Robin Read online

  “Don’t!” she moaned. “Please—don’t.”

  But he would not let her go.

  Perhaps days and nights passed—or perhaps only one day and night before she found herself still lying in her bed but feeling somehow more awake when she opened her eyes and found the same man sitting close to her holding her wrist again.

  “I am Dr. Redcliff,” he said in a quiet voice. “You are much better. I want to ask you some questions. I will not tire you.”

  He began to ask her questions very gently as if he did not wish to alarm or disturb her. She had been found in a dead faint lying on the landing. She had remained unconscious for an abnormally long time. When she had been brought out of one faint she had fallen into another and this had happened again and again. The indication was that she had been struck down by some shock. In examining her he had found that she was underweight. He wished to discover if she had been secretly working too late at night in her deep interest in what she was doing. What exactly had her diet been? Had she taken enough exercise in the open air? How had she slept? The Duchess was seriously anxious.

  They were the questions doctors always asked people except that he seemed more desirous of being sure of the amount of exercise she had taken than about anything else. He was specially interested in the times when she had been in the country. She was obliged to tell him she had always been alone. He thought it would have been better if she had had some companion. Once when he was asking her about her visits to Mrs. Bennett’s cottage the blackness almost engulfed her again. But he was watching her very closely and perhaps seeing her turn white—gave her some stimulant in time. He had a clever face which was not unkind, but she wished that it had not had such a keenly watchful look. More than once the watchfulness tired her and she closed her eyes because she did not want him to look into them—as if he were asking questions which were not altogether doctors’ questions.

  When he left her and went downstairs to talk to the Duchess he asked a good many quiet questions again. He was a man whose intense interest in his profession did not confine itself wholly to its scientific aspect. An extraordinarily beautiful child swooning into death was not a mere pathological incident to him. And he knew many strange things brought about by the abnormal conditions of war. He himself was conscious of being overstrung with the rest of a tormented world.

  He knew of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and he had heard more stories of her household, her loveliness and Lord Coombe than he had time to remember. He had, of course, heard the unsavoury rumours of the child who was being brought up for some nefarious object. As he knew Lord Coombe rather well he did not believe stories about him which went beyond a certain limit. Not until he had talked to the Duchess for some time did he discover that the hard-smitten child lying half-lifeless in her bed was the very young heroine of the quite favourite scandal. The knowledge gave him furiously to think. It was Coombe who had interested the Duchess in her. The Duchess had no doubt taken her under her protection for generously benign reasons. He pursued his questioning delicately.

  “Has she had any young friends? She seems to have taken her walks alone and even to have gone into the country by herself.”

  “The life of the young people in its ordinary sense of companionship and amusement has been stopped by the War. There may be some who go on in the old way but she has not been one of them,” the Duchess said.

  “Visits to old women in remote country places are not stimulating enough. Has she had no companions?”

  “I tried—” said the Duchess wearily. She was rather pale herself. “The news of the Sarajevo tragedy arrived on the day I gave a small dance for her—to bring some young people together.” Her waxen pallor became even more manifest. “How they danced!” she said woefully. “What living things they were! Oh!” the exclamation broke forth at a suddenly overwhelming memory. “The beautiful boy—the splendid lad who was blown to atoms—the news came only yesterday—was there dancing with the rest!”

  Dr. Redcliff leaned forward slightly.

  “To hear that any boy has been blown to atoms is a hideous thing,” he said. “Who brought the news? Was Miss Lawless in the room when it was brought?”

  “I think so though I am not sure. She comes in and goes out very quietly. I am afraid I forgot everything else. The shock was a great one. My old friend Lord Coombe brought the news. The boy would have succeeded him. We hear again and again of great families becoming extinct. The house of Coombe has not been prolific. The War has taken its toll. Donal Muir was the last of them. One has felt as though it was of great importance that—that a thing like that should be carried on.” She began to speak in a half-numbed introspective way. “What does it matter really? Only one boy of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands before it is over? But—but it’s the youngness— the power—the potential meaning—wasted— torn— scattered in fragments.” She stopped and sat quite still, gazing before her as though into space.

  “She is very young. She has been absorbed in war work and living in a highly charged atmosphere for some time.” Dr. Redcliff said presently, “ If she knew the poor lad—”

  “She did not really know him well, though they had met as children. They danced together that night and sat and talked in the conservatory. But she never saw him again,” the Duchess explained.

  “It might have been too much, even if she did not know him well. We must keep her quiet,” said Dr. Redcliff.

  Very shortly afterwards he rose and went away.

  An hour later he was sitting in a room at Coombe House alone with Lord Coombe. It was the room in which Mademoiselle Vallé had found his lordship on the night of Robin’s disappearance. No one knew now where Mademoiselle was or if she were still alive. She had been living with her old parents in a serene Belgian village which had been destroyed by the Germans. Black tales had been told of which Robin had been allowed to hear nothing. She had been protected in many ways.

