Robinetta

VIII

SUNDAY AT STOKE REVEL

On Sundays, the Stoke Revel household was expected to appear at church in full strength, visitors included.

“We meet in the hall punctually at a quarter to eleven,” it was Miss Smeardon’s duty to announce to strangers. “Mrs. de Tracy always prefers that the Stoke Revel guests should walk down together, as it sets a good example to the villagers.”

“What Nelson said about going to church with Lady Hamilton!” Lavendar had once commented, irrepressibly, but the allusion, rather fortunately, was lost upon Miss Smeardon. Mark began to picture the familiar Sunday scene to himself; Miss Smeardon in the hall at a quarter to eleven punctually, marshalling the church-goers; and Mrs. Loring,–she would be late of course, and come fluttering downstairs in some bewitching combination of flowery hat and floating scarf that no one had ever seen before. What a lover’s opportunity in this lateness, thought the young man to himself; but one could enjoy a walk to church in charming company, though something less than a lover.

It was Mrs. de Tracy’s custom, on Sunday mornings, to precede her household by half an hour in going to the sanctuary. No infirmities of old age had invaded her iron constitution, and it was nothing to her to walk alone to the church of Stoke Revel, steep though the hill was which led down through the ancient village to the yet more ancient edifice at its foot. During this solitary interval, Mrs. de Tracy visited her husband’s tomb, and no one knew, or dared, or cared to enquire, what motive encouraged this pious action in a character so devoid of tenderness and sentiment. Was it affection, was it duty, was it a mere form, a tribute to the greatness of an owner of Stoke Revel, such as a nation pays to a dead king? Who could tell?

The graveyard of Stoke Revel owned a yew tree, so very, very old that the count of its years was lost and had become a fable or a fairy tale. It was twisted, gnarled, and low; and its long branches, which would have reached the ground, were upheld, like the arms of some dying patriarch, by supports, themselves old and moss-grown. Under the spreading of this ancient tree were graves, and from the carved, age-eaten porch of the church, a path led among them, under the green tunnel, out into the sunny space beyond it. The Admiral lay in a vault of which the door was at the side of the church, for no de Tracy, of course, could occupy a mere grave, like one of the common herd; and here walked the funereal figure of Mrs. de Tracy, fair weather or foul, nearly every Sunday in the year.

In justice to Mrs. de Tracy, it must be made plain that with all her faults, small spite was not a part of her character. Yet to-day, her anger had been stirred by an incident so small that its very triviality annoyed her pride. It was Mark Lavendar’s custom, when his visits to Stoke Revel included a Sunday, cheerfully to evade church-going. His Sundays in the country were few, he said, and he preferred to enjoy them in the temple of nature, generally taking a long walk before lunch. But to-day he had announced his intention of coming to service, and well Mrs. de Tracy, versed in men and in human nature, knew why. Robinette would be there, and Lavendar followed, as the bee follows a basket of flowers on a summer day. As Mrs. de Tracy, like the Stoic that she was, accepted all the inevitable facts of life,–birth, death, love, hate (she had known them all in her day), she accepted this one also. But in that atrophy of every feeling except bitterness, that atrophy which is perhaps the only real solitude, the only real old age, her animosity was stirred. It was as though a dead branch upon some living tree was angry with the spring for breathing on it. As she returned, herself unseen in the shadow of the yew tree, she saw Lavendar and Robinette enter together under the lych-gate, the figure of the young woman touched with sunlight and colour, her lips moving, and Lavendar smiling in answer. In the clashing of the bells–bells which shook the air, the earth, the ancient stones, the very nests upon the trees–their voices were inaudible, but in their faces was a young happiness and hope to which the solitary woman could not blind herself.

Presently in the lukewarm air within, Robinette was finding the church’s immemorial smell of prayer-books, hassocks, decaying wood, damp stones, matting, school-children, and altar flowers, a harmonious and suggestive one if not pleasant. What an ancient air it was, she thought; breathed and re-breathed by slow generations of Stoke Revellers during their sleepy devotions! The very light that entered through the dim stained glass seemed old and dusty, it had seen so much during so many hundred years, seen so much, and found out so many secrets! Soon the clashing of the bells ceased and upon the still reverberating silence there broke the small, snoring noises of a rather ineffectual organ, while the amiable curate, Rev. Tobias Finch, made his appearance, and the service began.

