Robin
by Frances Hodgson Burnett · English · Gutenberg #18945 · 559,428 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Robin
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
Release date: July 30, 2006 [eBook #18945]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18945
Credits: Produced by Hilary Caws-Elwitt and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBIN ***
Produced by Hilary Caws-Elwitt and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
ROBIN
BY
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
AUTHOR OF
"THE SHUTTLE"
"THE SECRET GARDEN"
"THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE"
ETC.
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1922, BY
THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE YEARS BEFORE
Outline Arranged by Hamilton Williamson
from
_THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE_
In the years when Victorian standards and ideals began to dance an
increasingly rapid jig before amazed lookers-on, who presently found
themselves dancing as madly as the rest--in these years, there lived in
Mayfair, in a slice of a house, Robert Gareth-Lawless and his lovely
young wife. So light and airy was she to earthly vision and so
diaphanous the texture of her mentality that she was known as "Feather."
The slice of a house between two comparatively stately mansions in the
"right street" was a rash venture of the honeymoon.
Robert--well born, irresponsible, without resources--evolved a carefully
detailed method of living upon nothing whatever, of keeping out of the
way of duns, and telling lies with aptness and outward gaiety. But a
year of giving smart little dinners and going to smart big dinners 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. That
a Feather should become a parent gave rise to much wit of light weight
when Robin was exhibited in the form of a bundle of lace.
It was the Head of the House of Coombe who asked:
"What will you do with her?"
"Do?" Feather repeated. "What is it people 'do' with babies? I don't
know. I wouldn't touch her for the world. She frightens me."
Coombe said:
"She is staring at me. There is antipathy in her gaze." He stared back
unwaveringly also, but with a sort of cold interest.
"The Head of the House of Coombe" was not a title to be found in Burke
or Debrett. It was a fine irony of the Head's own. The peerage recorded
him as a marquis and added several lesser attendant titles.
To be born the Head of the House is a weighty and awe-inspiring
thing--one is called upon to be an example.
"I am not sure what I am an example of--or to," he said, on one
occasion, in his light, rather cold and detached way, "which is why I at
times regard myself in that capacity with a slightly ribald lightness."
A reckless young woman once asked him:
"Are you as wicked as people say you are?"
"I really don't know. It is so difficult to decide," he answered.
"Perhaps I am as wicked as I know how to be. And I may have painful
limitations or I may not."
He had reached the age when it was safe to apply to him that vague term
"elderly," and marriage might have been regarded as imperative. But he
had remained unmarried and seemed to consider his abstinence entirely
his own affair.
Courts and capitals knew him, and his opportunities were such as gave
him all ease as an onlooker. He saw closely those who sat with knit
brows and cautiously hovering hand at the great chess-board which is
formed by the map of Europe.
As a statesman or a diplomat he would have gone far, but he had been too
much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent for work
of any order. Having, however, been born with a certain type of brain,
it observed and recorded in spite of him, thereby adding flavour and
interest to existence. But that was all.
Texture and colour gave him almost abnormal pleasure. For this reason,
perhaps, he was the most perfectly dressed man in London.
It was at a garden-party that he first saw Feather. When his eyes fell
upon her, he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking.
Some one standing quite near him said afterwards that he had, for a
second or so, became pale--almost as if he saw something which
frightened him. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to
him. But he had not talked to her for fifteen minutes before he knew
that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour
at the sight of her. He had thought, at first, there was.
This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much
argument over tea-cups regarding the degree of Coombe's interest in her.
Remained, however, the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her.
Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure
that he was in love with her, and very practically aware that the more
men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out
of the slice of a house, the more likely the dwellers in it were to get
good invitations and continued credit.
The realisation of these benefits was cut short. Robert, amazingly and
unnaturally, failed her by dying. He was sent away in a hearse and the
tiny house ceased to represent hilarious little parties.
Bills were piled high everywhere. The rent was long overdue and must be
paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages.
"It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs.
From her bedroom window--at evening--she watched "Cook," the smart
footman, the nurse, the maids, climb into four-wheelers and be driven
away.
"They're gone--all of them!" she gasped. "There's no one left in the
house. It's empty!"
Then was Feather seized with a panic. She had something like hysterics,
falling face downward upon the carpet and clutching her hair until it
fell down. She was not a person to be judged--she was one of the
unexplained incidents of existence.
The night drew in more closely. A prolonged wailing shriek tore through
the utter soundlessness of the house. It came from the night-nursery. It
was Robin who had wakened and was screaming.
"I--I _won't_!" Feather protested, with chattering teeth. "I won't! I
_won't_!"
She had never done anything for the child since its birth. To reach her
now, she would be obliged to go out into the dark--past Robert's
bedroom--_the_ room.
"I--I couldn't--even if I wanted to!" she quaked. "I daren't! I
daren't! I wouldn't do it--for a _million pounds_!"
The screams took on a more determined note. She flung herself on her
bed, burrowing her head under the coverings and pillows she dragged over
her ears to shut out the sounds.
* * * * *
Feather herself had not known, nor in fact had any other human being
known why Lord Coombe drifted into seeming rather to follow her about.
But there existed a reason, and this it was, and this alone, which
caused him to appear--the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form--at
her door.
He listened while she poured it all forth, sobbing. Her pretty hair
loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.
"I would do anything--_any one_ asked me, if they would take care of
me."
A shuddering knowledge that it was quite true that she would do anything
for any man who would take care of her produced an effect on him nothing
else would have produced.
"Do I understand," he said, "that you are willing that _I_ should
arrange this for you?"
"Do you mean--really?" she faltered. "Will you--will you--?"
Her uplifted eyes were like a young angel's brimming with crystal drops
which slipped--as a child's tears slip--down her cheeks.
* * * * *
The florist came and refilled the window-boxes of the slice of a house
with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers. It became an
established fact that the household had not fallen to pieces, and its
frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing, indeed, the air of people
who had never really remained away from it.
As a bird in captivity lives in its cage and, perhaps, believes it to be
the world, Robin lived in her nursery. She was put to bed and taken up,
she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day she was taken out of it
downstairs and into the street. That was all.
It is a somewhat portentous thing to realise that a newborn human
creature can only know what it is taught. To Robin the Lady Downstairs
was merely a radiant and beautiful being of whom one might catch a
glimpse through a door, or if one pressed one's face against the window
pane at the right moment. On the very rare occasions when the Lady
appeared on the threshold of the day-nursery, Robin stood and stared
with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little
questions put to her.
So she remained unaware of mothers and unaware of affection. She never
played with other children. Andrews, her nurse--as behooved one employed
in a house about which there "was talk" bore herself with a lofty and
exclusive air.
"My rule is to keep myself to myself," she said in the kitchen, "and to
look as if I was the one that would turn up noses, if noses was to be
turned up. There's those that would snatch away their children if I let
Robin begin to make up to them."
But one morning, when Robin was watching some quarrelsome sparrows, an
old acquaintance surprised Andrews by appearing in the Gardens and
engaged her in a conversation so delightful that Robin was forgotten to
the extent of being allowed to follow her sparrows round a clump of
shrubbery out of sight.
It was while she watched them that she heard footsteps that stopped near
her. She looked up. A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporan
was standing by her. He spread and curved his red mouth, then began to
run and prance round in a circle, capering like a Shetland pony to
exhibit at once his friendliness and his prowess. After a minute or two
he stopped, breathing fast and glowing.
"My pony in Scotland does that. His name is Chieftain. I'm called Donal.
What are you called?"
"Robin," she answered, her lips and voice trembling with joy. He was so
beautiful.
They began to play together while Andrews' friend recounted intimate
details of a country house scandal.
Donal picked leaves from a lilac bush. Robin learned that if you laid a
leaf flat on the seat of a bench you could prick beautiful patterns on
the leaf's greenness. Donal had--in his rolled down stocking--a little
dirk. He did the decoration with the point of this while Robin looked
on, enthralled.
Through what means children so quickly convey to each other the entire
history of their lives is a sort of occult secret. Before Donal was
taken home, Robin knew that he lived in Scotland and had been brought to
London on a visit, that his other name was Muir, that the person he
called "mother" was a woman who took care of him. He spoke of her quite
often.
"I will bring one of my picture-books to-morrow," he said grandly. "Can
you read at all?"
"No," answered Robin, adoring him. "What are picture books?"
"Haven't you any?" he blurted out.
She lifted her eyes to the glowing blueness of his and said quite
simply, "I haven't anything."
His old nurse's voice came from the corner where she sat.
"I must go back to Nanny," he said, feeling, somehow, as if he had been
running fast. "I'll come to-morrow and bring _two_ picture books."
He put his strong little eight-year-old arms round her and kissed her
full on the mouth. It was the first time, for Robin. Andrews did not
kiss. There was no one else.
"Don't you like to be kissed?" said Donal, uncertain because she looked
so startled and had not kissed him back.
"Kissed," she repeated, with a small caught breath. "Ye--es." She knew
now what it was. It was being kissed. She drew nearer at once and lifted
up her face as sweetly and gladly as a flower lifts itself to the sun.
"Kiss me again," she said, quite eagerly. And this time, she kissed too.
When he ran quickly away, she stood looking after him with smiling,
trembling lips, uplifted, joyful--wondering and amazed.
The next morning Andrews had a cold and her younger sister Anne was
called in to perform her duties. The doctor pronounced the cold serious,
and Andrews was confined to her bed. Hours spent under the trees reading
were entirely satisfactory to Anne. And so, for two weeks, the
soot-sprinkled London square was as the Garden of Eden to Donal and
Robin.
In her fine, aloof way, Helen Muir had learned much in her stays in
London and during her married life--in the exploring of foreign cities
with her husband. She was not proud of the fact that in the event of the
death of Lord Coombe's shattered and dissipated nephew her son would
become heir presumptive to Coombe Court. She had not asked questions
about Coombe. It had not been necessary. Once or twice she had seen
Feather by chance. She was to see her again--by Feather's intention.
With Donal prancing at her side, Mrs. Muir went to the Gardens to meet
the child Nanny had described as "a bit of witch fire dancing--with her
colour and her big silk curls in a heap, and Donal staring at her like a
young man at a beauty."
Robin was waiting behind the lilac bushes and her nurse was already deep
in the mystery of "Lady Audley."
"There she is!" cried Donal, as he ran to her. "My mother has come with
me. This is Robin, mother! This is Robin."
Her exquisiteness and physical brilliancy gave Mrs. Muir something not
unlike a slight shock. Oh! No wonder, since she was like that. She
stooped and kissed the round cheek delicately. She took the little hand
and they walked round the garden, then sat on a bench and watched the
children "make up" things to play.
A victoria was driving past. Suddenly a sweetly hued figure spoke to the
coachman. "Stop here," she said. "I want to get out."
Robin's eyes grew very round and large and filled with a worshipping
light.
"It is," she gasped, "the Lady Downstairs!"
Feather floated near to the seat and paused, smiling. "Where is your
nurse, Robin?" she asked.
"She is only a few yards away," said Mrs. Muir.
"So kind of you to let Robin play with your boy. Don't let her bore you.
I am Mrs. Gareth-Lawless."
There was a little silence, a delicate little silence.
"I recognized you as Mrs. Muir at once," added Feather, unperturbed and
smiling brilliantly. "I saw your portrait at the Grovenor."
"Yes," said Mrs. Muir, gently.
"I wanted very much to see your son; that was why I came."
"Yes," still gently from Mrs. Muir.
"Because of Coombe, you know. We are such old friends. How queer that
the two little things have made friends too. I didn't know."
She bade them good-bye and strayed airily away.
And that night Donal was awakened, was told that "something" had
happened, that they were to go back to Scotland. He was accustomed to do
as he was told. He got out of bed and began to dress, but he swallowed
very hard.
"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."
Then, in a way that was strangely grown up: "She has no one but me to
remember."
* * * * *
The next morning a small, rose-coloured figure stood still for so long
in the gardens that it began to look rigid and some one said, "I wonder
what that little girl is waiting for."
A child has no words out of which to build hopes and fears. Robin could
only wait in the midst of a slow dark rising tide of something she had
no name for. Suddenly she knew. He was _gone_! She crept under the
shrubbery. She cried, she sobbed. If Andrews had seen her she would have
said she was "in a tantrum." But she was not. Her world had been torn
away.
* * * * *
Five weeks later Feather was giving a very little dinner in the slice of
a house. There was Harrowby, a good looking young man with dark eyes,
and the Starling who was "emancipated" and whose real name was Miss
March. The third diner was a young actor with a low, veiled
voice--Gerald Vesey--who adored and understood Feather's clothes.
Over coffee in the drawing-room Coombe joined them just at the moment
that Feather was "going to tell them something to make them laugh."
"Robin is in love!" she cried. "She is five years old and she has been
deserted and Andrews came to tell me she can neither eat nor sleep. The
doctor says she has had a shock."
Coombe did not join in the ripple of laughter, but he looked interested.
"Robin is a stimulating name," said Harrowby. "_Is_ it too late to let
us see her?"
"They usually go to sleep at seven, I believe," remarked Coombe, "but of
course I am not an authority."
Robin was not asleep, though she had long been in bed with her eyes
closed. She had heard Andrews say to her sister Anne:
"Lord Coombe's the reason. She does not want her boy to see or speak to
him, so she whisked him back to Scotland."
"Is Lord Coombe as bad as they say?" put in Anne, with bated breath.
"As to his badness," Robin heard Andrews answer, "there's some that
can't say enough against him. It's what he is in this house that does
it. She won't have her boy playing with a child like Robin."
Then--even as there flashed upon Robin the revelation of her own
unfitness--came a knock at the door.
She was taken up, dressed in her prettiest frock and led down the narrow
stairway. She heard the Lady say:
"Shake hands with Lord Coombe."
Robin put her hand behind her back--she who had never disobeyed since
she was born!
"Be pretty mannered, Miss Robin my dear," Andrews instructed, "and shake
hands with his Lordship."
Each person in the little drawing-room saw the queer flame in the
child-face. She shrilled out her words:
"Andrews will pinch me--Andrews will pinch me! But--No--No!"
She kept her hands behind her back and hatred surged up in her soul.
In spite of her tender years, the doctor held to the theory that Robin
had suffered a shock; she must be taken away to be helped by the bracing
air of the Norfolk coast. Before she went, workmen were to be seen
coming in and out of the house. When she returned to London, she was led
into rooms she had never been in before--light and airy rooms with
pretty walls and furniture.
It was "a whim of Coombe's," as Feather put it, that she should no
longer occupy the little dog-kennels of nurseries, so these new
apartments had been added in the rear. A whim of his also that Andrews,
whose disciplinary methods included pinching, should be dismissed and
replaced by Dowson, a motherly creature with a great deal of common
sense. Robin's lonely little heart opened to her new nurse, who became
in time her "Dowie."
It was Dowson who made it clear to Lord Coombe, at length, that Robin
had reached the age when she needed a governess, and it was he who said
to Feather a few days later:
"A governess will come here to-morrow at eleven o'clock. She is a
Mademoiselle Vallé. She is accustomed to the education of young
children. She will present herself for your approval."
"What on earth can it matter?" Feather cried.
"It does not matter to you," he answered. "It chances for the time being
to matter to _me_."
Mademoiselle Vallé was an intelligent, mature French woman, with a
peculiar power to grasp an intricate situation. She learned to love the
child she taught--a child so strangely alone. As time went on she came
to know that Robin was to receive every educational advantage, every
instruction. In his impersonal, aloof way Coombe was fixed in his
intention to provide her with life's defences. As she grew, graceful as
a willow wand, into a girlhood startlingly lovely, she learned modern
languages, learned to dance divinely.
And all the while he was deeply conscious that her infant hatred had not
lessened--that he could show her no reason why it should.
There were black hours when she was in deadly peril from a human beast,
mad with her beauty. Coombe had almost miraculously saved her, but her
detestation of him still held.
Her one thought--her one hope--was to learn--learn, so that she might
make her own living. Mademoiselle Vallé supported her in this, and
Coombe understood.
* * * * *
In one of the older London squares there was a house upon the broad
doorsteps of which Lord Coombe stood oftener than upon any other. The
old Dowager Duchess of Darte, having surrounded herself with almost
royal dignity, occupied that house in an enforced seclusion. She was a
confirmed rheumatic invalid, but her soul was as strong as it was many
years before, when she had given its support to Coombe in his unbearable
hours. She had poured out her strength in silence, and in silence he had
received it. She saved him from slipping over the verge of madness.
But there came a day when he spoke to her of this--of the one woman he
had loved, Princess Alixe of X----:
"There was never a human thing so transparently pure, and she was the
possession of a brute incarnate. She shook with terror before him. He
killed her."
"I believe he did," she said, unsteadily. "He was not received here at
Court afterward."
"He killed her. But she would have died of horror if he had not struck
her a blow. I saw that. I was in attendance on him at Windsor."
"When I first knew you," the Duchess said gravely.
"There was a night--I was young--young--when I found myself face to face
with her in the stillness of the wood. I went quite mad for a time. I
threw myself face downward on the earth and sobbed. She knelt and prayed
for her own soul as well as mine. I kissed the hem of her dress and
left her standing--alone."
After a silence he added:
"It was the next night that I heard her shrieks. Then she died."
The Duchess knew what else had died: the high adventure of youth and joy
of life in him.
On a table beside her winged chair were photographs of two women, who,
while obviously belonging to periods of some twenty years apart, were in
face and form so singularly alike that they might have been the same
person. One was the Princess Alixe of X---- and the other--Feather.
"The devil of chance," Coombe said, "sometimes chooses to play tricks.
Such a trick was played on me."
It was the photograph of Feather he took up and set a strange
questioning gaze upon.
"When I saw this," he said, "this--exquisitely smiling at me in a sunny
garden--the tomb opened under my feet and I stood on the brink of
it--twenty-five again."
He made clear to her certain facts which most persons would have
ironically disbelieved. He ended with the story of Robin.
"I am determined," he explained, "to stand between the child and what
would be inevitable. Her frenzy of desire to support herself arises from
her loathing of the position of accepting support from me. I sympathise
with her entirely."
"Mademoiselle Vallé is an intelligent woman," the Duchess said. "Send
her to me; I shall talk to her. Then she can bring the child."
And so it was arranged that Robin should be taken into the house in the
old fashioned square to do for the Duchess what a young relative might
have done. And, a competent person being needed to take charge of the
linen, "Dowie" would go to live under the same roof.
Feather's final thrust in parting with her daughter was:
"Donal Muir is a young man by this time. I wonder what his mother would
do now if he turned up at your mistress' house and began to make love to
you." She laughed outright. "You'll get into all sorts of messes but
that would be the nicest one!"
* * * * *
The Duchess came to understand that Robin held it deep in her mind that
she was a sort of young outcast.
"If she consorted," she thought, "with other young things and shared
their pleasures she would forget it."
She talked the matter over with her daughter, Lady Lothwell.
"I am not launching a girl in society," she said, "I only want to help
her to know a few nice young people. I shall begin with your children.
They are mine if I am only a grandmother. A small dinner and a small
dance--and George and Kathryn may be the beginning of an interesting
experiment."
* * * * *
The Duchess was rarely mistaken. The experiment was interesting. For
George--Lord Halwyn--it held a certain element of disaster. It was he
who danced with Robin first. He had heard of the girl who was a sort of
sublimated companion to his grandmother. He had encountered companions
before. This one, as she flew like a blown leaf across the floor and
laughed up into his face with wide eyes produced a new effect and was a
new kind.
He led her to the conservatory. He was extremely young and his fleeting
emotions had never known a tight rein. An intoxicating hot-house perfume
filled his nostrils. Suddenly he let himself go and was kissing the warm
velvet of her slim little neck.
"You--you--you've spoiled everything in the world!" she cried.
"Now"--with a desolate, horrible little sob--"now I can only go
back--_back_." She spoke as if she were Cinderella and he had made the
clock strike twelve. Her voice had absolute grief in it.
"I say,"--he was contrite--"don't speak like that. I beg pardon. I'll
grovel. Don't-- Oh, Kathryn! Come here!"
