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

it had always been waiting to be used for the happiness of people who knew each other and were young and ready for delight. When the young Lothwells had been children they had had dances and frolicking games with other children in the huge rooms and had kicked up their young heels on the polished floors at Christmas parties and on birthdays. How wonderful it must have been. But they had not known it was wonderful.

As Dowie dressed her the reflection she saw in the mirror gave back to her an intensified Robin whose curved lips almost quivered as they smiled. The soft silk of her hair looked like the night and the small rings on the back of her very slim white neck were things to ensnare the eye and hold it helpless.

“You look your best, my dear,” Dowie said as she clasped her little necklace. “And it is a good best.” Dowie was feeling tremulous herself though she could not have explained why. She thought that perhaps it was because she wished that Mademoiselle could have been with her.

Robin kissed her when the last touch had been given.

“I’m going to run down the staircase,” she said. “If I let myself walk slowly I shall have time to feel queer and shy and I might seem to CREEP into the drawing-room. I mustn’t creep in. I must walk in as if I had been to parties all my life.”

She ran down and as she did so she looked like a white bird flying, but she was obliged to stop upon the landing before the drawing-room door to quiet a moment of excited breathing. Still when she entered the room she moved as she should and held her head poised with a delicately fearless air. The Duchess—who herself looked her best in her fine old ivory profiled way—gave her a pleased smile of welcome which was almost affectionate.

“What a perfect little frock!” she said. “You are delightfully pretty in it.”

“Is it quite right?” said Robin. “Mademoiselle chose it for me.”

“It is quite right. ‘Frightfully right,’ George would say. George will sit near you at dinner. He is my grandson—Lord Halwyn you know, and you will no doubt frequently hear him say things are ‘frightfully’ something or other during the evening. Kathryn will say things are ‘deevy’ or ‘exquig’. I mention it because you may not know that she means ‘exquisite’ and ‘divine.’ Don’t let it frighten you if you don’t quite understand their language. They are dear handsome things sweeping along in the rush of their bit of century. I don’t let it frighten me that their world seems to me an entirely new planet.”

Robin drew a little nearer her. She felt something as she had felt years ago when she had said to Dowie. “I want to kiss you, Dowie.” Her eyes were pools of childish tenderness because she so well understood the infinitude of the friendly tact which drew her within its own circle with the light humour of its “I don’t let them frighten ME.”

“You are kind—kind to me,” she said. “And I am grateful—GRATEFUL.”

The extremely good-looking young people who began very soon to drift into the brilliant big room—singly or in pairs of brother and sister—filled her with innocent delight. They were so well built and gaily at ease with each other and their surroundings, so perfectly dressed and finished. The filmy narrowness of delicate frocks, the shortness of skirts accentuated the youth and girlhood and added to it a sort of child fairy-likeness. Kathryn in exquisite wisps of silver-embroidered gauze looked fourteen instead of nearly twenty—aided by a dimple in her cheek and a small tilted nose. A girl in scarlet tulle was like a child out of a nursery ready to dance about a Christmas tree. Everyone seemed so young and so suggested supple dancing, perhaps because dancing was going on everywhere and all the world whether fashionable or unfashionable was driven by a passion for whirling, swooping and inventing new postures and fantastic steps. The young men had slim straight bodies and light movements. Their clothes fitted their suppleness to perfection. Robin thought they all looked as if they had had a great deal of delightful exercise and plenty of pleasure all their lives.

They were of that stream which had always seemed to be rushing past her in bright pursuit of alluring things which belonged to them as part of their existence, but which had had nothing to do with her own youth. Now the stream had paused as if she had for the moment some connection with it. The swift light she was used to seeing illuminate glancing eyes as she passed people in the street, she saw again and again as new arrivals appeared. Kathryn was quite excited by her eyes and eyelashes and George hovered about. There was a great deal of hovering. At the dinner table sleek young heads held themselves at an angle which allowed of their owners seeing through or around, or under floral decorations and alert young eyes showed an eager gleam. After dinner was over and dancing began the Duchess smiled shrewdly as she saw the gravitating masculine movement towards a certain point. It was the point where Robin stood with a small growing circle about her.

It was George who danced with her first. He was tall and slender and flexible and his good shoulders had a military squareness of build. He had also a nice square face, and a warmly blue eye and knew all the latest steps and curves and unexpected swirls. Robin was an ozier wand and there was no swoop or dart or sudden sway and change she was not alert at. The swing and lure of the music, the swift movement, the fluttering of airy draperies as slim sister nymphs flew past her, set her pulses beating with sweet young joy. A brief, uncontrollable ripple of laughter broke from her before she had circled the room twice.

