The Truant Spirit (23 page)

“Not exactly, but—well, she’s very elegant and sophisticated. She plainly thought I was young and dowdy and inexperienced. She wasn’t—very flattering about my chances in marriage.”

“Marriage with whom?”

“With whom?” Sabina looked startled. “Oh, I see— but I told her that I was not going to marry M. Bergerac after all. I thought that would clear the air.”

“And did it?”

Sabina considered, going over in her mind that unsatisfactory exchange with Jean Jouvez.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “She was rather strange altogether. I think she has also had a fondness for Brock.” “Very likely—and he for her.” Bunny’s voice was dry as she bent over her silks, and Sabina slipped to the floor by the governess’s chair and laid her hands over the busy fingers. “Bunny, you’re keeping something from me,” she said again. “Was Brock once fond of Madame Jouvez and did he find out she was having an affair with Rene Bergerac? Is that the reason for all this—all this mystery?”

“Isn’t it true Brock wishes to marry you, Sabina?”

“He said so.”

“Then I hope you are not imagining that you have caught him on the rebound, whatever Madame Jouvez may have said to you.”

Sabina flushed at the disapproval in Bunny’s voice.

“No, I don’t—I never thought about it,” she said. “But—”

Bunny took off her pince-nez, which had made two little red marks either side of her nose, and looked into the young, uncertain face raised to hers.

“Keep these perplexities for Brock,” she said gently. “He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” There was a lilt in Sabina’s voice and Bunny regarded her a little sadly.

“You’re so young child,” she said. “So ignorant of worldly matters. Don’t get hurt if you find that life—and human relationships, perhaps—aren’t as simple as you think.”

“Are you warning me not to expect too much? I don’t, you know,” Sabina said, and her long throat looked young and tender in the firelight. “I don’t even know if Brock loves me, but—I think I might fulfil some need for him, don’t you?” Bunny took the ardent face between her hands and kissed the rounded forehead, a rare gesture for her.

“Yes, my dear, I think you might,” she said. “We’ve never discussed these matters, Sabina, but—I think you know Brock is very dear to me. If you can supply what I’ve always wanted for him, then—yes, then the end justifies the means.”

“Now
you
are talking in riddles,” Sabina laughed. “This whole affair is very puzzling and—there’s still no reply from Tante.”

“Brock will bring news tomorrow,” Bunny said.

“Is that where he’s been—to the Chateau Berger?”

“I think quite likely. Oh, dear, now look what I’ve done! Just as I had them in their right order, too.”

The silks had fallen to the floor, where they lay in a tumbled, glowing mass of colour.

“Never mind,” Sabina said, stooping to pick them up. “I’ll sort them out for you again, and this time we’ll put them straight back in their boxes. Isn’t it queer, Bunny, that someone as chic and alluring as Madame Jouvez could be fond of a man like M. Bergerac? Perhaps he isn’t so elderly and unattractive after all.”

“Really, Sabina, you alternate between simple wisdom and utter juvenile nonsense at times!” Bunny sounded quite cross, and Sabina looked surprised.

“Do I?” she said without rancour. “But I still think that was quite a sensible remark. She
is
alluring, even though I didn’t like her, and I may have had quite the wrong idea about M. Bergerac.”

“Very likely,” said Bunny dryly. “Even so, the Bergerac wealth can make up for a great deal to many women, whatever he himself is like. Had you thought of that?”

“Oh!” said Sabina, her eyes widening. “You think it might be Brock she was really fond of, though she wants the Bergerac money more?”

Bunny snatched the skeins of silk from the girl’s hands. “Oh, go to bed, Sabina!” she exclaimed impatiently. “This nonsense leads nowhere, and in any case I’ve washed my hands of the whole affair. Brock must do his own unravelling—which is more than I can say you have for these silks. They are all snarled up together and I shall need good strong daylight to disentangle them by.”

