Robinetta

“So Mrs. Prettyman is dead?” she said. Then, as the young people stood looking at her with an air of some expectancy, she added with a sour glance, “Do you expect me to be very much agitated by the news?”

“The death was unexpected,” began Lavendar lamely.

“She was seventy-five; my age!” said Mrs. de Tracy with a wintry smile. “Is death at seventy-five so unexpected an event?”

Lavendar said nothing; he had nothing to say, and Robinette for the same reason was silent. She was gazing at her aunt, almost unconsciously, with a wondering look. “At any rate,” continued Mrs. de Tracy, addressing her niece, “your protégée has been fortunate in two ways, Robinette. She will neither be turned out of her cottage nor see the destruction of her plum tree. By the way–” with a perfectly natural change of tone, dismissing at once both Mrs. Prettyman and Death–“the plum tree is down, I suppose? You saw it?”

“Very much down!” answered Lavendar. “And certainly we saw it! Carnaby does nothing by halves!”

A slight change, a kind of shade of softening, passed over Mrs. de Tracy’s stern features, as the shadow of a summer cloud may pass over a rocky hill. She turned suddenly to Robinette. “Can you tell me on your word of honour that you had nothing to do with Carnaby’s action; that you did not put it into his head to cut the plum tree down!”

“I?” exclaimed Robinette, scarlet with indignation. “I? Why–do you want to know what I think of the action? I think it was perfectly brutal, and the boy who did it next door to a criminal! There!”

Mrs. de Tracy seemed convinced by the energy of this disclaimer. “I have always considered yours a very candid character,” she observed with condescension. “I believe you when you say that you did not influence Carnaby in the matter, though I strongly suspected you before.”

“Well, upon my word!” ejaculated Robinette when they had got out of the room, too completely baffled to be more original. “What does she mean? Has any one ever understood the workings of Aunt de Tracy’s mind?”

“Don’t come to me for any more explanations! I’ve done my best for my client!” cried Lavendar. “I give up my brief! I always told you Mrs. de Tracy’s character was entirely singular.”

“Let us hope so!” commented Robinette with energy. “I should be sorry for the world if it were plural!”

Carnaby was not in the house, and Lavendar proceeded to look for him out of doors. He knew the boy was often to be found in a high part of the grounds behind the garden, where he had some special resort of his own, and he went there first. The afternoon had clouded over, and a slight shower was falling, as Mark followed the wooded path leading up hill. A rock-garden bordered it, where ferns and flowers were growing, each one of which seemed to be contributing some special and delicate fragrance to the damp, warm air. The beech trees here had low and spreading branches which framed now and again exquisite glimpses of the river far below and the wooded hills beyond it.

Lavendar had not gone far when he found Carnaby, Carnaby intensely perturbed, walking up and down by himself.

“You don’t need to tell me!” said the boy, with a quick and agitated gesture of the hand. “Bates told me. Old Mrs. Prettyman’s dead!” His merry, square-set face was changed and looked actually haggard, and his eyes searched Lavendar’s with an expression oddly different from their usual fearless and straightforward one. They seemed afraid. “Was it my grandmother’s–was it our fault?” he asked. “I, I feel like a murderer. Upon my soul, I do!”

“Don’t encourage morbid ideas, my dear fellow!” said Lavendar in a matter-of-fact tone. “There’s trouble enough in the world without foolish exaggeration. Mrs. Prettyman was ‘grave-ripe,’ as she often said to your cousin; a very feeble old woman, whose time had come. The doctor’s certificate will tell you how rheumatism had affected her heart, and the neighbours would very soon set your mind at rest by describing the number of times poor old Lizzie had nearly died before.”

“Think of it, though!” said Carnaby with wondering eyes. “Think of her lying dead in the cottage while I hacked and hewed at the plum tree just outside! By Jove! it makes a fellow feel queer!” He shuddered. The picture he evoked was certainly a strange one enough: a strange picture in the moonlight of a night in spring; the doomed beauty of the blossoming tree, the blind, headstrong human energy working for its destruction, and Death over all, stealthy and strong!

“What an ass I was!” said Carnaby, summing up the situation in the only language in which he could express himself. “Sweating and stewing and hacking away–thinking myself so awfully clever! And all the time things … things were being arranged in quite a different manner!”

“We are often made to feel our insignificance in ways like this,” said Lavendar. “We are very small atoms, Carnaby, in the path of the great forces that sweep us on.”

“I should rather think so!” assented the wondering boy. “And yet, can a fellow sit tight all the time and just wait till things happen?”

“Ask me something else!” suggested Lavendar ironically.

There was a short pause. “I’m awfully sorry old Mrs. Prettyman’s dead,” Carnaby said in a very subdued tone. “I meant to do a lot for her, to try and make up for my grandmother’s being such a beast.” He stopped short, and to Lavendar’s astonishment, his face worked, and two tears squeezed themselves out of his eyes and rolled over his round cheeks as they might have done over a baby’s. “It’s the j-jam I was thinking of,” he sniffed. “Once a pal of mine and I were playing the fool in old Mrs. Prettyman’s garden, pretending to steal the plums, and giving her duck bits of bread steeped in beer to make it s-squiffy (a duck can be just as drunk as a chap). She didn’t mind a bit. She was a regular old brick, and gave us a jolly good tea and a pot of jam to take away… And now she’s dead and–and…” Carnaby’s feelings became too much for him again, and a handkerchief that had seen better and much cleaner days came into play. Lavendar flung an arm round the boy’s shoulder.

