The Doll Maker

8

Clare did not sleep the rest of the night. By herself, in her own room, she had neither pride nor courage; the aching disillusion conquered all her spirit, and at times, during the long hours until the rising bell, she wept disconsolately. It was a heavier grief than death, and yet it was less credible. To die is common, but to Clare it seemed that no one before her could have been so beguiled by such a cruel pretence of love. She relived in those hours of the early morning every minute that she had ever spent with Niall, and in spite of the testimony of her heart she could not quite believe that all his love had been playacting. Intuition and reason were in conflict: the fact that he had told Jennifer their secret should have been conclusive, and yet reason argued that she must have read more into the younger girl's words than they would bear. He had undoubtedly been amusing himself in some way with Jennifer, but there must be some explanation of that. Clare and Niall knew each other so well now; he must be able to explain the affair to her; there must be some explanation that she could understand and accept.

And all those images of fear, those dawning shapes of terror emerging from the darkness, they must be her own creations, figments of an overworked brain and overexcited feelings. She had gone half−way to creating them for herself by her deliberate pretence of believing in Niall's super−natural powers. The words had been Jennifer's but the suggestions had been children of Clare's own imagination. So she reasoned, and her mind had some comfort, but her heart had none. The load of grief lay on it un−alleviated.

As she turned miserably on her bed she had a physical discomfort, too. Her ear, where Niall had pricked it weeks before, throbbed and burned, just as if Jennifer's angry whisper had reinflamed the little wound. Since the night he had pierced it she had felt nothing there until now. It would be easy to give way to superstitious panic—to believe that he was aware of her rebellion and was reminding her of his power over her. No! she sat up and exclaimed aloud. She was not rebelling against him. She loved him. She would believe his explanation of these dark acts. If she only knew what it was.... She must see him again, at once. That was the only firm conclusion at the end of those tormented hours.

Morning and the distractions of daylight life did not lessen the heavy sense of loss and ruin, but they brought Clare a little more courage to face the other fears. Those shapeless terrors were dream things and they dwindled and paled among the familiar activities and chatter of the school. Only the little red spot remained clearly visible on the lobe of her ear and the throbbing, though slight, persisted.

Reenie Ford was quick to notice, with sympathetic interest, her exhausted appearance. Her promise to enlighten Reenie about her 'clue' had been quite driven from Clare's mind. She stared back in blank consternation when Reenie cornered her alone in the Prefects' Room before luncheon, and with mysterious looks and whispers requested Clare's solution. She groped helplessly for something to say and fell back, without much hope, on her earlier inspiration.

“It was Miss Geary you saw,” she said.

“Miss Geary? Oh, I see....” Reenie's voice trailed away on a thin note of disappointment. But the name was persuasive; it summed up all oddities of behaviour at Paston Hall. With relief Clare saw from Reenie's changing expression that the vision she had of Miss Geary stalking the night sufficed; it explained all, and it blocked all further enquiry.

“I see....” said Reenie again, and sadly went her way.

Clare set out for Brackenbine immediately after luncheon. It was a cold drizzling day, and for that reason she was surprised to see the gardener's boy loitering in the road beyond the gates as if he could find no drier and warmer spot to spend his dinner interval in. He was an old friend, now grown into a tall youth, but still apt for small confidential commissions as in the days when he had bought Clare's gang their tea and sausages. He grinned and lifted the peak of his cap when she came up to him, and handed her a letter.

“Squire told me to give it you when you was by yourself,” he remarked, and with a nod sauntered off back to the school gates.

“Squire?” Clare murmured, supposing that he could only mean Niall, though she saw that the note was addressed to her in Mrs. Sterne's handwriting. She tore it open as she walked on and found that it was in fact from Mrs. Sterne.

