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ROBIN
BY
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
AUTHOR OF
"THE SHUTTLE"
"THE SECRET GARDEN"
"THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE"
ETC.
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1922, BY
THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE YEARS BEFORE
Outline Arranged by Hamilton Williamson
from
_THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE_
In the years when Victorian standards and ideals began to dance an
increasingly rapid jig before amazed lookers-on, who presently found
themselves dancing as madly as the rest--in these years, there lived in
Mayfair, in a slice of a house, Robert Gareth-Lawless and his lovely
young wife. So light and airy was she to earthly vision and so
diaphanous the texture of her mentality that she was known as "Feather."
The slice of a house between two comparatively stately mansions in the
"right street" was a rash venture of the honeymoon.
Robert--well born, irresponsible, without resources--evolved a carefully
detailed method of living upon nothing whatever, of keeping out of the
way of duns, and telling lies with aptness and outward gaiety. But a
year of giving smart little dinners and going to smart big dinners ended
in a condition somewhat akin to the feat of balancing oneself on the
edge of a sword.
Then Robin was born. She was an intruder and a calamity, of course. That
a Feather should become a parent gave rise to much wit of light weight
when Robin was exhibited in the form of a bundle of lace.
It was the Head of the House of Coombe who asked:
"What will you do with her?"
"Do?" Feather repeated. "What is it people 'do' with babies? I don't
know. I wouldn't touch her for the world. She frightens me."
Coombe said:
"She is staring at me. There is antipathy in her gaze." He stared back
unwaveringly also, but with a sort of cold interest.
"The Head of the House of Coombe" was not a title to be found in Burke
or Debrett. It was a fine irony of the Head's own. The peerage recorded
him as a marquis and added several lesser attendant titles.
To be born the Head of the House is a weighty and awe-inspiring
thing--one is called upon to be an example.
"I am not sure what I am an example of--or to," he said, on one
occasion, in his light, rather cold and detached way, "which is why I at
times regard myself in that capacity with a slightly ribald lightness."
A reckless young woman once asked him:
"Are you as wicked as people say you are?"
"I really don't know. It is so difficult to decide," he answered.
"Perhaps I am as wicked as I know how to be. And I may have painful
limitations or I may not."
He had reached the age when it was safe to apply to him that vague term
"elderly," and marriage might have been regarded as imperative. But he
had remained unmarried and seemed to consider his abstinence entirely
his own affair.
Courts and capitals knew him, and his opportunities were such as gave
him all ease as an onlooker. He saw closely those who sat with knit
brows and cautiously hovering hand at the great chess-board which is
formed by the map of Europe.
As a statesman or a diplomat he would have gone far, but he had been too
much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent for work
of any order. Having, however, been born with a certain type of brain,
it observed and recorded in spite of him, thereby adding flavour and
interest to existence. But that was all.
Texture and colour gave him almost abnormal pleasure. For this reason,
perhaps, he was the most perfectly dressed man in London.
It was at a garden-party that he first saw Feather. When his eyes fell
upon her, he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking.
Some one standing quite near him said afterwards that he had, for a
second or so, became pale--almost as if he saw something which
frightened him. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to
him. But he had not talked to her for fifteen minutes before he knew
that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour
at the sight of her. He had thought, at first, there was.
This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much
argument over tea-cups regarding the degree of Coombe's interest in her.
Remained, however, the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her.
Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure
that he was in love with her, and very practically aware that the more
men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out
of the slice of a house, the more likely the dwellers in it were to get
good invitations and continued credit.
The realisation of these benefits was cut short. Robert, amazingly and
unnaturally, failed her by dying. He was sent away in a hearse and the
tiny house ceased to represent hilarious little parties.
Bills were piled high everywhere. The rent was long overdue and must be
paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages.
"It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs.
From her bedroom window--at evening--she watched "Cook," the smart
footman, the nurse, the maids, climb into four-wheelers and be driven
away.
"They're gone--all of them!" she gasped. "There's no one left in the
house. It's empty!"
