Chapter IV: I (2)

"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."

The old lady said this so sharply that Dorothy felt as if she ought to put her hand in her pocket and produce one then and there.

"Call Tony in to me. Tony," she said, "you're an ass; but not such an ass as I thought you were."

"Good song, isn't it, grandmother?" he chuckled.

"Don't interrupt me. I said you were only not such an ass as I thought. You're still an ass. Your wife isn't. You understand what I mean? Produce an heir. Now I must go to bed." She swept out of the room like a swallow from under the eaves of a house.

On the way back to Clare, Bella and Connie could not contain their delight at the success Dorothy had made with their grandmother. Tompkins, the Chatfield butler, had confided in Connie just before she left that her ladyship had been heard to hum on entering her bedroom--an expression of superfluous good temper in which she had not indulged within his memory. The old lady was always cross at going to bed, probably because she could not wheel it about like her chair. Nor was grandmother the only victim to Dorothy's charm: Uncle Chat had been full of compliments; Charles and the girls had declared she was a stunner; Aunt Jane had corroborated Tompkins's story about humming.

The dowager, who always came away from Chatfield with a sense of renewed youth, though sometimes, indeed, feeling like a naughty little girl, was almost sprightly on the drive back to Clare. She had expected to be roundly scolded by her mother, and here she was going away with her pockets full of nuts, as it were; the little anxieties of daily life dropped from her shoulders, and when the drag met a very noisy motor in a narrow stretch of road she sat perfectly still and listened to the coachman's soothing clicks with profound trust in his ability to calm the horses.

"By the way, I hope you won't mind the suggestion, dear," she said to Dorothy, "but I think it would be nice to arrange a little dinner-party for Saturday night--just our particular neighbors, you know--Mr. and Mrs. Kingdon, Mr. and Mrs. Beadon, Mr. Hemming the curate, Doctor Lane, and Mr. Greenish of Cherrington Cottage."

Tony groaned.

"What could be nicer?" said Dorothy. "But...."

"You're going to say it sounds rather sudden. Yes--well, it will be sudden. But it struck me that it would be much nicer if we were a little sudden. You see, your wedding was rather sudden, and our neighbors will appreciate such a mark of intimacy. No doubt the Kingdons and the Beadons will have called this afternoon, and I thought that if you don't object I would send out the invitations myself and make it a sort of wedding breakfast. I know it all sounds very muddled, but my inspirations nearly always turn out well. I should like to feel on Sunday that we were all old friends. Besides, if you're really going to hunt on Monday, it will be nice for you to meet Mr. Kingdon, who is master of the Horley."

"I think it's a delightful idea," Dorothy exclaimed. "Thank you so much for suggesting it."

"This is going to be a terrible winter and spring," Clarehaven groaned.

"Tony, please don't be discouraging," said his mother. "I'm feeling so optimistic since our visit to Chatfield. Why, I'm even hoping to reconcile Mr. Kingdon and Mr. Beadon. Not, of course, that they're open enemies, but I should like the squire to appreciate the rector's beautiful character, and it seems such a pity that a few lighted candles should blind him to it. Mr. Kingdon will take in Dorothy; the rector will take me; you, Tony dear--please don't look so cross--ought to take in Mrs. Kingdon, who's a great admirer of yours--such a nice woman, Dorothy dear, with a most unfortunate inability to roll her r's--it's so sad, I think. Then the doctor will take in Mrs. Beadon; Mr. Greenish, Arabella; and Mr. Hemming, Connie."

"I like Tommy Hemming," said Connie. "He's a sport."

"I should call him a freak," Clarehaven muttered.

"We ought to do some riding to-morrow and Friday," his sister went on, quite unconcerned by his opinion of the curate. "I think Dorothy ought to ride Mignonette on Monday. She's a perfect ripper--a chestnut."

Dorothy liked the name, which reminded her of her own hair, and certainly had she chosen for herself she would have chosen a chestnut for the meet at Five Tree Farm. The dowager's forecast was right--both the Kingdons and the Beadons had called upon the new countess, and the dowager pattered up-stairs to her bird-bright room to send out invitations for Saturday.

"You see what you've let yourself in for," said Tony to his wife that night. "However, you'll be as fed up as I am when you've had one or two of these neighborly little dinners. And look here, Doodles, seriously I don't think you ought to hunt. I'm not saying you can't ride, but you ought to wait till next season, at any rate. You may have a nasty accident, and--well, yes, I'm the one to say it, after all--you may make a priceless fool of yourself."

