She looked round the studio, from the fire still smouldering on the hearth to the curtained window at the far end. It seemed exactly the same as when she had seen it on Christmas Eve, except that the portrait which had leaned against the foot of the easel had gone. It was nowhere to be seen in the room.
Abruptly Niall turned and looked down on her with a most serious, searching gaze. His dark eyes were so intent and there was such stern concentration in his face that she shrank back a little, startled and puzzled, thinking that he was angry. But he turned his head away after a moment and smiled somewhat sadly and awkwardly.
“I've just remembered,” he said. “I promised to show you something. I'd better redeem my promise before I go.”
“The puppets?” she asked, relieved beyond all proper measure that he was not angry.
“No, no,” he said, “or, at least, not exactly. No, it's nothing of mine. You remember I told you about old Captain Trethewy's hobby? The little tree's? Well, here they are.”
He walked to the far end of the room and drew the heavy curtain aside, revealing a small window with leaded panes and a deep, low wooden window−seat below it.
He knelt on the window−seat and made a gesture to Clare to sit beside him. She did so and gave a little exclamation of surprise and pleasure as she looked out.
The sill of the window, on a level with her chin inside, was only a few inches above the ground outside. She was looking into a deep hollow of the hill, as it were an old quarry, closed on three sides by sheer walls of sandstone rock and on the fourth by the gable−end of the house. Grass and little bushes grew thickly in all the clefts and crannies of the rock walls, and the trees of the wood stood thickly all round their upper edge; while the floor of the enclosed space, which might have been a little bigger than a tennis−court, was thickly carpeted with moss. It was not a level floor: it sloped gently up towards the back and sides of the hollow, and was varied by little undulations and tiny knolls where knobs of grey stone peeped out from under the mantling moss; here and there glinted the pale surface of a little frozen pool. About all this space, planted in groves and in alleys and singly, were the Captain's trees. None was more than three feet high, yet each was a perfect tree of some evergreen species unknown to Clare. Cupping her hands beside her face to shut out the room and the normal−sized trees of the wood above, she could look out into this miniature park as if she were viewing a distant landscape, and then the little trees seemed like ancient oaks, as mighty and venerable as those of Akenshaw, stout−boled, spreading their crooked arms wide over a dark green sward.
There were miniature walks meandering among the groves and through the alleys, and level stretches of what seemed like open lawn where she could fancy a herd of deer or red cattle might graze. Her eye travelled slowly over the landscape back to where the trees stood more thickly on the gently rising ground beneath the steep wall of rock, and there it fell upon what seemed at first sight a rough pile of crags rising above the foliage, but which, as she stared, in the subdued grey light that fell into that hollow place, she thought to be rather an artificial construction, not so much a miniature mountain as some rough, irregular pile of buildings, a castle of wild, fantastic style built of brown sandstone. The little walks converged up the slope towards it, but the entrance to it was hidden by the gnarled trees standing in a thick belt before it. Niall gave a short sigh, and she turned to him.
“And did the Captain make all this—this little park and all? And it's been kept so carefully all these years?”
“Carefully?” he answered. “No, hardly that. The trees could not help but live. But the Captain's garden suffered a long neglect under the Sternes. It's I who've tidied it up. And I who've played the Vandal, too.”
With his fingertip on the panes he drew her attention to a number of stumps about the miniature park where trees had been cut. She exclaimed in distress, “Oh! Why did you cut them?”
“Never fear,” he said. “The Captain's theory was right. The roots are immortal. Do you not see the little shoots springing from the old stump, here, from this near one? Look! I have only helped myself to the timber, and I've done that sparingly like a good and careful estate−manager. I don't think the Captain would grudge me the use of the timber he planted, for nothing else would do, and the purpose I have is something in his own vein.”
“Why? What have you used it for?” Clare asked.
He rose and drew the curtain again as Clare also got up.
They heard someone moving about briskly below now, and a moment later Mrs. Sterne's voice called up to them.
“Here we are!” Niall called back.
He stood a moment and looked at Clare, smiling. “I told you I was following fallacies of duration, seeking to make things that would live for ever, even like the Captain. The wood of his undying trees is the stuff I make my puppets from.”
4
Miss Geary, by some mysterious means, learned that Niall had gone away. She mentioned it to Clare the next afternoon when she met her at the lodge−gates. Clare glanced sharply at her; the old lady's face was as serene as ever, and her tone had been as usual, gentle and remote, but Clare fancied she had caught a suggestion of satisfaction or relief in her words. Clare told herself she was over−sensitive and suspicious: what earthly reason had old Miss Geary to be glad that Niall had gone—gone and left his mother alone? She should have been sorry for Mrs. Sterne, left lonely in her silent house in the wood. Niall had been gay, galant, in an innocent and merry way, with Miss Geary, and she had seemed to like him on Christmas Eve. Clare could not believe that the old lady had been in any way anxious on her account because of Niall's presence.
She had missed his cheerful clatter with the tea−cups at three o'clock that afternoon more sorely than she had thought possible. With as much seeming casualness as she could affect she had tried to find out from Mrs. Sterne where Niall had gone and when he would return. The answer was vague. He had gone on business to the north of England; he might be away some time; he was frequently away from Brackenbine, of course.
Clare stuck to her programme, working hard each morning and evening and looking forward keenly to her afternoon hours at Brackenbine. Though the house was quieter and less lively now, Mrs. Sterne's company was still a rich treasure; Clare could scarcely understand how she had endured the drabness of life before she knew her.
The days were still infinitely happier than any Clare had known at school; but her nights became oddly troubled. The assurance and the shining peace were shattered after Niall's departure; they broke very suddenly after dark on the evening when she last saw him. Each evening, after that, as soon as she had closed the door of her little room and was alone, she was beset by a strange agitation of mind. Again, like the extraordinary content which it had displaced, this agitation was something she had never experienced before. She deliberately recalled all that she had felt in the few weeks succeeding Anne Otterel's death and compared her present feelings with those. There was a distinct difference of kind; then she had been dispirited and crushed; something had been taken away from her: she had suffered loss and defeat, but it had been a passive feeling. Now, if it was a loss she was feeling, it left no deadness in her heart, but a strange, active anguish; her feelings were acute, her nerves uncontrolled, her mind worked with a too−hectic voluntary energy creating images of anxiety and fear.
Yet, in waking, she could not seize the images. She was afraid, yet could not see the thing she was afraid of.
Struggling to pin down either in words or pictures the subject of her anxiety, the nearest she could come to describing it to herself was that something was broken that must, at any cost, be made whole again. In dreams, however, her fears wore distinct, visible shapes. She slept badly in these nights, tossing on her bed for hours before she lost consciousness, and when she woke she was weary in both body and mind, her brain especially tired from intensive labour. She was aware that in her sleep she had been driven pitilessly through a succession of most crowded scenes, forced to follow a baffling course among persons and things that changed with mad haste and in−deflectable purpose from form to form, always progressing towards some huge, frightening, general transformation of being that was never reached. Some parts of the dreams, a few fragments only, she knew, remained vivid in her memory after she had wakened. They all related in some way to Brackenbine and the ones of which she retained a clear visual impression longest pertained to the little park of dwarf trees.