Read the book: «Robinetta»

I
THE PLUM TREE

At Wittisham several of the little houses had crept down very close to the river. Mrs. Prettyman’s cottage was just like a hive made for the habitation of some gigantic bee; its pointed roof covered with deep, close-cut thatch the colour of a donkey’s hide. There were small windows under the overhanging eaves, a pathway of irregular flat stones ran up to the doorway, and a bit of low wall divided the tiny garden from the river. The Plum Tree grew just beside the wall, so near indeed that it could look at itself on spring days when the water was like a mirror. In autumn the branches on that side of the tree were the first to be shaken, lest any of the fruit should fall down and be lost. Sometimes a village child treading cautiously on bare toes amongst the stones along the narrow margin, would pounce upon a plum with a squeal of joy, for although the village was surrounded with orchards, the fruit of Mrs. Prettyman’s tree had a flavour all its own.

The tree had been given to her by a nephew who was a gardener in a great fruit orchard in the North, and her husband had planted and tended it for years. It began life as a slender thing with two or three rods of branches, that looked as if the first wind of winter would blow it away, but before the storms came, it had begun to trust itself to the new earth, and to root itself with force and determination. There were good soil and water near it, and plenty of sunshine, and, as is the way of Nature, it set itself to do its own business at all seasons, unlike the distracted heart of man. The traffic of the river came and went; around the headland the big ships were steering in, or going out to sea; and in the village the human life went on while the Plum Tree grew high enough to look over the wall. Its stem by that time had a firm footing; next it took a charming bend to the side, and then again threw out new branches in that direction. It turned itself from the prevailing wind, throwing a new grace into its attitude, and went on growing; returning in blossom and leaves and fruit an hundredfold for all that it received from the earth and the sun.

In spring it was enchanting; at first, before the blossoms came out, with small bright leaves, and buds like pearls, heaped upon the branches; then, later, when the whole tree was white, imaged like a bride, in the looking-glass of the river. It only wanted a nightingale to sing in it by moonlight. There were no nightingales there, but the thrushes sang in the dawning, and the little birds whose voices were sweet and thin chirruped about it in crowds, while the larks, trilling out the ardour of mating time, sometimes rose from their nests in the grass and soared over its topmost branches on their skyward flight.

Spring, therefore, was its merriest time, for then every passer-by would cry, “What a beautiful tree!” or “Did ye ever see the likes of it?”

There were a few days of inevitable sadness a little later when its million petals fell and made a delicate carpet of snow on the ground. There they lay in a kind of fairy ring, as if there had been a shower of mother-of-pearl in the April night; and no human creature would have dared set a vandal foot on that magic circle, and mar the perfection of its beauty. All the same the Plum Tree had lost its petals, and that was hard to bear at first. But though its Wittisham neighbours often said to summer trippers, “I wish you could have seen it in blossom!” the Plum Tree did not repine, because of the secrets–the thousand, thousand secrets–it held under its leaves. “The blossoms were but a promise,” it thought, “and soon everybody will see the meaning of them.”

Then the tiny green globes began to appear on every branch and twig; crowding, crowding, crowding till it seemed as if there could never be room for so many to grow; but the weaker ones fell from the boughs or were blown away when the wind was fierce, so the Plum Tree felt no anxiety, knowing that it was built for a large family! The little green globes grew and grew, and drank in sweet mother-juices, and swelled, and when the summer sun touched their cheeks all day they flushed and reddened, till when August came the tree was laden with purpling fruit; fruit so tempting that its rosy beauty had sometimes to be hidden under a veil of grey fishing net, lest the myriad bird-friends it had made during the summer should love it too much for its own good.

So the Plum Tree grew and flourished, taking its part in the pageant of the seasons, unaware that its existence was to be interwoven with that of men; or that creatures of another order of being were to owe some changes in their fortunes to its silent obedience to the motive of life.

