Clare could not be sure how many of the little figures there were, but it seemed a party of not less than thirty or forty.
The procession went at a lively pace across the open area of the park in front of the window, and when they had nearly reached the trees on the other side they turned about and crossed Clare's front again, this time coming nearer still to her window. She looked intently at the leading sleigh and the four or five horsemen who accompanied it and who were made to move as if they were chatting with its occupants. Horsemen, she had assumed, from their dress, but now she was not sure that some of them were not women or girls: she saw long hair escaping from under the caps of some of them and spreading on the shoulders of scarlet coats, and it seemed to her that some of the figures had a softly feminine shape. She remembered now what Niall had said about creating an illusion: he had selected exactly the right light for his purpose and aided it skilfully by his use of little lanterns in the puppets' hands. In that strange mingling of lantern−light and moonlight, of cold radiance from the snow and soft blue shadows, there was movement enough to trick the eye into believing that the faces of the puppets themselves were animated: Clare could have sworn that she saw their expressions change, saw them laugh and move their lips and eyes—and yet there was a veiling dimness over the whole scene that was sufficient to soften and blur the mechanical jerkiness with which they must in reality have moved, and prompt the spectator's eye unconsciously to fill out and complete the imperfections of their forms and motions.
Clare had never seen any spectacle in all her life like this, and had never imagined that puppets could be brought to such perfection. She did not realise at the time, though she reflected on it later, that the very elaborateness of the puppets' costumes and the fine detail of their finish was part of the trick, for by engaging the eye with those attractions the showman might distract it from the mechanism of the show.
The leading sleigh passed in front of Clare again. The riders who were with it suddenly spurred ahead and gave her a glimpse of two figures of a man and a girl; and just before the sleigh turned the figure of the girl seemed to throw back the edge of the fur rug and Clare for a second saw a laughing face and a bare shoulder and arm, and caught a sparkle of jewels at wrist and neck. The puppet turned with an extraordinarily smooth and graceful motion to its companion, whose scarlet−sleeved arm then encircled the gleaming shoulder and drew the head of thick brown hair down to his breast. Then the sleigh, and after it the whole procession, turned up the middle of the park and went swiftly between the gentle waves of snow to the hollow where the pond lay.
There they halted for a moment or two and Clare now saw the figures of the skaters more clearly as they came up from the ice. Though diminished by distance they were recognisable in the light of the lanterns as girls clad in short fur−trimmed frocks. Clare even caught the glint of the skates swinging from their hands as they approached the main party. They appeared to greet the riders and the people in the sleighs, then mounted the sleighs with them. The whole body then formed into a procession once more and sped up the long slope in the distance and soon was lost in the darkness of the wood. Clare gazed after them until, one by one, the yellow fights in the top of the Castle went out and there was nothing to be seen except the cold, still moonlight on the snow, the grey and brown blur of the woods and the vast looming shadows of the cliffs behind.
Clare sat on in her window−recess, held in a muse of wonder by the animation of the pleasure party that had passed before her eyes. She was entranced by the gaiety and the liveliness and colour of the spectacle and, so completely had she accepted the illusion, she felt a pang of envy of those happy little figures in their companionship. The suggestion of enjoyment was so strong: as in her dreams when Niall had been away, a laughing throng had passed by her, crowding away to the Castle where there was mirth and music and gay revels in which she should have had her part. She should have been one of those little figures in the sleighs. Her second's glimpse of the beautiful young girl with her lover in the leading sleigh was most vivid now in her memory and, in a strange perturbation of feeling, she realised that the girl's face, the movement of her arm and the toss of her brown hair were not only life−like but familiar. Somewhere she had seen that lovely, laughing face turned in just that manner towards someone; somewhere she had seen those brown eyes sparkling for their lover. She had known them, but where and when escaped her; it could only have been in some episode of those crowded dreams.
A soft thud and a noise that was half purr, half growl, recalled to her immediate reality. She drew the curtain and felt Grim brush against her legs. Then there came a scuffling and scraping noise and Niall's voice called softly: “Here I am again! Wait, I'll make a light.”
Soon a match spurted and Clare was blinking in a lamplight that seemed excessively bright and brassy after the soft, elusive radiance of the snow theatre outside. Niall looked at her in high delight.
“Well?” he whispered. “Did you like them?”
She could not find words to express her wonder. All her vocabulary of praise seemed clumsy and inadequate for a performance of such delicacy and mastery.
“I'm glad you weren't disappointed, anyway,” said Niall, laughing with pleasure at her praise. “I thought you might have been expecting a sort of play, and the best I could do was a parade. I told you my interest is in making these little things and making them move. I have no idea how to produce a play with them.”
“Ah,” she said quickly. “It was more than a play. It was just like a few minutes of the life of a gay crowd of people. I might have been looking from a window into a real park with a big house−party out for a midnight drive in the snow and all streaming back to supper and dancing in the Castle. I mean, it was so real, I did believe that they had been living before I saw them and were going on living after they disappeared among the trees. Oh, it's hard to say what I mean, but while I was watching them I was sad that I wasn't with them, that I hadn't been invited to their party.”
“Were you?” he asked, drawing her close to him. “Were you, my beloved?”
She stroked his hand. “Yes. And yet I'm grateful. It's so odd a thing I feel about you Niall dear. I feel so many, many things all the time and yet, under them all, there's one constant thing: it's a kind of humility, a kind of humble gratitude, and I don't know whether it's gratitude to you or to the kind fates that made me meet you.”
“I know. I've felt like that to the fates who brought you over our wall that very night when I happened to be on that side of the wood.”
“No. It's different for me. I mean, I might have been any girl just happening to have the enterprise to climb out of school because she hated it—and they all do hate it. But you are so rare a person; you have so rare a skill, and all this strange knowledge and learning and power. Why, why should you care for a plain, dull girl like me?”
He took her face between his hands and tilted it to his own.
“The short answer is that you are neither plain nor dull. And what's all learning but a candle compared to the daylight of a loving eye, and what's the rarest artificer's skill beside the living body? I love you, and that's the sum of all that I could ever say of you; but still, there is a corollary: I want to please you, to make you as happy as you thought my little puppets were tonight.”
“You have. You have,” she said.
“Yes, but there might be a keener and completer joy than that. If you were constantly mine—if I could possess your heart for always and convert you to be a dweller in that rare world I love, beyond the dark wood; if I could take you there, under the immortal boughs...”