As a result of this, her grace saw Mademoiselle Vallé alone a few
mornings later and talked to her long and quietly. Their comprehension
of each other was complete. Before their interview was at an end the
Duchess’ interest in the adventure she was about to enter into had
become profound.
“The sooner she is surrounded by a new atmosphere, the better,” was one
of the things the Frenchwoman had said. “The prospect of an arrangement
so perfect and so secure fills me with the profoundest gratitude. It is
absolutely necessary that I return to my parents in Belgium. They are
old and failing in health and need me greatly. I have been sad and
anxious for months because I felt that it would be wickedness to desert
this poor child. I have been torn in two. Now I can be at peace—thank
the good God.”
“Bring her to me tomorrow if possible,” the Duchess said when they
parted. “I foresee that I may have something to overcome in the fact
that I am Lord Coombe’s old friend, but I hope to be able to overcome
it.”
“She is a baby—she is of great beauty—she has a passionate little soul
of which she knows nothing.” Mademoiselle Vallé said it with an anxious
reflectiveness. “I have been afraid. If I were her mother——” her eyes
sought those of the older woman.
“But she has no mother,” her grace answered. Her own eyes were serious.
She knew something of girls, of young things, of the rush and tumult of
young life in them and of the outlet it demanded. A baby who was of
great beauty and of a passionate soul was no trivial undertaking for a
rheumatic old duchess, but—“Bring her to me,” she said.
So was Robin brought to the tall Early Victorian mansion in the
belatedly stately square. And the chief thought in her mind was that
though mere good manners demanded under the circumstances that she
should come to see the Dowager Duchess of Darte and be seen by her, if
she found that she was like Lord Coombe, she would not be able to
endure the prospect of a future spent in her service howsoever
desirable such service might outwardly appear. This desirableness
Mademoiselle Vallé had made clear to her. She was to be the companion
of a personage of great and mature charm and grace who desired not mere
attendance, but something more, which something included the warmth and
fresh brightness of happy youth and bloom. She would do for her
employer the things a young relative might do. She would have a suite
of rooms of her own and a freedom as to hours and actions which greater
experience on her part would have taught was not the customary portion
meted out to a paid companion. But she knew nothing of paid service and
a preliminary talk of Coombe’s with Mademoiselle Vallé had warned her
against allowing any suspicion that this “earning a living” had been
too obviously ameliorated.
“Her life is unusual. She herself is unusual in a most dignified and
beautiful way. You will, it might almost be said, hold the position of
a young lady in waiting,” was Mademoiselle’s gracefully put
explanation.
When, after they had been ushered into the room where her grace sat in
her beautiful and mellow corner by the fire, Robin advanced towards the
highbacked chair, what the old woman was chiefly conscious of was the
eyes which seemed all lustrous iris. There was uncommon appeal and fear
in them. The blackness of their setting of up-curled lashes made them
look babyishly wide.
“Mademoiselle Vallé has told me of your wish to take a position as
companion,” the Duchess said after they were seated.
“I want very much,” said Robin, “to support myself and Mademoiselle
thinks that I might fill such a place if I am not considered too
young.”
“You are not too young—for me. I want something young to come and
befriend me. Am I too old for _you?_” Her smile had been celebrated
fifty years earlier and it had not changed. A smile does not. She was
not like Lord Coombe in any degree however remote. She did not belong
to his world, Robin thought.
“If I can do well enough the things you require done,” she answered
blushing her Jacqueminot rose blush, “I shall be grateful if you will
let me try to do them. Mademoiselle will tell you that I have no
experience, but that I am one who tries well.”
“Mademoiselle has answered all my questions concerning your
qualifications so satisfactorily that I need ask you very few.”
Such questions as she asked were not of the order Robin had expected.
She led her into talk and drew Mademoiselle Vallé into the
conversation. It was talk which included personal views of books, old
gardens and old houses, people, pictures and even—lightly—politics.
Robin found herself quite incidentally, as it were, reading aloud to
her an Italian poem. She ceased to be afraid and was at ease. She
forgot Lord Coombe. The Duchess listening and watching her warmed to
her task of delicate investigation and saw reason for anticipating
agreeably stimulating things. She was not taking upon herself a merely
benevolent duty which might assume weight and become a fatigue. In fact
she might trust Coombe for that. After all it was he who had virtually
educated the child—little as she was aware of the singular fact. It was
he who had dragged her forth from her dog kennel of a top floor nursery
and quaintly incongruous as it seemed, had found her a respectable
woman for a nurse and an intelligent person for a governess and
companion as if he had been a domesticated middle class widower with a
little girl to play mother to. She saw in the situation more than
others would have seen in it, but she saw also the ironic humour of it.
Coombe—with the renowned cut of his overcoat—the perfection of his line
and scarcely to be divined suggestions of hue—Coombe!
She did not avoid all mention of his name during the interview, but she
spoke of him only casually, and though the salary she offered was an
excellent one, it was not inordinate. Robin could not feel that she was
not being accepted as of the class of young persons who support
themselves self-respectingly, though even the most modest earned income
would have represented wealth to her ignorance.
Before they parted she had obtained the position so pleasantly
described by Mademoiselle Vallé as being something like that of a young
lady in waiting. “But I am really a companion and I will do
everything—everything I can so that I shall be worth keeping,” she
thought seriously. She felt that she should want to be kept. If Lord
Coombe was a friend of her employer’s it was because the Duchess did
not know what others knew. And her house was not his house—and the
hideous thing she had secretly loathed would be at an end. She would be
supporting herself as decently and honestly as Mademoiselle or Dowie
had supported themselves all their lives.