Then was Feather seized with a panic. She had something like hysterics,
falling face downward upon the carpet and clutching her hair until it
fell down. She was not a person to be judged--she was one of the
unexplained incidents of existence.
The night drew in more closely. A prolonged wailing shriek tore through
the utter soundlessness of the house. It came from the night-nursery. It
was Robin who had wakened and was screaming.
"I--I _won't_!" Feather protested, with chattering teeth. "I won't! I
_won't_!"
She had never done anything for the child since its birth. To reach her
now, she would be obliged to go out into the dark--past Robert's
bedroom--_the_ room.
"I--I couldn't--even if I wanted to!" she quaked. "I daren't! I
daren't! I wouldn't do it--for a _million pounds_!"
The screams took on a more determined note. She flung herself on her
bed, burrowing her head under the coverings and pillows she dragged over
her ears to shut out the sounds.
* * * * *
Feather herself had not known, nor in fact had any other human being
known why Lord Coombe drifted into seeming rather to follow her about.
But there existed a reason, and this it was, and this alone, which
caused him to appear--the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form--at
her door.
He listened while she poured it all forth, sobbing. Her pretty hair
loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.
"I would do anything--_any one_ asked me, if they would take care of
me."
A shuddering knowledge that it was quite true that she would do anything
for any man who would take care of her produced an effect on him nothing
else would have produced.
"Do I understand," he said, "that you are willing that _I_ should
arrange this for you?"
"Do you mean--really?" she faltered. "Will you--will you--?"
Her uplifted eyes were like a young angel's brimming with crystal drops
which slipped--as a child's tears slip--down her cheeks.
* * * * *
The florist came and refilled the window-boxes of the slice of a house
with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers. It became an
established fact that the household had not fallen to pieces, and its
frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing, indeed, the air of people
who had never really remained away from it.
As a bird in captivity lives in its cage and, perhaps, believes it to be
the world, Robin lived in her nursery. She was put to bed and taken up,
she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day she was taken out of it
downstairs and into the street. That was all.
It is a somewhat portentous thing to realise that a newborn human
creature can only know what it is taught. To Robin the Lady Downstairs
was merely a radiant and beautiful being of whom one might catch a
glimpse through a door, or if one pressed one's face against the window
pane at the right moment. On the very rare occasions when the Lady
appeared on the threshold of the day-nursery, Robin stood and stared
with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little
questions put to her.
So she remained unaware of mothers and unaware of affection. She never
played with other children. Andrews, her nurse--as behooved one employed
in a house about which there "was talk" bore herself with a lofty and
exclusive air.
"My rule is to keep myself to myself," she said in the kitchen, "and to
look as if I was the one that would turn up noses, if noses was to be
turned up. There's those that would snatch away their children if I let
Robin begin to make up to them."
But one morning, when Robin was watching some quarrelsome sparrows, an
old acquaintance surprised Andrews by appearing in the Gardens and
engaged her in a conversation so delightful that Robin was forgotten to
the extent of being allowed to follow her sparrows round a clump of
shrubbery out of sight.
It was while she watched them that she heard footsteps that stopped near
her. She looked up. A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporan
was standing by her. He spread and curved his red mouth, then began to
run and prance round in a circle, capering like a Shetland pony to
exhibit at once his friendliness and his prowess. After a minute or two
he stopped, breathing fast and glowing.
"My pony in Scotland does that. His name is Chieftain. I'm called Donal.
What are you called?"
"Robin," she answered, her lips and voice trembling with joy. He was so
beautiful.
They began to play together while Andrews' friend recounted intimate
details of a country house scandal.
Donal picked leaves from a lilac bush. Robin learned that if you laid a
leaf flat on the seat of a bench you could prick beautiful patterns on
the leaf's greenness. Donal had--in his rolled down stocking--a little
dirk. He did the decoration with the point of this while Robin looked
on, enthralled.
Through what means children so quickly convey to each other the entire
history of their lives is a sort of occult secret. Before Donal was
taken home, Robin knew that he lived in Scotland and had been brought to
London on a visit, that his other name was Muir, that the person he
called "mother" was a woman who took care of him. He spoke of her quite
often.
