Books: The Head of the House of Coombe
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Frances Hodgson Burnett >> The Head of the House of Coombe
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As a result of the skirt dancing, the furniture of the empty
drawing-room was a little scattered and untidy, but Feather had
found a suitable corner among cushions on a sofa, after everyone
had gone leaving Coombe alone with her. She wished he would sit
down, but he preferred to stand in his still, uncomfortable way.
"I know you are going to tell me something," she broke the silence.
"I am. When I went out of the room, I did not drive round to my
club as I said I found myself obliged to. I went upstairs to the
third floor--to the Nursery."
Feather sat quite upright.
"YOU went up to the Nursery!" If this was the reason for his staying,
what on earth had he come upon in the region of the third floor,
and how ridiculously unlike him to allow himself to interfere.
Could it be Andrews and Jennings? Surely Andrews was too old.--This
passed across her mind in a flash.
"You called Andrews to use her authority with the child when she
would not shake hands with me. The little creature, for some reason
of her own, evidently feels an antipathy to me. That interested
me and I watched her as Andrews whispered in her ear. The woman's
vanity was stung. I realized that she whispered a threat. A hint
of actual ferocity showed in her eyes in spite of herself. Robin
turned pale."
"Andrews was quite right. Children must be punished when they are
rude." Feather felt this at once silly and boring. What did he
know about such matters?
"The child said, 'Andrews will pinch me!' and I caught Andrews' eye
and knew it was true--also that she had done it before. I looked
at the woman's long, thin, strong fingers. They were cruel fingers.
I do not take liberties, as a rule, but I took a liberty. I excused
myself and climbed three flights of stairs."
Never had Feather been so surprised in her life. She looked like
a bewildered child.
"But--what COULD it matter to YOU?" she said in soft amaze.
"I don't know," his answer came after a moment's pause. "I have
caprices of mood. Certain mental images made my temperature rise.
Momentarily it did matter. One is like that at times. Andrews'
feline face and her muscular fingers--and the child's extraordinarily
exquisite flesh--gave me a second's furious shudder."
Feather quite broke in upon him.
"Are you--are you FOND of children?"
"No," he was really abrupt. "I never thought of such a thing in
my life--as being FOND of things."
"That was what--I mean I thought so." Feather faltered, as if in
polite acquiescence with a quite natural fact.
Coombe proceeded:
"As I went up the stairs I heard screams and I thought that
the pinching had begun. I got up quickly and opened the door and
found the woman lying flat on the floor by the bed, dragging out
the child who had hidden under it. The woman's face was devilish,
and so was her voice. I heard her threats. She got on her feet and
dragged the child up and held her between her knees. She clapped
her hand over mouth to stifle her shrieks. There I stopped her.
She had a fright at sight of me which taught her something." He
ended rather slowly. "I took the great liberty of ordering her
to pack her box and leave the house--course," with a slight bow,
"using you as my authority."
"Andrews!" cried Feather, aghast. "Has she--gone?"
"Would you have kept her?" he inquired.
"It's true that--that PINCHING" Feather's voice almost held tears,
"--really HARD pinching is--is not proper. But Andrews has been
invaluable. Everyone says Robin is better dressed and better kept
than other children. And she is never allowed to make the least
noise--"
"One wouldn't if one were pinched by those devilish, sinewy fingers
every time one raised one's voice. Yes. She has gone. I ordered
her to put her charge to bed before she packed. I did not leave
her alone with Robin. In fact, I walked about the two nurseries
and looked them over."
He had walked about the Night Nursery and the Day Nursery! He--the
Head of the House of Coombe, whose finely acrid summing up of
things, they were all secretly afraid of, if the truth were known.
"They" stood for her smart, feverishly pleasure-chasing set. In
their way, they half unconsciously tried to propitiate something
in him, always without producing the least effect. Her mental
vision presented to her his image as he had walked about the horrid
little rooms, his somewhat stiffly held head not much below the
low ceilings. He had taken in shabby carpets, furniture, faded
walls, general dim dinginess.
"It's an unholy den for anything to spend its days in--that third
floor," he made the statement detachedly, in a way. "If she's six,
she has lived six years there--and known nothing else."
"All London top floors are like it," said Feather, "and they are
all nurseries and school rooms--where there are children."
