It was no custom of his to outstay other people; in fact, he usually
went away comparatively early. Feather could not imagine what his
reason could be, but she was sure there was a reason. She was often
disturbed by his reasons, and found it difficult to adjust herself to
them. How—even if one had a logically brilliant mind—could one
calculate on a male being, who seemed not exactly to belong to the race
of men.
As a result of the skirt dancing, the furniture of the empty
drawing-room was a little scattered and untidy, but Feather had found a
suitable corner among cushions on a sofa, after everyone had gone
leaving Coombe alone with her. She wished he would sit down, but he
preferred to stand in his still, uncomfortable way.
“I know you are going to tell me something,” she broke the silence.
“I am. When I went out of the room, I did not drive round to my club as
I said I found myself obliged to. I went upstairs to the third floor—to
the Nursery.”
Feather sat quite upright.
“_You_ went up to the Nursery!” If this was the reason for his staying,
what on earth had he come upon in the region of the third floor, and
how ridiculously unlike him to allow himself to interfere. Could it be
Andrews and Jennings? Surely Andrews was too old.—This passed across
her mind in a flash.
“You called Andrews to use her authority with the child when she would
not shake hands with me. The little creature, for some reason of her
own, evidently feels an antipathy to me. That interested me and I
watched her as Andrews whispered in her ear. The woman’s vanity was
stung. I realized that she whispered a threat. A hint of actual
ferocity showed in her eyes in spite of herself. Robin turned pale.”
“Andrews was quite right. Children must be punished when they are
rude.” Feather felt this at once silly and boring. What did he know
about such matters?
“The child said, ‘Andrews will pinch me!’ and I caught Andrews’ eye and
knew it was true—also that she had done it before. I looked at the
woman’s long, thin, strong fingers. They were cruel fingers. I do not
take liberties, as a rule, but I took a liberty. I excused myself and
climbed three flights of stairs.”
Never had Feather been so surprised in her life. She looked like a
bewildered child.
“But—what _could_ it matter to _you?_” she said in soft amaze.
“I don’t know,” his answer came after a moment’s pause. “I have
caprices of mood. Certain mental images made my temperature rise.
Momentarily it did matter. One is like that at times. Andrews’ feline
face and her muscular fingers—and the child’s extraordinarily exquisite
flesh—gave me a second’s furious shudder.”
Feather quite broke in upon him.
“Are you—are you _fond_ of children?”
“No,” he was really abrupt. “I never thought of such a thing in my
life—as being _fond_ of things.”
“That was what—I mean I thought so.” Feather faltered, as if in polite
acquiescence with a quite natural fact.
Coombe proceeded:
“As I went up the stairs I heard screams and I thought that the
pinching had begun. I got up quickly and opened the door and found the
woman lying flat on the floor by the bed, dragging out the child who
had hidden under it. The woman’s face was devilish, and so was her
voice. I heard her threats. She got on her feet and dragged the child
up and held her between her knees. She clapped her hand over mouth to
stifle her shrieks. There I stopped her. She had a fright at sight of
me which taught her something.” He ended rather slowly. “I took the
great liberty of ordering her to pack her box and leave the
house—course,” with a slight bow, “using you as my authority.”
“Andrews!” cried Feather, aghast. “Has she—gone?”
“Would you have kept her?” he inquired.
“It’s true that—that _pinching_” Feather’s voice almost held tears,
“—really _hard_ pinching is—is not proper. But Andrews has been
invaluable. Everyone says Robin is better dressed and better kept than
other children. And she is never allowed to make the least noise—”
“One wouldn’t if one were pinched by those devilish, sinewy fingers
every time one raised one’s voice. Yes. She has gone. I ordered her to
put her charge to bed before she packed. I did not leave her alone with
Robin. In fact, I walked about the two nurseries and looked them over.”
He had walked about the Night Nursery and the Day Nursery! He—the Head
of the House of Coombe, whose finely acrid summing up of things, they
were all secretly afraid of, if the truth were known. “They” stood for
her smart, feverishly pleasure-chasing set. In their way, they half
unconsciously tried to propitiate something in him, always without
producing the least effect. Her mental vision presented to her his
image as he had walked about the horrid little rooms, his somewhat
stiffly held head not much below the low ceilings. He had taken in
shabby carpets, furniture, faded walls, general dim dinginess.
“It’s an unholy den for anything to spend its days in—that third
floor,” he made the statement detachedly, in a way. “If she’s six, she
has lived six years there—and known nothing else.”
“All London top floors are like it,” said Feather, “and they are all
nurseries and school rooms—where there are children.”
His faintly smiling glance took in her girl-child slimness in its
glittering sheath—the zephyr scarf floating from the snow of her bared
loveliness—her delicate soft chin deliciously lifted as she looked up
at him.
“How would _you_ like it?” he asked.
“But I am not a child,” in pretty protest. “Children are—are
different!”
“You look like a child,” he suddenly said, queerly—as if the aspect of
her caught him for an instant and made him absent-minded. “Sometimes—a
woman does. Not often.”
She bloomed into a kind of delighted radiance.
