"On the whole, though, I think he was right," said Mr. Beadon. "These Radicals, you know."
"Come and have lunch with us," the dowager invited.
It would be the last independent hospitality she could offer at Clare Court.
While the dowager was presiding over lunch at Clare for the last time, while her daughters were getting more and more openly excited about the arrival of their sister-in-law, and while even Mr. Beadon partook of their excitement to such an extent that he ate much less than usual, Dorothy was sitting down to lunch in the restaurant-car of the Western express. Her old life was being left behind more rapidly and with less regret than the country through which the train was traveling. Happiness always widens the waist of an hour-glass. Dorothy was so happy in being a countess that on this railway journey time and space passed with equal speed; and she looked so happy that all those who recognized her or were informed by one of the waiters who she was commented upon her radiant air. They decided with that credulous sentimentality imported into Great Britain with Hengist and Horsa that she must be very deeply in love with her husband; no one suspected that she might be more deeply in love with herself. The head waiter, anxious to pay his own humble tribute to the happy pair, removed the vase of faded flowers from the table they occupied and put in its place another vase of equally faded flowers. If he could have changed the lunch as easily, no doubt he would have done so, but train lunches are as immemorial as elms, and it would have taken more than the marriage of a Vanity girl to a Devonshire nobleman to persuadethe Great Western Railway Company that sauce tartare is not the only condiment, and that there are more fish in the sea than the anemic brill.
In days now mercifully forever fled Dorothy had often admired with a touch of envy the select minority of the human race that seemed able to obtain from the staff of a great railway station all the attention it wanted. Now she had entered that select minority, and perhaps nothing brought home more sharply the fact that she was a countess than the attitude of the station-master at Exeter.
"Welcome back to the West, my lord," he said to Clarehaven, who thanked him for his good wishes with the casual rudeness that minor officials of all countries find so attractive in their acknowledged patrons.
A perspiring woman with a little boy in her arms clutched the station-master's sleeve and begged to be informed if the express that was now lying along the platform like a great sleek snake was the slow train to whatever insignificant market-town she was bound. It was annoying for the station-master to have his little chat with Lord Clarehaven interrupted like this, especially by a woman who seemed under the impression that he was a porter. However, the official possessed a store of nobility from which to oblige an importunate inferior, and majestically he condescended to reveal that the slow train would leave in half an hour from the obscure platform it haunted. The station-master was forthwith invited to look after a much-dinted tin box while the perspiring and anxious creature's little boy was accommodated in the cloak-room; before he could protest she had darted off.
"Wonderful what they expect you to do for them, isn't it?" he laughed, with the lordly magnanimity that once inspired the English nation with confidence in the capacity of its chosen representatives to rule the world. At this moment a porter announced that his lordship's car was in the station-yard.
"Be under no apprehensions about your baggage, my lord," said the station-master. "I shall expedite it myself. Be under no apprehensions," he repeated; "it will certainly reach Cherrington Lanes to-night."
The porter, who was as eager as his chief to show his appreciation of being employed at a railway station patronized by Lord and Lady Clarehaven, overstepped the bounds of good will by picking up the perspiring woman's tin box in order to place it in the car. Luckily his chief perceived the horrible mistake in time and bellowed at him to take it out and leave it on the pavement outside the station. Then raising his cap, a gesture reserved for noblemen and irritation of the scalp, the station-master bowed Lord and Lady Clarehaven upon their way.
"Car going well, Deacock?"
"Not too well, my lord."
"Make the old thing hum, because I want her ladyship to reach Clarehaven before dark."
The chauffeur touched his cap, and the car answered generously to his efforts in spite of continual criticisms leveled against it by the owner.
"We must get a Lee-Lonsdale," he said to his wife.
"That would be very nice for Lonnie," she agreed. "Mine, of course, was more a car for town. So I sold it."
She did not add that her own Lee-Lonsdale had provided her with a bracelet of rubies.
"The setting is new," she had said to Tony when she showed him this heirloom. "But the stones are old."
And who should have contradicted her?
The green miles were rolled up like a length of silk; milestones fluttered like paper in the wake of the car; and by five o'clock they were driving through the lodge gates. Mrs. Crawley with nine little Crawleys, the fruit of Mr. Crawley's spare time from the peach-house at Clare, flung a few primroses into the car and cheered their new lady. Dorothy thought the primroses were very pretty and stood up to nod her thanks; she did notrealize that even an earl's estate in Devonshire might find it hard to produce so many primroses in the month of January; but she looked so beautiful standing up in the car that Mrs. Crawley felt the exertions of her large and ubiquitous family were well rewarded. The car leaped forward again, followed by shrill cheers that lingered upon the evening air and echoed many times in Dorothy's heart. The spellbound hush of landed property held earth in thrall, and the countess wished to enjoy it.