Mrs. de Tracy had entered the pew first, naturally; Miss Smeardon sat next, then Robinetta. Lavendar occupied the pew in front, alone, and through her half-closed eyelids Robinetta could see the line of his lean cheek and bony temple. He had not wished to sit there at all and he was so unresigned as to be badly in need of the soothing influences of Morning Prayer. Robinetta was beginning to wonder dreamily what manner of man this really was, behind his plain face and non-committal manner, when the muffled slam of a door behind, startled her, followed as it was by a quick step upon the matted aisle. Then without further warning, a big, broad-shouldered boy, in the uniform of a British midshipman, thrust himself into the pew beside her, hot and breathless after running hard. Mrs. Loring guessed at once that this must be Carnaby de Tracy, the young hopeful and heir of Stoke Revel of whom Mr. Lavendar had so often spoken, but the startling and unconventional nature of his appearance was not at all what one expected in a member of his family. Robinette stole more than one look at him as the offertory went round; a robust boy with a square chin, a fair face burnt red by the sun, a rollicking eye and an impudent nose; not handsome certainly, indeed quite plain, but he looked honest and strong and clean, and Robinette’s frolicsome youth was drawn to his, all ready for fun. Carnaby hitched about a good deal, dropped his hymn-book, moved the hassock, took out his handkerchief, and on discovering a huge hole, turned crimson.

Service over, the congregation shuffled out into the sunshine, and Mrs. de Tracy, after a characteristically cool and disapproving recognition of her grandson, became occupied with villagers. Lavendar made known young Carnaby to Mrs. David Loring, but the midshipman’s light grey eyes had discovered the pretty face without any assistance.

“This lady is your American cousin, Carnaby,” said Mark. “Did you know you had one?”

“I don’t think I did,” answered the boy, “but it’s never too late to mend!” He attempted a bow of finished grown-upness, failed somewhat, and melted at once into an engaging boyishness, under which his frank admiration of his new-found relative was not to be hidden. “I say, are you stopping at Stoke Revel?” he asked, as though the news were too good to be true. “Jolly! Hullo–” he broke off with animation as the cassocked figure of the Rev. Tobias Finch fluttered out from the porch–“here’s old Toby! Watch Miss Smeardon now! She expects to catch him, you know, but he says he’s going to be a celly–celly-what-d’you-call-’em?”

“Celibate?” suggested Lavendar, with laughing eyes.

“The very word, thank you!” said Carnaby. “Yes: a celibate. Not so easily nicked, good old Toby–you bet!”

“Do the clergymen over here always dress like that?” inquired Robinetta, trying to suppress a tendency to laugh at his slang.

“Cassock?” said Carnaby. “Toby wouldn’t be seen without it. High, you know! Bicycles in it. Fact! Goes to bed in it, I believe.”

“Carnaby, Carnaby! Come away!” said Lavendar. “Restrain these flights of imagination! Don’t you see how they shock Mrs. Loring?”

Before the Manor was reached, Robinetta and Carnaby had sworn eternal friendship deeper than any cousinship, they both declared. They met upon a sort of platform of Stoke Revel, predestined to sympathy upon all its salient characteristics; two naughty children on a holiday.

“Do you get enough to eat here?” asked Carnaby in a hollow whisper, in the drawing-room before lunch.

“Of course I have enough, Middy,” answered Robinetta with unconscious reservation. She had rejected “Carnaby” at once as a name quite impossible: he was “Middy” to her almost from the first moment of their acquaintance.

“Enough?” he ejaculated, “I don’t! I’d never be fed if it weren’t for old Bates and Mrs. Smith and Cooky.” Bates was the butler, Mrs. Smith the housekeeper, and Cooky her satellite. “Nobody gets enough to eat in this house!” added Carnaby darkly, “except the dog.”

At the lunch-table, the antagonism natural between a hot-blooded impetuous boy and a grandmother such as Mrs. de Tracy became rather painfully apparent. He had already been hauled over the coals for his arrival on Sunday and his indecorous appearance in church after service had begun.

“It does not appear to me that you are at all in need of sick-leave,” said Mrs. de Tracy suspiciously.

Carnaby, sensitive for all his robustness, flushed hotly, and then became impertinent. “My pulse is twenty beats too quick still, after quinsy. If you don’t believe the doctor, ma’am, it’s not my fault.”

