"You don't mind making me ridiculous," she said, bitterly.
"My dear girl, it was you that turned away, not me."
"Oh, go to the devil!" she burst out. "I'll have nothing more to do with you. You can console yourself with May Seymour."
The people who turned to stare after the lovely girl that seemed an incarnation of this blue-and-white April day might have been as shocked as Dorothy was at herself to think that she had just descended to the level of an actor by telling him to go to the devil.
The month of May found the "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" company billed to appear in the suburban theaters, and Dorothy was called upon to make up her mind whether she should take rooms with Sylvia and Lily in the center of London or economize for a few weeks by staying at home. Four months of separation from her family had not made her particularly anxious to return to them. At the same time, since she was not yet a London actress, it might be more prudent to wait a little while before she cut herself off too completely from Lonsdale Road. The only thing that worried her about staying at home was the thought that all the members of her family would inevitably insist on going to see her act during the week that they were to play at the Grand Theater, Fulham. Even if her father should be shy of patronizing a musical comedy so near the Bishop of London's palace, she saw no way of preventing at any rate Roland and her sister Dolly from going; since she had stolen her sister's name, Dorothy, notwithstanding her dislike of abbreviations, had always managed to think of her as Dolly. Yes; it was obvious that whether shestayed up in town or stayed in West Kensington, she should be unable to prevent some of the family from going to see her, and, as they would not appreciate the fact that not even the greatest actresses begin by playing Lady Macbeth, she must make the best of their inspection.
So, one Sunday afternoon when the laburnum buds were yellowing in Lonsdale Road, Dorothy drove back to No. 17. Everything was much the same except that Dolly—Dorothy was firm from the moment she entered the house about refusing to answer any more to Norah—had, presumably in revenge for the loss of her name, taken her sister's bed. Mr. Caffyn was glad to hear that the difficulties and dangers of stage life had been exaggerated, and promised that he would warn the Bishop of Hampstead, who was billed to preside at a forthcoming meeting of the Church and Stage Society, not to make too much of them in his anxiety about theatrical souls. Dorothy succeeded in deterring her relations from going to the theater the first week at Camberwell; but the following week, when the playbills of "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" flaunted themselves in every shop-window of West Kensington, a large party, not merely of the immediate family, but of uncles and aunts and cousins raked together from every obscure suburb in London, swarmed for the Thursday matinée, and, what was worse, insisted on buzzing round Dorothy outside the stage-door in order to take her out to tea between the performances. They alluded with some disappointment to the inconspicuousness of the part she played, and they all agreed that the outstanding feature of the performance was the comedian. They thought it must be very nice for Dorothy to have such a splendid humorist perpetually at hand.
"But he's not funny off the stage," explained Dorothy, crossly.
This seemed greatly to surprise the aunts and uncles, who evidently did not believe her. In the middle of teathe party was joined by Roland, Cecil, and Vincent; not having been able to get away for the matinée, they had arrived to swell the family reunion before going to the evening performance, for which they had booked stalls in the very front row, where, later on, to Dorothy's intense disgust, she saw Wilfred Curlew sitting with them'. However, he did have the decency not to wait after the play to accompany herself and her brothers back to West Kensington.
The next morning, before she was dressed, Dorothy was informed that a young gentleman was waiting to see her in the drawing-room, and discovered, when she got down, that a representative of a monthly magazine calledThe Boudoirhad come to ask for an interview. The young man, talking rather as if the magazine was a draper's shop, told her that his paper was making a special feature of beautiful actresses. He cannonaded Dorothy with all sorts of questions, and forced her to surrender the information that her favorite parts were Lady Teazle, Viola, Portia, and Beatrice.
"Comedy, in fact?" said the young man.
"Oh yes, comedy," Dorothy agreed, after a moment's hesitation to decide whether Portia, whose speech about the quality of mercy she had once declaimed at a school breaking-up, ought to be considered a comic figure.
"You have no ambitions for tragedy?"
"No," she told him. "I think there's enough tragedy in ordinary life."
"Would you recommend the stage as a profession?" he inquired.
"Rather a difficult question. It depends so much on the girl."
"Quite," agreed the young man, wisely. "But have you any advice for beginners?"
"My advice is to be natural," said Dorothy.
"Quite," agreed the young man again.
"Natural both on the stage and off," she added.
The young man, with an air of devout concentration, wrote down this valuable maxim, while Dorothy, looking at herself in the mirror, allowed various expressions of delicious naturalness to stand the test of her own critical observation.
"With whom did you study?" the interviewer inquired next.
"Principally with the late Mrs. Haden," said Dorothy, feeling very generous in mentioning Lily's mother after the way the daughter had behaved with Tom Hewitt. "A delightful teacher of the old school, now, alas! no longer with us."
The young man shook his head sadly.
"But my real lessons," Dorothy added, brightly, lest the loss of Mrs. Haden to art might be too much for the interviewer's emotions—"my real lessons were derived from watching famous actresses. No famous actress, continental or English, ever came to London whom I did not go to see. I often went without"—she paused to think what she could have gone without, for it might sound absurd to say that she went without clothes—"I often walked," she corrected herself, "in order to have the necessary money to buy a seat."
"That'll interest our readers very much," said the young man. "Yes, that's the personal note which always appeals to our readers." He sucked his pencil with relish. "And who is your favorite actress?"
"In England or abroad?"
"Oh, in England," the young man hurriedly explained; probably he was jibbing at the prospect of having to write a foreign name.
"In England, Ellen Terry, decidedly," Dorothy replied.
"Quite"; the young man sighed with relief. "Perhaps you would care to give me a photograph of yourself," he suggested.
"With pleasure," she said, taking from the mantelpiece one that she had sent her mother about a month ago.
"Of course," the interviewer hemmed, nervously, "that will be twelve and sixpence for the cost of reproduction."
"Twelve and six?" repeated Dorothy.
"The block will cost twelve and sixpence, that is to say."
"Twelve and six?" she repeated once more.
But she gave him the money; controlling her annoyance at the idea that this young man might be making a profit out of her innocence, she conducted him cheerfully to the door and presented him with a tulip from one of Dolly's flower-pots.
"You're fond of gardening?" he asked, with half-open note-book.
"I adore flowers," said Dorothy. "Good-by."
To her mother she explained the sad necessity she had been under of having to give away her favorite photograph.
"But, mother, I'll write for another one," she promised.
"Oh, Norah dear, I hope you will," said Mrs. Caffyn, much distressed.
"Only, as they're rather expensive, you won't mind giving me a guinea, will you?" Dorothy murmured, with a frown for the old "Norah."
"No, darling Norah—darling child, I mean, of course not. I'd no idea you were spending your salary like that," said Mrs. Caffyn, searching in her purse for the money.
That evening, during the first act a note was sent round to Dorothy from Wilfred Curlew to say that he had been to see her every night this week, and that he had persuaded a friend of his to give her some publicity in a magazine with which he was connected.
"At a cost of twelve and six," Dorothy scoffed to herself.
She did not send a word of thanks to Wilfred, and being unable from the stage to perceive his presence anywhere in the theater, she supposed that, having been there every night this week, he must by now have reached the gallery.
When the interview appeared the other girls were very jealous, and all of them vowed that they had never heard ofThe Boudoir.
"With a blush Miss Lonsdale handed our interviewer an exquisite bunch of flowers culled by the beautiful young actress from her garden, a 'thing of beauty' in the dreary desert of London streets," read out one of the girls.