This last because his sister had suddenly appeared.
Kathryn bore Robin away. Boys like George didn't really matter, she
pointed out, though of course it was bad manners. She had been kissed
herself, it seemed. As they walked between banked flowers she added:
"By the way, somebody important has been assassinated in one of the
Balkan countries. Lord Coombe has just come in and is talking it over
with grandmamma."
As they neared the entrance to the ballroom she paused with a new kind
of impish smile.
"The very best looking boy in all England," she said, "is dancing with
Sara Studleigh. He dropped in by chance to call and grandmamma made him
stay. His name is Donal Muir. He is Lord Coombe's heir. Here he comes.
Look!"
He was now scarcely two yards away. Almost as if he had been called he
turned his eyes toward Robin and straight into hers they
laughed--straight into hers.
The incident of their meeting was faultlessly correct; also, when Lady
Lothwell appeared, she presented him to Robin as if the brief ceremony
were one of the most ordinary in existence.
They danced for a time without a word. She wondered if he could not feel
the beating of her heart.
"That--is a beautiful waltz," he said at last, as if it were a sort of
emotional confidence.
"Yes," she answered. Only, "Yes."
Once round the great ballroom, twice, and he gave a little laugh and
spoke again.
"I am going to ask you a question. May I?"
"Yes."
"Is your name Robin?"
"Yes." She could scarcely breathe it.
"I thought it was. I hoped it was--after I first began to suspect. I
_hoped_ it was."
"It is--it is."
"Did we once play together in a garden?"
"Yes--yes."
Back swept the years, and the wonderful happiness began again.
* * * * *
In the shining ballroom the music rose and fell and swelled again into
ecstasy as he held her white young lightness in his arm and they swayed
and darted and swooped like things of the air--while the old Duchess and
Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and talked in murmurs of
Sarajevo.
ROBIN
CHAPTER I
It was a soft starlit night mystically changing into dawn when Donal
Muir left the tall, grave house on Eaton Square after the strangely
enchanted dance given by the old Dowager Duchess of Darte. A certain
impellingness of mood suggested that exercise would be a good thing and
he decided to walk home. It was an impellingness of body as well as
mind. He had remained later than the relative who had by chance been
responsible for his being brought, an uninvited guest, to the party. The
Duchess had not known that he was in London. It may also be accepted as
a fact that to this festivity given for the pleasure of Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless' daughter, she might not have chosen to assume the
responsibility of extending him an invitation. She knew something of his
mother and had sometimes discussed her with her old friend, Lord Coombe.
She admired Helen Muir greatly and was also much touched by certain
aspects of her maternity. What Lord Coombe had told her of the meeting
of the two children in the Gardens, of their innocent child passion of
attraction for each other, and of the unchildlike tragedy their enforced
parting had obviously been to both had at once deeply interested and
moved her. Coombe had only been able to relate certain surface incidents
connected with the matter, but they had been incidents not easy to
forget and from which unusual things might be deduced. No! She would
not have felt prepared to be the first to deliberately throw these two
young people across each other's paths at this glowing moment of their
early blooming--knowing as she did Helen Muir's strongly anxious desire
to keep them apart.
She had seen Donal Muir several times as the years had passed and had
not been blind to the physical beauty and allure of charm the rest of
the world saw and proclaimed with suitable adjectives. When the intimate
friend who was his relative appeared with him in her drawing-room and
she found standing before her, respectfully appealing for welcome with a
delightful smile, this quite incomparably good-looking young man, she
was conscious of a secret momentary disturbance and a recognition of the
fact that something a shade startling had happened.
"When a thing of the sort occurs entirely without one's aid and rather
against one's will--one may as well submit," she said later to Lord
Coombe. "Endeavouring to readjust matters is merely meddling with Fate
and always ends in disaster. As an incident, I felt there was a hint in
it that it would be the part of wisdom to leave things alone."
She had watched the two dancing with a kind of absorption in her gaze.
She had seen them go out of the room into the conservatory. She had
known exactly when they had returned and, seeing the look on their young
faces, had understood why the eyes of the beholders followed them.
When Lord Coombe came in with the ominous story of the assassination at
Sarajevo, all else had been swept from her mind. There had been place in
her being for nothing but the shock of a monstrous recognition. She had
been a gravely conscious looker-on at the slow but never ceasing growth
of a world peril for too many years not to be widely awake to each sign
of its development.
"Servia, Russia, Austria, Germany. It will form a pretext and a clear
road to France and England," Lord Coombe had said.
"A broad, clear road," the Duchess had agreed breathlessly--and, while
she gazed before her, ceased to see the whirl of floating and fluttering
butterfly-wings of gauze or to hear the music to whose measure they
fluttered and floated.
But no sense of any connection with Sarajevo disturbed the swing of the
fox trot or the measure of the tango, and when Donal Muir walked out
into the summer air of the starlit street and lifted his face, because
already a faint touch of primrose dawn was showing itself on the eastern
sky, in his young world there was only recognition of a vague tumult of
heart and brain and blood.
"What's the matter?" he was thinking. "What have I been doing-- What
have I been saying? I've been like a chap in a dream. I'm not awake
yet."
All that he had said to the girl was a simple fact. He had exaggerated
nothing. If, in what now seemed that long-ago past, he had not been a
sturdy, normal little lad surrounded by love and friendliness, with his
days full of healthy play and pleasure, the child tragedy of their being
torn apart might have left ugly marks upon his mind, and lurked there, a
morbid memory. And though, in time, rebellion and suffering had died
away, he had never really forgotten. Even to the cricket-playing,
larking boy at Eton there had now and then returned, with queer
suddenness, recollections which gave him odd moments of resurrected
misery. They passed away, but at long intervals they came back and
always with absolute reality. At Oxford the intervals had been longer
but a certain picture was one whose haunting never lost its clearness.
It was a vision of a colour-warm child kneeling on the grass, her eyes
uplifted, expressing only a lonely patience, and he could actually hear
her humble little voice as she said:
"I--I haven't anything." And it always roused him to rage.
Then there was the piteous break in her voice when she hid her eyes with
her arm and said of her beast of a mother:
"She--doesn't _like_ me!"
"Damn! Damn!" he used to say every time the thing came back. "Oh!
damn!--damn!" And the expletive never varied in its spontaneity.
* * * * *
As he walked under the primrose sky and breathed in the faint fragrant
stir of the freshening morning air, he who had always felt joyously the
sense of life knew more than ever before the keen rapture of living. The
springing lightness of his own step as it rang on the pavement was part
of it. It was as though he were still dancing and he almost felt
something warm and light in his arm and saw a little head of dark silk
near his breast.
Throughout his life he had taken all his joys to his closest companion
and nearest intimate--his mother. Theirs had not been a common life
together. He had not even tried to explain to himself the harmony and
gaiety of their nearness in which there seemed no separation of years.
She had drawn and held him to the wonder of her charm and had been the
fine flavour of his existence. It was actually true that he had so far
had no boyish love affairs because he had all unconsciously been in love
with the beautiful completeness of her.
Always when he returned home after festivities, he paused for a moment
outside her bedroom door because he so often found her awake and waiting
to talk to him if he were inclined to talk--to listen--to laugh
softly--or perhaps only to say good-night in her marvel of a voice--a
marvel because its mellow note held such love.
This time when, after entering the house and mounting the stairs he
reached her door, he found it partly open.
"Come in," he heard her say. "I went to sleep very early and awakened
half an hour ago. It is really morning."
She was sitting up in a deep chair by the window.
"Let me look at you," she said with a little laugh. "And then kiss me
and go to bed."
But even the lovely, faint early light revealed something to her.
"You walk like a young stag on the hillside," she said. "You don't want
to go to sleep at all. What is it?"
He sat on a low ottoman near her and laughed a little also.
"I don't know," he answered, "but I'm wide awake."
The English summer dawn is of a magical clear light and she could see
him well. She had a thrilled feeling that she had never quite known
before what a beautiful thing he was--how perfect and shining fair in
his boy manhood.
"Mother," he said, "you won't remember perhaps--it's a queer thing that
I should myself--but I have never really forgotten. There was a child I
played with in some garden when I was a little chap. She was a beautiful
little thing who seemed to belong to nobody--"
"She belonged to a Mrs. Gareth-Lawless," Helen interpolated.
"Then you do remember?"
"Yes, dear. You asked me to go to the Gardens with you to see her. And
Mrs. Gareth-Lawless came in by chance and spoke to me."
"And then we had suddenly to go back to Scotland. I remember you wakened
me quite early in the morning--I thought it was the middle of the
night." He began to speak rather slowly as if he were thinking it over.
"You didn't know that, when you took me away, it was a tragedy. I had
promised to play with her again and I felt as if I had deserted her
hideously. It was not the kind of a thing a little chap usually
feels--it was something different--something more. And to-night it
actually all came back. I saw her again, mother."
He was so absorbed that he did not take in her involuntary movement.
"You saw her again! Where?"
"The old Duchess of Darte was giving a small dance for her. Hallowe took
me--"
"Does the Duchess know Mrs. Gareth-Lawless?" Helen had a sense of
breathlessness.
"I don't quite understand the situation. It seems the little thing
insists on earning her own living and she is a sort of companion and
secretary to the Duchess. Mother, she is just the same!"
The last words were a sort of exclamation. As he uttered them, there
came back to her the day when--a little boy--he had seemed as though he
were speaking as a young man might have spoken. Now he was a young man,
speaking almost as if he were a little boy--involuntarily revealing his
exaltation.
As she had felt half frightened years before, so she felt wholly
frightened now. He was not a little boy any longer. She could not sweep
him away in her arms to save him from danger. Also she knew more of the
easy, fashionably accepted views of the morals of pretty Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless, still lightly known with some cynicism as "Feather." She
knew what Donal did not. His relationship to the Head of the House of
Coombe made it unlikely that gossip should choose him as the exact young
man to whom could be related stories of his distinguished relative, Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless and her girl. But through the years Helen Muir had
unavoidably heard things she thought particularly hideous. And here the
child was again "just the same."
"She has only grown up." His laugh was like a lightly indrawn breath.
"Her cheek is just as much like a rose petal. And that wonderful little
look! And her eyelashes. Just the same! Do girls usually grow up like
that? It was the look most. It's a sort of asking and giving--both at
once."
There it was! And she had nothing to say. She could only sit and look at
him--at his beautiful youth all alight with the sudden flame of that
which can set a young world on fire and sweep on its way either carrying
devastation or clearing a path to Paradise.
His own natural light unconsciousness was amazing. He only knew that he
was in delightful high spirits. The dancing, the music, the early
morning were, he thought, accountable for it.
She bent forward to kiss his cheek and she patted his hand.
"My dear! My dear!" she said. "How you have enjoyed your evening!"
"There never was anything more perfect," with the light laugh again.
"Everything was delightful--the rooms, the music, the girls in their
pretty frocks like a lot of flowers tossed about. She danced like a bit
of thistledown. I didn't know a girl could be so light. The back of her
slim little neck looks as fine and white and soft as a baby's. I am so
glad you were awake. Are you sure you don't want to go to sleep again?"
suddenly.
"Not in the least. Look at the sun beginning to touch the tips of the
little white clouds with rose. That stir among the leaves of the plane
trees is the first delicious breath of the morning. Go on and tell me
all about the party."
"It's a perfect time to talk," he laughed.
And there he sat and made gay pictures for her of what he had seen and
done. He thought he was giving her mere detail of the old Duchess'
dance. He did not know that when he spoke of new tangos, of flowers, of
music and young nymphs like tossed blossoms, he never allowed her for a
moment to lose sight of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless' girl. She was the light
floating over his vision of the happy youth of the assembly--she was the
centre--the beginning and the ending of it all.
CHAPTER II
If some uncomplex minded and even moderately articulate man or woman,
living in some small, ordinary respectable London house and going about
his or her work in the customary way, had been prompted by chance upon
June 29th, 1914, to begin to keep on that date a day-by-day diary of his
or her ordinary life, the effects of huge historic events, as revealed
by the every-day incidents to be noted in the streets, to be heard in
his neighbours' houses as well as among his fellow workers, to be read
in the penny or half-penny newspapers, would have resulted--if the
record had been kept faithfully and without any self-conscious sense of
audience--between 1914 and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human
document of immense historical value. Compared with it, the diaries of
Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless. But it must have been
begun in June, 1914, and have been written with the casualness of that
commonplace realism which is the most convincing realism of all. It is
true that the expression of the uncomplex mind is infrequently
articulate, but the record which would bring home the clearest truth
would be the one unpremeditatedly depicting the effect produced upon the
wholly unprepared and undramatic personality by the monstrous drama, as
the Second Deluge rose for its apparent overwhelming, carrying upon its
flood old civilisations broken from anchor and half submerged as they
tossed on the rising and raging waves. Such a priceless treasure as
this might have been the quite unliterary and unromantic diary of
any--say, Mr. James Simpson of any house number in any respectable side
street in Regents Park, or St. Johns Wood or Hampstead. One can easily
imagine him, sitting in his small, comfortable parlour and bending over
his blotting-pad in unilluminated cheerful absorption after his day's
work. It can also without any special intellectual effort be imagined
that the record might have begun with some such seemingly unprophetic
entry as follows:--
"June 29th, 1914. I made up my mind when I was at the office to-day that
I would begin to keep a diary. I have thought several times that I
would, and Harriet thinks it would be a good thing because we should
have it to refer to when there was any little dispute about dates and
things that have happened. To-night seemed a good time because there is
something to begin the first entry with. Harriet and I spent part of the
evening in reading the newspaper accounts of the assassination of the
Austrian Archduke and his wife. There seems to be a good deal of
excitement about it because he was the next heir to the Austrian throne.
The assassination occurred in Bosnia at a place called Sarajevo.
Crawshaw, whose desk is next to mine in the office, believes it will
make a nice mess for the Bosnians and Servians because they have been
rather troublesome about wanting to be united into one country instead
of two, and called Greater Serbia. That seems a silly sort of reason for
throwing bombs and killing people. But foreigners have a way of thinking
bombs settle everything. Harriet brought out her old school geography
and we looked up Sarajevo on the map of Austria-Hungary. It was hard to
find because the print was small and it was spelt Saraievo--without any
j in it. It was just on the line between Bosnia and Servia and the
geography said it was the chief city in Bosnia. Harriet said it was a
queer thing how these places on maps never seemed like real places when
you looked them up and just read their names and yet probably the people
in them were as real to themselves as we were, and there were streets in
them as real as Lupton Street where we were sitting, finding them on the
map on the sitting-room table. I said that bombs were pretty real things
and the sound of this one when it exploded seemed to have reached a long
way to judge from the newspapers and the talk in London. Harriet said my
putting it like that gave her a queer feeling--almost as if she had
heard it and it had made her jump. Somehow it seemed something like it
to me. At any rate we sat still a minute or two, thinking it over. Then
Harriet got up and went into the kitchen and made some nice toasted
cheese for our supper before we went to bed."
Men of the James Simpson type were among the many who daily passed
Coombe House on their way to and from their office work. Some of them no
doubt caught sight of Lord Coombe himself as he walked or drove through
the entrance gates. Their knowledge of him was founded upon rumoured
stories, repeated rather privately among themselves. He was a great
swell and there weren't many shady things he hadn't done and didn't know
the ins and outs of, but his remoteness from their own lives rendered
these accepted legends scarcely prejudicial. The perfection of his
clothes, and his unusual preservation of physical condition and good
looks, also his habit of the so-called "week-end" continental journeys,
were the points chiefly recalled by the incidental mention of his name.
If James Simpson, on his way home to Lupton Street with his friend
Crawshaw, chanced to see his lordship's car standing before his door a
few days after the bomb throwing in Sarajevo, he might incidentally have
referred to him somewhat in this wise:--
"As we passed by Coombe House the Marquis of Coombe came out and got
into his car. There were smart leather valises and travelling things in
it and a rug or so, as if he was going on some journey. He is a fine
looking man for one that's lived the life he has and reached his age. I
don't see how he's done it, myself. When I said to Crawshaw that it
looked as if he was going away for the week end, Crawshaw said that
perhaps he was taking Saturday to Monday off to run over to talk to the
Kaiser and old Franz Josef about the Sarajevo business, and he might
telephone to the Czar about it because he's intimate with them all, and
the whole lot seem to be getting mixed up in the thing and writing
letters and sending secret telegrams. It seems to be turning out, as
Crawshaw said it would, into a nice mess for Servia. Austria is making
it out that the assassination really was committed to stir up trouble,
and says it wasn't done just by a crazy anarchist, but by a secret
society working for its own ends. Crawshaw came in to supper and we
talked it all over. Harriet gave us cold beef and pickled onions and
beer, and we looked at the maps in the old geography again. We got quite
interested in finding places. Bosnia and Servia (it's often spelled
Serbia) are close up against Austria-Hungary, and Germany and Russia are
close against the other side. They can get into each other's countries
without much travelling. I heard to-day that Russia will have to help
Servia if she has a row with Austria. Crawshaw says that will give
Germany the chance she's been waiting for and that she will try to get
through Belgium to England. He says she hates England. Harriet began to
look pale as she studied the map and saw how little Belgium was and that
the Channel was so narrow. She said she felt as if England had been
silly to let herself get so slack and she almost wished she hadn't
looked at the geography. She said she couldn't help thinking how awful
it would be to see the German army marching up Regent Street and camping
in Hyde Park, and who in goodness' name knew what they might do to
people if they hated England so? She actually looked as if she would
have cried if Crawshaw and I hadn't chaffed her and made her laugh by
telling her we would join the army; and Crawshaw began to shoulder arms
with the poker and I got my new umbrella."
In this domesticated and almost comfortable fashion did the greatest
tragedy the human race has known since the beginning of the world
gradually prepare its first scenes and reveal glimpses of itself, as the
curtain of Time was, during that June, slowly raised by the hand of
Fate.
This is not what is known as a "war story." It is not even a story of
the War, but a relation of incidents occurring amidst and resulting from
the strenuousness of a period to which "the War" was a background so
colossal that it dwarfed all events, except in the minds of those for
whom such events personally shook and darkened or brightened the world.
Nothing can dwarf personal anguish at its moment of highest power; to
the last agony and despairing terror of the heart-wrung the cataclysm
of earthquake, tornado, shipwreck is but the awesome back drop of the
scene.
Also--incidentally--the story is one of the transitions in, and
convulsive changes of, points of view produced by the convulsion itself
which flung into new perspective the whole surface of the earth and the
races existing upon it.
The Head of the House of Coombe had, as he said, been born at once too
early and too late to admit of any fixed establishment of tastes and
ideals. His existence had been passed in the transition from one era to
another--the Early Victorian, under whose disappearing influences he had
spent his youth; the Late Victorian and Edwardian, in whose more rapidly
changing atmosphere he had ripened to maturity. He had, during this
transition, seen from afar the slow rising of the tidal wave of the
Second Deluge; and in the summer days of 1914 he heard the first low
roaring of its torrential swell, and visualised all that the
overwhelming power of its bursting flood might sweep before it and bury
forever beneath its weight.
He made seemingly casual crossings of the Channel and journeys which
were made up of the surmounting of obstacles, and when he returned,
brought with him a knowledge of things which it would have been unwise
to reveal carelessly to the general public. The mind of the general
public had its parallel, at the moment, in the temperature of a patient
in the early stages of, as yet, undiagnosed typhoid or any other fever.
Restless excitement and spasmodic heats and discomforts prompted and
ruled it. Its tendency was to nervous discontent and suspicious
fearfulness of approaching, vaguely formulated, evils. These risings of
temperature were to be seen in the very streets and shops. People were
talking--talking--talking. Ordinary people, common people, all kinds of
classes. The majority of them did not know what they were talking
about; most of them talked either uneducated, frightened or blustering
nonsense, but everybody talked more or less. Enormous numbers of
newspapers were bought and flourished about, or pored over anxiously.