“Carnaby has committed indiscretions in the way of growing since I last saw him,” Lavendar broke in hastily. “At sixteen one may easily outgrow one’s strength!”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. de Tracy, frigidly. The situation was saved by the behaviour of the lap-dog, which suddenly burst into a passion of barking and convulsive struggling in Miss Smeardon’s arms. His enemy had come, and Carnaby had fifty ways of exasperating his grandmother’s favourite, secrets between him and the bewildered dog. Rupert was a Prince Charles of pedigree as unquestioned as his mistress’s and an appearance dating back to Vandyke, but Carnaby always addressed him as “Lord Roberts,” for reasons of his own. It annoyed his grandmother and it infuriated the dog, who took it for a deadly insult.

“Lord Roberts! Bobs, old man, hi! hi!” Carnaby had but to say the words to make the little dog convulsive. He said them now, and the results seemed likely to be fatal to a dropsical animal so soon after a full meal.

“You’ll kill him!” whispered Robinette as they left the dining room.

“I mean to!” was the calm reply. “I’d like to wring old Smeardon’s neck too!” but the broad good humour of the rosy face, the twinkling eyes, belied these truculent words. In spite of infinite powers of mischief, there was not an ounce of vindictiveness in Carnaby de Tracy, though there might be other qualities difficult to deal with.

“There’s a man to be made there–or to be marred!” said Robinette to herself.

IX

POINTS OF VIEW

Evenings at Stoke Revel were of a dullness all too deep to be sounded and too closely hedged in by tradition and observance to be evaded or shortened by the boldest visitor. Lavendar and the boy would have prolonged their respite in the smoking room had they dared, but in these later days Lavendar found he wished to be below on guard. The thought of Robinette alone between the two women downstairs made him uneasy. It was as though some bird of bright plumage had strayed into a barnyard to be pecked at by hens. Not but what he realised that this particular bird had a spirit of her own, and plenty of courage, but no man with even a prospective interest in a pretty woman, likes to think of the object of his admiration as thoroughly well able to look after herself. She must needs have a protector, and the heaven-sent one is himself.

He had to take up arms in her defense on this, the first night of his arrival. Mrs. Loring had gone up to her room for some photographs of her house in America, and as she flitted through the door her scarf caught on the knob, and he had been obliged to extricate it. He had known her exactly four hours, and although he was unconscious of it, his heart was being pulled along the passage and up the stairway at the tail-end of that wisp of chiffon, while he listened to her retreating footsteps. Closing the door he came back to Mrs. de Tracy’s side.

“Her dress is indecorous for a widow,” said that lady severely.

“Oh, I don’t see that,” replied Lavendar. “She is in reality only a girl, and her widowhood has already lasted two years, you say.”

“Once a widow always a widow,” returned Mrs. de Tracy sententiously, with a self-respecting glance at her own cap and the half-dozen dull jet ornaments she affected. Lavendar laughed outright, but she rather liked his laughter: it made her think herself witty. Once he had told her she was “delicious,” and she had never forgotten it.

“That’s going pretty far, my dear lady,” he replied. “Not all women are so faithful to a memory as you. I understand Americans don’t wear weeds, and to me her blue cape is a delightful note in the landscape. Her dresses are conventional and proper, and I fancy she cannot express herself without a bit of colour.”

“The object of clothing, Mark, is to cover and to protect yourself, not to express yourself,” said Mrs. de Tracy bitingly.

“The thought of wearing anything bright always makes me shrink,” remarked Miss Smeardon, who had never apparently observed the tip of her own nose, “but some persons are less sensitive on these points than others.”

Mrs. de Tracy bowed an approving assent to this. “A widow’s only concern should be to refrain from attracting notice,” she said, as though quoting from a private book of proverbial philosophy soon to be published.

“Then Mrs. Loring might as well have burned herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, Hindoo fashion!” argued Lavendar. “A woman’s life hasn’t ended at two and twenty. It’s hardly begun, and I fear the lady in question will arouse attention whatever she wears.”

“Would she be called attractive?” asked Mrs. de Tracy with surprise.

“Oh, yes, without a doubt!”

“In gentlemen’s eyes, I suppose you mean?” said Miss Smeardon.

