Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_), and text
enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
THE SUNDERED STREAMS
THE HISTORY OF A MEMORY THAT HAD NO FULL STOPS
BY REGINALD FARRER
AUTHOR OF ‘THE GARDEN OF ASIA,’ ‘THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS,’ ETC.
‘Shōshi no kukai hétori nashi: Sodé no furi-awasé mo tashō no en.’
[There is no shore to the bitter Sea of Birth-and-Death: even the
touching of sleeves in passing is the result of some connection in a
former life.]
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W.
1907
[_All rights reserved_]
* * * * *
TO ‘MILADI’
ALICE, COUNTESS OF BECTIVE
* * * * *
THE SUNDERED STREAMS
CHAPTER I
The English language, flexible and rich though it be, lacks words
in which to convey the subtler social distinctions. We have had
to go abroad for ‘nouveau-riche’ and ‘parvenu,’ to say nothing
of ‘Philistia,’ ‘Bohemia,’ the ‘demi-monde,’ and all the other
geographical names that we have taken from the atlas of the human
world to describe some small corner in our own little parish. But, as
our civilization grows more and more complex, so does our borrowed
vocabulary grow less and less adequate, until nowadays we find not a
few fine differences in our microcosm which no word of our own or of
any other nation avails to identify. The ‘Arrived’ and the ‘New-rich’
are familiar figures, but what of those many families who suddenly
become wealthy and prominent after many generations of well-bred
obscurity? They cannot fairly be described as ‘nouveau-riche’ or
‘parvenu’; they have been there all the time, though not in evidence;
to brand them with the stigma of novelty would be manifestly unfair.
They have antiquity without importance--a vast difference, in the
eyes of social astronomers, between them and the blazing stars of
wealth that so suddenly emerge from the black night of genealogical
non-existence. As well compare a dazzling meteor, here and gone in a
flash, with a genuine star which, after æons of inconspicuousness,
abruptly swells into a luminary of the first magnitude. To describe
such fixed lights in our English hemisphere a new word must first be
coined in another language, and then borrowed. Such people are not
‘nouveau-riche’; they are ‘renrichis.’ And to this class belonged the
Dadds of Darnley-on-Downe--that obscure dynasty from which it is now
necessary to show the gradual genesis, through many quiet generations,
of Kingston Darnley, its apostate offspring.
Among soft Kentish meadows sleeps the little metropolis of
Darnley-on-Downe. It lies on the grassy plain like a neat poached egg
on a vast green plate, and, over all, the blue vault of heaven makes
a domed lid. The Downe meanders placidly at the foot of its gardens,
and comfortable little Georgian houses speak of agelong ease and
decent leisure. Darnley-on-Downe has no local peer, no local palace;
rank and fashion, therefore, are represented only by these dignified
dwellings of red brick, each enclosed in shrubberies of rose and laurel
and lilac, each tenanted by some family well known for generations in
Darnley-on-Downe.
As Cranford was, as Highbury was, so also was Darnley-on-Downe--placid,
happy and exclusive, intolerant of all new-comers and of all change.
Mrs. John succeeded Mrs. Joshua, and Mr. Reuben Mr. James; and no
outsider was ever permitted to disturb the orderly dynasties that so
long had ruled in the little town. Crowns fell, but the serenity of
Darnley-on-Downe remained unruffled, and the collapse of the Corsican
ogre took no higher rank in general conversation than the misdoings
of Mrs. Blessing’s Matilda, or the strange theft of Miss Minna Dadd’s
Leghorns. So, talking only to themselves, and only of themselves, the
aristocracy of Darnley-on-Downe passed inconspicuously from the nursery
to the grave, through the leisurely old days when the peace of the
country contrasted so strongly with the restless misery of the great
cities, and, in the absence of halfpenny morning papers, only rare
rumours filtered down into the provinces of a young Queen gradually
making her seat secure on a dishonoured and endangered throne.
Nowadays Cranford, probably, plays pit, and motors hoot beneath the
walls of Donwell Abbey. Nowadays clash and clangour fill the one main
street of Darnley-on-Downe, and the Georgian houses are being swept
away to make room for glassy palaces of art-nouveau design. But, in
the days when Fortune swooped so suddenly on the Dadds, only peace and
slumber haunted the Market Place and St. Eldred’s.
