The Truant Spirit

by Sara Seale

  “You were meant to breakfast in bed,” Bunny said, sounding quite flustered. “I trust you have not taken another chill after your experience yesterday. You should have waited until I called you, dear.”

  Brock, glancing up from his morning’s mail, observed dryly:

  “You sound like the proverbial hen with one chick. Such concern!”

  “Well, it’s more than you showed me,” Sabina retorted somewhat tartly, and he grinned.

  “Quite right,” he said. “I’m glad to see you can answer back.”

  He did not sound concerned one way or the other, neither did he ask her how she was, and she gave him a look of dislike and sat down at the table.

  Bunny brought the coffee and poured it out, remarking that it was a day to remain indoors and keep warm, but Sabina, her eyes on the frosted windows, said:

  “But I don’t want to miss a moment of it! I want to go out in the snow as soon as I’ve had my breakfast.”

  “No further than the garden, then,” warned Bunny, and Brock, with faint irony, inquired:

  “Haven’t you ever seen snow before?”

  “No” Sabina replied simply. “In London the snow never stays, but here the country is transformed. Is it anything like— like Switzerland?”

  “Switzerland?” repeated Bunny, puzzled.

  “She means the mountains,” Brock said with a quirk of the eyebrows. “She has an obsession about them—why, I can’t think. Perhaps my photographs get into her dreams.”

  “Perhaps they do,” said Sabina, giving him a strange look. “You are rather like the mountains yourself—cold and craggy and impersonal.”

  “Dear me!” said Brock mildly. “Do I get into your dreams, too?”

  But she flushed faintly and paid close attention to her breakfast, so did not see Bunny’s raised eyebrows or the glance of reproof she bestowed upon Brock.

  “You are both talking a great deal of nonsense,” Bunny said. “There’s more snow to come down, so you must get out of doors early, Sabina. You are sure you have no chill?”

  “I feel wonderful,” Sabina replied happily, and, indeed, in her thick scarlet sweater, with the light hair tumbling carelessly over her forehead she had a fleeting radiance. She had accepted them, Bunny thought curiously; even Brock with his sharp tongue and his apparent unconcern for finer feelings. Perhaps with the temporary severing of old ties she had come into her own.

  “Then enjoy yourself in your own fashion,” Bunny said and unaccountably sighed.

  Willie was sweeping snow from the little back yard, and Sabina tried to get him to throw snowballs with her, but it was one of his sullen days. He looked angry when a handful of snow hit him, and raised his shovel threateningly.

  “Willie!” warned Bunny’s voice from the kitchen window, and he shuffled off to the other side of the yard and took no further notice of Sabina.

  “Poor Willie,” Bunny said, “the children used to throw stones at him, you know, and sing a horrid rhyme they made up about him to make him angry. He doesn’t understand snowballing.” Sabina walked round the house, her heart quick with compassion. In his way Willie Washer had grown up much as she had herself, she supposed, for he, too, had never learnt to play.

  She spent a happy morning in the garden, kicking up the snow with childish delight, and even balancing on the shrouded tombstones as if they meant no more than the familiar landmarks of every day.

  “How disrespectful!” said Brock’s voice behind her, and she turned to find that he was standing on the snowy lawn, watching her.

  “Is it?” she asked anxiously. “Do you think the dead would mind?

  “Very unlikely, I should think,” he replied. “They’ve most of them lain there for as long as you’ve been alive or longer. Tell me, Sabina, did you never learn to play like this when you were a child?”

  “No,” she said, and thought of Willie. “There was no one to play with. Oh, look! A robin—and I think it’s hurt.” She stooped and gently picked up the bird at her feet. It hardly straggled, but its eyes were fixed and bright with alarm.

  “Let me see,” said Brock, opening her fingers with a touch that was curiously gentle. “It’s damaged its wing, I’m afraid. Probably flew into one of the tombstones. Make a little hollow for it in the shelter of this grass.”

  “But it will die if we leave it here in the cold with no food,” she said, and raised suddenly anguished eyes to his.

