Robin

Dowie studied it with care.

"Yes," she said. "You could copy it and make as many more as you liked.

They need a good many."

"I am glad of that," said Robin. "I should like to make a great many."

The slim fingers slid over the page. "I should like to make that one--and that--and that." Her face, bent over the picture, wore its touching _young_ look thrilled with something new. "They are so _pretty_--they are so pretty," she murmured like a dove.

"They"re the prettiest things in the world," Dowie said. "There never was anything prettier."

"It must be wonderful to make them and to know all the time you are putting in the tiny st.i.tches, that they are for something little--and warm--and alive!"

"Those that have done it never forget it," said Dowie. Robin lifted her face, but her hands still held the book with the touch which clung.

"I am beginning to realise what a strange life mine has been," she said.

"Don"t you think it has, Dowie? I haven"t known things. I didn"t know what mothers were. I never knew another child until I met Donal in the Gardens. No one had ever kissed me until he did. When I was older I didn"t know anything about love and marrying--really. It seemed only something one read about in books until Donal came. You and Mademoiselle made me happy, but I was like a little nun." She paused a moment and then said thoughtfully, "Do you know, Dowie, I have never touched a baby?"

"I never thought of it before," Dowie answered with a slightly caught breath, "but I believe you never have."

The girl leaned forward and her own light breath came a shade more quickly, and the faint colour on her cheek flickered into a sweeter warm tone.

"Are they very soft, Dowie?" she asked--and the asking was actually a wistful thing. "When you hold them do they feel very light--and soft--and warm? When you kiss them isn"t it something like kissing a little flower?"

"That"s what it is," said Dowie firmly as one who knows. "A baby that"s loved and taken care of is just nothing but fine soft lawns and white downiness with the scent of fresh violets under leaves in the rain."

A vaguely dreamy smile touched Robin"s face and she bent over the pictures again.

"I felt as if they must be like that though I had never held one," she murmured. "And Donal--told me." She did not say when he had told her but Dowie knew. And unearthly as the thing was, regarded from her standpoint, she was not frightened, because she said mentally to herself, what was happening was downright healthy and no harm could come of it. She felt safe and her mind was at ease even when Robin shut the little book and placed it on the table again.

"I"ll go to bed again," she said. "I shall sleep now."

"To be sure you will," Dowie said.

And they went out of the Tower room together, but before she followed her Dowie slipped aside and quietly opened the window.

CHAPTER XXIX

Coombe House had been transformed into one of the most practical nursing homes in London. The celebrated ballroom and picture gallery were filled with cots; a s.p.a.cious bedroom had become a perfectly equipped operating room; nurses and doctors moved everywhere with quiet swiftness. Things were said to be marvellously well done because Lord Coombe himself held reins which diplomatically guided and restrained amateurishness and emotional infelicities.

He spent most of his time, when he was in the house, in the room on the entrance floor where Mademoiselle had found him when she had come to him in her search for Robin.

He had faced ghastly hours there as the war news struck its hideous variant note from day to day. Every sound which rolled through the street had its meaning for him, and there were few which were not terrible. They all meant inhuman struggle, inhuman suffering, inhuman pa.s.sions, and wounds or death. He carried an unmoved face and a well-held head through the crowded thoroughfares. The men in the cots in his picture gallery and his ballroom were the better for the outward calm he brought when he sat and talked to them, but he often hid a mad fury in his breast or a heavy and sick fatigue.

Even in London a man saw and heard and was able, if he had an imagination, to visualise too much to remain quite normal. He had seen what was left of strong men brought back from the Front, men who could scarcely longer be counted as really living human beings; he had talked to men on leave who had a hideous hardness in their haggard eyes and who did not know that they gnawed at their lips sometimes as they told the things they had seen. He saw the people going into the churches and chapels. He sometimes went into such places himself and he always found there huddled forms kneeling in the pews, even when no service was being held. Sometimes they were men, sometimes women, and often they writhed and sobbed horribly. He did not know why he went in; his going seemed only part of some surging misery.

He heard weird stories again and again of occult happenings. He had been told all the details of Lady Maureen"s case and of a number of other cases somewhat resembling it. He was of those who have advanced through experience to the point where entire disbelief in anything is not easy.

