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

“That’s it. And she’s little—and she won’t understand. She’s very little—really.” There was a harrowingly protective note in his voice. “Perhaps—she’ll cry.”

Helen looking down at him with anguished eyes—he was buttoning his shoes—made an unearthly effort to find words, but, as she said them, she knew they were not the right ones.

“She will be disappointed, of course, but she is so little that she will not feel it as much as if she were bigger. She will get over it, darling. Very little girls do not remember things long.” Oh, how coarse and crass and stupid it sounded—how course and crass and stupid to say it to this small defiant scrap of what seemed the inevitable suffering of the world!

The clear blue of the eyes Robin had dwelt in, lifted itself to her. There was something almost fierce in it—almost like impotent hatred of something.

“She won’t,” he said, and she actually heard him grind his little teeth after it.

He did not look like Donal when he was dressed and sat at the breakfast table. He did not eat much of his porridge, but she saw that he determinedly ate some. She felt several times as if he actually did not look like anybody she had ever seen. And at the same time his fair hair, his fair cheeks, and the fair sturdy knees beneath his swinging kilt made him seem as much a little boy as she had ever known him. It was his hot blue eyes which were different.

He obeyed her every wish and followed where she led. When the train laboured out of the big station he had taken a seat in a corner and sat with his face turned to the window, so that his back was towards her. He stared and stared at the passing country and she could only see part of his cheek and the side of his neck. She could not help watching them and presently she saw a hot red glow under the skin as if a flood had risen. It subsided in a few moments, but presently she saw it rise again. This happened several times and he was holding his lip with, his teeth. Once she saw his shoulders more and he coughed obstinately two or three times. She knew that he would die before he would let himself cry, but she wished he would descend to it just this once, as the fields and hedges raced past and he was carried “Away! Away!” It might be that it was all his manhood she was saving for him.

He really made her heart stand still for a moment just as she was thinking this and saying it to herself almost fiercely. He suddenly turned on her; the blue of his eyes was flaming and the tide had risen again in his cheeks and neck. It was a thing like rage she saw before her—a child’s rage and impotently fierce. He cried out as if he were ending a sentence he had not finished when he spoke as he sat on the floor buttoning his shoes.

“She has no one but me to remember!” he said. “No one but me had ever even kissed her. She didn’t know!”

To her amazement he clenched both his savage young fists and shook them before him.

“It’ll kill me!” he raged.

She could not hold herself back. She caught at him with her arms and meant to drag him to her breast. “No! No! Donal!” she cried. “Darling! No—No!” But, as suddenly as the queer unchildish thing had broken out, did he remember himself and boy shame at his fantastic emotion overtook him. He had never spoken like that to anyone before! It was almost as bad as bursting out crying! The red tide ebbed away and he withdrew himself awkwardly from her embrace. He said not another word and sat down in his corner with his back turned toward the world.

*

That the Lady Downstairs, who was so fond of laughing and who knew so many persons who seemed to laugh nearly all the time, might have been joking about being her mother presented itself to Robin as a vague solution of the problem. The Lady had laughed when she said it, as people so often laughed at children. Perhaps she had only been amusing herself as grown-up persons were apparently entitled to do. Even Donal had not seemed wholly convinced and though his mother had said the Lady Downstairs WAS—somehow the subject had been changed at once. Mrs. Muir had so soon begun to tell them a story. Robin was not in the least aware that she had swiftly distracted their attention from a question, any discussion of which would have involved explanations she could not have produced. It would have been impossible to make it clear to any child. She herself was helpless before the situation and therefore her only refuge was to make the two think of other things. She had so well done this that Robin had gone home later only remembering the brightly transitory episode as she recalled others as brief and bright, when she had stared at a light and lovely figure standing on the nursery threshold and asking careless questions of Andrews, without coming in and risking the freshness of her draperies by contact with London top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact, too full of the reality of her happiness with Donal and Donal’s mother to be more than faintly bewildered by a sort of visionary conundrum.

