Dowie put her to bed as she had done when she was a child, feeling as if
the days in the nursery had come back again. She saw gradually die out
of the white face the unnatural restraint which she had grieved over. It
had suggested the look of a girl who was not only desolate but afraid
and she wondered how long she had worn it and what she had been most
afraid of.
In the depths of her comfortable being there lay hidden a maternal
pleasure in the nature of her responsibility. She had cared for young
mothers before, and that she should be called to watch over Robin, whose
child forlornness she had rescued, filled her heart with a glowing. As
she moved about the room quietly preparing for the comfort of the night
she knew that the soft dark of the lost eyes followed her and that it
was not quite so lost as it had looked in the church and on their
singularly silent journey.
When her work was done and she turned to the bed again Robin's arms were
held out to her.
"I want to kiss you, Dowie--I want to kiss you," she said with just the
yearning dwelling on the one word, which had so moved the good soul long
ago with its innocent suggestion of tender reverence for some sacred
rite.
Dowie hurriedly knelt by the bedside.
"Never you be frightened, my lamb--because you're so young and don't
know things," she whispered, holding her as if she were a baby. "Never
you let yourself be frightened for a moment. Your own Dowie's here and
always will be--and Dowie knows all about it."
"Until you took me on your knee to-night," very low and in broken
phrases, "I was so lonely. I was as lonely as I used to be in the old
nursery before you and Mademoiselle came. Afterwards--" with a shudder,
"there were so many long, long nights. There--always--will be so many.
One after every day. I lie in my bed in the dark. And there is
_Nothing_! Oh! Dowie, _let_ me tell you!" her voice was a sweet longing
wail. "When Donal came back all the world was full and shining and warm!
It was full. There was no loneliness anywhere. We wanted nothing but
each other. And when he was gone there was only emptiness! And I was not
alive and I could not think. I can scarcely think now."
"You'll begin to think soon, my lamb," Dowie whispered. "You've got
something to think of. After a while the emptiness won't be so big and
black."
She ventured it very carefully. Her wise soul knew that the Emptiness
must come first--the awful world-old Emptiness which for an
endless-seeming time nothing can fill-- And all smug preachers of the
claims of life and duty must be chary of approaching those who stand
desolate gazing into it.
"I could only _remember_," the broken heart-wringing voice went on. "And
it seemed as if the remembering was killing me over and over again-- It
is like that now. But in the Wood Lord Coombe said something
strange--which seemed to make me begin to think a little. Only it was
like beginning to try to write with a broken arm. I can't go on--I can
only think of Donal-- And be lonely--lonely--lonely."
The very words--the mere sound of them in her own ears made her voice
trail away into bitter helpless crying--which would not stop. It was the
awful weeping of utter woe and weakness whose convulsive sobs go on and
on until they almost cease to seem human sounds. Dowie's practical
knowledge told her what she had to face. This was what she had guessed
at when she had known that there had been crying in the night. Mere
soothing of the tenderest would not check it.
"I had been lonely--always-- And then the loneliness was gone. And
then--! If it had never gone--!"
"I know, my dear, I know," said Dowie watching her with practised,
anxious eye. And she went away for a few moments and came back with an
unobtrusive calming draught and coaxed her into taking it and sat down
and prayed as she held the little hands which unknowingly beat upon the
pillow. Something of her steadiness and love flowed from her through her
own warm restraining palms and something in her tender steady voice
spoke for and helped her--though it seemed long and long before the
cruelty of the storm had lessened and the shadow of a body under the
bed-clothes lay deadly still and the heavy eyelids closed as if they
would never lift again.
Dowie did not leave her for an hour or more but sat by her bedside and
watched. Like this had been the crying in the night. And she had been
alone.
* * * * *
As she sat and watched she thought deeply after her lights. She did not
think only of the sweet shattered thing she so well loved. She thought
much of Lord Coombe. Being a relic of a class which may be regarded as
forever extinct, her views on the subject of the rights and
responsibilities of rank were of an unswerving reverence verging on the
feudal. Even in early days her perfection of type was rare. To her
unwavering mind the remarkable story she had become a part of was almost
august in its subjection of ordinary views to the future of a great
house and its noble name. With the world falling to pieces and great
houses crumbling into nothingness, that this one should be rescued from
the general holocaust was a deed worthy of its head. But where was there
another man who would have done this thing as he had done it--remaining
totally indifferent to the ignominy which would fall upon his memory in
the years to come when the marriage was revealed. That the explanation
of his action would always be believed to be an unseemly and shameful
one was to her respectable serving-class mind a bitter thing. That it
would always be contemptuously said that a vicious elderly man had
educated the daughter of his mistress, that he might marry her and leave
an heir of her blooming youth, was almost worse than if he had been
known to have committed some decent crime like honest murder. Even the
servants' hall in the slice of a house, discussing the ugly whisper had
somewhat revolted at it and thought it "a bit too steep even for these
times." But he had plainly looked the whole situation in the face and
had made up his mind to do what he had done. He hadn't cared for
himself; he had only cared that the child who was to be born should be
his legitimatised successor and that there should remain after him a
Head of the House of Coombe. That such houses should have heads to
succeed to their dignities was a simple reverential belief of Dowie's
and--apart from all other feeling--the charge she had undertaken wore to
her somewhat the aspect of a religious duty. His lordship was as one who
had a place on a sort of altar.
"It's because he's so high in his way that he can bear it," was her
thought. "He's so high that nothing upsets him. He's above
things--that's what he is." And there was something else too--something
she did not quite follow but felt vaguely moved by. What was happening
to England came into it--and something else that was connected with
himself in some way that was his own affair. In his long talk with her
he had said some strange things--though all in his own way.
"Howsoever the tide of war turns, men and women will be needed as the
world never needed them before," was one of them. "This one small
unknown thing I want. It will be the child of my old age. I _want_ it.
Her whole being has been torn to pieces. Dr. Redcliff says that she
might have died before this if her delicate body had not been stronger
than it looks."
"She has never been ill, my lord," Dowie had answered, "--but she is ill
now."
"Save her--save _it_ for me," he broke out in a voice she had never
heard and with a face she had never seen.
That in this plainly overwrought hour he should allow himself a moment
of forgetfulness drew him touchingly near to her.
"My lord," she said, "I've watched over her since she was five. I know
the ways young things in her state need to have about them to give them
strength and help. Thank the Lord she's one of the loving ones and if we
can hold her until she--wakes up to natural feelings she'll begin to try
to live for the sake of what'll need her--and what's his as well as
hers."
Of this she thought almost religiously as she sat by the bedside and
watched.