Donal talked a great deal as he pranced home. Feather had excited as
well as allured him. Why hadn’t she told Robin she was her mother? Why
did she never show her pictures in the Nursery and hold her on her
knee? She was little enough to be held on knees! Did some mothers never
tell their children and did the children never find out? This was what
he wanted to hear explained. He took the gloved hand near him and held
it close and a trifle authoritatively.
“I am glad I know you are my mother,” he said, “I always knew.”
He was not sure that the matter was explained very clearly. Not as
clearly as things usually were. But he was not really disturbed. He had
remembered a book he could show Robin tomorrow and he thought of that.
There was also a game in a little box which could be easily carried
under his arm. His mother was “thinking” and he was used to that. It
came on her sometimes and of his own volition he always, on such
occasion, kept as quiet as was humanly possible.
After he was asleep, Helen sent for Nanny.
“You’re tired, ma’am,” the woman said when she saw her, “I’m afraid
you’ve a headache.”
“I have had a good deal of thinking to do since this afternoon,” her
mistress answered, “You were right about the nurse. The little girl
might have been playing with any boy chance sent in her way—boys quite
unlike Donal.”
“Yes, ma’am.” And because she loved her and knew her face and voice
Nanny watched her closely.
“You will be as—startled—as I was. By some queer chance the child’s
mother was driving by and saw us and came in to speak to me. Nanny—she
is Mrs. Gareth-Lawless.”
Nanny did start; she also reddened and spoke sharply.
“And she came in and spoke to you, ma’am!”
“Things have altered and are altering every day,” Mrs. Muir said.
“Society is not at all inflexible. She has a smart set of her own—and
she is very pretty and evidently well provided for. Easy-going people
who choose to find explanations suggest that her husband was a relation
of Lord Lawdor’s.”
“And him a canny Scotchman with a new child a year. Yes, my certie,”
offered Nanny, with an acrid grimness. Mrs. Muir’s hands clasped
strongly as they lay on the table before her.
“That doesn’t come within my bailiewick,” she said in her quiet voice.
“Her life is her own and not mine. Words are the wind that blows.” She
stopped just a moment and began again. “We must leave for Scotland by
the earliest train.”
“What’ll he do?” the words escaped from the woman as if involuntarily.
She even drew a quick breath. “He’s a strong feeling bairn—strong!”
“He’ll be stronger when he is a young man, Nanny!” desperately. “That
is why I must act now. There is no half way. I don’t want to be hard.
Oh, am I hard—am I hard?” she cried out low as if she were pleading.
“No, ma’am. You are not. He’s your own flesh and blood.” Nanny had
never before seen her mistress as she saw her in the next curious
almost exaggerated moment.
Her hand flew to her side.
“He’s my heart and my soul—” she said, “—he is the very entrails of me!
And it will hurt him so and I cannot explain to him because he is too
young to understand. He is only a little boy who must go where he is
taken. And he cannot help himself. It’s—unfair!”
Nanny was prone to become more Scotch as she became moved. But she
still managed to look grim.
“He canna help himsel,” she said, “an waur still, _you_ canna.”
There was a moment of stillness and then she said:
“I must go and pack up.” And walked out of the room.
Donal always slept like a young roe in the bracken, and in deep and
rapturous ease he slept this night. Another perfectly joyful day had
passed and his Mother had liked Robin and kissed her. All was well with
the world. As long as he had remained awake—and it had not been long—he
had thought of delightful things unfeverishly. Of Robin, somehow at
Braemarnie, growing bigger very quickly—big enough for all sorts of
games—learning to ride Chieftain, even to gallop. His mother would buy
another pony and they could ride side by side. Robin would laugh and
her hair would fly behind her if they went fast. She would see how fast
he could go—she would see him make Chieftain jump. They would have
picnics—catch sight of deer and fawns delicately lifting their feet as
they stepped. She would always look at him with that nice look in her
eyes and the little smile which came and went in a second. She was
quite different from the minister’s little girls at the Manse. He liked
her—he liked her!
He was wakened by a light in his room and by the sound of moving about.
He sat up quickly and found his Mother standing by his bed and Nanny
putting things into a travelling bag. He felt as if his Mother looked
taller than she had looked yesterday—and almost thin—and her face was
anxious and—shy.
“We let you sleep as late as we could, Donal,” she said. “You must get
up quickly now and have breakfast. Something has happened. We are
obliged to go back to Scotland by very early train. There is not a
minute to waste.”
At first he only said:
“Back!”
“Yes, dear. Get up.”
“To Braemarnie?”
“Yes, dear laddie!”
He felt himself grow hot and cold.
“Away! Away!” he said again vaguely.
“Yes. Get up, dear.”
He was as she had said only a little boy and accustomed to do as he was
told. He was also a fine, sturdy little Scot with a pride of his own.
