I
About the time that the fifth Earl of Clarehaven upset the lares and
penates of his house by marrying a Vanity girl the people of Great
Britain, having baited with red rags the golden calf of Victorianism
until the poor beast had leaped from its pedestal and disappeared in the
flowing tide, were now accepting from a lamasery of Liberal reformers
the idol of silver speech, forgetting either that silver tarnishes more
quickly than gold or that new brooms sweep clean, but soon wear out.
However, the new era lasted for quite a month, and long enough for the
Dowager Countess of Clarehaven to reach the conclusion that her son's
marriage was a sign of the times. Poets extract consolation for their
private woes and joys from observing that nature sympathizes with them.
When they are fain to weep, the skies weep with them; April's weather
follows the caprice of the girl next door; even great Ocean laughs when
his little friend the rhymester gets two guineas for a sonnet. What is
permitted to a poet will not be denied to a countess, and if the dowager
considered her chagrin to be a feather in the mighty wing of
revolution--to the widows of Conservative peers down in Devonshire the
return of the Liberal party in 1906 seemed nothing less than
revolution--she should not, therefore, be accused of exaggeration.
When in 1880 Lady Augusta Fanhope married the fourth Earl of Clarehaven
she brought neither beauty nor wealth to that dissolute and extravagant
man of thirty-five, who as a subaltern in the Blues had earned a kind
of fame by the size of his debts and by the length of his whiskers. Soon
after he succeeded to the title fashion made him cut short the whiskers;
but his debts increased yearly, and if he had not died during his son's
minority there would have been little left for that son to inherit.
Nobody understood why he married Lady Augusta, herself least of all.
Even when he was still alive she had taken refuge in the Anglican
religion; when he died she presented a memorial window by Burne-Jones to
Little Cherrington church. By now, when he had been dead ten years and
his son was bringing an actress to rule over Clare Court, the dowager
had come to regard her late husband as a saint. Fashion had trimmed his
whiskers; time had softened his memory; the stained-glass window had
done the rest.
"I'm glad your father never lived to see these dreadful Radicals
sweeping the country," she said to her daughters on this January day
that before it faded into darkness would bring such changes to Clare.
What the dowager really meant to express was her relief that the last
earl was not alive to meet his daughter-in-law; he ought not to have
been easily shocked, but marriage with an actress would certainly have
shocked him greatly, and his language when shocked was bad. The effect
of Dorothy's letter had already worn a little thin; the dowager's
pre-figuration of her approximated more closely every moment to an old
standing opinion of actresses she had formed from a large collection of
letters and photographs left behind by her husband, which she had lacked
the courage to burn unread. Her daughters Arabella and Constantia argued
that this Dorothy must be a "top-holer" to make their brother so
desperate. Last month he had taken them for several long walks and waxed
so eloquent over her beauty and charm and virtue that they had accepted
his point of view; with less to lose than their mother and unaware of
their father's weakness, they saw no reason why an actress should not
make Tony as good a wife as anybody.
"But love is blind," said the dowager. None knew the truth of this
better than she. "And in any case, dear children, beauty is only
skin-deep."
"Luckily for us, mother," said Arabella.
"I think you exaggerate your plainness," the dowager observed. "You do
not make the least attempt to bring out your good features. You, dearest
Bella, have very nice ankles; but if you wear shoes like that and never
pull up your stockings their slimness escapes the eye. And you, Connie,
have really beautiful ears; but when you jam your cap down on your head
like that you cause them to protrude in a way that cannot be considered
becoming."
The girls laughed; they were too much interested in country life to
bother about their appearance. Boots were made to keep out moisture and
get a good grip of muddy slopes: caps were meant to stay on one's head,
not to show off one's ears. Besides, they were ugly; they had decided as
much when they were still children, and, now that they were twenty-one
and nineteen, would be foolish to begin repining. Arabella's ankles
might be slim, but her teeth were large and prominent; her eyes were
pale as the wintry sky above them; her hands were knotted and raw; her
nose stuck to her face like a piece of mud thrown at a fence; her hair
resembled seaweed. As for Constantia, her nose was much too large; so
was her tongue; so were her hands; her eyes were globular, like marbles
of brown agate; everything protruded; she was like a person who has been
struck on the back of the head in a crowd.
"The question is," said Arabella, "are we to drive over to Exeter to
meet them? Because if we are I must tell Crowdy to see about putting us
up some sandwiches."
"Well, unless you're very eager to go," the dowager pleaded, "I should
appreciate your company. Were I left quite alone, I might get a
headache, and I am so anxious to appear cheerful. I think we ought to
assume that Dorothy will be as nervous as we are. I think it would be
kind to assume that."
"I vote for letting Deacock take the car by himself," Constantia
declared. "I always feel awkward at meeting even old friends at a
station, and it'll be so awfully hard to talk with the wind humming in
my ears."
When the noise of the car had died away among the knolls and hollows of
the great park the dowager turned to her daughters:
"It's such a fine day for the season of the year that perhaps I might
take a little drive in the chaise."
It was indeed a fine day of silver and faint celeste, such a one as in
January only the West Country can give. The leafless woods and isolated
clumps of trees breathed a dusky purple bloom like fruit; the grass was
peacock green. The dowager, moved by the brilliance of the landscape and
the weather to a complete apprehension of the fact that she was no
longer mistress of Clare, had been seized with a desire to take a last
sentimental survey of her dominion. Although her daughters had made
other plans for the morning, they willingly put them aside to encourage
such unwonted energy. While the pony was being harnessed, the dowager
took Arabella's arm and walked up and down the pergola that ran like a
battlement along a spur of the gardens and was the most conspicuous
object to those approaching Clare Court through the park.
"It's too late to change it before Dorothy comes," she decided,
mournfully. "But I do hope that there will be no more taking of Mr.
Tufton's advice. I'm sure that curved seat he persuaded me to put at the
end was a mistake. People deposit seats in gardens without thinking.
Nobody will ever sit there. It simply means that one will always have to
walk round it. So unnecessary! I do hope that Dorothy will give orders
to remove it."
"Connie," Arabella exclaimed, with a joyful gurgle, "don't you love the
way mother practises the idea of Dorothy? She used to be just the same
when we were expecting a new governess."
Her sister, who was munching an apple, nodded her agreement without
speaking.
The dowager was about to propose a descent by the terraces to visit her
water-lily pool (which would have involved a tiresome climb up again for
nothing, because the rose-hearted water-lilies of summer were nothing
now but blobs of decayed vegetation) when the wheels of the chaise
crackled on the drive and the girls insisted that if she were going to
have enough time for an expedition before lunch she must start at once.
