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The Head of the House of Coombe

by Frances Hodgson Burnett · English · Gutenberg #6491 · 635,078 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Head of the House of Coombe

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett


        
Release date: September 1, 2004 [eBook #6491]
                Most recently updated: May 31, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6491

Credits: Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE ***

[Illustration]




The Head of the House of Coombe

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

NEW YORK


Contents

 CHAPTER I
 CHAPTER II
 CHAPTER III
 CHAPTER IV
 CHAPTER V
 CHAPTER VI
 CHAPTER VII
 CHAPTER VIII
 CHAPTER IX
 CHAPTER X
 CHAPTER XI
 CHAPTER XII
 CHAPTER XIII
 CHAPTER XIV
 CHAPTER XV
 CHAPTER XVI
 CHAPTER XVII
 CHAPTER XVIII
 CHAPTER XIX
 CHAPTER XX
 CHAPTER XXI
 CHAPTER XXII
 CHAPTER XXIII
 CHAPTER XXIV
 CHAPTER XXV
 CHAPTER XXVI
 CHAPTER XXVII
 CHAPTER XXVIII
 CHAPTER XXIX
 CHAPTER XXX
 CHAPTER XXXI
 CHAPTER XXXII




CHAPTER I


The history of the circumstances about to be related began many years
ago—or so it seems in these days. It began, at least, years before the
world being rocked to and fro revealed in the pause between each of its
heavings some startling suggestion of a new arrangement of its
kaleidoscopic particles, and then immediately a re-arrangement, and
another and another until all belief in a permanency of design seemed
lost, and the inhabitants of the earth waited, helplessly gazing at
changing stars and colours in a degree of mental chaos.

Its opening incidents may be dated from a period when people still had
reason to believe in permanency and had indeed many of them—sometimes
through ingenuousness, sometimes through stupidity of type—acquired a
singular confidence in the importance and stability of their
possessions, desires, ambitions and forms of conviction.

London at the time, in common with other great capitals, felt itself
rather final though priding itself on being much more fluid and
adaptable than it had been fifty years previously. In speaking of
itself it at least dealt with fixed customs, and conditions and
established facts connected with them—which gave rise to brilliant—or
dull—witticisms.

One of these, heard not infrequently, was to the effect that—in
London—one might live under an umbrella if one lived under it in the
right neighbourhood and on the right side of the street, which axiom is
the reason that a certain child through the first six years of her life
sat on certain days staring out of a window in a small, dingy room on
the top floor of a slice of a house on a narrow but highly fashionable
London street and looked on at the passing of motors, carriages and
people in the dull afternoon grayness.

The room was exalted above its station by being called The Day Nursery
and another room equally dingy and uninviting was known as The Night
Nursery. The slice of a house was inhabited by the very pretty Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless, its inordinate rent being reluctantly paid by
her—apparently with the assistance of those “ravens” who are expected
to supply the truly deserving. The rent was inordinate only from the
standpoint of one regarding it soberly in connection with the character
of the house itself which was a gaudy little kennel crowded between two
comparatively stately mansions. On one side lived an inordinately rich
South African millionaire, and on the other an inordinately exalted
person of title, which facts combined to form sufficient grounds for a
certain inordinateness of rent.

Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was also, it may be stated, of the fibre which must
live on the right side of the street or dissolve into nothingness—since
as nearly nothingness as an embodied entity can achieve had Nature
seemingly created her at the outset. So light and airy was the fair,
slim, physical presentation of her being to the earthly vision, and so
almost impalpably diaphanous the texture and form of mind and character
to be observed by human perception, that among such friends—and
enemies—as so slight a thing could claim she was prettily known as
“Feather”. Her real name, “Amabel”, was not half as charming and
whimsical in its appropriateness. “Feather” she adored being called and
as it was the fashion among the amazing if amusing circle in which she
spent her life, to call its acquaintances fantastic pet names selected
from among the world of birds, beasts and fishes or inanimate
objects—“Feather” she floated through her curious existence. And it so
happened that she was the mother of the child who so often stared out
of the window of the dingy and comfortless Day Nursery, too much a
child to be more than vaguely conscious in a chaotic way that a certain
feeling which at times raged within her and made her little body hot
and restless was founded on something like actual hate for a special
man who had certainly taken no deliberate steps to cause her
detestation.

“Feather” had not been called by that delicious name when she married
Robert Gareth-Lawless who was a beautiful and irresponsibly rather than
deliberately bad young man. She was known as Amabel Darrel and the
loveliest girl in the lovely corner of the island of Jersey where her
father, a country doctor, had begotten a large family of lovely
creatures and brought them up on the appallingly inadequate proceeds of
his totally inadequate practice. Pretty female things must be disposed
of early lest their market value decline. Therefore a well-born young
man even without obvious resources represents a sail in the offing
which is naturally welcomed as possibly belonging to a bark which may
at least bear away a burden which the back carrying it as part of its
pack will willingly shuffle on to other shoulders. It is all very well
for a man with six lovely daughters to regard them as capital if he has
money or position or generous relations or if he has energy and an
ingenious unfatigued mind. But a man who is tired and neither clever
nor important in any degree and who has reared his brood in one of the
Channel Islands with a faded, silly, unattractive wife as his only aid
in any difficulty, is wise in leaving the whole hopeless situation to
chance and luck. Sometimes luck comes without assistance but—almost
invariably—it does not.

“Feather”—who was then “Amabel”—thought Robert Gareth-Lawless
incredible good luck. He only drifted into her summer by merest chance
because a friend’s yacht in which he was wandering about “came in” for
supplies. A girl Ariel in a thin white frock and with big larkspur blue
eyes yearning at you under her flapping hat as she answers your
questions about the best road to somewhere will not be too difficult
about showing the way herself. And there you are at a first-class
beginning.

The night after she met Gareth-Lawless in a lane whose banks were thick
with bluebells, Amabel and her sister Alice huddled close together in
bed and talked almost pantingly in whispers over the possibilities
which might reveal themselves—God willing—through a further
acquaintance with Mr. Gareth-Lawless. They were eager and breathlessly
anxious but they were young—_young_ in their eagerness and Amabel was
full of delight in his good looks.

“He is _so_ handsome, Alice,” she whispered actually hugging her, not
with affection but exultation. “And he can’t be more than twenty-six or
seven. And I’m _sure_ he liked me. You know that way a man has of
looking at you—one sees it even in a place like this where there are
only curates and things. He has brown eyes—like dark bright water in
pools. Oh, Alice, if he _should!_”

Alice was not perhaps as enthusiastic as her sister. Amabel had seen
him first and in the Darrel household there was a sort of unwritten,
not always observed code flimsily founded on “First come first served.”
Just at the outset of an acquaintance one might say “Hands off” as it
were. But not for long.

“It doesn’t matter how pretty one is they seldom do,” Alice grumbled.
“And he mayn’t have a farthing.”

“Alice,” whispered Amabel almost agonizingly, “I wouldn’t _care_ a
farthing—if only he _would!_ Have I a farthing—have you a farthing—has
anyone who ever comes here a farthing? He lives in London. He’d take me
away. To live even in a back street _in London_ would be Heaven! And
one _must_—as soon as one possibly can.—One _must!_ And Oh!” with
another hug which this time was a shudder, “think of what Doris Harmer
had to do! Think of his thick red old neck and his horrid fatness! And
the way he breathed through his nose. Doris said that at first it used
to make her ill to look at him.”

“She’s got over it,” whispered Alice. “She’s almost as fat as he is
now. And she’s loaded with pearls and things.”

“I shouldn’t have to ‘get over’ anything,” said Amabel, “if this one
_would_. I could fall in love with him in a minute.”

“Did you hear what Father said?” Alice brought out the words rather
slowly and reluctantly. She was not eager on the whole to yield up a
detail which after all added glow to possible prospects which from her
point of view were already irritatingly glowing. Yet she could not
resist the impulse of excitement. “No, you didn’t hear. You were out of
the room.”

“What about? Something about _him?_ I hope it wasn’t horrid. How could
it be?”

“He said,” Alice drawled with a touch of girlishly spiteful
indifference, “that if he was one of the poor Gareth-Lawlesses he
hadn’t much chance of succeeding to the title. His uncle—Lord Lawdor—is
only forty-five and he has four splendid healthy boys—perfect little
giants.”

“Oh, I didn’t know there was a title. How splendid,” exclaimed Amabel
rapturously. Then after a few moments’ innocent maiden reflection she
breathed with sweet hopefulness from under the sheet, “Children so
often have scarlet fever or diphtheria, and you know they say those
very strong ones are more likely to die than the other kind. The Vicar
of Sheen lost _four_ all in a week. And the Vicar died too. The doctor
said the diphtheria wouldn’t have killed him if the shock hadn’t
helped.”

Alice—who had a teaspoonful more brain than her sister—burst into a fit
of giggling it was necessary to smother by stuffing the sheet in her
mouth.

“Oh! Amabel!” she gurgled. “You _are_ such a donkey! You would have
been silly enough to say that even if people could have heard you.
Suppose _he_ had!”

“Why should he care,” said Amabel simply. “One can’t help thinking
things. If it happened he would be the Earl of Lawdor and—”

She fell again into sweet reflection while Alice giggled a little more.
Then she herself stopped and thought also. After all perhaps—! One had
to be practical. The tenor of her thoughts was such that she did not
giggle again when Amabel broke the silence by whispering with
tremulous, soft devoutness.

“Alice—do you think that praying _really_ helps?”

“I’ve prayed for things but I never got them,” answered Alice. “But you
know what the Vicar said on Sunday in sermon about ‘Ask and ye shall
receive’.”

“Perhaps you haven’t prayed in the right spirit,” Amabel suggested with
true piety. “Shall we—shall we try? Let us get out of bed and kneel
down.”

“Get out of bed and kneel down yourself,” was Alice’s sympathetic
rejoinder. “You wouldn’t take that much trouble for _me_.”

Amabel sat up on the edge of the bed. In the faint moonlight and her
white night-gown she was almost angelic. She held the end of the long
fair soft plait hanging over her shoulder and her eyes were full of
reproach.

“I think you ought to take _some_ interest,” she said plaintively. “You
know there would be more chances for you and the others—if I were not
here.”

“I’ll wait until you are not here,” replied the unstirred Alice.

But Amabel felt there was no time for waiting in this particular case.
A yacht which “came in” might so soon “put out”. She knelt down,
clasping her slim young hands and bending her forehead upon them. In
effect she implored that Divine Wisdom might guide Mr. Robert
Gareth-Lawless in the much desired path. She also made divers promises
because nothing is so easy as to promise things. She ended with a
gently fervent appeal that—if her prayer were granted—something “might
happen” which would result in her becoming a Countess of Lawdor. One
could not have put the request with greater tentative delicacy.

She felt quite uplifted and a trifle saintly when she rose from her
knees. Alice had actually fallen asleep already and she sighed quite
tenderly as she slipped into the place beside her. Almost as her lovely
little head touched the pillow her own eyes closed. Then she was asleep
herself—and in the faintly moonlit room with the long soft plait
trailing over her shoulder looked even more like an angel than before.

Whether or not as a result of this touching appeal to the Throne of
Grace, Robert Gareth-Lawless _did_. In three months there was a wedding
at the very ancient village church and five flowerlike bridesmaids
followed a flower of a bride to the altar and later in the day to the
station from where Mr. and Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless went on their way
to London. Perhaps Alice and Olive also knelt by the side of their
white beds the night after the wedding, for on that propitious day two
friends of the bridegroom’s—one of them the owner of the yacht—decided
to return again to the place where there were to be found the most
nymphlike of pretty creatures a man had ever by any chance beheld. Such
delicate little fair crowned heads, such delicious little tip-tilted
noses and slim white throats, such ripples of gay chatter and nonsense!
When a man has fortune enough of his own why not take the prettiest
thing he sees? So Alice and Olive were borne away also and poor Mr. and
Mrs. Darrel breathed sighs of relief and there were not only more
chances but causes for bright hopefulness in the once crowded house
which now had rooms to spare.

A certain inattention on the part of the Deity was no doubt responsible
for the fact that “something” did not “happen” to the family of Lord
Lawdor. On the contrary his four little giants of sons throve
astonishingly and a few months after the Gareth-Lawless wedding Lady
Lawdor—a trifle effusively, as it were—presented her husband with twin
male infants so robust that they were humorously known for years
afterwards as the “Twin Herculeses.”

By that time Amabel had become “Feather” and despite Robert’s ingenious
and carefully detailed method of living upon nothing whatever, had many
reasons for knowing that “life in a back street in London” is not a
matter of beds of roses. Since the back street must be the “right
street” and its accompaniments must wear an aspect of at least seeming
to belong to the right order of detachment and fashionable ease, one
was always in debt and forced to keep out of the way of duns, and
obliged to pretend things and tell lies with aptness and outward
gaiety. Sometimes one actually was so far driven to the wall that one
could not keep most important engagements and the invention of
plausible excuses demanded absolute genius. The slice of a house
between the two big ones was a rash venture of the honeymoon but a year
of giving smart little dinners in it and going to smart big dinners
from it in a smart if small brougham 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.
Nobody had contemplated her for a moment. Feather cried for a week when
she first announced the probability of her advent. Afterwards however
she managed to forget the approaching annoyance and went to parties and
danced to the last hour continuing to be a great success because her
prettiness was delicious and her diaphanous mentality was no strain
upon the minds of her admirers male and female.

That a Feather should become a parent gave rise to much wit of light
weight when Robin in the form of a bundle of lace was carried down by
her nurse to be exhibited in the gaudy crowded little drawing-room in
the slice of a house in the Mayfair street.

It was the Head of the House of Coombe who asked the first question
about her.

“What will you _do_ with her?” he inquired detachedly.

The frequently referred to “babe unborn” could not have presented a
gaze of purer innocence than did the lovely Feather. Her eyes of
larkspur blueness were clear of any thought or intention as spring
water is clear at its unclouded best.

Her ripple of a laugh was clear also—enchantingly clear.

“Do!” she repeated. “What is it people ‘do’ with babies? I suppose the
nurse knows. I don’t. I wouldn’t touch her for the world. She frightens
me.”

She floated a trifle nearer and bent to look at her.

“I shall call her Robin,” she said. “Her name is really Roberta as she
couldn’t be called Robert. People will turn round to look at a girl
when they hear her called Robin. Besides she has eyes like a robin. I
wish she’d open them and let you see.”

By chance she did open them at the moment—quite slowly. They were dark
liquid brown and seemed to be all lustrous iris which gazed unmovingly
at the object in line of focus. That object was the Head of the House of
Coombe.

“She is staring at me. There is antipathy in her gaze,” he said, and
stared back unmovingly also, but with a sort of cold interest.




CHAPTER II


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 and having been accepted
by his acquaintances was not infrequently used by them in their light
moments in the same spirit. The peerage recorded him as a Marquis and
added several lesser attendant titles.

“When English society was respectable, even to stodginess at times,”
was his point of view, “to be born ‘the Head of the House’ was a
weighty and awe-inspiring thing. In fearful private denunciatory
interviews with one’s parents and governors it was brought up against
one as a final argument against immoral conduct such as debt and not
going to church. As the Head of the House one was called upon to be an
Example. In the country one appeared in one’s pew and announced oneself
a ‘miserable sinner’ in loud tones, one had to invite the rector to
dinner with regularity and ‘the ladies’ of one’s family gave tea and
flannel petticoats and baby clothes to cottagers. Men and women were
known as ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ in those halcyon days. One
Represented things—Parties in Parliament—Benevolent Societies, and
British Hospitality in the form of astounding long dinners at which one
drank healths and made speeches. In roseate youth one danced the
schottische and the polka and the round waltz which Lord Byron
denounced as indecent. To recall the vigour of his poem gives rise to a
smile—when one chances to sup at a cabaret.”

He was considered very amusing when he analyzed his own mental attitude
towards his world in general.

“I was born somewhat too late and somewhat too early,” he explained in
his light, rather cold and detached way. “I was born and educated at
the closing of one era and have to adjust myself to living in another.
I was as it were cradled among treasured relics of the ethics of the
Georges and Queen Charlotte, and Queen Victoria in her bloom. _I_ was
in my bloom in the days when ‘ladies’ were reproved for wearing dresses
cut too low at Drawing Rooms. Such training gives curious interest to
fashions in which bodices are unconsidered trifles and Greek nymphs who
dance with bare feet and beautiful bare legs may be one’s own
relations. I trust I do not seem even in the shadowiest way to comment
unfavourably. I merely look on at the rapidities of change with
unalloyed interest. As the Head of the House of Coombe I am not sure
_what_ I am an Example of—or to. Which is why I at times regard myself
in that capacity with a slightly ribald lightness.”

The detachment of his question with regard to the newborn infant of the
airily irresponsible Feather was in entire harmony with his attitude
towards the singular incident of Life as illustrated by the World, the
Flesh and the Devil by none of which he was—as far as could be
observed—either impressed, disturbed or prejudiced. His own experience
had been richly varied and practically unlimited in its opportunities
for pleasure, sinful or unsinful indulgence, mitigated or unmitigated
wickedness, the gathering of strange knowledge, and the possible
ignoring of all dull boundaries. This being the case a superhuman
charity alone could have forborne to believe that his opportunities had
been neglected in the heyday of his youth. Wealth and lack of
limitations in themselves would have been quite enough to cause the
Nonconformist Victorian mind to regard a young—or middle-aged—male as
likely to represent a fearsome moral example, but these three
temptations combined with good looks and a certain mental brilliance
were so inevitably the concomitants of elegant iniquity that the
results might be taken for granted.

That the various worlds in which he lived in various lands accepted him
joyfully as an interesting and desirable of more or less abominably
sinful personage, the Head of the House of Coombe—even many years
before he became its head—regarded with the detachment which he had,
even much earlier, begun to learn. Why should it be in the least matter
what people thought of one? Why should it in the least matter what one
thought of oneself—and therefore—why should one think at all? He had
begun at the outset a brilliantly happy young pagan with this simple
theory. After the passing of some years he had not been quite so happy
but had remained quite as pagan and retained the theory which had lost
its first fine careless rapture and gained a secret bitterness. He had
not married and innumerable stories were related to explain the reason
why. They were most of them quite false and none of them quite true.
When he ceased to be a young man his delinquency was much discussed,
more especially when his father died and he took his place as the head
of his family. He was old enough, rich enough, important enough for
marriage to be almost imperative. But he remained unmarried. In
addition he seemed to consider his abstinence entirely an affair of his
own.

“Are you as wicked as people say you are?” a reckless young woman once
asked him. She belonged to the younger set which was that season trying
recklessness, in a tentative way, as a new fashion.

“I really don’t know. It is so difficult to decide,” he answered. “I
could tell better if I knew exactly what wickedness is. When I find out
I will let you know. So good of you to take an interest.”

Thirty years earlier he knew that a young lady who had heard he was
wicked would have perished in flames before immodestly mentioning the
fact to him, but might have delicately attempted to offer “first aid”
to reformation, by approaching with sweetness the subject of going to
church.

