Tea was ready when they joined the others, and then, while Mr. Burns read aloud to Agatha some passages from his Guide Book, describing the historical features of interest in the Castle, the three younger ones drew together, and seemed to be planning something. Soon they moved off.
“Where are you going, Clarissa, darling?” Agatha called.
“To climb to the top of the tower,” was Clarissa’s answer.
Agatha sprang from her camp stool.
“My dear, it can’t be safe. These ruins are terribly dangerous, I know. The stones are crumbling.”
“It’s all right,” Kitty said airily. “Everyone goes up. It’s the regular thing.”
“Do let us go,” Clarissa pleaded. “There is a wonderful view from the top, and we ought to see it.”
“If you go, I go too,” said Agatha firmly. She saw through David’s intention, and it was not only the wish to share the physical danger with Clarissa which determined her to make one of the party.
“I am afraid you would find it rather a climb,” the Rector interposed.
“I think we old fogies are safer down here,” Mrs. Burns added brightly.
Agatha was deaf to their words.
“Clarissa cannot go without me,” she murmured, and leaving Mr. and Mrs. Burns without ceremony, she hastened after the other three, clambering up the broken stairway as fast as her goloshes would allow.
Clarissa looked round and saw her coming.
“Here is Agatha,” she said. “Let us stay and help her up.”
“Much better push her down,” was David’s muttered comment to Kitty.
Clarissa had gone back, and was showing Agatha where to put her feet, and how to climb up the somewhat dilapidated remains of the stairs.
The staircase wound up the inside of the tower, and came out, with one last very steep step, on to a passage which ran round the top of the wall. They found themselves very high up, and the parapet was very low. The tower descended sheer beneath them to the green lawn, and all around the country stretched, wide and far away. It was a magnificent view.
Agatha was suddenly giddy. She threw herself down on her face, and was unable to move.
Clarissa was terribly concerned.
“Don’t look down, if it makes you giddy,” she said.
“I can’t help it,” Agatha moaned. “ We are so high up, that there’s no other way to look.”
“Then let us come down quickly.”
“I shall never be able to go down. Never. I can’t move.”
She had quite lost her nerve.
Clarissa looked anxiously at David.
“What shall we do?” she asked.
“Don’t ask him,” said Agatha querulously. “ He can’t do anything to help.”
She lay prone, clutching with her fingers at the stones.
Clarissa could only turn to David, in silent dismay. He seemed to be their only strength. She was very frightened. All her life she had leant only on Agatha, who had directed the quiet events of their days, and had provided for her in the trifling emergencies of her childhood, and now, all at once, Agatha was helpless. It was she who needed Clarissa now, and at the very moment of her need, Clarissa felt a giddiness creeping over herself, too—not the mere physical giddiness from being there on that height, but something more fundamental, as though her life had lost its inner spring. For a moment she began to feel darkness growing around her, then she realized that she must not let herself go: she must save Agatha, and in David’s strength was their one support.
She did not like to speak to him again, as she saw that to discuss the situation only maddened Agatha, but she looked at him dumbly, with those soft brown eyes of hers which held within them such changing lights, and shadows, and he silently answered her appeal.
He signed to her that she must try to persuade Agatha to crawl on her hands and knees to the head of the stairs. It was only a very few feet.
She refused to move. Clarissa sat down beside her.
“Do let David help us down,” she whispered. “ It will get worse and worse the longer we stay up here.”
“No, no, it is he who makes it worse,” Agatha groaned. She had an idea that if only she and Clarissa were left alone, her courage might return, but when she tried to visualize the actual descent, she clung to the stones where she lay. They seemed the last solid rampart in a swaying world.
But by degrees Clarissa and David did manage to move her—half dragging her along, and half persuading her to crawl—the few feet which lay between her and the top of the stairs. When she looked down, she could not believe that she had come that way. It was not a staircase at all, only the few sloping remains of footholds in the wall. The idea of stepping over the side and down into the abyss was unthinkable.
Then Clarissa had an inspiration.
“Go and fetch Jenkins,” she said to David. “ He will help us down. He is very sensible.”
And sulkily David went to fetch him.
But even Jenkins had great difficulty in persuading Agatha to move, and the whole party sincerely agreed with him when he said that “ Miss Bodenham didn’t ever ought to have gone up.”
There was not room for two people together on the steps, and at last Agatha was conveyed down, with Jenkins holding her from above, and David going down the stairs beneath, taking her feet, and placing them one after the other into position on the broken stairs.
Clarissa and Kitty followed.
The picnic had been a failure throughout, and the exhausted Agatha was at once placed in her motor-car and driven slowly home.
Chapter Twelve
Sometimes in the evening, when Agatha was tired after a long day, she leant back in her chair and shut her eyes, while memories of the past floated vaguely through her mind. Then she often saw the picture of Clarissa dancing. She had always danced when she was a little girl.
That summer when she first appeared, more like a dream or a phantom than a living child, she had come dancing and floating over the ground, as if her feet hardly touched it. In the white dress of those days, she had swayed and curved about the lawn as though a wind from the trees had swept down to bring her, and to drive her about in wayward gracious rhythm. She danced then to her own singing—nursery rhymes which Agatha herself had almost forgotten, and she sang them in a voice as faint as a grasshopper’s, till she vanished in her dancing like a bird which is lost as it flies.
