The Doll Maker

2

It wanted three days to Christmas. Miss Sperrod came looking for Clare in the Prefects' Room and found her sitting in the window−seat with her head against the rain−beaded glass, staring out at the sodden lawn to where the bare poles of coppice trees seemed to hold up a thick soft fabric of mist to veil the school wall. It was only when the Principal spoke that Clare turned her head and got reluctantly to her feet. Even then she was not clearly aware what Miss Sperrod was saying; she saw that she had a sheet of blue notepaper in her hand and realised that she was offering some confused explanations; her habitual note of over−emphasis which seemed always to anticipate objection was more than usually pronounced. “I really can't go myself,” the Principal was saying. “Quite some time ago I arranged to go to town for Christmas. Quite some time ago; and I really must go up on Christmas Eve. It is most awfully kind of Mrs. Sterne and I feel quite distressed that it's fallen out so awkwardly. I wouldn't wish to give her the slightest cause for offence. I shall write and tell her how terribly sorry I am that I can't alter my own arrangements now. I'm sure she'll understand. And I shall tell her that Miss Geary and you will be delighted to accept. It really is unfortunate that she didn't give me a little more warning. She didn't invite us last Christmas, or I would have waited before making my arrangements with my brother. But Miss Geary will represent me, and you, Clare, will have to represent the Prefect Body. Of course, Mrs. Sterne doesn't expect there to be many senior girls at school for the holidays.”

“Is it an invitation?” Clare asked.

“Have I not made myself clear?” said the Principal. She looked at the sheet of notepaper again. “Mrs. Sterne says she would be very pleased if I and any of the assistant mistresses and senior girls who are staying in school for Christmas will give her the pleasure of taking tea with her on Christmas Eve.”

“Mrs. Sterne,” Clare repeated with such an air of vagueness that the Principal spoke sharply.

.”Mrs. Sterne, of Brackenbine. She has been very helpful in several ways. She is interested in the school and it is very proper that the school should pay her the courtesy of accepting her invitation. I'm only sorry that there are so few people here. But Matron and Miss Finch will be required to stay in school to look after the juniors and that only leaves Miss Geary. You must be there quite punctually at half−past four.”

“I've never been to Brackenbine,” said Clare.

“It's perfectly proper for you to go with Miss Geary,” replied the Principal. “Miss Geary knows the family. It will be a very nice change for you, Clare, and I hope you will give Mrs. Sterne an interesting account of the work you are doing for the Oxford Scholarship.”

At luncheon Clare found that Miss Geary had received news of the invitation and welcomed it with scarcely restrained jubilation. Only then, seeing what pleasure the prospect of a little change gave her, did Clare realise what a dull, restricted life the old lady must lead. It was well known to all the girls that Miss Geary had no other home than Paston Hall, but that had never seemed strange to them; they were observant of her eccentricities, but, childlike, they had no comprehension of her circumstances, or sympathy for her loneliness and her difficulties. Clare understood now that Miss Geary was quite alone in the world and probably very poor; she could guess that the school paid her next to nothing and that she would probably never get another post if she left Paston Hall. Now she shared her excitement over Mrs. Sterne's invitation and experienced a gush of remorse for many childish mockings and mimickings.

“I think it's really kind of Mrs. Sterne,” Miss Geary said. “She must have spent a Christmas holiday at school herself, once.”

“I'm surprised I'm allowed to go,” Clare said. She looked at Miss Geary boldly, but the old lady seemed only mildly shocked at the implied rebellion against the customary controls.

“My dear,” she said, “if Mrs. Sterne invites you, that's quite different. Your parents couldn't possibly object to your visiting there. You see, the Sternes are a very old family, and then, you see, they own Paston Hall. It was only because Mr Arthur Sperrod knew old Mr Sterne that the Governors were able to take the Hall, and we are very lucky indeed to have such a delightful place.”

“Old Mr Sterne?” Clare asked, wonderingly.

“Yes, that was Mr Jabez Sterne. He was Mr Andrew Sterne's uncle and he died about nine years ago, soon after we came here. He was rather a queer old gentleman, I believe.”

“I'm getting muddled,” said Clare. “Who is Mr Andrew Sterne? Is he a young man?”

“Oh no! Mr Andrew was Mrs. Sterne's husband. He died a long time ago, before his uncle. Then the estate came to his widow. She was a Trethewy, from Cornwall. Some cousins of mine knew her. But she was related to the Sternes by blood, also. I think I've heard them say that she married her second cousin.”

“Who else lives with her?”

“Well,” Miss Geary hesitated, “I'm afraid I don't really know. I believe there is some family, or at least one son. But I've never met any of them but Rachel— that's Mrs. Sterne. I knew her, oh! ages ago, before she married. I didn't see her again until old Mr Sterne died after we came here. You see, she's lived nearly all her time abroad till recently.”

“But you've been to Brackenbine?” Clare asked.

The old lady looked at her, and seemed to study the question for a while.