"Good God, have mercy on us!" exclaimed Clarice Beauchamp, holding a hairpin dipped in eye-black over the gas. "It's a wonder the editor hasn't written before now to ask if he can't keep you."
The irritation in the dressing-room caused by the interview was allayed by a rumor that John Richards would visit the Alexandra Theater, Stoke Newington, where they were playing their last week in the suburbs, with a view to choosing girls for the Vanity production in the autumn. No confirmation could be obtained of this; but the chorus put on extra make-up and acted with all its eyes and all its legs for a shadowy figure at the back of one of the private boxes. After the first act the business manager, who had come behind for some purpose, was surrounded by all the girls, each of whom in turn begged him to tell her confidentially what Mr. Richards had said about the show and if he had had any criticisms to make about herself.
"Mr. Richards?" repeated the manager.
"Now, don't pretend you know nothing about it," they expostulated. "Weknow he's in front."
"Well, you know more than I do," said the manager.
"Then who is it at the back of the box on the prompt side?"
"You silly girls! That's the late mayor of Hackney."
"Then why do they make such a fuss of him?" persisted the girl who had started the rumor. "There was a carriage outside the box-office half an hour before the overture, and people were all round it, staring as if it was the king."
"It's a very sad story," the manager explained. "He's blind, poor fellow, and now, whenever he goes to the theater, they watch him being helped out of his brougham."
During the second act not an eye nor a leg was thrown in the direction of the mysterious stranger, whose identity was a great disappointment to the girls; they had counted on Mr. Richards visiting them in the course of the tour, and here it was coming to an end without a sign of him.
However, they were consoled by being told at the last minute that they were going to play three nights at Oxford before the tour came to a definite conclusion. Everybody agreed that it would be a delightful way to wind up, and when the company assembled at Paddington on a brilliant morning in earliest June, they seemed, in the new clothes they had been able to buy during the last month in London, more like a large picnic-party going up to Maidenhead than a touring company.
Dorothy had decided that the visit to Oxford was an occasion to justify breaking into the £500 she had got out of her mother, which was still practically intact, owing to the economy exerted all these weeks. Her new dresses and new hats, combined with that interview inThe Boudoir, gave the rest of the chorus an impression that there was somebody behind Dorothy, and they regarded her with a jealous curiosity that was most encouraging.
The three girls had only just finished dinner at their lodgings in Eden Square when Sylvia proposed a walk round Oxford. Dorothy agreed to go out if she were allowed time to change her things; but Lily declared that she was tired after the journey, and preferred to look at illustrated papers in deshabille. Many undergraduates turned their heads to stare at Dorothy's beauty or Sylvia's eye-glass when the two girls were walking down the High toward St. Mary's College, through the gatesof which Sylvia calmly suggested that they should pass in order to explore the gardens.
"But suppose they tell us that girls aren't allowed to go in," Dorothy demanded, in a panic.
"We'll go out again."
"But we should look so foolish."
"We always look foolish," said Sylvia. "Anything more foolish than you look at the present moment I can't imagine, except myself."
Before Dorothy could prevent her, Sylvia had asked a tall and haughty undergraduate if there was any reason why they should not take a walk in the college grounds. The young man blushed painfully, and Dorothy, who could see that his embarrassment at being spoken to by an actress was causing intense delight to a group of idlers in the college lodge, was angry with Sylvia for exposing the two of them to a share in the ridicule.
"All right, Dorothy," said Sylvia, cheerfully. "He says we can."
The tall and haughty undergraduate strode away up the High to escape from his friends' chaff, and the two girls wandered about the college until they found themselves in the famous St. Mary's Walks, where upon a seat embowered in foliage they listened to the bells that were ringing down the golden day and ringing in the unhastening Sabbath eve. Close at hand, but hidden from view by leafy banks, the pleasurable traffic of the Cherwell sounded continuously in a low murmur of talk that, blending with the swish of paddles and comfortable sound of jostling punts, seemed the very voice of indolent June. Dorothy supposed that she, like nature, must be looking most beautiful in this bewitching light, and regretted that the only passers-by should be ecclesiastical figures bent in grave intercourse, or a few young men arguing in throaty voices about topics she did not recognize.
"I don't think we've chosen a very good place," she complained, with a discontented pout.
"We've chosen the place," said Sylvia, "where nearly four years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in August, I agreed to get married."
"Married?" repeated Dorothy, in amazement. "Are you married?"
"Yes, I believe I'm married for the present; but I sha'n't be soon."
"Oh, Sylvia, do tell me about it! I won't say a word to anybody else."
But Sylvia, having said so much, would say no more; jumping up and insisting that she was thirsty, she reminded Dorothy that they had promised to help Charlie Clinton entertain his brother and some undergraduate friends. Charlie Clinton was an obscure member of the company who had suddenly sprung into considerable prominence by revealing that he had a brother at Oxford and was himself the black sheep of a respectable family. Dorothy, realizing that the blackest sheep is better form than the whitest goat, had accepted the invitation, but she was not much impressed by the collection of undergraduates gathered in his rooms, and was vexed that she had wasted her most becoming hat on young men who wanted to talk about nothing but music. She was vexed, too, at finding that David Bligh had been invited, and that he was talking affectedly about good music and sounding with his fluty voice rather like an undergraduate himself. Lily came and danced a classical dance which seemed to please everybody else, though Dorothy could not see anything in it. Bligh sang German songs, and was so much applauded that he condescendingly proposed that his pupil should sing, who refused so angrily that none of the undergraduates dared approach her. It was indeed a thoroughly boring evening, and she wondered if Oxford was going to produce nothing better than this.
The theater on Monday night, notwithstanding the fine weather, was packed; but the audience was noisy, and the men in the chorus who had not been invited toCharlie Clinton's party severely condemned the bad manners of undergraduates.
"They're a rowdy lot of bounders, that's what they are," Tom Hewitt proclaimed, loosening the collar around his aggressive neck.
Dorothy, who had been looking forward to astonishing some of the girls in the dressing-room with her news about Sylvia, forgot everything in a delightful triumph she was able to enjoy at the expense of Clarice Beauchamp. A note was brought round after the first act addressed:
To the fair artist's model in pink. Front row. O. P. side.
To the fair artist's model in pink. Front row. O. P. side.
Clarice Beauchamp had the impudence to contest Dorothy's right to open this note, and while some of the artist's models were rapidly transforming themselves into Polynesian beauties and others as rapidly assuming the aristocratic costumes of a millionaire's yachting-party, Clarice and Dorothy, who belonged to the latter division, argued heatedly. At last Fay Onslow, to whom the note could not possibly refer, was allowed to open it and give her verdict:
Fair lady, my name is Lonsdale. On the Grampian hills my father feeds his flock! In other words, will you and the lady with the monocle who yesterday afternoon picked out quite the most unattractive man in St. Mary's as your guide come and picnic with me on the upper river to-morrow? A friend of mine at the House is dying to meet you, but he is much too shy to write himself. If you can come, just send back your address by bearer and I'll send my tame cab to fetch you to-morrow at twelve o'clock.Yours sincerely,ARTHURLONSDALE.
Fair lady, my name is Lonsdale. On the Grampian hills my father feeds his flock! In other words, will you and the lady with the monocle who yesterday afternoon picked out quite the most unattractive man in St. Mary's as your guide come and picnic with me on the upper river to-morrow? A friend of mine at the House is dying to meet you, but he is much too shy to write himself. If you can come, just send back your address by bearer and I'll send my tame cab to fetch you to-morrow at twelve o'clock.
Yours sincerely,ARTHURLONSDALE.
