by Guy McCrone
As Henry moved in his chair, he became aware of the stiffness in his bones. But he had to go up last night. How could he have stayed down here while others searched on the hillside for his son? Now he sat, sore, and conscious of a great weariness, watching the Frenchwoman as she crossed the dim room, settled down by Robin’s bed and took up some knitting.
Sitting thus, Henry began to retrace the nightmare that was yesterday. The quarrel in the square. Robin’s foolish goodbye. His own annoyance, cooling to distress as the afternoon lengthened into evening and no Robin came. Stephen’s wife, Lucy, had gone up to the studio. She had found a woman working. No, he had not again been there. Nor had the woman heard anything of him. They had all begun to be alarmed, himself, Henry, in particular, remembering Robin’s angry parting.
The boy in the bed moved, sighing as he did so. The nurse stood up, put aside her knitting, bent over him watching, then sat down again and once more took it up.
Cheerful voices came up from the garden, exclaiming at the bright freshness of the morning.
Henry went on with yesterday. The thunder and the drenching rain. Robin could not have disappeared with the St. Roch girl. He must have been caught by the downpour, must be sheltering somewhere. The early darkness. The storm was over now; there was clear starlight. Where could Robin be? Fear had taken hold of him. The hotel had telephoned to the police, who had, in turn, spoken to the railway station. Miss St. Roch, in her own kind of dress and with her great dog, was difficult to miss. They found a porter who had seen her leave Mentone alone. At midday.
Then, after a dinner which Henry could not eat, the woman from the studio had come with a message. A neighbour had just heard of an old peasant having seen a young man on the hill; a strange-looking young man, who paid no attention when the peasant called to him.
The breeze blew through the slats of the shutters, rattling them gently. The nurse looked up, afraid they might again come loose, then she dropped her eyes and went on with her work.
Lucy and Stephen had waited down here. But he, his father, must go with the searchers, the little group of stocky, dark-skinned men whose rapid speech seemed to him a kind of guttural barking. They had been quick to show him kindness, lighting his steps over the stones with their lanterns and supporting his arm in rough places. One of them followed with a mule.
It had not taken long. The crazy boy had not climbed very high. The men knew, of course, the position of the peasant’s plot, and thus they guessed, readily enough, the way he must have taken.
And the finding of him.
Merely to remember was to flinch and bleed—to remember the look on his face, as suddenly a searching lantern found and lit it. Robin had the look of a stricken animal, trapped and beaten, waiting for the end, however it might come. With a cry he had run to his huddled, trembling son, calling him by name.
For a moment the Frenchwoman raised her head, wondering why, in this cool room, the patient’s father should be sitting over there wiping his brow.
It had been horrible. He was glad Phœbe had been spared the sight of Robin, dazed and broken, crouching up there in the darkness. But although he had not spoken, dull relief was in the boy’s eyes. Relief and an instinctive yielding as he, his father, had run forward to catch and hold him.
Now, unable to sit still, Henry rose and crossed to Robin’s bedside. In the shuttered twilight, he stood looking at him. He put back the dark hair and gazed into his face as he slept this sleep that drugs had forced upon him. Once or twice Robin’s brow contracted as though he were distressed. He stood beside him watching for he knew not what, then at length he turned and left him, coming back to his seat by the window.
An agony of contrition took hold of Henry. An agony of self-doubt, of self-interrogation.
The woman wondered to see him lying back, his eyes shut, his hands grasping the arms of his chair.
What had he done to Robin? Had he killed him? Was this to be the end? Why hadn’t he known his son better? And who was he, Henry Hayburn, to stand in judgment over this boy whose very existence sprang from his own unfaithfulness?
In the future, if Robin had a future, he must keep closer to him. Seek to understand him. Gain his confidence by giving all his own. Hold back nothing. Share his secrets. Treat Robin as a grown man. Why had he ever let it come to this? Why had they fallen so far apart?
The quarrel up there by the cathedral came again to Henry. Why, like a fool, had he lost his temper? Almost lost it so far as to admit to Robin he was his father?