“Yes, in gentlemen’s eyes,” answered Lavendar, firmly. “Those of women are apparently furnished with different lenses. But here comes the fair object of our discussion, so we must decide it later on.”

The question of ancestors, a favourite one at Stoke Revel, came up in the course of the next evening’s conversation, and Lavendar found Robinette a trifle flushed but smiling under a double fire of questions from Mrs. de Tracy and her companion. Mrs. de Tracy was in her usual chair, knitting; Miss Smeardon sat by the table with a piece of fancy-work; Robinette had pulled a foot-stool to the hearthrug and sat as near the flames as she conveniently could. She shielded her face with the last copy of Punch, and let her shoulders bask in the warmth of the fire, which made flickering shadows on her creamy neck. Her white skirts swept softly round her feet, and her favourite turquoise scarf made a note of colour in her lap. She was one of those women who, without positive beauty, always make pictures of themselves.

Lavendar analyzed her looks as he joined the circle, pretending to read. “She isn’t posing,” he thought, “but she ought to be painted. She ought always to be painted, each time one sees her, for everything about her suggests a portrait. That blue ribbon in her hair is fairly distracting! What the dickens is the reason one wants to look at her all the time! I’ve seen far handsomer women!”

“Do you use Burke and Debrett in your country, Mrs. Loring?” Miss Smeardon was enquiring politely, as she laid down one red volume after the other, having ascertained the complete family tree of a lady who had called that afternoon.

Robinette smiled. “I’m afraid we’ve nothing but telephone or business directories, social registers, and ‘Who’s Who,’ in America,” she said.

“You are not interested in questions of genealogy, I suppose?” asked Mrs. de Tracy pityingly.

“I can hardly say that. But I think perhaps that we are more occupied with the future than with the past.”

“That is natural,” assented the lady of the Manor, “since you have so much more of it, haven’t you? But the mixture of races in your country,” she continued condescendingly, “must have made you indifferent to purity of strain.”

“I hope we are not wholly indifferent,” said Robinette, as though she were stopping to consider. “I think every serious-minded person must be proud to inherit fine qualities and to pass them on. Surely it isn’t enough to give old blood to the next generation–it must be good blood. Yes! the right stock certainly means something to an American.”

“But if you’ve nothing that answers to Burke and Debrett, I don’t see how you can find out anybody’s pedigree,” objected Miss Smeardon. Then with an air of innocent curiosity and a glance supposed to be arch, “Are the Red Indians, the Negroes, and the Chinese in your so-called directories?”

“As many of them as are in business, or have won their way to any position among men no doubt are there, I suppose,” answered Robinette straightforwardly. “I think we just guess at people’s ancestry by the way they look, act, and speak,” she continued musingly. “You can ‘guess’ quite well if you are clever at it. No Indians or Chinese ever dine with me, Miss Smeardon, though I’d rather like a peaceful Indian at dinner for a change; but I expect he’d find me very dull and uneventful!”

“Dull!–that’s a word I very often hear on American lips,” broke in Lavendar as he looked over the top of Henry Newbolt’s poems. “I believe being dull is thought a criminal offence in your country. Now, isn’t there some danger involved in this fear of dullness?”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Robinette answered thoughtfully, looking into the fire. “Yes; I dare say there is, but I’m afraid there are social and mental dangers involved in not being afraid of it, too!” Her mischievous eyes swept the room, with Mrs. de Tracy’s solemn figure and Miss Smeardon’s for its bright ornaments. “The moment a person or a nation allows itself to be too dull, it ceases to be quite alive, doesn’t it? But as to us Americans, Mr. Lavendar, bear with us for a few years, we are so ridiculously young! It is our growing time, and what you want in a young plant is growth, isn’t it?”

“Y-yes,” Lavendar replied: then with a twinkle in his blue eyes he added: “Only somehow we don’t like to hear a plant grow! It should manage to perform the operation quite silently, showing not processes but results. That’s a counsel of perfection, perhaps, but don’t slay me for plain-speaking, Mrs. Loring!”

Robinette laughed. “I’ll never slay you for saying anything so wise and true as that!” she said, and Lavendar, flushing under her praise, was charmed with her good humour.

“America’s a very large country, is it not?” enquired Miss Smeardon with her usual brilliancy. “What is its area?”

