"I"m treating you exactly as you should be treated, Infant-in-Arms,"
Robinette answered firmly. "Give me your two paws, and look me straight in the eye."
Carnaby was no coward. His steel-grey eyes blazed as he met his cousin"s look. "Carnaby dear, do you know what you are to me? You are my kinsman; my only male relation. I"m so fond of you already, don"t spoil it! Think what you can be to me if you will. I am all alone in the world and when you grow a little older how I should like to depend upon you! I need affection; so do you, dear boy; can"t I see how you are just starving for it? There is no reason in the world why we shouldn"t be fond of each other! Oh! how grateful I should be to think of a strong young middy growing up to advise me and take me about! It was that kind of care and thought of me that was in your mind just now!"
"You"ll be marrying somebody one of these days," blurted Carnaby, wholly moved, but only half convinced. "Then you"ll forget all about your "kinsman.""
"I have no intention in that direction," said Robinette, "but if I change my mind I"ll consult you first; how will that do?"
"It wouldn"t do any good," sighed the boy, "so I"d rather you wouldn"t! You"d have your own way spite of everything a fellow could say against it!"
There was a moment of embarra.s.sment; then the silence was promptly broken by Robinette.
"Well, Middy dear, are we the best of friends?" she asked, rising from the bench and putting out her hand.
The lad took it and said all in a glow of chivalry, "You"re the dearest, the best, and the prettiest cousin in the world! You don"t mind my thinking you"re the prettiest?"
"Mind it? I delight in it! I shall come to your ship and pour out tea for you in my most fetching frock. Your friends will say: "Who is that particularly agreeable lady, Carnaby?" And you, with swelling chest, will respond, "That"s my American cousin, Mrs. Loring. She"s a nice creature; I"m glad you like her!""
Robinette"s imitation of Carnaby"s possible pomposity was so amusing and so clever that it drew a laugh from the boy in spite of himself.
"Just let anyone try to call you a "creature"!" he exclaimed. "He"d have me to reckon with! Oh! I am so tired of being a boy! The inside of me is all grown up and everybody keeps on looking at the outside and thinking I"m just the same as I always was!"
"Dear old Middy, you"re quite old enough to be my protector and that is what you shall be! Now shall we go in? I want you to stand near by while I ask your grandmother a favor."
"She won"t do it if she can help it," was Carnaby"s succinct reply.
"Oh, I am not sure! Where shall we find her,--in the library?"
"Yes; come along! Get up your circulation; you"ll need it!"
"Aunt de Tracy, there is something at Stoke Revel I am very anxious to have if you will give it to me," said Robinette, as she came into the library a few minutes later.
Mrs. de Tracy looked up from her knitting solemnly. "If it belongs to me, I shall no doubt be willing, as I know you would not ask for anything out of the common; but I own little here; nearly all is Carnaby"s."
"This was my mother"s," said Robinette. "It is a picture hanging in the smoking room; one that was a great favorite of hers, called "Robinetta." Her drawing-master found an Italian artist in London who went to the National Gallery and made a copy of the Sir Joshua picture, and I was named after it."
"I wish your mother could have been a little less romantic," sighed Mrs. de Tracy. "There were such fine old family names she might have used: Marcia and Elspeth, and Rosamond and Winifred!"
"I am sorry, Aunt de Tracy. If I had been consulted I believe I should have agreed with you. Perhaps when my mother was in America the family ties were not drawn as tightly as in the former years?"
"If it was so, it was only natural," said the old lady. "However, if you ask Carnaby, and if the picture has no great value, I am sure he will wish you to have it, especially if you know it to have been your mother"s property." Here Carnaby sauntered into the room. "That"s all right, grandmother," he said, "I heard what you were saying; only I wish it was a real Sir Joshua we were giving Cousin Robin instead of a copy!"
"Thank you, Carnaby dear, and thank you, too, Aunt de Tracy. You can"t think how much it is to me to have this; it is a precious link between mother"s girlhood, and mother, and me." So saying, she dropped a timid kiss upon Mrs. de Tracy"s iron-grey hair, and left the room.
"If she could live in England long enough to get over that excessive freedom of manner, your cousin would be quite a pleasing person, but I am afraid it goes too deep to be cured," Mrs. de Tracy remarked as she smoothed the hairs that might have been ruffled by Robinette"s kiss.
Carnaby made no reply. He was looking out into the garden and feeling half a boy, half a man, but wholly, though not very contentedly, a kinsman.
