“Niall!” exclaimed Mrs. Sterne with a soft gasp. “How like a man to crowd everything on the tray at once! And what a tray!”
“What's wrong with the tray?” demanded the young man, lowering it to the table, which it entirely covered. “I thought our guests worthy of the lordliest dish we've got, and Rajas may have eaten their rice off that!” He straightened up and with a whisking movement removed from his waist a little parlour−maid's apron which he rolled into a ball and tossed behind a chair.
“My son,” said Mrs. Sterne; and he bent with a foreign air that had nothing mocking in it as he took Miss Geary's hand. He turned then more slowly to Clare, and took her hand in a firm, short clasp as Miss Geary introduced her. He smiled gaily, but without the slightest sign of recognition when she looked up and met his eyes for a second with her own grave, appealing gaze.
Then, while his mother poured the tea, without interrupting his flow of light chatter about their lack of servants, he began to hand cups and plates and sandwiches.
As she observed him in covert snatches, for Clare was now drawn to Mrs. Sterne's side and plied with questions about her school life which it required some diplomacy to answer in Miss Geary's presence, Niall Sterne appeared to be about twenty−five years of age: at least, Clare told herself, puzzled by yet another seeming contradiction, he could be no more than that, because his mother was so young. Had she not seen his mother she would have guessed that he was thirty−five. He was very like her, with the same black hair and dark, brilliant eyes; yet there was something in his face that made him seem really the older of the two. Whereas her complexion was as soft, and the contours of her face as smooth and full as a girl's, some severe macerating process of time or sickness had removed all the youthful softness from his, and stretched the brown skin with a kind of lean economy over the essential bone and muscle. Clare felt that if she could have seen his features when he was not being consciously gay and amiable, when the light of his quick smile was put out, none of his mother's winning charm would remain. He seemed to her to wear this cheerfulness like a mask, while his natural expression would be one of melancholy and ascetic seriousness.
Very soon he had drawn Clare, first into helping him with the sandwiches and cake and mince−pies, and then, with a sly grin at the subtlety of his abdication, into taking sole charge of the service. “You do it with so much more natural address,” he said in a courtly fashion; then added in a loud aside on a wholly natural tone of regret, “Pity you can't stay for the washing−up!”
By−and−by, while Mrs. Sterne and Miss Geary talked painters and the latest exhibitions, Clare found herself sitting on a large leather cushion, looking into the blazing logs and talking quietly and privately to Niall as he lolled in one of the deep armchairs with his feet stretched to the hearthstone and Grim, the cat, on his shins.
Clare was amazed at the ease with which she could take her cue from him and copy his mild duplicity in pretending this was the first time they had met. Gradually, however, in that atmosphere of ease and friendly understanding which was so new and stimulating to her, she felt no more embarrassment at remembering her first meeting with him. Here, indeed, might be the meaning of the magic circle he had drawn about her—the circle of fire−lit ease and friendship, the talk, the quick understanding, the mirth and the arrowlike flight of ideas, a whole new, exciting and satisfying world of the heart and the head contained in one room, and such a world as she had once dreamed might have been her own, at Oxford. She talked now about her work for the scholarship, and from giving Niall a flat outline of her programme passed, under the influence of his questions, to argument and discussion, and, to her own wonder, found interest and ambition starting to life again. Niall had not been to the University; he had not even been regularly to school—his education had been a roving one—but he had read everything: the literature she in her despondency had abandoned for dead was as lively and as fresh as a summer woodland to him. While he talked she saw again that the vision Anne Otterel had shown her was not an illusion; this was what reading with Anne could have been like, and Paston Hall could have been the antechamber to rooms at Oxford. She felt the injustice of death and the irretrievable loss of wasted days more bitterly now than at any time since she first heard that Anne was dead.
She did not mention Anne Otterel to Niall. She said only, with resignation, that she had no hope; there was no one to help her at Paston Hall. They could not, or would not, even provide all the proper books.
“If it's only books...” said Niall, glancing at the tightly packed shelves about the room. “Let me see your syllabus. I shall be surprised if we can't raise what you're lacking.”
Clare shook her head. “It's not much use. There's so little time left now. And even if I felt sure of the French, there's the Latin. That alone will wreck my chances. It's not much in the Exam. Just two Unseens. But I've let it go. I don't seem to be able to grasp it at all by myself, from books.”
“Latin?” he exclaimed. “Why, you want my mother for that. Her father was a noted philologue of the old school. She'll discourse you Latin like Queen Elizabeth putting the Pope right on communion in two kinds. I say, Mother....”
But Mrs. Sterne spoke to him at the very instant when he called to her. Miss Geary was saying that it was getting quite late and they had a long walk back.
“But you must see the Tree lit up!” said Mrs. Sterne. “Niall, we've forgotten the Tree.”
“Oh no, I haven't!” replied Niall, jumping up. “I was just waiting for the signal. Come on, Clare, help me to light the candles!”
He gave her a box of matches and set her to lighting all the lower ones, while he fixed a taper in the end of a split willow−wand and lit the upper ones with as solemn and reverent a care as a priest at the high altar. For the second time Clare witnessed him performing a rite: there was something in his manner she understood very well, though she had only known the thing herself for a very brief period in her life: it was the fun of pretending to believe in magic, of pretending to find a way by ceremonies from everyday things to a world of shadows and strange powers. Softly, so that none but she could hear, as he lit his candles he recited some such abracadabra as he had chanted when he drew his magic circle in the wood.
He was so deliberate that Clare had lit all the candles she could reach before he had finished the higher ones. She stepped back and looked up. The tree had no conventional decorations except the candles, but holly berries were strung about it on invisible threads so that in the increasing shine of the candles they seemed to hang from the tips of the branches like drops of bright blood. Her eye travelled to the tree−top, and now that it was so brightly lit she saw that there was one other decoration. Not at the apex, where people might have put a star or an angel, or a fairy, but below the leading shoot there was tied a little figure: a doll with long fair hair, dressed in a green gown. It was fixed standing upright against the stem of the tree, ill−placed for a decoration, and when Niall lit the remaining candles that stood in front of it, she could no longer see it across their bright points of flame.