Over coffee in the drawing-room Coombe joined them just at the moment that Feather was “going to tell them something to make them laugh.”
“Robin is in love!” she cried. “ She is five years old and she has been deserted and Andrews came to tell me she can neither eat nor sleep. The doctor says she has had a shock.”
Coombe did not join in the ripple of laughter, but he looked interested.
“Robin is a stimulating name,” said Harrowby. “Is it too late to let us see her?”
“They usually go to sleep at seven, I believe,” remarked Coombe, “but of course I am not an authority.”
Robin was not asleep, though she had long been in bed with her eyes closed. She had heard Andrews say to her sister Anne:
“Lord Coombe’s the reason. She does not want her boy to see or speak to him, so she whisked him back to Scotland.”
“Is Lord Coombe as bad as they say?” put in Anne, with bated breath.
“As to his badness,” Robin heard Andrews answer, “there’s some that can’t say enough against him. It’s what he is in this house that does it. She won’t have her boy playing with a child like Robin.”
Then—even as there flashed upon Robin the revelation of her own unfitness—came a knock at the door.
She was taken up, dressed in her prettiest frock and led down the narrow stairway. She heard the Lady say:
“Shake hands with Lord Coombe.”
Robin put her hand behind her back—she who had never disobeyed since she was born!
“Be pretty mannered, Miss Robin my dear,” Andrews instructed, “and shake hands with his Lordship.”
Each person in the little drawing-room saw the queer flame in the child-face. She shrilled out her words:
“Andrews will pinch me—Andrews will pinch me! But—No—No!”
She kept her hands behind her back and hatred surged up in her soul.
In spite of her tender years, the doctor held to the theory that Robin had suffered a shock; she must be taken away to be helped by the bracing air of the Norfolk coast. Before she went, workmen were to be seen coming in and out of the house. When she returned to London, she was led into rooms she had never been in before—light and airy rooms with pretty walls and furniture.
It was “a whim of Coombe’s,” as Feather put it, that she should no longer occupy the little dog-kennels of nurseries, so these new apartments had been added in the rear. A whim of his also that Andrews, whose disciplinary methods included pinching, should be dismissed and replaced by Dowson, a motherly creature with a great deal of common sense. Robin’s lonely little heart opened to her new nurse, who became in time her “Dowie.”
It was Dowson who made it clear to Lord Coombe, at length, that Robin had reached the age when she needed a governess, and it was he who said to Feather a few days later:
“A governess will come here to-morrow at eleven o’clock. She is a Mademoiselle Vallé. She is accustomed to the education of young children. She will present herself for your approval.”
“What on earth can it matter?” Feather cried.
“It does not matter to you,” he answered. “It chances for the time being to matter to me.”
Mademoiselle Vallé was an intelligent, mature French woman, with a peculiar power to grasp an intricate situation. She learned to love the child she taught—a child so strangely alone. As time went on she came to know that Robin was to receive every educational advantage, every instruction. In his impersonal, aloof way Coombe was fixed in his intention to provide her with life’s defences. As she grew, graceful as a willow wand, into a girlhood startlingly lovely, she learned modern languages, learned to dance divinely.
And all the while he was deeply conscious that her infant hatred had not lessened—that he could show her no reason why it should.
There were black hours when she was in deadly peril from a human beast, mad with her beauty. Coombe had almost miraculously saved her, but her detestation of him still held.
Her one thought—her one hope—was to learn—learn, so that she might make her own living. Mademoiselle Vallé supported her in this, and Coombe understood.
In one of the older London squares there was a house upon the broad doorsteps of which Lord Coombe stood oftener than upon any other. The old Dowager Duchess of Darte, having surrounded herself with almost royal dignity, occupied that house in an enforced seclusion. She was a confirmed rheumatic invalid, but her soul was as strong as it was many years before, when she had given its support to Coombe in his unbearable hours. She had poured out her strength in silence, and in silence he had received it. She saved him from slipping over the verge of madness.
But there came a day when he spoke to her of this—of the one woman he had loved, Princess Alixe of X—:
“There was never a human thing so transparently pure, and she was the possession of a brute incarnate. She shook with terror before him. He killed her.”
“I believe he did,” she said, unsteadily. “He was not received here at Court afterward.”
“He killed her. But she would have died of horror if he had not struck her a blow. I saw that. I was in attendance on him at Windsor.”
“When I first knew you,” the Duchess said gravely.
“There was a night—I was young—young—when I found myself face to face with her in the stillness of the wood. I went quite mad for a time. I threw myself face downward on the earth and sobbed. She knelt and prayed for her own soul as well as mine. I kissed the hem of her dress and left her standing—alone.”
After a silence he added:
“It was the next night that I heard her shrieks. Then she died.”
The Duchess knew what else had died: the high adventure of youth and joy of life in him.
