The Daughter of the Hawk

by C. S. Forester

  Dawkins raged again, guiltily, and dropped the subject. For the rest of the day he cursed himself for his timidity toward Nina. He decided several times for and against running into Gilding and apologizing to Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter—and did not go. The whole afternoon he spent screwing up his courage to tackle Nina on her return from school. It took quite a lot of courage on his part. He heard Nina come in from school. He heard her go in to tea with Miss Lamb. He waited half an hour and then he rang the bell and told Mary to “ask Miss Nina to come and speak to me before she starts her homework.”

  Nina came, and of course her gray eyes and her long chin came with her, and Dawkins with set face waved her into the opposite armchair. Dawkins had tried to rehearse an opening, but he had been hampered by the quite remarkably acute realization of the necessity not to vent upon Nina the rage he felt with himself.

  “I want to hear all about what you did last night,” he said, keeping his voice desperately even, “and why you did it.”

  But Nina refused to be overawed by his judicial attitude and refused to subside into the ordinary Nina. She remained the Nina of the transcendent personality of last night.

  “You know what I did,” she said. “I got out of the window and came and fetched you home. And you ought to know why I did it.”

  Dawkins, uneasily, did know, and that was what was embarrassing him. But he stuck to his guns.

  “Don’t you know,” he said, “that it was very naughty of you to get up after you went to bed, and to sneak out of the house without letting Miss Lamb know? And you might have hurt yourself very badly climbing down that drainpipe, and you might easily have caught pneumonia or something very bad like that if Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter hadn’t been so kind as to lend you some of Betty’s clothes?”

  Nina’s only reply was a sneer.

  “Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter!” she said, and every syllable was quick with contempt.

  “Yes, Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter,” said Dawkins, clinging wildly to the offensive. “She is a very nice lady, and was much nicer to you than you deserve.”

  Nina thumped the arm of her chair and threw away all vestige of a tolerant hearing of Dawkins’ remarks.

  “Oh, it’s silly to talk like that, daddy,” she said. “You know she wasn’t and isn’t and won’t be ever. You do know that.”

  Gray eyes met blue eyes on terms of equality and climbed speedily to superiority.

  “She isn’t any good at all,” said Nina, and her voice gradually assumed a far more maternal tone even than the one she used toward Betty.

  “You know, she isn’t a bit like what you think she is. She thinks camping and that sort of thing is all rot, like our going exploring on the Baby. She doesn’t want to go up the Amazon or the Orinoco. And she hates me—oh, she does. It’d be awful if you married her.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, I know she wants to marry you. She told Betty so, but I’d have known even if Betty hadn’t told me.”

  Dawkins gaped at Nina wordlessly. All sorts of illusions were crashing round him—most of them had already been undermined, and these disclosures by Nina brought them down with a run. That Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter should want to marry him reduced her value in Dawkins’ eyes enormously. Dawkins was that sort of man, and he was old-fashioned enough to consider it unwomanly for a woman to want to marry any one, to say nothing of attempting to bring it about. From that very moment Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter ceased in his eyes to be a desirable, almost unattainable goddess and lapsed into some one to be run away from. Nina with her devilish intuition was aware of the fact.

  A very curious, rather comforting atmosphere suddenly grew up between the two of them, and Nina unconsciously added to it by slipping out of her chair and climbing up on to Dawkins’ knee. She punched him in the chest and looked into his eyes. With every gesture she proclaimed that she was still only a child, but at the same time there was something about her appearance and about Dawkins’ attitude which took her sex and her sexual ascendency over Dawkins for granted.

  “I’m glad you’re not going to marry her,” said Nina. “I wouldn’t like you to marry even the nicest woman in the world.”

  She eyed Dawkins with the expression of some one hesitating to impart some new revelation. And Dawkins’ blue eyes smiled back at her. He was feeling incredibly happy with this warm bundle in his arms. He seemed suddenly to have come out of some fantastic and badly lighted world into a world of solidity and light. The smile in Dawkins’ eyes was more than Nina could resist.

