The Head of the House of Coombe Part 43

"Really?" she said. "She is really going to do it? To take a situation! She wants to be independent and 'live her own life!'

What a joke--for a girl of mine!" She was either really amused or chose to seem so.

"What do YOU think of it?" she asked when she stopped laughing.

Her eyes had curiosity in them.

"I like it," he answered.

"Of course. I ought to have remembered that you helped her to an Early Victorian d.u.c.h.ess. She's one without a flaw--the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Darte. The most conscientiously careful mother couldn't object. It's almost like entering into the kingdom of heaven--in a dull way." She began to laugh again as if amusing images rose suddenly before her. "And what does the d.u.c.h.ess think of it?" she said after her laughter had ceased again. "How does she reconcile herself to the idea of a companion whose mother she wouldn't have in her house?"

"We need not enter into that view of the case. You decided some years ago that it did not matter to you whether Early Victorian d.u.c.h.esses included you in their visiting lists or did not. More modern ones do I believe--quite beautiful and amusing ones."

"But for that reason I want this one and those like her. They would bore me, but I want them. I want them to come to my house and be polite to me in their stuffy way. I want to be invited to their hideous dinner parties and see them sitting round their tables in their awful family jewels 'talking of the sad deaths of kings.'

That's Shakespeare, you know. I heard it last night at the theatre."

"Why do you want it?" Coombe inquired.

"When I ask you why you show your morbid interest in Robin, you say you don't know. I don't know--but I do want it."

She suddenly flushed, she even showed her small teeth. For an extraordinary moment she looked like a little cat.

"Robin will hare it," she cried, grinding a delicate fist into the palm on her knee. "She's not eighteen and she's a beauty and she's taken up by a perfectly decent old d.u.c.h.ess. She'll have EVERYTHING! The Dowager will marry her to someone important. You'll help," she turned on him in a flame of temper. "You are capable of marrying her yourself!" There was a a brief but entire silence.

It was broken by his saying,

"She is not capable of marrying ME."

There was brief but entire silence again, and it was he who again broke it, his manner at once cool and reasonable.

"It is better not to exhibit this kind of feeling. Let us be quite frank. There are few things you feel more strongly than that you do not want your daughter in the house. When she was a child you told me that you detested the prospect of having her on your hands.

She is being disposed of in the most easily explained and enviable manner."

"It's true--it's true," Feather murmured. She began to see advantages and the look of a little cat died out, or at least modified itself into that of a little cat upon whom dawned prospects of cream. No mood ever held her very long. "She won't come back to stay," she said. "The d.u.c.h.ess won't let her. I can use her rooms and I shall be very glad to have them. There's at least some advantage in figuring as a sort of Dame Aux Camelias."

CHAPTER XXVII

The night before Robin went away as she sat alone in the dimness of one light, thinking as girls nearly always sit and think on the eve of a change, because to youth any change seems to mean the final closing as well as the opening of ways, the door of her room was opened and an exquisite and nymphlike figure in pale green stood exactly where the rays of the reading lamp seemed to concentrate themselves in an effort to reveal most purely its delicately startling effect. It was her mother in a dress whose spring-like tint made her a sort of slim dryad. She looked so pretty and young that Robin caught her breath as she rose and went forward.

"It is your aged parent come to give you her blessing," said Feather.

"I was wondering if I might come to your room in the morning,"

Robin answered.

Feather seated herself lightly. She was not intelligent enough to have any real comprehension of the mood which had impelled her to come. She had merely given way to a secret sense of resentment of something which annoyed her. She knew, however, why she had put on the spring-leaf green dress which made her look like a girl.

She was not going to let Robin feel as if she were receiving a visit from her grandmother. She had got that far.

"We don't know each other at all, do we?" she said.

"No," answered Robin. She could not remove her eyes from her loveliness. She brought up such memories of the Lady Downstairs and the desolate child in the shabby nursery.

"Mothers are not as intimate with their daughters as they used to be when it was a sort of virtuous fashion to superintend their rice pudding and lecture them about their lessons. We have not seen each other often."

"No," said Robin.

Feather's laugh had again the rather high note Coombe had noticed.

"You haven't very much to say, have you?" she commented. "And you stare at me as if you were trying to explain me. I dare say you know that you have big eyes and that they're a good colour, but I may as well hint to you that men do not like to be stared at as if their deeps were being searched. Drop your eyelids."

Robin's lids dropped in spite of herself because she was startled, but immediately she was startled again by a note in her mother's voice--a note of added irritation.

"Don't make a habit of dropping them too often," it broke out, "or it will look as if you did it to show your eyelashes. Girls with tricks of that sort are always laughed at. Alison Carr LIVES sideways became she has a pretty profile."

Coombe would have recognized the little cat look, if he had been watching her as she leaned back in her chair and scrutinized her daughter. The fact was that she took in her every point, being an astute censor of other women's charms.

"Stand up," she said.

Robin stood up because she could not well refuse to do so, but she coloured because she was suddenly ashamed.

"You're not little, but you're not tall," her mother said. "That's against you. It's the fashion for women to be immensely tall now. Du Maurier's pictures in Punch and his idiotic Trilby did it.

Clothes are made for giantesses. I don't care about it myself, but a girl's rather out of it if she's much less than six feet high.

You can sit down."

A more singular interview between mother and daughter had a.s.suredly rarely taken place. As she looked at the girl her resentment of her increased each moment. She actually felt as if she were beginning to lose her temper.

"You are what pious people call 'going out into the world'," she went on. "In moral books mothers always give advice and warnings to their girls when they're leaving them. I can give you some warnings. You think that because you have been taken up by a dowager d.u.c.h.ess everything will be plain sailing. You're mistaken.

You think because you are eighteen and pretty, men will fall at your feet."

"I would rather be hideous," cried suddenly pa.s.sionate Robin. "I HATE men!"

The silly pretty thing who was responsible for her being, grew sillier as her irritation increased.

"That's what girls always pretend, but the youngest little idiot knows it isn't true. It's men who count. It makes me laugh when I think of them--and of you. You know nothing about them and they know everything about you. A clever man can do anything he pleases with a silly girl."

"Are they ALL bad?" Robin exclaimed furiously.

"They're none of them bad. They're only men. And that's my warning.

Don't imagine that when they make love to you they do it as if you were the old d.u.c.h.ess' granddaughter. You will only be her paid companion and that's a different matter."

"I will not speak to one of them----" Robin actually began.

"You'll be obliged to do what the d.u.c.h.ess tells you to do," laughed Feather, as she realized her obvious power to dull the glitter and glow of things which she had felt the girl must be dazzled and uplifted unduly by. She was rather like a spiteful schoolgirl entertaining herself by spoiling an envied holiday for a companion.

"Old men will run after you and you will have to be nice to them whether you like it or not." A queer light came into her eyes.