"I knew it was for me," said Dorothy. "Sylvia and I were in St. Mary's College yesterday afternoon."
Clarice Beauchamp, much mortified, had to surrender her claim to the note.
"But what a strange coincidence that he should be called Lonsdale!" Onzie exclaimed. "Most extraordinary, I call it. Who knows? He might be a relation."
"He might be," said Dorothy, calmly.
Lily looked up from her place as if she were going to speak, but, though she said nothing, Dorothy was glad that the terms of the note gave her no excuse for asking her to-morrow, even if Sylvia did maliciously propose that Lily should go instead of herself.
"Oh, but they particularly want you," Dorothy protested.
"Anyway, I can't go," Lily said; "I've promised to go round some of the colleges with Tom."
Dorothy winced at the threatened sacrilege.
Next morning a cab jingled up to the girls' lodgings, and they were driven to the nearest point of embarkation for a picnic on the upper river. Their host, a short young man with very fair hair and a round pink face, introduced himself and led the way to the Rollers, over which punts and canoes were dragged from the lower level of the Cherwell to the wider sweeps of the Isis. A tall young man who was standing by a couple of canoes moored to the bank came forward to greet them. His most immediately conspicuous feature was a pair of white flannel trousers down the seams of which ran stripes of vivid blue ribbon; but when he was introduced to Dorothy as Lord Clarehaven she forgot about his trousers in the more vivid blue of his name. All sorts of ideas rushed through her mind—a sudden dread that he might think Sylvia more attractive than herself, a sudden contempt for the party of the evening before, a sudden rapture in which blue sky, blue blood, and the blue stripes of the trousers merged exquisitely, and a sudden apprehension created by her pleated reflection in the water that she was not looking her best. After Lord Clarehaven she should not have been surprised if the first young man had also had a title; but he was apparently only Mr. Lonsdale,and, though entitled to respect as a friend of Lord Clarehaven, would probably interest Sylvia more than herself.
Dorothy's dread that she and Lord Clarehaven might not find themselves in the same canoe was soon dispelled, because Lord Clarehaven was evidently as eager for her company as she was for his, and they were soon leaving the others behind. There is no form of conveyance which makes for so much intimacy of regard as a canoe, and Dorothy, when she had once been able to reassure herself by means of a pocket-mirror that she had not been ruffled by the cab-drive or by the nervous business of getting gracefully into a wabbling canoe, settled herself down to be admired at a distance of about four feet. Moreover, she indulged for the first time in her life in the pleasure of admiring somebody else, a state of mind which doubled her charm by taking away much of her self-consciousness. If Lord Clarehaven was below the standard of aristocracy set by our full-blooded lady novelists, he was equally far removed from the chinless convention of banal caricature. He had the long legs, the narrow hips and head, and the big teeth of the Norman; but his fair hair was already thinning upon a high, retreating forehead, his nose was small, and if the protuberant eyes that one sees in Pekinese spaniels and other well-bred mammals were a faint intimation of approaching degeneracy in the stock, Dorothy was not sufficiently versed in physiognomy to recognize such symptoms; already fascinated by his title and his trousers, she was quite ready to be fascinated by his eyes.
"I was lunching in St. Mary's yesterday with Arthur Lonsdale," he was explaining, "and I noticed you from the lodge. I should have come up and spoken to you myself, but I was rather frightened by your friend's eye-glass. In fact, I'm still not at all at ease with her. She looks deuced clever, I mean, don't you think?"
"She is awfully clever."
"Poor girl, but I suppose it's not such a bore for agirl as it would be for a man. I'm an awful ass myself, you know. I mean, I'm absolutely incapable of doing anything."
"How did you know we belonged to the company?" asked Dorothy, implying that with all his modesty he must possess acute powers of judgment hidden away somewhere.
"Well, to tell you the truth, we didn't know. Somebody said your friend was a medical student, only I wasn't going to have that, and some man said he'd noticed you at the station, so Lonnie and I went to the theater on the off-chance and tried to spot you."
"Which you did?"
"Oh, rather. Only, then we couldn't spot your name. I was all for Clarice Beauchamp."
"She's an awfully horrid girl," said Dorothy, quickly.
"Is she? I'm sorry to hear that. And Lonnie betted you were Fay Onslow. So we were quits. Funny thing you should have the same name as Lonnie. No relation, I suppose?"
He was evidently so sure of this that Dorothy was rather piqued and asked, loftily, which Lonsdale he was.
"Cleveden's son."
"Oh, then I am a relation," said Dorothy. "Though of course a very, very distant one."
"By Jove! that's great!" said Clarehaven.
He seemed enthusiastic, but Dorothy could not make out whether he believed her or not, and she rather wished she had kept the relationship for the dressing-room. She hoped that Sylvia would not give Lonsdale an impression that she claimed to be his first cousin; this abrupt plunge into the whirlpool of society might make her act extravagantly. What a pity that she had not known who he was before they met, and "Oh!" she cried, aloud.
"What's the matter?" Clarehaven asked.
"Nothing. At least I think I touched a fish," said Dorothy.
But her exclamation was caused by dismay at recalling that she had addressed him as "Arthur Lonsdale, Esquire," when for the first time in her life she might have written "The Honorable Arthur Lonsdale," for everybody to see. What must he have thought of her ignorance? And now here in a canoe with her was Lord Clarehaven, but, owing to the foolish modesty that English titles affect, she did not know if he was a marquis, an earl, a viscount, or a mere baron. The prospect of the green river was leaden with the thought of her stupidity.
"You're looking very sad," said Clarehaven. "What's the matter?"
"I was thinking how beautiful it was here," she sighed.
"Topping, isn't it?"
"Topping," she echoed, awarding to the utterance of the epithet as much emotion as if it were robbed from Shakespeare's magic store. Amid a sweet smell of grass and to the accompaniment of lapping water and a small sibilant wind they lunched on the salmon and mayonnaise, the prawns in aspic, the galantine and cold chicken, the meringues and strawberries of how many Oxford picnics. Above them dreamed a huge sky; elm-trees guarded the near horizon; wasps had not begun, nor did Sylvia tease Dorothy about being related to Lonsdale when Clarehaven presented them as long-lost cousins.
By the end of the afternoon Dorothy had sufficiently confirmed her admirer's first impression to be invited to lunch with him at Christ Church the following day, in which invitation Sylvia was of course included. Then slowly they drifted back down the river, on the dimples and eddies of which the overhanging trees cast a patina as upon the muscles of an ancient bronze.
"How unreal the theater seems!" sighed Dorothy when they drove up to the stage-door.
"Does it?" Sylvia laughed. "It seems to me much more real than our pretty behavior this afternoon."
Dorothy slept badly that night. Her regret for the mistake she had made in addressing Arthur Lonsdale as esquire magnified itself horribly in the mean little bedroom of the lodgings in Eden Square. All night long she was waking up to reproach herself for her stupidity in not taking the trouble to make sure who he was before she sent back the note. Her blunder was all the more unpardonable because she should have been sufficiently interested in receiving a letter from a namesake to take this trouble. And now suppose Lord Clarehaven were to put her under the necessity of addressing him on the outside of an envelope? How was she to know what to write? "Lord Clarehaven, Christ Church College"? It sounded rather empty. In any case, she should have to ask for him at the lodge to-morrow, and how the porter would sneer behind her back if she should make a mistake! In despair Dorothy wandered into the next room where Sylvia and Lily were sleeping tranquilly.
"Oh dear!" she lamented.
"What's the matter?" asked Sylvia, jumping up in bed.
