The Head of the House of Coombe

  She felt much less helpless and when she was ready for bed she took a little more cognac. The flush had faded from her eye-lids and bloomed in delicious rose on her cheeks. As she crept between the cool sheets and nestled down on her pillow she had a delightful sense of increasing comfort—comfort. What a beautiful thing it was to go to sleep!

  And then she was disturbed—started out of the divine doze stealing upon her—by a shrill prolonged wailing shriek!

  It came from the Night Nursery and at the moment it seemed almost worse than anything which had occurred all through the day. It brought everything back so hideously. She had of course forgotten Robin again—and it was Robin! And Louisa had gone away with Edward. She had perhaps put the child to sleep discreetly before she went. And now she had wakened and was screaming. Feather had heard that she was a child with a temper but by fair means or foul Louisa had somehow managed to prevent her from being a nuisance.

  The shrieks shocked her into sitting upright in bed. Their shrillness tearing through the utter soundlessness of the empty house brought back all her terrors and set her heart beating at a gallop.

  “I—I won’t!” she protested, fairly with chattering teeth. “ I won’t! I won’t!”

  She had never done anything for the child since its birth, she did not know how to do anything, she had not wanted to know. To reach her now she would be obliged to go out in the dark—the gas-jet she would have to light was actually close to the outer door of Robert’s bedroom—the room! If she did not die of panic while she was trying to light it she would have to make her way almost in the dark up the steep crooked little staircase which led to the nurseries. And the awful little creature’s screams would be going on all the time making the blackness and dead silence of the house below more filled with horror by contrast—more shut off and at the same time more likely to waken to some horror which was new.

  “I—I couldn’t—even if I wanted to!” she quaked. “I daren’t! I daren’t! I wouldn’t do it—for a million pounds!” And she flung herself down again shuddering and burrowing her head under the coverings and pillows she dragged over her ears to shut out the sounds.

  The screams had taken on a more determined note and a fiercer shrillness which the still house heard well and made the most of, but they were so far deadened for Feather that she began beneath her soft barrier to protest pantingly.

  “I shouldn’t know what to do if I went. If no one goes near her she’ll cry herself to sleep. It’s—it’s only temper. Oh-h! what a horrible wail! It—it sounds like a—a lost soul!”

  But she did not stir from the bed. She burrowed deeper under the bed clothes and held the pillow closer to her ears.

  It did sound like a lost soul at times. What panic possesses a baby who cries in the darkness alone no one will ever know and one may perhaps give thanks to whatever gods there be that the baby itself does not remember. What awful woe of sudden unprotectedness when life exists only through protection—what piteous panic in the midst of black unmercifulness, inarticulate sound howsoever wildly shrill can neither explain nor express.

  Robin knew only Louisa, warmth, food, sleep and waking. Or if she knew more she was not yet aware that she did. She had reached the age when she generally slept through the night. She might not have disturbed her mother until daylight but Louisa had with forethought given her an infant sleeping potion. It had disagreed with and awakened her. She was uncomfortable and darkness enveloped her. A cry or so and Louisa would ordinarily have come to her sleepy, and rather out of temper, but knowing what to do. In this strange night the normal cry of warning and demand produced no result.

  No one came. The discomfort continued—the blackness remained black. The cries became shrieks—but nothing followed; the shrieks developed into prolonged screams. No Louisa, no light, no milk. The blackness drew in closer and became a thing to be fought with wild little beating hands. Not a glimmer—not a rustle—not a sound! Then came the cries of the lost soul—alone—alone—in a black world of space in which there was not even another lost soul. And then the panics of which there have been no records and never will be, because if the panic stricken does not die in mysterious convulsions he or she grows away from the memory of a formless past—except that perhaps unexplained nightmares from which one wakens quaking, with cold sweat, may vaguely repeat the long hidden thing.

  What the child Robin knew in the dark perhaps the silent house which echoed her might curiously have known. But the shrieks wore themselves out at last and sobs came—awful little sobs shuddering through the tiny breast and shaking the baby body. A baby’s sobs are unspeakable things—incredible things. Slower and slower Robin’s came—with small deep gasps and chokings between—and when an uninfantile druglike sleep came, the bitter, hopeless, beaten little sobs went on.

  But Feather’s head was still burrowed under the soft protection of the pillow.

  Chapter 5

  The morning was a brighter one than London usually indulges in and the sun made its way into Feather’s bedroom to the revealing of its coral pink glow and comfort. She had always liked her bedroom and had usually wakened in it to the sense of luxuriousness it is possible a pet cat feels when it wakens to stretch itself on a cushion with its saucer of cream awaiting it.

  But she did not awaken either to a sense of brightness or luxury this morning. She had slept it was true, but once or twice when the pillow had slipped aside she had found herself disturbed by the far-off sound of the wailing of some little animal which had caused her automatically and really scarcely consciously to replace the pillow. It had only happened at long intervals because it is Nature that an exhausted baby falls asleep when it is worn out. Robin had probably slept almost as much as her mother.

