Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.
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Contents
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Years Before
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Robin
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was born in Manchester and spent her early years there with her family. Her father died in 1852, and eventually, in 1865, Frances emigrated to the United States with her mother and siblings, settling with family in Knoxville, Tennessee. Frances began to be published at the age of 19, submitting short stories to magazines and using the proceeds to help support the family. In 1872, she married Swan Burnett, a doctor, with whom she had two sons while living in Paris. Her first novel, That Lass o’ Lowrie's , was published in 1877, while the Burnetts were living in Washington D.C.
Following a separation from her husband, Burnett lived on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually marrying for a second time, however she never truly recovered from the death of her first son, Lionel. Best known during her lifetime for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), her books for children, including The Secret Garden and The Little Princess , have endured as classics, but Burnett also wrote many other novels for adults, which were hugely popular and favourably compared to authors such as George Eliot.
The Years Before
Outline arranged by Hamilton Williamson
THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE
In the years when Victorian standards and ideals began to dance an increasingly rapid jig before amazed lookers-on, who presently found themselves dancing as madly as the rest—in these years, there lived in Mayfair, in a slice of a house, Robert Gareth-Lawless and his lovely young wife. So light and airy was she to earthly vision and so diaphanous the texture of her mentality that she was known as “Feather.”
The slice of a house between two comparatively stately mansions in the “right street” was a rash venture of the honeymoon.
Robert—well born, irresponsible, without resources—evolved a carefully detailed method of living upon nothing whatever, of keeping out of the way of duns, and telling lies with aptness and outward gaiety. But a year of giving smart little dinners and going to smart big dinners ended in a condition somewhat akin to the feat of balancing oneself on the edge of a sword.
Then Robin was born. She was an intruder and a calamity, of course. That a Feather should become a parent gave rise to much wit of light weight when Robin was exhibited in the form of a bundle of lace.
It was the Head of the House of Coombe who asked:
“What will you do with her?”
“Do?” Feather repeated. “What is it people ‘do’ with babies? I don’t know. I wouldn’t touch her for the world. She frightens me.”
Coombe said:
“She is staring at me. There is antipathy in her gaze.” He stared back unwaveringly also, but with a sort of cold interest.
“The Head of the House of Coombe” was not a title to be found in Burke or Debrett. It was a fine irony of the Head’s own. The peerage recorded him as a marquis and added several lesser attendant titles.
To be born the Head of the House is a weighty and awe-inspiring thing—one is called upon to be an example.
“I am not sure what I am an example of—or to,” he said, on one occasion, in his light, rather cold and detached way, “which is why I at times regard myself in that capacity with a slightly ribald lightness.”
A reckless young woman once asked him:
“Are you as wicked as people say you are?”
“I really don’t know. It is so difficult to decide,” he answered. “Perhaps I am as wicked as I know how to be. And I may have painful limitations or I may not.”
He had reached the age when it was safe to apply to him that vague term “elderly,” and marriage might have been regarded as imperative. But he had remained unmarried and seemed to consider his abstinence entirely his own affair.
Courts and capitals knew him, and his opportunities were such as gave him all ease as an onlooker. He saw closely those who sat with knit brows and cautiously hovering hand at the great chess-board which is formed by the map of Europe.
As a statesman or a diplomat he would have gone far, but he had been too much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent for work of any order. Having, however, been born with a certain type of brain, it observed and recorded in spite of him, thereby adding flavour and interest to existence. But that was all.
Texture and colour gave him almost abnormal pleasure. For this reason, perhaps, he was the most perfectly dressed man in London.
It was at a garden-party that he first saw Feather. When his eyes fell upon her, he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Some one standing quite near him said afterwards that he had, for a second or so, became pale—almost as if he saw something which frightened him. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. But he had not talked to her for fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought, at first, there was.
This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups regarding the degree of Coombe’s interest in her. Remained, however, the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her, and very practically aware that the more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house, the more likely the dwellers in it were to get good invitations and continued credit.
The realisation of these benefits was cut short. Robert, amazingly and unnaturally, failed her by dying. He was sent away in a hearse and the tiny house ceased to represent hilarious little parties.
Bills were piled high everywhere. The rent was long overdue and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants’ wages.
“It’s awful—it’s awful—it’s awful!” broke out between her sobs.
