“What has happened, Donal?” she said. “Have you come to tell me that—?”
“No, not that—though that may come any moment now. It is something else.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know how to begin,” he said. “There has never been anything like this before. But I must know from you that a—silly woman—has not been telling me spiteful lies. She is the kind of woman who would say anything it amused her to say.”
“What was it she said?”
“I was dragged into a house by Clonmel. He said he had promised to drop in to tea. There were a lot of people. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was there and began to talk to me.”
“Why did you think she might be telling you spiteful lies?”
“That is it,” he broke out miserably impetuous. “Perhaps it may all seem childish and unimportant to you. But you have always been perfect. You were the one perfect being. I have never doubted you—”
“Do you doubt me now?”
“Perhaps no one but myself could realise that a sort of sore spot—yes, a sore spot—was left in my mind for years because of a wretched thing which happened when I was a child. Did you deliberately take me back to Scotland so suddenly that early morning? Was it a thing which could have been helped?”
“I thought not, Donal. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps I was right.”
“Was it because you wanted to separate me from a child I was fond of?”
“Yes.”
“And your idea was that because her mother was a flighty woman with bad taste and the wrong surrounding her poor little girl would contaminate me?”
“It was because her mother was a light woman and all her friends were like her. And your affection for the child was not like a child’s affection.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he said and he leaned forward with his forehead in his hands.
“I wanted to put an end to it before it was too late. I saw nothing but pain in it for you. It filled me with heart-broken fear to think of the girl such a mother and such a life would make.”
“She was such a little thing—” said Donal, “—such a tender mite of a thing! She’s such a little thing even now.”
“Is she?” said Helen.
Now she knew he would not tell her. And she was right. Up to that afternoon there had always been the chance that he would. Night after night he had been on the brink of telling her of the dream. Only as the beauty and wonder of it grew he had each day given himself another day, and yet another and another. But he had always thought the hour would come and he had been sure she would not grudge him a moment he had held from her. Now he shut everything within himself.
“I wish you had not done it. It was a mistake,” was all he said. Suddenly he felt thrown back upon himself, heartsick and cold. For the first time in his life he could not see her side of the question. The impassioned egotism of first love overwhelmed him.
“You met her on the night of the old Duchess’ dance,” Helen said.
“Yes.”
“You have met her since?”
“Yes.”
“It is useless for older people to interfere,” she said. “ We have loved each other very much. We have been happy together. But I can do nothing to help you. Oh! Donal, my own dear!”
Her involuntary movement of putting her hand to her throat was a piteous gesture.
“You are going away,” she pleaded. “Don’t let anything come between us—not now! It is not as if you were going to stay. When you come back perhaps—”
“I may never come back,” he answered and as he said it he saw again the widowed girl who had hurried past him crying because he had saluted her. And he saw Robin as he had seen her the night before—Robin who belonged to no one—whom no one missed at any time when she went in or out—who could come and go and meet a man anywhere as if she were the only little soul in London. And yet who had always that pretty, untouched air.
“I only wanted to be sure. It was a mistake. We will never speak of it again,” he added.
“If it was a mistake, forgive it. It was only because I could not hear that your life should not be beautiful. These are not like other days. Oh! Donal my dear, my dear!” And she broke into weeping and took him in her arms and he held her and kissed her tenderly. But whatsoever happened—whatsoever he did he knew that if he was to save and hold his bliss to the end he could not tell her now.