“Yes,” she said at length, “I've been invited there before. Some of the other teachers, too. But I haven't been since last summer.”

Clare was too busy wondering how to elicit the particular information she wanted, to pay much attention to the slight embarrassment with which Miss Geary spoke.

“Will there be many people there?” she asked. “I mean, has Mrs. Sterne got people staying with her for Christmas, perhaps?”

“I don't know. I don't know that anybody's heard. I don't think anybody's been there since—well, since last summer. But I think I shall enjoy it better if there isn't a big party. We shall be able to have a much nicer talk. Rachel's very interesting.” Miss Geary mused for a while, looking at Clare, but obviously contemplating someone very different and much further away from her. “She's been able to do the things she wanted, you see,” she went on. “She's been able to carry on with her painting and become really good. She went to Paris and Rome. I was sketching in Cornwall when I first met her.”

The rain ceased before Christmas Eve, and in doing so solved Miss Geary's major problem, which had been how to get to Brackenbine if the weather should be wet. The question whether it would be permissible to order a taxi from Pentabridge to go so short a distance had plunged her into agonies of indecision. Clare herself was not free from some anxiety about the invitation. It was not expected that girls would go to parties or even pay visits outside the school in term−time, and the assumption was that those who stayed at school for the holidays were subject to the same restriction. Besides her school uniform, therefore, Clare's outfit contained nothing but one dark−blue velveteen frock, cut to the general directions laid down by Miss Sperrod for the Senior School's evening dress. She spread her frock out on her bed in the daylight after luncheon on Christmas Eve and dwelt on the signs of age and use it exhibited; she put it on and stood in front of her inadequate looking−glass and brooded helplessly on the fact that she had grown out of it. It was a very good frock, but it had been bought for her the last time her mother was in England nearly two years before, and the hem and cuffs had been let down already to their limit.

She wished she knew whether it was going to be a big party at the Sternes'. If it were only a small family affair she would be conspicuous; but if it were a big party there would be other girls, in pretty frocks. The thing began to seem such an ordeal to her that for a time she debated whether to go to Miss Geary and ask the old lady to leave her behind. Miss Sperrod had already gone to London; Miss Geary might be persuaded. It would be the easier way. She did not think that she had the courage now, when it came to the point, to take the risk of the young man's being at the tea−party. She had deliberately made herself put it no higher than that: a risk that he might be there.

She stood and looked closely into her mirror. Had she been pretty, she thought, she might have carried off her dowdy frock. She imagined how one or two of the senior girls of the last year would have managed the affair, and frankly admitted to herself now, in the time of need, how much she had envied their good looks and self−assurance. She tried to look at her own face objectively: her brown hair was straight and without lustre; her brow and chin were too square, and her eyes, which she called grey, were called green in the school. It seemed a very solemn, scared face in this dusky light of a winter afternoon. Clare counted its sole merit a good complexion; yet there was something there that only experience could have interpreted for her. The steady stare of those greenish eyes, and the straight, sure lines of mouth and chin, might have suggested to another observer that under her adolescent diffidence there was both mental and physical courage—a certain adventurousness of mind and a hardihood that circumstances might cause to be labeled either an obstinate defiance of authority or an admirable independence of character.

Clare had only so far discovered in herself a capacity for revolt; to shirk the consequences of her midnight encounter seemed to her in the end to be a denial of the Tightness of revolt against Paston Hall, and that she would not admit. By the time Miss Geary was ready to go Clare had managed to subordinate most of her misgivings to the necessity of completing her adventure.

The sun set on a day of dry cold, and before the red light had faded behind the woods the puddles in the gravel paths were filming over with ice. Well muffled−up, Miss Geary and Clare set out on foot. They turned left outside the school gates and in a few yards had entered territory that was entirely unknown to Clare. Pentabridge lay in the other direction, and the lane to Halliwell turned off the Pentabridge road a little before the school fence was reached. On fine Sunday mornings in term−time a 'crocodile' dragged its way to church along that lane, and that was the limit of topographical knowledge of the district that any Paston Hall girl was allowed to gain. In the other direction the road bent round the slope of Akenshaw Hall, with the shape and colours of whose wooded height Clare was familiar enough through five years of looking on it in sun and cloud from the school grounds. Sometimes, as a junior, she had let her eye trace possible pathways to its top, but dreamily, as she might have climbed in fancy the steeps of Ruwenzori pictured in a travel−book. The same high brick wall that divided the school grounds from Brackenbine bounded the road on their left hand, and it was only now that Clare realised that it went so far. Akenshaw Hill was a rough cone, standing in isolation from the broken chain of high ground that ran westwards from Pentabridge, and it seemed to Clare, as they walked on, with the road curving steadily away to the left, that the wall must girdle the whole hill.

The evening sky gave yet light enough to see the contrast between the fugitive greys and browns of the oak−wood which clothed all Akenshaw Hill and the solid black−green of the fir and pine plantations which stretched away in a broad sweep to the horizon on the other side of the road. The hill stood like an island in a dark sea; the dark red wall was its rampart cliff, and somewhere among its rocks and groves stood a house that one of its inhabitants, at least, could pretend was an enchanter's castle.

