The Head of the House of Coombe

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  “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.”

  “Oh!” said Dowson, the low and respectful interjection expressing a shade of disapproval, “Children do have fancies, ma’am. She’ll get over it if we give her something else to think of.”

  The good woman went to one of the large toy shops and bought a beautiful doll, a doll’s house, and some picture books. When they were brought up to the Day Nursery, Robin was asleep after a rather long walk, which Dowson had decided would be good for her. When she came later into the room, after the things had been unpacked, she regarded them with an expression of actual dislike.

  “Isn’t that a beautiful doll?” said Dowson, good-humouredly. “And did you ever see such a lovely house? It was kind Lord Coombe who gave them to you. Just you look at the picture books.”

  Robin put her hands behind her back and would not touch them. Dowson, who was a motherly creature with a great deal of commonsense, was set thinking. She began to make guesses, though she was not yet sufficiently familiar with the household to guess from any firm foundation of knowledge of small things.

  “Come here, dear,” she said, and drew the small thing to her knee. “Is it because you don’t love Lord Coombe?” she asked.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “But why?” said Dowson. “When he is such a kind gentleman?”

  But Robin would not tell her why and never did. She never told any one, until years had passed, how this had been the beginning of a hatred. The toys were left behind when she was taken to the seaside. Dowson tried to persuade her to play with them several times, but she would not touch them, so they were put away. Feeling that she was dealing with something unusual, and, being a kindly person, Dowson bought her some playthings on her own account. They were simple things, but Robin was ready enough to like them.

  “Did you give them to me?” she asked.

  “Yes, I did, Miss Robin.”

  The child drew near her after a full minute of hesitation.

  “I will kiss you!” she said solemnly, and performed the rite as whole-souledly as Donal had done.

  “Dear little mite!” exclaimed the surprised Dowson. “Dear me!” And there was actual moisture in her eyes as she squeezed the small body in her arms.

  “She’s the strangest mite I ever nursed,” was her comment to Mrs. Blayne below stairs. “It was so sudden, and she did it as if she’d never done it before. I’d actually been thinking she hadn’t any feeling at all.”

  “No reason why she should have. She’s been taken care of by the clock and dressed like a puppet, but she’s not been treated human!” broke forth Mrs. Blayne.

  Then the whole story was told—the “upstairs” story with much vivid description, and the mentioning of many names and the dotting of many “i’s”. Dowson had heard certain things only through vague rumour, but now she knew and began to see her way. She had not heard names before, and the definite inclusion of Lord Coombe’s suggested something to her.

  “Do you think the child could be jealous of his lordship?” she suggested.

  “She might if she knew anything about him—but she never saw him until the night she was taken down into the drawing-room. She’s lived upstairs like a little dog in its kennel.”

  “Well,” Dowson reflected aloud, “it sounds almost silly to talk of a child’s hating any one, but that bit of a thing’s eyes had fair hate in them when she looked up at him where he stood. That was what puzzled me.”

  Chapter 15

  Before Robin had been taken to the seaside to be helped by the bracing air of the Norfolk coast to recover her lost appetite and forget her small tragedy, she had observed that unaccustomed things were taking place in the house. Workmen came in and out through the mews at the back and brought ladders with them and tools in queer bags. She heard hammerings which began very early in the morning and went on all day. As Andrews had trained her not to ask tiresome questions, she only crept now and then to a back window and peeped out. But in a few days Dowson took her away.

  When she came back to London, she was not taken up the steep dark stairs to the third floor. Dowson led her into some rooms she had never seen before. They were light and airy and had pretty walls and furniture. A sitting-room on the ground floor had even a round window with plants in it and a canary bird singing in a cage.

  “May we stay here?” she asked Dowson in a whisper.

  “We are going to live here,” was the answer.

  And so they did.

  At first Feather occasionally took her intimates to see the additional apartments.

  “In perfect splendour is the creature put up, and I with a bedroom like a coalhole and such drawing-rooms as you see each time you enter the house!” she broke forth spitefully one day when she forgot herself.

  She said it to the Starling and Harrowby, who had been simply gazing about them in fevered mystification, because the new development was a thing which must invoke some more or less interesting explanation. At her outbreak, all they could do was to gaze at her with impartial eyes, which suggested question, and Feather shrugged pettish shoulders.

  “You knew I didn’t do it. How could I?” she said. “It is a queer whim of Coombe’s. Of course, it is not the least like him. I call it morbid.”

  After which people knew about the matter and found it a subject for edifying and quite stimulating discussion. There was something fantastic in the situation. Coombe was the last man on earth to have taken the slightest notice of the child’s existence! It was believed that he had never seen her—except in long clothes—until she had glared at him and put her hand behind her back the night she was brought into the drawing-room. She had been adroitly kept tucked away in an attic somewhere. And now behold an addition of several wonderful, small rooms built, furnished and decorated for her alone, where she was to live as in a miniature palace attended by servitors! Coombe, as a purveyor of nursery appurtenances, was regarded with humour, the general opinion being that the eruption of a volcano beneath his feet alone could have awakened his somewhat chill self-absorption to the recognition of any child’s existence.