Chapter 10
Mrs. Bennett’s cottage on the edge of Mersham Wood seemed to Robin when she first saw it to be only a part of a fairy tale. It is true that only in certain bits of England and in pictures in books of fairy tales did one see cottages of its kind, and in them always lived with their grandmothers—in the fairy stories as Robin remembered—girls who would in good time be discovered by wandering youngest sons of fairy story kings. The wood of great oaks and beeches spread behind and at each side of it and seemed to have no end in any land on earth. It nestled against its primæval looking background in a nook of its own. Under the broad branches of the oaks and beeches tall ferns grew so thick that they formed a forest of their own—a lower, lighter, lacy forest where foxglove spires pierced here and there, and rabbits burrowed and sniffed and nibbled, and pheasants hid nests and sometimes sprang up rocketing startlingly. Birds were thick in the wood and trilled love songs, or twittered and sang low in the hour before their bedtime, filling the twilight with clear adorable sounds. The fairy-tale cottage was whitewashed and its broad eaved roof was thatched. Hollyhocks stood in haughty splendour against its walls and on either side its path. The latticed windows were diamond-paned and their inside ledges filled with flourishing fuchsias and trailing white campanula, and mignonette. The same flowers grew thick in the crowded blooming garden. And there were nests in the hawthorn hedge. And there was a small wicket gate.
When Robin caught sight of it she wondered—for a moment—if she were going to cry. Only because it was part of the dream and could be nothing else—unless one wakened.
On the tiny porch covered with honeysuckle in bloom, a little, old fairy woman was sitting knitting a khaki sock very fast. She wore a clean print gown and a white apron and a white cap with a frilled border. She had a stick and a nutcracker face and a pair of large iron bowed spectacles. She was so busy that she did not seem to hear Robin as she walked up the path between the borders of pinks and snapdragons, but when she was quite close to her she glanced up.
Robin thought she looked almost frightened when she saw her. She got up and made an apologetic curtsey.
“Eh!” she ejaculated, “to think of me not hearing you. I do beg your pardon, Miss, I do that. I was really waiting here to be ready for you.”
“Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Bennett,” Robin answered in a sweet hurry to reassure her. “I hope you are very well.” And she held out her hand.
Mrs. Bennett had only been shocked at her own apparent inattention to duty. She was not really frightened and her nutcracker face illuminated itself with delighted smiles.
“I don’t hear very well at the best of times,” she said. “And I’ve got a bit of a cold. Just worry, Miss, just worry it is—along of this ’ere war and my grandsons going marching off every few days seems like. Dick, that’s the youngest as was always my pet, he’s the last and he’ll be off any minute—and these is his socks.”
Robin actually picked up a sock and patted it softly—with a childish quiver of her chin. It seemed alive.
“Yes, yes!” she said. “Oh! dear! Oh! dear!”
Mrs. Bennett winked tears out of her eyes hastily.
“Me being hard of hearing is no excuse for me talking about myself first thing. Dick, he’s an Englishman—and they’re all Englishmen—and it’s Englishmen that’s got to stand up and do their duty—same as they did at Waterloo.” She swallowed valiantly the lump in her throat. “Her grace wrote to me about you, Miss, with her own kind hand. She said the cottage was so quiet and pretty you wouldn’t mind it being little—and me being a bit deaf.”
“I shall mind nothing,” said Robin. She raised her voice and tried to speak very distinctly so as to make sure that the old fairy woman would hear her. “It is the most beautiful cottage I ever saw in my life. It is like a cottage in a fairy story.”
“That’s what the vicar says, Miss, my dear,” was Mrs. Bennett’s cheerful reply. “He says it ought to be hid some way because if the cheap trippers found it out they’d wear the life out of me with pestering me to give’em six-penny teas. They’d get none from me!” quite fiercely. “Her grace give it to me her own self and it’s on Mersham land and not a lawyer on earth could put me out.”
She became quite active and bustling—picking a spray of honeysuckle and a few sprigs of mignonette from near the doorway and handing them to Robin.
“Your room’s full of ’em,” she said, “them and musk and roses. You’ll sleep and wake in the midst of flowers and birds singing and bees humming. And I can give you rich milk and home-baked bread, God bless you! You are welcome. Come in, my pretty dear—Miss.”
The girl came down from London to the cottage on the wood’s edge several times during the weeks that followed. It was easy to reach and too beautiful and lone and strange to stay away from. The War ceased where the wood began. Mrs. Bennett delighted in her and, regarding the Duchess as a sort of adored deity, would have served her lodger on bended knee if custom had permitted. Robin could always make her hear, and she sat and listened so tenderly to her stories of her grandsons that there grew up between them an absolute affection.
