Books: The Head of the House of Coombe

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

But she did not stir from the bed. She burrowed deeper under the
bed clothes and held the pillow closer to her ears.

* * * * *

It did sound like a lost soul at times. What panic possesses
a baby who cries in the darkness alone no one will ever know and
one may perhaps give thanks to whatever gods there be that the baby
itself does not remember. What awful woe of sudden unprotectedness
when life exists only through protection--what piteous panic in
the midst of black unmercifulness, inarticulate sound howsoever
wildly shrill can neither explain nor express.

Robin knew only Louisa, warmth, food, sleep and waking. Or if she
knew more she was not yet aware that she did. She had reached the
age when she generally slept through the night. She might not have
disturbed her mother until daylight but Louisa had with forethought
given her an infant sleeping potion. It had disagreed with and
awakened her. She was uncomfortable and darkness enveloped her.
A cry or so and Louisa would ordinarily have come to her sleepy,
and rather out of temper, but knowing what to do. In this strange
night the normal cry of warning and demand produced no result.

No one came. The discomfort continued--the blackness remained
black. The cries became shrieks--but nothing followed; the shrieks
developed into prolonged screams. No Louisa, no light, no milk.
The blackness drew in closer and became a thing to be fought
with wild little beating hands. Not a glimmer--not a rustle--not
a sound! Then came the cries of the lost soul--alone--alone--in
a black world of space in which there was not even another lost
soul. And then the panics of which there have been no records
and never will be, because if the panic stricken does not die in
mysterious convulsions he or she grows away from the memory of
a formless past--except that perhaps unexplained nightmares from
which one wakens quaking, with cold sweat, may vaguely repeat the
long hidden thing.

What the child Robin knew in the dark perhaps the silent house
which echoed her might curiously have known. But the shrieks wore
themselves out at last and sobs came--awful little sobs shuddering
through the tiny breast and shaking the baby body. A baby's sobs
are unspeakable things--incredible things. Slower and slower
Robin's came--with small deep gasps and chokings between--and when
an uninfantile druglike sleep came, the bitter, hopeless, beaten
little sobs went on.

But Feather's head was still burrowed under the soft protection
of the pillow.

CHAPTER V

The morning was a brighter one than London usually indulges in
and the sun made its way into Feather's bedroom to the revealing
of its coral pink glow and comfort. She had always liked her bedroom
and had usually wakened in it to the sense of luxuriousness it
is possible a pet cat feels when it wakens to stretch itself on
a cushion with its saucer of cream awaiting it.

But she did not awaken either to a sense of brightness or luxury
this morning. She had slept it was true, but once or twice when
the pillow had slipped aside she had found herself disturbed by
the far-off sound of the wailing of some little animal which had
caused her automatically and really scarcely consciously to replace
the pillow. It had only happened at long intervals because it is
Nature that an exhausted baby falls asleep when it is worn out.
Robin had probably slept almost as much as her mother.

Feather staring at the pinkness around her reached at last, with
the assistance of a certain physical consciousness, a sort of
spiritless intention.

"She's asleep now," she murmured. "I hope she won't waken for a
long time. I feel faint. I shall have to find something to eat--if
it's only biscuits." Then she lay and tried to remember what Cook
had said about her not starving. "She said there were a few things
left in the pantry and closets. Perhaps there's some condensed
milk. How do you mix it up? If she cries I might go and give her
some. It wouldn't be so awful now it's daylight."

She felt shaky when she got out of bed and stood on her feet. She
had not had a maid in her girlhood so she could dress herself,
much as she detested to do it. After she had begun however she
could not help becoming rather interested because the dress she
had worn the day before had become crushed and she put on a fresh
one she had not worn at all. It was thin and soft also, and black
was quite startlingly becoming to her. She would wear this one
when Lord Coombe came, after she wrote to him. It was silly of
her not to have written before though she knew he had left town
after the funeral. Letters would be forwarded.

"It will be quite bright in the dining-room now," she said
to encourage herself. "And Tonson once said that the only places
the sun came into below stairs were the pantry and kitchen and it
only stayed about an hour early in the morning. I must get there
as soon as I can."