“You don’t often pay me compliments,” she said. “That is a beautiful
one. Robin—makes it more beautiful.”
“It isn’t a compliment,” he answered, still watching her in the
slightly absent manner. “It is—a tragic truth.”
He passed his hand lightly across his eyes as if he swept something
away, and then both looked and spoke exactly as before.
“I have decided to buy the long lease of this house. It is for sale,”
he said, casually. “I shall buy it for the child.”
“For Robin!” said Feather, helplessly.
“Yes, for Robin.”
“It—it would be an income—whatever happened. It is in the very heart of
Mayfair,” she said, because, in her astonishment—almost
consternation—she could think of nothing else. He would not buy it for
her. He thought her too silly to trust. But, if it were Robin’s—it
would be hers also. A girl couldn’t turn her own mother into the
street. Amid the folds of her narrow being hid just one spark of
shrewdness which came to life where she herself was concerned.
“Two or three rooms—not large ones—can be added at the back,” he went
on. “I glanced out of a window to see if it could be done.”
Incomprehensible as he was, one might always be sure of a certain
princeliness in his inexplicable methods. He never was personal or
mean. An addition to the slice of a house! That really _was_ generous!
Entrancement filled her.
“That really is kind of you,” she murmured, gratefully. “It seems too
much to ask!”
“You did not ask it,” was his answer.
“But I shall benefit by it. Nothing _could be_ nicer. These rooms are
so much too small,” glancing about her in flushed rapture, “And my
bedroom is dreadful. I’m obliged to use Rob’s for a dressing-room.”
“The new rooms will be for Robin,” he said. An excellent method he had
discovered, of entirely detaching himself from the excitements and
emotions of other persons, removed the usual difficulties in the way of
disappointing—speaking truths to—or embarrassing people who deserved
it. It was this method which had utterly cast down the defences of
Andrews. Feather was so wholly left out of the situation that she was
actually almost saved from its awkwardness. “When one is six,” he
explained, “one will soon be seven—nine—twelve. Then the teens begin to
loom up and one cannot be concealed in cupboards on a top floor. Even
before that time a governess is necessary, and, even from the abyss of
my ignorance, I see that no respectable woman would stand either the
Night or the Day Nursery. Your daughter—”
“Oh, don’t call her _that!_” cried Feather. “My daughter! It sounds as
if she were eighteen!” She felt as if she had a sudden hideous little
shock. Six years _had_ passed since Bob died! A daughter! A school girl
with long hair and long legs to keep out of the way. A grown-up girl to
drag about with one. Never would she do it!
“Three sixes are eighteen,” Coombe continued, “as was impressed upon
one in early years by the multiplication table.”
“I never saw you so interested in anything before,” Feather faltered.
“Climbing steep, narrow, horrid stairs to her nursery! Dismissing her
nurse!” She paused a second, because a very ugly little idea had
clutched at her. It arose from and was complicated with many fantastic,
half formed, secret resentments of the past. It made her laugh a shade
hysterical.
“Are you going to see that she is properly brought up and educated, so
that if—anyone important falls in love with her she can make a good
match?”
Hers was quite a hideous little mind, he was telling himself—fearful in
its latter day casting aside of all such small matters as taste and
feeling. People stripped the garments from things in these days. He
laughed inwardly at himself and his unwitting “these days.” Senile
severity mouthed just such phrases. Were they not his own days and the
outcome of a past which had considered itself so much more decorous?
Had not boldly questionable attitudes been held in those other days?
How long was it since the Prince Regent himself had flourished? It was
only that these days brought it all close against one’s eyes. But this
exquisite creature had a hideous little mind of her own whatsoever her
day.
Later, he confessed to himself that he was unprepared to see her spring
to her feet and stand before him absurdly, fantastically near being
impassioned.
“You think I am too silly to _see_ anything,” she broke forth. “But I
do see—a long way sometimes. I can’t bear it but I do—I do! I shall
have a grown-up daughter. She will be the kind of girl everyone will
look at—and someone—important—may want to marry her. But, Oh!—” He was
reminded of the day when she had fallen at his feet, and clasped his
rigid and reluctant knees. This was something of the same feeble
desperation of mood. “Oh, _why_ couldn’t someone like that have wanted
to marry _me!_ See!” she was like a pathetic fairy as she spread her
nymphlike arms, “how _pretty_ I am!”
His gaze held her a moment in the singular fashion with which she had
become actually familiar, because—at long intervals—she kept seeing it
again. He quite gently took her fingers and returned her to her sofa.
“Please sit down again,” he requested. “It will be better.”
She sat down without another imbecile word to say. As for him, he
changed the subject.
“With your permission, Benby will undertake the business of the lease
and the building,” he explained. “The plans will be brought to you. We
will go over them together, if you wish. There will be decent rooms for
Robin and her governess. The two nurseries can be made fit for human
beings to live in and used for other purposes. The house will be
greatly improved.”
It was nearly three o’clock when Feather went upstairs to her dozing
maid, because, after he had left her, she sat some time in the empty,
untidy little drawing-room and gazed straight before her at a painted
screen on which shepherdesses and swains were dancing in a Watteau
glade infested by flocks of little Loves.