“Bigger than England, but not as big as the British Empire!” suggested Carnaby, feeling the conversation was drifting into his ken.

“It’s just the size of the moon, I’ve heard!” said Robinette teasingly. “Does that throw any light on the question?”

“Moonlight!” laughed Carnaby, much pleased with his own wit. “Ha! ha! That’s the first joke I’ve made this holidays. Moonlight! Jolly good!”

“If you’d take a joke a little more in your stride, my son,” said Lavendar, “we should be more impressed by your mental sparkles.”

“Straighten the sofa-cushions, Carnaby,” said his grandmother, “and don’t lounge. I missed the point of your so-called joke entirely. As to the size of a country or anything else, I have never understood that it affected its quality. In fruit or vegetables, for instance, it generally means coarseness and indifferent flavour.” Miss Smeardon beamed at this palpable hit, but Mrs. Loring deprived the situation of its point by backing up Mrs. de Tracy heartily. She had no opinion of mere size, either, she declared.

“You don’t stand up for your country half enough,” objected Carnaby to his cousin. (“Why don’t you give the old cat beans?” was his supplement, sotto voce.)

“Just attack some of my pet theories and convictions, Middy dear, if you wish to see me in a rage,” said Robinette lightly, “but my motto will never be ‘My country right or wrong.’”

“Nor mine,” agreed Lavendar. “I’m heartily with you there.”

“It’s a great venture we’re trying in America. I wish every one would try to look at it in that light,” said Robinette with a slight flush of earnestness.

“What do you mean by a venture?” asked Mrs. de Tracy.

“The experiment we’re making in democracy,” answered Robinette. “It’s fallen to us to try it, for of course it simply had to be tried. It is thrillingly interesting, whatever it may turn out, and I wish I might live to see the end of it. We are creating a race, Aunt de Tracy; think of that!”

“It’s as difficult for nations as for individuals to hit the happy medium,” said Lavendar, stirring the fire. “Enterprise carried too far becomes vulgar hustling, while stability and conservatism often pass the coveted point of repose and degenerate into torpor.”

“This part of England seems to me singularly free from faults,” interposed Mrs. de Tracy in didactic tones. “We have a wonderful climate; more sunshine than in any part of the island, I believe. Our local society is singularly free from scandal. The clergy, if not quite as eloquent or profound as in London (and in my opinion it is the better for being neither) is strictly conscientious. We have no burglars or locusts or gnats or even midges, as I’m told they unfortunately have in Scotland, and our dinner-parties, though quiet and dignified, are never dull… What is the matter, Robinetta?”

“A sudden catch in my throat,” said Robinette, struggling with some sort of vocal difficulty and avoiding Lavendar’s eye. “Thank you,” as he offered her a glass of water from the punctual and strictly temperate evening tray. “Don’t look at me,” she added under her voice.

“Not for a million of money!” he whispered. Then he said aloud: “If I ever stand for Parliament, Mrs. Loring, I should like you to help me with my constituency!”

The unruffled temper and sweet reasonableness of Robinette’s answers to questions by no means always devoid of malice, had struck the young man very much, as he listened.

“She is good!” he thought to himself. “Good and sweet and generous. Her loveliness is not only in her face; it is in her heart.” And some favorite lines began to run in his head that night, with new conviction:–

but here Lavendar broke off with a laugh.

“It’s not come to that yet!” he thought. “I wonder if it ever will?”

X

A NEW KINSMAN

Young Mrs. Loring was making her way slowly at Stoke Revel Manor, and Mrs. de Tracy, though never affectionate, treated her with a little less indifference as the days went on. “The Admiral’s niece is a lady,” she admitted to herself privately; “not perhaps the highest type of English lady; that, considering her mixed ancestry and American education, would be too much to expect; but in the broad, general meaning of the word, unmistakably a lady!”

Mrs. Benson, though not melting outwardly as yet, held more lenient views still with regard to the American guest. Bates, the butler, was elderly, and severely Church of England; his knowledge of widows was confined to the type ably represented by his mistress and he regarded young Mrs. Loring as inclined to be “flighty.” The footman, who was entirely under the butler’s thumb in mundane matters, had fallen into the habit of sharing his opinions, and while agreeing in the general feeling of flightiness, declared boldly that the lady in question gave a certain “style” to the dinner-table that it had lacked before her advent.