Coombe merely stood and explained himself.
“I quite understand,” he said. “You are entirely within your rights. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless is, naturally, not able to attend to business. For the present—as a friend of her late husband’s—I will arrange matters for her. I am Lord Coombe. She does not wish to give up the house. Don’t send any more possible tenants. Call at Coombe House in an hour and I will give you a cheque.”
There were a few awkward apologetic moments and then the front door opened and shut, the hansom jingled away and Coombe returned to the drawing-room. Robin was still shrieking.
“She wants some more condensed milk,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. Go and give her some. I know an elderly woman who understands children. She was a nurse some years ago. I will send her here at once. Kindly give me the account books. My housekeeper will send you some servants. The trades-people will come for orders.”
Feather was staring at him.
“W-will they?” she stammered. “ W-will everything—?”
“Yes—everything,” he answered. “Don’t be frightened. Go upstairs and try to stop her. I must go now. I never heard a creature yell with such fury.”
She turned away and went towards the second flight of stairs with a rather dazed air. She had passed through a rather tremendous crisis and she was dazed. He made her feel so. She had never understood him for a moment and she did not understand him now—but then she never did understand people and the whole situation was a new one to her. If she had not been driven to the wall she would have been quite as respectable as she knew how to be.
Coombe called a hansom and drove home, thinking of many things and looking even more than usually detached. He had remarked the facial expression of the short and stout man as he had got into his cab and he was turning over mentally his own exact knowledge of the views the business mind would have held and what the business countenance would have decently covered if he—Coombe—had explained in detail that he was so far—in this particular case—an entirely blameless character.
Chapter 7
The slice of a house from that time forward presented the external aspect to which the inhabitants of the narrow and fashionable street and those who passed through it had been accustomed. Such individuals as had anticipated beholding at some early day notices conspicuously placed announcing “Sale by Auction. Elegant Modern Furniture” were vaguely puzzled as well as surprised by the fact that no such notices appeared even inconspicuously. Also there did not draw up before the door—even as the weeks went on—huge and heavy removal vans with their resultant litter, their final note of farewell a “To Let” in the front windows.
On the contrary, the florist came and refilled the window boxes with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers; new and even more correct servants were to be seen ascending and descending the area step; a young footman quite as smart as the departed Edward opened the front door and attended Mrs. Gareth-Lawless to her perfect little brougham. The trades-people appeared promptly every day and were obsequiously respectful in manner. Evidently the household had not disintegrated as a result of the death of Mr. Gareth-Lawless.
As it became an established fact that the household had not fallen to pieces its frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing indeed the air of people who had never really remained away from it. There had been natural reasons enough for considerate absence from a house of bereavement and a desolate widow upon whose grief it would have been indelicate to intrude. As Feather herself had realized, the circle of her intimates was not formed of those who could readily adjust themselves to entirely changed circumstances. If you dance on a tight rope and the rope is unexpectedly withdrawn, where are you? You cannot continue dancing until the rope is restrung.
The rope, however, being apparently made absolutely secure, it was not long before the dancing began again. Feather’s mourning, wonderfully shading itself from month to month, was the joy of all beholders. Madame Helene treated her as a star gleaming through gradually dispersing clouds. Her circle watched her with secretly humorous interest as each fine veil of dimness was withdrawn.
“The things she wears are priceless,” was said amiably in her own drawing-room. “ Where does she get them? Figure to yourself Lawdor paying the bills.”
“She gets them from Helene,” said a long thin young man with a rather good-looking narrow face and dark eyes, peering through pince nez, “But I couldn’t.”
In places where entertainment as a means of existence proceed so to speak, fast and furiously, questions of taste are not dwelt upon at leisure. You need not hesitate before saying anything you liked in any one’s drawing-room so long as it was amusing enough to make somebody—if not everybody—laugh. Feather had made people laugh in the same fashion in the past. The persons she most admired were always making sly little impudent comments and suggestions, and the thwarted years on the island of Jersey had, in her case, resulted in an almost hectic desire to keep pace. Her efforts had usually been successes because Nature’s self had provided her with the manner of a silly pretty child who did not know how far she went. Shouts of laughter had often greeted her, and the first time she had for a moment doubted her prowess was on an occasion when she had caught a glimpse of Coombe who stared at her with an expression which she would—just for one second—have felt might be horror, if she had not been so sure it couldn’t be, and must of course be something else—one of the things nobody ever understood in him.
By the time the softly swathing veils of vaporous darkness were withdrawn, and the tight rope assuring everyone of its permanent security became a trusted support, Feather at her crowded little parties and at other people’s bigger ones did not remain wholly unaware of the probability that even people who rather liked her made, among themselves, more or less witty comments upon her improved fortunes. They were improved greatly. Bills were paid, trades-people were polite, servants were respectful; she had no need to invent excuses and lies. She and Robert had always kept out of the way of stodgy, critical people, so they had been intimate with none of the punctilious who might have withdrawn themselves from a condition of things they chose to disapprove: accordingly, she found no gaps in her circle. Those who had formed the habit of amusing themselves at her house were as ready as before to amuse themselves again.