"Sylvia, I can't sleep. I think there's a rat in my room. I suppose Arthur Lonsdale didn't say if Lord Clarehaven was a marquis, did he?"
"Damn your eyes, Dorothy, did you wake me up to ask that? Go and get hold of Debrett, if you want to know so badly."
Dorothy went back to her bedroom in peace of mind. Of course! How easy it was, really, and she fell into a delicious sleep, from which, notwithstanding her disturbed night, she was early awake to dress and be out of the house by ten o'clock in order to search the Oxford bookshops for aPeerage.
"We have aBaronetage" said one bookseller.
Dorothy shrugged her shoulders compassionately, and went from shop to shop until she found the big redvolume of her desire. She paid without a moment's hesitation the price of it, called a cab, and drove back to Eden Square, that she might have plenty of time to devour the contents before going to Christ Church. Her breath came fast when she actually read Clarehaven and began to absorb the wonderful information below:
CLAREHAVEN, EARL OF. (Clare) [Earl U.K. 1816. Bt. E. 1660.]
ANTHONYGILBERTCLARE, 5th Earl, and 10th Baronet;b.Oct. 15, 1882;s.1896; ed. at Eton and Christ Church; is 2d Lieut, in North Devon Dragoons, and 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.Motto—Claro non clango.
Seat—Clare Court, Devonshire.Town residence—129 Curzon Street, W.Club—Bachelors'.
SISTERS LIVING
LadyArabella. b. 1885.
LadyConstantia. b. 1887.
WIDOW LIVING OF FOURTH EARL
Augusta (Countess of Clarehaven) 2d dau. of 9th Earl of Chatfield:m.1880 the 4th Earl whod.1896.Residence—Clare Court, Devonshire.
PREDECESSORS—[1] Anthony Clare,M.P.for Devon (a descendant of Richard Fitzgilbert, Baron of Clare, a companion of the Conqueror, son of Gilbert Crispin, Earl of Brione in Normandy, who was son of Geoffrey, a natural son of Richard I. Duke of Normandy), was cr. a Bt. 1660;d.1674;s.by his son [2]SirGilbert, 2d Bt.;d.1710;s.by his son [3]SirAnthony, 3d Bt.;d.1747;s.by his nephew [4]SirWilliam, 4th Bt.;d.1764;s.by his cousin [5]SirAnthony, 5th Bt.; cr.Baron Clarehaven(peerage of Great Britain) 1796;d.1802;s.by his son [6] Gilbert, 2d Baron; cr.Viscount ClareandEarl of Clarehaven(peerage of United Kingdom) 1816;d.1826;s.by his son [7] Richard Crispin, 2d Earl.b.1788.m.1818 Lady Caroline Lacey whod.1859, 2d dau. of 3d Marquess of Longlan;d.1864; s. by his son [8] Geoffrey William,P.C., 3d Earl.b.1820; sometime Lord Lieut. of Devon; M.P. for S. Devon (C); Vice-Chamberlain of H. M. Queen Victoria's Household.m.1845 the Hon. Louisa Travers, whod.1890, dau. of the 26th Baron Travers;d.1867;s.by his son [9] Gilbert Crispin, 4th Earl,b.1845; Lieut. Royal Horse Guards, 1866-67:m.1880 Lady Augusta Fanhope, 2d dau. of 9th Earl of Chatfield;d.1896;s.by his son [10] Anthony Gilbert, 5th Earl and present peer; also Viscount Clare and Baron Clarehaven.
Half a dozen times word for word she read through these magic pages, until she felt that she simply could not make a mistake at lunch. Then a page or two farther on, past Clarendon and Clarina, she came to:
CLEVEDEN, BARON. (Lonsdale) [Baron G.B. 1762.]
CHARLESARTHURBRABAZONLONSDALE.G.C.M.G., G.C.I.E.5th Baron;b.Oct. 10, 1858;s.1888; ed. at Eton and at Ch. Ch. Oxford. (B.A. 1880); is a J.P. and D.L. for Warwickshire and Verderer of the Forest of Arden; Hon. Col. of Yeo.; sat as M.P. for West Warwick—(C) 1880-1884; was Assist. Private Sec. to the Premier—(M. Salisbury) 1885-6; Gov. and Com. in Ch. of E. Australia. 1893-99; and Gov. of Central India. 1899-1901;K.C.M.G.1893;G.C.M.G.1898;G.C.I.E.1899:m.1882 Lady Helen Druce (an Extra Woman of the Bed-chamber to H.M. Queen Victoria), dau. of 10th Earl of Monteith and has issue.
Arms—Argent, an oak tree englanté vert.Crest—A bugle horn or, enguiché and stringed vert.Supporters—On either side a forester sounding a horn proper.Motto—J'y serai.
Seat—Cressingham Hall, Warwick.Clubs—Carlton. Travellers'.
SON LIVING
Hon.ARTHURGEORGEMORNINGTON.b.Feb. 24, 1883.
DAUGHTER LIVING
Hon.Sylvia May.b.1885.
"Sylvia?" Dorothy said to herself. But she decided to stick to the name Dorothy, and went on reading about her family.
BROTHER LIVING
Rev. the Hon. George,b.1860; ed. at Eton, and at St. Mary's Coll. Oxford. (B.A. 1883. M.A. 1886); is R. of Bingham-cum-Bingham Monachorum;m.1894 Mary Alice, dau. of the late Rev. Francis Greville, V. of St. Wilfred's, Tilchester, and Hon. Canon of Tilchester, and has issue living, Arthur Brabazon—b.1896. Mary—b.1898. Georgina Maud—b.1900.Residence—Bingham Rectory, Hants.
SISTERS LIVING
Hon.Frances Louisa,b.1863.m.1885 Sir William Honeywood-Greene, 6th Bt.Residence—Arden Towers, Warwick.
Hon.Caroline,b.1865.m.1886 Sir Stanley Pinkerton, K.C.V.O. Master of the King's Spaniels.Residence—210 Eaton Square, S.W.
Hon.Horatia.b.1867.
There followed a couple of pages devoted to collateral branches of the Lonsdales. These were something new: the Clares apparently lacked collaterals. Presently it dawned on Dorothy that these collaterals treated of the more distant relations of the family, and in a fever she began to search for confirmation of the legend in Lonsdale Road that through their grandmother, Mrs. Doyle, the Caffyns were connected with Lord Cleveden. On and on she read through colonels and rectors with their numerous offspring, through consuls and captains and judges and doctors even; but there was no mention of Doyles, still less of Caffyns. The connection must indeed be very remote: perhaps it was hidden among the predecessors.
PREDECESSORS.—[1] George Lonsdale, Verderer of the Forest of Arden; M.P. for Warwickshire 1740-62; cr.Baron Cleveden, of Cressingham, co. Warwick (peerage of Great Britain) 1762;d.1764;s.by his son [2] Arthur, 2d Baron;d.1822;s.by his son [3] Charles, 3d Baron;b.1790:m.1830 the Hon. Horatia Brabazon, whod.1851, dau. of 3d Viscount Brabazon;d.1840;s.by his son [4] George Brabazon, 4th Baron;b.1832; a Lord-in-Waiting to H. M. Queen Victoria 1858-64:m.1856 LadyMay Mornington, whod.1895, 3d dau. of 11th Earl of Belgrove;d.1888;s.by his son [5] Charles Arthur Brabazon, 5th Baron and present peer.
