Von Hillern made no further calls on Mrs. Gareth-Lawless. His return
to Berlin was immediate and Fraulein Hirsch came no more to give
lessons in German. Later, Coombe learned from the mam with the
steady, blunt-featured face, that she had crossed the Channel on
a night boat not many hours after Von Hillern had walked away from
Berford Place. The exact truth was that she had been miserably
prowling about the adjacent streets, held in the neighbourhood
by some self-torturing morbidness, half thwarted helpless passion,
half triumphing hatred of the young thing she had betrayed. Up
and down the streets she had gone, round and round, wringing her
lean fingers together and tasting on her lips the salt of tears
which rolled down her cheeks--tears of torment and rage.
There was the bitterness of death in what, by a mere trick of
chance, came about. As she turned a corner telling herself for
the hundredth time that she must go home, she found herself face
to face with a splendid figure swinging furiously along. She
staggered at the sight of the tigerish rage in the white face she
recognized with a gasp. It was enough merely to behold it. He had
met with some disastrous humiliation!
As for him, the direct intervention of that Heaven whose special
care he was, had sent him a woman to punish--which, so far, was at
least one thing arranged as it should be. He knew so well how he
could punish her with his mere contempt and displeasure--as he
could lash a spaniel crawling at his feet. He need not deign to
tell her what had happened, and he did not. He merely drew back
and stood in stiff magnificence looking down at her.
"It is through some folly of yours," he dropped in a voice of
vitriol. "Women are always foolish. They cannot hold their tongues
or think clearly. Return to Berlin at once. You are not of those
whose conduct I can commend to be trusted in the future."
He was gone before she could have spoken even if she had dared.
Sobbing gasps caught her breath as she stood and watched him
striding pitilessly and superbly away with, what seemed to her
abject soul, the swing and tread of a martial god. Her streaming
tears tasted salt indeed. She might never see him again--even from
a distance. She would be disgraced and flung aside as a blundering
woman. She had obeyed his every word and done her straining best,
as she had licked the dust at his feet--but he would never cast a
glance at her in the future or utter to her the remotest word of
his high commands. She so reeled as she went her wretched way that
a good-natured policeman said to her as he passed,
"Steady on, my girl. Best get home and go to bed."
To Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, it was stated by Coombe that Fraulein
Hirsch had been called back to Germany by family complications.
That august orders should recall Count Von Hillern, was easily
understood. Such magnificent persons never shone upon society for
any length of time.
That Feather had been making a country home visit when her daughter
had faced tragedy was considered by Lord Coombe as a fortunate
thing.
"We will not alarm Mrs. Gareth-Lawless by telling her what has
occurred," he said to Mademoiselle Valle. "What we most desire
is that no one shall suspect that the hideous thing took place. A
person who was forgetful or careless might, unintentionally, let
some word escape which--"
What he meant, and what Mademoiselle Valle knew he meant--also what
he knew she knew he meant--was that a woman, who was a heartless
fool, without sympathy or perception, would not have the delicacy
to feel that the girl must be shielded, and might actually see a
sort of ghastly joke in a story of Mademoiselle Valle's sacrosanct
charge simply walking out of her enshrining arms into such a "galere"
as the most rackety and adventurous of pupils could scarcely have
been led into. Such a point of view would have been quite possible
for Feather--even probable, in the slightly spiteful attitude of
her light mind.
"She was away from home. Only you and I and Dowie know," answered
Mademoiselle.
"Let us remain the only persons who know," said Coombe. "Robin
will say nothing."
They both knew that. She had been feverish and ill for several
days and Dowie had kept her in bed saying that she had caught cold.
Neither of the two women had felt it possible to talk to her. She
had lain staring with a deadly quiet fixedness straight before
her, saying next to nothing. Now and then she shuddered, and once
she broke into a mad, heart-broken fit of crying which she seemed
unable to control.
"Everything is changed," she said to Dowie and Mademoiselle who
sat on either side of her bed, sometimes pressing her head down
onto a kind shoulder, sometimes holding her hand and patting it.
"I shall be afraid of everybody forever. People who have sweet
faces and kind voices will make me shake all over. Oh! She seemed
so kind--so kind!"
It was Dowie whose warm shoulder her face hidden on this time,
and Dowie was choked with sobs she dared not let loose. She could
only squeeze hard and kiss the "silk curls all in a heap"--poor,
tumbled curls, no longer a child's!
"Aye, my lamb!" she managed to say. "Dowie's poor pet lamb!"
"It's the knowing that kind eyes--kind ones--!" she broke off,
panting. "It's the KNOWING! I didn't know before! I knew nothing.