The fact remained, however,—curiously, perhaps, in connection with the usual slightness of all impressions made on her—that there was a memory which never wholly left her. Even when she tried to force it so far into the background of her existence that it might almost be counted as forgotten, it had a trick of rising before her. It was the memory of the empty house as its emptiness had struck to the centre of her being when she had turned from her bedroom window after watching the servants drive away in their cabs. It was also the memory of the hours which had followed—the night in which nobody had been in any of the rooms—no one had gone up or down the stairs—when all had seemed dark and hollow—except the Night Nursery where Robin screamed, and her own room where she herself cowered under the bed clothes and pulled the pillow over her head. But though the picture would not let itself be blotted out, its effect was rather to intensify her sense of relief because she had slipped so safely from under the wheels of destiny.
“Sometimes,” she revealed artlessly to Coombe, “while I am driving in the park on a fine afternoon when every one is out and the dresses look like the flower beds, I let myself remember it just to make myself enjoy everything more by contrast.”
The elderly woman who had been a nurse in her youth and who had been sent by Lord Coombe temporarily to replace Louisa had not remained long in charge of Robin. She was not young and smart enough for a house on the right side of the right street, and Feather found a young person who looked exactly as she should when she pushed the child’s carriage before her around the square.
The square—out of which the right street branches—and the “Gardens” in the middle of the square to which only privileged persons were admitted b
y private key, the basement kitchen and Servants’ Hall, and the two top floor nurseries represented the world to the child Robin for some years. When she was old enough to walk in the street she was led by the hand over the ground she had travelled daily in her baby carriage. Her first memory of things was a memory of standing on the gravel path in the Square Gardens and watching some sparrows quarrel while Andrews, her nurse, sat on a bench with another nurse and talked in low tones. They were talking in a way Robin always connected with servants and which she naturally accepted as being the method of expression of their species—much as she accepted the mewing of cats and the barking of dogs. As she grew older, she reached the stage of knowing that they were generally saying things they did not wish her to hear.
She liked watching the sparrows in the Gardens because she liked watching sparrows at all times. They were the only friends she had ever known, though she was not old enough to call them friends, or to know what friends meant. Andrews had taught her, by means of a system of her own, to know better than to cry or to make any protesting noise when she was left alone in her ugly small nursery. Andrews’ idea of her duties did not involve boring herself to death by sitting in a room on the top floor when livelier entertainment awaited her in the basement where the cook was a woman of wide experience, the housemaid a young person who had lived in gay country houses, and the footman at once a young man of spirit and humour. So Robin spent many hours of the day—taking them altogether—quite by herself. She might have more potently resented her isolations if she had ever known any other condition than that of a child in whom no one was in the least interested and in whom “being good” could only mean being passive under neglect and calling no one’s attention to the fact that she wanted anything from anybody. As a bird born in captivity lives in its cage and perhaps believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery and knew every square inch of it with a deadly if unconscious sense of distaste and fatigue. She was put to bed and taken up, she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day—twice perhaps if Andrews chose—she was taken out of it downstairs and into the street. That was all. And that was why she liked the sparrows so much.
And sparrows are worth watching if you live in a nursery where nothing ever happens and where, when you look out, you are so high up that it is not easy to see the people in the world below, in addition to which it seems nearly always raining. Robin used to watch them hopping about on the slate roofs of the homes on the other side of the street. They fluttered their wings, they picked up straws and carried them away. She thought they must have houses of their own among the chimneys—in places she could not see. She fancied it would be nice to hop about on the top of a roof oneself if one were not at all afraid of falling. She liked the chippering and chirping sounds the birds made because it sounded like talking and laughing—like the talking and laughing she sometimes wakened out of her sleep to lie and listen to when the Lady Downstairs had a party. She often wondered what the people were doing because it sounded as if they liked doing it very much.
Sometimes when it had rained two or three days she had a feeling which made her begin to cry to herself—but not aloud. She had once had a little black and blue mark on her arm for a week where Andrews had pinched her because she had cried loud enough to be heard. It had seemed to her that Andrews twisted and pinched the bit of flesh for five minutes without letting it go and she had held her large hand over her mouth as she did it.
“Now you keep that in your mind,” she had said when she had finished and Robin had almost choked in her awful little struggle to keep back all sound.
The one thing Andrews was surest of was that nobody would come upstairs to the Nursery to inquire the meaning of any cries which were not unearthly enough to disturb the household. So it was easy to regulate the existence of her charge in such a manner as best suited herself.