Clare heard Miss Geary's voice telling her about Mrs. Sterne, but she was listening to another voice reciting solemn nonsense, and she was watching again, three−parts serious in a game of make−believe, a dim lantern that drew a magic circle to prove that the other side of Brackenbine wall was indeed a world away from Paston Hall.

The entrance to Brackenbine was a pair of wrought−iron gates between sandstone pillars standing flush with the brick wall. Beyond them the wall went on, curving round to complete its circuit of the hill. The gates stood a little ajar, and Miss Geary, fumbling to draw her electric torch from her pocket, sidled through. Clare paused to cast one last glance round, at the band of wan light separating the deepening sky from the dark coniferous plantations, at the dusky web of bare boughs spreading out over her head from the park within, and at the pale ribbon of the lonely, houseless lane bending onwards out of sight into the gloom.

It was quite dark inside the park, for the trees arched over the drive and on each hand there was a tall undergrowth of laurel and rhododendron. Miss Geary's torch threw a little pool of light which enabled them to pick their way along the ruts and over the half−frozen puddles. Sheltered though they were from the breeze, Clare felt colder here than in the lane outside; they went more slowly, up and down, across the slope of the hill, following something more like a cart−track than the approach to a gentleman's house.

It seemed to Clare they must have gone winding about nearly a mile through the wood from the gate, before they reached the house, and then, suddenly, they were at the door almost as soon as they caught the first gleam of its lighted windows through the trees.

Clare had scarcely known what to expect; the descriptions she had heard from the Paston Hall gardener and Miss Geary were so mixed up with fancies started by her encounter with the young man in the wood. But she had imagined something nearer to her conception of an old manor−house, something, however much decayed, more dignified and extensive than this. For an instant, as they stepped straight from the bushes to the front door, she thought that this could not be the house, but only a lodge or keeper's cottage. Then Miss Geary crossed unhesitatingly the single stone step, pushed the half−open door and entered a little lamp−lit hall.

Firelight and lamplight and a broad warmth poured on them from a wide−open door within the hall, and while they were still busied with their coats and goloshes, a soft, clear welcoming voice wished them a Merry Christmas. From where she stood just inside the outer door, Clare looked through the inner one, straight across to a huge open fireplace full of flames from a log fire. She saw Mrs. Sterne crossing the room to greet them, gliding towards them with that red and yellow thicket of flame behind her, wearing a dress of golden−coloured satin that shimmered and glowed as though it were a thing of fire itself.

From that first glimpse of their hostess Clare was captivated. Surprise contributed to the extraordinary attraction she instantly felt. For some reason, perhaps nothing sounder than her friends' baseless conjectures in the Third Form, she had never questioned that Mrs. Sterne was an old woman—as old as Miss Geary, and she still could not quite believe that this was the Mrs. Sterne, the old friend and contemporary of Miss Geary. This woman seemed only half Miss Geary's age; her fine, small face was unwrinkled, her hair was jet black and her large, dark eyes were brilliant. But Miss Geary greeted her as 'Rachel' and laughed and expanded in the warmth of meeting and put on an ease and confidence of manner that Clare had never seen in her before.

The conversation that Mrs. Sterne and Miss Geary fell into, immediately after the exchange of greetings and Clare's introduction, was about persons she had never heard of, and so, being freed from taking a part in it she gave all her attention to the room into which Mrs. Sterne led them. She was aware at once of a contradiction to her first impression of the house: it was a big room, the very sort of spacious, panelled drawing−room that she would have expected to find in an old country manor−house. There were two oil−lamps with yellow silk shades, but the fire gave more light than they, and painted the room with a rich pattern of golden and ruddy lights; yet it was so long that neither lamp nor firelight could fully illuminate its depth, but only pick out, here and there on the end wall the gilt of a picture−frame or a gleam of polished moulding on the paneling, and these few highlights in the brown dusk created an illusion of vaster depths beyond. Its spaciousness was far different from the drab and draughty width of the greater rooms of Paston Hall; there were no hard surfaces here, but a soft mingling of tones of brown and gold—the tawny carpet, the dull−gold curtains, the velvet and leather of the armchairs and the dark old woodwork all harmonising like the colours of an autumn wood, enriched by the warm firelight as by the light of the setting sun.

This Christmas Eve the woods in fact contributed to the room's decoration: round the fireplace there was a great arc of interwined fir and holly branches, and dull red sparks of holly berries glowed from sheaves of evergreens in vases about the room, while between the two long windows on the side opposite the fireplace stood the biggest Christmas−tree that Clare had ever seen. It was a ten−foot−high spruce planted in a great wooden tub, and wax candles, not yet lit, stood on its boughs as thickly as blossom candles on a noble chestnut−tree in June.

