MY DEARMOTHER,—I am sorry I could not come and see you before I got married, but you can understand how delicate and difficult my position was, and how much everything depended on myself. No doubt, later on when I am thoroughly at home in my new surroundings, it will be easier for us to meet again. I don't know if father told you that I did explain to him my motives in treating you all rather abruptly. Or did he never refer to a little talk we once had? You will be glad to hear that I am very, very happy. My husband adores me, my mother-in-law has been more than kind, and my sisters-in-law equally so. On Thursday we drove over to Chatfield Hall to see my husband's grandmother, old Lady Chatfield, who is famous for speaking her mind, and of course not at all prejudiced in my favor by my having been on the stage. However, we had a jolly little talk together and everybody is delighted with the impression I made. On Saturday we had a small dinner-party. The rector, who is very High Church and would not, therefore, appeal to father, was there. Mr. Kingdon, the squire, would be more his style. There was also a Mr. Greenish, who promised to teach me gardening. Quite a jolly evening. Yesterdaymorning all the villagers cheered when I came out of church, and to-day I hunted with the Horley. I was rather a success. I hope you got the check for £500 I sent you, and that you will buy yourself something nice with it. It isn't exactly a present, but in a way it counts as one, doesn't it? You must try to be a little more firm with father in future. Don't forget that though I may seem heartless I am not really so. I hope you will write to me sometimes. You should address the envelope to The Countess of Clarehaven, but if you speak about me to your friends you should speak about me as Lady Clarehaven.Your loving daughter,DOROTHYCLAREHAVEN.
MY DEARMOTHER,—I am sorry I could not come and see you before I got married, but you can understand how delicate and difficult my position was, and how much everything depended on myself. No doubt, later on when I am thoroughly at home in my new surroundings, it will be easier for us to meet again. I don't know if father told you that I did explain to him my motives in treating you all rather abruptly. Or did he never refer to a little talk we once had? You will be glad to hear that I am very, very happy. My husband adores me, my mother-in-law has been more than kind, and my sisters-in-law equally so. On Thursday we drove over to Chatfield Hall to see my husband's grandmother, old Lady Chatfield, who is famous for speaking her mind, and of course not at all prejudiced in my favor by my having been on the stage. However, we had a jolly little talk together and everybody is delighted with the impression I made. On Saturday we had a small dinner-party. The rector, who is very High Church and would not, therefore, appeal to father, was there. Mr. Kingdon, the squire, would be more his style. There was also a Mr. Greenish, who promised to teach me gardening. Quite a jolly evening. Yesterdaymorning all the villagers cheered when I came out of church, and to-day I hunted with the Horley. I was rather a success. I hope you got the check for £500 I sent you, and that you will buy yourself something nice with it. It isn't exactly a present, but in a way it counts as one, doesn't it? You must try to be a little more firm with father in future. Don't forget that though I may seem heartless I am not really so. I hope you will write to me sometimes. You should address the envelope to The Countess of Clarehaven, but if you speak about me to your friends you should speak about me as Lady Clarehaven.
Your loving daughter,DOROTHYCLAREHAVEN.
For two years Dorothy's life as a countess went quietly along, gathering in its train a number of pleasant little memories that in after years were to mean something more than pleasure. The major difficulties of her new position were all encountered and defeated in that first week; thenceforward nothing seriously disturbed her for long. In the autumn of the year in which Clarehaven married, the dowager, after consulting Dorothy, decided that his restlessness was finally cured and that the danger of his wanting to tear about the Continent in Lee-Lonsdale cars no longer threatened the family peace. In these circumstances the dowager thought it would be tactful to move into Clare Lodge with Arabella and Constantia.
She should not be too far away if her daughter-in-law had need of her, and by moving that little way off she should do much to prevent her son's chafing against the barriers of domesticity. It would be easier for Dorothy to act as hostess of the shooting-parties that were arranged for the autumn if she were apparent as the only hostess. In the administration of the village the two countesses shared equally—the dowager by superintending the making of soup and gruel for sick villagers, Dorothy by assisting at its distribution. The rector won Dorothy's heart by his readiness to discuss with her the history of the greatfamily into which she had married, and by preparing a second edition of hisClarehaven and the Claresfor when it should be wanted, affixing against the fifth earl's name an asterisk, like a second star of Bethlehem, that should direct the wise reader to this foot-note:
...The present Earl in January, 1906, delighted his many friends and well-wishers in the county by wedding the beautiful Miss Dorothy Lonsdale, a distant connection of that Lord Cleveden who is famous as a most capable administrator in the land of the golden wattle and upon "India's coral strand."
