Part 22 (1/2)

”In a hidden way--yes. That is what I am coming to. When I first saw Mrs. Gareth-Lawless sitting under her tree--” He suddenly stopped. ”No,”

harshly, ”I need not put it into words to _you_.” Then a pause as if for breath. ”She had a way of lifting her eyes as a very young angel might--she had a quivering spirit of a smile--and soft, deep curled corners to her mouth. You saw the same things in the old photograph you bought. The likeness was--Oh! it was h.e.l.lish that such a resemblance could be! In less than half an hour after she spoke to me I had shut another door. But I was obliged to go and _look_ at her again and again.

The resemblance drew me. By the time her husband died I knew her well enough to be sure what would happen. Some man would pick her up and throw her aside--and then some one else. She could have held nothing long. She would have pa.s.sed from one hand to another until she was tossed into the gutter and swept away--quivering spirit of a smile and all of it. I could not have shut any door on that. I prevented it--and kept her clean--by shutting doors right and left. I have watched over her. At times it has bored me frightfully. But after a year or so--behind another door I had shut the child.”

”Robin? I had sometimes thought so,” said the d.u.c.h.ess.

”I did not know why exactly. It was not affection or attraction. It was a sort of resentment of the beastly unfairness of things. The bottomless gulf seemed to yawn in her path when she was nothing but a baby.

Everything was being tossed into it before she had taken a step. I began to keep an eye on her and prevent things--or a.s.sist them. It was more fury than benevolence, but it has gone on for years--behind the shut door.”

”Are you quite sure you have been entirely free from all affection for her?” The d.u.c.h.ess asked the question impersonally though with a degree of interest.

”I think so. I am less sure that I have the power to feel what is called 'affection' for any one. I think that I have felt something nearer it for Donal--and for you--than for any one else. But when the child talked to me in the wood I felt for the first time that I wished her to know that my relation to her mother was not the reason for her hating me which she had believed.”

”She shall be made to understand,” said the d.u.c.h.ess.

”She must,” he said, ”_because of the rest_.”

The last four words were, as it were, italicised. Now, she felt, she was probably about to hear the chief thing he had been approaching. So she waited attentively.

”Behind a door has been shut another thing,” he said and he endeavoured to say it with his usual detached rigidity of calm, but did not wholly succeed. ”It is the outcome of the generations and the centuries at present diminis.h.i.+ng in value and dignity. The past having had its will of me and the present and future having gripped me--if I had had a son--”

As if in a flash she saw as he lingered on the words that he was speaking of a thing of which he had secretly thought often and much, though he had allowed no human being to suspect it. She had not suspected it herself. In a secretive, intense way he had pa.s.sionately desired a son.

”If you had had a son--” she repeated.

”He would have stood for both--the past and the future--at the beginning of a New World,” he ended.

He said it with such deliberate meaning that the magnitude of his possible significance caused her to draw a sudden breath.

”Is it going to be a New World?” she said.

”It cannot be the old one. I don't take it upon myself to describe the kind of world it will be. That will depend upon the men and women who build it. Those who were born during the last few years--those who are about to be born now.”

Then she knew what he was thinking of.

”Donal's child will be one of them,” she said.

”The Head of the House of Coombe--if there is a Head who starts fair--ought to have quite a lot to say--and do. Howsoever black things look,” obstinately fierce, ”England is not done for. At the worst no real Englishman believes she can be. She _can't_! You know the old saying, 'In all wars England loses battles, but she always wins one--the last one.' She always will. Afterwards she must do her bit for the New World.”

CHAPTER XVIII

This then was it--the New World and the human creatures who were to build it, the unborn as well as those now in their cradles or tottering in their first step on the pathway leading to the place of building. Yet he himself had no thought of there being any touch of heroic splendour in his way of looking at it. He was not capable of drama. Behind his shut doors of immovability and stiff coldness, behind his cynic habit of treating all things with detached lightness, the generations and the centuries had continued their work in spite of his modernity. His British obstinacy would not relinquish the long past he and his had seemed to _own_ in representing it. He had loved one woman, and one only--with a love like a deep wound; he had longed for a son; he had stubbornly undertaken to protect a creature he felt life had treated unfairly. The shattering of the old world had stirred in him a powerful interest in the future of the new one whose foundations were yet to be laid. The combination of these things might lead to curious developments.

They sat and talked long and the developments were perhaps more unusual than she had imagined they might be.

”If I had been able to express the something which approached affection which I felt for Donal, he would have found out that my limitations were not deliberately evil proclivities,” was one of the things he said. ”One day he would have ended by making a clean breast of it. He was afraid of me. I suspect he was afraid of his mother--fond as they were of each other. I should have taken the matter in hand and married the pair of them at once--quietly if they preferred it, but safely and sanely. G.o.d knows I should have comprehended their wish to keep a roaring world out of their paradise. It _was_ paradise!”

”How you believe her!” she exclaimed.