His faintly smiling glance took in her girl-child slimness in its
glittering sheath--the zephyr scarf floating from the snow of her
bared loveliness--her delicate soft chin deliciously lifted as she
looked up at him.
"How would YOU like it?" he asked.
"But I am not a child," in pretty protest. "Children are--are
different!"
"You look like a child," he suddenly said, queerly--as if the
aspect of her caught him for an instant and made him absent-minded.
"Sometimes--a woman does. Not often."
She bloomed into a kind of delighted radiance.
"You don't often pay me compliments," she said. "That is a beautiful
one. Robin--makes it more beautiful."
"It isn't a compliment," he answered, still watching her in the
slightly absent manner. "It is--a tragic truth."
He passed his hand lightly across his eyes as if he swept something
away, and then both looked and spoke exactly as before.
"I have decided to buy the long lease of this house. It is for
sale," he said, casually. "I shall buy it for the child."
"For Robin!" said Feather, helplessly.
"Yes, for Robin."
"It--it would be an income--whatever happened. It is in the very
heart of Mayfair," she said, because, in her astonishment--almost
consternation--she could think of nothing else. He would not buy
it for her. He thought her too silly to trust. But, if it were
Robin's--it would be hers also. A girl couldn't turn her own
mother into the street. Amid the folds of her narrow being hid
just one spark of shrewdness which came to life where she herself
was concerned.
"Two or three rooms--not large ones--can be added at the back,"
he went on. "I glanced out of a window to see if it could be done."
Incomprehensible as he was, one might always be sure of a certain
princeliness in his inexplicable methods. He never was personal
or mean. An addition to the slice of a house! That really WAS
generous! Entrancement filled her.
"That really is kind of you," she murmured, gratefully. "It seems
too much to ask!"
"You did not ask it," was his answer.
"But I shall benefit by it. Nothing COULD BE nicer. These rooms
are so much too small," glancing about her in flushed rapture, "And
my bedroom is dreadful. I'm obliged to use Rob's for a dressing-room."
"The new rooms will be for Robin," he said. An excellent method he
had discovered, of entirely detaching himself from the excitements
and emotions of other persons, removed the usual difficulties
in the way of disappointing--speaking truths to--or embarrassing
people who deserved it. It was this method which had utterly cast
down the defences of Andrews. Feather was so wholly left out of the
situation that she was actually almost saved from its awkwardness.
"When one is six," he explained, "one will soon be seven--nine--twelve.
Then the teens begin to loom up and one cannot be concealed in
cupboards on a top floor. Even before that time a governess is
necessary, and, even from the abyss of my ignorance, I see that no
respectable woman would stand either the Night or the Day Nursery.
Your daughter--"
"Oh, don't call her THAT!" cried Feather. "My daughter! It sounds
as if she were eighteen!" She felt as if she had a sudden hideous
little shock. Six years HAD passed since Bob died! A daughter! A
school girl with long hair and long legs to keep out of the way.
A grown-up girl to drag about with one. Never would she do it!
"Three sixes are eighteen," Coombe continued, "as was impressed
upon one in early years by the multiplication table."
"I never saw you so interested in anything before," Feather faltered.
"Climbing steep, narrow, horrid stairs to her nursery! Dismissing
her nurse!" She paused a second, because a very ugly little idea
had clutched at her. It arose from and was complicated with many
fantastic, half formed, secret resentments of the past. It made
her laugh a shade hysterical.
"Are you going to see that she is properly brought up and educated,
so that if--anyone important falls in love with her she can make
a good match?"
Hers was quite a hideous little mind, he was telling himself--fearful
in its latter day casting aside of all such small matters as taste
and feeling. People stripped the garments from things in these
days. He laughed inwardly at himself and his unwitting "these
days." Senile severity mouthed just such phrases. Were they not
his own days and the outcome of a past which had considered itself
so much more decorous? Had not boldly questionable attitudes been
held in those other days? How long was it since the Prince Regent
himself had flourished? It was only that these days brought it
all close against one's eyes. But this exquisite creature had a
hideous little mind of her own whatsoever her day.
Later, he confessed to himself that he was unprepared to see her
spring to her feet and stand before him absurdly, fantastically
near being impassioned.
"You think I as too silly to SEE anything," she broke forth. "But
I do see--a long way sometimes. I can't bear it but I do--I do!
