The Truant Spirit (4 page)

A small, neat woman stood in the doorway, peering out. Even in the dim light, she had the authentic air of an old-fashioned governess, with her netted hair and high-necked bodice and pince-nez suspended from a button by a fine chain, but her voice, when she spoke, though precise, held a youthful eagerness.

“Brock ... is that you?”

She did not see Sabina, pressed against the wall of the porch, and as Brock gathered her up into a warm embrace, Sabina felt herself to be an intruder.

“My dear boy, how glad I am to see you,” Bunny said, automatically patting her hair back into place. “I had almost given you up, and although there have been hot bottles in your bed all day, they must be cold now, and Tregenna has never been to mend that latch on your window.”

“Dear Bunny,” Brock said, and Sabina was surprised by the simple affection in his voice. “It might have been only yesterday that you saw me, instead of a year ago. Haven’t you had that catch dealt with yet?”

“Nobody uses that room but you,” Bunny said. “I should have remembered. But come into the warm, dear boy. Was it the weather that delayed you?”

“No, not entirely,” he said. “I’ve brought another guest for the night, Bunny. I hope it won’t be too much trouble to fix up a room. Come out of your retirement, young lady, and meet our Bunny, who has always had a welcome for everyone.”

Sabina advanced uncertainly into the circle of light, but she did not think the welcome of Brock’s governess extended so universally as he imagined. Bunny surveyed her shrewdly, and there was reservation in her voice and a gentle air of reproof as she said:

“Could you not have let me know, Brock? There are no fires lighted in the other rooms and the beds are not aired.”

“I’m sorry, my dear,” Brock answered with rather puckish enjoyment, “but I hadn’t met the young lady myself until a couple of hours ago. This is Miss Sabina Lamb. She has run away from a rich fiance she has never met and has lost her purse and her luggage on the way.”

Bunny gave him a long look. “Have you been drinking?” she asked with mild severity.

“No,” he replied quite seriously. “I called for a quick one on the road, where I met our runaway. In the circumstances I could do nothing else but bring her with me. Will you ask us in, Bunny dear? Your guest has an aversion to the graveyard.”

“Of course, of course,” Bunny said, annoyed that surprise should have made her appear lacking in hospitality, but she added a little reprovingly as she closed the door: “A graveyard should not be shunned by the living. We all have to come to it.” Sabina, chilled by the reminder, stood in the shadowy hall, feeling lost and alien. She was unused to lamplight and the peculiar stillness of a country house. The shadows played tricks with her unaccustomed eyes and she knew that she was unwanted by these two strangers upon whom fate had so perversely thrust her. She became aware that the governess had picked up one of the small oil lamps and was inspecting her more closely in the light. She had placed her pince-nez on her long pinched nose and through them her round brown eyes observed with the deliberate summing up of her profession. She was really rather like a rabbit, Sabina thought uneasily, with her round mild eyes and slightly protuberant teeth.

“Why, she’s only a child,” Bunny said then, and for some reason her voice sounded sharp and impatient.

“Nineteen, so she tells me,” Brock observed, watching with amusement, “but that can be an age of much knowledge these sophisticated days.”

Bunny gave him a disapproving look, and the lenses of her pince-nez flashed in the light as she set the lamp down again.

“If I didn’t know you better, Brock—” she began, and he grinned.

“How well do you think you know me?” he interrupted. “Miss Sabina Lamb has been convinced for some time past of my base designs, haven’t you, Sabina?”

“Then she should know better than to accompany a perfect stranger to an unknown destination even if she has lost her luggage,” said Bunny tartly, but as she saw the girl began to sway a little on her feet she turned her back firmly on Brock.

“What am I thinking of!” she exclaimed. “You look exhausted, child, and feverish, too, if I’m not mistaken. Come into the living-room and sit by the fire while I get you both some hot soup.”