“This kind of regret comes to us all, Carnaby,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s a man with a heart in his breast who hasn’t sometime had to say to himself, I might have done better: I might have been kinder: it’s too late now! But it’s never too late!” added Lavendar under his breath–“not where Love is!”

The shower was over, and though the sun had not come out, a pleasant light lay upon the river as the friends walked down; upon the river beyond which old Lizzie Prettyman was sleeping so peacefully, the sleep of kings and beggars, and just and unjust, and rich and poor alike. Carnaby had dried his eyes but continued in a pensive mood.

“Cousin Robin’s still angry with me about the tree,” he said, uncertainly.

“She won’t be angry long!” Lavendar assured him. “You and your Cousin Robin are going to be firm friends, friends for life.”

Carnaby seemed a good deal comforted. “Mind you don’t tell her I blubbered!” he said in sudden alarm. “Swear!”

“She wouldn’t think a bit the worse of you for that!” said Lavendar.

“Swear, though!” repeated Carnaby in deadly earnest.

And Lavendar swore, of course.

But an influence very unlike Lavendar’s and a spirit very different from Robinette’s enfolded Carnaby de Tracy in his home and fought, as it were, for his soul. That night, after the last lamp had been put out by the careful Bates, and after Benson had bade a respectful good-night to her mistress, a light still burned in Mrs. de Tracy’s room. Presently, carried in her hand, it flitted out along the silent passages, past rows of doors which were closed upon empty rooms or upon unconscious sleepers, till it came to Carnaby’s door; to the Boys’ Room, as that far-away and most unluxurious apartment had always been called. Mrs. de Tracy was making a pilgrimage to the shrine of one of her gods. She opened the door, and closing it gently behind her, she stood beside Carnaby’s bed and looked at him, intently and haggardly.

Mrs. de Tracy’s was a singular character, as Mark Lavendar had said. The circumstances of her widowhood with its heavy responsibilities had perhaps hardly been fair to her. There had been little room for the kindlier and softer feelings, though it is to be feared that they would not have found much congenial soil in her heart. The personal selfishness in her had long been merged in the greater and harder selfishness of caste; she had become a mere machine for the keeping up of Stoke Revel.

But to-night she was moved by the positively human sentiment which had been stirred in her by Carnaby’s startling act of cutting the plum tree down. Ah! let fools believe if they could that she was angry with the boy! She had never felt anger less or pride more. While others talked and argued, shilly-shallied, made love, muddled and made mistakes, her grandson, the man of the race that always ruled, had cut the knot for himself, without hesitation and without compunction, without consulting anyone or asking anyone’s leave. That was the way the de Tracys had always acted. And it seemed to Mrs. de Tracy a crowning coincidence, a fitting kind of poetical justice, that Carnaby’s action should actually have prevented the sale of the land; that dreaded, detestable sale of the first land that the de Tracys had held upon the banks of the river.

So, since Carnaby was to be a man of the right kind, his grandmother had come to look at him, not in love, as other women come to such bedsides, but in pride of heart. The boy, after his “white night” at Wittisham and the varied emotions of the succeeding day, lay on his side, in the deep, recuperative sleep of youth whence its energies are drawn and in which its vigors are renewed. His round cheek indented the pillow, his rumpled hair stirred in the breeze that blew in at the window, his arm and his open hand, relaxed, lay along the sheet. Another woman would have straightened the bed-clothes above him; another might have touched his hair or hand; another kissed his cheek. But not even because he was like her departed husband, like the man who five and fifty years before had courted a certain cold and proud, handsome and penniless Miss Augusta Gallup, would Mrs. de Tracy do these things. She had had her sensation, such as it was, her secret moment of emotion, and was satisfied. She left the room as she had come, the candle casting exaggerated shadows of herself upon the walls where Carnaby’s bats and fishing rods and sporting prints hung.

It is sad to be old as Mrs. de Tracy was old, but her age was of her own making, a shrinkage of the heart, a drying up of the wells of feeling that need not have been.

“I should be better out of the way,” her bitterness said within her, and alas! it was true. Her great, gaunt room seemed very lonely, very full of shadows when she returned to it. Rupert, who always slept at her bedside, awaited her. Disturbed at this unwonted hour, he stirred in his basket, wheezed and gurgled, turned round and round and could not get comfortable, whined, and looked up in his mistress’s face. She stood watching him with a sort of grim pity, and, strangely enough, bestowed upon him the caress she had not found for her grandson.

“Poor Rupert! You are getting too old, like your mistress! Your departure, like hers, will be a sorrow to no one!” Rupert seemed to wheeze an asthmatical consent, and presently he snuggled down in his basket and went to sleep.