"Not too fast through the park," she begged.
The car slowed down; at the top of the first incline from which the house was visible it stopped to give Dorothy a moment in which to admire her great possessions. The whole sky was plumed with multitudinous small clouds rosy as the ruffled throats of linnets in spring; on the summit of the last long incline before them Clare Court with its gardens and terraces and gleaming pergola dreamed in the enchantment of the wintry sunsets; in the dark groves on either side the trunks of the pines glowed like pillars of fire. Nothing broke the stillness except a mistlethrush singing very loud from an oak-tree close at hand, and when the bird was silent the lowing of a cow far away on some other earth, it seemed. Suddenly from woodland near the drive came a sound like pattering leaves; a line of fallow deer rippled forth and broke into startled groups that nosed the air now vibrant with the noise of dogs approaching.
"How lovely!" Dorothy exclaimed. "You never told me there were deer," she added, reproachfully, as if the absence of deer had been the one thing that all this time had kept her from accepting Clarehaven's hand. "And how divine it must be here in summer."
"Well, if you hadn't been such a timid little deer, we might have been here, anyway, last October."
Dorothy might have retorted that if Clarehaven had not been so bold a hart she might have been here the summer before last; but she did not remind him of thatlittle flat round the corner, because the herd dashed off to a more remote corner of the park at sight of several dogs scampering down the drive with loud yaps of excitement, and Tony's sisters running behind. Dorothy jumped out of the car to meet her relations for the first time, glad to encounter them like this with dogs barking and so much of the conversation directed to keeping them in order, for she had half expected in that preludial hush to behold the dowager materializing from the misty dusk like a gigantic genie from an uncorked jar.
"Only two hours from Exeter. Pretty good for the old boneshaker, what?" said Tony. "Deacock drove her along like a thoroughbred."
The chauffeur touched his cap and, smiling complacently, leaned over to pat the tires of the car.
"Mother's waiting at the house," said Arabella. "She would have driven down in the chaise to meet Dorothy, but she didn't know exactly when you'd be here and was so afraid of catching cold just when she most wanted not to."
There followed a stream of gossip about the health of various animals, and about the way Marlow, the head-keeper, was looking forward to shooting Cherrington Long Covert, and how much afraid he had been that Tony would not be back before the end of the month, and how glad he was that he was back, in the middle of which Constantia informed Dorothy that there was a meet at Five Tree Farm two days hence and asked her if she was going to hunt for the rest of the season. Arabella kicked her sister so clumsily that Dorothy noticed the warning, and with a sudden impulse to risk all, even death, in the attempt, she replied that of course she intended to hunt for the rest of the season. Tony began to protest, but she cut him short.
"My dear boy, when I lived with my grandmother I always hunted. And I've kept up riding ever since."
"Well, that's topping," exclaimed Connie.
"Yes, that really is topping," echoed Arabella.
"But alas! I don't shoot," Dorothy confessed, "so if it won't bore you too much you'll have to give me lessons."
"Oh, rather," began Connie, immediately. "Well, you see, the most important thing is not to look across your barrels. I find that most people—Well, for instance, supposing you put up a woodcock...."
"I say, Connie, shut up, shut up," Tony exclaimed. "You can't begin at once. You'll put our eyes out in the car with that stick."
The shooting-lesson was postponed; and clambering into the car, in another five minutes they had all reached the house. Dorothy's first emotion at sight of the dowager was relief at finding that she was quite a head shorter than herself. In spite of Napoleon, height is, on the whole, an advantage to human beings in moments of stress. Dorothy had involuntarily imagined her mother-in-law as a tall, beaked woman with a cold and flashing eye, in fact with all the attributes the well-informed novelist usually awards to dowagers. This dowdy little woman, whose slight resemblance to a beaver was emphasized by wearing a cape made of that animal's fur, had to stand on tiptoe to greet her daughter-in-law, and it was unreasonable to be frightened of a woman who in an emotional crisis had to stand on tiptoe. Nevertheless, Dorothy was sincerely grateful for her kindly welcome, and took the first opportunity of whispering some of her hopes and fears for the future to her mother-in-law, who invited her, after tea, to come up-stairs to her den and have a little talk. When they entered the small square room in an angle of the house twilight was still sapphire upon the window-panes, one of which looked out over the park and the other mysteriously down into the grove of pines. Fussing about with matches, the dowager explained apologetically that she preferred always to trim and light her own lamp.