Clean, humble, small, and quiet, the cottages and shops of the
working-classes lined the broad pavement, with here a neat bank fronted
by Corinthian pilasters, and there a rambling, wide-mouthed inn,
haunted by loafing dogs and ostlers full of leisure. Then came the
church, solid and unassuming, very essence made visible of that orderly
if unimpassioned spirit that then possessed the Church of England.
Under its shadow, flanked by tall clipped obelisks of yew, squatted the
solid square of the vicarage, with green lawn and beds of roses leading
down to the wicket that opened on the roadway. And beyond this again
began a wide, ancient avenue of limes, fragrant and tranquil, on whose
either side stretched that series of red-brick houses in which the
Upper Ten of Darnley-on-Downe discreetly led its days, and formed an
aristocracy no less rigid, no less zealous for birth and tradition than
that higher world called ‘county,’ with which it had nothing to do, and
yet so much in common. St. Eldred’s was the name of this provincial
faubourg, and the wayfarer, passing down its green length, might divine
its exclusive character from the lack of any invidious distinction
made between the houses. The identity of each was kept sacred for the
elect, and the outsider was to know nothing. In our own assertive time
each gate would bear a curly Gothic title--‘Chatsworth,’ ‘Arundel,’
‘Sandringham’ would gratify our loyal eyes. In those days Mrs. Blessing
knew Miss Dadd’s house, and Miss Dadd knew Mrs. Blessing’s. This
knowledge was held to be amply sufficient, and it was even felt that
to share it with the unprivileged world at large would be profane and
vulgar. Thus the unguided stranger would have travelled uninstructed
past gateway after gateway, past trim red wall after trim red wall,
without being able to attribute any definite personality to the dweller
in each cloistered precinct. And therefore he must necessarily have
passed on his way without gathering any idea of the extent to which the
Dadds dominated St. Eldred’s.
All the dwellers in these houses lived in a small way, and all of them
drew their incomes from some retail trade. ‘County’ people, from their
own high circle, contemplating these lesser worlds, would never have
guessed the intense and silent arrogance with which, in turn, these
lesser worlds looked down on the struggling aspirants from beneath, on
the new and unknown persons who painfully fought to win a footing in
St. Eldred’s. But, in the close ring of this aristocracy, the Dadds
were certainly the ruling dynasty. Had the wayfarer been privileged
with a guide, he would have learned that every fourth house in St.
Eldred’s enshrined a Dadd or the relation of a Dadd. Here dwelt Mrs.
Reuben Dadd; yonder Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Dadd; and, not a stone’s-throw
farther, was the house of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. As
for the head of the family, Mr. Dadd, with his consort, dwelt in a
stout-pillared edifice which even an uninstructed stranger must have
seen to be the residence of a presiding Power.
The Dadds permeated social life in Darnley-on-Downe. They were
everywhere, had married into every family, had accorded brides to every
neighbouring house of repute, had come at last to be, as it were, the
very incarnation of decency and proper pride in Darnley-on-Downe. They
were no richer than their neighbours, but in those days wealth gave no
precedence, and the Dadds had a prestige which their fellow-nobles in
St. Eldred’s lacked. For the Dadds owned land, and, though St. Eldred’s
made no attempt to connect itself with the world of landowners and
county families, yet a vague aroma of grandeur still clung to the one
family in its midst that might be said to verge on the territorial
class. The glory of the Dadds was a big freehold farm beyond the town,
where they had been established from time immemorial, honourably
obscure from the days of Henry the Eighth. St. Eldred’s, accordingly,
cherishing its own pedigrees and antiquities, as it did, with as
fervent a passion as any Austrian noble, yet by tacit consent accorded
supremacy to this landowning family in its midst.
The Dadds by now had gone down, alas, in the world; however, St.
Eldred’s never dreamed of making worldly prosperity a criterion for
approval. St. Eldred’s lived, itself, in a penurious prosperity or
a prosperous poverty; wealth, being unattainable, was held to be
undesirable as well as rather vulgar, and the fading income of the
Dadds only set the seal on their title to general admiration. The
farm was still theirs indeed, but its yield was less and lessening.
All through the good old Protection days their corn had brought high
prices; but, unfortunately, the cost of living had grown even higher
in proportion, until the Dadds found themselves forced to renounce
agricultural hopes, leave the farm fallow, and plunge into small trade.
