I
Dorothy was at Little Cherrington when the news of Tony's death reached
her. The dowager had already vacated Clare Lodge, and with a few of her
dearest possessions was now established in Cherrington Cottage. Only
extreme necessity could have driven her into that particular abode,
because in order for her to go into it, Mr. Greenish had to go out of
it, which upset Mr. Greenish so much that he went out of Cherrington
altogether, out of Devonshire, even, and as far away as Hampshire. His
choice of a county was the dowager's only consolation; Connie lived in
Hampshire; the world was small; Mr. Greenish and Bella might even yet
come together. Bella, absorbed in her short stories--one of which had
been accepted, but not published, and another of which had been
published but not paid for--found that the chief objection to being in
Cherrington Cottage was the noise that the children made going to and
from school. It was strange to find Bella, who in her youth had made as
much noise even as Connie, so dependent now upon quiet; but in whatever
divine hands mortals fall, their behavior usually changes radically
afterward. We all know what love can do for anybody; we all know what
the Salvation Army can do for anybody; and if Virgil's account of the
Cumaean Sibyl may be trusted, the transforming influence of Apollo is
second to none.
Tony's consideration in securing Cherrington Cottage to his mother could
only have been bettered if he had made some provision for a sum of
money to maintain it, or, for that matter, herself; delicious as the
exterior of it undoubtedly was, the walls were not edible. The sudden
stoppage in the payment of her jointure put the dowager in the
humiliating position of having to ask her brother, Lord Chatfield, to
pay the weekly bills, and it was with the intention of dealing with this
matter that Dorothy had gone down much against her will to the scene
that was consecrated to her greatest triumph and her greatest failure.
Perhaps the nerves of the usually so genial Uncle Chat had been too much
wrought upon by the outbreak of war. As deputy lieutenant of the county
he had been harried by a series of telegrams from the War Office, each
of which had contradicted its predecessor. He had had to lend not merely
all his own horses to England, but to arrange to lend most of his
neighbors', some of whom were not quite such willing lenders as his
lordship. His eldest son, Paignton, was already at the front in the
North Devon Dragoons, and his second son was assisting an elderly
gentleman who had lived in obscurity since Tel-el-Kebir--where he had
been jabbed in the liver by a dervish--to command, drill, and generally
produce for their country's need the two hundred and ten rustics that at
present constituted the Seventh Service Battalion of the King's Own
Devon Light Infantry. His daughters, Lady Maud and Lady Mary, had given
him no rest till they were allowed to do something or other; though
before he understood what exactly this was the war had lasted many
months longer than the greatest pessimist had believed possible. His
sister, Lady Jane, in despair of finding anything else to do, was
collecting mittens for the soldiers, a hobby which made the ground floor
of Chatfield Hall look like a congested wool-warehouse in the city.
At such a moment the problem of his younger sister's financial future
struck poor Uncle Chat as much more hopelessly insoluble than it would
have seemed in those happy days when he had nothing to talk about
except cigars and pigs. Bella immediately after the outbreak of war put
down the pen and took up the sword, or in other words yearned to join
the V.A.D., and it was the imperative need of finding money for Bella to
gratify her patriotism in London that drove the dowager into discussing
her finances with her brother. Dorothy, who could not bear the
suggestion that Tony had heartlessly left for France without any heed of
his family obligations, a suggestion that reflected upon herself, at
once turned over to the dowager half of the L2,000 in the bank.
Actually, she only left herself with something over L600, for extra
money had had to be found for Tony's equipment and for the payment of
bills he had overlooked. There was no reason to suppose that Uncle Chat
was really criticizing her behavior in the least; but his air of general
irritation gave her the impression that he was, which preyed upon her
mind so much that she began to feel almost on a level with her
unfortunate namesake who had lost the Derby. She fancied that everybody
was ascribing Tony's mad career to his marriage, and thinking that if he
had only married a nice girl in his own class none of these disasters
would have happened. She fancied that the disapproval of the family
which had been carefully concealed all these years out of deference to
Tony's feelings was now making itself known, she was embittered by the
imagined atmosphere of hostility, and she made up her mind that as soon
as possible she would cut herself off from the Fanhopes and from what
was left of the Clares.