“Dear Clare,” it ran, “I'm so sorry not to have seen you again before I go. I have to go to Cornwall on urgent business and I don't know when I shall be back. It may be a long time. It's too bad we couldn't finish our lessons, seeing your exam's so close, though I doubt whether the little extra work one does in the last few weeks makes all that difference, and perhaps you know as much as I could tell you now about what we have been doing. I'm sure you'll carry on successfully by yourself. Don't overwork, though, and don't let anyone muddle you; you know what you have to do. If you need help ask Miss Geary.

I didn't say goodbye yesterday because I only made up my mind to go this morning and the only good train is the twelve o'clock from Pentabridge, so that I must be off in an hour.

Every success, my dear Clare. Yours,

Rachel Sterne.”

Clare stopped when she had read this. The gardener's boy had disappeared; the lane was empty. She scarcely comprehended what the letter was about, except that she would not see Mrs. Sterne that afternoon. But the thought of doing Latin had been quite out of her mind; she had only one purpose in going to Brackenbine now. Before she reached the house, however, she did see that Mrs. Sterne's letter meant that she was not to go there: she saw also that Niall's instructions to the gardener's boy were meant to give her a chance to avoid letting anyone know that his mother was putting her off.

She approached the old house now with greater agitation than she had ever felt in her life. She had no courage for the coming meeting. Her only allies had been pride and indignation, and both had deserted her on the way through the wet wood. She crept into the little hall, hurt and pitiful, coming to the source of the hurt for comfort.

There was no fire in either the dining room or the drawing−room. She listened for a minute at the bottom of the stairs, but there was no sound from the studio. Slowly she went up and peeped into all the rooms. The house was empty. It seemed that Niall had been working in the studio earlier in the day, for the fire there was still alive and his tools lay about the bench. Clare sat down on a box by the bench and looked about her as if she were seeing the well−known room for the first time, or as if she expected it to have put on some quite different aspect and acquired some quite different contents since Jennifer's revelation. It was a hard thing for Clare to realise that she was not the sole privileged visitor to the studio. It was an absurdly unjustified assumption, she now told herself sadly; indeed, so many of her assumptions about Niall had been absurd and naive. She bent her head and her finger stirred the fine shavings and tiny chips of wood on the bench and her eyes filled with tears.

Jennifer, too, had been happy with him in this room. She, too, had been excited and delighted by the things he could show her: and, because she was a child and her relations with Niall were so different, it had not spoilt it for her to know that she was not his only——Clare looked up, gazing round the silent room as if it could supply the word her thoughts had faltered on. What was she to Niall? She had thought in her simplicity that they were lovers. But was she really no more to him than Jennifer? A sort of live doll whom it amused him to have in his power? He had played at making her his slave. He had done that to Jennifer also. Then Jennifer's words of the previous night came vividly back to her. He had not only played at making love to her; he had frightened her in some way. There had been a real fear of what he could do to her in Jennifer's voice when she cried that she could not disobey him. Could Niall really have enjoyed frightening Jennifer? Could he really have been so cruel as to show her the kind of play her mention of the dead seemed to imply? What had he really made her believe about his power over her?

In her anxiety and in the torment of uncertainty which this waiting for Niall increased beyond endurance, Clare jumped up and walked back and forth in the middle of the studio. On a sudden impulse, as she reached the far end of the room, she snatched the long curtain aside and looked out through the leaded panes of the little window again, upon the ancient dwarf trees. They looked sad under the drizzle; the park, where she had seen a play of such jollity and gay companionship, looked so deserted, so wet and drear in this grey daylight, that her heart sank and she drew the curtain slowly back to hide it.

But her mind was puzzling actively over some of the things Jennifer had said the night before. She paused in her pacing by the upturned box on which she had stood to pose for Niall, and the train of ideas that recollection produced held her still, startled by a discovery: not one discovery, but several. Jennifer was the key to more than one mystery.