Mrs. Sterne had drawn them to the hearth, where a low table covered with a white cloth stood before the fire, and Clare had scarcely done taking in the room when a man's voice, accompanied by much rattling of crockery, sounded cheerily from the little hall, and very unsteadily, bearing an enormous brass tray loaded with tea−things, there came in the young man who had captured Clare by the wall. Even without the big black cat that bounced into the room behind him, even had he not raised his unmistakable, clear and bantering voice, she would have known him by his dark head and long, brown hands. For all her previous guess at her captor's identity and her attempts to prepare herself to meet him in the light, her self−possession forsook her and, as she rose, she moved near to Miss Geary's chair and looked down at her shoes.

“Niall!” exclaimed Mrs. Sterne with a soft gasp. “How like a man to crowd everything on the tray at once! And what a tray!”

“What's wrong with the tray?” demanded the young man, lowering it to the table, which it entirely covered. “I thought our guests worthy of the lordliest dish we've got, and Rajas may have eaten their rice off that!” He straightened up and with a whisking movement removed from his waist a little parlour−maid's apron which he rolled into a ball and tossed behind a chair.

“My son,” said Mrs. Sterne; and he bent with a foreign air that had nothing mocking in it as he took Miss Geary's hand. He turned then more slowly to Clare, and took her hand in a firm, short clasp as Miss Geary introduced her. He smiled gaily, but without the slightest sign of recognition when she looked up and met his eyes for a second with her own grave, appealing gaze.

Then, while his mother poured the tea, without interrupting his flow of light chatter about their lack of servants, he began to hand cups and plates and sandwiches.

As she observed him in covert snatches, for Clare was now drawn to Mrs. Sterne's side and plied with questions about her school life which it required some diplomacy to answer in Miss Geary's presence, Niall Sterne appeared to be about twenty−five years of age: at least, Clare told herself, puzzled by yet another seeming contradiction, he could be no more than that, because his mother was so young. Had she not seen his mother she would have guessed that he was thirty−five. He was very like her, with the same black hair and dark, brilliant eyes; yet there was something in his face that made him seem really the older of the two. Whereas her complexion was as soft, and the contours of her face as smooth and full as a girl's, some severe macerating process of time or sickness had removed all the youthful softness from his, and stretched the brown skin with a kind of lean economy over the essential bone and muscle. Clare felt that if she could have seen his features when he was not being consciously gay and amiable, when the light of his quick smile was put out, none of his mother's winning charm would remain. He seemed to her to wear this cheerfulness like a mask, while his natural expression would be one of melancholy and ascetic seriousness.

Very soon he had drawn Clare, first into helping him with the sandwiches and cake and mince−pies, and then, with a sly grin at the subtlety of his abdication, into taking sole charge of the service. “You do it with so much more natural address,” he said in a courtly fashion; then added in a loud aside on a wholly natural tone of regret, “Pity you can't stay for the washing−up!”

By−and−by, while Mrs. Sterne and Miss Geary talked painters and the latest exhibitions, Clare found herself sitting on a large leather cushion, looking into the blazing logs and talking quietly and privately to Niall as he lolled in one of the deep armchairs with his feet stretched to the hearthstone and Grim, the cat, on his shins.

Clare was amazed at the ease with which she could take her cue from him and copy his mild duplicity in pretending this was the first time they had met. Gradually, however, in that atmosphere of ease and friendly understanding which was so new and stimulating to her, she felt no more embarrassment at remembering her first meeting with him. Here, indeed, might be the meaning of the magic circle he had drawn about her—the circle of fire−lit ease and friendship, the talk, the quick understanding, the mirth and the arrowlike flight of ideas, a whole new, exciting and satisfying world of the heart and the head contained in one room, and such a world as she had once dreamed might have been her own, at Oxford. She talked now about her work for the scholarship, and from giving Niall a flat outline of her programme passed, under the influence of his questions, to argument and discussion, and, to her own wonder, found interest and ambition starting to life again. Niall had not been to the University; he had not even been regularly to school—his education had been a roving one—but he had read everything: the literature she in her despondency had abandoned for dead was as lively and as fresh as a summer woodland to him. While he talked she saw again that the vision Anne Otterel had shown her was not an illusion; this was what reading with Anne could have been like, and Paston Hall could have been the antechamber to rooms at Oxford. She felt the injustice of death and the irretrievable loss of wasted days more bitterly now than at any time since she first heard that Anne was dead.

She did not mention Anne Otterel to Niall. She said only, with resignation, that she had no hope; there was no one to help her at Paston Hall. They could not, or would not, even provide all the proper books.

“If it's only books...” said Niall, glancing at the tightly packed shelves about the room. “Let me see your syllabus. I shall be surprised if we can't raise what you're lacking.”

Clare shook her head. “It's not much use. There's so little time left now. And even if I felt sure of the French, there's the Latin. That alone will wreck my chances. It's not much in the Exam. Just two Unseens. But I've let it go. I don't seem to be able to grasp it at all by myself, from books.”

“Latin?” he exclaimed. “Why, you want my mother for that. Her father was a noted philologue of the old school. She'll discourse you Latin like Queen Elizabeth putting the Pope right on communion in two kinds. I say, Mother....”

