The history of the circumstances about to be related began many
years ago--or so it seems in these days. It began, at least, years
before the world being rocked to and fro revealed in the pause
between each of its heavings some startling suggestion of a new
arrangement of its kaleidoscopic particles, and then immediately
a re-arrangement, and another and another until all belief in a
permanency of design seemed lost, and the inhabitants of the earth
waited, helplessly gazing at changing stars and colours in a degree
of mental chaos.
Its opening incidents may be dated from a period when people
still had reason to believe in permanency and had indeed many of
them--sometimes through ingenuousness, sometimes through stupidity
of type--acquired a singular confidence in the importance and
stability of their possessions, desires, ambitions and forms of
conviction.
London at the time, in common with other great capitals, felt
itself rather final though priding itself on being much more fluid
and adaptable than it had been fifty years previously. In speaking
of itself it at least dealt with fixed customs, and conditions
and established facts connected with them--which gave rise to
brilliant--or dull--witticisms.
One of these, heard not infrequently, was to the effect that--in
London--one might live under an umbrella if one lived under it in
the right neighbourhood and on the right side of the street, which
axiom is the reason that a certain child through the first six
years of her life sat on certain days staring out of a window
in a small, dingy room on the top floor of a slice of a house on
a narrow but highly fashionable London street and looked on at
the passing of motors, carriages and people in the dull afternoon
grayness.
The room was exalted above its station by being called The Day
Nursery and another room equally dingy and uninviting was known as
The Night Nursery. The slice of a house was inhabited by the very
pretty Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, its inordinate rent being reluctantly
paid by her--apparently with the assistance of those "ravens" who
are expected to supply the truly deserving. The rent was inordinate
only from the standpoint of one regarding it soberly in connection
with the character of the house itself which was a gaudy little
kennel crowded between two comparatively stately mansions. On one
side lived an inordinately rich South African millionaire, and
on the other an inordinately exalted person of title, which facts
combined to form sufficient grounds for a certain inordinateness
of rent.
Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was also, it may be stated, of the fibre
which must live on the right side of the street or dissolve into
nothingness--since as nearly nothingness as an embodied entity can
achieve had Nature seemingly created her at the outset. So light
and airy was the fair, slim, physical presentation of her being
to the earthly vision, and so almost impalpably diaphanous the
texture and form of mind and character to be observed by human
perception, that among such friends--and enemies--as so slight a
thing could claim she was prettily known as "Feather". Her real
name, "Amabel", was not half as charming and whimsical in its
appropriateness. "Feather" she adored being called and as it was
the fashion among the amazing if amusing circle in which she spent
her life, to call its acquaintances fantastic pet names selected
from among the world of birds, beasts and fishes or inanimate
objects--"Feather" she floated through her curious existence. And
it so happened that she was the mother of the child who so often
stared out of the window of the dingy and comfortless Day Nursery,
too much a child to be more than vaguely conscious in a chaotic way
that a certain feeling which at times raged within her and made her
little body hot and restless was founded on something like actual
hate for a special man who had certainly taken no deliberate steps
to cause her detestation.
* * * * *
"Feather" had not been called by that delicious name when she married
Robert Gareth-Lawless who was a beautiful and irresponsibly rather
than deliberately bad young man. She was known as Amabel Darrel
and the loveliest girl in the lovely corner of the island of Jersey
where her father, a country doctor, had begotten a large family of
lovely creatures and brought them up on the appallingly inadequate
proceeds of his totally inadequate practice. Pretty female things
must be disposed of early lest their market value decline. Therefore
a well-born young man even without obvious resources represents a
sail in the offing which is naturally welcomed as possibly belonging
to a bark which may at least bear away a burden which the back
carrying it as part of its pack will willingly shuffle on to other
shoulders. It is all very well for a man with six lovely daughters
to regard them as capital if he has money or position or generous
relations or if he has energy and an ingenious unfatigued mind. But
a man who is tired and neither clever nor important in any degree
and who has reared his brood in one of the Channel Islands with a
faded, silly, unattractive wife as his only aid in any difficulty,
is wise in leaving the whole hopeless situation to chance and luck.
Sometimes luck comes without assistance but--almost invariably--it
does not.
"Feather"--who was then "Amabel"--thought Robert Gareth-Lawless
incredible good luck. He only drifted into her summer by merest
chance because a friend's yacht in which he was wandering about
"came in" for supplies. A girl Ariel in a thin white frock and with
big larkspur blue eyes yearning at you under her flapping hat as
she answers your questions about the best road to somewhere will
not be too difficult about showing the way herself. And there you
are at a first-class beginning.