"Do you think so?" Dorothy asked. "Do you think I made a priceless fool of myself when I sang to your grandmother this afternoon? If I can carry that off, I can certainly ride after a fox. Kiss me. You mean well, but you don't yet know what I can do."

A former Anthony kissed away kingdoms and provinces; this Anthony kissed away doubts and fears and scruples as easily.

Dorothy dressed herself very simply for the neighborly little dinner-party. She decided that white would be the best sedative for any tremors felt by the neighbors at the prospect of finding their society led by an actress; and she made up her mind to cast a special spell upon the M. F. H. and so guard herself from the consequences of any mistake she might make at the meet. There was nothing about Mr. Kingdon that diverged the least from the typical fox-hunting squire that for two hundred years has been familiar to the people of Great Britain. His neck was thick and red; his voice came in gusts; and he recounted as good stories of his own the jokes in _Punch_ of the week before last. What deeper sense in Squire Kingdon was outraged by the rector's ritualism it would be hard to say, for his body did not appear to be the temple of anything except food and drink; perhaps, like the bull that he so much resembled, an imperfectly understood nervous system was wrought upon by certain colors. The congregation of Great Cherrington would scarcely have been stirred from their lethargic worship to see the squire with lowered head charge up the aisle, when Mr. Beadon began to play the picador with a colored stole, and toss Mr. Beadon over his shoulders into the font. Mrs. Kingdon was to her husband as a radish is to a beet-root. The weather is a bad lady's maid, and the weather had made of Mrs. Kingdon's complexion something that ought to have infuriated her husband as much as Mr. Beadon's colored stoles. In spite of her hard and highly colored appearance, she was a mild enough woman, given to deep sighs in pauses of the conversation, when she was probably thinking about the rolling of her r's and regretting that three of her children had inherited this impotency of palate or tongue.

"We must all pull together," she said to Dorothy, who expressed her anxiety to find herself lugging at the same rope as Mrs. Kingdon against whatever team opposed them.

"Very true, Mrs. Kingdon," the rector observed. "I wish the squire was always of your opinion."

"Mr. Beadon can never forget that he is a clergyman," whispered Mrs. Kingdon when the rector passed on.

Yet the monotone of Mr. Beadon's clericality had once been illuminated when he had broken that vow of celibacy to which he had attached such importance in order to marry Mrs. Beadon. In the confusion of the Sabine rape Mrs. Beadon might have found herself wedded, but that any man in cold blood and with many women to choose from should have deliberately chosen Mrs. Beadon passed normal comprehension. Her husband treated her in the same way as he treated the crucifix from Oberammergau that he kept in a triptych by his bed. He would admire her, respect her, almost worship her, and then abruptly he would shut her up with a little click. Mrs. Beadon was much thinner even than her husband; while she was eating, the upper part of her chest resembled a musical box, her throat a violin played pizzicato, the accumulated music of which expressed itself during digestion in remote trills and far-off scales. She was seldom vocal in conversation, but voluble in psalms and hymns; she performed many kind actions such as blowing little boys' noses on the way to school, and though she did not blow Dorothy's nose, she squeezed her hand and confided that the news of Lord Clarehaven's marriage had meant a great deal to her.

"Oh, so much!" she had time to repeat before her husband closed the doors of the triptych.

Mr. Hemming, the curate, was a muscular and, did not his clerical collar forbid one to suppose so, a completely fatuous young man. When he was pleased about anything he said, "Oh, cheers!" When he was displeased he shook his head in silence. Mr. Beadon told Dorothy that he was a loyal churchman, and certainly once in the course of the evening he came to the rescue of his rector, who had been pinned in a corner of the room, by asking the squire, why he wore a pink coat when he hunted. The squire replied that such was the custom for an M. F. H., and Mr. Hemming, with a guffaw, said that it was also the custom for a fisher of men to wear sporting colors. This irreverent attempt to put fishing on an equality with fox-hunting naturally upset the squire, and the dowager's hopes, of an early reconciliation between him and the rector were destroyed.