...The present Earl in January, 1906, delighted his many friends and well-wishers in the county by wedding the beautiful Miss Dorothy Lonsdale, a distant connection of that Lord Cleveden who is famous as a most capable administrator in the land of the golden wattle and upon "India's coral strand."
She for her part won Mr. Beadon's heart by often attending his services at Clarehaven, and not merely by attending herself, but by insisting upon Mrs. Bitterplum's and Mrs. Smith's attending, too. This arrangement suited everybody, because the dowager at Little Cherrington was able to worship her stained-glass window without a sense that, whatever she might be before God's throne, she was now of secondary importance in the church. The step up that the rector had promised himself for Easter was effected without an apoplexy from Mr. Kingdon, possibly because the white stole did not inflame his taurine eye. At Whitsuntide, however, when a red stole appeared, his face followed the liturgical sequence, and there was a painful scene in the churchyard on a hot morning in early June. Dorothy, on being appealed to by the rector, drove over to Cherrington Hall that afternoon and remonstrated with Mr. Kingdon on his inconsiderate behavior. She pointed out that Mrs. Beadon was in an interesting condition at the moment and that if Mr. Kingdon had his prejudices to consider, Mr. Beadon had his conscience; that it was not right for the squire to add fuel to the ancient rivalry between Great and Little Cherrington; and finally that inasmuch as the bishop was shortly coming to stay at Clare for a confirmation, it would be unkind to pain his sensitive diocesan spirit with these parochial disputes. Dorothy's arguments may not have convincedthe squire, but her beauty and condescension penetrated where logic was powerless, and Mr. Beadon was allowed to preach for more than twenty bee-loud Sundays after Trinity wearing a grass-green stole round his neck and with never a word of protest from the squire. Nor were the Sundays within the octaves of St. Peter or St. James, of St. Lawrence or St. Bartholomew, profaned by the squire's objections to the tribute of red silk that Mr. Beadon paid to the blood of the martyrs. His wife celebrated her husband's victory by producing twins at Lammastide, and everybody in the neighborhood said that the religious tone of Cherrington was remarkably high.
In September Dorothy had her first shooting-party, to which, among others, Arthur Lonsdale and Harry Tufton were invited. Tony had been in camp with his yeomanry regiment during most of August; he seemed glad to be back at Clare; the shooting was good; the visits of his old friends from London did not apparently disturb him. Notwithstanding Connie's lessons, Dorothy never became a good shot; she really hated killing birds. However, she encouraged Clarehaven to go on with his favorite sport, and herself hunted hard all the season. She was much admired as a horsewoman, and the fact that she had not so long ago been a Vanity girl was already as dim as most old family curses are. In early spring Tony suggested that it would be a good idea to go up to town for the season.
"A very good idea," she agreed. "Bella and Connie ought to be presented." Dorothy spoke as calmly as if she had been presented herself. "It's a pity I can't present them," she added, "but I should not like to be presented myself. I don't think that actresses ought to be presented, even if they do retire from the stage when they marry. Sometimes an individual suffers unjustly; but it's better that one person should suffer than that all sorts of precedents should be started. Of course, your mother will present them."
"But look here, I thought we'd go up alone," Tony argued. "I told you I'd had the house done up very comfortably. I don't think the girls would enjoy London a bit."
"They may not enjoy it," said Dorothy, "but they ought to go."