Numbers of young Germans were silently disappearing from their places in
shops, factories and warehouses. That was how Germany showed her
readiness for any military happening. Her army was already trained and
could be called from any country and walk in life. A mysterious unheard
command called it and it was obliged to obey. The entire male population
of England had not been trained from birth to regard itself as an
immense military machine, ready at any moment for action. The James
Simpson type of Englishman indulged in much discussion of the pros and
cons of enforced military training of youth. Germany's well known
contempt of the size and power of the British Army took on an aspect
which filled the James Simpsons with rage. They had not previously
thought of themselves as martial, because middle-class England was
satisfied with her belief in her strength and entire safety. Of course
she was safe. She always had been. Britannia Rules the Waves and the
James Simpsons were sure that incidentally she ruled everything else.
But as there stole up behind the mature Simpsons the haunting
realization that, if England was "drawn in" to a war, it would be the
young Simpsons who must gird their loins and go forth to meet Goliath in
his armour, with only the sling and stone of untrained youth and valour
as their weapon, there were many who began to feel that even
inconvenient drilling and discipline might have been good things.
"There is something quite thrilling in going about now," said Feather to
Coombe, after coming in from a shopping round, made in her new electric
brougham. "One doesn't know what it is, but it's in the air. You see it
in people's faces. Actually shop girls give one the impression of just
having stopped whispering together when you go into a place and ask for
something. A girl who was trying on some gloves for me--she was a thin
girl with prominent watery eyes--had such a frightened look, that I said
to her, just to see what she would say--'I wonder what would happen to
the shops if England got into war?' She turned quite white and answered,
'Oh, Madam, I can't bear to think of it. My favourite brother's a
soldier. He's such a nice big fellow and we're so fond of him. And he's
always talking about it. He says Germany's not going to let England keep
out. We're so frightened--mother and me.' She almost dropped a big tear
on my glove. It _would_ be quite exciting if England did go in."
"It would," Coombe answered.
"London would be crowded with officers. All sorts of things would have
to be given for them--balls and things."
"Cannon balls among other things," said Coombe.
"But we should have nothing to do with the cannon balls, thank
goodness," exhilaration sweeping her past unpleasant aspects. "One would
be sorry for the Tommies, of course, if the worst came to the worst. But
I must say army and navy men are more interesting than most civilians.
It's the constant change in their lives, and their having to meet so
many kinds of people."
"In actual war, men who are not merely 'Tommies' actually take part,"
Coombe suggested. "I was looking at a ball-room full of them the night
after the news came from Sarajevo. Fine, well-set-up youngsters dancing
with pretty girls. I could not help asking myself what would have
happened to them before the German army crossed the Channel--if they
were not able to prevent the crossing. And what would happen to the
girls after its crossing, when it poured over London and the rest of
England in the unbridled rage of drunken victory."
He so spoke because beneath his outward coldness he himself felt a
secret rage against this lightness which, as he saw things, had its
parallel in another order of trivial unawareness in more important
places and larger brains. Feather started and drew somewhat nearer to
him.
"How hideous! What do you mean! Where was the party?" she asked.
"It was a small dance given by the Duchess, very kindly, for Robin," he
answered.
"For Robin!" with open eyes whose incredulity held irritation. "The old
Duchess giving parties to her 'useful companion' girl! What nonsense!
Who was there?" sharply.
"The young fellows who would be first called on if there was war. And
the girls who are their relatives. Halwyn was there--and young Dormer
and Layton--they are all in the army. The cannon balls would be for them
as well as for the Tommies of their regiments. They are spirited lads
who wouldn't slink behind. They'd face things."
Feather had already forgotten her moment's shock in another thought.
"And they were invited to meet Robin! Did they dance with her? Did she
dance much? Or did she sit and stare and say nothing? What did she
wear?"
"She looked like a very young white rose. She danced continually. There
was always a little mob about her when the music stopped. I do not think
she sat at all, and it was the young men who stared. The only dance she
missed--Kathryn told her grandmother--was the one she sat out in the
conservatory with Donal Muir."
At this Feather's high, thin little laugh broke forth.
"He turned up there? Donal Muir!" She struck her hands lightly together.
"It's too good to be true!"
"Why is it too good to be true?" he inquired without enthusiasm.
"Oh, don't you see? After all his mother's airs and graces and running
away with him when they were a pair of babies--as if Robin had the
plague. I was the plague--and so were you. And here the old Duchess
throws them headlong at each other--in all their full bloom--into each
other's arms. I did not do it. You didn't. It was the stuffiest old
female grandee in London, who wouldn't let _me_ sweep her front
door-steps for her--because I'm an impropriety."
She asked a dozen questions, was quite humorous over the picture she
drew of Mrs. Muir's consternation at the peril her one ewe lamb had been
led into by her highly revered friend.
"A frightfully good-looking, spoiled boy like that always plunges
headlong into any adventure that attracts him. Women have always made
love to him and Robin will make great eyes, and blush and look at him
from under her lashes as if she were going to cry with joy--like Alice
in the Ben Bolt song. She'll 'weep with delight when he gives her a
smile and tremble with fear at his frown.' His mother can't stop it,
however furious she may be. Nothing can stop that sort of thing when it
once begins."
"If England declares war Donal Muir will have more serious things to do
than pursue adventures," was Coombe's comment. He looked serious himself
as he said the words, because they brought before him the bodily
strength and beauty of the lad. He seemed suddenly to see him again as
he had looked when he was dancing. And almost at the same moment he saw
other scenes than ball-rooms and heard sounds other than those drawn
forth by musicians screened with palms. He liked the boy. He was not his
son, but he liked him. If he had been his son, he thought--! He had been
through the monster munition works at Essen several times and he had
heard technical talks of inventions, the sole reason for whose presence
in the world was that they had the power to blow human beings into
unrecognisable, ensanguined shreds and to tear off limbs and catapult
them into the air. He had heard these powers talked of with a sense of
natural pride in achievement, in fact with honest and cheerful self
gratulation.
He had known Count Zeppelin well and heard his interesting explanation
of what would happen to a thickly populated city on to which bombs were
dropped.
But Feather's view was lighter and included only such things as she
found entertaining.
"If there's a war the heirs of great families won't be snatched at
first," she quite rattled on. "There'll be a sort of economising in that
sort of thing. Besides he's very young and he isn't in the Army. He'd
have to go through some sort of training. Oh, he'll have time! And
there'll be so much emotion and excitement and talk about parting
forever and 'This may be the last time we ever meet' sort of thing that
every boy will have adventure--and not only boys. When I warned Robin,
the night before she went away, I did not count on war or I could have
said more--"
"What did you warn her of?"
"Of making mistakes about the men who would make love to her. I warned
her against imagining she was as safe as she would be if she were a
daughter of the house she lived in. I knew what I was talking about."
"Did she?" was Coombe's concise question.
"Of course she did--though of course she pretended not to. Girls always
pretend. But I did my duty as a parent. And I told her that if she got
herself into any mess she mustn't come to me."
Lord Coombe regarded her in silence for a moment or so. It was one of
the looks which always made her furious in her small way.
"Good morning," he said and turned his back and walked out of the room.
Almost immediately after he had descended the stairs she heard the front
door close after him.
It was the kind of thing which made her feel her utter helplessness
against him and which enraged all the little cat in her being. She
actually ground her small teeth.
"I was quite right," she said. "It's her affair to take care of herself.
Would he want her to come to _him_ in any silly fix? I should like to
see her try it."
CHAPTER III
Robin sat at the desk in her private room and looked at a key she held
in her hand. She had just come upon it among some papers. She had put it
into a narrow lacquered box when she arranged her belongings, after she
left the house in which her mother continued to live. It was the key
which gave entrance to the Gardens. Each householder possessed one. She
alone knew why she rather timidly asked her mother's permission to keep
this one.
"One of the first things I seem to remember is watching the gardeners
planting flowers," Robin had said. "They had rows of tiny pots with
geraniums and lobelia in them. I have been happy there. I should like to
be able to go in sometimes and sit under the trees. If you do not
mind--"
Feather did not mind. She herself was not in the least likely to be
seized with a desire to sit under trees in an atmosphere heavy with
nursemaids and children.
So Robin had been allowed to keep the key and until to-day she had not
opened the lacquer box. Was it quite by accident that she had found it?
She was not quite sure it was and she was asking herself questions, as
she sat looking at it as it lay in her palm.
The face of the whole world had changed since the night when she had sat
among banked flowers and palms and ferns, and heard the splashing of the
fountain and the sound of the music and dancing, and Donal Muir's voice,
all at the same time. That which had happened had made everybody and
everything different; and, because she lived in this particular house
and saw much of special people, she realised that the growing shudder
in the life about her was only the first convulsive tremor of an
earthquake. The Duchess began to have much more for her to do. She
called on her to read special articles in the papers, and to make notes
and find references. Many visitors came to the house to discuss, to
plan, to prepare for work. A number of good-looking, dancing boys had
begun to come in and out in uniform, and with eager faces and a
businesslike military air which oddly transformed them. The recalcitrant
George was more transformed than any of the rest. His eyes looked almost
fierce in their anxious intensity, his voice had taken on a somewhat
hard defiant ring. It could not be possible that he had ever done that
silly thing by the fountain and that she had splashed him from head to
foot. It was plain that there were young soldiers who were straining at
leashes, who were restless at being held back by the bindings of red
tape, and who every hour were hearing things--true or untrue--which
filled them with blind fury. As days passed Robin heard some of these
things--stories from Belgium--which caused her to stare straight before
her, blanched with horror. It was not only the slaughter and
helplessness which pictured itself before her--it was stories half
hinted at about girls like herself--girls who were trapped and
overpowered--carried into lonely or dark places where no one could hear
them. Sometimes George and the Duchess forgot her because she was so
quiet--people often forgot everything but their excitement and
wrath--and every one who came in to talk, because the house had become a
centre of activities, was full of new panics or defiances or rumours of
happenings or possibilities.
The maelstrom had caught Robin herself in its whirling. She realised
that she had changed with the rest. She was no longer only a girl who
was looked at as she passed along the street and who was beginning to be
happy because she could earn her living. What was every girl in these
days? How did any girl know what lay before her and those who protected
the land she lived in? What could a girl do but try in some way to
help--in any way to help the fight and the fighters. She used to lie
awake and think of the Duchess' plans and concentrate her thought on the
mastering of details. There was no hour too early or too late to find
her ready to spring to attention. The Duchess had set her preparations
for future possibilities in train before other women had quite begun to
believe in their existence. Lady Lothwell had at first laughed quite
gaily at certain long lists she found her mother occupied with--though
this, it is true, was in early days.
But Robin, even while whirled by the maelstrom, could not cease thinking
certain vague remote thoughts. The splashing of fountains among flowers,
and the sound of music and dancing were far away--but there was an echo
to which she listened unconsciously as Donal Muir did. Something she
gave no name to. But as the, as yet unheard, guns sent forth vibrations
which reached far, there rose before her pictures of columns of marching
men--hundreds, thousands, young, erect, steady and with clear
eyes--marching on and on--to what--to what? Would _every_ man go? Would
there not be some who, for reasons, might not be obliged--or able--or
ready--until perhaps the, as yet hoped for, sudden end of the awful
thing had come? Surely there would be many who would be too young--or
whose youth could not be spared because it stood for some power the
nation needed in its future.
She had taken out and opened the lacquered box while thinking these
things. She was thinking them as she looked at the key in her hand.
"It is not quiet anywhere now," she said to herself. "But there will be
some corner under a tree in the Gardens where it will _seem_ quiet if
one sits quite still there. I will go and try."
There were very few nursemaids with their charges in the place when she
reached it about an hour later.
The military element filling the streets engendered a spirit of caution
with regard to nursemaids in the minds of their employers. Even those
who were not young and good-looking were somewhat shepherded. The two or
three quite elderly ones in the Gardens cast serious glances at the girl
who walked past them to a curve in the path where large lilac bushes and
rhododendrons made a sort of nook for a seat under a tree.
They could not see her when she sat down and laid her book beside her on
the bench. She did not even open it, but sat and looked at the greenery
of the shrubs before her. She was very still, and she looked as if she
saw more than mere leaves and branches.
After a few minutes she got up slowly and went to a tall bush of lilac.
She plucked several leaves and carried them back to her bench, somewhat
as if she were a girl moving in a dream. Then, with a tiny shadow of a
smile, she took a long pin from under the lapel of her coat and, leaning
forward, began to prick out a pattern on the leaf she had laid on the
wooden seat. She was in the midst of doing it--had indeed decorated two
or three--when she found herself turning her head to listen to
something. It was a quick, buoyant marching step--not a nursemaid's, not
a gardener's, and it was coming towards her corner as if with
intention--and she suddenly knew that she was listening as if the
intention concerned herself. This was only because there are
psychological moments, moods, conditions at once physical and mental
when every incident in life assumes the significance of
intention--because unconsciously or consciously one is _waiting_.
Here was a crisp tread somehow conveying a suggestion of familiar happy
eagerness. The tall young soldier who appeared from behind the clump of
shrubs and stood before her with a laughing salute had evidently come
hurriedly. And the hurry and laughter extraordinarily brought back the
Donal who had sprung upon her years ago from dramatic ambush. It was
Donal Muir who had come.
"I saw you from a friend's house across the street," he said. "I
followed you."
He made no apology and it did not even cross her mind that apology was
conventionally necessary. He sat down beside her and his effect--though
it did not express itself physically--was that of one who was breathing
quickly. The clear blueness of his gaze seemed to enfold and cover her.
The wonderfulness of him was the surrounding atmosphere she had felt as
a little child.
"The whole world is rocking to and fro," he said. "It has gone mad. We
are all mad. There is no time to wait for anything."
"I know! I know!" she whispered, because her pretty breast was rising
and falling, and she had scarcely breath left to speak with.
Even as he looked down at her, and she up at him, the colour and
laughter died out of him. Some suddenly returning memory brought a black
cloud into his eyes and made him pale. He caught hold of both her hands
and pressed them quite hard against his bowed face. He did not kiss them
but held them against his cheek.
"It is terrible," he said.
Without being told she knew what he meant.
"You have been hearing new horrible things?" she said. What she guessed
was that they were the kind of things she had shuddered at, feeling her
blood at once hot and cold. He lifted his face but did not release her
hands.
"At my friend's house. A man had just come over from Holland," he shook
himself as if to dismiss a nightmare. "I did not come here to say such
things. The enormous luck of catching sight of you, by mere chance,
through the window electrified me. I--I came because I was catapulted
here." He tried to smile and managed it pretty well. "How could I stay
when--there you were! Going into the same garden!" He looked round him
at the greenness with memory awakening. "It's the same garden. The
shrubs have grown much bigger and they have planted some new ones--but
it is the same garden." His look came back to her. "You are the same
Robin," he said softly.
"Yes," she answered, as she had always answered "yes" to him.
"You are the same little child," he added and he lifted her hands again,
but this time he kissed them as gently as he had spoken. "God! I'm
glad!" And that was said softly, too. He was not a man of thirty or
forty--he was a boy of twenty and his whole being was vibrating with the
earthquake of the world.
That he vaguely recognised this last truth revealed itself in his next
words.
"It would have taken me six months to say this much to you--to get this
far--before this thing began," he said. "I daren't have run after you in
the street. I should have had to wait about and make calls and ask for
invitations to places where I might see you. And when we met we should
have been polite and have talked all round what we wanted to say. It
would have been cheek to tell you--the second time we met--that your
eyes looked at me just as they did when you were a little child. I
should have had to be decently careful because you might have felt shy.
You don't feel shy now, do you? No, you don't," in caressing conviction
and appeal.
"No--no." There was the note of a little mating bird in the repeated
word.
This time he spread one of her hands palm upward on his own larger one.
He looked down at it tenderly and stroked it as he talked.
"It is because there is no time. Things pour in upon us. We don't know
what is before us. We can only be sure of one thing--that it may be
death or wounds. I don't know when they'll think me ready to be sent
out--or when they'll be ready to send me and other fellows like me. But
I shall be sent. I am sitting in a garden here with you. I'm a young
chap and big and strong and I love life. It is my duty as a man to go
and kill other young chaps who love it as much as I do. And they must do
their best to kill me, 'Gott strafe England,' they're saying in
Germany--I understand it. Many a time it's in me to say, 'Gott strafe
Germany.'"
He drew in his breath sharply, as if to pull himself together, and was
still a moment. The next he turned upon her his wonderful boy's smile.
Suddenly there was trusting appeal in it.
"You don't mind my holding your hand and talking like this, do you? Your
eyes are as soft as--I've seen fawns cropping among the primroses with
eyes that looked like them. But yours _understand_. You don't mind my
doing this?" he kissed her palm. "Because there is no time."
Her free hand caught at his sleeve.
"No," she said. "You're going--you're _going_!"
"Yes," he answered. "And you wouldn't hold me back."
"No! No! No! No!" she cried four times, "Belgium! Belgium! Oh! Belgium!"
And she hid her eyes on his sleeve.
"That's it--Belgium! There has been war before, but this promises from
the outset to be something else. And they're coming on in their
millions. We have no millions--we have not even guns and uniforms
enough, but we've got to stop them, if we do it with our bare hands and
with walls of our dead bodies. That was how Belgium held them back. Can
England wait?"
"You can't wait!" cried Robin. "No man can wait."
How he glowed as he looked at her!
"There. That shows how you understand. See! That's what draws me. That's
why, when I saw you through the window, I had to follow you. It wasn't
only your lovely eyes and your curtains of eyelashes and because you are
a sort of rose. It is you--you! Whatsoever you said, I should know the
meaning of, and what I say you will always understand. It's as if we
answered each other. That's why I never forgot you. It's why I waked up
so when I saw you at the Duchess'." He tried to laugh, but did not quite
succeed. "Do you know I have never had a moment's real rest since that
night--because I haven't seen you."
"I--" faltered Robin, "have wondered and wondered--where you were."
All the forces of nature drew him a little nearer to her--though the
gardener who clumped past them dully at the moment only saw a
particularly good-looking young soldier, apparently engaged in agreeable
conversation with a pretty girl who was not a nursemaid.
"Did you come here because of that?" he asked with frank anxiety. "Do
you come here often and was it just chance? Or did you come because you
were wondering?"
"I didn't exactly know--at first. But I know now. I have not been here
since I went to live in Eaton Square," she gave back to him. Oh! how
good and beautiful his asking eyes were! It was as he drew even a little
nearer that he saw for the first time the pricked lilac leaves lying on
the bench beside her.
"Did you do those?" he said suddenly quite low. "Did you?"
"Yes," as low and quite sweetly unashamed. "You taught me--when we
played together."
The quick emotion in his flushing face could scarcely be described.
"How lovely--how _lovely_ you are!" he exclaimed, almost under his
breath. "I--I don't know how to say what I feel--about your remembering.
You little--little thing!" This last because he somehow strangely saw
her five years old again.
It was a boy's unspoiled, first love making--the charming outburst of
young passion untrained by familiar use to phrases. It was like the
rising of a Spring freshet and had the same irresistible power.
"May I have them? Will you give them to me with your own little hand?"
The happy glow of her smiling, as she picked them up and laid them, one
by one, on his open extended palm, was as the glow of the smiling of
young Eve. The dimples playing round her mouth and the quiver of her
lashes, as she lifted them to laugh into his eyes, were an actual peril.
"Must I give you the pin too?" she said.
"Yes--everything," he answered in a sort of helpless joy. "I would carry
the wooden bench away with me if I could. But they would stop me at the
gate." They were obliged to treat something a little lightly because
everything seemed tensely tremulous.
"Here is the pin," she said, taking it from under the lapel of her coat.
"It is quite a long one." She looked at it a moment and then ended in a
whisper. "I must have known why I was coming here--because, you see, I
brought the pin." And her eyelashes lifted themselves and made their
circling shadows again.
"Then I must have the pin. And it will be a talisman. I shall have a
little flat case made for the leaves and the sacred pin shall hold it
together. When I go into battle it will keep me safe. Bullets and
bayonets will glance aside." He said it, as he laid the treasure away in
his purse, and he did not see her face as he spoke of bullets and
bayonets.
