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

On the afternoon of the day upon which this occurred, Coombe was standing in Feather’s drawing-room with a cup of tea in his hand and wearing the look of a man who is given up to reflection.

“I saw Mrs. Muir today for the first time for several years,” he said after a silence. “She is in London with the boy.”

“Is she as handsome as ever?”

“Quite. Hers is not the beauty that disappears. It is line and bearing and a sort of splendid grace and harmony.”

“What is the boy like?”

Coombe reflected again before he answered.

“He is—amazing. One so seldom sees anything approaching physical perfection that it strikes one a sort of blow when one comes upon it suddenly face to face.”

“Is he as beautiful as all that?”

“The Greeks used to make statues of bodies like his. They often called them gods—but not always. The Creative Intention plainly was that all human beings should be beautiful and he is the expression of it.”

Feather was pretending to embroider a pink flower on a bit of gauze and she smiled vaguely.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she admitted with no abasement of spirit, “but if ever there was any Intention of that kind it has not been carried out.” Her smile broke into a little laugh as she stuck her needle into her work. “I’m thinking of Henry,” she let drop in addition.

“So was I, it happened,” answered Coombe after a second or so of pause.

Henry was the next of kin who was—to Coombe’s great objection—his heir presumptive, and was universally admitted to be a repulsive sort of person both physically and morally. He had brought into the world a weakly and rickety framework and had from mere boyhood devoted himself to a life which would have undermined a Hercules. A relative may so easily present the aspect of an unfortunate incident over which one has no control. This was the case with Henry. His character and appearance were such that even his connection with an important heritage was not enough to induce respectable persons to accept him in any form. But if Coombe remained without issue Henry would be the Head of the House.

“How is his cough?” inquired Feather.

“Frightful. He is an emaciated wreck and he has no physical cause for remaining alive.”

Feather made three or four stitches.

“Does Mrs. Muir know?” she said.

“If Mrs. Muir is conscious of his miserable existence, that is all,” he answered. “She is not the woman to inquire. Of course she cannot help knowing that—when he is done with—her boy takes his place in the line of succession.”

“Oh, yes, she’d know that,” put in Feather.

It was Coombe who smiled now—very faintly.

“You have a mistaken view of her,” he said.

“You admire her very much,” Feather bridled. The figure of this big Scotch creature with her “line” and her “splendid grace and harmony” was enough to make one bridle.

“She doesn’t admire me,” said Coombe. “She is not proud of me as a connection. She doesn’t really want the position for the boy, in her heart of hearts.”

“Doesn’t want it!” Feather’s exclamation was a little jeer only because she would not have dared a big one.

“She is Scotch Early Victorian in some things and extremely advanced in others,” he went on. “She has strong ideas of her own as to how he shall be brought up. She’s rather Greek in her feeling for his being as perfect physically and mentally as she can help him to be. She believes things. It was she who said what you did not understand—about the Creative Intention.”

“I suppose she is religious,” Feather said. “Scotch people often are but their religion isn’t usually like that. Creative Intention’s a new name for God, I suppose. I ought to know all about God. I’ve heard enough about Him. My father was not a clergyman but he was very miserable, and it made him so religious that he was ALMOST one. We were every one of us christened and catechized and confirmed and all that. So God’s rather an old story.”

“Queer how old—from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,” said Coombe. “It’s an ancient search—that for the Idea—whether it takes form in metal or wood or stone.”

“Well,” said Feather, holding her bit of gauze away from her the better to criticize the pink flower. “As ALMOST a clergyman’s daughter I must say that if there is one tiling God didn’t do, it was to fill the world with beautiful people and things as if it was only to be happy in. It was made to-to try us by suffering and-that sort of thing. It’s a-a-what d’ye call it? Something beginning with P.”

“Probation,” suggested Coombe regarding her with an expression of speculative interest. Her airy bringing forth of her glib time-worn little scraps of orthodoxy—as one who fished them out of a bag of long-discarded remnants of rubbish—was so true to type that it almost fascinated him for a moment.

“Yes. That’s it—probation,” she answered. “I knew it began with a P. It means ‘thorny paths’ and ‘seas of blood’ and, if you are religious, you ‘tread them with bleeding feet—’ or swim them as the people do in hymns. And you praise and glorify all the time you’re doing it. Of course, I’m not religious myself and I can’t say I think it’s pleasant—but I do KNOW! Every body beautiful and perfect indeed! That’s not religion—it’s being irreligious. Good gracious, think of the cripples and lepers and hunchbacks!”

