He was alone with the Duchess. The doors were closed, and the world shut
out by her own order. She leaned against the high back of her chair,
watching him intently as she listened. He walked slowly up and down the
room with long paces. He had been doing it for some time and he had told
her from beginning to end the singular story of what had happened when
he found Robin lying face downward on the moss in Mersham Wood.
This is what he was saying in a low, steady voice.
"She had not once thought of what most women would have thought of
before anything else. If I were speaking to another person than yourself
I should say that she was too ignorant of the world. To you I will say
that she is not merely a girl--she is the unearthly luckless embodiment
of the pure spirit of Love. She knew only worship and the rapt giving of
gifts. Her unearthliness made him forget earth himself. Folly and
madness of course! Incredible madness--it would seem to most people--a
decently intelligent lad losing his head wholly and not regaining his
senses until it was too late to act sanely. But perhaps not quite
incredible to you and me. There must have been days which seemed to
him--and lads like him--like the last hours of a condemned man. In the
midst of love and terror and the agony of farewells--what time was there
for sanity?"
"You _believe_ her?" the Duchess said.
"Yes," impersonally. "In spite of the world, the flesh and the devil. I
also know that no one else will. To most people her story will seem a
thing trumped up out of a fourth rate novel. The law will not listen to
it. You will--when you see her unawakened face."
"I have seen it," was the Duchess' interpolation. "I saw it when she
went upon her knees and prayed that I would let her go to Mersham Wood.
There was something inexplicable in her remoteness from fear and shame.
She was only woe's self. I did not comprehend. I was merely a baffled
old woman of the world. Now I begin to see. I believe her as you do. The
world and the law will laugh at us because we have none of the accepted
reasons for our belief. But I believe her as you do--absurd as it will
seem to others."
"Yes, it will seem absurd," Coombe said slowly pacing. "But here she
is--and here _we_ are!"
"What do you see before us?" she asked of his deep thought.
"I see a helpless girl in a dark plight. As far as knowledge of how to
defend herself goes, she is as powerless as a child fresh from a
nursery. She lives among people with observing eyes already noting the
change in her piteous face. Her place in your house makes her a centre
of attention. The observation of her beauty and happiness has been
good-natured so far. The observation will continue, but in time its
character will change. I see that before anything else."
"It is the first thing to be considered," she answered.
"The next--" she paused and thought seriously, "is her mother. Perhaps
Mrs. Gareth-Lawless has sharp eyes. She said to you something rather
vulgarly hideous about being glad her daughter was in my house and not
in hers."
"Her last words to Robin were to warn her not to come to her for refuge
'if she got herself into a mess.' She is in what Mrs. Gareth-Lawless
would call 'a mess.'"
"It is what a good many people would call it," the Duchess said. "And
she does not even know that her tragedy would express itself in a mere
vulgar colloquialism with a modern snigger in it. Presently, poor child,
when she awakens a little more she will begin to go about looking like a
little saint. Do you see that--as I do?"
She thought he did and that he was moved by it though he did not say so.
"I am thinking first of her mother. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless must see and
hear nothing. She is not a criminal or malignant creature, but her light
malice is capable of playing flimsily with any atrocity. She has not
brain enough to know that she can be atrocious. Robin can be protected
only if she is shut out of the whole affair. She was simply speaking the
truth when she warned the girl not to come to her in case of need."
"For a little longer I can keep her here," the Duchess said. "As she
looks ill it will not be unnatural that the doctor should advise me to
send her away from London. It is not possible to remember anything long
in the life we live now. She will be forgotten in a week. That part of
it will be simple."
"Yes," he answered. "Yes."
He paced the length of the room twice--three times and said nothing. She
watched him as he walked and she knew he was going to say more. She also
wondered what curious thing it might be. She had said to herself that
what he said and did would be entirely detached from ordinary or archaic
views. Also she had guessed that it might be extraordinary--perhaps as
extraordinary as his long intimacy with Mrs. Gareth-Lawless. Was there a
possibility that he was going to express himself now?
"But that is not all," he said at last and he ended his pondering walk
by coming nearer to her. He sat down and touched the newspapers lying on
the table.
"You have been poring over these," he said, "and I have been doing the
same thing. I have also been talking to the people who know things and
to those who ought to know them but don't. Just now the news is worse
each day. In the midst of the roar and thunder of cataclysms to talk
about a mere girl 'in trouble' appears disproportionate. But because our
world seems crumbling to pieces about us she assumes proportions of her
own. I was born of the old obstinate passions of belief in certain
established things and in their way they have had their will of me.
Lately it has forced itself upon me that I am not as modern as I have
professed to be. The new life has gripped me, but the old has not let me
go. There are things I cannot bear to see lost forever without a
struggle."
"Such as--" she said it very low.
"I conceal things from myself," he answered, "but they rise and confront
me. There were days when we at least believed--quite obstinately--in a
number of things."
"Sometimes quite heroically," she admitted. "'God Save the Queen' in its
long day had actual glow and passion. I have thrilled and glowed myself
at the shouting song of it."