The reckless young woman looked at him with an attention which he was
far from being blind enough not to see was increased by his answer.

“I never know what you mean,” she said almost wistfully.

“Neither do I,” was his amiable response. “And I am sure it would not
be worth while going into. Really, we neither of us know what we mean.
Perhaps I am as wicked as I know how to be. And I may have painful
limitations—or I may not.”

After his father’s death he spent rather more time in London and rather
less in wandering over the face of the globe. But by the time he was
forty he knew familiarly far countries and near and was intimate with
most of the peoples thereof. He could have found his way about
blind-folded in the most distinctive parts of most of the great cities.
He had seen and learned many things. The most absorbing to his mind had
been the ambitions and changes of nations, statesmen, rulers and those
they ruled or were ruled by. Courts and capitals knew him, and his
opportunities were such as gave him all ease as an onlooker. He was
outwardly of the type which does not arouse caution in talkers and he
heard much which was suggestive even to illumination, from those to
whom he remained unsuspected of being a man who remembered things long
and was astute in drawing conclusions. The fact remained however that
he possessed a remarkable memory and one which was not a rag-bag filled
with unassorted and parti-coloured remnants, but a large and orderly
space whose contents were catalogued and filed and well enclosed from
observation. He was also given to the mental argument which follows a
point to its conclusion as a mere habit of mind. He saw and knew well
those who sat and pondered with knit brows and cautiously hovering hand
at the great chess-board which is formed by the Map of Europe. He found
an enormous interest in watching their play. It was his fortune as a
result of his position to know persons who wore crowns and a natural
incident in whose lives it was to receive the homage expressed by the
uncovering of the head and the bending of the knee. At forty he looked
back at the time when the incongruousness, the abnormality and the
unsteadiness of the foundations on which such personages stood first
struck him. The realization had been in its almost sacrilegious novelty
and daring, a sort of thunderbolt passing through his mind. He had at
the time spoken of it only to one person.

“I have no moral or ethical views to offer,” he had said. “I only
_see_. The thing—as it is—will disintegrate. I am so at sea as to what
will take its place that I feel as if the prospect were rather
horrible. One has had the old landmarks and been impressed by the old
pomp and picturesqueness so many centuries, that one cannot see the
earth without them. There have been kings even in the Cannibal
Islands.”

As a statesman or a diplomat he would have seen far but he had been too
much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent for
work of any order. He freely admitted to himself that he was a
worthless person but the fact did not disturb him. Having been born
with a certain order of brain it observed and worked in spite of him,
thereby adding flavour and interest to existence. But that was all.

It cannot be said that as the years passed he quite enjoyed the fact
that he knew he was rarely spoken of to a stranger without its being
mentioned that he was the most perfectly dressed man in London. He
rather detested the idea though he was aware that the truth was
unimpeachable. The perfection of his accompaniments had arisen in his
youth from a secret feeling for fitness and harmony. Texture and colour
gave him almost abnormal pleasure. His expression of this as a
masculine creature had its limits which resulted in a concentration on
perfection. Even at five-and-twenty however he had never been called a
dandy and even at five-and-forty no one had as yet hinted at Beau
Brummel though by that time men as well as women frequently described
to each other the cut and colour of the garments he wore, and tailors
besought him to honour them with crumbs of his patronage in the
ambitious hope that they might mention him as a client. And the simple
fact that he appeared in a certain colour or cut set it at once on its
way to become a fashion to be seized upon, worn and exaggerated until
it was dropped suddenly by its originator and lost in the oblivion of
cheap imitations and cheap tailor shops. The first exaggeration of the
harmony he had created and the original was seen no more.

Feather herself had a marvellous trick in the collecting of her
garments. It was a trick which at times barely escaped assuming the
proportions of absolute creation. Her passion for self-adornment
expressed itself in ingenious combination and quite startling
uniqueness of line now and then. Her slim fairness and ash-gold
gossamer hair carried airily strange tilts and curves of little or
large hats or daring tints other women could not sustain but invariably
strove to imitate however disastrous the results. Beneath soft drooping
or oddly flopping brims hopelessly unbecoming to most faces hers looked
out quaintly lovely as a pictured child’s wearing its grandmother’s
bonnet. Everything draped itself about or clung to her in entrancing
folds which however whimsical were never grotesque.

“Things are always becoming to me,” she said quite simply. “But often I
stick a few pins into a dress to tuck it up here and there, or if I
give a hat a poke somewhere to make it crooked, they are much more
becoming. People are always asking me how I do it but I don’t know how.
I bought a hat from Cerise last week and I gave it two little thumps
with my fist—one in the crown and one in the brim and they made it
wonderful. The maid of the most grand kind of person tried to find out
from my maid where I bought it. I wouldn’t let her tell of course.”

She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of
Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such
gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon
her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world.

Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the
mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she
might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time—particularly
if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly
about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in
her insistence on clothes—clothes—clothes—as if they were the breath of
life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat
before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair
in different styles—in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings—soft
bands and loops—in braids and coils—he broke forth into an uneasy short
laugh and expressed himself—though she did not know he was expressing
himself and would not have understood him if she had.

“If you have a soul—and I’m not at all certain you have—” he said,
“it’s divided into a dressmaker’s and a hairdresser’s and a milliner’s
shop. It’s full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs.
It’s an awful mess, Feather.”

“I hope it’s a shoe shop and a jeweller’s as well,” she laughed quite
gaily. “And a lace-maker’s. I need every one of them.”

“It’s a rag shop,” he said. “It has nothing but _chiffons_ in it.”

“If ever I _do_ think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things
floating about like little balloons,” was her cheerful response.

“That’s an idea,” he answered with a rather louder laugh. “Yours might
be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call
_paillettes_.”

The fancy attracted her.

“If I had one like that”—with a pleased creative air, “it would look
rather ducky floating from my shoulder—or even my hat—or my hair in the
evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond
pin—and with lovely little pink and blue streamers.” With the touch of
genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her
universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before.

“You mustn’t make me laugh,” she said holding up her hand. “I am having
my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny
poke bonnet—and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and
demure. You mustn’t really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like
that. You must only smile.”

Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that
she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now
that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of
his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that
she had none whatever.

It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress
and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw
her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead
and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather’s
special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every
other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in
her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them.
Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a
little nun’s or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young
great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female
creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees.

When Coombe’s eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of
people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said
afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale—almost as if he
saw something which frightened him.

“Who is that under the copper beech—being talked to by Harlow?” he
inquired.

Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids
down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke
bonnet.

“It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless—‘Feather’ we call her,” he was
answered. “Was there ever anything more artful than that startling
little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn’t see it as
quickly.”

“One wouldn’t look at it as long,” said Coombe. “One is in danger of
staring. And the little hat—or bonnet—which pokes and is fastened under
her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone
rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won’t be staring if I
am talking to her. Please.”

The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew
nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather
lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they
looked like an angel’s when they were lifted. There are eyes of that
particular cut. But he had not talked to her 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. With the
perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she
had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes—almost before the colour
had quite returned to his face—the story of her husband’s idea of her
soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with _paillettes_.
And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or
her hair by the light sparkling chain—and with delicate ribbon
streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh—though she thought it
had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person
and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed.

“Exquisite!” he said. “I shall never see you in the future without it.
But wouldn’t it be necessary to vary the colour at times?”

“Oh! Yes—to match things,” seriously. “I couldn’t wear a pink and blue
one with this—” glancing over the smoky mousey thing “—or
_paillettes_.”

“Oh, no—not _paillettes_,” he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh
laugh having ended.

“One couldn’t imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to
think,” she reflected. “Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing—like the edge
of a rain-cloud—scarcely a colour at all.”

For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a
dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel
might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul
might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also.

Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily
through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he
really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people
they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable
letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most
rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She
scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only
taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that
it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact
summing up at the agency had been as follows:

“They’re a good looking pair and he’s Lord Lawdor’s nephew. They’re
bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house
because she’s so pretty. They’ll last two or three years perhaps and
you’ll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up
young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual.”

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 owners of it
were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware.
Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no
doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked
her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have
money.

This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much
argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs—even in
corners of Feather’s own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument
regarded the degree of Coombe’s interest in her. There was always
curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman—especially and
privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow
observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to
a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not
possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather
might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone
could explain it—and he would not.

Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her.
It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than
one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion
stand apart a little and look at her—watch her—with an expression
suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to
betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of
profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she
best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes
which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little
but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he
was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her
at balls.

Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure
that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was
that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that
if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it.
Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life
in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the
matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at
once light and friendly.

“Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor’s as you know
him so well,” she said. “When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame
Hélène’s last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six
dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more.”

“Does she think he is going to pay for them?” asked Bob.

“It doesn’t matter what she thinks”; Feather laughed very prettily.

“Doesn’t it?”

“Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What’s the matter, Rob? You look
quite red and cross.”

“I’ve had a headache for three days,” he answered, “and I feel hot and
cross. I don’t care about a lot of things you say, Feather.”

“Don’t be silly,” she retorted. “I don’t care about a lot of things you
say—and do, too, for the matter of that.”

Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room
grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead.

“There’s a—sort of limit,” he commented. He hesitated a little before
he added sulkily “—to the things one—_says_.”

“That sounds like Alice,” was her undisturbed answer. “She used to
squabble at me because I _said_ things. But I believe one of the
reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by _saying_ things.
Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know,” she added
practically. “Somehow he _counts_. Don’t you recollect how before we
knew him—when he was abroad so long—people used to bring him into their
talk as if they couldn’t help remembering him and what he was like. I
knew quite a lot about him—about his cleverness and his manners and his
way of keeping women off without being rude—and the things he says
about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his
clothes. I adore his clothes. And I’m convinced he adores mine.”

She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the
grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine
thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that
final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He
did not wear things—they were expressions of his mental subtleties.
Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes—carried them about
with her—however beautifully.

“I like him,” she went on. “I don’t know anything about political
parties and the state of Europe so I don’t understand the things he
says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn’t
really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a
haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled
pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to
him.”

The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about
uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her
existence except on such occasions as her nurse—who had promptly fallen
in love with the smart young footman—carried her down to the kitchen
and Servants’ Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and
an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants’ Hall had been given that
name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it
was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries.

The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife’s
drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing
hard.

“Feather!” he gasped. “Don’t know what’s up with me. I believe
I’m—awfully ill! I can’t see straight. Can’t think.”

He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather
sprang at him.

“Don’t, Rob, don’t!” she cried in actual anguish. “Lord Coombe is
taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I’m going to wear—”
She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. “Oh! do try
to sit up,” she begged pathetically. “Just try. _Don’t_ give up till
afterwards.” But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear.
He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and
quite insensible.

It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that
very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa.

He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless.

“Have you sent for a doctor?” he inquired.

“He’s—only just done it!” she exclaimed. “It’s more than I can bear.
You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and—”

“Were you thinking of going?” he put it to her quietly.

“I shall have to send for a nurse of course—” she began. He went so far
as to interrupt her.

“You had better not go—if you’ll pardon my saying so,” he suggested.

“Not go? Not go at all?” she wailed.

“Not go at all,” was his answer. And there was such entire lack of
encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs.

In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely
penniless widow with a child.




CHAPTER III


Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been
that “poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless” and her situation were pathetic.
Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness
and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother
of a dear little girl—left with no income! How very sad! What _could_
she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her
darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and
suggested “the Scriptures” as suitable reading. Some of them—rare and
strange souls even in their time—would have known what they meant and
meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express
through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used
the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and
creditable.

But to Feather’s immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers
of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties,
small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the
regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase—tucked
against a wall—one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when
one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious
little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and
noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and
done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried—dancing and
songs which seemed almost startling at first—but which were gradually
being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing
and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases.
And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at
which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly
become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to
have dragged Death nakedly into their midst—to have died in his bed in
one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried
down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody
could bear to think of it.

Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that
such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her
stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and
cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly
snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because
she was frightened. Numbers of cards “with sympathy” had been left at
the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had
accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come
to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent
bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been
silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was
actually not a sound to be heard—no one going up and down stairs—Rob’s
room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty—the
drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long
_would_ it be before it would be full of people again—how long must she
wait before she could decently invite anyone?—It was really at this
point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to
activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun
to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at
cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no
immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future
festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily
clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled
everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give
her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing
only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met
on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and
must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants’
wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly
hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street—would the
servants go away—would she be left without even a carriage? What could
she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and
by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out
of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her,
she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a
frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in.

“It’s awful—it’s awful—it’s awful!” broke out between her sobs. “What
can I do? I can’t do anything! There’s nothing to do! It’s awful—it’s
awful—it’s awful!” She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying
until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would
suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had
cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of
limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted—though
of course it had generally been less. And crying made one’s nose and
eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and
cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the
glass.

She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson
should bring her a cup of beef tea.

“It’s time for lunch,” she thought. “I’m faint with crying. And she
shall bathe my eyes with rose-water.”

It was not Tonson’s custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she
was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and
then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt
always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the
thing which most struck terror to her soul—that horrid stillness. The
servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their
gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if
they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even
found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a
little noise—do anything to break the silence.

The room she sat in—Rob’s awful little room adjoining—which was awful
because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the
bed before she was taken away in hysterics—were dread enclosures of
utter silence. The whole house was dumb—the very street had no sound in
it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang
the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing
through the place.

Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before
she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did
not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself.

“How dare Tonson!” she began. “I have rung four or five times! How dare
she!”

The smart young footman’s manner had been formed in a good school. It
was attentive, impersonal.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” he answered.

“What do you mean? What does _she_ mean? Where is she?” Feather felt
almost breathless before his unperturbed good style.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” he answered as before. Then with the same
unbiassed bearing added, “None of us know. She has gone away.”

Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying.

“Away! Away!” the words were a faint gasp.

“She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a
four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma’am.” Feather dropped her hand from
the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left,
sinking into it helplessly.

“Who—who will dress me?” she half wailed.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” replied the young footman, his excellent manner
presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, “Cook,
ma’am, wishes to speak to you.”

“Tell her to come to me here,” Feather said. “And I—I want a cup of
beef tea.”

“Yes, ma’am,” with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind
him.

It was not long before it was opened again. “Cook” had knocked and
Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was
not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face
somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained
at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she
brought nothing else.

“I wanted some beef tea, Cook,” said Feather protestingly.

“There is no beef tea, ma’am,” said Cook. “There is neither beef, nor
stock, nor Liebig in the house.”

“Why—why not?” stammered Feather and she stammered because even her
lack of perception saw something in the woman’s face which was new to
her. It was a sort of finality.

She held out the pile of small books.

“Here are the books, ma’am,” was her explanation. “Perhaps as you don’t
like to be troubled with such things, you don’t know how far behind
they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It’s been an every-day
fight to get the things that was wanted. It’s not an agreeable thing
for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I’ve had to do it because I
had my reputation to think of and I couldn’t send up rubbish when there
was company.”

Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook
drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table
near her.

“That’s the butcher’s book,” she said. “He’s sent nothing in for three
days. We’ve been living on leavings. He’s sent his last, he says and he
means it. This is the baker’s. He’s not been for a week. I made up
rolls because I had some flour left. It’s done now—and _he’s_ done.
This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when
the last month’s supply came, that it would BE the last until payment
was made. This is wines—and coal and wood—and laundry—and milk. And
here is wages, ma’am, which _can’t_ go on any longer.”

Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly.

“Oh, go away!—go away!” she cried. “If Mr. Lawless were here—”

“He isn’t, ma’am,” Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more
terrifying than any ferocity could have been—a way which pointed
steadily to the end of things. “As long as there’s a gentleman in a
house there’s generally a sort of a prospect that things _may_ be
settled some way. At any rate there’s someone to go and speak your mind
to even if you have to give up your place. But when there’s no
gentleman and nothing—and nobody—respectable people with their livings
to make have got to protect themselves.”

The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that
her employer’s death had left “Nothing” and “Nobody” was prompted by no
consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for
the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her
interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her
grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not
reached her.

“Oh! go away! Go _awa-ay!_” Feather almost shrieked.

“I am going, ma’am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It’s no use
waiting and giving the month’s notice. We shouldn’t save the month’s
wages and the trades-people wouldn’t feed us. We can’t stay here and
starve. And it’s a time of the year when places has to be looked for.
You can’t hold it against us, ma’am. It’s better for you to have us out
of the house tonight—which is when our boxes will be taken away.”

Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life
she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a
solid wall of stone—not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through,
or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could
not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would
help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there
were such things as lies.

“Do you mean,” she cried out, “that you are all going to _leave_ the
house—that there won’t be any servants to wait on me—that there’s
nothing to eat or drink—that I shall have to stay here _alone_—and
starve!”

“We should have to starve if we stayed,” answered Cook simply. “And of
course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you
might get in a woman by the day. You won’t starve, ma’am. You’ve got
your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel
would be sure to come.”

“My father is ill. I think he’s dying. My mother could not leave him
for a moment. Perhaps he’s dead now,” Feather wailed.

“You’ve got your London friends, ma’am—”

Feather literally beat her hands together.

“My friends! Can I go to people’s houses and knock at their front door
and tell them I haven’t any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that?
Can I?” And she said it as if she were going crazy.

The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for the
rest. It had not been pleasant but she knew she had been quite within
her rights and dealt with plain facts. But she did not enjoy the
prospect of seeing her little fool of a mistress raving in hysterics.

“You mustn’t let yourself go, ma’am,” she said. “You’d better lie down
a bit and try to get quiet.” She hesitated a moment looking at the
pretty ruin who had risen from her seat and stood trembling.

“It’s not my place of course to—make suggestions,” she said quietly.
“But—had you ever thought of sending for Lord Coombe, ma’am?”

Feather actually found the torn film of her mind caught for a second by
something which wore a form of reality. Cook saw that her tremor
appeared to verge on steadying itself.

“Coombe,” she faintly breathed as if to herself and not to Cook.

“Coombe.”

“His lordship was very friendly with Mr. Lawless and he seemed fond
of—coming to the house,” was presented as a sort of added argument. “If
you’ll lie down I’ll bring you a cup of tea, ma’am—though it can’t be
beef.”

Feather staggered again to her bed and dropped flat upon it—flat as a
slim little pancake in folds of thin black stuff which hung and
floated.

“I can’t bring you cream,” said Cook as she went out of the room.
“Louisa has had nothing but condensed milk—since yesterday—to give Miss
Robin.”

“Oh-h!” groaned Feather, not in horror of the tea without cream though
that was awful enough in its significance, but because this was the
first time since the falling to pieces of her world that she had given
a thought to the added calamity of Robin.




