Robin Read online

  There was seldom much leisure in their meetings. Sometimes they had only a few minutes in which to exchange a word or so, to cling to each other’s hands. But even in these brief meetings the words that were said were food for new life and dreams when they were apart. And the tide rose.

  But it did not overflow until one early morning when they met in a gorse-filled hollow at Hampstead, each looking at the other pale and stricken. In Robin’s wide eyes was helpless horror and Donal knew too well what she was going to say.

  “Lord Halwyn is killed!” she gasped out. “And four of his friends! We all danced the tango together—and that new kicking step!” She began to sob piteously. Somehow it was the sudden memory of the almost comic kicking step which overwhelmed her with the most gruesome sense of awfulness—as if the world had come to an end.

  “It was new—and they laughed so! They are killed!” she cried beating her little hands. He had just heard the same news. Five of them! And he had heard details she had been spared.

  He was as pale as she. He stood before her quivering, hot and cold. Until this hour they had been living only through the early growing wonder of their dream; they had only talked together and exquisitely yearned and thrilled at the marvel of every simple word or hand-touch or glance, and every meeting had been a new delight. But now suddenly the being of each shook and called to the other in wild need of the nearer nearness which is comfort and help. It was early—early morning—the heath spread about them wide and empty, and at that very instant a skylark sprang from its hidden nest in the earth and circled upward to heaven singing as to God.

  “They will take you!” she wailed. “You—you!” And did not know that she held out her arms.

  But he knew—with a great shock of incredible rapture and tempestuous answering. He caught her softness to his thudding young chest and kissed her sobbing mouth, her eyes, her hair, her little pulsing throat.

  “Oh, little love,” he himself almost sobbed the words. “Oh, little lovely love!”

  She melted into his arms like a weeping child. It was as if she had always rested there and it was mere Nature that he should hold and comfort her. But he had never heard or dreamed of the possibility of such anguish as was in her sobbing.

  “They will take you!” she said. “And—you danced too. And I must not hold you back! And I must stay here and wait and wait—and wait—until some day—! Donal! Donal!”

  He sat down with her amongst the gorse and held her on his knee as if she had been six years old. She did not attempt to move but crouched there and clung to him with both hands. She remembered only one thing—that he must go! And there were cannons—and shells singing and screaming! And boys like George in awful heaps. No laughing face as it had once looked—all marred and strange and piteously lonely as they lay.

  It took him a long time to calm her terror and woe. When at last he had so far quieted her that her sobs came only at intervals she seemed to awaken to sudden childish awkwardness. She sat up and shyly moved. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t know—!” she quavered. “ I am—I am sitting on your knee like a baby!” But he could not let her go.

  “It is because I love you so,” he answered in his compelling boy voice, holding her gently. “Don’t move—don’t move! There is no time to think and wait—or care for anything—if we love each other. We do love each other, don’t we?” He put his cheek against hers and pressed it there. “Oh, say we do,” he begged. “There is no time. And listen to the skylark singing!”

  The butterfly-wing flutter of her lashes against his cheek as she pressed the softness of her own closer, and the quick exquisite indrawing of her tender, half-sobbing childish breath were unspeakably lovely answering things—though he heard her whisper.

  “Yes, Donal! Donal!” And again, “Donal! Donal!”

  And he held her closer and kissed her very gently again. And they sat and whispered that they loved each other and had always loved each other and would love each other forever and forever and forever. Poor enrapt children! It has been said before, but they said it again and yet again. And the circling skylark seemed to sing at the very gates of God’s heaven.

  So the tide rose to its high flowing.

  Chapter 7

  The days of gold which linked themselves one to another with strange dawns of pearl and exquisite awakenings, each a miracle, the gemmed night whose blue darkness seemed studded with myriads of new stars, the noons whose heats or rains were all warm scents of flowers and fragrant mists, wrought themselves into a chain of earthly beauty. The hour in which the links must break and the chain end was always a faint spectre veiled by kindly mists which seemed to rise hour by hour to soften and hide it.