Clare Court viewed from the southeast appeared as a long, low house of
gray stone with no particular indication of its age for the
unprofessional observer, to whom, indeed, the chief feature might have
seemed the four magnolias that covered it with their large glossy
leaves, the rufous undersides of which, mingling with the stone, gave it
a warmth of color that otherwise it would have lacked. The house was
built on a moderate elevation, the levels of which were spacious enough
to allow for ornamental gardens on the south side of the drive; these
had been laid out in the Anglo-Italian manner with pergolas and
statuary, yews instead of cypresses, and box-bordered terraces leading
gradually down to the ornamental pool overhung on the far side by
weeping willows. The kitchens and servants' quarters on either side of
the house were masked by shrubberies and groves of tall pines, in the
ulterior gloom of which the drive disappeared on the way to the stables
and the home farm.
The dowager got into the chaise, and the pony, a dapple gray of some
antiquity, proceeded at a pace that did not make it difficult for the
two girls, who by now had summoned to heel half a dozen dogs of various
breeds, to keep up with it on foot.
"Shall we turn aside and look at the farm?" Constantia suggested, where
the road forked.
"No, I think I'd like to drive down to the sea first of all," said the
dowager.
"Bravo, mother!" both her daughters applauded.
The dogs, understanding from their mistresses' accents that some
delightful project was in the air, began to bark loudly while they
scampered through the scraggy rhododendrons and put up shrilling
blackbirds with as much gusto as if they were partridges. The drive kept
in the shadow of the pines for about two hundred yards, until where the
trees began to grow smaller and sparser it emerged upon a spacious sward
that between bare uplands went rolling down to the sea a mile away. To
one looking back Clare Court now appeared under a strangely altered
aspect as a gray pile rising starkly from a wide lawn and unmellowed by
anything except the salt northwest wind; even the dowager and her
daughters, who had lived in it all these years, could never repress an
exclamation of wonder each time they emerged from the dim pinewood and
beheld it thus. On the other side of the house there had been sunlight
and a rich prospect of parkland losing itself in trees and a carefully
cultivated seclusion. Here was nothing except a line of gray-green downs
undulating against space, in a dip of which was the shimmer of fusing
sky and sea. Except at midsummer the pines were tall enough to cut off
the low westering sun from the house, and on this January day from where
they were standing in pale sunlight the gray pile seemed frozen. The
sense of desolation was increased by a walled-up door in the center of
the house, above which angelic supporters sustained the full moon of
Clare on a stone escutcheon. The first baronet had failed to establish
his right to the three chevronels originally borne by that great family
and had been granted arms that accorded better with the rococo taste of
his period.
"I've always wanted to plant a hedge of those hydrangeas with black
stalks in front of the pines," said the dowager, pensively, "but unless
they come blue they wouldn't look nice, and perhaps they wouldn't be
able to stand the wind on this side. But the effect would be lovely in
summer. Blue sky! Blue sea! Blue hydrangeas! Dark pine-trees and vivid
grass! It really would be a wonderful effect. Of course, it may be that
Tony's wife will be quite interested in flowers. One never can tell.
Come along, Clement." Clement was the pony, so-called because he was
such a saint.
The drive now skirted the edge of the downs in a gradual descent to
Clarehaven, a small cove formed by green headlands as if earth had
thrust out a pair of fists to scoop up some of the sea for herself. The
ruins of two round towers were visible on both headlands; on the slopes
of the westernmost stood a little church surrounded by tumble-down
tombstones that, even as the bodies of those whom they recorded had
become part of the earth on which they lived, were themselves growing
yearly less distinguishable from the outcrops of stone that no mortal
had set upon these cliffs. Two cottages marked the end of the drive,
which lost itself beyond them in a rocky beach that was strewn with
fragments of ancient masonry. At sight of the chaise several children
had bolted into the cottages like disturbed rabbits, and presently a
couple of women tying on clean aprons came out to greet the countess and
offer the hospitality of their homes. Their husbands, one of whom was
called Bitterplum, the other less picturesquely Smith, were mermen of
toil, fishers in summer and for the rest of the year agricultural
laborers.
"It's very kind of you, Mrs. Smith, and of you, too, Mrs. Bitterplum,"
said the dowager, "but I can only stay a few minutes. What a beautiful
day, isn't it? You must get ready to welcome his lordship, you know.
He'll be bringing her ladyship to see you very shortly. Are Bitterplum
and Smith quite well?"
"Oh ess, ess, ess," murmured the wives, wiping their mouths with their
aprons. Then Mrs. Smith volunteered:
"Parson Beadon's to the church."
At this moment a black figure appeared from the little building, and
after experiencing some difficulty in locking the church door behind him
hurried down the path to meet the important visitors. Mr. Beadon, the
rector of Clarehaven-cum-Cherringtons, was a tall, lean man, the ascetic
cast of whose countenance had been tempered by matrimony as the
indigestible loaf of his dogma had been leavened by expediency. Although
Lord Clarehaven was patron of the living that included Great
Cherrington, its church warden was a fierce squire who owned most of the
land round; here Mr. Beadon was nearly evangelical, with nothing more
vicious than a surpliced choir to mark the corruption of nineteen
hundred years of Christianity. At Little Cherrington, where the dowager
worshiped and where she had her stained-glass window of the fourth earl,
he indulged in linen vestments as a dipsomaniac might indulge in herb
beer; but at Clarehaven, with none except Mrs. Bitterplum and Mrs. Smith
to mark his goings on, he used to have private orgies of hagiolatry,
from one of which he was now returning.
After Mr. Beadon had greeted the dowager and the two girls he asked,
anxiously, if Tony had arrived, and confided with the air of a very
naughty boy that he had been holding a little celebration of St. Anthony
with special intention for the happiness of the marriage. St. Anthony
was not on the dowager's visiting-list, having no address in the Book of
Common Prayer; but she could hardly be cross with the rector for
observing his festival, inasmuch as he had the same name as her son. Mr.
Beadon was a good man whose services at Little Cherrington were exactly
what she wanted and who had, moreover, written an excellent history of
Clarehaven and the Devonshire branch of the Clare family. At the same
time, the bishop was also a good man, and she devoutly hoped that the
Bohemianism of Mr. Beadon's services at Clarehaven would not take away
what was left to his episcopal appetite from the claims of diabetes.
"One of Mrs. Bitterplum's children has been serving me," said Mr.
