The Head of the House of Coombe Part 51

"Is your name Robin?"

"Yes," she could scarcely breathe it.

"I thought it was," in the voice in which he had spoken of the music. "I hoped it was--after I first began to suspect. I HOPED it was."

"It is--it is."

"Did we--" he had not indeed meant that his arm should hold her a shade closer, but--in spite of himself--it did because he was after all so little more than a boy, "--did we play together in a garden?"

"Yes--yes," breathed Robin. "We did." Surely she heard a sound as if he had caught a quick breath. But after it there were a few more steps and another brief s.p.a.ce of silence.

"I knew," he said next, very low. "I KNEW that we played together in a garden."

"You did not know when you first looked at me tonight." Innocently revealing that even his first glance had been no casual thing to her.

But his answer revealed something too.

"You were near the door--just coming into the room. I didn't know why you startled me. I kept looking for you afterwards in the crowd."

"I didn't see you look," said Robin softly, revealing still more in her utter inexperience.

"No, because you wouldn't look at me--you were too much engaged.

Do you like this step?"

"I like them all."

"Do you always dance like this? Do you always make your partner feel as if he had danced with you all his life?"

"It is--because we played together in the garden," said Robin and then was quite terrified at herself. Because after all--after all they were only two conventional young people meeting for the first time at a dance, not knowing each other in the least. It was really the first time. The meeting of two children could not count. But the beating and strange elated inward tremor would not stop.

As for him he felt abnormal also and he was usually a very normal creature. It was abnormal to be so excited that he found himself, as it were, upon another plane, because he had recognized and was dancing with a girl he had not seen since she was five or six.

It was not normal that he should be possessed by a desire to keep near to her, overwhelmed by an impelling wish to talk to her--to ask her questions. About what--about herself--themselves--the years between--about the garden.

"It began to come back bit by bit after I had two fair looks. You pa.s.sed me several times though you didn't know." (Oh! had she not known!) "I had been promised some dances by other people. But I went to Lady Lothwell. She's very kind."

Back swept the years and it had all begun again, the wonderful happiness--just as the anguish had swept back on the night her mother had come to talk to her. As he had brought it into her dreary little world then, he brought it now. He had the power.

She was so happy that she seemed to be only waiting to hear what he would say--as if that were enough. There are phases like this--rare ones--and it was her fate that through such a phase she was pa.s.sing.

It was indeed true that much more water had pa.s.sed under his bridge than under hers, but now--! Memory reproduced for him with an acuteness like actual pain, a childish torment he thought he had forgotten. And it was as if it had been endured only yesterday--and as if the urge to speak and explain was as intense as it had been on the first day.

"She's very little and she won't understand," he had said to his mother. "She's very little, really--perhaps she'll cry."

How monstrous it had seemed! Had she cried--poor little soul!

He looked down at her eyelashes. Her cheek had been of the same colour and texture then. That came back to him too. The impulse to tighten his arms was infernally powerful--almost automatic.

"She has no one but me to remember!" he heard his own child voice saying fiercely. Good Lord, it WAS as if it had been yesterday.

He actually gulped something down in his throat.

"You haven't rested much," he said aloud. "There's a conservatory with marble seats and corners and a fountain going. Will you let me take you there when we stop dancing? I want to apologize to you."

The eyelashes lifted themselves and made round her eyes the big soft shadow of which Sara Studleigh had spoken. A strong and healthy valvular organ in his breast lifted itself curiously at the same time.

"To apologize?"

Was he speaking to her almost as if she were still four or five?

It was to the helplessness of those years he was about to explain--and yet he did not feel as though he were still eight.

"I want to tell you why I never came back to the garden. It was a broken promise, wasn't it?"

The music had not ceased, but they stopped dancing.

"Will you come?" he said and she went with him like a child--just as she had followed in her babyhood. It seemed only natural to do what he asked.

The conservatory was like an inner Paradise now. The tropically scented warmth--the tiers on tiers of bloom above bloom--the softened swing of music--the splash of the fountain on water and leaves. Their plane had lifted itself too. They could hear the splashing water and sometimes feel it in the corner seat of marble he took her to. A crystal drop fell on her hand when she sat down.

The blue of his eyes was vaguely troubled and he spoke as if he were not certain of himself.

"I was wakened up in what seemed to me the middle of the night,"

he said, as if indeed the thing had happened only the day before.

"My mother was obliged to go back suddenly to Scotland. I was only a little chap, but it nearly finished me. Parents and guardians don't understand how gigantic such a thing can be. I had promised you--we had promised each other--hadn't we?"

"Yes," said Robin. Her eyes were fixed upon his face--open and unmoving. Such eyes! Such eyes! All the touchingness of the past was in their waiting on his words.

"Children--little boys especially--are taught that they must not cry out when they are hurt. As I sat in the train through the journey that day I thought my heart would burst in my small breast.

I turned my back and stared out of the window for fear my mother would see my face. I'd always loved her. Do you know I think that just then I HATED her. I had never hated anything before. Good Lord! What a thing for a little chap to go through! My mother was an angel, but she didn't KNOW."

"No," said Robin in a small strange voice and without moving her gaze. "She didn't KNOW."

He had seated himself on a sort of low marble stool near her and he held a knee with clasped hands. They were hands which held each other for the moment with a sort of emotional clinch. His position made him look upward at her instead of down.

"It was YOU I was wild about," he said. "You see it was YOU. I could have stood it for myself. The trouble was that I felt I was such a big little chap. I thought I was years--ages older than you--and mountains bigger," his faint laugh was touched with pity for the smallness of the big little chap. "You seemed so tiny and pretty--and lonely."

"I was as lonely as a new-born bird fallen out of its nest."

"You had told me you had 'nothing.' You said no one had ever kissed you. I'd been loved all my life. You had a wondering way of fixing your eyes on me as if I could give you everything--perhaps it was a c.o.xy little chap's conceit that made me love you for it--but perhaps it wasn't."

"You WERE everything," Robin said--and the mere simpleness of the way in which she said it brought the garden so near that he smelt the warm hawthorn and heard the distant piano organ and it quickened his breath.

"It was because I kept seeing your eyes and hearing your laugh that I thought my heart was bursting. I knew you'd go and wait for me--and gradually your little face would begin to look different.

I knew you'd believe I'd come. 'She's little'--that was what I kept saying to myself again and again. 'And she'll cry--awfully--and she'll think I did it. She'll never know.' There,"--he hesitated a moment--"there was a kind of mad shame in it. As if I'd BETRAYED your littleness and your belief, though I was too young to know what betraying was."

Just as she had looked at him before, "as if he could give her everything," she was looking at him now. In what other way could she look while he gave her this wonderful soothing, binding softly all the old wounds with unconscious, natural touch because he had really been all her child being had been irradiated and warmed by. There was no pose in his manner--no sentimental or flirtatious youth's affecting of a picturesque att.i.tude. It was real and he told her this thing because he must for his own relief.

"Did you cry?" he said. "Did my little chap's conceit make too much of it? I suppose I ought to hope it did."

Robin put her hand softly against her heart.

"No," she answered. "I was only a baby, but I think it KILLED something--here."