The Head of the House of Coombe

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

“This—!” turning a hopeless gaze upon the two tiny rooms crowded with knick-knacks and nonsense. “The parties and the fun—and everything in the world! I have only had some biscuits and raisins to eat today—and the landlord is going to turn me out.”

It seemed almost too preposterous to quite credit that she was uttering naked truth.—And yet—! After a second’s gaze at her he repeated what he had said below stairs.

“Will you tell me exactly what you mean?”

Then he sat still and listened while she poured it all forth. And as he listened he realized that it was the mere every day fact that they were sitting in the slice of a house with the cream-coloured front and the great lady in her mansion on one side and the millionaire and his splendours on the other, which peculiarly added to a certain hint of gruesomeness in the situation.

It was not necessary to add colour and desperation to the story. Any effort Feather had made in that direction would only have detracted from the nakedness of its stark facts. They were quite enough in themselves in their normal inevitableness. Feather in her pale and totally undignified panic presented the whole thing with clearness which had—without being aided by her—an actual dramatic value. This in spite of her mental dartings to and from and dragging in of points and bits of scenes which were not connected with each other. Only a brain whose processes of inclusion and exclusion were final and rapid could have followed her. Coombe watched her closely as she talked. No grief-stricken young widowed loneliness and heart-break were the background of her anguish. She was her own background and also her own foreground. The strength of the fine body laid prone on the bed of the room she held in horror, the white rigid face whose good looks had changed to something she could not bear to remember, had no pathos which was not concerned with the fact that Robert had amazingly and unnaturally failed her by dying and leaving her nothing but unpaid bills. This truth indeed made the situation more poignantly and finally squalid, as she brought forth one detail after another. There were bills which had been accumulating ever since they began their life in the narrow house, there had been trades-people who had been juggled with, promises made and supported by adroit tricks and cleverly invented misrepresentations and lies which neither of the pair had felt any compunctions about and had indeed laughed over. Coombe saw it all though he also saw that Feather did not know all she was telling him. He could realize the gradually increasing pressure and anger at tricks which betrayed themselves, and the gathering determination on the part of the creditors to end the matter in the only way in which it could be ended. It had come to this before Robert’s illness, and Feather herself had heard of fierce interviews and had seen threatening letters, but she had not believed they could mean all they implied. Since things had been allowed to go on so long she felt that they would surely go on longer in the same way. There had been some serious threatening about the rent and the unpaid-for furniture. Robert’s supporting idea had been that he might perhaps “get something out of Lawdor who wouldn’t enjoy being the relation of a fellow who was turned into the street!”

“He ought to have done something,” Feather complained. “Robert would have been Lord Lawdor himself if his uncle had died before he had all those disgusting children.”

She was not aware that Coombe frequently refrained from saying things to her—but occasionally allowed himself not to refrain. He did not refrain now from making a simple comment.

“But he is extremely robust and he has the children. Six stalwart boys and a stalwart girl. Family feeling has apparently gone out of fashion.”

As she wandered on with her story he mentally felt himself actually dragged into the shrimp-pink bedroom and standing an onlooker when the footman outside the door “did not know” where Tonson had gone. For a moment he felt conscious of the presence of some scent which would have been sure to exhale itself from draperies and wardrobe. He saw Cook put the account books on the small table, he heard her, he also comprehended her. And Feather at the window breathlessly watching the two cabs with the servants’ trunks on top, and the servants respectably unprofessional in attire and going away quietly without an unpractical compunction—he saw these also and comprehended knowing exactly why compunctions had no part in latter-day domestic arrangements. Why should they?

When Feather reached the point where it became necessary to refer to Robin some fortunate memory of Alice’s past warnings caused her to feel—quite suddenly—that certain details might be eliminated.