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

“something” which had drawn her eyes downward was that she had stood so long without moving that her tense feet had begun vaguely to hurt her and the ache attracted her attention. She changed her position slightly and turned her eyes upon the gate again. He was coming very soon. He would be sure to run fast now and he would be laughing. Donal! Donal! She even laughed a little low, quivering laugh herself.

“What is that child waiting for? I should really like to know,” the distant nurse said again curiously.

If she had been eighteen years old she would have said to herself that she was waiting hours and hours. She would have looked at a little watch a thousand times; she would have walked up and down and round and round the garden never losing sight of the gate—or any other point for that matter—for more than a minute. Each sound of the church clock striking a few streets away would have brought her young heart thumping into her throat.

But a child has no watch, no words out of which to build hopes and fears and reasons, arguments battling against anguish which grows—palliations, excuses. Robin, could only wait in the midst of a slow dark, rising tide of something she had no name for. This slow rising of an engulfing flood she felt when pins and needles began to take possession of her feet, when her legs ached, and her eyes felt as if they had grown big and tightly strained. Donal! Donal! Donal!

Who knows but that some echo of the terror against which she had fought and screamed on the night when she had lain alone in the dark in her cradle and Feather had hid her head under the pillow—came back and closed slowly around and over her, filling her inarticulate being with panic which at last reached its unbearable height? She had not really stood waiting the entire morning, but she was young enough to think that she had and that at any moment Anne might come and take her away. He had not come running—he had not come laughing—he had not come with his plaid swinging and his feather standing high! There came a moment when her strained eyes no longer seemed to see clearly! Something like a big lump crawled up into her throat! Something of the same sort happened the day she had burst into a wail of loneliness and Andrews had pinched her. Panic seized her; she clutched the breast of her rose-coloured frock and panic-driven turned and fled into a thick clump of bushes where there was no path and where even Donal had never pierced.

“That child has run away at last,” the distant nurse remarked, “I’d like to find out what she WAS waiting for.”

The shrubs were part of the enclosing planting of the Gardens. The children who came to play on the grass and paths felt as if they formed a sort of forest. Because of this, Robin had made her frantic dash to their shelter. No one would come—no one would see her—no one would hear her, beneath them it was almost dark. Bereft, broken and betrayed, a little mad thing, she pushed her way into their shadow and threw herself face downward, a small, writhing, rose-coloured heap, upon the damp mould. She could not have explained what she was doing or why she had given up all, as if some tidal wave had overwhelmed her. Suddenly she knew that all her new world had gone—forever and ever. As it had come so it had gone. As she had not doubted the permanence of its joy, so she KNEW that the end had come. Only the wisdom of the occult would dare to suggest that from her child mate, squaring his sturdy young shoulders against the world as the flying train sped on its way, some wave of desperate, inchoate thinking rushed backward. There was nothing more. He would not come back running. He was GONE!

There was no Andrews to hear. Hidden in the shadow under the shrubs, the rattle and roar of the street outside the railing drowned her mad little cries. All she had never done before, she did then. Her hands beat on the damp mould and tore at it—her small feet beat it and dug into it. She cried, she sobbed; the big lump in her throat almost strangled her—she writhed and did not know she was writhing. Her tears pouring forth wet her hair, her face, her dress. She did not cry out, “Donal! Donal!” because he was nowhere—nowhere. If Andrews had seen her she would have said she was “in a tantrum,” But she was not. The world had been torn away.

A long time afterwards, as it seemed to her, she crawled out from under the shrubs, carrying her pretty flopping hat in her earth-stained hand. It was not pretty any more. She had been lying on it and it was crushed and flat. She crept slowly round the curve to Anne.

Seeing her, Anne sprang to her feet. The rose was a piteous thing beaten to earth by a storm. The child’s face was swollen and stained, her hair was tangled and damp there were dark marks of mould on her dress, her hat, her hands, her white cheeks; her white shoes were earth-stained also, and the feet in the rose-coloured socks dragged themselves heavily—slowly.

“My gracious!” the young woman almost shrieked. “What’s happened! Where have you been? Did you fall down? Ah, my good gracious! Mercy me!”

Robin caught her breath but did not say a word.

“You fell down on a flower bed where they’d been watering the plants!” almost wept Anne. “You must have. There isn’t that much dirt anywhere else in the Gardens.”

And when she took her charge home that was the story she told Andrews. Out of Robin she could get nothing, and it was necessary to have an explanation.

The truth, of which she knew nothing, was but the story of a child’s awful dismay and a child’s woe at one of Life’s first betrayals. It would be left behind by the days which came and went—it would pass—as all things pass but the everlasting hills—but in this way it was that it came and wrote itself upon the tablets of a child’s day.