The Doll Maker

11

It was not disagreeable to lie propped with pillows, to feel weak and helpless and to know that it did not matter. Clare looked at the glass jar of yellow wild−flowers on the table by her bed in the Sanatorium, looked from them to Miss Geary and smiled. She smiled in answer to the old lady's enquiring look, and it was a smile, too, of gratitude. Clare was calm now, and she had a sense of the solidity of the earth and the reality of the things and people about her; she felt at home in her own world, and she was content with that security and comfort, but she was not happy. Quietly and reasonably she acknowledged that happiness would take a long time to grow again, and in the meantime, the sense of safety and reality depended on not dwelling much on what had cut down the old trees of joy. Yet she had asked Miss Geary to tell her what she knew of that last night she remembered, now, when she was clear−headed again and the doctor could promise an end to her lying in bed.

It was Matron who had first noticed the fiery glow behind Brackenbine wood, Miss Geary had said, and the Under−matron who, when more people were up and observing the fire from the upstairs windows, had discovered Clare's absence from the Sanatorium.

“Of course,” said Miss Geary, “you had been a little light−headed for some days. And you had talked about the window. I guessed that if you had climbed out in your sleep you would have gone to Brackenbine. It had been so much on your mind, hadn't it? So I just dragged Miss Linskill along with me and came to look for you. I positively had to drag her; she did want so many explanations and there just wasn't time to give them. Fortunately, you hadn't got anywhere near the house. We found you by that large flat rock, you know, on the drive.”

“And there's nothing left of the house?” Clare murmured.

Miss Geary shook her head. “It's such a pity. The old house and all Rachel's pictures, too. But even if they had been at home I don't suppose they would have been able to save anything. There was so much timber in the old place and the Pentabridge fire−brigade took such a long time to come.”

“Nothing was left?” Clare repeated in a whisper.

Miss Geary looked steadily at her. She seemed to retire some distance and regard her from there, trying, as it were, to see her as one small figure in relation to a long vista. Then, she returned to close quarters and replied:

“The place was burned down to its foundations: in fact if there had not been a good deal of rain lately, it would have set the whole wood ablaze, too. As it is, the trees all round are charred and blackened, and all the shrubs and little ornamental trees they had in a little garden on the hillside behind are killed. I went round myself the next morning to see, because I thought I would like to write to Rachel. I think I told you that I had heard that she wasn't coming back here, even before the fire? Well, I understand now she's going to live in Italy.” Clare lay back; her eye wandered round the Sanatorium, over the five empty beds. The school was very quiet. Term had ended a few days before.

“I'm glad Jennifer's all right,” she said. She was very tired, and there was such comfort in the thought of sleep, and yet she did not want Miss Geary to go. “Will she come back again next term?” she asked.

Miss Geary looked a little guilty.

“Why,” she said, in an almost conspiratorial tone, “Mr Gray was talking to me about that when he came to fetch her away. He seemed strongly inclined to take her away from Paston Hall. He talked to me privately. I think I fail to dissuade him.”

Clare looked at a letter with a Malayan stamp which was lying on her table. Her mother was on her way home. She would have left Paston Hall soon after Easter; Jennifer would not come back. Behind the oak−woods lay a tract of white ashes, wetted by the rain, disappearing little by little into the earth. Of a term−time and a holiday, and of all animate and inanimate things they had contained, nothing remained but light ashes sifting away into the mould. She laid her cheek on the pillow and closed her eyes.

Miss Geary watched her for a while. She saw the small drop that glistened on Clare's eyelashes, and, half−turning away, she looked in a preoccupied way at the coltsfoot in the glass. Her thin, delicate hand strayed out to rearrange them.

“I gathered them yesterday, in Brackenbine,” she remarked, quietly. “They were growing quite near where the house was. By next summer the woodland will be growing green over all that place. I'm glad you're going to be nineteen next summer, Clare.”