May and June were spent in town in an unsuccessful attempt to induce many eligible bachelors even to dance with Arabella and Constantia, let alone to propose to them. Dorothy condoled with the dowager on Arthur Lonsdale's bad taste in not wanting to marry Arabella; Arthur himself was lectured severely on his obligations, and she could not understand why he would not stop laughing, particularly as Lady Cleveden herself had been in favor of the match. Dorothy went to the opera twice a week; but she refused to go near the Vanity. Once she drove over to West Kensington to see her mother, whose chin had more hairs than ever, but who otherwise was not much changed. The rest of the family alarmed her with the flight of time. Gladys and Marjorie were the Agnes and Edna of four years ago; Agnes and Edna themselves were getting perilously like the Norah and Dorothy of four years ago; Cecil was a medical student smoking bigger pipes than Roland, who himself had grown a very heavy black mustache. The countess managed to avoid seeing her father, and when her mother protested his disappointment she said that he would understand. Mrs. Caffyn was too much awed by having a countess for a daughter to insist, and she assured her that not only did she fully appreciate her reasons for withdrawing from open intercourse with her family, but that she approved of them. The countess gave her a sealskin coat for next winter, kissed her on both cheeks, and disappeared as abruptly from West Kensington as Enoch from the antediluvian landscape.
The responsibility of two plain sisters became too much for Clarehaven; after Ascot he admitted that he shouldbe thoroughly glad to get back to Clare, which was exactly what his wife had hoped.
While Dorothy was studying with the rector the lives of obscure saints and the histories of prominent noblemen, she took lessons with the doctor in natural history and with Mr. Greenish in horticulture. Mr. Greenish enjoyed sending off on her account large orders to nursery gardeners all over England for rare shrubs that he had neither the money nor the space to buy for himself. Both at the Temple Show and at Holland House he had been continually at Lady Clarehaven's elbow with a note-book; and the glories of next summer in the Clare gardens made bright his wintry meditations. Mr. Greenish himself looked rather like a tuber, and it became a current joke that one day Dorothy would plant him in a secluded border. The dowager was delighted by her daughter-in-law's hobby, for which, though it ran to the extravagance of ordering the whole stock of a new orange tulip at a guinea a bulb, not to mention twenty roots of sunset-huedEremurus warerat forty shillings apiece, and a hundred of topaz-hungEremurus bungeiat ten shillings, she had nothing but enthusiasm.
"My golden border will be lovely," Dorothy announced.
"It will be unique," Mr. Greenish added. "Lady Clarehaven is specializing in shades of gold, copper, and bronze," he explained to the dowager.
"These roots oddly resemble echinoderms," said Doctor Lane, looking at the roots of theEremurus.
"I should have said starfish," Mr. Greenish put in.
"Starfishareechinoderms," said the doctor, severely.
"Wonderful!" the dowager exclaimed, with the eyes of a child looking upon the fairies. She herself never rose to the height of her daughter-in-law's Incalike ambitions; but her own Japanese tastes (expensive enough) were gratified. Those black-stemmed hydrangeas were ordered by the hundred to bloom by the edge of the pines, and Dorothy presented her with twenty-four of M. Latour-Marlias'snewest and most expensive hybrid water-lilies. Nor did the hydrangeas come pink; they knew that they were being employed by a noble family and preserved the authentic blue of their patrons' blood. As the rector hoped before he died that popular clamor in the Cherringtons would compel him to flout his bishop by holding an open-air procession upon the feast of Corpus Christi, so Dorothy aspired to convert the two villages from vegetables to flowers. She knew, however, that it would be useless to attempt too much at first in this direction, and at Mr. Greenish's suggestion she decided to open her campaign by organizing a grand entertainment for the two Cherringtons, Clarehaven, and the several villages and hamlets in the neighborhood. Uncle Chat was called in to help with his advice, and while Tony was in camp she made her preparations. Marquees were hired from Exeter; the countryside pulsated with the spirit of competition. Dorothy drew up the bills herself with a nice compromise between the claims of age and strict precedence in her list of patrons.
