Chapter 5

"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:--

He that loves a rosy cheek, Or a coral lip admires, Or from star-like eyes doth seek Fuel to maintain his fires,-- As old Time makes these decay, So his flames will waste away.

But a smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts and calm desires, Hearts with equal love combined--

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.

For a helpless victim, however, a slave bound in fetters of steel, one would have to know Cummins, the under housemaid, who lighted Mrs. Loring's fire night and morning. She was young, shy, country bred, and new to service. When Mrs. Benson sent her to the guest's room at eight o'clock on the morning after her arrival she stopped outside the door in a panic of fear.

"Come in!" called a cheerful voice. "Come in!"

Cummins entered, bearing her box with brush and cloth and kindlings. To her further embarrassment Mrs. Loring was sitting up in bed with an ermine coat on, over which her bright hair fell in picturesque disorder. She had brought the coat for theatre and opera, but as these attractions were lacking at Stoke Revel and as life there was, to her, one prolonged Polar expedition, with dashes farthest north morning and evening, she had diverted it to practical uses.

"Make me a quick fire please, a big fire, a hot fire," she begged, "or I shall be late for breakfast; I never can step into that tin tub till the ice is melted."

"There's no ice in it, ma'am," expostulated Cummins gently, with the voice of a wood dove.

"You can't see it because you're English," said the strange lady, "but I can see it and feel it. Oh, you make _such_ a good fire! What is your name, please?"

"Cummins, ma'am."

"There's another Cummins downstairs, but she is tall and large. You shall be 'Little Cummins.'"

Now every morning the shy maid palpitated outside the bedroom door, having given her modest knock; palpitated for fear it should be all a dream. But no, it was not! there would be a clear-voiced "Come in!" and then, as she entered; "Good morning, Little Cummins. I've been longing for you since daybreak!" A trifle later on it was, "Good Little Cummins bearing coals of comfort! Kind Little Cummins," and other strange and wonderful terms of praise, until Little Cummins felt herself consumed by a passion to which Mrs. de Tracy's coals became as less than naught unless they could be heaped on the altar of the beloved.

So life went on at Stoke Revel, outwardly even and often dull, while in reality many subtle changes were taking place below the surface; changes slight in themselves but not without meaning.

Robinette ran up to her room directly after breakfast one morning and pinned on her hat as she came downstairs. Mark Lavendar had gone to London for a few days, but even the dullness of breakfast-table conversation had not robbed her of her joy in the early sunshine, made more cheery by the prospect of a walk with Carnaby, with whom she was now fast friends.

Carnaby looked at her beamingly as they stood together on the steps. "You're the best turned-out woman of my acquaintance," he said approvingly, with a laughable struggle for the tone of a middle-aged man of the world.

"How many ladies of fashion do you know, my child?" enquired Robinetta, pulling on her gloves.

"I see a lot of 'em off and on," Carnaby answered somewhat huffily, "and they don't call me a child either!"

"Don't they? Then that's because they're timid and don't dare address a future Admiral as Infant-in-Arms! Come on, Middy dear, let's walk."

Robinette wore a white serge dress and jacket, and her hat was a rough straw turned up saucily in two places with black owls' heads. Mrs. Benson and Little Cummins had looked at it curiously while Robinette was at breakfast.

"'Tis black underneath and white on top, Mrs. Benson. 'Ow can that be? It looks as if one 'at 'ad been clapped on another!"

"That's what it is, Cummins. It's a double hat; but they'll do anything in America. It's a double hat with two black owls' heads, and I'll wager they charged double price for it!"

"She's a lovely beauty in anythink and everythink she wears," said Little Cummins loyally.

"May I call you 'Cousin Robin'?" Carnaby asked as they walked along. "Robinette is such a long name."

"Cousin Robin is very nice, I think," she answered. "As a matter of fact I ought to be your Aunt Robin; it would be much more appropriate."

"Aunt be blowed!" ejaculated Carnaby.

"You're very fond of making yourself out old, but it's no go! When I first heard you were a widow I thought you would be grandmother's age,--I say--do you think you will marry another time, Cousin Robin?"

"That's a very leading question for a gentleman to put to a lady! Were you intending to ask me to wait for you, Middy dear?" asked Robinette, putting her arm in the boy's laughingly, quite unconscious of his mood.

"I'd wait quick enough if you'd let me! I'd wait a lifetime! There never was anybody like you in the world!"

The words were said half under the boy's breath and the emotion in his tone was a complete and disagreeable surprise. Here was something that must be nipped in the bud, instantly and courageously. Robinette dropped Carnaby's arm and said: "We'll talk that over at once, Middy dear, but first you shall race me to the top of the twisting path, down past the tulip beds, to the seat under the big ash tree.--Come on!"

The two reached the tree in a moment, Carnaby sufficiently in advance to preserve his self-respect and with a colour heightened by something other than the exercise of running.

"Sit down, first cousin once removed!" said Robinette. "Do you know the story of Sydney Smith, who wrote apologizing to somebody for not being able to come to dinner? 'The house is full of cousins,' he said; 'would they were "once removed"!'"

"It's no good telling me literary anecdotes!--You're not treating me fairly," said Carnaby sulkily.

"I'm treating you exactly as you should be treated, Infant-in-Arms," Robinette answered firmly. "Give me your two paws, and look me straight in the eye."

Carnaby was no coward. His steel-grey eyes blazed as he met his cousin's look. "Carnaby dear, do you know what you are to me? You are my kinsman; my only male relation. I'm so fond of you already, don't spoil it! Think what you can be to me if you will. I am all alone in the world and when you grow a little older how I should like to depend upon you! I need affection; so do you, dear boy; can't I see how you are just starving for it? There is no reason in the world why we shouldn't be fond of each other! Oh! how grateful I should be to think of a strong young middy growing up to advise me and take me about! It was that kind of care and thought of me that was in your mind just now!"

"You'll be marrying somebody one of these days," blurted Carnaby, wholly moved, but only half convinced. "Then you'll forget all about your 'kinsman.'"

"I have no intention in that direction," said Robinette, "but if I change my mind I'll consult you first; how will that do?"

"It wouldn't do any good," sighed the boy, "so I'd rather you wouldn't! You'd have your own way spite of everything a fellow could say against it!"

There was a moment of embarrassment; then the silence was promptly broken by Robinette.

"Well, Middy dear, are we the best of friends?" she asked, rising from the bench and putting out her hand.

The lad took it and said all in a glow of chivalry, "You're the dearest, the best, and the prettiest cousin in the world! You don't mind my thinking you're the prettiest?"

"Mind it? I delight in it! I shall come to your ship and pour out tea for you in my most fetching frock. Your friends will say: 'Who is that particularly agreeable lady, Carnaby?' And you, with swelling chest, will respond, 'That's my American cousin, Mrs. Loring. She's a nice creature; I'm glad you like her!'"

Robinette's imitation of Carnaby's possible pomposity was so amusing and so clever that it drew a laugh from the boy in spite of himself.

"Just let anyone try to call you a 'creature'!" he exclaimed. "He'd have me to reckon with! Oh! I am so tired of being a boy! The inside of me is all grown up and everybody keeps on looking at the outside and thinking I'm just the same as I always was!"

"Dear old Middy, you're quite old enough to be my protector and that is what you shall be! Now shall we go in? I want you to stand near by while I ask your grandmother a favor."

"She won't do it if she can help it," was Carnaby's succinct reply.

"Oh, I am not sure! Where shall we find her,--in the library?"

"Yes; come along! Get up your circulation; you'll need it!"

"Aunt de Tracy, there is something at Stoke Revel I am very anxious to have if you will give it to me," said Robinette, as she came into the library a few minutes later.

Mrs. de Tracy looked up from her knitting solemnly. "If it belongs to me, I shall no doubt be willing, as I know you would not ask for anything out of the common; but I own little here; nearly all is Carnaby's."

"This was my mother's," said Robinette. "It is a picture hanging in the smoking room; one that was a great favorite of hers, called 'Robinetta.' Her drawing-master found an Italian artist in London who went to the National Gallery and made a copy of the Sir Joshua picture, and I was named after it."

"I wish your mother could have been a little less romantic," sighed Mrs. de Tracy. "There were such fine old family names she might have used: Marcia and Elspeth, and Rosamond and Winifred!"

"I am sorry, Aunt de Tracy. If I had been consulted I believe I should have agreed with you. Perhaps when my mother was in America the family ties were not drawn as tightly as in the former years?"

"If it was so, it was only natural," said the old lady. "However, if you ask Carnaby, and if the picture has no great value, I am sure he will wish you to have it, especially if you know it to have been your mother's property." Here Carnaby sauntered into the room. "That's all right, grandmother," he said, "I heard what you were saying; only I wish it was a real Sir Joshua we were giving Cousin Robin instead of a copy!"

"Thank you, Carnaby dear, and thank you, too, Aunt de Tracy. You can't think how much it is to me to have this; it is a precious link between mother's girlhood, and mother, and me." So saying, she dropped a timid kiss upon Mrs. de Tracy's iron-grey hair, and left the room.

"If she could live in England long enough to get over that excessive freedom of manner, your cousin would be quite a pleasing person, but I am afraid it goes too deep to be cured," Mrs. de Tracy remarked as she smoothed the hairs that might have been ruffled by Robinette's kiss.

Carnaby made no reply. He was looking out into the garden and feeling half a boy, half a man, but wholly, though not very contentedly, a kinsman.

XI

THE SANDS AT WESTON

"Thursday morning? Is it possible that this is Thursday morning? And I must run up to London on Saturday," said Lavendar to himself as he finished dressing by the open window. He looked up the day of the week in his calendar first, in order to make quite sure of the fact. Yes, there was no doubt at all that it was Thursday. His sense of time must have suffered some strange confusion; in one way it seemed only an hour ago that he had arrived from the clangour and darkness of London to the silence of the country, the cuckoos calling across the river between the wooded hills, and the April sunshine on the orchard trees; in another, years might have passed since the moment when he first saw Robinette Loring sitting under Mrs. Prettyman's plum tree.

"Eight days have we spent together in this house, and yet since that time when we first crossed in the boat, I've never been more than half an hour alone with her," he thought. "There are only three other people in the house after all, but they seem to have the power of multiplying themselves like the loaves and fishes (only when they're not wanted) so that we're eternally in a crowd. That boy particularly! I like Carnaby, if he could get it into his thick head that his presence isn't always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he's quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it's my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I'll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can't like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her," he sighed. "After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much as she does me?"

No one could have told from Lavendar's face, when he appeared fresh and smiling at the breakfast table half an hour later, that he was hatching any deep-laid schemes.

Robinette entered the dining room five minutes late, as usual, pretty as a pink, breathless with hurrying. She wore a white dress again, with one rose stuck at her waistband, "A little tribute from the gardener," she said, as she noticed Lavendar glance at it. She went rapidly around the table shaking hands, and gave Carnaby's red cheeks a pinch in passing that made Lavendar long to tweak the boy's ear.

"Good morning, all!" she said cheerily, "and how is my first cousin once removed? Is he going to Weston with me this morning to buy hairpins?"

"He is!" Carnaby answered joyfully, between mouthfuls of bacon and eggs. "He has been out of hairpins for a week."

"Does he need tapes and buttons also?" asked Robinette, taking the piece of muffin from his hand and buttering it for herself; an act highly disapproved of by Mrs. de Tracy, who hurriedly requested Bates to pass the bread.

"He needs everything you need," Carnaby said with heightened colour.

"My hair is giving me a good deal of trouble, lately," remarked Lavendar, passing his hand over a thickly thatched head.

"I have an excellent American tonic that I will give you after breakfast," said Robinette roguishly. "You need to apply it with a brush at ten, eleven, and twelve o'clock, sitting in the sun continuously between those hours so that the scalp may be well invigorated. Carnaby, will you buy me butter scotch and lemonade and oranges in Weston?"

"I will, if Grandmother'll increase my allowance," said Carnaby malevolently, "for I need every penny I've got in hand for the hairpins."

"I hope you are not hungry, Robinetta," said Mrs. de Tracy, "that you have to buy food in Weston."

"No, indeed," said Robinette, "I was only longing to test Carnaby's generosity and educate him in buying trifles for pretty ladies."

"He can probably be relied on to educate himself in that line when the time comes," Mrs. de Tracy remarked; "and now if you have all finished talking about hair, I will take up my breakfast again."

"Oh, Aunt de Tracy, I am so sorry if it wasn't a nice subject, but I never thought. Anyway I only talked about hairpins; it was Mr. Lavendar who introduced hair into the conversation; wasn't it, Middy dear?"

Lavendar thought he could have annihilated them both for their open comradeship, their obvious delight in each other's society. Was he to be put on the shelf like a dry old bachelor? Not he! He would circumvent them in some way or another, although the rôle of gooseberry was new to him.

The two young people set off in high spirits, and Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon watched them as they walked down the avenue on their way to the station, their clasped hands swinging in a merry rhythm as they hummed a bit of the last popular song.

"I hope Robinetta will not Americanize Carnaby," said Mrs. de Tracy. "He seems so foolishly elated, so feverishly gay all at once. Her manner is too informal; Carnaby requires constant repression."

"Perhaps his temperature has not returned to normal since his attack of quinsy," Miss Smeardon observed, reassuringly.

Meanwhile Lavendar sat in Admiral de Tracy's old smoking room for half an hour writing letters. Every time that he glanced up from his work, and he did so pretty often, his eyes fell on a picture that hung upon the opposite wall. It was the copy of Sir Joshua's "Robinetta" made long ago and just presented to its namesake.

In the portrait the girl's hair was a still brighter gold; yet certainly there was a likeness somewhere about it, he thought; partly in the expression, partly in the broad low forehead, and the eyes that looked as if they were seeing fairies.

Of course to his mind Mrs. Loring was a hundred times more lovely than Sir Joshua's famous girl with a robin. He felt very ill-used because Robinette and Carnaby had deliberately gone for an excursion without him and had left him toiling over business papers when they had gone off to enjoy themselves.