The Truant Spirit (26 page)

He sat down wearily, stretching his lame leg stiffly before him.

“It was hardly the time or the place in that chilly room of yours with soot blowing down the chimney,” he retorted. “In any case she was not in a receptive mood.

“That’s scarcely to be wondered at,” Bunny commented dryly. “You made little effort to take the sting out of that unpleasant young woman’s observations.”

“What do you take me for?” he inquired harshly. “The damage was done. It wasn’t going to help anyone to explain or expostulate then.”

“So I tried to tell Sabina, but she’s at the age when a fine show of feeling counts a great deal.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I gave her credit for more sense,” he said shortly, and Bunny patted her neatly netted hair with a small, ineffectual movement.

“My dear boy! I think you’ve expected more maturity from poor Sabina than it’s as yet in her power to give,” she said. “She told me you have never once said that you—er—loved her—in fact you loved only the mountains and yourself.”

He rubbed his eyelids with a tired, nervous gesture. “Oh, heavens, Bunny, what did she expect!” he exclaimed irritably. “Doesn’t a woman know what a man feels for her without being told?”

Her smile was the one she used to bestow on him when as a small boy he had been particularly stubborn.

“I don’t know,” she said with a certain primness; “but I can imagine women like to hear it in so many words. That’s only natural.”

He grinned at her suddenly.

“I had thought there was plenty of time for that. We hadn’t even reached the formality of being engaged,” he said.

“But you do love her, Brock?”

She asked the question with delicate diffidence because she had always considered such probings to be an impertinence, but his eyes held a tender affection as he replied gently:

“Yes, dear Bunny; I’ve learnt the wisdom of your counsels.” “That there are other ways of fulfilment besides climbing mountains.”

“Then see that she knows it too, dear boy. The young are very vulnerable, and I believe first love must be handled with care. Where is she?”

“Crying in her room, I imagine, and probably packing a

suitcase.”

Bunny looked alarmed.

“You mean you think she might run away?”

“Well, she has a weakness for it, hasn’t she? Especially running away from the man she’s supposed to marry! Don’t worry, Bunny. It’s a rough evening, and she won’t get far, carrying a heavy suitcase. We’ll hear her go if she does. Incidentally, you don’t need to worry about Willie’s whereabouts. He was lurking among the graves when I had my little plain speaking with Jeanne. I shouted to him when she had gone, but he went over the wall to the moor looking as if he’d seen a ghost.”

“He saw her at Penruthan yesterday,” Bunny said absently. “I think he confuses her with your mother, who he is convinced haunts the place.”

“Perhaps she does,” he said, sounding suddenly tired. “Perhaps Penruthan is best left to rot in its decay.”

“Was that the front door?” Bunny got to her feet, but he smiled at her reassuringly.

“No, my silly dear, it was the wind. Don’t fuss—I shall hear her if she goes.”

But they neither of them heard her. Bunny dropped into a fitful doze and Brock, brooding on his own follies, became used to the noises of the house and ceased to separate one sound from another. Sabina crept out of the house an hour later and began the long walk to the little railway halt beyond the village.

Her bout of weeping over, it had not taken her long to decide what she must do. To stay another night at the rectory was impossible after what had occurred. Had Brock taken her in his arms and replied to Jeanne Jouvez taunts, or later sought to comfort instead of telling her to finish her weeping alone, she could have tried to listen with reason to the explanations Bunny had started in the parlour, but he had made it only too plain that he found her attitude illogical, that she had no more right to expect tenderness from him than from the mythical Rene Bergerac.

She could not pack everything into one suitcase, but they would, perhaps, send the rest after her. When she reached Marthe at the address of her Hampstead friends she would write, tendering gratitude for her visit and apologies for causing so much trouble. She did not want to go to Marthe, but there was no one else. Very shortly now, Tante must return following the successful culmination of her plans, and Tante, too, must be faced and the endless, weary scenes and arguments.

Sabina looked anxiously in her purse, counting the money which Bunny had said Tante had sent for her. There was just enough for a single third-class fare to London, but poor Willie would have to go without his present. She thought of Willie as she packed, while Brock’s cold mountains looked down at her from the walls. It seemed so long ago now that the tow-headed boy had stood in the kitchen in his muddy boots and told her that Penruthan was cursed. Well, perhaps it was. It had brought the Bergeracs no happiness and certainly none to her, for those brief days of felicity had been bound not with the house, but with Brock whom she had thought to be poor and without guile.

She shut the bulging case, fastening the locks with difficulty. He should have his house. If it was legally possible to give Penruthan away she would return it to the only person who had a right to it, but she would not barter herself now to a man who did not love her. When she was ready to leave she stood for a moment, bidding a silent farewell to the room. She gazed longest at Kanchenjunga with its five snow summits. It had always been her favourite of them all, and she lifted a mocking hand in salute.

“You win,” she said softly and turned to go.

The wind took her as she went down the drive, whipping her clothes like paper to her body, and buffeting the suitcase against her legs. It was very dark and the tombstones in the graveyard sprang like gaunt spectres from the shadows. The wind sighed through the long grass between the graves, and beyond, the moor was a vast pool of blackness.

Sabina battled with difficulty against the wind, stopping every so often to change the heavy suitcase from one hand to the other. As she went down the deserted road to the village, Willie’s tune came unbidden to her mind, and accompanied her flagging footsteps in the darkness:

Willie Washer’s proper mazed,

Doesn ’t know where he was raised
...

A stone had got into her shoe, and she had to prop herself on the high, crumbling bank in order to remove it:

Silly Willie proper dazed,

Sillie Willie Wash-er

Poor Willie, she thought, her arm aching

painfully, he would be disappointed that she had forgotten his present and left without bidding him good-bye.

