Books: The Head of the House of Coombe

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"A hundred a year!" Feather breathed. From her delicate shoulders
hung floating scarf-like sleeves of black transparency and she lifted
one of them and held it out like a night moth's wing--"This cost
forty pounds," she said, her voice quite faint and low. "A good
nurse would cost forty! A cook--and a footman and a maid--and a
coachman--and the brougham--I don't know how much they would cost.
Oh-h!"

She drooped forward upon her sofa and laid face downward on a
cushion--slim, exquisite in line, lost in despair.

The effect produced was that she gave herself into his hands. He
felt as well as saw it and considered. She had no suggestion to
offer, no reserve. There she was.

"It is an incredible sort of situation," he said in an even,
low-pitched tone rather as if he were thinking aloud, "but it is
baldly real. It is actually simple. In a street in Mayfair a woman
and child might--" He hesitated a second and a wailed word came
forth from the cushion.

"Starve!"

He moved slightly and continued.

"Since their bills have not been paid the trades-people will not
send in food. Servants will not stay in a house where they are
not fed and receive no wages. No landlord will allow a tenant to
occupy his property unless he pays rent. It may sound inhuman--but
it is only human."

The cushion in which Feather's face was buried retained a faint
scent of Robert's cigar smoke and the fragrance brought back to her
things she had heard him say dispassionately about Lord Coombe as
well as about other men. He had not been a puritanic or condemnatory
person. She seemed to see herself groveling again on the floor
of her bedroom and to feel the darkness and silence through which
she had not dared to go to Robin.

Not another night like that! No! No!

"You must go to Jersey to your mother and father," Coombe said.
"A hundred a year will help you there in your own home."

Then she sat upright and there was something in her lovely little
countenance he had never seen before. It was actually determination.

"I have heard," she said, "of poor girls who were driven--by
starvation to--to go on the streets. I--would go ANYWHERE before
I would go back there."

"Anywhere!" he repeated, his own countenance expressing--or rather
refusing to express something as new as the thing he had seen in
her own.

"Anywhere!" she cried and then she did what he had thought her on
the verge of doing a few minutes earlier--she fell at his feet and
embraced his knees. She clung to him, she sobbed, her pretty hair
loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.

"Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe!" she cried as
she had cried in the hall.

He rose and endeavoured to disengage himself as he had done before.
This time with less success because she would not let him go. He
had the greatest possible objection to scenes.

"Mrs. Lawless--Feather--I beg you will get up," he said.

But she had reached the point of not caring what happened if she
could keep him. He was a gentleman--he had everything in the world.
What did it matter?

"I have no one but you and--and you always seemed to like me, I
would do anything--ANYONE asked me, if they would take care of me.
I have always liked you very much--and I did amuse you--didn't I?
You liked to come here."

There was something poignant about her delicate distraught loveliness
and, in the remoteness of his being, a shuddering knowledge that
it was quite true that she would do anything for any man who would
take care of her, produced an effect on him nothing else would
have produced. Also a fantastic and finely ironic vision of Joseph
and Potiphar's wife rose before him and the vision of himself as
Joseph irked a certain complexness of his mentality. Poignant as
the thing was in its modern way, it was also faintly ridiculous.

Then Robin awakened and shrieked again. The sound which had gained
strength through long sleep and also through added discomfort
quite rang through the house. What that sound added to the moment
he himself would not have been able to explain until long afterwards.
But it singularly and impellingly added.

"Listen!" panted Feather. "She has begun again. And there is no
one to go to her."

"Get up, Mrs. Lawless," he said. "Do I understand that you are
willing that _I_ arrange this for you!"

He helped her to her feet.

"Do you mean--really!" she faltered. "Will you--will you--?"

Her uplifted eyes were like a young angel's brimming with crystal
drops which slipped--as a child's tears slip--down her cheeks.
She clasped her hands in exquisite appeal. He stood for a moment
quite still, his mind fled far away and he forgot where he was.
And because of this the little simpleton's shallow discretion
deserted her.

"If you were a--a marrying man--?" she said foolishly--almost in
a whisper.

He recovered himself.