Of the other two guests, Doctor Lane was a pleasant, elderly gentleman whose chief pride was that he still read _The Lancet_ every week. One felt in talking to him that a man who still read _The Lancet_ after twenty-five years of Cherrington evinced a sensitiveness to medical progress that was laudable and peculiar. He was a widower without children and devoted what little leisure he had to the study of newts, salamanders, and olms; a pair of olms, which a friend had brought him back from Carniola, he kept in a subterranean tank in his garden, enhancing thereby in the eyes of the village his reputation as a physician. The last guest, Mr. Greenish, was a well-groomed bachelor of about forty, one of that class who suddenly appear for no obvious reason in remote country villages and devote themselves to gardening or other forms of outdoor life, who are useful about the parish, and who often play billiards well. They may be criminals hiding from justice; more probably they are people who have inherited money late in life from aunts, and who, having long dreamed of retiring into the country, do so at the first opportunity. Mr. Greenish did not hunt, but he was a good shot, and Clarehaven found him the least intolerable of his immediate neighbors.

It cannot be said that Dorothy found it difficult to shine at such a party; indeed, she was such a success that when the evening came to an end no doubt remained in the dowager's mind that to-morrow morning Little Cherrington church would have double its usual congregation to see the new countess. In fact, Mr. Kingdon was so much taken with her that he announced his own intention of worshiping at Little Cherrington, and the rector regretted that he had not known of this beforehand in order that he might have seized the opportunity, in the absence of the squire, to test the congregation of Great Cherrington with a linen chasuble. As a matter of fact, on the way home he plotted with Mr. Hemming to do this, and was successful in passing off the vestment on the congregation as a flaw in the curate's surplice.

Dorothy looked particularly attractive that Sunday in her coat and skirt of lavender box-cloth, for the fashion of the moment was one that well showed off a figure like hers. The rector's sermon on a text from the Song of Solomon alluded with voluptuous imagery to the romance of the married state, and, being entirely unintelligible to the congregation, was considered round the parishes to be one of the best sermons he had ever preached. If only to-morrow, thought Dorothy, when she walked out of the churchyard through a crowd of uncovered rustics, she could leave the hunting-field as triumphantly. Her rides on the preceding days with Clarehaven and the girls had been successful. They had all congratulated her, and any lingering anxiety in her husband's mind seemed to have passed away. As the moment drew near, however, Dorothy began to be nervous about breaches of hunting etiquette, and she spent Sunday afternoon in turning over the pages of bound volumes of _Punch_ in order to extract from the weekly hunting joke hints what not to do. A succession of irate M. F. H.'s, purple in the face and shaking crops at presumptuous cockneys, haunted her dreams that night; when she woke to a moist gray morning, for the first time in her life she felt really nervous. It was in vain that she sought to reassure herself by recalling past triumphs on the stage or by telling herself how easily she had dealt with Lady Chatfield. Failure in either of those cases would not have been irremediable; but let her make no mistake, before to-day's dusk she should have settled the whole of her future life. If she made a fool of herself she should never escape from being pointed out as a Vanity girl; if she succeeded, the Vanity girl would be forgotten, and by sheer personal prowess she might lead the county. It was a tribute to Dorothy's complexion that not even on this rather shaky morning did she feel the need for rouge. Five Tree Farm was only three miles from Clare Court, and the meets there, being considered the best of the season, always had very large fields. She was disappointed that Tony was not in pink, but he told her he did not care enough about hunting to dress up for it.

"That's what I like about shooting," he said, "there isn't all this confounded putting it on."

The master cantered up and congratulated Dorothy on her first appearance with the Horley Hunt.

"We're going to draw Dedenham Copse first," he informed her, and cantered off again, shouting loudly to two unfortunate young men with bicycles who were doing no harm at all, but whom he persisted in abusing as "damned socialists." Suddenly, hounds gave tongue with changed, almost intolerable eager note; there was a thud of hoofs all round her; confused cries; the sound of a horn shrilling to the gray sky....

"Wonderful morning for scent," she heard somebody say, and flushed because she thought a personal remark had been passed about herself; but before she had time to worry who had said it and why it had been said Mignonette was nearly leading the field.

"Dorothy," shouted her husband, "for God's sake don't get too far in front. Hold your mare in a bit. And for God's sake don't ride over hounds."

But Dorothy paid no attention to him and was soon galloping with the first half-dozen. By her side appeared Charlie Fanhope.

"Topping run," he breathed. "I say, you're looking glorious. Awful to think I shall be on the way to Eton this time to-morrow."