From this they made a fair livelihood, and were able to support their
regal position in the world of St. Eldred’s. So they lived, married,
ruled, and died, till never a house in St. Eldred’s but was kin to the
royal family of Dadd.
James Dadd after James Dadd contentedly took up his sceptre, swayed it
during his time, and laid it by. Their clan, like all others in St.
Eldred’s, was magnificently complacent in contemplation of its own
position. No Dadd was ever heard to aspire to more giddy worlds, no
Dadd was ever known to show any hankerings after wilder flights, after
new courses, after original thought or action of any kind. In a young
member of the family, in a collateral, the weight of his elders would
immediately have crushed out such sparks of discontent; as for the head
of the dynasty, so surrounded was the ruling Dadd by now with uncles,
cousins, and aunts, not to mention dowagers of bygone sovereigns, that
it would have been as easy for him to revolt as for a Pope to make
headway against the College of Cardinals. Such, then, was the decorous
state of affairs, when suddenly a most astonishing thing happened.
The railway mania was sweeping over England. Counties were being opened
up, and landowners being driven crazy with hysterical apprehensions
of ruin, and opposition to every threatened change. At first all
these commotions left the quiet waters of St. Eldred’s unruffled. But
eventually a railway company came sniffing round the ancestral but
profitless farm of the Dadds, and, somehow, during the negotiations,
it was discovered that those barren acres covered a coal-field of
exuberant richness.
It was not to be expected that this new fact should bring about any
sudden alteration in the feeling of St. Eldred’s towards the Dadds.
Only a mild flutter agitated for a while the red-brick houses. Then it
was felt that the acquisition of wealth by the Dadds was very right
and proper. Wealth was only vulgar when in new and plebeian hands. A
Dadd could be trusted to avoid giving offence, a Dadd would never be
ostentatious, nor presume to change his mode of life. So, undeterred by
any disapproval from their peers, the ruling Dadds proceeded quietly
to develop their new possibilities. What those possibilities were no
one had the audacity or the grandeur of mind to compute. Unsuspected,
unrealized, volumes of money rolled ceaselessly in to the account of
the mine-owners, while they, in their innocence, continued unperturbed
in the old simple ways, never caring to dream that their new wealth
could do more for them than add, at most, a parlourmaid.
It was some years before even this grand addition was made to their
scale of living, and then it was only when the sudden death of
James Dadd the Eighth had left the family sceptre in the hands of a
queen-regent. The widow ruled for her son (now, at a tender age, raised
to the rank of James Dadd the Ninth), and hardly had she grasped the
reins of power than she began to show signs of wishing to use the
abundant resources which had now been accumulating for fifteen years
or more. Her ambitions were not approved, and the extra parlourmaid
was only condoned as an indulgence for the sorrows of widowhood. But
from that moment a little rift began to widen between the reigning
Dadds and Darnley-on-Downe. The money began insensibly to come between
the rulers and the ruled. It was inevitable that it should. An
income--even an unspent income--of fifteen thousand a year cannot long
live on terms of perfect friendly equality with incomes of several
hundred or so. The richer, sooner or later, condescends; the poorer,
sooner or later, grudges. Thus it was in Darnley-on-Downe. Even the
suspicion that Mrs. Dadd had ‘notions’--that she would have liked a
landau, and had conceived thoughts of sending her sons to Eton--caused
a certain vigilant enmity to exasperate the keenness with which her
every action was watched and weighed by her council of relatives. The
slightest sign of ambition was soon marked as a treason to the clan.
All the Dadd connections, all the Dadd collaterals, all the dowagers
and younger branches of the Dadds made common cause with St. Eldred’s,
and joined in the general suspicion with which the conduct of Mrs. Dadd
was viewed. The widow found herself unable to carry out the smallest
extravagance. Very innocent and trifling were the few indulgences that
she had hoped for, but even these were put beyond her reach by the
decree of her relatives, by that incorruptible synod over which even
a Dadd queen-regent had no more power than a doge of Venice over his
Council of Ten. Nor was her submission able to redeem her popularity.
The very fact of having once had ‘notions’ was enough to mark her out
for ever as a traitor to the Constitution of St. Eldred’s. She was no
longer quite ‘one of themselves.’ The excommunication was pronounced
by those terrible princesses, the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and
no one was found to question its justice as it thundered across the
tea-table.