"I will bring one of my picture-books to-morrow," he said grandly. "Can
you read at all?"
"No," answered Robin, adoring him. "What are picture books?"
"Haven't you any?" he blurted out.
She lifted her eyes to the glowing blueness of his and said quite
simply, "I haven't anything."
His old nurse's voice came from the corner where she sat.
"I must go back to Nanny," he said, feeling, somehow, as if he had been
running fast. "I'll come to-morrow and bring _two_ picture books."
He put his strong little eight-year-old arms round her and kissed her
full on the mouth. It was the first time, for Robin. Andrews did not
kiss. There was no one else.
"Don't you like to be kissed?" said Donal, uncertain because she looked
so startled and had not kissed him back.
"Kissed," she repeated, with a small caught breath. "Ye--es." She knew
now what it was. It was being kissed. She drew nearer at once and lifted
up her face as sweetly and gladly as a flower lifts itself to the sun.
"Kiss me again," she said, quite eagerly. And this time, she kissed too.
When he ran quickly away, she stood looking after him with smiling,
trembling lips, uplifted, joyful--wondering and amazed.
The next morning Andrews had a cold and her younger sister Anne was
called in to perform her duties. The doctor pronounced the cold serious,
and Andrews was confined to her bed. Hours spent under the trees reading
were entirely satisfactory to Anne. And so, for two weeks, the
soot-sprinkled London square was as the Garden of Eden to Donal and
Robin.
In her fine, aloof way, Helen Muir had learned much in her stays in
London and during her married life--in the exploring of foreign cities
with her husband. She was not proud of the fact that in the event of the
death of Lord Coombe's shattered and dissipated nephew her son would
become heir presumptive to Coombe Court. She had not asked questions
about Coombe. It had not been necessary. Once or twice she had seen
Feather by chance. She was to see her again--by Feather's intention.
With Donal prancing at her side, Mrs. Muir went to the Gardens to meet
the child Nanny had described as "a bit of witch fire dancing--with her
colour and her big silk curls in a heap, and Donal staring at her like a
young man at a beauty."
Robin was waiting behind the lilac bushes and her nurse was already deep
in the mystery of "Lady Audley."
"There she is!" cried Donal, as he ran to her. "My mother has come with
me. This is Robin, mother! This is Robin."
Her exquisiteness and physical brilliancy gave Mrs. Muir something not
unlike a slight shock. Oh! No wonder, since she was like that. She
stooped and kissed the round cheek delicately. She took the little hand
and they walked round the garden, then sat on a bench and watched the
children "make up" things to play.
A victoria was driving past. Suddenly a sweetly hued figure spoke to the
coachman. "Stop here," she said. "I want to get out."
Robin's eyes grew very round and large and filled with a worshipping
light.
"It is," she gasped, "the Lady Downstairs!"
Feather floated near to the seat and paused, smiling. "Where is your
nurse, Robin?" she asked.
"She is only a few yards away," said Mrs. Muir.
"So kind of you to let Robin play with your boy. Don't let her bore you.
I am Mrs. Gareth-Lawless."
There was a little silence, a delicate little silence.
"I recognized you as Mrs. Muir at once," added Feather, unperturbed and
smiling brilliantly. "I saw your portrait at the Grovenor."
"Yes," said Mrs. Muir, gently.
"I wanted very much to see your son; that was why I came."
"Yes," still gently from Mrs. Muir.
"Because of Coombe, you know. We are such old friends. How queer that
the two little things have made friends too. I didn't know."
She bade them good-bye and strayed airily away.
And that night Donal was awakened, was told that "something" had
happened, that they were to go back to Scotland. He was accustomed to do
as he was told. He got out of bed and began to dress, but he swallowed
very hard.
"I shall not see Robin," he said in a queer voice. "She won't find me
when she goes behind the lilac bushes. She won't know why I don't come."
Then, in a way that was strangely grown up: "She has no one but me to
remember."
* * * * *
The next morning a small, rose-coloured figure stood still for so long
in the gardens that it began to look rigid and some one said, "I wonder
what that little girl is waiting for."