Tony in his last letter had proposed that he and she should go on the
stage when he came home, which of course would have been ridiculous;
but, now that Tony was dead, there was surely nothing to prevent her
return to the stage. When she got back to town she might go and ask Sir
John Richards if he could not find a part in the autumn production at
the Vanity Theater. Whatever was now lacking to her voice, whatever the
years had added to her appearance, and notwithstanding the wear and tear
that had added very little, would be counterbalanced in the eyes of the
British public by the privilege of reading upon the program the name of
the Countess of Clarehaven. Nothing was any longer owing to the family
name; no, indeed, except Bella still bore it, and if third-rate stories
were to appear in third-rate magazines under the signature of Arabella
Clare, there was no reason why a bill of the play should not advertise
the Countess of Clare. It happened that Harry Tufton had come down to
Cherrington to assist at the memorial service which was to be held in
Clarehaven church. Dorothy supposed that he was anxious to keep in with
the Chatfields, and in speaking to him about her project she was not
actuated by any desire for the sympathy of an old friend. She asked his
advice in a practical spirit, because he was connected with the theater,
and when he tried to discourage her by hinting at the fickleness of
public affection, she discerned in his opposition to her plan nothing
except the tired anxiety of one who was being importuned by an old
friend to give the best advice compatible with the minimum of trouble to
himself. Tufton's doubtfulness of her capacity still to attract the
favor of an audience had the effect of strengthening her resolve to test
his opinion; she asked him with that indifferent smile of hers, which
had lost none of its magic of provocation, if he really thought that the
British public was as fickle as himself. Tufton protested against the
imputation, and excused himself for the evasion of friendship implicit
in his attitude by pleading that the War Office kept him so very busy
nowadays.
"Of course it was an awful blow when they wouldn't accept me for active
service," he said, earnestly. "Heart, don't you know."
"Oh, your heart is weak," she inquired, with a mocking air of concern.
"I suppose the very idea of war produced palpitations. Don't strain it
going up-stairs in Whitehall."
"Somebody must do the work at home," he said, irritably.
"Yes, I feel so sorry for you poor Cinderellas," she murmured. "But
never mind, you'll always be able to feel that if it wasn't for you the
poor fellows at the front, don't you know, wouldn't be able to get
along. I suppose you call yourselves the noble army of martyrs?"
It had been fun to twist the tail of that ship's rat, Dorothy thought,
when she saw him hurry away from Cherrington to catch the first train
back to town after the service.
The news of Tony's death had reached Cherrington on the morning of the
day that Dorothy was going back to the flat. When she had made over half
of her money to the dowager and was clear of the fancied atmosphere of
hostility at Chatfield, she had begun to feel penitently that she had
misjudged her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. It had seemed dreadful to
leave them here in this cottage almost within sight and sound of the
changes at Clare Court, and she had invited them to come and stay with
her in Halfmoon Street until the flat was given up. The dowager had been
unwilling to leave the country, and when the news of her son's death
arrived was firm in her determination to remain in Cherrington.
"He was born here," she said, "and it is here that I shall always think
of him best. I don't think I can afford to put up a window to his
memory; he must just have a simple stone slab. I should like to copy
that inscription at Rhodes. Do you remember it? 'Anthony, Fifth Earl of
Clarehaven. With God. 1914.'"
Dorothy's grief at the death of Tony had for the moment been kept in
control by the tremendous effort she had been called upon to make in
facing the future; it was the future which had occupied her mind to the
exclusion of any contemplation of the past. Now when her mother-in-law
spoke these simple words she burst into tears. They linked Tony with so
many generations of his house; and they brought home to her almost as a
visible fact his death. She had spent so many years perpetually on the
verge, as it were, of broken promises, of resolutions never carried out,
of little optimisms and extenuations, that when the announcement of his
death arrived it was more than usually true in her case that she did not
at first realize it. The telegraphic form in which the news had been
conveyed to her involuntarily merged itself with so many telegrams in
the past which had turned out false, and only when the dowager stated
his death like this in terms that admitted of no doubt did Dorothy
suddenly confront the reality. She remembered that once a telegram had
arrived almost on this very date to say that Tony could not get away
from camp in time to be present at the annual show. There was no annual
show this year--war had obliterated it--but on the afternoon of this day
on which she had meant to return to town she walked, instead, about the
field where the show had customarily been held, and so vivid was the
familiar scene of hot women and blazing dahlias that she was transported
back in imagination and found herself excusing on the ground of his
military duties her husband's absence from this spectral exhibition. A
farmer, one of her late tenants, passed her while she was wandering over
the field, touched his cap, and begged to express his sorrow at the
news.
"'Tis going to be a handsome year for partridges, too," he said. "But
there, my lady, his lordship of late never seemed to care for partridges
so much as he belonged. I remember when he was a youngster he'd regular
walk me off my feet, as the saying is, after they birds. And he was
uncommon fond of land-rails. Yes, it always seemed to give him a sort of
extra pleasure, as you might say, when he could get a shot at a
land-rail."
The reproach that was implied in the farmer's first words was mitigated
by these reminiscences of Tony as a boy, and Dorothy thought that if her
son had lived he would already be over six years old and within
measurable distance of shooting his first land-rail in the company of
the burly farmer beside her. Her son! Would it have made any difference
to Tony if he had had an heir? Ought she to thank God or reproach Him
for her childlessness?
Three days later Mr. Beadon sang for the late earl a requiem at
Clarehaven church. Whoever should be the new owner of Clare--nobody had
materialized from that mysterious firm of Reinhardt & Co.--he was not
yet flaunting his proprietorship. The mourners passed slowly through the
somber groves of pines and looked back at the empty house across the
short herbage burnished by the drought of August, and the house empty
and solemn, perhaps more solemn because it had not been dressed for
grief, eyed with all its windows their progress seaward.