  “You know why, don’t you?” she said. “It isn’t because of the French rivers or the Amazon or the Orinoco or anything like that.”

  And she leaned forward to him, and Dawkins felt on his mustached mouth the touch of her lips, warm and friendly and childlike. Then they looked at each other, joint sharers in a great secret.

  Chapter XXII

  So all that winter and the next spring Dawkins’ life and Nina’s, too, moved along ordinary lines. Dawkins did his work at the settlement in his thorough fashion, still feeling oddly out of his element, but earning the devotion and the regard of all those who saw the value of the work he did. He put his hand in his pocket for the sake of the charities that were administered under his eye; he collected facts and information; he took parties of mothers to the seaside. Now and again a gust of passion would take him by the throat and he would not reach home until the next day, but that was only to be expected. Miss Lamb, in fact, with surprising shrewdness, became accustomed to these periodic absences, and one can hardly help suspecting that she guessed the reason for them. It is even to be feared that little Miss Lamb, virtuous Miss Lamb, maidenly Miss Lamb, condoned them in her heart, and sought and found excuses for her hero.

  The golf made steady, automatic, almost inevitable progress. Dawkins’ handicap came down by occasional ones or even twos. Membership in the Manor Club came to him without a struggle, and there Dawkins was able to hobnob with wealth and blue blood and to drift into desired but unsought popularity. He was helped in that, indeed, by his acquaintance with one of the most eminent members of all the Gilding Manor Club—a very Eminent Gentleman indeed, who twinkled at him in the dining-room on his first visit and asked how the exploring was getting on, and played a round with him in the afternoon, and returned full of admiration at an exhibition of immense driving and iron nerve. But nobody in the club ever guessed that the reason why Dawkins was so modest and retiring about the exposure of his person in the wash-room after a round on a wet day was because his back was seamed with crisscross scars acquired in a South American convict prison.

  The rumors which associated him with monstrous wealth gradually died away after he had disposed of all his jewels and had comfortably invested the proceeds. Mr. Carver had stolen very little from him, thanks to Dawkins’ minute examination of accounts and his consistency in handing over small parcels at a time. Carver had privately decided that he would inveigle all the remaining stones from Dawkins in one large batch and then simply keep them and defy Dawkins to prosecute him to regain possession. But he had no opportunity—in fact he did not know that the supply had come to an end until he had sold the last of them. However, Carver had made something over a comfortable fifty thousand pounds and had no real grounds for complaint; and Dawkins could draw rather more than four thousand pounds a year from his gilt-edged investments. It was more than he needed for everything he wanted to do, so that he was far richer than most people in the world. The feeling of respectability and permanence was most astonishingly comfortable, and his love for Nina and her little tender affection for him kept him happy.

  Nina did not say anything more to him during those months about the secret they shared, of course. No child would. In fact any casual observer might imagine that it was quite forgotten, for Nina went on in her own child’s way, with occasional little tempers and occasional naughtinesses, wriggling from one trouble to another at school, although it was not for a long time that she came into contact with authority as violently as the time
when she was “liable to expulsion.” Home work and hockey and riding lessons, and tennis when the summer came round; any unthinking person would have decided on observation that these things bulked far more importantly in Nina’s life than Dawkins did—but whoever thought so would have been wrong.

  Summer brought other things besides tennis. There were week-end trips in the Baby, and despite all the imminent preparations for the Continental voyage, and despite the fact that they had explored the Thames so thoroughly the previous summer, they were periods of sheer delight to which Dawkins, Nina and Miss Lamb looked forward one and all. The other girls at Gilding High School listened enviously to Nina’s accounts of the forty-eight-hour Odysseys, and they most heartily envied Nina the possession of such a wonderful guardian as she had. They had seen him sometimes at hockey matches and on Sports Day, big, blond and terrible, and yet deliciously human—and did he not sometimes cook sausages over an oil stove, which not one in a hundred of their own respectable something-in-the-City fathers would ever have dreamed of doing? Dawkins hardly knew it, but he was an object of worship to quite three hundred bits of femininity in Gilding, to say nothing of the mothers who admired from afar. But Nina knew it, and the knowledge gave her an unreasoning but wholly satisfactory pride. The memory of an ingeniously ill-tempered auntie, and of something not quite respectable at home which had made her the object of the derision of her schoolmates at private school, was being overlaid and erased with comforting rapidity.

