The Head of the House of Coombe Part 44

"Lord Coombe is fond of girls just out of the schoolroom. But if he begins to make love to you don't allow yourself to feel too much flattered."

Robin sprang toward her.

"Do you think I don't ABHOR Lord Coombe!" she cried out forgetting herself in the desperate cruelty of the moment. "Haven't I reason----"

but there she remembered and stopped.

But Feather was not shocked or alarmed. Years of looking things in the face had provided her with a mental surface from which tilings rebounded. On the whole it even amused her and "suited her book" that Robin should take this tone.

"Oh! I suppose you mean you know he admires me and pays bills for me. Where would you have been if he hadn't done it? He's been a sort of benefactor."

"I know nothing but that even when I was a little child I could not bear to touch his hand!" cried Robin. Then Feather remembered several things she had almost forgotten and she was still more entertained.

"I believe you've not forgotten through all these years that the boy you fell so indecently in love with was taken away by his mother because Lord Coombe was YOUR mother's admirer and he was such a sinner that even a baby was contaminated by him! Donal Muir is a young man by this time. I wonder what his mother would do now if he turned up at your mistress' house--that's what she is, you know, your mistress--and began to make love to you." She laughed outright. "You'll get into all sorts of messes, but that would be the nicest one!"

Robin could only stand and gaze at her. Her moment's fire had died down. Without warning, out of the past a wave rose and overwhelmed her then and there. It bore with it the wild woe of the morning when a child had waited in the spring sun and her world had fallen into nothingness. It came back--the broken-hearted anguish, the utter helpless desolation, as if she stood in the midst of it again, as if it had never pa.s.sed. It was a re-incarnation. She could not bear it.

"Do you hate me--as I hate Lord Coombe?" she cried out. "Do you WANT unhappy things to happen to me? Oh! Mother, why!" She had never said "Mother" before. Nature said it for her here. The piteous appeal of her youth and lonely young rush of tears was almost intolerably sweet. Through some subtle cause it added to the thing in her which Feather resented and longed to trouble and to hurt.

"You are a spiteful little cat!" she sprang up to exclaim, standing close and face to face with her. "You think I am an old thing and that I'm jealous of you! Because you're pretty and a girl you think women past thirty don't count. You'll find out. Mrs. Muir will count and she's forty if she's a day. Her son's such a beauty that people go mad over him. And he worships her--and he's her slave. I wish you WOULD get into some mess you couldn't get out of! Don't come to me if you do."

The wide beauty of Robin's gaze and her tear wet bloom were too much. Feather was quite close to her. The spiteful schoolgirl impulse got the better of her.

"Don't make eyes at me like that," she cried, and she actually gave the rose cheek nearest her a sounding little slap, "There!"

she exclaimed hysterically and she turned about and ran out of the room crying herself.

Robin had parted from Mademoiselle Valle at Charing Cross Station on the afternoon of the same day, but the night before they had sat up late together and talked a long time. In effect Mademoiselle had said also, "You are going out into the world," but she had not approached the matter in Mrs. Gareth-Lawless' mood. One may have charge of a girl and be her daily companion for years, but there are certain things the very years themselves make it increasingly difficult to say to her. And after all why should one state difficult things in exact phrases unless one lacks breeding and is curious. Anxious she had been at times, but not curious. So it was that even on this night of their parting it was not she who spoke.

It was after a few minutes of sitting in silence and looking at the fire that Robin broke in upon the quiet which had seemed to hold them both.

"I must learn to remember always that I am a sort of servant.

I must be very careful. It will be easier for me to realize that I am not in my own house than it would be for other girls. I have not allowed Dowie to dress me for a good many weeks. I have learned how to do everything for myself quite well."

"But Dowie will be in the house with you and the d.u.c.h.ess is very kind."

"Every night I have begun my prayers by thanking G.o.d for leaving me Dowie," the girl said. "I have begun them and ended them with the same words." She looked about her and then broke out as if involuntarily. "I shall be away from here. I shall not wear anything or eat anything or sleep on any bed I have not paid for myself."

"These rooms are very pretty. We have been very comfortable here," Mademoiselle said. Suddenly she felt that if she waited a few moments she would know definitely things she had previously only guessed at. "Have you no little regrets?"

"No," answered Robin, "No."

She stood upon the hearth with her hands behind her. Mademoiselle felt as if her fingers were twisting themselves together and the Frenchwoman was peculiarly moved by the fact that she looked like a slim jeune fille of a creature saying a lesson. The lesson opened in this wise.

"I don't know when I first began to know that I was different from all other children," she said in a soft, hot voice--if a voice can express heat. "Perhaps a child who has nothing--nothing--is obliged to begin to THINK before it knows what thoughts are. If they play and are loved and amused they have no time for anything but growing and being happy. You never saw the dreadful little rooms upstairs----"

"Dowie has told me of them," said Mademoiselle.

