She threw herself into a chair palpitating in one of her rages of a little cat—wreathing her scarf round and round her wrist and singularly striking him with the effect of almost spitting and hissing out her words.
“I won’t give up everything I like and that likes me,” she flung out. “The War has done something to us all. It’s made us let ourselves go. It’s done something to me too. It’s made me less frightened. I won’t be bullied into—into things.”
“Do I seem to bully you? I am sorry.”
The fact that she had let herself go with the rest of the world got the better of her.
“You have not been near me for weeks and now you turn up with your air of a grand Bashawe and order people out of my house. You have not been near me.”
The next instant it was as though she tore off some last shred of mental veiling and threw it aside in her reckless mounting heat of temper.
“Near me!” she laughed scathingly, “For the matter of that when have you ever been near me? It’s always been the same. I’ve known it for years. As the Yankees say, you ‘wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.’ I’m sick of it. What did you do it for?”
“Do what?”
“Take possession of me as if I were your property. You never were in love with me—never for a second. If you had been you’d have married me.”
“Yes. I should have married you.”
“There was no reason why you should not. I was pretty. I was young. I’d been decently brought up—and it would have settled everything. Why didn’t you instead of letting people think I was your mistress when I didn’t count for as much as a straw in your life?”
“You represented more than that,” he answered. “Kindly listen to me.”
That she had lost her head completely was sufficiently manifested by the fact that she had begun to cry—which made it necessary for her to use her handkerchief with inimitable skill to prevent the tears from encroaching on her brilliant white and rose.
“If you had been in love with me—” she chafed bitterly.
“On the morning some years ago when I came to you I made myself clear to the best of my ability,” he said. “I did not mention love. I told you that I had no intention of marrying you. I called your attention to what the world would assume. I left the decision to you.”
“What could I do—without a penny? Some other man would have had to do it if you had not,” the letting go rushed her into saying.
“Or you would have been obliged to return to your parents in Jersey—which you refused to contemplate.”
“Of course I refused. It would have been mad to do it. And there were other people who would have paid my bills.”
“Solely because I knew that, I made my proposition. Being much older than you I realised that other people might not feel the responsibility binding—and permanent.”
She sat up and stared at him. There was no touch of the rancour of recrimination in his presentation of detached facts. He was different from the rest. He was always better dressed and the perfection of his impersonal manner belonged to a world being swept away. He made Mr. Owen Delamore seem by contrast a bounder and an outsider. But the fact which had in the secret places of her small mind been the fly in her ointment—the one fact that he had never for a moment cared a straw for her—caused her actually to hate him as he again made it, quite without prejudice, crystal clear. It was true that he had more than kept his word—that he had never broken a convention in his bearing towards her—that in his rigid way he had behaved like a prince—but she had been dirt under his feet—she had been dirt under his feet! She wanted to rave like a fishwife—though there were no fishwives in Mayfair.
It was at this very moment of climax that a sudden memory beset her.
“Rob always said that if a woman who was pretty could see a man often enough—again and again—he couldn’t help himself—unless there was some one else!”
Her last words were fiercely accusing. She quite glared at him a few seconds, her chest heaving pantingly.
She suddenly sprang from her sofa and dashed towards a table where a pile of photographs lay in an untidy little heap. She threw them about with angrily shaking hands until at last she caught at one and brought it back to him.
“There was some one else,” she laughed shrilly. “You were in love with that creature.”
It was one of the photographs of Alixe such as the Bond Street shop had shown in its windows.
She made a movement as if to throw it into the grate and he took it from her hand, saying nothing whatever.
“I’d forgotten about it until Owen Delamore reminded me only yesterday,” she said. “ He’s a romantic thing and he heard that you had been in attendance and had been sent to their castle in Germany. He worked the thing out in his own way. He said you had chosen me because I was like her. I can see now! I was like her!”
“If you had been like her,” his voice was intensely bitter, “I should have asked you to be my wife. You are as unlike her as one human being can be to another.”
“But I was enough like her to make you take me up!” she cried furiously.
“I have neither taken you up nor put you down,” he answered. “ Be good enough never to refer to the subject again.”
“I’ll refer to any subject I like. If you think I shall not you are mistaken. It will be worth talking about. An Early Victorian romance is worth something in these days.”
The trend of her new circle had indeed carried her far. He was privately appalled by her. She was hysterically, passionately spiteful—almost to the point of malignance.
“Do you realise that this is a scene? It has not been our habit to indulge in scenes,” he said.
“I shall speak about it as freely as I shall speak about Robin,” she flaunted at him, wholly unrestrained. “Do you think I know nothing about Robin? I’m an affectionate mother and I’ve been making inquiries. She’s not with the Dowager at Eaton Square. She got ill and was sent away to be hidden in the country. Girls are, sometimes. I thought she would be sent away somewhere, the day I met her in the street. She looked exactly like that sort of thing. Where is she? I demand to know.”