But Mrs. Sterne spoke to him at the very instant when he called to her. Miss Geary was saying that it was getting quite late and they had a long walk back.

“But you must see the Tree lit up!” said Mrs. Sterne. “Niall, we've forgotten the Tree.”

“Oh no, I haven't!” replied Niall, jumping up. “I was just waiting for the signal. Come on, Clare, help me to light the candles!”

He gave her a box of matches and set her to lighting all the lower ones, while he fixed a taper in the end of a split willow−wand and lit the upper ones with as solemn and reverent a care as a priest at the high altar. For the second time Clare witnessed him performing a rite: there was something in his manner she understood very well, though she had only known the thing herself for a very brief period in her life: it was the fun of pretending to believe in magic, of pretending to find a way by ceremonies from everyday things to a world of shadows and strange powers. Softly, so that none but she could hear, as he lit his candles he recited some such abracadabra as he had chanted when he drew his magic circle in the wood.

He was so deliberate that Clare had lit all the candles she could reach before he had finished the higher ones. She stepped back and looked up. The tree had no conventional decorations except the candles, but holly berries were strung about it on invisible threads so that in the increasing shine of the candles they seemed to hang from the tips of the branches like drops of bright blood. Her eye travelled to the tree−top, and now that it was so brightly lit she saw that there was one other decoration. Not at the apex, where people might have put a star or an angel, or a fairy, but below the leading shoot there was tied a little figure: a doll with long fair hair, dressed in a green gown. It was fixed standing upright against the stem of the tree, ill−placed for a decoration, and when Niall lit the remaining candles that stood in front of it, she could no longer see it across their bright points of flame.

The tree was a pyramid of lights, but not at all Clare's idea of a Christmas−tree, which ought to be loaded with glittering balls of glass and draped with tinsel; yet it was odder still, on an unconventional tree, to put just one doll. She would have liked to ask why, but the question would have seemed disparaging.

Niall blew out his taper: then, crossing the room, he turned out the two oil−lamps. The fifty or sixty little candles on the tree illuminated the room far more brightly than the combined lamplight and firelight had done. Both Clare and Miss Geary looked wonderingly about them.

“It's a beautiful room,” said Miss Geary, meditatively. “One would not imagine, from the outside...”

“I know,” Niall interrupted her. “You mean it's too ambitious for so small a cottage. Rum, isn't it? The place is out of proportion.”

“It's not a big house, then?” Clare asked him.

“Very small, really. I mean, for what the builder presumably intended it to be. There's only one other room downstairs besides this: the little parlour across the hall that we use for our dining−room. Come, I'll show you! Never mind,” he added to Miss Geary, “don't hurry off. I'll convoy you back to your gate.”

They moved out into the little hall, which was no more, in fact, than a short, flagged passage from which two other doors led off and which ended in a staircase, mounting steeply and turning at a small landing.

Niall picked up a lamp and opened one of the doors to show them the little parlour: a cottage room with white−plastered walls above a low wainscot, furnished with an unstained oak table and chairs and an old−fashioned, high sideboard. The stone flags of the floor were uncovered except for a skin rug before the open hearth.

“The other door goes to the kitchen and usual offices,” Niall explained. “And that's really all there is downstairs.”

“It seems a very old house,” Clare said. “I suppose it's much older than Paston Hall?”

“About a hundred and fifty years older,” said Niall. “This,” he went on with mock sententiousness, “is the original manor of Brackenbine, the seat of the Trethewys. Paston Hall represents the debased taste and distorted values of a mid−Victorian Sterne suffering under the influence of low taxation, the New Plumbing, and Sir Gilbert Scott.”

“I wouldn't call our plumbing very new,” murmured Clare. “It's prehistoric.”

“Well, there isn't any at all here,” said Niall, complacently. “That simplifies matters in a hard winter. All I have to do is to fit the pump with a straw overcoat. But it's also one reason why we can't keep a servant.”

“You had a girl in the summer, though, hadn't you?” Miss Geary asked Mrs. Sterne. “I thought she seemed a nice girl.”

“I must keep an eye on the candles,” said Mrs. Sterne abruptly, turning back into the drawing−room. Miss Geary followed her.

“Yes, do,” remarked Niall. “The old place is three−parts timber,” he explained to Clare. “It would burn like a match factory.”

Clare heard Mrs. Sterne replying to Miss Geary's question about the servant: “Ah yes, Janet. She was a good girl, poor thing. She really did look as if she was going to stay and then she took her holiday last July... stayed with her aunt in Pentabridge....” Mrs. Sterne's voice became indistinct as she moved further into the room, and Clare caught only another phrase or two: ”... put into hospital... just the height of the epidemic... died in a few days.”

“There!” exclaimed Niall, lifting the lamp high and approaching the end of the passage where a roughly−squared black beam stretched across, supporting the wall above the stairway opening, “there you see the Builder, his Mark!”

