“Her life is unusual. She herself is unusual in a most dignified and beautiful way. You will, it might almost be said, hold the position of a young lady in waiting,” was Mademoiselle’s gracefully put explanation.
When, after they had been ushered into the room where her grace sat in her beautiful and mellow corner by the fire, Robin advanced towards the highbacked chair, what the old woman was chiefly conscious of was the eyes which seemed all lustrous iris. There was uncommon appeal and fear in them. The blackness of their setting of up-curled lashes made them look babyishly wide.
“Mademoiselle Valle has told me of your wish to take a position as companion,” the Duchess said after they were seated.
“I want very much,” said Robin, “to support myself and Mademoiselle thinks that I might fill such a place if I am not considered too young.”
“You are not too young—for me. I want something young to come and befriend me. Am I too old for you?” Her smile had been celebrated fifty years earlier and it had not changed. A smile does not. She was not like Lord Coombe in any degree however remote. She did not belong to his world, Robin thought.
“If I can do well enough the things you require done,” she answered blushing her Jacqueminot rose blush, “I shall be grateful if you will let me try to do them. Mademoiselle will tell you that I have no experience, but that I am one who tries well.”
“Mademoiselle has answered all my questions concerning your qualifications so satisfactorily that I need ask you very few.”
Such questions as she asked were not of the order Robin had expected. She led her into talk and drew Mademoiselle Valle into the conversation. It was talk which included personal views of books, old gardens and old houses, people, pictures and even—lightly—politics. Robin found herself quite incidentally, as it were, reading aloud to her an Italian poem. She ceased to be afraid and was at ease. She forgot Lord Coombe. The Duchess listening and watching her warmed to her task of delicate investigation and saw reason for anticipating agreeably stimulating things. She was not taking upon herself a merely benevolent duty which might assume weight and become a fatigue. In fact she might trust Coombe for that. After all it was he who had virtually educated the child—little as she was aware of the singular fact. It was he who had dragged her forth from her dog kennel of a top floor nursery and quaintly incongruous as it seemed, had found her a respectable woman for a nurse and an intelligent person for a governess and companion as if he had been a domesticated middle class widower with a little girl to play mother to. She saw in the situation more than others would have seen in it, but she saw also the ironic humour of it. Coombe—with the renowned cut of his overcoat—the perfection of his line and scarcely to be divined suggestions of hue—Coombe!
She did not avoid all mention of his name during the interview, but she spoke of him only casually, and though the salary she offered was an excellent one, it was not inordinate. Robin could not feel that she was not being accepted as of the class of young persons who support themselves self-respectingly, though even the most modest earned income would have represented wealth to her ignorance.
Before they parted she had obtained the position so pleasantly described by Mademoiselle Valle as being something like that of a young lady in waiting. “But I am really a companion and I will do everything—everything I can so that I shall be worth keeping,” she thought seriously. She felt that she should want to be kept. If Lord Coombe was a friend of her employer’s it was because the Duchess did not know what others knew. And her house was not his house—and the hideous thing she had secretly loathed would be at an end. She would be supporting herself as decently and honestly as Mademoiselle or Dowie had supported themselves all their lives.
With an air of incidentally recalling a fact, the Duchess said after they had risen to leave her:
“Mademoiselle Valle tells me you have an elderly nurse you are very fond of. She seems to belong to a class of servants almost extinct.”
“I love her,” Robin faltered—because the sudden reminder brought back a pang to her. There was a look in her eyes which faltered also. “She loves me. I don’t know how—” but there she stopped.
“Such women are very valuable to those who know the meaning of their type. I myself am always in search of it. My dear Miss Brent was of it, though of a different class.”
“But most people do not know,” said Robin. “It seems old-fashioned to them—and it’s beautiful! Dowie is an angel.”
“I should like to secure your Dowie for my housekeeper and myself,”—one of the greatest powers of the celebrated smile was its power to convince. “A competent person is needed to take charge of the linen. If we can secure an angel we shall be fortunate.”
A day or so later she said to Coombe in describing the visit.
“The child’s face is wonderful. If you could but have seen her eyes when I said it. It is not the mere beauty of size and shape and colour which affect one. It is something else. She is a little flame of feeling.”
The “something else” was in the sound of her voice as she answered.
“She will be in the same house with me! Sometimes perhaps I may see her and talk to her! Oh! how grateful I am!” She might even see and talk to her as often as she wished, it revealed itself and when she and Mademoiselle got into their hansom cab to drive away, she caught at the Frenchwoman’s hand and clung to it, her eyelashes wet.
“It is as if there must be Goodness which takes care of one,” she said. “I used to believe in it so—until I was afraid of all the world. Dowie means most of all. I did now know how I could bear to let her go away. And since her husband and her daughter died, she has no one but me. I should have had no one but her if you had gone back to Belgium, Mademoiselle. And now she will be safe in the same house with me. Perhaps the Duchess will keep her until she dies. I hope she will keep me until I die. I will be as good and faithful as Dowie and perhaps the Duchess will live until I am quite old—and not pretty any more. And I will make economies as you have made them, Mademoiselle, and save all my salary—and I might be able to end my days in a little cottage in the country.”
Mademoiselle was conscious of an actual physical drag at her heartstrings. The pulsating glow of her young loveliness had never been more moving and oh! the sublime certainty of her unconsciousness that Life lay between this hour and that day when she was “quite old and not pretty any more” and having made economies could die in a little cottage in the country! She believed in her vision as she had believed that Donal would come to her in the garden.
Upon Feather the revelation that her daughter had elected to join the ranks of girls who were mysteriously determined to be responsible for themselves produced a curious combination of effects. It was presented to her by Lord Coombe in the form of a simple impersonal statement which had its air of needing no explanation. She heard it with eyes widening a little and a smile slowly growing. Having heard, she broke into a laugh, a rather high-pitched treble laugh.
“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 duchess. She’s one without a flaw—the Dowager Duchess 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 Duchess 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 duchesses
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 duchess. 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 Duchess 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 27
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 because 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 assuredly 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 duchess 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 passionate 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 Duchess’ 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 Duchess 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. “ 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 wh
en 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 passed. 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.