II
THE MANOR HOUSE

The long, low drawing room of the Manor at Stoke Revel was the warmest and most genial room in the old Georgian house. It was four-windowed and faced south, and even on this morning of a chilly and backward spring, the tentative sunshine of April had contrived to put out the fire in the steel grate. One of the windows opened wide to the garden, and let in a scent which was less of flowers than of the promise of flowers–a scent of earth and green leaves, of the leafless daphne still a-bloom in the shrubbery, of hyacinths and daffodils and tulips and primroses still sheathed in their buds and awaiting a warmer air.

But this promise of spring borne into the room by the wandering breeze from the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of age and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon, a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless photographs of her family and her wide connection, most prominent among them two–that of her husband, Admiral de Tracy, who had died many years ago, and that of her grandson, his successor, whose guardian she was, and whose minority she directed. Her eldest son, the father of this boy, who had died on his ship off the coast of Africa; his wife, dead too these many years; her other sons as well (she had borne four); their wives and children–grown men, fashionable women, beautiful children, fat babies: the likenesses of them all were around her, standing amid china and flowers and bric-a-brac on the crowded tables and what-nots of the not inharmonious and yet shabby Victorian room. Mrs. de Tracy, it might at a glance be seen, was no innovator, either in furniture, in dress, or probably in ideas. As she was dressed now, in the severely simple black of a widow, so she had been dressed when she first mourned Admiral de Tracy. The muslin ends of her widow’s cap fell upon her shoulders, and its border rested on the hard lines of iron-grey hair which framed a face small, pale, aquiline in character and decidedly austere in expression.

She took one from a docketed pile of letters and held it up under her glasses, the sun suddenly striking a dazzle of blue and green from the diamond rings on her small, withered hands. Then she read it aloud to her companion in an even and chilly voice. She had read it before, in the same way, at the same hour, several times. The letter, couched in an epistolary style largely dependent upon underlining, appeared to contain, nevertheless, some matter of moment. It was dated from Eaton Square, in London, some weeks before, and signed Maria Spalding. (“Her mother was a Gallup,” Mrs. de Tracy would say, if any one asked who Maria Spalding was; and this was considered sufficient, for Mrs. de Tracy’s maiden name had been Gallup,–not euphonious but nevertheless aristocratic.)

My dear Augusta (Maria Spalding wrote): I am going to ask you to help me out of a difficulty. There is no use beating about the bush. You know that Cynthia’s daughter Robinetta (Loring is her married name) has been with me for a month. American or no American, I meant to have had her for a part of the season, and to present her, if possible (so good for these Americans to learn what royalty is and to breathe the atmosphere which doth hedge a King as Shakespeare says, and which they can never have, of course, in a country like theirs). I know you can’t approve, dear Augusta, and you will blame me for sentimentality–but I never can forget what a sweet creature Cynthia was before she ran away with that odious American–and my greatest friend in girlhood, too, you must remember. So Robinette, as she is generally called, has come to my house as a home, but a most unlucky thing has happened. I have had influenza so badly that it has affected my heart (an old trouble), I am ordered to Nauheim, and Robinette is stranded, poor dear. She has few friends in London and certainly none who can put her up. Tho’ she is a widow, she is only twenty-two (just imagine!), very pretty, and really, tho’ you won’t believe it, quite nice. I am desperate, and just wondering if you would let by-gones be by-gones, and receive her at Stoke Revel. She has set her heart upon seeing the place, and some picture she was called after (I can’t remember it, so it can’t be one of the famous Stoke Revel group–a copy, I fancy), and on paying a visit to Lizzie Prettyman, her mother’s old nurse at Wittisham over the river. She promised her mother she would do this–and such a promise is sacred, don’t you think? It’s such an old story now, Cynthia’s American marriage, and no fault of Robinette’s, poor dear child. Her wish is almost a pious one, don’t you agree, to pay respect to her mother’s memory and the family, and is much to be encouraged in these days of radicalism, when every natural tie is loosened and people pay no more respect to their parents than if they hadn’t any, but had made themselves and brought themselves up from the beginning. So don’t you think it’s a good thing to encourage the right kind of feeling in Robinette, especially as she is an American, you know…

Mrs. de Tracy paused, and replaced the letter in the package from which she had withdrawn it.