"Yes," he drew a little nearer to her and his cold face gained a slight
colour. "In those days when a son--or a grandson--was born to the head
of a house it was a serious and impressive affair."
"Yes." And he knew she at once recalled her own son--and George in
Flanders.
"It meant new generations, and generations counted for decent dignity as
well as power. A farmer would say with huge pride, 'Me and mine have
worked the place for four generations,' as he would say of the owner of
the land, 'Him and his have held it for six centuries.' Centuries and
generations are in danger of no longer inspiring special reverence. It
is the future and the things to be which count."
"The things to be--yes," the Duchess said and knew that he was drawing
near the thing he had to say.
"I suppose I was born a dogged sort of devil," he went on almost in a
monotone. "The fact did not manifest itself to me until I came to the
time when--all the rest of me dropped into a bottomless gulf. That
perhaps describes it. I found myself suddenly standing on the edge of
it. And youth, and future, and belief in the use of hoping and real
enjoyment of things dropped into the blackness and were gone while I
looked on. If I had not been born a dogged devil I should have blown my
brains out. If I had been born gentler or kinder or more patient I
should perhaps have lived it down and found there was something left. A
man's way of facing things depends upon the kind of thing he was born. I
went on living _without_--the rest of myself. I closed my mouth and not
only my mouth but my life--as far as other men and women were concerned.
When I found an interest stirring in me I shut another door--that was
all. Whatsoever went on did it behind a shut door."
"But there were things which went on?" the Duchess gently suggested.
"In a hidden way--yes. That is what I am coming to. When I first saw
Mrs. Gareth-Lawless sitting under her tree--" He suddenly stopped. "No,"
harshly, "I need not put it into words to _you_." Then a pause as if for
breath. "She had a way of lifting her eyes as a very young angel
might--she had a quivering spirit of a smile--and soft, deep curled
corners to her mouth. You saw the same things in the old photograph you
bought. The likeness was--Oh! it was hellish that such a resemblance
could be! In less than half an hour after she spoke to me I had shut
another door. But I was obliged to go and _look_ at her again and again.
The resemblance drew me. By the time her husband died I knew her well
enough to be sure what would happen. Some man would pick her up and
throw her aside--and then some one else. She could have held nothing
long. She would have passed from one hand to another until she was
tossed into the gutter and swept away--quivering spirit of a smile and
all of it. I could not have shut any door on that. I prevented it--and
kept her clean--by shutting doors right and left. I have watched over
her. At times it has bored me frightfully. But after a year or
so--behind another door I had shut the child."
"Robin? I had sometimes thought so," said the Duchess.
"I did not know why exactly. It was not affection or attraction. It was
a sort of resentment of the beastly unfairness of things. The bottomless
gulf seemed to yawn in her path when she was nothing but a baby.
Everything was being tossed into it before she had taken a step. I began
to keep an eye on her and prevent things--or assist them. It was more
fury than benevolence, but it has gone on for years--behind the shut
door."
"Are you quite sure you have been entirely free from all affection for
her?" The Duchess asked the question impersonally though with a degree
of interest.
"I think so. I am less sure that I have the power to feel what is called
'affection' for any one. I think that I have felt something nearer it
for Donal--and for you--than for any one else. But when the child talked
to me in the wood I felt for the first time that I wished her to know
that my relation to her mother was not the reason for her hating me
which she had believed."
"She shall be made to understand," said the Duchess.
"She must," he said, "_because of the rest_."
The last four words were, as it were, italicised. Now, she felt, she was
probably about to hear the chief thing he had been approaching. So she
waited attentively.
"Behind a door has been shut another thing," he said and he endeavoured
to say it with his usual detached rigidity of calm, but did not wholly
succeed. "It is the outcome of the generations and the centuries at
present diminishing in value and dignity. The past having had its will
of me and the present and future having gripped me--if I had had a
son--"
As if in a flash she saw as he lingered on the words that he was
speaking of a thing of which he had secretly thought often and much,
though he had allowed no human being to suspect it. She had not
suspected it herself. In a secretive, intense way he had passionately
desired a son.
"If you had had a son--" she repeated.
"He would have stood for both--the past and the future--at the
beginning of a New World," he ended.
He said it with such deliberate meaning that the magnitude of his
possible significance caused her to draw a sudden breath.
"Is it going to be a New World?" she said.
"It cannot be the old one. I don't take it upon myself to describe the
kind of world it will be. That will depend upon the men and women who
build it. Those who were born during the last few years--those who are
about to be born now."
Then she knew what he was thinking of.
"Donal's child will be one of them," she said.
"The Head of the House of Coombe--if there is a Head who starts
fair--ought to have quite a lot to say--and do. Howsoever black things
look," obstinately fierce, "England is not done for. At the worst no
real Englishman believes she can be. She _can't_! You know the old
saying, 'In all wars England loses battles, but she always wins one--the
last one.' She always will. Afterwards she must do her bit for the New
World."