Books: The Head of the House of Coombe

F >> Frances Hodgson Burnett >> The Head of the House of Coombe

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"But most people do not know," said Robin. "It seems old-fashioned
to them--and it's beautiful! Dowie is an angel."

"I should like to secure your Dowie for my housekeeper and
myself,"--one of the greatest powers of the celebrated smile was
its power to convince. "A competent person is needed to take charge
of the linen. If we can secure an angel we shall be fortunate."

A day or so later she said to Coombe in describing the visit.

"The child's face is wonderful. If you could but have seen her
eyes when I said it. It is not the mere beauty of size and shape
and colour which affect one. It is something else. She is a little
flame of feeling."

The "something else" was in the sound of her voice as she answered.

"She will be in the same house with me! Sometimes perhaps I may
see her and talk to her! Oh! how GRATEFUL I am!" She might even
see and talk to her as often as she wished, it revealed itself
and when she and Mademoiselle got into their hansom cab to drive
away, she caught at the Frenchwoman's hand and clung to it, her
eyelashes wet,

"It is as if there MUST be Goodness which takes care of one," she
said. "I used to believe in it so--until I was afraid of all the
world. Dowie means most of all. I did now know how I could bear
to let her go away. And since her husband and her daughter died,
she has no one but me. I should have had no one but her if you
had gone back to Belgium, Mademoiselle. And now she will be safe
in the same house with me. Perhaps the Duchess will keep her until
she dies. I hope she will keep me until I die. I will be as good
and faithful as Dowie and perhaps the Duchess will live until I
am quite old--and not pretty any more. And I will make economies
as you have made them, Mademoiselle, and save all my salary--and
I might be able to end my days in a little cottage in the country."

Mademoiselle was conscious of an actual physical drag at her
heartstrings. The pulsating glow of her young loveliness had never
been more moving and oh! the sublime certainty of her unconsciousness
that Life lay between this hour and that day when she was "quite
old and not pretty any more" and having made economies could die
in a little cottage in the country! She believed in her vision as
she had believed that Donal would come to her in the garden.

Upon Feather the revelation that her daughter had elected to
join the ranks of girls who were mysteriously determined to be
responsible for themselves produced a curious combination of effects.
It was presented to her by Lord Coombe in the form of a simple
impersonal statement which had its air of needing no explanation.
She heard it with eyes widening a little and a smile slowly growing.
Having heard, she broke into a laugh, a rather high-pitched treble
laugh.

"Really?" she said. "She is really going to do it? To take a
situation! She wants to be independent and 'live her own life!'
What a joke--for a girl of mine!" She was either really amused or
chose to seem so.

"What do YOU think of it?" she asked when she stopped laughing.
Her eyes had curiosity in them.

"I like it," he answered.

"Of course. I ought to have remembered that you helped her to an
Early Victorian duchess. She's one without a flaw--the Dowager
Duchess of Darte. The most conscientiously careful mother couldn't
object. It's almost like entering into the kingdom of heaven--in
a dull way." She began to laugh again as if amusing images rose
suddenly before her. "And what does the Duchess think of it?" she
said after her laughter had ceased again. "How does she reconcile
herself to the idea of a companion whose mother she wouldn't have
in her house?"

"We need not enter into that view of the case. You decided some
years ago that it did not matter to you whether Early Victorian
duchesses included you in their visiting lists or did not. More
modern ones do I believe--quite beautiful and amusing ones."

"But for that reason I want this one and those like her. They would
bore me, but I want them. I want them to come to my house and be
polite to me in their stuffy way. I want to be invited to their
hideous dinner parties and see them sitting round their tables in
their awful family jewels 'talking of the sad deaths of kings.'
That's Shakespeare, you know. I heard it last night at the theatre."

"Why do you want it?" Coombe inquired.

"When I ask you why you show your morbid interest in Robin, you
say you don't know. I don't know--but I do want it."

She suddenly flushed, she even showed her small teeth. For an
extraordinary moment she looked like a little cat.

"Robin will hare it," she cried, grinding a delicate fist into
the palm on her knee. "She's not eighteen and she's a beauty and
she's taken up by a perfectly decent old duchess. She'll have
EVERYTHING! The Dowager will marry her to someone important. You'll
help," she turned on him in a flame of temper. "You are capable
of marrying her yourself!" There was a a brief but entire silence.
It was broken by his saying,

"She is not capable of marrying ME."