  Though they had not been intimates the two men knew each other well. To each individually the type of the other was one he could understand. It was plain to Lord Coombe that Redcliff found his case of rather special interest, which he felt was scarcely to be wondered at. As he himself had seen the too slender prostrate figure and the bloodless small face with its curtain of lashes lying too heavily close to the cold cheek, he had realised that their helpless beauty alone was enough to arrest more than ordinary attention. She had, as the woman had cried out, looked as if she were dead, and dead loveliness is a reaching power.

  Dr. Redcliff spoke of her thoughtfully and with a certain gentleness. He at first included her with many other girls, the changes in whose methods of life he had been observing.

  “The closed gates in their paths are suddenly thrown open for them because no one has to lock and unlock them,” he said. “It produces curious effects. The light-minded ones take advantage of the fact and find dangerous amusement in it sometimes. The serious ones go about the work they have taken in hand. Miss Lawless is, I gather, one of the thinking and feeling ones and has gone about a great deal.”

  “Yes. The Duchess has tried to save her from her own ardour, but perhaps she has worked too steadily.”

  “Has the Duchess always known where she has gone and what people she has seen?”

  “That would have been impossible. She wished her to feel free and if we had not wished it, one can see that it would not have been possible to stand guard over her. Neither was it necessary.”

  But he began to listen with special attention. There awakened in his mind the consciousness that he was being asked questions which suggested an object. The next one added to his awakening sense of the thing.

  “Her exercise and holidays were always taken alone?” Redcliff said.

  “The Duchess believed so.”

  “She has evidently been living under a poignant strain and some ghastly shock has struck her down. I think she must have been in the room when you brought the news of young Muir’s terrible death.”

  “
She was,” said Coombe. “I saw her and then forgot.”

  “I thought so,” Redcliff went on. “She cried out several times, ‘Blown to atoms—atoms! Donal!’ She was not conscious of the cries.”

  “Are you sure she said ‘Donal’?” Coombe asked.

  “Quite sure. It was that which set me thinking. I have thought a great deal. She has touched me horribly. The mere sight of her was enough. There is desolation in her childlikeness.”

  Lord Coombe sat extremely still. The room was very silent till Redcliff went on in dropped voice.

  “There was another thing she said. She whispered it brokenly word by word. She did not know that, either. She whispered, ‘Now—no one—will ever—know—ever.’”

  Lord Coombe still sat silent. What he was thinking could not be read in his face but being a man of astute perception and used to the study of faces Dr. Redcliff knew that suddenly some startling thought had leaped within him.

  “You were right to come to me,” he said. “What is it you—suspect?”

  That Dr. Redcliff was almost unbearably moved was manifest. He was not a man of surface emotions but his face actually twitched and he hastily gulped something down.

  “She is a heartbreakingly beautiful thing,” he said. “She has been left—through sheer kindness—in her own young hands. They were too young—and these are hours of cataclysm. She knows nothing. She does not know that—she will probably have a child.”

  Chapter 15

  The swiftness of the process by which the glowing little Miss Lawless, at whom people had found themselves involuntarily looking so often, changed from a rose of a girl into something strangely like a small waxen image which walked, called forth frequent startled comment. She was glanced at even oftener than ever.

  “Is she going into galloping consumption? Her little chin has grown quite pointed and her eyes are actually frightening,” was an early observation. But girls who are going into galloping consumption cough and look hectic and are weaker day by day and she had no cough, nor was she hectic and, though it was known that Dr. Redcliff saw her frequently, she insisted that she was not ill and begged the Duchess to let her go on with her work.

  “But the done for woe in her face is inexplicable—in a girl who has had no love affairs and has not even known any one who could have flirted with her and ridden away. The little thing’s done for. It cries out aloud. I can’t bear to look at her,” one woman protested.

  “I shall send her away if she does not improve,” the Duchess said. “She shall go to some remote place in the Highlands and she shall not be allowed to remember that there is a war in the world. If I can manage to send her old nurse Dowie with her she will stand guard over her like an old shepherd.”

  She also had been struck by the look which had been spoken of as “done for.” Girls did not look like that for any common reason. She asked herself questions and with great care sat on foot a gradual and delicate cross-examination of Robin herself. But she discovered no reason common or uncommon for the thing she recognised each time she looked at her. It was inevitable that she should talk to Lord Coombe but she met in him a sort of barrier. She could not avoid seeing that he was preoccupied. She remotely felt that he was turning over in his mind something which precluded the possibility of his giving attention to other questions.

  “I almost feel as if your interest in her had lapsed,” she said at last.

  “No. It has taken a—an entirely new form,” was his answer.

  It was when his glance encountered hers after he said this that each regarded the other with a slow growing anxiousness. Something came to life in each pair of eyes and it was something disturbed and reluctant. The Duchess spoke first.

  “She has had no companions,” she said painfully. “The War put an end to what I thought I might do for her. There has been nobody.”