When she had so dressed herself that the reflection the mirror
gave back to her was of the nature of a slight physical stimulant
she opened her bedroom door and faced exploration of the deserted
house below with a quaking sense of the proportions of the
inevitable. She got down the narrow stairs casting a frightened
glance at the emptiness of the drawing-rooms which seemed to stare
at her as she passed them. There was sun in the dining-room and
when she opened the sideboard she found some wine in decanters and
some biscuits and even a few nuts and some raisins and oranges.
She put them on the table and sat down and ate some of them and
began to feel a little less shaky.

If she had been allowed time to sit longer and digest and reflect
she might have reached the point of deciding on what she would write
to Lord Coombe. She had not the pen of a ready writer and it must
be thought over. But just when she was beginning to be conscious
of the pleasant warmth of the sun which shone on her shoulders from
the window, she was almost startled our of her chair by hearing
again stealing down the staircase from the upper regions that faint
wail like a little cat's.

"Just the moment--the very MOMENT I begin to feel a little
quieted--and try to think--she begins again!" she cried out. "It's
worse then ANYTHING!"

Large crystal tears ran down her face and upon the polished table.

"I suppose she would starve to death if I didn't give her some
food--and then _I_ should be blamed! People would be horrid about
it. I've got nothing to eat myself."

She must at any rate manage to stop the crying before she could
write to Coombe. She would be obliged to go down into the pantry
and look for some condensed milk. The creature had no teeth but
perhaps she could mumble a biscuit or a few raisins. If she could
be made to swallow a little port wine it might make her sleepy. The
sun was paying its brief morning visit to the kitchen and pantry
when she reached there, but a few cockroaches scuttled away before
her and made her utter a hysterical little scream. But there WAS
some condensed milk and there was a little warm water in a kettle
became the fire was not quite out. She imperfectly mixed a decoction
and filled a bottle which ought not to have been downstairs but
had been brought and left there by Louisa as a result of tender
moments with Edward.

When she put the bottle and some biscuits and scraps of cold ham
on a tray because she could not carry them all in her hands, her
sense of outrage and despair made her almost sob.

"I am just like a servant--carrying trays upstairs," she wept.
"I--I might be Edward--or--or Louisa." And her woe increased when
she added in the dining-room the port wine and nuts and raisins
and macaroons as viands which MIGHT somehow add to infant diet
and induce sleep. She was not sure of course--but she knew they
sucked things and liked sweets.

A baby left unattended to scream itself to sleep and awakening
to scream itself to sleep again, does not present to a resentful
observer the flowerlike bloom and beauty of infancy. When Feather
carried her tray into the Night Nursery and found herself confronting
the disordered crib on which her offspring lay she felt the child
horrible to look at. Its face was disfigured and its eyes almost
closed. She trembled all over as she put the bottle to its mouth
and saw the fiercely hungry clutch of its hands. It was old enough
to clutch, and clutch it did, and suck furiously and starvingly--even
though actually forced to stop once or twice at first to give vent
to a thwarted remnant of a scream.

Feather had only seen it as downy whiteness and perfume in
Louisa's arms or in its carriage. It had been a singularly vivid
and brilliant-eyed baby at whom people looked as they passed.

"Who will give her a bath?" wailed Feather. "Who will change her
clothes? Someone must! Could a woman by the day do it? Cook said
I could get a woman by the day."

And then she remembered that one got servants from agencies. And
where were the agencies? And even a woman "by the day" would demand
wages and food to eat.

And then the front door bell rang.

What could she do--what could she do? Go downstairs and open the
door herself and let everyone know! Let the ringer go on ringing
until he was tired and went away? She was indeed hard driven,
even though the wail had ceased as Robin clutched her bottle to
her breast and fed with frenzy. Let them go away--let them! And
then came the wild thought that it might be Something--the Something
which must happen when things were at their worst! And if it had
come and the house seemed to be empty! She did not walk down the
stairs, she ran. Her heart beat until she reached the door out of
breath and when she opened it stood their panting.

The people who waited upon the steps were strangers. They were
very nice looking and quite young--a man and a woman very perfectly
dressed. The man took a piece of paper out of his pocketbook and
handed it to her with an agreeable apologetic courtesy.