Henry opened his eyes and sat forward in his chair. But had he not, just now, determined to share his secrets?
Why not tell his son the truth? Tell him everything? Step down from his stucco pillar? Robin, surely, must feel different towards him when he knew he was his father.
But would he find him ready to listen? If health came back, would mad resentment come back with it? Henry could not think so. Robin had been rational after they had found him; and plucky on that journey down.
He had almost fainted again with pain and exhaustion as the men had tried to lift him to the mule’s back. But making an effort, he had been able to show them the reason, pointing to his foot. Then, taking better care next time, they had got him up and set him in the saddle.
Slowly the little cavalcade had brought Robin down the hillside, swaying and sliding, as the creature found its way by instinct and by the light of the lanterns. He, his father, had walked beside him, holding him to keep him as steady as he could. It had been the most anxious journey Henry had ever made.
A gentle tapping sounded on the door. The nurse opened, and Lucy put her head in. “Henry,” she whispered, “you’re awake, are you? It’s ten o’clock. You must come downstairs and have some coffee.”
III
They had dreaded pneumonia. But in this, at least, the fates were merciful. Yet the events of that fateful day and evening could not but take a heavy toll of Robin’s strength. The ravages of the disease that had brought him to Mentone must, as his doctor feared, noting the all-too-active symptoms, be given a fatal impetus.
It was a dreary time of waiting.
Robin’s days and nights were passed between an exhausted sleep and a distressing wakefulness. And yet a veil of unreality hung between himself and his emotions. He would follow those who came and went in his room—the doctor, the nurses, Stephen, Lucy and his father—with eyes that were dazed and gentle, eyes that reflected neither rebellion nor dislike. He spoke little, and was, indeed, discouraged from doing so.
And while Robin lay gazing out at the sunlight of early May dancing on the familiar date-palm, his father, sitting through the long hours, patient and purposeless, would ask himself what was passing in that mind, usually so quick: would ask himself, sometimes, if his son’s thinking were lowered to a mere dull consciousness.
Yet people and happenings passed before Robin as he lay there. Denise. Her face, her aspect, their love together, her laughter, her hand on his shoulder when she bent to read what he had written. “Now, would you put it just like that? Well, I don’t know. Oh, I guess it’s all right. Leave it, Robin. What do I know, anyway?” The reading of her farewell letter.
And up by the cathedral; his strange outburst of rage at that lean figure who now sat forever over there by the window. The mountainside. The moving lanterns. The descent. Events and people hung and floated continually; floated like fishes in a glass tank, coming to the front, showing themselves clearly, then receding into the inner dimness, while others moved forward to become clear in their turn. Yet dim or clear, they hung apart, all of them in a world that could not touch him.
But after some time things were better. Robin awoke one day to find his father by his bedside in the nurse’s chair. For some minutes he lay drowsily contemplating the square, familiar profile. Curiosity had begun once more to raise its head. Allowed to talk now, he startled Sir Henry by saying: “Hullo! What are you doing over here?”
“You’ve had a good sleep, Rob. Better than us
ual. Your nurse has gone out for half an hour. All right?”
“All right.”
“I’ve got news for you.” Henry waited, but Robin did not speak. “Your mother will be here this afternoon. She and your uncle and aunt are going to wait with you and bring you home. In several weeks from now; but whenever they can. The doctor says that’s what to do.” Here Henry stopped, remembering, suddenly, his son’s hot disavowal of Scotland and anything connected with it.
But Robin was smiling. “I’m glad,” he said.
“I’ve got to get back,” Henry now added, with relief. “You won’t be too excited at seeing her, will you?”
“No.”
This drowsy, smiling Robin pleased him. This was the child of the old days waiting, already half-asleep, for his father to come and bid him good-night. Henry touched his hand. “Robin,” he said, “you and I must never quarrel any more. What’s past is past.”
“Yes, Father. Past.”