It would be cynical to say that at such a moment Mr. Beadon derived a
positive pleasure from conducting a mass of requiem for the dead earl,
and if for a moment he regarded with a kind of gloomy triumph Squire
Kingdon's inevitable conformity to the majestic ritual of woe expressed
by the catafalque from which depended the dead earl's hatchment, he made
up by the grave eloquence of his funeral oration for any fleeting
pettiness. The windows of the little church on the cliff were wide open
to the serene air, and if ever the preacher fell mute for a space to
recover from his emotion the plaint of the tide was heard in a monody
above the mourners' tears; but above the preacher's voice, above all the
sounds of nature in communion with human grief, there was continuously
audible a gay chattering of birds among the tombs, of whinchats and
stonechats that were mobilizing along these cliffs, unaware that there
was anything very admirable or very adventurous about their impending
migration. A cynic listening to those birds might have criticized the
rector's sermon for its exaggeration of the spirit in which the young
earl had set out to Flanders; a cynic might have given himself leave to
doubt if the fifth Earl of Clarehaven was inspired by the same spirit as
inspired Sir Gilbert Clare to defend Rhodes against the Moslem; but,
whatever the spirit in which he had set forth, no cynic could impugn the
spirit in which he had died; no living man, indeed, had any longer the
right to sneer at his frailties and follies or to condemn his vices and
his extravagance. Besides, a cynic contemporary with Sir Gilbert Clare
may have questioned the spirit in which the Hospitaller had watched the
cliffs of Devon fade out in the sunset. Who knows? There were stonechats
and whinchats then as now.
On the morning after the requiem Dorothy was confronted with the
possibility of an event that in its significance, should it come to
fruition, would obliterate all that had happened in the past and would
provide her in the future with a task so tremendous that she almost fell
on her knees then and there to pray for strength and wisdom to sustain
it. This was the possibility that she was going to have a child.
Such a prospect changed every plan for the future that she had been
making and destroyed her freedom in the very moment it had been given
back to her by the death of her husband. Her intention of proving to
Harry Tufton that she could again be a favorite of the public must now
be relinquished; her ambition to withdraw haughtily from the protection
of Lord Chatfield must presumably be abandoned. Yet need they? She
should not be too impulsive. Who now except herself had the right to say
a word about her child's future? Who else could claim to be the guardian
of its destiny? If she was right about her condition, she should rejoice
that Tony was dead. If he had been alive and in that mood he was in
before the outbreak of war solved his future so rapidly and so
completely, this wonderful prospect would only have led to
recriminations, even to open hatred. It would have been he who had
robbed their child of its inheritance, and she could never have
refrained from taunting him with his egotism. Nor was it likely that he
would have been reformed by the prospect of being a father; he had not
shown much inclination that way in the early years of their marriage;
and even if for a while he had changed his habits, he would gradually
have relapsed, and, moreover, with his genial and indulgent character he
would have held out not merely a bad, but also an attractive, example,
which would doubtless have been eagerly and assiduously imitated by any
child of his. Yes, but now the future lay in her hands ... and meanwhile
she must not be too sure that she was going to have a child at all, nor,
even if it were established that she was, must she make too many plans
in advance, because everything would be ruled by whether it was a boy or
a girl. If it should be a girl, she might go back to the stage next
year; she would only be thirty-one next March. It was odd how much
younger thirty-one seemed than thirty. But if it should be a boy ...
well, even if it should be a boy, why should she not go back to the
stage and by her own exertions keep him, educate him, prepare him to be
what he must be--landless, houseless, moneyless, but still the sixth
Earl of Clarehaven? Stoic, indeed, should be his training, and his
nobility should be won as well as conferred.
Several days of uncertainty went by, and finally Dorothy decided to ask
Doctor Lane his opinion of her condition. He was a very old man now and
no longer in practice, but at least he would know how to keep a secret,
and a secret she intended his opinion to remain at present. Already
plans were seething in her head for the immediate future, and when
Doctor Lane assured her that she was going to have a baby, without
saying a word even to the dowager she left next day for London.
Dorothy, who had been fancying that Tony's family wanted to be rid of
her, soon found that, on the contrary, they would not let her alone,
and when the lease expired at Michaelmas and while she was still
wondering where she was going to live next, she received an invitation
to join the dowager, Bella, and Lady Jane at the Chatfield town mansion
in Grosvenor Square. It appeared that Lady Jane had by this time become
so inextricably entangled in unknitted wool that the only way she could
disentangle herself was by coming up to town to continue there with
proper help the preparation of mittens against the winter cold.
"Not that it will be necessary," everybody said, "but it's as well to be
prepared, and of course it _might_ drag on till the spring."