CHAPTER IV


If one were to devote one’s mental energies to speculation as to what
is going on behind the noncommittal fronts of any row of houses in any
great city the imaginative mind might be led far. Bricks, mortar,
windows, doors, steps which lead up to the threshold, are what are to
be seen from the outside. Nothing particular may be transpiring within
the walls, or tragedies, crimes, hideous suffering may be enclosed. The
conclusion is obvious to banality—but as suggestive as banal—so
suggestive in fact that the hyper-sensitive and too imaginative had
better, for their own comfort’s sake, leave the matter alone. In most
cases the existing conditions would not be altered even if one knocked
at the door and insisted on entering with drawn sword in the form of
attendant policeman. The outside of the slice of a house in which
Feather lived was still rather fresh from its last decorative touching
up. It had been painted cream colour and had white doors and windows
and green window boxes with variegated vinca vines trailing from them
and pink geraniums, dark blue lobelia and ferns filling the earth
stuffed in by the florist who provided such adornments. Passers-by
frequently glanced at it and thought it a nice little house whose
amusing diminutiveness was a sort of attraction. It was rather like a
new doll’s house.

No one glancing at it in passing at the closing of this particular day
had reason to suspect that any unaccustomed event was taking place
behind the cream-coloured front. The front door “brasses” had been
polished, the window-boxes watered and no cries for aid issued from the
rooms behind them. The house was indeed quiet both inside and out.
Inside it was indeed even quieter than usual. The servants’ preparation
for departure had been made gradually and undisturbedly. There had been
exhaustive quiet discussion of the subject each night for weeks, even
before Robert Gareth-Lawless’ illness. The smart young footman Edward
who had means of gaining practical information had constituted himself
a sort of private detective. He had in time learned all that was to be
learned. This, it had made itself clear to him on investigation, was
not one of those cases when to wait for evolutionary family events
might be the part of discretion. There were no prospects ahead—none at
all. Matters would only get worse and the whole thing would end in
everybody not only losing their unpaid back wages but having to walk
out into the street through the door of a disgraced household whose
owners would be turned out into the street also when their belongings
were sold over their heads. Better get out before everything went to
pieces and there were unpleasantnesses. There would be unpleasantnesses
because there was no denying that the trades-people had been played
tricks with. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was only one of a lot of pretty
daughters whose father was a poor country doctor in Jersey. He had had
“a stroke” himself and his widow would have nothing to live on when he
died. That was what Mrs. Lawless had to look to. As to Lord Lawdor
Edward had learned from those who _did_ know that he had never approved
of his nephew and that he’d said he was a fool for marrying and had
absolutely refused to have anything to do with him. He had six boys and
a girl now and big estates weren’t what they had been, everyone knew.
There was only one thing left for Cook and Edward and Emma and Louisa
to do and that was to “get out” without any talk or argument.

“She’s not one that won’t find someone to look after her,” ended
Edward. “Somebody or other will take her up because they’ll be sorry
for her. But us lot aren’t widows and orphans. No one’s going to be
sorry for us or care a hang what we’ve been let in for. The longer we
stay, the longer we won’t be paid.” He was not a particularly depraved
or cynical young footman but he laughed a little at the end of his
speech. “There’s the Marquis,” he added. “He’s been running in and out
long enough to make a good bit of talk. Now’s his time to turn up.”

After she had taken her cup of tea without cream Feather had fallen
asleep in reaction from her excited agitation. It was in accord with
the inevitable trend of her being that even before her eyes closed she
had ceased to believe that the servants were really going to leave the
house. It seemed too ridiculous a thing to happen. She was possessed of
no logic which could lead her to a realization of the indubitable fact
that there was no reason why servants who could neither be paid nor
provided with food should remain in a place. The mild stimulation of
the tea also gave rise to the happy thought that she would not give
them any references if they “behaved badly”. It did not present itself
to her that references from a house of cards which had ignominiously
fallen to pieces and which henceforth would represent only shady
failure, would be of no use. So she fell asleep.

When she awakened the lights were lighted in the streets and one
directly across the way threw its reflection into her bedroom. It lit
up the little table near which she had sat and the first thing she saw
was the pile of small account books. The next was that the light which
revealed them also fell brightly on the glass knob of the door which
led into Robert’s room.

She turned her eyes away quickly with a nervous shudder. She had a
horror of the nearness of Rob’s room. If there had been another part of
the house in which she could have slept she would have fled to it as
soon as he was taken ill. But the house was too small to have “parts”.
The tiny drawing-rooms piled themselves on top of the dining-room, the
“master’s bedrooms” on top of the drawing-rooms, and the nurseries and
attics where Robin and the servants slept one on the other at the top
of the house. So she had been obliged to stay and endure everything.
Rob’s cramped quarters had always been full of smart boots and the
smell of cigars and men’s clothes. He had moved about a good deal and
had whistled and laughed and sworn and grumbled. They had neither of
them had bad tempers so that they had not quarrelled with each other.
They had talked through the open door when they were dressing and they
had invented clever tricks which helped them to get out of money
scrapes and they had gossiped and made fun of people. And now the door
was locked and the room was a sort of horror. She could never think of
it without seeing the stiff hard figure on the bed, the straight close
line of the mouth and the white hard nose sharpened and narrowed as
Rob’s had never been. Somehow she particularly could not bear the
recollection of the sharp unnatural modeling of the hard, white nose.
She could not _bear_ it! She found herself recalling it the moment she
saw the light on the door handle and she got up to move about and try
to forget it.

It was then that she went to the window and looked down into the
street, probably attracted by some slight noise though she was not
exactly aware that she had heard anything.

She must have heard something however. Two four-wheeled cabs were
standing at the front door and the cabman assisted by Edward were
putting trunks on top of them. They were servants’ trunks and Cook was
already inside the first cab which was filled with paper parcels and
odds and ends. Even as her mistress watched Emma got in carrying a
sedate band-box. She was the house-parlourmaid and a sedate person. The
first cab drove away as soon as its door was closed and the cabman
mounted to his seat. Louisa looking wholly unprofessional without her
nurse’s cap and apron and wearing a tailor-made navy blue costume and a
hat with a wing in it, entered the second cab followed by Edward
intensely suggesting private life and possible connection with a Bank.
The second cab followed the first and Feather having lost her breath
looked after them as they turned the corner of the street.

When they were quite out of sight she turned back into the room. The
colour had left her skin, and her eyes were so wide stretched and her
face so drawn and pinched with abject terror that her prettiness itself
had left her.

“They’ve gone—all of them!” she gasped. She stopped a moment, her chest
rising and falling. Then she added even more breathlessly, “There’s no
one left in the house. It’s—empty!”

This was what was going on behind the cream-coloured front, the white
windows and green flower-boxes of the slice of a house as motors and
carriages passed it that evening on their way to dinner parties and
theatres, and later as the policeman walked up and down slowly upon his
beat.

Inside a dim light in the small hall showed a remote corner where on a
peg above a decorative seat hung a man’s hat of the highest gloss and
latest form; and on the next peg a smart evening overcoat. They had
belonged to Robert Gareth-Lawless who was dead and needed such things
no more. The same dim light showed the steep narrowness of the
white-railed staircase mounting into gruesome little corners of
shadows, while the miniature drawing-rooms illumined only from the
street seemed to await an explanation of dimness and chairs unfilled,
combined with unnatural silence.

It would have been the silence of the tomb but that it was now and then
broken by something like a half smothered shriek followed by a sort of
moaning which made their way through the ceiling from the room above.

Feather had at first run up and down the room like a frightened cat as
she had done in the afternoon. Afterwards she had 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 hour has passed when the
clearly moral can sum up the responsibilities of a creature born
apparently without brain, or soul or courage. Those who aspire to such
morals as are expressed by fairness—mere fairness—are much given to
hesitation. Courage had never been demanded of Feather so far. She had
none whatever and now she only felt panic and resentment. She had no
time to be pathetic about Robert, being too much occupied with herself.
Robert was dead—she was alive—here—in an empty house with no money and
no servants. She suddenly and rather awfully realized that she did not
know a single person whom it would not be frantic to expect anything
from.

Nobody had money enough for themselves, however rich they were. The
richer they were the more they needed. It was when this thought came to
her that she clutched her hands in her hair. The pretty and smart women
and agreeable more or less good looking men who had chattered and
laughed and made love in her drawing-rooms were chattering, laughing
and making love in other houses at this very moment—or they were at the
theatre applauding some fashionable actor-manager. At this very
moment—while she lay on the carpet in the dark and every little room in
the house had horror shut inside its closed doors—particularly Robert’s
room which was so hideously close to her own, and where there seemed
still to lie moveless on the bed, the stiff hard figure. It was when
she recalled this that the unnatural silence of the drawing-rooms was
intruded upon by the brief half-stifled hysteric shriek, and the
moaning which made its way through the ceiling. She felt almost as if
the door handle might turn and something stiff and cold try to come in.

So the hours went on behind the cream-coloured outer walls and the
white windows and gay flower-boxes. And the street became more and more
silent—so silent at last that when the policeman walked past on his
beat his heavy regular footfall seemed loud and almost resounding.

To even vaguely put to herself any question involving action would not
have been within the scope of her mentality. Even when she began to
realize that she was beginning to feel faint for want of food she did
not dare to contemplate going downstairs to look for something to eat.
What did she know about downstairs? She had never there and had paid no
attention whatever to Louisa’s complaints that the kitchen and
Servants’ Hall were small and dark and inconvenient and that
cockroaches ran about. She had cheerfully accepted the simple
philosophy that London servants were used to these things and if they
did their work it did not really matter. But to go out of one’s room in
the horrible stillness and creep downstairs, having to turn up the gas
as one went, and to face the basement steps and cockroaches scuttling
away, would be even more impossible than to starve. She sat upon the
floor, her hair tumbling about her shoulders and her thin black dress
crushed.

“I’d give almost _anything_ for a cup of coffee,” she protested feebly.
“And there’s no _use_ in ringing the bell!”

Her mother ought to have come whether her father was ill or not. He
wasn’t dead. Robert was dead and her mother ought to have come so that
whatever happened she would not be quite alone and _something_ could be
done for her. It was probably this tender thought of her mother which
brought back the recollection of her wedding day and a certain wedding
present she had received. It was a pretty silver travelling flask and
she remembered that it must be in her dressing-bag now, and there was
some cognac left in it. She got up and went to the place where the bag
was kept. Cognac raised your spirits and made you go to sleep, and if
she could sleep until morning the house would not be so frightening by
daylight—and something might happen. The little flask was almost full.
Neither she nor Robert had cared much about cognac. She poured some
into a glass with water and drank it.

Because she was unaccustomed to stimulant it made her feel quite warm
and in a few minutes she forgot that she had been hungry and realized
that she was not so frightened. It was such a relief not to be
terrified; it was as if a pain had stopped. She actually picked up one
or two of the account books and glanced at the totals. If you couldn’t
pay bills you couldn’t and nobody was put in prison for debt in these
days. Besides she would not have been put in prison—Rob would—and Rob
was dead. Something would happen—something.

As she began to arrange her hair for the night she remembered what Cook
had said about Lord Coombe. She had cried until she did not look as
lovely as usual, but after she had bathed her eyes with cold rose-water
they began to seem only shadowy and faintly flushed. And her fine
ash-gold hair was wonderful when it hung over each shoulder in wide,
soft plaits. She might be a school-girl of fifteen. A delicate lacy
night-gown was one of the most becoming things one wore. It was a pity
one couldn’t wear them to parties. There was nothing the least indecent
about them. Millicent Hardwicke had been photographed in one of hers
and no one had suspected what it was. Yes; she would send a little note
to Coombe. She knew Madame Hélène had only let her have her beautiful
mourning because—. The things she had created were quite unique—thin,
gauzy, black, floating or clinging. She had been quite happy the
morning she gave Hélène her orders. Tomorrow when she had slept through
the night and it was broad daylight again she would be able to think of
things to say in her letter to Lord Coombe. She would have to be a
little careful because he did not like things to bore him.—Death and
widows might—a little—at first. She had heard him say once that he did
not wish to regard himself in the light of a charitable institution. It
wouldn’t do to frighten him away. Perhaps if he continued coming to the
house and seemed very intimate the trades-people might be managed.

She felt much less helpless and when she was ready for bed she took a
little more cognac. The flush had faded from her eye-lids and bloomed
in delicious rose on her cheeks. As she crept between the cool sheets
and nestled down on her pillow she had a delightful sense of increasing
comfort—comfort. What a beautiful thing it was to go to sleep!

And then she was disturbed—started out of the divine doze stealing upon
her—by a shrill prolonged wailing shriek!

It came from the Night Nursery and at the moment it seemed almost worse
than anything which had occurred all through the day. It brought
everything back so hideously. She had of course forgotten Robin
again—and it was Robin! And Louisa had gone away with Edward. She had
perhaps put the child to sleep discreetly before she went. And now she
had wakened and was screaming. Feather had heard that she was a child
with a temper but by fair means or foul Louisa had somehow managed to
prevent her from being a nuisance.

The shrieks shocked her into sitting upright in bed. Their shrillness
tearing through the utter soundlessness of the empty house brought back
all her terrors and set her heart beating at a gallop.

“I—I _won’t!_” she protested, fairly with chattering teeth. “I won’t! I
_won’t!_”

She had never done anything for the child since its birth, she did not
know how to do anything, she had not wanted to know. To reach her now
she would be obliged to go out in the dark—the gas-jet she would have
to light was actually close to the outer door of Robert’s bedroom—_the_
room! If she did not die of panic while she was trying to light it she
would have to make her way almost in the dark up the steep crooked
little staircase which led to the nurseries. And the awful little
creature’s screams would be going on all the time making the blackness
and dead silence of the house below more filled with horror by
contrast—more shut off and at the same time more likely to waken to
some horror which was new.

“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?_” And she flung herself down
again shuddering and burrowing her head under the coverings and pillows
she dragged over her ears to shut out the sounds.

The screams had taken on a more determined note and a fiercer
shrillness which the still house heard well and made the most of, but
they were so far deadened for Feather that she began beneath her soft
barrier to protest pantingly.

“I shouldn’t know what to do if I went. If no one goes near her she’ll
cry herself to sleep. It’s—it’s only temper. Oh-h! what a horrible
wail! It—it sounds like a—a lost soul!”

But she did not stir from the bed. She burrowed deeper under the bed
clothes and held the pillow closer to her ears.

It did sound like a lost soul at times. What panic possesses a baby who
cries in the darkness alone no one will ever know and one may perhaps
give thanks to whatever gods there be that the baby itself does not
remember. What awful woe of sudden unprotectedness when life exists
only through protection—what piteous panic in the midst of black
unmercifulness, inarticulate sound howsoever wildly shrill can neither
explain nor express.

Robin knew only Louisa, warmth, food, sleep and waking. Or if she knew
more she was not yet aware that she did. She had reached the age when
she generally slept through the night. She might not have disturbed her
mother until daylight but Louisa had with forethought given her an
infant sleeping potion. It had disagreed with and awakened her. She was
uncomfortable and darkness enveloped her. A cry or so and Louisa would
ordinarily have come to her sleepy, and rather out of temper, but
knowing what to do. In this strange night the normal cry of warning and
demand produced no result.

No one came. The discomfort continued—the blackness remained black. The
cries became shrieks—but nothing followed; the shrieks developed into
prolonged screams. No Louisa, no light, no milk. The blackness drew in
closer and became a thing to be fought with wild little beating hands.
Not a glimmer—not a rustle—not a sound! Then came the cries of the lost
soul—alone—alone—in a black world of space in which there was not even
another lost soul. And then the panics of which there have been no
records and never will be, because if the panic stricken does not die
in mysterious convulsions he or she grows away from the memory of a
formless past—except that perhaps unexplained nightmares from which one
wakens quaking, with cold sweat, may vaguely repeat the long hidden
thing.

What the child Robin knew in the dark perhaps the silent house which
echoed her might curiously have known. But the shrieks wore themselves
out at last and sobs came—awful little sobs shuddering through the tiny
breast and shaking the baby body. A baby’s sobs are unspeakable
things—incredible things. Slower and slower Robin’s came—with small
deep gasps and chokings between—and when an uninfantile druglike sleep
came, the bitter, hopeless, beaten little sobs went on.

But Feather’s head was still burrowed under the soft protection of the
pillow.




CHAPTER V


The morning was a brighter one than London usually indulges in and the
sun made its way into Feather’s bedroom to the revealing of its coral
pink glow and comfort. She had always liked her bedroom and had usually
wakened in it to the sense of luxuriousness it is possible a pet cat
feels when it wakens to stretch itself on a cushion with its saucer of
cream awaiting it.

But she did not awaken either to a sense of brightness or luxury this
morning. She had slept it was true, but once or twice when the pillow
had slipped aside she had found herself disturbed by the far-off sound
of the wailing of some little animal which had caused her automatically
and really scarcely consciously to replace the pillow. It had only
happened at long intervals because it is Nature that an exhausted baby
falls asleep when it is worn out. Robin had probably slept almost as
much as her mother.

Feather staring at the pinkness around her reached at last, with the
assistance of a certain physical consciousness, a sort of spiritless
intention.

“She’s asleep now,” she murmured. “I hope she won’t waken for a long
time. I feel faint. I shall have to find something to eat—if it’s only
biscuits.” Then she lay and tried to remember what Cook had said about
her not starving. “She said there were a few things left in the pantry
and closets. Perhaps there’s some condensed milk. How do you mix it up?
If she cries I might go and give her some. It wouldn’t be so awful now
it’s daylight.”

She felt shaky when she got out of bed and stood on her feet. She had
not had a maid in her girlhood so she could dress herself, much as she
detested to do it. After she had begun however she could not help
becoming rather interested because the dress she had worn the day
before had become crushed and she put on a fresh one she had not worn
at all. It was thin and soft also, and black was quite startlingly
becoming to her. She would wear this one when Lord Coombe came, after
she wrote to him. It was silly of her not to have written before though
she knew he had left town after the funeral. Letters would be
forwarded.

“It will be quite bright in the dining-room now,” she said to encourage
herself. “And Tonson once said that the only places the sun came into
below stairs were the pantry and kitchen and it only stayed about an
hour early in the morning. I must get there as soon as I can.”

When she had so dressed herself that the reflection the mirror gave
back to her was of the nature of a slight physical stimulant she opened
her bedroom door and faced exploration of the deserted house below with
a quaking sense of the proportions of the inevitable. She got down the
narrow stairs casting a frightened glance at the emptiness of the
drawing-rooms which seemed to stare at her as she passed them. There
was sun in the dining-room and when she opened the sideboard she found
some wine in decanters and some biscuits and even a few nuts and some
raisins and oranges. She put them on the table and sat down and ate
some of them and began to feel a little less shaky.

If she had been allowed time to sit longer and digest and reflect she
might have reached the point of deciding on what she would write to
Lord Coombe. She had not the pen of a ready writer and it must be
thought over. But just when she was beginning to be conscious of the
pleasant warmth of the sun which shone on her shoulders from the
window, she was almost startled our of her chair by hearing again
stealing down the staircase from the upper regions that faint wail like
a little cat’s.

“Just the moment—the very _moment_ I begin to feel a little quieted—and
try to think—she begins again!” she cried out. “It’s worse then
_anything!_”

Large crystal tears ran down her face and upon the polished table.

“I suppose she would starve to death if I didn’t give her some food—and
then _I_ should be blamed! People would be horrid about it. I’ve got
nothing to eat myself.”