Dorothy sighed her disappointment, but resolved that she would adopt the family crest and motto as her own.J'y seraiunderneath a bugle-horn: how well it would look on her note-paper. Fired by its inspiration, she began to dress herself for lunch with the Earl of Clarehaven, and when, an hour later, she ushered Sylvia into the Christ Church lodge with a hardihood that contrasted strongly with the reluctance she had shown when Sylvia had dragged her into St. Mary's on Sunday, there was no need to inquire for Lord Clarehaven by his correct title, because the host was there himself to meet his guests and escort them across the spaciousness of Tom Quad to his rooms in Peckwater. It appeared that at the last minute an urgent summons to play cricket for the Eton Ramblers had prevented Lonsdale from coming. Dorothy, notwithstanding her knowledge of the Lonsdale collaterals, was not sorry, for she did not wish to discuss the relationship with one of the family, especially before Sylvia, to whom she now turned with a hint of patronage.
"My dear, you will be disappointed. Mr. Lonsdale is not coming to lunch."
Sylvia said she would try to put up with the disappointment and hoped that an equally entertaining substitute had been provided.
"I've asked a fellow called Tufton," said Clarehaven. "His father's a sleeping partner or something of jolly old John Richards at the Vanity, and I thought he might be useful. Besides, he's not at all a bad egg. We elected him to the Bullingdon this term."
Dorothy looked at her host gratefully and admiringly.
"How awfully sweet of you!" she murmured, with the lightest, briefest touch of her fingers on his wrist, and thinking how well the people who mattered knew how to do things.
They had reached Peckwater by now, the architecture of which, brightened by many window-boxes in full bloom, reminded Dorothy of streets in Mayfair. Her morning with Debrett had in fact turned her head so completely that she sought everywhere for illustrations of grandeur in the life around her; in this regard Clarehaven's rooms, by conforming perfectly to her notions of what they should be, made her want to kiss herself with satisfaction. To begin with, the door of his bedroom, slightly ajar, allowed a glimpse of numerous pairs of boots running up the scale from brogues to waders, which somehow spoke more eloquently of riches and leisure than if the luncheon-table had been laid with gold. Dorothy was contemplating the tints of these boots like a poet in an autumnal glade when Clarehaven presented Mr. Tufton, who, to do him justice, looked as well turned out as one of his host's hunting-tops and in a chestnut-colored suit with extravagantly rolled collar maintained his personality against the boots and the cigars and the brown sherry and the old paneling and the studies of grouse by Thorburn that gave this room its air of mellow opulence.
Dorothy told Mr. Tufton brightly that he had missed a wonderful afternoon yesterday.
"I was playing polo," he explained.
Dorothy, having an idea that polo was nearly as dangerous as bull-fighting, shuddered.
"I say, do you feel a draught?" inquired the host, anxiously.
"Oh no, it's delicious here."
A voice from the quad was shouting "Tony," and Dorothy, remembering Anthony from Debrett, could not resist telling Clarehaven that he was being called. Clarehaven was moving over to the window to discourage whoever was demanding his presence, when another voice came clearly up through the June air.
"Shut up, Ridgway! Tony's lunching some does, you silly ass!"
Dorothy could not help thinking that Sylvia ought to have pretended not to hear this allusion instead of bursting out into what was really a vulgar peal of laughter.
"I think thereisa draught," said Mr. Tufton, closing the windows so gravely that one felt much of his inmost meditation was devoted to the tactful handling of moments like this.
"Are these your sisters?" Dorothy asked, picking up a photograph of two girls, each holding a foxhound.
"Yes, those are my sisters Bella and Connie," Clarehaven replied. "They're awful keen on puppy-walking."
Perhaps, after all, abbreviations were sometimes tolerable, and names like Arabella and Constantia were rather long.
"Isn't your second name Gilbert?" she asked.
"Yes. Dreadful infliction, isn't it?"
Dorothy decided not to say that her father's name was Gilbert, to which she had been leading up, and took her seat at table, noticing with pleasure that the full moon of the house of Clare adorned the silver. After lunch they looked at albums of snapshots, during the examination of which Mr. Tufton was most useful, because he was continually saying: "By Jove! Isn't that Lady Connie?" or: "By Gad! Isn't that the covert where Lady Bella got her left and right last October?" or: "Hello! I see Lady Clarehaven has followed my advice about the pergola." If Mr. Tufton could advise countesses as stately as the Countess of Clarehaven and refer to the daughters of an earl as Lady Bella and Lady Connie, what might not Dorothy do with patience and discretion? Meanwhile she took no risks, and if she had to mention the members of her host's family she alluded to them as "your mother" or "your elder sister" or "your younger sister."
"But what a glorious place Clare Court must be!" she exclaimed.
"Oh, I don't know," said the owner of it. "The train service is absolutely rotten."
"You'll have your new car this vac.," Mr. Tufton reminded him. "I wrote the firm a very strong letter yesterday." Then seeing that his friend was growing gloomy at the prospect of Devonshire even with a new car, he suggested a stroll round Meadows, and cleverly arranged to lag behind with Sylvia.
Clarehaven when he was alone with Dorothy did not find much more to say, but he was able to look at her with a more open admiration than when his glances had been disconcerted by Sylvia's monocle.
"You know I'm tremendously quelled by your friend," he avowed. "By Jove! you know, I feel she's always criticizing a fellow. Now with you I feel absolutely at my ease."
"I'm glad," Dorothy murmured. Then for two full moments she let her deep eyes flash into his.
"I say, when you look at me like that," said Clarehaven, solemnly, "you absolutely bring my heart into my mouth. By Gad! I feel it being hooked up like a trout."
"I'm afraid it's a very easy heart to hook," she laughed.
"Oh no, it's not! Oh no, really it's not! I can assure you that I'm not in the least susceptible."
"Ah, you'll forget all about me to-morrow."
"My dear Dorothy! You don't object to my calling you Dorothy? My dear Dorothy, if you knew how unlikely I am to forget all about you to-morrow...."
"Well?"
"Well, I'm not going to forget about you, that's all."
"We shall see."
"Yes, we shall," said Clarehaven, fiercely.
Dorothy was anxious to add still a small touch to his obvious appreciation, and she conceived the daring idea of inviting him back to tea in the lodgings. She felt that there in the dingy little room her grace and beauty wouldappear more desirable than ever, and if he should fancy from her invitation that she intended to make herself cheap he would soon perceive from her behavior how far removed she was from the average chorus-girl. Clarehaven applauded the suggestion, and though Sylvia looked rather bored by it, Tufton was enthusiastic; so they visited a pastry-cook's and bought lots of expensive cakes and chocolates, for which the guest of honor paid.
"How the poor live!" exclaimed Dorothy, pointing with a dramatic gesture at the drab little houses of Eden Square as if she would comment upon an aspect of Oxford that was hardly credible after Christ Church.
"Yes, this is our quad," chuckled Sylvia. "Old Tom!"
"I've never been here before," said Clarehaven, anxious to convince Dorothy that really he was not susceptible. "I've heard of Eden Square, of course, but this is my first visit. It's where all the theatrical people stay, isn't it, Tuffers?"
"It may be," replied Mr. Tufton, who, having paid for everything he possessed with money his father was making out of the theater, naturally did not wish to show himself too familiar with its domestic life.
"Number ten," said Dorothy, gaily. "Here we are!"
She opened the front door and led the way along a narrow passage to the sitting-room, and, flinging wide open the door, drew back for Clarehaven to enter first.
"You'll have to excuse the general untidiness," she warned him.