“Maria Spalding’s point of view,” she observed, “has, I confess, helped me to overcome the extreme reluctance I felt to receive the child of that American here. Cynthia de Tracy’s elopement nearly broke my dear husband’s heart. She was the apple of his eye before our marriage; so much younger than himself that she was like his child rather than his sister.”

“What a shock it must have been!” murmured the companion. “What ingratitude! Can you really receive her child? Of course you know best, Mrs. de Tracy; but it seems a risk.”

“Hardly a risk,” rejoined Mrs. de Tracy with dignity. “But it is a trial to me, and an effort that I scarcely feel called upon to make.”

Miss Smeardon was so well versed in her duties that she knew she always had to urge her employer to do exactly what she most wanted to do, and the poor creature had developed a really wonderful ingenuity in divining what these wishes were. Just now, however, she was, to use a sporting phrase, “at fault” for a minute. She could not exactly tell whether Mrs. de Tracy wanted to be urged to ask her niece to Stoke Revel, or whether she wanted to be supplied with a really plausible excuse for not doing so. Those of you who have seen a hound at fault can imagine the companion at this moment: irresolute, tense, desperately anxious to find and follow up the right scent. Compromise, that useful refuge, came to her aid.

“It is difficult to know,” she faltered. Then Mrs. de Tracy gave her the lead.

“Maria Spalding is right when she says that my husband’s niece contemplates a duty in visiting Stoke Revel,” she announced. “The young woman is the lawful daughter of Cynthia de Tracy that was: our solicitors could never discover anything dubious in the marriage, though we long suspected it. Therefore, though I never could have invited her here, I admit that the Admiral’s niece has a right to come, in a way.”

“Though her maiden name was Bean!” ejaculated the companion, almost under her breath. “There are Pease in the North, as everyone knows; perhaps there are Beans somewhere.”

“There have never been Beans,” said Mrs. de Tracy solemnly and totally unconscious of a pun. “Look for yourself!”

Miss Smeardon did not need to rise from her seat and fetch Burke: it lay always close at hand. She merely lifted it on to her knee and ran her finger down the names beginning with B-e-a.

“Beaton, Beare, Beatty, Beale–” she read out, and she shook her head in dismal triumph; “but never a Bean! No! we English have no such dreadful names, thank Heavens!”

“This is the beginning of April,” pursued Mrs. de Tracy, referring to a date-card. “Maria Spalding’s course at Nauheim will take three weeks. We must allow her a week for going and coming. During that time Mrs. David Loring can be my guest.”

“A whole month!” cried the companion, as though in ecstasy at her employer’s generosity. “A whole month at Stoke Revel!”

Mrs. de Tracy took no notice. “Write in my name to Maria Spalding, please,” she commanded. “Be sure that there is no mistake about dates. Mention the departure and arrival of trains, and say that Mrs. David Loring will find a fly at the station. That is all, I think.”

The companion bent officiously forward. “You remember, of course, that young Mr. Lavendar comes down next week upon business?”

“Well, what if he does?” asked Mrs. de Tracy shortly.

“Mrs. David Loring is a widow,” murmured the companion darkly; “a young American widow; and they are said to be so dangerous!”

Mrs. de Tracy drew herself up. “Do you insinuate that the Admiral’s niece will lay herself out to attract Mr. Lavendar, a widow in the house of a widow! You go rather too far, Miss Smeardon, though you are speaking of an American. Besides, allusions of this character are extremely distasteful to me. I have been told that the minds of unmarried women are always running upon love affairs, but I should hardly have thought it of you.”

“I’m sure I never imagined any about myself!” murmured Miss Smeardon with the pitiable writhe of the trodden-on worm.

“I should suppose not,” rejoined Mrs. de Tracy gravely, and the companion took up her pen obediently to write to Maria Spalding.