She swept her gaze round the studio again: with a definite purpose, now. His sketch−book must be somewhere about. The door of one of the plywood presses stood a little ajar; she went across, swung it back, and began to search among the contents. Papers and books were piled on all the three shelves, but almost at once she found the black−backed sketch−book in which he had made his studies of herself, and, turning the pages she found again the quick drawing he had done to illustrate how a gym−tunic might be worn. Sitting there on the floor she looked at it with new understanding. Beyond a shadow of doubt it was Jennifer; not an exact likeness, but rather the handsome girl that Jennifer might grow into in a few years' time. Niall must have studied her closely to be able to draw this recognisable projection of her so rapidly and so surely; he must have sketched her many times.

The book was nearly full. Clare turned back the pages, beyond the drawings of herself. There, on the pages immediately before those studies, was Jennifer again; the contemporary Jennifer here; drawn with a masterly skill and care, her likeness delightfully caught, her youth and the slight softness and roundness of her figure brought out as if Niall's pencil had loved the lines. She turned over more pages, finding Jennifer in all manner of costumes and attitudes; finding other figure−studies, pages of detail of hands, arms, legs, separate features, careful little drawings of lips and ears and noses which she could not recognise as belonging to any face she knew. Then, near the beginning of the book she came upon a drawing of Anne Otterel.

She gazed at that a long time. She knew Niall's style too well now to be mistaken. He had certainly made the drawing. It was more realistic than his mother's painting of Anne: an exact likeness. He had taken time and trouble over it; the drawing was not such a hasty sketch as he might perhaps have done as a kind of aside while Anne was sitting for his mother. Moreover, she found on earlier pages preliminary studies for the drawing. Niall had given a lot of attention to getting as perfect a likeness as he could. Puzzled, fighting against a conviction she dare not, yet must, admit, Clare sat with the book across her knee and tried to recollect exactly what Niall had told her about his acquaintance with Anne. Jennifer's curious words, too, echoed in her mind, and hard on them came a visual image of something she herself had seen from that very room. It was true, strenuously though she had denied it to herself. The puppet she had seen riding in the sleigh, turning her head with her lover's arm round her shoulders, had been made in the likeness of Anne Otterel. Jennifer had not doubted it, and now, here in these studies of Anne, Clare seemed to have found preliminary drawings for the portrait doll. The question she had wanted to ask him and had not quite managed to express was answered. His puppets were copied from life, they did represent real persons. If Anne Otterel, then also...She quickly opened the book at the beginning.

There she was: the girl of the Pentabridge Independent, the Christmas−tree doll that Clare had saved from burning. She remembered her name now, Margaret Raines. There were only two full−length sketches of her. He had drawn her sitting on a stile, her hands clasped in her lap, her long plaits uncoiled and hanging over her shoulders. Unlike Anne and Jennifer, this girl was not smiling; he had caught a dreaming, wistful expression.

Clare had spent a long time looking through the sketchbook and still there was no sound of Niall arriving. Suddenly realising how late it was, she stood up to put the book back on the shelf. She stood there with it in her hands, troubled and unhappy. She had the explanation of something in her hands, and yet the explanation seemed only to propound a darker riddle. She laid the book down on top of a similar one, then, yielding to the urgency of her desire to know the ultimate answer, she slid the lower book out and began to study that. It was filled like the first with figure studies, but there was no one here she recognised. There were both boys and girls, and she had no doubt at all that they were the originals of some of the puppets she had seen. She pondered the matter, with the book open at one page covered with sketches of a young woman she had certainly never seen in the flesh and yet who had some significance for her. One detail of the drawings gave her the clue. The girl in one sketch was wearing a housemaid's cap and apron. Finally Clare traced the association: last Christmas Eve she had listened to some talk of the maid the Sterne's had had the previous year. What was her name? Janet. That was it. Niall had used Janet too for a model.