On a table beside her winged chair were photographs of two women, who, while obviously belonging to periods of some twenty years apart, were in face and form so singularly alike that they might have been the same person. One was the Princess Alixe of X— and the other—Feather.
“The devil of chance,” Coombe said, “sometimes chooses to play tricks. Such a trick was played on me.”
It was the photograph of Feather he took up and set a strange questioning gaze upon.
“When I saw this,” he said, “this—exquisitely smiling at me in a sunny garden—the tomb opened under my feet and I stood on the brink of it—twenty-five again.”
He made clear to her certain facts which most persons would have ironically disbelieved. He ended with the story of Robin.
“I am determined,” he explained, “ to stand between the child and what would be inevitable. Her frenzy of desire to support herself arises from her loathing of the position of accepting support from me. I sympathise with her entirely.”
“Mademoiselle Vallé is an intelligent woman,” the Duchess said. “Send her to me; I shall talk to her. Then she can bring the child.”
And so it was arranged that Robin should be taken into the house in the old fashioned square to do for the Duchess what a young relative might have done. And, a competent person being needed to take charge of the linen, “Dowie” would go to live under the same roof.
Feather’s final thrust in parting with her daughter was:
“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 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!”
The Duchess came to understand that Robin held it deep in her mind that she was a sort of young outcast.
“If she consorted,” she thought, “with other young things and shared their pleasures she would forget it.”
She talked the matter over with her daughter, Lady Lothwell.
“I am not launching a girl in society,” she said, “ I only want to help her to know a few nice young people. I shall begin with your children. They are mine if I am only a grandmother. A small dinner and a small dance—and George
and Kathryn may be the beginning of an interesting experiment.”
The Duchess was rarely mistaken. The experiment was interesting. For George—Lord Halwyn—it held a certain element of disaster. It was he who danced with Robin first. He had heard of the girl who was a sort of sublimated companion to his grandmother. He had encountered companions before. This one, as she flew like a blown leaf across the floor and laughed up into his face with wide eyes produced a new effect and was a new kind.
He led her to the conservatory. He was extremely young and his fleeting emotions had never known a tight rein. An intoxicating hot-house perfume filled his nostrils. Suddenly he let himself go and was kissing the warm velvet of her slim little neck.
“You—you—you’ve spoiled everything in the world!” she cried. “Now”—with a desolate, horrible little sob—“now I can only go back—back.” She spoke as if she were Cinderella and he had made the clock strike twelve. Her voice had absolute grief in it.
“I say,”—he was contrite—“don’t speak like that. I beg pardon. I’ll grovel. Don’t— Oh, Kathryn! Come here!”
This last because his sister had suddenly appeared.
Kathryn bore Robin away. Boys like George didn’t really matter, she pointed out, though of course it was bad manners. She had been kissed herself, it seemed. As they walked between banked flowers she added:
“By the way, somebody important has been assassinated in one of the Balkan countries. Lord Coombe has just come in and is talking it over with grandmamma.”
As they neared the entrance to the ballroom she paused with a new kind of impish smile.
“The very best looking boy in all England,” she said, “ is dancing with Sara Studleigh. He dropped in by chance to call and grandmamma made him stay. His name is Donal Muir. He is Lord Coombe’s heir. Here he comes. Look!”
He was now scarcely two yards away. Almost as if he had been called he turned his eyes toward Robin and straight into hers they laughed—straight into hers.
The incident of their meeting was faultlessly correct; also, when Lady Lothwell appeared, she presented him to Robin as if the brief ceremony were one of the most ordinary in existence.
They danced for a time without a word. She wondered if he could not feel the beating of her heart.
“That—is a beautiful waltz,” he said at last, as if it were a sort of emotional confidence.
“Yes,” she answered. Only, “Yes.”
Once round the great ballroom, twice, and he gave a little laugh and spoke again.
“I am going to ask you a question. May I?”
“Yes.”
“Is your name Robin?”
“Yes.” She could scarcely breathe it.
“I thought it was. I hoped it was—after I first began to suspect. I hoped it was.”
“It is—it is.”
“Did we once play together in a garden?”
“Yes—yes.”
Back swept the years, and the wonderful happiness began again.
In the shining ballroom the music rose and fell and swelled again into ecstasy as he held her white young lightness in his arm and they swayed and darted and swooped like things of the air—while the old Duchess and Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and talked in murmurs of Sarajevo.