The sentence was out before she had time to realize that the general untidiness included a searing vision of Lily in an arm-chair, imparadised upon the lap of the impossible Tom Hewitt. Sylvia dashed forward to the rescue of Dorothy, who was standing speechless with mortification, and began introducing everybody to one another as fast as she could. Clarehaven's devotion to the stage did not seem impaired by this abrupt manifestation of low life behind the scenes, and Tufton, who inother company would probably have been as much outraged as Dorothy herself by such a reflection upon the source of his wealth, copied his friend's lead. Tom Hewitt with a mumbled excuse about having to see the manager retired as soon as possible. Lily, notwithstanding that her left cheek was flushed and that the hair on the left side of her head was more conspicuously a part of the general untidiness than the hair on the right, seemed utterly unconscious of having as good as torn up the Debrett in which Dorothy had invested this morning, and actually talked away in her languorous style to Clarehaven and Tufton as if Tom Hewitt's lap was the natural place on which to pass a lovely summer afternoon.
For Dorothy that tea-party was a martyrdom from which she began to think that she should never recover. Wherever she looked she saw that horrible picture of Lily and Tom. Once Clarehaven asked for another lump of sugar, and, tormented by the vision, she put two chocolates in his cup. Tufton passed his cup for a little more milk, and she emptied it away into the slop-bowl. Finally in an effort to restore her equanimity she took a chocolate that concealed a sticky caramel within, and when her mouth was all twisted and her teeth felt as if they were being pulled out by the roots Clarehaven asked if she could not spare him a photograph. He was being kind, thought Dorothy, miserably; the Fitzgilberts and Crispins and Clares of all those generations were gathering to help him hide the contempt he must feel for this tea-party; Lacy and Travers and Fanhope were behind him, pleading the obligations of nobility. And if he were not being kind she must suppose that he rather liked Lily, which would be worst of all. But what a lesson she had been given, what a lesson, indeed! If but once it might be granted to her that a folly should be expiated in the pain of the moment, she would never play tricks with fortune again.
When Clarehaven rose to make his farewells Dorothydid not attempt to detain him, but with a sorrowful grace shook his hand and would not even give him the photograph.
"No, no, I'd rather send you one from London."
"But you'll forget," he protested.
"No, I sha'n't. One hundred and twenty-nine Curzon Street. Or will you be at Clare Court?"
"I'll write to you."
"No, no," said Dorothy. It would never do for him to write to Lonsdale Road; besides, he might take it into his head to visit her there, which might be more disastrous than this tea-party. What would he think, for instance, of the misshapen boots that were usually waiting outside Roland's room like two large black-beetles? No, when she had thought out her campaign she would send him a photograph, and if, looking back on this afternoon, he decided that she was not worth while—well, she must put up with it. Dorothy was so sorry for herself that Clarehaven was flattered by her melancholy countenance into supposing that he had made a deep impression. In the narrow passage Tufton slipped behind and whispered to her that she must look her best to-night.
"Why?"
"Stable information," he said, and hurried after his friend, Lord Clarehaven.
When the three girls were alone together in the fatal sitting-room Dorothy's repressed rage with Lily broke out uncontrollably.
"I hope you don't think I'll ever live with you again after that disgusting exhibition. I suppose you think just because you went with me to Walter Keal that you can do as you like. I don't know what Sylvia thinks of you, but I can tell you what I think. You make me feel absolutely sick. That beastly chorus-boy! The idea of letting anybody like that even look at you! Thank Heaven, the tour's over. I'm going down to the theater. I can't stay in this room. It makes me blush to thinkof it. I'll take jolly good care who I live with in future."
Something in Lily's fragility, something in her still untidy hair and uncomprehending muteness, inflamed Dorothy beyond the bounds of toleration, and in despair of just words to humiliate her sufficiently she slapped her face.
"Hit her back, my lass," cried Sylvia, putting up her eye-glass to watch the fray; but Lily collapsed tearfully into the arm-chair, and Dorothy rushed out of the room.
The sight of Debrett's scarlet and gold upon her dressing-table was enough to reconjure all her mortification, and she was just going to weep her heart out upon the bed as, no doubt, below Lily was weeping hers out upon the shoulders of a ghostly Tom Hewitt, when Tufton's parting advice recurred to her. She had to look her best to-night. Why? He must have some reason to say that.
"J'y serai?" cried Dorothy, mustering all her family pride to keep back her tears.
Although fortified by the motto, Dorothy was still suffering from the memory of that afternoon, and when she arrived at the theater to dress and saw Tom Hewitt standing by the stage-door she tried to pass him without acknowledging his salute.
"Mr. Richards will be in front to-night," he told her, portentously.
"Oh, we're always hearing that," said Dorothy. "I don't believe it."
"It's a fact. Warren told me so himself. And Mr. Keal's come down with him."
So this was why Tufton had advised her to look her best to-night; the visit could only mean that the greatman wanted girls for the autumn production at the Vanity. Dorothy began to cheer up. Even if Lily's behavior had disgusted Lord Clarehaven irreparably, such behavior would not spoil her own chance of being engaged by John Richards, and at the Vanity there would be plenty of titled admirers. No doubt most of them would be younger sons or elder sons who had not yet succeeded, but ... "j'y serai," murmured Dorothy. "It's a good thing that I don't fall in love very easily. And it's lucky I didn't let myself cry," she added, congratulating her reflection in the dressing-room mirror.
Every girl was painting herself and powdering herself and pulling up her stockings and patting her hair and, regardless of the undergraduates she had met during the week, preparing to act as she had never acted before. Dorothy took neither more nor less trouble with her appearance than she took every night.
This time rumor was incarnate in fact, for the great Mr. Richards came and stood in the wings during a large portion of the play, and Dorothy, convinced that the one thing she ought not to do was to throw a single glance in his direction, devoted all her attention to the front of the house. There were lots of flowers; but nobody, neither principal nor chorus-girl, was handed such a magnificent basket of pink roses as herself, and nobody who had not suffered as she had suffered that afternoon in the depths could have been so gloriously thrilled on the heights as Dorothy was when the curtain fell at the close of the performance amid the shouts and cheers of youthful art-loving England, and she was stopped in the wings by Mr. Water Keal.
"Come here, dear," he said. "I want to introduce you to Mr. Richards."
The impresario was a large and melancholy man whose voice reverberated in the back of a cavernous throat with so high a palate that consonants were lost in its echoes and his speech seemed to consist entirely of vowels.
"Who sent you the prehy flowers, dear?" he asked, lugubriously.
"The Earl of Clarehaven," said Dorothy, with a brilliant smile.
"Ha—ha, vehy 'ice, vehy 'ice," he muttered, fondling the card attached. "Goo' gir'! Goo' gir'!"
The millionaire's yachting friends wore evening gowns for the latter part of the second act, and Dorothy in old rose, with her basket of flowers and exquisite neck and shoulders, was indeed looking her best.
"Goo' gir'!" Mr. Richards boomed once more; then as she passed from the royal presence he patted her shoulder in congratulation, dusted the powder from his fingers, lit an enormous cigar, and wandered away with Mr. Keal.
When Dorothy reached the dressing-room every girl was speculating on the depth of the impression she had made upon Mr. Richards, but not one of them could claim that the great man had patted her on the back or noticed her flowers. Presently the call-boy came with a message that Miss Lonsdale was to be at the theater to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock without fail, and it was obvious to the most jealous observer that Dorothy's chance had come. She was so much elated by her good fortune that she was reconciled to Lily, told everybody what a delightful lunch she had had with Lord Clarehaven and what a delightful picnic she had had with Lord Clarehaven and how she had met a cousin of hers, Arthur Lonsdale, who was the only son of Lord Cleveden.