She smiled at him; from out of the past came the memory of an old colored Christmas supplement on the walls of the nursery in Lonsdale Road. A girl and a boy on rocking-horses, brown and dapple-gray, the boy wearing a green-velvet cap and jacket, the girl befrilled and besashed, were both plunging forward with rosy smiles. Underneath it had been inscribed: "Yoicks! Tally-ho!" While her mare's heels thudded over the soft turf, Dorothy kept saying to herself, "Yoicks! Yoicks! Yoicks!" Charlie Fanhope, riding beside her, was as fresh and rosy as the boy in the picture.

"You can't take that gate, can you?" he was saying.

Before her like a ladder rose a five-barred gate. At the riding-school in Knightsbridge Dorothy had jumped obstacles quite as high; but those had been obstacles that collapsed conveniently when touched by the heels of her horse.

"I say I don't think you can take that gate," Charlie Fanhope repeated, anxiously. "I'll open it. I'll open it."

But Dorothy in a dream left all to Mignonette; remembering from real life to grip the pommel, to keep her wrists down, and to sit well back, she seemed to be uttering a prolonged gasp that was carried away by the wind as a diver's gasp is lost in the sound of the water. Where was her cousin? Left behind to crackle through one of those gaps he knew of. Yoicks! Yoicks! Yoicks! They were in a wide, down-sloping meadowland intensely green, and checkered with the black and red riders in groups; hounds were disappearing at the bottom of the slope in a thick coppice. Nursery pictures of Caldecott came back to Dorothy when she saw the squire with his horn and his mulberry-colored face and his huge bay horse go puffing past to investigate the check, which lasted long enough for Dorothy to receive many felicitations upon her horsewomanship.

"My word! Doodles," said her husband, cantering up to her side. "You really are a wonder, but for the Lord's sake be careful."

"I told you that you didn't yet really know me," she murmured; before he could reply, from the farthest corner of the coppice came the whip's "Viewhalloo." Hounds gave tongue again with high-pitched notes of excitement as of children playing. Forrard away! For-rard! They were off again with the fox gone away toward Maidens' Common, and before the merry huntsmen the prospect of the finest run in Devonshire. Thirty minutes at racing speed and never a check; wind singing; hoofs thudding; a view of the fox; Dorothy always among the first half-dozen riders.

They killed some twelve miles away from Clare in Tangley Bottom, and nobody would have accused the master, when he handed Dorothy the brush, of being influenced by the countess's charming company at dinner on Saturday night. Best of all in a day of superlatives, Clarehaven had taken a nasty toss; his wife had him in hand as securely as she had Mignonette.

"Glorious day," Connie sighed when at last they were walking through the gates of the park.

"Glorious," echoed Dorothy.

A faint flush low on the western sky symbolized her triumph. And though one or two malicious women said that it was a pity Lord Clarehaven should have married a circus girl, the legend never spread. Besides, they had not been introduced to the Diana of Clare, who soon had the county as securely in hand as her horse and her husband.

Dorothy, tired though she was, felt the need of confiding in somebody the tale of her triumph. She was even tempted to write to Olive. In the end she chose her mother; perhaps the kindness of the dowager had stirred a dormant piety.

She wrote:

MY DEAR MOTHER,--I am sorry I could not come and see you before I
got married, but you can understand how delicate and difficult my
position was, and how much everything depended on myself. No doubt,
later on when I am thoroughly at home in my new surroundings, it
will be easier for us to meet again. I don't know if father told
you that I did explain to him my motives in treating you all rather
abruptly. Or did he never refer to a little talk we once had? You
will be glad to hear that I am very, very happy. My husband adores
me, my mother-in-law has been more than kind, and my sisters-in-law
equally so. On Thursday we drove over to Chatfield Hall to see my
husband's grandmother, old Lady Chatfield, who is famous for
speaking her mind, and of course not at all prejudiced in my favor
by my having been on the stage. However, we had a jolly little talk
together and everybody is delighted with the impression I made. On
Saturday we had a small dinner-party. The rector, who is very High
Church and would not, therefore, appeal to father, was there. Mr.
Kingdon, the squire, would be more his style. There was also a Mr.
Greenish, who promised to teach me gardening. Quite a jolly
evening. Yesterday morning all the villagers cheered when I came
out of church, and to-day I hunted with the Horley. I was rather a
success. I hope you got the check for L500 I sent you, and that you
will buy yourself something nice with it. It isn't exactly a
present, but in a way it counts as one, doesn't it? You must try to
be a little more firm with father in future. Don't forget that
though I may seem heartless I am not really so. I hope you will
write to me sometimes. You should address the envelope to The
Countess of Clarehaven, but if you speak about me to your friends
you should speak about me as Lady Clarehaven.