Beadon. "Yes, it was an impressive little--Eucharist." He had brought
his lips together for Mass, and Eucharist came out with such a cough
that the dowager begged him not to take cold. Mrs. Bitterplum brought
him out a cup of chocolate, a supply of which he kept in her cottage to
assuage the pangs of hunger after his long walk and arduous ritual on an
empty stomach. He swallowed the chocolate quickly, not to lose the
pleasure of company back to Little Cherrington; but with all the heat
and hurry of his late breakfast he could not stop talking.
"Mrs. Bitterplum is always kind enough--yes--curious old West Country
name...."
Arabella and Constantia had turned away to hide their smiles.
"I have failed hitherto to trace its origin. No.... Oh, indeed yes, when
you're ready, Lady Clarehaven. Good day to you, Mrs. Smith. Good day,
and thank you, Mrs. Bitterplum."
The pony's head had been turned inland, and Mr. Beadon talked earnestly
to the dowager while the chaise was driving slowly back. The topic of
the marriage led him along the by-paths of family lore in numerous
allusions to the historical importance of the various spots where the
dowager lingered during her last drive as mistress of Clare; but the
rector's discourse was so much intruded upon by gossip of nothing more
than parochial interest that it will be simpler to give a direct
abstract of the family history.
In the middle of the thirteenth century a younger member of the great
family of Clare whose demesnes stretched east and west from Suffolk to
Wales fell in with one of those pirate Mariscos that from Lundy Island
swept the Bristol Channel for ships laden with food and wine; in the
course of his seafaring he had discovered a cove on the north coast of
Devonshire that struck him as an excellent center for piracy on his own
account, notwithstanding that his chief patron had recently been hanged,
drawn, and quartered. He fortified his cove with round towers at either
entrance and thus created Clarehaven, where his descendants for a
hundred years or more levied toll on passing traffic and made an
alliance with the gentleman pirates of Fowey, whom in the reign of
Edward III they helped to drive back the discomfited men of Kent from
the west. The baser sort of pirates that in time came to haunt Lundy
made the less professional exploits of the Clares no longer worth while,
and before the close of the fourteenth century they had for many years
abandoned the sea and were reaping a more peaceful harvest from the
land. During the great days of Elizabeth the old spirit was reincarnate
in one or two members of the family, who fared farther than the Bristol
Channel and rounded fiercer capes than Land's End; but when in the early
years of the seventeenth century a great storm drove the sea to
overwhelm Clarehaven, there was not more to destroy than a few cottages
belonging to the fishermen that were now all that remained of the
medieval pirates. Then came the Great Rebellion, when Anthony Clare,
Esquire, mustered his grooms and fishermen to meet Sir Bevil Grenville
marching from Cornwall for the king. Finding large Roundhead forces at
Bideford between him and Sir Bevil, he retired again to the obscurity of
North Devon until the glorious Restoration, when with a relative he
appeared in Parliament as member for the borough of Clarehaven, and was
created a baronet by Charles II for his loyalty. Sir Anthony, with a
borough in his pocket and two thousand acres of land on which to develop
agriculture and choose a site for a house, abandoned what was left of
the old pirate's keep and began to build Clare Court. He chose an
aspect facing the sea, but died before the house was finished; Sir
Gilbert, his son, being more interested in digging for badgers than for
foundations, suspended building and contented himself with half a house.
Sir Anthony, the third baronet, took after his great-grandfather and
dreamed of sailing north to help the Earl of Mar in 1715. He must often
have stood in that now walled-up doorway under the escutcheon of his
house and gazed northward between the uplands to the sea; luckily for
his successors the days were long past when a Clare could go on board
his own ship lying at anchor in Clarehaven as snug as a horse in his
stable. Sheriffmuir was far from Devon, but the news of that ambiguous
battle reached the baronet before he had taken a rash step forward for a
lost cause. Every night for thirty years he was carried to bed drunk,
and, though he was never too drunk to sip from a goblet which had not
been previously passed across a finger-bowl to the king over the water,
he was too drunk and gouty to come out in '45. The nephew who succeeded
him two years later worked hard for the second George to atone for his
uncle's disaffection, and the family came to be favorably regarded at
court. Sir William was a bachelor and hated the sea. When not at St.
James's he used to live in Clare Lodge, a trim, red-brick house he had
built for himself about a mile eastward of the family mansion,
overlooking the hamlet of Little Cherrington and many desirable acres of
common land.
Mr. Beadon was discoursing of Sir William when the dowager paused to
admire the view from Clare Lodge. An excellent tenant had lately vacated
it, and she was wondering how long it would be before she and the girls
should be living there. She turned her attention once more to the
rector's mild criticism of Sir William, who had not attempted to make
Clarehaven a real borough, but who had bought Little Cherrington, and
inclosed all the acres he coveted. When he died in 1764, his cousin
Anthony enjoyed a tolerably rich inheritance, to which he added by
marrying a Miss Arabella Hopley with a dowry of L10,000. This lady, by
the death of her brother in a hunting accident, some years later became
heiress of Hopley Hall and three thousand acres of good land adjoining
the Clare estate; Sir Anthony loyally sent the two members for his
borough, which by now was reduced to three or four cottages moldering at
the tide's edge, to vote for the government; and on being rewarded in
the year 1796 with the barony of Clarehaven, he decided to finish Clare
Court. Before his succession he had spent a good deal of time at the
famous health resort of Curtain Wells, and he was not satisfied with the
sea view that did not include sunshine; it was he who pulled down the
kitchens and stables behind and built the present front of Clare Court.
His son Gilbert was prominent during the Napoleonic wars for seeing that
his tenantry kept a lookout for Bonaparte; and by putting down smuggling
he performed a vicarious penance for the deeds of his ancestors. It was
he who completed Clare Court; and in 1816, ten years before his death,
he was created Earl of Clarehaven and Viscount Clare, a peer of that
United Kingdom lately achieved by Pitt with such a mixture of glory and
shame. To mark his appreciation of the divine favor the first earl built
at Little Cherrington a chapel-of-ease to Clarehaven church, the
congregation of which by that time was the three electors of the
borough. He then bought the living of Great Cherrington, and presented
this shamrock of a cure to his natural son, who became rector of
Clarehaven-cum-Cherringtons. This gentleman paid a curate L40 a year to
look after the three churches and was last seen in an intoxicated
condition on the quay of Boulogne harbor.
The present incumbent, who was anxious that the dowager should not
object to a step up he proposed to take next Easter by introducing
colored vestments at Little Cherrington and linen vestments at Great
Cherrington for those very early services that fierce Squire Kingdon
would never get up to attend, perhaps alluded to the history of his
predecessor in order to emphasize his own superiority. It was all very
discreetly done, even to selecting the moment when the two girls were
examining a shepherd's sick dog and therefore out of hearing.