  Nina did not know of one period of mortal terror through which Dawkins had passed, and she would have been frantic with fear if she had known about it. For letters had come to Dawkins, addressed to him in care of the first branch of the National County bank which he had patronized. They had come from auntie, and they were speciously worded demands for the return of Nina to her. Dawkins had sweated with terror when the first one came, but he had held himself free from panic. Dreading the least bit of scandal which might deprive Nina of her new-found respectability he had hurried to London (he would not chance the leakage of gossip from a Gilding lawyer) and had put himself unreservedly in the hands of the best firm of solicitors to whom the Eminent Gentleman could recommend him. They had hummed and hawed, and had raised amazed eyebrows at the sight of the would-be legal document which Mrs. Royle had signed on his first taking Nina away, but they assured him in the end that if he was on the wrong side of the law Mrs. Royle was also, and finally they had dealt with Mrs. Royle in such a fashion that at long last, and at the cost of a few more hundreds, Dawkins found himself constituted legal guardian of Nina with formalities which not even the Lord Chancellor could controvert.

  This end was only reached, however, when summer was fairly come, and Nina would not have been much interested in the business even if Dawkins had told her about it, for there were such heaps of other excitements to distract her. Her year in the fourth form had passed like a flash, and was ending now in a splutter of examinations, and Nina was beending to consider the possibility of finding herself next year in the fifth form, a height which made even the Everest-summit of the sixth seemingly attainable. But school work faded into unimportance when the imminence of the French tour came into Nina’s mind. Mr. Dawkins was busy having the Baby registered, and obtaining permis de voyage, and attending to the half-hundred details necessary to insure unrestricted access to the interior of France. Crises in the correspondence occurred weekly, and the breakfast-table atmosphere at the Other House alternated between elation and depression with the variations of the mind of French officialdom.

  Miss Lamb quite began to put on airs, because the correspondence in French was necessarily carried on by her. Yet even Miss Lamb was not infallible, and came a nasty cropper in one of the letters wherein she had to transpose the Baby’s draught of water from feet to meters—for she was guilty of a mistake in arithmetic for which she would have censured Nina with all the mild severity of which she was capable. And the arguments she had with Dawkins about the exact meanings of flottable and navigable! It was all too exciting for words.

  Yet it all came about. As soon as ever the summer term was finished they were on board the Baby with the paid hand they had engaged for the run across, and they nosed their way amid hectic incidents through London and down the Pool and out past the North Foreland. They waited their chance for a favorable day, and ran across the Straits, so that Nina’s delighted eyes rested for the first time on the coast of France. Then they crawled onward past all the seaside resorts in the full swing of the bourgeois August season, and crept past Havre into the wide green estuary of the Seine.

  Nina would not have liked to have to state which she preferred, the open sea or the rivers; both had so much to be said in their favor. The sea was wide and exciting (Nina was never seasick—not like poor Miss Lamb, who would have stated her preference in no uncertain terms), and the Baby’s engine could be opened full out. But rivers were her first love, after all, and the green fields seen through gray rain, and the strange chalky cliffs of the lower Seine, and the immense turns and twists of the river made her heart beat faster and brought a queer little lump into her throat. There was enormous excitement, too, in going shopping with Miss Lamb, and her the ease with which she conversed with village folk. The French of the Gilding High School, Nina found, was not much use in a motor-boat on the Seine—and even daddy, the invincible, was quite hopeless even in such a simple matter as asking the way.