She must at any rate manage to stop the crying before she could write
to Coombe. She would be obliged to go down into the pantry and look for
some condensed milk. The creature had no teeth but perhaps she could
mumble a biscuit or a few raisins. If she could be made to swallow a
little port wine it might make her sleepy. The sun was paying its brief
morning visit to the kitchen and pantry when she reached there, but a
few cockroaches scuttled away before her and made her utter a
hysterical little scream. But there _was_ some condensed milk and there
was a little warm water in a kettle because the fire was not quite out.
She imperfectly mixed a decoction and filled a bottle which ought not
to have been downstairs but had been brought and left there by Louisa
as a result of tender moments with Edward.

When she put the bottle and some biscuits and scraps of cold ham on a
tray because she could not carry them all in her hands, her sense of
outrage and despair made her almost sob.

“I am just like a servant—carrying trays upstairs,” she wept. “I—I
might be Edward—or—or Louisa.” And her woe increased when she added in
the dining-room the port wine and nuts and raisins and macaroons as
viands which _might_ somehow add to infant diet and induce sleep. She
was not sure of course—but she knew they sucked things and liked
sweets.

A baby left unattended to scream itself to sleep and awakening to
scream itself to sleep again, does not present to a resentful observer
the flowerlike bloom and beauty of infancy. When Feather carried her
tray into the Night Nursery and found herself confronting the
disordered crib on which her offspring lay she felt the child horrible
to look at. Its face was disfigured and its eyes almost closed. She
trembled all over as she put the bottle to its mouth and saw the
fiercely hungry clutch of its hands. It was old enough to clutch, and
clutch it did, and suck furiously and starvingly—even though actually
forced to stop once or twice at first to give vent to a thwarted
remnant of a scream.

Feather had only seen it as downy whiteness and perfume in Louisa’s
arms or in its carriage. It had been a singularly vivid and
brilliant-eyed baby at whom people looked as they passed.

“Who will give her a bath?” wailed Feather. “Who will change her
clothes? Someone must! Could a woman by the day do it? Cook said I
could get a woman by the day.”

And then she remembered that one got servants from agencies. And where
were the agencies? And even a woman “by the day” would demand wages and
food to eat.

And then the front door bell rang.

What could she do—what could she do? Go downstairs and open the door
herself and let everyone know! Let the ringer go on ringing until he
was tired and went away? She was indeed hard driven, even though the
wail had ceased as Robin clutched her bottle to her breast and fed with
frenzy. Let them go away—let them! And then came the wild thought that
it might be Something—the Something which must happen when things were
at their worst! And if it had come and the house seemed to be empty!
She did not walk down the stairs, she ran. Her heart beat until she
reached the door out of breath and when she opened it stood their
panting.

The people who waited upon the steps were strangers. They were very
nice looking and quite young—a man and a woman very perfectly dressed.
The man took a piece of paper out of his pocketbook and handed it to
her with an agreeable apologetic courtesy.

“I hope we have not called early enough to disturb you,” he said. “We
waited until eleven but we are obliged to catch a train at half past.
It is an ‘order to view’ from Carson & Bayle.” He added this because
Feather was staring at the paper.

Carson & Bayle were the agents they had rented the house from. It was
Carson & Bayle’s collector Robert had met on the threshold and sworn at
two days before he had been taken ill. They were letting the house over
her head and she would be turned out into the street?

The young man and woman finding themselves gazing at this exquisitely
pretty creature in exquisite mourning, felt themselves appallingly
embarrassed. She was plainly the widow Carson had spoken of. But why
did she open the door herself? And why did she look as if she did not
understand? Indignation against Carson & Bayle began to stir the young
man.

“Beg pardon! So sorry! I am afraid we ought not to have come,” he
protested. “Agents ought to know better. They said you were giving up
the house at once and we were afraid someone might take it.”

Feather held the “order to view” in her hand and snared at them quite
helplessly.

“There—are no—no servants to show it to you,” she said. “If you could
wait—a few days—perhaps—”

She was so lovely and Madame Hélène’s filmy black creation was in
itself such an appeal, that the amiable young strangers gave up at
once.

“Oh, certainly—certainly! Do excuse us! Carson and Bayle ought not to
have—! We are so sorry. Good morning, _good_ morning,” they gave forth
in discomfited sympathy and politeness, and really quite scurried away.

Having shut the door on their retreat Feather stood shivering.

“I am going to be turned out of the house! I shall have to live in the
street!” she thought. “Where shall I keep my clothes if I live in the
street!”

Even she knew that she was thinking idiotically. Of course if
everything was taken from you and sold, you would have no clothes at
all, and wardrobes and drawers and closets would not matter. The
realization that scarcely anything in the house had been paid for came
home to her with a ghastly shock. She staggered upstairs to the first
drawing-room in which there was a silly pretty little buhl writing
table.

She felt even more senseless when she sank into a chair before it and
drew a sheet of note-paper towards her. Her thoughts would not connect
themselves with each other and she could not imagine what she ought to
say in her letter to Coombe. In fact she seemed to have no thoughts at
all. She could only remember the things which had happened, and she
actually found she could write nothing else. There seemed nothing else
in the world.

“Dear Lord Coombe,” trailed tremulously over the page—“The house is
quite empty. The servants have gone away. I have no money. And there is
not any food. And I am going to be turned out into the street—and the
baby is crying because it is hungry.”

She stopped there, knowing it was not what she ought to say. And as she
stopped and looked at the words she began herself to wail somewhat as
Robin had wailed in the dark when she would not listen or go to her. It
was like a beggar’s letter—a beggar’s! Telling him that she had no
money and no food—and would be turned out for unpaid rent. And that the
baby was crying because it was starving!

“It’s a beggar’s letter—just a beggar’s,” she cried out aloud to the
empty room. “And it’s tru-ue!” Robin’s wail itself had not been more
hopeless than hers was as she dropped her head and let it lie on the
buhl table.

She was not however even to be allowed to let it lie there, for the
next instant there fell on her startled ear quite echoing through the
house another ring at the doorbell and two steely raps on the smart
brass knocker. It was merely because she did not know what else to do,
having lost her wits entirely that she got up and trailed down the
staircase again.

When she opened the door, Lord Coombe—the apotheosis of exquisite
fitness in form and perfect appointment as also of perfect
expression—was standing on the threshold.




CHAPTER VI


If he had meant to speak he changed his mind after his first sight of
her. He merely came in and closed the door behind him. Curious
experiences with which life had provided him had added finish to an
innate aptness of observation, and a fine readiness in action.

If she had been of another type he would have saved both her and
himself a scene and steered ably through the difficulties of the
situation towards a point where they could have met upon a normal
plane. A very pretty woman with whose affairs one has nothing whatever
to do, and whose pretty home has been the perfection of modern
smartness of custom, suddenly opening her front door in the unexplained
absence of a footman and confronting a visitor, plainly upon the verge
of hysteria, suggests the necessity of promptness.

But Feather gave him not a breath’s space. She was in fact not merely
on the verge of her hysteria. She had gone farther. And here he was.
Oh, here he was! She fell down upon her knees and actually clasped his
immaculateness.

“Oh, Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe!” She said it three times
because he presented to her but the one idea.

He did not drag himself away from her embrace but he distinctly removed
himself from it.

“You must not fall upon your knees, Mrs. Lawless,” he said. “Shall we
go into the drawing-room?”

“I—was writing to you. I am starving—but it seemed too silly when I
wrote it. And it’s true!” Her broken words were as senseless in their
sound as she had thought them when she saw them written.

“Will you come up into the drawing-room and tell me exactly what you
mean,” he said and he made her release him and stand upon her feet.

As the years had passed he had detached himself from so many weaknesses
and their sequelae of emotion that he had felt himself a safely
unreachable person. He was not young and he knew enough of the
disagreeableness of consequences to be adroit in keeping out of the way
of apparently harmless things which might be annoying. Yet as he
followed Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and watched her stumbling up the stairs
like a punished child he was aware that he was abnormally in danger of
pitying her as he did not wish to pity people. The pity was also
something apart from the feeling that it was hideous that a creature so
lovely, so shallow and so fragile should have been caught in the great
wheels of Life.

He knew what he had come to talk to her about but he had really no
clear idea of what her circumstances actually were. Most people had of
course guessed that her husband had been living on the edge of his
resources and was accustomed to debt and duns, but a lovely being
greeting you by clasping your knees and talking about “starving”—in
this particular street in Mayfair, led one to ask oneself what one was
walking into. Feather herself had not known, in fact neither had any
other human being known, that there was a special reason why he had
drifted into seeming rather to allow her about—why he had finally been
counted among the frequenters of the narrow house—and why he had seemed
to watch her a good deal sometimes with an expression of serious
interest—sometimes with an air of irritation, and sometimes with no
expression at all. But there existed this reason and this it was and
this alone which had caused him to appear upon her threshold and it had
also been the power which had prevented his disengaging himself with
more incisive finality when he found himself ridiculously clasped about
the knees as one who played the part of an obdurate parent in a
melodrama.

Once in the familiar surroundings of her drawing-room her ash-gold
blondness and her black gauzy frock heightened all her effects so
extraordinarily that he frankly admitted to himself that she possessed
assets which would have modified most things to most men.

As for Feather, when she herself beheld him against the background of
the same intimate aspects, the effect of the sound of his voice, the
manner in which he sat down in a chair and a certain remotely dim hint
in the hue of his clothes and an almost concealed note of some touch of
colour which scarcely seemed to belong to anything worn—were so
reminiscent of the days which now seemed past forever that she began to
cry again.

He received this with discreet lack of melodrama of tone.

“You mustn’t do that, Mrs. Lawless,” he said, “or I shall burst into
tears myself. I am a sensitive creature.”

“Oh, _do_ say ‘Feather’ instead of Mrs. Lawless,” she implored.
“Sometimes you said ‘Feather’.”

“I will say it now,” he answered, “if you will not weep. It is an
adorable name.”

“I feel as if I should never hear it again,” she shuddered, trying to
dry her eyes. “It is all over!”

“What is all over?”

“This—!” turning a hopeless gaze upon the two tiny rooms crowded with
knick-knacks and nonsense. “The parties and the fun—and everything in
the world! I have only had some biscuits and raisins to eat today—and
the landlord is going to turn me out.”

It seemed almost too preposterous to quite credit that she was uttering
naked truth.—And yet—! After a second’s gaze at her he repeated what he
had said below stairs.

“Will you tell me exactly what you mean?”

Then he sat still and listened while she poured it all forth. And as he
listened he realized that it was the mere every day fact that they were
sitting in the slice of a house with the cream-coloured front and the
great lady in her mansion on one side and the millionaire and his
splendours on the other, which peculiarly added to a certain hint of
gruesomeness in the situation.

It was not necessary to add colour and desperation to the story. Any
effort Feather had made in that direction would only have detracted
from the nakedness of its stark facts. They were quite enough in
themselves in their normal inevitableness. Feather in her pale and
totally undignified panic presented the whole thing with clearness
which had—without being aided by her—an actual dramatic value. This in
spite of her mental dartings to and from and dragging in of points and
bits of scenes which were not connected with each other. Only a brain
whose processes of inclusion and exclusion were final and rapid could
have followed her. Coombe watched her closely as she talked. No
grief-stricken young widowed loneliness and heart-break were the
background of her anguish. She was her own background and also her own
foreground. The strength of the fine body laid prone on the bed of the
room she held in horror, the white rigid face whose good looks had
changed to something she could not bear to remember, had no pathos
which was not concerned with the fact that Robert had amazingly and
unnaturally failed her by dying and leaving her nothing but unpaid
bills. This truth indeed made the situation more poignantly and finally
squalid, as she brought forth one detail after another. There were
bills which had been accumulating ever since they began their life in
the narrow house, there had been trades-people who had been juggled
with, promises made and supported by adroit tricks and cleverly
invented misrepresentations and lies which neither of the pair had felt
any compunctions about and had indeed laughed over. Coombe saw it all
though he also saw that Feather did not know all she was telling him.
He could realize the gradually increasing pressure and anger at tricks
which betrayed themselves, and the gathering determination on the part
of the creditors to end the matter in the only way in which it could be
ended. It had come to this before Robert’s illness, and Feather herself
had heard of fierce interviews and had seen threatening letters, but
she had not believed they could mean all they implied. Since things had
been allowed to go on so long she felt that they would surely go on
longer in the same way. There had been some serious threatening about
the rent and the unpaid-for furniture. Robert’s supporting idea had
been that he might perhaps “get something out of Lawdor who wouldn’t
enjoy being the relation of a fellow who was turned into the street!”

“He ought to have done something,” Feather complained. “Robert would
have been Lord Lawdor himself if his uncle had died before he had all
those disgusting children.”

She was not aware that Coombe frequently refrained from saying things
to her—but occasionally allowed himself _not_ to refrain. He did not
refrain now from making a simple comment.

“But he is extremely robust and he has the children. Six stalwart boys
and a stalwart girl. Family feeling has apparently gone out of
fashion.”

As she wandered on with her story he mentally felt himself actually
dragged into the shrimp-pink bedroom and standing an onlooker when the
footman outside the door “did not know” where Tonson had gone. For a
moment he felt conscious of the presence of some scent which would have
been sure to exhale itself from draperies and wardrobe. He saw Cook put
the account books on the small table, he heard her, he also
comprehended her. And Feather at the window breathlessly watching the
two cabs with the servants’ trunks on top, and the servants respectably
unprofessional in attire and going away quietly without an unpractical
compunction—he saw these also and comprehended knowing exactly why
compunctions had no part in latter-day domestic arrangements. Why
should they?

When Feather reached the point where it became necessary to refer to
Robin some fortunate memory of Alice’s past warnings caused her to
feel—quite suddenly—that certain details might be eliminated.

“She cried a little at first,” she said, “but she fell asleep
afterwards. I was glad she did because I was afraid to go to her in the
dark.”

“Was she in the dark?”

“I think so. Perhaps Louisa taught her to sleep without a light. There
was none when I took her some condensed milk this morning. There was
only c-con-d-densed milk to give her.”

She shed tears and choked as she described her journey into the lower
regions and the cockroaches scuttling away before her into their
hiding-places.

“I _must_ have a nurse! I _must_ have one!” she almost sniffed.
“Someone must change her clothes and give her a bath!”

“You can’t?” Coombe said.

“I!” dropping her handkerchief. “How—how _can_ I?”

“I don’t know,” he answered and picked up the handkerchief with an
aloof grace of manner.

It was really Robin who was for Feather the breaking-point.

He thought she was in danger of flinging herself upon him again. She
caught at his arm and her eyes of larkspur blue were actually wild.

“Don’t you see where I am! How there is nothing and nobody—Don’t you
_see?_”

“Yes, I see,” he answered. “You are quite right. There is nothing _and_
nobody. I have been to Lawdor myself.”

“You have been to _talk_ to him?”

“Yesterday. That was my reason for coming here. He will not see you or
be written to. He says he knows better than to begin that sort of
thing. It may be that family feeling has not the vogue it once had, but
you may recall that your husband infuriated him years ago. Also England
is a less certain quantity than it once was—and the man has a family.
He will allow you a hundred a year but there he draws the line.”

“A hundred a year!” Feather breathed. From her delicate shoulders hung
floating scarf-like sleeves of black transparency and she lifted one of
them and held it out like a night moth’s wing—“This cost forty pounds,”
she said, her voice quite faint and low. “A good nurse would cost
forty! A cook—and a footman and a maid—and a coachman—and the
brougham—I don’t know how much they would cost. Oh-h!”

She drooped forward upon her sofa and laid face downward on a
cushion—slim, exquisite in line, lost in despair.

The effect produced was that she gave herself into his hands. He felt
as well as saw it and considered. She had no suggestion to offer, no
reserve. There she was.

“It is an incredible sort of situation,” he said in an even,
low-pitched tone rather as if he were thinking aloud, “but it is baldly
real. It is actually simple. In a street in Mayfair a woman and child
might—” He hesitated a second and a wailed word came forth from the
cushion.

“Starve!”

He moved slightly and continued.

“Since their bills have not been paid the trades-people will not send
in food. Servants will not stay in a house where they are not fed and
receive no wages. No landlord will allow a tenant to occupy his
property unless he pays rent. It may sound inhuman—but it is only
human.”

The cushion in which Feather’s face was buried retained a faint scent
of Robert’s cigar smoke and the fragrance brought back to her things
she had heard him say dispassionately about Lord Coombe as well as
about other men. He had not been a puritanic or condemnatory person.
She seemed to see herself groveling again on the floor of her bedroom
and to feel the darkness and silence through which she had not dared to
go to Robin.

Not another night like that! No! No!

“You must go to Jersey to your mother and father,” Coombe said. “A
hundred a year will help you there in your own home.”

Then she sat upright and there was something in her lovely little
countenance he had never seen before. It was actually determination.

“I have heard,” she said, “of poor girls who were driven—by starvation
to—to go on the streets. I—would go _anywhere_ before I would go back
there.”

“Anywhere!” he repeated, his own countenance expressing—or rather
refusing to express something as new as the thing he had seen in her
own.

“Anywhere!” she cried and then she did what he had thought her on the
verge of doing a few minutes earlier—she fell at his feet and embraced
his knees. She clung to him, she sobbed, her pretty hair loosened
itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.

“Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe!” she cried as she
had cried in the hall.

He rose and endeavoured to disengage himself as he had done before.
This time with less success because she would not let him go. He had
the greatest possible objection to scenes.

“Mrs. Lawless—Feather—I beg you will get up,” he said.

But she had reached the point of not caring what happened if she could
keep him. He was a gentleman—he had everything in the world. What did
it matter?

“I have no one but you and—and you always seemed to like me, I would do
anything—_anyone_ asked me, if they would take care of me. I have
always liked you very much—and I did amuse you—didn’t I? You liked to
come here.”

There was something poignant about her delicate distraught loveliness
and, in the remoteness of his being, 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.
Also a fantastic and finely ironic vision of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife
rose before him and the vision of himself as Joseph irked a certain
complexness of his mentality. Poignant as the thing was in its modern
way, it was also faintly ridiculous.

Then Robin awakened and shrieked again. The sound which had gained
strength through long sleep and also through added discomfort quite
rang through the house. What that sound added to the moment he himself
would not have been able to explain until long afterwards. But it
singularly and impellingly added.

“Listen!” panted Feather. “She has begun again. And there is no one to
go to her.”

“Get up, Mrs. Lawless,” he said. “Do I understand that you are willing
that _I_ should arrange this for you!”

He helped her to her feet.

“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. She clasped her
hands in exquisite appeal. He stood for a moment quite still, his mind
fled far away and he forgot where he was. And because of this the
little simpleton’s shallow discretion deserted her.

“If you were a—a marrying man—?” she said foolishly—almost in a
whisper.

He recovered himself.

“I am not,” with a finality which cut as cleanly as a surgical knife.

Something which was not the words was of a succinctness which filled
her with new terror.

“I—I know!” she whimpered, “I only said if you were!”