“Shall I send your love to the Admiral’s niece?” she humbly enquired, “or–or something of the kind?” There was irony in the last phrase, but it was quite unconscious.

“Not my love,” replied Mrs. de Tracy, “some suitable message. Make no mistake about the dates, remember.”

Thus a letter containing dates, and though not love, the substitute described by Miss Smeardon as “something of the kind” for an unwanted niece from an unknown aunt, left Stoke Revel by the afternoon post and reached Robinette Loring at breakfast next morning.

III
YOUNG MRS. LORING

Young Mrs. Loring thought she had never taken so long a drive as that from the Weston railway station to Stoke Revel. The way stretched through narrow winding roads, always up hill, always between high Devonshire hedges. The rain-soaked lanes were slippery and she was unpleasantly conscious of the size and weight of the American wardrobe trunk that reared its mighty frame in front of her almost to the blotting-out of the driver, who steadied it with one hand as he plied the whip with the other. It struck her humorously that the trunk was larger than most of the cottages they were passing.

It was a late spring that year in England,–Robinette was a new-comer and did not know that England runs to late and wet springs, believing that they make more conversation than early, fine ones,–and the trees were just bursting into leaf. The sun had not shone for three days and the landscape, for all its beautiful greenness, looked gloomy to an eye accustomed to a good deal of crude sunshine.

As the horse mounted higher and higher Robinette glanced out of the windows at the dripping boughs and her face lost something of its sparkle of anticipation. She had little to expect in the way of a warm welcome, she knew that; or at least her mind knew it, but Robinette’s heart always expected surprises, although she had lived two and twenty summers and was a widow at that.

Her mother had been a de Tracy of Stoke Revel whose connection with that ancient family had ceased abruptly when she met an American architect while traveling on the Continent, married him out of hand and went to his native New England with him. The de Tracys had no opinion of America, its government, its institutions, its customs, or its people, and when they learned that Cynthia de Tracy had not only allied herself with this undesirable nation, but had selected a native by the name of Harold Bean, they regarded the incident of the marriage as closed.

The union had been a happy one, though the de Tracys of Stoke Revel had always regarded the unfortunately named architect more as a vegetable than a human being; and the daughter of the marriage was the young Mrs. Loring now driving in the station fly to the home of her mother’s people.

Her father had died when she was fifteen and her mother followed three years after, leaving her with a respectable fortune but no relations; the entire family (happily, Mrs. de Tracy would have said) having died out with Harold. Robinette was unspeakably lonely, even with her hundred friends, for there was enough English blood in her to make her cry out inwardly for kith and kin, for family ties, for all the dear familiar backgrounds of hearth and home. Had a welcoming hand been stretched across the sea she would have flown at once to make acquaintance with the de Tracys, cold and indifferent as they had always been, but no bidding ever came, and the picture of the Manor House of Stoke Revel on her dressing-table was the only reminder of her connection with that ancient and honourable house.

It is not difficult to see, under the circumstances, how the nineteen-year-old Robinette became the wife of the first man in whom she inspired a serious passion.

It is incredible that women should confuse the passive process of being loved with the active process of loving, but it occurs nevertheless, and Robinette drifted into marriage with the vaguest possible notions of what it meant; feeling and knowing that she needed something, and supposing it must be a husband. It was better fortune, perhaps, than she merited, and equally kind for both parties, that her husband died before either of them realized the tragic mistake. David Loring was too absorbed in his own emotions to note the absence of full response on the part of his wife; Robinette was too much a child and too inexperienced to be conscious of her own lack of feeling.

It was death, not life, that opened her eyes. When David Loring lay in his coffin, Robinette’s heart was suddenly seized with growing pains. Her vision widened; words and promises took on a new and larger meaning, and she became a serious woman for her years, although there was an ineradicable gaiety of spirit in her that needed only sunshine to make it the dominant note of her nature.