He held the lamp close, and in a plain shield deeply carved in the wood of the beam Clare read the initials 'I.T.' She repeated them.

“Yes,” said Niall. “'I' for John, the Waterman. John Trethewy, that stands for. Captain John Trethewy, I should say.”

“Was he your ancestor?”

Niall seated himself on a big oak chest that stood at the foot of the stairs. “Sit down here and I'll tell you about him,” he said. “My mother's started another gossip with your teacher, so there's no hurry.” He dropped his voice, giving her a rapid smile as she sat down beside him: “The sprite may want to flit off like a bat, but the schoolgirl must wait on her mistress!” And, before she could consider whether to respond to his sudden acknowledgment of their conspiracy, he had resumed in his former tone:

“Captain John Trethewy is the earliest ancestor we can trace with any certainty. He was the son of a respectable apothecary of Truro. At least, I say so. My mother says I've invented that bit. But anyway, John was put to study medicine, and his father appears to have had a share in a merchant ship, so I argue that he was a man of some substance and it is probable that he apprenticed little John to his own trade.

“But John had an itch to roam. He went to sea, perhaps in the ship his father had a share in, perhaps in one of Old Noll's—we don't know. But he does speak of Blake's bombardment of Algiers as if he had actually been there, so I think it probable that he shipped as a naval surgeon.”

“Speak?” Clare asked. “Did he write a book?”

“Well, if you can call it a book. Jottings, rather. Observations on divers curiosities of Nature collected in the course of sundry navigations; all written in most chirurgeonly Latin.

“We don't quite know how he fared at the Restoration,” Niall continued. “But some time later he appears to be voyaging prosperously out of Bristol to the Gulf of Guinea and from there to the American Plantations with slaves; there are some hints also that he cruised the Caribbean for a time, less respectably—though there again, my mother would say that's my romantic fancy. In any case, he conducted his navigations with prudence and was able to put away a considerable number of pieces of eight in his old oak chest—perhaps this one—until the day when he fell foul of the Sallee Rovers. Making for Guinea, he is boarded by a galley off the coast of Barbary, and then, as he pathetically notes, bereft of all but his breeches he is sold to a most miserable slavery, southwards from Same.”

“Well, he had sold the poor negroes in America,” Clare said.

“Yes,” agreed Niall, “and in his wretched state of bondage it was some consolation to him to know that the profits of those transactions were safely enchested in Truro. However, reading between the lines, I divine that his slavery was not so harsh as you might think. It seems that he was bought by a powerful noble, a Kaid, as he calls him, of those parts, and carried off to his castle in the mountains. There, by and by, he finds occasion to demonstrate his art as a surgeon, and from that day he advances steadily to a great degree of favour. From the liberty he was allowed I suspect that the old fellow—though, of course, he wasn't so old then—must have satisfied the formal requirements of Islam and become a True−Believer; though he is naturally reticent about that in his notes. The fact is, however, that he was able to travel freely about over a large part of Morocco, and when he finally made up his mind to escape, he not only found the facilities to do so, but he left Barbary with considerably more than he took into it. There is a passage which can only mean that he sailed away in a boat of his own, manned by Christian slaves whom he had somehow or other managed to release. “Still, his experience seems to have cured him of his desire to rove. Sometime before the Glorious Revolution he bought this estate of Brackenbine and settled down to live as a country gentleman; his old father presumably by this time obiit.”

“He must have been quite wealthy, then?” Clare asked.

“Well enough off,” agreed Niall. “But the interesting thing is that you can deduce that the old chap had ideas larger than his fortune. You'd have expected that after his hard life he would have wanted a comfortable little estate in his native country—just a small place where he could browse about among his herbs and botanise in the hedgerows. But instead of that he comes out here, a long way from Cornwall, in a district that was pretty lonely and wild at that time of day, buys a large tract of woodland with old Akenshaw Hill in the middle of it, and blows the major portion of his hard−earned coin on building miles and miles of high brick wall all round his property. We know he built the wall first, and we know what an expense it was and how he worried over it until he got it finished. That, to my mind, is the reason for the odd disproportion of this house. He had planned a spacious mansion, but the wall took all his money—or far more than he had estimated—so he is forced to compromise with a cottage, but he won't abandon his plan altogether, so he builds one room in his cottage to the proportion of the house he would have put up if the money had stretched so far.”

Niall paused and looked at Clare, musing for a few moments. “A deer−park wall was a normal thing, I suppose,” he said. “But it sometimes seems to me when I look at this one that old Captain Trethewy must have gone a bit queer through his Moroccan years. There's a touch of Kubla Khan about this one—

'So twice five miles of fertile ground,

With walls and towers were girdled round...'

Though it isn't ten miles, of course; and as for fertility, well, the oaks do well enough: little else has ever been tried. I think he must have brought back Moorish ideas of privacy. There couldn't have been many inhabitants in this district then, but what few there were he didn't want poking their noses into his business.”

“What was his business?” Clare asked. “Did he still do something?”

