The Head of the House of Coombe

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  A respectable, middle-class looking man with a steady, blunt-featured face, had been talking to him and stepped quietly aside as Mademoiselle entered. There seemed to be no question of his leaving the room.

  Coombe met his visitor half way:

  “Something has alarmed you very much?” he said.

  “Robin went out with Fraulein Hirsch this afternoon,” she said quickly. “They went to Kensington Gardens. They have not come back—and it is nine o’clock. They are always at home by six.”

  “Will you sit down,” he said. The man with the steady face was listening intently, and she realized he was doing so and that, somehow, it was well that he should.

  “I do not think there is time for any one to sit down,” she said, speaking more quickly than before. “It is not only that she has not come back. Fraulein Hirsch has presented her to one of her old employers-a Lady Etynge. Robin was delighted with her. She has a daughter who is in France—,”

  “Marguerite staying with her aunt in Paris,” suddenly put in the voice of the blunt-featured man from his side of the room.

  “Helene at a Covent in Tours,” corrected Mademoiselle, turning a paling countenance towards him and then upon Coombe. “Lady Etynge spoke of wanting to engage some nice girl as a companion to her daughter, who is coming home. Robin thought she might have the good fortune to please her. She was to go to Lady Etynge’s house to tea sine afternoon and be shown the rooms prepared for Helene. She thought the mother charming.”

  “Did she mention the address?” Coombe asked at once.

  “The house was in Berford Place—a large house at a corner. She chanced to see Lady Etynge go into it one day or we should not have known. She did not notice the number. Fraulein Hirsch thought it was 97A. I have the Blue Book, Lord Coombe—through the Peerage—through the Directory! There is no Lady Etynge and there is no 97A in Berford Place! That is why I came here.”

  The man who had stood aside, stepped forward again. It was as if he answered some sign, though Lord Coombe at the moment crossed the hearth and rang the bell.

  “Scotland Yard knows that, ma’am,” said the man. “We’ve had our eyes on that house for two weeks, and this kind of thing is what we want.”

  “The double brougham,” was Coombe’s order to the servant who answered his ring. Then he came back to Mademoiselle.

  “Mr. Barkstow is a detective,” he said. “Among the other things he has done for me, he has, for some time, kept a casual eye on Robin. She is too lovely a child and too friendless to be quite safe. There are blackguards who know when a girl has not the usual family protection. He came here to tell me that she had been seen sitting in Kensington Gardens with a woman Scotland Yard has reason to suspect.”

  “A black ‘ un!” said Barkstow savagely. “If she’s the one we think she is—a black, poisonous, sly one with a face that no girl could suspect.”

  Coombe’s still countenance was so deadly in the slow lividness, which Mademoiselle saw began to manifest itself, that she caught his sleeve with a shaking hand.

  “She’s nothing but a baby!” she said. “She doesn’t know what a baby she is. I can see her eyes frantic with terror! She’d go mad.”

  “Good God!” he said, in a voice so low it scarcely audible.

  He almost dragged her out of the room, though, as they passed through the hall, the servants only saw that he had given the lady his arm-and two of the younger footmen exchanged glances with each other which referred solely to the inimitableness of the cut of his evening overcoat.

  When they entered the carriage, Barkstow entered with them and Mademoiselle Valle leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her face clutched in her hands. She was trying to shut out from her mental vision a memory of Robin’s eyes.

  “If—if Fraulein Hirsch is—not true,” she broke out once. “Count von Hillern is concerned. It has come upon me like a flash. Why did I not see before?”

  The party at the big house, where the red carpet was rolled across the pavement, was at full height when they drove into the Place. Their brougham did not stop at the corner but at the end of the line of waiting carriages.

  Coombe got out and looked up and down the thoroughfare.

  “It must be done quietly. There must be no scandal,” he said. “The policeman on the beat is an enormous fellow. You will attend to him, Barkstow,” and Barkstow nodded and strolled away.

  Coombe walked up the Place and down on the opposite side until he was within a few yards of the corner house. When he reached this point, he suddenly quickened his footsteps because he saw that someone else was approaching it with an air of intention. It was a man, not quite as tall as himself but of heavier build and with square held shoulders. As the man set his foot upon the step, Coombe touched him on the arm and said something in German.

  The man started angrily and then suddenly stood quite still and erect.

  “It will be better for us to walk up the Place together,” Lord Coombe said, with perfect politeness.

  If he could have been dashed down upon the pavement and his head hammered in with the handle of a sword, or if he could have been run through furiously again and again, either or both of these things would have been done. But neither was possible. It also was not possible to curse aloud in a fashionable London street. Such curses as one uttered must be held in one’s foaming mouth between one’s teeth. Count von Hillern knew this better than most men would have known it. Here was one of those English swine with whom Germany would deal in her own way later.

  They walked back together as if they were acquaintances taking a casual stroll.

  “There is nothing which would so infuriate your—Master—as a disgraceful scandal,” Lord Coombe’s highbred voice suggested undisturbedly. “The high honour of a German officer—the knightly bearing of a wearer of the uniform of the All Highest—that sort of thing you know. All that sort of thing!”