“If I were—in this instance—it would make no difference.” He saw the
kind of slippery silliness he was dealing with and what it might
transform itself into if allowed a loophole. “There must be no
mistakes.”

In her fright she saw him for a moment more distinctly than she had
ever seen him before and hideous dread beset her lest she had blundered
fatally.

“There shall be none,” she gasped. “I always knew. There shall be none
at all.”

“Do you know what you are asking me?” he inquired.

“Yes, yes—I’m not a girl, you know. I’ve been married. I won’t go home.
I can’t starve or live in awful lodgings. _Somebody_ must save me!”

“Do you know what people will say?” his steady voice was slightly
lower.

“It won’t be said to me.” Rather wildly. “Nobody minds—really.”

He ceased altogether to look serious. He smiled with the light detached
air his world was most familiar with.

“No—they don’t really,” he answered. “I had, however, a slight
preference for knowing whether you would or not. You flatter me by
intimating that you would not.”

He knew that if he had held out an arm she would have fallen upon his
breast and wept there, but he was not at the moment in the mood to hold
out an arm. He merely touched hers with a light pressure.

“Let us sit down and talk it over,” he suggested.

A hansom drove up to the door and stopped before he had time to seat
himself. Hearing it he went to the window and saw a stout businesslike
looking man get out, accompanied by an attendant. There followed a
loud, authoritative ringing of the bell and an equally authoritative
rap of the knocker. This repeated itself. Feather, who had run to the
window and caught sight of the stout man, clutched his sleeve.

“It’s the agent we took the house from. We always said we were out.
It’s either Carson or Bayle. I don’t know which.”

Coombe walked toward the staircase.

“You can’t open the door!” she shrilled.

“He has doubtless come prepared to open it himself.” he answered and
proceeded at leisure down the narrow stairway.

The caller had come prepared. By the time Coombe stood in the hall a
latchkey was put in the keyhole and, being turned, the door opened to
let in Carson—or Bayle—who entered with an air of angered
determination, followed by his young man.

The physical presence of the Head of the House of Coombe was always
described as a subtly impressive one. Several centuries of rather
careful breeding had resulted in his seeming to represent things by
silent implication. A man who has never found the necessity of
explaining or excusing himself inevitably presents a front wholly
unsuggestive of uncertainty. The front Coombe presented merely awaited
explanations from others.

Carson—or Bayle—had doubtless contemplated seeing a frightened servant
trying to prepare a stammering obvious lie. He confronted a tall, thin
man about whom—even if his clothes had been totally different—there
could be no mistake. He stood awaiting an apology so evidently that
Carson—or Bayle—began to stammer himself even before he had time to
dismiss from his voice the suggestion of bluster. It would have
irritated Coombe immensely if he had known that he—and a certain
overcoat—had been once pointed out to the man at Sandown and that—in
consequence of the overcoat—he vaguely recognized him.

“I—I beg pardon,” he began.

“Quite so,” said Coombe.

“Some tenants came to look at the house this morning. They had an order
to view from us. They were sent away, my lord—and decline to come back.
The rent has not been paid since the first half year. There is no one
now who can even _pretend_ it’s going to be paid. Some step had to be
taken.”

“Quite so,” said Coombe. “Suppose you step into the dining-room.”

He led the pair into the room and pointed to chairs, but neither the
agent nor his attendant was calm enough to sit down.

Coombe merely stood and explained himself.

“I quite understand,” he said. “You are entirely within your rights.
Mrs. Gareth-Lawless is, naturally, not able to attend to business. For
the present—as a friend of her late husband’s—I will arrange matters
for her. I am Lord Coombe. She does not wish to give up the house.
Don’t send any more possible tenants. Call at Coombe House in an hour
and I will give you a cheque.”

There were a few awkward apologetic moments and then the front door
opened and shut, the hansom jingled away and Coombe returned to the
drawing-room. Robin was still shrieking.

“She wants some more condensed milk,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. Go
and give her some. I know an elderly woman who understands children.
She was a nurse some years ago. I will send her here at once. Kindly
give me the account books. My housekeeper will send you some servants.
The trades-people will come for orders.”

Feather was staring at him.

“W-will they?” she stammered. “W-will everything—?”

“Yes—everything,” he answered. “Don’t be frightened. Go upstairs and
try to stop her. I must go now. I never heard a creature yell with such
fury.”

She turned away and went towards the second flight of stairs with a
rather dazed air. She had passed through a rather tremendous crisis and
she _was_ dazed. He made her feel so. She had never understood him for
a moment and she did not understand him now—but then she never did
understand people and the whole situation was a new one to her. If she
had not been driven to the wall she would have been quite as
respectable as she knew how to be.

Coombe called a hansom and drove home, thinking of many things and
looking even more than usually detached. He had remarked the facial
expression of the short and stout man as he had got into his cab and he
was turning over mentally his own exact knowledge of the views the
business mind would have held and what the business countenance would
have decently covered if he—Coombe—had explained in detail that he was
so far—in this particular case—an entirely blameless character.




CHAPTER VII


The slice of a house from that time forward presented the external
aspect to which the inhabitants of the narrow and fashionable street
and those who passed through it had been accustomed. Such individuals
as had anticipated beholding at some early day notices conspicuously
placed announcing “Sale by Auction. Elegant Modern Furniture” were
vaguely puzzled as well as surprised by the fact that no such notices
appeared even inconspicuously. Also there did not draw up before the
door—even as the weeks went on—huge and heavy removal vans with their
resultant litter, their final note of farewell a “To Let” in the front
windows.

On the contrary, the florist came and refilled the window boxes with an
admirable arrangement of fresh flowers; new and even more correct
servants were to be seen ascending and descending the area step; a
young footman quite as smart as the departed Edward opened the front
door and attended Mrs. Gareth-Lawless to her perfect little brougham.
The trades-people appeared promptly every day and were obsequiously
respectful in manner. Evidently the household had not disintegrated as
a result of the death of Mr. Gareth-Lawless.

As it became an established fact that the household had not fallen to
pieces its frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing indeed the air
of people who had never really remained away from it. There had been
natural reasons enough for considerate absence from a house of
bereavement and a desolate widow upon whose grief it would have been
indelicate to intrude. As Feather herself had realized, the circle of
her intimates was not formed of those who could readily adjust
themselves to entirely changed circumstances. If you dance on a tight
rope and the rope is unexpectedly withdrawn, where are you? You cannot
continue dancing until the rope is restrung.

The rope, however, being apparently made absolutely secure, it was not
long before the dancing began again. Feather’s mourning, wonderfully
shading itself from month to month, was the joy of all beholders.
Madame Hélène treated her as a star gleaming through gradually
dispersing clouds. Her circle watched her with secretly humorous
interest as each fine veil of dimness was withdrawn.

“The things she wears are priceless,” was said amiably in her own
drawing-room. “Where does she get them? Figure to yourself Lawdor
paying the bills.”

“She gets them from Hélène,” said a long thin young man with a rather
good-looking narrow face and dark eyes, peering through _pince nez_,
“But I couldn’t.”

In places where entertainment as a means of existence proceed so to
speak, fast and furiously, questions of taste are not dwelt upon at
leisure. You need not hesitate before saying anything you liked in any
one’s drawing-room so long as it was amusing enough to make somebody—if
not everybody—laugh. Feather had made people laugh in the same fashion
in the past. The persons she most admired were always making sly little
impudent comments and suggestions, and the thwarted years on the island
of Jersey had, in her case, resulted in an almost hectic desire to keep
pace. Her efforts had usually been successes because Nature’s self had
provided her with the manner of a silly pretty child who did not know
how far she went. Shouts of laughter had often greeted her, and the
first time she had for a moment doubted her prowess was on an occasion
when she had caught a glimpse of Coombe who stared at her with an
expression which she would—just for one second—have felt might be
horror, if she had not been so sure it couldn’t be, and must of course
be something else—one of the things nobody ever understood in him.

By the time the softly swathing veils of vaporous darkness were
withdrawn, and the tight rope assuring everyone of its permanent
security became a trusted support, Feather at her crowded little
parties and at other people’s bigger ones did not remain wholly unaware
of the probability that even people who rather liked her made, among
themselves, more or less witty comments upon her improved fortunes.
They were improved greatly. Bills were paid, trades-people were polite,
servants were respectful; she had no need to invent excuses and lies.
She and Robert had always kept out of the way of stodgy, critical
people, so they had been intimate with none of the punctilious who
might have withdrawn themselves from a condition of things they chose
to disapprove: accordingly, she found no gaps in her circle. Those who
had formed the habit of amusing themselves at her house were as ready
as before to amuse themselves again.

The fact remained, however,—curiously, perhaps, in connection with the
usual slightness of all impressions made on her—that there was a memory
which never wholly left her. Even when she tried to force it so far
into the background of her existence that it might almost be counted as
forgotten, it had a trick of rising before her. It was the memory of
the empty house as its emptiness had struck to the centre of her being
when she had turned from her bedroom window after watching the servants
drive away in their cabs. It was also the memory of the hours which had
followed—the night in which nobody had been in any of the rooms—no one
had gone up or down the stairs—when all had seemed dark and
hollow—except the Night Nursery where Robin screamed, and her own room
where she herself cowered under the bed clothes and pulled the pillow
over her head. But though the picture would not let itself be blotted
out, its effect was rather to intensify her sense of relief because she
had slipped so safely from under the wheels of destiny.

“Sometimes,” she revealed artlessly to Coombe, “while I am driving in
the park on a fine afternoon when every one is out and the dresses look
like the flower beds, I let myself remember it just to make myself
enjoy everything more by contrast.”

The elderly woman who had been a nurse in her youth and who had been
sent by Lord Coombe temporarily to replace Louisa had not remained long
in charge of Robin. She was not young and smart enough for a house on
the right side of the right street, and Feather found a young person
who looked exactly as she should when she pushed the child’s carriage
before her around the square.

The square—out of which the right street branches—and the “Gardens” in
the middle of the square to which only privileged persons were admitted
by private key, the basement kitchen and Servants’ Hall, and the two
top floor nurseries represented the world to the child Robin for some
years. When she was old enough to walk in the street she was led by the
hand over the ground she had travelled daily in her baby carriage. Her
first memory of things was a memory of standing on the gravel path in
the Square Gardens and watching some sparrows quarrel while Andrews,
her nurse, sat on a bench with another nurse and talked in low tones.
They were talking in a way Robin always connected with servants and
which she naturally accepted as being the method of expression of their
species—much as she accepted the mewing of cats and the barking of
dogs. As she grew older, she reached the stage of knowing that they
were generally saying things they did not wish her to hear.

She liked watching the sparrows in the Gardens because she liked
watching sparrows at all times. They were the only friends she had ever
known, though she was not old enough to call them friends, or to know
what friends meant. Andrews had taught her, by means of a system of her
own, to know better than to cry or to make any protesting noise when
she was left alone in her ugly small nursery. Andrews’ idea of her
duties did not involve boring herself to death by sitting in a room on
the top floor when livelier entertainment awaited her in the basement
where the cook was a woman of wide experience, the housemaid a young
person who had lived in gay country houses, and the footman at once a
young man of spirit and humour. So Robin spent many hours of the
day—taking them altogether—quite by herself. She might have more
potently resented her isolations if she had ever known any other
condition than that of a child in whom no one was in the least
interested and in whom “being good” could only mean being passive under
neglect and calling no one’s attention to the fact that she wanted
anything from anybody. As a bird born in captivity lives in its cage
and perhaps believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery and
knew every square inch of it with a deadly if unconscious sense of
distaste and fatigue. She was put to bed and taken up, she was fed and
dressed in it, and once a day—twice perhaps if Andrews chose—she was
taken out of it downstairs and into the street. That was all. And that
was why she liked the sparrows so much.

And sparrows are worth watching if you live in a nursery where nothing
ever happens and where, when you look out, you are so high up that it
is not easy to see the people in the world below, in addition to which
it seems nearly always raining. Robin used to watch them hopping about
on the slate roofs of the homes on the other side of the street. They
fluttered their wings, they picked up straws and carried them away. She
thought they must have houses of their own among the chimneys—in places
she could not see. She fancied it would be nice to hop about on the top
of a roof oneself if one were not at all afraid of falling. She liked
the chippering and chirping sounds the birds made became it sounded
like talking and laughing—like the talking and laughing she sometimes
wakened out of her sleep to lie and listen to when the Lady Downstairs
had a party. She often wondered what the people were doing because it
sounded as if they liked doing it very much.

Sometimes when it had rained two or three days she had a feeling which
made her begin to cry to herself—but not aloud. She had once had a
little black and blue mark on her arm for a week where Andrews had
pinched her because she had cried loud enough to be heard. It had
seemed to her that Andrews twisted and pinched the bit of flesh for
five minutes without letting it go and she had held her large hand over
her mouth as she did it.

“Now you keep that in your mind,” she had said when she had finished
and Robin had almost choked in her awful little struggle to keep back
all sound.

The one thing Andrews was surest of was that nobody would come upstairs
to the Nursery to inquire the meaning of any cries which were not
unearthly enough to disturb the household. So it was easy to regulate
the existence of her charge in such a manner as best suited herself.

“Just give her food enough and keep her from making silly noises when
she wants what she doesn’t get,” said Andrews to her companions below
stairs. “That one in the drawing-room isn’t going to interfere with the
Nursery. Not her! I know my business and I know how to manage her kind.
I go to her politely now and then and ask her permission to buy things
from Best’s or Liberty’s or some other good place. She always stares a
minute when I begin, as if she scarcely understood what I was talking
about and then she says ‘Oh, yes, I suppose she must have them.’ And I
go and get them. I keep her as well dressed as any child in Mayfair.
And she’s been a beauty since she was a year old so she looks first
rate when I wheel her up and down the street, so the people can see
she’s well taken care of and not kept hidden away. No one can complain
of her looks and nobody is bothered with her. That’s all that’s wanted
of _me_. I get good wages and I get them regular. I don’t turn up my
nose at a place like this, whatever the outside talk is. Who cares in
these days anyway? Fashionable people’s broader minded than they used
to be. In Queen Victoria’s young days they tell me servants were no
class that didn’t live in families where they kept the commandments.”

“Fat lot the commandments give any one trouble in these times,” said
Jennings, the footman, who was a wit. “There’s one of ’em I could
mention that’s been broken till there’s no bits of it left to keep. If
I smashed that plate until it was powder it’d have to be swept into the
dust din. That’s what happened to one or two commandments in
particular.”

“Well,” remarked Mrs. Blayne, the cook, “she don’t interfere and he
pays the bills prompt. That’ll do _me_ instead of commandments. If
you’ll believe me, my mother told me that in them Queen Victoria days
ladies used to inquire about cold meat and ask what was done with the
dripping. Civilisation’s gone beyond that—commandments or no
commandments.”

“He’s precious particular about bills being paid,” volunteered
Jennings, with the air of a man of the world. “I heard him having a row
with her one day about some bills she hadn’t paid. She’d spent the
money for some nonsense and he was pretty stiff in that queer way of
his. Quite right he was too. I’d have been the same myself,” pulling up
his collar and stretching his neck in a manner indicating exact
knowledge of the natural sentiments of a Marquis when justly annoyed.
“What he intimated was that if them bills was not paid with the money
that was meant to pay them, the money wouldn’t be forthcoming the next
time.” Jennings was rather pleased by the word “forthcoming” and
therefore he repeated it with emphasis, “It wouldn’t be _forthcoming_.”

“That’d frighten her,” was Andrews’ succinct observation.

“It did!” said Jennings. “She’d have gone in hysterics if he hadn’t
kept her down. He’s got a way with him, Coombe has.”

Andrews laughed, a brief, dry laugh.

“Do you know what the child calls her?” she said. “She calls her the
Lady Downstairs. She’s got a sort of fancy for her and tries to get
peeps at her when we go out. I notice she always cranes her little neck
if we pass a room she might chance to be in. It’s her pretty clothes
and her laughing that does it. Children’s drawn by bright colours and
noise that sounds merry.”

“It’s my belief the child doesn’t know she _is_ her mother!” said Mrs.
Blayne as she opened an oven door to look at some rolls.

“It’s my belief that if I told her she was she wouldn’t know what the
word meant. It was me she got the name from,” Andrews still laughed as
she explained. “I used to tell her about the Lady Downstairs would hear
if she made a noise, or I’d say I’d let her have a peep at the Lady
Downstairs if she was very good. I saw she had a kind of awe of her
though she liked her so much, so it was a good way of managing her. You
mayn’t believe me but for a good bit I didn’t take in that she didn’t
know there was such things as mothers and, when I did take it in, I saw
there wasn’t any use in trying to explain. She wouldn’t have
understood.”

“How would you go about to explain a mother, anyway?” suggested
Jennings. “I’d have to say that she was the person that had the right
to slap your head if you didn’t do what she told you.”

“I’d have to say that she was the woman that could keep you slaving at
kitchen maid’s work fifteen hours a day,” said Mrs. Blayne; “My mother
was cook in a big house and trained me under her.”

“I never had one,” said Andrews stiffly. The truth was that she had
taken care of eight infant brothers and sisters, while her maternal
parent slept raucously under the influence of beer when she was not
quarrelling with her offspring.

Jane, the housemaid, had passed a not uncomfortable childhood in the
country and was perhaps of a soft nature.

“I’d say that a mother’s the one that you belong to and that’s fond of
you, even if she does keep you straight,” she put in.

“Her mother isn’t fond of her and doesn’t keep herself straight,” said
Jennings. “So that wouldn’t do.”

“And she doesn’t slap her head or teach her to do kitchen maid’s work,”
put in Mrs. Blayne, “so yours is no use, Mr. Jennings, and neither is
mine. Miss Andrews ’ll have to cook up an explanation of her own
herself when she finds she has to.”

“She can get it out of a Drury Lane melodrama,” said Jennings, with
great humour. “You’ll have to sit down some night, Miss Andrews, and
say, ‘The time has come, me chee-ild, when I must tell you All’.”

In this manner were Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and her maternal affections
discussed below stairs. The interesting fact remained that to Robin the
Lady Downstairs was merely a radiant and beautiful being who floated
through certain rooms laughing or chattering like a bird, and always
wearing pretty clothes, which were different each time one beheld her.
Sometimes one might catch a glimpse of her through a door, or, if one
pressed one’s face against the window pane at the right moment, she
might get into her bright little carnage in the street below and, after
Jennings had shut its door, she might be seen to give a lovely flutter
to her clothes as she settled back against the richly dark blue
cushions.

It is a somewhat portentous thing to realize that a newborn human
creature can only know what it is taught. The teaching may be conscious
or unconscious, intelligent or idiotic, exquisite or brutal. The images
presented by those surrounding it, as its perceptions awaken day by
day, are those which record themselves on its soul, its brain, its
physical being which is its sole means of expressing, during physical
life, all it has learned. That which automatically becomes the Law at
the dawning of newborn consciousness remains, to its understanding, the
Law of Being, the Law of the Universe. To the cautious of
responsibility this at times wears the aspect of an awesome thing,
suggesting, however remotely, that it might seem well, perhaps, to
remove the shoes from one’s feet, as it were, and tread with deliberate
and delicate considering of one’s steps, as do the reverently courteous
even on the approaching of an unknown altar.