He bent to scrutinise his son’s face, seeking to find what Robin wanted him to take from these three words. He could find neither regret nor bitterness. So he took courage. “Just before I leave you, and while I have this chance, there is something I want to tell you, Robin.”
His son turned his eyes to him. “Yes?”
“I’ll never mention our—that stupid talk up by the cathedral again. Except this once. But—”
“What do you want to tell me, Father?”
“You said we had built a fantasy round you. That there wasn’t a drop of Scotch blood in you.”
Robin’s head nodded on his pillow.
“Well, there is Scotch blood in you.”
Robin continued to watch him. “In me, Father? But I was told—”
“You had to be told something.”
“But whose?”
“My own.” Emotion forced Henry to stand up and turn away.
“And who—?”
“She was a Viennese girl. That part is true. I wanted you to know. I thought—I don’t know—that it might bring us nearer, maybe, make you feel—well—that I’m not—that I understand a bit.” It was difficult for Henry to turn back and look at his son just then, yet he must see how Robin took this.
There was curiosity in the boy’s face. Nothing more. “So you are my father, after all? And what about Mother all this time?”
Henry considered his answer. “Not the whole story now, Rob. Some time later,” he said. “But your mother was—was good. You see, Rob, she insisted on bringing you—and me—back home again.” It was all that he could say. He had hurried out to the balcony, and for a time he was out of Robin’s sight.
Robin lay thinking about this. So his father—like himself? No. It was very queer. When they had been in Vienna. He must ask more about it sometime. Meanwhile, this was something new to lie and think about. A bright new fish to swim to the front of the glass tank.
But presently, the fish was receding into the dim recesses of a mere drowsy weakness.
Some few minutes later, when Henry felt he could return to Robin’s bedside, he was much surprised to find that his son was again asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Two
WHEN Phœbe came to look back on the long, sunlit months of the year 1901, the summer of a Glasgow Exhibition, the last summer of Robin’s life, its memory lay there behind her a hot, uneasy, golden dream. A dream compounded of joy and sorrow.
The early mists lifting from the valley. The distant mountains, their colours ever growing darker, richer, as sunlit day succeeded sunlit day. The birds squabbling and twittering in the silver birches over there across an early morning lawn still with the bloom of dew upon it. And then, later, when the dew was safely gone and the air had turned warm, the routine of arranging Robin’s long chair and rugs, that he might spend his day in the open. The quiet hours of sitting beside him. The friends and relatives who came and went. Lucy and Stephen on a long visit. Robin’s wasting aspect. A monotonous, bittersweet pattern.
And yet things had happened. There was that important day when Bel and Tom Moorhouse had come to Whins of Endrick to be with Robin, fetched, Phœbe remembered, by Henry’s much-used motor-car after it had dropped him at the shipyard. Later, it had taken Lucy and Stephen to the Exhibition, and herself to a consultation with her doctor. A day of moment to herself and Henry, stamped forever on her mind.
She would always see the group by the tea-table over there on the grass when she returned that afternoon. Bel in a suit of white serge, its jacket thrown back over her garden chair; the choking elegance of her lacy blouse with its boned neck; her straw hat modishly draped with a white veil. She was holding up her parasol with one hand and pouring out tea with the other. A Bel whose face was smooth again, now that her son was home and safe beside her. A son, Phœbe remembered telling herself, who would be able to live out the usual span now, like any other. Tom himself in a long chair like Robin’s, but, unlike Robin, becoming fat a little, and with no marks of his South African wounding in a face that was brown and cheerful. Presently Tom would have an artificial foot, and his life would touch back to normal.
And Robin, lying on his cushions, watching her as she crossed to greet them, with eyes that seemed in these days to possess a quick, separate life of their own. She had sometimes wondered if these eyes knew everything.
“We must get back, Phœbe.” Bel had risen after tea. Tom, too, had stood up on one foot, balancing his strong young body. Phœbe could still remember a sharp, quite primitive jealousy as she turned her eyes from Tom to Robin.