CLAREHAVEN AND CHERRINGTONAGRICULTURAL FÊTE ANDFLOWER SHOWSaturday, August 31, 1907UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF
CLAREHAVEN AND CHERRINGTONAGRICULTURAL FÊTE ANDFLOWER SHOWSaturday, August 31, 1907UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF
The Earl of Chatfield; the Earl and Countess of Clarehaven; Lavinia, Countess of Chatfield; Augusta, Countess of Clarehaven; the Viscount Paignton; the Lady Jane Fanhope; the Lady Arabella Clare; the Lady Constantia Clare; the Lady Mary Fanhope; the Lady Maud Fanhope; George Kingdon, Esq., J.P., M.F.H., and Mrs. Kingdon; the Rev. Claude Conybeare Beadon, M.A., and Mrs. Beadon; Dr. Eustace Lane; Horatio Greenish, Esq.Prizes for live stock, including poultry, pigeons, and rabbits.Prizes for collections of mixed vegetables.A special prize offered by the Earl of Chatfield for the best collection of runner-beans.A special and veryvaluableprize offered by the Countess of Clarehaven for the best collection offlowersfrom a cottage garden.A special prize offered by the Dowager Countess of Clarehaven for the best collection of wild flowers made by a village child within a four-mile radius of Clare Court.A special prize offered by Doctor Lane for a collection of insect pests set and mounted by the scholars of Cherrington Church Schools and Horley Board Schools.The Countess of Clarehaven has kindly consented to give away the prizes.The band of the Loyal North Devon Dragoons (by kind permission of Colonel Budding-Robinson, M.V.O., and officers) will play during the afternoon.Swings, roundabouts, cocoanut-shies, climbing greasy pole for a side of bacon offered by H. Greenish, Esq., sack-races, egg-and-spoon races, hat-trimming competition for agricultural laborers.
The Earl of Chatfield; the Earl and Countess of Clarehaven; Lavinia, Countess of Chatfield; Augusta, Countess of Clarehaven; the Viscount Paignton; the Lady Jane Fanhope; the Lady Arabella Clare; the Lady Constantia Clare; the Lady Mary Fanhope; the Lady Maud Fanhope; George Kingdon, Esq., J.P., M.F.H., and Mrs. Kingdon; the Rev. Claude Conybeare Beadon, M.A., and Mrs. Beadon; Dr. Eustace Lane; Horatio Greenish, Esq.
Prizes for live stock, including poultry, pigeons, and rabbits.
Prizes for collections of mixed vegetables.
A special prize offered by the Earl of Chatfield for the best collection of runner-beans.
A special and veryvaluableprize offered by the Countess of Clarehaven for the best collection offlowersfrom a cottage garden.
A special prize offered by the Dowager Countess of Clarehaven for the best collection of wild flowers made by a village child within a four-mile radius of Clare Court.
A special prize offered by Doctor Lane for a collection of insect pests set and mounted by the scholars of Cherrington Church Schools and Horley Board Schools.
The Countess of Clarehaven has kindly consented to give away the prizes.
The band of the Loyal North Devon Dragoons (by kind permission of Colonel Budding-Robinson, M.V.O., and officers) will play during the afternoon.
Swings, roundabouts, cocoanut-shies, climbing greasy pole for a side of bacon offered by H. Greenish, Esq., sack-races, egg-and-spoon races, hat-trimming competition for agricultural laborers.
ILLUMINATIONS AND FIREWORKS
Entrance, one shilling. After five o'clock, sixpence. After eight, threepence. Children free.
Entrance, one shilling. After five o'clock, sixpence. After eight, threepence. Children free.
REFRESHMENTS
It was a blazing day, one of those typical days when rustic England seems to consist entirely of large cactus dahlias and women perspiring in bombazine. Tony, to Dorothy's annoyance, had declined to open the proceedings with a speech, and with Uncle Chat also refusing, Mr. Kingdon had to be asked to address the competitors. He bellowed a number of platitudes about the true foundations of England's greatness, told everybody that he was a Conservative—a Tory of the old school. He might say amid all this floral wealth a Conservatory. Ha-ha! He had no use for new-fangled notions, and, by Jove! when helooked round at the magnificent display that owed so much to the energy and initiative of Lady Clarehaven, by Jove! he couldn't understand why anybody wanted to be anything else except a Conservative.
"No politics, squire," the village atheist cried from the back of the tent, and Mr. Kingdon, who had been badly heckled by that gentleman at a recent election meeting, descended from the rostrum.
When the time came to distribute the awards Dorothy sprang the little surprise of which only Mr. Greenish was in the secret, by making a speech herself. She spoke with complete self-assurance and, as theNorth Devon Courantsaid, "with a gracious comprehension of what life meant to her humbler neighbors."