"Another child might have forgotten them. I never shall. I--I was so little and they were full of something awful. It was loneliness.

The first time Andrews pinched me was one day when the thing frightened me and I suddenly began to cry quite loud. I used to stare out of the window and--I don't know when I noticed it first--I could see the children being taken out by their nurses.

And there were always two or three of them and they laughed and talked and skipped. The nurses used to laugh and talk too. Andrews never did. When she took me to the gardens the other nurses sat together and chattered and their children played games with other children. Once a little girl began to talk to me and her nurse called her away. Andrews was very angry and jerked me by my arm and told me that if ever I spoke to a child again she would pinch me."

"Devil!" exclaimed the Frenchwoman.

"I used to think and think, but I could never understand. How could I?"

"A baby!" cried Mademoiselle Valle and she got up and took her in her arms and kissed her. "Chere pet.i.te ange!" she murmured. When she sat down again her cheeks were wet. Robin's were wet also, but she touched them with her handkerchief quickly and dried them. It was as if she had faltered for a moment in her lesson.

"Did Dowie ever tell you anything about Donal?" she asked hesitatingly.

"Something. He was the little boy you played with?"

"Yes. He was the first human creature," she said it very slowly as if trying to find the right words to express what she meant, "--the first HUMAN creature I had ever known. You see Mademoiselle, he--he knew everything. He had always been happy, he BELONGED to people and things. I belonged to n.o.body and nothing. If I had been like him he would not have seemed so wonderful to me. I was in a kind of delirium of joy. If a creature who had been deaf dumb and blind had suddenly awakened, and seeing on a summer day in a world full of flowers and sun--it might have seemed to them as it seemed to me."

"You have remembered it through all the years," said Mademoiselle, "like that?"

"It was the first time I became alive. One could not forget it.

We only played as children play but--it WAS a delirium of joy. I could not bear to go to sleep at night and forget it for a moment.

Yes, I remember it--like that. There is a dream I have every now and then and it is more real than--than this is--" with a wave of her hand about her. "I am always in a real garden playing with a real Donal. And his eyes--his eyes--" she paused and thought, "There is a look in them that is like--it is just like--that first morning."

The change which pa.s.sed over her face the next moment might have been said to seem to obliterate all trace of the childish memory.

"He was taken away by his mother. That was the beginning of my finding out," she said. "I heard Andrews talking to her sister and in a baby way I gathered that Lord Coombe had sent him. I hated Lord Coombe for years before I found out that he hadn't--and that there was another reason. After that it took time to puzzle things out and piece them together. But at last I found out what the reason had been. Then I began to make plans. These are not my rooms," glancing about her again, "--these are not my clothes,"

with a little pull at her dress. "I'm not 'a strong character', Mademoiselle, as I wanted to be, but I haven't one little regret--not one." She kneeled down and put her arms round her old friend's waist, lifting her face. "I'm like a leaf blown about by the wind. I don't know what it will do with me. Where do leaves go?

One never knows really."

She put her face down on Mademoiselle's knee then and cried with soft bitterness.

When she bade her good-bye at Charing Cross Station and stood and watched the train until it was quite out of sight, afterwards she went back to the rooms for which she felt no regrets. And before she went to bed that night Feather came and gave her farewell maternal advice and warning.

CHAPTER XXVIII

That a previously scarcely suspected daughter of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless had become a member of the household of the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Darte stirred but a pa.s.sing wave of interest in a circle which was not that of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless herself and which upon the whole but casually acknowledged its curious existence as a modern abnormality. Also the att.i.tude of the d.u.c.h.ess herself was composedly free from any admission of necessity for comment.

"I have no pretty young relative who can be spared to come and live with me. I am fond of things pretty and young and I am greatly pleased with what a kind chance put in my way," she said. In her discussion of the situation with Coombe she measured it with her customary fine ac.u.men.

"Forty years ago it could not have been done. The girl would have been made uncomfortable and outside things could not have been prevented from dragging themselves in. Filial piety in the ma.s.s would have demanded that the mother should be accounted for. Now a genial knowledge of a variety in mothers leaves Mrs. Gareth-Lawless to play about with her own probably quite amusing set. Once poor Robin would have been held responsible for her and so should I. My position would have seemed to defy serious moral issues. But we have reached a sane habit of detaching people from their relations.

A nice condition we should be in if we had not."

"You, of course, know that Henry died suddenly in some sort of fit at Ostend." Coombe said it as if in a form of reply. She had naturally become aware of it when the rest of the world did, but had not seen him since the event.

"One did not suppose his const.i.tution would have lasted so long,"