“Tom! Stop jumping about on one foot! You’ll fall down. Here, take your crutches.” Bel could laugh at her son’s antics, as he got to the car in a succession of hops.
When they were gone away and Phœbe came back to the tea-table, she found Robin’s eyes still upon her. “Tired?” she asked.
“Not specially.”
“Why are you looking at me like that, Robin?”
“I couldn’t be looking at a better friend.”
“Bad boy. That’s no answer.”
“Mother, you’ve got a secret!”
She remembered wondering if she were blushing; and her absurd hesitation as she said: “How do you know what I’ve got?”
“I know the guilty look!” His detached teasing smile, there against the cushions. And then: “Tell me, Mother. Amuse me.”
And indeed why not? Unless it should be that the thought of a new life he might never see would have power to vex him. Still: “Something I was once told could never be again is going to happen to me, Robin. I haven’t got used to the idea of it yet. Your old, middle-aged mother is going to have a baby.”
“Good heavens!”
She watched him, as his thin body shook with silent laughter there under the rug.
“Well? Will you please tell me what there is to laugh about?”
“I don’t know! But somehow—no! When I think of Sir Henry—”
“What about your father?”
“I can just see him looking sentimentally down on that poor little bit of wriggling redness; then going to his writing-desk and making arrangements for his engineering course. And by the way, Mother, tell the baby from me not to send any poetry to the evening newspapers. Tell him to keep to the weeklies. Father doesn’t read them.”
“Robin! That’s not fair!” Yet she was not quite sure what he meant. Still, she was glad at least that he had taken it in this way. Glad now, when anything amused him.
He had lain thinking for a time after that. The summer day was on the wane, a little, but the sun was still high. The birds, awakening from their midday torpor, gave a chirp now and then among the birches. A red squirrel dared to appear and to bump himself across the far corner of the lawn. Cows in a distant field gathered themselves about the gate, lowing to be milked. Midges began to dance. The parlourmaid came down the front steps and took away the tea-tray.
She had turned to him then, she remembered, wondering why he lay so quiet. He stretched out a hand.
“
No. Really, old lady, I’m pleased about this. About as pleased as I could be about anything, I suppose. Pleased for you and pleased for Sir Henry. He’ll get a full-blooded Scotsman this time. Not a half-bred misfit. Yes, honestly, it’s wonderful! Just as it should be.”
She knew what he meant. It was beyond her powers to answer him. How could she tell him that she would give up everything she had, this new hope even, if only the half-bred misfit, as he chose to call himself, the child of those far-off days of her own young, bewildered suffering, could be spared to live out his life as Tom Moorhouse would now do.
“So keep up your health and your pecker, Mother. It’s your bounden duty. Will you promise me?”
She had said: “I promise.”
That Robin had spoken again of this, Phœbe could not recall. Nor yet, strangely, could she recall the first telling of the news to her husband. But it had been the coming of the second Robin that had shone like a lamp before them in the darkest winter Henry and Phœbe Hayburn ever hoped to know.
Henry had come back that evening accompanied by his brother and Lucy. They were full of news. Foreign royalty was to come to Glasgow’s Exhibition. As people of importance, Sir Henry and Lady Hayburn were expected to be there.
They had gone indoors, she remembered, leaving her to follow with Robin.
And again she had seen the knowing smile. “Well, Robin? What is it now?”
“Aunt Lucy has a secret too. Oh, not your kind of secret! But something. I wonder what it is.”
II
Phœbe was not told Lucy’s secret until the thing actually happened. On the day of the royal visit she learned what it was.
That morning, she had been forced to tell Henry she would not be able to come to the Exhibition with him; that she felt sick and had a headache. Her husband, guessing the reason, had smiled and acquiesced cheerfully enough, adding, however, that Stephen, and especially Stephen’s wife, must help him by taking her place. But Lucy, hearing this at breakfast, had come up to see her. Her new sister-in-law, Phœbe remembered, had seemed more than conventionally worried. “But, my dear girl! How can I leave you in this condition?”