This being acknowledged a scientific, as well as a spiritual truth,
there remains no mystery in the fact that Robin at six years old—when
she watched the sparrows in the Square Gardens—did not know the name of
the feeling which had grown within her as a result of her pleasure in
the chance glimpses of the Lady Downstairs. It was a feeling which made
her eager to see her or anything which belonged to her; it made her
strain her child ears to catch the sound of her voice; it made her long
to hear Andrews or the other servants speak of her, and yet much too
shy to dare to ask any questions. She had found a place on the
staircase leading to the Nursery, where, by squeezing against the
balustrade, she could sometimes see the Lady pass in and out of her
pink bedroom. She used to sit on a step and peer between the railing
with beating heart. Sometimes, after she had been put to bed for the
night and Andrews was safely entertained downstairs, Robin would be
awakened from her first sleep by sounds in the room below and would
creep out of bed and down to her special step and, crouching in a
hectic joy, would see the Lady come out with sparkling things in her
hair and round her lovely, very bare white neck and arms, all swathed
in tints and draperies which made her seem a vision of colour and
light. She was so radiant a thing that often the child drew in her
breath with a sound like a little sob of ecstasy, and her lip trembled
as if she were going to cry. But she did not know that what she felt
was the yearning of a thing called love—a quite simple and natural
common thing of which she had no reason for having any personal
knowledge. As she was unaware of mothers, so she was unaware of
affection, of which Andrews would have felt it to be superfluously
sentimental to talk to her.

On the very rare occasions when the Lady Downstairs appeared on the
threshold of the Day Nursery, Robin—always having been freshly dressed
in one of her nicest frocks—stood and stared with immense startled eyes
and answered in a whisper the banal little questions put to her. The
Lady appeared at such rare intervals and remained poised upon the
threshold like a tropic plumaged bird for moments so brief, that there
never was time to do more than lose breath and gaze as at a sudden
vision. Why she came—when she did come—Robin did not understand. She
evidently did not belong to the small, dingy nurseries which grew
shabbier every year as they grew steadily more grimy under the
persistent London soot and fogs.

Feather always held up her draperies when she came. She would not have
come at all but for the fact that she had once or twice been asked if
the child was growing pretty, and it would have seemed absurd to admit
that she never saw her at all.

“I think she’s rather pretty,” she said downstairs. “She’s round and
she has a bright colour—almost too bright, and her eyes are round too.
She’s either rather stupid or she’s shy—and one’s as bad as the other.
She’s a child that stares.”

If, when Andrews had taken her into the Gardens, she had played with
other children, Robin would no doubt have learned something of the
existence and normal attitude of mothers through the mere accident of
childish chatter, but it somehow happened that she never formed
relations with the charges of other nurses. She took it for granted for
some time that this was because Andrews had laid down some mysterious
law. Andrews did not seem to form acquaintances herself. Sometimes she
sat on a bench and talked a little to another nurse, but she seldom sat
twice with the same person. It was indeed generally her custom to sit
alone, crocheting or sewing, with a rather lofty and exclusive air and
to call Robin back to her side if she saw her slowly edging towards
some other child.

“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. Some wouldn’t, of course, but I’m not
going to run risks. I’m going to save my own pride.”

But one morning when Robin was watching her sparrows, a nurse, who was
an old acquaintance, surprised Andrews by appearing in the Gardens with
two little girls in her charge. They were children of nine and eleven
and quite sufficient for themselves, apart from the fact that they
regarded Robin as a baby and, therefore, took no notice of her. They
began playing with skipping ropes, which left their nurse free to
engage in delighted conversation with Andrews.

It was conversation so delightful that Robin was forgotten, even to the
extent of being allowed to follow her sparrows round a clump of
shrubbery and, therefore, out of Andrews’ sight, though she was only a
few yards away. The sparrows this morning were quarrelsome and suddenly
engaged in a fight, pecking each other furiously, beating their wings
and uttering shrill, protesting chipperings. Robin did not quite
understand what they were doing and stood watching them with spellbound
interest.

It was while she watched them that she heard footsteps on the gravel
walk which stopped near her and made her look up to see who was at her
side. A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporan was standing by
her, and she found herself staring into a pair of handsome deep blue
eyes, blue like the waters of a hillside tarn. They were wide, glowing,
friendly eyes and none like them had ever looked into hers before. He
seemed to her to be a very big boy indeed, and in fact, he was
unusually tall and broad for his age, but he was only eight years old
and a simple enough child pagan. Robin’s heart began to beat as it did
when she watched the Lady Downstairs, but there was something different
in the beating. It was something which made her red mouth spread and
curve itself into a smile which showed all her small teeth.

So they stood and stared at each other and for some strange, strange
reason—created, perhaps, with the creating of Man and still hidden
among the deep secrets of the Universe—they were drawn to each
other—wanted each other—knew each other. Their advances were, of
course, of the most primitive—as primitive and as much a matter of
instinct as the nosing and sniffing of young animals. He spread and
curved his red mouth and showed the healthy whiteness of his own
handsome teeth as she had shown her smaller ones. Then he began to run
and prance round in a circle, capering like a Shetland pony to exhibit
at once his friendliness and his prowess. He tossed his curled head and
laughed to make her laugh also, and she not only laughed but clapped
her hands. He was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen before
in her life, and he was plainly trying to please her. No child creature
had ever done anything like it before, because no child creature had
ever been allowed by Andrews to make friends with her. He, on his part,
was only doing what any other little boy animal would have
done—expressing his child masculinity by “showing off” before a little
female. But to this little female it had never happened before.

It was all beautifully elemental. As does not too often happen, two
souls as well as two bodies were drawn towards each other by the Magnet
of Being. When he had exhibited himself for a minute or two he came
back to her, breathing fast and glowing.

“My pony in Scotland does that. His name is Chieftain. He is a Shetland
pony and he is only that high,” he measured forty inches from the
ground. “I’m called Donal. What are you called?”

“Robin,” she answered, her lips and voice trembling with joy. He was so
beautiful. His hair was bright and curly. His broad forehead was clear
white where he had pushed back his bonnet with the eagle feather
standing upright on it. His strong legs and knees were white between
his tartan kilt and his rolled back stockings. The clasps which held
his feather and the plaid over his shoulder were set with fine stones
in rich silver. She did not know that he was perfectly equipped as a
little Highland chieftain, the head of his clan, should be.

They began to play together, and the unknown Fates, which do their work
as they choose, so wrought on this occasion as to cause Andrews’ friend
to set forth upon a journey through a story so exciting in its nature
that its hearer was held spellbound and oblivious to her surroundings
themselves. Once, it is true, she rose as in a dream and walked round
the group of shrubs, but the Fates had arranged for that moment also.
Robin was alone and was busily playing with some leaves she had plucked
and laid on the seat of a bench for some mysterious reason. She looked
good for an hour’s safe occupation, and Andrews returned to her
friend’s detailed and intimate version of a great country house
scandal, of which the papers were full because it had ended in the
divorce court.

Donal had, at that special moment, gone to pick some of the biggest
leaves from the lilac bush of which the Gardens contained numerous
sooty specimens. The leaves Robin was playing with were some he had
plucked first to show her a wonderful thing. If you laid a leaf flat on
the seat of the bench and were fortunate enough to possess a large pin
you could prick beautiful patterns on the leaf’s greenness—dots and
circles, and borders and tiny triangles of a most decorative order.
Neither Donal nor Robin had a pin but Donal had, in his rolled down
stocking, a little dirk the point of which could apparently be used for
any interesting purpose. It was really he who did the decoration, but
Robin leaned against the bench and looked on enthralled. She had never
been happy before in the entire course of her brief existence. She had
not known or expected any conditions other than those she was familiar
with—the conditions of being fed and clothed, kept clean and exercised,
but totally unloved and unentertained. She did not even know that this
nearness to another human creature, the exchange of companionable
looks, which were like flashes of sunlight, the mutual outbreaks of
child laughter and pleasure were happiness. To her, what she felt, the
glow and delight of it, had no name but she wanted it to go on and on,
never to be put an end to by Andrews or anyone else.

The boy Donal was not so unconscious. He had been happy all his life.
What he felt was that he had liked this little girl the minute he saw
her. She was pretty, though he thought her immensely younger than
himself, and, when she had looked up at him with her round, asking
eyes, he had wanted to talk to her and make friends. He had not played
much with boys and he had no haughty objection to girls who liked him.
This one did, he saw at once.

Through what means children so quickly convey to each other—while
seeming scarcely to do more than play—the entire history of their lives
and surroundings, is a sort of occult secret. It is not a matter of
prolonged conversation. Perhaps images created by the briefest of
unadorned statements produce on the unwritten tablets of the child mind
immediate and complete impressions. Safe as the locked garden was,
Andrews cannot have forgotten her charge for any very great length of
time and yet before Donal, hearing his attendant’s voice from her
corner, left Robin to join her and be taken home, the two children knew
each other intimately. Robin knew that Donal’s home was in
Scotland—where there are hills and moors with stags on them. He lived
there with “Mother” and he had been brought to London for a visit. The
person he called “Mother” was a woman who took care of him and he spoke
of her quite often. Robin did not think she was like Andrews, though
she did not in the least know why. On his part Donal knew about the
nurseries and the sparrows who hopped about on the slates of the houses
opposite. Robin did not describe the nurseries to him, but Donal knew
that they were ugly and that there were no toys in them and nothing to
do. Also, in some mystic fashion, he realized that Andrews would not
let Robin play with him if she saw them together, and that, therefore,
they must make the most of their time. Full of their joy in each other,
they actually embarked upon an ingenious infant intrigue, which
involved their trying to meet behind the shrubs if they were brought to
the Gardens the next day. Donal was sure he could come because his
nurse always did what he asked of her. He was so big now that she was
not a real nurse, but she had been his nurse when he was quite little
and “Mother” liked her to travel with them. He had a tutor but he had
stayed behind in Scotland at Braemarnie, which was their house. Donal
would come tomorrow and he would look for Robin and when she saw him
she must get away from Andrews and they would play together again.

“I will bring one of my picture books,” he said grandly. “Can you read
at all?”

“No,” answered Robin adoring him. “What are picture books?”

“Haven’t you any?” he blurted out.

“No,” said Robin. She looked at the gravel walk, reflecting a moment
thoughtfully on the Day Nursery and the Night Nursery. Then she lifted
her eyes to the glowing blueness of his and said quite simply, “I
haven’t anything.”

He suddenly remembered things his Mother had told him about poor
people. Perhaps she was poor. Could she be poor when her frock and hat
and coat were so pretty? It was not polite to ask. But the thought made
him love her more. He felt something warm rush all over his body. The
truth, if he had been old enough to be aware of it, was that the entire
simpleness of her acceptance of things as they were, and a something
which was unconsciousness of any cause for complaint, moved his child
masculinity enormously. His old nurse’s voice came from her corner
again.

“I must go to Nanny,” he said, feeling somehow as if he had been
running fast. “I’ll come tomorrow and bring two picture books.”

He was a loving, warm blooded child human thing, and the expression of
affection was, to him, a familiar natural impulse. He put his strong
little eight-year-old arms round her and kissed her full on her mouth,
as he embraced her with all his strength. He kissed her twice.

It was the first time for Robin. Andrews did not kiss. There was no one
else. It was the first time, and Nature had also made her a loving,
warm blooded, human thing. How beautiful he was—how big—how strong his
arms were—and how soft and warm his mouth felt. She stood and gazed at
him with wide asking eyes and laughed a little. She had no words
because she did not know what had happened.

“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. As ingenuously and
heartily as before, he kissed her again 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.




CHAPTER VIII


When she went back to Andrews she carried the pricked leaves with her.
She could not have left them behind. From what source she had drawn a
characterizing passionate, though silent, strength of mind and body, it
would be difficult to explain. Her mind and her emotions had been left
utterly unfed, but they were not of the inert order which scarcely
needs feeding. Her feeling for the sparrows had held more than she
could have expressed; her secret adoration of the “Lady Downstairs” was
an intense thing. Her immediate surrender to the desire in the first
pair of human eyes—child eyes though they were—which had ever called to
her being for response, was simple and undiluted rapture. She had
passed over her little soul without a moment’s delay and without any
knowledge of the giving. It had flown from her as a bird might fly from
darkness into the sun. Eight-year-old Donal was the sun.

No special tendency to innate duplicity was denoted by the fact that
she had acquired, through her observation of Andrews, Jennings, Jane
and Mrs. Blayne, the knowledge that there were things it was best not
to let other people know. You were careful about them. From the occult
communications between herself and Donal, which had resulted in their
intrigue, there had of course evolved a realizing sense of the value of
discretion. She did not let Andrews see the decorated leaves, but put
them into a small pocket in her coat. Her Machiavellian intention was
to slip them out when she was taken up to the Nursery. Andrews was
always in a hurry to go downstairs to her lunch and she would be left
alone and could find a place where she could hide them.

Andrews’ friend started when Robin drew near to them. The child’s
cheeks and lips were the colour of Jacqueminot rose petals. Her eyes
glowed with actual rapture.

“My word! That’s a beauty if I ever saw one,” said the woman. “First
sight makes you jump. My word!”

Robin, however, did not know what she was talking about and in fact
scarcely heard her. She was thinking of Donal. She thought of him as
she was taken home, and she did not cease thinking of him during the
whole rest of the day and far into the night. When Andrews left her,
she found a place to hide the pricked leaves and before she put them
away she did what Donal had done to her—she kissed them. She kissed
them several times because they were Donal’s leaves and he had made the
stars and lines on them. It was almost like kissing Donal but not quite
so beautiful.

After she was put to bed at night and Andrews left her she lay awake
for a long time. She did not want to go to sleep because everything
seemed so warm and wonderful and she could think and think and think.
What she thought about was Donal’s face, his delightful eyes, his white
forehead with curly hair pushed back with his Highland bonnet. His
plaid swung about when he ran and jumped. When he held her tight the
buttons of his jacket hurt her a little because they pressed against
her body. What was “Mother” like? Did he kiss her? What pretty stones
there were in his clasps and buckles! How nice it was to hear him laugh
and how fond he was of laughing. Donal! Donal! Donal! He liked to play
with her though she was a girl and so little. He would play with her
tomorrow. His cheeks were bright pink, his hair was bright, his eyes
were bright. He was all bright. She tried to see into the blueness of
his eyes again as it seemed when they looked at each other close to. As
she began to see the clear colour she fell asleep.

The power which had on the first morning guided Robin to the seclusion
behind the clump of shrubs and had provided Andrews with an enthralling
companion, extended, the next day, an even more beneficient and
complete protection. Andrews was smitten with a cold so alarming as to
confine her to bed. Having no intention of running any risks,
whatsoever, she promptly sent for a younger sister who, temporarily
being “out of place”, came into the house as substitute. She was a
pretty young woman who assumed no special responsibilities and was fond
of reading novels.

“She’s been trained to be no trouble, Anne. She’ll amuse herself
without bothering you as long as you keep her out,” Andrews said of
Robin.

Anne took “Lady Audley’s Secret” with her to the Gardens and, having
led her charge to a shady and comfortable seat which exactly suited
her, she settled herself for a pleasant morning.

“Now, you can play while I read,” she said to Robin.

As they had entered the Gardens they had passed, not far from the gate,
a bench on which sat a highly respectable looking woman who was hemming
a delicate bit of cambric, and evidently in charge of two picture books
which lay on the seat beside her. A fine boy in Highland kilts was
playing a few yards away. Robin felt something like a warm flood rush
over her and her joy was so great and exquisite that she wondered if
Anne felt her hand trembling. Anne did not because she was looking at a
lady getting into a carriage across the street.

The marvel of that early summer morning in the gardens of a splendid
but dingy London square was not a thing for which human words could
find expression. It was not an earthly thing, or, at least, not a thing
belonging to an earth grown old. A child Adam and Eve might have known
something like it in the Garden of Eden. It was as clear and simple as
spring water and as warm as the sun.

Anne’s permission to “play” once given, Robin found her way behind the
group of lilacs and snowballs. Donal would come, not only because he
was so big that Nanny would let him do what he wanted to do, but
because he would do everything and anything in the world. Donal! Donal!
Her heart was a mere baby’s heart but it beat as if she were
seventeen—beat with pure rapture. He was all bright and he would laugh
and laugh.

The coming was easy enough for Donal. He had told his mother and Nanny
rejoicingly about the little girl he had made friends with and who had
no picture books. But he did not come straight to her. He took his
picture books under his arm, and showing all his white teeth in a
joyous grin, set out to begin their play properly with a surprise. He
did not let her see him coming but “stalked” her behind the trees and
bushes until he found where she was waiting, and then thrust his face
between the branches of a tall shrub near her and laughed the outright
laugh she loved. And when she turned she was looking straight into the
clear blue she had tried to see when she fell asleep. “Donal! Donal!”
she cried like a little bird with but one note.

The lilac and the snowball were in blossom and there was a big hawthorn
tree which smelt sweet and sweet. They could not see the drift of smuts
on the blossoms, they only smelled the sweetness and sat under the
hawthorn and sniffed and sniffed. The sun was deliciously warm and a
piano organ was playing beautifully not far away. They sat close to
each other, so close that the picture book could lie open on both pairs
of knees and the warmth of each young body penetrated the softness of
the other. Sometimes Donal threw an arm around her as she bent over the
page. Love and caresses were not amazements to him; he accepted them as
parts of the normal joy of life. To Robin they were absolute wonder.
The pictures were delight and amazement in one. Donal knew all about
them and told her stories. She felt that such splendour could have
emanated only from him. It could not occur to her that he had not
invented them and made the pictures. He showed her Robinson Crusoe and
Robin Hood. The scent of the hawthorn and lilac intoxicated them and
they laughed tremendously because Robin Hood’s name was like Robin’s
own and he was a man and she was a girl. They could scarcely stop
laughing and Donal rolled over and over on the grass, half from
unconquerable high spirits and half to make Robin laugh still more.

He had some beautiful coloured glass marbles in his pocket and he
showed her how to play with them, and gave her two of the prettiest. He
could shoot them over the ground in a way to thrill the beholder. He
could hop on one leg as far as he liked. He could read out of books.

“Do you like me?” he said once in a pause between displays of his
prowess.

Robin was kneeling upon the grass watching him and she clasped her
little hands as if she were uttering a prayer.

“Oh, yes, yes!” she yearned. “Yes! Yes!”

“I like you,” he answered; “I told my mother all about you.”

He came to her and knelt by her side.

“Have you a mother?” he asked.

“No,” shaking her head.

“Do you live with your aunt?”

“No, I don’t live with anybody.”

He looked puzzled.

“Isn’t there any lady in your house?” he put it to her. She brightened
a little, relieved to think she had something to tell him.

“There’s the Lady Downstairs,” she said. “She’s so pretty—so pretty.”

