“I will not speak to one of them——” Robin actually began.
“You’ll be obliged to do what the Duchess tells you to do,” laughed Feather, as she realized her obvious power to dull the glitter and glow of things which she had felt the girl must be dazzled and uplifted unduly by. She was rather like a spiteful schoolgirl entertaining herself by spoiling an envied holiday for a companion. “Old men will run after you and you will have to be nice to them whether you like it or not.” A queer light came into her eyes. “Lord Coombe is fond of girls just out of the schoolroom. But if he begins to make love to you don’t allow yourself to feel too much flattered.”
Robin sprang toward her.
“Do you think I don’t abhor Lord Coombe!” she cried out forgetting herself in the desperate cruelty of the moment. “Haven’t I reason——” but there she remembered and stopped.
But Feather was not shocked or alarmed. Years of looking things in the face had provided her with a mental surface from which tilings rebounded. On the whole it even amused her and “suited her book” that Robin should take this tone.
“Oh! I suppose you mean you know he admires me and pays bills for me. Where would you have been if he hadn’t done it? He’s been a sort of benefactor.”
“I know nothing but that even when I was a little child I could not bear to touch his hand!” cried Robin. Then Feather remembered several things she had almost forgotten and she was still more entertained.
“I believe you’ve not forgotten through all these years that the boy you fell so indecently in love with was taken away by his mother because Lord Coombe was your mother’s admirer and he was such a sinner that even a baby was contaminated by him! Donal Muir is a young man by this time. I wonder what his mother would do now if he turned up at your mistress’ house—that’s what she is, you know, your mistress—and began to make love to you.” She laughed outright. “You’ll get into all sorts of messes, but that would be the nicest one!”
Robin could only stand and gaze at her. Her moment’s fire had died down. Without warning, out of the past a wave rose and overwhelmed her then and there. It bore with it the wild woe of the morning when a child had waited in the spring sun and her world had fallen into nothingness. It came back—the broken-hearted anguish, the utter helpless desolation, as if she stood in the midst of it again, as if it had never passed. It was a re-incarnation. She could not bear it.
“Do you hate me—as I hate Lord Coombe?” she cried out. “Do you want unhappy things to happen to me? Oh! Mother, why!” She had never said “Mother” before. Nature said it for her here. The piteous appeal of her youth and lonely young rush of tears was almost intolerably sweet. Through some subtle cause it added to the thing in her which Feather resented and longed to trouble and to hurt.