Your loving daughter,

DOROTHY CLAREHAVEN.

IV

For two years Dorothy's life as a countess went quietly along, gathering in its train a number of pleasant little memories that in after years were to mean something more than pleasure. The major difficulties of her new position were all encountered and defeated in that first week; thenceforward nothing seriously disturbed her for long. In the autumn of the year in which Clarehaven married, the dowager, after consulting Dorothy, decided that his restlessness was finally cured and that the danger of his wanting to tear about the Continent in Lee-Lonsdale cars no longer threatened the family peace. In these circumstances the dowager thought it would be tactful to move into Clare Lodge with Arabella and Constantia.

She should not be too far away if her daughter-in-law had need of her, and by moving that little way off she should do much to prevent her son's chafing against the barriers of domesticity. It would be easier for Dorothy to act as hostess of the shooting-parties that were arranged for the autumn if she were apparent as the only hostess. In the administration of the village the two countesses shared equally--the dowager by superintending the making of soup and gruel for sick villagers, Dorothy by assisting at its distribution. The rector won Dorothy's heart by his readiness to discuss with her the history of the great family into which she had married, and by preparing a second edition of his _Clarehaven and the Clares_ for when it should be wanted, affixing against the fifth earl's name an asterisk, like a second star of Bethlehem, that should direct the wise reader to this foot-note:

...The present Earl in January, 1906, delighted his many friends
and well-wishers in the county by wedding the beautiful Miss
Dorothy Lonsdale, a distant connection of that Lord Cleveden who is
famous as a most capable administrator in the land of the golden
wattle and upon "India's coral strand."

She for her part won Mr. Beadon's heart by often attending his services at Clarehaven, and not merely by attending herself, but by insisting upon Mrs. Bitterplum's and Mrs. Smith's attending, too. This arrangement suited everybody, because the dowager at Little Cherrington was able to worship her stained-glass window without a sense that, whatever she might be before God's throne, she was now of secondary importance in the church. The step up that the rector had promised himself for Easter was effected without an apoplexy from Mr. Kingdon, possibly because the white stole did not inflame his taurine eye. At Whitsuntide, however, when a red stole appeared, his face followed the liturgical sequence, and there was a painful scene in the churchyard on a hot morning in early June. Dorothy, on being appealed to by the rector, drove over to Cherrington Hall that afternoon and remonstrated with Mr. Kingdon on his inconsiderate behavior. She pointed out that Mrs. Beadon was in an interesting condition at the moment and that if Mr. Kingdon had his prejudices to consider, Mr. Beadon had his conscience; that it was not right for the squire to add fuel to the ancient rivalry between Great and Little Cherrington; and finally that inasmuch as the bishop was shortly coming to stay at Clare for a confirmation, it would be unkind to pain his sensitive diocesan spirit with these parochial disputes. Dorothy's arguments may not have convinced the squire, but her beauty and condescension penetrated where logic was powerless, and Mr. Beadon was allowed to preach for more than twenty bee-loud Sundays after Trinity wearing a grass-green stole round his neck and with never a word of protest from the squire. Nor were the Sundays within the octaves of St. Peter or St. James, of St. Lawrence or St. Bartholomew, profaned by the squire's objections to the tribute of red silk that Mr. Beadon paid to the blood of the martyrs. His wife celebrated her husband's victory by producing twins at Lammastide, and everybody in the neighborhood said that the religious tone of Cherrington was remarkably high.

In September Dorothy had her first shooting-party, to which, among others, Arthur Lonsdale and Harry Tufton were invited. Tony had been in camp with his yeomanry regiment during most of August; he seemed glad to be back at Clare; the shooting was good; the visits of his old friends from London did not apparently disturb him. Notwithstanding Connie's lessons, Dorothy never became a good shot; she really hated killing birds. However, she encouraged Clarehaven to go on with his favorite sport, and herself hunted hard all the season. She was much admired as a horsewoman, and the fact that she had not so long ago been a Vanity girl was already as dim as most old family curses are. In early spring Tony suggested that it would be a good idea to go up to town for the season.

