Robin Part 20

The sobbing broke forth again.

"Did--did his eyes look as if he had been crying? He did cry--he did!"

The Head of the House of Coombe showed no muscular facial sign of emotion and stood stiffly still. But what was this which leaped scalding to his glazed eyes and felt hot?

"Yes," he answered huskily. "I saw--even as he marched past--that his eyes were heavy and had circles round them. There were other eyes like his--some were boys' eyes and some were the eyes of men. They held their heads up--but they had all said 'Good-bye'--as he had."

The Wood echoed to a sound which was a heart-wrung wail and she dropped forward on the moss again and lay there.

"He said, 'Oh, let us cry--together--together! Oh little--lovely love'!"

She who would have borne torment rather than betray the secret of the dream, now that it could no longer be a secret lay reft of all but memories and the wild longing to hold to her breast some shred which was her own. He let her wail, but when her wailing ceased helplessly he bent over her.

"Listen to me," he said. "If Donal were here he would tell you to listen. You are a child. You are too young to know what has come upon you--both."

She did not speak.

"You were both too young--and you were driven by fate. If he had been more than a boy--and if he had not been in a frenzy--he would have remembered. He would have thought--"

Yes--yes! She knew how young! But oh, what mattered youth--or thought--or remembering! Her small hand beat in soft impatience on the ground.

He was--strangely--on one knee beside her, his head bent close, and in his voice there was a new strong insistence--as if he would not let her alone-- Oh! Donal! Donal!

"He would have remembered--that he might leave a child!"

His voice was almost hard. She did not know that in his mind was a memory which now in secret broke him--a memory of a belief which was a thing he had held as a gift--a certain faith in a clear young highness and strength of body and soul in this one scion of his house, which even in youth's madness would have _remembered_. If the lad had been his own son he might have felt something of the same pang.

His words brought back what she had heard Redcliff say to her earlier in the day--the thing which had only struck her again to the earth.

"It--will have--no father," she shuddered. "There is not even a grave."

He put his hand on her shoulder--he even tried to force her to lift her head.

"It _must_ have a father," he said, harshly. "Look at me. It _must_."

Stupefied and lost to all things as she was, she heard something in his harshness she could not understand and was startled by. Her small starved face stared at him piteously. There was no one but herself left in the world.

"There is no time--" he broke forth.

"He said so too," she cried out. "There was no time!"

"But he should have remembered," the harsh voice revealed more than he knew. "He could have given his child all that life holds that men call happiness. How could even a lad forget! He loved you--you loved him. If he had married you--"

He stopped in the midst of the words. The little starved face stared at him with a kind of awfulness of woe. She spoke as if she scarcely knew the words she uttered, and not, he saw, in the least as if she were defending herself--or as if she cared whether he believed her or not--or as if it mattered.

"Did you--think we were--not married?" the words dragged out.

Something turned over in his side. He had heard it said that hearts did such things. It turned--because she did not care. She knew what love and death were--what they _were_--not merely what they were called--and life and shame and loss meant nothing.

"Do you know what you are saying?" he heard the harshness of his voice break. "For G.o.d's sake, child, let me hear the truth."

She did not even care then and only put her childish elbows on her knees and her face in her hands and wept and wept.

"There was--no time," she said. "Every day he said it. He knew--he _knew_. Before he was killed he wanted _something_ that was his own. It was our secret. I wanted to keep it his secret till I died."

"Where," he spoke low and tensely, "were you married?"

"I do not know. It was a little house in a poor crowded street. Donal took me. Suddenly we were frightened because we thought he was to go away in three days. A young chaplain who was going away too was his friend. He had just been married himself. He did it because he was sorry for us. There was no time. His wife lent me a ring. They were young too and they were sorry."

"What was the man's name?"

"I can't remember. I was trembling all the time. I knew nothing. That was like a dream too. It was all a dream."

"You do not remember?" he persisted. "You were married--and have no proof."

"We came away so quickly. Donal held me in his arm in the cab because I trembled. Donal knew. Donal knew everything."

He was a man who had lived through tragedy but that had been long ago.