  Feather staring at the pinkness around her reached at last, with the assistance of a certain physical consciousness, a sort of spiritless intention.

  “She’s asleep now,” she murmured. “I hope she won’t waken for a long time. I feel faint. I shall have to find something to eat—if it’s only biscuits.” Then she lay and tried to remember what Cook had said about her not starving. “She said there were a few things left in the pantry and closets. Perhaps there’s some condensed milk. How do you mix it up? If she cries I might go and give her some. It wouldn’t be so awful now it’s daylight.”

  She felt shaky when she got out of bed and stood on her feet. She had not had a maid in her girlhood so she could dress herself, much as she detested to do it. After she had begun however she could not help becoming rather interested because the dress she had worn the day before had become crushed and she put on a fresh one she had not worn at all. It was thin and soft also, and black was quite startlingly becoming to her. She would wear this one when Lord Coombe came, after she wrote to him. It was silly of her not to have written before though she knew he had left town after the funeral. Letters would be forwarded.

  “It will be quite bright in the dining-room now,” she said to encourage herself. “And Tonson once said that the only places the sun came into below stairs were the pantry and kitchen and it only stayed about an hour early in the morning. I must get there as soon as I can.”

  When she had so dressed herself that the reflection the mirror gave back to her was of the nature of a slight physical stimulant she opened her bedroom door and faced exploration of the deserted house below with a quaking sense of the proportions of the inevitable. She got down the narrow stairs casting a frightened glance at the emptiness of the drawing-rooms which seemed to stare at her as she passed them. There was sun in the dining-room and when she opened the sideboard she found some wine in decanters and some biscuits and even a few nuts and some raisins and oranges. She put them on the table and sat down and ate some of them and began to feel a little less shaky.

  If she had been allowed time to sit longer and digest and reflect she might have reached the point of deciding on what she would write to Lord Coombe. She had not the pen of a ready writer and it must be thought over. But just when she
was beginning to be conscious of the pleasant warmth of the sun which shone on her shoulders from the window, she was almost startled our of her chair by hearing again stealing down the staircase from the upper regions that faint wail like a little cat’s.

  “Just the moment—the very moment I begin to feel a little quieted—and try to think—she begins again!” she cried out. “It’s worse then anything!”

  Large crystal tears ran down her face and upon the polished table.

  “I suppose she would starve to death if I didn’t give her some food—and then I should be blamed! People would be horrid about it. I’ve got nothing to eat myself.”

  She must at any rate manage to stop the crying before she could write to Coombe. She would be obliged to go down into the pantry and look for some condensed milk. The creature had no teeth but perhaps she could mumble a biscuit or a few raisins. If she could be made to swallow a little port wine it might make her sleepy. The sun was paying its brief morning visit to the kitchen and pantry when she reached there, but a few cockroaches scuttled away before her and made her utter a hysterical little scream. But there was some condensed milk and there was a little warm water in a kettle because the fire was not quite out. She imperfectly mixed a decoction and filled a bottle which ought not to have been downstairs but had been brought and left there by Louisa as a result of tender moments with Edward.

  When she put the bottle and some biscuits and scraps of cold ham on a tray because she could not carry them all in her hands, her sense of outrage and despair made her almost sob.

  “I am just like a servant—carrying trays upstairs,” she wept. “I—I might be Edward—or—or Louisa.” And her woe increased when she added in the dining-room the port wine and nuts and raisins and macaroons as viands which might somehow add to infant diet and induce sleep. She was not sure of course—but she knew they sucked things and liked sweets.

  A baby left unattended to scream itself to sleep and awakening to scream itself to sleep again, does not present to a resentful observer the flowerlike bloom and beauty of infancy. When Feather carried her tray into the Night Nursery and found herself confronting the disordered crib on which her offspring lay she felt the child horrible to look at. Its face was disfigured and its eyes almost closed. She trembled all over as she put the bottle to its mouth and saw the fiercely hungry clutch of its hands. It was old enough to clutch, and clutch it did, and suck furiously and starvingly—even though actually forced to stop once or twice at first to give vent to a thwarted remnant of a scream.

  Feather had only seen it as downy whiteness and perfume in Louisa’s arms or in its carriage. It had been a singularly vivid and brilliant-eyed baby at whom people looked as they passed.

  “Who will give her a bath?” wailed Feather. “Who will change her clothes? Someone must! Could a woman by the day do it? Cook said I could get a woman by the day.”

  And then she remembered that one got servants from agencies. And where were the agencies? And even a woman “by the day” would demand wages and food to eat.

  And then the front door bell rang.

  What could she do—what could she do? Go downstairs and open the door herself and let everyone know! Let the ringer go on ringing until he was tired and went away? She was indeed hard driven, even though the wail had ceased as Robin clutched her bottle to her breast and fed with frenzy. Let them go away—let them! And then came the wild thought that it might be Something—the Something which must happen when things were at their worst! And if it had come and the house seemed to be empty! She did not walk down the stairs, she ran. Her heart beat until she reached the door out of breath and when she opened it stood their panting.