"How different from the late lord," Mr. Beadon sighed. "Mrs.
Beadon"--the rector paid tribute to his outraged celibacy by never
referring to her as his wife--"Mrs. Beadon often wonders why I don't
write a special memoir of him."
The dowager gazed affectionately at the chlorotic window by Burne-Jones.
"Perhaps his life was too quiet," she said. "I think the window is
enough."
"_Claro non clango._ But when Mr. Kingdon dies," said the rector,
tartly, "I understand that Mrs. Kingdon will erect an organ to _his_
memory."
They passed out of the church and stood looking down into the lap of the
fair landscape outspread before them, talking of other ancestors: of
Richard, the second earl, who married the daughter of a marquis and saw
Clarehaven disfranchised in 1832, by which time the borough was so
rotten that there was nothing perceptible of it except a few
seaweed-covered stones at low tide; it was he who destroyed a couple of
good farms to provide himself with a park worthy of his rank, which he
inclosed with a stone wall and planted trees, the confines of which his
descendants now tried proudly to trace in the wintry haze. Lest any want
of patriotism should be imputed to the second earl, Mr. Beadon reminded
his listeners of how Geoffrey, the third earl, did his duty to his
country, first as a member of Parliament for one of the divisions of
Devonshire, when he showed the Whigs that the disfranchisement of his
borough was not enough to keep a Clare out of Parliament, and afterward
as Lord Lieutenant of the county; his duty to his sovereign by acting as
Vice-Chamberlain to her Majesty's household. Of his son Gilbert, the
fourth earl, enough has been said; though it may be added here that he
sold Hopley Hall and many acres besides.
"On the whole, though, I think he was right," said Mr. Beadon. "These
Radicals, you know."
"Come and have lunch with us," the dowager invited.
It would be the last independent hospitality she could offer at Clare
Court.
II
While the dowager was presiding over lunch at Clare for the last time,
while her daughters were getting more and more openly excited about the
arrival of their sister-in-law, and while even Mr. Beadon partook of
their excitement to such an extent that he ate much less than usual,
Dorothy was sitting down to lunch in the restaurant-car of the Western
express. Her old life was being left behind more rapidly and with less
regret than the country through which the train was traveling. Happiness
always widens the waist of an hour-glass. Dorothy was so happy in being
a countess that on this railway journey time and space passed with equal
speed; and she looked so happy that all those who recognized her or were
informed by one of the waiters who she was commented upon her radiant
air. They decided with that credulous sentimentality imported into Great
Britain with Hengist and Horsa that she must be very deeply in love with
her husband; no one suspected that she might be more deeply in love with
herself. The head waiter, anxious to pay his own humble tribute to the
happy pair, removed the vase of faded flowers from the table they
occupied and put in its place another vase of equally faded flowers. If
he could have changed the lunch as easily, no doubt he would have done
so, but train lunches are as immemorial as elms, and it would have taken
more than the marriage of a Vanity girl to a Devonshire nobleman to
persuade the Great Western Railway Company that sauce tartare is not
the only condiment, and that there are more fish in the sea than the
anemic brill.
In days now mercifully forever fled Dorothy had often admired with a
touch of envy the select minority of the human race that seemed able to
obtain from the staff of a great railway station all the attention it
wanted. Now she had entered that select minority, and perhaps nothing
brought home more sharply the fact that she was a countess than the
attitude of the station-master at Exeter.
"Welcome back to the West, my lord," he said to Clarehaven, who thanked
him for his good wishes with the casual rudeness that minor officials of
all countries find so attractive in their acknowledged patrons.
A perspiring woman with a little boy in her arms clutched the
station-master's sleeve and begged to be informed if the express that
was now lying along the platform like a great sleek snake was the slow
train to whatever insignificant market-town she was bound. It was
annoying for the station-master to have his little chat with Lord
Clarehaven interrupted like this, especially by a woman who seemed under
the impression that he was a porter. However, the official possessed a
store of nobility from which to oblige an importunate inferior, and
majestically he condescended to reveal that the slow train would leave
in half an hour from the obscure platform it haunted. The station-master
was forthwith invited to look after a much-dinted tin box while the
perspiring and anxious creature's little boy was accommodated in the
cloak-room; before he could protest she had darted off.
"Wonderful what they expect you to do for them, isn't it?" he laughed,
with the lordly magnanimity that once inspired the English nation with
confidence in the capacity of its chosen representatives to rule the
world. At this moment a porter announced that his lordship's car was in
the station-yard.
"Be under no apprehensions about your baggage, my lord," said the
station-master. "I shall expedite it myself. Be under no apprehensions,"
he repeated; "it will certainly reach Cherrington Lanes to-night."
The porter, who was as eager as his chief to show his appreciation of
being employed at a railway station patronized by Lord and Lady
Clarehaven, overstepped the bounds of good will by picking up the
perspiring woman's tin box in order to place it in the car. Luckily his
chief perceived the horrible mistake in time and bellowed at him to take
it out and leave it on the pavement outside the station. Then raising
his cap, a gesture reserved for noblemen and irritation of the scalp,
the station-master bowed Lord and Lady Clarehaven upon their way.
"Car going well, Deacock?"
"Not too well, my lord."
"Make the old thing hum, because I want her ladyship to reach Clarehaven
before dark."
The chauffeur touched his cap, and the car answered generously to his
efforts in spite of continual criticisms leveled against it by the
owner.
"We must get a Lee-Lonsdale," he said to his wife.
"That would be very nice for Lonnie," she agreed. "Mine, of course, was
more a car for town. So I sold it."
She did not add that her own Lee-Lonsdale had provided her with a
bracelet of rubies.
"The setting is new," she had said to Tony when she showed him this
heirloom. "But the stones are old."
And who should have contradicted her?
The green miles were rolled up like a length of silk; milestones
fluttered like paper in the wake of the car; and by five o'clock they
were driving through the lodge gates. Mrs. Crawley with nine little
Crawleys, the fruit of Mr. Crawley's spare time from the peach-house at
Clare, flung a few primroses into the car and cheered their new lady.
Dorothy thought the primroses were very pretty and stood up to nod her
thanks; she did not realize that even an earl's estate in Devonshire
might find it hard to produce so many primroses in the month of January;
but she looked so beautiful standing up in the car that Mrs. Crawley
felt the exertions of her large and ubiquitous family were well
rewarded. The car leaped forward again, followed by shrill cheers that
lingered upon the evening air and echoed many times in Dorothy's heart.
The spellbound hush of landed property held earth in thrall, and the
countess wished to enjoy it.