The dowager, who had been worked up by her sister to feel that even
though she had given a son to England she was still in debt, and Bella
were among the twenty ladies collected by Lady Jane to make mittens, and
the spinster was anxious to add Dorothy to her flock, for what between
wool and ladies she was become very pastoral. So great pressure was put
on Dorothy to make mittens, too. Uncle Chat was very penitent for his
behavior over the jointure, and he now insisted that the money Dorothy
had shared with her mother-in-law should be returned to her. Had it not
been for her condition, she would have taken pleasure in refusing this;
in the circumstances she accepted it, but she still did not say a word
about her pregnancy, for reasons compounded of superstition and pride.
Her experience of child-bearing had destroyed her self-confidence and
she felt that she could not bear to have a great fuss made about her and
to be installed in state at Chatfield Hall to wait there doing nothing
through all this anxious winter of war. Nor did the manufacture of
mittens in Grosvenor Square appeal to her. Moreover, it was possible
that the news would not be welcome. She could not have borne to see
Uncle Chat's face fall again at the prospect of having to support a
grandnephew of the same rank as himself, and though she did not think
that the dowager would attempt to interfere, or that she would be
anything but delighted and tactful, there was the chance that after her
son's death she might arrogate to herself a right to spoil her grandson.
If Dorothy accepted for him the charity of his grandmother's family, she
could not avoid admitting the dowager to the privilege of maternity; but
if during the months of expectation she kept close her secret and if it
were a boy, untrammeled by any obligations she should be at liberty to
make her own decision about his up-bringing. More and more she was
forming all her plans to fit the future of a boy, and one of her chief
reasons for not relying upon the good will of the family was her desire
to spare this son prenatal coddling by coddling herself.
Dorothy might have found it hard to analyze justly all the motives that
inspired her to take the step she did; but whatever they were, a hot
morning in late September found her sitting at the window of her old
room in Lonsdale Road.
II
If outwardly Lonsdale Road presented the same appearance as it had
presented on that September morning twelve years ago when Dorothy, after
washing her hair, made up her mind to be engaged to Wilfred Curlew, the
standpoint from which she now looked out of her window was so profoundly
changed that the road itself was transmuted by the alchemy of her mind
to achieve the significant and incommunicable landscape of a dream. It
was as if in looking at Lonsdale Road she were looking at herself, and a
much truer self than she ever used to see portrayed in that old mirror
upon her dressing-table.
In an upper room of the house opposite a servant was dusting. Down
below, amid that immemorial acrid smell of privet, two little girls were
busily digging in the front garden. These were the daughters of her
second sister, the rightful Dorothy, who was staying with her parents
because her husband, Claude Savage, had left Norbiton for France with
his regiment of territorials. Mrs. Savage, a dark, neat little woman, as
capable a housewife as she had promised to become, and at twenty-eight
not quite so annoying as formerly, came into the room from time to time
and glanced out of the window to see that her little girls were not
making themselves too dirty.
"Hope they're not disturbing you with their chattering."
"No, no," said the countess. "I like listening to them."
Ah, there was Edna down below, not as twelve years ago giggling back
from school with Agnes, but wheeling a perambulator and from time to
time bending cautiously over to arrange the coverlet over her sleeping
baby. Edna was a dull edition of Agnes, and already at twenty-six much
more like Mrs. Caffyn than any of her sisters. Her chin was rather
furry; she was indefinite, not so indefinite as her mother because
modern education had not permitted to her what was formerly considered a
prerogative of woman. Edna had been married for about three years to
Walter Hume, a young doctor in Golders Green, who was stationed at some
northern camp with the R.A.M.C. She, too, was staying with her
parents.
"Edna keeps on fussing with the coverlet," said Mrs. Savage, critically.
"But she ought not to be walking along the sunny side of the pavement."
The countess did not pay much attention to the practical sister looking
over her shoulders; she was thinking of Agnes and wondering what she was
doing, and how her baby was getting on.
"Have you heard from Agnes lately?" she asked.
"Yes. Her husband has gone in for politics. But of course politics out
there must be very different from what they are in England. You can't
imagine Agnes as the wife of a politician. Tut-tut! Ridiculous!"
"What did she call her little boy?"
"Oh, gracious, don't ask me! Some perfectly absurd name. Could it be
Xenophon? I know Claude laughed muchly when he heard it. Thank goodness,
he wouldn't have let me choose such names for Mary and Ethel. I suppose
Agnes is happy. She seems to be. I sometimes wonder where some of the
members of our family get their taste for adventure."
"But you've no idea what a lovely place Aphros is ... it lies in the
middle of a circle of islands and...."
"Yes, yes," Mrs. Savage interrupted, "but it's a long way from England,
and the idea of living abroad doesn't appeal to me."
"Don't you ever want to travel?"
"Well, Claude and I had planned to go to Switzerland with a party this
August, but of course the war put a stop to that."
"By the way, isn't the war rather an adventure for Claude?" the countess
asked, with a smile.
"An adventure?" Mrs. Savage echoed. "It's a great inconvenience."