There was brief but entire silence again, and it was he who again
broke it, his manner at once cool and reasonable.

"It is better not to exhibit this kind of feeling. Let us be quite
frank. There are few things you feel more strongly than that you do
not want your daughter in the house. When she was a child you told
me that you detested the prospect of having her on your hands.
She is being disposed of in the most easily explained and enviable
manner."

"It's true--it's true," Feather murmured. She began to see advantages
and the look of a little cat died out, or at least modified itself
into that of a little cat upon whom dawned prospects of cream. No
mood ever held her very long. "She won't come back to stay," she
said. "The Duchess won't let her. I can use her rooms and I shall
be very glad to have them. There's at least some advantage in
figuring as a sort of Dame Aux Camelias."

CHAPTER XXVII

The night before Robin went away as she sat alone in the dimness
of one light, thinking as girls nearly always sit and think on
the eve of a change, because to youth any change seems to mean
the final closing as well as the opening of ways, the door of
her room was opened and an exquisite and nymphlike figure in pale
green stood exactly where the rays of the reading lamp seemed
to concentrate themselves in an effort to reveal most purely its
delicately startling effect. It was her mother in a dress whose
spring-like tint made her a sort of slim dryad. She looked so pretty
and young that Robin caught her breath as she rose and went forward.

"It is your aged parent come to give you her blessing," said
Feather.

"I was wondering if I might come to your room in the morning,"
Robin answered.

Feather seated herself lightly. She was not intelligent enough to
have any real comprehension of the mood which had impelled her to
come. She had merely given way to a secret sense of resentment of
something which annoyed her. She knew, however, why she had put
on the spring-leaf green dress which made her look like a girl.
She was not going to let Robin feel as if she were receiving a
visit from her grandmother. She had got that far.

"We don't know each other at all, do we?" she said.

"No," answered Robin. She could not remove her eyes from her
loveliness. She brought up such memories of the Lady Downstairs
and the desolate child in the shabby nursery.

"Mothers are not as intimate with their daughters as they used
to be when it was a sort of virtuous fashion to superintend their
rice pudding and lecture them about their lessons. We have not
seen each other often."

"No," said Robin.

Feather's laugh had again the rather high note Coombe had noticed.

"You haven't very much to say, have you?" she commented. "And you
stare at me as if you were trying to explain me. I dare say you
know that you have big eyes and that they're a good colour, but
I may as well hint to you that men do not like to be stared at as
if their deeps were being searched. Drop your eyelids."

Robin's lids dropped in spite of herself because she was startled,
but immediately she was startled again by a note in her mother's
voice--a note of added irritation.

"Don't make a habit of dropping them too often," it broke out, "or
it will look as if you did it to show your eyelashes. Girls with
tricks of that sort are always laughed at. Alison Carr LIVES
sideways became she has a pretty profile."

Coombe would have recognized the little cat look, if he had been
watching her as she leaned back in her chair and scrutinized her
daughter. The fact was that she took in her every point, being an
astute censor of other women's charms.

"Stand up," she said.

Robin stood up because she could not well refuse to do so, but
she coloured because she was suddenly ashamed.

"You're not little, but you're not tall," her mother said. "That's
against you. It's the fashion for women to be immensely tall
now. Du Maurier's pictures in Punch and his idiotic Trilby did it.
Clothes are made for giantesses. I don't care about it myself, but
a girl's rather out of it if she's much less than six feet high.
You can sit down."

A more singular interview between mother and daughter had assuredly
rarely taken place. As she looked at the girl her resentment of her
increased each moment. She actually felt as if she were beginning
to lose her temper.

"You are what pious people call 'going out into the world'," she
went on. "In moral books mothers always give advice and warnings
to their girls when they're leaving them. I can give you some
warnings. You think that because you have been taken up by a
dowager duchess everything will be plain sailing. You're mistaken.
You think because you are eighteen and pretty, men will fall at
your feet."

"I would rather be hideous," cried suddenly passionate Robin. "I
HATE men!"

The silly pretty thing who was responsible for her being, grew
sillier as her irritation increased.