  But often in those days did it occur that the hurrying and changing visitors to the house in Eaton Square, glancing at Robin as she sat writing letters, or as she passed them in some hall or room, found themselves momentarily arrested in an almost startled fashion by the mere radiance of her.

  “She is lovelier every time one turns one’s head towards her,” the Starling said—the Starling having become a vigorous worker and the Duchess giving welcome to any man, woman or child who could be counted on for honest help. “It almost frightens me to see her eyes when she looks up suddenly. It is like finding one’s self too close to a star. A star in the sky is all very well—but a star only three feet away from one is a kind of shock. What has happened to the child?”

  She said it to Gerald Vesey who between hours of military training was helping Harrowby to arrange a matinee for the benefit of the Red Cross. Harrowby had been rejected by the military authorities on account of defective sight and weak chest but had with a promptness unexpected by his friends merged himself into unprominent, useful hard work which frequently consisted of doing disagreeable small jobs men of his type generally shied away from.

  “Something has happened to her,” answered Vesey. “She has the flight of a skylark let out of a cage. Her moving is flight—not ordinary walking. I hope her work has kept her away from—well, from young gods and things.”

  “The streets are full of them,” said Harrowby, “marching to defy death and springing to meet glory—marching not walking. Young Mars and Ajax and young Paris with Helen in his eyes. She might be some youngster’s Helen! Why do you hope her work has kept her away?”

  Vesey shook his Greek head with a tragic bitterness.

  “Oh! I don’t know,” he groaned. “There’s too much disaster piled high and staring in every one of their flushing rash young faces. On they go with their heads in the air and their hearts thumping, and hoping and refusing to believe in the devil and hell let loose—and the whole thing stares and gibbers at them.”

  But each day her eyes looked larger and more rapturously full of heavenly glowing, and her light movements were more like bird flight, and her swiftness and sweet readiness to serve delighted and touched people more, and they spoke oftener to and of her, and felt actually a thought uplifted from the darkness because she was like pure light’s self.

  Lord Coombe met her in the street one evening at twilight and he stopped to speak to her.

  “I have just come from Darte Norham,” he said to her. “The Duchess asked me to see you personally and make sure that you do not miss Dowie too much—that you are not lonely.”

  “I am very busy and am very well taken care of,” was her answer. “The servants are very attentive and kind. I am not lonely at all, thank you. The Duchess is very good to me.”

  Donal evidently knew nothing of her reasons for disliking Lord Coombe. She could not have told him of them. He did not dislike his relative himself and in fact rather liked him in spite of the frigidity he sometimes felt. He, at any rate, admired his cold brilliance of mind. Robin could not therefore let herself detest the man and regard him as an enemy. But she did not like the still searching of the grey eyes which rested on her so steadily.

  “The Duchess wished me to make sure that you did not work too enthusiastically. She desires you to take
plenty of exercise and if you are tired to go into the country for a day or two of fresh air and rest. She recommends old Mrs. Bennett’s cottage at Mersham Wood. The place is quite rustic though it is near enough to London to be convenient. You might come and go.”

  “She is too kind—too kind,” said Robin. “Oh! how kind to think of me like that. I will write and thank her.”

  The sweet gratitude in her eyes and voice were touching. She could not speak steadily.

  “I may tell her then that you are well taken care of and that you are happy,” the grey eyes were a shade less cold but still searching and steady. “You look—happy.”

  “I never was so happy before. Please—please tell her that when you thank her for me,” was Robin’s quite yearning little appeal. She held out her hand to him for the first time in her life. “Thank you, Lord Coombe, for so kindly delivering her beautiful message.”

  His perfect manner did not record any recognition on his part of the fact that she had done an unexpected thing. But as he went on his way he was thinking of it.

  “She is very happy for some reason,” he thought. “Perhaps the rush and excitement of her new work exalts her. She has the ecstasied air of a lovely child on her birthday—with all her world filled with petting and birthday gifts.”