Inquiries were made into her remote ancestry, and it was soon found
that, though by birth an unblemished Blessing, yet she had inherited
the sinister tendencies of a Messiter great-great-great-grandmother,
whom history convicted of eccentricities that went the length of
reading her Bible in French. From such a tainted spring what purity
could be expected? The situation was summed up by the Misses Adelaide
and Minna Dadd. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, was
their stern pronouncement. A regretful loyalty, a disapproving
adherence now marked the family’s attitude towards her--a loyalty, an
adherence as faithful but as disapproving as ever a virtuous believer
in Divine right can have felt for a drunken and profligate Pretender,
or a patriotic Catholic for Queen Elizabeth.
So far, it is true, her eldest son, James Dadd the Ninth, seemed a
model of Dadd virtues. He had made no open move towards ostentation and
prodigality. His younger brother Robert, however, was the incarnate
tragedy of St. Eldred’s, the incarnate accusation of Mrs. Dadd’s
regency. Briefly, this ulcer of St. Eldred’s must be skimmed; Robert
Dadd had run away from home, and when next heard of, many years later,
was understood to be in Japan, and to have become a Mormon or a
Buddhist, or a disciple of whatever religion rules in those benighted
parts. Never again was his name heard in St. Eldred’s, but the Messiter
great-great-great-grandmother was held accountable for such a strange,
terrible aberration--the first break in the impeccable succession
of the Dadds. There was yet another child--a daughter--but she was
ten years younger than her brothers, and could not as yet prove, in
her own person, the corrupt heredity of her mother. However, she was
already watched with care, and every tearing of her pinafore was held
symptomatic of inherited depravity.
James Dadd the Ninth came at last to his own, and his unhappy mother,
crushed by years of disapproval, sank, unregretted, to the grave. And
hardly had St. Eldred’s consigned her decently to the tomb, than James
Dadd gave abundant proof of the evil spirit that all his relatives
had long suspected. He left Darnley-on-Downe. He shut up the family
house; he travelled; he began timidly to live on a scale that drove
St. Eldred’s dizzy with horrified astonishment. Thanks to his mother’s
economy, he was now extremely rich, and bit by bit began to realize the
extent of his opportunities. But, though St. Eldred’s shook its head
over him, though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd refused to read
the papers any longer, for fear of finding his iniquities chronicled,
James Dadd remained the true son of his fathers. Wealth could not
make him wealthy; it takes a generation at least to make the genuine
spendthrift, to ingraft the joy and the splendour of purchasing. James
Dadd remained nervous, awkward, bourgeois in his uneasy enjoyment of
his money. Assertive one moment, he was uneasy and parsimonious the
next, always self-conscious, always troubled by the disapproval of the
only world he really knew--the world that had made him and written its
signature large across the face of his personality. Wherever he went,
he carried St. Eldred’s, and heard the mild but tremendous tones of the
Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd among the arches of the Colosseum as in
the silences of the Desert. Sometimes he defied the voices, sometimes
he quailed before them, but escape them he never could. He was out of
his sphere; they told him so. He had cast off his own world, and could
enter no other.
Often in his travels he met other men on similar errands of pleasure,
young men and old, sons of country squires or illustrious families. In
most cases they had not a quarter of his income, but they seemed to
have the careless knack of getting more pleasure out of half a crown
than he could ever buy with a five-pound note. Poor as they might be,
generations of spending ancestors had left them the secret of spending
easily, gaily, serenely, of letting money flow unperceived between
their fingers, of securing a double return for their outlay through
their very indifference as to whether they ever got any return at
all. This was the whole distinction between himself and them. Actual
superiority of birth and breeding they had none, though their forbears
might be more prominent than his. But centuries of inconspicuousness
disqualify a man for the conspicuous position conferred by sudden
wealth, and James Dadd, for all his long pedigree, was far less fitted
for his new place in life than many a grandson of some successful
politician or lawyer, who might number, perhaps, two generations to
James Dadd’s twenty, but made up for this lack of quantity by the
eminence of the father and grandfather whose high and hard-won position
he had painlessly inherited.
So James Dadd, misplaced and ill at ease, passed thus through life
with occasional spasmodic attempts at the assumption of a defiant
self-complacency. He knew that he was an outcast from St. Eldred’s.