“Poor Bunny, you’re tired,” Sabina said, and smiled at the look of annoyance on Bunny’s face as she remembered how irritating it was to be told this when it was your spirit that was tired rather than your mind.

Was Bunny sad, she wondered, as she undressed that night, at losing her favourite pupil to matrimony at last? Had he all these years filled a place in her heart for the child she had never had, so that now she must suffer the natural pain of relinquishing her rights? Sabina flung open her door as she heard Bunny’s step in the passage and stood there, waiting, a candle in her hands.

“Bunny ...” she said softly, “Bunny darling ... It will make no difference, I promise you. You have known a part of him that I can never know. For the rest, we’ll share the future— both of us loving him.”

The governess paused, shielding her own candle so that the light fell full on her face, revealing its composure; the little rabbit teeth pressed to her lower lip, the round brown eyes mild and a shade reproving. But as she regarded the girl standing there in her long blue robe, the candlelight spilling on her fair and eager face, her expression changed for an instant to one of shy surprise.

“Thank you, my dear; you have a very charming perception. Good night,” she said with grave dignity and passed on to her own room.

Sabina returned slowly to hers, and did her nightly round of Brock’s mountains, holding the candle above and below the photographs to watch the snowy summits changing in the light.
One day he shall take me,
she thought,
one day when I share a place in his heart with you ...

She put out the lamp and before getting into bed she drew the curtains to look out at the night. Moonlight flooded the garden and the old churchyard, bathing the quiet graves in

beauty and an unfamiliar sense of peace.

Sabina knew a fleeting regret that it was no longer in her power to bring back order and dignity to Penruthan, but she was not sorry that she would not live there. One woman had stamped sadness upon it while another, in some way bound up with the first, had trespassed with appraising eyes and, like Willie’s ghost, left discontent behind. But this was no night for regrets. Even the unpleasant taste left by that strange encounter with Jeanne Jouvez could not spoil the moment, for tomorrow Brock would come, and tomorrow was nearly here

She wakened to a rough day. It was as if that early spring had been premature and the month of March asserted itself, wiping all traces of tenderness from the earth. A wild wind howled over the moor, bringing sudden squalls of rain, and soot had fallen down the chimney in the night, making black marks on the faded bedroom carpet.

Sabina saw Willie early in the morning, capering on the rough lawn under her window, shouting at the top of his voice:

A knife and a razor Spells nebuchadnezzar,

A knife and a fork Spells nebuchadnork;

A new pair of slippers,

And an old pair of shoes
--------

He broke off abruptly as he saw her leaning out of the window, and with a rude grimace, jumped clumsily over the wall and made off across the moor. It was clearly going to be one of his difficult days.

When she got downstairs the living-room fire was smoking badly, filling the house with acrid fumes, and soot had fallen here, too, covering the furniture with smuts.

“Oh, dear, how tiresome!” Bunny said, exasperated. “The very day that Brock comes back! We shall have to use the parlour, and he says there are no comfortable chairs there.”

Smoke filled the house long after the fire had been dowsed and the wind was too strong to permit the opening of windows. Sabina’s eyes watered as she helped Bunny with the chores, and Mrs. Cheadle stayed in her kitchen, saying firmly that the smoke would make her cough.

“Why do you keep her?” Sabina asked indignantly, for it had long been apparent that Mrs. Cheadle came only when it suited her, and once there, did little else but drink cups of strong tea over the fire. “There must be other women in the village who’d be glad to work for you and be more help.” “Yes, that’s probably true, but Mrs. Cheadle was here in my husband’s time. She feels the old rectory is her particular right, and I haven’t the heart to make a change,” Bunny said, and Sabina smiled at her affectionately. No, she thought, Bunny would not turn Mrs. Cheadle away any more than she would turn away poor simple Willie Washer.

“Where’s Willie?” she asked, suddenly missing him. “I saw him early this morning.”

“Well, he hasn’t come back,” Bunny replied. “I’m afraid it’s one of those days when everything combines to go wrong, added to which, I’ve broken my pince-nez.”