Since then he had only known the things of the world. He had seen struggles and tricks and paltry craftiness. He had known of women caught in traps of folly and pa.s.sion and weakness and had learned how terror taught them to lie and shift and even show abnormal cleverness. Above all he knew exactly what the world would say if a poor wretch of a girl told a story like this of a youngster like Donal--when he was no longer on earth to refute it.

And yet if these wild things were true, here in a wintry wood she sat a desolate and undefended thing--with but one thought. And in that which was most remote in his being he was conscious that he was for the moment relieved because even worldly wisdom was not strong enough to overcome his desire to believe in a certain thing which was--that the boy would have played fair even when his brain whirled and all his fierce youth beset him.

As he regarded her he saw that it would be difficult to reach her mind which was so torn and stunned. But by some method he must reach it.

"You must answer all the questions I ask," he said. "It is for Donal's sake."

She did not lift her face and made no protest.

He began to ask such questions as a sane man would know must be answered clearly and as he heard her reply to each he gradually reached the realisation of what her empty-handed, naked helplessness confronted.

That he himself comprehended what no outsider would, was due to his memories of heart-wrung hours, of days and nights when he too had been unable to think quite sanely or to reason with a normal brain. Youth is a remorseless master. He could see the tempest of it all--the hours of heaven--and the glimpses of h.e.l.l's self--on whose brink the two had stood clinging breast to breast. With subtle carefulness he slowly gleaned it all. He followed the rising of the tide which at first had borne them along unquestioning. They had not even asked where they were going because the way led through young paradise. Then terror had awakened them. There had come to them the news of death day after day--lads they knew and had seen laughing a few weeks before--Halwyn, Meredith, Jack or Harry or Phil. A false rumour of a sudden order to the Front and they had stood and gazed into each other's eyes in a fateful hour. Robin did not know of the picture her disjointed, sobbed-forth sentences and words made clear. Coombe could see the lad as he stood before her in this very Wood and then went slowly down upon his knees and kissed her small feet in the moss as he made his prayer. There had been something rarely beautiful in the ecstasy of his tenderness--and she had given herself as a flower gives itself to be gathered. She seemed to have seen nothing, noted nothing, on the morning of the mad marriage, but Donal, who held her trembling in his arms as they drove through the crowded streets in the shabby neighbourhood she had never seen before, to the house crowded between others all like itself. She had actually not heard the young chaplain's name in her shyness and tremor. He would scarcely have been an ent.i.ty but for the one moving fact that he himself had just hastily married a girl he adored and must leave, and so sympathised and understood the stress of their hour. On their way home they had been afraid of chance recognition and had tried to shield themselves by sitting as far back as possible in the cab.

"I could not think. I could not see. It was all frightening--and unreal."

She had not dreamed of asking questions. Donal had taken care of her and tried to help her to be less afraid of seeing people who might recognise her. She had tilted her hat over her face and worn a veil. She had gone home to Eaton Square--and then in the afternoon to the cottage at Mersham Wood.

They had not written letters to each other. Robin had been afraid and they had met almost every day. Once Lord Coombe thought himself on the track of some clue when she touched vaguely on some paper Donal had meant to send her and had perhaps forgotten in the haste and pressure of the last few hours because his orders had been so sudden. But there was no trace. There had been something he wished her to have. But if this had meant that his brain had by chance cleared to sane reasoning and he had, for a few moments touched earth and intended to send her some proof which would be protection if she needed it--the moment had been too late and, at the last, action had proved impossible. And Death had come so soon. It was as though a tornado had swept him out of her arms and dashed him broken to earth. And she was left with nothing because she asked nothing--wanted nothing.

The obviousness of this, when he had ended his questioning and exhausted his resources, was a staggering thing.

"Do you know," he said grimly, after it was all over, "--that no one will believe you?"

"Donal knew," she said. "There is no one--no one else."

"You mean that there is no one whose belief or disbelief would affect you?"

The Wood was growing darker still and she had ceased crying and sat still like a small ghost in the dim light.

"There never _was_ any one but Donal, you know," she said. To all the rest of the world she was as a creature utterly unawake and to a man who was of the world and who had lived a long life in it the contemplation of her was a strange and baffling thing.