Robin Part 33

"You told me I had something to think of," she said. "I am thinking now.

I shall always be thinking."

"That's right, my dear," Dowie answered her with sane kindliness.

"I will do everything you tell me, Dowie. I will not cry any more and I will eat what you ask me to eat. I will sleep as much as I can and I will walk every day. Then I shall get strong."

"That's the way to look at things. It's a brave way," Dowie answered.

"What we want most is strength and good spirits, my dear."

"That was one of the things Donal said," Robin went on quite naturally and simply. "He told me I need not be ill. He said a rose was not ill when a new bud was blooming on it. That was one of the lovely things he told me. There were so many."

"It was a beautiful thing, to be sure," said Dowie.

To her wholly untranscendental mind, long trained by patent facts and duties, any suggestion of the occult was vaguely ominous. She had spent her early years among people who regarded such things with terror. In the stories of her youth those who saw visions usually died or met with calamity. That their visions were, as a rule, gruesome and included pale and ghastly faces and voices hollow with portent was now a supporting recollection. "He was not dead. He was not an angel. He was Donal,"

Robin had said in her undoubting voice. And she had stood the test--that real test of earthly egg and b.u.t.tered toast. Dowie was a sensible and experienced creature and had been prepared before the doctor's suggestion to lose no advantage. If the child began to sleep and eat her food, and the fits of crying could be controlled, why should she not be allowed to believe what supported her? When her baby came she'd forget less natural things. Dowie knew how her eyes would look as she bent over it--how they would melt and glow and brood and how her childish mouth would quiver with wonder and love. Who knew but that the Lord himself had sent her that dream to comfort her because she had always been such a loving, lonely little thing with nothing but tender goodness in her whole body and soul? She had never had an untender thought of anybody but for that queer dislike to his lordship-- And when you came to think of what had been forced into her innocent mind about him, who wondered?-- And she was beginning to see that differently too, in these strange days. She was nothing now but softness and sorrow. It seemed only right that some pity should be shown to her.

Dowie noticed that she did not stay up late that night and that when she went to bed she knelt a long time by her bedside saying her prayers. Oh!

What a little girl she looked, Dowie thought,--in her white night gown with her long curly plait hanging down her back tied with a blue ribbon!

And she to be the mother of a child--that was no more than one herself!

When all the prayers were ended and Dowie came back to the room to tuck her in, her face was marvellously still-looking and somehow remotely sweet as if she had not quite returned from some place of wonderful calm.

She nestled into the softness of the pillow with her hand under her cheek and her lids dropped quietly at once.

"Good night, Dowie dear," she murmured. "I am going to sleep."

To sleep in a moment or so Dowie saw she went--with the soft suddenness of a baby in its cradle.

But it could not be said that Dowie slept soon. She found herself lying awake listening to the wind whirling and crying round the tower. The sound had something painfully human in it which made her conscious of a shivering inward tremor.

"It sounds as if something--that has been hurt and is cold and lonely wants to get in where things are human and warm," was her troubled thought.

It was a thought so troubled that she could not rest and in spite of her efforts to lie still she turned from side to side listening in an abnormal mood.

"I'm foolish," she whispered. "If I don't get hold of myself I shall lose my senses. I don't feel like myself. Would it be too silly if I got up and opened a tower window?"

She actually got out of her bed quietly and crept to the tower room and opened one. The crying wind rushed in and past her with a soft cold sweep. It was not a bitter wind, only a piteous one.

"It's--it's come in," she said, quaking a little, and went back to her bed.

When she awakened in the morning she realised that she must have fallen asleep as quickly as Robin had, for she remembered nothing after her head had touched the pillow. The wind had ceased and the daylight found her herself again.

"It was silly," she said, "but it did something for me as silliness will sometimes. Walls and shut windows are nothing to them. If he came, he came without my help. But it pacified the foolish part of me."

She went into Robin's room with a sense of holding her breath, but firm in her determination to breathe and speak as a matter of fact woman should.

Robin was standing at her window already dressed in the short skirt and soft hat. She turned and showed that her thin small face was radiant.

"I have been out on the moor. I wakened just after sunrise, and I heard a skylark singing high up in the sky. I went out to listen and say my prayers," she said. "You don't know what the moor is like, Dowie, until you stand out on it at sunrise."

She met Dowie's approach half way and slipped her arms round her neck and kissed her several times. Dowie had for a moment quailed before a thought that she looked too much like a young angel, but her arms held close and her kisses were warm and human.

"Well, well!" Dowie's pats on her shoulder took courage. "That's a good sign--to get up and dress yourself and go into the open air. It would give you an appet.i.te if anything would."

"Perhaps I can eat two eggs this morning," with a pretty laugh.

"Wouldn't that be wonderful?" and she took off her hat and laid it aside on the lounge as if she meant to go out again soon.