  Von Hillern ground out some low spoken and quite awful German words. If he had not been trapped—if he had been in some quiet by-street!

  “The man walking ahead of us is a detective from Scotland Yard. The particularly heavy and rather martial tread behind us is that of a policeman much more muscular than either of us. There is a ball going on in the large house with the red carpet spread across the pavement. I know the people who are giving it. There are a good many coachmen and footmen about. Most of them would probably recognize me.”

  It became necessary for Count von Hillern actually to wipe away certain flecks of foam from his lips, as he ground forth again more varied and awful sentiments in his native tongue.

  “You are going back to Berlin,” said Coombe, coldly. “If we English were not such fools, you would not be here. You are, of course, not going into that house.”

  Von Hillern burst into a derisive laugh.

  “You are going yourself,” he said. “You are a worn-out old Roue, but you are mad about her yourself in your senile way.”

  “You should respect my age and decrepitude,” answered Coombe. “A certain pity for my gray hairs would become your youth. Shall we turn here or will you return to your hotel by some other way?” He felt as if the man might a burst a blood vessel if he were obliged to further restrain himself.

  Von Hillern wheeled at the corner and confronted him.

  “There will come a day—” he almost choked.

  “Der Toy? Naturally,” the chill of Coombe’s voice was a sound to drive this particular man at this particular, damnably-thwarted moment, raving mad. And not to be able to go mad! Not to be able!

  “Swine of a doddering Englishman! Who would envy you—trembling on your lean shanks—whatsoever you can buy for yourself. I spit on you—spit!”

  “Don’t,” said Coombe. “You are sputtering to such an extent that you really are, you know.”

  Von Hillern whirled round the corner.

  Coombe, left alone, stood still a moment.

  “I was in time,” he said to himself, feeling somewhat nauseated. �
�By extraordinary luck, I was in time. In earlier days one would have said something about ‘Provadence’.” And he at once walked back.

  Chapter 23

  It was not utterly dark in the room, though Robin, after passing her hands carefully over the walls, had found no electric buttons within reach nor any signs of candles or matches elsewhere. The night sky was clear and brilliant with many stars, and this gave her an unshadowed and lighted space to look at. She went to the window and sat down on the floor, huddled against the wall with her hands clasped round her knees, looking up. She did this in the effort to hold in check a rising tide of frenzy which threatened her. Perhaps, if she could fix her eyes on the vault full of stars, she could keep herself from going out of her mind. Though, perhaps, it would be better if she did go out of her mind, she found herself thinking a few seconds later.

  After her first entire acceptance of the hideous thing which had happened to her, she had passed through nerve breaking phases of terror-stricken imaginings. The old story of the drowning man across whose brain rush all the images of life, came back to her. She did not know where or when or how she had ever heard or read of the ghastly incidents which came trooping up to her and staring at her with dead or mad eyes and awful faces. Perhaps they were old nightmares— perhaps a kind of delirium had seized her. She tried to stop their coming by saying over and over again the prayers Dowie had taught her when she was a child. And then she thought, with a sob which choked her, that perhaps they were only prayers for a safe little creature kneeling by a white bed-and did not apply to a girl locked up in a top room, which nobody knew about. Only when she thought of Mademoiselle Valle and Dowie looking for her—with all London spread out before their helplessness—did she cry. After that, tears seemed impossible. The images trooped by too close to her. The passion hidden within her being—which had broken out when she tore the earth under the shrubbery, and which, with torture staring her in the face, had leaped in the child’s soul and body and made her defy Andrews with shrieks—leaped up within her now. She became a young Fury, to whom a mad fight with monstrous death was nothing. She told herself that she was strong for a girl—that she could tear with her nails, she could clench her teeth in a flesh, she could shriek, she could battle like a young madwoman so that they would be forced to kill her. This was one of the images which rose op before her again yet again, A hideous—hideous thing, which would not remain away.

  She had not had any food since the afternoon cap of tea and she began to feel the need of it. If she became faint—! She lifted her face desperately as she said it, and saw the immense blue darkness, powdered with millions of stars and curving over her—as it curved over the hideous house and all the rest of the world. How high—how immense—how fathomlessly still it was—how it seemed as if there could be nothing else—that nothing else could be real! Her hands were clenched together hard and fiercely, as she scrambled to her knees and uttered a of prayer—not a child’s—rather the cry of a young Fury making a demand.

  “Perhaps a girl is Nothing,” she cried, “—a girl locked up in a room! But, perhaps, she is Something—she may he real too! Save me—save me! But if you won’t save me, let me be killed!”

  She knelt silent after it for a few minutes and then she sank down and lay on the floor with her face on her arm.

  How it was possible that even young and worn-out as she was, such peace as sleep could overcome her at such a time, one cannot say. But in the midst of her torment she was asleep.

  But it was not for long. She wakened with a start and sprang to her feet shivering. The carriages were still coming and going with guests for the big house opposite. It could not be late, though she seemed to have been in the place for years—long enough to feel that it was the hideous centre of the whole earth and all sane and honest memories were a dream. She thought she would begin to walk up and down the room.

