“Yes. He was the first human creature,” she said it very slowly as if trying to find the right words to express what she meant, “—the first human creature I had ever known. You see Mademoiselle, he—he knew everything. He had always been happy, he belonged to people and things. I belonged to nobody and nothing. If I had been like him he would not have seemed so wonderful to me. I was in a kind of delirium of joy. If a creature who had been deaf dumb and blind had suddenly awakened, and seeing on a summer day in a world full of flowers and sun—it might have seemed to them as it seemed to me.”
“You have remembered it through all the years,” said Mademoiselle, “like that?”
“It was the first time I became alive. One could not forget it. We only played as children play but—it was a delirium of joy. I could not bear to go to sleep at night and forget it for a moment. Yes, I remember it—like that. There is a dream I have every now and then and it is more real than—than this is—” with a wave of her hand about her. “I am always in a real garden playing with a real Donal. And his eyes—his eyes—” she paused and thought, “There is a look in them that is like—it is just like—that first morning.”
The change which passed over her face the next moment might have been said to seem to obliterate all trace of the childish memory.
“He was taken away by his mother. That was the beginning of my finding out,” she said. “I heard Andrews talking to her sister and in a baby way I gathered that Lord Coombe had sent him. I hated Lord Coombe for years before I found out that he hadn’t—and that there was another reason. After that it took time to puzzle things out and piece them together. But at last I found out what the reason had been. Then I began to make plans. These are not my rooms,” glancing about her again, “—these are not my clothes,” with a little pull at her dress. “I’m not ‘a strong character’, Mademoiselle, as I wanted to be, but I haven’t one little regret—not one.” She kneeled down and put her arms round her old friend’s waist, lifting her face. “I’m like a leaf blown about by the wind. I don’t know what it will do with me. Where do leaves go? One never knows really.”
She put her face down on Mademoiselle’s knee then and cried with soft bitterness.
When she bade her good-bye at Charing Cross Station and stood and watched the train until it was quite out of sight, afterwards she went back to the rooms for which she felt no regrets. And before she went to bed that night Feather came and gave her farewell maternal advice and warning.
CHAPTER XXVIII
That a previously scarcely suspected daughter of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless had become a member of the household of the Dowager Duchess of Darte stirred but a passing wave of interest in a circle which was not that of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless herself and which upon the whole but casually acknowledged its curious existence as a modern abnormality. Also the attitude of the Duchess herself was composedly free from any admission of necessity for comment.
“I have no pretty young relative who can be spared to come and live with me. I am fond of things pretty and young and I am greatly pleased with what a kind chance put in my way,” she said. In her discussion of the situation with Coombe she measured it with her customary fine acumen.