“And yet we don’t see each other often,” the old fairy woman had said. “You flit in like, and flit away again as if you was a butterfly, I think sometimes when I’m sitting here alone. When you come to stay you’re mostly flitting about the wood and I only see you bit by bit. But I couldn’t tell you, Miss, my dear, what it’s like to me. You do love the wood, don’t you? It’s a fairy place too—same as this is.”
“It’s all fairy, Mrs. Bennett,” Robin said. “Perhaps I am a fairy too when I am here. Nothing seems quite earthly.”
She bent forward suddenly and took the old face in her hands and kissed it.
“Eh! I shouldn’t wonder,” the old fairy woman chuckled sweetly. “I used to hear tales of fairies in Devonshire in my young days. And you do look like something witched—but you’ve been witched for happiness. Babies look that way for a bit sometimes—as if they brought something with them when they come to earth.”
“Yes,” answered Robin. “Yes.”
It was true that she only flitted in and out, and that she spent hours in the depths of the wood, and always came back as if from fairy land.
Once she had a holiday of nearly a week. She came down from town one afternoon in a pretty white frock and hat and white shoes and with an air of such delicate radiance about her that Mrs. Bennett would have clutched her to her breast, but for long-ago gained knowledge of the respect due to those connected with great duchesses.
“Like a new young bride you look, my pretty dear—Miss,” she cried out when she first saw her as she came up the path between the hollyhocks in the garden. “God’s surely been good to you this day. There’s something like heaven in your face.” Robin stood still a moment looking like the light at dawn and breathing with soft quickness as if she had come in haste.
“God has been good to me for a long time,” she said.
In the deep wood she walked with Donal night after night when the stillness was like heaven itself. Now and then a faint rustle among the ferns or the half awakened movement and sleepy note of a bird in the leaves slightly stirred the silence, but that was all. Lances of moonlight pierced through the branches and their slow feet made no sound upon the thick moss. Here and there pale foxglove spires held up their late blossoms like flower spirits in the dim light.
Donal thought—the first night she came to him softly through the ferns—that her coming was like that of some fair thing not of earth—a vision out of some old legend or ancient poem of faëry. But he marched towards her, soldierly—like a young Lohengrin whose silver mail had changed to khaki. There was no longer war in the world—there never had been.
“I brought it with me,” he said and took her close in his arms. For a few minutes the wood seemed more still than before.
“Do you hear my heart beat?” he said at last.
“I feel it. Do you hear mine?” she whispered.
“We love each other so!” he breathed. “We love each other so!”
“Yes,” she answered. “ Yes.”
Did every one who saw him know how beautiful he was? Oh his smile that loved her so and made her feel there was no fear or loneliness left on earth! He was so tall and straight and strong—a young soldier statue! When he laughed her heart always gave a strange little leap. It was such a lovely sound. His very hands were beautiful—with long, strong smooth fingers and smooth firm palms. Oh! Donal! Donal! And while she smiled as a little angel might smile, small sobs of joy filled her throat.
They sat together among the ferns, close side by side. He showed her the thing he had brought with him. It was a very slender chain of gold with a plain gold ring hung on it. He put the chain around her neck but slipped the ring on her finger and kissed it again and again.
“Wear it when we are together,” he whispered. “I want to see it. It makes you mine as much as if I had put it on in a church with a huge organ playing.”
“I should be yours without it,” answered Robin. “I am yours.”
“Yes,” he whispered again. “You are mine. And I am yours. It always was so—since the morning stars sang together.”
Chapter 11
“There are more women than those in Belgium who are being swept over by the chariots of war and trampled on by marching feet,” the Duchess of Darte said to a group of her women friends on a certain afternoon.
The group had met to work and some one had touched on a woeful little servant-maid drama which had painfully disclosed itself in her household. A small, plain kitchen maid had “walked out” in triumphant ecstasy with a soldier who, a few weeks after bidding her good-bye, had been killed in Belgium. She had been brought home to her employer’s house by a policeman who had dragged her out of the Serpentine. An old story had become a modern one. In her childish ignorance and terror of her plight she had seen no other way, but she had not had courage to face more than very shallow water, with the result of finding herself merely sticking in the mud and wailing aloud.