"One gets these little fads living in the depths of the country."
"Of course," Dorothy agreed, planning with herself some similar fad for the near future.
The lamp was lighted; the windows changed from sapphire to indigo as the jewel changes when it is no longer held against the light; in the golden glow the walls of the room broke into blossom, it seemed. Dorothy, reacting from Mr. and Mrs. Caffyn's taste in domestic decoration, had supposed that all well-bred and artistic people devoted themselves to plain color schemes such as she had elaborated in the Halfmoon Street flat; but here was a kind of decoration that, though she knew instinctively it could not be impeached on the ground of bad taste, did astonish her by its gaudiness. Such a prodigality of brilliant red-and-blue macaws, of claret-winged pompadouras and birds of paradise swooping from bough to bough of such brilliant foliage; such sprawling purple convolvuluses and cleft crimson pomegranates on the trellised screen; such quaint old china groups on the mantelpiece; such tumble-down chairs and faded holland covers; and everywhere, like fruit fallen from those tropic boughs, such vividly colored balls of wool.
"Oh," exclaimed Dorothy, divining in a flash of inspiration how to make the most of her totem, "it's exactly like my grandmother's room!"
"I am fond of my little den," said the dowager, "and as long as you so kindly want me to stay on at Clare I hope you won't turn me out of it."
Dorothy expostulated with a gesture; she would have liked to show her appreciation of the room in some perfect compliment, but she could think of nothing better than to suggest sharing it, a prospect that she did not suppose would attract her mother-in-law.
"I feel a dreadful intruder," she sighed.
"My dear child, please. I might have known that Tony would have chosen well for himself, and I do hopeyou understand—I tried to explain to you in my letter—how old-fashioned and out of the world we are down here. My husband was a very quiet man, and for the last ten years of his life a great invalid. The result was that I scarcely appreciated how things had changed in the world, and I foolishly fancied that Tony was just as much of a country cousin as myself. His sudden departure to Africa like that came as a great shock to me. One scarcely realizes down here that there is such a place as Africa." Heaven and her wall-paper were the only scenes of tropical luxuriance in the imagination of which the dowager indulged herself. "And, of course, my mother was very much upset at the idea of the marriage."
Dorothy started. Was there, then, a super-dowager to be encountered?
"I see that Tony has not told you about her. Chatfield Hall, where my brother lives, whom you will learn to know and love as Uncle Chat, is only fifteen miles from Clare."
Dorothy did not know how to prevent her mother-in-law's perceiving her mortification; to think that in her long study of Debrett she had omitted to make herself acquainted with what was therein recorded of the family of Fanhope! Really she did not deserve to be a countess!
"My mother," went on the dowager, "who as you've no doubt guessed is now an extremely old lady, was inclined to blame me for Tony's choice. She has always been accustomed to expect a good deal from her children. Even Uncle Chat has never yet ventured to introduce a motor-car to Chatfield. So you must not be disappointed if at first she's a little brusk. Poor old darling, she's almost blind, but her hearing is as acute as ever, and oh dear, I am so glad you have a pretty voice."
"Did you think I should have a cockney accent?" Dorothy asked.
"Well, to be frank, the contingency had presented itself,"the dowager admitted. "And I am so glad you don't use too much scent. I know everybody uses scent nowadays, but my mother, whose sense of smell is even more acute than her hearing, abominates scent. It does seem so ironical that she should have kept her sense of smell and almost lost her sight. You mustn't be frightened by her; but if you are you must remember that we're all frightened by her, which ought to be a great consolation. I thought we would drive over and see her to-morrow. It would be nice to feel that the ice was broken."
"Even if I do get rather wet," Dorothy laughed.
The dowager smiled anxiously; she was not used to extensions of familiar phrases, and her daughter-in-law's remark made her sharply aware that a stranger was in the house.
"You think you'd rather wait a day or two before you go?" she suggested.
"Oh no, I think we ought to go and see Lady Chatfield as soon as possible," said Dorothy.
"I'm so glad you agree with me."
"I'm rather sensitive where mothers are concerned," said Dorothy.
She felt that now was her moment to win the dowager immovably to her side. There was something in the atmosphere of this gay little room, some intimacy as of a garden long tended by a gentle and lonely soul, that invited a contribution from one who was privileged to enter it like this. Dorothy felt that the room needed "playing up to." The medium that tempted her was the fairy-tale; a room like this was meant for fairy-tales.
