This night of the Christmas holidays was the seventh or eighth she had spent in ranging the grounds since she heard the news of Anne's death. She found the great−girthed beech−tree by the wall between whose roots they had been used to make their fire, and sitting there she thought that she began to see her school life in its true proportions. The greater part of her five years had been a drab waste. She excepted entirely from her school life those few holidays in Spain: they were glittering bits of another existence altogether, chipped off and dropped by accident on to this dun expanse, this desert of time which she could almost perceive with her senses as she could feel and smell the peculiar cold stale stuffiness of a winter class−room. The only fun and excitement in that time had been those nocturnal adventures in the Third Form. They were pitiful enough, but they had been real; the risks had been real, and so had been the goodness of the red firelight, the smell of the woodsmoke and the taste of the sausages and the strong sweet tea that the Australian girl, Pamela, made in an enamelled can. She remembered those picnics kindlily now because they were a real escape. The independence and the high adventurous life Anne Otterel had seemed to beckon her to, had proved in the end only a glamour and a deception.
She stood up, cramped and cold from long sitting on the roots of the beech−tree and, though weary of her own discouragement, she was still unwilling to go back, out of the kingdom of the night into the prison of her narrow room. She stroked the smooth bark of the tree and, groping behind, stretched across and found the wall with her fingertips.
It was a high brick wall, much older than the Victorian building of the school. Clare knew that it was the original bounding wall of the neighbouring property, an old house called Brackenbine, which she had never seen. Some people by the name of Sterne lived, or had lived there, and, if the gardener was to be believed, they owned Paston Hall, which had been built seventy years before on part of their estate outside their old park wall. A modernising Sterne had built it, the gardener said, because the old house was small and dark and damp—“all smothered with great old trees and so slumped into the side of yon old Akenshaw Hill that the rabbits can run over the roof,” he said. Clare knew, too, that the School had not long tenanted Paston Hall. She had heard Miss Geary mention the days when it was known as Paston House and occupied three villas in a North London suburb. She had never been interested enough to speculate why the Sternes had left the new house and returned to the old one. It occurred to her now, with her new appraisal of Miss Sperrod's object in keeping a school, that the Sternes must have become hard−up and been obliged to let the Hall. They must, she thought, have let it very cheaply.
The bricks she touched were not those of the wall itself, but of a buttress. Each course was set a little back from the one below to give the necessary inclination to the top of the wall, and thus, Clare remembered well, it formed a steep stairway for the toes, by which, and by propping oneself with one arm against the beech−tree, the coping of the wall could be reached. They had done it often as Third−Formers, and sat astride the wall−top and looked into the gloom of the wood on the other side and talked about the house of Brackenbine which was hidden in it. Her toes seemed of their own will to find the first step on the buttress; she braced herself against the tree−trunk and in a few moments she had found a familiar hand−hold on a horizontal bough of the tree and had twisted herself on to the top of the wall. She settled herself there on the rounded coping; one leg in the school grounds, the other in Brackenbine wood.
It was pitch dark in the wood. A cold little wind crept through the bare trees and made a bough or two creak quietly. Clare pulled the belt of her coat tighter and blew into her gloved hands. In the old days there would have been a leaping of flames below, the crackling of dry twigs and a fine, bold sizzling of sausages, not this black loneliness of cold and the wandering of the uncomfortable wind. Clare groped with her toe for the foothold on the buttress in order to climb down again, but, as she half−turned, she saw a light among the trees of Brackenbine.
It was a little yellow spark of light, low down, near the ground. It went out a moment after Clare noticed it, but it was so odd that someone should be abroad in Brackenbine wood in the middle of a winter's night that Clare, secure in the darkness that mantled her, settled herself again on the wall−top and waited to see if it would reappear. It was not long before it winked again, and again it went out and quickly reappeared, as though someone were searching about among the trees with a lantern or a torch. The light seemed not to approach any nearer to the wall, but it winked and moved about quickly over a small area. It flitted so rapidly from side to side that Clare began to wonder whether it could be a lantern after all; doubtfully, she turned over the possibility that it was a will−o'−the−wisp. Then she saw the explanation: there was not one light but several; two or three shone for an instant together.
They were such tiny points of light, weaving so mazily in and out of the tree−trunks, that had Clare been in Spain she would have put them down as fireflies. She stared so hard that after a time she could not be sure how near or far they were from her; they might have been a number of lanterns far away, except that she had seen by daylight how thick Brackenbine wood was and knew that she would not see an ordinary lantern at all if it were any great distance from the wall. It seemed to her, all the same, that one of the lights was more powerful than the others; it gave a broader and more diffused glow, and suddenly, in some alarm, she realised that it was much nearer to the wall than she had thought, for she caught a glimpse of twigs and dead leaves faintly lit by it for a moment.
Cautiously she drew up her legs and slowly got to her feet on the wall−top in order to descend the buttress on her own side, but as she steadied herself against the beech−tree bough she put her weight on a thin dead branch which snapped with a loud crack. She lurched and clutched again at the bough, but the mortar of the old rounded coping−stone under her feet had all perished; the stone rocked and gave way, and though her hold on the bough saved her from pitching headlong down, her feet followed the stone and she swung helplessly over the Brackenbine side of the wall. Careless of the noise she made now, she tried to heave herself up again, but before she could find a foothold someone rushed over the dead leaves below, and a pair of arms winding swiftly round her waist plucked her from her hold and she was pressed down on her back into a bed of damp leaves and crackling, rotten twigs.
She had scarcely found breath to give a shout before her assailant's grip was relaxed and his weight lifted from her. Two hands under her shoulders lifted her to a sitting position and then one passed briefly over her head and face.
She heard a deep intake of breath and then an awkward little laugh.
“By Artemis!” a man's voice exclaimed softly. “A lady nighthawk! Has Diana turned bat−fowler, or are you simply Halliwell's first female poacher? I'll have you know, on the one supposition, that bats are sadly out of season; and, on the other, that there hasn't been a bird bagged at Brackenbine since my great−uncle Jabez blew a stuffed one out of the Bishop's wife's hat on the morning after the relief of Mafeking. Hoosh! Grim, sheathe your claws! This is my mouse!”
Clare, too breathless and astounded still for speech, tried to wriggle away from a set of small claws which had hooked themselves in her collar and a little rough tongue which was rasping determinedly at her neck. The man recovered his breath while still speaking; his voice was soft and bantering, but he held Clare down with a firm hand on her shoulder when she tried to rise.