"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 diminishing 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.

"She is not a trivial thing, neither was he. If I did _not_ believe her I should know that he _meant_ to marry her, even if fate played them some ghastly trick and there was not time. Another girl's consciousness of herself might have saved her, but she had no consciousness but his.

If--if a son is born he should be what his father would have been after my death."

"The Head of the House," the d.u.c.h.ess said.

"It is a curious thing," he deliberated, "that now there remains no possible head but what is left of myself--it ceases to seem the mere pompous phrase one laughed at--the Head of the House of Coombe. Here I, of all men, sit before you glaring into the empty future and demanding one. There ought to have been more males in the family. Only four were killed--and we are done for."

"If you had seen them married before he went away--" she began.

He rose to his feet as if involuntarily. He looked as she had never seen him look before.

"Allow me to make a fantastic confession to you," he said. "It will open doors. If all were as the law foolishly demands it should be--if she were safe in the ordinary way--absurdly incredible or not as the statement may seem--I should now be at her feet."

"At her feet!" she said slowly, because she felt herself facing actual revelation.

"Her child would be to me the child of the son who ought to have been born to me a life time ago. G.o.d, how I have wanted him! Robin would seem to be what another Madonna-like young creature might have been if she had been my wife. She would not know that she was a little saint on an altar. She would be the shrine of the past and the future. In my inexpressive way I should be worshipping before her. That her possible son would rescue the House of Coombe from extinction would have meant much, but it would be a mere detail. Now you understand."

Yes. She understood. Things she had never comprehended and had not expected to comprehend explained themselves with comparative clearness.

He proceeded with a certain hard distinctness.

"The thing which grips me most strongly is that this one--who is one of those who have work before them--shall not be handicapped. He shall not begin life manacled and shamed by illegitimacy. He shall begin it with the background of all his father meant to give him. The law of England will not believe in his claims unless they can be proven. She can prove nothing. I can prove nothing for her. If she had been a little female costermonger she would have demanded her 'marriage lines' and clung to them fiercely. She would have known that to be able to flaunt them in the face of argument was indispensable."

"She probably did not know that there existed such doc.u.ments," the d.u.c.h.ess said. "Neither of the pair knew anything for the time but that they were wild with love and were to be torn apart."

"Therefore," he said with distinctness even clearer and harder, "she must possess indisputable doc.u.mentary evidence of marriage before the child is born--as soon as possible."

"Marriage!" she hesitated aghast. "But _who_ will--?"

"I," he answered with absolute rigidity. "It will be difficult. It must be secret. But if it can be done--when his time comes the child can look his new world in the face. He will be the Head of the House of Coombe when it most needs a strong fellow who has no cause to fear anything and who holds money and power in his hands."

"You propose to suggest that she shall marry _you_?" she put it to him.

"Yes. It will be the devil's own job," he answered. "She has not begun to think of the child yet--and she has abhorred me all her life. To her the world means nothing. She does not know what it can do to her and she would not care if she did. Donal was her world and he is gone. But you and I know what she does not."

"So this is what you have been thinking?" she said. It was indeed an unarchaic point of view. But even as she heard him she realised that it was the almost inevitable outcome--not only of what was at the moment happening to the threatened and threatening world, but of his singularly secretive past--of all the things he had hidden and also of all the things he had professed not to hide but had baffled people with.

"Since the morning Redcliff dropped his bomb I have not been able to think of much else," he said. "It was a bomb, I own. Neither you nor I had reason for a shadow of suspicion. My mind has a trick of dragging back to me a memory of a village girl who was left as--as she is. She said her lover had married her--but he went away and never came back.

The village she lived in was a few miles from Coombe Keep and she gave birth to a boy. His childhood must have been a sort of h.e.l.l. When other boys had rows with him they used to shout 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d' after him in the street. He had a shifty, sickened look and when he died of measles at seven years old no doubt he was glad of it. He used to run crying to his wretched mother and hide his miserable head in her ap.r.o.n."

"It sounds unendurable," the d.u.c.h.ess said sharply.

"I can defy the world as she cannot," he said with dangerous calm. "I can provide money for her. She may be hidden away. But only one thing will save her child--Donal's child--from being a sort of outcast and losing all he should possess--a quick and quiet marriage which will put all doubt out of the question."

"And you know perfectly well what the general opinion will be with regard to yourself?"