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.
3
Miss Sperrod came back from London the day after Boxing Day. The first news of her arrival that Clare had was in the evening, when the maid brought her a message to say that the Principal wished to see her in her sitting−room. Clare left the Prefects' Room and went slowly through to the front of the school.
She had spent the two days of Christmas in a mood of strange quietude and content: a mood out of all harmony with what she should have felt. By the experience of the Christmas before, the brittle pretence of jollity, which the Matron and Miss Finch tried to sustain for the benefit of the few miserable juniors immured with them, should have left Clare depressed and irritated. Boxing Day should have ended in a congested gloom of indigestion and ill−temper. On the contrary, when she put her head on the pillow that night, Clare felt nothing but a wide peace. It endured beyond next morning's awakening, and all morning, tramping through the hoar−frosted grounds and sitting by the little fire in the Prefects' Room, Clare mused over a hitherto unknown feeling: unknown, as far as all positive memory went; but somewhere in the lost dawn of recollection there was a fugitive knowledge of some such sensation of security and mellow peace experienced long ago in the different world of early childhood.
It should not have been so: that was the puzzle. There should have been very different feelings associated with the images of Brackenbine and its inhabitants that stood so vividly and constantly in these two days before her mind's eye. The peace and friendliness were there, it is true, and Clare had brought away the cosy warmth of the Sternes' hearth in her heart, but, starting like sharp thorns out of that sweetness, there had been other things to startle and distress her.
That sudden confrontation with Anne Otterel's portrait and the revelation of her intimacy with the Sternes should have surprised her far more than it did. She ought to have felt grieved and jealous: hurt that Anne had had friendships that she had kept hidden from her. Clare knew she would have felt so if the revelation had come a little earlier, in another way. But now there was this new tolerance and understanding, this peace in her heart. She could see herself, without any sense of perverse self−denigration at all, just as Anne must have seen her: one among a number of schoolgirls whom Anne had to do with in term−time, no one very important to Anne in her own free life. Anne would have shaken off Paston Hall from her soul as soon as she stepped outside the gate on the last day of term. Clare knew exactly now what that feeling of emancipation was, for by going to Brackenbine she herself had discarded Paston Hall. School had burst open as when a ripening kernel splits the nut, and the shrivelled husk had fallen from her.