  He knew a strange moment of repudiation as he watched her, the bird held against her breast, as if the pity which flowed from her were a tangible thing to hold and swamp him.

  “Then bring it into the kitchen if you must,” he replied impatiently. “Bunny will, doubtless, support your sentiments, though the bird is sure to die.”

  She carried the robin carefully indoors, aware that Brock did not follow her, and made a nest in an old work-basket of Bunny’s and set it by the fire. Mrs. Cheadle had already gone and Bunny was preparing soup for Willie’s lunch.

  “Brock says it’s sure to die, but it won’t, will it, Bunny?” she pleaded.

  “Not if we can help it,” Bunny assured her briskly. “Wild birds don’t take kindly to captivity, but robins are tamer and more trusting than most. We will give it some warm milk with a drop of brandy.”

  “Why does he like to seem unkind—Brock, I mean?” Sabina asked. “He looked at me as if—as if he resented me being sorry for the robin.”

  “Brock’s afraid of pity, even if it’s indirect,” Bunny said composedly, “but he’s many times brought maimed creatures into the warm when he was a boy, and cured them, too.”

  He came into the kitchen as she spoke, knocking the snow from his shoes.

  “Well, you’re more likely to choke the little perisher if you feed it like that. Here—let me do it,” he said, and taking the spoon from Bunny, knelt down on the hearth beside them.

  Sabina sat back on her heels, observing the delicacy with which he handled the bird and the expert care with which he coaxed a few drops of liquid down its throat. His hands were strong and shapely, she noticed with surprise, and his dark face, intent on his work, had an unconscious tenderness.

  Bunny had gone out to the woodshed with Willie’s soup, and Brock looked up suddenly, aware of the girl’s silent gaze.

  “Why are you staring at me with those wide, puzzled eyes?” he demanded mockingly. “Are you afraid I’ll wring the creature’s neck if you turn your back?”

  But his sharpness did not disconcert her now. She only shook her head slowly and said:

  “What a strange man you are! I don’t believe you ever think before you speak.”

  His eyebrows rose in the forbidding, saturnine twist.

  “Perhaps I think too much,” he replied cryptically “but that can’t be applied to you, can it? You confide in perfect strangers and have few reticences.”

  “Oh, yes, I have,” she answered gravely. “One is taught reticence by other people, I think. Until I came here I had learnt to hold my tongue in a different way. I’m sorry if my confidences have embarrassed you, Mr. Brockman. I have only tried to explain my actions.”

  “For heaven’s sake, you’re talking just like Bunny! Why should you embarrass me?” he exclaimed with irritation.

  “And if you start calling me Mr. Brockman I shall address you as Miss Lamb. You have a curious kind of wisdom in you, haven’t you?”

  She looked really startled.

  “I? Oh, no. Tante has always told me I’m foolish and ignorant, and Tante is usually right.”

  “It’s not the kind of wisdom your aunt would recognise or understand,” he said dryly, laying the robin back in the basket.

  “You have an exploring mind, Sabina—are you really content to let it lie fallow with a husband who has been chosen for

  you?”

  For once he spoke without his usual irony, and Sabina knew a sudden brief desolation of spirit.

  “I’ve never been encouraged to have an independent opinion,” she replied a lit
tle bleakly, “and Tante expects me to marry.”

  “Very properly, but Rene Bergerac isn’t the only man in the world.”

  “He’s the only man that Tante will agree to,” she said with unexpected mischief. “Besides, you’ve forgotten Penruthan.”

  “Ah, yes, Penruthan ...” he said with becoming gravity. “You feel, I think you said, that the Bergeracs are more entitled to Penruthan than you are.”

  “Well, yes, I do. I don’t feel Madame Bergerac had the right to leave it away from her family just for spite.”

  “For spite?”

  “It can’t have been anything else, can it? She never knew me.” “No doubt what Bergerac thinks himself. He sided with his father by all accounts.”

  “Yes. I don’t think his mother can have been a very nice woman, even though—even though—”

  “Even though Bergerac senior was not altogether faithful? Wouldn’t you mind, then, if your husband sometimes looked in other directions?”

