What did occur was not at all complicated. It would not have been
possible for a woman to have spent her girlhood with the cleverest
mother of her day and have emerged from her training either obstinate
or illogical. Lady Lothwell listened to as much of the history of Robin
as her mother chose to tell her and plainly felt an amiable interest in
it. She knew much more detail and gossip concerning Mrs. Gareth-Lawless
than the Duchess herself did. She had heard of the child who was kept
out of sight, and she had been somewhat disgusted by a vague story of
Lord Coombe’s abnormal interest in it and the ugly hint that he had an
object in view. It was too unpleasantly morbid to be true of a man her
mother had known for years.
“Of course you were not thinking of anything large or formal?” she said
after a moment of smiling hesitation.
“No. I am not launching a girl into society. I only want to help her to
know a few nice young people who are good-natured and well-mannered.
She is not the ordinary old lady’s companion and if she were not so
strict with herself and with me, I confess I should behave towards her
very much as I should behave to Kathryn if you could spare her to live
with me. She is a heart-warming young thing. Because I am known to have
one of my eccentric fancies for her and because after all her father
_was_ well connected, her present position will not be the obstacle.
She is not the first modern girl who has chosen to support herself.”
“But isn’t she much too pretty?”
“Much. But she doesn’t flaunt it.”
“But heart-warming—and too pretty! Dearest mamma!” Lady Lothwell
laughed again. “She can do no harm to Kathryn, but I own that if George
were not at present quite madly in love with a darling being at least
fifteen years older than himself I should pause to reflect. Mrs. Stacy
will keep him steady—Mrs. Alan Stacy, you know—the one with the
magnificent henna hair, and the eyes that droop. No boy of twenty-two
can resist her. They call her adorers ‘The Infant School’.”
“A small dinner and a small dance—and George and Kathryn may be the
beginning of an interesting experiment. It would be pretty and kind of
you to drop in during the course of the evening.”
“Are you hoping to—perhaps—make a marriage for her?” Lady Lothwell
asked the question a shade disturbedly. “You are so amazing, mamma
darling, that I know you will do it, if you believe in it. You seem to
be able to cause the things you really want, to evolve from the
universe.”
“She is the kind of girl whose place in the universe is in the home of
some young man whose own place in the universe is in the heart and soul
and life of her kind of girl. They ought to carry out the will of God
by falling passionately in love with each other. They ought to marry
each other and have a large number of children as beautiful and
rapturously happy as themselves. They would assist in the evolution of
the race.”
“Oh! Mamma! how delightful you always are! For a really brilliant woman
you are the most adorable dreamer in the world.”
“Dreams are the only things which are true. The rest are nothing but
visions.”
“Angel!” her daughter laughed a little adoringly as she kissed her. “I
will do whatever you want me to do. I always did, didn’t I? It’s your
way of making one see what you see when you are talking that does it.”
It was understood before they parted that Kathryn and George would be
present at the small dinner and the small dance, and that a few other
agreeable young persons might be trusted to join them, and that Lady
Lothwell and perhaps her husband would drop in.
“It’s your being almost Early Victorian, mamma, which makes it easy for
you to initiate things. You will initiate little Miss Lawless. It was
rather neat of her to prefer to drop the ‘Gareth.’ There has been less
talk in late years of the different classes ‘keeping their
places’—‘upper’ and ‘lower’ classes really strikes one as vulgar.”
“We may ‘keep our places’,” the Duchess said. “We may hold on to them
as firmly as we please. It is the places themselves which are moving,
my dear. It is not unlike the beginning of a landslide.”
Robin went to Dowie’s room the next evening and stood a moment in
silence watching her sewing before she spoke. She looked anxious and
even pale.
“Her grace is going to give a party to some young people, Dowie,” she
said. “She wishes me to be present. I—I don’t know what to do.”
“What you must do, my dear, is to put on your best evening frock and go
downstairs and enjoy yourself as the other young people will. Her grace
wants you to see someone your own age,” was Dowie’s answer.
“But I am not like the others. I am only a girl earning her living as a
companion. How do I know—”
“Her grace knows,” Dowie said. “And what she asks you to do it is your
duty to do—and do it prettily.”