"I am not," with a finality which cut as cleanly as a surgical
knife.

Something which was not the words was of a succinctness which
filled her with new terror.

"I--I know!" she whimpered, "I only said if you were!"

"If I were--in this instance--it would make no difference." He saw
the kind of slippery silliness he was dealing with and what it
might transform itself into if allowed a loophole. "There must be
no mistakes."

In her fright she saw him for a moment more distinctly than she
had ever seen him before and hideous dread beset her lest she had
blundered fatally.

"There shall be none," she gasped. "I always knew. There shall be
none at all."

"Do you know what you are asking me?" he inquired.

"Yes, yes--I'm not a girl, you know. I've been married. I won't
go home. I can't starve or live in awful lodgings. SOMEBODY must
save me!"

"Do you know what people will say?" his steady voice was slightly
lower.

"It won't be said to me." Rather wildly. "Nobody minds--really."

He ceased altogether to look serious. He smiled with the light
detached air his world was most familiar with.

"No--they don't really," he answered. "I had, however, a slight
preference for knowing whether you would or not. You flatter me
by intimating that you would not."

He knew that if he had held out an arm she would have fallen upon
his breast and wept there, but he was not at the moment in the mood
to hold out an arm. He merely touched hers with a light pressure.

"Let us sit down and talk it over," he suggested.

A hansom drove up to the door and stopped before he had time to
seat himself. Hearing it he went to the window and saw a stout
businesslike looking man get out, accompanied by an attendant.
There followed a loud, authoritative ringing of the bell and an
equally authoritative rap of the knocker. This repeated itself.
Feather, who had run to the window and caught sight of the stout
man, clutched his sleeve.

"It's the agent we took the house from. We always said we were
out. It's either Carson or Bayle. I don't know which."

Coombe walked toward the staircase.

"You can't open the door!" she shrilled.

"He has doubtless come prepared to open it himself." he answered
and proceeded at leisure down the narrow stairway.

The caller had come prepared. By the time Coombe stood in the hall
a latchkey was put in the keyhole and, being turned, the door
opened to let in Carson--or Bayle--who entered with an air of
angered determination, followed by his young man.

The physical presence of the Head of the House of Coombe was always
described as a subtly impressive one. Several centuries of rather
careful breeding had resulted in his seeming to represent things
by silent implication. A man who has never found the necessity of
explaining or excusing himself inevitably presents a front wholly
unsuggestive of uncertainty. The front Coombe presented merely
awaited explanations from others.

Carson--or Bayle--had doubtless contemplated seeing a frightened
servant trying to prepare a stammering obvious lie. He confronted
a tall, thin man about whom--even if his clothes had been totally
different--there could be no mistake. He stood awaiting an apology
so evidently that Carson--or Bayle--began to stammer himself
even before he had time to dismiss from his voice the suggestion
of bluster. It would have irritated Coombe immensely if he had
known that he--and a certain overcoat--had been once pointed out
to the man at Sandown and that--in consequence of the overcoat--he
vaguely recognized him.

"I--I beg pardon," he began.

"Quite so," said Coombe.

"Some tenants came to look at the house this morning. They had an
order to view from us. They were sent away, my lord--and decline
to come back. The rent has not been paid since the first half
year. There is no one now who can even PRETEND it's going to be
paid. Some step had to be taken."

"Quite so," said Coombe. "Suppose you step into the dining-room."

He led the pair into the room and pointed to chairs, but neither
the agent nor his attendant was calm enough to sit down.

Coombe merely stood and explained himself.

"I quite understand," he said. "You are entirely within your
rights. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless is, naturally, not able to attend to
business. For the present--as a friend of her late husband's--I
will arrange matters for her. I am Lord Coombe. She does not wish
to give up the house. Don't send any more possible tenants. Call
at Coombe House in an hour and I will give you a cheque."

There were a few awkward apologetic moments and then the front door
opened and shut, the hansom jingled away and Coombe returned to
the drawing-room. Robin was still shrieking.

"She wants some more condensed milk," he said. "Don't be frightened.
Go and give her some. I know an elderly woman who understands
children. She was a nurse some years ago. I will send her here at
once. Kindly give me the account books. My housekeeper will send
you some servants. The trades-people will come for orders."