"Not too fast through the park," she begged.
The car slowed down; at the top of the first incline from which the
house was visible it stopped to give Dorothy a moment in which to admire
her great possessions. The whole sky was plumed with multitudinous small
clouds rosy as the ruffled throats of linnets in spring; on the summit
of the last long incline before them Clare Court with its gardens and
terraces and gleaming pergola dreamed in the enchantment of the wintry
sunsets; in the dark groves on either side the trunks of the pines
glowed like pillars of fire. Nothing broke the stillness except a
mistlethrush singing very loud from an oak-tree close at hand, and when
the bird was silent the lowing of a cow far away on some other earth, it
seemed. Suddenly from woodland near the drive came a sound like
pattering leaves; a line of fallow deer rippled forth and broke into
startled groups that nosed the air now vibrant with the noise of dogs
approaching.
"How lovely!" Dorothy exclaimed. "You never told me there were deer,"
she added, reproachfully, as if the absence of deer had been the one
thing that all this time had kept her from accepting Clarehaven's hand.
"And how divine it must be here in summer."
"Well, if you hadn't been such a timid little deer, we might have been
here, anyway, last October."
Dorothy might have retorted that if Clarehaven had not been so bold a
hart she might have been here the summer before last; but she did not
remind him of that little flat round the corner, because the herd
dashed off to a more remote corner of the park at sight of several dogs
scampering down the drive with loud yaps of excitement, and Tony's
sisters running behind. Dorothy jumped out of the car to meet her
relations for the first time, glad to encounter them like this with dogs
barking and so much of the conversation directed to keeping them in
order, for she had half expected in that preludial hush to behold the
dowager materializing from the misty dusk like a gigantic genie from an
uncorked jar.
"Only two hours from Exeter. Pretty good for the old boneshaker, what?"
said Tony. "Deacock drove her along like a thoroughbred."
The chauffeur touched his cap and, smiling complacently, leaned over to
pat the tires of the car.
"Mother's waiting at the house," said Arabella. "She would have driven
down in the chaise to meet Dorothy, but she didn't know exactly when
you'd be here and was so afraid of catching cold just when she most
wanted not to."
There followed a stream of gossip about the health of various animals,
and about the way Marlow, the head-keeper, was looking forward to
shooting Cherrington Long Covert, and how much afraid he had been that
Tony would not be back before the end of the month, and how glad he was
that he was back, in the middle of which Constantia informed Dorothy
that there was a meet at Five Tree Farm two days hence and asked her if
she was going to hunt for the rest of the season. Arabella kicked her
sister so clumsily that Dorothy noticed the warning, and with a sudden
impulse to risk all, even death, in the attempt, she replied that of
course she intended to hunt for the rest of the season. Tony began to
protest, but she cut him short.
"My dear boy, when I lived with my grandmother I always hunted. And I've
kept up riding ever since."
"Well, that's topping," exclaimed Connie.
"Yes, that really is topping," echoed Arabella.
"But alas! I don't shoot," Dorothy confessed, "so if it won't bore you
too much you'll have to give me lessons."
"Oh, rather," began Connie, immediately. "Well, you see, the most
important thing is not to look across your barrels. I find that most
people--Well, for instance, supposing you put up a woodcock...."
"I say, Connie, shut up, shut up," Tony exclaimed. "You can't begin at
once. You'll put our eyes out in the car with that stick."
The shooting-lesson was postponed; and clambering into the car, in
another five minutes they had all reached the house. Dorothy's first
emotion at sight of the dowager was relief at finding that she was quite
a head shorter than herself. In spite of Napoleon, height is, on the
whole, an advantage to human beings in moments of stress. Dorothy had
involuntarily imagined her mother-in-law as a tall, beaked woman with a
cold and flashing eye, in fact with all the attributes the well-informed
novelist usually awards to dowagers. This dowdy little woman, whose
slight resemblance to a beaver was emphasized by wearing a cape made of
that animal's fur, had to stand on tiptoe to greet her daughter-in-law,
and it was unreasonable to be frightened of a woman who in an emotional
crisis had to stand on tiptoe. Nevertheless, Dorothy was sincerely
grateful for her kindly welcome, and took the first opportunity of
whispering some of her hopes and fears for the future to her
mother-in-law, who invited her, after tea, to come up-stairs to her den
and have a little talk. When they entered the small square room in an
angle of the house twilight was still sapphire upon the window-panes,
one of which looked out over the park and the other mysteriously down
into the grove of pines. Fussing about with matches, the dowager
explained apologetically that she preferred always to trim and light her
own lamp.
"One gets these little fads living in the depths of the country."
"Of course," Dorothy agreed, planning with herself some similar fad for
the near future.
The lamp was lighted; the windows changed from sapphire to indigo as the
jewel changes when it is no longer held against the light; in the golden
glow the walls of the room broke into blossom, it seemed. Dorothy,
reacting from Mr. and Mrs. Caffyn's taste in domestic decoration, had
supposed that all well-bred and artistic people devoted themselves to
plain color schemes such as she had elaborated in the Halfmoon Street
flat; but here was a kind of decoration that, though she knew
instinctively it could not be impeached on the ground of bad taste, did
astonish her by its gaudiness. Such a prodigality of brilliant
red-and-blue macaws, of claret-winged pompadouras and birds of paradise
swooping from bough to bough of such brilliant foliage; such sprawling
purple convolvuluses and cleft crimson pomegranates on the trellised
screen; such quaint old china groups on the mantelpiece; such
tumble-down chairs and faded holland covers; and everywhere, like fruit
fallen from those tropic boughs, such vividly colored balls of wool.
"Oh," exclaimed Dorothy, divining in a flash of inspiration how to make
the most of her totem, "it's exactly like my grandmother's room!"
"I am fond of my little den," said the dowager, "and as long as you so
kindly want me to stay on at Clare I hope you won't turn me out of it."
Dorothy expostulated with a gesture; she would have liked to show her
appreciation of the room in some perfect compliment, but she could think
of nothing better than to suggest sharing it, a prospect that she did
not suppose would attract her mother-in-law.
"I feel a dreadful intruder," she sighed.
"My dear child, please. I might have known that Tony would have chosen
well for himself, and I do hope you understand--I tried to explain to
you in my letter--how old-fashioned and out of the world we are down
here. My husband was a very quiet man, and for the last ten years of his
life a great invalid. The result was that I scarcely appreciated how
things had changed in the world, and I foolishly fancied that Tony was
just as much of a country cousin as myself. His sudden departure to
Africa like that came as a great shock to me. One scarcely realizes down
here that there is such a place as Africa." Heaven and her wall-paper
were the only scenes of tropical luxuriance in the imagination of which
the dowager indulged herself. "And, of course, my mother was very much
upset at the idea of the marriage."