Robin lost even a shade more colour.
“Do you realize that I have never been to a party in my life—not even
to a children’s party, Dowie? I shall not know how to behave myself.”
“You know how to talk nicely to people, and you know how to sit down
and rise from your chair and move about a room like a quiet young lady.
You dance like a fairy. You won’t be asked to do anything more.”
“The Duchess,” reflected Robin aloud slowly, “would not let me come
downstairs if she did not know that people would—be kind.”
“Lady Kathryn and Lord Halwyn are coming. They are her own
grandchildren,” Dowie said.
“How did you know that?” Robin inquired.
“Because her grace was kind enough to say to me that she was thinking
of something like this. It was your being a girl among those so much
older that brought it to her mind——and her being what she is.”
Robin’s colour began to come back.
“It’s not what usually happens to girls in situations,” she said.
“Her grace herself isn’t what usually happens,” said Dowie. “There is
no one like her for high wisdom and kindness.”
Having herself awakened to the truth of this confidence-inspiring fact,
Robin felt herself supported by it. One knew what far-sighted
perception and clarity of experienced vision this one woman had gained
during her many years of life. If she had elected to do this thing she
had seen her path clear before her and was not offering a gift which
awkward chance might spoil or snatch away from the hand held out to
receive it. A curious slow warmth began to creep about Robin’s heart
and in its mounting gradually fill her being. It was true she had been
taught to dance, to move about and speak prettily. She had been taught
a great many things which seemed to be very carefully instilled into
her mind and body without any special reason. She had not been aware
that Lord Coombe and Mademoiselle Vallé had directed and discussed her
training as if it had been that of a young royal person whose equipment
must be a flawless thing. If the Dowager Duchess of Darte had wished to
present her at Court some fair morning she would have known the length
of the train she must wear, where she must make her curtseys and to
whom and to what depth, how to kiss the royal hand, and how to manage
her train when she retired from the presence. When she had been taught
this she had asked Mademoiselle Vallé if the training was part of every
girl’s education and Mademoiselle had answered,
“It is best to know everything—even ceremonials which may or may not
prove of use. It all forms part of a background and prevents one from
feeling unfamiliar with customs.”
When she had passed the young pairs in the streets she had found an
added interest in them because of this background. She could imagine
them dancing together in fairy ball rooms whose lights and colours her
imagination was obliged to construct for her out of its own fabric; she
knew what the girls would look like if they went to a Drawing Room and
she often wondered if they would feel shy when the page spread out
their lovely peacock tails for them and left them to their own devices.
It was mere Nature that she should have pondered and pondered and
sometimes unconsciously longed to feel herself part of the flood of
being sweeping past her as she stood apart on the brink of the river.
The warmth about her heart made it beat a little faster. She opened the
door of her wardrobe when she found herself in her bedroom. The dress
hung modestly in its corner shrouded from the penetration of London
fogs by clean sheeting. It was only white and as simple as she knew how
to order it, but Mademoiselle had taken her to a young French person
who knew exactly what she was doing in all cases, and because the girl
had the supple lines of a wood nymph and the eyes of young antelope she
had evolved that which expressed her as a petal expresses its rose.
Robin locked her door and took the dress down and found the silk
stockings and slippers which belonged to it. She put them all on
standing before her long mirror and having left no ungiven last touch
she fell a few steps backward and looked at herself, turning and
balancing herself as a bird might have done. She turned lightly round
and round.
“Yes. I _am_—” she said. “I am—very!”
The next instant she laughed at herself outright.
“How silly! How silly!” she said. “Almost _everybody_ is—more or less!
I wonder if I remember the new steps.” For she had been taught the new
steps—the new walking and swayings and pauses and sudden swirls and
swoops. And her new dress was as short as other fashionable girls’
dresses were, but in her case revealed a haunting delicacy of contour
and line.
So before her mirror she danced alone and as she danced her lips parted
and her breast rose and fell charmingly, and her eyes lighted and
glowed as any girl’s might have done or as a joyous girl nymph’s might
have lighted as she danced by a pool in her forest seeing her
loveliness mirrored there.
Something was awakening as something had awakened when Donal had kissed
a child under the soot sprinkled London trees.