  “At present it is a curious fact that in one sense we know very little of each other’s lives,” he answered. “The old leisurely habit of observing details no longer exists. As Redcliff said in speaking of her—and girls generally—all the gates are thrown wide open.”

  The Duchess was very silent for a space before she made her reply.

  “Yes.”

  “You do not know her mother?”

  “No.”

  “Two weeks ago she gave me something to reflect on. Her feeling for her daughter is that of a pretty cat-like woman for something enragingly younger than herself. She always resented her. She was infuriated by your interest in her. She said to me one afternoon, ‘ I hope the Duchess is still pleased with her companion. I saw her to-day in Bond Street and she looked like a housemaid I once had to dismiss rather suddenly. I am glad she is in her grace’s house and not in mine.’”

  After a few seconds—

  “I am glad she is in my house and not in hers,” the Duchess said.

  “After I had spoken to her at some length and she had quite lost her temper, she added ‘You evidently don’t know that she has been meeting Donal Muir. He told me so himself at the Erwyn’s. I asked him if he had seen her since the dance and he owned that he had—and then was cross at himself for making the slip. I did not ask him how often he had met her. He would not have told me. But if he met her once he met her as often as he chose.’ She was not lying when she said it. I know her. I have been thinking constantly ever since.” There was a brief silence between them; then he proceeded. “Robin worshipped him when she was a mere baby. They were very beautiful together on the night of the dance. She fainted on the stairway after hearing of his death. She had been crawling up to hide herself in her room, poor child! It is one of the tragedies. Perhaps you and I together—”

  The Duchess was seeing again the two who had come forth shining from the conservatory. She continued to see them as Lord Coombe went on speaking, telling her what Dr. Redcliff had told him.

  On her part Robin scarcely understood anything which was happening because nothing seemed to matter. On the morning when the Duchess told her that Dr. Redcliff wished to see her alone that fact mattered as little as the rest. She was indifferently conscious that the Duchess regarded her in an anxious kind way, but if she had been unkind instead of kind that would have meant nothing. There was only room for one thing in the world. She wondered sometimes if she were really dead—as Donal was—and did not know she was so. Perhaps after people died they walked about as she did and did not understand that others could not see them and they were not alive. But if she were dead she would surely see Donal.

  Before she went to Dr. Redcliff the Duchess took her hand and held it closely in both her own. She looked at her with a curious sort of pitifulness—as if she were sorry.

  “My poor child,” she said. “Whatsoever he tells you don’t be frightened. Don’t think you are without friends. I will take care of you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think anything would frighten me. Nothing seems frightening—now.” After which she went into the room where Dr. Redcliff was waiting for her.

  The Duchess sat alone and thought deeply. What she thought of chiefly was the Head of the House of Coombe. She had always known that more than probably his attitude towards a circumstance of this sort would not even remotely approach in likeness that of other people. His point of view would detach itself from ordinary theories of moralities and immoralities. He would see with singular clearness all sides of the incident. He would not be indignant, or annoyed or embarrassed. He had had an interest in Robin as a creature representing peculiar loveliness and undefended potentialities. Sometimes she had felt that this had even verged on a tenderness of which he was himself remotely, if at all, conscious. Concerning the boy Donal she had realised that he felt something stronger and deeper than any words of his own had at any time expressed. He had believed fine things of him and had watched him silently. He had wished he had been his own flesh and blood. Perhaps he had always felt a longing for a son who might have been his companion as well as his successor. Who knew whether a thwarted
paternal instinct might not now be giving him such thinking to do as he might have done if Donal Muir had been the son of his body—dead on the battlefield but leaving behind him something to be gravely considered? What would a man think—what would a man do under such circumstances?

  “One might imagine what some men would do—but it would depend entirely upon the type,” she thought. “What he will do will be different. It might seem cold; it might be merely judicial—but it might be surprising.”

  She was quite haunted by the haggard look of his face as he had exclaimed:

  “I wish to God I had known him better! I wish to God I had talked to him more!”

  What he had done this morning was to go to Mersham Wood to see Mrs. Bennett. There were things it might be possible to learn by amiable and carefully considered expression of interest in her loss and loneliness. Concerning such things as she did not already know she would learn nothing from his conversation, but concerning such things as she had become aware of he would learn everything without alarming her.

  “If those unhappy children met at her cottage and wandered about in Mersham Wood together the tragedy is understandable.”

  The Duchess’ thinking ended pityingly because just at this time it was that Robin opened the door and stood looking at her.

  It seemed as though Dr. Redcliff must have talked to her for a long time. But she had on her small hat and coat and what the Duchess seemed chiefly to see was the wide darkness of her eyes set in a face suddenly pinched, small and snow white. She looked like a starved baby.

  “Please,” she said with her hands clasped against her chest, “please—may I go to Mersham Wood?”

  “To—Mersham Wood,” the Duchess felt aghast—and then suddenly a flood of thought rushed upon her.

  “It is not very far,” the little gasping voice uttered. “I must go, please! Oh! I must! Just—to Mersham Wood!”