I shall have a grown-up daughter. She will be the kind of girl
everyone will look at--and someone--important--may want to marry
her. But, Oh!--" He was reminded of the day when she had fallen
at his feet, and clasped his rigid and reluctant knees. This was
something of the same feeble desperation of mood. "Oh, WHY couldn't
someone like that have wanted to marry ME! See!" she was like
a pathetic fairy as she spread her nymphlike arms, "how PRETTY I
am!"
His gaze held her a moment in the singular fashion with which she
had become actually familiar, because--at long intervals--she kept
seeing it again. He quite gently took her fingers and returned
her to her sofa.
"Please sit down again," he requested. "It will be better."
She sat down without another imbecile word to say. As for him, he
changed the subject.
"With your permission, Benby will undertake the business of the
lease and the building," he explained. "The plans will be brought
to you. We will go over them together, if you wish. There will be
decent rooms for Robin and her governess. The two nurseries can be
made fit for human beings to live in and used for other purposes.
The house will be greatly improved."
It was nearly three o'clock when Feather went upstairs to her
dozing maid, because, after he had left her, she sat some time in
the empty, untidy little drawing-room and gazed straight before
her at a painted screen on which shepherdesses and swains were
dancing in a Watteau glade infested by flocks of little Loves.
CHAPTER XIV
When, from Robin's embarrassed young consciousness, there had
welled up the hesitating confession, "She--doesn't like me," she
could not, of course, have found words in which to make the reasons
for her knowledge clear, but they had for herself no obscurity.
The fair being who, at rare intervals, fluttered on the threshold
of her world had a way of looking at her with a shade of aloof
distaste in her always transient gaze.
The unadorned fact was that Feather did NOT like her. She had been
outraged by her advent. A baby was absurdly "out of the picture."
So far as her mind encompassed a future, she saw herself flitting
from flower to flower of "smart" pleasures and successes,
somehow, with more money and more exalted invitations--"something"
vaguely--having happened to the entire Lawdor progeny, and she,
therefore, occupying a position in which it was herself who could
gracefully condescend to others. There was nothing so "stodgy"
as children in the vision. When the worst came to the worst, she
had been consoled by the thought that she had really managed the
whole thing very cleverly. It was easier, of course, to so arrange
such things in modern days and in town. The Day Nursery and the
Night Nursery on the third floor, a smart-looking young woman
who knew her business, who even knew what to buy for a child and
where to buy it, without troubling any one simplified the situation.
Andrews had been quite wonderful. Nobody can bother one about
a healthy, handsome child who is seen meticulously cared for and
beautifully dressed, being pushed or led or carried out in the open
air every day.
But there had arrived the special morning when she had seen a
child who so stood out among a dozen children that she had been
startled when she recognized that it was Robin. Andrews had taken
her charge to Hyde Park that day and Feather was driving through
the Row on her way to a Knightsbridge shop. First her glance had
been caught by the hair hanging to the little hips--extraordinary
hair in which Andrews herself had a pride. Then she had seen the
slender, exquisitely modeled legs, and the dancing sway of the
small body. A wonderfully cut, stitched, and fagotted smock and hat
she had, of course, taken in at a flash. When the child suddenly
turned to look at some little girls in a pony cart, the amazing
damask of her colour, and form and depth of eye had given her another
slight shock. She realized that what she had thrust lightly away
in a corner of her third floor produced an unmistakable effect when
turned out into the light of a gay world. The creature was tall
too--for six years old. Was she really six? It seemed incredible.
Ten more years and she would be sixteen.
Mrs. Heppel-Bevill had a girl of fifteen, who was a perfect
catastrophe. She read things and had begun to talk about her "right
to be a woman." Emily Heppel-Bevill was only thirty-seven--three
years from forty. Feather had reached the stage of softening in
her disdain of the women in their thirties. She had found herself
admitting that--in these days--there were women of forty who had
not wholly passed beyond the pale into that outer darkness where
there was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. But there
was no denying that this six year old baby, with the dancing step,
gave one--almost hysterically--"to think." Her imagination could
not--never had and never would she have allowed it to--grasp any
belief that she herself could change. A Feather, No! But a creature
of sixteen, eighteen--with eyes that shape--with lashes an inch
long--with yards of hair--standing by one's side in ten years! It
was ghastly!
