CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER I
The history of the circumstances about to be related began many years
ago—or so it seems in these days. It began, at least, years before the
world being rocked to and fro revealed in the pause between each of its
heavings some startling suggestion of a new arrangement of its
kaleidoscopic particles, and then immediately a re-arrangement, and
another and another until all belief in a permanency of design seemed
lost, and the inhabitants of the earth waited, helplessly gazing at
changing stars and colours in a degree of mental chaos.
Its opening incidents may be dated from a period when people still had
reason to believe in permanency and had indeed many of them—sometimes
through ingenuousness, sometimes through stupidity of type—acquired a
singular confidence in the importance and stability of their
possessions, desires, ambitions and forms of conviction.
London at the time, in common with other great capitals, felt itself
rather final though priding itself on being much more fluid and
adaptable than it had been fifty years previously. In speaking of
itself it at least dealt with fixed customs, and conditions and
established facts connected with them—which gave rise to brilliant—or
dull—witticisms.
One of these, heard not infrequently, was to the effect that—in
London—one might live under an umbrella if one lived under it in the
right neighbourhood and on the right side of the street, which axiom is
the reason that a certain child through the first six years of her life
sat on certain days staring out of a window in a small, dingy room on
the top floor of a slice of a house on a narrow but highly fashionable
London street and looked on at the passing of motors, carriages and
people in the dull afternoon grayness.
The room was exalted above its station by being called The Day Nursery
and another room equally dingy and uninviting was known as The Night
Nursery. The slice of a house was inhabited by the very pretty Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless, its inordinate rent being reluctantly paid by
her—apparently with the assistance of those “ravens” who are expected
to supply the truly deserving. The rent was inordinate only from the
standpoint of one regarding it soberly in connection with the character
of the house itself which was a gaudy little kennel crowded between two
comparatively stately mansions. On one side lived an inordinately rich
South African millionaire, and on the other an inordinately exalted
person of title, which facts combined to form sufficient grounds for a
certain inordinateness of rent.
Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was also, it may be stated, of the fibre which must
live on the right side of the street or dissolve into nothingness—since
as nearly nothingness as an embodied entity can achieve had Nature
seemingly created her at the outset. So light and airy was the fair,
slim, physical presentation of her being to the earthly vision, and so
almost impalpably diaphanous the texture and form of mind and character
to be observed by human perception, that among such friends—and
enemies—as so slight a thing could claim she was prettily known as
“Feather”. Her real name, “Amabel”, was not half as charming and
whimsical in its appropriateness. “Feather” she adored being called and
as it was the fashion among the amazing if amusing circle in which she
spent her life, to call its acquaintances fantastic pet names selected
from among the world of birds, beasts and fishes or inanimate
objects—“Feather” she floated through her curious existence. And it so
happened that she was the mother of the child who so often stared out
of the window of the dingy and comfortless Day Nursery, too much a
child to be more than vaguely conscious in a chaotic way that a certain
feeling which at times raged within her and made her little body hot
and restless was founded on something like actual hate for a special
man who had certainly taken no deliberate steps to cause her
detestation.
“Feather” had not been called by that delicious name when she married
Robert Gareth-Lawless who was a beautiful and irresponsibly rather than
deliberately bad young man. She was known as Amabel Darrel and the
loveliest girl in the lovely corner of the island of Jersey where her
father, a country doctor, had begotten a large family of lovely
creatures and brought them up on the appallingly inadequate proceeds of
his totally inadequate practice. Pretty female things must be disposed
of early lest their market value decline. Therefore a well-born young
man even without obvious resources represents a sail in the offing
which is naturally welcomed as possibly belonging to a bark which may
at least bear away a burden which the back carrying it as part of its
pack will willingly shuffle on to other shoulders. It is all very well
for a man with six lovely daughters to regard them as capital if he has
money or position or generous relations or if he has energy and an
ingenious unfatigued mind. But a man who is tired and neither clever
nor important in any degree and who has reared his brood in one of the
Channel Islands with a faded, silly, unattractive wife as his only aid
in any difficulty, is wise in leaving the whole hopeless situation to
chance and luck. Sometimes luck comes without assistance but—almost
invariably—it does not.
“Feather”—who was then “Amabel”—thought Robert Gareth-Lawless
incredible good luck. He only drifted into her summer by merest chance
because a friend’s yacht in which he was wandering about “came in” for
supplies. A girl Ariel in a thin white frock and with big larkspur blue
eyes yearning at you under her flapping hat as she answers your
questions about the best road to somewhere will not be too difficult
about showing the way herself. And there you are at a first-class
beginning.
