Сарбан - Ringstones

He was sitting cross−legged on a large flat−topped boulder that overhung the beck. He looked up at our approach, which I am certain he had heard or seen long before I saw him, and cried, “Good morning, Miss Hazel!” cheerfully; then he bent his head again over some, little contraption that he was busy making out of reeds and twigs. I sprang up on to the rock beside him and glanced down into the stream hurrying away among its stones, then at the boy's short dark curls and bent back.

There was nothing ill−mannered in Nuaman's preoccupation with his handiwork. I felt, rather, that after our recognition of friendship the night before he accepted me as an understanding companion with whom ceremony was out of place. I watched him while he worked. He had left off his shirt, and the sunlight, broken by the leaves of an alder that grew beside the rock, patterned the clear gold of his naked skin. He was tanned very evenly, as if he had spent most of his time running about undressed in the sun. He wore nothing on his feet, which were well−shaped and strong. He had been used to going barefoot, I guessed, since his infancy.

He worked very deftly with fingers that looked both strong and sensitive. It was a little cage he was making and it was put together with extraordinary ingenuity and skill.

“What are you going to put in your cage?” I asked.

He twisted his head round and looked up at me with a quick smile. “I don't know yet I must see what I can catch. Perhaps a squirrel.”

“It's not big enough,” I said. “But are there squirrels in your country, too?”

“Oh yes,” he answered, putting his work aside. “Yes, there are squirrels in my country.” “What is your country, Nuaman?”

“No,” he said. “Not Nu−a−man. You must say it like this.” He laughed and pronounced his name several times, urging me to repeat it and clapping his hands when I got somewhere near the right pronunciation. He made a queer little stop in his throat just after the V, which I couldn't imitate well enough to please him, but I succeeded in drawing out the last syllable until he approved. Then he asked me what my other name was.

“Daphne,” he repeated. “That's an old name, isn't it? Nearly as old as mine. Look! Let's go and look for a squirrel!”

“Aren't you going to tell me about your country?”

“Oh, another time. Do come and look at the squirrel's house that we've found.”

He jumped up and called something softly to the girls who were loitering by the foot of the tree near us; then, like a squirrel himself, he slipped from the rock and in two bounds was across the stream.

I had come out with the intention of collecting the children and taking charge of them but, instead, I found myself following Nuaman on a dancing, darting tour of the park. He went over the ground like a hare in March or an untrained spaniel pup, ranging back and forth to examine here a tree, there a tuffet of moss or a flower. He was as talkative as the girls were silent The words came tumbling from him, sometimes in perfectly easy, colloquial English, at other times queerly misused or wrongly combined so that I was puzzled to grasp his meaning. I could see his need for someone to practise his English with, but, as I tried to keep up with his will−o'−the−wisp career across the park, I also agreed rather grimly with Dr Ravelin that no one but a budding gym−teacher would do.

He led us in the end to the edge of the oak−wood at the lower end of the park, and there he leaned, laughing, against the trunk of a tall, straight oak.

“There now, do you see the squirrel−house?” he asked.

High up among the leaves I could make out something that might have been a large nest of twigs and grass. Whether it was a squirrel's or some large bird's I could not say. I had no idea whether there were squirrels in that part or not.

“Shall I go and see if the children are still there?” Nuaman asked.

“The children? Oh, I see. The young ones, you mean. Why, I don't know. Would there be young ones at this time of the year? But you can't climb that, can you?”

The bole of the oak was straight and too thick for him to swarm up, while the first branch grew out a good twelve or fourteen feet from the ground. I myself could not have reached it with a standing jump. Nuaman trotted back some yards from the tree, paused an instant and before I had grasped what he was going to do he dashed at the trunk, leaped and touched it with his toes six feet from the ground and with the momentary purchase he gained there sprang up and caught the horizontal bough. In a minute he was among the higher branches and hidden by the leaves. I heard him call out, laughing, “The children, I mean the young ones, are not in the house!”

Now, I thought, this is the real test of my qualifications. Sure enough, in a moment Nuaman was calling out to me, “Oh, do come up, Daphne!” I could have climbed the tree, but I could not have run up it the way he had done. At least, not without a few trial shots. The two girls, as I saw out of the corner of my eye, were looking at me expectantly. I called out that I couldn't come up in the frock and shoes I had on then, but I would climb as many trees as he liked when I was properly dressed for it. He seemed to be perfectly satisfied and clambered swiftly down, swinging himself lightly off the lowest branch. There was not the slightest hint of showing−off in his manner: not even the faint, polite contempt an English boy of his age would have for a girl who would wear such stupid clothes that she couldn't do things.

I got them back into the house and began to talk about what we should do. My chief interest just then was in finding out something about them. But always Nuaman darted away from the subject of his country, his parents and his language. Even the length of his stay at Ringstones he would not state exactly.

“Oh, we've been here a long time. Years,” he said lightly. “All summer?” I persisted, interpreting the exaggeration. “Yes, all the summer.”

I say he would not tell me. Even so early I realised that it was he and not the girls who was to be my chief concern. They were for the most part quite silent; all I could get out of them for a long time was a 'yes' or 'no' given, I generally felt, without any understanding of the question. I did, however, satisfy myself to some extent about their relations to Nuaman.

“You're not brother and sisters,” I had asked direct. “Oh no, not that.”

“Cousins, then?”

“Cousins? I don't understand. What are cousins?”

I explained. “Yes, yes!” he said, when I had disentangled myself from degrees of kinship more complicated than I had realised before trying to define them. “Yes, something of the sort.” And as if repeating the lesson to Marvan and Ianthe he rattled away to them for a minute or two in their own language quoting the word 'cousin' and impressing it upon them, as it seemed.

We spent all that day together, indoors and out, ranging into every part of the park, peeping into every room of the old house except only Dr Ravelin's own. I was amazed at Nuaman's acute observation and knowledge of English birds and animals and flowers. Often, it is true, he did not know the English names, and I had to confess my own ignorance so often that I grew ashamed of myself, but he seemed to know them all in his own language and to distinguish every one without hesitation.

Marvan and Ianthe followed us in cur comings and goings, always reserved and shy and a little behind. He gave them little orders—or what seemed to be orders— in their language, always softly and gaily, and they obeyed promptly, fetching and carrying for him as an English girl might fetch and carry for an adored brother years younger than herself. I had learned, however, that Nuaman and the girls were the same age.