Part 6 (1/2)

”There--are no--no servants to show it to you,” she said. ”If you could wait--a few days--perhaps--”

She was so lovely and Madame Helene's filmy black creation was in itself such an appeal, that the amiable young strangers gave up at once.

”Oh, certainly--certainly! Do excuse us! Carson and Bayle ought not to have--! We are so sorry. Good morning, GOOD morning,” they gave forth in discomfited sympathy and politeness, and really quite scurried away.

Having shut the door on their retreat Feather stood s.h.i.+vering.

”I am going to be turned out of the house! I shall have to live in the street!” she thought. ”Where shall I keep my clothes if I live in the street!”

Even she knew that she was thinking idiotically. Of course if everything was taken from you and sold, you would have no clothes at all, and wardrobes and drawers and closets would not matter.

The realization that scarcely anything in the house had been paid for came home to her with a ghastly shock. She staggered upstairs to the first drawing-room in which there was a silly pretty little buhl writing table.

She felt even more senseless when she sank into a chair before it and drew a sheet of note-paper towards her. Her thoughts would not connect themselves with each other and she could not imagine what she ought to say in her letter to Coombe. In fact she seemed to have no thoughts at all. She could only remember the things which had happened, and she actually found she could write nothing else. There seemed nothing else in the world.

”Dear Lord Coombe,” trailed tremulously over the page--”The house is quite empty. The servants have gone away. I have no money. And there is not any food. And I am going to be turned out into the street--and the baby is crying because it is hungry.”

She stopped there, knowing it was not what she ought to say. And as she stopped and looked at the words she began herself to wail somewhat as Robin had wailed in the dark when she would not listen or go to her. It was like a beggar's letter--a beggar's! Telling him that she had no money and no food--and would be turned out for unpaid rent. And that the baby was crying because it was starving!

”It's a beggar's letter--just a beggar's,” she cried out aloud to the empty room. ”And it's tru-ue!” Robin's wail itself had not been more hopeless than hers was as she dropped her head and let it lie on the buhl table.

She was not however even to be allowed to let it lie there, for the next instant there fell on her startled ear quite echoing through the house another ring at the doorbell and two steely raps on the smart bra.s.s knocker. It was merely because she did not know what else to do, having just lost her wits entirely that she got up and trailed down the staircase again.

When she opened the door, Lord Coombe--the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form and perfect appointment as also of perfect expression--was standing on the threshold.

CHAPTER VI

If he had meant to speak he changed his mind after his first sight of her. He merely came in and closed the door behind him. Curious experiences with which life had provided him had added finish to an innate aptness of observation, and a fine readiness in action.

If she had been of another type he would have saved both her and himself a scene and steered ably through the difficulties of the situation towards a point where they could have met upon a normal plane. A very pretty woman with whose affairs one has nothing whatever to do, and whose pretty home has been the perfection of modern smartness of custom, suddenly opening her front door in the unexplained absence of a footman and confronting a visitor, plainly upon the verge of hysteria, suggests the necessity of promptness.

But Feather gave him not a breath's s.p.a.ce. She was in fact not merely on the verge of her hysteria. She had gone farther. And here he was. Oh, here he was! She fell down upon her knees and actually clasped his immaculateness.

”Oh, Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe!” She said it three times because he presented to her but the one idea.

He did not drag himself away from her embrace but he distinctly removed himself from it.

”You must not fall upon your knees, Mrs. Lawless,” he said. ”Shall we go into the drawing-room?”

”I--was writing to you. I am starving--but it seemed too silly when I wrote it. And it's true!” Her broken words were as senseless in their sound as she had thought them when she saw them written.

”Will you come up into the drawing-room and tell me exactly what you mean,” he said and he made her release him and stand upon her feet.

As the years had pa.s.sed he had detached himself from so many weaknesses and their sequelae of emotion that he had felt himself a safely unreachable person. He was not young and he knew enough of the disagreeableness of consequences to be adroit in keeping out of the way of apparently harmless things which might be annoying.

Yet as he followed Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and watched her stumbling up the stairs like a punished child he was aware that he was abnormally in danger of pitying her as he did not wish to pity people. The pity was also something apart from the feeling that it was hideous that a creature so lovely, so shallow and so fragile should have been caught in the great wheels of Life.

He knew what he had come to talk to her about but he had really no clear idea of what her circ.u.mstances actually were. Most people had of course guessed that her husband had been living on the edge of his resources and was accustomed to debt and duns, but a lovely being greeting you by clasping your knees and talking about ”starving”--in this particular street in Mayfair, led one to ask oneself what one was walking into. Feather herself had not known, in fact neither had any other human being known, that there was a special reason why he had drifted into seeming rather to allow her about--why he had finally been counted among the frequenters of the narrow house--and why he had seemed to watch her a good deal sometimes with an expression of serious interest--sometimes with an air of irritation, and sometimes with no expression at all. But there existed this reason and this it was and this alone which had caused him to appear upon her threshold and it had also been the power which had prevented his disengaging himself with more incisive finality when he found himself ridiculously clasped about the knees as one who played the part of an obdurate parent in a melodrama.