The night after she met Gareth-Lawless in a lane whose banks were thick
with bluebells, Amabel and her sister Alice huddled close together in
bed and talked almost pantingly in whispers over the possibilities
which might reveal themselves—God willing—through a further
acquaintance with Mr. Gareth-Lawless. They were eager and breathlessly
anxious but they were young—_young_ in their eagerness and Amabel was
full of delight in his good looks.
“He is _so_ handsome, Alice,” she whispered actually hugging her, not
with affection but exultation. “And he can’t be more than twenty-six or
seven. And I’m _sure_ he liked me. You know that way a man has of
looking at you—one sees it even in a place like this where there are
only curates and things. He has brown eyes—like dark bright water in
pools. Oh, Alice, if he _should!_”
Alice was not perhaps as enthusiastic as her sister. Amabel had seen
him first and in the Darrel household there was a sort of unwritten,
not always observed code flimsily founded on “First come first served.”
Just at the outset of an acquaintance one might say “Hands off” as it
were. But not for long.
“It doesn’t matter how pretty one is they seldom do,” Alice grumbled.
“And he mayn’t have a farthing.”
“Alice,” whispered Amabel almost agonizingly, “I wouldn’t _care_ a
farthing—if only he _would!_ Have I a farthing—have you a farthing—has
anyone who ever comes here a farthing? He lives in London. He’d take me
away. To live even in a back street _in London_ would be Heaven! And
one _must_—as soon as one possibly can.—One _must!_ And Oh!” with
another hug which this time was a shudder, “think of what Doris Harmer
had to do! Think of his thick red old neck and his horrid fatness! And
the way he breathed through his nose. Doris said that at first it used
to make her ill to look at him.”
“She’s got over it,” whispered Alice. “She’s almost as fat as he is
now. And she’s loaded with pearls and things.”
“I shouldn’t have to ‘get over’ anything,” said Amabel, “if this one
_would_. I could fall in love with him in a minute.”
“Did you hear what Father said?” Alice brought out the words rather
slowly and reluctantly. She was not eager on the whole to yield up a
detail which after all added glow to possible prospects which from her
point of view were already irritatingly glowing. Yet she could not
resist the impulse of excitement. “No, you didn’t hear. You were out of
the room.”
“What about? Something about _him?_ I hope it wasn’t horrid. How could
it be?”
“He said,” Alice drawled with a touch of girlishly spiteful
indifference, “that if he was one of the poor Gareth-Lawlesses he
hadn’t much chance of succeeding to the title. His uncle—Lord Lawdor—is
only forty-five and he has four splendid healthy boys—perfect little
giants.”
“Oh, I didn’t know there was a title. How splendid,” exclaimed Amabel
rapturously. Then after a few moments’ innocent maiden reflection she
breathed with sweet hopefulness from under the sheet, “Children so
often have scarlet fever or diphtheria, and you know they say those
very strong ones are more likely to die than the other kind. The Vicar
of Sheen lost _four_ all in a week. And the Vicar died too. The doctor
said the diphtheria wouldn’t have killed him if the shock hadn’t
helped.”
Alice—who had a teaspoonful more brain than her sister—burst into a fit
of giggling it was necessary to smother by stuffing the sheet in her
mouth.
“Oh! Amabel!” she gurgled. “You _are_ such a donkey! You would have
been silly enough to say that even if people could have heard you.
Suppose _he_ had!”
“Why should he care,” said Amabel simply. “One can’t help thinking
things. If it happened he would be the Earl of Lawdor and—”
She fell again into sweet reflection while Alice giggled a little more.
Then she herself stopped and thought also. After all perhaps—! One had
to be practical. The tenor of her thoughts was such that she did not
giggle again when Amabel broke the silence by whispering with
tremulous, soft devoutness.
“Alice—do you think that praying _really_ helps?”
“I’ve prayed for things but I never got them,” answered Alice. “But you
know what the Vicar said on Sunday in sermon about ‘Ask and ye shall
receive’.”
“Perhaps you haven’t prayed in the right spirit,” Amabel suggested with
true piety. “Shall we—shall we try? Let us get out of bed and kneel
down.”
“Get out of bed and kneel down yourself,” was Alice’s sympathetic
rejoinder. “You wouldn’t take that much trouble for _me_.”
Amabel sat up on the edge of the bed. In the faint moonlight and her
white night-gown she was almost angelic. She held the end of the long
fair soft plait hanging over her shoulder and her eyes were full of
reproach.
“I think you ought to take _some_ interest,” she said plaintively. “You
know there would be more chances for you and the others—if I were not
here.”
“I’ll wait until you are not here,” replied the unstirred Alice.
