“Squire told me to give it you when you was by yourself,” he remarked, and with a nod sauntered off back to the school gates.
“Squire?” Clare murmured, supposing that he could only mean Niall, though she saw that the note was addressed to her in Mrs. Sterne's handwriting. She tore it open as she walked on and found that it was in fact from Mrs. Sterne.
“Dear Clare,” it ran, “I'm so sorry not to have seen you again before I go. I have to go to Cornwall on urgent business and I don't know when I shall be back. It may be a long time. It's too bad we couldn't finish our lessons, seeing your exam's so close, though I doubt whether the little extra work one does in the last few weeks makes all that difference, and perhaps you know as much as I could tell you now about what we have been doing. I'm sure you'll carry on successfully by yourself. Don't overwork, though, and don't let anyone muddle you; you know what you have to do. If you need help ask Miss Geary.
I didn't say goodbye yesterday because I only made up my mind to go this morning and the only good train is the twelve o'clock from Pentabridge, so that I must be off in an hour.
Every success, my dear Clare. Yours,
Rachel Sterne.”
Clare stopped when she had read this. The gardener's boy had disappeared; the lane was empty. She scarcely comprehended what the letter was about, except that she would not see Mrs. Sterne that afternoon. But the thought of doing Latin had been quite out of her mind; she had only one purpose in going to Brackenbine now. Before she reached the house, however, she did see that Mrs. Sterne's letter meant that she was not to go there: she saw also that Niall's instructions to the gardener's boy were meant to give her a chance to avoid letting anyone know that his mother was putting her off.
She approached the old house now with greater agitation than she had ever felt in her life. She had no courage for the coming meeting. Her only allies had been pride and indignation, and both had deserted her on the way through the wet wood. She crept into the little hall, hurt and pitiful, coming to the source of the hurt for comfort.
There was no fire in either the dining room or the drawing−room. She listened for a minute at the bottom of the stairs, but there was no sound from the studio. Slowly she went up and peeped into all the rooms. The house was empty. It seemed that Niall had been working in the studio earlier in the day, for the fire there was still alive and his tools lay about the bench. Clare sat down on a box by the bench and looked about her as if she were seeing the well−known room for the first time, or as if she expected it to have put on some quite different aspect and acquired some quite different contents since Jennifer's revelation. It was a hard thing for Clare to realise that she was not the sole privileged visitor to the studio. It was an absurdly unjustified assumption, she now told herself sadly; indeed, so many of her assumptions about Niall had been absurd and naive. She bent her head and her finger stirred the fine shavings and tiny chips of wood on the bench and her eyes filled with tears.
Jennifer, too, had been happy with him in this room. She, too, had been excited and delighted by the things he could show her: and, because she was a child and her relations with Niall were so different, it had not spoilt it for her to know that she was not his only——Clare looked up, gazing round the silent room as if it could supply the word her thoughts had faltered on. What was she to Niall? She had thought in her simplicity that they were lovers. But was she really no more to him than Jennifer? A sort of live doll whom it amused him to have in his power? He had played at making her his slave. He had done that to Jennifer also. Then Jennifer's words of the previous night came vividly back to her. He had not only played at making love to her; he had frightened her in some way. There had been a real fear of what he could do to her in Jennifer's voice when she cried that she could not disobey him. Could Niall really have enjoyed frightening Jennifer? Could he really have been so cruel as to show her the kind of play her mention of the dead seemed to imply? What had he really made her believe about his power over her?
In her anxiety and in the torment of uncertainty which this waiting for Niall increased beyond endurance, Clare jumped up and walked back and forth in the middle of the studio. On a sudden impulse, as she reached the far end of the room, she snatched the long curtain aside and looked out through the leaded panes of the little window again, upon the ancient dwarf trees. They looked sad under the drizzle; the park, where she had seen a play of such jollity and gay companionship, looked so deserted, so wet and drear in this grey daylight, that her heart sank and she drew the curtain slowly back to hide it.
But her mind was puzzling actively over some of the things Jennifer had said the night before. She paused in her pacing by the upturned box on which she had stood to pose for Niall, and the train of ideas that recollection produced held her still, startled by a discovery: not one discovery, but several. Jennifer was the key to more than one mystery.
She swept her gaze round the studio again: with a definite purpose, now. His sketch−book must be somewhere about. The door of one of the plywood presses stood a little ajar; she went across, swung it back, and began to search among the contents. Papers and books were piled on all the three shelves, but almost at once she found the black−backed sketch−book in which he had made his studies of herself, and, turning the pages she found again the quick drawing he had done to illustrate how a gym−tunic might be worn. Sitting there on the floor she looked at it with new understanding. Beyond a shadow of doubt it was Jennifer; not an exact likeness, but rather the handsome girl that Jennifer might grow into in a few years' time. Niall must have studied her closely to be able to draw this recognisable projection of her so rapidly and so surely; he must have sketched her many times.
The book was nearly full. Clare turned back the pages, beyond the drawings of herself. There, on the pages immediately before those studies, was Jennifer again; the contemporary Jennifer here; drawn with a masterly skill and care, her likeness delightfully caught, her youth and the slight softness and roundness of her figure brought out as if Niall's pencil had loved the lines. She turned over more pages, finding Jennifer in all manner of costumes and attitudes; finding other figure−studies, pages of detail of hands, arms, legs, separate features, careful little drawings of lips and ears and noses which she could not recognise as belonging to any face she knew. Then, near the beginning of the book she came upon a drawing of Anne Otterel.
She gazed at that a long time. She knew Niall's style too well now to be mistaken. He had certainly made the drawing. It was more realistic than his mother's painting of Anne: an exact likeness. He had taken time and trouble over it; the drawing was not such a hasty sketch as he might perhaps have done as a kind of aside while Anne was sitting for his mother. Moreover, she found on earlier pages preliminary studies for the drawing. Niall had given a lot of attention to getting as perfect a likeness as he could. Puzzled, fighting against a conviction she dare not, yet must, admit, Clare sat with the book across her knee and tried to recollect exactly what Niall had told her about his acquaintance with Anne. Jennifer's curious words, too, echoed in her mind, and hard on them came a visual image of something she herself had seen from that very room. It was true, strenuously though she had denied it to herself. The puppet she had seen riding in the sleigh, turning her head with her lover's arm round her shoulders, had been made in the likeness of Anne Otterel. Jennifer had not doubted it, and now, here in these studies of Anne, Clare seemed to have found preliminary drawings for the portrait doll. The question she had wanted to ask him and had not quite managed to express was answered. His puppets were copied from life, they did represent real persons. If Anne Otterel, then also...She quickly opened the book at the beginning.