"I will, to-morrow!"
Lord Coombe was left standing in the garish, crowded little drawing-room listening to ominous sounds in the street--to cries, running feet and men on fleeing bicycles shouting warnings as they sped at top speed and strove to clear the way.
CHAPTER x.x.xVIII
It was one of the raids which left h.e.l.lish things behind it--things hushed with desperate combined effort to restrain panic, but which blighted the air people strove to breathe and kept men and women shuddering for long after and made people waken with sharp cries from nightmares of horror. Certain paled faces belonged to those who had seen things and would never forget them. Others strove to look defiant and cheerful and did not find it easy. Some tried to get past policemen to certain parts of the city and some, getting past, returned livid and less adventurous in spirit because they had heard things it was gruesome to hear. Lord Coombe went the next morning to the slice of a house and found the servants rather hysterical. Feather had not returned, but they were not hysterical for that reason. She had probably remained at the house to which she had gone to see the Zepps. After the excitement was over, people like the Sinclairs were rather inclined to restore themselves by making a night of it, so to speak.
As "to-morrow" had now arrived, Lord Coombe wished to see her on her return. He had in fact lain awake thinking of plans of defence but had so far been able to decide on none. If there had been anything to touch, to appeal to, there might have been some hope, but she had left taste and fastidiousness scattered in shreds behind her. The War, as she put it, had made her less afraid of life. She had in fact joined the army of women who could always live so long as their beauty lasted. At the beginning of her relations with Lord Coombe she had belonged in a sense to a world which now no longer existed in its old form. Possibly there would soon be neither courts nor d.u.c.h.esses and so why should anything particularly matter? There were those who were taking cataclysms lightly and she was among them. If her airy mind chanced to have veered and her temper died down, money or jewels might induce her to keep quiet if one could endure the unspeakable indignity of forcing oneself to offer them. She would feel such an offer no indignity and would probably regard it as a tremendous joke. But she could no more be trusted than a female monkey or jackdaw.
Lord Coombe sat among the gewgaws in the drawing room and waited because he must see her when she came in and at least discover if the weather c.o.c.k had veered.
After waiting an hour or more he heard a taxi arrive at the front door and stop there. He went to the window to see who got out of the vehicle.
It gave him a slight shock to recognise a man he knew well. He wore plain clothes, but he was a member of the police force.
He evidently came into the house and stopped in the hall to talk to the immature footman who presently appeared at the drawing-room door, looking shaken because he had been questioned and did not know what it portended.
"What is the matter?" Lord Coombe a.s.sisted him with.
"Some one who is asking about Mrs. Gareth-Lawless. He doesn"t seem satisfied with what I tell him. I took the liberty of saying your lordship was here and perhaps you"d see him."
"Bring him upstairs."
It was in fact a man who knew Lord Coombe well enough to be aware that he need make no delay.
"It was one of the worst, my lord," he said in answer to Coombe"s first question. "We"ve had hard work--and the hardest of it was to hold things--people--back." He looked hag-ridden as he went on without any preparation. He was too tired for prefaces.
"There was a lady who went out of here last night. She was with a gentleman. They were running to a friend"s house to see things from the roof. They didn"t get there. The gentleman is in the hospital delirious to-day. He doesn"t know what happened. It"s supposed something frightened her and she lost her wits and ran away. The gentleman tried to follow her but the lights were out and he couldn"t find her in the dark streets. The running about and all the noises and crashes sent him rather wild perhaps. Trying to find a frightened woman in the midst of all that--and not finding her--"
"What ghastly--d.a.m.nable thing has happened?" Coombe asked with stiff lips.
"It"s both," the man said, "--it"s both."
He produced a package and opened it. There was a torn and stained piece of spangled violet gauze folded in it and on top was a little cardboard box which he opened also to show a ring with a big amethyst in it set with pearls.
"Good G.o.d!" Coombe e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, getting up from his chair hastily, "Oh!
Good G.o.d!"
"You know them?" the man asked.
"Yes. I saw them last night--before she went out."
"She ran the wrong way--she must have been crazy with fright. This--"
the man hesitated a second here and pulled himself together, "--this is all that was found except--"
"Good G.o.d!" said Lord Coombe again and he walked to and fro rapidly, trying to hold his body rigid.
"The gentleman--his name is Delamore--went on looking--after the raid was over. Some one saw him running here and there as if he had gone crazy. He was found afterwards where he"d fainted--near a woman"s hand with this ring on and the piece of scarf in it. He"s a strong young chap but he"d fainted dead. He was carried to the hospital and to-day he"s delirious."
"There--was nothing more?" shuddered Coombe.
"Nothing, my lord."
Out of unbounded s.p.a.ce embodied nothingness had seemed to float across the world of living things, and into s.p.a.ce the nothingness had disappeared--leaving behind a trinket and a rent sc.r.a.p of purple gauze.
CHAPTER x.x.xIX
Six weeks later Coombe was driven again up the climbing road to Darreuch. There was something less of colour than usual in his face, but the slightly vivid look of shock observing persons had been commenting upon had died out. As he had travelled, leaning back upon the cushions of the railway carriage, he had kept his eyes closed for the greater part of the journey. When at last he began to open them and look out at the increasingly beautiful country he also began to look rested and calm. He already felt the nearing peace of the shrine and added to it was an immense relaxing and uplift. A girl of a type entirely different from Robin"s might, he knew, have made him feel during the past months as if he were taking part in a melodrama. This she had wholly saved him from by the clear simplicity of her natural acceptance of all things as they were. She had taken and given without a word. He was, as it were, going home to her now, as deeply thrilled and moved as a totally different type of man might have gone--a man who was simpler.
The things he might once have been and felt were at work within him.
Again he longed to see the girl--he _wanted_ to see her. He was going to the castle in response to a telegram from Dowie. All was well over. She was safe. For the rest, all calamity had been kept from her knowledge and, as he had arranged it, the worst would never reach her. In course of time she would learn all it was necessary that she should know of her mother"s death.
When Mrs. Macaur led him to one of his own rooms she glowed red and expectantly triumphant.
"The young lady, your lordship--it was wonderfu"!"
But before she had time to say more Dowie had appeared and her face was smooth and serene to marvellousness.
"The Almighty himself has been in this place, my lord," she said devoutly. "I didn"t send more than a word, because she"s like a schoolroom child about it. She wants to tell you herself." The woman was quivering with pure joy.
"May I see her?"
"She"s waiting, my lord."
Honey scents of gorse and heather blew softly through the open windows of the room he was taken to. He did not know enough of such things to be at all sure what he had expected to see--but what he moved quickly towards, the moment after his entrance, was Robin lying fair as a wild rose on her pillows--not pale, not tragic, but with her eyes wide and radiant as a shining child"s.
Her smiling made his heart stand still. He really could not speak. But she could and turned back the covering to show him what lay in her soft curved arm.
"He is not like me at all," was her joyous exulting. "He is exactly like Donal."
The warm, tender breathing, semi-dormant, scarcely sentient-seeming thing might indeed have been the reincarnation of what had in the past so peculiarly reached bodily perfection. Robin, who mysteriously knew every line and curve of the new-born body, could point out how each limb and feature was an embryonic replica.
"Though he looks so tiny, he is not really little," was her lovely yearning boast. "He is really very big. Dowie has known hundreds of babies and they were none of them as big as he is. He is a giant--an angel giant," burying her face in the soft red neck.
"It seemed to change me into another type of man," Coombe once said to the d.u.c.h.ess.