Donal had been taken to the place by an amusement-loving acquaintance who professed that a special invitation made it impossible to pass by without dropping in. The house was Mrs. Erwyn’s and had already attracted attention through the recent débuts of Eileen and Winifred who had grown up very pretty and still retained their large, curious eyes and their tendency to giggle musically.
In very short and slimly alluring frocks they were assisting their mother in preparing young warriors for the seat of war by giving them chocolate in egg-shell cups and little cakes. Winifred carried a coral satin work-bag embroidered with carnations and was crocheting a silk necktie peculiarly suited to fierce onslaught on the enemy.
“Oh!” she gasped, clutching in secret at Eileen’s sleeve when Donal entered the room. “There he is! Jack said he would make him come! Just look at him!”
“Gracious!” ejaculated Eileen. “I daren’t look! It’s not safe!”
They looked, however, to their irresistible utmost when he came to make his nice, well-behaved bow to his hostess.
“I love his bow,” Eileen whispered. “It is such a beautiful tall bow. And he looks as good as he is beautiful.”
“Oh! not good exactly!” protested Winifred. “Just sweet—as if he thinks you are quite as nice as himself.”
He was taken from one group to another and made much of and flattered quite openly. He was given claret cup and feathery sandwiches and asked questions and given information. He was chattered to and whispered about and spent half an hour in a polite vortex of presentation. He was not as highly entertained as his companion was because he was thinking of something else—of a place which seemed incredibly far away from London drawing-rooms—even if he could have convinced himself that it existed on the same earth. The trouble was that he was always thinking of this place—and of others. He could not forget them even in the midst of any clamour of life. Sometimes he was afraid he forgot where he was and might look as if he were not listening to people. There were moments when he caught his breath because of a sudden high throb of his heart. How could he shut out of his mind that which seemed to be his mind—his body—the soul of him!
It was at a moment when he was thinking of this with a sudden sense of disturbance that a silver toned voice evidently speaking to him attracted his attention.
The voice was of silver and the light laugh was silvery.
“You look as if you were not thinking of any of us,” the owner said.
He turned about to find himself looking at one of the prettiest of the filmily dressed creatures in the room. Her frock was one of the briefest and her tiny heels the highest and most slender. The incredible foot and ankle wore a flesh silk stocking so fine that it looked as though they were bare—which was the achievement most to be aspired to. Every atom of her was lovely and her small deep-curved mouth and pure large eyes were like an angel’s.
“I believe you remember me!” she said after a second or so in which they held each other’s gaze and Donal knew he began to flush slowly.
“Yes,” he answered. “I do—now I have looked again. You were—The Lady Downstairs.”
She flung out the silver laugh again.
“After all these years! After one has grown old and withered and wrinkled—and has a grown-up daughter.”
He answered with a dazzling young-man-of-the-world bow and air. He had not been to Eton and Oxford and touched the outskirts of two or three London seasons, as a boy beauty and a modest Apollo Belvidere in his teens, without learning a number of pleasant little ways.
“You are exactly as you were the morning you came into the Gardens dressed in crocuses and daffodils. I thought they were daffodils and crocuses. I said so to my mother afterwards.”
He did not like her but he knew how her world talked to her. And he wanted to hear her speak—The Lady Downstairs—who had not “liked” the soft-eyed, longing, warm little lonely thing.
“All people say of you is entirely true,” she said. “I did not believe it at first but I do now.” She patted the seat of the small sofa she had dropped on. “Come and sit here and talk to me a few minutes. Girls will come and snatch you away presently but you can spare about three minutes.”
He did as he was told and wondered as he came nearer to the shell fineness of her cheek and her seraphic smile.
“I want you to tell me something about my only child,” she said.
He hoped very much that he did not flush in his sometimes-troublesome blond fashion then. He hoped so.
“I shall be most happy to tell you anything I have the honour of knowing,” he answered. “Only ask.”
“You would be capable of putting on a touch of Lord Coombe’s little stiff air—if you were not so young and polite,” she said. “It was Lord Coombe who told me about the old Duchess’ dance—and that you tangoed or swooped—or kicked with my Robin. He said both of you did it beautifully.”
“Miss Gareth-Lawless did—at least.”
He was looking down and so did not chance to see the look of a little cat which showed itself in her quick side glance.
“She is not my Robin now. She belongs to the Dowager Duchess of Darte—for a consideration. She is one of the new little females who are obstinately determined to earn an honest living. I haven’t seen her for months—perhaps years. Is she pretty?” The last three words came out like the little cat’s pounce on a mouse. Donal even felt momentarily startled.
But he remained capable of raising clear eyes to hers and saying, “She was prettier than any one else at the Duchess’ house that night. Far prettier.”
“Have you never seen her since?”
This was a pounce again and he was quite aware of it.
“Yes.”
Feather gurgled.