“Well,” Niall hesitated. “He turned gardener—botanist of a sort. He had collected a good number of exotic plants in his voyages. He tried to acclimatise them, and, also, he was trying some interesting tricks with the growth of plants—something like the Japanese art of growing dwarf pines and oaks, though I don't suppose he ever got as far afield as Japan. Perhaps it was something he had seen in Morocco. He seems to have had a theory that these very small trees could resist natural decay and live for ever. It might be—though it's just a guess—it might be that he planned to plant all his estate with a miniature forest, and for that reason he was so intent on getting his wall built, to protect his little trees. The interesting thing about that is that he may be right.”

“Right?” Clare repeated, not quite understanding. “About the life of his little trees, I mean,” Niall replied. “Why? Did he manage to make them grow?”

“Yes,” said Niall. “Yes, he did. Some of them are still growing. I'll show you them when you come again, in the daylight.”

Clare gave him a startled look. “Oh, I don't think...” she began, but he interrupted her, jumping up from the chest.

“Oh, I say, Miss Geary's really bent on going and I haven't shown you the rest of the house yet. Come on, you can see it in a couple of minutes while she's getting her goloshes on!”

He seized the lamp, and without giving Clare time to object began to mount the stairs. She rose, looked to the drawing−room door, and hesitated. Then he called to her from the landing and she ran up the first flight of stairs to join him.

The stair twisted awkwardly between half−timbered walls. Niall climbed ahead and called a warning to Clare to mind her head as he gained the top landing.

“Coming up here always makes me feel a bit like a mouse living in a hollow tree,” he said. “My Great−Uncle Jabez in his latter days refused to climb the stairs at all. He slept in the parlour. It was really because he was stiff and rheumaticky, but he used to tell me that it was because he was going up one night when he met the Captain's ghost coming down and the Captain refused to go back, so, not liking to walk through him—seeing that he was a relation of sorts—he went down and stayed down ever after. That was just his way of making a little boy feel cosy in the place, of course.”

“It's not really haunted, is it?” Clare asked, half−seriously. She looked round the irregularly−shaped space of the top landing where they stood, at the wide old black doors in the timbered and plastered walls, at the diamond−paned window in a deep recess and at their own shadows swinging about them as Niall moved the lamp to and fro.

“Ah, pity!” said Niall regretfully. “Christmas Eve, a two−hundred−and−fifty−year−old house, and no ghost! The Captain would have made such a lovely one, too, in his wig and sword and buckled shoes and all, and goodness knows what deeds done on the Spanish Main to rob him of his mortal repose. But you want a sticky end to make a ghost, and for all we know the Captain died quietly in his bed with his buckled shoes off. Though, in strict truth, there's no record of where, when and how he did die. I expect it was in here, though.”

He turned to one of the doors and put his hand on the iron ring which served for a knob. He half−turned it, then, pausing, listened to the murmur of voices from below, and gave Clare a delighted smile.

“This is fun, your coming to Brackenbine again, after all. You know, I had a sort of fear you might be too shy to come after our encounter. But I'm glad you weren't.”

Clare looked down at the dark, uneven boards, not knowing what to answer; he seemed to hesitate whether to say more about the other night, then turned the ring and opened the door.

“We always call this the Captain's room,” he said, entering and holding up the light. “It was a lumber−room when we came here. You see we've made it into a studio.”

It was a long room, as long as the drawing−room downstairs, but with a ceiling sloping on each side to within six feet of the floor. At one end long curtains seemed to cover a window, and at the other was an open fireplace piled with white wood ashes which still gave off an appreciable warmth. In the middle of the ceiling on one side was a large skylight. Niall advanced into the centre of the room, showing her how the apparatus of his mother's occupation and his own crowded the place: wooden presses and stacks of canvases were ranged round the walls; some little tables were thickly littered with pots and tubes of paint and jars of brushes; under the skylight stood an artist's easel and, to one side, a joiner's bench strewn with tools and chips; there was a profusion of odds and ends—books, pottery, pieces of material, bottles and boxes, all in disorder, but in a warm and living disorder: it was a room in which someone was constantly busy, where creative work was done; and a space in front of the fire had been made comfortable with a high old leather screen to shut off the draught and some well−worn armchairs and low bookshelves and a reading−lamp by the corner of the hearth.

“Do you paint too?” Clare asked.

“Oh,” he answered, deprecatingly, “not seriously. I never studied. I'm no good at any of these things, really.” He nodded towards the bench. “I amuse myself with wood−carving: puppets, you know.”

“Puppets?” Clare repeated in great surprise. “Yes, little dolls that you can animate.”

“I know,” she said. “I mean, I know what puppets are —it was only—well, I've never actually seen them. Do you make them act—have a puppet theatre, I mean?”

“Yes,” he said. “Act, yes. After a fashion. No, but it's really just the making of them, the perfection of their animation, that fascinates me. I first saw them made in Italy. In a little village near Florence where we were living then. There was a family that had made puppets ever since the Middle Ages. I used to sit and watch the old man and his sons by the hour and I picked up most of what I know about the craft there. My mother became interested, too. She dresses them and paints them.”