“The policeman was a kind-hearted, sensible fellow,” said the relator of the incident. “He had a family of his own and what he said was ‘She looked such a poor little drowned rat of a thing I couldn’t make up my mind to run her in, ma’am. This ’ere war’s responsible for a lot more than what the newspapers tell about. Young chaps in uniform having to brace up and perhaps lying awake in the night thinking over what the evening papers said—and young women they’ve been sweet-heartin’ with—they get wild, in a way, and cling to each other and feel desperate—and he talks and she cries—and he may have his head blown off in a week’s time. And who wonders that there’s trouble.’ Do you know he actually told me that there were a number of girls he was keeping a watch on. He said he’d begun to recognise a certain look in their eyes when they walked alone in the park. He said it was a ‘stark, frightened look.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but it gave me a shudder.”
“I think I know,” said the Duchess. “Poor, wretched children! There ought to be a sort of moratorium in the matter of social laws. The old rules don’t hold. We are facing new conditions. This is a thing for women to take in hand, practically, as they are taking in hand other work. It must be done absolutely without prejudice. There is no time to lecture or condemn or even deplore. There is only time to try to heal wounds and quiet maddening pain and save life.”
Lady Lothwell took the subject up.
“In the country places and villages, where the new army is swarming to be billeted, the clergymen and their wives are greatly ag
itated. Even in times of peace one’s vicar’s wife tells one stories in shocked whispers of ‘immorality’—though the rustic mind does not seem to regard it as particularly immoral. An illegal baby is generally accepted with simple resignation or merely a little fretful complaint even in quite decent cottages. It is called—rather prettily, I think—‘a love child’ and the nicer the grandparents are, the better they treat it. Mrs. Gracey, the wife of our rector at Mowbray Wells told me a few days ago that she and her husband were quite in despair over the excited, almost lawless, holiday air of the village girls. There are so many young men about and uniforms have what she calls ‘such a dreadful effect.’ Giddy and unreliable young women are wandering about the lanes and fields with stranger sweethearts at all hours. Even girls who have been good Sunday-school scholars are becoming insubordinate. She did not in the least mean to be improperly humorous—in fact she was quite tragic when she said that the rector felt that he ought to marry, on the spot, every rambling couple he met. He had already performed the ceremony in a number of cases when he felt it was almost criminally rash and idiotic, or would have been in time of peace.”
“That was what I meant by speaking of the women who were being swept over by the chariot of war,” said the Duchess. “It involves issues the women who can think must hold in their minds and treat judicially. One cannot moralise and be shocked before an advancing tidal wave. It has always been part of the unreason and frenzy of times of war.
When Death is near, Life fights hard for itself. It does not care who or what it strikes.”
The tidal wave swept on and the uninitiated who formed the mass of humanity in every country in the world, reading with feverish anxiety almost hourly newspaper extras every day, tried to hide a secret fear that no one knew what was really happening or could trust to the absolute truth of any spoken or published statement. The exultant hope of to-day was dashed to-morrow. The despair of the morning was lightened by gleams of hope before night closed, and was darkened and lightened again and again. Great cities and towns aroused themselves from a half-somnolent belief in security. Village by village England awakened to what she faced in common with an amazed and half incredulous world. The amazement and incredulity were founded upon a certain mistaken belief in a world predominance of the laws of decency and civilisation. The statement of piety and morality that the world in question was a bad one, filled with crime, had somehow so far been accepted with a guileless reservation in the matter of a ruling majority whose lapses from virtue were at least not openly vaunted treachery, blows struck at any unprepared back presenting itself, merciless attacks on innocence and weakness, and savage gluttings of lust, of fury, with exultant pæans of self-glorification and praise of a justly applauding God. Before such novelty of onslaught the British mind had breathless moments of feeling itself stupid and incapably aghast. But after its first deep draughts of the cup of staggering the nation braced up a really muscular back and stood upon hard, stout legs and firm feet, immovable and fixed on solid British earth.