"That's what girls always pretend, but the youngest little idiot
knows it isn't true. It's men who count. It makes me laugh when
I think of them--and of you. You know nothing about them and they
know everything about you. A clever man can do anything he pleases
with a silly girl."

"Are they ALL bad?" Robin exclaimed furiously.

"They're none of them bad. They're only men. And that's my warning.
Don't imagine that when they make love to you they do it as if
you were the old Duchess' granddaughter. You will only be her paid
companion and that's a different matter."

"I will not speak to one of them----" Robin actually began.

"You'll be obliged to do what the Duchess tells you to do," laughed
Feather, as she realized her obvious power to dull the glitter
and glow of things which she had felt the girl must be dazzled
and uplifted unduly by. She was rather like a spiteful schoolgirl
entertaining herself by spoiling an envied holiday for a companion.
"Old men will run after you and you will have to be nice to them
whether you like it or not." A queer light came into her eyes.
"Lord Coombe is fond of girls just out of the schoolroom. But if
he begins to make love to you don't allow yourself to feel too
much flattered."

Robin sprang toward her.

"Do you think I don't ABHOR Lord Coombe!" she cried out forgetting
herself in the desperate cruelty of the moment. "Haven't I reason----"
but there she remembered and stopped.

But Feather was not shocked or alarmed. Years of looking things
in the face had provided her with a mental surface from which
tilings rebounded. On the whole it even amused her and "suited
her book" that Robin should take this tone.

"Oh! I suppose you mean you know he admires me and pays bills for
me. Where would you have been if he hadn't done it? He's been a
sort of benefactor."

"I know nothing but that even when I was a little child I could
not bear to touch his hand!" cried Robin. Then Feather remembered
several things she had almost forgotten and she was still more
entertained.

"I believe you've not forgotten through all these years that the
boy you fell so indecently in love with was taken away by his
mother because Lord Coombe was YOUR mother's admirer and he was
such a sinner that even a baby was contaminated by him! Donal
Muir is a young man by this time. I wonder what his mother would
do now if he turned up at your mistress' house--that's what she
is, you know, your mistress--and began to make love to you." She
laughed outright. "You'll get into all sorts of messes, but that
would be the nicest one!"

Robin could only stand and gaze at her. Her moment's fire had died
down. Without warning, out of the past a wave rose and overwhelmed
her then and there. It bore with it the wild woe of the morning
when a child had waited in the spring sun and her world had fallen
into nothingness. It came back--the broken-hearted anguish, the
utter helpless desolation, as if she stood in the midst of it
again, as if it had never passed. It was a re-incarnation. She
could not bear it.

"Do you hate me--as I hate Lord Coombe?" she cried out. "Do you WANT
unhappy things to happen to me? Oh! Mother, why!" She had never
said "Mother" before. Nature said it for her here. The piteous
appeal of her youth and lonely young rush of tears was almost
intolerably sweet. Through some subtle cause it added to the thing
in her which Feather resented and longed to trouble and to hurt.

"You are a spiteful little cat!" she sprang up to exclaim, standing
close and face to face with her. "You think I am an old thing
and that I'm jealous of you! Because you're pretty and a girl you
think women past thirty don't count. You'll find out. Mrs. Muir
will count and she's forty if she's a day. Her son's such a beauty
that people go mad over him. And he worships her--and he's her
slave. I wish you WOULD get into some mess you couldn't get out
of! Don't come to me if you do."

The wide beauty of Robin's gaze and her tear wet bloom were too
much. Feather was quite close to her. The spiteful schoolgirl
impulse got the better of her.

"Don't make eyes at me like that," she cried, and she actually
gave the rose cheek nearest her a sounding little slap, "There!"
she exclaimed hysterically and she turned about and ran out of
the room crying herself.

Robin had parted from Mademoiselle Valle at Charing Cross Station
on the afternoon of the same day, but the night before they had
sat up late together and talked a long time. In effect Mademoiselle
had said also, "You are going out into the world," but she had not
approached the matter in Mrs. Gareth-Lawless' mood. One may have
charge of a girl and be her daily companion for years, but there
are certain things the very years themselves make it increasingly
difficult to say to her. And after all why should one state
difficult things in exact phrases unless one lacks breeding and
is curious. Anxious she had been at times, but not curious. So it
was that even on this night of their parting it was not she who
spoke.