"I am a Highlander," he said next and for the moment he looked as if he
saw things far away. "In the Highlands we believe more than most people
do. Perhaps that's why I feel as if we two are not quite like other
people,--as if we had been something--I don't know what--to each other
from the beginning of time--since the 'morning stars first sang
together.' I don't know exactly what that means, or how stars sing--but
I like the sound of it. It seems to mean something I mean though I don't
know how to say it." He was not in the least portentous or solemn, but
he was the most strongly feeling and _real_ creature she had ever heard
speaking to her and he swept her along with him, as if he had indeed
been the Spring freshet and she a leaf. "I believe," here he began to
speak slowly as if he were thinking it out, "that there was
something--that meant something--in the way we two were happy together
and could not bear to be parted--years ago when we were nothing but
children. Do you know that, little chap as I was, I never stopped
thinking of you day and night when we were not playing together. I
_couldn't_!"
"Neither could I stop thinking," said Robin. "I had dreams about seeing
your eyes looking at me. They were blue like clear water in summer. They
were always laughing. I always _wanted_ them to look at me! They--they
are the same eyes now," in a little rush of words.
Their blueness was on hers--in the very deeps of their uplifted
liquidity.
"God! I'm _glad_!" his voice was on a hushed note.
There has never been a limner through all the ages who has pictured--at
such a moment--two pairs of eyes reaching, melting into, lost in each
other in their human search for the longing soul drawing together human
things. Hand and brush and colour cannot touch That which Is and Must
Be--in its yearning search for the spirit which is its life on earth.
Yet a boy and girl were yearning towards it as they sat in mere mortal
form on a bench in a London square. And neither of them knew more than
that they wondered at and adored the beauty in each other's eyes.
"I didn't know what a little chap I was," he said next. "I'd had a
splendid life for a youngster and I was big for my age and ramping with
health and strength and happiness. You seemed almost a baby to me,
but--it was the way you looked at me, I think--I wanted to talk to you,
and please you and make you laugh. You had a red little mouth with deep
dimples that came and went near the corners. I liked to see them
twinkle."
"You told me," she laughed, remembering. "You put the point of your
finger in them. But you didn't hurt me," in quick lovely reassuring.
"You were not a rough little boy."
"I wouldn't have hurt you for worlds. I didn't even know I was cheeky.
The dimples were so deep that it seemed quite natural to poke at
them--like a sort of game."
"We laughed and laughed. It _was_ a sort of game. I sat quite still and
let you make little darts at them," Robin assisted him. "We laughed like
small crazy things. We almost had child hysterics."
The dimples showed themselves now and he held himself in leash.
"You did everything I wanted you to do," he said, "and I suppose that
made me feel bigger and bigger."
"_I_ thought you were big. And I had never seen anything so wonderful
before. You knew everything in the world and I knew nothing. Don't you
remember," with hesitation--as if she were almost reluctant to recall
the memory of a shadow into the brightness of the moment--"I told you
that I had nothing--and nobody?"
All rushed back to him in a warm flow.
"That was it," he said. "When you said that I felt as if some one had
insulted and wronged something of my own. I remember I felt hot and
furious. I wanted to give you things and fight for you. I--caught you in
my arms and squeezed you."
"Yes," Robin answered.
"It was because of--that time when the morning stars first sang
together," he answered smiling, but still as _real_ as before. "It
wasn't a stranger child I wanted to take care of. It was some one I
had--belonged to--long--long and long. I'm a Highlander and I know it's
true. And there's another thing I know," with a sudden change almost to
boyish fierceness, "you are one of the things I'm going to face cannon
and bayonets for. If there were nothing else and no one else in England,
I should stand on the shore and fight until I dropped dead and the whole
Hun mass surged over me before they should reach you."
"Yes," whispered Robin, "I know."
They both realised that the time had come when they must part, and when
he lifted again the hand nearest to him, it was with the gesture of one
who had reached the moment of farewell.
"It's our garden," he said. "It's the _same_ garden. Just because there
is no time--may I see you here again? I can't go away without knowing
that."
"I will come," she answered, "whenever the Duchess does not need me. You
see I belong to nobody but myself."
"I belong to people," he said, "but I belong to myself too." He paused a
second or so and a strange half puzzled expression settled in his eyes.
"It's only fair that a man who's looking the end of things straight in
the face should have something for himself--to himself. If it's only a
heavenly hour now and then. Before things stop. There's such a lot of
life--and such a lot to live for--forever if one could. And a smash--or
a crash--or a thrust--and it's over! Sometimes I can hardly get hold of
it."
He shook his head as he rose and stood upright, drawing his splendid
young body erect.
"It's only fair," he said. "A chap's so strong and--and ready for
living. Everything's surging through one's mind and body. One can't go
out without having _something_--of one's own. You'll come, won't
you--just because there's no time? I--I want to keep looking into your
eyes."
"I want you to look into them," said Robin. "I'll come."
He stood still a moment looking at her just as she wanted him to look.
Then after a few more words he bent low and kissed her hands and then
stood straight again and saluted and went away.
CHAPTER IV
There was one facet of the great stone of War upon which many strange
things were written. They were not the things most discussed or
considered. They were results--not causes. But for the stress of mental,
spiritual and physical tempest-of-being the colossal background of storm
created, many of them might never have happened; but the consequences of
their occurrence were to touch close, search deep, and reach far into
the unknown picture of the World the great War might leave in fragments
which could only be readjusted by centuries of time.
The interested habit of observation of, and reflection on, her kind
which knew no indifferences, in the mind of the Duchess of Darte,
awakened by stages to the existence of this facet and to the moment of
the writings thereupon.
"It would seem almost as if Nature--Fate--had meant to give a new
impulse to the race--to rouse human creatures to new moods, to thrust
them into places where they see new things. Men and women are being
dragged out of their self-absorbed corners and stirred up and shaken.
Emotions are being roused in people who haven't known what a real
emotion was. Middle-aged husbands and wives who had sunk into
comfortable acceptance of each other and their boys and girls are being
dragged out of bed, as it were, and wakened up and made to stand on
their feet and face unbelievable possibilities. If you have boys old
enough to be soldiers and girls old enough to be victims--your life
makes a sort of _volte face_ and everyday, worldly comforts and
successes or little failures drop out of your line of sight, and change
their values. Mothers are beginning to clutch at their sons; and even
self-centred fathers and selfish pretty sisters look at their male
relatives with questioning, with a hint of respect or even awe in it.
Perhaps the women feel it more than the men. Good-looking, light-minded,
love-making George has assumed a new aspect to his mother and to
Kathryn. They're secretly yearning over him. He has assumed a new aspect
to me. I yearn over him myself. He has changed--he has suddenly grown
up. Boys are doing it on every hand."
"The youngest youngster vibrates with the shock of cannon firing, even
though the sound may not be near enough to be heard," answered Coombe.
"We're all vibrating unconsciously. We are shuddering consciously at the
things we hear and are mad to put a stop to, before they go further."
"Innocent little villages full of homes torn and trampled under foot and
burned!" the Duchess almost cried out. "And worse things than
that--worse things! And the whole monstrosity growing more huge and
throwing out new and more awful tentacles every day."
"Every hour. No imagination has yet conceived what it may be."
"That is why the poor human things are clutching at each other, and
finding values and attractions where they did not see them before.
Colonel Marion and his wife were here yesterday. He is a stout man over
fifty and has a red face and prominent eyes. His wife has been so
occupied with herself and her children that she had almost forgotten he
existed. She looked at and listened to him as if she were a bride."
"I have seen changes of that sort myself," said Coombe. "He is more
alive himself. He has begun to be of importance. And men like him have
been killed already--though the young ones go first."
"The young ones know that, and they clutch the most frantically. That is
what I am seeing in young eyes everywhere. Mere instinct makes it
so--mere uncontrollable instinct which takes the form of a sort of
desperateness at facing the thousand chances of death before they have
lived. They don't know it isn't actual fear of bullets and shrapnel.
Sometimes they're afraid it's fear and it makes them sick at themselves
and determined to grin and hide it. But it isn't fear--it's furious
Nature protesting."
"There are hasty bridals and good-bye marriages being made in all
ranks," Coombe put in. "They are inevitable."
"God help the young things--those of them who never meet again--and
perhaps, also, some of those who do. The nation ought to take care of
the children. If there is a nation left, God knows they will be needed,"
the Duchess said. "One of my footmen who 'joined up' has revealed an
unsuspected passion for a housemaid he used to quarrel with, and who
seemed to detest him. I have three women in my household who have
soldier lovers in haste to marry them. I shall give them my blessing and
take care of the wives when they are left behind. One can be served by
old men and married women--and one can turn cottages into small
orphanages if the worst happens."
There was a new vigour in her splendid old face and body.
"There is a reason now why I am the Dowager Duchess of Darte," she went
on, "and why I have money and houses and lands. There is a reason why I
have lived when it sometimes seemed as if my usefulness was over. There
are uses for my money--for my places--for myself. Lately I have found
myself saying, as Mordecai said to Esther, 'Who knowest whether thou art
not come to the kingdom for such a time as this.' A change is taking
place in me too. I can do more because there is so much more to do. I
can even use my hands better. Look at them."
She held them out that he might see them--her beautiful old-ivory
fingers, so long stiffened by rheumatism. She slowly opened and shut
them.
"I can move them more--I have been exercising them and having them
rubbed. I want to be able to knit and sew and wait on myself and perhaps
on other people. Because I have been a rich, luxurious old woman it has
not occurred to me that there were rheumatic old women who were forced
to do things because they were poor--the things I never tried to do. I
have begun to try."
She let her hands fall on her lap and sat gazing up at him with a rather
strange expression.
"Do you know what I have been doing?" she said. "I have been praying to
God--for a sort of miracle. In their terror people are beginning to ask
their Deity for things as they have never done it before. We are most of
us like children waking in horror of the black night and shrieking for
some one to come--some one--any one! Each creature cries out to his own
Deity--the God his own need has made. Most of us are doing it in
secret--half ashamed to let it be known. We are abject things. Mothers
and fathers are doing it--young lovers and husbands and wives."
"What miracle are you asking for?"
"For power to do things I have not done for years. I want to walk--to
stand--to work. If under the stress of necessity I begin to do all
three, my doctors will say that mental exaltation and will power have
caused the change. It may be true, but mental exaltation and will power
are things of the soul not of the body. Anguish is actually forcing me
into a sort of practical belief. I am trying to 'have faith even as a
grain of mustard seed' so that I may say unto my mountain, 'Remove hence
to yonder place and it shall be removed.'"
"'The things which I do, ye shall do also and even greater things than
these shall ye do.'" Coombe repeated the words deliberately. "I heard an
earnest middle-aged dissenter preach a sermon on that text a few days
ago."
"What?"--his old friend leaned forward. "Are _you_ going to hear
sermons?"
"I am one of the children, I suppose. Though I do not shriek aloud,
probably something shrieks within me. I was passing a small chapel and
heard a singular voice. I don't know exactly why I went into the place,
but when I sat down inside I felt the tension of the atmosphere at once.
Every one looked anxious or terrified. There were pale faces and stony
or wild eyes. It did not seem to be an ordinary service and voices kept
breaking out with spasmodic appeals, 'Almighty God, look down on us!'
'Oh, Christ, have mercy!' 'Oh, God, save us!' One woman in black was
rocking backwards and forwards and sobbing over and over again, 'Oh,
Jesus! Jesus! Oh, Lord Jesus!'"
"Part of her body and soul was lying done to death in some field--or by
some roadside," said the Duchess. "She could not pray--she could only
cry out. I can hear her, 'Oh, Lord Jesus!'"
Later came the morning when the changed George came to say good-bye. He
was wonderfully good-looking in his khaki and seemed taller and more
square of jaw. He made a few of the usual young jokes which were
intended to make things cheerful and to treat affectionate fears
lightly, but his good-natured blue eye held a certain deadly quiet in
its depths.
His mother and Kathryn were with him, and it was while they were
absorbed in anxious talk with the Duchess that he walked over to where
Robin sat and stood before her.
"Will you come into the library and let me say something to you? I don't
want to go away without saying it," he put it to her.
The library was the adjoining room and Robin rose and went with him
without any comment or question. Already the time had come when
formalities had dropped away and people did not ask for trivial
explanations. The pace of events had become too rapid.
"There are a lot of chances when a man goes out--that he won't come
back," he said, still standing after she had taken a place in the
window-seat he guided her to. "There are not as many as one's friends
can't help thinking--but there are enough to make him feel he'd like to
leave things straight when he goes. What I want you to let me say is,
that the minute I had made a fool of myself the night of the dance, I
knew what an ass I had been and I was ready to grovel."
Robin's lifted face was quite gentle. Suddenly she was thinking
self-reproachingly, "Oh, poor boy--poor boy!"
"I flew into a temper and would not let you," she answered him. "It
_was_ temper--but there were things you didn't know. It was not your
fault that you didn't." The square, good-natured face flushed with
relief, and George's voice became even slightly unsteady.
"That's kind of you," he said, "it's _kind_ and I'm jolly grateful.
Things mean a lot just now--with all one's people in such a state and
trying so pluckily to hide it. I just wanted to make sure that you knew
that _I_ knew that the thing only happened because I was a silly idiot
and for no other reason. You will believe me, won't you, and won't
remember it if you ever remember me?"
"I shall remember you--and it is as if--that had never happened at all."
She put out, as she got up, such a kind hand that he grasped it almost
joyously.
"You have made it awfully easy for me. Thank you, Miss Lawless." He
hesitated a second and then dropped his voice. "I wonder if I dare--I
wonder if it would be cheek--and impudence if I said something else?"
"Scarcely anything seems cheek or impudence now," Robin answered with
simple sadness. "Nothing ordinary seems to matter because _everything_
is of so much importance."
"I feel as if what I wanted to say was one of the things that _are_
important. I don't know what--older people--or safe ones--would think
about it, but--" He broke off and began again. "To _us_ young ones who
are facing-- It's the only big thing that's left us--in our bit of the
present. We can only be sure of to-day--"
"Yes--yes," Robin cried out low. "Only to-day--just to-day." She even
panted a little and George, looking into her eyes, knew that he might
say anything, because for a reason she was one of the girls who in this
hour could understand.
"Perhaps you don't know where our house is," he said quite quickly. "It
is one of those in the Square--facing the Gardens. I might have played
with you there when I was a little chap--but I don't think I did."
"Nobody did but Donal," she said, quickly also. How did she know that he
was going to say something to her about Donal?
"I gave him the key to the Gardens that day," he hurried on. "I was at
the window with him when he saw you. I understood in a minute when I saw
his face and he'd said half a dozen words to me. I gave him my key. He
has got it now." He actually snatched at both her hands and gripped
them. It was a _grip_ and his eyes burned through a sort of sudden
moisture. "We can't stay here and talk. But I couldn't _not_ say it! Oh,
I say, be _good_ to him! You would, if he had only a day to live because
some damned German bullet had struck him. You're life--you're
youngness--you're _to-day_! Don't say 'No' to _anything_ he asks of
you--for God's sake, don't."
"I'd give him my heart in his two hands," gasped Robin. "I couldn't give
him my soul because it was always his."
"God take care of the pair of you--and be good to the rest of us,"
whispered George, wringing her hands hard and dropping them.
That was how he went away.
A few weeks later he was lying, a mangled object, in a field in
Flanders. One of thousands--living, laughing, good as honest bread is
good; the possible passer-on of life and force and new thinking for new
generations--one of hundreds of thousands--one of millions before the
end came--nice, healthy, normal-minded George, son and heir of a house
of decent nobles.
CHAPTER V
And still youth marched away, and England seemed to swarm with soldiers
and, at times, to hear and see nothing but marching music and marching
feet, though life went on in houses, shops, warehouses and offices, and
new and immense activities evolved as events demanded them. Many of the
new activities were preparations for the comfort and care of soldiers
who were going away, and for those who would come back and would need
more care than the others. Women were doing astonishing work and
revealing astonishing power and determination. The sexes mingled with a
businesslike informality unknown in times of peace. Lovely girls went in
and out of their homes, and from one quarter of London to another
without question. They walked with a brisk step and wore the steady
expression of creatures with work in view. Slim young war-widows were to
be seen in black dresses and veiled small hats with bits of white crape
inside their brims. Sometimes their little faces were awful to behold,
but sometimes they wore a strained look of exaltation.
The Dowager Duchess of Darte was often absent from Eaton Square. She was
understood to be proving herself much stronger than her friends had
supposed her to be. She proved it by doing an extraordinary amount of
work. She did it in her house in Eaton Square--in other people's houses,
in her various estates in the country, where she prepared her villagers
and tenants for a future in which every farm house and cottage must be
as ready for practical service as her own castle or manor house. Darte
Norham was no longer a luxurious place of residence but a potential
hospital for wounded soldiers; so was Barons Court and the beautiful old
Dower House at Malworth.
Sometimes Robin was with her, but oftener she remained at Eaton Square
and wrote letters and saw busy people and carried out lists of orders.
It was not every day or evening that she could easily find time to go
out alone and make her way to the Square Gardens and in fact it was not
often to the Gardens she went. There were so many dear places where
trees grew and made quiet retreats--all the parks and heaths and green
suburbs--and everywhere pairs walked or sat and talked, and were frankly
so wholly absorbed in the throb of their own existences that they had no
interest in, or curiosity concerning, any other human beings.
"Ought I to ask you to come and meet me--as if you were a little
housemaid meeting her life-guardsman?" Donal had said feverishly the
second time they met.
A sweet flush ran up to the roots of her hair and even showed itself on
the bit of round throat where her dress was open.
"Yes, you ought," she answered. "There are no little housemaids and
life-guardsmen now. It seems as if there were only--people."
The very sound of her voice thrilled him--everything about her thrilled
him--the very stuff her plain frock was made of, the small hat she wore,
her way of moving or quiet sitting down near him, but most of all the
lift of her eyes to his--because there was no change in it and the eyes
expressed what they had expressed when they had first looked at him. It
was a thing which moved him to-day exactly as it had moved him when he
was too young to explain its meaning and appeal. It was the lovely faith
and yearning acceptance of him as a being whose perfection could not be
questioned. There was in it no conscious beguiling flattery or
appraisement--it was pure acceptance and sweet waiting for what he had
to give. He sometimes found himself trembling with his sense of its
simple unearthliness.
Few indeed were the people who at this time were wholly normal. The
whole world seemed a great musical instrument, overstrung and giving out
previously unknown harmonies and inharmonies. Amid the thunders of great
crashing discords the individual note was almost unheard--but the
individual note continued its vibrations.
The tone which expressed Donal Muir--in common with many others of his
age and sex--was a novel and abnormal one. His being no longer sang the
healthy human song of mere joy in life and living. A knowledge of
cruelty and brutal force, of helplessness and despair, grew in him day
by day. Causes for gay good cheer and laughter were swept away, leaving
in their places black facts and needs to gaze at with hard eyes.
"Do you see how everything has _stopped_--how nothing can go on?" he
said to Robin on their second meeting in the Gardens. "The things we
used to fill our time and amuse ourselves with--dancing and tennis and
polo and theatres and parties--how jolly and all right they were in
their day, but how futile they seem just now. How could one even stand
talk of them! There is only one thing."
The blue of his eyes grew dark.
"It is as if a gigantic wall were piling itself up between us and Life,"
he went on. "That is how I see it--a wall piling itself higher every
hour. It's built of dead things and maimed and tortured ones. It's
building itself of things you can't speak of. It stands between all the
world and living--mere living. We can't go on till we've stormed it and
beaten it down--or added our bodies to it. If it isn't beaten down it
will rise to heaven itself and shut it out--and that will be the end of
the world." He shook his head in sudden defiant bitterness. "If it can't
be beaten down, better the world _should_ come to an end."
Robin put out her hand and caught his sleeve.
"It will be beaten down," she cried. "You--_you_--and others like you--"
"It will be," he said. "And it's because, when men read the day's news,
almost every single one of them feels something leaping up in him that
seems strong enough to batter it to earth single-handed."