Now, it's all over. I'm afraid of all the world!"
"Not all, cherie," breathed Mademoiselle.
She sat upright against her pillows. The mirror on a dressing
table reflected her image--her blooming tear-wet youth, framed in
the wonderful hair falling a shadow about her. She stared at the
reflection hard and questioningly.
"I suppose," her voice was pathos itself in its helplessness, "it
is because what you once told me about being pretty, is true. A
girl who looks like THAT," pointing her finger at the glass, "need
not think she can earn her own living. I loathe it," in fierce
resentment at some bitter injustice. "It is like being a person
under a curse!"
At this Dowie broke down openly and let her tears run fast. "No,
no! You mustn't say it or think it, my dearie!" she wept. "It
might call down a blight on it. You a young thing like a garden
flower! And someone--somewhere--God bless him--that some day'll
glory in it--and you'll glory too. Somewhere he is--somewhere!"
"Let none of them look at me!" cried Robin. "I loather them, too.
I hate everything--and everybody--but you two--just you two."
Mademoiselle took her in her arms this time when she sobbed again.
Mademoiselle knew how at this hour it seemed to her that all her
world was laid bare forever more. When the worst of the weeping
was over and she lay quiet, but for the deep catching breaths
which lifted her breast in slow, childish shudders at intervals,
she held Mademoiselle Valle's hand and looked at her with a faint,
wry smile.
"You were too kind to tell me what a stupid little fool I was when
I talked to you about taking a place in an office!" she said. "I
know now that you would not have allowed me to do the things I
was so sure I could do. It was only my ignorance and conceit. I
can't answer advertisements. Any bad person can say what they choose
in an advertisement. If that woman had advertised, she would have
described Helene. And there was no Helene." One of the shuddering
catches of her breath broke in here. After it, she said, with
a pitiful girlishness of regret: "I--I could SEE Helene. I have
known so few people well enough to love them. No girls at all. I
though--perhaps--we should begin to LOVE each other. I can't bear
to think of that--that she never was alive at all. It leaves a
sort of empty place."
When she had sufficiently recovered herself to be up again,
Mademoiselle Valle said to her that she wished her to express her
gratitude to Lord Coombe.
"I will if you wish it," she answered.
"Don't you feel that it is proper that you should do it? Do you
not wish it yourself?" inquired Mademoiselle. Robin looked down
at the carpet for some seconds.
"I know," she at last admitted, "that it is proper. But I don't
wish to do it."
"No?" said Mademoiselle Valle.
Robin raised her eyes from the carpet and fixed them on her.
"It is because of--reasons," she said. "It is part of the horror
I want to forget. Even you mayn't know what it has done to me.
Perhaps I am turning into a girl with a bad mind. Bad thoughts keep
swooping down on me--like great black ravens. Lord Coombe saved
me, but I think hideous things about him. I heard Andrews say he
was bad when I was too little to know what it meant. Now, I KNOW,
I remember that HE knew because he chose to know--of his own free
will. He knew that woman and she knew him. HOW did he know her?"
She took a forward step which brought her nearer to Mademoiselle.
"I never told you but I will tell you now," she confessed, "When
the door opened and I saw him standing against the light I--I did
not think he had come to save me."
"MON DIEU!" breathed Mademoiselle in soft horror.
"He knows I am pretty. He is an old man but he knows. Fraulein
Hirsch once made me feel actually sick by telling me, in her meek,
sly, careful way, that he liked beautiful girls and the people
said he wanted a young wife and had his eye on me. I was rude to
her because it made me so furious. HOW did he know that woman so
well? You see how bad I have been made!"
"He knows nearly all Europe. He has seen the dark corners as well
as the bright places. Perhaps he has saved other girls from her.
He brought her to punishment, and was able to do it because he
has been on her track for some time. You are not bad--but unjust.
You have had too great a shock to be able to reason sanely just
yet."
"I think he will always make me creep a little," said Robin, "but
I will say anything you think I ought to say."
On an occasion when Feather had gone again to make a visit in the
country, Mademoiselle came into the sitting room with the round
window in which plants grew, and Coombe followed her. Robin looked
up from her book with a little start and then stood up.
"I have told Lord Coombe that you wish--that I wish you to thank
him," Mademoiselle Valle said.
"I came on my own part to tell you that any expression of gratitude
is entirely unnecessary," said Coombe.
"I MUST be grateful. I AM grateful." Robin's colour slowly faded
as she said it. This was the first time she had seen him since he
had supported her down the staircase which mounted to a place of
hell.