Dowie tried not to watch her too obviously, but she could scarcely keep her eyes from her. She knew that she must not ask her questions at the risk of "losing an advantage." She had, in fact, never been one of the women who must ask questions. There was however something eerie in remembering her queer feeling about the crying of the wind, silly though she had decided it to be, and something which made it difficult to go about all day knowing nothing but seeing strange signs. She had been more afraid for Robin than she would have admitted even to herself. And when the girl sat down at the table by the window overlooking the moor and ate her breakfast without effort or distaste, it was far from easy to look quite as if she had been doing it every morning.

Then there was the look in her eyes, as if she was either listening to something or remembering it. She went out twice during the day and she carried it with her even when she talked of other things. Dowie saw it specially when she lay down on the big lounge to rest. But she did not lie down often or long at a time. It was as though she was no longer unnaturally tired and languid. She did little things for herself, moving about naturally, and she was pleased when a messenger brought flowers, explaining that his lordship had ordered that they should be sent every other day from the nearest town. She spent an hour filling crystal bowls and clear slim vases with them and the look never left her.

But she said nothing until she went out with Dowie at sunset. They only walked for a short time and they did not keep to the road but went on to the moor itself and walked among the heath and bracken. After a little while they sat down and gave themselves up to the vast silence with here and there the last evening twitter of a bird in it. The note made the stillness greater. The flame of the sky was beyond compare and, after gazing at it for a while, Dowie turned a slow furtive look on Robin.

But Robin was looking at her with clear soft naturalness--loving and untroubled and kindly sweet.

"He came back, Dowie. He came again," she said. And her voice was still as natural as the good woman had ever known it.

CHAPTER XXVIII

But even after this Dowie did not ask questions. She only watched more carefully and waited to be told what the depths of her being most yearned to hear. The gradually founded belief of her careful prosaic life prevented ease of mind or a sense of security. She could not be certain that it would be the part of wisdom to allow herself to feel secure. She did not wish to arouse Doctor Benton's professional anxiety by asking questions about Lady Maureen Darcy, but, by a clever and adroitly gradual system of what was really cross examination which did not involve actual questions, she drew from him the name of the woman who had been Lady Maureen's chief nurse when the worst seemed impending.

It was by fortunate chance the name of a woman she had once known well during a case of dangerous illness in an important household. She herself had had charge of the nursery and Nurse Darian had liked her because she had proved prompt and intelligent in an alarming crisis.

They had become friends and Dowie knew she might write to her and ask for information and advice. She wrote a careful respectful letter which revealed nothing but that she was anxious about a case she had temporary charge of. She managed to have the letter posted in London and the answer forwarded to her from there. Nurse Darian's reply was generously full for a hard-working woman. It answered questions and was friendly.

But the woman's war work had plainly led her to see and reflect upon the opening up of new and singular vistas.

"What we hear oftenest is that the whole world is somehow changing," she ended by saying. "You hear it so often that you get tired. But something _is_ happening--something strange-- Even the doctors find themselves facing things medical science does not explain. They don't like it. I sometimes think doctors hate change more than anybody. But the cleverest and biggest ones talk together. It's this looking at a thing lying on a bed alive and talking perhaps, one minute--and _gone out_ the next, that sets you asking yourself questions. In these days a nurse seems to see nothing else day and night. You can't make yourself believe they have gone far-- And when you keep hearing stories about them coming back--knocking on tables, writing on queer boards--just any way so that they can get at those they belong to--! Well, I shouldn't be sure myself that a comforting dream means that a girl's mind's giving away. Of course a nurse is obliged to watch--But Lady Maureen found _something_--And she _was_ going mad and now she is as sane as I am."

Dowie was vaguely supported because the woman was an intelligent person and knew her business thoroughly. Nevertheless one must train one's eyes to observe everything without seeming to do so at all.

Every morning when the weather was fine Robin got up early and went out on the moor to say her prayers and listen to the skylarks singing.

"When I stand and turn my face up to the sky--and watch one going higher into heaven--and singing all the time without stopping," she said, "I feel as if the singing were carrying what I want to say with it.

Sometimes he goes so high that you can't see him any more-- He's not even a little speck in the highest sky-- Then I think perhaps he has gone in and taken my prayer with him. But he always comes back. And perhaps if I could understand he could tell me what the answer is."

She ate her breakfast each day and was sweetly faithful to her promise to Dowie in every detail. Dowie used to think that she was like a child who wanted very much to learn her lesson well and follow every rule.

"I want to be good, Dowie," she said once. "I should like to be very good. I am so _grateful_."

Doctor Benton driving up the moor road for his daily visits made careful observation of every detail of her case and pondered in secret. The alarming thinness and sharpening of the delicate features was he saw, actually becoming less marked day by day; the transparent hands were less transparent; the movements were no longer languid.

"She spends most of the day out of doors when the weather's decent,"

Dowie said. "She eats what I give her. And she sleeps."

Doctor Benton asked many questions and the answers given seemed to provide him with food for reflection.