Later on, she used to dance in the drawing-room, while Agatha played, with stiff and chilblained fingers, on the piano, which had stood in Mrs. Bodenham’s schoolroom. Its keys were yellow, and its tones were thin and cracked. Agatha sat by it, and marvelled at the invention and grace with which Clarissa envolved dance after dance to her playing, for she herself had never been able to dance at all. So Clarissa danced alone, without a partner, and as she grew older she gradually forgot her steps, and played duets with Agatha in the evenings instead.
Kitty Burns often tried to persuade her to come with her to the dancing classes which were held each winter at the High School in the town near by. Kitty enjoyed these, but Clarissa was shy at the thought of finding herself among a crowd of strange girls. She could not face them, and also, she had no desire to learn the modern dances. Both she and Agatha disliked their names, and agreed that they did not sound like dances at all.
But a day or two after the picnic, when they were all sitting one afternoon in the Rectory garden, Mrs. Burns said that she was going to give a dance for Kitty and her friends, and that Clarissa must certainly come to it.
Clarissa said she could only go to a ball if she was allowed to dance by herself.
“I can’t think how two people can possibly dance together,” she said. “I can only dance alone.”
The others laughed at her, but she stuck to what she said, and then, remembering some of the dances she used to invent, she sprang up and threw herself into the old poses, moving over the lawn with winged steps, singing as she went in a little shrill voice that came from nowhere.
It was enchantingly pretty, but it would have looked very odd in a ballroom. Kitty teased her, and told her that her dancing was like that of a baby of five years old, but David was enthusiastic, saying it was inspired, and that she was a genius and a born dancer.
Agatha thought it an impertinence on his part even to admire Clarissa’s dancing. His praises exasperated her, and she was relieved when Kitty persuaded him to join her in giving a demonstration of a modern foxtrot. She and Clarissa sat together and criticized, agreeing that they thought it ugly.
“Try, Clarissa,” said David, leaving his partner, and returning to the other two.
It was Agatha who answered.
“No,” she said, addressing Clarissa. “ You could never do that. It’s not what you call dancing at all.”
Clarissa mocked at them.
“I don’t want to look like you two,” she said.
“You couldn’t,” David answered, and coming to her, he took her hand as though he meant to take her literally from Agatha’s side, and compel her to dance with him.
Agatha pushed him away. She had never done anything so violent before, and she felt at once that her impulse had been unladylike. She sat erect and spoke acidly.
“Don’t tease her. She doesn’t want to dance with you.”
Clarissa laughed lightly.
“As David says, I couldn’t,” she said, but the next moment she was trying the steps with Kitty.
It was a swallow pirouetting with a porpoise.
David sat down on the seat by Agatha, who hated to know that he appreciated as much as she did the difference between Clarissa’s fairy like movements and Kitty’s jogtrot. And yet the two girls somehow kept in step.
“You could soon do it all right,” Kitty declared.
“I can now,” Clarissa answered as she sat down, and she was astonished to find that she could.
In the evening she and Agatha talked of the proposed dance.
“After all, I believe I do want to go,” Clarissa said. “I think the actual dances are stupid, though I suppose one could dance them in one’s own way; but I do want to know what it feels like to be at a real dance, and I should like to have a new dress to dance in. You must have one, too, and they shall be the loveliest dresses we have ever had. Let us go to Bath and buy them.”
Agatha knew that this dance would be a crisis in her struggle with David. In the ballroom he would have the right to take Clarissa from her side, and she knew that she could never consent to sit and watch them dance together. But she did not know what to say. She temporized; thought that perhaps Clarissa might after all not want to go when the time came, but it would be best to have their dresses ready in case she did.
So they shopped in Bath, taking a very long time to decide on what they wanted. For Clarissa they bought a little silvery dress, the colour of starlight, and Agatha chose black lace for herself. They got many other things as well—shoes, stockings, gloves, fans, and flowers, and with each thing they bought Agatha felt that she was becoming more and more hopelessly involved. Each purchase was another link in the chain which would drag her to her defeat.
As the days passed, the dance seemed to become more and more inevitable. Nothing else was talked of. The guests, the music, the refreshments, the floor, all were discussed again and again, and Agatha felt helpless as she heard how entirely Clarissa had accepted the prospect of going and how naturally the others expected her to be there.
And worst of all, the tennis lessons gave place to lessons in dancing, and Agatha had to sit by and watch David with his arm round Clarissa’s waist, showing her the different steps, and she saw that Clarissa seemed to find it quite easy to dance with him, as though they understood each other and moved naturally in step.
But when at last the evening of the dance arrived, Clarissa was once more sitting by Agatha’s bedside, bathing her throbbing forehead with eau-de-Cologne. And on the ottoman at the foot of the bed, in two large cardboard boxes, the two new dresses lay swathed in their tissue paper.