  “To be exact we none of us really know anything in particular about his mental processes.” Harrowby pondered aloud. “He’s capable of any number of things we might not understand, if he condescended to tell us about them—which he would never attempt. He has a remote, brilliantly stored, cynical mind. He owns that he is of an inhuman selfishness. I haven’t a suggestion to make, but it sets one searching through the purlieus of one’s mind for an approximately reasonable explanation.”

  “Why ‘purlieus’?” was the Starling’s inquiry. Harrowby shrugged his shoulders ever so lightly.

  “Well, one isn’t searching for reasons founded on copy-book axioms,” he shook his head. “Coombe? No.”

  There was a silence given to occult thought.

  “Feather is really in a rage and is too Feathery to be able to conceal it,” said Starling.

  “Feather would be—inevitably,” Harrowby lifted his near-sighted eyes to her curiously. “Can you see Feather in the future—when Robin is ten years older?”

  “I can,” the Starling answered.

  The years which followed were changing years—growing years. Life and entertainment went on fast and furiously in all parts of London, and in no part more rapidly than in the slice of a house whose front always presented an air of having been freshly decorated, in spite of summer rain and winter soot and fog. The plants in the window boxes seemed always in bloom, being magically replaced in the early morning hours when they dared to hint at flagging. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, it was said, must be renewed in some such mysterious morning way, as she merely grew prettier as
she neared thirty and passed it. Women did in these days! Which last phrase had always been a useful one, probably from the time of the Flood. Old fogeys, male and female, had used it in the past as a means of scathingly unfavourable comparison, growing flushed and almost gobbling like turkey cocks in their indignation. Now, as a phrase, it was a support and a mollifier. “In these days” one knew better how to amuse oneself, was more free to snatch at agreeable opportunity, less in bondage to old fancies which had called themselves beliefs; everything whirled faster and more lightly—danced, two-stepped, instead of marching.

  Robin vaguely connected certain changes in her existence with the changes which took place in the fashion of sleeves and skirts which appeared to produce radical effects in the world she caught glimpses of. Sometimes sleeves were closely fitted to people’s arms, then puffs sprang from them and grew until they were enormous and required delicate manipulation when coats were put on; then their lavishness of material fell from the shoulder to the wrists and hung there swaying until some sudden development of skirt seemed to distract their attention from themselves and they shrank into unimportance and skirts changed instead. Afterwards, sometimes figures were slim and encased in sheathlike draperies, sometimes folds rippled about feet, “fullness” crept here or there or disappeared altogether, trains grew longer or shorter or wider or narrower, cashmeres, grosgrain silks and heavy satins were suddenly gone and chiffon wreathed itself about the world and took possession of it. Bonnets ceased to exist and hats were immense or tiny, tall or flat, tilted at the back, at the side, at the front, worn over the face or dashingly rolled back from it; feathers drooped or stood upright at heights which rose and fell and changed position with the changing seasons. No garment or individual wore the same aspect for more than a month’s time. It was necessary to change all things with a rapidity matching the change of moods and fancies which altered at the rate of the automobiles which dashed here and there and everywhere, through country roads, through town, through remote places with an unsparing swiftness which set a new pace for the world.

  “I cannot hark back regretfully to stage coaches,” said Lord Coombe. “Even I was not born early enough for that. But in the days of my youth and innocence express trains seemed almost supernatural. One could drive a pair of horses twenty miles to make a country visit, but one could not drive back the same day. One’s circle had its limitations and degrees of intimacy. Now it is possible motor fifty miles to lunch and home to dine with guests from the remotest corners of the earth. Oceans are crossed in six days, and the eager flit from continent to continent. Engagements can be made by cable and the truly enterprising can accept an invitation to dine in America on a fortnight’s notice. Telephones communicate in a few seconds and no one is secure from social intercourse for fifteen minutes. Acquaintances and correspondence have no limitations because all the inhabitants of the globe can reach one by motor or electricity. In moments of fatigue I revert to the days of Queen Anne with pleasure.”

  While these changes went on, Robin lived in her own world in her own quarters at the rear of the slice of a house. During the early years spent with Dowson, she learned gradually that life was a better thing than she had known in the dreary gloom of the third floor Day and Night Nurseries. She was no longer left to spend hours alone, nor was she taken below stairs to listen blankly to servants talking to each other of mysterious things with which she herself and the Lady Downstairs and “him” were somehow connected, her discovery of this fact being based on the dropping of voices and sidelong glances at her and sudden warning sounds from Andrews. She realized that Dowson would never pinch her, and the rooms she lived in were pretty and bright.

  Gradually playthings and picture books appeared in them, which she gathered Dowson presented her with. She gathered this from Dowson herself.

  She had never played with the doll, and, by chance a day arriving when Lord Coombe encountered Dowson in the street without her charge, he stopped her again and spoke as before.

  “Is the little girl well and happy, Nurse?” he asked.

  “Quite well, my lord, and much happier than she used to be.”