There is nothing so dangerous to others as the mere spitefully malignant temper of an empty headed creature giving itself up to its own weak fury. It knows no restraint, no limit in its folly. In her fantastic broodings over her daughter’s undue exaltation of position Feather had many times invented for her own entertainment little scenes in which she could score satisfactorily. Such scenes had always included Coombe, the Dowager, Robin and Mrs. Muir.
“I am her mother. She is not of age. I can demand to see her. I can make her come home and stay with me while I see her through her ‘trouble,’ as pious people call it. She’s got herself into trouble—just like a housemaid. I knew she would—I warned her,” and her laugh was actually shrill.
It was inevitable—and ghastly—that he should suddenly see Robin with her white eyelids dropped over her basket of sewing by the window in the Tower room at Darreuch. It rose as clear as a picture on a screen and he felt sick with actual terror.
“I’ll go to the Duchess and ask her questions until she can’t face me without telling the truth. If she’s nasty I’ll talk to the War Work people who crowd her house. They all saw Robin and the wide-awake ones will understand when I’m maternal and tragic and insist on knowing. I’ll go to Mrs. Muir and talk to her. It will be fun to see her face and the Duchess’.”
He had never suspected her of malice such as this. And even in the midst of his ghastly dismay he saw that it was merely the malice of an angrily spiteful selfish child of bad training and with no heart. There was nothing to appeal to—nothing to arrest and control. She might repent her insanity in a few days but for the period of her mood she would do her senseless worst.
“Your daughter has not done what you profess to believe,” he said. “You do not believe it. Will you tell me why you propose to do these things?”
She had worked herself up to utter recklessness.
“Because of everything,” she spat forth. “Because I’m in a rage—because I’m sick of her and her duchesses. And I’m most sick of you hovering about her as if she were a princess of the blood and you were her Grand Chamberlain. Why don’t you marry her yourself—baby and all! Then you’ll be sure there’ll be another Head of the House of Coombe!”
She knew then that she had raved like a fishwife—that, even though there had before been no fishwives in Mayfair, he saw one standing shrilling before him. It was in his eyes and she knew it before she had finished speaking, for his look was maddening. It enraged her even further and she shook in the air the hand with the big purple amethyst ring, still clutching the end of the bedizened purple scarf. She was intoxicated with triumph—for she had reached him.
“I will! I will!” she cried. “ I will—to-morrow!”
“You will not!” his voice rang out as she had never heard it before. He even took a step forward. Then came the hurried leap of feet up the narrow staircase and Owen Delamore flung the door wide, panting:
“You told me to dash in,” he almost shouted. “They’re coming! We can rush round to the Sinclairs’. They’re on the roof already!”
She caught the purple scarf around her and ran towards him, for at this new excitement her frenzy reached its highest note.
“I will! I will!” she called back to Coombe as she fled out of the room and she held up and waved at him again the hand with the big amethyst. “ I will, to-morrow!”
Lord Coombe was left standing in the garish, crowded little drawing-room listening to ominous sounds in the street—to cries, running feet and men on fleeing bicycles shouting warnings as they sped at top speed and strove to clear the way.
Chapter 38
It was one of the raids which left hellish things behind it—things hushed with desperate combined effort to restrain panic, but which blighted the air people strove to breathe and kept men and women shuddering for long after and made people waken with sharp cries from nightmares of horror. Certain paled faces belonged to those who had seen things and would never forget them. Others strove to look defiant and cheerful and did not find it easy. Some tried to get past policemen to certain parts of the city and some, getting past, returned livid and less adventurous in spirit because they had heard things it was gruesome to hear. Lord Coombe went the next morning to the slice of a house and found the servants rather hysterical. Feather had not returned, but they were not hysterical for that reason. She had probably remained at the house to which she had gone to see the Zepps. After the excitement was over, people like the Sinclairs were rather inclined to restore themselves by making a night of it, so to speak.
As “to-morrow” had now arrived, Lord Coombe wished to see her on her return. He had in fact lain awake thinking of plans of defence but had so far been able to decide on none. If there had been anything to touch, to appeal to, there might have been some hope, but she had left taste and fastidiousness scattered in shreds behind her. The War, as she put it, had made her less afraid of life. She had in fact joined the army of women who could always live so long as their beauty lasted. At the beginning of her relations with Lord Coombe she had belonged in a sense to a world which now no longer existed in its old form. Possibly there would soon be neither courts nor duchesses and so why should anything particularly matter? There were those who were taking cataclysms lightly and she was among them. If her airy mind chanced to have veered and her temper died down, money or jewels might induce her to keep quiet if one could endure the unspeakable indignity of forcing oneself to offer them. She would feel such an offer no indignity and would probably regard it as a tremendous joke. But she could no more be trusted than a female monkey or jackdaw.