There were a good many loose papers on the top shelf. She lifted some, when she had put the second book back, not with any conscious purpose, but because for some reason she could not bring herself to leave the cupboard until the vague idea bulking in the back of her mind should settle into cognisable shape. She raised the loose sheets idly, and had been looking at them for some moments before she actually saw what they were. Then she realised that she held in her hand the working drawings for some puppets. One was a figure drawn to scale, marked off in squares, with dimensions pencilled in; another was of an arm in sections. She sorted them out: they were the drawings for two complete puppets; they were somewhat smudged and bore every appearance of being constantly handled. They were drawn with very clear definition of line; only the ovals of the faces were blank. Yet Clare was convinced that they were the drawings he was working from now. Indeed, one of the figures needed no features to identify it: Clare could recognise Jennifer at once; and the other—she looked with a curious pity and helplessness at the other, for the features that should fill that blank oval would be her own.

She slipped the papers back and closed the door of the press. Slowly she moved away, down the room towards the door, and there, overcome by dread, she turned and ran down the stairs and out of the house, mortally afraid of meeting Niall.

She did not slow down to a walk until she was near the large flat rock where so often she had lingered with him. She leaned against it now, trying to subdue her fears, and to look at what she had discovered coolly and sensibly. “What on earth is there to be afraid of?” she repeated over and over, aloud. Surely, she reasoned, Niall's own explanation was simple enough. He wanted to make his puppets life−like; no sculptor, surely, would attempt to make a realistic statue without a living model. What was strange or wrong in Niall using as a model anyone he knew who was willing to pose? She clung to that clear, common−sense explanation, shaking off queer amorphous things that were trying to clutch her and drag her from her hold on safety. She shuddered physically and felt the damp chill of the drizzle penetrate her; bewildered and unhappy that Brackenbine should seem so drear and cold to her, she walked on, out through the gates into the public road.

Before she reached the school gates, however, some lineaments of the obscure riddle had become defined; some of her discoveries had classified themselves according to a common feature and showed her that her sense of something dark and dangerous beyond the seeming common sense of Niall's method was not false. She could accept Niall's casual account of making Anne Otterel's acquaintance as substantially true, though she could guess that he had left a good deal unsaid. He had known Anne much better than he had let her believe. His deception there, if it was deception, did not grieve her. Anne Otterel had died before ever she knew Niall. No doubt Anne had been a little in love with him. They would have talked, have laughed and joked together on those summer afternoons when Anne came to sit for his mother. She was not jealous of Anne. She was only sad for her, sad that it had ended as it had. Niall, too, would have been in love with Anne—or at least, strongly attracted. There was no wonder, then, that he had made a puppet in her image. She could even understand, given his extraordinary absorption in his art, that he would find nothing shocking or cruel in making her image appear to live and play when the original was buried in the cold ground.

Clare could see, too, that chance might have thrown Niall and the Pentabridge girl briefly together. Her form−mistress had told the editor of the Independent the one fact that could explain how Niall had met her: Margaret was in the habit of going for long walks alone in the country round Pentabridge. The lonely lane winding round the slopes of Akenshaw Hill would be an obvious attraction to someone who was interested in birds; the gates of Brackenbine stood ajar all the time and there was nothing to forbid a rambler's entrance. Niall would have received a young girl student of Nature with a charming, amused welcome. Clare could see him offering her the freedom of Brackenbine wood; at the same time his observant artist's eye would be learning her face and figure, finding in her a model for a new puppet. Clare recognised frankly now that Niall's art, or hobby, amounted almost to a monomania, so disproportionate as to have squeezed some of the common human feelings, or conventions, quite out of his make−up. A man less intent on his own single purpose would have been more sensitive than to have condemned to the flames that charming little image of a girl whom he had known and who was now dead.

Clare stopped at the gates of Paston Hall, her hands on the cold iron, her eyes on the familiar red−brick jumble of sham Gothic constructions. Some of Niall's puppets had indeed assorted themselves: three of the people he had studied so carefully had one character in common. Anne Otterel, Margaret Raines and the maid, Janet, they had all died, all of the same disease, all within a short time last summer.