But he gently put out his own hand and took in it the slim gloved one
and looked down at it, as if it were something quite apart and
wonderful--rather as if hands were rare and he had not often seen one
before.
There was much sound of heavy traffic on the streets. The lumbering of
army motor trucks and vans, the hurry of ever-passing feet and vehicles,
changed the familiar old-time London roar, which had been as that of low
and distant thunder, into the louder rumbling of a storm which had drawn
nearer and was spending its fury within the city's streets themselves.
Just at this moment there arose the sound of some gigantic loaded thing,
passing with unearthly noises, and high above it pierced the shrilling
of fifes.
Robin glanced about the empty garden.
"The noise seems to shut us in. How deserted the Gardens look. I feel as
if we were in another world. We are shut in--and shut out," she
whispered.
He whispered also. He still looked down at the slim gloved hand as if it
had some important connection with the moment.
"We have so few minutes together," he said. "And I have thought of so
many things I must say to you. I cannot stop thinking about you. I think
of you even when I am obliged to think of something else at the same
time. I am in a sort of tumult every moment I am away from you." He
stopped suddenly and looked up. "I am speaking as if I had been with you
a score of times. I haven't, you know. I have only seen you once since
the dance. But it is as if we had met every day--and it's true--I am in
a sort of tumult. I think thousands of new things and I feel as if I
_must_ tell you of them all."
"I--think too," said Robin. Oh! the dark dew of her imploring eyes! Oh!
the beat of the little pulse he could actually see in her soft bare
throat. He did not even ask himself what the eyes implored for. They had
always looked like that--as if they were asking to be allowed to be
happy and to love all kind things on earth.
"One of the new things I cannot help thinking about--it's a queer thing
and I must tell you about it. It's not like me and yet it's the
strongest feeling I ever had. Since the War has changed everything and
everybody, all one's feelings have grown stronger. I never was furious
before--and I've been furious. I've felt savage. I've raged. And the
thing I'm thinking of is like a kind of obsession. It's this--" he
caught her hands again and held her face to face with him. "I--I want to
have you to myself," he exclaimed.
She did not try to move. She only gazed at him.
"Nobody else _has_ me--at all," she answered. "No one wants me."
The colour ran up under his fine skin.
"What I mean is a little different. Perhaps you mayn't understand it. I
want this--our being together in this way--our understanding and
talking--to be something that belongs to _us_ and to no one else. It's
too sudden and wonderful for any one but ourselves to understand. Nobody
else _could_ understand it. Perhaps we don't ourselves--quite! But I
know what it does to _me_. I can't bear the thought of other people
spoiling the beauty of it by talking it over and looking on." He
actually got up and began to walk about. "Oh, I _ought_ to have
something of my own--before it's all over--I ought! I want this miracle
of a thing--for my own."
He stopped and stood before her.
"My mother is the most beloved creature in the world. I have always told
her everything. She has always cared. I don't know why I have not told
her about--this--but I haven't and I don't want to--now. That is part of
the strange thing. I do not want to tell her--even the belovedest woman
that ever lived. I want it for myself. Will you let me have it--will you
help me to keep it?"
"Like a secret?" said Robin in her soft note.
"No, not a secret. A sort of sacred, heavenly unbelievable thing we own
together."
"I understand," was Robin's answer. "It does not seem strange to me. I
have thought something like that too--almost exactly like."
It did not once occur to them to express, even to themselves, in any
common mental form the fact that they were "in love" with each other.
The tide which swept them with it had risen ages before and bore them on
its swelling waves as though they were leaves.
"No one but ourselves will know that we meet," she went on further. "I
may come and go as I like in these hurried busy hours. Even Lady Kathryn
is as free as if she were a shop girl. It is as you said before--there
is no time to be curious and ask questions. And even Dowie has been
obliged to go to her cousin's widow whose husband has just been killed."
Shaken, thrilled, exalted, Donal sat down again and talked to her.
Together they made their plans for meeting, as they had done when
Andrews had slackened her guard. There was no guard to keep watch on
them now. And the tide rose hour by hour.
CHAPTER VI
Aunts and cousins and more or less able relatives were largely drawn on
in these days of stress and need, and Dowie was an efficient person. The
cousin whose husband had been killed in Belgium, leaving a young widow
and two children scarcely younger and more helpless than herself, had no
relation nearer than Dowie, and had sent forth to the good woman a
frantic wail for help in her desolation. The two children were, of
course, on the point of being added to by an almost immediately
impending third, and the mother, being penniless and prostrated, had
remembered the comfortable creature with her solid bank account of
savings and her good sense and good manners and knowledge of a world
larger than the one into which she had been born.
"You're settled here, my lamb," Dowie had said to Robin. "It's more like
your own home than the other place was. You're well and safe and busy. I
must go to poor Henrietta in Manchester. That's my bit of work, it
seems, and thank God I'm able to do it. She was a fine girl in a fine
shop, poor Henrietta, and she's not got any backbone and her children
are delicate--and another coming. Well, well! I do thank God that you
don't need your old Dowie as you did at first."
Thus she went away and in her own pleasant rooms in the big house, now
so full of new activities, Robin was as unwatched as if she had been a
young gull flying in and out of its nest in a tall cliff rising out of
the beating sea.
Her early fever of anxiety never to lose sight of the fact that she was
a paid servitor had been gradually assuaged by the delicate adroitness
of the Duchess and by the aid of soothing time. While no duty or service
was forgotten or neglected, she realised that life was passed in an
agreeable freedom which was a happy thing. Certain hours and days were
absolutely her own to do what she chose with. She had never asked for
such privileges, but the Duchess with an almost imperceptible adjustment
had arranged that they should be hers. Sometimes she had taken Dowie
away on little holidays to the sea side, often she spent hours in
picture galleries or great libraries or museums. In attendance on the
Duchess she had learned to know all the wonders and picturesqueness of
her London and its environments, and often with Dowie as her companion
she wandered about curious and delightful places and, pleased as a
child, looked in at her kind at work or play.
While nations shuddered and gasped, cannon belched forth, thunder and
flaming, battleships crashed together and sudden death was almost as
unintermitting as the ticking of the clock, among the thousands of
pairing souls and bodies drawn together in a new world where for the
time being all sound was stilled but the throb of pulsing hearts, there
moved with the spellbound throng one boy and girl whose dream of being
was a thing of entrancement.
Every few days they met in some wonderfully chosen and always quiet
spot. Donal knew and loved the half unknown remote corners of the older
London too. There were dim gardens behind old law courts, bits of mellow
old enclosures and squares seemingly forgotten by the world, there were
the immensities of the great parks where embowered paths and corners
were at certain hours as unexplored as the wilderness. When the Duchess
was away or a day of holiday came, there were, more than once, a few
hours on the river where, with boat drawn up under enshrouding trees,
green light and lapping water, sunshine and silence, rare swans sailing
serenely near as if to guard them made the background to the thrill of
heavenly young wonder and joy.
It was always the same. Each pair of eyes found in the beauty of the
other the same wonder and, through that which the being of each
expressed, each was shaken by the same inward thrill. Sometimes they
simply sat and gazed at each other like happy amazed children scarcely
able to translate their own delight. Their very aloofness from the
world--its unawareness of their story's existence made for the
perfection of all they felt.
"It could not be like this if any one but ourselves even _knew_," Donal
said. "It is as if we had been changed into spirits and human beings
could not see us."
There was seldom much leisure in their meetings. Sometimes they had only
a few minutes in which to exchange a word or so, to cling to each
other's hands. But even in these brief meetings the words that were said
were food for new life and dreams when they were apart. And the tide
rose.
But it did not overflow until one early morning when they met in a
gorse-filled hollow at Hampstead, each looking at the other pale and
stricken. In Robin's wide eyes was helpless horror and Donal knew too
well what she was going to say.
"Lord Halwyn is killed!" she gasped out. "And four of his friends! We
all danced the tango together--and that new kicking step!" She began to
sob piteously. Somehow it was the sudden memory of the almost comic
kicking step which overwhelmed her with the most gruesome sense of
awfulness--as if the world had come to an end.
"It was new--and they laughed so! They are killed!" she cried beating
her little hands. He had just heard the same news. Five of them! And he
had heard details she had been spared.
He was as pale as she. He stood before her quivering, hot and cold.
Until this hour they had been living only through the early growing
wonder of their dream; they had only talked together and exquisitely
yearned and thrilled at the marvel of every simple word or hand-touch or
glance, and every meeting had been a new delight. But now suddenly the
being of each shook and called to the other in wild need of the nearer
nearness which is comfort and help. It was early--early morning--the
heath spread about them wide and empty, and at that very instant a
skylark sprang from its hidden nest in the earth and circled upward to
heaven singing as to God.
"They will take _you_!" she wailed. "_You--you!_" And did not know that
she held out her arms.
But he knew--with a great shock of incredible rapture and tempestuous
answering. He caught her softness to his thudding young chest and kissed
her sobbing mouth, her eyes, her hair, her little pulsing throat.
"Oh, little love," he himself almost sobbed the words. "Oh, little
lovely love!"
She melted into his arms like a weeping child. It was as if she had
always rested there and it was mere Nature that he should hold and
comfort her. But he had never heard or dreamed of the possibility of
such anguish as was in her sobbing.
"They will take you!" she said. "And--you danced too. And I must not
hold you back! And I must stay here and wait and wait--and _wait_--until
some day--! Donal! Donal!"
He sat down with her amongst the gorse and held her on his knee as if
she had been six years old. She did not attempt to move but crouched
there and clung to him with both hands. She remembered only one
thing--that he must go! And there were cannons--and shells singing and
screaming! And boys like George in awful heaps. No laughing face as it
had once looked--all marred and strange and piteously lonely as they
lay.
It took him a long time to calm her terror and woe. When at last he had
so far quieted her that her sobs came only at intervals she seemed to
awaken to sudden childish awkwardness. She sat up and shyly moved. "I
didn't mean--I didn't know--!" she quavered. "I am--I am sitting on your
knee like a baby!" But he could not let her go.
"It is because I love you so," he answered in his compelling boy voice,
holding her gently. "Don't move--don't move! There is no time to think
and wait--or care for anything--if we love each other. We _do_ love each
other, don't we?" He put his cheek against hers and pressed it there.
"Oh, say we do," he begged. "There is no time. And listen to the skylark
singing!"
The butterfly-wing flutter of her lashes against his cheek as she
pressed the softness of her own closer, and the quick exquisite
indrawing of her tender, half-sobbing childish breath were unspeakably
lovely answering things--though he heard her whisper.
"Yes, Donal! Donal!" And again, "Donal! Donal!"
And he held her closer and kissed her very gently again. And they sat
and whispered that they loved each other and had always loved each other
and would love each other forever and forever and forever. Poor enrapt
children! It has been said before, but they said it again and yet again.
And the circling skylark seemed to sing at the very gates of God's
heaven.
So the tide rose to its high flowing.
CHAPTER VII
The days of gold which linked themselves one to another with strange
dawns of pearl and exquisite awakenings, each a miracle, the gemmed
night whose blue darkness seemed studded with myriads of new stars, the
noons whose heats or rains were all warm scents of flowers and fragrant
mists, wrought themselves into a chain of earthly beauty. The hour in
which the links must break and the chain end was always a faint spectre
veiled by kindly mists which seemed to rise hour by hour to soften and
hide it.
But often in those days did it occur that the hurrying and changing
visitors to the house in Eaton Square, glancing at Robin as she sat
writing letters, or as she passed them in some hall or room, found
themselves momentarily arrested in an almost startled fashion by the
mere radiance of her.
"She is lovelier every time one turns one's head towards her," the
Starling said--the Starling having become a vigorous worker and the
Duchess giving welcome to any man, woman or child who could be counted
on for honest help. "It almost frightens me to see her eyes when she
looks up suddenly. It is like finding one's self too close to a star. A
star in the sky is all very well--but a star only three feet away from
one is a kind of shock. What has happened to the child?"
She said it to Gerald Vesey who between hours of military training was
helping Harrowby to arrange a matinee for the benefit of the Red Cross.
Harrowby had been rejected by the military authorities on account of
defective sight and weak chest but had with a promptness unexpected by
his friends merged himself into unprominent, useful hard work which
frequently consisted of doing disagreeable small jobs men of his type
generally shied away from.
"Something has happened to her," answered Vesey. "She has the flight of
a skylark let out of a cage. Her moving is flight--not ordinary walking.
I hope her work has kept her away from--well, from young gods and
things."
"The streets are full of them," said Harrowby, "marching to defy death
and springing to meet glory--marching not walking. Young Mars and Ajax
and young Paris with Helen in his eyes. She might be some youngster's
Helen! Why do you hope her work has kept her away?"
Vesey shook his Greek head with a tragic bitterness.
"Oh! I don't know," he groaned. "There's too much disaster piled high
and staring in every one of their flushing rash young faces. On they go
with their heads in the air and their hearts thumping, and hoping and
refusing to believe in the devil and hell let loose--and the whole thing
stares and gibbers at them."
But each day her eyes looked larger and more rapturously full of
heavenly glowing, and her light movements were more like bird flight,
and her swiftness and sweet readiness to serve delighted and touched
people more, and they spoke oftener to and of her, and felt actually a
thought uplifted from the darkness because she was like pure light's
self.
Lord Coombe met her in the street one evening at twilight and he stopped
to speak to her.
"I have just come from Darte Norham," he said to her. "The Duchess
asked me to see you personally and make sure that you do not miss Dowie
too much--that you are not lonely."
"I am very busy and am very well taken care of," was her answer. "The
servants are very attentive and kind. I am not lonely at all, thank you.
The Duchess is very good to me."
Donal evidently knew nothing of her reasons for disliking Lord Coombe.
She could not have told him of them. He did not dislike his relative
himself and in fact rather liked him in spite of the frigidity he
sometimes felt. He, at any rate, admired his cold brilliance of mind.
Robin could not therefore let herself detest the man and regard him as
an enemy. But she did not like the still searching of the grey eyes
which rested on her so steadily.
"The Duchess wished me to make sure that you did not work too
enthusiastically. She desires you to take plenty of exercise and if you
are tired to go into the country for a day or two of fresh air and rest.
She recommends old Mrs. Bennett's cottage at Mersham Wood. The place is
quite rustic though it is near enough to London to be convenient. You
might come and go."
"She is too kind--too kind," said Robin. "Oh! _how_ kind to think of me
like that. I will write and thank her."
The sweet gratitude in her eyes and voice were touching. She could not
speak steadily.
"I may tell her then that you are well taken care of and that you are
happy," the grey eyes were a shade less cold but still searching and
steady. "You look--happy."
"I never was so happy before. Please--please tell her that when you
thank her for me," was Robin's quite yearning little appeal. She held
out her hand to him for the first time in her life. "Thank you, Lord
Coombe, for so kindly delivering her beautiful message."
His perfect manner did not record any recognition on his part of the
fact that she had done an unexpected thing. But as he went on his way he
was thinking of it.
"She is very happy for some reason," he thought. "Perhaps the rush and
excitement of her new work exalts her. She has the ecstasied air of a
lovely child on her birthday--with all her world filled with petting and
birthday gifts."
The Duchess evidently extended her care to the extent of sending special
messages to Mrs. James, the housekeeper, who began to exercise a
motherly surveillance over Robin's health and diet and warmly to
advocate long walks and country visits to the cottage at Mersham Wood.
"Her grace will be really pleased if you take a day or two while she's
away. She's always been just that interested in those about her, Miss,"
Mrs. James argued. "She wouldn't like to come back and find you looking
tired or pale. Not that there's much danger of that," quite beamingly.
"For all your hard work, I must say you look--well, you look as I've
never seen you. And you always had a colour like a new-picked rose."
The colour like a new-picked rose ran up to the rings of hair on the
girl's forehead as if she were made a little shy.
"It is because her grace has been so good--and because every one is so
kind to me," she said. "Kindness makes me happy."
She was so happy that she was never tired and was regarded as a young
wonder in the matter of work and readiness and exactitude. Her accounts,
her correspondence, her information were always in order. When she took
the prescribed walks and in some aloof path or corner met the strong,
slim khaki-clad figure, they walked or stood or sat closely side by side
and talked of many things--though most of all they dwelt on one. She
could ask Donal questions and he could throw light on such things as
young soldiers knew better than most people. She came into close
touch--a shuddering touch sometimes it was--with needs and facts
concerning marchings and trenches and attacks and was therefore able to
visualise and to speak definitely of necessities not always understood.
"How did you find that out?" little black-clad Lady Kathryn asked her
one day. "I wish I had known it before George went away."
"A soldier told me," was her answer. "Soldiers know things we don't."
"The world is made of soldiers now," said Kathryn. "And one is always
talking to them. I shall begin to ask them questions about small things
like that."
It was the same morning that as they stood alone together for a few
minutes Kathryn suddenly put her hand upon Robin's shoulder.
"You never--_never_ feel the least angry--when you remember about
George--the night of the dance," she pleaded shakily. "Do you, Robin?
You couldn't _now_! Could you?"
Tears rushed into Robin's eyes.
"Never--never!" she said. "I always remember him--oh, quite differently!
He----" she hesitated a second and began again. "He did something--so
wonderfully kind--before he went away--something for me. That is what I
remember. And his nice voice--and his good eyes."
"Oh! he _was_ good! He was!" exclaimed Kathryn in a sort of despairing
impatience. "So many of them are! It's awful!" And she sat down in the
nearest chair and cried hopelessly into her crushed handkerchief while
Robin tried to soothe--not to comfort her. There was no comfort to
offer. And behind the rose tinted mists her own spectre merely pretended
to veil itself.
* * * * *
When she lay in bed at night in her quiet room she often lay awake long
and long for pure bliss. The world in which people were near--_near_--to
one another and loved each other, the world Donal had always belonged to
even when he was a little boy, she now knew and lived in. There was no
loneliness in it. If there was pain or trouble some one who loved you
was part of it and you, and so you could bear it. All the radiant
mornings and heavenly nights, all the summer scents of flowers or hay or
hedges in bloom, or new rain on the earth, were things felt just as that
other one felt them and drew in their delights--exactly in the same way.
Once in the night stillness of a sweet dark country lane she had stood
in the circle of Donal's arm, her joyous, warm young breast against his
and they had heard together the singing of a nightingale in a thicket.
"Let us stand still," he had whispered close to her ear. "Let us not
speak a word--not a word. Oh! little lovely love! Let us only
_listen_--and be happy!"
Almost every day there were marvels like this. And when they were apart
she could not forget them but walked like a spirit strayed on to earth
and unknowing of its radiance. This was why people glanced at her
curiously and were sometimes vaguely troubled.
CHAPTER VIII
The other woman who loved and was loved by him moved about her world in
these days with a face less radiant than the one people turned to look
at in the street or in its passing through the house in Eaton Square.
Helen Muir's eyes were grave and pondered. She had always known of the
sometime coming of the hour in which would rise the shadow--to him a
cloud of rapture--which must obscure the old clearness of vision which
had existed between them. She had been too well balanced of brain to
allow herself to make a tragedy of it or softly to sentimentalise of
loss. It was mere living nature that it should be so. He would be as
always, a beloved wonder of dearness and beauty when his hour came and
she would look on and watch and be so cleverly silent and delicately
detached from his shy, aloof young moods, his funny, dear involuntary
secrets and reserves. But at any moment--day or night--at any elate
emotional moment _ready_!
She had the rare accomplishment of a perfect knowledge of _how to wait_,
and to wait--if necessary--long. When the first golden down had shown
itself on his cheek and lip she had not noticed it too much and when his
golden soprano voice began to change to a deeper note and annoyed him
with its uncertainties she had spared him awkwardness by making him feel
the transition a casual natural thing, instead of a personal and
characteristic weakness. She had loved every stage of innocence and
ignorance and adorable silliness he had passed through and he had grown
closer to her through the medium of each, because nothing in life was
so clear as her lovely wiseness and fine perceptive entirety of sympathy
and poise.
"I never have to explain really," he said more than once. "You would
understand even if I were an idiot or a criminal. And you'd understand
if I were an archangel."
