayside scuttled away at the noisy
approach of the brakes. Only afterward did Paul learn their name and
nature: to him then they were mythical beasts