The throbbing in Agatha’s tortured head grew less by slow degrees, and her breathing gradually became snoring. She was asleep. For some time Clarissa sat motionless, watching her, and then, very quietly, she put the bottle of eau-de-Cologne back in its place on the washing-stand, and went and stood by the open window.
Chapter Thirteen
Like Agatha, David had known that this evening would be the turning point in their struggle. He knew that when he danced with Clarissa, he must at last have her to himself, and that they would speak to each other alone, away from Agatha’s watchful antagonism. But as the time passed, and all the guests arrived except the two for whom he was looking, he slowly realized that he was once more frustrated. Agatha had won again.
The Burns family met together indignantly to discuss what they should do in face of Miss Bodenham’s cruelty in depriving Clarissa of her first dance; and Kitty determined that she herself would run over to find out what was the matter, and to insist on bringing Clarissa back with her.
“No,” said David. “ I am going.” And there was that in his tone which made it impossible to do anything but acquiesce.
It was only a few hundred yards from the Rectory to Miss Bodenham’s house, and as he went down the little lane which intervened, the music of the dance followed him, growing gradually fainter. But when he entered the garden, he seemed to step all at once into an enchanted circle of stillness. It was another world. The garden lay clear and magic in the light of a yellow full moon. Each white flower stood out alone against a soft, toneless background which by-day was a mass of many colours. The white clematis was as marvellous as the moon herself, and the tobacco plants poured scent out of long narrow pitchers with wide lips.
David moved, noiselessly along, stepping from shadow to shadow under the line of cut yew trees which parted the kitchen garden from the herbaceous border, till he came out into the open, quite near the house. The moonlight shone upon it, making it glisten like crystal, and in the midst of its gleaming white surface, the window of Miss Bodenham’s room showed as a shadowy frame. Against the darkness in the room behind her, he could see Clarissa standing, and the moon shone upon her, lighting up her face, and giving it a spirit-like transparency. She seemed to be watching him, but her eyes had almost the look of a sleep-walker, and she was so immovable that she might have been a little silver statue.
As he came nearer to her, a sense of awe possessed him, so that he hardly knew whether or not he would dare to speak to her, and when he found himself beneath the window he called to her very gently indeed.
Then he saw that she was glad to see him, for at the sound of his voice she swayed slightly, and her lips parted in a faint smile, but she did not speak. There was less tension in her attitude, however, and it seemed to him that it must have been fear which had kept her rigid. He had frightened her, coming up like that through the trees, and he cursed himself for his clumsiness.
Then he called again, and this time a little louder—
“Clarissa, come down. They have sent me to fetch you.”
Still he got no reply, only a small helpless gesture which seemed to indicate that Miss Bodenham was there, asleep, and must not be disturbed.
Though he realized that this would, of course, prevent Clarissa from speaking, he was nevertheless aware of a strange element in her silence. It was as though she were a very long way off, and not the Clarissa of every day.
“Something has happened,” he thought. “ That woman is a vampire. She has put some spell upon Clarissa. There’s something uncanny in her power,” and with all the fervour and passion that was in him, he called her once more, putting all the strength of his love into his voice, and determined by that strength to save her and to draw her to himself.
This time he knew that he had reached her, for she moved quickly forward, and for one horrified moment he thought she was going to step out of the window and come straight to him in answer to his call. He sprang forward to save her as she fell, but she
turned back again into the shadow of the room.
He waited, listening.
The door opened slowly, and Clarissa stood on the threshold.
“I have been so frightened,” she said, and her voice shook as the stars shake on a misty night. “Agatha is asleep, and I have been lost. I thought I was awake alone.”
The flood of moonlight all around her seemed to dazzle her, and she reeled as if she was about to fall. He caught her, taking her hand, and was startled by its icy coldness.
“You must be ill,” he said. “ Is your hand always cold like this?”
“It used to be,” she answered, and drawing it from him, she held it out towards the sky. It was transparent in the moonlight.
“Clarissa, little one,” he said, and with all the tenderness of his nature, he tried to pierce the strange mist of dream which seemed to enfold her, “ Clarissa, I have come to find you. Have you forgotten the dance?”
“The dance?” she cried, and her face lit with its own bewitching smile. “Oh, oh, the dance! We are going to it. Oh, we should be there!”
Her torpor fell from her, and with a magical lightness, and a poise instinct with gaiety, she sprang past him and moved across the lawn with some of those exquisite fairy steps which she had created in her childish dances. For a few seconds she floated here and there in the moonlit circle of the lawn, and then he saw that she was going further and further away from him. He followed, fearing he knew not what.
She flew like the shadow of a cloud in the wind. Nothing could equal the silent fleetness of her footfall, and when she reached the garden gate which led into the lane, she laid one hand upon it, and flew over it, as if she had wings. It did not arrest for one moment the swiftness of her flight, whilst David, following her, found that the object delayed him for a second or two.
Clarissa danced down the road before him, and now the music of the violin could be heard faintly through the night.
“Oh, oh, the dance! The dance!” She sang, and her voice rippled with the twinkling leaves of the poplars in the hedgerow, while her feet caught the rhythm of the music.
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