A child has no words out of which to build hopes and fears. Robin could
only wait in the midst of a slow dark rising tide of something she had
no name for. Suddenly she knew. He was _gone_! She crept under the
shrubbery. She cried, she sobbed. If Andrews had seen her she would have
said she was "in a tantrum." But she was not. Her world had been torn
away.
* * * * *
Five weeks later Feather was giving a very little dinner in the slice of
a house. There was Harrowby, a good looking young man with dark eyes,
and the Starling who was "emancipated" and whose real name was Miss
March. The third diner was a young actor with a low, veiled
voice--Gerald Vesey--who adored and understood Feather's clothes.
Over coffee in the drawing-room Coombe joined them just at the moment
that Feather was "going to tell them something to make them laugh."
"Robin is in love!" she cried. "She is five years old and she has been
deserted and Andrews came to tell me she can neither eat nor sleep. The
doctor says she has had a shock."
Coombe did not join in the ripple of laughter, but he looked interested.
"Robin is a stimulating name," said Harrowby. "_Is_ it too late to let
us see her?"
"They usually go to sleep at seven, I believe," remarked Coombe, "but of
course I am not an authority."
Robin was not asleep, though she had long been in bed with her eyes
closed. She had heard Andrews say to her sister Anne:
"Lord Coombe's the reason. She does not want her boy to see or speak to
him, so she whisked him back to Scotland."
"Is Lord Coombe as bad as they say?" put in Anne, with bated breath.
"As to his badness," Robin heard Andrews answer, "there's some that
can't say enough against him. It's what he is in this house that does
it. She won't have her boy playing with a child like Robin."
Then--even as there flashed upon Robin the revelation of her own
unfitness--came a knock at the door.
She was taken up, dressed in her prettiest frock and led down the narrow
stairway. She heard the Lady say:
"Shake hands with Lord Coombe."
Robin put her hand behind her back--she who had never disobeyed since
she was born!
"Be pretty mannered, Miss Robin my dear," Andrews instructed, "and shake
hands with his Lordship."
Each person in the little drawing-room saw the queer flame in the
child-face. She shrilled out her words:
"Andrews will pinch me--Andrews will pinch me! But--No--No!"
She kept her hands behind her back and hatred surged up in her soul.
In spite of her tender years, the doctor held to the theory that Robin
had suffered a shock; she must be taken away to be helped by the bracing
air of the Norfolk coast. Before she went, workmen were to be seen
coming in and out of the house. When she returned to London, she was led
into rooms she had never been in before--light and airy rooms with
pretty walls and furniture.
It was "a whim of Coombe's," as Feather put it, that she should no
longer occupy the little dog-kennels of nurseries, so these new
apartments had been added in the rear. A whim of his also that Andrews,
whose disciplinary methods included pinching, should be dismissed and
replaced by Dowson, a motherly creature with a great deal of common
sense. Robin's lonely little heart opened to her new nurse, who became
in time her "Dowie."
It was Dowson who made it clear to Lord Coombe, at length, that Robin
had reached the age when she needed a governess, and it was he who said
to Feather a few days later:
"A governess will come here to-morrow at eleven o'clock. She is a
Mademoiselle Vallé. She is accustomed to the education of young
children. She will present herself for your approval."
"What on earth can it matter?" Feather cried.
"It does not matter to you," he answered. "It chances for the time being
to matter to _me_."
Mademoiselle Vallé was an intelligent, mature French woman, with a
peculiar power to grasp an intricate situation. She learned to love the
child she taught--a child so strangely alone. As time went on she came
to know that Robin was to receive every educational advantage, every
instruction. In his impersonal, aloof way Coombe was fixed in his
intention to provide her with life's defences. As she grew, graceful as
a willow wand, into a girlhood startlingly lovely, she learned modern
languages, learned to dance divinely.
And all the while he was deeply conscious that her infant hatred had not
lessened--that he could show her no reason why it should.
There were black hours when she was in deadly peril from a human beast,
mad with her beauty. Coombe had almost miraculously saved her, but her
detestation of him still held.
