The Head of the House of Coombe, Frances Hodgson Burnett [adult books to read txt] 📗

I was glad she did because I was afraid to go to her in the dark.”

“Was she in the dark?”

“I think so. Perhaps Louisa taught her to sleep without a light. There was none when I took her some condensed milk this morning. There was only c-con-d-densed milk to give her.”

She shed tears and choked as she described her journey into the lower regions and the cockroaches scuttling away before her into their hiding-places.

“I MUST have a nurse! I MUST have one!” she almost sniffed. “Someone must change her clothes and give her a bath!”

“You can’t?” Coombe said.

“I!” dropping her handkerchief. “How—how CAN I?”

“I don’t know,” he answered and picked up the handkerchief with an aloof grace of manner.

It was really Robin who was for Feather the breaking-point.

He thought she was in danger of flinging herself upon him again. She caught at his arm and her eyes of larkspur blue were actually wild.

“Don’t you see where I am! How there is nothing and nobody—Don’t you SEE?”

“Yes, I see,” he answered. “You are quite right. There is nothing AND nobody. I have been to Lawdor myself.”

“You have been to TALK to him?”

“Yesterday. That was my reason for coming here. He will not see you or be written to. He says he knows better to begin that sort of thing. It may be that family feeling has not the vogue it once had, but you may recall that your husband infuriated him years ago. Also England is a less certain quantity than it once was—and the man has a family. He will allow you a hundred a year but there he draws the line.”

“A hundred a year!” Feather breathed. From her delicate shoulders hung floating scarf-like sleeves of black transparency and she lifted one of them and held it out like a night moth’s wing—“This cost forty pounds,” she said, her voice quite faint and low. “A good nurse would cost forty! A cook—and a footman and a maid—and a coachman—and the brougham—I don’t know how much they would cost. Oh-h!”

She drooped forward upon her sofa and laid face downward on a cushion—slim, exquisite in line, lost in despair.

The effect produced was that she gave herself into his hands. He felt as well as saw it and considered. She had no suggestion to offer, no reserve. There she was.

“It is an incredible sort of situation,” he said in an even, low-pitched tone rather as if he were thinking aloud, “but it is baldly real. It is actually simple. In a street in Mayfair a woman and child might—” He hesitated a second and a wailed word came forth from the cushion.

“Starve!”

He moved slightly and continued.

“Since their bills have not been paid the trades-people will not send in food. Servants will not stay in a house where they are not fed and receive no wages. No landlord will allow a tenant to occupy his property unless he pays rent. It may sound inhuman—but it is only human.”

The cushion in which Feather’s face was buried retained a faint scent of Robert’s cigar smoke and the fragrance brought back to her things she had heard him say dispassionately about Lord Coombe as well as about other men. He had not been a puritanic or condemnatory person. She seemed to see herself groveling again on the floor of her bedroom and to feel the darkness and silence through which she had not dared to go to Robin.

Not another night like that! No! No!

“You must go to Jersey to your mother and father,” Coombe said. “A hundred a year will help you there in your own home.”

Then she sat upright and there was something in her lovely little countenance he had never seen before. It was actually determination.

“I have heard,” she said, “of poor girls who were driven—by starvation to—to go on the streets. I—would go ANYWHERE before I would go back there.”

“Anywhere!” he repeated, his own countenance expressing—or rather refusing to express something as new as the thing he had seen in her own.

“Anywhere!” she cried and then she did what he had thought her on the verge of doing a few minutes earlier—she fell at his feet and embraced his knees. She clung to him, she sobbed, her pretty hair loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.

“Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe!” she cried as she had cried in the hall.

He rose and endeavoured to disengage himself as he had done before. This time with less success because she would not let him go. He had the greatest possible objection to scenes.

“Mrs. Lawless—Feather—I beg you will get up,” he said.

But she had reached the point of not caring what happened if she could keep him. He was a gentleman—he had everything in the world. What did it matter?

“I have no one but you and—and you always seemed to like me, I would do anything—ANYONE asked me, if they would take care of me. I have always liked you very much—and I did amuse you—didn’t I? You liked to come here.”

There was something poignant about her delicate distraught loveliness and, in the remoteness of his being, 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. Also a fantastic and finely ironic vision of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife rose before him and the vision of himself as Joseph irked a certain complexness of his mentality. Poignant as the thing was in its modern way, it was also faintly ridiculous.