With a deep awareness she knew that, when she first realised that the
shadow was rising, it would be different. She would have to watch it
with an aloofness more delicate and yet more warmly sensitive than any
other. In the days when she first thought of him as like one who is
listening to a far-off sound, it seemed possible that in the clamour of
louder echoes this one might lose itself and at last die away even from
memory. It was youth's way to listen and youth's way to find it easy to
forget. He heard many reverberations in these days and had much reason
for thought and action. He thought a great deal, he worked
energetically, he came and went, he read and studied, he obeyed orders
and always stood ready for new ones. Her pride in his vigorous
initiative and practical determination was a glowing flame in her heart.
He meant to be no toy soldier.
As she became as practical a worker as he was, they did much together
and made plans without ceasing. When he was away she was always doing
things in which he was interested and when he returned he always brought
to her suggestions for new service or the development of the old. But as
the days passed and became weeks she knew that the far-off sound was
still being listened to. She could not have told how--but she knew. And
she saw the beloved dearness and beauty growing in him. He came into the
house each day in his khaki as if khaki were a shining thing. When he
laughed, or sat and smiled, or dreamed--forgetting she was there--her
very heart quaked with delight in him. Another woman than Robin counted
over his charms and made a tender list of them, wondering at each one.
As a young male pheasant in mating time dons finer gloss and brilliancy
of plumage, perhaps he too bloomed and all unconscious developed added
colour and inches and gallant swing of tread. As people turned half
astart to look at Robin bending over her desk or walking about among
them in her modest dress, so also did they turn to look after him as he
went in springing march along the streets.
"Some day he will begin to tell me," Helen used to say to herself at
night. "He may only _begin_--but perhaps it will be to-morrow."
It was not, however, to-morrow--or to-morrow. And in the midst of his
work he still listened. As he sat and dreamed he listened and sometimes
he was very deep in thought--sitting with his arms folded and his eyes
troubled and questioning of the space into which he looked. The time was
really not very long, but it began to seem so to her.
"But some day--soon--he will tell me," she thought.
* * * * *
One afternoon Donal walked into a room where a number of well-dressed
women were talking, drinking tea and knitting or crocheting. It had
begun already to be the fashion for almost every woman to carry on her
arm a work bag and produce from its depths at any moment without warning
something she was making. In the early days the bag was usually highly
decorated and the article being made was a luxury. Only a few serious
and pessimistic workers had begun to produce plain usefulness and in
this particular Mayfair drawing-room "the War" as yet seemed to present
itself rather as a dramatic and picturesque social asset. A number of
good-looking young officers moved about or sat in corners being petted
and flirted with, while many of the women had the slightly elated
excitement of air produced in certain of their sex by the marked
preponderance of the presence of the masculine element. It was a thing
which made for high spirits and laughs and amiable semi-caressing chaff.
The women who in times of peace had been in the habit of referring to
their "boys" were in these days in great form.
Donal had been taken to the place by an amusement-loving acquaintance
who professed that a special invitation made it impossible to pass by
without dropping in. The house was Mrs. Erwyn's and had already
attracted attention through the recent _débuts_ of Eileen and Winifred
who had grown up very pretty and still retained their large, curious
eyes and their tendency to giggle musically.
In very short and slimly alluring frocks they were assisting their
mother in preparing young warriors for the seat of war by giving them
chocolate in egg-shell cups and little cakes. Winifred carried a coral
satin work-bag embroidered with carnations and was crocheting a silk
necktie peculiarly suited to fierce onslaught on the enemy.
"Oh!" she gasped, clutching in secret at Eileen's sleeve when Donal
entered the room. "There he is! Jack said he would make him come! Just
_look_ at him!"
"Gracious!" ejaculated Eileen. "I daren't look! It's not safe!"
They looked, however, to their irresistible utmost when he came to make
his nice, well-behaved bow to his hostess.
"I love his bow," Eileen whispered. "It is such a beautiful _tall_ bow.
And he looks as good as he is beautiful."
"Oh! not _good_ exactly!" protested Winifred. "Just _sweet_--as if he
thinks you are quite as nice as himself."
He was taken from one group to another and made much of and flattered
quite openly. He was given claret cup and feathery sandwiches and asked
questions and given information. He was chattered to and whispered about
and spent half an hour in a polite vortex of presentation. He was not as
highly entertained as his companion was because he was thinking of
something else--of a place which seemed incredibly far away from London
drawing-rooms--even if he could have convinced himself that it existed
on the same earth. The trouble was that he was always thinking of this
place--and of others. He could not forget them even in the midst of any
clamour of life. Sometimes he was afraid he forgot where he was and
might look as if he were not listening to people. There were moments
when he caught his breath because of a sudden high throb of his heart.
How could he shut out of his mind that which seemed to _be_ his
mind--his body--the soul of him!
It was at a moment when he was thinking of this with a sudden sense of
disturbance that a silver toned voice evidently speaking to him
attracted his attention.
The voice was of silver and the light laugh was silvery.
"You look as if you were not thinking of any of us," the owner said.
He turned about to find himself looking at one of the prettiest of the
filmily dressed creatures in the room. Her frock was one of the briefest
and her tiny heels the highest and most slender. The incredible foot and
ankle wore a flesh silk stocking so fine that it looked as though they
were bare--which was the achievement most to be aspired to. Every atom
of her was lovely and her small deep-curved mouth and pure large eyes
were like an angel's.
"I believe you remember me!" she said after a second or so in which they
held each other's gaze and Donal knew he began to flush slowly.
"Yes," he answered. "I do--now I have looked again. You were--The Lady
Downstairs."
She flung out the silver laugh again.
"After all these years! After one has grown old and withered and
wrinkled--and has a grown-up daughter."
He answered with a dazzling young-man-of-the-world bow and air. He had
not been to Eton and Oxford and touched the outskirts of two or three
London seasons, as a boy beauty and a modest Apollo Belvidere in his
teens, without learning a number of pleasant little ways.
"You are exactly as you were the morning you came into the Gardens
dressed in crocuses and daffodils. I thought they were daffodils and
crocuses. I said so to my mother afterwards."
He did not like her but he knew how her world talked to her. And he
wanted to hear her speak--The Lady Downstairs--who had not "liked" the
soft-eyed, longing, warm little lonely thing.
"All people say of you is entirely true," she said. "I did not believe
it at first but I do now." She patted the seat of the small sofa she had
dropped on. "Come and sit here and talk to me a few minutes. Girls will
come and snatch you away presently but you can spare about three
minutes."
He did as he was told and wondered as he came nearer to the shell
fineness of her cheek and her seraphic smile.
"I want you to tell me something about my only child," she said.
He hoped very much that he did not flush in his sometimes-troublesome
blond fashion then. He hoped so.
"I shall be most happy to tell you anything I have the honour of
knowing," he answered. "Only ask."
"You would be capable of putting on a touch of Lord Coombe's little
stiff air--if you were not so young and polite," she said. "It was Lord
Coombe who told me about the old Duchess' dance--and that you tangoed or
swooped--or kicked with my Robin. He said both of you did it
beautifully."
"Miss Gareth-Lawless did--at least."
He was looking down and so did not chance to see the look of a little
cat which showed itself in her quick side glance.
"She is not my Robin now. She belongs to the Dowager Duchess of
Darte--for a consideration. She is one of the new little females who are
obstinately determined to earn an honest living. I haven't seen her for
months--perhaps years. Is she pretty?" The last three words came out
like the little cat's pounce on a mouse. Donal even felt momentarily
startled.
But he remained capable of raising clear eyes to hers and saying, "She
was prettier than any one else at the Duchess' house that night. Far
prettier."
"Have you never seen her since?"
This was a pounce again and he was quite aware of it.
"Yes."
Feather gurgled.
"That was really worthy of Lord Coombe," she said. "I wasn't being
pushing, really, Mr. Muir. If any one asks you your intentions it will
be the Dowager--not little Miss Gareth-Lawless' mother. I never
pretended to chaperon Robin. She might run about all over London without
my asking any questions. I am afraid I am not much of a mother. I am not
in the least like yours."
"Like mine?" He wondered why his mother should be so suddenly dragged
in.
She laughed with a bright air of being much entertained.
"Do you remember how Mrs. Muir whisked you away from London the day
after she found out that you were playing with my vagabond of a
Robin--unknowing of your danger? There was a mother for you! It nearly
killed my little pariah."
She rose and held out her hand.
"I have not really had my three minutes, but 'I must not detain you any
longer,' as Royal Highnesses say. I must go."
"Why?" he ejaculated with involuntary impatience.
"Because Eileen Erwyn is standing with her back markedly turned towards
us, pretending to talk. I know the expression of her little ears and she
has just laid them back close to her head, which means business. Why do
you all at once look _quite_ like Lord Coombe?" Perhaps he did look a
trifle like his relative. He had risen to his feet.
"I was not aware that I was whisked away from London," he said.
"I was," with pretty impudence. "You were bundled back to Scotland
almost before daylight. Lord Coombe knew about it. We laughed immensely
together. It was a great joke because Robin fainted and fell into the
mud, or something of the sort, when you didn't turn up the next morning.
She almost pined away and died of grief, tiresome little thing! I told
you Eileen was preparing to assault. Here she is! Hordes of girls will
now advance upon you. So glad to have had you even for a few treasured
seconds. _Good_ afternoon."
CHAPTER IX
It was not a long time before he had left the house, but it seemed long
and as if he had thought a great many rather incoherent things before he
had reached the street and presently parted from his gay acquaintance
and was on his way to his mother's house where she was spending a week,
having come down from Scotland as she did often.
He walked all the way home because he wanted movement. He also wanted
time to think things over because the intensity of his own mood troubled
him. It was new for him to think much about himself, but lately he had
found himself sometimes wondering at, as well as shaken by, emotional
mental phases through which he passed. A certain moving fancy always
held its own in his thoughts--as a sort of background to them. It was in
his feeling that he was in those weeks a Donal Muir who was unknown and
unseen by the passing world. No one but himself--and Robin--could know
the meaning, the feeling, the nature of this Donal. It was as if he
lived in a new Dimension of whose existence other people did not know.
He could not have explained because it would not have been understood.
He could vaguely imagine that effort at explanation would end--even
begin--by being so clumsy that it would be met by puzzled or unbelieving
smiles.
To walk about--to sleep--to awaken surrounded by rarefied light and air
in which no object or act or even word or thought wore its past familiar
meaning, or to go about the common streets, feeling as though somehow
one were apart and unseen, was a singular thing. Having had a youth
filled with quite virile pleasures and delightful emotions--and to be
lifted above them into other air and among other visions--was, he told
himself, like walking in a dream. To be filled continually with one
thought, to rebel against any obstacle in the path to one desire, and
from morning until night to be impelled by one eagerness for some moment
or hour for which there was reason enough for its having place in the
movings of the universe, if it brought him face to face with what he
must stand near to--see--hear--perhaps touch.
It was because of the world's madness, because of the human fear and
weeping everywhere, because of the new abysses which seemed to yawn
every day on every side, that both soul and senses were so abnormally
overstrung. He was overwhelmed by exquisite compassions in his thoughts
of Robin, he was afraid for her youngness, her sweetness, the innocent
defencelessness which was like a child's. He was afraid of his own young
rashness and the entrancement of the dream. The great lunging chariot of
War might plunge over them both.
But never for one moment could he force himself to regret or repent.
Boys in their twenties already lay in their thousands on the fields over
there. And she would far, far rather remember the kind hours and know
that they were hidden in his heart for him to remember as he died--if he
died! She had lain upon his breast holding him close and fast and she
had sobbed hard--hard--but she had said it again and again and over and
over when he had asked her.
It was this aspect of her and things akin to it which had risen in his
incoherent thoughts when he was manoeuvering to get away from the
drawing-room full of chattering people. He knew himself overwhelmed
again by the exquisite compassion because the thing Mrs. Gareth-Lawless
had told him had brought back all the silent anguish of impotent
childish rebellion the morning when he had been awakened before the day,
and during the day when he had thought his small breast would burst as
the train rushed on with him--away--away!
And Robin had told him the rest--sitting one afternoon in the same chair
with him--a roomy, dingy red arm-chair in an old riverside inn where
they had managed to meet and had spent a long rainy day together. She
had told him--in a queer little strained voice--about the waiting--and
waiting--and waiting. And about the certainty of her belief in his
coming. And the tiny foot which grew numb. And the slow lump climbing in
her throat. And the rush under the shrubs--and the beating hands--and
cries--and of the rose dress and socks and crushed hat covered with mud.
She had not been piteous or dramatic. She had been so simple that she
had broken his heart in two and he had actually hidden his face in her
hair.
"Oh! Donal, dear. You're crying!" she had said and she had broken down
too and for a few seconds they had cried together rocking in each
other's arms, while the rain streamed down the window panes and
beautifully shut them in, since there are few places more enclosing than
the little, dingy private parlour of a remote English inn on a
ceaselessly rainy day.
It had all come back before he reached the house in Kensington whose
windows looked into the thick leaves of the plane trees. And at the same
time he knew that the burning anger which kept rising in him was perhaps
undue and not quite fair. But he was thinking it had _not_ been mere
cruel chance--it could have been helped--it need never have been! It
had been the narrow cold hard planning of grown-up people who knew that
they were powerful enough to enforce any hideous cruelty on creatures
who had no defence. He actually found his heated mind making a statement
of the case as wild as this and its very mercilessness of phrase checked
him. The grown-up person had been his mother--his long-beloved--and he
was absolutely calling her names. He pulled himself up vigorously and
walked very fast. But the heat did not quite die down and other thoughts
surged up in spite of his desire to keep his head and be reasonably
calm. There _had_ been a certain narrowness in the tragic separation of
two happy children if the only reason for it had been that the mother of
one was a pretty, frivolous, much gossiped about woman belonging to a
rather too rapid set. And if it had been a reason then, how would it
present itself now? What would happen to an untouched dream if argument
and disapproval crashed into it? If his first intensely passionate
impulse had been his desire to save it even from the mere touch of
ordinary talk and smiling glances because he had felt that they would
spoil the perfect joy of it, what would not open displeasure and
opposition make of the down on the butterfly's wing--the bloom on the
peach? It was not so he phrased in his thoughts the things which
tormented him, but the figures would have expressed his feeling. What if
his mother were angry--though he had never seen her angry in his life
and could only approach the idea because he had just found out that she
had once been cruel--yes, it had been cruel! What if Coombe actually
chose to interfere. Coombe with his unmoving face, his perfection of
exact phrase and his cold almost inhuman eye! After all the matter
concerned him closely.
"While Houses threaten to crumble and Heads may fall into the basket
there are things we must remember until we disappear," he had said not
long ago with this same grey eye fixed on him. "I have no son. If
Marquisates continue to exist you will be the Head of the House of
Coombe."
What would _he_ make of a dream if he handled it? What would there be
left? Donal's heart burned in his side when he recalled Feather's
impudent little laugh as she had talked of her "vagabond Robin," her
"small pariah." He was a boy entranced and exalted by his first passion
and because he was a sort of young superman it was not a common one,
though it shared all the unreason and impetuous simplicities of the most
rudimentary of its kind. He could not think very calmly or logically;
both the heaven and the earth in him swept him along as with the rush of
the spheres. It was Robin who was foremost in all his thoughts. It was
because she was so apart from all the world that it had seemed beautiful
to keep her so in his heart. She had always been so aloof a little
creature--so unclaimed and naturally left alone. Perhaps that was why
she had retained through the years the untouched look which he had
recognised even at the dance, in the eyes which only waited exquisitely
for kindness and asked for love. No one had ever owned her, no one
really knew her--people only saw her loveliness--no one knew her but
himself--the little beautiful thing--his own--his _own_ little thing!
Nothing on earth should touch her!
Because his thinking ended--as it naturally always did--in such
thoughts as these last, he was obliged to turn back when he saw the
plane trees and walk a few hundred feet in the opposite direction to
give himself time. He even turned a corner and walked down another
street. It was just as he turned that poignant chance brought him face
to face with a girl in deep new mourning with the border of white crêpe
in the brim of her close hat. Her eyes were red and half-closed with
recent crying and she had a piteous face. He knew what it all meant and
involuntarily raised his hand in salute. He scarcely knew he did it and
for a second she seemed not to understand. But the next second she burst
out crying and hurriedly took out her handkerchief and hid her face as
she passed. One of the boys lying on the blood-wet mire in Flanders, was
Donal's bitter thought, but he had had his kind hours to recall at the
last moment--and even now she had them too.
Helen Muir from her seat at the window looking into the thick leafage of
the trees saw him turn at the entrance and heard him mount the steps.
The days between them and approaching separation were growing shorter
and shorter. She thought this every morning when she awakened and
realised anew that the worst of it all was that neither knew how short
they were and that the thing which was to happen would be sudden--as
death is always sudden however long one waits. He had never reached even
that _beginning_ of the telling--whatsoever he had to tell. Perhaps it
was coming now. She had tried to prepare herself by endeavouring to
imagine how he would look when he began--a little shy--even a little
lovably awkward? But his engaging smile--his quite darling smile--would
show itself in spite of him as it always did.
But when he came into the room his look was a new one to her. It was
not happy--it was not a free look. There was something like troubled
mental reservation in it--and when had there ever been mental
reservation between them? Oh, no--that must not--must not be _now_! Not
now!
He sat down with his cap in his hand as if he had forgotten to lay it
aside or as if he were making a brief call.
"What has happened, Donal?" she said. "Have you come to tell me that--?"
"No, not that--though that may come any moment now. It is something
else."
"What else?"
"I don't know how to begin," he said. "There has never been anything
like this before. But I must know from you that a--silly woman--has not
been telling me spiteful lies. She is the kind of woman who would say
anything it amused her to say."
"What was it she said?"
"I was dragged into a house by Clonmel. He said he had promised to drop
in to tea. There were a lot of people. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was there and
began to talk to me."
"Why did you think she might be telling you spiteful lies?"
"That is it," he broke out miserably impetuous. "Perhaps it may all seem
childish and unimportant to you. But you have always been perfect. You
were the one perfect being. I have never doubted you--"
"Do you doubt me now?"
"Perhaps no one but myself could realise that a sort of sore spot--yes,
a sore spot--was left in my mind for years because of a wretched thing
which happened when I was a child. _Did_ you deliberately take me back
to Scotland so suddenly that early morning? Was it a thing which could
have been helped?"
"I thought not, Donal. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps I was right."
"Was it because you wanted to separate me from a child I was fond of?"
"Yes."
"And your idea was that because her mother was a flighty woman with bad
taste and the wrong surrounding her poor little girl would contaminate
me?"
"It was because her mother was a light woman and all her friends were
like her. And your affection for the child was not like a child's
affection."
"No, it wasn't," he said and he leaned forward with his forehead in his
hands.
"I wanted to put an end to it before it was too late. I saw nothing but
pain in it for you. It filled me with heart-broken fear to think of the
girl such a mother and such a life would make."
"She was such a little thing--" said Donal, "--such a tender mite of a
thing! She's such a little thing even now."
"Is she?" said Helen.
Now she knew he would not tell her. And she was right. Up to that
afternoon there had always been the chance that he would. Night after
night he had been on the brink of telling her of the dream. Only as the
beauty and wonder of it grew he had each day given himself another day,
and yet another and another. But he had always thought the hour would
come and he had been sure she would not grudge him a moment he had held
from her. Now he shut everything within himself.
"I wish you had not done it. It was a mistake," was all he said.
Suddenly he felt thrown back upon himself, heartsick and cold. For the
first time in his life he could not see her side of the question. The
impassioned egotism of first love overwhelmed him.
"You met her on the night of the old Duchess' dance," Helen said.
"Yes."
"You have met her since?"
"Yes."
"It is useless for older people to interfere," she said. "We have loved
each other very much. We have been happy together. But I can do nothing
to help you. Oh! Donal, my own dear!"
Her involuntary movement of putting her hand to her throat was a piteous
gesture.