Dorothy started. Was there, then, a super-dowager to be encountered?
"I see that Tony has not told you about her. Chatfield Hall, where my
brother lives, whom you will learn to know and love as Uncle Chat, is
only fifteen miles from Clare."
Dorothy did not know how to prevent her mother-in-law's perceiving her
mortification; to think that in her long study of Debrett she had
omitted to make herself acquainted with what was therein recorded of the
family of Fanhope! Really she did not deserve to be a countess!
"My mother," went on the dowager, "who as you've no doubt guessed is now
an extremely old lady, was inclined to blame me for Tony's choice. She
has always been accustomed to expect a good deal from her children. Even
Uncle Chat has never yet ventured to introduce a motor-car to Chatfield.
So you must not be disappointed if at first she's a little brusk. Poor
old darling, she's almost blind, but her hearing is as acute as ever,
and oh dear, I am so glad you have a pretty voice."
"Did you think I should have a cockney accent?" Dorothy asked.
"Well, to be frank, the contingency had presented itself," the dowager
admitted. "And I am so glad you don't use too much scent. I know
everybody uses scent nowadays, but my mother, whose sense of smell is
even more acute than her hearing, abominates scent. It does seem so
ironical that she should have kept her sense of smell and almost lost
her sight. You mustn't be frightened by her; but if you are you must
remember that we're all frightened by her, which ought to be a great
consolation. I thought we would drive over and see her to-morrow. It
would be nice to feel that the ice was broken."
"Even if I do get rather wet," Dorothy laughed.
The dowager smiled anxiously; she was not used to extensions of familiar
phrases, and her daughter-in-law's remark made her sharply aware that a
stranger was in the house.
"You think you'd rather wait a day or two before you go?" she suggested.
"Oh no, I think we ought to go and see Lady Chatfield as soon as
possible," said Dorothy.
"I'm so glad you agree with me."
"I'm rather sensitive where mothers are concerned," said Dorothy.
She felt that now was her moment to win the dowager immovably to her
side. There was something in the atmosphere of this gay little room,
some intimacy as of a garden long tended by a gentle and lonely soul,
that invited a contribution from one who was privileged to enter it like
this. Dorothy felt that the room needed "playing up to." The medium that
tempted her was the fairy-tale; a room like this was meant for
fairy-tales.
"I told you, didn't I, that this room reminded me of my grandmother's
room, and what you tell me about Lady Chatfield reminds me a little of
her character. My grandmother was a Lonsdale, a descendant of a younger
branch of the Cleveden Lonsdales. Her husband was an Irish landowner
called Doyle who was involved somehow with political troubles. I don't
quite know what happened, but he lost most of his money and died quite
suddenly soon after my mother was born. My grandmother came back to
England with her little daughter and settled down in Warwickshire, her
native county. When my mother was quite young--about twenty--she fell in
love with my father, who was reading for Holy Orders in the
neighborhood. My grandmother opposed the match, but my mother ran away,
and my father, instead of becoming a clergyman, took up rescue work in
the slums."
"A fine thing to do," the dowager commented, approvingly.
"Yes, but unfortunately my grandmother was very proud and very
unreasonable. She never forgave my mother, although she had me to live
with her until I was eleven, when she died. I was brought up in the
depths of the country and ever since I have always longed to get back to
it. I used to ride with friends of my grandmother. One of them was the
Duke of Ayr. Did you ever meet him? He died the other day, but of course
I hadn't seen him for many years."
"I did meet him long ago," said the dowager. "He was a great influence
for good in the country."
"Oh, a wonderful man," Dorothy agreed. "Well, the few family heirlooms
my grandmother still possessed were left to me, together with a small
sum of money, which I'm sorry to say my father spent. That was my excuse
for going on the stage. I told him that it was his fault and his fault
only that I had to earn my own living. But the rescue work had affected
his common sense. He turned me out of the house. I lived for a whole
year on fifty pounds. But I was determined to succeed, and when I met
Tony and he asked me to marry him I refused, because I had grown proud.
You can understand that, can't you? Tell me, dear Lady Clarehaven, that
you can understand my anxiety to prove that I could be a success.
Besides, when I was a child the estrangement between my mother and my
grandmother had greatly affected my imagination. I didn't want to find
myself the cause of estranging another mother from her son. Have you
forgiven me? Do you think that you will ever love me?"
The dowager wept and declared that as soon as her own mother was
pacified she should make it her business to reconcile Dorothy with hers.
"Oh no," cried Dorothy, "that's impossible. My father must learn a
little humility first. When he has learned his lesson I will be
reconciled with my family, but meanwhile haven't you a place in your
heart for me?"
The dowager, so far as it was possible for a small woman to perform the
action with one so much taller than herself, clasped Dorothy to her
heart.
"How I wish my husband were alive to be with us this evening," she
exclaimed.
It was probably as well that he was not; if he had been, neither age nor
decency would have intervened to prevent the fourth earl from making
love to his daughter-in-law. The fifth earl interrupted any further
exchanges of confidences by bursting into the room to protest against
his wife's desertion.
"Your mother has been so sweet to me, Tony," she said.
"Of course she has," he answered. "She knows what I've had to go through
to bring off this coup."
"Indeed," the dowager confessed, "I never suspected he had such
determination. Dear old boy, it only seems yesterday that he was such a
little boy, and now--" She broke off with a sigh and patted him on the
shoulder.
"Your mother and I have just decided that it would be best if I am
presented to Lady Chatfield to-morrow," Dorothy announced.
"What?" cried Clarehaven. "No. Look here! Steady, mother! I'm absolutely
against that. I'm sorry to appear the undutiful grandson and all that,
but really, don't you know, I must discourage her a bit. I didn't bring
Dorothy down to Clare to be buzzing over to Chatfield all the time.
We'll get Uncle Chat over here to dinner one night, and that'll be quite
enough."
The dowager looked appealingly at her daughter-in-law, who at once took
matters into her own hands.
"Don't be absurd, Tony. Of course we shall go to-morrow."
He would have continued to protest, but his wife fixed him with those
deep-brown eyes of hers.
"Now, don't go on arguing, there's a dear boy, or your mother will think
we do nothing but quarrel."
Tony was silent, and the dowager regarded her daughter-in-law with open
admiration. She had never seen one of the males of Clare or Fanhope
quelled so completely since the days when she was a little girl and saw
her own fierce old mother quell her husband.
