In the fine, crisp days of the week following Christmas the arrangement worked very well. Clare would arrive with her grammar and exercise book at Brackenbine soon after luncheon, to find Mrs. Sterne waiting for her with a good log fire burning in the little dining−parlour and books spread on the oak table. For two hours they would work at Latin. It was teaching of a sort Clare had never known before. Even Anne Otterel, in the very short time she had given to Clare the previous summer term, had had something of the schoolmistress in her manner; but to enter on Latin grammar with Mrs. Sterne was like setting out with a companion to explore a newfound land: neither knowing on what wonders and riches they might chance at any moment. Clare began to see that Mrs. Sterne had learnt her Latin as a child for the pleasure of its literature; it had never been a dead language to her. She told Clare how she and her father used to talk a kind of dog−latin together, she making up words where she did not know them, her father gravely accepting them so long as they were correctly inflected. Mrs. Sterne was able to show Clare the relation of Latin to French and Spanish, which no one had ever pointed out to her before; to reveal the descent of little Spanish ditties Clare knew, from songs and rhymes heard in the streets of Rome two thousand years ago. She read passages of the Aeneid and the Georgics aloud, and suddenly that spiky fence of scansion and syntax which had previously seemed to Clare to prevent her ever feeling the power and meaning of Latin verse collapsed; the language came to life. These words upon the page had been spoken by living lips that lovingly shaped the beauty of their sounds, and they had been heard by living people who were moved by them as she was moved by a poem of Yeats.
Clare drank in huge draughts of new understanding, and in doing so acquired a voracious appetite for factual knowledge. She saw the acquisition of grammatical knowledge as a necessary preparation for their delightful expeditions of exploration, and she set about acquiring it with the same excited zest as she had given in childhood to preparing the equipment for a picnic or camping trip with her father. Endowed with an excellent memory and with a gift for concentration where her interest was roused, she mastered each morning substantial portions of grammar, and, in being so busy and in the feeling of making a real gain of knowledge, the listlessness and despair of the autumn term slipped from her. The assurance and shining content that had begun on Christmas Eve persisted.
Each day their lesson would be ended at three o'clock by the cheerful rattle of cups as Niall brought in to them an early cup of tea. It was a sound that Clare came to listen for as putting the crown on her delight. Then, for a few minutes the three of them would sit before the glowing logs and talk—of Latin and of poetry, of pictures and foreign lands, of everything under the sun, or, as it seemed to Clare, of every sunlit thing.
Usually Niall would walk back with her to the lodge−gates, through the grave brown oak−woods, and then he would be at his gayest and most extravagant, telling her tales of his Great−Uncle Jabez that set them both laughing until their voices rang back in echo from the hard−frozen slopes of Akenshaw Hill. It was Niall who explained, or rather hinted at an explanation of Miss Sperrod's concern to maintain good relations with the owner of Brackenbine.
“Old Jabez couldn't keep the Hall up,” he said. “It wants an army of servants and even in his day that came expensive. He'd run through the Sterne fortune soon after his father left it to him and got into pretty low water. He couldn't sell the estate, of course; it's entailed upon the heirs male. Then Arthur Sperrod—your Principal's brother—popped up and made himself useful, and, I suspect the consideration was that Jabez withdrew to Brackenbine and let the Hall to your respected Governing Body for a song. We renewed the lease on the same terms soon after I inherited the property. Actually, though I'm your landlord, Arthur Sperrod has the management of the whole thing. All he needs is my signature when the lease falls to be renewed again the year after next. It's an advantageous arrangement to your Governors. They wouldn't find such another place for so little now in the length of England.”
“But you're not forced to renew it, if you could get more for it from somebody else, are you?” Clare asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh well. It suits us well enough. We're bad business people. All we want is to be quiet and private. We might get much worse neighbours than you, you know. We are not unappreciative of Spoil−the−Child's careful discipline!” He grinned.
Clare had never worked so hard in all her schooldays, and yet her activity now seemed as different from pre−examination 'swotting' as old holidays had seemed from term−time. The 'few lessons a week' that Mrs. Sterne had suggested were, from the beginning, one a day. Quickly Clare came to feel that Brackenbine rather than Paston Hall was her home; she felt at home there as soon as she passed the iron gates.
One afternoon when the New Year was a few days old she came as usual to Brackenbine, but on stepping from the little hall into the dining−parlour she found it empty. The fire burned on the hearth but no books were spread on the table. She peeped into the drawing−room, where the great Christmas−tree still stood and the evergreens still ornamented the chimney−breast; that too, was empty. She opened the door to the kitchen and listened, but no sound came from there. Then she caught the slight noise of someone moving upstairs, and, rather diffidently, called Mrs. Sterne's name from the foot of the stairs. An indinstinct reply came down to her. A little hesitantly she climbed halfway up. There she heard Niall's voice clearly raised: “Hello! Here I am!”
She went up to the top landing, and through an open door saw Niall busy with a suitcase on his bed, and drawers and cupboard doors opened round him.
“Hello!” he exclaimed as he looked up. “I thought it was my mother. Isn't she back yet?”
He came out on to the landing where Clare stood in the light from the open studio door. “She went to Pentabridge this morning,” he explained. “I thought she'd be back before you came.”
“No,” said Clare. “No, she's not downstairs. I—I thought it was your mother calling—I came up...” “Well,” he said, after a pause during which he looked away from her, back into his bedroom, “she can't be
long; she was going to get the one o'clock bus and she's only got to walk from Halliwell corner.” Clare had followed his gaze to the suitcase open on his bed and the things scattered round it.
“I'll just wait in the dining−room,” she said. “You want to get on with your packing, I expect.” She spoke in a flat voice, not looking at him.
“Oh well...” he said. “No hurry about that.”
He moved away to the threshold of the studio and stood looking idly round at the litter of things within. He was silent so long that Clare, troubled by the strange flatness and coldness that had fallen between them, forced herself to say something:
“Are you going away for long?”
He moved over to his work−bench on the other side of the studio, and she had perforce to follow him to hear his reply. He stood looking down at his tools as if studying what he should do with them, and only after a long pause replied:
“I don't know. I don't know how long it will be.”
There was a gloomy finality in his tone, and Clare did not know what to say after that. She felt her own heart sink like a stone and, standing there, a little behind him, watching his long fingers as they played with the handle of a chisel on the bench, she admitted quite simply and humbly to herself that the greater part of the fife and joy and zest of her days would depart with Niall.