The Head of the House of Coombe by Frances Hodgson Burnett (cool books to read .txt) 📕

“Now you keep that in your mind,” she had said when she had finished and Robin had almost choked in her awful little struggle to keep back all sound.

The one thing Andrews was surest of was that nobody would come upstairs to the Nursery to inquire the meaning of any cries which were not unearthly enough to disturb the household. So it was easy to regulate the existence of her charge in such a manner as best suited herself.

“Just give her food enough and keep her from making silly noises when she wants what she doesn’t get,” said Andrews to her companions below stairs. “That one in the drawing-room isn’t going to interfere with the Nursery. Not her! I know my business and I know how to manage her kind. I go to her politely now and then and ask her permission to buy things from Best’s or Liberty’s or some other good place. She always stares a minute when I begin, as if she scarcely understood what I was talking about and then she says ‘Oh, yes, I suppose she must have them.’ And I go and get them. I keep her as well dressed as any child in Mayfair. And she’s been a beauty since she was a year old so she looks first rate when I wheel her up and down the street, so the people can see she’s well taken care of and not kept hidden away. No one can complain of her looks and nobody is bothered with her. That’s all that’s wanted of ME. I get good wages and I get them regular. I don’t turn up my nose at a place like this, whatever the outside talk is. Who cares in these days anyway? Fashionable people’s broader minded than they used to be. In Queen Victoria’s young days they tell me servants were no class that didn’t live in families where they kept the commandments.”

“Fat lot the commandments give any one trouble in these times,” said Jennings, the footman, who was a wit. “There’s one of ‘em I could mention that’s been broken till there’s no bits of it left to keep. If I smashed that plate until it was powder it’d have to be swept into the dust din. That’s what happened to one or two commandments in particular.”

“Well,” remarked Mrs. Blayne, the cook, “she don’t interfere and he pays the bills prompt. That’ll do ME instead of commandments. If you’ll believe me, my mother told me that in them Queen Victoria days ladies used to inquire about cold meat and ask what was done with the dripping. Civilisation’s gone beyond that—commandments or no commandments.”

“He’s precious particular about bills being paid,” volunteered Jennings, with the air of a man of the world. “I heard him having a row with her one day about some bills she hadn’t paid. She’d spent the money for some nonsense and he was pretty stiff in that queer way of his. Quite right he was too. I’d have been the same myself,” pulling up his collar and stretching his neck in a manner indicating exact knowledge of the natural sentiments of a Marquis when justly annoyed. “What he intimated was that if them bills was not paid with the money that was meant to pay them, the money wouldn’t be forthcoming the next time.” Jennings was rather pleased by the word “forthcoming” and therefore he repeated it with emphasis, “It wouldn’t be FORTHCOMING.”

“That’d frighten her,” was Andrews’ succinct observation.

“It did!” said Jennings. “She’d have gone in hysterics if he hadn’t kept her down. He’s got a way with him, Coombe has.”

Andrews laughed, a brief, dry laugh.

“Do you know what the child calls her?” she said. “She calls her the Lady Downstairs. She’s got a sort of fancy for her and tries to get peeps at her when we go out. I notice she always cranes her little neck if we pass a room she might chance to be in. It’s her pretty clothes and her laughing that does it. Children’s drawn by bright colours and noise that sounds merry.”

“It’s my belief the child doesn’t know she IS her mother!” said Mrs. Blayne as she opened an oven door to look at some rolls.

“It’s my belief that if I told her she was she wouldn’t know what the word meant. It was me she got the name from,” Andrews still laughed as she explained. “I used to tell her about the Lady Downstairs would hear if she made a noise, or I’d say I’d let her have a peep at the Lady Downstairs if she was very good. I saw she had a kind of awe of her though she liked her so much, so it was a good way of managing her. You mayn’t believe me but for a good bit I didn’t take in that she didn’t know there was such things as mothers and, when I did take it in, I saw there wasn’t any use in trying to explain. She wouldn’t have understood.”

“How would you go about to explain a mother, anyway?” suggested Jennings. “I’d have to say that she was the person that had the right to slap your head if you didn’t do what she told you.”

“I’d have to say that she was the woman that could keep you slaving at kitchen maid’s work fifteen hours a day,” said Mrs. Blayne; “My mother was cook in a big house and trained me under her.”

“I never had one,” said Andrews stiffly. The truth was that she had taken care of eight infant brothers and sisters, while her maternal parent slept raucously under the influence of beer when she was not quarrelling with her offspring.