That night in the bridal chamber of Clare the fifth earl chose a not
altogether suitable costume of pink-silk pajamas in which to give
utterance to his plans for the future. If Dorothy had been beautiful in
the dowager's bower, she was much more fatally beautiful now in a
dishabille of peach bloom and with her fawn-colored hair glinting in the
candle-light against the dark panels of this ancient and somber room.
When Clarehaven began to walk up and down in the excitement of his
projects she went slowly across to a Caroline chair with high wicker
back, sitting down in which she waited severely and serenely until he
had finished. Tony might prance about in his pajamas, but he was no more
free than a colt which a horse-breaker holds in tether to be jerked down
upon his four legs when he has kicked his heels long enough.
"I didn't marry you," her husband was protesting, "to come and live down
here and be ruled by Grandmother Chatfield. I don't give a damn for my
grandmother; she's a meddlesome old woman who ought to have been dead
ten years ago. As for Uncle Chat, he bores me to death. He can only talk
about cigars and pigs. Look here, Doodles, we're going to stay here
three or four more days, and then we're off to the Riviera. We'll make
Lonnie come with us and drive down through France--topping roads--and I
want to try the pigeons at Monte. After that I thought we'd go to Cairo,
or perhaps we might go to Cairo first and take Monte on the way back.
Anyway, Curzon Street will be ready by the beginning of May. I'm having
it devilishly comfortably done up. I didn't tell you about that; it's
going to be the most comfortable house in London. I tried every chair
myself in Waring's. I'm sorry I had to bore you at all with my family,
but I'm awfully fond of my mother, and I knew she wouldn't be happy till
she'd seen you, and all that. Well, now it's done, and we can buzz on
again as soon as possible."
"Any more plans?" asked Dorothy.
"No, I thought we'd go up to Scotland for August, and after that I don't
see why we shouldn't have a good shoot here in September. But I haven't
thought much about next autumn."
"That's where I'm cleverer than you," said his wife. "I've not only
thought about next autumn, but about next week, and about next year, and
the year after that, and the year after that, too. Listen, old thing.
When you first met me you wanted to put me in a little flat round the
corner, didn't you? Please don't interrupt me. You couldn't understand
then why I wouldn't accept your offer; I don't think you really
understand very much better even now. London for me doesn't exist any
longer. How you can possibly expect me to go away from this glorious
place, which I already love as if I'd lived here all my life, to tear
about the Continent with you as if I wasn't your wife at all, I don't
know. If you don't realize what you owe to your name, I realize it. I
don't choose that people should say: 'There goes that ass Clarehaven who
married a girl from the Vanity. Look at him!' I don't choose that people
should point you out as my husband. I choose to be your wife, and I
intend that all your family--and when I say your family I mean your
mother's family, too--shall go down on their knees and thank God that
you did marry a Vanity girl, and that a Vanity girl knew what she owed
to her country in these dreadful days when common Radicals are trying to
destroy all that we hold most sacred. I want you to take your place in
the House of Lords, when you've lost that trick of talking to everybody
as if they were waiters at the Savoy. Why, you don't deserve to be an
earl!"
"My dear thing, you mustn't attach too much importance to a title. You
must remember...."
"Are you trying to correct my tone?" she asked, coldly. "Because, let me
tell you that all this false modesty about your position is only
snobbery dressed out in a new disguise. Anyway, I didn't marry you to be
criticized."
"Oh well, of course, if you insist on staying down here for the present
I suppose I must," said Tony. "Anyway, I dare say we can have some jolly
parties to cheer the place up a bit."
"No, we sha'n't have any jolly parties--at any rate yet awhile," said
Dorothy. "I don't intend to begin by turning Clare gardens into bear
gardens."
"Good Heavens! what is the matter with you?" he demanded. "What has my
mother been saying?"
"Your mother hasn't been saying anything. I said all these things over
to myself a thousand thousand times before I married you."
"Well, why didn't you tell me some of your ideas before you did marry
me?" he muttered.
"Do you regret it?" she asked, standing up.
"Don't be a silly old thing, Doodles. Of course I don't regret it. But
having married the loveliest girl in London, I should like to splash
around a bit with you. My tastes are bonhomous. I'd always thought....
Dash it, I love you madly, you know that. I'm proud of you."
"Aren't you proud that the loveliest girl in London is willing to be
loved by you only? God! my dear boy, you ought to be grateful that
you've got me to yourself."
She held out her arms, and it was not remarkable that in those arms and
with those lips Clarehaven forgot all about driving along the topping
roads of France in a Lee-Lonsdale car. When his wife released him from
the first real embrace she had ever given him he staggered like one who
has been enchanted.
"Dash it...." he murmured, blinking his eyes to quench the fire that
burned them. "I'm not very poetical, don't you know--but your
kisses--well, really, do you know I think I shall take to reading
poetry?"
III
The next morning Dorothy paced the picture-gallery of Clare that ran the
whole length of the north side of the house. She had several ordeals to
pass in the few days immediately ahead, and she derived much help from
the contemplation of her predecessors at Clare. Gradually from the
glances of those tranquil dames, some of whom for more than two
centuries had gazed seaward through the panes of those high narrow
windows mistily iridescent from a thousand salt gales, Dorothy caught an
attitude toward life; from their no longer perturbable expressions, from
their silent testimony to the insignificance of everything in the
backward of time, she acquired confidence in herself. What was old Lady
Chatfield except a picture, and how could she harm an interloper even
more vulnerable than an actress? She should try this afternoon to think
of the super-dowager as one of the long row of noble dames and console
herself with the thought that in another hundred years the fifth
Countess of Clarehaven would be accounted the loveliest of all the
ladies in this gallery. Who was there to outmatch her? Even the first
countess, with all Romney had yielded from his magic store of roses,
would have to admit she was surpassed by her successor.
"But who shall paint my portrait?" Dorothy asked herself. "Romney should
be alive now. There's no painter as good as he for my style of beauty.
And how shall I be painted? If I manage to ride to hounds as
triumphantly as I hope I shall, I might be painted in a riding-habit.
The black would set off my hair and my complexion and my figure. I don't
want everybody at the Academy to say that my dress is so wonderful, as
if without a dress I should be nothing. Thirty years from now I will be
painted again in some wonderful dress. But oh, if only I don't fail at
the meet on Monday! If only--if only...."
At lunch Tony suggested that he should drive Dorothy to Chatfield in the
car and that his mother and sisters should go in the barouche. The
dowager reminded him how much his grandmother objected to motor-cars at
Chatfield and urged that it was unfair on Dorothy to irritate the old
lady wantonly.