Her one thought--her one hope--was to learn--learn, so that she might
make her own living. Mademoiselle Vallé supported her in this, and
Coombe understood.
* * * * *
In one of the older London squares there was a house upon the broad
doorsteps of which Lord Coombe stood oftener than upon any other. The
old Dowager Duchess of Darte, having surrounded herself with almost
royal dignity, occupied that house in an enforced seclusion. She was a
confirmed rheumatic invalid, but her soul was as strong as it was many
years before, when she had given its support to Coombe in his unbearable
hours. She had poured out her strength in silence, and in silence he had
received it. She saved him from slipping over the verge of madness.
But there came a day when he spoke to her of this--of the one woman he
had loved, Princess Alixe of X----:
"There was never a human thing so transparently pure, and she was the
possession of a brute incarnate. She shook with terror before him. He
killed her."
"I believe he did," she said, unsteadily. "He was not received here at
Court afterward."
"He killed her. But she would have died of horror if he had not struck
her a blow. I saw that. I was in attendance on him at Windsor."
"When I first knew you," the Duchess said gravely.
"There was a night--I was young--young--when I found myself face to face
with her in the stillness of the wood. I went quite mad for a time. I
threw myself face downward on the earth and sobbed. She knelt and prayed
for her own soul as well as mine. I kissed the hem of her dress and
left her standing--alone."
After a silence he added:
"It was the next night that I heard her shrieks. Then she died."
The Duchess knew what else had died: the high adventure of youth and joy
of life in him.
On a table beside her winged chair were photographs of two women, who,
while obviously belonging to periods of some twenty years apart, were in
face and form so singularly alike that they might have been the same
person. One was the Princess Alixe of X---- and the other--Feather.
"The devil of chance," Coombe said, "sometimes chooses to play tricks.
Such a trick was played on me."
It was the photograph of Feather he took up and set a strange
questioning gaze upon.
"When I saw this," he said, "this--exquisitely smiling at me in a sunny
garden--the tomb opened under my feet and I stood on the brink of
it--twenty-five again."
He made clear to her certain facts which most persons would have
ironically disbelieved. He ended with the story of Robin.
"I am determined," he explained, "to stand between the child and what
would be inevitable. Her frenzy of desire to support herself arises from
her loathing of the position of accepting support from me. I sympathise
with her entirely."
"Mademoiselle Vallé is an intelligent woman," the Duchess said. "Send
her to me; I shall talk to her. Then she can bring the child."
And so it was arranged that Robin should be taken into the house in the
old fashioned square to do for the Duchess what a young relative might
have done. And, a competent person being needed to take charge of the
linen, "Dowie" would go to live under the same roof.
Feather's final thrust in parting with her daughter was:
"Donal Muir is a young man by this time. I wonder what his mother would
do now if he turned up at your mistress' house and began to make love to
you." She laughed outright. "You'll get into all sorts of messes but
that would be the nicest one!"
* * * * *
The Duchess came to understand that Robin held it deep in her mind that
she was a sort of young outcast.
"If she consorted," she thought, "with other young things and shared
their pleasures she would forget it."
She talked the matter over with her daughter, Lady Lothwell.
"I am not launching a girl in society," she said, "I only want to help
her to know a few nice young people. I shall begin with your children.
They are mine if I am only a grandmother. A small dinner and a small
dance--and George and Kathryn may be the beginning of an interesting
experiment."
* * * * *
The Duchess was rarely mistaken. The experiment was interesting. For
George--Lord Halwyn--it held a certain element of disaster. It was he
who danced with Robin first. He had heard of the girl who was a sort of
sublimated companion to his grandmother. He had encountered companions
before. This one, as she flew like a blown leaf across the floor and
laughed up into his face with wide eyes produced a new effect and was a
new kind.
He led her to the conservatory. He was extremely young and his fleeting
emotions had never known a tight rein. An intoxicating hot-house perfume
filled his nostrils. Suddenly he let himself go and was kissing the warm
velvet of her slim little neck.
"You--you--you've spoiled everything in the world!" she cried.