"A very good idea," she agreed. "Bella and Connie ought to be presented." Dorothy spoke as calmly as if she had been presented herself. "It's a pity I can't present them," she added, "but I should not like to be presented myself. I don't think that actresses ought to be presented, even if they do retire from the stage when they marry. Sometimes an individual suffers unjustly; but it's better that one person should suffer than that all sorts of precedents should be started. Of course, your mother will present them."

"But look here, I thought we'd go up alone," Tony argued. "I told you I'd had the house done up very comfortably. I don't think the girls would enjoy London a bit."

"They may not enjoy it," said Dorothy, "but they ought to go."

May and June were spent in town in an unsuccessful attempt to induce many eligible bachelors even to dance with Arabella and Constantia, let alone to propose to them. Dorothy condoled with the dowager on Arthur Lonsdale's bad taste in not wanting to marry Arabella; Arthur himself was lectured severely on his obligations, and she could not understand why he would not stop laughing, particularly as Lady Cleveden herself had been in favor of the match. Dorothy went to the opera twice a week; but she refused to go near the Vanity. Once she drove over to West Kensington to see her mother, whose chin had more hairs than ever, but who otherwise was not much changed. The rest of the family alarmed her with the flight of time. Gladys and Marjorie were the Agnes and Edna of four years ago; Agnes and Edna themselves were getting perilously like the Norah and Dorothy of four years ago; Cecil was a medical student smoking bigger pipes than Roland, who himself had grown a very heavy black mustache. The countess managed to avoid seeing her father, and when her mother protested his disappointment she said that he would understand. Mrs. Caffyn was too much awed by having a countess for a daughter to insist, and she assured her that not only did she fully appreciate her reasons for withdrawing from open intercourse with her family, but that she approved of them. The countess gave her a sealskin coat for next winter, kissed her on both cheeks, and disappeared as abruptly from West Kensington as Enoch from the antediluvian landscape.

The responsibility of two plain sisters became too much for Clarehaven; after Ascot he admitted that he should be thoroughly glad to get back to Clare, which was exactly what his wife had hoped.

While Dorothy was studying with the rector the lives of obscure saints and the histories of prominent noblemen, she took lessons with the doctor in natural history and with Mr. Greenish in horticulture. Mr. Greenish enjoyed sending off on her account large orders to nursery gardeners all over England for rare shrubs that he had neither the money nor the space to buy for himself. Both at the Temple Show and at Holland House he had been continually at Lady Clarehaven's elbow with a note-book; and the glories of next summer in the Clare gardens made bright his wintry meditations. Mr. Greenish himself looked rather like a tuber, and it became a current joke that one day Dorothy would plant him in a secluded border. The dowager was delighted by her daughter-in-law's hobby, for which, though it ran to the extravagance of ordering the whole stock of a new orange tulip at a guinea a bulb, not to mention twenty roots of sunset-hued _Eremurus warer_ at forty shillings apiece, and a hundred of topaz-hung _Eremurus bungei_ at ten shillings, she had nothing but enthusiasm.

"My golden border will be lovely," Dorothy announced.

"It will be unique," Mr. Greenish added. "Lady Clarehaven is specializing in shades of gold, copper, and bronze," he explained to the dowager.

"These roots oddly resemble echinoderms," said Doctor Lane, looking at the roots of the _Eremurus_.

"I should have said starfish," Mr. Greenish put in.

"Starfish _are_ echinoderms," said the doctor, severely.

"Wonderful!" the dowager exclaimed, with the eyes of a child looking upon the fairies. She herself never rose to the height of her daughter-in-law's Incalike ambitions; but her own Japanese tastes (expensive enough) were gratified. Those black-stemmed hydrangeas were ordered by the hundred to bloom by the edge of the pines, and Dorothy presented her with twenty-four of M. Latour-Marlias's newest and most expensive hybrid water-lilies. Nor did the hydrangeas come pink; they knew that they were being employed by a noble family and preserved the authentic blue of their patrons' blood. As the rector hoped before he died that popular clamor in the Cherringtons would compel him to flout his bishop by holding an open-air procession upon the feast of Corpus Christi, so Dorothy aspired to convert the two villages from vegetables to flowers. She knew, however, that it would be useless to attempt too much at first in this direction, and at Mr. Greenish's suggestion she decided to open her campaign by organizing a grand entertainment for the two Cherringtons, Clarehaven, and the several villages and hamlets in the neighborhood. Uncle Chat was called in to help with his advice, and while Tony was in camp she made her preparations. Marquees were hired from Exeter; the countryside pulsated with the spirit of competition. Dorothy drew up the bills herself with a nice compromise between the claims of age and strict precedence in her list of patrons.