Sabina followed her into a room on the right of the hall and sank thankfully on to a wooden settle by the fire. She had never seen such a vast open hearth before. The chimney was like a cavern and you could roast an ox with ease, she thought. The room was long and low-ceilinged, and smoke had turned the whitewash between the beams to a dusty yellow. There was a great deal of furniture and numerous little tables bearing framed snapshots of children; brass and copper and odd and often hideous pieces of china decorated the walls, and a great
armoire
of exquisite workmanship and proportions rubbed shoulders with a cheap cabinet from which the paint was peeling. It was an extraordinary room to Sabina’s eyes, accustomed to the stereotyped modernity of small hotels, and tired though she was, she longed to pry further into the shadows, and explore the dark corners filled with so many unusual things.

Brock watched her as he warmed his back by the fire.

“Does the room shock you?” he inquired with derisive amusement. “It’s hardly evidence of a collector’s taste, is it?”

“Why should it shock me?” she asked simply. “I wouldn’t know about collectors’ tastes, anyway. I—I like it.”

“So do I,” he agreed surprisingly. “Bunny occupies each room in the house in strict rotation when she’s alone, but her personal favourites are here.”

“And it’s where they should be,” said Bunny briskly, coming into the room with two bowls of soup on a tray. “This is the heart of the house, and I don’t expect or need the approval of the young of today. I’m old-fashioned, and don’t mind who knows it.”

“Sabina must be old-fashioned, too,” said Brock with his customary dryness. “She is a dutiful niece ready to be forced into marriage with an elderly
roue
at her aunt’s command.”

Bunny’s quick eyes saw the suspicious brightness on Sabina’s lashes and she said reprovingly:

“What nonsense are you talking? Here we both are snapping at the poor child, and whatever the reason for her presence here she looks fit to drop.”

Sabina was at the stage of exhaustion when a few kind words would be her undoing, and Bunny hastily placed a bowl of soup on a stool beside her and bade her drink it at once.

“I should explain,” Sabina began between scalding mouthfuls which made her eyes water in earnest, “I should try to explain why I’m here at all.”

“The explanation, though hard to swallow, is very enlightening,” Brock said softly, and Bunny gave him a quick look.

“Explanations can wait till the morning,” she said with firmness. “Miss Lamb has a temperature, if I’m not mistaken. I shall go and put a hot bottle in one of the beds at once. The room will be cold, as there’s only a fire lighted in yours, Brock, but it can’t he helped.”

“She’d better have mine for tonight, then,” he said indifferently. “If she’s got a chill we don’t want her any worse by morning.”

The governess compressed her lips, then nodded. “Perhaps that would be best,” she said, but it was clear that she considered the intrusion most unfortunate. It was not for a strange young girl she had prepared with loving care the room which no one but Brock ever used.

Sabina tried to protest, but they took no notice of her, and Brock observed with his twisted smile:

“You needn’t think we’re being unselfish, my dear; neither of us is anxious for a sick guest on our hands tomorrow.”

“That wasn’t kind,” Bunny reproved. “Miss Lamb is my guest at any rate for tonight, and you should know better by now than to embarrass someone under your own roof.”

But he looked unrepentant, and Sabina, following her hostess across the hall and up a flight of dark, slippery stairs, resolved that however she felt by the morning she would relieve them both of her presence as early as possible.

Brock’s room, unlike the one downstairs, was high and uncluttered. The furniture was solid and masculine and the books, in a glass-fronted bookcase, well bound and selected with discrimination. The walls were hung with very fine photographs of mountain peaks and ranges. They lent an austere and strangely impersonal air to the room, as if the high places of the earth could have no part in the mundane affairs of man. Sabina suspected that Brock himself had supervised the arrangements for this room, and she wished, in spite of the welcoming peat fire, that she could have slept elsewhere. She did not want to be reminded of the inconvenience she had caused him.

Bunny had left her to fetch what might be required for the night, and she returned now with a few necessities and laid an old-fashioned nightdress carefully on the bed.

“Not what you’re used to, no doubt, but it will serve,” she said, and Sabina experienced a wild desire to laugh.