“Poor Bunny! But never mind, I’ll get the wood in for you. Perhaps Willie will come in the afternoon, and then he can clean up the soot on the hearth.”

“No, I must do it myself. There’s no telling with Willie. Sometimes he stays away for days, and rough weather always seems to affect him.”

“Makes him queerer, you mean? I thought he was a little strange yesterday coming back from Penruthan.”

They had been upstairs making the beds, and Bunny began going round the room with her duster while Sabina paused to lean against the window and look out on the wild grey morning.

“Willie thinks Penruthan is haunted,” she said. “He talked very strangely on the way home and made a lot of biblical quotations—all foretelling doom, as far as I could make out.” “He has probably got confused with the old stories,” Bunny said. “But when he starts quoting from the Bible it usually means he is in for a queer spell.”

“What old stories?” asked Sabina. “Do you mean Penruthan
is
supposed to be haunted?”

Bunny straightened a picture and gave a final tweak to the bedspread.

“Not that I’ve ever heard,” she said. “But Willie has grown up with the old traditions, even though he cannot remember the family.”

“You mean Madame Bergerac’s own family? But that must have been many years ago.”

“Yes. But the house remained even if the family was forgotten and—”

“And?” Sabina turned from the window, struck by something strange in Bunny’s reply.

Bunny collected her dustpan and brushes and prepared to move into the next room.

“You don’t understand country people, my dear,” she said. “They accept what they have always known and especially if they are Cornish, take for granted that others know as much as they do.”

Sabina’s high forehead creased in perplexity, and the sudden suspicion that she was being warned that she should understand more than she did.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Penruthan until now has only been a name to me. Ought I to understand any more than the fact that it was left to me by someone I had never known?”

Bunny stood regarding her, the dustpan in her hands, and her face beneath the knotted handkerchief suddenly tired and uncertain.

“No,” she said. “No, Sabina, you are quite right. Penruthan’s history concerns you only indirectly and now, perhaps, not at all. Tell me, do you like the house?” Sabina hesitated. Could one apply such a word to that gaunt, derelict place, beautiful, perhaps, but with a grandeur outmoded and a little sad?

“I don’t know.” she said slowly. “I would have liked to hand it back to the Bergeracs, but—no, I don’t think I would want to live there myself. What will happen to it now?”

Bunny was slow to reply, as if she found the idle question difficult to answer, or distasteful.

“It will, I think, fulfil that for which it was meant,” she said at last. “Your hair looks full of soot and smoke. You had better wash it, dear child, before Brock returns.” Sabina did so in the scullery because there the water was hotter, and as she sat drying her hair by the kitchen range while Mrs. Cheadle sniffed and grumbled at the weather, she thought of Bunny’s strange remarks, of Willie’s oddness and of Jeanne’s puzzling behaviour yesterday. Rain beat on the ill-fitting windows which rattled in the wind, and Mrs. Cheadle, rather than exceed her allotted time by five minutes, was already putting on her outdoor clothes to leave, complaining sourly of her wet walk to the village. Sabina did not mind the weather. It was fitting, she thought, that Brock should return on such a day. He was as harsh and forbidding as the elements, and as likely as they to change overnight to a mood of gentleness.

Sabina shook her damp head before the fire, watching drops of water hiss on the red coals. She heard Mrs. Cheadle leave,

and settled happily on the rag rug, thankful as Bunny always was to have the kitchen to herself again. A casserole was already in the oven cooking gently for luncheon and the pleasant smell of herbs and onion tickled Sabina’s nose and made her hungry.

The back door opened and slammed again, bringing a gust of wind and rain, and Willie Washer stood inside, his heavy boots making muddy marks on the flags.

“What be ’e doin’, missy?” he asked.

“Drying my hair. I had to wash it because the living-room smoked and soot fell down the chimney. If you’d come as usual, Willie, you could have cleaned things up,” said Sabina severely. “You were here earlier this morning.”