"You are going away," she pleaded. "Don't let anything come between
us--not _now_! It is not as if you were going to stay. When you come
back perhaps--"
"I may never come back," he answered and as he said it he saw again the
widowed girl who had hurried past him crying because he had saluted her.
And he saw Robin as he had seen her the night before--Robin who belonged
to no one--whom no one missed at any time when she went in or out--who
could come and go and meet a man anywhere as if she were the only little
soul in London. And yet who had always that pretty, untouched air.
"I only wanted to be sure. It was a mistake. We will never speak of it
again," he added.
"If it was a mistake, forgive it. It was only because I could not hear
that your life should not be beautiful. These are not like other days.
Oh! Donal my dear, my dear!" And she broke into weeping and took him in
her arms and he held her and kissed her tenderly. But whatsoever
happened--whatsoever he did he knew that if he was to save and hold his
bliss to the end he could not tell her now.
CHAPTER X
Mrs. Bennett's cottage on the edge of Mersham Wood seemed to Robin when
she first saw it to be only a part of a fairy tale. It is true that only
in certain bits of England and in pictures in books of fairy tales did
one see cottages of its kind, and in them always lived with their
grandmothers--in the fairy stories as Robin remembered--girls who would
in good time be discovered by wandering youngest sons of fairy story
kings. The wood of great oaks and beeches spread behind and at each side
of it and seemed to have no end in any land on earth. It nestled against
its primæval looking background in a nook of its own. Under the broad
branches of the oaks and beeches tall ferns grew so thick that they
formed a forest of their own--a lower, lighter, lacy forest where
foxglove spires pierced here and there, and rabbits burrowed and sniffed
and nibbled, and pheasants hid nests and sometimes sprang up rocketting
startlingly. Birds were thick in the wood and trilled love songs, or
twittered and sang low in the hour before their bedtime, filling the
twilight with clear adorable sounds. The fairy-tale cottage was
whitewashed and its broad eaved roof was thatched. Hollyhocks stood in
haughty splendour against its walls and on either side its path. The
latticed windows were diamond-paned and their inside ledges filled with
flourishing fuchsias and trailing white campanula, and mignonette. The
same flowers grew thick in the crowded blooming garden. And there were
nests in the hawthorn hedge. And there was a small wicket gate.
When Robin caught sight of it she wondered--for a moment--if she were
going to cry. Only because it was part of the dream and could be nothing
else--unless one wakened.
On the tiny porch covered with honeysuckle in bloom, a little, old fairy
woman was sitting knitting a khaki sock very fast. She wore a clean
print gown and a white apron and a white cap with a frilled border. She
had a stick and a nutcracker face and a pair of large iron bowed
spectacles. She was so busy that she did not seem to hear Robin as she
walked up the path between the borders of pinks and snapdragons, but
when she was quite close to her she glanced up.
Robin thought she looked almost frightened when she saw her. She got up
and made an apologetic curtsey.
"Eh!" she ejaculated, "to think of me not hearing you. I do beg your
pardon, Miss, I do that. I was really waiting here to be ready for you."
"Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Bennett," Robin answered in a sweet hurry to
reassure her. "I hope you are very well." And she held out her hand.
Mrs. Bennett had only been shocked at her own apparent inattention to
duty. She was not really frightened and her nutcracker face illuminated
itself with delighted smiles.
"I don't hear very well at the best of times," she said. "And I've got a
bit of a cold. Just worry, Miss, just worry it is--along of this 'ere
war and my grandsons going marching off every few days seems like. Dick,
that's the youngest as was always my pet, he's the last and he'll be off
any minute--and these is his socks."
Robin actually picked up a sock and patted it softly--with a childish
quiver of her chin. It seemed alive.
"Yes, yes!" she said. "Oh! dear! Oh! dear!"
Mrs. Bennett winked tears out of her eyes hastily.
"Me being hard of hearing is no excuse for me talking about myself first
thing. Dick, he's an Englishman--and they're all Englishmen--and it's
Englishmen that's got to stand up and do their duty--same as they did at
Waterloo." She swallowed valiantly the lump in her throat. "Her grace
wrote to me about you, Miss, with her own kind hand. She said the
cottage was so quiet and pretty you wouldn't mind it being little--and
me being a bit deaf."
"I shall mind nothing," said Robin. She raised her voice and tried to
speak very distinctly so as to make sure that the old fairy woman would
hear her. "It is the most beautiful cottage I ever saw in my life. It is
like a cottage in a fairy story."
"That's what the vicar says, Miss, my dear," was Mrs. Bennett's cheerful
reply. "He says it ought to be hid some way because if the cheap
trippers found it out they'd wear the life out of me with pestering me
to give 'em six-penny teas. They'd get none from me!" quite fiercely.
"Her grace give it to me her own self and it's on Mersham land and not a
lawyer on earth could put me out."
She became quite active and bustling--picking a spray of honeysuckle and
a few sprigs of mignonette from near the doorway and handing them to
Robin.
"Your room's full of 'em," she said, "them and musk and roses. You'll
sleep and wake in the midst of flowers and birds singing and bees
humming. And I can give you rich milk and home-baked bread, God bless
you! You _are_ welcome. Come in, my pretty dear--Miss."
The girl came down from London to the cottage on the wood's edge several
times during the weeks that followed. It was easy to reach and too
beautiful and lone and strange to stay away from. The War ceased where
the wood began. Mrs. Bennett delighted in her and, regarding the Duchess
as a sort of adored deity, would have served her lodger on bended knee
if custom had permitted. Robin could always make her hear, and she sat
and listened so tenderly to her stories of her grandsons that there grew
up between them an absolute affection.
"And yet we don't see each other often," the old fairy woman had said.
"You flit in like, and flit away again as if you was a butterfly, I
think sometimes when I'm sitting here alone. When you come to stay
you're mostly flitting about the wood and I only see you bit by bit. But
I couldn't tell you, Miss, my dear, what it's like to me. You do love
the wood, don't you? It's a fairy place too--same as this is."
"It's all fairy, Mrs. Bennett," Robin said. "Perhaps I am a fairy too
when I am here. Nothing seems quite earthly."
She bent forward suddenly and took the old face in her hands and kissed
it.
"Eh! I shouldn't wonder," the old fairy woman chuckled sweetly. "I used
to hear tales of fairies in Devonshire in my young days. And you do look
like something witched--but you've been witched for happiness. Babies
look that way for a bit sometimes--as if they brought something with
them when they come to earth."
"Yes," answered Robin. "Yes."
It was true that she only flitted in and out, and that she spent hours
in the depths of the wood, and always came back as if from fairy land.
Once she had a holiday of nearly a week. She came down from town one
afternoon in a pretty white frock and hat and white shoes and with an
air of such delicate radiance about her that Mrs. Bennett would have
clutched her to her breast, but for long-ago gained knowledge of the
respect due to those connected with great duchesses.
"Like a new young bride you look, my pretty dear--Miss," she cried out
when she first saw her as she came up the path between the hollyhocks in
the garden. "God's surely been good to you this day. There's something
like heaven in your face." Robin stood still a moment looking like the
light at dawn and breathing with soft quickness as if she had come in
haste.
"God has been good to me for a long time," she said.
* * * * *
In the deep wood she walked with Donal night after night when the
stillness was like heaven itself. Now and then a faint rustle among the
ferns or the half awakened movement and sleepy note of a bird in the
leaves slightly stirred the silence, but that was all. Lances of
moonlight pierced through the branches and their slow feet made no sound
upon the thick moss. Here and there pale foxglove spires held up their
late blossoms like flower spirits in the dim light.
Donal thought--the first night she came to him softly through the
ferns--that her coming was like that of some fair thing not of earth--a
vision out of some old legend or ancient poem of faëry. But he marched
towards her, soldierly--like a young Lohengrin whose silver mail had
changed to khaki. There was no longer war in the world--there never had
been.
"I brought it with me," he said and took her close in his arms. For a
few minutes the wood seemed more still than before.
"Do you hear my heart beat?" he said at last.
"I feel it. Do you hear mine?" she whispered.
"We love each other so!" he breathed. "We love each other so!"
"Yes," she answered. "Yes."
Did every one who saw him know how beautiful he was? Oh his smile that
loved her so and made her feel there was no fear or loneliness left on
earth! He was so tall and straight and strong--a young soldier statue!
When he laughed her heart always gave a strange little leap. It was such
a lovely sound. His very hands were beautiful--with long, strong smooth
fingers and smooth firm palms. Oh! Donal! Donal! And while she smiled as
a little angel might smile, small sobs of joy filled her throat.
They sat together among the ferns, close side by side. He showed her the
thing he had brought with him. It was a very slender chain of gold with
a plain gold ring hung on it. He put the chain around her neck but
slipped the ring on her finger and kissed it again and again.
"Wear it when we are together," he whispered. "I want to see it. It
makes you mine as much as if I had put it on in a church with a huge
organ playing."
"I should be yours without it," answered Robin. "I _am_ yours."
"Yes," he whispered again. "You are mine. And I am yours. It always was
so--since the morning stars sang together."
CHAPTER XI
"There are more women than those in Belgium who are being swept over by
the chariots of war and trampled on by marching feet," the Duchess of
Darte said to a group of her women friends on a certain afternoon.
The group had met to work and some one had touched on a woeful little
servant-maid drama which had painfully disclosed itself in her
household. A small, plain kitchen maid had "walked out" in triumphant
ecstasy with a soldier who, a few weeks after bidding her good-bye, had
been killed in Belgium. She had been brought home to her employer's
house by a policeman who had dragged her out of the Serpentine. An old
story had become a modern one. In her childish ignorance and terror of
her plight she had seen no other way, but she had not had courage to
face more than very shallow water, with the result of finding herself
merely sticking in the mud and wailing aloud.
"The policeman was a kind-hearted, sensible fellow," said the relator of
the incident. "He had a family of his own and what he said was 'She
looked such a poor little drowned rat of a thing I couldn't make up my
mind to run her in, ma'am. This 'ere war's responsible for a lot more
than what the newspapers tell about. Young chaps in uniform having to
brace up and perhaps lying awake in the night thinking over what the
evening papers said--and young women they've been sweet-heartin'
with--they get wild, in a way, and cling to each other and feel
desperate--and he talks and she cries--and he may have his head blown
off in a week's time. And who wonders that there's trouble.' Do you know
he actually told me that there were a number of girls he was keeping a
watch on. He said he'd begun to recognise a certain look in their eyes
when they walked alone in the park. He said it was a 'stark, frightened
look.' I didn't know what he meant, but it gave me a shudder."
"I think I know," said the Duchess. "Poor, wretched children! There
ought to be a sort of moratorium in the matter of social laws. The old
rules don't hold. We are facing new conditions. This is a thing for
women to take in hand, practically, as they are taking in hand other
work. It must be done absolutely without prejudice. There is no time to
lecture or condemn or even deplore. There is only time to try to heal
wounds and quiet maddening pain and save life."
Lady Lothwell took the subject up.
"In the country places and villages, where the new army is swarming to
be billeted, the clergymen and their wives are greatly agitated. Even in
times of peace one's vicar's wife tells one stories in shocked whispers
of 'immorality'--though the rustic mind does not seem to regard it as
particularly immoral. An illegal baby is generally accepted with simple
resignation or merely a little fretful complaint even in quite decent
cottages. It is called--rather prettily, I think--'a love child' and the
nicer the grandparents are, the better they treat it. Mrs. Gracey, the
wife of our rector at Mowbray Wells told me a few days ago that she and
her husband were quite in despair over the excited, almost lawless,
holiday air of the village girls. There are so many young men about and
uniforms have what she calls 'such a dreadful effect.' Giddy and
unreliable young women are wandering about the lanes and fields with
stranger sweethearts at all hours. Even girls who have been good
Sunday-school scholars are becoming insubordinate. She did not in the
least mean to be improperly humorous--in fact she was quite tragic when
she said that the rector felt that he ought to marry, on the spot, every
rambling couple he met. He had already performed the ceremony in a
number of cases when he felt it was almost criminally rash and idiotic,
or would have been in time of peace."
"That was what I meant by speaking of the women who were being swept
over by the chariot of war," said the Duchess. "It involves issues the
women who can think must hold in their minds and treat judicially. One
cannot moralise and be shocked before an advancing tidal wave. It has
always been part of the unreason and frenzy of times of war. When Death
is near, Life fights hard for itself. It does not care who or what it
strikes."
* * * * *
The tidal wave swept on and the uninitiated who formed the mass of
humanity in every country in the world, reading with feverish anxiety
almost hourly newspaper extras every day, tried to hide a secret fear
that no one knew what was really happening or could trust to the
absolute truth of any spoken or published statement. The exultant hope
of to-day was dashed to-morrow. The despair of the morning was lightened
by gleams of hope before night closed, and was darkened and lightened
again and again. Great cities and towns aroused themselves from a
half-somnolent belief in security. Village by village England awakened
to what she faced in common with an amazed and half incredulous world.
The amazement and incredulity were founded upon a certain mistaken
belief in a world predominance of the laws of decency and civilisation.
The statement of piety and morality that the world in question was a
bad one, filled with crime, had somehow so far been accepted with a
guileless reservation in the matter of a ruling majority whose lapses
from virtue were at least not openly vaunted treachery, blows struck at
any unprepared back presenting itself, merciless attacks on innocence
and weakness, and savage gluttings of lust, of fury, with exultant pæans
of self-glorification and praise of a justly applauding God. Before such
novelty of onslaught the British mind had breathless moments of feeling
itself stupid and incapably aghast. But after its first deep draughts of
the cup of staggering the nation braced up a really muscular back and
stood upon hard, stout legs and firm feet, immovable and fixed on solid
British earth.
Incompetent raw troops gathered from fields, shops and desks, half
trained, half clad, half armed, according to pessimistic report, fared
forth across the narrow Channel and did strangely competent things--this
being man's way when in dire moments needs must be. Riff-raff exalted
itself and also died competently enough. The apparently aimless male
offspring of the so-called useless rich and great died competently
enough with the rest. The Roll of Honour raked fore and aft. The
youngsters who had tangoed best and had shone in _cabarets_ were swept
away as grass by scythes.
"Will any one be left?" white Robin shuddered, clinging to Donal in the
wood at night. "Every day there are new ones. Almost every one who has
gone! Kathryn says that no one--_no one_ will ever come back!"
"Hush--sh! Hush--sh!" whispered Donal. "Hush--sh! little lovely love!"
And his arms closed so tightly around her that she could for a few
moments scarcely breathe.
The Duchess had much work for her to do and was glad to see that the
girl looked well and untired. When she was at home in Eaton Square her
grace was even more strict about the walks and country holidays than she
had been when she was away.
"Health and strength were never so much needed," she said. "We must keep
our bodies in readiness for any test or strain."
This notwithstanding, there was at last a morning when Robin looked as
though she had not slept well. It was so unusual a thing that the
Duchess spoke of it.
"I hope you have not been sitting up late at your work?" she said.
"No. Thank you," Robin answered. "I went to bed last night at ten
o'clock."
The Duchess looked at her seriously. Never before had she seen her with
eyes whose misted heaviness suggested tears. Was it possible that there
seemed something at once strained and quivering about her mouth--as if
she were making an effort to force the muscles to hold it still.
"I hope you would tell me if you had a headache. You must, you know, my
dear."
Robin's slight movement nearer to her had the air of being almost
involuntary--as if it were impelled by an uncontrollable yearning to be
a little near _something_--some one. The strained and quivering look was
even more noticeable and her lifted eyes singularly expressed something
she was trying to hold back.
"Thank you--indeed!" she said. "But it isn't headache. It is--things I
could not help thinking about in the night."
The Duchess took her hand and patted it with firm gentleness.
"You mustn't, my dear. You must try hard _not_ to do it. We shall be of
no use if we let our minds go. We must try to force ourselves into a
sort of deafness and blindness in certain directions. I am trying--with
all my might."
"I know I must," Robin answered not too steadily. "I must--more than
most people. I'm not brave and strong. I'm weak and cowardly--cowardly."
Her breath caught itself and she went on quickly, "Work helps more than
anything else. I want to _work_ all the time. Please may I begin the
letters now?"
She was bending over her desk when Lord Coombe came in earlier than was
his custom. The perfection of his dress, his smooth creaselessness and
quiet harmony of color and line seemed actually to add to the aged look
of his face. His fine rigidity was worn and sallowed. After his greeting
phrases he stood for a space quite silent while the Duchess watched him
as if waiting.
"He has gone?" she said presently. She spoke in quite a low voice, but
it reached Robin's desk.
"Yes. At dawn. The suddenness and secrecy of these goings add to the
poignancy of them. I saw him but he did not see me. I found out the hour
and made an effort. He is not my boy, but I wanted to _look_ at him. It
was perhaps for the last time. Good God! What a crime!"
He spoke low himself and rather quickly and with a new tone in his
voice--as if he had been wrenched and was in pain.
"I am not in a heroic mood. I was only sick and furious when I watched
them go by. They were a handsome, clean-built lot. But he stood out--the
finest among them. His mere beauty and strength brought hideous
thoughts into one's mind--thoughts of German deviltries born of hell."
Robin was looking at her hand which had stopped writing. She could not
keep it still. She must get up and go to her own rooms. Would her knees
shake under her like that when she tried to stand on her feet? The low
talking went on and she scarcely heard what was said. She and Donal had
always known this was coming; they had known it even the first day they
had talked together in the Garden. The knowledge had been the spectre
always waiting hidden at some turn in the path ahead. That was why they
had been so frightened and desperate and hurried. They had clung
together and shut their eyes and caught at the few hours--the few
heavenly hours. He had said it would come suddenly. But she had not
thought it would be as sudden as this. Last night a soldier had brought
a few wild, passionate blotted lines to her. Yes, they had been blotted
and blistered. She pushed her chair back and began to rise from it.
There had been a few seconds of dead silence. Lord Coombe had been
standing thinking and biting his lip. "He is gone!" he said. "_Gone!_"
They did not notice Robin as she left the room. Outside the door she
stood in the hall and looked up the staircase piteously. It looked so
long and steep that she felt it was like a path up a mountain. But she
moved towards the bottom step and began to climb stair by stair--stair
by stair--dragging at the rail of the balustrade.
When she reached her room she went in and shut the door. She fell down
upon the floor and sat there. Long ago his mother had taken him away
from her. Now the War had taken him. The spectre stood straight in the
path before her.
"It was such a short time," she said, shaking. "And he is gone. And the
fairy wood is there still--and the ferns!--All the nights--always!"
And what happened next was not a thing to be written about--though at
the time the same thing was perhaps at that very hour happening in
houses all over England.
CHAPTER XII
The effect of something like unreality produced in the mind of the
mature and experienced by a girl creature, can only be equaled by the
intensity of the sense of realness in the girl herself. That centre of
the world in which each human being exists is in her case more
poignantly a centre than any other. She passes smiling or serious, a
thing of untried eyes and fair unmarked smoothness of texture, and
onlookers who have lived longer than she know that the unmarked
untriedness is a sign that so far "nothing" has happened in her life and
in most cases believe that "nothing" is happening. They are quite sure
they know--long after the thing has ceased to be true. The surface of
her is so soft and fair, and its lack of any suggestion of abysses or
chasms seems to make them incredible things. But the centre of the world
contains all things and when one is at the beginning of life and sees
them for the first time they assume strange proportions. It enters a
room, it talks lightly or sweetly, it whirls about in an airy dance,
this pretty untested thing; and, among those for whom the belief in the
reality of strange proportions has modified itself through long
experience, only those of the thinking habit realise that at any moment
the testing--the marking with deep scores may begin or has perhaps begun
already. At eighteen or twenty a fluctuation of flower-petal tint which
may mean an imperfect night can signify no really important cause. What
could eighteen or twenty have found to think about in night watches? But
in its centre of the world as it stands on the stage with the curtain
rolling up, those who have lived longer--so very long--are only the dim
audience sitting in the shadowy auditorium looking on at passionately
real life with which they have really nothing whatever to do, because
what they have seen is past and what they have learned has lost its
importance and meaning with the changing of the years. The lying awake
and tossing on pillows--if lying awake there is--has its cause in _real_
joys--or griefs--not in things atrophied by time. So it seems on the
stage, in the first act. If the curtain goes down on anguish and despair
it seems equally the pitiless truth that it can never rise again; the
play is ended; the lights go out forever; the theatre crumbles to dust;
the world comes to an end. But the dim audience sitting in the shadow do
not generally know this.