"There is nothing to which I should object so much as being regarded
as a benefactor," he answered definitely, but with entire lack of
warmth. "The role does not suit me. Being an extremely bad man," he
said it as one who speaks wholly without prejudice, "my experience
is wide. I chance to know things. The woman who called herself
Lady Etynge is of a class which--which does not count me among its
clients. I had put certain authorities on her track--which was how
I discovered your whereabouts when Mademoiselle Valle told me that
you had gone to take tea with her. Mere chance you see. Don't be
grateful to me, I beg of you, but to Mademoiselle Valle."
"Why," faltered Robin, vaguely repelled as much as ever, "did it
matter to you?"
"Because," he answered--Oh, the cold inhumanness of his gray
eye!--"you happened to live in--this house."
"I thought that was perhaps the reason," she said--and she felt
that he made her "creep" even a shade more.
"I beg your pardon," she added, suddenly remembering, "Please sit
down."
"Thank you," as he sat. "I will because I have something more to
say to you."
Robin and Mademoiselle seated themselves also and listened.
"There are many hideous aspects of existence which are not considered
necessary portions of a girl's education," he began.
"They ought to be," put in Robin, and her voice was as hard as it
was young.
It was a long and penetrating look he gave her.
"I am not an instructor of Youth. I have not been called upon to
decide. I do not feel it my duty to go even now into detail."
"You need not," broke in the hard young voice. "I know everything
in the world. I'm BLACK with knowing."
"Mademoiselle will discuss that point with you. What you have,
unfortunately, been forced to learn is that it is not safe for a
girl--even a girl without beauty--to act independently of older
people, unless she has found out how to guard herself against--devils."
The words broke from him sharply, with a sudden incongruous hint
of ferocity which was almost startling. "You have been frightened,"
he said next, "and you have discovered that there are devils, but
you have not sufficient experience to guard yourself against them."
"I have been so frightened that I shall be a coward--a coward all
my life. I shall be afraid of every face I see--the more to be
trusted they look, the more I shall fear them. I hate every one
in the world!"
Her quite wonderful eyes--so they struck Lord Coombe--flamed with
a child's outraged anguish. A thunder shower of tears broke and
rushed down her cheeks, and he rose and, walking quietly to the window
full of flowers, stood with his back to her for a few moments. She
neither cared nor knew whether it was because her hysteric emotion
bored or annoyed him, or because he had the taste to realize that
she would not wish to be looked at. Unhappy youth can feel no law
but its own.
But all was over during the few moments, and he turned and walked
back to his chair.
"You want very much to do some work which will insure your entire
independence--to take some situation which will support you without
aid from others? You are not yet prepared to go out and take the
first place which offers. You have been--as you say--too hideously
frightened, and you know there are dangers in wandering about
unguided. Mademoiselle Valle," turning his head, "perhaps you
will tell her what you know of the Duchess of Darte?"
Upon which, Mademoiselle Valle took hold of her hand and entered
into a careful explanation.
"She is a great personage of whom there can be no doubt. She
was a lady of the Court. She is of advanced years and an invalid
and has a liking for those who are pretty and young. She desires
a companion who is well educated and young and fresh of mind. The
companion who had been with her for many years recently died. If
you took her place you would live with her in her town house and
go with her to the country after the season. Your salary would
be liberal and no position could be more protected and dignified.
I have seen and talked to her grace myself, and she will allow me
to take you to her, if you desire to go."
"Do not permit the fact that she has known me for many years
to prejudice you against the proposal," said Coombe. "You might
perhaps regard it rather as a sort of guarantee of my conduct in
the matter. She knows the worst of me and still allows me to retain
her acquaintance. She was brilliant and full of charm when she
was a young woman, and she is even more so now because she is--of
a rarity! If I were a girl and might earn my living in her service,
I should feel that fortune had been good to me--good."
Robin's eyes turned from one of them to the other--from Coombe to
Mademoiselle Valle, and from Mademoiselle to Coombe pathetically.
"You--you see--what has been done to me," she said. "A few weeks
ago I should have KNOWN that God was providing for me--taking
care of me. And now--I am still afraid. I feel as if she would see
that--that I am not young and fresh any more but black with evil.
I am afraid of her--I am afraid of you," to Coombe, "and of myself."
Coombe rose, evidently to go away.
"But you are not afraid of Mademoiselle Valle," he put it to her.
"She will provide the necessary references for the Duchess. I will
leave her to help you to decide."
Robin rose also. She wondered if she ought not to hold out her
hand. Perhaps he saw her slight movement. He himself made none.
"I remember you objected to shaking hands as a child," he said,
with an impersonal civil smile, and the easy punctiliousness of
his bow made it impossible for her to go further.