  She missed the familiar note in his voice and replied quite seriously:

  “I don’t know much about such things; but it’s the French way, isn’t it?”

  He got to his feet, suddenly pulling her up beside him. “Yes, it’s often the French way, and the British and every other nation under the sun, if it comes to that; but it’s not usual to go into marriage expecting the worst.” He made her a little nervous, standing over her and voicing the very thoughts which had sometimes troubled her.

  “But you see,” she said, trying carefully to explain her unnatural feelings, “when it’s not a question of love one hasn’t the same right to—well, to perfection. Tante has explained that a wise woman can be happier if she recognises from the start that marriage is a business contract.” His face was grimly decisive as he searched for the truth in hers.

  “You’ve learnt your lesson well, my obliging little innocent,” he said. “Well, let’s hope you won’t wake up one fine morning to find that platitudes can be misleading as well as untrue.”

  “Did you?” she asked shrewdly, and his eyes were suddenly frosty and impersonal.

  “I’ve discovered many unpleasant fallacies in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever tried to live by platitudes,” he said. “You’d better give it a little mature thought. I wouldn’t like you to end up a disillusioned woman.”

  “Why should you care?” she asked, feeling she was getting the worst of the discussion.

  “True, why should I?” he agreed with his usual unconcern, and she experienced a most unfamiliar desire to hit him.

  It began to snow heavily by the afternoon, and Bunny said that they had better be resigned to the house for the rest of the day. Brock, however, went out to chop wood, despite the weather, for Willie had gone home, and the elderly woman and the young girl glanced at each other across the fire-lit hearth with that sense of companionship women can share when a masculine presence is removed for a time.

  “I’m glad to have you here, Sabina,” Bunny said. “I feel I’ve known you for a long time.”

  “Me too,” said Sabina ungrammatically, and Bunny automatically smiled reproof. “But I hope I’m not spoiling Mr. Brockman’s visit. He doesn’t seem to be the sort of man who would enjoy purely feminine society for long.”

  Bunny was darning linen and she smiled as she bent over her work.

  “Do you think so? Brock has had plenty of feminine friends. He has an eye for an elegant woman, you know.”

  “Has he?” Sabina sounded surprised and immediately imagined a succession of anonymous lovelies, chic and witty like Tante, who would know how to answer those uneasy ironies.

  “That surprises you?” Bunny asked. “Women find him attractive, you know.”

  Sabina remained silent, and, looking up, Bunny observed the faint colour in her cheeks.

  “That, I can see, is more understandable to you,” she said primly and watched the blush deepen. “I believe many women like that rather hard casualness in a man.

  “Is it only a pose, then?”

  “Oh, no, it’s not a pose. Brock’s heart still lies with his mountains, I fear. That’s why he’s never taken a wife.”

  “It would be difficult,” Sabina said slowly, “to live with someone in isolation on a mountain top.

  “No more difficult than living with a man one had never seen,” said Bunny mildly, and Sabina held out her hands for the linen in the governess’s lap.

  “Let me do it,” she said quickly. “You’ll strain your eyes in this light.”

  Bunny handed over the work without protest and let her pince-nez swing idly by their thin gold chain.

  “That’s very good of you, dear,” she said. “Fine work has become rather trying for me now, and I was never a very good needlewoman, alas.”

  They were sitting silently, one on each side of the cavernous fireplace, when Brock returned from his labours, and he flung himself into a chair between them and lazily watched Sabina at work.

  “What a domestic scene,” he observed. “I didn’t think any young woman plied her needle these days—but of course you had a French upbringing, Sabina.”

  She thought she detected the old derision in this remark, and remembering Bunny’s mild rebuke earlier, replied sedately:

  “I like sewing. When one’s hands are occupied it’s easier to arrive at conclusions.”

  ‘A profound observation,” he said with amusement. “But you haven’t had time, yet, to reach many conclusions, have you?” “Now, Brock ...” murmured Bunny, but Sabina answered gently:

  “No—but isn’t that why I’m here?”