Chapter 1
It was a soft starlit night mystically changing into dawn when Donal Muir left the tall, grave house on Eaton Square after the strangely enchanted dance given by the old Dowager Duchess of Darte. A certain impellingness of mood suggested that exercise would be a good thing and he decided to walk home. It was an impellingness of body as well as mind. He had remained later than the relative who had by chance been responsible for his being brought, an uninvited guest, to the party. The Duchess had not known that he was in London. It may also be accepted as a fact that to this festivity given for the pleasure of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless’ daughter, she might not have chosen to assume the responsibility of extending him an invitation. She knew something of his mother and had sometimes discussed her with her old friend, Lord Coombe. She admired Helen Muir greatly and was also much touched by certain aspects of her maternity. What Lord Coombe had told her of the meeting of the two children in the Gardens, of their innocent child passion of attraction for each other, and of the unchildlike tragedy their enforced parting had obviously been to both had at once deeply interested and moved her. Coombe had only been able to relate certain surface incidents connected with the matter, but they had been incidents not easy to forget and from which unusual things might be deduced. No! She would not have felt prepared to be the first to deliberately throw these two young people across each other’s paths at this glowing moment of their early blooming—knowing as she did Helen Muir’s strongly anxious desire to keep them apart.
She had seen Donal Muir several times as the years had passed and had not been blind to the physical beauty and allure of charm the rest of the world saw and proclaimed with suitable adjectives. When the intimate friend who was his relative appeared with him in her drawing-room and she found standing before her, respectfully appealing for welcome with a delightful smile, this quite incomparably good-looking young man, she was conscious of a secret momentary disturbance and a recognition of the fact that something a shade startling had happened.
“When a thing of the sort occurs entirely without one’s aid and rather against one’s will—one may as well submit,” she said later to Lord Coombe. “Endeavouring to readjust matters is merely meddling with Fate and always ends in disaster. As an incident, I felt there was a hint in it that it would be the part of wisdom to leave things alone.”
She had watched the two dancing with a kind of absorption in her gaze. She had seen them go out of the room into the conservatory. She had known exactly when they had returned and, seeing the look on their young faces, had understood why the eyes of the beholders followed them.
When Lord Coombe came in with the ominous story of the assassination at Sarajevo, all else had been swept from her mind. There had been place in her being for nothing but the shock of a monstrous recognition. She had been a gravely conscious looker-on at the slow but never ceasing growth of a world peril for too many years not to be widely awake to each sign of its development.
“Servia, Russia, Austria, Germany. It will form a pretext and a clear road to France and England,” Lord Coombe had said.
“A broad, clear road,” the Duchess had agreed breathlessly—and, while she gazed before her, ceased to see the whirl of floating and fluttering butterfly-wings of gauze or to hear the music to whose measure they fluttered and floated.
But no sense of any connection with Sarajevo disturbed the swing of the fox trot or the measure of the tango, and when Donal Muir walked out into the summer air of the starlit street and lifted his face, because already a faint touch of primrose dawn was showing itself on the eastern sky, in his young world there was only recognition of a vague tumult of heart and brain and blood.
“What’s the matter?” he was thinking. “What have I been doing—What have I been saying? I’ve been like a chap in a dream. I’m not awake yet.”
All that he had said to the girl was a simple fact. He had exaggerated nothing. If, in what now seemed that long-ago past, he had not been a sturdy, normal little lad surrounded by love and friendliness, with his days full of healthy play and pleasure, the child tragedy of their being torn apart might have left ugly marks upon his mind, and lurked there, a morbid memory. And though, in time, rebellion and suffering had died away, he had never really forgotten. Even to the cricket-playing, larking boy at Eton there had now and then returned, with queer suddenness, recollections which gave him odd moments of resurrected misery. They passed away, but at long intervals they came back and always with absolute reality. At Oxford the intervals had been longer but a certain picture was one whose haunting never lost its clearness. It was a vision of a colour-warm child kneeling on the grass, her eyes uplifted, expressing only a lonely patience, and he could actually hear her humble
little voice as she said:
“I—I haven’t anything.” And it always roused him to rage.
Then there was the piteous break in her voice when she hid her eyes with her arm and said of her beast of a mother:
“She—doesn’t like me!”
“Damn! Damn!” he used to say every time the thing came back. “Oh! damn!—damn!” And the expletive never varied in its spontaneity.
As he walked under the primrose sky and breathed in the faint fragrant stir of the freshening morning air, he who had always felt joyously the sense of life knew more than ever before the keen rapture of living. The springing lightness of his own step as it rang on the pavement was part of it. It was as though he were still dancing and he almost felt something warm and light in his arm and saw a little head of dark silk near his breast.
Throughout his life he had taken all his joys to his closest companion and nearest intimate—his mother. Theirs had not been a common life together. He had not even tried to explain to himself the harmony and gaiety of their nearness in which there seemed no separation of years. She had drawn and held him to the wonder of her charm and had been the fine flavour of his existence. It was actually true that he had so far had no boyish love affairs because he had all unconsciously been in love with the beautiful completeness of her.
Always when he returned home after festivities, he paused for a moment outside her bedroom door because he so often found her awake and waiting to talk to him if he were inclined to talk—to listen—to laugh softly—or perhaps only to say good-night in her marvel of a voice—a marvel because its mellow note held such love.
This time when, after entering the house and mounting the stairs he reached her door, he found it partly open.
“Come in,” he heard her say. “I went to sleep very early and awakened half an hour ago. It is really morning.”