  “Did she,” he hesitated slightly, “like the playthings you bought her?”

  Dowson hesitated more than slightly but, being a sensible woman and at the same time curious about the matter, she spoke the truth.

  “She wouldn’t play with them at all, my lord. I couldn’t persuade her to. What her child’s fancy was I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I—except that it is founded on a distinct dislike,” said Coombe. There was a brief pause. “Are you fond of toys yourself, Dowson?” he inquired coldly.

  “I am that—and I know how to choose them, your lordship,” replied Dowson, with a large, shrewd intelligence.

  “Then oblige me by throwing away the doll and its accompaniments and buying some toys for yourself, at my expense. You can present them to Miss Robin as a personal gift. She will accept them from you.”

  He passed on his way and Dowson looked after him interestedly.

  “If she was his,” she thought, “ I shouldn’t be puzzled. But she’s not—that I’ve ever heard of. He’s got some fancy of his own the same as Robin has, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. I’d like to know what it is.”

  It was a fancy—an old, old fancy—it harked back nearly thirty years—to the dark days of youth and passion and unending tragedy whose anguish, as it then seemed, could never pass—but which, nevertheless, had faded with the years as they flowed by. And yet left him as he was and had been. He was not sentimental about it, he smiled at himself drearily—though never at the memory—when it rose again and, through its vague power, led him to do strange things curiously verging on the emotional and eccentric. But even the child—who quite loathed him for some fantastic infant reason of her own—even the child had her part in it. His soul oddly withdrew itself into a far remoteness as he walked away and Piccadilly became a shadow and a dream.

  Dowson went home and began to pack neatly in a box the neglected doll and the toys which had accompanied her. Robin seeing her doing it, asked a question.

  “Are they going back to the shop?”

  “No. Lord Coombe is letting me give them to a little girl who is very poor and has to lie in bed because her back hurts her. His lordship is so kind he does not want you to be troubled with them. He is not angry. He is too good to be angry.”

  That was not true, thought Robin. He had done that thing she remembered! Goodness could not have done it. Only badness.

  When Dowson brought in a new doll and other wonderful things, a little hand enclosed her wrist quite tightly as she was unpacking the boxes. It was Robin’s and the small creature looked at her with a questioning, half appealing, half fierce.

  “Did he send them, Dowson?”

  “They are a present from me,” Dowson answered comfortably, and Robin said again,

  “I want to kiss you. I like to kiss you. I do.”

  To those given to psychical interests and speculations, it might have suggested itself that, on the night when the creature who had seemed to Andrews a soft tissued puppet had suddenly burst forth into defiance and fearless shrillness, some cerebral change had taken place in her. From that hour her softness had become a thing of the past. Dowson had not found a baby, but a brooding, little, passionate being. She was neither insubordinate nor irritable, but Dowson was conscious of a certain intensity of temperament in her. She knew that she was always thinking of things of which she said almost nothing. Only a sensible motherly curiosity, such as Dowson’s could have made discoveries, but a rare question put by the child at long intervals sometimes threw a faint light. There were questions chiefly concerning mothers and their habits and customs. They were such as, in their very unconsciousness, revealed a strange past history. Lights were most unconsciously thrown by Mrs. Gareth-Lawless herself. Her quite amiable detachment from all shadow of responsibility, her brilliantly unending occupations, her goings in and out,
the flocks of light, almost noisy, intimates who came in and out with her revealed much to a respectable person who had soberly watched the world.

  “The Lady Downstairs is my mother, isn’t she?” Robin inquired gravely once.

  “Yes, my dear,” was Dowson’s answer.

  A pause for consideration of the matter and then from Robin:

  “All mothers are not alike, Dowson, are they?”

  “No, my dear,” with wisdom.

  Though she was not yet seven, life had so changed for her that it was a far cry back to the Spring days in the Square Gardens. She went back, however, back into that remote ecstatic past.

  “The Lady Downstairs is not—alike,” she said at last, “Donal’s mother loved him. She let him sit in the same chair with her and read in picture books. She kissed him when he was in bed.”

  Jennings, the young footman who was a humourist, had, of course, heard witty references to Robin’s love affair while in attendance, and he had equally, of course, repeated them below stairs. Therefore,

  Dowson had heard vague rumours but had tactfully refrained from mentioning the subject to her charge.

  “Who was Donal?” she said now, but quite quietly. Robin did not know that a confidante would have made her first agony easier to bear. She was not really being confidential now, but, realizing Dowson’s comfortable kindliness, she knew that it would be safe to speak to her.

  “He was a big boy,” she answered keeping her eyes on Dowson’s face. “He laughed and ran and jumped. His eyes—” she stopped there because she could not explain what she had wanted to say about these joyous young eyes, which were the first friendly human ones she had known.

  “He lives in Scotland,” she began again. “His mother loved him. He kissed me. He went away. Lord Coombe sent him.”

  Dawson could not help her start.

  “Lord Coombe!” she exclaimed.

  Robin came close to her and ground her little fist into her knee, until its plumpness felt almost bruised.