  But a sound she heard at this very instant made her stand stock still. She had known there would be a sound at last—she had waited for it all the time—she had known, of course, that it would come, but she had not even tried to guess whether she would hear it early or late. It would be the sound of the turning of the handle of the locked door. It had come. There it was! The click of the lock first and then the creak of the turned handle!

  She went to the window again and stood with her back against it, so that her body was outlined against the faint light. Would the person come in the dark, or would he carry a light? Something began to whirl in her brain. What was the low, pumping thump she seemed to hear and feel at the same time? It was the awful thumping of her heart.

  The door opened—not stealthily, but quite in the ordinary way. The person who came in did not move stealthily either. He came in as though he were making an evening call. How tall and straight his body was, with a devilish elegance of line against the background of light in the hall. She thought she saw a white flower on his lapel as his overcoat fell back. The leering footman had opened the for him.

  “Turn on the lights.” A voice she knew gave the order, the leering footman obeyed, touching a spot high on the wall.

  She had vaguely and sickeningly felt almost sure that it would be either Count von Hillern or Lord Coombe—and it was not Count von Hillern! The cold wicked face—the ironic eyes which made her creep—the absurd, elderly perfection of dress—even the flawless flower-made her flash quake with repulsion. If Satan came into the room, he might look like that and make one’s revolting being quake so.

  “I thought—it might be you,” the strange girl’s voice said to him aloud.

  “Robin,” he said.

  He was moving towards her and, as she threw out her madly clenched little hands, he stopped and drew back.

  “Why did you think I might come?” he asked.

  “Because you are the kind of a man who would do the things only devils would do. I have hated—hated—hated you since I was a baby. Come and kill me if you like. Call the footman back to help you, if yon like. I can’t get away. Kill me—kill me—kill me!”

  She was lost in her frenzy and looked as if she were mad.

  One moment he hesitated, and then he pointed politely to the sofa.

  “Go and sit down, please,” he suggested. It was no more then a courteous suggestion. “I shall remain here. I have no desire to approach you—if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  But she would not leave the window.

  “It is natural that you should be overwrought,” he said.

  “This is a damnable thing. You are too young to know the worst of it.”

  “You are the worst of it!” she cried. “You.”

  “No” as the chill of his even voice struck her, she wondered if he were really human. “Von Hillern would have been the worst of it. I stopped him at the front door and knew how to send him away. Now, listen, my good child. Hate me as ferociously as you like. That is a detail. You are in the house of a woman whose name stands for shame and infamy and crime.”

  “What are you doing in it—” she cried again, “—in a place where girls are trapped—and locked up in top rooms—to be killed?”

  “I came to take you away. I wish to do it quietly. It would be rather horrible if the public discovered that you have spent some hours here. If I had not slipped in when they were expecting von Hillern, and if the servants were not accustomed to the quiet entrance of well dressed men, I could not have got in without an open row and the calling of the policemen,—which I wished to avoid. Also, the woman downstairs knows me and realized that I was not lying when I said the house was surrounded and she was on the point of being ‘run in’. She is a woman of broad experience, and at once knew that she might as well keep quiet.”

  Despite his cold eyes and the bad smile she hated, despite his almost dandified meticulous attire and the festal note of his white flower, which she hated with the rest—he was, perhaps, not lying to her. Perhaps for the sake of her mother he had chosen to save her—and, being the man he was, he had been able to make
use of his past experiences.

  She began to creep away from the window, and she felt her legs, all at once, shaking under her. By the time she reached the Chesterfield sofa she fell down by it and began to cry. A sort of hysteria seized her, and she shook from head to foot and clutched at the upholstery with weak hands which clawed. She was, indeed, an awful, piteous sight. He was perhaps not lying, but she was afraid of him yet.

  “I told the men who are waiting outside that if I did not bring you out in half an hour, they were to break into the house. I do not wish them to break in. We have not any time to spare. What you are doing is quite natural, but you must try and get up.” He stood by her and said this looking down at her slender, wrung body and lovely groveling head.

  He took a flask out of his overcoat pocket—and it was a gem of goldsmith’s art. He poured some wine into its cup and bent forward to hold it out to her.

  “Drink this and try to stand on your feet,” he said. He knew better than to try to help her to rise—to touch her in any way. Seeing to what the past hours had reduced her, he knew better. There was mad fear in her eyes when she lifted her head and threw out her hand again.

  “No! No!” she cried out. “No, I will drink nothing!” He understood at once and threw the wine into the grate.

  “I see,” he said. “You might think it might be drugged. You are right. It might be. I ought to have thought of that.” He returned the flask to his pocket. “ Listen again. You must. The time will soon be up and we must not let those fellows break in and make a row that will collect a crowd We must go at once. Mademoiselle Valle is waiting for you in my carriage outside. You will not be afraid to drink wine she gives you.”

  “Mademoiselle!” she stammered.

  “Yes. In my carriage, which is not fifty yards from the house. Can you stand on your feet?” She got up and stood but she was still shuddering all over.

  “Can you walk downstairs? If you cannot, will you let me carry you? I am strong enough-in spite of my years.”

  “I can walk,” she whispered.