"I never heard such nonsense," Tony exclaimed. "She'll soon be expecting
us to row over to Chatfield in the Ark. Well, I sha'n't go at all. You
and Dorothy had better drive over together in the victoria."
The dowager threw out a signal of distress to her daughter-in-law, who
said firmly but kindly that they would all drive over together in the
drag.
"We shall look like a village treat," muttered Tony, sulkily.
"But I'm anxious to see the country," said Dorothy. "And you drive much
too fast in the car for me to see anything. I don't want to arrive blown
to pieces."
Naturally in the end Dorothy had her way about going in the drag, and
she wondered what Tony could have wished better than to swing through
the gates of Chatfield Park and pull up with a clatter at the gates of
Chatfield Hall. The very sound of the footman's feet alighting on the
gravel drive was like a seal upon the dignity of their arrival. Uncle
Chat came out to greet them, a round, red-faced man with short
side-whiskers, dressed in a pepper-and-salt suit. He had been a widower
for ten years, but his wife before she died--slowly frightened to death
by her mother-in-law, as malicious story-tellers said--had left him two
sons and two daughters. Paignton, the eldest boy, was a freshman at
Trinity, Cambridge, and was at present away on a visit; Charles, the
second boy, was still at home, with Eton looming in a day or so; Dorothy
liked his fresh complexion and the schoolboy impudence that not even his
grandmother had been able to squash. She told him that she was going to
hunt on Monday for the first time for several years, and he promised to
be her equerry and show her some gaps that might be welcome.
"But it's not difficult country," he assured her. "Not like Ireland."
"No. My great-grandfather was killed by an Irish wall," she said.
Tony looked up at this. Perhaps he was thinking that if she rode as
recklessly as she talked she really would be killed out hunting. Of the
other easy members of the family Mary and Maud were jolly girls still in
the thrall of a governess, while Lady Jane, Tony's aunt, was milder even
than his mother, and, having now been for over fifty years at the
super-dowager's beck and call, had the look of one who is always
listening for bells.
The super-dowager herself lived in a self-propelling invalid chair in
which, though she was reputed to be blind, she propelled herself about
the ground floor of Chatfield with as much agility as the mole, another
animal whose blindness is probably exaggerated. Beyond occasionally
knocking over a table, she did more damage with her tongue than with her
chair and kept the kitchen in a state of continuous alarm. One of her
favorite pastimes was to coast down the long corridor that divided them
from the rest of the house, and, pulling up suddenly beside the cook, to
accuse her of burning whatever dish she was preparing. The only servants
at Chatfield who felt at all secure were those high-roosting birds, the
housemaids.
"Who's making all this noise?" demanded the super-dowager, advancing
rapidly into the hall soon after the Clarehaven party had arrived, and
scattering the group right and left.
"Tony has brought his wife to see you," said her daughter. "They only
reached Clare last night."
"Tony's wife?" repeated the old lady. "And who may she be? Chatfield, if
Paignton marries an actress you understand that I leave here at once?
I've made that quite clear, I hope?"
"If you have, Lady Chatfield," said Dorothy, "I'm sure that Paignton
won't marry an actress."
"Who's that talking to me?"
At this moment Arabella and Constantia, who, because their noses were
respectively too small and too large, easily caught cold, sneezed
simultaneously.
"Augusta," said the super-dowager.
"Yes, mamma."
"Don't tell me that's not Bella and Connie, because I know it is. Can
nothing be done about their taking cold like this? They never come here
but they must go sneezing and sniffing about, until one might suppose
Chatfield was draughty."
Considering that for her peregrinations the super-dowager insisted upon
every door of the ground floor's being left open, one might have been
justified in supposing so.
"Where's that girl?" demanded the old lady. "Why doesn't she come close?
Has she got a cold, too?"
"No, no," laughed Dorothy, "I haven't got a cold."
"Your voice is pleasant, child," said the super-dowager. "Augusta, her
voice is pleasant. Chatfield, her voice is pleasant. Clarehaven, come
here. Your wife has a pleasant voice."
"Of course she has," said the grandson. "You ought to have heard her
sing 'Dolly and her Collie.'"
If looks could have killed her husband, Dorothy would have been the
third dowager present at that moment; but strange to say, the old lady
seemed to like the idea of Dorothy's singing.
"She _shall_ sing me 'Dolly and her Collie'; she shall sing it to me
after tea. Come, let's have tea," and, giving a violent twirl to her
wheel, the old lady shot forward in advance of the party toward the
drawing-room, beating by a neck the footman at the door, who in order to
avoid dropping the tray had to perform a pirouette like a comic juggler.
"Why did you make me look such a fool?" Dorothy muttered to Tony at the
first opportunity.
"My dear girl, believe me, I'm the only person who knows how to manage
the silly old thing."
Dorothy was miserable all through tea, wondering if the super-dowager
was really in earnest about making her sing. She wondered what the
servants would think, what her mother-in-law would think, what her uncle
would think, what her new cousins would think, what the whole county of
Devon would think, what all England would think of her humiliation.
Perhaps the old lady was not in earnest. Perhaps it was merely a test of
her dignity. Were ever sandwiches in the world so dry as these?
"What's that?" the super-dowager was exclaiming. "Certainly not! Nobody
can hear this song except myself. I should never dream of allowing a
public performance at Chatfield. This is not a performance. This is a
contribution to my miserable old age."
The old lady swooped about the room like a hen driving intruding
sparrows from her grain; when all were banished she swung rapidly
backward and commanded Dorothy to begin. Poor Dorothy tried to explain
how the effect of the song had depended upon the accessories. There had
been the music, for instance.
"Never mind about the music," said the super-dowager.
"And there was a chorus of six."
"Never mind about the chorus."
"And then I haven't got my dog."
"Never mind about the dog."
Dorothy, who had thought that she had put "Dolly and her Collie" behind
her forever, had to stand up and sing to Lady Chatfield as she had sung
to Mr. Richards in the cupola of the Vanity not so many months ago.
"The words are rubbish," said the old lady. "The tune is catchy, but not
so catchy as the tunes they used to write. Your voice is pleasant. Come
nearer to me, child. They tell me you're handsome. Yes, well, I can
almost see that you are. And I'm glad of it, for the Clares are an ugly
race."
Considering that the super-dowager was directly responsible for Tony's
mother, and therefore partially responsible for Arabella and Constantia,
this opinion struck Dorothy as lacking proportion.
"Beauty is required in the family. You understand what I mean? Let's
have none of these modern notions of waiting five or six years before
you do your duty. Produce an heir."