The night after she met Gareth-Lawless in a lane whose banks were
thick with bluebells, Amabel and her sister Alice huddled close
together in bed and talked almost pantingly in whispers over the
possibilities which might reveal themselves--God willing--through
a further acquaintance with Mr. Gareth-Lawless. They were eager and
breathlessly anxious but they were young--YOUNG in their eagerness
and Amabel was full of delight in his good looks.
"He is SO handsome, Alice," she whispered actually hugging her, not
with affection but exultation. "And he can't be more than twenty-six
or seven. And I'm SURE he liked me. You know that way a man has of
looking at you--one sees it even in a place like this where there
are only curates and things. He has brown eyes--like dark bright
water in pools. Oh, Alice, if he SHOULD!"
Alice was not perhaps as enthusiastic as her sister. Amabel had
seen him first and in the Darrel household there was a sort of
unwritten, not always observed code flimsily founded on "First come
first served." Just at the outset of an acquaintance one might
say "Hands off" as it were. But not for long.
"It doesn't matter how pretty one is they seldom do," Alice
grumbled. "And he mayn't have a farthing."
"Alice," whispered Amabel almost agonizingly, "I wouldn't
CARE a farthing--if only he WOULD! Have I a farthing--have you a
farthing--has anyone who ever comes here a farthing? He lives in
London. He'd take me away. To live even in a back street IN LONDON
would be Heaven! And one MUST--as soon as one possibly can.--One
MUST! And Oh!" with another hug which this time was a shudder,
"think of what Doris Harmer had to do! Think of his thick red old
neck and his horrid fatness! And the way he breathed through his
nose. Doris said that at first it used to make her ill to look at
him."
"She's got over it," whispered Alice. "She's almost as fat as he
is now. And she's loaded with pearls and things."
"I shouldn't have to 'get over' anything," said Amabel, "if this
one WOULD. I could fall in love with him in a minute."
"Did you hear what Father said?" Alice brought out the words
rather slowly and reluctantly. She was not eager on the whole to
yield up a detail which after all added glow to possible prospects
which from her point of view were already irritatingly glowing.
Yet she could not resist the impulse of excitement. "No, you didn't
hear. You were out of the room."
"What about? Something about HIM? I hope it wasn't horrid. How
could it be?"
"He said," Alice drawled with a touch of girlishly spiteful
indifference, "that if he was one of the poor Gareth-Lawlesses he
hadn't much chance of succeeding to the title. His uncle--Lord
Lawdor--is only forty-five and he has four splendid healthy
boys--perfect little giants."
"Oh, I didn't know there was a title. How splendid," exclaimed Amabel
rapturously. Then after a few moments' innocent maiden reflection
she breathed with sweet hopefulness from under the sheet, "Children
so often have scarlet fever or diphtheria, and you know they
say those very strong ones are more likely to die than the other
kind. The Vicar of Sheen lost FOUR all in a week. And the Vicar
died too. The doctor said the diphtheria wouldn't have killed him
if the shock hadn't helped."
Alice--who had a teaspoonful more brain than her sister--burst
into a fit of giggling it was necessary to smother by stuffing
the sheet in her mouth.
"Oh! Amabel!" she gurgled. "You ARE such a donkey! You would have
been silly enough to say that even if people could have heard you.
Suppose HE had!"
"Why should he care," said Amabel simply. "One can't help thinking
things. If it happened he would be the Earl of Lawdor and--"
She fell again into sweet reflection while Alice giggled a little
more. Then she herself stopped and thought also. After all perhaps--!
One had to be practical. The tenor of her thoughts was such that
she did not giggle again when Amabel broke the silence by whispering
with tremulous, soft devoutness.
"Alice--do you think that praying REALLY helps?"
"I've prayed for things but I never got them," answered Alice.
"But you know what the Vicar said on Sunday in sermon about 'Ask
and ye shall receive'."
"Perhaps you haven't prayed in the right spirit," Amabel suggested
with true piety. "Shall we--shall we try? Let us get out of bed
and kneel down."
"Get out of bed and kneel down yourself," was Alice's sympathetic
rejoinder. "You wouldn't take that much trouble for ME."
Amabel sat up on the edge of the bed. In the faint moonlight and
her white night-gown she was almost angelic. She held the end of
the long fair soft plait hanging over her shoulder and her eyes
were full of reproach.
"I think you ought to take SOME interest," she said plaintively.
"You know there would be more chances for you and the others--if
I were not here."
"I'll wait until you are not here," replied the unstirred Alice.
