The Truant Spirit (28 page)

The other men went back to the front of the house, where the fire brigade had at last arrived and were working too late on a hopeless task.

“Do you want to stay and watch?” asked Brock, his eyes resting on her with curious intensity.

“No,” she said, and without conscious directions began walking from one sloping terrace to another towards the broken door in the wall. She leaned against it, pulling off her cap, and the wind whipped the hair back from her tired face.

“What will become of Willie?” she asked sadly. “Will

he go to prison?”

“No,” Brock answered with gentleness. “To a home, I expect; but that would really be best for him, you know. He’s a lonely creature.”

“Yes. I always felt a fellow feeling for him. He was trying to help you in his muddled, crazy fashion, you know.”

“Yes, I know, and perhaps he has.”

She looked up at him unhappily. The burning house cast a ruddy glow on his face, accentuating the sharp, forbidding lines of his features; the dominant nose and the hard, unyielding mouth. Sabina sighed.

“Yes, perhaps he has. You don’t have to marry me now,” she said.

He took her by the shoulders and gave her a sharp shake. “My darling child! Was there ever any woman with such a poor opinion of herself as you?” he exclaimed, and oddly enough he was laughing. “I believe you’re still convinced that the elderly M. Bergerac was only after Penruthan!”

“Well, you were, weren’t you?” she said. “You were here on holiday to look it over, just like me, missing poor Tante by a day. You had made plans for it.”

“No,” he said a little roughly. “I knew all along the house wasn’t worth the money it would cost to put it to rights. Mine was a sentimental pilgrimage, that’s all.”

The shouts of the men in the distance came faintly through the roar of wind and flame. Every so often a piece of masonry fell with a muffled crash, and even here in the shelter of the high wall, smuts settled on Sabina’s hair.

“Then why—” she began, her wide-set eyes suddenly enormous, but he pulled her abruptly into his arms.

“If you were going to ask anything so idiotic as why did I want to marry you, then my answer is why do you think?” he said. “Sabina, my poor shorn lamb, Bunny says that women should be told the things men imagine they must know for themselves. I’ve been remiss in taking what you had to give me without explaining in so many words that I was a man with as much to give in return. Did you really not know I had fallen in love with you?”

“No ... no, I didn’t ... ” she said, and at the humorous but somehow anxious tenderness in his face, the tears came. She put up her hands to draw his head down to hers, and although she could not speak, he felt her tears wet and warm on his cheek.

“You will still,” he said to give her time, “have a husband with a physical infirmity, I’m afraid, though not, as you had imagined, a weak digestion. As to the elderly
roue
well— there’s no smoke without a fire—which is, perhaps, something of a cliche with one already blazing behind us, but—I’ve had my
affaires
since my climbing days were over. Shall you mind?”

She raised her face then, and he traced the charming crescents of her lips and eyelids with a possessive finger.

“No, I shan’t mind,” she said, “any more than I mind the detraction of Penruthan, for now we are two and two.”

“Two and two?”

Yes.
One is One and all alone and ever more shall be so.

...
That used to frighten me, you know. It’s funny, but coming here in the train, I couldn’t get those couplets out of my mind.”

“Is this another of your rhymes?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can’t remember all of it. Shall I recite you what I know?”

“Yes, please,” he replied gravely, because he could see that she was quite exhausted.

They stood there in the flickering light while she repeated those strange couplets for him, making them sound like a spell.

Seven for the Seven who dwell in Heaven Six for the Six Proud Walkers.

Five for the Flamboys under the boat,

Four
—

“I can’t remember four.”

“Never mind, we must go home. Bunny will be getting anxious, and you’ve got a smut on your nose.”

She rubbed her nose absently with the back of her hand, smudging the smut to a sooty smear.

“Need we go back by the house? I don’t want to see your old home blackened and charred. ”

“There’s a path outside the wall, running back to the road,” he said. “Didn’t you find it?”

“No.”

“We must have made it when I was a boy and the village children used to come up and play and weren’t allowed inside. Come, I’ll show you.”

“You too?” she said softly, and her heart lifted as she took the hand he held out to her. He was not so different, she thought, stepping through the broken door to meet the fury of the wind; beneath that protective armour he was solitary and vulnerable as herself ...

The broken door swung to behind them for the last time, and they walked in mutual silence down the rough dark path to the road.

THE END