"Now"--with a desolate, horrible little sob--"now I can only go
back--_back_." She spoke as if she were Cinderella and he had made the
clock strike twelve. Her voice had absolute grief in it.
"I say,"--he was contrite--"don't speak like that. I beg pardon. I'll
grovel. Don't-- Oh, Kathryn! Come here!"
This last because his sister had suddenly appeared.
Kathryn bore Robin away. Boys like George didn't really matter, she
pointed out, though of course it was bad manners. She had been kissed
herself, it seemed. As they walked between banked flowers she added:
"By the way, somebody important has been assassinated in one of the
Balkan countries. Lord Coombe has just come in and is talking it over
with grandmamma."
As they neared the entrance to the ballroom she paused with a new kind
of impish smile.
"The very best looking boy in all England," she said, "is dancing with
Sara Studleigh. He dropped in by chance to call and grandmamma made him
stay. His name is Donal Muir. He is Lord Coombe's heir. Here he comes.
Look!"
He was now scarcely two yards away. Almost as if he had been called he
turned his eyes toward Robin and straight into hers they
laughed--straight into hers.
The incident of their meeting was faultlessly correct; also, when Lady
Lothwell appeared, she presented him to Robin as if the brief ceremony
were one of the most ordinary in existence.
They danced for a time without a word. She wondered if he could not feel
the beating of her heart.
"That--is a beautiful waltz," he said at last, as if it were a sort of
emotional confidence.
"Yes," she answered. Only, "Yes."
Once round the great ballroom, twice, and he gave a little laugh and
spoke again.
"I am going to ask you a question. May I?"
"Yes."
"Is your name Robin?"
"Yes." She could scarcely breathe it.
"I thought it was. I hoped it was--after I first began to suspect. I
_hoped_ it was."
"It is--it is."
"Did we once play together in a garden?"
"Yes--yes."
Back swept the years, and the wonderful happiness began again.
* * * * *
In the shining ballroom the music rose and fell and swelled again into
ecstasy as he held her white young lightness in his arm and they swayed
and darted and swooped like things of the air--while the old Duchess and
Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and talked in murmurs of
Sarajevo.
ROBIN
CHAPTER I
It was a soft starlit night mystically changing into dawn when Donal
Muir left the tall, grave house on Eaton Square after the strangely
enchanted dance given by the old Dowager Duchess of Darte. A certain
impellingness of mood suggested that exercise would be a good thing and
he decided to walk home. It was an impellingness of body as well as
mind. He had remained later than the relative who had by chance been
responsible for his being brought, an uninvited guest, to the party. The
Duchess had not known that he was in London. It may also be accepted as
a fact that to this festivity given for the pleasure of Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless' daughter, she might not have chosen to assume the
responsibility of extending him an invitation. She knew something of his
mother and had sometimes discussed her with her old friend, Lord Coombe.
She admired Helen Muir greatly and was also much touched by certain
aspects of her maternity. What Lord Coombe had told her of the meeting
of the two children in the Gardens, of their innocent child passion of
attraction for each other, and of the unchildlike tragedy their enforced
parting had obviously been to both had at once deeply interested and
moved her. Coombe had only been able to relate certain surface incidents
connected with the matter, but they had been incidents not easy to
forget and from which unusual things might be deduced. No! She would
not have felt prepared to be the first to deliberately throw these two
young people across each other's paths at this glowing moment of their
early blooming--knowing as she did Helen Muir's strongly anxious desire
to keep them apart.
She had seen Donal Muir several times as the years had passed and had
not been blind to the physical beauty and allure of charm the rest of
the world saw and proclaimed with suitable adjectives. When the intimate
friend who was his relative appeared with him in her drawing-room and
she found standing before her, respectfully appealing for welcome with a
delightful smile, this quite incomparably good-looking young man, she
was conscious of a secret momentary disturbance and a recognition of the
fact that something a shade startling had happened.
"When a thing of the sort occurs entirely without one's aid and rather
against one's will--one may as well submit," she said later to Lord
Coombe. "Endeavouring to readjust matters is merely meddling with Fate
and always ends in disaster. As an incident, I felt there was a hint in
it that it would be the part of wisdom to leave things alone."
