Robin Part 8

There was a new vigour in her splendid old face and body.

"There is a reason now why I am the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Darte," she went on, "and why I have money and houses and lands. There is a reason why I have lived when it sometimes seemed as if my usefulness was over. There are uses for my money--for my places--for myself. Lately I have found myself saying, as Mordecai said to Esther, 'Who knowest whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this.' A change is taking place in me too. I can do more because there is so much more to do. I can even use my hands better. Look at them."

She held them out that he might see them--her beautiful old-ivory fingers, so long stiffened by rheumatism. She slowly opened and shut them.

"I can move them more--I have been exercising them and having them rubbed. I want to be able to knit and sew and wait on myself and perhaps on other people. Because I have been a rich, luxurious old woman it has not occurred to me that there were rheumatic old women who were forced to do things because they were poor--the things I never tried to do. I have begun to try."

She let her hands fall on her lap and sat gazing up at him with a rather strange expression.

"Do you know what I have been doing?" she said. "I have been praying to G.o.d--for a sort of miracle. In their terror people are beginning to ask their Deity for things as they have never done it before. We are most of us like children waking in horror of the black night and shrieking for some one to come--some one--any one! Each creature cries out to his own Deity--the G.o.d his own need has made. Most of us are doing it in secret--half ashamed to let it be known. We are abject things. Mothers and fathers are doing it--young lovers and husbands and wives."

"What miracle are you asking for?"

"For power to do things I have not done for years. I want to walk--to stand--to work. If under the stress of necessity I begin to do all three, my doctors will say that mental exaltation and will power have caused the change. It may be true, but mental exaltation and will power are things of the soul not of the body. Anguish is actually forcing me into a sort of practical belief. I am trying to 'have faith even as a grain of mustard seed' so that I may say unto my mountain, 'Remove hence to yonder place and it shall be removed.'"

"'The things which I do, ye shall do also and even greater things than these shall ye do.'" Coombe repeated the words deliberately. "I heard an earnest middle-aged dissenter preach a sermon on that text a few days ago."

"What?"--his old friend leaned forward. "Are _you_ going to hear sermons?"

"I am one of the children, I suppose. Though I do not shriek aloud, probably something shrieks within me. I was pa.s.sing a small chapel and heard a singular voice. I don't know exactly why I went into the place, but when I sat down inside I felt the tension of the atmosphere at once.

Every one looked anxious or terrified. There were pale faces and stony or wild eyes. It did not seem to be an ordinary service and voices kept breaking out with spasmodic appeals, 'Almighty G.o.d, look down on us!'

'Oh, Christ, have mercy!' 'Oh, G.o.d, save us!' One woman in black was rocking backwards and forwards and sobbing over and over again, 'Oh, Jesus! Jesus! Oh, Lord Jesus!'"

"Part of her body and soul was lying done to death in some field--or by some roadside," said the d.u.c.h.ess. "She could not pray--she could only cry out. I can hear her, 'Oh, Lord Jesus!'"

Later came the morning when the changed George came to say good-bye. He was wonderfully good-looking in his khaki and seemed taller and more square of jaw. He made a few of the usual young jokes which were intended to make things cheerful and to treat affectionate fears lightly, but his good-natured blue eye held a certain deadly quiet in its depths.

His mother and Kathryn were with him, and it was while they were absorbed in anxious talk with the d.u.c.h.ess that he walked over to where Robin sat and stood before her.

"Will you come into the library and let me say something to you? I don't want to go away without saying it," he put it to her.

The library was the adjoining room and Robin rose and went with him without any comment or question. Already the time had come when formalities had dropped away and people did not ask for trivial explanations. The pace of events had become too rapid.

"There are a lot of chances when a man goes out--that he won't come back," he said, still standing after she had taken a place in the window-seat he guided her to. "There are not as many as one's friends can't help thinking--but there are enough to make him feel he'd like to leave things straight when he goes. What I want you to let me say is, that the minute I had made a fool of myself the night of the dance, I knew what an a.s.s I had been and I was ready to grovel."

Robin's lifted face was quite gentle. Suddenly she was thinking self-reproachingly, "Oh, poor boy--poor boy!"

"I flew into a temper and would not let you," she answered him. "It _was_ temper--but there were things you didn't know. It was not your fault that you didn't." The square, good-natured face flushed with relief, and George's voice became even slightly unsteady.

"That's kind of you," he said, "it's _kind_ and I'm jolly grateful.

Things mean a lot just now--with all one's people in such a state and trying so pluckily to hide it. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that _I_ knew that the thing only happened because I was a silly idiot and for no other reason. You will believe me, won't you, and won't remember it if you ever remember me?"

"I shall remember you--and it is as if--that had never happened at all."

She put out, as she got up, such a kind hand that he grasped it almost joyously.

"You have made it awfully easy for me. Thank you, Miss Lawless." He hesitated a second and then dropped his voice. "I wonder if I dare--I wonder if it would be cheek--and impudence if I said something else?"

"Scarcely anything seems cheek or impudence now," Robin answered with simple sadness. "Nothing ordinary seems to matter because _everything_ is of so much importance."