It was after a few minutes of sitting in silence and looking at
the fire that Robin broke in upon the quiet which had seemed to
hold them both.

"I must learn to remember always that I am a sort of servant.
I must be very careful. It will be easier for me to realize that
I am not in my own house than it would be for other girls. I have
not allowed Dowie to dress me for a good many weeks. I have learned
how to do everything for myself quite well."

"But Dowie will be in the house with you and the Duchess is very
kind."

"Every night I have begun my prayers by thanking God for leaving
me Dowie," the girl said. "I have begun them and ended them with
the same words." She looked about her and then broke out as if
involuntarily. "I shall be away from here. I shall not wear anything
or eat anything or sleep on any bed I have not paid for myself."

"These rooms are very pretty. We have been very comfortable
here," Mademoiselle said. Suddenly she felt that if she waited a
few moments she would know definitely things she had previously
only guessed at. "Have you no little regrets?"

"No," answered Robin, "No."

She stood upon the hearth with her hands behind her. Mademoiselle
felt as if her fingers were twisting themselves together and the
Frenchwoman was peculiarly moved by the fact that she looked like
a slim jeune fille of a creature saying a lesson. The lesson opened
in this wise.

"I don't know when I first began to know that I was different from
all other children," she said in a soft, hot voice--if a voice
can express heat. "Perhaps a child who has nothing--nothing--is
obliged to begin to THINK before it knows what thoughts are. If
they play and are loved and amused they have no time for anything
but growing and being happy. You never saw the dreadful little
rooms upstairs----"

"Dowie has told me of them," said Mademoiselle.

"Another child might have forgotten them. I never shall. I--I was
so little and they were full of something awful. It was loneliness.
The first time Andrews pinched me was one day when the thing
frightened me and I suddenly began to cry quite loud. I used
to stare out of the window and--I don't know when I noticed it
first--I could see the children being taken out by their nurses.
And there were always two or three of them and they laughed and
talked and skipped. The nurses used to laugh and talk too. Andrews
never did. When she took me to the gardens the other nurses sat
together and chattered and their children played games with other
children. Once a little girl began to talk to me and her nurse
called her away. Andrews was very angry and jerked me by my arm
and told me that if ever I spoke to a child again she would pinch
me."

"Devil!" exclaimed the Frenchwoman.

"I used to think and think, but I could never understand. How
could I?"

"A baby!" cried Mademoiselle Valle and she got up and took her in
her arms and kissed her. "Chere petite ange!" she murmured. When
she sat down again her cheeks were wet. Robin's were wet also, but
she touched them with her handkerchief quickly and dried them. It
was as if she had faltered for a moment in her lesson.

"Did Dowie ever tell you anything about Donal?" she asked
hesitatingly.

"Something. He was the little boy you played with?"

"Yes. He was the first human creature," she said it very slowly
as if trying to find the right words to express what she meant,
"--the first HUMAN creature I had ever known. You see Mademoiselle,
he--he knew everything. He had always been happy, he BELONGED
to people and things. I belonged to nobody and nothing. If I had
been like him he would not have seemed so wonderful to me. I was
in a kind of delirium of joy. If a creature who had been deaf dumb
and blind had suddenly awakened, and seeing on a summer day in a
world full of flowers and sun--it might have seemed to them as it
seemed to me."

"You have remembered it through all the years," said Mademoiselle,
"like that?"

"It was the first time I became alive. One could not forget it.
We only played as children play but--it WAS a delirium of joy. I
could not bear to go to sleep at night and forget it for a moment.
Yes, I remember it--like that. There is a dream I have every now
and then and it is more real than--than this is--" with a wave of
her hand about her. "I am always in a real garden playing with
a real Donal. And his eyes--his eyes--" she paused and thought,
"There is a look in them that is like--it is just like--that first
morning."

The change which passed over her face the next moment might have
been said to seem to obliterate all trace of the childish memory.

