The sun set on a day of dry cold, and before the red light had faded behind the woods the puddles in the gravel paths were filming over with ice. Well muffled−up, Miss Geary and Clare set out on foot. They turned left outside the school gates and in a few yards had entered territory that was entirely unknown to Clare. Pentabridge lay in the other direction, and the lane to Halliwell turned off the Pentabridge road a little before the school fence was reached. On fine Sunday mornings in term−time a 'crocodile' dragged its way to church along that lane, and that was the limit of topographical knowledge of the district that any Paston Hall girl was allowed to gain. In the other direction the road bent round the slope of Akenshaw Hall, with the shape and colours of whose wooded height Clare was familiar enough through five years of looking on it in sun and cloud from the school grounds. Sometimes, as a junior, she had let her eye trace possible pathways to its top, but dreamily, as she might have climbed in fancy the steeps of Ruwenzori pictured in a travel−book. The same high brick wall that divided the school grounds from Brackenbine bounded the road on their left hand, and it was only now that Clare realised that it went so far. Akenshaw Hill was a rough cone, standing in isolation from the broken chain of high ground that ran westwards from Pentabridge, and it seemed to Clare, as they walked on, with the road curving steadily away to the left, that the wall must girdle the whole hill.
The evening sky gave yet light enough to see the contrast between the fugitive greys and browns of the oak−wood which clothed all Akenshaw Hill and the solid black−green of the fir and pine plantations which stretched away in a broad sweep to the horizon on the other side of the road. The hill stood like an island in a dark sea; the dark red wall was its rampart cliff, and somewhere among its rocks and groves stood a house that one of its inhabitants, at least, could pretend was an enchanter's castle.
Clare heard Miss Geary's voice telling her about Mrs. Sterne, but she was listening to another voice reciting solemn nonsense, and she was watching again, three−parts serious in a game of make−believe, a dim lantern that drew a magic circle to prove that the other side of Brackenbine wall was indeed a world away from Paston Hall.
The entrance to Brackenbine was a pair of wrought−iron gates between sandstone pillars standing flush with the brick wall. Beyond them the wall went on, curving round to complete its circuit of the hill. The gates stood a little ajar, and Miss Geary, fumbling to draw her electric torch from her pocket, sidled through. Clare paused to cast one last glance round, at the band of wan light separating the deepening sky from the dark coniferous plantations, at the dusky web of bare boughs spreading out over her head from the park within, and at the pale ribbon of the lonely, houseless lane bending onwards out of sight into the gloom.
It was quite dark inside the park, for the trees arched over the drive and on each hand there was a tall undergrowth of laurel and rhododendron. Miss Geary's torch threw a little pool of light which enabled them to pick their way along the ruts and over the half−frozen puddles. Sheltered though they were from the breeze, Clare felt colder here than in the lane outside; they went more slowly, up and down, across the slope of the hill, following something more like a cart−track than the approach to a gentleman's house.
It seemed to Clare they must have gone winding about nearly a mile through the wood from the gate, before they reached the house, and then, suddenly, they were at the door almost as soon as they caught the first gleam of its lighted windows through the trees.
Clare had scarcely known what to expect; the descriptions she had heard from the Paston Hall gardener and Miss Geary were so mixed up with fancies started by her encounter with the young man in the wood. But she had imagined something nearer to her conception of an old manor−house, something, however much decayed, more dignified and extensive than this. For an instant, as they stepped straight from the bushes to the front door, she thought that this could not be the house, but only a lodge or keeper's cottage. Then Miss Geary crossed unhesitatingly the single stone step, pushed the half−open door and entered a little lamp−lit hall.
Firelight and lamplight and a broad warmth poured on them from a wide−open door within the hall, and while they were still busied with their coats and goloshes, a soft, clear welcoming voice wished them a Merry Christmas. From where she stood just inside the outer door, Clare looked through the inner one, straight across to a huge open fireplace full of flames from a log fire. She saw Mrs. Sterne crossing the room to greet them, gliding towards them with that red and yellow thicket of flame behind her, wearing a dress of golden−coloured satin that shimmered and glowed as though it were a thing of fire itself.
From that first glimpse of their hostess Clare was captivated. Surprise contributed to the extraordinary attraction she instantly felt. For some reason, perhaps nothing sounder than her friends' baseless conjectures in the Third Form, she had never questioned that Mrs. Sterne was an old woman—as old as Miss Geary, and she still could not quite believe that this was the Mrs. Sterne, the old friend and contemporary of Miss Geary. This woman seemed only half Miss Geary's age; her fine, small face was unwrinkled, her hair was jet black and her large, dark eyes were brilliant. But Miss Geary greeted her as 'Rachel' and laughed and expanded in the warmth of meeting and put on an ease and confidence of manner that Clare had never seen in her before.
The conversation that Mrs. Sterne and Miss Geary fell into, immediately after the exchange of greetings and Clare's introduction, was about persons she had never heard of, and so, being freed from taking a part in it she gave all her attention to the room into which Mrs. Sterne led them. She was aware at once of a contradiction to her first impression of the house: it was a big room, the very sort of spacious, panelled drawing−room that she would have expected to find in an old country manor−house. There were two oil−lamps with yellow silk shades, but the fire gave more light than they, and painted the room with a rich pattern of golden and ruddy lights; yet it was so long that neither lamp nor firelight could fully illuminate its depth, but only pick out, here and there on the end wall the gilt of a picture−frame or a gleam of polished moulding on the paneling, and these few highlights in the brown dusk created an illusion of vaster depths beyond. Its spaciousness was far different from the drab and draughty width of the greater rooms of Paston Hall; there were no hard surfaces here, but a soft mingling of tones of brown and gold—the tawny carpet, the dull−gold curtains, the velvet and leather of the armchairs and the dark old woodwork all harmonising like the colours of an autumn wood, enriched by the warm firelight as by the light of the setting sun.
This Christmas Eve the woods in fact contributed to the room's decoration: round the fireplace there was a great arc of interwined fir and holly branches, and dull red sparks of holly berries glowed from sheaves of evergreens in vases about the room, while between the two long windows on the side opposite the fireplace stood the biggest Christmas−tree that Clare had ever seen. It was a ten−foot−high spruce planted in a great wooden tub, and wax candles, not yet lit, stood on its boughs as thickly as blossom candles on a noble chestnut−tree in June.
Mrs. Sterne had drawn them to the hearth, where a low table covered with a white cloth stood before the fire, and Clare had scarcely done taking in the room when a man's voice, accompanied by much rattling of crockery, sounded cheerily from the little hall, and very unsteadily, bearing an enormous brass tray loaded with tea−things, there came in the young man who had captured Clare by the wall. Even without the big black cat that bounced into the room behind him, even had he not raised his unmistakable, clear and bantering voice, she would have known him by his dark head and long, brown hands. For all her previous guess at her captor's identity and her attempts to prepare herself to meet him in the light, her self−possession forsook her and, as she rose, she moved near to Miss Geary's chair and looked down at her shoes.