“That was really worthy of Lord Coombe,” she said. “I wasn’t being pushing, really, Mr. Muir. If any one asks you your intentions it will be the Dowager—not little Miss Gareth-Lawless’ mother. I never pretended to chaperon Robin. She might run about all over London without my asking any questions. I am afraid I am not much of a mother. I am not in the least like yours.”
“Like mine?” He wondered why his mother should be so suddenly dragged in.
She laughed with a bright air of being much entertained.
“Do you remember how Mrs. Muir whisked you away from London the day after she found out that you were playing with my vagabond of a Robin—unknowing of your danger? There was a mother for you! It nearly killed my little pariah.”
She rose and held out her hand.
“I have not really had my three minutes, but ‘I must not detain you any longer,’ as Royal Highnesses say. I must go.”
“Why?” he ejaculated with involuntary impatience.
“Because Eileen Erwyn is standing with her back markedly turned towards us, pretending to talk. I know the expression of her little ears and she has just laid them back close to her head, which means business. Why do you all at once look quite like Lord Coombe?” Perhaps he did look a trifle like his relative. He had risen to his feet.
“I was not aware that I was whisked away from London,” he said.
“I was,” with pretty impudence. “You were bundled back to Scotland almost before daylight. Lord Coombe knew about it. We laughed immensely together. It was a great joke because Robin fainted and fell into the mud, or something of the sort, when you didn’t turn up the next morning. She almost pined away and died of grief, tiresome little thing! I told you Eileen was preparing to assault. Here she is! Hordes of girls will now advance upon you. So glad to have had you even for a few treasured seconds. Good afternoon.”
Chapter 9
It was not a long time before he had left the house, but it seemed long and as if he had thought a great many rather incoherent things before he had reached the street and presently parted from his gay acquaintance and was on his way to his mother’s house where she was spending a week, having come down from Scotland as she did often.
He walked all the way hom
e because he wanted movement. He also wanted time to think things over because the intensity of his own mood troubled him. It was new for him to think much about himself, but lately he had found himself sometimes wondering at, as well as shaken by, emotional mental phases through which he passed. A certain moving fancy always held its own in his thoughts—as a sort of background to them. It was in his feeling that he was in those weeks a Donal Muir who was unknown and unseen by the passing world. No one but himself—and Robin—could know the meaning, the feeling, the nature of this Donal. It was as if he lived in a new Dimension of whose existence other people did not know. He could not have explained because it would not have been understood. He could vaguely imagine that effort at explanation would end—even begin—by being so clumsy that it would be met by puzzled or unbelieving smiles.
To walk about—to sleep—to awaken surrounded by rarefied light and air in which no object or act or even word or thought wore its past familiar meaning, or to go about the common streets, feeling as though somehow one were apart and unseen, was a singular thing. Having had a youth filled with quite virile pleasures and delightful emotions—and to be lifted above them into other air and among other visions—was, he told himself, like walking in a dream. To be filled continually with one thought, to rebel against any obstacle in the path to one desire, and from morning until night to be impelled by one eagerness for some moment or hour for which there was reason enough for its having place in the movings of the universe, if it brought him face to face with what he must stand near to—see—hear—perhaps touch.
It was because of the world’s madness, because of the human fear and weeping everywhere, because of the new abysses which seemed to yawn every day on every side, that both soul and senses were so abnormally overstrung. He was overwhelmed by exquisite compassions in his thoughts of Robin, he was afraid for her youngness, her sweetness, the innocent defencelessness which was like a child’s. He was afraid of his own young rashness and the entrancement of the dream. The great lunging chariot of War might plunge over them both.
But never for one moment could he force himself to regret or repent. Boys in their twenties already lay in their thousands on the fields over there. And she would far, far rather remember the kind hours and know that they were hidden in his heart for him to remember as he died—if he died! She had lain upon his breast holding him close and fast and she had sobbed hard—hard—but she had said it again and again and over and over when he had asked her.
It was this aspect of her and things akin to it which had risen in his incoherent thoughts when he was manoeuvering to get away from the drawing-room full of chattering people. He knew himself overwhelmed again by the exquisite compassion because the thing Mrs. Gareth-Lawless had told him had brought back all the silent anguish of impotent childish rebellion the morning when he had been awakened before the day, and during the day when he had thought his small breast would burst as the train rushed on with him—away—away!
And Robin had told him the rest—sitting one afternoon in the same chair with him—a roomy, dingy red arm-chair in an old riverside inn where they had managed to meet and had spent a long rainy day together. She had told him—in a queer little strained voice—about the waiting—and waiting—and waiting. And about the certainty of her belief in his coming. And the tiny foot which grew numb. And the slow lump climbing in her throat. And the rush under the shrubs—and the beating hands—and cries—and of the rose dress and socks and crushed hat covered with mud. She had not been piteous or dramatic. She had been so simple that she had broken his heart in two and he had actually hidden his face in her hair.