Robin, like Donal, slept perfectly through the night. Her sleep was perhaps made more perfect by fair dreams in which she played in the Gardens and she and Donal ran to and from the knees of the Mother lady to ask questions and explain their games. As the child had often, in the past, looked up at the sky, so she had looked up into the clear eyes of the Mother lady. There was something in them which she had never seen before but which she kept wanting to see again. Then there came a queer bit of a dream about the Lady Downstairs. She came dancing towards them dressed in hyacinths and with her arms full of daffodils. She danced before Donal’s Mother—danced and laughed as if she thought they were all funny. She threw a few daffodils at them and then danced away. The daffodils lay on the gravel walk and they all looked at them but no one picked them up. Afterwards—in the dream—Mrs. Muir suddenly caught her in her arms and kissed her and Robin was glad and felt warm all over—inside and out.

She wakened smiling at the dingy ceiling of the dingy room. There was but one tiny shadow in the world, which was the fear that Andrews would get well too quickly. She was no longer in bed but was well enough to sit up and sew a little before the tiny fire in the atom of a servant’s room grate. The doctor would not let her go out yet; therefore, Anne still remained in charge. Founding one’s hope on previous knowledge of Anne’s habits, she might be trusted to sit and read and show no untoward curiosity.

From her bed Robin could see the sky was blue. That meant that she would be taken out. She lay as quiet as a mouse and thought of the joy before her, until Anne came to dress her and give her her breakfast.

“We’ll put on your rose-coloured smock this morning,” the girl said, when the dressing began. “I like the hat and socks that match.”

Anne was not quite like Andrews who was not talkative. She made a conversational sort of remark after she had tied the white shoes.

“You’ve got pretty little aristocratic legs of your own,” she said amiably. “I like my children to have nice legs.”

Robin was uplifted in spirit by the commendation, but she hoped Anne would put on her own things quickly. Sometimes she was rather a long time. The one course, however, towards which discretion pointed as entirely safe was the continuance of being as quiet as a mouse—even quieter, if such thing might be—so that nothing might interfere with anything any one wanted to do. To interfere would have been to attract attention and might lead to delay. So she stood and watched the sparrows inoffensively until Anne called her.

When she found herself out on the street her step was so light on the pavement that she was rather like a rose petal blown fluttering along by soft vagrant puffs of spring air. Under her flopping hat her eyes and lips and cheeks were so happy that more than one passer-by turned head over shoulder to look after her.

“Your name ought to be Rose,” Anne giggled involuntarily as she glanced down at her because someone had stared. She had not meant to speak but the words said themselves.

Because the time was young June even London sky and air were wonderful. Stray breaths of fragrance came and went. The green of the trees in the Gardens was light and fresh and in the bedded-out curves and stars and circles there were more flowers every hour, so that it seemed as if blooming things with scents grew thick about one’s feet. It was no wonder one felt light and smiled back at nurses and governesses who looked up. Robin drew eyes became she was like a summer bloom suddenly appearing in the Spring Garden.

Nanny was not sitting on the bench near the gate and Donal was not to be seen amusing himself. But he was somewhere just out of sight, or, if he had chanced to be late, he would come very soon even if his Mother could not come with him—though Robin could not believe she would not. To a child thing both happiness and despair cannot be conceived of except as lasting forever.

Anne sat down and opened her book. She had reached an exciting part and looked forward to a thoroughly enjoyable morning.

Robin hopped about for a few minutes. Donal had taught her to hop and she felt it an accomplishment. Entangled in the meshes of the feathery, golden, if criminal, ringlets of Lady Audley, Anne did not know when she hopped round the curve of the walk behind the lilac and snowball bushes.

Once safe in her bit of enchanted land, the child stood still and looked about her. There was no kilted figure to be seen, but it would come towards her soon with swinging plaid and eagle’s feather standing up grandly in its Highland bonnet. He would come soon. Perhaps he would come running—and the Mother lady would walk behind more slowly and smile. Robin waited and looked—she waited and looked.

She was used to waiting but she had never watched for anyone before. There had never been any one or anything to watch for. The newness of the suspense gave it a sort of deep thrill at first. How long was “at first”? She did not know. She stood—and stood—and stood—and looked at every creature who entered the gate. She did not see any one who looked in the least like Donal or his Mother or Nanny. There were nurses and governesses and children and a loitering lady or two. There were never many people in the Gardens—only those who had keys. She knew nothing about time but at length she knew that on other mornings they had been playing together before this.

The small rose-coloured figure stood so still for so long that it began to look rigid and a nurse sitting at some distance said to another,

“What is that child waiting for?”

What length of time had passed before she found herself looking slowly down at her feet because of something. The