"You know, he was governor of Central India," Dorothy reminded the dressing-room.
"India!" echoed Miss Onslow. "That sounds hot stuff, anyway."
Dorothy buried her face in the roses to get rid of the effluvium of such vulgarity. And then in the middle of her success, just when her true friends should have been most pleased, Sylvia, who had shared—well, notshared, but had been allowed to assist at her triumph—Sylvia it was who asked, in a voice audible to the whole dressing-room:
"On which side of the road are you related to young Lonsdale?"
Luckily the joke was too obscure to be generally understood; but Dorothy decided to banish Sylvia from the list of her friends that in Lily's company she might henceforth inhabit an outer darkness unlit by Debrett's scarlet and gold.
"I expect I shall soon forget what an awful life touring is," said Dorothy to herself that night, as she turned back the limp cotton sheets and looked distastefully at the hummocky mattress. There was a trenchant symbolism, too, in massacring a flea with Debrett; no other volume would have been heavy enough.
The next morning Mr. Richards seemed to be inviting her—so gentle were his accents, so soft his intonation—to join the Vanity company next September at three pounds a week. Mr. Keal and his Jewish assistant, Mr. Fitzmaurice, were present at her triumph; and when Dorothy was going down-stairs from the manager's office, Mr. Fitzmaurice hurried after her and begged her not to forget that it was he who had been the first to recognize her talents.
"Well, call me a cab, there's a good boy," said Dorothy, to reward him; and Mr. Fitzmaurice, who only six months ago had looked at her so critically on that wet December morning in Leicester Square, now ran hither and thither in the summer weather until he had found her a cab.
"What swank!" Dorothy heard Clarice Beauchamp say when, with a rattle and a dash, she drove up to the station, where the company were mustering for their last journey together. But she had only a gracious smile for poor Clarice; and at Paddington, although she parted with Sylvia and Lily cordially enough, she did not invite either of them to come and see her in Lonsdale Road.
NOT even the Irishman's passion for originality is strong enough to resist the common impulse of human nature to follow the course of the sun; he must migrate westward like the Saxon before him, and it is surely remarkable to find a theater holding out against a social tendency to which an Irishman succumbs. When a flood of new thoroughfares submerged old theatrical London in the last years of the nineteenth century and created a new theaterdom farther west; when the barbarous hoardings of the Strand Improvement obliterated so many resorts of leisure, and, like the people of Croton, the London County Council diverted a stream of traffic to flow where once was the Sybaris of Holywell Street and the Opéra Comique; when the Lyceum and the Adelphi changed the quality of their wares; when Terry's became a cinema palace and His Grace of Bedford sold Drury Lane overnight—the Vanity was almost the only theater that preserved its position and its character. The peak of Ararat was not more welcome to the water-weary eyes of Noah than to patrons of a theater as old-fashioned as the Ark was the sight of that little island upon which the Vanity maintained itself amid the wrecks and ruins of the engulfed Strand. Close by, as if to commemorate the friendly rivalry of Church and Stage, upon another island St. Clement Dane's cleft the traffic of Fleet Street long after Temple Bar had been swept away; and it was agreeably appropriate that the church where Doctor Johnson, our greatest conservative, waswont to bow his head before the slow grinding of God's mills should have for company in a visible protest against the illusion of progress that monument of English conservatism, the Vanity Theater. More secure upon its island in the Strand than the Eddystone Lighthouse upon its rock in the Channel, the illuminated portico of the Vanity blazed away as brightly as it ever did before the destruction of the mean streets that used to obscure its glory. Not far off, the Savoy Hotel served as prologue and epilogue to its entertainments; and no alliance between one of the new theaters in Piccadilly and the Ritz or Carlton could yet claim to have superseded that time-honored alliance between the Vanity and the Savoy.
In the early 'seventies the sacred lamp of burlesque, as journalists moved to poesy by their theme have it, was lighted at the Vanity, and in the waning 'eighties the gas-lamp of burlesque, with nothing but an added brightness to mark the change, became the electric bulb of musical comedy. Time moved slowly at the Vanity; tenors grew hoarse and comedians grew stiff, but they were not easily superseded; many ladies grew stout, but the boards of the Vanity were strong, and even the places of those dearly loved by the gods who married young were only taken by others equally beloved and exactly like their predecessors; puns disappeared gradually from the librettos; the frocks of the chorus exaggerated the fashion of the hour; very seldom a melody was sufficiently novel to escape being whistled by the town; but in the opening years of the twentieth century the Vanity was intrinsically what the Vanity had been thirty years before and what no doubt it would be thirty years thence. The modish young men who applauded "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" sat in the stalls where their fathers and in some cases their grandfathers had applauded "Hamlet Up to Date." The fathers vowed that the Vanity had deteriorated since the days when mutton-chop whiskers were cultivated and the ladies of the chorus flirted bustleson the outside of a coach-and-four; but the sons were quite content with the present régime and considered jolly old John Richards as good as any impresario of the 'eighties. Unless the standard of beauty had universally declined at the dawn of the new century, that opinion of youth must be indorsed; it is doubtful if twenty more beautiful girls than the Vanity chorus contained in the autumn of 1903 could have been found in any other city or in any other country, and certainly not in any other theater. When a few years after this date John Richards was knighted for his services to human nature and applied to the College of Heralds for a grant of arms, a friend with a taste for Latin robbed Propertius for the motto and gave himTot milia formosarum, which, though lending itself to a ribald translation of "The foremost harem of smiling Totties," was not less well deserved by John Richards than by Pluto, to whom the poet addressed the original observation.
Dorothy, by spending in complete seclusion the two months before rehearsals began, prepared herself to shimmer as clearly as she could in the shimmering galaxy that was to make "The River Girl" as big a hit as "Miss Elsie of Chelsea." She declined to accompany her family to the seaside in August, being sure that August at Eastbourne would be bad for her complexion; therefore she remained behind in Lonsdale Road with the cook, who by the time Dorothy had finished with her began to have ambitions to be a lady's maid. Nothing is more richly transfigured by unfamiliarity than the empty streets of a London suburb in mid-August, when their sun-dyed silence quivers upon the air like noon in Italy. At such a season the sorceress Calypso might not have disdained West Kensington for her spells; Dorothy, dream-haunted and with nothing more strenuous than singing-lessons and fashion papers to impinge upon the drowsy days, lived on self-enchantment. She never sent Lord Clarehaven the promised photograph, not did she even write him a letter;after deliberation she had decided that it would be more effective to appear upon his next horizon like a new planet rather than to wane slowly from his recollection like a summer moon. To write from an address at which it would be impossible to renew their acquaintance would be foolish. Besides, with such a future as hers at the Vanity was surely bound to be, did one Clarehaven more or less matter? He had served his purpose in demonstrating the ease with which she could reach beyond other girls; but, as Mary, the cook, had observed last night in recounting her rupture with the milkman, "plenty more mothers had sons," and if Clarehaven arrived impatiently at the same conclusion about the supply of daughters, that was better than exposing herself to the greater humiliation of being taken up in an idle moment and as readily dropped again. Dorothy's imagination had been touched by reading of three Vanity marriages that were now sharing the attention of the holiday press with giant gooseberries and vegetable marrows of mortal seeming. The younger son of a duke, the eldest son of a viscount, a Welsh baronet had, one after another, made those gaps in the Vanity chorus, to fill one of which Dorothy had been chosen by the provident Mr. Richards; she accepted the omen, and made up her mind that for her it should always be marriage or nothing.