“And the idea is that God made them all—by way of entertaining himself?” he put it to her quietly.

“Well, who else did?” said Feather cheerfully.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Certain things I heard Mrs. Muir say suggested to one that it might be interesting to think it out.”

“Did she talk to you about God at afternoon tea?” said Feather. “It’s the kind of thing a religious Scotch woman might do.”

“No, she did not talk to me. Perhaps that was her mistake. She might have reformed me. She never says more to me than civility demands. And it was not at tea. I accidentally dropped in on the Bethunes and found an Oriental had been lecturing there. Mrs. Muir was talking to him and I heard her. The man seemed to be a scholar and a deep thinker and as they talked a group of us stood and listened or asked questions.”

“How funny!” said Feather.

“It was not funny at all. It was astonishingly calm and serious—and logical. The logic was the new note. I had never thought of reason in that connection.”

“Reason has nothing to do with it. You must have faith. You must just believe what you’re told not think at all. Thinking is wickedness—unless you think what you hear preached.” Feather was even a trifle delicately smug as she rattled off her orthodoxy—but she laughed after she had done with it. “But it MUST have been funny—a Turk or a Hindoo in a turban and a thing like a tea gown and Mrs. Muir in her Edinburgh looking clothes talking about God.”

“You are quite out of it,” Coombe did not smile at all as he said it. “The Oriental was as physically beautiful as Donal Muir is. And Mrs. Muir—no other woman in the room compared with her. Perhaps people who think grow beautiful.”

Feather was not often alluring or coquettish in her manner to Coombe but she tilted her head prettily and looked down at her flower through lovely lashes.

“I don’t think,” she said. “And I am not so bad looking.”

“No,” he answered coldly. “You are not. At times you look like a young angel.”

“If Mrs. Muir is like that,” she said after a brief pause, “I should like to know what she thinks of me?”

“No, you would not—neither should I—if she thinks at all,” was his answer. “But you remember you said you did not mind that sort of thing.”

“I don’t. Why should I? It can’t harm me.” Her hint of a pout made her mouth entrancing. “But, if she thinks good looks are the result of religiousness I should like to let her see Robin—and compare her with her boy. I saw Robin in the park last week and she’s a perfect beauty.”

“Last week?” said Coombe.

“She doesn’t need anyone but Andrews. I should bore her to death if I went and sat in the Nursery and stared at her. No one does that sort of thing in these days. But I should like to see Mrs. Muir to see the two children together!” “That could not easily be arranged, I am afraid,” he said.

“Why not?”

His answer was politely deliberate.

“She greatly disapproves of me, I have told you. She is not proud of the relationship.”

“She does not like ME you mean?”

“Excuse me. I mean exactly what I said in telling you that she has her own very strong views of the boy’s training and surroundings. They may be ridiculous but that sort of thing need not trouble you.”

Feather held up her hand and actually laughed.

“If Robin meets him in ten years from now-THAT for her very strong views of his training and surroundings!”

And she snapped her fingers.

Mrs. Muir’s distaste for her son’s unavoidable connection the man he might succeed had a firm foundation. She had been brought up in a Scottish Manse where her father dominated as an omnipotent and almost divine authority. As a child of imagination she had not been happy but she had been obedient. In her girlhood she had varied from type through her marriage with a young man who was a dreamer, an advanced thinker, an impassioned Greek scholar and a lover of beauty. After he had from her terrors of damnation, they had been profoundly happy. They were young and at ease and they read and thought together ardently. They explored new creeds and cults and sometimes found themselves talking nonsense and sometimes discovering untrodden paths of wisdom. They were youthful enough to be solemn about things at times, and clever enough to laugh at their solemnity when they awakened to it. Helen Muir left the reverent gloom of the life at the Manse far behind despite her respect for certain meanings they beclouded.

“I live in a new structure,” she said to her husband, “but it is built on a foundation which is like a solid subterranean chamber. I don’t use the subterranean chamber or go into it. I don’t want to. But now and then echoes—almost noises—make themselves heard in it. Sometimes I find I have listened in spite of myself.”

She had always been rather grave about her little son and when her husband’s early death left him and his