“Just give her food enough and keep her from making silly noises when she wants what she doesn’t get,” said Andrews to her companions below stairs. “That one in the drawing-room isn’t going to interfere with the Nursery. Not her! I know my business and I know how to manage her kind. I go to her politely now and then and ask her permission to buy things from Best’s or Liberty’s or some other good place. She always stares a minute when I begin, as if she scarcely understood what I was talking about and then she says ‘Oh, yes, I suppose she must have them.’ And I go and get them. I keep her as well dressed as any child in Mayfair. And she’s been a beauty since she was a year old so she looks first rate when I wheel her up and down the street, so the people can see she’s well taken care of and not kept hidden away. No one can complain of her looks and nobody is bothered with her. That’s all that’s wanted of me. I get good wages and I get them regular. I don’t turn up my nose at a place like this, whatever the outside talk is. Who cares in these days anyway? Fashionable people’s broader minded than they used to be. In Queen Victoria’s young days they tell me servants were no class that didn’t live in families where they kept the commandments.”
“Fat lot the commandments give any one trouble in these times,” said Jennings, the footman, who was a wit. “ There’s one of ‘ em I could mention that’s been broken till there’s no bits of it left to keep. If I smashed that plate until it was powder it’d have to be swept into the dust din. That’s what happened to one or two commandments in particular.”
“Well,” remarked Mrs. Blayne, the cook, “she don’t interfere and he pays the bills prompt. That’ll do me instead of commandments. If you’ll believe me, my mother told me that in them Queen Victoria days ladies used to inquire about cold meat and ask what was done with the dripping. Civilisation’s gone beyond that—commandments or no commandments.”
“He’s precious particular about bills being paid,” volunteered Jennings, with the air of a man of the world. “I heard him having a row with her one day about some bills she hadn’t paid. She’d spent the money for some nonsense and he was pretty stiff in that queer way of his. Quite right he was too. I’d have been the same myself,” pulling up his collar and stretching his neck in a manner indicating exact knowledge of the natural sentiments of a Marquis when justly annoyed. “What he intimated was that if them bills was not paid with the money that was meant to pay them, the money wouldn’t be forthcoming the next time.” Jennings was rather pleased by the word “forthcoming” and therefore he repeated it with emphasis, “It wouldn’t be forthcoming.”
“That’d frighten her,” was Andrews’ succinct observation.
“It did!” said Jennings. “She’d have gone in hysterics if he hadn’t kept her down. He’s got a way with him, Coombe has.”
Andrews laughed, a brief, dry laugh.
“Do you know what the child calls her?” she said. “She calls her the Lady Downstairs. She’s got a sort of fancy for her and tries to get peeps at her when we go out. I notice she always cranes her little neck if we pass a room she might chance to be in. It’s her pretty clothes and her laughing that does it. Children’s drawn by bright colours and noise that sounds merry.”
“It’s my belief the child doesn’t know she is her mother!” said Mrs. Blayne as she opened an oven door to look at some rolls.
“It’s my belief that if I told her she was she wouldn’t know what the word meant. It was me she got the name from,” Andrews still laughed as she explained. “I used to tell her about the Lady Downstairs would hear if she made a noise, or I’d say I’d let her have a peep at the Lady Downstairs if she was very good. I saw she had a kind of awe of her though she liked her so much, so it was a good way of managing her. You mayn’t believe me but for a good bit I didn’t take in that she didn’t know there was such things as mothers and, when I did take it in, I saw there wasn’t any use in trying to explain. She wouldn’t have understood.”
“How would you go about to explain a mother, anyway?” suggested Jennings. “I’d have to say that she was the person that had the right to slap your head if you didn’t do what she told you.”
“I’d have to say that she was the woman that could keep you slaving at kitchen maid’s work fifteen hours a day,” said Mrs. Blayne; “My mother was cook in a big house and trained me under her.”
“I never had one,” said Andrews stiffly. The truth was that she had taken care of eight infant brothers and sisters, while her maternal parent slept raucously under the influence of beer when she was not quarrelling with her offspring.
Jane, the housemaid, had passed a not uncomfortable childhood in the country and was perhaps of a soft nature.
“I’d say that a mother’s the one that you belong to and that’s fond of you, even if she does keep you straight,” she put in.
“Her mother isn’t fond of her and doesn’t keep herself straight,” said Jennings. “So that wouldn’t do.”
“And she doesn’t slap her head or teach her to do kitchen maid’s work,” put in Mrs. Blayne, “so yours is no use, Mr. Jennings, and neither is mine. Miss Andrews ‘ll have to cook up an explanation of her own herself when she finds she has to.”
“She can get it out of a Drury Lane melodrama,” said Jennings, with great humour. “You’ll have to sit down some night, Miss Andrews, and say, ‘The time has come, me chee-ild, when I must tell you All’.”
In this manner were Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and her maternal affections discussed below stairs. The interesting fact remained that to Robin the Lady Downstairs was merely a radiant and beautiful being who floated through certain rooms laughing or chattering like a bird, and always wearing pretty clothes, which were different each time one beheld her. Sometimes one might catch a glimpse of her through a door, or, if one pressed one’s face against the window pane at the right moment, she might get into her bright little carriage in the street below and, after Jennings had shut its door, she might be seen to give a lovely flutter to her clothes as she settled back against the richly dark blue cushions.