But Amabel felt there was no time for waiting in this particular
case. A yacht which "came in" might so soon "put out". She knelt
down, clasping her slim young hands and bending her forehead upon
them. In effect she implored that Divine Wisdom might guide Mr.
Robert Gareth-Lawless in the much desired path. She also made
divers promises because nothing is so easy as to promise things.
She ended with a gently fervent appeal that--if her prayer
were granted--something "might happen" which would result in her
becoming a Countess of Lawdor. One could not have put the request
with greater tentative delicacy.
She felt quite uplifted and a trifle saintly when she rose from
her knees. Alice had actually fallen asleep already and she sighed
quite tenderly as she slipped into the place beside her. Almost
as her lovely little head touched the pillow her own eyes closed.
Then she was asleep herself--and in the faintly moonlit room with
the long soft plait trailing over her shoulder looked even more
like an angel than before.
Whether or not as a result of this touching appeal to the Throne
of Grace, Robert Gareth-Lawless DID. In three months there was
a wedding at the very ancient village church, and the flowerlike
bridesmaids followed a flower of a bride to the altar and later in
the day to the station from where Mr. and Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless
went on their way to London. Perhaps Alice and Olive also knelt by
the side of their white beds the night after the wedding, for on
that propitious day two friends of the bridegroom's--one of them
the owner of the yacht--decided to return again to the place where
there were to be found the most nymphlike of pretty creatures a man
had ever by any chance beheld. Such delicate little fair crowned
heads, such delicious little tip-tilted noses and slim white throats,
such ripples of gay chatter and nonsense! When a man has fortune
enough of his own why not take the prettiest thing he sees? So
Alice and Olive were borne away also and poor Mr. and Mrs. Darrel
breathed sighs of relief and there were not only more chances but
causes for bright hopefulness in the once crowded house which now
had rooms to spare.
A certain inattention on the part of the Deity was no doubt
responsible for the fact that "something" did not "happen" to the
family of Lord Lawdor. On the contrary his four little giants of
sons throve astonishingly and a few months after the Gareth-Lawless
wedding Lady Lawdor--a trifle effusively, as it were--presented her
husband with twin male infants so robust that they were humorously
known for years afterwards as the "Twin Herculeses."
By that time Amabel had become "Feather" and despite Robert's
ingenious and carefully detailed method of living upon nothing
whatever, had many reasons for knowing that "life is a back street
in London" is not a matter of beds of roses. Since the back street
must be the "right street" and its accompaniments must wear an aspect
of at least seeming to belong to the right order of detachment and
fashionable ease, one was always in debt and forced to keep out of
the way of duns, and obliged to pretend things and tell lies with
aptness and outward gaiety. Sometimes one actually was so far driven
to the wall that one could not keep most important engagements and
the invention of plausible excuses demanded absolute genius. The
slice of a house between the two big ones was a rash feature of
the honeymoon but a year of giving smart little dinners in it and
going to smart big dinners from it in a smart if small brougham
ended in a condition somewhat akin to the feat of balancing oneself
on the edge of a sword.
Then Robin was born. She was an intruder and a calamity of course.
Nobody had contemplated her for a moment. Feather cried for a week
when she first announced the probability of her advent. Afterwards
however she managed to forget the approaching annoyance and went
to parties and danced to the last hour continuing to be a great
success because her prettiness was delicious and her diaphanous
mentality was no train upon the minds of her admirers male and
female.
That a Feather should become a parent gave rise to much wit of light
weight when Robin in the form of a bundle of lace was carried down
by her nurse to be exhibited in the gaudy crowded little drawing-room
in the slice of a house in the Mayfair street.
It was the Head of the House of Coombe who asked the first question
about her.
"What will you DO with her?" he inquired detachedly.
The frequently referred to "babe unborn" could not have presented
a gaze of purer innocence than did the lovely Feather. Her eyes of
larkspur blueness were clear of any thought or intention as spring
water is clear at its unclouded best.
Her ripple of a laugh was clear also--enchantingly clear.
"Do!" repeated. "What is it people 'do' with babies? I suppose
the nurse knows. I don't. I wouldn't touch her for the world. She
frightens me."
She floated a trifle nearer and bent to look at her.
"I shall call her Robin," she said. "Her name is really Roberta
as she couldn't be called Robert. People will turn round to look
at a girl when they hear her called Robin. Besides she has eyes
like a robin. I wish she'd open them and let you see."
By chance she did open them at the moment--quite slowly. They were
dark liquid brown and seemed to be all lustrous iris which gazed
unmovingly at the object in of focus. That object was the Head of
the House of Coombe.
"She is staring at me. There is antipathy in her gaze," he said,
and stared back unmovingly also, but with a sort of cold interest.