Robinetta Part 18

Robinette could only be thankful that Lavendar was occupied in a _sotto voce_ discussion of wine with Bates, and she was able to conceal the bundle of herbs before his eyes met hers, for the fury she felt against her precious young kinsman at that moment she could have expressed only by blows.

Dinner seemed interminably long. Robinette, for more reasons than one, was preoccupied; Lavendar made few remarks, and Carnaby was possessed by a spirit of perfectly fiendish mischief, saying and doing everything that could most exasperate his grandmother, put her guests to the blush, and shock Miss Smeardon.

But at last Mrs. de Tracy rose from the table, and the ladies followed her from the room, leaving Lavendar to cope alone with Carnaby.

"My fair American cousin is more than usually lovely to-night, eh, Mr.

Lavendar?" the boy said, with his laughable a.s.sumption of a man of the world.

"There, my young friend; that will do! you're talking altogether too much," said Lavendar, as he poured himself out a gla.s.s of wine and sat down by the open window to drink it. Carnaby, perhaps not unreasonably offended, lounged out of the room, and left the older man to his own meditations.

Robinette in the meantime went into the drawing room with her aunt, and they sat down together in the dim light while Miss Smeardon went upstairs to write a letter.

"Aunt de Tracy," Robinette began, "I was calling on Mrs. Prettyman just after you had been with her this afternoon, and do you know the dear old soul had taken the strangest idea into her head! She says you are going to ask her to leave the cottage."

"The land on which her cottage stands is about to be sold," said Mrs.

de Tracy. "It is necessary that she should move."

"Yes, she quite understood that; but she thinks she is not going to get another house; that was what was distressing her, naturally. Of course she hates to leave the old place, but I believe if she gets another nicer cottage, that will quite console her," said Robinette quickly.

"I have no vacant cottage on the estate just now," said Mrs. de Tracy quietly.

"Then what is she to do? Isn't it impossible that she should move until another place is made ready for her?" Robinette rose and stood beside the table, leaning the tips of her fingers on it in an att.i.tude of intense earnestness. She was trying to conceal the anger and dismay she felt at her aunt's reply.

"Mrs. Prettyman has relatives at Exeter," said Mrs. de Tracy without the quiver of an eyelid.

"Yes; but they are poor. They aren't very near relations, and they don't want her. O Aunt de Tracy, is it necessary to make her leave?

She depends upon the plum tree so! She makes twenty-five dollars a year from the jam!"

"Dollars have no significance for me," said Mrs. de Tracy with an icy smile.

"Well, pounds then: five pounds she makes. How is she ever going to live without that, unless you give her the equivalent? It's half her livelihood! I promised you would consider it? Was I wrong?"

Old bitternesses rose in Mrs. de Tracy's heart, the prejudices and the grudges of a lifetime. Everything connected with Robinette's mother had been wrong in her eyes, and now everything connected with Robinette was wrong too, and becoming more so with startling rapidity.

"You had no right whatsoever to make any promises on my behalf," she now said harshly. "You have acted foolishly and officiously. This is no business of yours."

"I'll gladly make it my business if you'll let me, Aunt de Tracy!"

pleaded Robinette. "If you don't feel inclined to provide for Mrs.

Prettyman, mayn't I? She is my mother's old nurse and she shan't want for anything as long as I have a penny to call my own!" Robinette's eyes filled with tears, but Mrs. de Tracy was not a whit moved by this show of emotion, which appeared to her unnecessary and theatrical.

"You are forgetting yourself a good deal in your way of speaking to me on this subject," she said coldly. "When I behaved unbecomingly in my youth, my mother always recommended me to go upstairs, shut myself up alone in my room, and collect my thoughts. The process had invariably a calming effect. I advise you to try it."

Robinette did not need to be proffered the hint twice. She rushed out of the room like a whirlwind, not looking where she went. In the hall, she came face to face with Lavendar, who had just left the dining room.

"Mr. Lavendar!" she cried. "Do go into the drawing room and speak to my aunt. Preach to her! Argue with her! Convince her that she can't and mustn't act in this way; can't go and turn Mrs. Prettyman out, and rob her of the plum tree, and leave her with hardly a penny in the world or a roof over her head!"

"It's not a very pretty or a very pleasant business, Mrs. Loring, I admit," said Lavendar quietly.

"Is it English law?" cried Robinette with indignation. "If it is, I call it mean and unjust!"

"Sometimes the laws seem very hard," said Lavendar. "I'd like to discuss this affair with you quietly another time."

As he spoke, Carnaby appeared and wanted to be told what the matter was, but Robinette discovered that it is not very easy to criticise a grandmother to her youthful grandson, more especially when the lady in question is your hostess.

"Aunt de Tracy and I have had a little difference of opinion about Mrs. Prettyman and her cottage, and the plum tree," she said to the boy quietly, and Lavendar nodded approval.

"Prettyman's got the sack, hasn't she?" Carnaby enquired with a boy's carelessness.

Robinette looked very grave. "My dear old nurse is to leave her cottage," she said with a quiver in her voice. "She's to lose her plum tree--"

"But of course she'll get compensation," cried Carnaby.