From her bedroom window—at evening—she watched “Cook,” the smart footman, the nurse, the maids, climb into four-wheelers and be driven away.
“They’re gone—all of them!” she gasped. “There’s no o
ne left in the house. It’s empty!”
Then was Feather seized with a panic. She had something like hysterics, falling face downward upon the carpet and clutching her hair until it fell down. She was not a person to be judged—she was one of the unexplained incidents of existence.
The night drew in more closely. A prolonged wailing shriek tore through the utter soundlessness of the house. It came from the night-nursery. It was Robin who had wakened and was screaming.
“I—I won’t!” Feather protested, with chattering teeth. “I won’t! I won’t!”
She had never done anything for the child since its birth. To reach her now, she would be obliged to go out into the dark—past Robert’s bedroom—the room.
“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!”
The screams took on a more determined note. She flung herself on her bed, burrowing her head under the coverings and pillows she dragged over her ears to shut out the sounds.
Feather herself had not known, nor in fact had any other human being known why Lord Coombe drifted into seeming rather to follow her about. But there existed a reason, and this it was, and this alone, which caused him to appear—the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form—at her door.
He listened while she poured it all forth, sobbing. Her pretty hair loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.
“I would do anything—any one asked me, if they would take care of me.”
A shuddering knowledge that it was quite true that she would do anything for any man who would take care of her produced an effect on him nothing else would have produced.
“Do I understand,” he said, “that you are willing that I should arrange this for you?”
“Do you mean—really?” she faltered. “Will you—will you—?”
Her uplifted eyes were like a young angel’s brimming with crystal drops which slipped—as a child’s tears slip—down her cheeks.
The florist came and refilled the window-boxes of the slice of a house with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers. It became an established fact that the household had not fallen to pieces, and its frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing, indeed, the air of people who had never really remained away from it.
As a bird in captivity lives in its cage and, perhaps, believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery. She was put to bed and taken up, she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day she was taken out of it downstairs and into the street. That was all.
It is a somewhat portentous thing to realise that a newborn human creature can only know what it is taught. To Robin the Lady Downstairs was merely a radiant and beautiful being of whom one might catch a glimpse through a door, or if one pressed one’s face against the window pane at the right moment. On the very rare occasions when the Lady appeared on the threshold of the day-nursery, Robin stood and stared with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little questions put to her.
So she remained unaware of mothers and unaware of affection. She never played with other children. Andrews, her nurse—as behooved one employed in a house about which there “was talk” bore herself with a lofty and exclusive air.
“My rule is to keep myself to myself,” she said in the kitchen, “and to look as if I was the one that would turn up noses, if noses was to be turned up. There’s those that would snatch away their children if I let Robin begin to make up to them.”
But one morning, when Robin was watching some quarrelsome sparrows, an old acquaintance surprised Andrews by appearing in the Gardens and engaged her in a conversation so delightful that Robin was forgotten to the extent of being allowed to follow her sparrows round a clump of shrubbery out of sight.
It was while she watched them that she heard footsteps that stopped near her. She looked up. A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporran was standing by her. He spread and curved his red mouth, then began to run and prance round in a circle, capering like a Shetland pony to exhibit at once his friendliness and his prowess. After a minute or two he stopped, breathing fast and glowing.
“My pony in Scotland does that. His name is Chieftain. I’m called Donal. What are you called?”
“Robin,” she answered, her lips and voice trembling with joy. He was so beautiful.
They began to play together while Andrews’friend recounted intimate details of a country house scandal.
Donal picked leaves from a lilac bush. Robin learned that if you laid a leaf flat on the seat of a bench you could prick beautiful patterns on the leaf’s greenness. Donal had—in his rolled down stocking—a little dirk. He did the decoration with the point of this while Robin looked on, enthralled.
Through what means children so quickly convey to each other the entire history of their lives is a sort of occult secret. Before Donal was taken home, Robin knew that he lived in Scotland and had been brought to London on a visit, that his other name was Muir, that the person he called “mother” was a woman who took care of him. He spoke of her quite often.
“I will bring one of my picture-books to-morrow,” he said grandly. “Can you read at all?”
“No,” answered Robin, adoring him. “What are picture books?”
“Haven’t you any?” he blurted out.
She lifted her eyes to the glowing blueness of his and said quite simply, “I haven’t anything.”