  The Duchess evidently extended her care to the extent of sending special messages to Mrs. James, the housekeeper, who began to exercise a motherly surveillance over Robin’s health and diet and warmly to advocate long walks and country visits to the cottage at Mersham Wood.

  “Her grace will be really pleased if you take a day or two while she’s away. She’s always been just that interested in those about her, Miss,” Mrs. James argued. “She wouldn’t like to come back and find you looking tired or pale. Not that there’s much danger of that,” quite beamingly. “For all your hard work, I must say you look—well, you look as I’ve never seen you. And you always had a colour like a new-picked rose.”

  The colour like a new-picked rose ran up to the rings of hair on the girl’s forehead as if she were made a little shy.

  “It is because her grace has been so good—and because every one is so kind to me,” she said. “Kindness makes me happy.”

  She was so happy that she was never tired and was regarded as a young wonder in the matter of work and readiness and exactitude. Her accounts, her correspondence, her information were always in order. When she took the prescribed walks and in some aloof path or corner met the strong, slim khaki-clad figure, they walked or stood or sat closely side by side and talked of many things—though most of all they dwelt on one. She could ask Donal questions and he could throw light on such things as young soldiers knew better than most people. She came into close touch—a shuddering touch sometimes it was—with needs and facts concerning marchings and trenches and attacks and was therefore able to visualise and to speak definitely of necessities not always understood.

  “How did you find that out?” little black-clad Lady Kathryn asked her one day. “I wish I had known it before George went away.”

  “A soldier told me,” was her answer. “Soldiers know things we don’t.”

  “The world is made of soldiers now,” said Kathryn. “And one is always talking to them. I shall begin to ask them questions about small things like that.”

  It was the same morning that as they stood alone together for a few minutes Kathryn suddenly put her hand upon Robin’s shoulder.

  “You never—never feel the least angry—when you remember about George—the night of the dance,” she pleaded shakily. “Do you, Robin? You couldn’t now! Could you?”

  Tears rushed into Robin’s eyes.

  “Never—never!” she said. “I always remember him—oh, quite differently! He—” she hesitated a second and began again. “He did something—so wonderfully kind—before he went away—something for me. That is what I remember. And his nice voice—and his good eyes.”

  “Oh! he was good! He was!” exclaimed Kathryn in a sort of despairing impatience. “So many of them are! It’s awful!” And she sat down in the nearest chair and cried hopelessly into her crushed handkerchief while Robin tried to soothe—not to comfort her. There was no comfort to offer. And behind the rose tinted mists her own spectre merely pretended to veil itself.

  When she lay in bed at night in her quiet room she often lay awake long and long for pure bliss. The world in which people were near—near—to one another and loved each other, the world Donal had always belonged to even when he was a little boy, she now knew and lived in. There was no loneliness in it. If there was pain or trouble some one who loved you was part of it and you, and so you could bear it. All the radiant mornings and heavenly nights, all the summer scents of flowers or hay or hedges in bloom, or new rain on the earth, were things felt just as that other one felt them and drew in their delights—exactly in the same way. Once in the night stillness of a sweet dark country lane she had stood in the circle of Donal’s arm, her joyous, warm young breast against his and they had heard together the singing of a nightingale in a thicket.

  “Let us stand still,” he had whispered close to her ear. “Let us not speak a word—not a word. Oh! little lovely love! Let us only listen—and be happy!”

  Almost every day there were marvels like this. And when they were apart she could not forget them but walked like a spirit strayed on to earth and unknowing of its radiance. This was why people glanced at her curiously and were sometimes vaguely troubled.