  The people who waited upon the steps were strangers. They were very nice looking and quite young—a man and a woman very perfectly dressed. The man took a piece of paper out of his pocketbook and handed it to her with an agreeable apologetic courtesy.

  “I hope we have not called early enough to disturb you,” he said. “We waited until eleven but we are obliged to catch a train at half past. It is an ‘order to view’ from Carson & Bayle.” He added this because Feather was staring at the paper.

  Carson & Bayle were the agents they had rented the house from. It was Carson & Bayle’s collector Robert had met on the threshold and sworn at two days before he had been taken ill. They were letting the house over her head and she would be turned out into the street?

  The young man and woman finding themselves gazing at this exquisitely pretty creature in exquisite mourning, felt themselves appallingly embarrassed. She was plainly the widow Carson had spoken of. But why did she open the door herself? And why did she look as if she did not understand? Indignation against Carson & Bayle began to stir the young man.

  “Beg pardon! So sorry! I am afraid we ought not to have come,” he protested. “Agents ought to know better. They said you were giving up the house at once and we were afraid someone might take it.”

  Feather held the “order to view” in her hand and stared at them quite helplessly.

  “There—are no—no servants to show it to you,” she said. “ If you could wait—a few days—perhaps—”

  She was so lovely and Madame Helene’s filmy black creation was in itself such an appeal, that the amiable young strangers gave up at once.

  “Oh, certainly—certainly! Do excuse us! Carson and Bayle ought not to have—! We are so sorry. Good morning, good morning,” they gave forth in discomfited sympathy and politeness, and really quite scurried away.

  Having shut the door on their retreat Feather stood shivering.

  “I am going to be turned out of the house! I shall have to live in the street!” she thought. “Where shall I keep my clothes if I live in the street!”

  Even she knew that she was thinking idiotically. Of course if everything was taken from you and sold, you would have no clothes at all, and wardrobes and drawers and closets would not matter. The realization that scarcely anything in the house had been paid for came home to her with a ghastly shock. She staggered upstairs to the first drawing-room in which there was a silly pretty little buhl writing table.

  She felt even more senseless when she sank into a chair before it and drew a sheet of note-paper towards her. Her thoughts would not connect themselves with each other and she could not imagine what she ought to say in her letter to Coombe. In fact she seemed to have no thoughts at all. She could only remember the things which had happened, and she actually found she could write nothing else. There seemed nothing else in the world.

  “Dear Lord Coombe,” trailed tremulously over the page—“The house is quite empty. The servants have gone away. I have no money. And there is not any food. And I am going to be turned out into the street—and the baby is crying because it is hungry.”

  She stopped there, knowing it was not what she ought to say. And as she stopped and looked at the words she began herself to wail somewhat as Robin had wailed in the dark when she would not listen or go to her. It was like a beggar’s letter—a beggar’s! Telling him that she had no money and no food—and would be turned out for unpaid rent. And that the baby was crying because it was starving!

  “It’s a beggar’s letter—just a beggar’s,” she cried out aloud to the empty room. “And it’s tru-ue!” Robin’s wail itself had not been more hopeless than hers was as she dropped her head and let it lie on the buhl table.

  She was not however even to be allowed to let it lie there, for the next instant there fell on her startled ear quite echoing through the house another ring at the doorbell and two steely raps on the smart brass knocker. It was merely because she did not know what else to do, having just lost her wits entirely that she got up and trailed down the staircase again.

  When she opened the door, Lord Coombe—the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form and perfect appointment as also of perfect expression—was standing on the threshold.

  Chapter 6

  If he had meant to speak he changed his mind after his first sight of her.
He merely came in and closed the door behind him. Curious experiences with which life had provided him had added finish to an innate aptness of observation, and a fine readiness in action.

  If she had been of another type he would have saved both her and himself a scene and steered ably through the difficulties of the situation towards a point where they could have met upon a normal plane. A very pretty woman with whose affairs one has nothing whatever to do, and whose pretty home has been the perfection of modern smartness of custom, suddenly opening her front door in the unexplained absence of a footman and confronting a visitor, plainly upon the verge of hysteria, suggests the necessity of promptness.

  But Feather gave him not a breath’s space. She was in fact not merely on the verge of her hysteria. She had gone farther. And here he was. Oh, here he was! She fell down upon her knees and actually clasped his immaculateness.

  “Oh, Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe!” She said it three times because he presented to her but the one idea.

  He did not drag himself away from her embrace but he distinctly removed himself from it.

  “You must not fall upon your knees, Mrs. Lawless,” he said. “Shall we go into the drawing-room?”

  “I—was writing to you. I am starving—but it seemed too silly when I wrote it. And it’s true!” Her broken words were as senseless in their sound as she had thought them when she saw them written.

  “Will you come up into the drawing-room and tell me exactly what you mean,” he said and he made her release him and stand upon her feet.