Even if he would, he could never now return to the red-brick house
of his early years. In the flesh, perhaps, he might, but his spirit
could never again be admitted within its doors, could never again be
admitted to intimacy by the spirit of St. Eldred’s. Rashly he had cut
himself off from his own people, and must henceforth face the fact.
Nor, though either diffident or vehement in the spending of his money,
could he really contemplate returning to the life of Darnley-on-Downe.
He had tasted of headier joys--tasted awkwardly, perhaps, and
incompletely, but even so the small-beer on which St. Eldred’s had
reared him must for evermore be insipid to his palate. Though now he
never heard from his brother Robert, he sympathized with his revolt,
and resolved that he, too, could never again have any part in the
life of Darnley-on-Downe. And at this point, just after the one brief
tragic flash of romance that broke into his life, he came across Lady
Kirk-Hammerton.
Lady Kirk-Hammerton was the sonless widow of a second-rate Lord
Chancellor. Devoid of wealth or breeding, she and her husband had had
recourse to blatancy to emphasize their value. Now that he was dead
she redoubled the intensity of her methods, and soon acquired that
notoriety which she considered synonymous with fame. Bereft of her
husband, there was no reason why people should ever take notice of her
again, unless her demeanour forced them to do so. Therefore she set
herself heroically to the task of making her existence conspicuous in
the eye of the world, with such success that, with the best resolve,
nobody could succeed in ignoring her. Physically and metaphorically,
she shouted her way from place to place, and her conversation blazed
no less obtrusively than her gowns. As for a foil, she felt that her
brilliancy needed none, and therefore had no reason for tolerating her
daughter’s incorrigible respectability. With the more joy, therefore,
did she fall upon James Dadd at Naples, and hurl him, not unwilling,
into the company of her undesirable offspring.
But if the daughter emphasized the mother’s mature and vehement charms,
so did the mother’s overwhelming presence show up the pale grace of
the daughter. Lady Adela Vayne-Kingston was pretty, shrinking, mild,
domestic--the very type that, in happier circumstances, would have
been most dear to St. Eldred’s. She hated her mother’s loud voice
and louder manners; her one hope was to marry someone obscure and
gentle, who would remove her from the burning atmosphere of Lady
Kirk-Hammerton, in whose train, since her girlhood, she had been
dragged hither and thither, never protesting, but always reluctant.
James Dadd, for his part, found in Lady Adela a reminiscence of his
old home-life. She seemed to him the ghost of peaceful St. Eldred’s,
with an added touch of worldly experience and travelled charm. Her
character, far from repeating her mother’s, harked back to some
obscure ancestress, probably in domestic service, and was so meek
and placid as to be the very incarnation of all that James Dadd had
been brought up to love and respect. On the other hand, this same
gentleness of temperament, which St. Eldred’s considered the hall-mark
of good breeding, was believed by Lady Kirk-Hammerton to be especially
distasteful to those high circles after which she hankered; and she
had long, therefore, been eagerly seeking a chance to be rid of
the daughter whom her best efforts had failed to render brazen and
clamorous. Her delight, accordingly, surpassed all bounds, when at the
end of a week’s acquaintance, James Dadd proposed to Lady Adela, and
was thankfully accepted.
Though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd had ceased to subscribe to
‘the Paper,’ they yet had their recognised channels for the reception
of news. For the butcher conveyed the events of the world to their
cook, and she, in turn, laid edited selections before her mistresses.
In this way was brought to their notice the approaching marriage
between ‘James Dadd, Esq., of Darnley-on-Downe, and the Lady Adela
Vayne-Kingston, daughter of the late Earl of Kirk-Hammerton.’
That afternoon was hurriedly convened a great meeting of the Dadd
family to consider this announcement. Unmixed disapproval filled
every bosom in the tribe. The engagement was held equivalent to the
abdication of James Dadd from the headship of his race. In two ways
the proposed marriage was disliked. It was thoroughly unsuitable to a
Dadd; it was thoroughly unworthy of a Dadd. Lady Adela was at once too
high and too low to be a fair match of James Dadd. Accident had given
her a titular position superior to her lover’s, while her birth was in
every way disastrously inferior to his own. Even St. Eldred’s had heard
something of Lady Kirk-Hammerton, and it was impossible to imagine that
her daughter could, by any stretch of courtesy, be called a lady in the
true sense of the word. All the Dadd pride of birth rose up against
the thought of connection with a girl without a grandfather--a girl,
too, whom uninstructed sections of the world might dare to consider her
husband’s social superior. It was felt that James Dadd had inflicted
a crowning insult on his family in thus threatening to misally it.