She bustled out of the room to look after her own daughters and give
Edna some advice about hers; soon after she was gone Gladys and
Marjorie, the prototypes of those little girls in the front garden,
strolled in to gossip with their eldest sister. Although it was nearly
noon, they were only just out of bed, because they had been up late at a
dance on the night before. Gladys, a girl of twenty, was very like her
eldest sister at the same age. She was not quite so tall and perhaps she
lacked her air of having been born to grandeur, but she was sufficiently
like to make Dorothy wonder if her career would at all resemble her own.
On the whole, she thought that probably herself and Agnes had exhausted
the right of the Caffyns to astonish their neighbors. Gladys and
Marjorie, the latter a charming new edition of the original Dorothy,
with flashing deep-blue eyes, dark hair, and an Irish complexion, were
already, at twenty and nineteen, too free to be ambitious. Twelve years
had made a great difference to the liberty of girls in West Kensington,
and Mr. Caffyn no longer objected to the young men who came to his
house, mostly in uniform nowadays, which provided one more excuse for
emancipation. Gladys and Marjorie frequently arrived home unchaperoned
from dances at three o'clock in the morning, and their father did not
turn a hair; perhaps he was already so white that he was incapable of
showing any more marks of life's fitful fever. No doubt he had long ago
given up the ladies of Lauriston Mansions, and probably at no period in
his career was he more qualified to be the secretary of the Church of
England Purity Society than upon the eve of his retirement from the
post. Dorothy had not seen her father since that night she drove him
back in her car from the Vanity. Tacitly they had been friends at once
when the countess came to live at home for a while; indeed, she fancied
that she could grow quite fond of him, and she was even compelled to
warn herself against a slight inclination to accept his flattery a
little too complacently. Mrs. Caffyn, with a perversity that is often
shown by blondes upon the verge of sixty, would not go white, and her
hair was of so indefinite a shade as to be quite indescribably the very
expression of her own indefinite personality.
Of the boys--it was odd to hear of the boys again--Roland had long been
married and already had four children. At this rate he was likely to
surpass his father, whom on a larger scale he was beginning to resemble.
Roland was continually in a state of being expected to come and look the
family up. He was so long in doing so that he became almost a myth to
his eldest sister, and when at last, one afternoon, he did materialize
with the largest mustache she had ever seen, his appearance gave her the
same kind of thrill that she used to get at the Zoo, when at short
intervals the sea-lion would emerge from the water and flap about among
the rocks of his cage. It was obvious that Roland regarded her with a
mixture of suspicion, jealousy, and disapproval, for he had not brought
his wife with him, and when the countess asked him if he had also left
his pipe at home, he growled out that he supposed she was far too grand
for pipes. Dorothy remembered that sometimes when they were children he
and she had seemed upon the path of mutual understanding, and, feeling
penitent for her share in the way they had for twelve years been walking
away from each other, she tried to be specially affectionate with
Roland; but he was already out of earshot. He evidently was thinking
that her abrupt re-entry into the family circle would probably mean a
reduction in his share of any money left by their parents, because he
was continually alluding to her financial state and his own. She tried
to ascribe this to his position as the manager of a branch bank; but she
knew in her heart that he was dividing L500 a year first by eight and
then by nine and thinking what a difference to his holiday that extra L7
would make. Of Dorothy's other brothers, Cecil was in camp somewhere,
and hoping to get to France soon with the R.A.M.C.; he had been married
only a few months, and his wife was living in the nearest town to his
quarters. Vincent, who had won a scholarship at Sydney Sussex College,
Cambridge, had already enlisted and wrote home as confidently of
promotion in the near future as twelve years ago he had boasted that he
would soon be in the eleven of St. James's Preparatory School.
Perhaps the most striking result of the countess's return was the
impetus it gave to Mrs. Caffyn's Wednesday afternoons. The punctilious
ladies came as they had been coming steadily for twelve years; but a
quantity of less punctilious ladies also came and were so much over-awed
by meeting a countess in a West Kensington drawing-room that they had no
appetite for cakes, which was just as well because otherwise the strain
put upon the normal provision by so many extra visitors might have been
too much for it. In addition to the Wednesday ladies, several friends of
Dorothy's youth visited No. 17 in the evenings, and though by now the
billiard-table was more like a neglected tennis-lawn, she played one or
two games to remind her of old times, thinking how scornful she would
have been twelve years ago if any one had prophesied to her such
indulgence in sentiment. Among these friends of youth came Wilfred
Curlew, who in outward appearance was the least changed of all. His
career had been successful, if the editorship of a society paper can be
considered success. Being a journalist, he rightly considered himself
indispensable at home, and it is unlikely that his inaccurate and cheery
paragraphs in _The Way of the World_ did any more to make the war
ridiculous than some of the inaccurate and cheery despatches sent home
from the front by generals. A slight tendency which he had formerly had
toward a cockney accent had been checked by an elocutionist who had
imprisoned his voice in his throat, whence it was never allowed to
stray. If Lady Clarehaven had once been a Vanity girl, Mr. Wilfred
Curlew, the editor of _The Way of the World_, had once written fierce
revolutionary articles about Society in _The Red Lamp_; and whereas Lady
Clarehaven had long been indifferent to her past, Mr. Curlew was still
sensitive about his, as sensitive as a man who oils the wheels of
railway-coaches in termini would be if it were known that he had once
been a train-wrecker.