It would be unfair at this stage in Dorothy's career to accuse her of formulating any definite plan to win a coronet, still less of casting her eye upon Lord Clarehaven's coronet in particular; but during these sun-drenched August days she did resolve to do nothing that might spoil the fulfilment of the augury. Left to herself, and free from the criticism of friends or relations, it would have been strange if Dorothy's estimate of her own powers had not been rather heightened by so much lazy self-contemplation. One day she had met an acquaintance marooned like herself upon this desert isle of holidays, and on being asked what she was doing in London atsuch a season, had replied truthfully enough that she was just looking round; but she did not add that she was looking round at herself in a mirror. This cloistral felicity lasted as long as the lime-trees in West Kensington kept their summer greenery; at the end of August the leaves began to wither, the rumble of returning cabs was heard more often every day, and the first rehearsal of "The River Girl" was called. Dorothy's seclusion was over; of the girls who passed through the Vanity stage-door that August morning there was none so fresh as she.
"How odd," she thought, "that only this time last year the notion of going on the stage had never even entered my head."
Dorothy had paused for a moment on the threshold of the theater, and was listening while the door swung to and fro behind her and syncopated the dull beat of the traffic in the Strand to a sort of ragtime tune. How different these rehearsals were going to be from those of last year in the Lisle Street club-room, and how right she had been to escape from the provinces so quickly.
From the first moment Dorothy felt more herself in the Vanity than she had felt all those six months of touring. She was, of course, stared at and criticized, but she was never acutely conscious of the jealousy that had glared from the eyes of her companions in the provinces. The beauty of her rivals in this metropolitan chorus only made her own beauty more remarkable; she, being the first to recognize this, accorded to her associates such a frank and such an obviously sincere admiration that she gained a reputation for simplicity, which the other girls ascribed to innocence. From innocence to mystery is but a short step in an ambient like the Vanity, and without a Lily or a Sylvia to tell the other girls too much about her, Dorothy developed the mysterious aspect of herself and left her innocence undefined. At the Vanity there was none of the destructive intimacy oftouring life. Nobody ever saw the ladies of this chorus in polychrome on the wet platform of a Yorkshire railway station; nobody ever saw the ladies of this chorus tilting with a hatpin at pickled onions; nobody, in fact, had any excuse for being disillusioned by the ladies of the Vanity, because, being individually and collectively aware of their national importance, they were never really off the stage; indeed, except occasionally in their bedrooms, perhaps, they were never really behind the scenes. The fancy of a casual observer, who lingered for a moment at the stage-door to watch the ladies of the Vanity tripping out of their hansoms, was as much stimulated by the sight as the fancy of the regular patron who from the front of the house was privileged to observe them tripping on to the stage. They were brilliant butterflies by day and gorgeous moths by night; though nature forbids us to suppose that they never were caterpillars, their larval state is as unimaginable as the touch of time that worked the metamorphosis.
Dorothy did not allude to the chrysalis of West Kensington from which she had just emerged, nor did she mention more than she could help the caterpillar existence of touring. True to her native caution, she avoided committing herself to any sudden friendships that might afterward be regretted, but she fluttered round all the girls in turn, and with Miss Birdie Underhill and Miss Maisie Yorke, two members of the sextet sung from punts in the first act, she made a tolerably high excursion into the empyrean. Birdie and Maisie were tall blondes of the same type as herself, but, being some years older, they were beginning to think that, inasmuch as they had not been able to find even the younger son of a baron whose attentions conformed to his title, they ought to accept the hands of two devoted and moderately rich stock-brokers who had long and patiently admired them. Perhaps it was the first faint intimations of maternity demanding expression that led these two queens of thechorus to hint so graciously to Dorothy at the inheritance they designed for her. To pass from butterflies to bees for a metaphor, they fed her with queens' food (prepared by Romano's) and taught her that the drones must either be married or massacred—even both if necessary. Dorothy was too wise to think she knew everything, and, being acquisitive rather than mimetic, she gained from the two queens the cynicism of a wide experience without subjecting herself to the wear and tear of the process.
Lest a too exclusive attention to Miss Underhill and Miss Yorke should leave her stranded when they quitted the chorus, Dorothy frequented equally the company of a very lovely brunette called Olive Fanshawe, who was certainly the most popular girl in the dressing-room and of a sweet and gentle disposition, without either affectation or duplicity. Apart from the advantage of being friends with a girl so genuinely beloved, Dorothy was attracted to Olive Fanshawe's ivory skin and lustrous dark hair; that would set off her own roses and mignonette to perfection, and she was glad when Olive proposed that perhaps later on they might share a flat. She decided, however, to stay at home during the winter, or at any rate until she should have obtained a more prominent place in the chorus and be justified in launching out on her own with some prospect of practical homage in return.
Dorothy's early confidence in herself had been slightly shaken in the first six weeks of "The River Girl," because Clarehaven had not once been to see her, or, if he had, had never written to tell her how lovely she looked on the banks of a scene-painter's Thames. If he still took the least interest in her, he could easily have found out where she was, and it was significant that she had seen nothing of Tufton, either. Dorothy began to be afraid that those two days at Oxford had vanished from Clarehaven's memory; so, lacking as yet any great incentive to make the best of herself off the stage, she decided not to wastemoney either on a flat or on winter clothes. No address out of Mayfair would suit her, and no furs less expensive than sables would become her fair beauty. At nineteen she need not be in too much of a hurry, and she should certainly be wise to wait until the springtime would provide her with the prettiest frocks for much less outlay. As for taking a flat, why, anything might have happened by the spring.
Dorothy's plans, however, were precipitated by the behavior of her father. It appeared that a friendly archdeacon had warned Mr. Caffyn privately of the forthcoming sale of some church schools in the center of a large maritime town in the west of England in order that a cinema theater might be erected on their site to the glory of God, the profit of His Church, and the convenience of His little ones. The archdeacon drew Mr. Caffyn's attention to the clause in the contract by which the morality of every performance was secured, and strongly advised him to follow his own example and invest in the theater. Mr. Caffyn, who was not of a speculative temperament, felt that, though he should be unwise to risk brewery stock profitable enough at a date when the Liberal party had scarcely yet swelled the womb of politics, he was being offered an excellent opportunity to add to his wife's income, which was not yielding more than three and a half per cent. upon her capital. It was on top of this important decision that Dorothy came back from the theater one foggy November night to be met by her mother in the dim hall of No. 17.
"A most terrible thing has occurred," Mrs. Caffyn whispered. "Hush! Don't disturb Cecil. Tread quietly. The poor boy is tired out with working for his Christmas examinations, and father might hear us."
To Mrs. Caffyn the drawing-room seemed the only fit environment for an appalling problem the day had brought her, the only atmosphere that could brace her to confront its solution, but Dorothy, who was cold afterher nerves by drinking the fresh tea brought in for a late arrival. Dorothy came down-stairs, rather cross at having been disturbed from her afternoon nap, and Mr. Caffyn, a Cenci of suburban prose, confronted his wife and daughter.
"I have seldom felt such a fool," he began upon a note of pompous reminiscence that whistled in his mustache like a wind through withered sedge on the margin of a December stream. "I haveneverfelt such a fool," he corrected himself, "as I was made to feel this afternoon by my own wife and my own daughter. I go to your bank," he proclaimed, fixing his wife's wavering eye—"I go to your bank, and there, in the presence of my eldest son, I ask to see Mr. Jones, the manager, with a view to improving your financial position."