“Is she——” he stopped and shook his head. “She couldn’t be your
mother,” he corrected himself. “You’d know about _her_.”

“She wears pretty clothes. Sometimes they float about and sparkle and
she wears little crowns on her head—or flowers. She laughs,” Robin
described eagerly. “A great many people come to see her. They all
laugh. Sometimes they sing. I lie in bed and listen.”

“Does she ever come upstairs to the Nursery?” inquired Donal with a
somewhat reflective air.

“Yes. She comes and stands near the door and says, ‘Is she quite well,
Andrews?’ She does not laugh then. She—she _looks_ at me.”

She stopped there, feeling suddenly that she wished very much that she
had more to tell. What she was saying was evidently not very
satisfactory. He seemed to expect more—and she had no more to give. A
sense of emptiness crept upon her and for no reason she understood
there was a little click in her throat.

“Does she only stand near the door?” he suggested, as one putting the
situation to a sort of crucial test. “Does she never sit on a big chair
and take you on her knee?”

“No, no,” in a dropped voice. “She will not sit down. She says the
chairs are grubby.”

“Doesn’t she _love_ you at all?” persisted Donal. “Doesn’t she _kiss_
you?”

There was a thing she had known for what seemed to her a long time—God
knows in what mysterious fashion she had learned it, but learned it
well she had. That no human being but herself was aware of her
knowledge was inevitable. To whom could she have told it? But
Donal—Donal wanted to know all about her. The little click made itself
felt in her throat again.

“She—she doesn’t _like_ me!” Her dropped voice was the whisper of one
humbled to the dust by confession, “She—doesn’t _like_ me!” And the
click became another thing which made her put up her arm over her
eyes—her round, troubled child eyes, which, as she had looked into
Donal’s, had widened with sudden, bewildered tears.

Donal flung his arms round her and squeezed his buttons into her tender
chest. He hugged her close; he kissed her; there was a choking in his
throat. He was hot all over.

“She does like you. She must like you. I’ll make her!” he cried
passionately. “She’s not your mother. If she was, she’d _love_ you!
She’d _love_ you!”

“Do Mothers l-love you?” the small voice asked with a half sob.
“What’s—what’s _love_ you?” It was not vulgar curiosity. She only
wanted to find out.

He loosed his embrace, sitting back on his heels to stare.

“Don’t you _know?_”

She shook her head with soft meekness.

“N-no,” she answered.

Big boys like himself did not usually play with such little girls. But
something had drawn him to her at their first moment of encounter. She
wasn’t like any other little girls. He felt it all the time and that
was part of the thing which drew him. He was not, of course, aware that
the male thrill at being regarded as one who is a god had its power
over the emotions. She wasn’t making silly fun and pretending. She
really didn’t know—because she was different.

“It’s liking very much. It’s more,” he explained. “My mother loves
_me_. I—I _love_ you!” stoutly. “Yes, I _love_ you. That’s why I kissed
you when you cried.”

She was so uplifted, so overwhelmed with adoring gratitude that as she
knelt on the grass she worshipped him.

“I love _you_,” she answered him. “I _love_ you—_love_ you!” And she
looked at him with such actual prayerfulness that he caught at her and,
with manly promptness, kissed her again—this being mere Nature.

Because he was eight years old and she was six her tears flashed away
and they both laughed joyously as they sat down on the grass again to
talk it over.

He told her all the pleasant things he knew about Mothers. The world
was full of them it seemed—full. You belong to them from the time you
were a baby. He had not known many personally because he had always
lived at Braemarnie, which was in the country in Scotland. There were
no houses near his home. You had to drive miles and miles before you
came to a house or a castle. He had not seen much of other children
except a few who lived at the Manse and belonged to the minister.
Children had fathers as well as mothers. Fathers did not love you or
take care of you quite as much as Mothers—because they were men. But
they loved you too. His own father had died when he was a baby. His
mother loved him as much as he loved her. She was beautiful but—it
seemed to reveal itself—not like the Lady Downstairs. She did not laugh
very much, though she laughed when they played together. He was too big
now to sit on her knee, but squeezed into the big chair beside her when
she read or told him stories. He always did what his mother told him.
She knew everything in the world and so knew what he ought to do. Even
when he was a big man he should do what his mother told him.

Robin listened to every word with enraptured eyes and bated breath.
This was the story of Love and Life and it was the first time she had
ever heard it. It was as much a revelation as the Kiss. She had spent
her days in the grimy Nursery and her one close intimate had been a
bony woman who had taught her not to cry, employing the practical
method of terrifying her into silence by pinching her—knowing it was
quite safe to do it. It had not been necessary to do it often. She had
seen people on the streets, but she had only seen them in passing by.
She had not watched them as she had watched the sparrows. When she was
taken down for a few minutes into the basement, she vaguely knew that
she was in the way and that Mrs. Blayne’s and Andrews’ and Jennings’
low voices and occasional sidelong look meant that they were talking
about her and did not want her to hear.

“I have no mother and no father,” she explained quite simply to Donal.
“No one kisses me.”

“No one!” Donal said, feeling curious. “Has no one ever kissed you but
me?”

“No,” she answered.

Donal laughed—because children always laugh when they do not know what
else to do.

“Was that why you looked as if you were frightened when I said good-bye
to you yesterday?”

“I—I didn’t know,” said Robin, laughing a little too—but not very much,
“I wasn’t frightened. I liked you.”

“I’ll kiss you as often as you want me to,” he volunteered nobly. “I’m
used to it—because of my mother. I’ll kiss you again now.” And he did
it quite without embarrassment. It was a sort of manly gratuity.

Once Anne, with her book in her hand, came round the shrubs to see how
her charge was employing herself, and seeing her looking at pictures
with a handsomely dressed companion, she returned to “Lady Audley’s
Secret” feeling entirely safe.

The lilac and the hawthorn tree continued to breathe forth warmed
scents of paradise in the sunshine, the piano organ went on playing,
sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away, but evidently finding the
neighbourhood a desirable one. Sometimes the children laughed at each
other, sometimes at pictures Donal showed, or stories he told, or at
his own extreme wit. The boundaries were removed from Robin’s world.
She began to understand that there was another larger one containing
wonderful and delightful things she had known nothing about. Donal was
revealing it to her in everything he said even when he was not aware
that he was telling her anything. When Eve was formed from the rib of
Adam the information it was necessary for him to give her regarding her
surroundings must have filled her with enthralling interest and a
reverence which adored. The planted enclosure which was the central
feature of the soot sprinkled, stately London Square was as the Garden
of Eden.

The Garden of Eden it remained for two weeks. Andrews’ cold was serious
enough to require a doctor and her sister Anne continued to perform
their duties. The weather was exceptionally fine and, being a vain
young woman, she liked to dress Robin in her pretty clothes and take
her out because she was a beauty and attracted attention to her nurse
as well as to herself. Mornings spent under the trees reading were
entirely satisfactory. Each morning the children played together and
each night Robin lay awake and lived again the delights of the past
hours. Each day she learned more wonders and her young mind and soul
were fed. There began to stir in her brain new thoughts and the
beginning of questioning. Scotland, Braemarnie, Donal’s mother, even
the Manse and the children in it, combined to form a world of
enchantment. There were hills with stags living in them, there were
moors with purple heather and yellow brome and gorse; birds built their
nests under the bushes and Donal’s pony knew exactly where to step even
in the roughest places. There were two boys and two girls at the Manse
and they had a father and a mother. These things were enough for a new
heaven and a new earth to form themselves around. The centre of the
whole Universe was Donal with his strength and his laugh and his eyes
which were so alive and glowing that she seemed always to see them. She
knew nothing about the thing which was their somehow—not-to-be-denied
allure. They were _asking_ eyes—and eyes which gave. The boy was in
truth a splendid creature. His body and beauty were perfect life and
joyous perfect living. His eyes asked other eyes for everything. “Tell
me more,” they said. “Tell me more! Like me! Answer me! Let us give
each other everything in the world.” He had always been well, he had
always been happy, he had always been praised and loved. He had known
no other things.

During the first week in which the two children played together, his
mother, whose intense desire it was to understand him, observed in him
a certain absorption of mood when he was not talking or amusing himself
actively. He began to fall into a habit of standing at the windows,
often with his chin in his hand, looking out as if he were so full of
thought that he saw nothing. It was not an old habit, it was a new one.

“What are you thinking about, Donal?” she asked one afternoon.

He seemed to awaken, as it were, when he heard her. He turned about
with his alluring smile.

“I am thinking it is _funny_,” he said. “It is funny that I should like
such a little girl such a lot. She is years and years younger than I
am. But I like her so. It is such fun to tell her things.” He marched
over to his mother’s writing table and leaned against it. What his
mother saw was that he had an impassioned desire to talk about this
child. She felt it was a desire even a trifle abnormal in its
eagerness.

“She has such a queer house, I think,” he explained. “She has a nurse
and such pretty clothes and she is so pretty herself, but I don’t
believe she has any toys or books in her nursery.”

“Where is her mother?”

“She must be dead. There is no lady in her house but the Lady
Downstairs. She is very pretty and is always laughing. But she is not
her mother because she doesn’t like her and she never kisses her. I
think that’s the queerest thing of all. No one had _ever_ kissed her
till I did.”

His mother was a woman given to psychological analysis. Her eyes began
to dwell on his face with slightly anxious questioning.

“Did you kiss her?” she inquired.

“Yes. I kissed her when I said good morning the first day. I thought
she didn’t like me to do it but she did. It was only because no one had
ever done it before. She likes it very much.”

He leaned farther over the writing table and began to pour forth, his
smile growing and his eyes full of pleasure. His mother was a trifle
alarmedly struck by the feeling that he was talking like a young man in
love who cannot keep his tongue still, though in his case even the
youngest manhood was years away, and he made no effort to conceal his
sentiments which a young man would certainly have striven to do.

“She’s got such a pretty little face and such a pretty mouth and
cheeks,” he touched a Jacqueminot rose in a vase. “They are the colour
of that. Today a robin came with the sparrows and hopped about near us.
We laughed and laughed because her eyes are like the robin’s, and she
is called Robin. I wish you would come into the Gardens and see her,
mother. She likes everything I do.”

“I must come, dear,” she answered.

“Nanny thinks she is lovely,” he announced. “She says I am in love with
her. Am I, mother?”

“You are too young to be in love,” she said. “And even when you are
older you must not fall in love with people you know nothing about.”

It was an unconscious bit of Scotch cautiousness which she at once
realized was absurd and quite out of place. But—!

She realized it because he stood up and squared his shoulders in an odd
young-mannish way. He had not flushed even faintly before and now a
touch of colour crept under his fair skin.

“But I _do_ love her,” he said. “I _do_. I can’t stop.” And though he
was quite simple and obviously little boy-like, she actually felt
frightened for a moment.




CHAPTER IX


On the afternoon of the day upon which this occurred, Coombe was
standing in Feather’s drawing-room with a cup of tea in his hand and
wearing the look of a man who is given up to reflection.

“I saw Mrs. Muir today for the first time for several years,” he said
after a silence. “She is in London with the boy.”

“Is she as handsome as ever?”

“Quite. Hers is not the beauty that disappears. It is line and bearing
and a sort of splendid grace and harmony.”

“What is the boy like?”

Coombe reflected again before he answered.

“He is—amazing. One so seldom sees anything approaching physical
perfection that it strikes one a sort of blow when one comes upon it
suddenly face to face.”

“Is he as beautiful as all that?”

“The Greeks used to make statues of bodies like his. They often called
them gods—but not always. The Creative Intention plainly was that all
human beings should be beautiful and he is the expression of it.”

Feather was pretending to embroider a pink flower on a bit of gauze and
she smiled vaguely.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she admitted with no abasement of spirit,
“but if ever there was any Intention of that kind it has not been
carried out.” Her smile broke into a little laugh as she stuck her
needle into her work. “I’m thinking of Henry,” she let drop in
addition.

“So was I, it happened,” answered Coombe after a second or so of pause.

Henry was the next of kin who was—to Coombe’s great objection—his heir
presumptive, and was universally admitted to be a repulsive sort of
person both physically and morally. He had brought into the world a
weakly and rickety framework and had from mere boyhood devoted himself
to a life which would have undermined a Hercules. A relative may so
easily present the aspect of an unfortunate incident over which one has
no control. This was the case with Henry. His character and appearance
were such that even his connection with an important heritage was not
enough to induce respectable persons to accept him in any form. But if
Coombe remained without issue Henry would be the Head of the House.

“How is his cough?” inquired Feather.

“Frightful. He is an emaciated wreck and he has no physical cause for
remaining alive.”

Feather made three or four stitches.

“Does Mrs. Muir know?” she said.

“If Mrs. Muir is conscious of his miserable existence, that is all,” he
answered. “She is not the woman to inquire. Of course she cannot help
knowing that—when he is done with—her boy takes his place in the line
of succession.”

“Oh, yes, she’d know that,” put in Feather.

It was Coombe who smiled now—very faintly.

“You have a mistaken view of her,” he said.

“You admire her very much,” Feather bridled. The figure of this big
Scotch creature with her “line” and her “splendid grace and harmony”
was enough to make one bridle.

“She doesn’t admire me,” said Coombe. “She is not proud of me as a
connection. She doesn’t really want the position for the boy, in her
heart of hearts.”

“Doesn’t want it!” Feather’s exclamation was a little jeer only because
she would not have dared a big one.

“She is Scotch Early Victorian in some things and extremely advanced in
others,” he went on. “She has strong ideas of her own as to how he
shall be brought up. She’s rather Greek in her feeling for his being as
perfect physically and mentally as she can help him to be. She believes
things. It was she who said what you did not understand—about the
Creative Intention.”

“I suppose she is religious,” Feather said. “Scotch people often are
but their religion isn’t usually like that. Creative Intention’s a new
name for God, I suppose. I ought to know all about God. I’ve heard
enough about Him. My father was not a clergyman but he was very
miserable, and it made him so religious that he was _almost_ one. We
were every one of us christened and catechized and confirmed and all
that. So God’s rather an old story.”

“Queer how old—from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,”
said Coombe. “It’s an ancient search—that for the Idea—whether it takes
form in metal or wood or stone.”

“Well,” said Feather, holding her bit of gauze away from her the better
to criticize the pink flower. “As _almost_ a clergyman’s daughter I
must say that if there is one thing God didn’t do, it was to fill the
world with beautiful people and things as if it was only to be happy
in. It was made to—to try us by suffering and—that sort of thing. It’s
a—a—what d’ye call it? Something beginning with P.”

“Probation,” suggested Coombe regarding her with an expression of
speculative interest. Her airy bringing forth of her glib time-worn
little scraps of orthodoxy—as one who fished them out of a bag of
long-discarded remnants of rubbish—was so true to type that it almost
fascinated him for a moment.

“Yes. That’s it—probation,” she answered. “I knew it began with a P. It
means ‘thorny paths’ and ‘seas of blood’ and, if you are religious, you
‘tread them with bleeding feet—’ or swim them as the people do in
hymns. And you praise and glorify all the time you’re doing it. Of
course, I’m not religious myself and I can’t say I think it’s
pleasant—but I do _know!_ Every body beautiful and perfect indeed!
That’s not religion—it’s being irreligious. Good gracious, think of the
cripples and lepers and hunchbacks!”

“And the idea is that God made them all—by way of entertaining
himself?” he put it to her quietly.

“Well, who else did?” said Feather cheerfully.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Certain things I heard Mrs. Muir say
suggested to one that it might be interesting to think it out.”

“Did she talk to you about God at afternoon tea?” said Feather. “It’s
the kind of thing a religious Scotch woman might do.”

“No, she did not talk to me. Perhaps that was her mistake. She might
have reformed me. She never says more to me than civility demands. And
it was not at tea. I accidentally dropped in on the Bethunes and found
an Oriental had been lecturing there. Mrs. Muir was talking to him and
I heard her. The man seemed to be a scholar and a deep thinker and as
they talked a group of us stood and listened or asked questions.”

“How funny!” said Feather.

“It was not funny at all. It was astonishingly calm and serious—and
logical. The logic was the new note. I had never thought of reason in
that connection.”

“Reason has nothing to do with it. You must have faith. You must just
believe what you’re told not think at all. Thinking is
wickedness—unless you think what you hear preached.” Feather was even a
trifle delicately smug as she rattled off her orthodoxy—but she laughed
after she had done with it. “But it _must_ have been funny—a Turk or a
Hindoo in a turban and a thing like a tea gown and Mrs. Muir in her
Edinburgh looking clothes talking about God.”

“You are quite out of it,” Coombe did not smile at all as he said it.
“The Oriental was as physically beautiful as Donal Muir is. And Mrs.
Muir—no other woman in the room compared with her. Perhaps people who
think grow beautiful.”

Feather was not often alluring or coquettish in her manner to Coombe
but she tilted her head prettily and looked down at her flower through
lovely lashes.

“_I_ don’t think,” she said. “And I am not so bad looking.”

“No,” he answered coldly. “You are not. At times you look like a young
angel.”

“If Mrs. Muir is like that,” she said after a brief pause, “I should
like to know what she thinks of me?”

“No, you would not—neither should I—if she thinks at all,” was his
answer. “But you remember you said you did not mind that sort of
thing.”

“I don’t. Why should I? It can’t harm me.” Her hint of a pout made her
mouth entrancing. “But, if she thinks good looks are the result of
religiousness I should like to let her see Robin—and compare her with
her boy. I saw Robin in the park last week and she’s a perfect beauty.”

“Last week?” said Coombe.

“She doesn’t need anyone but Andrews. I should bore her to death if I
went and sat in the Nursery and stared at her. No one does that sort of
thing in these days. But I should like to see Mrs. Muir to see the two
children together!”

“That could not easily be arranged, I am afraid,” he said.

“Why not?”

His answer was politely deliberate.

“She greatly disapproves of me, I have told you. She is not proud of
the relationship.”

“She does not like _me_ you mean?”

“Excuse me. I mean exactly what I said in telling you that she has her
own very strong views of the boy’s training and surroundings. They may
be ridiculous but that sort of thing need not trouble you.”

Feather held up her hand and actually laughed.

“If Robin meets him in ten years from now—_that_ for her very strong
views of his training and surroundings!”

And she snapped her fingers.

Mrs. Muir’s distaste for her son’s unavoidable connection with the man
he might succeed had a firm foundation. She had been brought up in a
Scottish Manse where her father dominated as an omnipotent and almost
divine authority. As a child of imagination she had not been happy but
she had been obedient. In her girlhood she had varied from type through
her marriage with a young man who was a dreamer, an advanced thinker,
an impassioned Greek scholar and a lover of beauty. After he had
released her from her terrors of damnation, they had been profoundly
happy. They were young and at ease and they read and thought together
ardently. They explored new creeds and cults and sometimes found
themselves talking nonsense and sometimes discovering untrodden paths
of wisdom. They were youthful enough to be solemn about things at
times, and clever enough to laugh at their solemnity when they awakened
to it. Helen Muir left the reverent gloom of the life at the Manse far
behind despite her respect for certain meanings they beclouded.