But Amabel felt there was no time for waiting in this particular case.
A yacht which “came in” might so soon “put out”. She knelt down,
clasping her slim young hands and bending her forehead upon them. In
effect she implored that Divine Wisdom might guide Mr. Robert
Gareth-Lawless in the much desired path. She also made divers promises
because nothing is so easy as to promise things. She ended with a
gently fervent appeal that—if her prayer were granted—something “might
happen” which would result in her becoming a Countess of Lawdor. One
could not have put the request with greater tentative delicacy.
She felt quite uplifted and a trifle saintly when she rose from her
knees. Alice had actually fallen asleep already and she sighed quite
tenderly as she slipped into the place beside her. Almost as her lovely
little head touched the pillow her own eyes closed. Then she was asleep
herself—and in the faintly moonlit room with the long soft plait
trailing over her shoulder looked even more like an angel than before.
Whether or not as a result of this touching appeal to the Throne of
Grace, Robert Gareth-Lawless _did_. In three months there was a wedding
at the very ancient village church and five flowerlike bridesmaids
followed a flower of a bride to the altar and later in the day to the
station from where Mr. and Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless went on their way
to London. Perhaps Alice and Olive also knelt by the side of their
white beds the night after the wedding, for on that propitious day two
friends of the bridegroom’s—one of them the owner of the yacht—decided
to return again to the place where there were to be found the most
nymphlike of pretty creatures a man had ever by any chance beheld. Such
delicate little fair crowned heads, such delicious little tip-tilted
noses and slim white throats, such ripples of gay chatter and nonsense!
When a man has fortune enough of his own why not take the prettiest
thing he sees? So Alice and Olive were borne away also and poor Mr. and
Mrs. Darrel breathed sighs of relief and there were not only more
chances but causes for bright hopefulness in the once crowded house
which now had rooms to spare.
A certain inattention on the part of the Deity was no doubt responsible
for the fact that “something” did not “happen” to the family of Lord
Lawdor. On the contrary his four little giants of sons throve
astonishingly and a few months after the Gareth-Lawless wedding Lady
Lawdor—a trifle effusively, as it were—presented her husband with twin
male infants so robust that they were humorously known for years
afterwards as the “Twin Herculeses.”
By that time Amabel had become “Feather” and despite Robert’s ingenious
and carefully detailed method of living upon nothing whatever, had many
reasons for knowing that “life in a back street in London” is not a
matter of beds of roses. Since the back street must be the “right
street” and its accompaniments must wear an aspect of at least seeming
to belong to the right order of detachment and fashionable ease, one
was always in debt and forced to keep out of the way of duns, and
obliged to pretend things and tell lies with aptness and outward
gaiety. Sometimes one actually was so far driven to the wall that one
could not keep most important engagements and the invention of
plausible excuses demanded absolute genius. The slice of a house
between the two big ones was a rash venture of the honeymoon but a year
of giving smart little dinners in it and going to smart big dinners
from it in a smart if small brougham 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.
Nobody had contemplated her for a moment. Feather cried for a week when
she first announced the probability of her advent. Afterwards however
she managed to forget the approaching annoyance and went to parties and
danced to the last hour continuing to be a great success because her
prettiness was delicious and her diaphanous mentality was no strain
upon the minds of her admirers male and female.
That a Feather should become a parent gave rise to much wit of light
weight when Robin in the form of a bundle of lace was carried down by
her nurse to be exhibited in the gaudy crowded little drawing-room in
the slice of a house in the Mayfair street.
It was the Head of the House of Coombe who asked the first question
about her.
“What will you _do_ with her?” he inquired detachedly.
The frequently referred to “babe unborn” could not have presented a
gaze of purer innocence than did the lovely Feather. Her eyes of
larkspur blueness were clear of any thought or intention as spring
water is clear at its unclouded best.
Her ripple of a laugh was clear also—enchantingly clear.
“Do!” she repeated. “What is it people ‘do’ with babies? I suppose the
nurse knows. I don’t. I wouldn’t touch her for the world. She frightens
me.”
She floated a trifle nearer and bent to look at her.
“I shall call her Robin,” she said. “Her name is really Roberta as she
couldn’t be called Robert. People will turn round to look at a girl
when they hear her called Robin. Besides she has eyes like a robin. I
wish she’d open them and let you see.”
By chance she did open them at the moment—quite slowly. They were dark
liquid brown and seemed to be all lustrous iris which gazed unmovingly
at the object in line of focus. That object was the Head of the House of
Coombe.
“She is staring at me. There is antipathy in her gaze,” he said, and
stared back unmovingly also, but with a sort of cold interest.