“Yes,” said Robin. Her eyes were fixed upon his face—open and unmoving. Such eyes! Such eyes! All the touchingness of the past was in their waiting on his words.
“Children—little boys especially—are taught that they must not cry out when they are hurt. As I sat in the train through the journey that day I thought my heart would burst in my small breast. I turned my back and stared out of the window for fear my mother would see my face. I’d always loved her. Do you know I think that just then I hated her. I had never hated anything before. Good Lord! What a thing for a little chap to go through! My mother was an angel, but she didn’t know.”
“No,” said Robin in a small strange voice and without moving her gaze. “She didn’t know.”
He had seated himself on a sort of low marble stool near her and he held a knee with clasped hands. They were hands which held each other for the moment with a sort of emotional clinch. His position made him look upward at her instead of down.
“It was you I was wild about,” he said. “You see it was you. I could have stood it for myself. The trouble was that I felt I was such a big little chap. I thought I was years—ages older than you—and mountains bigger,” his faint laugh was touched with pity for the smallness of the big little chap. “You seemed so tiny and pretty—and lonely.”
“I was as lonely as a new-born bird fallen out of its nest.”
“You had told me you had ‘nothing.’ You said no one had ever kissed you. I’d been loved all my life. You had a wondering way of fixing your eyes on me as if I could give you everything—perhaps it was a coxy little chap’s conceit that made me love you for it—but perhaps it wasn’t.”
“You were everything,” Robin said—and the mere simpleness of the way in which she said it brought the garden so near that he smelt the warm hawthorn and heard the distant piano organ and it quickened his breath.
“It was because I kept seeing your eyes and hearing your laugh that I thought my heart was bursting. I knew you’d go and wait for me—and gradually your little face would begin to look different. I knew you’d believe I’d come. ‘She’s little’—that was what I kept saying to myself again and again. ‘And she’ll cry—awfully—and she’ll think I did it. She’ll never know.’ There,”—he hesitated a moment—“there was a kind of mad shame in it. As if I’d betrayed your littleness and your belief, though I was too young to know what betraying was.”
Just as she had looked at him before, “as if he could give her everything,” she was looking at him now. In what other way could she look while he gave her this wonderful soothing, binding softly all the old wounds with unconscious, natural touch because he had really been all her child being had been irradiated and warmed by. There was no pose in his manner—no sentimental or flirtatious youth’s affecting of a picturesque attitude. It was real and he told her this thing because he must for his own relief.