After the first awkwardness of such a rencounter had worn off Dorothy
found Wilfred entertaining. It was astonishing to learn how accurately
the failings and follies of so many of her friends and acquaintances
were known to the editor, who had never met one of them. At first he
pretended that he had met them; but as gradually he saw more of the
countess he gave up this pretense, and finally he revealed the existence
in his mind of a perpetual and abominable dread that soon or late in one
of his cheery paragraphs he should make a mistake, not, of course, a
mistake of fact or even an unjust imputation--that would be nothing--but
a mistake of form. He was really haunted day and night by such bogies as
referring to a maid of honor after marriage without her prefix, though
to have suggested that her behavior with somebody else's husband was
less honorable than that would no more have troubled him than to state
positively that her main hobby was breeding Sealyham terriers, when it
was really communicating every Sunday at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge. If
in Lonsdale Road Dorothy beheld her present self, in Wilfred Curlew she
saw the reflection of what she was twelve years ago, enough of which old
self still existed to make her feel proud that never in her most anxious
moments had she revealed to another person her own dread of making a
mistake.
One day after a long talk about well-known people in society, Curlew
exclaimed from the depths of his inmost being, "If only I had you
always!"
"Is this a proposal?" she laughed.
He rose and walked about the room in his agitated fashion; then
supporting with one arm the small of his back as he used, and wrenching
his voice back into his throat whence in his emotion it had nearly
escaped, he paused to mutter:
"Presumptuous, I know, but sincere."
This phrase remained in Dorothy's mind for long afterward, and in her
gloomiest hours she could always smile when she repeated gently to
herself, "Presumptuous, I know, but sincere."
Naturally, she told Curlew as kindly as she could that his proposal was
far outside the remotest bounds of possibility.
"Besides," she added, "you'd really be much better off without my help.
Readers of your paper will always greatly prefer your view of society to
my view. My view would pull your circulation down to nothing in less
than no time."
"It's true," Curlew groaned. "How wise you are!"
Only that morning he had received a sharp reminder from the great brain
of which _The Way of the World_ was merely an inquisitive and
insignificant tentacle, to say that the last three or four numbers of
the paper had shown a marked falling off in their ability to provide
what the public required.
"You have to admit that I am right," Dorothy pointed out kindly.
"Yes, but if you'd marry me, in a year or two I would give up journalism
and write novels. I've got a theory about the form of the English novel
which I should like to put into practice."
"I'm afraid," said Dorothy, "I have heard too many theories about the
form of race-horses to believe much in theories of form about anything.
Form is a capricious quality."
"It's an awful thing," poor Wilfred groaned, "for a man who knows he can
write good stuff never to have an opportunity of doing so. I'm afraid
I've sold my soul," he murmured, in a transport of remorse.
"We all of us do that sooner or later," she said. "And it's only when we
don't get a good price for it that we repent."
Dorothy's faculty for aphorisms had no doubt been fostered by the
respect which was accorded to her at Lonsdale Road, but she was far from
talking merely for the sake of talking, and her inspiration was really
the fruit of experience, not the mere flowering of words. She had,
perhaps, been wiser than she had realized in coming home for a while.
Notwithstanding those two younger sisters nearly as beautiful as
herself, notwithstanding the knowledge generally diffused that she was
without money, her beauty and rank were still sufficiently remarkable in
West Kensington to preserve her dignity. Here she ran no risks of
acquiring a deeper cynicism from the behavior of old friends like
Tufton, and inasmuch as misfortune had made her more truly the equal of
those around her she had no temptation now to lord it over her sisters,
as no doubt they had expected she would; in the homage of West
Kensington she let the pleasant side of herself develop and, by a strong
effort resisting an inclination to worry about the future, she resigned
herself to whatever fortune had in store for her.
Dorothy was not content with waiting for all her old friends to visit
her; there was one whom she herself sought out soon after she reached
West Kensington. She had not seen Olive Airdale since her marriage, and
she was glad she was visiting her for the first time humbly and on foot,
even if Olive should think that it was only in adversity that she cared
to seek out the companions of her early days. What rubbish! As if Olive
would think anything except that she was glad to see her old friend. It
was an opalescent afternoon in mid-October when Dorothy rang the bell of
the little red house in Gresley Road, and Olive's welcome of her was as
if the mist over London had suddenly melted to reveal that very paradise
which for the fanciful wayfarer existed somewhere behind these
enchanting and transfigurative autumnal airs.
"My dearest Dorothy," she exclaimed. "But why do you reproach yourself?
As if I hadn't always perfectly understood! I've been so worried about
you. And I wish you could have met Jack--but of course he enlisted at
once. You don't know him or you'd realize that of course he had to."
They talked away as if there had never been the smallest break in their
association; Rose and Sylvius, those nice fat twins who would be five
years old next April, interested the countess immensely now that she
would soon be a mother herself.