"He was taken away by his mother. That was the beginning of my
finding out," she said. "I heard Andrews talking to her sister and
in a baby way I gathered that Lord Coombe had sent him. I hated
Lord Coombe for years before I found out that he hadn't--and
that there was another reason. After that it took time to puzzle
things out and piece them together. But at last I found out what
the reason had been. Then I began to make plans. These are not my
rooms," glancing about her again, "--these are not my clothes,"
with a little pull at her dress. "I'm not 'a strong character',
Mademoiselle, as I wanted to be, but I haven't one little regret--not
one." She kneeled down and put her arms round her old friend's
waist, lifting her face. "I'm like a leaf blown about by the
wind. I don't know what it will do with me. Where do leaves go?
One never knows really."

She put her face down on Mademoiselle's knee then and cried with
soft bitterness.

When she bade her good-bye at Charing Cross Station and stood and
watched the train until it was quite out of sight, afterwards she
went back to the rooms for which she felt no regrets. And before
she went to bed that night Feather came and gave her farewell
maternal advice and warning.

CHAPTER XXVIII

That a previously scarcely suspected daughter of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless
had become a member of the household of the Dowager Duchess of
Darte stirred but a passing wave of interest in a circle which was
not that of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless herself and which upon the whole
but casually acknowledged its curious existence as a modern
abnormality. Also the attitude of the Duchess herself was composedly
free from any admission of necessity for comment.

"I have no pretty young relative who can be spared to come and
live with me. I am fond of things pretty and young and I am greatly
pleased with what a kind chance put in my way," she said. In her
discussion of the situation with Coombe she measured it with her
customary fine acumen.

"Forty years ago it could not have been done. The girl would have
been made uncomfortable and outside things could not have been
prevented from dragging themselves in. Filial piety in the mass
would have demanded that the mother should be accounted for. Now
a genial knowledge of a variety in mothers leaves Mrs. Gareth-Lawless
to play about with her own probably quite amusing set. Once poor
Robin would have been held responsible for her and so should I. My
position would have seemed to defy serious moral issues. But we
have reached a sane habit of detaching people from their relations.
A nice condition we should be in if we had not."

"You, of course, know that Henry died suddenly in some sort of
fit at Ostend." Coombe said it as if in a form of reply. She had
naturally become aware of it when the rest of the world did, but
had not seen him since the event.

"One did not suppose his constitution would have lasted so long,"
she answered. "You are more fortunate in young Donal Muir. Have
you seen him and his mother?"

"I made a special journey to Braemarnie and had a curious interview
with Mrs. Muir. When I say 'curious' I don't mean to imply that it
was not entirely dignified. It was curious only because I realize
that secretly she regards with horror and dread the fact that her
boy is the prospective Head of the House of Coombe. She does not
make a jest of it as I have had the temerity to do. It's a cheap
defense, this trick of making an eternal jest of things, but it
IS a defense and one has formed the habit."

"She has never done it--Helen Muir," his friend said. "On the
whole I believe she at times knows that she has been too grave.
She was a beautiful creature passionately in love with her husband.
When such a husband is taken away from such a woman and his child
is left it often happens that the flood of her love is turned into
one current and that it is almost overwhelming. She is too sane
to have coddled the boy and made him effeminate--what has she done
instead?"

"He is a splendid young Highlander. He would be too good-looking
if he were not as strong and active as a young stag. All she has
done is to so fill him with the power and sense of her charm that
he has not seen enough of the world or learned to care for it. She
is the one woman on earth for him and life with her at Braemarnie
is all he asks for."

"Your difficulty will be that she will not be willing to trust
him to your instructions."

"I have not as much personal vanity as I may seem to have," Coombe
said. "I put all egotism modestly aside when I talked to her and
tried to explain that I would endeavour to see that he came to no
harm in my society. My heir presumptive and I must see something
of each other and he must become intimate with the prospect of
his responsibilities. More will be demanded of the next Marquis
of Coombe than has been demanded of me. And it will be DEMANDED
not merely hoped for or expected. And it will be the overwhelming
forces of Fate which will demand it--not mere tenants or constituents
or the general public."

"Have you any views as to WHAT will be demanded?" was her interested
question.

"None. Neither has anyone else who shares my opinion. No one will
have any until the readjustment comes. But before the readjustment
there will be the pouring forth of blood--the blood of magnificent
lads like Donal Muir--perhaps his own blood,--my God!"

"And there may be left no head of the house of Coombe," from the
Duchess.

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