Niall paused and looked at Clare, musing for a few moments. “A deer−park wall was a normal thing, I suppose,” he said. “But it sometimes seems to me when I look at this one that old Captain Trethewy must have gone a bit queer through his Moroccan years. There's a touch of Kubla Khan about this one—
'So twice five miles of fertile ground,
With walls and towers were girdled round...'
Though it isn't ten miles, of course; and as for fertility, well, the oaks do well enough: little else has ever been tried. I think he must have brought back Moorish ideas of privacy. There couldn't have been many inhabitants in this district then, but what few there were he didn't want poking their noses into his business.”
“What was his business?” Clare asked. “Did he still do something?”
“Well,” Niall hesitated. “He turned gardener—botanist of a sort. He had collected a good number of exotic plants in his voyages. He tried to acclimatise them, and, also, he was trying some interesting tricks with the growth of plants—something like the Japanese art of growing dwarf pines and oaks, though I don't suppose he ever got as far afield as Japan. Perhaps it was something he had seen in Morocco. He seems to have had a theory that these very small trees could resist natural decay and live for ever. It might be—though it's just a guess—it might be that he planned to plant all his estate with a miniature forest, and for that reason he was so intent on getting his wall built, to protect his little trees. The interesting thing about that is that he may be right.”
“Right?” Clare repeated, not quite understanding. “About the life of his little trees, I mean,” Niall replied. “Why? Did he manage to make them grow?”
“Yes,” said Niall. “Yes, he did. Some of them are still growing. I'll show you them when you come again, in the daylight.”
Clare gave him a startled look. “Oh, I don't think...” she began, but he interrupted her, jumping up from the chest.
“Oh, I say, Miss Geary's really bent on going and I haven't shown you the rest of the house yet. Come on, you can see it in a couple of minutes while she's getting her goloshes on!”
He seized the lamp, and without giving Clare time to object began to mount the stairs. She rose, looked to the drawing−room door, and hesitated. Then he called to her from the landing and she ran up the first flight of stairs to join him.
The stair twisted awkwardly between half−timbered walls. Niall climbed ahead and called a warning to Clare to mind her head as he gained the top landing.
“Coming up here always makes me feel a bit like a mouse living in a hollow tree,” he said. “My Great−Uncle Jabez in his latter days refused to climb the stairs at all. He slept in the parlour. It was really because he was stiff and rheumaticky, but he used to tell me that it was because he was going up one night when he met the Captain's ghost coming down and the Captain refused to go back, so, not liking to walk through him—seeing that he was a relation of sorts—he went down and stayed down ever after. That was just his way of making a little boy feel cosy in the place, of course.”
“It's not really haunted, is it?” Clare asked, half−seriously. She looked round the irregularly−shaped space of the top landing where they stood, at the wide old black doors in the timbered and plastered walls, at the diamond−paned window in a deep recess and at their own shadows swinging about them as Niall moved the lamp to and fro.
“Ah, pity!” said Niall regretfully. “Christmas Eve, a two−hundred−and−fifty−year−old house, and no ghost! The Captain would have made such a lovely one, too, in his wig and sword and buckled shoes and all, and goodness knows what deeds done on the Spanish Main to rob him of his mortal repose. But you want a sticky end to make a ghost, and for all we know the Captain died quietly in his bed with his buckled shoes off. Though, in strict truth, there's no record of where, when and how he did die. I expect it was in here, though.”
He turned to one of the doors and put his hand on the iron ring which served for a knob. He half−turned it, then, pausing, listened to the murmur of voices from below, and gave Clare a delighted smile.
“This is fun, your coming to Brackenbine again, after all. You know, I had a sort of fear you might be too shy to come after our encounter. But I'm glad you weren't.”
Clare looked down at the dark, uneven boards, not knowing what to answer; he seemed to hesitate whether to say more about the other night, then turned the ring and opened the door.
“We always call this the Captain's room,” he said, entering and holding up the light. “It was a lumber−room when we came here. You see we've made it into a studio.”
It was a long room, as long as the drawing−room downstairs, but with a ceiling sloping on each side to within six feet of the floor. At one end long curtains seemed to cover a window, and at the other was an open fireplace piled with white wood ashes which still gave off an appreciable warmth. In the middle of the ceiling on one side was a large skylight. Niall advanced into the centre of the room, showing her how the apparatus of his mother's occupation and his own crowded the place: wooden presses and stacks of canvases were ranged round the walls; some little tables were thickly littered with pots and tubes of paint and jars of brushes; under the skylight stood an artist's easel and, to one side, a joiner's bench strewn with tools and chips; there was a profusion of odds and ends—books, pottery, pieces of material, bottles and boxes, all in disorder, but in a warm and living disorder: it was a room in which someone was constantly busy, where creative work was done; and a space in front of the fire had been made comfortable with a high old leather screen to shut off the draught and some well−worn armchairs and low bookshelves and a reading−lamp by the corner of the hearth.
“Do you paint too?” Clare asked.
“Oh,” he answered, deprecatingly, “not seriously. I never studied. I'm no good at any of these things, really.” He nodded towards the bench. “I amuse myself with wood−carving: puppets, you know.”
“Puppets?” Clare repeated in great surprise. “Yes, little dolls that you can animate.”
“I know,” she said. “I mean, I know what puppets are —it was only—well, I've never actually seen them. Do you make them act—have a puppet theatre, I mean?”
“Yes,” he said. “Act, yes. After a fashion. No, but it's really just the making of them, the perfection of their animation, that fascinates me. I first saw them made in Italy. In a little village near Florence where we were living then. There was a family that had made puppets ever since the Middle Ages. I used to sit and watch the old man and his sons by the hour and I picked up most of what I know about the craft there. My mother became interested, too. She dresses them and paints them.”