"And Sylvia?" Dorothy asked.
"Oh, my dear, we don't know. Isn't it dreadful? None of us knows. She
was engaged to be married to Arthur Madden--you remember him, perhaps at
the Frivolity last year--and suddenly he married another girl and
Sylvia vanished--utterly and completely. She went abroad, that's all we
know."
So Sylvia with all her self-assurance had not been able to escape a
fall. In Dorothy's present mood it would have been unfair to say that
she was glad to find that Sylvia was vulnerable, but she did feel that
if she ever met Sylvia again she should perhaps get back her old
affection for her more easily. And while she was thinking this about
Sylvia she suddenly realized that all these other people must be feeling
the same about herself.
The revival of her intimacy with Olive made a great difference to
Dorothy's stay in West Kensington, and she might even have stayed on at
Lonsdale Road until her baby was born had not her two married sisters
turned out to be going to have babies also. Though Dorothy had never
possessed a very keen sense of humor, her sense of the ridiculous had
been sufficiently developed to make her feel that the sight of three
young women in an interesting condition round the dining-room table of
No. 17 would be a little too much of a good thing. She therefore wrote
to Doctor Lane to say that she wanted her child to be born in
Devonshire, and asked for his advice. He suggested that she should go to
a nursing-home he knew of in Ilfracombe. Thither she went in the month
of January, taking with her from Lonsdale Road that old colored
supplement inscribed "Yoicks! Tally-Ho"; and there, without any of those
raptures that marked her first pregnancy, but with abundant health and
serenity of purpose, she waited for her time to come, and at the end of
April bore a posthumous son to Clarehaven.
III
Not until her son was actually born did Dorothy apprise the dowager of
the event. It was lucky that spring was already warm over France and
that the sudden famine of mittens did not inconvenience the troops at
this season, because the instant withdrawal of the dowager, Lady Jane,
and Lady Arabella from the house in Grosvenor Square left the twenty
ladies they had gathered together with neither wool to continue their
good work nor with addresses to which it could be sent. The dowager in a
state of perfect happiness began to trace in the lineaments of the baby
a strong likeness to her dead son, and, as Dorothy had expected, to
lament loudly his disinheritance; Lady Jane insisted that he must be
taken at once to Chatfield, where Uncle Chat would be more than
delighted to look after him entirely; Bella, who had been working
herself up into a state of great excitement over a baby that Connie
expected to bring into the world at the end of May, ceased to take the
least interest in Connie or her child and celebrated the advent of her
nephew, the sixth earl, by abandoning prose for a paean of rhapsodic
verse. As for Dorothy, she who during the months of waiting had supposed
that she had at last reached that high summit of complete indifference
to the world, lost nearly all her superiority, and with her strength
renewed and increasing every day was on fire to secure somehow or other
to her son the material prosperity that his rank demanded. She was still
averse to taking him to Chatfield, because even if at such an early age
it was improbable that the externals of Chatfield would make the least
impression upon his character, she did not like to surrender all her
fine schemes of independence at once. She compromised by consenting to
take the baby to Cherrington Cottage, where his arrival elicited from
their former tenants a most moving demonstration of affection for the
family.
Clare Court was still vacant, and during that summer Dorothy used to
wheel the perambulator of her baby round and round the domains of which
he had been robbed. For his name she had gone back to her old choice of
Lucius, and she felt that by doing so she was conferring upon this
posthumous son the greatest compliment in her capacity. The dowager was
at first a little distressed that he was not christened Anthony, but
when Dorothy read to her, out of a volume of Clarendon she borrowed from
the rector, that this namesake was "'a person of such prodigious parts
of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in
conversation, of so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to
mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if
there were no other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war than
that single loss, it must be most infamous and execrable to all
posterity.' 'Thus,'" Dorothy read on, "'fell that incomparable young
man, in the four-and-thirtieth year of his age, having so much
despatched the true business of life that the eldest rarely attain to
that immense knowledge, and the youngest enter not into the world with
more innocency.'"
"Yes, yes," sighed the dowager. "Dear old Tony! He was in his
thirty-second year. Dear old boy!"
Dorothy looked at her mother-in-law to see if she were serious; when she
saw that indeed she was she had not the heart to say that the eulogy
might as a description of Tony's life be considered somewhat elevated.
After all, Tony had died for his king and his country; Lord Falkland had
died for his king only.
On the anniversary of the fifth earl's death, when the wind at dusk was
cooing round Cherrington Cottage like a mighty dove, Dorothy was seized
with a sudden restlessness and a desire to encounter the mysterious and
uneasy air of this gusty twilight of late summer. Her son was fast
asleep, with both his grandmother and his aunt Arabella ready to
minister to his most incomprehensible baby wish and serve him, were it
possible, with the paradisal milk of which he dreamed. He had been
restless all day, and now that he was sleeping so calmly Dorothy felt
that she could allow herself to take air and exercise. Owing to the
continued emptiness of the Court, she had grown into the habit of
walking about the park whenever she felt inclined, and except for the
solemnity and silence of the house itself she was hardly conscious that
she was no longer the mistress of Clare, because the lodge-keepers and
various servants of the estate were familiar to her and always showed
how glad they were to see her among them.