Feather was staring at him.

"W-will they?" she stammered. "W-will everything--?"

"Yes--everything," he answered. "Don't be frightened. Go upstairs
and try to stop her. I must go now. I never heard a creature yell
with such fury."

She turned away and went towards the second flight of stairs with
a rather dazed air. She had passed through a rather tremendous crisis
and she WAS dazed. He made her feel so. She had never understood
him for a moment and she did not understand him now--but then she
never did understand people and the whole situation was a new one
to her. If she had not been driven to the wall she would have been
quite as respectable as she knew how to be.

Coombe called a hansom and drove home, thinking of many things
and looking even more than usually detached. He had remarked the
facial expression of the short and stout man as he had got into
his cab and he was turning over mentally his own exact knowledge of
the views the business mind would have held and what the business
countenance would have decently covered if he--Coombe--had explained
in detail that he was so far--in this particular case--an entirely
blameless character.

CHAPTER VII

The slice of a house from that time forward presented the external
aspect to which the inhabitants of the narrow and fashionable
street and those who passed through it had been accustomed. Such
individuals as had anticipated beholding at some early day notices
conspicuously placed announcing "Sale by Auction. Elegant Modern
Furniture" were vaguely puzzled as well as surprised by the fact
that no such notices appeared even inconspicuously. Also there
did not draw up before the door--even as the weeks went on--huge
and heavy removal vans with their resultant litter, their final
note of farewell a "To Let" in the front windows.

On the contrary, the florist came and refilled the window boxes
with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers; new and even more
correct servants were to be seen ascending and descending the area
step; a young footman quite as smart as the departed Edward opened
the front door and attended Mrs. Gareth-Lawless to her perfect
little brougham. The trades-people appeared promptly every day and
were obsequiously respectful in manner. Evidently the household
had not disintegrated as a result of the death of Mr. Gareth-Lawless.

As it became an established fact that the household had not fallen to
pieces its frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing indeed
the air of people who had never really remained away from it. There
had been natural reasons enough for considerate absence from a
house of bereavement and a desolate widow upon whose grief it would
have been indelicate to intrude. As Feather herself had realized,
the circle of her intimates was not formed of those who could
readily adjust themselves to entirely changed circumstances. If
you dance on a tight rope and the rope is unexpectedly withdrawn,
where are you? You cannot continue dancing until the rope is
restrung.

The rope, however, being apparently made absolutely secure, it
was not long before the dancing began again. Feather's mourning,
wonderfully shading itself from month to month, was the joy of all
beholders. Madame Helene treated her as a star gleaming through
gradually dispersing clouds. Her circle watched her with secretly
humorous interest as each fine veil of dimness was withdrawn.

"The things she wears are priceless," was said amiably in her own
drawing-room. "Where does she get them? Figure to yourself Lawdor
paying the bills."

"She gets them from Helene," said a long thin young man with
a rather good-looking narrow face and dark eyes, peering through
pince nez, "But I couldn't."

In places where entertainment as a means of existence proceed so
to speak, fast and furiously, questions of taste are not dwelt
upon at leisure. You need not hesitate before saying anything you
liked in any one's drawing-room so long as it was amusing enough
to make somebody--if not everybody--laugh. Feather had made people
laugh in the same fashion in the past. The persons she most admired
were always making sly little impudent comments and suggestions,
and the thwarted years on the island of Jersey had, in her case,
resulted in an almost hectic desire to keep pace. Her efforts had
usually been successes because Nature's self had provided her with
the manner of a silly pretty child who did not know how far she
went. Shouts of laughter had often greeted her, and the first time
she had for a moment doubted her prowess was on an occasion when
she had caught a glimpse of Coombe who stared at her with an
expression which she would--just for one second--have felt might
be horror, if she had not been so sure it couldn't be, and must of
course be something else--one of the things nobody ever understood
in him.