She had watched the two dancing with a kind of absorption in her gaze.
She had seen them go out of the room into the conservatory. She had
known exactly when they had returned and, seeing the look on their young
faces, had understood why the eyes of the beholders followed them.
When Lord Coombe came in with the ominous story of the assassination at
Sarajevo, all else had been swept from her mind. There had been place in
her being for nothing but the shock of a monstrous recognition. She had
been a gravely conscious looker-on at the slow but never ceasing growth
of a world peril for too many years not to be widely awake to each sign
of its development.
"Servia, Russia, Austria, Germany. It will form a pretext and a clear
road to France and England," Lord Coombe had said.
"A broad, clear road," the Duchess had agreed breathlessly--and, while
she gazed before her, ceased to see the whirl of floating and fluttering
butterfly-wings of gauze or to hear the music to whose measure they
fluttered and floated.
But no sense of any connection with Sarajevo disturbed the swing of the
fox trot or the measure of the tango, and when Donal Muir walked out
into the summer air of the starlit street and lifted his face, because
already a faint touch of primrose dawn was showing itself on the eastern
sky, in his young world there was only recognition of a vague tumult of
heart and brain and blood.
"What's the matter?" he was thinking. "What have I been doing-- What
have I been saying? I've been like a chap in a dream. I'm not awake
yet."
All that he had said to the girl was a simple fact. He had exaggerated
nothing. If, in what now seemed that long-ago past, he had not been a
sturdy, normal little lad surrounded by love and friendliness, with his
days full of healthy play and pleasure, the child tragedy of their being
torn apart might have left ugly marks upon his mind, and lurked there, a
morbid memory. And though, in time, rebellion and suffering had died
away, he had never really forgotten. Even to the cricket-playing,
larking boy at Eton there had now and then returned, with queer
suddenness, recollections which gave him odd moments of resurrected
misery. They passed away, but at long intervals they came back and
always with absolute reality. At Oxford the intervals had been longer
but a certain picture was one whose haunting never lost its clearness.
It was a vision of a colour-warm child kneeling on the grass, her eyes
uplifted, expressing only a lonely patience, and he could actually hear
her humble little voice as she said:
"I--I haven't anything." And it always roused him to rage.
Then there was the piteous break in her voice when she hid her eyes with
her arm and said of her beast of a mother:
"She--doesn't _like_ me!"
"Damn! Damn!" he used to say every time the thing came back. "Oh!
damn!--damn!" And the expletive never varied in its spontaneity.
* * * * *
As he walked under the primrose sky and breathed in the faint fragrant
stir of the freshening morning air, he who had always felt joyously the
sense of life knew more than ever before the keen rapture of living. The
springing lightness of his own step as it rang on the pavement was part
of it. It was as though he were still dancing and he almost felt
something warm and light in his arm and saw a little head of dark silk
near his breast.
Throughout his life he had taken all his joys to his closest companion
and nearest intimate--his mother. Theirs had not been a common life
together. He had not even tried to explain to himself the harmony and
gaiety of their nearness in which there seemed no separation of years.
She had drawn and held him to the wonder of her charm and had been the
fine flavour of his existence. It was actually true that he had so far
had no boyish love affairs because he had all unconsciously been in love
with the beautiful completeness of her.
Always when he returned home after festivities, he paused for a moment
outside her bedroom door because he so often found her awake and waiting
to talk to him if he were inclined to talk--to listen--to laugh
softly--or perhaps only to say good-night in her marvel of a voice--a
marvel because its mellow note held such love.
This time when, after entering the house and mounting the stairs he
reached her door, he found it partly open.
"Come in," he heard her say. "I went to sleep very early and awakened
half an hour ago. It is really morning."
She was sitting up in a deep chair by the window.
"Let me look at you," she said with a little laugh. "And then kiss me
and go to bed."
But even the lovely, faint early light revealed something to her.
"You walk like a young stag on the hillside," she said. "You don't want
to go to sleep at all. What is it?"
He sat on a low ottoman near her and laughed a little also.