"No, Middy; she's to get no compensation," said Robinette in a low voice.

"Well, I call that jolly hard! It's a beastly shame," said Carnaby, evidently p.r.i.c.king up his ears and with a sudden frown that changed his face. "I say, Mark--" But Lavendar did not think the moment suitable for a discussion of Mrs. Prettyman's wrongs. Besides, he did not wish Robinette to be banished from the drawing room for a whole interminable evening. He contrived to silence Carnaby for the time being.

"Let's bury the hatchet for a little while," he suggested. "Have you forgotten, Mrs. Loring, that I made Mrs. de Tracy promise to show off the Stoke Revel jewels for your benefit this very night?"

"O! but now I'm in disgrace, she won't!" said Robinette.

"Yes, she will!" said Carnaby. "Nothing puts the old lady in such a heavenly temper as showing off the jewels. Don't you miss it, Cousin Robin! It's like the Tower of London and Madam Tussaud's rolled into one, this show, I can a.s.sure you. Come on! Come back into the drawing room. Needn't be afraid when Mark's there!"

Robinette found that a black look or two was all that she had to fear from Mrs. de Tracy at present, and even these became less severe under the alchemy of Lavendar's tact. A reminder that an exhibition of the jewelry had been promised was graciously received. Bates and Benson were summoned, and armed with innumerable keys, they descended to subterranean regions where safes were unlocked and jewel-boxes solemnly brought into the drawing room. Mrs. de Tracy wore an air almost devotional, as she unlocked the final receptacles with keys never allowed to leave her own hands.

"If the proceedings had begun with prayer and ended with a hymn, it wouldn't have surprised me in the least!" Robinette said to herself, looking silently on. Her silence, luckily for her, was taken for the speechlessness of awe, and did a good deal to make up, in the eyes of her august relative, for her late indiscretions. As a matter of fact, her irreverent thoughts were mostly to the effect that all but the historical pieces of the Stoke Revel _corbeille_ would be the better of re-setting by Tiffany or Cartier.

Mrs. de Tracy opened an old s.h.a.green case and the firelight flickered on the diamonds of a small tiara.

"This is a part of the famous Montmorency set," she announced proudly, with the tone of a Keeper of Regalia. Then she took out a rope of pearls ending in ta.s.sels. "These belonged to Marie Antoinette," she said.

An emerald set was next produced, and the emeralds, it was explained, had once adorned a crown. Deep green they were, encrusted in their diamond setting; costly, unique; but they left Robinette cold, though like most American women, she loved precious stones as an adornment.

One of those emeralds, she was thinking, was worth fifty times more than old Lizzie Prettyman's cottage: the sale of one of them would have averted that other sale which was to cause so much distress to a poor harmless old woman.

"When do you wear your jewels, Aunt de Tracy?" she asked gravely.

"I have not worn them since the Admiral's death," was the virtuous reply, "and I have never called or considered them mine, Robinetta.

They are the de Tracy jewels. When Carnaby takes his place as the head of the house, they will be his. He will see that his wife wears them on the proper occasions."

"Carnaby's wife!" thought Robinette. "Why! she mayn't be born! He may never have a wife! And to think of all those precious stones hiding their brightness in these boxes like prisoners in a dungeon for years and years, only to be let out now and then by Bates and Benson, jingling their keys like jailers! And this house is a prison too!" she said to herself; "a prison for souls!" and the thought of its h.o.a.rded wealth made her indignant; all this hidden treasure in a house where there was never enough to eat, where guests s.h.i.+vered in fireless bedrooms, where servants would not stay because they were starved! And Carnaby, too, whose youth was being embittered by unnecessary economies: Carnaby, who had so little pocket-money that he was a laughing-stock among his fellows--it was for Carnaby these sacrifices were being made! Strange traditions! Fetiches of family pride almost as grotesque to her thinking as those of any savages under the sun.

"My poor dear Middy!" she thought. "What chance has he, brought up in an atmosphere like this?" But she happened to raise her eyes at the moment, and to see the actual Carnaby of the moment, not the Carnaby her gloomy imagination was evoking from the future with the "petty h.o.a.rd of maxims preaching down" his heart. He had contrived to get hold of the Marie Antoinette pearls without his grandmother's knowledge and to hang them around his neck; he had poised the Montmorency tiara on his own sleek head; he had forced a heavy bracelet by way of collar round Rupert's throat, and now with that choking and goggling unfortunate held partner-wise in his arms, he was waltzing on tiptoe about the farther drawing room behind the unconscious backs of Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon.

"He's only a careless boy," thought Robinette, "a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, hare-brained youngster. They can't have poisoned his nature yet, and I'm sure he has a good heart. If he were at the head of affairs at Stoke Revel instead of his grandmother, I wonder what would be done in the matter of my poor old nurse?" Robinette stood in the doorway for a moment before going up to her room. Her whole att.i.tude spoke depression as Carnaby stole up behind her.

"See here, Cousin Robin, I can't bear to have you go on like this.

Don't take Prettyman's trouble so to heart. We'll do something! I'll do something myself! I have a happy thought."