Coombe, in his cold perfunctory way, climbing the crooked, narrow
stairs, dismissing Andrews--looking over the rooms--dismissing
them, so to speak, and then remaining after the rest had gone
to reveal to her a new abnormal mood--that, in itself alone, was
actually horrible. It was abnormal and yet he had always been more
or less like that in all things. Despite everything--everything--he
had never been in love with her at all. At first she had believed
he was--then she had tried to make him care for her. He had never
failed her, he had done everything in his grand seigneur fashion.
Nobody dare make gross comment upon her, but, while he saw her
loveliness as only such a man could--she had gradually realized
that she had never had even a chance with him. She could not
even think that if she had not been so silly and frightened that
awful day six years ago, and had not lost her head, he might have
admired her more and more and in the end asked her to marry him.
He had said there must be no mistakes, and she had not been allowed
to fall into making one. The fact that she had not, had, finally,
made her feel the power of a certain fascination in him. She thought
it was a result of his special type of looks, his breeding, the
wonderful clothes he wore--but it was, in truth, his varieties of
inaccessibility.
"A girl might like him," she had said to herself that night--she
sat up late after he left her. "A girl who--who had up-to-date sense
might. Modern people don't grow old as they used to. At fifty-five
he won't be fat, or bald and he won't have lost his teeth. People
have found out they needn't. He will be as thin and straight as
he is today--and nothing can alter his nose. He will be ten years
cleverer than he is now. Buying the house for a child of that
age--building additional rooms for her!"
In the fevered, rapid, deep-dipping whirl of the life which was
the only one she knew, she had often seen rather trying things
happen--almost unnatural changes in situations. People had overcome
the folly of being afraid to alter their minds and their views
about what they had temporarily believed were permanent bonds and
emotions. Bonds had become old fogeyish. Marriages went to pieces,
the parties in love affairs engaged in a sort of "dance down the
middle" and turn other people's partners. The rearrangement of
figures sometimes made for great witticism. Occasionally people
laughed at themselves as at each other. The admirers of engaging
matrons had been known to renew their youth at the coming-out balls
of lovely daughters in their early teens, and to end by assuming
the flowery chains of a new allegiance. Time had, of course,
been when such a volte face would have aroused condemnation and
indignant discussion, but a humorous leniency spent but little
time in selecting terms of severity. Feather had known of several
such contretemps ending in quite brilliant matches. The enchanting
mothers usually consoled themselves with great ease, and, if the
party of each part was occasionally wittily pungent in her comments
on the other, everybody laughed and nobody had time to criticize.
A man who had had much to bestow and who preferred in youth
to bestow it upon himself was not infrequently more in the mood
for the sharing of marriage when years had revealed to him the
distressing fact that he was not, and had never been, the centre of
the universe, which distressing fact is one so unfairly concealed
from youth in bloom.
It was, of course, but as a vaguely outlined vision that these
recognitions floated through what could only be alleged to be
Feather's mind because there was no other name for it. The dark
little staircase, the rejected and despised third floor, and Coombe
detachedly announcing his plans for the house, had set the--so to
speak--rather malarious mist flowing around her. A trying thing
was that it did not really dispel itself altogether, but continued
to hang about the atmosphere surrounding other and more cheerful
things. Almost impalpably it added to the familiar feeling--or lack
of feeling--with regard to Robin. She had not at all hated the
little thing; it had merely been quite true that, in an inactive
way, she had not LIKED her. In the folds of the vague mist quietly
floated the truth that she now liked her less.
Benby came to see and talk to her on the business of the
structural changes to be made. He conducted himself precisely as
though her views on the matter were of value and could not, in
fact, be dispensed with. He brought the architect's plans with him
and explained them with care. They were clever plans which made
the most of a limited area. He did not even faintly smile when
it revealed itself to him, as it unconsciously did, that Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless regarded their adroit arrangement as a singular
misuse of space which could have been much better employed for
necessities of her own. She was much depressed by the ground floor
addition which might have enlarged her dining-room, but which was
made into a sitting-room for Robin and her future governess.
"And that is in ADDITION to her schoolroom which might have been
thrown into the drawing-room--besides the new bedrooms which I
needed so much," she said.