With an air of incidentally recalling a fact, the Duchess said after
they had risen to leave her:
“Mademoiselle Vallé tells me you have an elderly nurse you are very
fond of. She seems to belong to a class of servants almost extinct.”
“I love her,” Robin faltered—because the sudden reminder brought back a
pang to her. There was a look in her eyes which faltered also. “She
loves me. I don’t know how——” but there she stopped.
“Such women are very valuable to those who know the meaning of their
type. I myself am always in search of it. My dear Miss Brent was of it,
though of a different class.”
“But most people do not know,” said Robin. “It seems old-fashioned to
them—and it’s beautiful! Dowie is an angel.”
“I should like to secure your Dowie for my housekeeper and myself,”—one
of the greatest powers of the celebrated smile was its power to
convince. “A competent person is needed to take charge of the linen. If
we can secure an angel we shall be fortunate.”
A day or so later she said to Coombe in describing the visit.
“The child’s face is wonderful. If you could but have seen her eyes
when I said it. It is not the mere beauty of size and shape and colour
which affect one. It is something else. She is a little flame of
feeling.”
The “something else” was in the sound of her voice as she answered.
“She will be in the same house with me! Sometimes perhaps I may see her
and talk to her! Oh! how _grateful_ I am!” She might even see and talk
to her as often as she wished, it revealed itself and when she and
Mademoiselle got into their hansom cab to drive away, she caught at the
Frenchwoman’s hand and clung to it, her eyelashes wet,
“It is as if there _must_ be Goodness which takes care of one,” she
said. “I used to believe in it so—until I was afraid of all the world.
Dowie means most of all. I did not know how I could bear to let her go
away. And since her husband and her daughter died, she has no one but
me. I should have had no one but her if you had gone back to Belgium,
Mademoiselle. And now she will be safe in the same house with me.
Perhaps the Duchess will keep her until she dies. I hope she will keep
me until I die. I will be as good and faithful as Dowie and perhaps the
Duchess will live until I am quite old—and not pretty any more. And I
will make economies as you have made them, Mademoiselle, and save all
my salary—and I might be able to end my days in a little cottage in the
country.”
Mademoiselle was conscious of an actual physical drag at her
heartstrings. The pulsating glow of her young loveliness had never been
more moving and oh! the sublime certainty of her unconsciousness that
Life lay between this hour and that day when she was “quite old and not
pretty any more” and having made economies could die in a little
cottage in the country! She believed in her vision as she had believed
that Donal would come to her in the garden.
Upon Feather the revelation that her daughter had elected to join the
ranks of girls who were mysteriously determined to be responsible for
themselves produced a curious combination of effects. It was presented
to her by Lord Coombe in the form of a simple impersonal statement
which had its air of needing no explanation. She heard it with eyes
widening a little and a smile slowly growing. Having heard, she broke
into a laugh, a rather high-pitched treble laugh.
“Really?” she said. “She is really going to do it? To take a situation!
She wants to be independent and ‘live her own life!’ What a joke—for a
girl of mine!” She was either really amused or chose to seem so.
“What do _you_ think of it?” she asked when she stopped laughing. Her
eyes had curiosity in them.
“I like it,” he answered.
“Of course. I ought to have remembered that you helped her to an Early
Victorian duchess. She’s one without a flaw—the Dowager Duchess of
Darte. The most conscientiously careful mother couldn’t object. It’s
almost like entering into the kingdom of heaven—in a dull way.” She
began to laugh again as if amusing images rose suddenly before her.
“And what does the Duchess think of it?” she said after her laughter
had ceased again. “How does she reconcile herself to the idea of a
companion whose mother she wouldn’t have in her house?”
“We need not enter into that view of the case. You decided some years
ago that it did not matter to you whether Early Victorian duchesses
included you in their visiting lists or did not. More modern ones do I
believe—quite beautiful and amusing ones.”
“But for that reason I want this one and those like her. They would
bore me, but I want them. I want them to come to my house and be polite
to me in their stuffy way. I want to be invited to their hideous dinner
parties and see them sitting round their tables in their awful family
jewels ‘talking of the sad deaths of kings.’ That’s Shakespeare, you
know. I heard it last night at the theatre.”
“Why do you want it?” Coombe inquired.
“When I ask you why you show your morbid interest in Robin, you say you
don’t know. I don’t know—but I do want it.”
She suddenly flushed, she even showed her small teeth. For an
extraordinary moment she looked like a little cat.
“Robin will hare it,” she cried, grinding a delicate fist into the palm
on her knee. “She’s not eighteen and she’s a beauty and she’s taken up
by a perfectly decent old duchess. She’ll have _everything!_ The
Dowager will marry her to someone important. You’ll help,” she turned
on him in a flame of temper. “You are capable of marrying her
yourself!” There was a a brief but entire silence. It was broken by his
saying,
“She is not capable of marrying _me_.”
There was brief but entire silence again, and it was he who again broke
it, his manner at once cool and reasonable.
“It is better not to exhibit this kind of feeling. Let us be quite
frank. There are few things you feel more strongly than that you do not
want your daughter in the house. When she was a child you told me that
you detested the prospect of having her on your hands. She is being
disposed of in the most easily explained and enviable manner.”
“It’s true—it’s true,” Feather murmured. She began to see advantages
and the look of a little cat died out, or at least modified itself into
that of a little cat upon whom dawned prospects of cream. No mood ever
held her very long. “She won’t come back to stay,” she said. “The
Duchess won’t let her. I can use her rooms and I shall be very glad to
have them. There’s at least some advantage in figuring as a sort of
Dame Aux Camelias.”