His breeding had been of the sort which did not include insubordinate
scenes, so he got out of bed and began to dress. But his mother saw
that his hands shook.
“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.”
He swallowed very hard and was dead still for a few minutes, though he
did not linger over his dressing. His mother felt that the whole thing
was horrible. He was acting almost like a young man even now. She did
not know how she could bear it. She spoke to him in a tone which was
actually rather humble.
“If we knew where she lived you—you could write a little letter and
tell her about it. But we do not where she lives.”
He answered her very low.
“That’s it. And she’s little—and she won’t understand. She’s very
little—really.” There was a harrowingly protective note in his voice.
“Perhaps—she’ll cry.”
Helen looking down at him with anguished eyes—he was buttoning his
shoes—made an unearthly effort to find words, but, as she said them,
she knew they were not the right ones.
“She will be disappointed, of course, but she is so little that she
will not feel it as much as if she were bigger. She will get over it,
darling. Very little girls do not remember things long.” Oh, how coarse
and crass and stupid it sounded—how coarse and crass and stupid to say
it to this small defiant scrap of what seemed the inevitable suffering
of the world!
The clear blue of the eyes Robin had dwelt in, lifted itself to her.
There was something almost fierce in it—almost like impotent hatred of
something.
“She won’t,” he said, and she actually heard him grind his little teeth
after it.
He did not look like Donal when he was dressed and sat at the breakfast
table. He did not eat much of his porridge, but she saw that he
determinedly ate some. She felt several times as if he actually did not
look like anybody she had ever seen. And at the same time his fair
hair, his fair cheeks, and the fair sturdy knees beneath his swinging
kilt made him seem as much a little boy as she had ever known him. It
was his hot blue eyes which were different.
He obeyed her every wish and followed where she led. When the train
laboured out of the big station he had taken a seat in a corner and sat
with his face turned to the window, so that his back was towards her.
He stared and stared at the passing country and she could only see part
of his cheek and the side of his neck. She could not help watching them
and presently she saw a hot red glow under the skin as if a flood had
risen. It subsided in a few moments, but presently she saw it rise
again. This happened several times and he was holding his lip with, his
teeth. Once she saw his shoulders move and he coughed obstinately two
or three times. She knew that he would die before he would let himself
cry, but she wished he would descend to it just this once, as the
fields and hedges raced past and he was carried “Away! Away!” It might
be that it was all his manhood she was saving for him.
He really made her heart stand still for a moment just as she was
thinking this and saying it to herself almost fiercely. He suddenly
turned on her; the blue of his eyes was flaming and the tide had risen
again in his cheeks and neck. It was a thing like rage she saw before
her—a child’s rage and impotently fierce. He cried out as if he were
ending a sentence he had not finished when he spoke as he sat on the
floor buttoning his shoes.
“She has no one but me to remember!” he said. “No one but me had ever
even kissed her. She didn’t know!”
To her amazement he clenched both his savage young fists and shook them
before him.
“It’ll kill me!” he raged.
She could not hold herself back. She caught at him with her arms and
meant to drag him to her breast. “No! No! Donal!” she cried. “Darling!
No—No!” But, as suddenly as the queer unchildish thing had broken out,
did he remember himself and boy shame at his fantastic emotion overtook
him. He had never spoken like that to anyone before! It was almost as
bad as bursting out crying! The red tide ebbed away and he withdrew
himself awkwardly from her embrace. He said not another word and sat
down in his corner with his back turned toward the world.
That the Lady Downstairs, who was so fond of laughing and who knew so
many persons who seemed to laugh nearly all the time, might have been
joking about being her mother presented itself to Robin as a vague
solution of the problem. The Lady had laughed when she said it, as
people so often laughed at children. Perhaps she had only been amusing
herself as grown-up persons were apparently entitled to do. Even Donal
had not seemed wholly convinced and though his mother had said the Lady
Downstairs _was_—somehow the subject had been changed at once. Mrs.
Muir had so soon begun to tell them a story. Robin was not in the least
aware that she had swiftly distracted their attention from a question,
any discussion of which would have involved explanations she could not
have produced. It would have been impossible to make it clear to any
child. She herself was helpless before the situation and therefore her
only refuge was to make the two think of other things. She had so well
done this that Robin had gone home later only remembering the brightly
transitory episode as she recalled others as brief and bright, when she
had stared at a light and lovely figure standing on the nursery
threshold and asking careless questions of Andrews, without coming in
and risking the freshness of her draperies by contact with London
top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact, too full of the reality
of her happiness with Donal and Donal’s mother to be more than faintly
bewildered by a sort of visionary conundrum.