“I live in a new structure,” she said to her husband, “but it is built
on a foundation which is like a solid subterranean chamber. I don’t use
the subterranean chamber or go into it. I don’t want to. But now and
then echoes—almost noises—make themselves heard in it. Sometimes I find
I have listened in spite of myself.”

She had always been rather grave about her little son and when her
husband’s early death left him and his dignified but not large estate
in her care she realized that there lay in her hands the power to
direct a life as she chose, in as far as was humanly possible. The pure
blood and healthy tendencies of a long and fine ancestry expressing
themselves in the boy’s splendid body and unusual beauty had set the
minds of two imaginative people working from the first. One of Muir’s
deepest interests was the study of development of the race. It was he
who had planted in her mind that daringly fearless thought of a human
perfection as to the Intention of the Creative Cause. They used to look
at the child as he lay asleep and note the beauty of him—his hands, his
feet, his torso, the tint and texture and line of him.

“This is what was _meant_—in the plan for every human being—How could
there be scamping and inefficiency in Creation. It is we ourselves who
have scamped and been incomplete in our thought and life. Here he is.
Look at him. But he will only develop as he is—if living does not warp
him.” This was what his father said. His mother was at her gravest as
she looked down at the little god in the crib.

“It’s as if some power had thrust a casket of loose jewels into our
hands and said, ‘It is for you to see that not one is lost’,” she
murmured. Then the looked up and smiled.

“Are we being solemn—over a baby?” she said.

“Perhaps,” he was always even readier to smile than she was. “I’ve an
idea, however, that there’s enough to be solemn about—not too solemn,
but just solemn enough. You are a beautiful thing, Fair Helen! Why
shouldn’t he be like you? Neither of us will forget what we have just
said.”

Through her darkest hours of young bereavement she remembered the words
many times and felt as if they were a sort of light she might hold in
her hand as she trod the paths of the “Afterwards” which were in the
days before her. She lived with Donal at Braemarnie and lived _for_ him
without neglecting her duty of being the head of a household and an
estate and also a good and gracious neighbour to things and people. She
kept watch over every jewel in his casket, great and small. He was so
much a part of her religion that sometimes she realized that the echoes
from the subterranean chamber were perhaps making her a little strict
but she tried to keep guard over herself.

He was handsome and radiant with glowing health and vitality. He was a
friendly, rejoicing creature and as full of the joy of life as a
scampering moor pony. He was clever enough but not too clever and he
was friends with the world. Braemarnie was picturesquely ancient and
beautiful. It would be a home of sufficient ease and luxury to be a
pleasure but no burden. Life in it could be perfect and also supply
freedom. Coombe Court and Coombe Keep were huge and castellated and
demanded great things. Even if the Head of the House had been a man to
like and be proud of—the accession of a beautiful young Marquis would
rouse the hounds of war, so to speak, and set them racing upon his
track. Even the totally unalluring “Henry” had been beset with
temptations from his earliest years. That he promptly succumbed to the
first only brought forth others. It did not seem fair that a creature
so different, a splendid fearless thing, should be dragged from his
hills and moors and fair heather and made to breathe the foul scent of
things, of whose poison he could know nothing. She was not an ignorant
childish woman. In her fine aloof way she had learned much in her stays
in London with her husband and in their explorings of foreign cities.

This was the reason for her views of her boy’s training and
surroundings. She had not asked questions about Coombe himself, but it
had not been necessary. Once or twice she had seen Feather by chance.
In spite of herself she had heard about Henry. Now and then he was
furbished up and appeared briefly at Coombe Court or at The Keep. It
was always briefly because he inevitably began to verge on misbehaving
himself after twenty-four hours had passed. On his last visit to Coombe
House in town, where he had turned up without invitation, he had become
so frightfully drunk that he had been barely rescued from the trifling
_faux pas_ of attempting to kiss a very young royal princess. There
were quite definite objections to Henry.

Helen Muir was _not_ proud of the Coombe relationship and with unvaried
and resourceful good breeding kept herself and her boy from all chance
of being drawn into anything approaching an intimacy. Donal knew
nothing of his prospects. There would be time enough for that when he
was older, but, in the meantime, there should be no intercourse if it
could be avoided.

She had smiled at herself when the “echo” had prompted her to the hint
of a quaint caution in connection with his little boy flame of delight
in the strange child he had made friends with. But it _had_ been a
flame and, though she, had smiled, she sat very still by the window
later that night and she had felt a touch of weight on her heart as she
thought it over. There were wonderful years when one could give one’s
children all the things they wanted, she was saying to herself—the
desires of their child hearts, the joy of their child bodies, their
little raptures of delight. Those were divine years. They were so safe
then. Donal was living through those years now. He did not know that
any happiness could be taken from him. He was hers and she was his. It
would be horrible if there were anything one could not let him keep—in
this early unshadowed time!

She was looking out at the Spring night with all its stars lit and
gleaming over the Park which she could see from her window. Suddenly
she left her chair and rang for Nanny.

“Nanny,” she said when the old nurse came, “tell me something about the
little girl Donal plays with in the Square gardens.”

“She’s a bonny thing and finely dressed, ma’am,” was the woman’s
careful answer, “but I don’t make friends with strange nurses and I
don’t think much of hers. She’s a young dawdler who sits novel reading
and if Master Donal were a young pickpocket with the measles, the child
would be playing with him just the same as far as I can see. The young
woman sits under a tree and reads and the pretty little thing may do
what she likes. I keep my eye on them, however, and they’re in no
mischief. Master Donal reads out of his picture books and shows himself
off before her grandly and she laughs and looks up to him as if he were
a king. Every lad child likes a woman child to look up to him. It’s
pretty to see the pair of them. They’re daft about each other. Just wee
things in love at first sight.”

“Donal has known very few girls. Those plain little things at the Manse
are too dull for him,” his mother said slowly.

“This one’s not plain and she’s not dull,” Nanny answered. “My word!
but she’s like a bit of witch fire dancing—with her colour and her big
silk curls in a heap. Donal stares at her like a young man at a beauty.
I wish, ma’am, we knew more of her forbears.”

“I must see her,” Mrs. Muir said. “Tomorrow I’ll go with you both to
the Gardens.”

Therefore the following day Donal pranced proudly up the path to his
trysting place and with him walked a tall lady at whom people looked as
she passed. She was fair like Donal and had a small head softly swathed
with lovely folds of hair. Also her eyes were very clear and calm.
Donal was plainly proud and happy to be with her and was indeed
prancing though his prance was broken by walking steps at intervals.

Robin was waiting behind the lilac bushes and her nurse was already
deep in the mystery of Lady Audley.

“There she is!” cried Donal, and he ran to her. “My mother has come
with me. She wants to see you, too,” and he pulled her forward by her
hand. “This is Robin, Mother! This is Robin.” He panted with elation
and stood holding his prize as if she might get away before he had
displayed her; his eyes lifted to his tall mother’s were those of an
exultant owner.

Robin had no desire to run away. To adore anything which belonged to
Donal was only nature. And this tall, fair, wonderful person was a
Mother. No wonder Donal talked of her so much. The child could only
look up at her as Donal did. So they stood hand in hand like little
worshippers before a deity.

Andrews’ sister in her pride had attired the small creature like a
flower of Spring. Her exquisiteness and her 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.

“Donal wanted me to see his little friend,” she said. “I always want to
see his playmates. Shall we walk round the Garden together and you
shall show me where you play and tell me all about it.”

She took the small hand and they walked slowly. Robin was at first too
much awed to talk but as Donal was not awed at all and continued his
prancing and the Mother lady said pretty things about the flowers and
the grass and the birds and even about the pony at Braemarnie, she
began now and then to break into a little hop herself and presently
into sudden ripples of laughter like a bird’s brief bubble of song. The
tall lady’s hand was not like Andrews, or the hand of Andrews’ sister.
It did not pull or jerk and it had a lovely feeling. The sensation she
did not know was happiness again welled up within her. Just one walk
round the Garden and then the tall lady sat down on a seat to watch
them play. It was wonderful. She did not read or work. She sat and
watched them as if she wanted to do that more than anything else. Donal
kept calling out to her and making her smile: he ran backwards and
forwards to her to ask questions and tell her what they were “making
up” to play. When they gathered leaves to prick stars and circles on,
they did them on the seat on which she sat and she helped them with new
designs. Several times, in the midst of her play, Robin stopped and
stood still a moment with a sort of puzzled expression. It was because
she did not feel like Robin. Two people—a big boy and a lady—letting
her play and talk to them as if they liked her and had time!

The truth was that Mrs. Muir’s eyes followed Robin more than they
followed Donal. Their clear deeps yearned over her. Such a glowing
vital little thing! No wonder! No wonder! And as she grew older she
would be more vivid and compelling with every year. And Donal was of
her kind. His strength, his beauty, his fearless happiness-claiming
temperament. How could one—with dignity and delicacy—find out why she
had this obvious air of belonging to nobody? Donal was an exact little
lad. He had had foundation for his curious scraps of her story. No
mother—no playthings or books—no one had ever kissed her! And she
dressed and _soignée_ like this! Who was the Lady Downstairs?

A victoria was driving past the Gardens. It was going slowly because
the two people in it wished to look at the spring budding out of
hyacinths and tulips. Suddenly one of the pair—a sweetly-hued figure
whose early season attire was hyacinth-like itself—spoke to the
coachman.

“Stop here!” she said. “I want to get out.”

As the victoria drew up near a gate she made a light gesture.

“What do you think, Starling,” she laughed. “The very woman we are
talking about is sitting in the Gardens there. I know her perfectly
though I only saw her portrait at the Academy years ago. Yes, there she
is. Mrs. Muir, you know.” She clapped her hands and her laugh became a
delighted giggle. “And my Robin is playing on the grass near her—with a
boy! What a joke! It must be _the_ boy! And I wanted to see the pair
together. Coombe said couldn’t be done. And more than anything I want
to speak to _her_. Let’s get out.”

They got out and this was why Helen Muir, turning her eyes a moment
from Robin whose hand she was holding, saw two women coming towards her
with evident intention. At least one of them had evident intention. She
was the one whose light attire produced the effect of being made of
hyacinth petals.

Because Mrs. Muir’s glance turned towards her, Robin’s turned also. She
started a little and leaned against Mrs. Muir’s knee, her eyes growing
very large and round indeed and filling with a sudden worshipping
light.

“It is—” she ecstatically sighed or rather gasped, “the Lady
Downstairs!”

Feather floated near to the seat and paused smiling.

“Where is your nurse, Robin?” she said.

Robin being always dazzled by the sight of her did not of course shine.

“She is reading under the tree,” she answered tremulously.

“She is only a few yards away,” said Mrs. Muir. “She knows Robin is
playing with my boy and that I am watching them. Robin is your little
girl?” amiably.

“Yes. So kind of you to let her 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,” said Feather, unperturbed and
smiling brilliantly, “I saw your portrait at the Grosvenor.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Muir gently. She had risen and was beautifully
tall,—“the line” was perfect, and she looked with a gracious calm into
Feather’s eyes.

Donal, allured by the hyacinth petal colours, drew near. Robin made an
unconscious little catch at his plaid and whispered something.

“Is this Donal?” Feather said.

“_Are_ you the Lady Downstairs, please?” Donal put in politely, because
he wanted so to know.

Feather’s pretty smile ended in the prettiest of outright laughs. Her
maid had told her Andrews’ story of the name.

“Yes, I believe that’s what she calls me. It’s a nice name for a
mother, isn’t it?”

Donal took a quick step forward.

“_Are_ you her mother?” he asked eagerly.

“Of course I am.”

Donal quite flushed with excitement.

“She doesn’t _know_,” he said.

He turned on Robin.

“She’s your Mother! You thought you hadn’t one! She’s your Mother!”

“But I am the Lady Downstairs, too.” Feather was immensely amused. She
was not subtle enough to know why she felt a perverse kind of pleasure
in seeing the Scotch woman standing so still, and that it led her into
a touch of vulgarity. “I wanted very much to see your boy,” she said.

“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. I am so
glad I caught a glimpse of you and that I had seen the portrait. _Good_
morning. Goodbye, children.”

While she strayed airily away they all watched her. She picked up her
friend, the Starling, who, not feeling concerned or needed, had paused
to look at daffodils. The children watched her until her victoria drove
away, the chiffon ruffles of her flowerlike parasol fluttering in the
air.

Mrs. Muir had sat down again and Donal and Robin leaned against her.
They saw she was not laughing any more but they did not know that her
eyes had something like grief in them.

“She’s her Mother!” Donal cried. “She’s lovely, too. But she’s—her
_Mother!_” and his voice and face were equally puzzled.

Robin’s little hand delicately touched Mrs. Muir.

“_Is_—she?” she faltered.

Helen Muir took her in her arms and held her quite close. She kissed
her.

“Yes, she is, my lamb,” she said. “She’s your mother.”

She was clear as to what she must do for Donal’s sake. It was the only
safe and sane course. But—at this age—the child _was_ a lamb and she
could not help holding her close for a moment. Her little body was
deliciously soft and warm and the big silk curls all in a heap were a
fragrance against her breast.




CHAPTER X


Donal talked a great deal as he pranced home. Feather had excited as
well as allured him. Why hadn’t she told Robin she was her mother? Why
did she never show her pictures in the Nursery and hold her on her
knee? She was little enough to be held on knees! Did some mothers never
tell their children and did the children never find out? This was what
he wanted to hear explained. He took the gloved hand near him and held
it close and a trifle authoritatively.

“I am glad I know you are my mother,” he said, “I always knew.”

He was not sure that the matter was explained very clearly. Not as
clearly as things usually were. But he was not really disturbed. He had
remembered a book he could show Robin tomorrow and he thought of that.
There was also a game in a little box which could be easily carried
under his arm. His mother was “thinking” and he was used to that. It
came on her sometimes and of his own volition he always, on such
occasion, kept as quiet as was humanly possible.

After he was asleep, Helen sent for Nanny.

“You’re tired, ma’am,” the woman said when she saw her, “I’m afraid
you’ve a headache.”

“I have had a good deal of thinking to do since this afternoon,” her
mistress answered, “You were right about the nurse. The little girl
might have been playing with any boy chance sent in her way—boys quite
unlike Donal.”

“Yes, ma’am.” And because she loved her and knew her face and voice
Nanny watched her closely.

“You will be as—startled—as I was. By some queer chance the child’s
mother was driving by and saw us and came in to speak to me. Nanny—she
is Mrs. Gareth-Lawless.”

Nanny did start; she also reddened and spoke sharply.

“And she came in and spoke to you, ma’am!”

“Things have altered and are altering every day,” Mrs. Muir said.
“Society is not at all inflexible. She has a smart set of her own—and
she is very pretty and evidently well provided for. Easy-going people
who choose to find explanations suggest that her husband was a relation
of Lord Lawdor’s.”

“And him a canny Scotchman with a new child a year. Yes, my certie,”
offered Nanny, with an acrid grimness. Mrs. Muir’s hands clasped
strongly as they lay on the table before her.

“That doesn’t come within my bailiewick,” she said in her quiet voice.
“Her life is her own and not mine. Words are the wind that blows.” She
stopped just a moment and began again. “We must leave for Scotland by
the earliest train.”

“What’ll he do?” the words escaped from the woman as if involuntarily.
She even drew a quick breath. “He’s a strong feeling bairn—strong!”

“He’ll be stronger when he is a young man, Nanny!” desperately. “That
is why I must act now. There is no half way. I don’t want to be hard.
Oh, am I hard—am I hard?” she cried out low as if she were pleading.

“No, ma’am. You are not. He’s your own flesh and blood.” Nanny had
never before seen her mistress as she saw her in the next curious
almost exaggerated moment.

Her hand flew to her side.

“He’s my heart and my soul—” she said, “—he is the very entrails of me!
And it will hurt him so and I cannot explain to him because he is too
young to understand. He is only a little boy who must go where he is
taken. And he cannot help himself. It’s—unfair!”

Nanny was prone to become more Scotch as she became moved. But she
still managed to look grim.

“He canna help himsel,” she said, “an waur still, _you_ canna.”

There was a moment of stillness and then she said:

“I must go and pack up.” And walked out of the room.

Donal always slept like a young roe in the bracken, and in deep and
rapturous ease he slept this night. Another perfectly joyful day had
passed and his Mother had liked Robin and kissed her. All was well with
the world. As long as he had remained awake—and it had not been long—he
had thought of delightful things unfeverishly. Of Robin, somehow at
Braemarnie, growing bigger very quickly—big enough for all sorts of
games—learning to ride Chieftain, even to gallop. His mother would buy
another pony and they could ride side by side. Robin would laugh and
her hair would fly behind her if they went fast. She would see how fast
he could go—she would see him make Chieftain jump. They would have
picnics—catch sight of deer and fawns delicately lifting their feet as
they stepped. She would always look at him with that nice look in her
eyes and the little smile which came and went in a second. She was
quite different from the minister’s little girls at the Manse. He liked
her—he liked her!

He was wakened by a light in his room and by the sound of moving about.
He sat up quickly and found his Mother standing by his bed and Nanny
putting things into a travelling bag. He felt as if his Mother looked
taller than she had looked yesterday—and almost thin—and her face was
anxious and—shy.

“We let you sleep as late as we could, Donal,” she said. “You must get
up quickly now and have breakfast. Something has happened. We are
obliged to go back to Scotland by very early train. There is not a
minute to waste.”

At first he only said:

“Back!”

“Yes, dear. Get up.”

“To Braemarnie?”

“Yes, dear laddie!”

He felt himself grow hot and cold.

“Away! Away!” he said again vaguely.

“Yes. Get up, dear.”

He was as she had said only a little boy and accustomed to do as he was
told. He was also a fine, sturdy little Scot with a pride of his own.
His breeding had been of the sort which did not include insubordinate
scenes, so he got out of bed and began to dress. But his mother saw
that his hands shook.

“I shall not see Robin,” he said in a queer voice. “She won’t find me
when she goes behind the lilac bushes. She won’t know why I don’t
come.”

He swallowed very hard and was dead still for a few minutes, though he
did not linger over his dressing. His mother felt that the whole thing
was horrible. He was acting almost like a young man even now. She did
not know how she could bear it. She spoke to him in a tone which was
actually rather humble.

“If we knew where she lived you—you could write a little letter and
tell her about it. But we do not where she lives.”

He answered her very low.

“That’s it. And she’s little—and she won’t understand. She’s very
little—really.” There was a harrowingly protective note in his voice.
“Perhaps—she’ll cry.”

Helen looking down at him with anguished eyes—he was buttoning his
shoes—made an unearthly effort to find words, but, as she said them,
she knew they were not the right ones.

“She will be disappointed, of course, but she is so little that she
will not feel it as much as if she were bigger. She will get over it,
darling. Very little girls do not remember things long.” Oh, how coarse
and crass and stupid it sounded—how coarse and crass and stupid to say
it to this small defiant scrap of what seemed the inevitable suffering
of the world!

The clear blue of the eyes Robin had dwelt in, lifted itself to her.
There was something almost fi

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