"I hope we have not called early enough to disturb you," he said.
"We waited until eleven but we are obliged to catch a train at
half past. It is an 'order to view' from Carson & Bayle." He added
this because Feather was staring at the paper.

Carson & Bayle were the agents they had rented the house from.
It was Carson & Bayle's collector Robert had met on the threshold
and sworn at two days before he had been taken ill. They were
letting the house over her head and she would be turned out into
the street?

The young man and woman finding themselves gazing at this exquisitely
pretty creature in exquisite mourning, felt themselves appallingly
embarrassed. She was plainly the widow Carson had spoken of. But
why did she open the door herself? And why did she look as if she
did not understand? Indignation against Carson & Bayle began to
stir the young man.

"Beg pardon! So sorry! I am afraid we ought not to have come," he
protested. "Agents ought to know better. They said you were giving
up the house at once and we were afraid someone might take it."

Feather held the "order to view" in her hand and snared at them
quite helplessly.

"There--are no--no servants to show it to you," she said. "If you
could wait--a few days--perhaps--"

She was so lovely and Madame Helene's filmy black creation was in
itself such an appeal, that the amiable young strangers gave up
at once.

"Oh, certainly--certainly! Do excuse us! Carson and Bayle ought
not to have--! We are so sorry. Good morning, GOOD morning," they
gave forth in discomfited sympathy and politeness, and really
quite scurried away.

Having shut the door on their retreat Feather stood shivering.

"I am going to be turned out of the house! I shall have to live
in the street!" she thought. "Where shall I keep my clothes if I
live in the street!"

Even she knew that she was thinking idiotically. Of course if
everything was taken from you and sold, you would have no clothes
at all, and wardrobes and drawers and closets would not matter.
The realization that scarcely anything in the house had been paid
for came home to her with a ghastly shock. She staggered upstairs
to the first drawing-room in which there was a silly pretty little
buhl writing table.

She felt even more senseless when she sank into a chair before
it and drew a sheet of note-paper towards her. Her thoughts would
not connect themselves with each other and she could not imagine
what she ought to say in her letter to Coombe. In fact she seemed
to have no thoughts at all. She could only remember the things
which had happened, and she actually found she could write nothing
else. There seemed nothing else in the world.

"Dear Lord Coombe," trailed tremulously over the page--"The house
is quite empty. The servants have gone away. I have no money. And
there is not any food. And I am going to be turned out into the
street--and the baby is crying because it is hungry."

She stopped there, knowing it was not what she ought to say. And
as she stopped and looked at the words she began herself to wail
somewhat as Robin had wailed in the dark when she would not listen
or go to her. It was like a beggar's letter--a beggar's! Telling
him that she had no money and no food--and would be turned out for
unpaid rent. And that the baby was crying because it was starving!

"It's a beggar's letter--just a beggar's," she cried out aloud
to the empty room. "And it's tru-ue!" Robin's wail itself had not
been more hopeless than hers was as she dropped her head and let
it lie on the buhl table.

She was not however even to be allowed to let it lie there, for
the next instant there fell on her startled ear quite echoing
through the house another ring at the doorbell and two steely raps
on the smart brass knocker. It was merely because she did not know
what else to do, having just lost her wits entirely that she got
up and trailed down the staircase again.

When she opened the door, Lord Coombe--the apotheosis of exquisite
fitness in form and perfect appointment as also of perfect
expression--was standing on the threshold.

CHAPTER VI

If he had meant to speak he changed his mind after his first sight
of her. He merely came in and closed the door behind him. Curious
experiences with which life had provided him had added finish to
an innate aptness of observation, and a fine readiness in action.

If she had been of another type he would have saved both her and
himself a scene and steered ably through the difficulties of the
situation towards a point where they could have met upon a normal
plane. A very pretty woman with whose affairs one has nothing
whatever to do, and whose pretty home has been the perfection of
modern smartness of custom, suddenly opening her front door in
the unexplained absence of a footman and confronting a visitor,
plainly upon the verge of hysteria, suggests the necessity of
promptness.

But Feather gave him not a breath's space. She was in fact not
merely on the verge of her hysteria. She had gone farther. And
here he was. Oh, here he was! She fell down upon her knees and
actually clasped his immaculateness.