The park that evening was haunted by strange noises; but Dorothy's mind
never ran on the supernatural, and neither swooping owl, nor flitting
bat, nor weasel swiftly jigging across her path, nor sudden scurry of
deer startled at their drinking-pool alarmed her. She walked on until
the dusk had deepened to a wind-blown starlight, and she found herself
in the gardens, where on the curved seat of the pergola she sat until
the moon rose and the statues shivered like ghosts in a light changing
from silver to gray, from gray to silver, as the scud traveled over the
moon's face. But Dorothy had no eyes that night for shadows. She was
keeping the anniversary of the fifth earl's death by concentrating upon
one supreme problem--the restoration of all these moonlit acres, of all
these surging yews and cedars, of every stone and statue, to the
rightful heir. If any ghost had walked in Clare that night she would
have thought of nothing but the best way to retain him for her son's
service. Each extravagant idea that came into her head seemed to stay
there but for an instant before it was caught by the wind and blown out
of reach forever. Restlessly she left the pergola and wandered round the
empty house where the wind in the pines on either side was like a sea
and the scent of the magnolias in bloom against the walls swirled upon
the air with an extraordinary sweetness. She entered one of the groves
and passed through to the lawn behind, where a wild notion came into her
head, inspired by the wild night and this mad close of summer, to find
an ax and deface the escutcheon of Clare, to mutilate the angelic
supporters, to eclipse forever that stone moon in her complement, and so
spoil for the intruding owner at least one of his trophies. The
unheraldic moon was not yet above the pine-trees on the eastern side of
the house, and such was the force of the wind blowing straight off the
sea from the northwest--blowing here with redoubled force on account of
the gap in the cliffs through which it had to travel--that when a cloud
passed over the still invisible moon on the far side, Dorothy had the
impression that the luminary was being blown out like a lamp, so dark
did it then become here in the shadow of the house. She had an impulse
to defy this wind, to walk down to the headland's edge and watch the
waves leaping like angry, foaming dogs against the face of the cliff;
but half-way to the sea she had to turn round, exhausted, and surrender
to the will of the wind. Her hair blown all about her shoulders,
spindrift and spume racing at her side, she let herself sail back along
the lea toward the house, looking to any one who should see her like a
mermaid cast up by the tempest upon a haunted island. Haunted it was,
indeed, for just as the moon shining down a gorge of clouds rose above
the pines she met the Caliban of this island.
"You!" she cried. "I knew it was you the whole time."
Houston was unable to speak for a minute, so frightened had he been by
this apparition from the sea, so frightened was he to be wandering round
this stolen house and in his wanderings to have provoked this spirit of
the place, and in the end more frightened than ever, perhaps, to find
who the spirit really was. Dorothy did not realize how strange she
looked, how magical and debonair, how perilous, how wild; she whose
brain was throbbing with one thought perceived in Houston's expression
only the shame he should naturally feel for having robbed her son.
"You look tremendously blown about," he managed to say, finally. "Won't
you come inside for a minute?"
Then suddenly as if the wind had got into his brain he said to her,
"Dorothy, why don't you marry me and take all this back for yourself?"
"Could I?"
She had appealed to herself, not to him; but he, misunderstanding her
question, began like a true Oriental to praise the gifts he would offer
her.
"Stop," she commanded. "All these things that you want to give to me,
will you give them to my son? Don't be so bewildered. You knew I had a
son? I can't stop here to argue about myself and what I can give you or
you can give me. If you will make over Clare as it stands with all its
land--oh yes, and buy back the Hopley estate which Tony's father
sold--to my son, I'll marry you."
"If you'll marry me I'll do anything," he vowed.
There was a momentary lull in the wind, and as if in the silence that
followed he was able to grasp how much he had undertaken, he stammered,
nervously:
"And you and I? Suppose you and I have children?"
"Well," said Dorothy, "they'll be half brothers and sisters of the sixth
Earl of Clarehaven, which will be quite enough for _them_, won't it?"
And that night, while the wind still cooed round Cherrington Cottage,
Dorothy, Countess of Clarehaven, wrote out for Debrett and read to
Augusta, Countess of Clarehaven:
"Clarehaven, Earl of (Clare.) (Earl. U.K. 1816. Bt. 1660.) Lucius Clare;
6th Earl and 11th Baronet; _b._ April 25, 1915; _s._ 1915; is patron of
one living.
"_Arms_--Purpure, two flanches ermine, on a chief sable a moon in her
complement argent. _Crest_--A moon in her complement argent, arising
from a cloud proper. _Supporters_--Two angels, vested purpure, winged
and crined, or, each holding in the exterior hand a key or.
"_Seat_--Clare Court, Devonshire."
THE END