“Ah yes,” said Clare, grudgingly conceding his point. “But I can't imagine Spare−the−Rod approving of a tunic like that! And anyway, you'd have to have the figure for it. That's not me you've drawn. It's more like...”
She picked the book up and moved to the lamp, which Niall had lit, to see the drawing better. It has been on the tip of her tongue to say the name of the girl he had drawn, and in the very instant of recognising her, the name had gone. She had certainly never known any girl exactly like this drawing—and yet there was a teasing resemblance to some good−looking young girl with short curly hair and shapely limbs whom she knew quite well; she was convinced that in another minute the errant name would return to her. While she hesitated he put out his hand and took the book from her and laid it, closed, on the bench. He took her hand and began to talk of something else and she lost the chance to pin the elusive likeness down.
Yet it still teased her, and this time, when she was leaving Brackenbine, she did not lose herself wholly in the delight of his arms and kisses. She pondered while he fondled her hair and stroked her ear where the little sign of his masterdom still remained. It was difficult to frame what she felt she must ask, and when she did find the words it seemed to her quite a different question from the one she had been trying to answer when she looked at the drawing under the lamp.
“Do you always make your puppets from a model?” she asked. “I mean, from drawings of an actual person— like drawing me this afternoon?”
“Why yes,” he said, as if not quite understanding why the question seemed important to her. “A living model's best, but not so easy to get. Sometimes I use photos instead.”
“Photos?” she exclaimed, grasping with relief at something she yet could not clearly define. “Photos in the papers?”
He gave a short laugh. “Yes. Photos in the papers if I find a suitable one. Why?”
“Oh,” she said, looking up, aware of a curious lightness, as if a burden were lifted from her mind. “Oh, I don't know why I wanted to know. Will my doll be like me when it's finished? A sort of portrait?”
“It could be, my beloved,” he said, kissing her. “It will be, in fact, because I shall have your image in my mind all the time I'm making it. It will be more than like you. It will be you. You are constantly in my mind and heart and you will enter into the wood through these hands of mine.”
She laid her head against his shoulder.
“You must make a puppet for yourself, too, then,” she said. “Perhaps then they would be lovers like you and me and they could go together into the enchanted country where we can't go in reality. Ah yes, you must do that, and then, through them, we can join the others in the Captain's park and go to the revels in the Castle.”
He pressed her eagerly to him, binding her with his arms and forcing back her head with an assured dominance.
“I will! I will!” he whispered. “I'll not fail with you!”
7
One breezy Sunday morning a fortnight or more after she had returned the doll to Niall, Clare was walking round the school grounds when she heard her name called anxiously in a rather weak breathless voice from behind. She turned in some irritation, but the girl who was hurrying to catch her up was one with whom it was impossible to be annoyed. It was Reenie Ford, a Sixth Former and a Prefect, a thin, anaemic−looking girl with short−sighted brown eyes and a habitual expression of high seriousness on her pale face. She was notorious for being conscientious beyond all conscience. The younger girls made fun of her; Clare, while avoiding her when she could, did not like to hurt her feelings. She sighed and left the world of Brackenbine in which her fancy had been straying.
It was a world that had undergone some change difficult to define in these last two weeks. It was as though her visits there had become charged with more secrecy and with the excitement of some impending greater adventure which, turn and turn about, appeared delightful and frightening. Three or four times this fortnight Mrs. Sterne had been away and there should have been no visit, but Clare had gone all the same and spent the afternoon alone with Niall. Neither the danger nor the deceit of that deterred her now. She was in full rebellion, committing the most heinous offense that anyone at Paston Hall, she supposed, could imagine, and she had not a qualm of conscience.
Niall had been hard at work on his carving. Alone with him, she watched and tried to help, feeling humbly grateful and pleased when he asked her to hand him a tool or fetch and carry for him. She would busy herself making their tea, moving happily about the house, up and down to the kitchen, feeling that she was at home at last, loving Brackenbine as she had never loved any house before. Niall was making two dolls; he worked slowly and his method was complicated. There were a good many different parts all to be shaped separately, so that it was difficult yet to see what the finished product would be like.
Sometimes she begged to be shown some of the others—the little actors who had traversed the Captain's park so gaily on that white, frosty night at the beginning of term. But Niall was always evasive, putting her off, as it seemed, merely to tease her, but in the end promising that she should see them all as much as she liked when her own was finished.
Once or twice, now that the afternoons had grown longer, he had put down his tools early and taken her out through the studio skylight to ramble about the steep wooded slope of the hill before it grew dark. There she had had a brief glimpse of the miniature park again, looking down from the top of its perpendicular cliffs. Still, from the one point where he let her look down she could not clearly see the Castle: it was largely hidden by the tangled wood of little trees. There was no way down into the park from the hill, so far as she could see. He would neither tell her how he had worked his puppets from outside on the night of the show, nor let her go through the studio window to explore the park for herself. She wheedled, but all she could obtain was a promise that she should be shown the secret when the new dolls were finished.
She had been with Niall in imagination while she marched with great strides round the school grounds this morning, and Reenie Ford was alarmed at the challenging stare with which Clare met her when she wheeled round.
“Clare!” she said, panting. “I'm sorry, only I couldn't make you hear. You walk so fast. I hope you don't mind me disturbing you—I expect you're thinking something awfully difficult out—but there's something important I want to tell you, and now's a good time.”
There were no other girls about the grounds. The bulk of the school had been marched off to church at Halliwell; Clare was allowed to please herself about going, and Reenie was excused because, having weak ankles, she could not manage the four−mile walk. Not far away there was a seat sheltered from the whisking wind, which was blowing Reenie's long skirt and loose blouse about her like clothes on the sticks of a scarecrow. Clare went over and sat down. She wondered, with an internal groan of boredom, what shocking breach of discipline Reenie could have discovered in the Junior School to demand her intervention.
“What is it?” she asked.
Reenie composed herself and began. She spoke, Clare thought, as if she had learnt her piece by heart, like a policeman in the witness−box.
“It was the night before last,” she related. “Friday, at a quarter to three. Well, of course, that would make it Saturday morning, really. So, yesterday morning at a quarter to three—I looked at my luminous watch and made a careful note of the time—I woke up with my dyspepsia. I get quite bad attacks sometimes in the night, you know, and I always keep some tablets in my drawer. I took four tablets with a glass of water and then I thought that I would pull the curtains across because the moon was quite bright and I thought it would help me to sleep if I darkened the room more. Naturally, I couldn't help looking out of the window, and, do you know? I know you'll scarcely believe me, but it's absolutely true: I saw somebody coming across the grounds, towards the school. At a quarter to three in the morning!” Reenie looked at Clare with tightly−pressed lips and gleaming eyes.