"Oh, Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe!" She said it three
times because he presented to her but the one idea.

He did not drag himself away from her embrace but he distinctly
removed himself from it.

"You must not fall upon your knees, Mrs. Lawless," he said. "Shall
we go into the drawing-room?"

"I--was writing to you. I am starving--but it seemed too silly when
I wrote it. And it's true!" Her broken words were as senseless in
their sound as she had thought them when she saw them written.

"Will you come up into the drawing-room and tell me exactly what
you mean," he said and he made her release him and stand upon her
feet.

As the years had passed he had detached himself from so many
weaknesses and their sequelae of emotion that he had felt himself
a safely unreachable person. He was not young and he knew enough
of the disagreeableness of consequences to be adroit in keeping out
of the way of apparently harmless things which might be annoying.
Yet as he followed Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and watched her stumbling
up the stairs like a punished child he was aware that he was
abnormally in danger of pitying her as he did not wish to pity
people. The pity was also something apart from the feeling that it
was hideous that a creature so lovely, so shallow and so fragile
should have been caught in the great wheels of Life.

He knew what he had come to talk to her about but he had really no
clear idea of what her circumstances actually were. Most people
had of course guessed that her husband had been living on the
edge of his resources and was accustomed to debt and duns, but a
lovely being greeting you by clasping your knees and talking about
"starving"--in this particular street in Mayfair, led one to ask
oneself what one was walking into. Feather herself had not known,
in fact neither had any other human being known, that there was
a special reason why he had drifted into seeming rather to allow
her about--why he had finally been counted among the frequenters
of the narrow house--and why he had seemed to watch her a good
deal sometimes with an expression of serious interest--sometimes
with an air of irritation, and sometimes with no expression at
all. But there existed this reason and this it was and this alone
which had caused him to appear upon her threshold and it had also
been the power which had prevented his disengaging himself with
more incisive finality when he found himself ridiculously clasped
about the knees as one who played the part of an obdurate parent
in a melodrama.

Once in the familiar surroundings of her drawing-room her ash-gold
blondness and her black gauzy frock heightened all her effects
so extraordinarily that he frankly admitted to himself that she
possessed assets which would have modified most things to most
men.

As for Feather, when she herself beheld him against the background
of the same intimate aspects, the effect of the sound of his voice,
the manner in which he sat down in a chair and a certain remotely
dim hint in the hue of his clothes and an almost concealed note of
some touch of colour which scarcely seemed to belong to anything
worn--were so reminiscent of the days which now seemed past forever
that she began to cry again.

He received this with discreet lack of melodrama of tone.

"You mustn't do that, Mrs. Lawless," he said, "or I shall burst
into tears myself. I am a sensitive creature."

"Oh, DO say 'Feather' instead of Mrs. Lawless," she implored.
"Sometimes you said 'Feather'."

"I will say it now," he answered, "if you will not weep. It is an
adorable name."

"I feel as if I should never hear it again," she shuddered, trying
to dry her eyes. "It is all over!"

"What is all over?"

"This--!" turning a hopeless gaze upon the two tiny rooms crowded
with knick-knacks and nonsense. "The parties and the fun--and
everything in the world! I have only had some biscuits and raisins
to eat today--and the landlord is going to turn me out."

It seemed almost too preposterous to quite credit that she was
uttering naked truth.--And yet--! After a second's gaze at her be
repeated what he had said below stairs.

"Will you tell me exactly what you mean?"

Then he sat still and listened while she poured it all forth. And
as he listened he realized that it was the mere every day fact that
they were sitting in the slice of a house with the cream-coloured
front and the great lady in her mansion on one side and the
millionaire and his splendours on the other, which peculiarly
added to a certain hint of gruesomeness in the situation.