His old nurse’s voice came from the corner where she sat.
“I must go back to Nanny,” he said, feeling, somehow, as if he had been running fast. “I’ll come to-morrow and bring two picture books.”
He put his strong little eight-year-old arms round her and kissed her full on the mouth. It was the first time, for Robin. Andrews did not kiss. There was no one else.
“Don’t you like to be kissed?” said Donal, uncertain because she looked so startled and had not kissed him back.
“Kissed,” she repeated, with a small caught breath. “Ye—es.” She knew now what it was. It was being kissed. She drew nearer at once and lifted up her face as sweetly and gladly as a flower lifts itself to the sun. “Kiss me again,” she said, quite eagerly. And this time, she kissed too. When he ran quickly away, she stood looking after him with smiling, trembling lips, uplifted, joyful—wondering and amazed.
The next morning Andrews had a cold and her younger sister Anne was called in to perform her duties. The doctor pronounced the cold serious, and Andrews was confined to her bed. Hours spent under the trees reading were entirely satisfactory to Anne. And so, for two weeks, the soot-sprinkled London square was as the Garden of Eden to Donal and Robin.
In her fine, aloof way, Helen Muir had learned much in her stays in London and during her married life—in the exploring of foreign cities with her husband. She was not proud of the fact that in the event of the death of Lord Coombe’s shattered and dissipated nephew her son would become heir presumptive to Coombe Court. She had not asked questions about Coombe. It had not been necessary. Once or twice she had seen Feather by chance. She was to see her again—by Feather’s intention.
With Donal prancing at her side, Mrs. Muir went to the Gardens to meet the child Nanny had described as “a bit of witch fire dancing—with her colour and her big silk curls in a heap, and Donal staring at her like a young man at a beauty.”
Robin was waiting behind the lilac bushes and her nurse was already deep in the mystery of “Lady Audley.”
“There she is!” cried Donal, as he ran to her. “My mother has come with me. This is Robin, mother! This is Robin.”
Her exquisiteness and physical brilliancy gave Mrs. Muir something not unlike a slight shock. Oh! No wonder, since she was like that. She stooped and kissed the round cheek delicately. She took the little hand and they walked round the garden, then sat on a bench and watched the children “make up” things to play.
A victoria was driving past. Suddenly a sweetly hued figure spoke to the coachman. “Stop here,” she sai
d. “I want to get out.”
Robin’s eyes grew very round and large and filled with a worshipping light.
“It is,” she gasped, “the Lady Downstairs!”
Feather floated near to the seat and paused, smiling. “Where is your nurse, Robin?” she asked.
“She is only a few yards away,” said Mrs. Muir.
“So kind of you to let Robin play with your boy. Don’t let her bore you. I am Mrs. Gareth-Lawless.”
There was a little silence, a delicate little silence.
“I recognized you as Mrs. Muir at once,” added Feather, unperturbed and smiling brilliantly. “ I saw your portrait at the Grovenor.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Muir, gently.
“I wanted very much to see your son; that was why I came.”
“Yes,” still gently from Mrs. Muir.
“Because of Coombe, you know. We are such old friends. How queer that the two little things have made friends too. I didn’t know.”
She bade them good-bye and strayed airily away.
And that night Donal was awakened, was told that “something” had happened, that they were to go back to Scotland. He was accustomed to do as he was told. He got out of bed and began to dress, but he swallowed very hard.
“I shall not see Robin,” he said in a queer voice. “She won’t find me when she goes behind the lilac bushes. She won’t know why I don’t come.” Then, in a way that was strangely grown up: “ She has no one but me to remember.”
The next morning a small, rose-coloured figure stood still for so long in the gardens that it began to look rigid and some one said, “I wonder what that little girl is waiting for.”
A child has no words out of which to build hopes and fears. Robin could only wait in the midst of a slow dark rising tide of something she had no name for. Suddenly she knew. He was gone! She crept under the shrubbery. She cried, she sobbed. If Andrews had seen her she would have said she was “in a tantrum.” But she was not. Her world had been torn away.
Five weeks later Feather was giving a very little dinner in the slice of a house. There was Harrowby, a good looking young man with dark eyes, and the Starling who was “emancipated” and whose real name was Miss March. The third diner was a young actor with a low, veiled voice—Gerald Vesey—who adored and understood Feather’s clothes.