Robin Part 24

Robin trembled all over and looked up in her face.

"I may begin to cry," she quavered. "I do not want to trouble you by beginning to cry. I must not."

"Cry if you want to cry," the d.u.c.h.ess answered.

"It will be better," said Lord Coombe, "if you can keep calm. It is necessary that you should be calm enough to think--and understand. Will you try? It is for Donal's sake."

"I will try," she answered, but her amazed eyes still yearningly wondered at the d.u.c.h.ess. Her arm had felt almost like Dowie's.

"Which of us shall begin to explain to her?" the d.u.c.h.ess questioned.

"Will you? It may be better."

They were going to take care of her. She was not to be turned into the street--though perhaps if she were turned into the street without money she would die somewhere--and that would not matter because she would be thankful.

The d.u.c.h.ess took one of her hands and held it on her knee. She looked kind still but she was grave.

"Do not be frightened when I tell you that most people will _not_ believe what you say about your marriage," she said. "That is because it is too much like the stories other girls have told when they were in trouble. It is an easy story to tell when a man is dead. And in Donal's case so much is involved that the law would demand proofs which could not be denied. Donal not only owned the estate of Braemarnie, but he would have been the next Marquis of Coombe. You have not remembered this and--" more slowly and with a certain watchful care--"you have been too unhappy and ill--you have not had time to realise that if Donal has a son--"

She heard Robin's caught breath.

"What his father would have inherited he would inherit also. Braemarnie would be his and in his turn he would be the Marquis of Coombe. It is because of these important things that it would be said that it would be immensely to your interest to insist that you were married to Donal Muir and the law would not allow of any shade of doubt."

"People would think I wanted the money and the castles--for myself?"

Robin said blankly.

"They would think that if you were a dishonest woman--you wanted all you could get. Even if you were not actually dishonest they would see you would want it for your son. You might think it ought to be his--whether his father had married you or not. Most women love their children."

Robin sat very still. The stunned brain was slowly working for itself.

"A child whose mother seems bad--is very lonely," she said.

"It is not likely to have many friends."

"It seems to belong to no one. It _must_ be unhappy. If--Donal's mother had not been married--even he would have been unhappy."

No one made any reply.

"If he had been poor it would have made it even worse. If he had belonged to n.o.body and had been poor too--! How could he have borne it!"

Lord Coombe took the matter up gently, as it were removing it from the d.u.c.h.ess' hands.

"But he had everything he wished for from his birth," he said. "He was always happy. I like to remember the look in his eyes. Thank G.o.d for it!"

"That beautiful look!" she cried. "That beautiful laughing look--as if all the world were joyful!"

"Thank G.o.d for it," Coombe said again. "I once knew a wretched village boy who had no legal father though his mother swore she had been married. His eyes looked like a hunted ferret's. It was through being shamed and flouted and bullied. The village lads used to shout 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d'

after him."

It was then that the baying of the hounds suddenly seemed at hand. The large eyes quailed before the stark emptiness of the s.p.a.ce they gazed into.

"What shall I do--what shall I do?" Robin said and having said it she did not know that she turned to Lord Coombe.

"You must try to do what we tell you to do--even if you do not wish to do it," he said. "It shall be made as little difficult for you as is possible."

The expression of the d.u.c.h.ess as she looked on and heard was a changing one because her mind included so many aspects of the singular situation.

She had thought it not unlikely that he would do something unusual.

Could anything much more unusual have been provided than that a man, who had absolute splendour of rank and wealth to offer, should for strange reasons of his own use the tact of courts and the fine astuteness of diplomatists in preparing the way to offer marriage to a penniless, friendless and disgraced young "companion" in what is known as "trouble"? It was because he was himself that he understood what he was dealing with--that splendour and safety would hold no lure, that protection from disgrace counted as nothing, that only one thing had existence and meaning for her. And even as this pa.s.sed through her mind, Robin's answer repeated it.

"I will do it whether it is difficult or not," she said, "but--" she actually got up from her ottoman with a quiet soft movement and stood before them--not a defiant young figure, only simple and elementally sweet-- "I am not ashamed," she said. "I am not ashamed and _I_ do not matter at all."

There was that instant written upon Coombe's face--so far at least as his old friend was concerned--his response to the significance of this.

It was the elemental thing which that which moved him required; it was what the generations and centuries of the house of Coombe required--a primitive creature unashamed and with no cowardice or weak vanity lurking in its being. The d.u.c.h.ess recognised it in the brief moment of almost breathless silence which followed.

"You are very splendid, child," he said after it, "though you are not at all conscious of it."

"Sit down again." The d.u.c.h.ess put out a hand which drew Robin still nearer to her. "Explain to her now," she said.

Robin's light soft body rested against her when it obeyed. It responded to more than the mere touch of her hand; its yielding was to something which promised kindness and even comfort--that something which Dowie and Mademoiselle had given in those days which now seemed to have belonged to another world. But though she leaned against the d.u.c.h.ess' knee she still lifted her eyes to Lord Coombe.

"This is what I must ask you to listen to," he said. "We believe what you have told us but we know that no one else will--without legal proof.

We also know that some form may have been neglected because all was done in haste and ignorance of formalities. You can give no clue--the ordinary methods of investigation are in confusion as the whole country is. This is what remains for us to face. _You_ are not ashamed, but if you cannot prove legal marriage Donal's son will know bitter humiliation; he will be robbed of all he should possess--his life will be ruined. Do you understand?"

"Yes," she answered without moving her eyes from his face. She seemed to him again as he stood before her in the upper room of Lady Etynge's house when, in his clear aloof voice, he had told her that he had come to save her. He had saved her then, but now it was not she who needed saving.

"There is only one man who can give Donal's child what his father would have given him," he went on.

"Who is he?" she asked.

"I am the man," he answered, and he stood quite still.

"How--can you do it?" she asked again.

"I can marry you," his clear, aloof voice replied.

"You!--You!--You!" she only breathed it out--but it was a cry.

Then he held up his hand as if to calm her.

"I told you in the wood that hatred was useless now and that your reason for hating me had no foundation. I know how you will abhor what I suggest. But it will not be as bad as it seems. You need not even endure the ignominy of being known as the Marchioness of Coombe. But when I am dead Donal's son will be my successor. It will not be held against him that I married his beautiful young mother and chose to keep the matter a secret. I have long been known as a peculiar person given to arranging my affairs according to my own liking. The Head of the House of Coombe"--with an ironic twitch of the mouth--"will have the law on his side and will not be asked for explanations. A romantic story will add to public interest in him. If your child is a daughter she will be protected. She will not be lonely, she will have friends. She will have all the chances of happiness a girl naturally longs for--all of them.

Because you are her mother."

Robin rose and stood before him as involuntarily as she had risen before, but now she looked different. Her hands were wrung together and she was the blanched embodiment of terror. She remembered things Fraulein Hirsh had said.

"I could not marry you--if I were to be killed because I didn't," was all she could say. Because marriage had meant only Donal and the dream, and being saved from the world this one man had represented to her girl mind.

"You say that because you have no doubt heard that it has been rumoured that I have a depraved old man's fancy for you and that I have always hoped to marry you. That is as false as the other story I denied. I am not in love with you even in an antediluvian way. You would not marry me for your own sake. That goes without saying. But I will repeat what I said in the Wood when you told me you would believe me. There is Something--not you--not Donal--to be saved from suffering."

"That is true," the d.u.c.h.ess said and put out her hand as before. "And there is something longer drawn out and more miserable than mere dying--a dreary outcast sort of life. We know more about such things than you do."