Clare lifted her head and fixed her eyes on him. They were wide, and their troubled grey was as sad as a winter sea under a dull sky.
“Who did make it?” she asked in a voice so low he could scarcely catch the question.
He slowly shook his head. “That's still to be known. Perhaps Captain Trethewy—or if he did not, he certainly knew who did. Perhaps those people who...”
He broke off suddenly, wheeling round towards the door, listening with a frown on his brow. Clare realised that she had been aware of some slight noises below, as if someone were in the hall, but her mind had been so preoccupied she had given them no conscious attention. They both listened now, but the sounds were not repeated. A minute passed, then there was a soft, rapid scuffling and Grim, whose absence they had not noticed, flew back into the room, his tail fluffed out to enormous size and every hair of his body standing on end. He bounded across the studio, up on to a table and from there to the ledge of the skylight, where he crouched down, his ears flattened and his sharp teeth showing in a true wild−cat snarl. Niall looked at him, and back again to the door, listening and waiting.
“What is it?” Clare asked, frightened. “Has someone come?”
“No, no, it can't be,” he muttered. Then, after listening still for a few moments, he strode out, and Clare heard him run down the stairs and into the rooms on the ground−floor. He returned in a little while, grinning cheerfully.
“Some enemy of Grim's, I suppose, of his own sort,” he said. He went over to the bench and picked up his tool again. “I did think for a moment it might be my mother—though she should be well on her way to Cornwall now and, anyway, he wouldn't have got into that state about her.”
Clare watched him work for some time. She had looked at her watch and found that it was time for her to set off back to Paston Hall, and yet she felt she could not move without his permission. He looked up at length.
“Shall I come again?” she asked, in a faltering tone. He considered the question.
“No. Better not, perhaps.” He frowned and looked towards the door again, uncertain about something. “It ought to have been all right; and yet—No. They'll be long days when you don't come, but you had better not take the risk. It might be known now that you have no excuse for coming.”
He went down with her to the hall and helped her on with her coat; then, at the door took her in his arms. She accepted his kisses obediently; when she was thus encircled his power was absolute.
“Ah, if there could be no interval,” he said. “But the time is only counted in days. When we meet again it will be never to part.”
Clare walked back along the drive with bent head, seeing nothing. The purpose with which she had come to Brackenbine this afternoon had been utterly defeated, and she could feel no anger at his victory. How could there be any rebellion in her soul when every thought and feeling she possessed now she had on lease from him? He was incontestably her owner. Even her rebellion against Paston Hall was no longer hers; she could break all the rules now without the least sense of risk or the least doubt of her tightness, for she broke them by his authority. She walked, and it seemed to her that the very motion of her legs was directed by him. She understood all Niall's purpose now and understood, too, the process by which he achieved it. The only wonder to her was that she had ever thought it obscure, had ever turned and twisted in an agony of desire to understand. There was so clearly no need to understand, to rack her brains, to think what to do; for very simply, there was nothing for her to do. Only she wished the next few days were over. They would be a blank, an utter emptiness: she hoped that he would cast a merciful spell of oblivion on her to help her across the nothingness of those days: or, if he would be kind to her, he might fill them with dreams, so that she would be living in the enchanted wood even before her actual awakening among its groves.
She walked on, not feeling the ground beneath her feet or the air on her cheek, or noticing the pale sunlight that now shone on the tops of the Brackenbine oaks. An impalpable but impenetrable sphere immured her. Yet something, some remote, vague disturbance from outside was distracting her. It seemed an age before she could decide that it was some real sound that she was hearing, and as long again before she was well aware that the sound was a human voice, a known voice, speaking her name.
She had stopped, without knowing it, and was standing near the great flat rock not far from the gates. Very slowly, she found her bodily eyes asserting their functions, and little by little the sphere of insulation about her dissolved and she saw a human figure sitting on a boulder at the foot of the bank. It was a grey−haired figure, wearing an old grey coat which showed a tweed skirt and lisle stockings below it.
Clare heard her own voice saying, without surprise, “Yes, Miss Geary?”
The gaunt old lady stuck the point of her umbrella into the ground between her worn brogues. She arched her brows and smiled—the lofty, mysteriously amused smile that the school knew so well.
“You were so rapt,” she said, “I had to speak three times; but what I tell you three times is true; I am convinced that you are Clare Lydgate. Where did I bring you back from? Vergil's Rome? Or were you walking in a stranger place, with another guide?”
“Oh, Miss Geary,” Clare said, with a kind of pitiful little appeal in her voice, going and standing near the teacher, “I didn't know you were coming for me.”
“Indeed, I didn't know myself until the rain stopped,” said Miss Geary, looking up and studying her, drawing back her head, as her habit was, as if to get Clare's face in better focus. “I set out quite early and had a walk through the wood. In fact, I went as far as the house, but you evidently hadn't finished your lesson, so I walked slowly back and thought I would wait for you here. I haven't been out for so long. The gleam of sunshine tempted me. And here, see! I've found the world has woken up since I was last out.”
She pointed with her umbrella, and there, on the wet, bare earth of the bank beside her, Clare saw two or three round heads of yellow flowers.
“Coltsfoot!” she exclaimed softly, and stopped above them, then lifted her head again, gazing with curious expectation round about her. The wood was still fast−bound in winter; the oak boughs were black and bare against the sky; a few rags of withered leaves still hung forlornly here and there, and no fresh green lightened the sombre wall of laurels. The earth beneath was barren, yet the sky was light. The uniform roof of cloud that seemed to have been spread across heaven for as long as Clare could remember, was broken: between the delicately−shaded masses of pearl and smoky grey were rifts of blue, and from the south−west, from behind white ramparts, shone brave, bright lances of the sun. Clare stooped again to gaze upon the coltsfoot that lifted their little round lamps of life from the dark, dead ground, and as she bent her head she felt the tears well up in her eyes and a great sigh seemed to tear the heart loose in her breast. Miss Geary rose and slipped an arm through hers. “I thought it would be very pleasant to walk along to meet you,” she said, beginning to walk towards the gates. “And I think I've had my reward. It's just such a winter's day as you sometimes, rarely, chance on when you perceive life beginning again. You can't say it's spring yet. I expect we shall see the country deep in snow after this, and yet we've seen the change. Oh dear! What commonplace sentiments I have! I'm just saying what people have been saying for thousands of years, and yet, Clare my dear, it's something that it's right to say. Immutability is wrong, you see; life is life because it is change: birth, growth, flowering, reproduction and death—these are the right things. We should not seek to preserve anything for ever, for what is living and true and lovely will always reproduce itself. I was young once and I wished I could be young for ever. But it's better to grow old and change as life will have us change. It's better to live the appointed seasons and then sleep peacefully.”