CLAREHAVEN AND CHERRINGTON

AGRICULTURAL FETE AND

FLOWER SHOW

Saturday, August 31, 1907

UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF

The Earl of Chatfield; the Earl and Countess of Clarehaven; Lavinia, Countess of Chatfield; Augusta, Countess of Clarehaven; the Viscount Paignton; the Lady Jane Fanhope; the Lady Arabella Clare; the Lady Constantia Clare; the Lady Mary Fanhope; the Lady Maud Fanhope; George Kingdon, Esq., J.P., M.F.H., and Mrs. Kingdon; the Rev. Claude Conybeare Beadon, M.A., and Mrs. Beadon; Dr. Eustace Lane; Horatio Greenish, Esq.

Prizes for live stock, including poultry, pigeons, and rabbits.

Prizes for collections of mixed vegetables.

A special prize offered by the Earl of Chatfield for the best collection of runner-beans.

A special and very _valuable_ prize offered by the Countess of Clarehaven for the best collection of _flowers_ from a cottage garden.

A special prize offered by the Dowager Countess of Clarehaven for the best collection of wild flowers made by a village child within a four-mile radius of Clare Court.

A special prize offered by Doctor Lane for a collection of insect pests set and mounted by the scholars of Cherrington Church Schools and Horley Board Schools.

The Countess of Clarehaven has kindly consented to give away the prizes.

The band of the Loyal North Devon Dragoons (by kind permission of Colonel Budding-Robinson, M.V.O., and officers) will play during the afternoon.

Swings, roundabouts, cocoanut-shies, climbing greasy pole for a side of bacon offered by H. Greenish, Esq., sack-races, egg-and-spoon races, hat-trimming competition for agricultural laborers.

ILLUMINATIONS AND FIREWORKS

Entrance, one shilling. After five o'clock, sixpence. After eight, threepence. Children free.

REFRESHMENTS

It was a blazing day, one of those typical days when rustic England seems to consist entirely of large cactus dahlias and women perspiring in bombazine. Tony, to Dorothy's annoyance, had declined to open the proceedings with a speech, and with Uncle Chat also refusing, Mr. Kingdon had to be asked to address the competitors. He bellowed a number of platitudes about the true foundations of England's greatness, told everybody that he was a Conservative--a Tory of the old school. He might say amid all this floral wealth a Conservatory. Ha-ha! He had no use for new-fangled notions, and, by Jove! when he looked round at the magnificent display that owed so much to the energy and initiative of Lady Clarehaven, by Jove! he couldn't understand why anybody wanted to be anything else except a Conservative.

"No politics, squire," the village atheist cried from the back of the tent, and Mr. Kingdon, who had been badly heckled by that gentleman at a recent election meeting, descended from the rostrum.

When the time came to distribute the awards Dorothy sprang the little surprise of which only Mr. Greenish was in the secret, by making a speech herself. She spoke with complete self-assurance and, as the _North Devon Courant_ said, "with a gracious comprehension of what life meant to her humbler neighbors."

"Fellow-villagers of the two Cherringtons and of Clarehaven," she began, evoking loud applause from Mr. and Mrs. Bitterplum and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who between them had raised the largest marrow, for which they would shortly receive ten shillings as a token of England's gratitude, "in these days when so much is heard of rural depopulation I confess that looking round me at this crowded assembly I am not one of the alarmists. I confess that I see no signs of rural depopulation among the merry faces of the little children of our healthy North Devon breed. I regret that the committee did not include in its list of prizes another for the best collection of home-grown children." (Loud cheers from the audience, in the middle of which one of the little Smiths of Clarehaven had to be led out of the tent because there was some doubt whether in chewing one of the prize dahlias he had not swallowed an earwig.) "Meanwhile, I can only marvel at the enthusiasm and good will with which you have all worked to make our first agricultural fete the success it undoubtedly has been. I am told by people who understand these things that no finer runner-beans have ever appeared than the collection of runner-beans for which, after long deliberation by the judges, Mr. Isaac Hodge of Little Cherrington has been awarded the prize." (Cheers.) "I will not detain you with eulogies of the potatoes shown by our worthy neighbor, Mr. Blundell of Great Cherrington. Nor shall I detain you by singing the praises of the really noble beet-roots from the garden of Mr. Adam Crump of Horley Hill. But I should like to say here how much I regret that the collections of flowers fell so far below the standard set by the vegetables. We must remember that without beauty utility is of little use. This autumn I shall be happy to present flower seeds to all cottage gardens who apply for them. Mr. Greenish has kindly consented to act as my distributer. Next year I shall present five pounds and a silver cup for the best exhibit from these seeds. And now nothing remains for me except to congratulate once more the winners on their well-deserved success, and the losers on a failure that only the exceptional quality of the winning exhibits prevented being a success, too."