By the time the softly swathing veils of vaporous darkness were
withdrawn, and the tight rope assuring everyone of its permanent
security became a trusted support, Feather at her crowded little
parties and at other people's bigger ones did not remain wholly
unaware of the probability that even people who rather liked
her made, among themselves, more or less witty comments upon her
improved fortunes. They were improved greatly. Bills were paid,
trades-people were polite, servants were respectful; she had no
need to invent excuses and lies. She and Robert had always kept out
of the way of stodgy, critical people, so they had been intimate
with none of the punctilious who might have withdrawn themselves
from a condition of things they chose to disapprove: accordingly,
she found no gaps in her circle. Those who had formed the habit of
amusing themselves at her house were as ready as before to amuse
themselves again.

The fact remained, however,--curiously, perhaps, in connection with
the usual slightness of all impressions made on her--that there
was a memory which never wholly left her. Even when she tried to
force it so far into the background of her existence that it might
almost be counted as forgotten, it had a trick of rising before
her. It was the memory of the empty house as its emptiness had
struck to the centre of her being when she had turned from her
bedroom window after watching the servants drive away in their
cabs. It was also the memory of the hours which had followed--the
night in which nobody had been in any of the rooms--no one had gone
up or down the stairs--when all had seemed dark and hollow--except
the Night Nursery where Robin screamed, and her own room where she
herself cowered under the bed clothes and pulled the pillow over
her head. But though the picture would not let itself be blotted
out, its effect was rather to intensify her sense of relief because
she had slipped so safely from under the wheels of destiny.

"Sometimes," she revealed artlessly to Coombe, "while I am driving
in the park on a fine afternoon when every one is out and the
dresses look like the flower beds, I let myself remember it just
to make myself enjoy everything more by contrast."

The elderly woman who had been a nurse in her youth and who had
been sent by Lord Coombe temporarily to replace Louisa had not
remained long in charge of Robin. She was not young and smart
enough for a house on the right side of the right street, and
Feather found a young person who looked exactly as she should when
she pushed the child's carriage before her around the square.

The square--out of which the right street branches--and the "Gardens"
in the middle of the square to which only privileged persons were
admitted by private key, the basement kitchen and Servants' Hall,
and the two top floor nurseries represented the world to the
child Robin for some years. When she was old enough to walk in the
street she was led by the hand over the ground she had travelled
daily in her baby carriage. Her first memory of things was a memory
of standing on the gravel path in the Square Gardens and watching
some sparrows quarrel while Andrews, her nurse, sat on a bench
with another nurse and talked in low tones. They were talking in
a way Robin always connected with servants and which she naturally
accepted as being the method of expression of their species--much
as she accepted the mewing of cats and the barking of dogs. As
she grew older, she reached the stage of knowing that they were
generally saying things they did not wish her to hear.

She liked watching the sparrows in the Gardens because she liked
watching sparrows at all times. They were the only friends she had
ever known, though she was not old enough to call them friends,
or to know what friends meant. Andrews had taught her, by means
of a system of her own, to know better than to cry or to make any
protesting noise when she was left alone in her ugly small nursery.
Andrews' idea of her duties did not involve boring herself to death
by sitting in a room on the top floor when livelier entertainment
awaited her in the basement where the cook was a woman of wide
experience, the housemaid a young person who had lived in gay
country houses, and the footman at once a young man of spirit
and humour. So Robin spent many hours of the day--taking them
altogether--quite by herself. She might have more potently resented
her isolations if she had ever known any other condition than
that of a child in whom no one was in the least interested and
in whom "being good" could only mean being passive under neglect
and calling no one's attention to the fact that she wanted anything
from anybody. As a bird born in captivity lives in its cage and
perhaps believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery
and knew every square inch of it with a deadly if unconscious
sense of distaste and fatigue. She was put to bed and taken up,
she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day--twice perhaps if
Andrews chose--she was taken out of it downstairs and into the
street. That was all. And that was why she liked the sparrows so
much.