"Fellow-villagers of the two Cherringtons and of Clarehaven," she began, evoking loud applause from Mr. and Mrs. Bitterplum and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who between them had raised the largest marrow, for which they would shortly receive ten shillings as a token of England's gratitude, "in these days when so much is heard of rural depopulation I confess that looking round me at this crowded assembly I am not one of the alarmists. I confess that I see no signs of rural depopulation among the merry faces of the little children of our healthy North Devon breed. I regret that the committee did not include in its list of prizes another for the best collection of home-grown children." (Loud cheers from the audience, in the middle of which one of the little Smiths of Clarehaven had to be led out of the tent because there was some doubt whether in chewing one of the prize dahlias he had not swallowed an earwig.) "Meanwhile, I can only marvel at the enthusiasm and good will with which you have all worked to make our first agricultural fête the success it undoubtedly has been. I am told by people who understand these things that no finer runner-beans have ever appeared than the collection of runner-beans for which, after long deliberation by the judges, Mr. Isaac Hodgeof Little Cherrington has been awarded the prize." (Cheers.) "I will not detain you with eulogies of the potatoes shown by our worthy neighbor, Mr. Blundell of Great Cherrington. Nor shall I detain you by singing the praises of the really noble beet-roots from the garden of Mr. Adam Crump of Horley Hill. But I should like to say here how much I regret that the collections of flowers fell so far below the standard set by the vegetables. We must remember that without beauty utility is of little use. This autumn I shall be happy to present flower seeds to all cottage gardens who apply for them. Mr. Greenish has kindly consented to act as my distributer. Next year I shall present five pounds and a silver cup for the best exhibit from these seeds. And now nothing remains for me except to congratulate once more the winners on their well-deserved success, and the losers on a failure that only the exceptional quality of the winning exhibits prevented being a success, too."
Amid loud cheers Dorothy pinned rosettes to the lapels of the perspiring competitors, shook hands with each one, to whom she handed his prize wrapped in tissue-paper, and, bowing graciously, descended from the dais.
"Now if I can make a speech like that at a flower-show," she said to her husband that evening, "why can't you speak in the House of Lords?"
The fact of the matter was that Dorothy was beginning to worry herself over Clarehaven's lack of interest in the affairs of his country. Since they had been married the only additional entry in Debrett under his title was the record of his being a J.P. for the county of Devon. Dorothy felt that this was not enough; he should be preparing himself by his demeanor in the House of Lords to be offered at least an under-secretaryship when the Radicals should be driven from power.
"All right," said Tony. "But I can't very well play the hereditary legislator and all that if you insist upon keeping me down in the country."
"When does Parliament reassemble?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know. Some time in the autumn, I suppose."
"Very well, then, we'll go up to town on one condition, which is that you will make a speech. If you haven't spoken within a week of the opening I shall come back here."
Tony, in order to get away from Devonshire, was ready to promise anything, but at the end of October, on a day also memorable in the history of Clare for the largest battue ever held in those coverts, Dorothy told her husband that she was going to have a baby.
He flushed with the slaughter of hundreds of birds, she flushed with what all this meant to her and him and England, faced each other in the bridal chamber of Clare that itself was flushed with a crimson October sunset.
"Tony, aren't you wildly happy?"
"Why, yes ... of course I am ... only, Doodles, I suppose this means you won't go up to town? Oh well, never mind. Gad! you look glorious this evening." He put his arms round her and kissed her.
"Not that way," she murmured. "Not that way now."