  Then there was Jumieges Abbey, too, and St. Wandrille and Caudebec, and then Rouen, and a perfectly astonishing climb inside the walls of Rouen Cathedral up to where you looked down from such a height that you experienced an odd sensation as if a big hand had gripped your stomach and were squeezing it. Then the non-tidal Seine, with its green hills which were so hospitable and friendly, as though they were little cousins of Summer Hill far back at the Other House, and the pleasant fields of Normandy, until factory buildings began to grow more and more frequent, and the reaches of the river shorter and shorter, and Paris was at hand and the Eiffel Tower plain to see.

  Perhaps the passage through Paris gave Nina a rather distorted idea of geography. Paris for her was not the Queen of Europe, nor the burial place of Napoleon; she was not even now quite old enough to look on it as the place that frocks come from. Instead, Nina came to look upon Paris as a nasty place covering the river for thirty long kilometers without a single suitable spot to tie up in, which from fear of delays they entered into at dawn and pushed hurriedly through all day. The St. Denis canal enabled them to cut off the corner between La Briche and the Ile du Cité, but it involved a horrible, smoky, gloomy, sickly journey through tunnels and along commercial waterways at their worst. Nina simply hated Paris, and was not a bit pleased when Miss Lamb promised that she would bring her there again at Christmas by a more normal route, so that they could see Notre Dame and the Louvre and the shops without being bothered about tieing-up places.

  But it was worth all the fatigue and squalor of the passage through Paris when once they had won their way through and the Baby began to chug her way through the clear water of the upper Seine alongside the beautiful woods of Fontainebleau, with Barbizon close to the river, where Miss Lamb talked sentimentally about Trilby. And the wooded banks of Fontainebleau were succeeded by the steep valley of the Yonne, and every day, wet or fine clouded or sunny, was a miracle of beauty and peace, and every night was one of friendly good-fellowship, so that Nina came to love the sound of the quiet breathing of Miss Lamb in the other berth when she woke in the night, and reveled in the knowledge that Dawkins was sleeping under his green canvas awning just outside the cabin door. Every minute of that time Nina was thrilled with the realization of what a wonderful holiday she was having.

  They left the Yonne at Laroche and began the wonderful climb up the Burgundy Canal, rising higher and higher with each lock passed through. Nina came to realize that a canal can be every bit as exciting as a river, because a river necessarily flows in a valley, while a really sensible canal, like this one of Burg
undy, will pass clear over hilltops. There is something marvelous about steering one’s boat over the roof of the world, as Nina did while they passed the terraced vineyards of Burgundy.

  It could not last for ever, of course, as even Nina admitted. They made the dark and weird passage of the Pouilly tunnel with the aid of a pilot, and then they dropped down again, lock by lock, flight after flight of locks, through Dijon to the placid sober meanderings of the Saône. And yet those placid undetermined reaches of river, running through green meadowland, were strangely satisfactory, too. Their very ordinariness was a merit after the Homeric perfection of the Burgundy Canal. Châlon, as Nina saw regretfully on the map, was their “farthest South”; it was not for them to penetrate this year through to the Rhone and the Mediterranean. They turned aside with hearts full of sadness into the busy commerce of the Canal du Centre, hurried through the commercialized district centering on Le Creusot, and in due course made a sedate arrival upon the Loire.

  But the Loire was not for them; the Baby drew too much water for that treacherous stream with its shifting sandbanks and summer shallows. They were confined to the more prosaic water of the Lateral Canal, but Nina and Miss Lamb and Dawkins were quite satisfied even with that, and they cruised on past Digoin and Nevers and Sancerre and Cosne, while the guide-books foamed at the mouth with superlatives regarding the history of the castles and abbeys they left at every kilometer. And then almost before they realized it they were back on the Seine again at Fontainebleau, with Paris close ahead of them. That was the end of the most perfect and wonderful six weeks Nina could ever remember, for holidays were nearly over, and Nina and Miss Lamb had to leave Dawkins to take the Baby single-handed down to Rouen, there to find paid hands to assist in the navigation back to England.