And sparrows are worth watching if you live in a nursery where
nothing ever happens and where, when you look out, you are so high
up that it is not easy to see the people in the world below, in
addition to which it seems nearly always raining. Robin used to
watch them hopping about on the slate roofs of the homes on the
other side of the street. They fluttered their wings, they picked
up straws and carried them away. She thought they must have houses
of their own among the chimneys--in places she could not see. She
fancied it would be nice to hop about on the top of a roof oneself
if one were not at all afraid of falling. She liked the chippering
and chirping sounds the birds made became it sounded like talking
and laughing--like the talking and laughing she sometimes wakened
out of her sleep to lie and listen to when the Lady Downstairs had
a party. She often wondered what the people were doing because it
sounded as if they liked doing it very much.

Sometimes when it had rained two or three days she had a feeling
which made her begin to cry to herself--but not aloud. She had
once had a little black and blue mark on her arm for a week where
Andrews had pinched her because she had cried loud enough to be
heard. It had seemed to her that Andrews twisted and pinched the
bit of flesh for five minutes without letting it go and she had
held her large hand over her mouth as she did it.

"Now you keep that in your mind," she had said when she had finished
and Robin had almost choked in her awful little struggle to keep
back all sound.

The one thing Andrews was surest of was that nobody would come
upstairs to the Nursery to inquire the meaning of any cries which
were not unearthly enough to disturb the household. So it was easy
to regulate the existence of her charge in such a manner as best
suited herself.

"Just give her food enough and keep her from making silly noises
when she wants what she doesn't get," said Andrews to her companions
below stairs. "That one in the drawing-room isn't going to interfere
with the Nursery. Not her! I know my business and I know how to
manage her kind. I go to her politely now and then and ask her
permission to buy things from Best's or Liberty's or some other
good place. She always stares a minute when I begin, as if she
scarcely understood what I was talking about and then she says
'Oh, yes, I suppose she must have them.' And I go and get them. I
keep her as well dressed as any child in Mayfair. And she's been
a beauty since she was a year old so she looks first rate when I
wheel her up and down the street, so the people can see she's well
taken care of and not kept hidden away. No one can complain of her
looks and nobody is bothered with her. That's all that's wanted
of ME. I get good wages and I get them regular. I don't turn up
my nose at a place like this, whatever the outside talk is. Who
cares in these days anyway? Fashionable people's broader minded
than they used to be. In Queen Victoria's young days they tell
me servants were no class that didn't live in families where they
kept the commandments."

"Fat lot the commandments give any one trouble in these times,"
said Jennings, the footman, who was a wit. "There's one of 'em I
could mention that's been broken till there's no bits of it left
to keep. If I smashed that plate until it was powder it'd have
to be swept into the dust din. That's what happened to one or two
commandments in particular."

"Well," remarked Mrs. Blayne, the cook, "she don't interfere and
he pays the bills prompt. That'll do ME instead of commandments.
If you'll believe me, my mother told me that in them Queen Victoria
days ladies used to inquire about cold meat and ask what was done
with the dripping. Civilisation's gone beyond that--commandments
or no commandments."

"He's precious particular about bills being paid," volunteered
Jennings, with the air of a man of the world. "I heard him having
a row with her one day about some bills she hadn't paid. She'd
spent the money for some nonsense and he was pretty stiff in that
queer way of his. Quite right he was too. I'd have been the same
myself," pulling up his collar and stretching his neck in a manner
indicating exact knowledge of the natural sentiments of a Marquis
when justly annoyed. "What he intimated was that if them bills
was not paid with the money that was meant to pay them, the
money wouldn't be forthcoming the next time." Jennings was rather
pleased by the word "forthcoming" and therefore he repeated it
with emphasis, "It wouldn't be FORTHCOMING."

"That'd frighten her," was Andrews' succinct observation.

"It did!" said Jennings. "She'd have gone in hysterics if he hadn't
kept her down. He's got a way with him, Coombe has."

Andrews laughed, a brief, dry laugh.

"Do you know what the child calls her?" she said. "She calls her
the Lady Downstairs. She's got a sort of fancy for her and tries
to get peeps at her when we go out. I notice she always cranes
her little neck if we pass a room she might chance to be in. It's
her pretty clothes and her laughing that does it. Children's drawn
by bright colours and noise that sounds merry."

"It's my belief the child doesn't know she IS her mother!" said
Mrs. Blayne as she opened an oven door to look at some rolls.

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