"I told you, didn't I, that this room reminded me of my grandmother's room, and what you tell me about Lady Chatfield reminds me a little of her character. My grandmother was a Lonsdale, a descendant of a younger branch of the Cleveden Lonsdales. Her husband was an Irish landowner called Doyle who was involved somehow with political troubles. I don't quite know what happened,but he lost most of his money and died quite suddenly soon after my mother was born. My grandmother came back to England with her little daughter and settled down in Warwickshire, her native county. When my mother was quite young—about twenty—she fell in love with my father, who was reading for Holy Orders in the neighborhood. My grandmother opposed the match, but my mother ran away, and my father, instead of becoming a clergyman, took up rescue work in the slums."
"A fine thing to do," the dowager commented, approvingly.
"Yes, but unfortunately my grandmother was very proud and very unreasonable. She never forgave my mother, although she had me to live with her until I was eleven, when she died. I was brought up in the depths of the country and ever since I have always longed to get back to it. I used to ride with friends of my grandmother. One of them was the Duke of Ayr. Did you ever meet him? He died the other day, but of course I hadn't seen him for many years."
"I did meet him long ago," said the dowager. "He was a great influence for good in the country."
"Oh, a wonderful man," Dorothy agreed. "Well, the few family heirlooms my grandmother still possessed were left to me, together with a small sum of money, which I'm sorry to say my father spent. That was my excuse for going on the stage. I told him that it was his fault and his fault only that I had to earn my own living. But the rescue work had affected his common sense. He turned me out of the house. I lived for a whole year on fifty pounds. But I was determined to succeed, and when I met Tony and he asked me to marry him I refused, because I had grown proud. You can understand that, can't you? Tell me, dear Lady Clarehaven, that you can understand my anxiety to prove that I could be a success. Besides, when I was a child the estrangement between my mother and my grandmother had greatlyaffected my imagination. I didn't want to find myself the cause of estranging another mother from her son. Have you forgiven me? Do you think that you will ever love me?"
The dowager wept and declared that as soon as her own mother was pacified she should make it her business to reconcile Dorothy with hers.
"Oh no," cried Dorothy, "that's impossible. My father must learn a little humility first. When he has learned his lesson I will be reconciled with my family, but meanwhile haven't you a place in your heart for me?"
The dowager, so far as it was possible for a small woman to perform the action with one so much taller than herself, clasped Dorothy to her heart.
"How I wish my husband were alive to be with us this evening," she exclaimed.
It was probably as well that he was not; if he had been, neither age nor decency would have intervened to prevent the fourth earl from making love to his daughter-in-law. The fifth earl interrupted any further exchanges of confidences by bursting into the room to protest against his wife's desertion.
"Your mother has been so sweet to me, Tony," she said.
"Of course she has," he answered. "She knows what I've had to go through to bring off this coup."
"Indeed," the dowager confessed, "I never suspected he had such determination. Dear old boy, it only seems yesterday that he was such a little boy, and now—" She broke off with a sigh and patted him on the shoulder.
"Your mother and I have just decided that it would be best if I am presented to Lady Chatfield to-morrow," Dorothy announced.
"What?" cried Clarehaven. "No. Look here! Steady, mother! I'm absolutely against that. I'm sorry to appear the undutiful grandson and all that, but really, don't you know, I must discourage her a bit. I didn't bring Dorothy down to Clare to be buzzing over to Chatfieldall the time. We'll get Uncle Chat over here to dinner one night, and that'll be quite enough."
The dowager looked appealingly at her daughter-in-law, who at once took matters into her own hands.
"Don't be absurd, Tony. Of course we shall go to-morrow."
He would have continued to protest, but his wife fixed him with those deep-brown eyes of hers.
"Now, don't go on arguing, there's a dear boy, or your mother will think we do nothing but quarrel."
Tony was silent, and the dowager regarded her daughter-in-law with open admiration. She had never seen one of the males of Clare or Fanhope quelled so completely since the days when she was a little girl and saw her own fierce old mother quell her husband.
That night in the bridal chamber of Clare the fifth earl chose a not altogether suitable costume of pink-silk pajamas in which to give utterance to his plans for the future. If Dorothy had been beautiful in the dowager's bower, she was much more fatally beautiful now in a dishabille of peach bloom and with her fawn-colored hair glinting in the candle-light against the dark panels of this ancient and somber room. When Clarehaven began to walk up and down in the excitement of his projects she went slowly across to a Caroline chair with high wicker back, sitting down in which she waited severely and serenely until he had finished. Tony might prance about in his pajamas, but he was no more free than a colt which a horse-breaker holds in tether to be jerked down upon his four legs when he has kicked his heels long enough.