This was the more so because almost all previously accepted laws had been shaken as by an earthquake. He had fallen upon a new sort of book drifting about. He had had such books put into his hands by acquaintances, some of whom were of the impressionable hysteric order, but many of whom were as a.n.a.lytically minded as himself. He found much of such literature in the book shops. He began to look over the best written and ended by reading them with deep attention. He was amazed to discover that for many years profoundly scientific men had been seriously investigating and experimenting with mysteries unexplainable by the accepted laws of material science. They had discussed, argued and written grave books upon them. They had been doing all this before any society for psychical research had founded itself and the intention of new logic was to be scientific rather than psychological. They had written books, scattered through the years, on mesmerism, hypnosis, abnormal mental conditions, the powers of suggestion, even unexplored dimensions and in modern days psychotherapeutics.

"What has amazed me is my own ignorance of the prolonged and serious nature of the investigation of an astonishing subject," he said in talking with the d.u.c.h.ess. "To realise that a.n.a.lytical minds have been doing grave work of which one has known nothing is an actual shock to one"s pride. I suppose the tendency would have been to pooh-pooh it. The cheap, modern popular form is often fantastic and crude, but there remains the fact that it all contains truths not to be explained by the rules we have always been familiar with."

The d.u.c.h.ess had read the book he had brought her and held it in her hands.

"Perhaps the time has come, in which we are to learn the new ones," she said.

"Perhaps we are being forced to learn them--as a result of our pooh-poohing," was his answer. "Some of us may learn that clear-cut disbelief is at least indiscreet."

Therefore upon a certain morning he sat long in reflection over a letter which had arrived from Dowie. He read it a number of times.

"I don"t know what your lordship may think," Dowie said and he felt she held herself with a tight rein. "If I may say so, it"s what"s going to come out of it that matters and not what any of us think of it. So far it seems as if a miracle had happened. About a week ago she wakened in the morning looking as I"d been afraid she"d never look again. There was actually colour in her thin little face that almost made it look not so thin. There was a light in her eyes that quite startled me. She lay on her bed and smiled like a child that"s suddenly put out of pain. She said--quite quiet and natural--that she"d seen her husband. She said he had _come_ and talked to her a long time and that it was not a dream, and he was not an angel--he was himself. At first I was terrified by a dreadful thought that her poor young mind had given way. But she had no fever and she was as sweet and sensible as if she was talking to her Dowie in her own nursery. And, my lord, this is what does matter. She sat up and _ate her breakfast_ and said she would take a walk with me.

And walk she did--stronger and better than I"d have believed. She had a cup of tea and a gla.s.s of milk and a fresh egg and a slice of hot b.u.t.tered toast. That"s what I hold on to, my lord--without any thinking.

I daren"t write about it at first because I didn"t trust it to last. But she has wakened in the same way every morning since. And she"s eaten the bits of nice meals I"ve put before her. I"ve been careful not to put her appet.i.te off by giving her more than a little at a time. And she"s slept like a baby and walked every day. I believe she thinks she sees Captain Muir every night. I wouldn"t ask questions, but she spoke of it once again to me.

"Your obedient servant, SARAH ANN DOWSON."

Lord Coombe sat in interested reflection. He felt curiously uplifted above the rolling sounds in the street and the headlines of the pile of newspapers on the table.

"If it had not been for the tea and egg and b.u.t.tered toast she would have been sure the poor child was mad." He thought it out. "An egg and a slice of b.u.t.tered toast guarantee even spiritual things. Why not? We are material creatures who have only material sight and touch and taste to employ as arguments. I suppose that is why tables are tipped, and banjos fly about for beginners. It"s because we cannot see other things, and what we cannot see-- Oh! fools that we are! The child said he was not an angel--he was himself. Why not? Where did he come from?

Personally I believe that he _came_."

CHAPTER x.x.x

"It was Lord Coombe who sent the book," said Robin.

She was sitting in the Tower room, watching Dowie open the packages which had come from London. She herself had opened the one which held the models and she was holding a tiny film of lawn and fine embroidery in her hands. Dowie could see that she was quite unconscious that she loosely held it against her breast as if she were nursing it.

"It"s his lordship"s way to think of things," the discreet answer came impersonally.

Robin looked slowly round the small and really quite wonderful room.

"You know I said that, the first night we came here."

"Yes?" Dowie answered.

Robin turned her eyes upon her. They were no longer hollowed, but they still looked much too large.

"Dowie," she said. "He _knows_ things."

"He always did," said Dowie. "Some do and some don"t."