Then Robin awakened and shrieked again. The sound which had gained strength through long sleep and also through added discomfort quite rang through the house. What that sound added to the moment he himself would not have been able to explain until long afterwards. But it singularly and impellingly added.

“Listen!” panted Feather. “She has begun again. And there is no one to go to her.”

“Get up, Mrs. Lawless,” he said. “Do I understand that you are willing that I arrange this for you!”

He helped her to her feet.

“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. She clasped her hands in exquisite appeal. He stood for a moment quite still, his mind fled far away and he forgot where he was. And because of this the little simpleton’s shallow discretion deserted her.

“If you were a—a marrying man—?” she said foolishly—almost in a whisper.

He recovered himself.

“I am not,” with a finality which cut as cleanly as a surgical knife.

Something which was not the words was of a succinctness which filled her with new terror.

“I—I know!” she whimpered, “I only said if you were!”

“If I were—in this instance—it would make no difference.” He saw the kind of slippery silliness he was dealing with and what it might transform itself into if allowed a loophole. “There must be no mistakes.”

In her fright she saw him for a moment more distinctly than she had ever seen him before and hideous dread beset her lest she had blundered fatally.

“There shall be none,” she gasped. “I always knew. There shall be none at all.”

“Do you know what you are asking me?” he inquired.

“Yes, yes—I’m not a girl, you know. I’ve been married. I won’t go home. I can’t starve or live in awful lodgings. SOMEBODY must save me!”

“Do you know what people will say?” his steady voice was slightly lower.

“It won’t be said to me.” Rather wildly. “Nobody minds—really.”

He ceased altogether to look serious. He smiled with the light detached air his world was most familiar with.

“No—they don’t really,” he answered. “I had, however, a slight preference for knowing whether you would or not. You flatter me by intimating that you would not.”

He knew that if he had held out an arm she would have fallen upon his breast and wept there, but he was not at the moment in the mood to hold out an arm. He merely touched hers with a light pressure.

“Let us sit down and talk it over,” he suggested.

A hansom drove up to the door and stopped before he had time to seat himself. Hearing it he went to the window and saw a stout businesslike looking man get out, accompanied by an attendant. There followed a loud, authoritative ringing of the bell and an equally authoritative rap of the knocker. This repeated itself. Feather, who had run to the window and caught sight of the stout man, clutched his sleeve.

“It’s the agent we took the house from. We always said we were out. It’s either Carson or Bayle. I don’t know which.”

Coombe walked toward the staircase.

“You can’t open the door!” she shrilled.

“He has doubtless come prepared to open it himself.” he answered and proceeded at leisure down the narrow stairway.

The caller had come prepared. By the time Coombe stood in the hall a latchkey was put in the keyhole and, being turned, the door opened to let in Carson—or Bayle—who entered with an air of angered determination, followed by his young man.

The physical presence of the Head of the House of Coombe was always described as a subtly impressive one. Several centuries of rather careful breeding had resulted in his seeming to represent things by silent implication. A man who has never found the necessity of explaining or excusing himself inevitably presents a front wholly unsuggestive of uncertainty. The front Coombe presented merely awaited explanations from others.

Carson—or Bayle—had doubtless contemplated seeing a frightened servant trying to prepare a stammering obvious lie. He confronted a tall, thin man about whom—even if his clothes had been totally different—there could be no mistake. He stood awaiting an apology so evidently that Carson—or Bayle—began to stammer himself even before he had time to dismiss from his voice the suggestion of bluster. It would have irritated Coombe immensely if he had known that he—and a certain overcoat—had been once pointed out to the man at Sandown and that—in consequence of the overcoat—he vaguely recognized him.

“I—I beg pardon,” he began.

“Quite so,” said Coombe.

“Some tenants came to look at the house this morning. They had an order to view from us. They were sent away, my lord—and decline to come back. The rent has not been paid since the first half year. There is no one now who can even PRETEND it’s going to be paid. Some step had to be taken.”

“Quite so,” said Coombe. “Suppose you step into the dining-room.”

He led the pair into the room and pointed to chairs, but neither the agent nor his attendant was calm enough to sit down.

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