"I don't know," he answered, "but I'm wide awake."
The English summer dawn is of a magical clear light and she could see
him well. She had a thrilled feeling that she had never quite known
before what a beautiful thing he was--how perfect and shining fair in
his boy manhood.
"Mother," he said, "you won't remember perhaps--it's a queer thing that
I should myself--but I have never really forgotten. There was a child I
played with in some garden when I was a little chap. She was a beautiful
little thing who seemed to belong to nobody--"
"She belonged to a Mrs. Gareth-Lawless," Helen interpolated.
"Then you do remember?"
"Yes, dear. You asked me to go to the Gardens with you to see her. And
Mrs. Gareth-Lawless came in by chance and spoke to me."
"And then we had suddenly to go back to Scotland. I remember you wakened
me quite early in the morning--I thought it was the middle of the
night." He began to speak rather slowly as if he were thinking it over.
"You didn't know that, when you took me away, it was a tragedy. I had
promised to play with her again and I felt as if I had deserted her
hideously. It was not the kind of a thing a little chap usually
feels--it was something different--something more. And to-night it
actually all came back. I saw her again, mother."
He was so absorbed that he did not take in her involuntary movement.
"You saw her again! Where?"
"The old Duchess of Darte was giving a small dance for her. Hallowe took
me--"
"Does the Duchess know Mrs. Gareth-Lawless?" Helen had a sense of
breathlessness.
"I don't quite understand the situation. It seems the little thing
insists on earning her own living and she is a sort of companion and
secretary to the Duchess. Mother, she is just the same!"
The last words were a sort of exclamation. As he uttered them, there
came back to her the day when--a little boy--he had seemed as though he
were speaking as a young man might have spoken. Now he was a young man,
speaking almost as if he were a little boy--involuntarily revealing his
exaltation.
As she had felt half frightened years before, so she felt wholly
frightened now. He was not a little boy any longer. She could not sweep
him away in her arms to save him from danger. Also she knew more of the
easy, fashionably accepted views of the morals of pretty Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless, still lightly known with some cynicism as "Feather." She
knew what Donal did not. His relationship to the Head of the House of
Coombe made it unlikely that gossip should choose him as the exact young
man to whom could be related stories of his distinguished relative, Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless and her girl. But through the years Helen Muir had
unavoidably heard things she thought particularly hideous. And here the
child was again "just the same."
"She has only grown up." His laugh was like a lightly indrawn breath.
"Her cheek is just as much like a rose petal. And that wonderful little
look! And her eyelashes. Just the same! Do girls usually grow up like
that? It was the look most. It's a sort of asking and giving--both at
once."
There it was! And she had nothing to say. She could only sit and look at
him--at his beautiful youth all alight with the sudden flame of that
which can set a young world on fire and sweep on its way either carrying
devastation or clearing a path to Paradise.
His own natural light unconsciousness was amazing. He only knew that he
was in delightful high spirits. The dancing, the music, the early
morning were, he thought, accountable for it.
She bent forward to kiss his cheek and she patted his hand.
"My dear! My dear!" she said. "How you have enjoyed your evening!"
"There never was anything more perfect," with the light laugh again.
"Everything was delightful--the rooms, the music, the girls in their
pretty frocks like a lot of flowers tossed about. She danced like a bit
of thistledown. I didn't know a girl could be so light. The back of her
slim little neck looks as fine and white and soft as a baby's. I am so
glad you were awake. Are you sure you don't want to go to sleep again?"
suddenly.
"Not in the least. Look at the sun beginning to touch the tips of the
little white clouds with rose. That stir among the leaves of the plane
trees is the first delicious breath of the morning. Go on and tell me
all about the party."
"It's a perfect time to talk," he laughed.
And there he sat and made gay pictures for her of what he had seen and
done. He thought he was giving her mere detail of the old Duchess'
dance. He did not know that when he spoke of new tangos, of flowers, of
music and young nymphs like tossed blossoms, he never allowed her for a
moment to lose sight of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless' girl. She was the light
floating over his vision of the happy youth of the assembly--she was the
centre--the beginning and the ending of it all.