The village seemed deserted, too. Only the little inn showed a bright light of invitation over its door, but no one went in or out. Sabina felt exhausted. The day’s emotions had drained her, and the wind and her encumbering suitcase had taken the last of her strength. The little halt was still a long way off at the top of the steep hill beyond the village; she could not, she thought, carry the suitcase any further. She left it on the little green outside the inn and walked on. Someone would find it and take it back to the rectory.

When at last she reached the halt she was fighting for breath and her legs felt as if they no longer belonged to her. The old porter who was sole guardian of Truan station knew her by sight and seemed amazed by her demand for a single ticket to London.

“Lunnon!” he said, “you’ll not get there tonight. Connection for the six o’clock from Kairy went at four. Did ’e walk up here, missy?”

“Yes. Isn’t there a train at all?”

“There’s the midnight, but connection from here don’ t go till ten.”

“What’s the time now?”

He peered at an ancient turnip watch the size of a saucer.

“Seven fifty-eight precisely,” he announced in tones which sounded as if he expected her to contradict him immediately. “What be the rectory folk a-thinkin’ of to let ’e walk on a night like this?” He thrust a whiskered face suddenly into hers and added suspiciously: “Do they know you’m goin’ to Lunnon?”

“Yes ... yes ...” said Sabina hurriedly. “Can I have my ticket please?”

He produced one reluctantly and took her money, then came out of his small wooden cabin to lock the gates.

“Can’t wait here,” he said. “No train for two hours, and I be goin’ home for me bite.”

Sabina looked at the dark countryside, which offered no shelter, and despair made her want to cry all over again.

“But can’t I wait on the platform?” she pleaded. “I must—I
must
sit down. I can’t walk about for two hours.”

“Well—” he scratched his head, giving her a very old-fashioned look at the same time. “I don’t never allow it when I’m not about, but—well, p’raps you’d best sit in the shelter, but no larking on the line, mind you, like they dratted boys. If I find you been up to tricks I’ll be powerful angry.”

Sabina laughed a little hysterically.

“I don’t feel at all like larking on the line,” she said, and he let her through to the platform and locked her in!

There was a rough wooden shelter with one bench, and she sank on to it thankfully. As she stretched her aching legs, rubbing the calves, in which pins and needles had started little points of pain, she thought of Brock spending his boyhood in Penruthan, living in one wing with only his mother and governess for company. Had he felt bitter when she, an interloper, had come to inspect the house he knew so well, or had he listened to her comments with tolerance, knowing that through her he could get his home back again? Had he been happy with no companions with whom to share the walled-in gardens, or had he been impatient for the moment when his exile was over and he could return to his stepfather’s comfortable chateau in France? It no longer mattered, she supposed, and whatever ties there were with the past, all that remained now to Penruthan was its use commercially.

As time went on and only the wind howled through the darkness, Sabina came to know a great desolation. It seemed to her that she must be the only creature left alive in this isolation of blackness; no trains had ever passed this way, no train ever would; she was condemned to sit here for ever and no one would come to unlock the gates.

She must have fallen asleep, for she did not hear Brock’s dragging steps on the wooden platform, nor was she aware of him standing there looking down at her until the beam from his torch flashed in her face. For a moment she thought it was that other occasion when he had found her asleep in the snow at Penruthan, and she murmured, as then:

“I came straight across the moor, going west ...”

He bent over her and roughly shook her awake.

“You have a genius for causing alarm and despondency in people’s otherwise quiet homes, haven’t you?” he said, and she blinked up at him, shocked back into the reality of the moment.

“I might have known that you would catch up with me before I had a chance,” she sighed.

“A chance for what? To arrive in London in the small hours with no luggage and nowhere to go?”

“I was going to Marthe. I would have written.”

“How thoughtful of you. And did you suppose that the estimable Marthe wouldn’t have sent you straight back here?”

“No, why should she? She didn’t like you. She thought you would interfere with Tante’s plans.”

“Very likely,” he retorted with extreme dryness. “But it must be presumed that by now your aunt has communicated with her devoted servant and made everything clear.”

“Oh!” said Sabina. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

She glanced at him a little timidly. He seemed as she remembered him first at Kairy with a hat pulled over his eyes and the collar of an old raincoat turned up to meet it. It would not have surprised her if he had suddenly offered her a glass of brandy.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked with the reasonableness of utter defeat.

“I seem to remember telling you when I left that the next time you ran away you would have to be punished. What would you suggest—an old-fashioned spanking, or just exiled to France with an unsympathetic husband?” She did not reply, but only gave him a faint, uncertain smile, and he sat down beside her on the hard, shiny bench and studied his hands clasped between his knees.

“Sabina—” he said, and the harshness had gone from his voice, “I’ve been foolish with you, I think I let this business go too far, as Bunny pointed out. Tell me. if you had learnt the truth from me today, as I had intended, and not from Jeanne, would you have had this violent reaction?”

His closeness made it difficult to reply with honesty. “Perhaps not,” she said. “You would have—kept the illusion for me, I think; but she—she took everything away.”

“And yet you were willing to marry Rene Bergerac to start with—knowing just those same things.”

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose it
is
illogical, as Bunny said; but you see, I had never been in love. I didn’t know that—that things would hurt when before—well, I suppose I was just callow and—it’s very hard for me to explain Brock.”

He looked at her then. She wore a little knitted cap of blue wool pulled down over her ears. Beneath it the pale, soft hair turned outwards in charming disorder like a very young child’s.