  Chapter 8

  The other woman who loved and was loved by him moved about her world in these days with a face less radiant than the one people turned to look at in the street or in its passing through the house in Eaton Square. Helen Muir’s eyes were grave and pondered. She had always known of the sometime coming of the hour in which would rise the shadow—to him a cloud of rapture—which must obscure the old clearness of vision which had existed between them. She had been too well balanced of brain to allow herself to make a tragedy of it or softly to sentimentalise of loss. It was mere living nature that it should be so. He would be as always, a beloved wonder of dearness and beauty when his hour came and she would look on and watch and be so cleverly silent and delicately detached from his shy, aloof young moods, his funny, dear involuntary secrets and reserves. But at any moment—day or night—at any elate emotional moment ready!

  She had the rare accomplishment of a perfect knowledge of how to wait, and to wait—if necessary—long. When the first golden down had shown itself on his cheek and lip she had not noticed it too much and when his golden soprano voice began to change to a deeper note and annoyed him with its uncertainties she had spared him awkwardness by making him feel the transition a casual natural thing, instead of a personal and characteristic weakness. She had loved every stage of innocence and ignorance and adorable silliness he had passed through and he had grown closer to her through the medium of each, because nothing in life was so clear as her lovely wiseness and fine perceptive entirety of sympathy and poise.

  “I never have to explain really,” he said more than once. “You would understand even if I were an idiot or a criminal. And you’d understand if I were an archangel.”

  With a deep awareness she knew that, when she first realised that the shadow was rising, it would be different. She would have to watch it with an aloofness more delicate and yet more warmly sensitive than any other. In the days when she first thought of him as like one who is listening to a far-off sound, it seemed possible that in the clamour of louder echoes this one might lose itself and at last die away even from memory. It was youth’s way to listen and youth’s way to find it easy to forget. He heard many reverberations in these days and had much reason or thought and action. He thought a great deal, he worked energetically, he came and went, he read and studied, he obeyed orders and always stood ready for new ones. Her pride in his vigorous initiative and practical determination was a glowing flame in her heart. He meant to be no toy soldier.

  As she became as practica
l a worker as he was, they did much together and made plans without ceasing. When he was away she was always doing things in which he was interested and when he returned he always brought to her suggestions for new service or the development of the old. But as the days passed and became weeks she knew that the far-off sound was still being listened to. She could not have told how—but she knew. And she saw the beloved dearness and beauty growing in him. He came into the house each day in his khaki as if khaki were a shining thing. When he laughed, or sat and smiled, or dreamed—forgetting she was there—her very heart quaked with delight in him. Another woman than Robin counted over his charms and made a tender list of them, wondering at each one. As a young male pheasant in mating time dons finer gloss and brilliancy of plumage, perhaps he too bloomed and all unconscious developed added colour and inches and gallant swing of tread. As people turned half astart to look at Robin bending over her desk or walking about among them in her modest dress, so also did they turn to look after him as he went in springing march along the streets.

  “Some day he will begin to tell me,” Helen used to say to herself at night. “He may only begin—but perhaps it will be to-morrow.”

  It was not, however, to-morrow—or to-morrow. And in the midst of his work he still listened. As he sat and dreamed he listened and sometimes he was very deep in thought—sitting with his arms folded and his eyes troubled and questioning of the space into which he looked. The time was really not very long, but it began to seem so to her.

  “But some day—soon—he will tell me,” she thought.

  One afternoon Donal walked into a room where a number of well-dressed women were talking, drinking tea and knitting or crocheting. It had begun already to be the fashion for almost every woman to carry on her arm a work bag and produce from its depths at any moment without warning something she was making. In the early days the bag was usually highly decorated and the article being made was a luxury. Only a few serious and pessimistic workers had begun to produce plain usefulness and in this particular Mayfair drawing-room “the War” as yet seemed to present itself rather as a dramatic and picturesque social asset. A number of good-looking young officers moved about or sat in corners being petted and flirted with, while many of the women had the slightly elated excitement of air produced in certain of their sex by the marked preponderance of the presence of the masculine element. It was a thing which made for high spirits and laughs and amiable semi-caressing chaff. The women who in times of peace had been in the habit of referring to their “boys” were in these days in great form.