"I didn't marry you," her husband was protesting, "to come and live down here and be ruled by Grandmother Chatfield. I don't give a damn for my grandmother; she's a meddlesome old woman who ought to have been dead ten years ago. As for Uncle Chat, he bores me to death. He can only talk about cigars and pigs. Look here, Doodles, we're going to stay here three or four moredays, and then we're off to the Riviera. We'll make Lonnie come with us and drive down through France—topping roads—and I want to try the pigeons at Monte. After that I thought we'd go to Cairo, or perhaps we might go to Cairo first and take Monte on the way back. Anyway, Curzon Street will be ready by the beginning of May. I'm having it devilishly comfortably done up. I didn't tell you about that; it's going to be the most comfortable house in London. I tried every chair myself in Waring's. I'm sorry I had to bore you at all with my family, but I'm awfully fond of my mother, and I knew she wouldn't be happy till she'd seen you, and all that. Well, now it's done, and we can buzz on again as soon as possible."
"Any more plans?" asked Dorothy.
"No, I thought we'd go up to Scotland for August, and after that I don't see why we shouldn't have a good shoot here in September. But I haven't thought much about next autumn."
"That's where I'm cleverer than you," said his wife. "I've not only thought about next autumn, but about next week, and about next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, too. Listen, old thing. When you first met me you wanted to put me in a little flat round the corner, didn't you? Please don't interrupt me. You couldn't understand then why I wouldn't accept your offer; I don't think you really understand very much better even now. London for me doesn't exist any longer. How you can possibly expect me to go away from this glorious place, which I already love as if I'd lived here all my life, to tear about the Continent with you as if I wasn't your wife at all, I don't know. If you don't realize what you owe to your name, I realize it. I don't choose that people should say: 'There goes that ass Clarehaven who married a girl from the Vanity. Look at him!' I don't choose that people should point you out as my husband. I choose to be your wife, and I intend that all your family—and when I say yourfamily I mean your mother's family, too—shall go down on their knees and thank God that you did marry a Vanity girl, and that a Vanity girl knew what she owed to her country in these dreadful days when common Radicals are trying to destroy all that we hold most sacred. I want you to take your place in the House of Lords, when you've lost that trick of talking to everybody as if they were waiters at the Savoy. Why, you don't deserve to be an earl!"
"My dear thing, you mustn't attach too much importance to a title. You must remember...."
"Are you trying to correct my tone?" she asked, coldly. "Because, let me tell you that all this false modesty about your position is only snobbery dressed out in a new disguise. Anyway, I didn't marry you to be criticized."
"Oh well, of course, if you insist on staying down here for the present I suppose I must," said Tony. "Anyway, I dare say we can have some jolly parties to cheer the place up a bit."
"No, we sha'n't have any jolly parties—at any rate yet awhile," said Dorothy. "I don't intend to begin by turning Clare gardens into bear gardens."
"Good Heavens! what is the matter with you?" he demanded. "What has my mother been saying?"
"Your mother hasn't been saying anything. I said all these things over to myself a thousand thousand times before I married you."
"Well, why didn't you tell me some of your ideas before you did marry me?" he muttered.
"Do you regret it?" she asked, standing up.
"Don't be a silly old thing, Doodles. Of course I don't regret it. But having married the loveliest girl in London, I should like to splash around a bit with you. My tastes are bonhomous. I'd always thought.... Dash it, I love you madly, you know that. I'm proud of you."
"Aren't you proud that the loveliest girl in London is willing to be loved by you only? God! my dear boy, you ought to be grateful that you've got me to yourself."
She held out her arms, and it was not remarkable that in those arms and with those lips Clarehaven forgot all about driving along the topping roads of France in a Lee-Lonsdale car. When his wife released him from the first real embrace she had ever given him he staggered like one who has been enchanted.
"Dash it...." he murmured, blinking his eyes to quench the fire that burned them. "I'm not very poetical, don't you know—but your kisses—well, really, do you know I think I shall take to reading poetry?"
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 thefirst 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 ChatfieldHall. 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 pastimeswas 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 ispleasant. 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.
"Sheshallsing 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 commandedDorothy 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 Kingdonsand 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 Kingdonsand 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 inPunchof 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 understoodnervous 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 amusical 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 readThe Lancetevery week. One felt in talking to him that a man who still readThe Lancetafter 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, enhancingthereby 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 thechurchyard 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 ofPunchin 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 totwo 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: