Robinetta. Findlater Jane Helen
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!”
IV
A CHILLY RECEPTION
Mrs. Benson approached the wardrobe trunk with the air of a person who has taken an immediate and violent dislike to an object.
“We have all looked at your box, ma’am, but I am sorry to say we are not sure that it is set up properly. It is very different from any we have ever seen at the Manor, and the men had some difficulty in getting it up to the room. I fancy it is upside down, is it not? No? We rather thought it was. I would call the boot-and-knife boy to unlock it, but he jammed his hand in attempting to force the catches, and I thought you would be kind enough to instruct me how to open it, perhaps?”
“I am quite able to do it myself,” said Robinette, keeping down a hysterical laugh. “See how easily it goes when you know the secret!” and she deftly turned her key in two locks one after the other, let down the mysterious façade of the affair, and pulled out an extraordinary rack on which hung so many dresses and wraps that Mrs. Benson lost her breath in surprise.
“Would you like me to carry some of your things into another room, ma’am?” she asked. “They will never go in the wardrobe; it is only a plain English wardrobe, ma’am. We have never had any American guests.”
“The things needn’t be moved,” said Robinette, “many of them will be quite convenient where they are;–and now you need not trouble about me; I am well used to helping myself, if you will be kind enough to come in just before dinner for a moment.”
Mrs. Benson disappeared below stairs, where she regaled the injured boot-and-knife boy and the female servants with the first instalment of what was destined to be the most dramatic and sensational serial story ever told at the Manor House.
“The lid of the box don’t lift up,” she explained, “like all the box lids as ever I saw, and me with Lady Chitterton for six years, traveling constantly. The front of the thing splits in the middle and the bottom half falls on the floor. A heathenish kind of tray lifts off from its hinges like a door, and a clothes rack pulls out on runners. ’T is a sight to curdle your blood; and the number of dresses she’s brought would make her out to be richer than Crusoe!–though I have heard from a cousin of mine who was in service in America that the ladies over there spend every penny they can rake and scrape on their clothes. Their husbands may work their fingers to the bone, and their parents be in the workhouse, but fine frocks they