Robin, like Donal, slept perfectly through the night. Her sleep was
perhaps made more perfect by fair dreams in which she played in the
Gardens and she and Donal ran to and from the knees of the Mother lady
to ask questions and explain their games. As the child had often, in
the past, looked up at the sky, so she had looked up into the clear
eyes of the Mother lady. There was something in them which she had
never seen before but which she kept wanting to see again. Then there
came a queer bit of a dream about the Lady Downstairs. She came dancing
towards them dressed in hyacinths and with her arms full of daffodils.
She danced before Donal’s Mother—danced and laughed as if she thought
they were all funny. She threw a few daffodils at them and then danced
away. The daffodils lay on the gravel walk and they all looked at them
but no one picked them up. Afterwards—in the dream—Mrs. Muir suddenly
caught her in her arms and kissed her and Robin was glad and felt warm
all over—inside and out.
She wakened smiling at the dingy ceiling of the dingy room. There was
but one tiny shadow in the world, which was the fear that Andrews would
get well too quickly. She was no longer in bed but was well enough to
sit up and sew a little before the tiny fire in the atom of a servant’s
room grate. The doctor would not let her go out yet; therefore, Anne
still remained in charge. Founding one’s hope on previous knowledge of
Anne’s habits, she might be trusted to sit and read and show no
untoward curiosity.
From her bed Robin could see the sky was blue. That meant that she
would be taken out. She lay as quiet as a mouse and thought of the joy
before her, until Anne came to dress her and give her her breakfast.
“We’ll put on your rose-coloured smock this morning,” the girl said,
when the dressing began. “I like the hat and socks that match.”
Anne was not quite like Andrews who was not talkative. She made a
conversational sort of remark after she had tied the white shoes.
“You’ve got pretty little aristocratic legs of your own,” she said
amiably. “I like my children to have nice legs.”
Robin was uplifted in spirit by the commendation, but she hoped Anne
would put on her own things quickly. Sometimes she was rather a long
time. The one course, however, towards which discretion pointed as
entirely safe was the continuance of being as quiet as a mouse—even
quieter, if such thing might be—so that nothing might interfere with
anything any one wanted to do. To interfere would have been to attract
attention and might lead to delay. So she stood and watched the
sparrows inoffensively until Anne called her.
When she found herself out on the street her step was so light on the
pavement that she was rather like a rose petal blown fluttering along
by soft vagrant puffs of spring air. Under her flopping hat her eyes
and lips and cheeks were so happy that more than one passer-by turned
head over shoulder to look after her.
“Your name ought to be Rose,” Anne giggled involuntarily as she glanced
down at her because someone had stared. She had not meant to speak but
the words said themselves.
Because the time was young June even London sky and air were wonderful.
Stray breaths of fragrance came and went. The green of the trees in the
Gardens was light and fresh and in the bedded-out curves and stars and
circles there were more flowers every hour, so that it seemed as if
blooming things with scents grew thick about one’s feet. It was no
wonder one felt light and smiled back at nurses and governesses who
looked up. Robin drew eyes became she was like a summer bloom suddenly
appearing in the Spring Garden.
Nanny was not sitting on the bench near the gate and Donal was not to
be seen amusing himself. But he was somewhere just out of sight, or, if
he had chanced to be late, he would come very soon even if his Mother
could not come with him—though Robin could not believe she would not.
To a child thing both happiness and despair cannot be conceived of
except as lasting forever.
Anne sat down and opened her book. She had reached an exciting part and
looked forward to a thoroughly enjoyable morning.
Robin hopped about for a few minutes. Donal had taught her to hop and
she felt it an accomplishment. Entangled in the meshes of the feathery,
golden, if criminal, ringlets of Lady Audley, Anne did not know when
she hopped round the curve of the walk behind the lilac and snowball
bushes.
Once safe in her bit of enchanted land, the child stood still and
looked about her. There was no kilted figure to be seen, but it would
come towards her soon with swinging plaid and eagle’s feather standing
up grandly in its Highland bonnet. He would come soon. Perhaps he would
come running—and the Mother lady would walk behind more slowly and
smile. Robin waited and looked—she waited and looked.
She was used to waiting but she had never watched for anyone before.
There had never been any one or anything to watch for. The newness of
the suspense gave it a sort of deep thrill at first. How long was “at
first”? She did not know. She stood—and stood—and stood—and looked at
every creature who entered the gate. She did not see any one who looked
in the least like Donal or his Mother or Nanny. There were nurses and
governesses and children and a loitering lady or two. There were never
many people in the Gardens—only those who had keys. She knew nothing
about time but at length she knew that on other mornings they had been
playing together before this.
The small rose-coloured figure stood so still for so long that it began
to look rigid and a nurse sitting at some distance said to another,
“What is that child waiting for?”