Amid loud cheers Dorothy pinned rosettes to the lapels of the perspiring competitors, shook hands with each one, to whom she handed his prize wrapped in tissue-paper, and, bowing graciously, descended from the dais.

"Now if I can make a speech like that at a flower-show," she said to her husband that evening, "why can't you speak in the House of Lords?"

The fact of the matter was that Dorothy was beginning to worry herself over Clarehaven's lack of interest in the affairs of his country. Since they had been married the only additional entry in Debrett under his title was the record of his being a J.P. for the county of Devon. Dorothy felt that this was not enough; he should be preparing himself by his demeanor in the House of Lords to be offered at least an under-secretaryship when the Radicals should be driven from power.

"All right," said Tony. "But I can't very well play the hereditary legislator and all that if you insist upon keeping me down in the country."

"When does Parliament reassemble?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Some time in the autumn, I suppose."

"Very well, then, we'll go up to town on one condition, which is that you will make a speech. If you haven't spoken within a week of the opening I shall come back here."

Tony, in order to get away from Devonshire, was ready to promise anything, but at the end of October, on a day also memorable in the history of Clare for the largest battue ever held in those coverts, Dorothy told her husband that she was going to have a baby.

He flushed with the slaughter of hundreds of birds, she flushed with what all this meant to her and him and England, faced each other in the bridal chamber of Clare that itself was flushed with a crimson October sunset.

"Tony, aren't you wildly happy?"

"Why, yes ... of course I am ... only, Doodles, I suppose this means you won't go up to town? Oh well, never mind. Gad! you look glorious this evening." He put his arms round her and kissed her.

"Not that way," she murmured. "Not that way now."

V

The pride and joy that Dorothy felt were so complete that she would take no risk of spoiling them by allowing her husband to intrude upon her at such a time. This boy of hers--there was no fear in her sanguine and circumspect mind that she might produce a daughter--was the fruit of herself and the earldom. To this end had she let Clarehaven make love to her, and if now she should continue to allow him such liberty she should be cheapening herself like a woman of pleasure. If at first she had rejoiced in her own position as a countess, all that self-satisfaction was now incorporated in this unborn son to be magnified by him into nobility and all that was expressed by nobility in its fullest sense. The thrill that every woman, however much she may dread or resent it, feels at the first prospect of maternity was for Dorothy heightened beyond any comparison that would not be blasphemous. On this small green earth would walk a Viscount Clare that, having taken flesh from a Vanity girl, should be the savior of his country. It no longer mattered that her husband was blind to the duties of his rank when she held in her womb, not some political pawn-broker like Disraeli, but an incarnation of the benign genius of aristocracy, a being that would indeed ennoble herself. Yet the father of this prodigy regarded him merely as an unwelcome hindrance to his plan for spending the winter in London. If it were not for the duty she owed to a great house to produce other children, and so by every means in mortal power save the family from extinction, she should never again live with Tony as his wife. What had been all their kisses except the prelude to this event? Did he with his boots and his guns suppose that as a man he counted with this unborn son within her? Poor vain fool, not to have comprehended that every conjugal duty, every social obligation, every movement of her head, every flash of her eye, every offer of her hand since she came to Clare had been consecrated to this great issue. Yet his flimsy imagination, which, were it never so flimsy, might at such a moment have managed to spur his body to kneel in awe of the future, had thought of nothing except to make love as lightly as he had made incessant love to her ever since they were married. Love! What did she care for that kind of love? Only for this result, only because she had believed that perfect fruit comes from perfect blossom, had she yielded to him all of herself with passion, sometimes with ecstasy. And now her reward was at hand. The wild autumnal gales might sweep round the ancient house, but at last it was secure; she, Dorothy Lonsdale, had secured it.