To those who came in and out of the house in Eaton Square the figure
sitting at the desk writing letters or taking orders from the Duchess
was that of the unconsidered and unreal girl. Among the changing groups
of women with intensely absorbed and often strained faces the
kind-hearted observing ones were given to noticing Robin and speaking to
her almost affectionately because she was so attractive an object as
well as so industriously faithful to her work. Girls who were
Jacqueminot-rose flushed and who looked up to answer people with eyes
like an antelope's were not customarily capable of concentrating their
attention entirely upon brief letters of request and lists of
necessaries for hospitals and comfort kits. This type was admitted to be
frequently found readier for service in the preparation of
entertainments "for the benefit of"--more especially when such benefits
took the form of dancing. But the Duchess' little Miss Lawless came and
went on errands, wasting no time. She never forgot things or was slack
in any way. Her antelope eyes expressed a kind of yearning eagerness to
do all she could without a moment's delay.
"She works as if it were a personal thing with her," Lady Lothwell once
said thoughtfully. "I have seen girls wear that look when they are war
brides or have lovers or brothers at the front."
But she remained to the world generally only a rather specially lovely
specimen of the somewhat unreal young being with whom great agonies and
terrors had but little to do.
On a day when the Duchess had a cold and was obliged to remain in her
room Robin was with her, writing and making notes of instruction at her
bedside. In the afternoon a cold and watery sun making its way through
the window threw a chill light on her as she drew near with some papers
in her hand. It was the revealing of this light which made the Duchess
look at her curiously.
"You are not quite as blooming as you were, my child," she said. "About
two months ago you were particularly blooming. Lady Lothwell and Lord
Coombe and several other people noticed it. You have not been taking
your walks as regularly as you did. Let me look at you." She took her
hand and drew her nearer. "No. This will not do."
Robin stood very still.
"How could _any_ one be blooming!" broke from her.
"You are thinking about things in the night again," said the Duchess.
"Yes," said Robin. "Every night. Sometimes all night."
The Duchess watched her anxiously.
"It's so--lonely!" There was a hint of hysteric breakdown in the
exclamation. "How can I--_bear_ it!" She turned and went back to her
writing table and there she sat down and hid her face, trembling in an
extraordinary way.
"You are as unhappy as that?" said the Duchess. "And you are _lonely_?"
"All the world is lonely," Robin cried--not weeping, only shaking.
"Everything is left to itself to suffer. God has gone away."
The Duchess trembled a little herself. She too had hideously felt
something like the same thing at times of late. But this soft shaking
thing--! There shot into her mind like a bolt a sudden thought. Was this
something less inevitable--something more personal? She wondered what
would be best to say.
"Even older people lose their nerve sometimes," she decided on at last.
"When you said that work was the greatest help you were right. Work--and
as much sleep as one can get, and walking and fresh air. And we must
help each other--old and young. I want you to help _me_, child. I need
you."
Robin stood up and steadied herself somehow. She took up a letter in a
hand not yet quite still.
"Please need me," she said. "Please let me do everything--anything--and
never stop. If I never stop in the day time perhaps I shall sleep better
at night."
As there came surging in day by day bitter and cruel waves of war
news--stories of slaughter by land and sea, of massacre in simple
places, of savagery wrought on wounded men and prisoners in a
hydrophobia of hate let loose, it was ill lying awake in the dark
remembering loved beings surrounded by the worst of all the world has
ever known. Robin was afraid to look at the newspapers which her very
duties themselves obliged her to familiarise herself with, and she could
not close her ears. With battleship raids on harmless coast towns,
planned merely to the end of the wanton killing of such unconsidered
trifles of humanity as little children and women and men at their
every-day work, the circle of horror seemed to draw itself in closely.
Zeppelin raids leaving fragments of bodies on pavements and broken
things under fallen walls, were not so near as the women who dragged
themselves back to their work with death in their faces written
large--the death of husband or son or lover. These brought realities
close indeed.
"I don't know how he died," one of them said to the Duchess. "I don't
know how long it took him to die. I don't want to be told. I am glad he
is dead. Yes, I am glad. I wish the other two were dead too. I'm not
splendid and heroic. I thought I was at first, but I couldn't keep it
up--after I heard about Mrs. Foster's boy. If I believed there was
anything to thank, I should say 'Thank God I have no more sons.'"
That night Robin lay in the dark thinking of the dream. Had there been a
dream--or had it only been like the other things one dreamed about?
Sometimes an eerie fearfulness beset her vaguely. If there were letters
each day! But letters belonged to a time when rivers of blood did not
run through the world. She sat up in bed and clasped her hands round her
knees gazing into the blackness which seemed to enclose and shut her in.
It _had_ been true! She could see the wood and the foxglove spires
piercing the ferns. She could hear the ferns rustle and the little bird
sounds and stirrings. And oh! she could hear Donal whispering. "Can you
hear my heart beat?"
He had said it over and over again. His heart seemed to be so big and to
beat so strongly. She had thought it was because he was so big and
marvellous himself. It had been rapture to lay her cheek and ear against
his breast and listen. Everything had been so still. They had been so
still--so still themselves for pure joy in their close, close nearness.
Yes, the dream had been true. But here she sat in the dark and
Donal--where was Donal? Where millions of men were marching,
marching--only to kill each other--thinking of nothing but killing.
Donal too. He must kill. If he were a brave soldier he must only think
of killing and not be afraid because at any moment he might be killed
too. She clutched her knees and shuddered, feeling her forehead grow
damp. Donal killing a man--perhaps a boy like himself--a boy who might
have a dream of his own! How would his blue eyes look while he was
killing a man? Oh! No! No! No! Not Donal!
With her forehead still damp and her hands damp also she found herself
getting out of bed and walking up and down in the dark. She was wringing
her hands and sobbing. She must not think of things like these. She must
shut them out of her mind and think only of the dream. It had been
true--it had! And then the strange thought came to her that out of all
the world only he and she had known of their dreaming. And if he never
came back--! (Oh! please, God, let him come back!) no one need ever
know. It was their own, own dream and how could she bear to speak of it
to any one and why should she? He had said he wanted to have this one
thing of his very own before his life ended--if it was going to end. If
it ended it would be his sacred secret and hers forever. She might live
to be an old woman with white hair and no one would ever guess that
since the morning stars sang together they two had belonged to each
other.
Night after night she lay awake with thoughts like these. Through the
waiting days she began to find an anguished comfort in the feeling that
she was keeping their secret for him and that no one need ever know.
More than once she went on quietly with her writing when people stood
near her and spoke of him and his regiment, which every one was
interested in because he was so handsome and so young and new to the
leading of men. There were rumours that he must have been plunged into
fierce fighting though definite news did not come through without delay.
"Boys like that," she heard. "They ought to be kept at home. All the
greatest names will be extinct. And they are the splendid, silly ones
who expose themselves most. Young Lord Elphinstowe a week ago--the last
of his line! Scarcely a fragment of him to put together." There were
women who had a hysterical desire to talk about such things and make
gruesome pictures even of slightly founded stories. But when she heard
them she did not even lift her eyes from her work.
One marked feature of their meetings--though they themselves had not
marked it--had been that they had never talked of the future. It had
been as though there were no future. To live perfectly through the few
hours--even for the one hour or half hour they could snatch--was all
that they could plan and hope for. Could they meet to-morrow in this
place or that? When they met were they quite safe and blissfully alone?
The spectre had always been waiting and they had always been trying to
forget it. Each meeting had seemed so brief and crowded and breathlessly
sweet.
Only a boy and a girl could have so lost sight of all but their hour and
perhaps also only this boy and girl, because their hour had struck at a
time when all futures seemed to hold only chances that at any moment
might come to an end.
"Do you hear my heart beat? There is no time--no time!" these two things
had been the beginning, the middle and the end.
Sometimes Robin went and sat in the Gardens and one day in coming out
she met her mother whom she had not seen for months. Feather had been
exultingly gay and fashionably patriotic and she was walking round the
corner to a meeting to be held at her club. The khaki colouring of her
coat and brief skirt and cap added to their military air with pipings
and cords and a small upright feather of scarlet. She wore a badge and a
jewelled pin or so. She was about to pass Robin unrecognised but took a
second glance at her and stopped.
"I didn't know you," she exclaimed. "What is the matter?"
"Nothing--thank you," Robin answered pausing.
"Something _is_! You are losing your looks. Is your mistress working you
to death?"
"The Duchess is very kind indeed. She is most careful that I don't do
too much. I like my work more every day."
Feather took her in with a sharp scrutinising. She seemed to look her
over from her hat to her shoes before she broke into her queer little
critical laugh.
"Well, I can't congratulate her on the result. You are thin. You've lost
your colour and your mouth is beginning to drag at the corners." And she
nodded and marched away, the high heels of her beautiful small brown
boots striking the pavement with a military click.
As she had dressed in the morning Robin had wondered if she was mistaken
in thinking that the awful nights had made her look different.
If there had been letters to read--even a few lines such as are all a
soldier may write--to read over and over again, to hide in her breast
all day, to kiss and cry over and lay her cheek upon at night. Such a
small letter would have been such a huge comfort and would have made the
dream seem less far away. But everybody waited for letters--and waited
and waited. And sometimes they went astray or were lost forever and
people were left waiting.
CHAPTER XIII
But there were no letters. And she was obliged to sit at her desk in the
corner and listen to what people said about what was happening, and now
and then to Lord Coombe speaking in low tones to the Duchess of his
anxiety and uncertainty about Donal. Anxiety was increasing on every
side and such of the unthinking multitude as had at last ceased to
believe that one magnificent English blow would rid the earth of
Germany, had begun to lean towards belief in a vision of German millions
adding themselves each day to other millions advancing upon France,
Belgium, England itself, a grey encroaching mass rolling forward and
ever forward, overwhelming even neutral countries until not only Europe
but the whole world was covered, and the mailed fist beat its fragments
into such dust as it chose. Even those who had not lost their heads and
who knew more than the general public, wore grave faces because they
felt they knew too little and could not know more. Coombe's face was
hard and grey many days.
"It seems as if one lost them in the flood sometimes," Robin heard him
say to the Duchess. "I saw his mother yesterday and could give her no
definite news. She believes that he is where the worst fighting is going
on. I could not tell her he was not."
As, when they had been together, the two had not thought of any future,
so, now Robin was alone, she could not think of any to-morrow--perhaps
she would not. She lived only in the day which was passing. She rose,
dressed and presented herself to the Duchess for orders; she did the
work given her to do, she saw the day gradually die and the lights
lighted; she worked as long as she was allowed to do so--and then the
day was over and she climbed the staircase to her room.
Sometimes she sat and wrote letters to Donal--long yearning letters, but
when they were written she tore them into pieces or burned them. If they
were to keep their secret she could not send such letters because there
were so many chances that they would be lost. Still there was a hopeless
comfort in writing them, in pouring out what she would not have written
even if she had been sure that it would reach him safely. No girl who
loved a man who was at the Front would let him know that it seemed as if
her heart were slowly breaking. She must be brave--brave! But she was
not brave, that she knew. The news from the Front was worse every day;
there were more women with awful faces; some workers had dropped out and
came no more. One of them who had lost three sons in one battle had died
a few days after the news arrived because the shock had been too great
for her strength to endure. There were new phases of anguish on all
sides. She did all she was called on to do with a secret passion of
eagerness; each smallest detail was the sacred thing. She begged the
Duchess to allow her to visit and help the mothers of sons who were
fighting--or wounded or missing. That made her feel nearer to things she
wanted to feel near to. When they cried or told her stories, she could
understand. When she worked she might be doing things which might
somehow reach Donal or boys like Donal.
Howsoever long her life was she knew one thing would never be blotted
out by time--the day she went down to Mersham Wood to see Mrs. Bennett,
whose three grandsons had been killed within a few days of each other.
She had received the news in one telegram. There was no fairy wood any
longer, there were only bare branched trees standing holding out naked
arms to the greyness of the world. They looked as if they were
protesting against something. The grass and ferns were brown and sodden
with late rains and there were no hollyhocks and snapdragons in the
cottage garden--only on either side of the brick path dead brown stalks,
some of them broken by the wind. Things had not been neatly cut down and
burned and swept away. The grandsons had made the garden autumn-tidy
every year before this one.
The old fairy woman sat on a clean print-covered arm chair by a very
small fire. She had a black print dress on and a black shawl and a black
ribbon round her cap. Her Bible lay on a little table near her but it
was closed.
"Don't get up, please, Mrs. Bennett," Robin said when she lifted the
latch and entered.
The old fairy woman looked at her in a dazed way.
"I'm so eye-dimmed with crying that I can scarcely see," she said.
Robin came to her and knelt down on the hearth.
"I'm your lodger," she faltered, "who--who used to love the fairy wood
so."
She had not known what she would say when she spoke first but she had
certainly not thought of saying anything like this. And she certainly
had not known that she would suddenly find herself overwhelmed by a
rising tidal wave of unbearable woe and drop her face on to the old
woman's lap with wild sobbing. She had not come down from London to do
this--but away from the world--in the clean, still little cottage room
which seemed to hold only grief and silence and death the wave rose and
broke and swept her with it.
Mrs. Bennett only gave herself up to the small clutching hands and sat
and shivered.
"No one--will come in--will they?" Robin was gasping. "There is no one
to hear, is there?"
"No one on earth," said the old fairy woman. "Quiet and loneliness are
left if there's naught else."
What she thought it would be hard to say. The blow which had come to her
at the end of a long life had, as it were, felled her as a tree might
have been felled in Mersham Wood. As the tree might have lain for a
short time with its leaves still seeming alive on its branches so she
seemed living. But she had been severed from her root. She listened to
the girl's sobbing and stroked her hair.
"Don't be afraid. There's no one left to hear but the walls and the bare
trees in the wood," she said.
Robin sobbed on.
"You've a kind heart, but you're not crying for me," she said next.
"You've a black trouble of your own. There's few that hasn't these days.
And it's worse for the young that's got to live through it and after it.
When Mary Ann comes to see after me to-morrow morning I may be lying
dead, thank God. But you're a child." The small clutching hands clutched
more piteously because it was so true--so true. Whatsoever befell there
were all the long, long years to come--with only the secret left and the
awful fear that sometime she might begin to be afraid that it was not a
real thing--since no one had ever known or ever would know and since she
could never speak of it or hear it spoken of.
"I'm so afraid," she shuddered at last in a small low voice. "I'm so
_lonely_!" The old fairy woman's stroking hand stopped short.
"Is there--anything--you'd like to tell me--anything in the world?" she
asked tremulously. "There's nothing I'd mind."
The pretty head on her lap shook itself to and fro.
"No! No! No! No!" the small choked voice gave out. "Nothing--nothing!
Nothing. That's why it's so lonely."
As she had waited alone through the night in her cradle, as she had
watched the sparrows on the roofs above her in the nursery, as she had
played alone until Donal came, so it was her fate to be alone now.
"But you came away from London because there were too many people there
and you wanted to be in a place where there was nothing but an empty
cottage and an old woman. Some would call it lonelier here."
"The wood is here--the fairy wood!" she cried and her sobbing broke
forth tenfold more bitterly.
Mrs. Bennett had seen in her day much of the troubles of others and many
of the things she had seen had been the troubles of women who were
young. Sometimes it had been possible to help them, sometimes it had
not, but in any case she had always known that help could be given only
if one asked careful questions. The old established rules with regard to
one's behaviour in connection with duchesses and their belongings had
strangely faded away since the severing of her root as all things on
earth had faded and lost consequence. She remembered no rules as she
bent her head over the girl and almost whispered to her.
"I won't ask no questions after this one, Miss dear," she said quaking.
"But was there ever--a young gentleman--in the wood?"
"No! No! No! No!" four times again Robin cried it. "Never! Never!" And
she lifted her face and let her see it white and streaming and with eyes
which desperately defied and as they defied implored for love and aid
and mercy.
The old fairy woman's nutcracker mouth trembled. It mumbled pathetically
before she was able to control it. She knew she had heard this kind of
thing before though in cases with which great ladies had nothing
whatever to do. And at the same time there was something in this case
that was somehow different.
"I don't know what to say or do," she faltered helplessly. "With the
world like this--we've got to try to comfort each other--and we don't
know how."
"Let me come into your arms," said Robin like a child. "Hold me and let
me hold you." She crept near and folding soft arms about the old figure
laid her cheek against the black shawl. "Let us cry. There's nothing for
either of us to do but cry until our hearts break in two. We are all
alone and no one can hear us."
"There's naught but the wood outside," moaned the old fairy woman.
The voice against the shawl was a moan also.
"Perhaps the wood hears us--perhaps it hears. Oh! me! Oh! me!"
* * * * *
When she reached London she saw that there were excited groups of people
talking together in the streets. Among them were women who were crying,
or protesting angrily or comforting others. But she had seen the same
thing before and would not let herself look at people or hear anything
she could shut her ears against. Some new thing had happened, perhaps
the Germans had taken some important town and wreaked their vengeance on
the inhabitants, perhaps some new alarming move had been made and
disaster stared the Allies in the face. She staggered through the crowds
in the station and did not really know how she reached Eaton Square.
Half an hour later she was sitting at her desk quiet and neat in her
house dress. She had told the Duchess all she could tell her of her
visit to old Mrs. Bennett.
"We both cried a good deal," she explained when she saw her employer
look at her stained eyes. "She keeps remembering what they were like
when they were babies--how rosy and fat they were and how they learned
to walk and tumbled about on her little kitchen floor. And then how big
they grew and how fine they looked in their khaki. She says the worst
thing is wondering how they look now. I told her she mustn't wonder. She
mustn't think at all. She is quite well taken care of. A girl called
Mary Ann comes in three times a day to wait on her--and her daughter
comes when she can but her trouble has made her almost wander in her
mind. It's because they are _all_ gone. When she comes in she forgets
everything and sits and says over and over again, 'If it had only been
Tom--or only Tom and Will--or if it had been Jem--or only Jem and
Tom--but it's Will--and Jem--and Tom,'--over and over again. I am not at
all sure I know how to comfort people. But she was glad I came."
When Lord Coombe came in to make his daily visit he looked rigid
indeed--as if he were stiff and cold though it was not a cold night.
He sat down by the Duchess and took a telegram from his pocket. Glancing
up at him, Robin was struck by a whiteness about his mouth. He did not
speak at once. It was as though even his lips were stiff.
"It has come," he said at last. "Killed. A shell." The Duchess repeated
his words after him. Her lips seemed stiff also.
"Killed. A shell."
He handed the telegram to her. It was the customary officially
sympathetic announcement. She read it more than once. Her hands began to
tremble. But Coombe sat with face hidden. He was bowed like an old man.
"A shell," he said slowly as if thinking the awful thing out. "That I
heard unofficially." Then he added a strange thing, dragging the words
out. "How could that--be blown to atoms?"
The Duchess scarcely breathed her answer which was as strange as his
questioning.
"Oh! How _could_ it!"
She put out her shaking hand and touched his sleeve, watching his face
as if something in it awed her.
"You _loved_ him?" She whispered it. But Robin heard.
"I did not know I had loved anything--but I suppose that has been it.
His physical perfection attracted me at first--his extraordinary
contrast to Henry. It was mere pride in him as an heir and successor.
Afterwards it was a _beautiful_ look his young blue eyes had. Beautiful
seems an unmasculine word for such a masculine lad, but no other word
expresses it. It was a sort of valiant brightness and joy in living and
being friends with the world. I saw it every time he came to talk to me.
I wished he were my son. I even tried to think of him as my son." He
uttered a curious low sound like a sudden groan, "My son has been
killed."
* * * * *
When he was about to leave the house and stood in the candle-lighted
hall he was thinking of many dark things which passed unformedly through
his mind and made
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