What length of time had passed before she found herself looking slowly
down at her feet because of something. The “something” which had drawn
her eyes downward was that she had stood so long without moving that
her tense feet had begun vaguely to hurt her and the ache attracted her
attention. She changed her position slightly and turned her eyes upon
the gate again. He was coming very soon. He would be sure to run fast
now and he would be laughing. Donal! Donal! She even laughed a little
low, quivering laugh herself.
“What is that child waiting for? I should really like to know,” the
distant nurse said again curiously.
If she had been eighteen years old she would have said to herself that
she was waiting hours and hours. She would have looked at a little
watch a thousand times; she would have walked up and down and round and
round the garden never losing sight of the gate—or any other point for
that matter—for more than a minute. Each sound of the church clock
striking a few streets away would have brought her young heart thumping
into her throat.
But a child has no watch, no words out of which to build hopes and
fears and reasons, arguments battling against anguish which
grows—palliations, excuses. Robin, could only wait in the midst of a
slow dark, rising tide of something she had no name for. This slow
rising of an engulfing flood she felt when pins and needles began to
take possession of her feet, when her legs ached, and her eyes felt as
if they had grown big and tightly strained. Donal! Donal! Donal!
Who knows but that some echo of the terror against which she had fought
and screamed on the night when she had lain alone in the dark in her
cradle and Feather had hid her head under the pillow—came back and
closed slowly around and over her, filling her inarticulate being with
panic which at last reached its unbearable height? She had not really
stood waiting the entire morning, but she was young enough to think
that she had and that at any moment Anne might come and take her away.
He had not come running—he had not come laughing—he had not come with
his plaid swinging and his feather standing high! There came a moment
when her strained eyes no longer seemed to see clearly! Something like
a big lump crawled up into her throat! Something of the same sort
happened the day she had burst into a wail of loneliness and Andrews
had pinched her. Panic seized her; she clutched the breast of her
rose-coloured frock and panic-driven turned and fled into a thick clump
of bushes where there was no path and where even Donal had never
pierced.
“That child has run away at last,” the distant nurse remarked, “I’d
like to find out what she _was_ waiting for.”
The shrubs were part of the enclosing planting of the Gardens. The
children who came to play on the grass and paths felt as if they formed
a sort of forest. Because of this, Robin had made her frantic dash to
their shelter. No one would come—no one would see her—no one would hear
her, beneath them it was almost dark. Bereft, broken and betrayed, a
little mad thing, she pushed her way into their shadow and threw
herself face downward, a small, writhing, rose-coloured heap, upon the
damp mould. She could not have explained what she was doing or why she
had given up all, as if some tidal wave had overwhelmed her. Suddenly
she knew that all her new world had gone—forever and ever. As it had
come so it had gone. As she had not doubted the permanence of its joy,
so she _knew_ that the end had come. Only the wisdom of the occult
would dare to suggest that from her child mate, squaring his sturdy
young shoulders against the world as the flying train sped on its way,
some wave of desperate, inchoate thinking rushed backward. There was
nothing more. He would not come back running. He was _gone!_
There was no Andrews to hear. Hidden in the shadow under the shrubs,
the rattle and roar of the street outside the railing drowned her mad
little cries. All she had never done before, she did then. Her hands
beat on the damp mould and tore at it—her small feet beat it and dug
into it. She cried, she sobbed; the big lump in her throat almost
strangled her—she writhed and did not know she was writhing. Her tears
pouring forth wet her hair, her face, her dress. She did not cry out,
“Donal! Donal!” because he was nowhere—nowhere. If Andrews had seen her
she would have said she was “in a tantrum,” But she was not. The world
had been torn away.
A long time afterwards, as it seemed to her, she crawled out from under
the shrubs, carrying her pretty flopping hat in her earth-stained hand.
It was not pretty any more. She had been lying on it and it was crushed
and flat. She crept slowly round the curve to Anne.
Seeing her, Anne sprang to her feet. The rose was a piteous thing
beaten to earth by a storm. The child’s face was swollen and stained,
her hair was tangled and damp there were dark marks of mould on her
dress, her hat, her hands, her white cheeks; her white shoes were
earth-stained also, and the feet in the rose-coloured socks dragged
themselves heavily—slowly.
“My gracious!” the young woman almost shrieked. “What’s happened! Where
have you been? Did you fall down? Ah, my good gracious! Mercy me!”
Robin caught her breath but did not say a word.
“You fell down on a flower bed where they’d been watering the plants!”
almost wept Anne. “You must have. There isn’t that much dirt anywhere
else in the Gardens.”
And when she took her charge home that was the story she told Andrews.
Out of Robin she could get nothing, and it was necessary to have an
explanation.
The truth, of which she knew nothing, was but the story of a child’s
awful dismay and a child’s woe at one of Life’s first betrayals. It
would be left behind by the days which came and went—it would pass—as
all things pass but the everlasting hills—but in this way it was that
it came and wrote itself upon the tablets of a child’s day.