The nightdress was of flannelette with long sleeves gathered at the wrists and a high buttoned neck finished modestly with feather-stitching. She could hear Tante exclaiming with horror: “Mon dieu, c’est incroyable!”

“The bathroom is next door. There is a nightlight there, but mind the steps,” Bunny said, casting a last practised glance about the room. “If you are not accustomed to an oil lamp don’t touch it except to blow it out. They smitch very easily.”

“Smitch?”

“Smoke. It’s a west-country expression. Good night, my dear, and I hope you’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Thank you. Good night, Miss—Miss Bunny, and I’m sorry to be such a trouble,” said Sabina and immediately blushed.

Of course Brock’s ex-governess was no longer “Miss,” neither was her surname Bunny. A faint smile touched Bunny’s rather prim mouth but she made no correction. She observed the blush with interest and quietly left the room and went downstairs.

Sabina stood in the middle of the big room and tried to find fresh amusement in contemplating the nightdress. But the nightdress no longer seemed funny. It looked more like a shroud than a relic of Edwardian propriety, and, remembering the graves so close beneath her window, Sabina sat down on the floor and wept with sudden desolation.

Morning brought no relief to the situation and for Sabina the unhappy knowledge that, however unwilling, she must trespass further on this grudging hospitality, for she had been sick all night, falling repeatedly down the bathroom steps despite Bunny’s warning, and when daylight came she was weak and tearful and the fever of the night before had mounted.

“I must get Dr. Northy to have a look at her,” Bunny told Brock when they met at breakfast. “I don’t think it’s more than a chill and possibly some sort of emotional disturbance, but the girl’s a stranger to us. We cannot run any risks.”

Brock’s frown was dark and brooding, reminding her of those bitter weeks after his accident.

“I shouldn’t have brought her here,” he said, “but she was virtually stranded and, discounting the preposterous yarn she spun me at first, she really didn’t seem very fit to fend for herself.”

“The preposterous yarn presumably had something to do with the nonsense you were talking last night,” Bunny observed. “Had she invented some tall story in order to get free lodging for the night?”

“I thought so at first, but later—well, she produced some rather startling facts which can be verified or not. What did you make of her?”

“A nice child, I think,” she replied after a pause. “I felt more sure of her as soon as she blushed.”

“As soon as she blushed?” His eyebrows went up, but he remembered at the same time Sabina’s vivid blush at the landlord’s comments in the little public-house at Kairy. “What had you been saying to her, Bunny?”

“When she said good night she addressed me as Miss Bunny and then went scarlet with embarrassment. The young don’t blush any more, Brock. When you find one that does there is usually something tender and vulnerable about them.”

“You think so? Yet this girl, if she is to be believed, is quite ready to marry a man whom she has never seen and whom she doesn’t appear to have very flattering ideas about.”

She looked across at him with the tolerant expression with which he had been familiar in his boyhood.

‘Perhaps you had better try to explain,” she said. “Who, in any case, are Tante and Marthe? The girl isn’t French.”

“No. Tante is aunt by marriage, I imagine. She apparently had expectations through the niece that couldn’t be realised, so wants to marry her off.”

“Expectations?' Is the girl an heiress, then?” Bunny’s voice was dry. Sabina’s clothes had presented no evidence that thought had been spent on her wardrobe, neither had she given the impression of someone used to money.

Brock buttered a piece of toast with careful deliberation.

“She owns a house which is unfortunately entailed—a useless asset when it boils down to hard cash,” he said, and she looked at him inquiringly.

“It still doesn’t make much sense—unless, of course, the aunt has someone up her sleeve who wants the house enough to take the girl with it.”

“She has. Sabina is the owner of Penruthan. Strange, isn’t it?”

“Penruthan...” Bunny sat up very straight and stiff in her chair, her round eyes suddenly shrewd. “But that means ... Brock! You wouldn’t encourage—you wouldn’t permit—”