Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. “Sweet woman!” he was saying to himself. “It is more than a merry heart that is able to give such sympathy; it’s a sad old world after all where such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of evil.”
Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little embroidered futility of a handkerchief was in her hand once more. “A rose and a smile! that’s all we could give it,” she said; “and we would either of us share some of that burden if we only could.” She watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added, “After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of things, or we shouldn’t be a living world at all.”
“Amen,” said Lavendar, “but the sight of suffering innocents like that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead.”
“Dead!” she echoed. “Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with.”
“Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I’ve known, was like that,” Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other’s past.
“She was a fine woman,” he went on, “with a certain comfortable breadth about her, of mind and body; and those large, warm, capable hands that seem so fitted to lift burdens.”
Lavendar was in an absent-minded mood, and never much given to noting details at any time. He bent over on the low wall in 146 retrospective silence, looking at the blue sea before them.
Robinette, who was perched beside him, spread her two small hands on her white serge knees and regarded them fixedly for a moment.
“I wonder if it’s a matter of size,” she said after a moment. “I wonder! Let’s be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father’s success came to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be accepted, so I was my mother’s helper. We had but one servant, and I learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee, and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy’s sister had to work, Admiral de Tracy’s niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my father’s illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed 147 his pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life again when her health failed. I wasn’t enough for her; she needed father and her face was bent towards him. My hands were busy again for months, and they held my mother’s when she died. Time went on. Then I began again to make a home out of a house; to use my strength and time as a good wife should, for the comfort of her husband; but oh! so faultily, for I was all too young and inexperienced. It was only for a few months, then death came into my life for the third time, and I was less than twenty. For the first time since I can remember, my hands are idle, but it will not be for long. I want them to be busy always. I want them to be full! I want them to be tired! I want them ready to do the tasks my head and heart suggest.”