XI
THE SANDS AT WESTON
"Thursday morning? Is it possible that this is Thursday morning? And I must run up to London on Sat.u.r.day," said Lavendar to himself as he finished dressing by the open window. He looked up the day of the week in his calendar first, in order to make quite sure of the fact. Yes, there was no doubt at all that it was Thursday. His sense of time must have suffered some strange confusion; in one way it seemed only an hour ago that he had arrived from the clangour and darkness of London to the silence of the country, the cuckoos calling across the river between the wooded hills, and the April sunshine on the orchard trees; in another, years might have pa.s.sed since the moment when he first saw Robinette Loring sitting under Mrs. Prettyman"s plum tree.
"Eight days have we spent together in this house, and yet since that time when we first crossed in the boat, I"ve never been more than half an hour alone with her," he thought. "There are only three other people in the house after all, but they seem to have the power of multiplying themselves like the loaves and fishes (only when they"re not wanted) so that we"re eternally in a crowd. That boy particularly!
I like Carnaby, if he could get it into his thick head that his presence isn"t always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he"s quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it"s my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I"ll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can"t want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He"ll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can"t like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her," he sighed. "After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much as she does me?"
No one could have told from Lavendar"s face, when he appeared fresh and smiling at the breakfast table half an hour later, that he was hatching any deep-laid schemes.
Robinette entered the dining room five minutes late, as usual, pretty as a pink, breathless with hurrying. She wore a white dress again, with one rose stuck at her waistband, "A little tribute from the gardener," she said, as she noticed Lavendar glance at it. She went rapidly around the table shaking hands, and gave Carnaby"s red cheeks a pinch in pa.s.sing that made Lavendar long to tweak the boy"s ear.
"Good morning, all!" she said cheerily, "and how is my first cousin once removed? Is he going to Weston with me this morning to buy hairpins?"
"He is!" Carnaby answered joyfully, between mouthfuls of bacon and eggs. "He has been out of hairpins for a week."
"Does he need tapes and b.u.t.tons also?" asked Robinette, taking the piece of m.u.f.fin from his hand and b.u.t.tering it for herself; an act highly disapproved of by Mrs. de Tracy, who hurriedly requested Bates to pa.s.s the bread.
"He needs everything you need," Carnaby said with heightened colour.
"My hair is giving me a good deal of trouble, lately," remarked Lavendar, pa.s.sing his hand over a thickly thatched head.
"I have an excellent American tonic that I will give you after breakfast," said Robinette roguishly. "You need to apply it with a brush at ten, eleven, and twelve o"clock, sitting in the sun continuously between those hours so that the scalp may be well invigorated. Carnaby, will you buy me b.u.t.ter scotch and lemonade and oranges in Weston?"
"I will, if Grandmother"ll increase my allowance," said Carnaby malevolently, "for I need every penny I"ve got in hand for the hairpins."
"I hope you are not hungry, Robinetta," said Mrs. de Tracy, "that you have to buy food in Weston."
"No, indeed," said Robinette, "I was only longing to test Carnaby"s generosity and educate him in buying trifles for pretty ladies."
"He can probably be relied on to educate himself in that line when the time comes," Mrs. de Tracy remarked; "and now if you have all finished talking about hair, I will take up my breakfast again."
"Oh, Aunt de Tracy, I am so sorry if it wasn"t a nice subject, but I never thought. Anyway I only talked about hairpins; it was Mr.
Lavendar who introduced hair into the conversation; wasn"t it, Middy dear?"
Lavendar thought he could have annihilated them both for their open comradeship, their obvious delight in each other"s society. Was he to be put on the shelf like a dry old bachelor? Not he! He would circ.u.mvent them in some way or another, although the role of gooseberry was new to him.
The two young people set off in high spirits, and Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon watched them as they walked down the avenue on their way to the station, their clasped hands swinging in a merry rhythm as they hummed a bit of the last popular song.
"I hope Robinetta will not Americanize Carnaby," said Mrs. de Tracy.
"He seems so foolishly elated, so feverishly gay all at once. Her manner is too informal; Carnaby requires constant repression."
"Perhaps his temperature has not returned to normal since his attack of quinsy," Miss Smeardon observed, rea.s.suringly.
Meanwhile Lavendar sat in Admiral de Tracy"s old smoking room for half an hour writing letters. Every time that he glanced up from his work, and he did so pretty often, his eyes fell on a picture that hung upon the opposite wall. It was the copy of Sir Joshua"s "Robinetta" made long ago and just presented to its namesake.