"I feel as if what I wanted to say was one of the things that _are_ important. I don't know what--older people--or safe ones--would think about it, but--" He broke off and began again. "To _us_ young ones who are facing-- It's the only big thing that's left us--in our bit of the present. We can only be sure of to-day--"

"Yes--yes," Robin cried out low. "Only to-day--just to-day." She even panted a little and George, looking into her eyes, knew that he might say anything, because for a reason she was one of the girls who in this hour could understand.

"Perhaps you don't know where our house is," he said quite quickly. "It is one of those in the Square--facing the Gardens. I might have played with you there when I was a little chap--but I don't think I did."

"n.o.body did but Donal," she said, quickly also. How did she know that he was going to say something to her about Donal?

"I gave him the key to the Gardens that day," he hurried on. "I was at the window with him when he saw you. I understood in a minute when I saw his face and he'd said half a dozen words to me. I gave him my key. He has got it now." He actually s.n.a.t.c.hed at both her hands and gripped them. It was a _grip_ and his eyes burned through a sort of sudden moisture. "We can't stay here and talk. But I couldn't _not_ say it! Oh, I say, be _good_ to him! You would, if he had only a day to live because some d.a.m.ned German bullet had struck him. You're life--you're youngness--you're _to-day_! Don't say 'No' to _anything_ he asks of you--for G.o.d's sake, don't."

"I'd give him my heart in his two hands," gasped Robin. "I couldn't give him my soul because it was always his."

"G.o.d take care of the pair of you--and be good to the rest of us,"

whispered George, wringing her hands hard and dropping them.

That was how he went away.

A few weeks later he was lying, a mangled object, in a field in Flanders. One of thousands--living, laughing, good as honest bread is good; the possible pa.s.ser-on of life and force and new thinking for new generations--one of hundreds of thousands--one of millions before the end came--nice, healthy, normal-minded George, son and heir of a house of decent n.o.bles.

CHAPTER V

And still youth marched away, and England seemed to swarm with soldiers and, at times, to hear and see nothing but marching music and marching feet, though life went on in houses, shops, warehouses and offices, and new and immense activities evolved as events demanded them. Many of the new activities were preparations for the comfort and care of soldiers who were going away, and for those who would come back and would need more care than the others. Women were doing astonishing work and revealing astonishing power and determination. The s.e.xes mingled with a businesslike informality unknown in times of peace. Lovely girls went in and out of their homes, and from one quarter of London to another without question. They walked with a brisk step and wore the steady expression of creatures with work in view. Slim young war-widows were to be seen in black dresses and veiled small hats with bits of white c.r.a.pe inside their brims. Sometimes their little faces were awful to behold, but sometimes they wore a strained look of exaltation.

The Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Darte was often absent from Eaton Square. She was understood to be proving herself much stronger than her friends had supposed her to be. She proved it by doing an extraordinary amount of work. She did it in her house in Eaton Square--in other people's houses, in her various estates in the country, where she prepared her villagers and tenants for a future in which every farm house and cottage must be as ready for practical service as her own castle or manor house. Darte Norham was no longer a luxurious place of residence but a potential hospital for wounded soldiers; so was Barons Court and the beautiful old Dower House at Malworth.

Sometimes Robin was with her, but oftener she remained at Eaton Square and wrote letters and saw busy people and carried out lists of orders.

It was not every day or evening that she could easily find time to go out alone and make her way to the Square Gardens and in fact it was not often to the Gardens she went. There were so many dear places where trees grew and made quiet retreats--all the parks and heaths and green suburbs--and everywhere pairs walked or sat and talked, and were frankly so wholly absorbed in the throb of their own existences that they had no interest in, or curiosity concerning, any other human beings.

"Ought I to ask you to come and meet me--as if you were a little housemaid meeting her life-guardsman?" Donal had said feverishly the second time they met.

A sweet flush ran up to the roots of her hair and even showed itself on the bit of round throat where her dress was open.

"Yes, you ought," she answered. "There are no little housemaids and life-guardsmen now. It seems as if there were only--people."

The very sound of her voice thrilled him--everything about her thrilled him--the very stuff her plain frock was made of, the small hat she wore, her way of moving or quiet sitting down near him, but most of all the lift of her eyes to his--because there was no change in it and the eyes expressed what they had expressed when they had first looked at him. It was a thing which moved him to-day exactly as it had moved him when he was too young to explain its meaning and appeal. It was the lovely faith and yearning acceptance of him as a being whose perfection could not be questioned. There was in it no conscious beguiling flattery or apprais.e.m.e.nt--it was pure acceptance and sweet waiting for what he had to give. He sometimes found himself trembling with his sense of its simple unearthliness.

Few indeed were the people who at this time were wholly normal. The whole world seemed a great musical instrument, overstrung and giving out previously unknown harmonies and inharmonies. Amid the thunders of great crashing discords the individual note was almost unheard--but the individual note continued its vibrations.

The tone which expressed Donal Muir--in common with many others of his age and s.e.x--was a novel and abnormal one. His being no longer sang the healthy human song of mere joy in life and living. A knowledge of cruelty and brutal force, of helplessness and despair, grew in him day by day. Causes for gay good cheer and laughter were swept away, leaving in their places black facts and needs to gaze at with hard eyes.

"Do you see how everything has _stopped_--how nothing can go on?" he said to Robin on their second meeting in the Gardens. "The things we used to fill our time and amuse ourselves with--dancing and tennis and polo and theatres and parties--how jolly and all right they were in their day, but how futile they seem just now. How could one even stand talk of them! There is only one thing."