Lord Coombe sat among the gewgaws in the drawing room and waited because he must see her when she came in and at least discover if the weather cock had veered.
After waiting an hour or more he heard a taxi arrive at the front door and stop there. He went to the window to see who got out of the vehicle. It gave him a slight shock to recognise a man he knew well. He wore plain clothes, but he was a member of the police force.
He evidently came into the house and stopped in the hall to talk to the immature footman who presently appeared at the drawing-room door, looking shaken because he had been questioned and did not know what it portended.
“What is the matter?” Lord Coombe assisted him with.
“Some one who is asking about Mrs. Gareth-Lawless. He doesn’t seem satisfied with what I tell him. I took the liberty of saying your lordship was here and perhaps you’d see him.”
“Bring him upstairs.”
It was in fact a man who knew Lord Coombe well enough to be aware that he need make no delay.
“It was one of the worst, my lord,” he said in answer to Coombe’s first question. “ We’ve had hard work—and the hardest of it was to hold things—people—back.” He looked hag-ridden as he went on without any preparation. He was too tired for prefaces.
“There was a lady who went out of here last night. She was with a gentleman. They were running to a friend’s house to see things from the roof. They didn’t get there. The gentleman is in the hospital delirious to-day. He doesn’t know what happened. It’s supposed something frightened her and she lost her wits and ran away. The gentleman tried to follow her but the lights were out and he couldn’t find her in the dark streets. The running about and all the noises and crashes sent him rather wild perhaps. Trying to find a frightened woman in the midst of all that—and not finding her—”
“What ghastly—damnable thing has happened?” Coombe asked with stiff lips.
“It’s both,” the man said, “—it’s both.”
He produced a package and opened it. There was a torn and stained piece of spangled violet gauze folded in it and on top was a little cardboard box which he opened also to show a ring with a big amethyst in it set with pearls.
“Good God!” Coombe ejaculated, getting up from his chair hastily, “Oh! Good God!”
“You know them?” the man asked.
“Yes. I saw them last night—before she went out.”
“She ran the wrong way—she must have been crazy with fright. This—” the man hesitated a second here and pulled himself together, “—this is all that was found except—”
“Good God!” said Lord Coombe again and he walked to and fro rapidly, trying to hold his body rigid.
“The gentleman—his name is Delamore—went on looking—after the raid was over. Some one saw him running here and there as if he had gone crazy. He was found afterwards where he’d fainted—near a woman’s hand with this ring on and the piece of scarf in it. He’s a strong young chap but he’d fainted dead. He was carried to the hospital and to-day he’s delirious.”
“There—was nothing more?” shuddered Coombe.
“Nothing, my lord.”
Out of unbounded space embodied nothingness had seemed to float across the world of living things, and into space the nothingness had disappeared—leaving behind a trinket and a rent scrap of purple gauze.
Chapter 39
Six weeks later Coombe was driven again up the climbing road to Darreuch. There was something less of colour than usual in his face, but the slightly vivid look of shock observing persons had been commenting upon had died out. As he had travelled, leaning back upon the cushions of the railway carriage, he had kept his eyes closed for the greater part of the journey. When at last he began to open them and look out at the increasingly beautiful country he also began to look rested and calm. He already felt the nearing peace of the shrine and added to it was an immense relaxing and uplift. A girl of a type entirely different from Robin’s might, he knew, have made him feel during the past months as if he were taking part in a melodrama. This she had wholly saved him from by the clear simplicity of her natural acceptance of all things as they were. She had taken and given without a word. He was, as it were, going home to he
r now, as deeply thrilled and moved as a totally different type of man might have gone—a man who was simpler.
The things he might once have been and felt were at work within him. Again he longed to see the girl—he wanted to see her. He was going to the castle in response to a telegram from Dowie. All was well over. She was safe. For the rest, all calamity had been kept from her knowledge and, as he had arranged it, the worst would never reach her. In course of time she would learn all it was necessary that she should know of her mother’s death.
When Mrs. Macaur led him to one of his own rooms she glowed red and expectantly triumphant.
“The young lady, your lordship—it was wonderful!”
But before she had time to say more Dowie had appeared and her face was smooth and serene to marvellousness.
“The Almighty himself has been in this place, my lord,” she said devoutly. “I didn’t send more than a word, because she’s like a schoolroom child about it. She wants to tell you herself.” The woman was quivering with pure joy.
“May I see her?”
“She’s waiting, my lord.”
Honey scents of gorse and heather blew softly through the open windows of the room he was taken to. He did not know enough of such things to be at all sure what he had expected to see—but what he moved quickly towards, the moment after his entrance, was Robin lying fair as a wild rose on her pillows—not pale, not tragic, but with her eyes wide and radiant as a shining child’s.
Her smiling made his heart stand still. He really could not speak. But she could and turned back the covering to show him what lay in her soft curved arm.
“He is not like me at all,” was her joyous exulting. “He is exactly like Donal.”
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