"The new nurse, who is a highly respectable person," explained
Benby, "could not have been secured if she had not known that
improvements were being made. The reconstruction of the third floor
will provide suitable accommodations."
The special forte of Dowson, the new nurse, was a sublimated
respectability far superior to smartness. She had been mystically
produced by Benby and her bonnets and jackets alone would have
revealed her selection from almost occult treasures. She wore
bonnets and "jackets," not hats and coats.
"In the calm days of Her Majesty, nurses dressed as she does. I do
not mean in the riotous later years of her reign--but earlier--when
England dreamed in terms of Crystal Palaces and Great Exhibitions.
She can only be the result of excavation," Coombe said of her.
She was as proud of her respectability as Andrews had been of her
smartness. This had, in fact, proved an almost insuperable obstacle
to her engagement. The slice of a house, with its flocking in and
out of chattering, smart people in marvellous clothes was not the
place for her, nor was Mrs. Gareth-Lawless the mistress of her
dreams. But her husband had met with an accident and must be kept
in a hospital, and an invalid daughter must live by the seaside--and
suddenly, when things were at their worst with her, had come
Benby with a firm determination to secure her with wages such as
no other place would offer. Besides which she had observed as she
had lived.
"Things have changed," she reflected soberly. "You've got to resign
yourself and not be too particular."
She accepted the third floor, as Benby had said, because it was to
be rearranged and the Night and Day Nurseries, being thrown into
one, repainted and papered would make a decent place to live in.
At the beautiful little girl given into her charge she often looked
in a puzzled way, because she knew a good deal about children, and
about this one there was something odd. Her examination of opened
drawers and closets revealed piles of exquisite garments of all
varieties, all perfectly kept. In these dingy holes, which called
themselves nurseries, she found evidence that money had been spent
like water so that the child, when she was seen, might look like
a small princess. But she found no plaything--no dolls or toys,
and only one picture book, and that had "Donal" written on the
fly leaf and evidently belonged to someone else.
What exactly she would have done when she had had time to think
the matter over, she never knew, because, a few days after her
arrival, a tall, thin gentleman, coming up the front steps as she
was going out with Robin, stopped and spoke to her as if he knew
who she was.
"You know the kind of things children like to play with, nurse?"
he said.
She respectfully replied that she had had long experience with
young desires. She did not know as yet who he was, but there was
that about him which made her feel that, while there was no knowing
what height his particular exaltation in the matter of rank might
reach, one would be safe in setting it high.
"Please go to one of the toy shops and choose for the child what
she will like best. Dolls--games--you will know what to select.
Send the bill to me at Coombe House. I am Lord Coombe."
"Thank you, my lord," Dowson answered, with a sketch of a curtsey,
"Miss Robin, you must hold out your little hand and say 'thank
you' to his lordship for being so kind. He's told Dowson to buy
you some beautiful dolls and picture books as a present."
Robin's eyelashes curled against her under brows in her wide, still
glance upward at him. Here was "the one" again! She shut her hand
tightly into a fist behind her back.
Lord Coombe smiled a little--not much.
"She does not like me," he said. "It is not necessary that
she should give me her hand. I prefer that she shouldn't, if she
doesn't want to. Good morning, Dowson."
To the well-regulated mind of Dowson, this seemed treating too
lightly a matter as serious as juvenile incivility. She remonstrated
gravely and at length with Robin.
"Little girls must behave prettily to kind gentlemen who are
friends of their mammas. It is dreadful to be rude and not say
'thank you'," she said.
But as she talked she was vaguely aware that her words passed by
the child's ears as the summer wind passed. Perhaps it was all a
bit of temper and would disappear and leave no trace behind. At
the same time, there WAS something queer about the little thing.
She had a listless way of sitting staring out of the window and
seeming to have no desire to amuse herself. She was too young
to be listless and she did not care for her food. Dowson asked
permission to send for the doctor and, when he came, he ordered
sea air.
"Of course, you can take her away for a few weeks," Mrs. Gareth-Lawless
said. Here she smiled satirically and added, "But I can tell you
what it is all about. The little minx actually fell in love with
a small boy she met in the Square Gardens and, when his mother
took him from London, she began to mope like a tiresome girl in
her teens. It's ridiculous, but is the real trouble."
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