Mrs. John, Mrs. Reuben, Mrs. Joshua, coincided in the opinion firmly
announced by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd; the young Johns,
Reubens, and Joshuas, dissented in nothing; only the peccant James’s
sister, now a girl of promising beauty, held her own counsel, and
decided to write congratulations to her brother and his destined
bride. For in her, too, the blood of great-great-great-grandmother
Messiter was at its fell work; her soul longed for change and variety
and gaiety; and all these things she saw attainable through James’s
marriage with the daughter of that notorious Lady Kirk-Hammerton.
But she was too wise to make her heresy public; and the condemnation
of James’s choice was passed without protest by the assembled council.
An ultimatum was drafted by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and
would have been dispatched on the morrow, with the approval of all, had
not the morrow brought news that destroyed every hope of reconciliation
with the traitor. It was announced that, with royal permission, James
Dadd, of Darnley-on-Downe, would in future be known as James Darnley.
St. Eldred’s gasped at the wickedness of this public repudiation.
In point of fact it was Lady Adela, gentle and winning, whose vitality
had stirred to a great effort, under great pressure, and had risen
to urge upon her lover this change of name. She pointed out that to
ask a girl to become Lady Adela Dadd was to exact a sacrifice as far
beyond mortal power to grant as beyond mortal justice to demand. James
Dadd, recognising that he could never hope to be reincluded in the
clan whose nominal sovereign he still was, found himself inclined
to consider Lady Adela’s plea in a favourable spirit. Together they
decided to adopt the more euphonious name of Darnley, and James Dadd
hastened to make his decision public, that thus he might at once be
finally cut off from any remonstrances or embassies of his family. He
judged the temper of St. Eldred’s rightly. His announcement was taken
as an irremediable declaration of war. His name was never mentioned
again in Darnley-on-Downe, except as that of one deservedly dead and
unregretted. The sceptre passed into the capable hands of Mr. and
Mrs. Reuben Dadd, and by silent consent it was agreed that no infant
henceforth should bear the dishonoured names of James or Robert. Only
James Dadd’s young sister remained hopefully loyal to his memory, and
when, a year later, the redoubled severity of the Misses Adelaide
and Minna Dadd alone betrayed their secret knowledge that a son had
been born to Mr. and Lady Adela Darnley, the one acknowledgment
of the event that reached the outlaw from Darnley-on-Downe was a
surreptitiously-posted letter of his sister’s. If anything could have
aggravated the wrath of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd it would
have been the knowledge that the infant, that their own great nephew,
had been christened, not James, but Kingston.
Kingston Darnley, indeed! There was a name for a child! You cannot make
a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, said the Misses Adelaide and Minna
Dadd; and they were universally felt to have expressed the situation in
all its bearings. And thus, from years of corrupting wealth and secret
disloyalty, was generated the culminating disgrace of the Dadds, in
Kingston Darnley. Kingston Darnley!
Why, why had great-great-great-grandfather Blessing married a Messiter
of eccentric tendencies? And what a curse is money! Better decorum and
a competence than stalled peacocks and a marriage with the daughters of
Heth! It became the fashion in St. Eldred’s to affect, by contrast, a
greater poverty than the circumstances of anyone necessitated. To give
two cakes at tea became vulgar, and the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd
took to going to church with only one Prayer Book between them. Nothing
could have induced St. Eldred’s to confess that it knew anything of the
Darnleys, and the various steps in Lady Adela’s progress were sternly
ignored by a watchful world. Even when Mr. and Lady Adela Darnley
entertained a Princess for some charitable function, the only comment
made in St. Eldred’s was the tacit one involved in the simultaneous
retirement to bed of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. Another
outcast, however, was soon added to James and Robert--another topic for
the silence of St. Eldred’s. For, after some secret correspondence,
James Darnley’s sister eloped from the care of her aunts, and was next
heard of under the wing of her brother’s wife in London. Within a
year she had married a stockbroker of abundant wealth. The lips of St.
Eldred’s snapped on this fulfilment of the disasters brought about by
great-great-great-grandmother Messiter. The old dynasty of Dadd was
ended in Darnley-on-Downe. The main royal line was wiped out, and the
Reuben Dadds reigned in its stead.