“How heavenly it is!” she exclaimed and lifted her eyes to Halwyn’s. “How heavenly!”

They were not safe eyes to lift in such a way to those of a very young man. They gave George a sudden enjoyable shock. He had heard of the girl who was a sort of sublimated companion to his grandmother. The Duchess herself had talked to him a little about her and he had come to the party intending to behave very amiably and help the little thing enjoy herself. He had also encountered before in houses where there were no daughters the smart well-born, young companion who was allowed all sorts of privileges because she knew how to assume tiresome little responsibilities and how to be entertaining enough to add cheer and spice to the life of the elderly and lonely. Sometimes she was a subtly appealing sort of girl and given to being sympathetic and to liking sympathy and quiet corners in conservatories or libraries, and sometimes she was capable of scientific flirtation and required scientific management. A man had to have his wits about him. This one as she flew like a blown leaf across the floor and laughed up into his face with wide eyes, produced a new effect and was a new kind.

“It’s you who are heavenly,” he answered with a boy’s laugh. “You are like a feather—and a willow wand.”

“You are light too,” she laughed back, “and you are like steel as well.”

Mrs. Alan Stacy, the lady with the magnificent henna hair, had recently given less time to him, being engaged in the preliminary instruction of a new member of the Infant Class. Such things will, of course, happen and though George had quite ingenuously raged in secret, the circumstances left him free to “hover” and hovering was a pastime he enjoyed.

“Let us go on like this forever and ever,” he said sweeping half the length of the room with her and whirling her as if she were indeed a leaf in the wind, “Forever and ever.”

“I wish we could. But the music will stop,” she gave back.

“Music ought never to stop—never,” he answered.

But the music did stop and when it began again almost immediately another tall, flexible young man made a lightning claim on her and carried her away only to hand her to another and he in his turn to another. She was not allowed more than a moment’s rest and borne on the crest of the wave of young delight, she did not need more. Young eyes were always laughing into hers and elating her by a special look of pleasure in everything she did or said or inspired in themselves. How was she informed without phrases that for this exciting evening she was a creature without a flaw, that the loveliness of her eyes startled those who looked into them, that it was a thrilling experience to dance with her, that somehow she was new and apart and wonderful? No sleek-haired, slim and straight-backed youth said exactly any of these things to her, but somehow they were conveyed and filled her with a wondering realization of the fact that if they were true, they were no longer dreadful and maddening, since they only made people like and want to dance with one. To dance, to like people and be liked seemed so heavenly natural and right—to be only like air and sky and free, happy breathing. There was, it was true, a blissful little uplifted look about her which she herself was not aware of, but which was singularly stimulating to the masculine beholder. It only meant indeed that as she whirled and swayed and swooped laughing she was saying to herself at intervals,

“This is what other girls feel like. They are happy like this. I am laughing and talking to people just as other girls do. I am Robin Gareth-Lawless, but I am enjoying a party like this—a YOUNG party.”

Lady Lothwell sitting near her mother watched the trend of affairs with an occasional queer interested smile.

“Well, mamma darling,” she said at last as youth and beauty whirled by in a maelstrom of modern Terpsichorean liveliness, “she is a great success. I don’t know whether it is quite what you intended or not.”

The Duchess did not explain what she had intended. She was watching the trend also and thinking a good deal. On the whole Lady Lothwell had scarcely expected that she would explain. She rarely did. She seldom made mistakes, however.

Kathryn in her scant gauzy strips of white and silver having drifted towards them at the moment stood looking on with a funny little disturbed expression on her small, tip-tilted face.

“There’s something ABOUT her, grandmamma,” she said.

“All the girls see it and no one knows what it is. She’s sitting out for a few minutes and just look at George—and Hal Brunton—and Captain Willys. They are all laughing, of course, and pretending to joke, but they would like to eat each other up. Perhaps it’s her eyelashes. She looks out from under them as if they were a curtain.”

Lady Lothwell’s queer little smile became a queer little laugh.

“Yes. It gives her a look of being ecstatically happy and yet almost shy and appealing at the same time. Men can’t stand it of course.”

“None of them are trying to stand it,” answered little Lady Kathryn somewhat in the tone of a retort.

“I don’t believe she knows she does it,” Lady Lothwell said quite reflectively.

“She does not know at all. That is the worst of it,” commented the Duchess.

“Then you see that there IS a worst,” said her daughter.

The Duchess glanced towards Kathryn, but fortunately the puzzled fret of the girl’s forehead was even at the moment melting into a smile as a young man of much attraction descended upon her with smiles of his