It was not necessary to add colour and desperation to the story.
Any effort Feather had made in that direction would only have
detracted from the nakedness of its stark facts. They were quite
enough in themselves in their normal inevitableness. Feather in
her pale and totally undignified panic presented the whole thing
with clearness which had--without being aided by her--an actual
dramatic value. This in spite of her mental dartings to and from
and dragging in of points and bits of scenes which were not connected
with each other. Only a brain whose processes of inclusion and
exclusion were final and rapid could have followed her. Coombe
watched her closely as she talked. No grief-stricken young widowed
loneliness and heart-break were the background of her anguish. She
was her own background and also her own foreground. The strength
of the fine body laid prone on the bed of the room she held in horror,
the white rigid face whose good looks had changed to something she
could not bear to remember, had no pathos which was not concerned
with the fact that Robert had amazingly and unnaturally failed
her by dying and leaving her nothing but unpaid bills. This truth
indeed made the situation more poignantly and finally squalid,
as she brought forth one detail after another. There were bills
which had been accumulating ever since they began their life in
the narrow house, there had been trades-people who had been juggled
with, promises made and supported by adroit tricks and cleverly
invented misrepresentations and lies which neither of the pair had
felt any compunctions about and had indeed laughed over. Coombe
saw it all though he also saw that Feather did not know all she was
telling him. He could realize the gradually increasing pressure
and anger at tricks which betrayed themselves, and the gathering
determination on the part of the creditors to end the matter in the
only way in which it could be ended. It had come to this before
Robert's illness, and Feather herself had heard of fierce interviews
and had seen threatening letters, but she had not believed they
could mean all they implied. Since things had been allowed to go on
so long she felt that they would surely go on longer in the same
way. There had been some serious threatening about the rent and
the unpaid-for furniture. Robert's supporting idea had been that
he might perhaps "get something out of Lawdor who wouldn't enjoy
being the relation of a fellow who was turned into the street!"

"He ought to have done something," Feather plained. "Robert would
have been Lord Lawdor himself if his uncle had died before he had
all those disgusting children."

She was not aware that Coombe frequently refrained from saying
things to her--but occasionally allowed himself NOT to refrain.
He did not refrain now from making a simple comment.

"But he is extremely robust and he has the children. Six stalwart
boys and a stalwart girl. Family feeling has apparently gone out
of fashion."

As she wandered on with her story he mentally felt himself actually
dragged into the shrimp-pink bedroom and standing an onlooker when
the footman outside the door "did not know" where Tonson had gone.
For a moment he felt conscious of the presence of some scent which
would have been sure to exhale itself from draperies and wardrobe.
He saw Cook put the account books on the small table, he heard her,
he also comprehended her. And Feather at the window breathlessly
watching the two cabs with the servants' trunks on top, and
the servants respectably unprofessional in attire and going away
quietly without an unpractical compunction--he saw these also
and comprehended knowing exactly why compunctions had no part in
latter-day domestic arrangements. Why should they?

When Feather reached the point where it became necessary to refer
to Robin some fortunate memory of Alice's past warnings caused her
to feel--quite suddenly--that certain details might be eliminated.

"She cried a little at first," she said, "but she fell asleep
afterwards. I was glad she did because I was afraid to go to her
in the dark."

"Was she in the dark?"

"I think so. Perhaps Louisa taught her to sleep without a light.
There was none when I took her some condensed milk this morning.
There was only c-con-d-densed milk to give her."

She shed tears and choked as she described her journey into the
lower regions and the cockroaches scuttling away before her into
their hiding-places.

"I MUST have a nurse! I MUST have one!" she almost sniffed. "Someone
must change her clothes and give her a bath!"

"You can't?" Coombe said.

"I!" dropping her handkerchief. "How--how CAN I?"

"I don't know," he answered and picked up the handkerchief with
an aloof grace of manner.

It was really Robin who was for Feather the breaking-point.

He thought she was in danger of flinging herself upon him again.
She caught at his arm and her eyes of larkspur blue were actually
wild.

"Don't you see where I am! How there is nothing and nobody--Don't
you SEE?"

"Yes, I see," he answered. "You are quite right. There is nothing
AND nobody. I have been to Lawdor myself."

"You have been to TALK to him?"

"Yesterday. That was my reason for coming here. He will not see
you or be written to. He says he knows better to begin that sort
of thing. It may be that family feeling has not the vogue it once
had, but you may recall that your husband infuriated him years
ago. Also England is a less certain quantity than it once was--and
the man has a family. He will allow you a hundred a year but there
he draws the line."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25