“Oh! Donal, dear. You’re crying!” she had said and she had broken down too and for a few seconds they had cried together rocking in each other’s arms, while the rain streamed down the window panes and beautifully shut them in, since there are few places more enclosing than the little, dingy private parlour of a remote English inn on a ceaselessly rainy day.
It had all come back before he reached the house in Kensington whose windows looked into the thick leaves of the plane trees. And at the same time he knew that the burning anger which kept rising in him was perhaps undue and not quite fair. But he was thinking it had not been mere cruel chance—it could have been helped—it need never have been! It had been the narrow cold hard planning of grown-up people who knew that they were powerful enough to enforce any hideous cruelty on creatures who had no defence. He actually found his heated mind making a statement of the case as wild as this and its very mercilessness of phrase checked him. The grown-up person had been his mother—his long-beloved—and he was absolutely calling her names. He pulled himself up vigorously and walked very fast. But the heat did not quite die down and other thoughts surged up in spite of his desire to keep his head and be reasonably calm. There had been a certain narrowness in the tragic separation of two happy children if the only reason for it had been that the mother of one was a pretty, frivolous, much gossiped about woman belonging to a rather too rapid set. And if it had been a reason then, how would it present itself now? What would happen to an untouched dream if argument and disapproval crashed into it? If his first intensely passionate impulse had been his desire to save it even from the mere touch of ordinary talk and smiling glances because he had felt that they would spoil the perfect joy of it, what would not open displeasure and opposition make of the down on the butterfly’s wing—the bloom on the peach? It was not so he phrased in his thoughts the things which tormented him, but the figures would have expressed his feeling. What if his mother were angry—though he had never seen her angry in his life and could only approach the idea because he had just found out that she had once been cruel—yes, it had been cruel! What if Coombe actually chose to interfere. Coombe with his unmoving face, his perfection of exact phrase and his cold almost inhuman eye! After all the matter concerned him closely.
“While Houses threaten to crumble and Heads may fall into the basket there are things we must remember until we disappear,” he had said not long ago with this same grey eye fixed on him. “I have no son. If Marquisates continue to exist you will be the Head of the House of Coombe.”
What would he make of a dream if he handled it? What would there be left? Donal’s heart burned in his side when he recalled Feather’s impudent little laugh as she had talked of her “vagabond Robin,” her “small pariah.” He was a boy entranced and exalted by his first passion and because he was a sort of young superman it was not a common one, though it shared all the unreason and impetuous simplicities of the most rudimentary of its kind. He could not think very calmly or logically; both the heaven and the earth in him swept him along as with the rush of the spheres. It was Robin who was foremost in all his thoughts. It was because she was so apart from all the world that it had seemed beautiful to keep her so in his heart. She had always been so aloof a little creature—so unclaimed and naturally left alone. Perhaps that was why she had retained through the years the untouched look which he had recognised even at the dance, in the eyes which only waited exquisitely for kindness and asked for love. No one had ever owned her, no one really knew her—people only saw her loveliness—no one knew her but himself—the little beautiful thing—his own—his own little thing! Nothing on earth should touch her!
Because his thinking ended—as it naturally always did—in such thoughts as these last, he was obliged to turn back when he saw the plane trees and walk a few hundred feet in the opposite direction to give himself time. He even turned a corner and walked down another street. It was just as he turned that poignant chance brought him face to face with a girl in deep new mourning with the border of white crêpe in the brim of her close hat. Her eyes were red and half-closed with recent crying and she had a piteous face. He knew what it all meant and involuntarily raised his hand in salute. He scarcely knew he did it and for a second she seemed not to understand. But the next second she burst out crying and hurriedly took out her handkerchief and hid her face as she passed. One of the boys lying o
n the blood-wet mire in Flanders, was Donal’s bitter thought, but he had had his kind hours to recall at the last moment—and even now she had them too.
Helen Muir from her seat at the window looking into the thick leafage of the trees saw him turn at the entrance and heard him mount the steps. The days between them and approaching separation were growing shorter and shorter. She thought this every morning when she awakened and realised anew that the worst of it all was that neither knew how short they were and that the thing which was to happen would be sudden—as death is always sudden however long one waits. He had never reached even that beginning of the telling—whatsoever he had to tell. Perhaps it was coming now. She had tried to prepare herself by endeavouring to imagine how he would look when he began—a little shy—even a little lovably awkward? But his engaging smile—his quite darling smile—would show itself in spite of him as it always did.
But when he came into the room his look was a new one to her. It was not happy—it was not a free look. There was something like troubled mental reservation in it—and when had there ever been mental reservation between them? Oh, no—that must not—must not be now! Not now!
He sat down with his cap in his hand as if he had forgotten to lay it aside or as if he were making a brief call.