Robin. Frances Hodgson Burnett

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СКАЧАТЬ he vaguely recognised this last truth revealed itself in his next words.

      "It would have taken me six months to say this much to you—to get this far—before this thing began," he said. "I daren't have run after you in the street. I should have had to wait about and make calls and ask for invitations to places where I might see you. And when we met we should have been polite and have talked all round what we wanted to say. It would have been cheek to tell you—the second time we met—that your eyes looked at me just as they did when you were a little child. I should have had to be decently careful because you might have felt shy. You don't feel shy now, do you? No, you don't," in caressing conviction and appeal.

      "No—no." There was the note of a little mating bird in the repeated word.

      This time he spread one of her hands palm upward on his own larger one. He looked down at it tenderly and stroked it as he talked.

      "It is because there is no time. Things pour in upon us. We don't know what is before us. We can only be sure of one thing—that it may be death or wounds. I don't know when they'll think me ready to be sent out—or when they'll be ready to send me and other fellows like me. But I shall be sent. I am sitting in a garden here with you. I'm a young chap and big and strong and I love life. It is my duty as a man to go and kill other young chaps who love it as much as I do. And they must do their best to kill me, 'Gott strafe England,' they're saying in Germany—I understand it. Many a time it's in me to say, 'Gott strafe Germany.'"

      He drew in his breath sharply, as if to pull himself together, and was still a moment. The next he turned upon her his wonderful boy's smile. Suddenly there was trusting appeal in it.

      "You don't mind my holding your hand and talking like this, do you? Your eyes are as soft as—I've seen fawns cropping among the primroses with eyes that looked like them. But yours understand. You don't mind my doing this?" he kissed her palm. "Because there is no time."

      Her free hand caught at his sleeve.

      "No," she said. "You're going—you're going!"

      "Yes," he answered. "And you wouldn't hold me back."

      "No! No! No! No!" she cried four times, "Belgium! Belgium! Oh! Belgium!" And she hid her eyes on his sleeve.

      "That's it—Belgium! There has been war before, but this promises from the outset to be something else. And they're coming on in their millions. We have no millions—we have not even guns and uniforms enough, but we've got to stop them, if we do it with our bare hands and with walls of our dead bodies. That was how Belgium held them back. Can England wait?"

      "You can't wait!" cried Robin. "No man can wait."

      How he glowed as he looked at her!

      "There. That shows how you understand. See! That's what draws me. That's why, when I saw you through the window, I had to follow you. It wasn't only your lovely eyes and your curtains of eyelashes and because you are a sort of rose. It is you—you! Whatsoever you said, I should know the meaning of, and what I say you will always understand. It's as if we answered each other. That's why I never forgot you. It's why I waked up so when I saw you at the Duchess'." He tried to laugh, but did not quite succeed. "Do you know I have never had a moment's real rest since that night—because I haven't seen you."

      "I—" faltered Robin, "have wondered and wondered—where you were."

      All the forces of nature drew him a little nearer to her—though the gardener who clumped past them dully at the moment only saw a particularly good-looking young soldier, apparently engaged in agreeable conversation with a pretty girl who was not a nursemaid.

      "Did you come here because of that?" he asked with frank anxiety. "Do you come here often and was it just chance? Or did you come because you were wondering?"

      "I didn't exactly know—at first. But I know now. I have not been here since I went to live in Eaton Square," she gave back to him. Oh! how good and beautiful his asking eyes were! It was as he drew even a little nearer that he saw for the first time the pricked lilac leaves lying on the bench beside her.

      "Did you do those?" he said suddenly quite low. "Did you?"

      "Yes," as low and quite sweetly unashamed. "You taught me—when we played together."

      The quick emotion in his flushing face could scarcely be described.

      "How lovely—how lovely you are!" he exclaimed, almost under his breath. "I—I don't know how to say what I feel—about your remembering. You little—little thing!" This last because he somehow strangely saw her five years old again.

      It was a boy's unspoiled, first love making—the charming outburst of young passion untrained by familiar use to phrases. It was like the rising of a Spring freshet and had the same irresistible power.

      "May I have them? Will you give them to me with your own little hand?"

      The happy glow of her smiling, as she picked them up and laid them, one by one, on his open extended palm, was as the glow of the smiling of young Eve. The dimples playing round her mouth and the quiver of her lashes, as she lifted them to laugh into his eyes, were an actual peril.

      "Must I give you the pin too?" she said.

      "Yes—everything," he answered in a sort of helpless joy. "I would carry the wooden bench away with me if I could. But they would stop me at the gate." They were obliged to treat something a little lightly because everything seemed tensely tremulous.

      "Here is the pin," she said, taking it from under the lapel of her coat. "It is quite a long one." She looked at it a moment and then ended in a whisper. "I must have known why I was coming here—because, you see, I brought the pin." And her eyelashes lifted themselves and made their circling shadows again.

      "Then I must have the pin. And it will be a talisman. I shall have a little flat case made for the leaves and the sacred pin shall hold it together. When I go into battle it will keep me safe. Bullets and bayonets will glance aside." He said it, as he laid the treasure away in his purse, and he did not see her face as he spoke of bullets and bayonets.

      "I am a Highlander," he said next and for the moment he looked as if he saw things far away. "In the Highlands we believe more than most people do. Perhaps that's why I feel as if we two are not quite like other people—as if we had been something—I don't know what—to each other from the beginning of time—since the 'morning stars first sang together.' I don't know exactly what that means, or how stars sing—but I like the sound of it. It seems to mean something I mean though I don't know how to say it." He was not in the least portentous or solemn, but he was the most strongly feeling and real creature she had ever heard speaking to her and he swept her along with him, as if he had indeed been the Spring freshet and she a leaf. "I believe," here he began to speak slowly as if he were thinking it out, "that there was something—that meant something—in the way we two were happy together and could not bear to be parted—years ago when we were nothing but children. Do you know that, little chap as I was, I never stopped thinking of you day and night when we were not playing together. I couldn't!"

      "Neither could I stop thinking," said Robin. "I had dreams about seeing your eyes looking at me. They were blue like clear water in summer. They were always laughing. I always wanted them to look at me! They—they are the same eyes now," in a little rush of words.

      Their blueness was on hers—in the very deeps СКАЧАТЬ