Jane, the housemaid, had passed a not uncomfortable childhood in the country and was perhaps of a soft nature.

“I’d say that a mother’s the one that you belong to and that’s fond of you, even if she does keep you straight,” she put in.

“Her mother isn’t fond of her and doesn’t keep herself straight,” said Jennings. “So that wouldn’t do.”

“And she doesn’t slap her head or teach her to do kitchen maid’s work,” put in Mrs. Blayne, “so yours is no use, Mr. Jennings, and neither is mine. Miss Andrews ‘ll have to cook up an explanation of her own herself when she finds she has to.”

“She can get it out of a Drury Lane melodrama,” said Jennings, with great humour. “You’ll have to sit down some night, Miss Andrews, and say, ‘The time has come, me chee-ild, when I must tell you All’.”

In this manner were Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and her maternal affections discussed below stairs. The interesting fact remained that to Robin the Lady Downstairs was merely a radiant and beautiful being who floated through certain rooms laughing or chattering like a bird, and always wearing pretty clothes, which were different each time one beheld her. Sometimes one might catch a glimpse of her through a door, or, if one pressed one’s face against the window pane at the right moment, she might get into her bright little carnage in the street below and, after Jennings had shut its door, she might be seen to give a lovely flutter to her clothes as she settled back against the richly dark blue cushions.

It is a somewhat portentous thing to realize that a newborn human creature can only know what it is taught. The teaching may be conscious or unconscious, intelligent or idiotic, exquisite or brutal. The images presented by those surrounding it, as its perceptions awaken day by day, are those which record themselves on its soul, its brain, its physical being which is its sole means of expressing, during physical life, all it has learned. That which automatically becomes the Law at the dawning of newborn consciousness remains, to its understanding, the Law of Being, the Law of the Universe. To the cautious of responsibility this at times wears the aspect of an awesome thing, suggesting, however remotely, that it might seem well, perhaps, to remove the shoes from one’s feet, as it were, and tread with deliberate and delicate considering of one’s steps, as do the reverently courteous even on the approaching of an unknown altar.

This being acknowledged a scientific, as well as a spiritual truth, there remains no mystery in the fact that Robin at six years old—when she watched the sparrows in the Square Gardens—did not know the name of the feeling which had grown within her as a result of her pleasure in the chance glimpses of the Lady Downstairs. It was a feeling which made her eager to see her or anything which belonged to her; it made her strain her child ears to catch the sound of her voice; it made her long to hear Andrews or the other servants speak of her, and yet much too shy to dare to ask any questions. She had found a place on the staircase leading to the Nursery, where, by squeezing against the balustrade, she could sometimes see the Lady pass in and out of her pink bedroom. She used to sit on a step and peer between the railing with beating heart. Sometimes, after she had been put to bed for the night and Andrews was safely entertained downstairs, Robin would be awakened from her first sleep by sounds in the room below and would creep out of bed and down to her special step and, crouching in a hectic joy, would see the Lady come out with sparkling things in her hair and round her lovely, very bare white neck and arms, all swathed in tints and draperies which made her seem a vision of colour and light. She was so radiant a thing that often the child drew in her breath with a sound like a little sob of ecstasy, and her lip trembled as if she were going to cry. But she did not know that what she felt was the yearning of a thing called love—a quite simple and natural common thing of which she had no reason for having any personal knowledge. As she was unaware of mothers, so she was unaware of affection, of which Andrews would have felt it to be superfluously sentimental to talk to her.

On the very rare occasions when the Lady Downstairs appeared on the threshold of the Day Nursery, Robin—always having been freshly dressed in one of her nicest frocks—stood and stared with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little questions put to her. The Lady appeared at such rare intervals and remained poised upon the threshold like a tropic plumaged bird for moments so brief, that there never was time to do more than lose breath and gaze as at a sudden vision. Why she came—when she did come—Robin did not understand. She evidently did not belong to the small, dingy nurseries which grew shabbier every year as they grew steadily more grimy under the persistent London soot and fogs.

Feather always held up her draperies when she came. She would not have come at all but for the fact that she had once or twice been asked if the child was growing pretty, and it would have seemed absurd to admit that she never saw her at all.

“I think she’s rather pretty,” she said downstairs. “She’s round and she has a bright colour—almost too bright, and her eyes are round too. She’s either rather stupid or she’s shy—and one’s as bad as the other. She’s a child that stares.”

If, when Andrews had taken her into the Gardens, she had played with other children, Robin would no doubt have learned something of the existence and normal attitude of mothers through the mere accident of childish chatter, but it