At the moment, Robinette, in the station fly on her way to Stoke Revel, was only in the making, although she herself considered her life as practically finished. The past and the present were moulding her into something that only the future could determine. Sometimes April, sometimes July, sometimes witch, sometimes woman; impetuous, intrepid, romantic, tempestuous, illogical,–these were but the elements of which the coming years of experience had yet to shape a character. Young Mrs. Loring had plenty of briars, but she had good roots and in favorable soil would be certain to bear roses.

But in the immediate present, the fly with the immense American wardrobe trunk beside the driver, turned into the avenue of Stoke Revel, and Mrs. David Loring bestowed upon herself those little feminine attentions which precede arrival–pattings of the hair behind the ears, twitches of the veil, and pullings down about the waist and sleeves. A little toy of a purse made of golden chainwork, hanging from her wrist, was searched for the driver’s fare, and it had hardly snapped to again when the fly drew up before the entrance to the house. How interesting it looked! Robinette put her head out of the carriage window and gazed up at the long row of windows, the old weather-coloured stones, and the carved front of the building. Here was a house where things might happen, she thought, and her young heart gave a sudden bound of anticipation.

But the door was shut, alas! and a blank feeling came over Robinette as she looked at it. Some one perhaps would come out and welcome her, she thought for a brief moment, but only the butler appeared, who, with the formal announcement of her name, ushered her into a long, low room with a row of windows on one side and a pleasant old-fashioned look of comfort and habitation. She caught a glimpse of a tea-table with a steaming urn upon it, heard the furious barking of a little dog, saw that there were two figures in the room and moved instinctively towards the one beside the window, the figure in weeds, neither very tall nor very imposing, yet somehow formidable.

“How do you do?” said an icy voice, and a chill hand held hers for a moment, but did not press it. The colour in Robinette’s cheeks paled and then rushed back, as she drew herself up unconsciously.

“I am very well, thank you, Aunt de Tracy,” she answered with commendable composure.

“This is my friend and companion, Miss Smeardon,” continued Mrs. de Tracy, advancing to the tea-table where that useful personage officiated. “Mrs. David Loring–Miss Smeardon.” Miss Smeardon had the dog upon her lap, yapping, clashing his teeth together, and obviously thirsting for the visitor’s blood. He was quieted with soothing words, and Robinette seated herself innocently in the nearest chair, beside the table.

“Excuse me!” the companion said with a slight cough; “Mrs. de Tracy’s chair! Do you mind taking another?” There was something disagreeable in her voice, and in Mrs. de Tracy’s deliberate scrutiny something so nearly insulting that a childish impulse to cry then and there suddenly seized upon Robinette. This was her mother’s home–and no kiss had welcomed her to it, no kind word! There were perfunctory questions about her journey, references to the coldness and lateness of the spring, enquiries after the health of Maria Spalding (whose mother was a Gallup), but no claiming of kinship, no naming of her mother’s name nor of her native country! Robinette’s ardent spirit had felt sorrow, but it had never met rebuff nor known injustice, and the sudden stir of revolt at her heart was painful with an almost physical pain.

After a long drawn hour of this social torture, Mrs. de Tracy rang, and a hard-featured elderly maid appeared.

“Show Mrs. Loring to her room, Benson,” said the mistress of the house, “and help her to unpack.”

Robinette followed her conductor upstairs with a sinking heart. Oh! but the chill of this English spring was in her bones, and the coldness of a reception so frigid that her passionate young spirit almost rebelled on the spot, prompting wild ideas and impulsive impossibilities; even a flight to her mother’s old nurse–to Lizzie Prettyman, so often lovingly described, with her little thatched cottage beyond the river! Surely she would find the welcome there that was lacking here, and the touch of human kindness that one craved in a foreign land. But no! Robinette called to her aid her strong American common sense and the “grit” that her countrymen admire. Was she to confess herself routed in the very first onset–the very first attempt in storming the ancestral stronghold? With a characteristically quick return of hope, the Admiral’s niece exclaimed, “Certainly not!”