  He frowned and said impatiently:

  “Don’t pay any attention to me. You’re so young and absurd that I can’t resist trying to get a rise. It looks as if this weather has set in, Bunny. Have you enough supplies in case the roads become impassable?”

  “I think so. Oil is the only thing we might run short of,” Bunny replied. “Perhaps you had better fetch some more from the village tomorrow.”

  “Will we be snowed up?” asked Sabina, raising a flushed, expectant face from her work.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Brock answered, then smiled with

  unexpected gentleness. “It’s all a great adventure, isn’t it, Sabina? You’ll be really disappointed if we aren’t besieged here?”

  Her mouth curved into shy tenderness.

  “It is an adventure for me,” she said, “But I wouldn’t like Bunny to be inconvenienced by the snow, of course.”

  “Snow ... mountains ... I wonder why they hold such enchantment for you?” he said with the same strange gentleness.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, her eyes wide and clear. “Perhaps those who can never experience achievements in high and snowy places can still share the magic—even if it’s only imagined.”

  A log shifted on the open hearth, sending up a shower of sparks, and the peat which supported it crumbled into ash, filling the room with an aromatic scent.

  “Yes .” said Brock reflectively. “Yes .”

  Bunny cleared her throat and remarked that it was getting too dark for Sabina to see what she was doing, but even when the lamp was lighted and the curtains drawn against the snow-filled twilight, Brock’s mood lingered. He seemed fascinated by watching Sabina work. Her face bent over the snowy linen was charming in its unawareness. The soft hair fell forward in smooth sobriety over the sharp planes of her cheekbones, and the crescent curves of her downcast lids were full and tender in the firelight. He became a little hypnotised by the needle which flashed in and out under her fingers with the most delicate care.

  His mood was unchanged when tea was brought, and he laughed at the butter running down Sabina’s chin as she ate crumpets with frank enjoyment and, afterwards, he fetched his books on mountaineering and spread maps on the floor to illustrate a climb.

  He was very like a small boy displaying his treasures, Bunny thought, watching them, and as Sabina’s absorbed face caught her eyes, she gave a little sigh and remo
ved the tea-things unnoticed by either of them.

  To Sabina it was like entering a new world as he explained the technical terms of mountaineering to her. She was quick, he found, to grasp the significance of detours and weather conditions, and listened with rapt attention to his stories of the strange phenomena to be found in the mountains.

  “You have the makings of a climber, I think,” he said, her enthusiasm taking him back to his own early days.

  “No, no,” she said quickly. “I wouldn’t have the courage. To climb in the greatest sense must mean, I think, complete singleness of purpose.”

  “I would have said you had that—or the makings of it. ”

  “Not as you have. Perhaps it’s different for a woman— perhaps one’s sex is hampering. A woman would demand more of life, I think, than climbing mountains.”

  She was still lying flat on her stomach on the floor, her elbows propped on the spread sheets of a map. He regarded her delicate face with a preoccupied air.

  “You think, like Bunny, that mountaineering is not a complete form of fulfilment?” he asked.

  “Does Bunny think that? But she is a woman. A man, I think, can more easily isolate things. You Brock, have had only one love, haven’t you?”

  “Why do you talk with such assurance—you who have not known love at all?”

  “I have no assurance, really, only—”

  “Only what?”

  “Somehow, one knows these things. It’s like knowing one’s own limitations, I suppose.”

  The gaze he suddenly bent on her was dark and brooding. “Yet you are prepared to embark on one of the great adventures of life with no more perception than a schoolgirl,” he said.

  Her eyes strayed from the map and searched his face uneasily. “It’s different for me,” she said. “I’ve grown up in a tradition, and perhaps I’m not born for great experience.”

  “You’re born with the gift for talking a great deal of rubbish,” he said crossly. “Really, Sabina, I hardly know which I’m speaking to, sometimes—a child of unusual perception or an adolescent nitwit.”

  “There’s no need to be rude,” Sabina said, and he laughed. “Well, it’s sixteen years since I was your age,” he said. “I expect I’ve forgotten how confused one can be at nineteen.” “Brock—Bunny said you wanted me to keep your room while I’m here, but I think you should have it back.”