He noticed them, and as he set out the tea−cups he smiled and lifted his brows enquiringly. “For whom?”
“For Margaret,” she said. “For the one that failed.”
He nodded slowly and sadly. “It was my fault; perhaps I was mistaken. I thought I saw what I wanted there, but I was wrong.”
He paused and stared into the fire, and when he spoke again it was as if to himself. He frowned and muttered:
“Yet it would have succeeded. If she had not refused at the last moment. She let me think she was willing, but in her heart she resisted me. I saw it when I came to put the heart in. The blood had died. But it was too late then.”
He stared a minute longer into the embers, then shook his shoulders and jumped up and began to pour out the tea, throwing off his gloom again and laughing down at Clare.
“I'll not fail with you!” he said. “Or Jennifer. Be glad for Jennifer. She'll both delight and be delighted. There are merry boys among my people who'll give her pleasure she can't imagine now. Ah! wait until her beauty is displayed in the summer woods when the bright streams invite! We'll see her dance, too, in the courts, between the fountains on summer nights. You'll see her happy then, and you'll hear what laughter comes from lips of unchanging youth, of unimpairable loveliness. I shall have brought my people a flower they'll cherish and rejoice in —for ever!”
“You'll not hurt her?” Clare asked timidly. “She has been frightened.”
He made a gesture of denial, or dismissal with his hand. “Nothing. She's a child yet, and has a child's waywardness sometimes. But there's no real rebellion in her. I shan't need to open up the castle dungeons for her! Some tears and scratches, perhaps, but what are those in an eternity of adventure? There are laws, too, beyond the trees, but I can be a merry judge and contrive my sentences to end in laughter.”
Clare sighed. “Yes, she's seen that. You've shown her what happens to your disobedient slaves, I know. And she accepts it. She's glad to be under your rule. I expect she'd fawn on you if you punished her. We're slaves already. You have our minds now. What does it matter what you do with our bodies?” Her tone was quiet; her words were suited to the naked, rain−washed bones of truth she saw so clearly now.
“And is that a little thing?” he rejoined with energy, throwing back his head proudly. “Is it a little thing to live under my lordship? I tell you I shall set you free from your servitude to Time and Change, and when you have found that freedom my chains will be bonds of flowers, my laws as light as the brilliant air, and you will put on my livery as gladly as the tree puts on its leaves in spring.”
He jumped up and began to pace about the open space in the middle of the room. Grim joined him with one bound and trotted close at his heels. Niall threw a glance up at the skylight. The day seemed lighter now than when Clare had come, as if the fine rain had stopped and the clouds had parted.
“It is too long, too long already!” he exclaimed. “And here I am wasting hours of daylight!” He swung about to the bench and stopped short, as if he had forgotten that he had cleared his work away. Then he pulled his keys from his pocket and threw open the locked press and began taking the things out. Clare felt that he had dismissed her. She rose, but could not go until he gave her some order. Seeing that he took no notice of her, but bent busily over his vice, she approached and looked at his work. He neither forbade her nor invited her, but after a while, when she picked up one part of a puppet that was lying on the bench, he straightened up and watched her as she examined it.
She handled the thing with a queer, timid care now, as she would have held some small animal in her hands. It was the torso of one of the puppets—Jennifer's—and it was almost finished; the hair was fixed, though un−trimmed yet, and the features were carved. The body seemed to lack only painting, but towards the left side, below the breast there had been drilled a round hole half−way through the body, of a diameter such that a large pea would have entered. Clare put her finger on the mouth of the hole, touching it wonderingly, concerned, as if it were a wound. He smiled.
“That will be filled,” he remarked. “That's the last job of all.”
She watched him for a long time in silence as he worked. Her interest was intense, but she felt no excitement, no apprehension, even, any more; only a calm patience within which she could admire dispassionately the exceedingly fine workmanship of all the little figure's intricate joints, the grace of its lines and the surpassing skill of the long fingers that worked on them.
By−and−by her eyes strayed to the press where he kept his work. She had never seen inside it before, for it was always kept locked. Now she observed that things were kept much more tidily in it than in the one where he put his sketch−books. The top−shelf seemed to be occupied by pieces of glass apparatus, small retorts and tubes held in wooden stands—small stoppered tubes such as she had seen in his hand once, containing some tiny blobs or pellets of dark stuff. On the shelf below were stacked many pieces of wood of varying shape and sizes, and in the front, something that impelled her, with a sharper curiosity to move closer and examine it: another puppet torso, less finished than Jennifer's, but still, nearing completion. Then, in looking into those small, exquisitely fashioned features, some more active feelings of pity and fear began to constrict her heart. It was herself she was looking at, or the thing that she would be when she had ceased to be herself. It was she, and yet not a perfectly true likeness: she would wear a fairer form, she saw, than in this life. Hesitantly and fearfully, she put out her forefinger to touch that small hole in the breast, the hollow where the heart should lie. He came across then and, mistaking what she was looking at, said pleasantly: “Has the Captain's coach taken your eye?” She drew back, uncomprehending. Then he bent and showed her something at the back of the shelf which she had missed in her concentration on her own doll. It was a most elaborate model of a coach—a massive vehicle in the style of the seventeenth century, richly carved and gilded and provided with complete sets of tiny harness so finely stitched and riveted that Clare could scarcely believe it to be the work of ordinary human hands. Jennifer's words sprang into Clare's mind, and her eyes grew wide with fear; but the coach was empty now. Niall opened the door to show her the inside, stroking the upholstery with the tip of his finger, but Clare dared not touch those cushions, knowing full well what form Jennifer had seen reclining on them. Niall exhibited all the coach to her, handling it with loving care, bidding her admire it.
“Did you make it?” she whispered.
He put it back on the shelf, and shook his head.
“No. I only discovered it, buried under God knows what rubbish, broken and dirty. I was fourteen when I found it;—more than a year younger than Jennifer is now, but the day is as fresh in my memory as if it were last week. That's why I showed it to her, in use, in the Park. That day when I was fourteen, examining this treasure that I'd found, I first made the astounding discovery and first glimpsed the power I might acquire, and I swore to myself that I would see the Captain's coach in motion one day. Well, I've seen it many times, but I could never recapture that first amazement and fresh wonder of discovery until the night I saw it through Jennifer's eyes. For that great pleasure she has given me I've promised that she shall ride in it by my side, and she shall have an escort of handsome boys and girls in the finest array, and she shall drive to the ball in the gayest cavalcade that's been seen in all the long years of Brackenbine.”