Clare's eyes wandered over the bench on which he had now set down the light. “Ah,” he said, divining her thoughts, “I've got nothing on hand now. I haven't done anything for some time. I'm pretty lazy, really.” He brushed a little heap of chips together with his hand, sweeping them carefully back from the edge of the bench, as though they were valuable. Clare asked suddenly:

“Is that one of your puppets that I saw on the Christmas−tree?”

He jerked his head up in a startled way and looked hard at her for a moment before replying; then, almost grudgingly, he said: “Well, yes. She's one of mine.” He looked down at the bench again and then remarked, as if he had resumed a train of thought that Clare's question had interrupted:

“I'm not an artist at all, I think; though I may be a frustrated craftsman; I think the itch I have to make something in the round is a more primitive impulse than the ideas that inspire true art. I suppose sculpture grew out of a desire to make something as nearly resembling a living human being as possible; and the idea of making a statue that could come to life has always haunted men's imagination. In Ancient Egypt they made portrait statues of the dead which the soul could return to animate if the mummified real body by chance were destroyed. And isn't there some idea behind it all of creating a body of something more durable than flesh and blood? The flesh of man decays within a century, but the flesh of the oak endures for many centuries and marble may endure for ever. A man made of marble would never die; one made of oak might live a thousand years.”

“He'd be a bit stiff in the joints, though,” said Clare, flippant because she did not quite understand his meaning.

He laughed. “So all art may be a fallacy of duration, since duration's nothing worth if the life dies. All marble, carved wood and painted canvas is vain. Unless—yes, unless one could perfect the artifice of eternity.”

He picked up the lamp again and turned away from the bench. “Ah well,” he said. “My fancies outrun my skill, perhaps. I chip out my little dolls and study to perfect their animation—to create the amusing illusion that they have an independent life, and I make them out of the most durable organic material I have discovered because, I suppose, of the attractiveness of that other illusion of immortality. If I could wed the two—animation and durability, then I should be a master−artificer.”

He cast a casual look round the studio. “There's not much to see, I'm afraid; not much to give background to my Great−Uncle Jabez's rather thin story of the Captain's ghost. No four−poster, no antique oak presses—those things are plywood. I used to like this room, though, on the rare occasions when I came to stay with Great−Uncle Jabez when I was a little boy. This end of the house runs right into the hill, you see. The bluebells grow level with the eaves and it's solid rock behind that wall. You can walk up on to the roof straight out of the wood. We had this big skylight put in, but there used to be a little one there before, and I used to sneak in through it from the roof. Hello! That sounds like Miss Geary going; we must go down.”

They started towards the door of the studio. As Niall passed the easel he brushed against the projecting end of its ledge, causing it to slew round a little. A canvas that had been leaning against its foot fell backwards on the floor. “Tut!” said Niall, and picked it up and set it against the easel again, but with its face outwards to the room. Clare threw a glance at it, then started and could not check a swift intake of breath. At the sound Niall looked curiously at her, then shone his lamp full on the painting. It was of a young woman in a summer frock, sitting on the grass, with a dappled light falling through trees upon her; a gay, laughing portrait, full of life and summer light. The face was tilted sideways up, with a listening air; the lips were curved in a delighted smile and the brown eyes were soft and bright with interest and affection; the artist had caught all the brilliant animation with which a fresh young girl would listen to her lover in his gayest mood.

Niall unexpectedly stepped between Clare and the canvas. She fell back a pace, confused and embarrassed. “I thought—” she began, “I thought it was someone I knew once. But it couldn't be,” she added hastily.

“It's too young.”

He nodded rather sadly.

“It is, though. It's Anne Otterel. It looks younger because it's not finished, perhaps. My mother was painting her when she was staying at Halliwell last summer. We were very sorry that it could never be finished.”

He moved on towards the door again, and Clare, with a lingering look back at the portrait, now obscured by the shadows, followed him.

“I didn't know,” she said lamely, “I didn't know you knew her ... I didn't know she was at Halliwell in the holidays. She never said...”

Niall had begun to descend the stairs. “I didn't know her particularly, myself,” he said. “My mother met her. She came a few times for sittings.”

When they came down into the little hall they found Miss Geary already dressed and waiting for them. Clare hurried on her things while Niall apologised. His brief seriousness of mood was dismissed; he drew his mother under the great bunch of mistletoe that hung from one of the rafters and kissed her; turning to Miss Geary he looked for a second as though he were going to claim the privilege from her, but instead, took her hand and, bowing low, kissed that. Clare, tying her scarf, moved to the door behind the mistress, but not without meeting his dark questing glance as he straightened up. He took a lighted lantern which his mother had got ready, and, with the big cat playing with little growling purrs about his feet, led them out and through the wood. In spite of Miss Geary's protestations he accompanied them, chatting gaily, all the way back through the keen black night to Paston Hall gate.