The pride and joy that Dorothy felt were so complete that she would take no risk of spoiling them by allowing her husband to intrude upon her at such a time. This boy of hers—there was no fear in her sanguine and circumspect mind that she might produce a daughter—was the fruit of herself and the earldom. To this end had she let Clarehaven make love to her, and if now she should continue to allow him such liberty she should be cheapening herself like a woman of pleasure. If at first she had rejoiced in her own position as a countess, all that self-satisfaction was now incorporated in this unborn son to be magnified by him into nobility and all that was expressedby nobility in its fullest sense. The thrill that every woman, however much she may dread or resent it, feels at the first prospect of maternity was for Dorothy heightened beyond any comparison that would not be blasphemous. On this small green earth would walk a Viscount Clare that, having taken flesh from a Vanity girl, should be the savior of his country. It no longer mattered that her husband was blind to the duties of his rank when she held in her womb, not some political pawn-broker like Disraeli, but an incarnation of the benign genius of aristocracy, a being that would indeed ennoble herself. Yet the father of this prodigy regarded him merely as an unwelcome hindrance to his plan for spending the winter in London. If it were not for the duty she owed to a great house to produce other children, and so by every means in mortal power save the family from extinction, she should never again live with Tony as his wife. What had been all their kisses except the prelude to this event? Did he with his boots and his guns suppose that as a man he counted with this unborn son within her? Poor vain fool, not to have comprehended that every conjugal duty, every social obligation, every movement of her head, every flash of her eye, every offer of her hand since she came to Clare had been consecrated to this great issue. Yet his flimsy imagination, which, were it never so flimsy, might at such a moment have managed to spur his body to kneel in awe of the future, had thought of nothing except to make love as lightly as he had made incessant love to her ever since they were married. Love! What did she care for that kind of love? Only for this result, only because she had believed that perfect fruit comes from perfect blossom, had she yielded to him all of herself with passion, sometimes with ecstasy. And now her reward was at hand. The wild autumnal gales might sweep round the ancient house, but at last it was secure; she, Dorothy Lonsdale, had secured it.
There was no hunting, of course, for Dorothy thisseason, not even in so mild a form as cubbing, and, amorous of solitude, she often used to walk by herself to Clarehaven; there, on one of those green headlands that had withstood the sea when the fortifications of Clare had crumbled in the foaming tide, she would sit by the hour, drinking in from the salt blast strength and endurance for this son of hers dedicate from the womb to his country and to his order. On those wild days the little church, which belonged to the dim origins of the family and had been built by sea-rovers to abide in their hearts while they were seafaring, became a true shrine for her. She would take refuge there from the fury of the storm, and there sit in an ancient chair bleached and worm-eaten, her eyes fixed upon that east window stained by nothing save spindrift and scud from the sea. The wind would howl and shriek, would rattle at the hasps of the narrow windows like hands entreating shelter, would drum and whistle and moan by the old oaken doors, while Dorothy sat in a stillness of gray light, herself radiant with that first beauty of coming motherhood before the weary months of waiting have begun to drag the cheeks. There for hours she would sit, her eyes shining, her neck blue-veined with blood coursing to reinforce the second life that was in the making, her complexion not paragoned by the petal of any rose in all the roses that ever had or ever would bloom at Clare.
Everything in the little church had taken on a luminous gray from the open space of light by which it was surrounded. The altar was of granite; the candlesticks of pewter; the crucifix of silver. Wise with all his follies, the rector had chosen this church to express whatever, still untainted by expediency or snobbery, was left of his inmost aspirations, and here he had allowed nothing to affront the stark simplicity of such architecture. Here there were no chrysanthemums in brazen vases, only sprigs of sea-holly gathered by children on the salt edge of the downs, sea-holly from the fled summer that preservedthe illusion of having been gathered yesterday. The benches had not been varnished; year by year they had slowly assumed that desiccated appearance of age which gives to wood thus mellowed a strangely immaterial look, a lightness and a grace, rough-hewn though it be, that varnished wood never acquires. In this building, wrought, it seemed, by labor of wind and cloud, of air and rain, Dorothy's coloring exceeded richness; when the yellow winter sun shone through the landward windows the effulgence mingled with the hue of her cheeks to incarnadine the very air around her and blush upon the stones beyond. How often had she sat thus in meditation upon nothing except the power and strength of her unborn son! Could her husband wait beside her in this church where his pirate ancestors, dripping with sea-water, had thanked God for their deliverance and for booty stacked upon the beach below? Not he! He would be trying to play with her wrist all the time, pecking at her with kisses like a canary at a lump of sugar.
Dorothy had no desire to make a secret of her condition; she was only too anxious that everybody who could appreciate its importance should be made aware of it. Yet there was nothing in her of the gross femininity that takes a pleasure in accentuating the outward signs of approaching motherhood and, as if it had done something unusual, rejoices in a physical condition that is attainable by all women. Dorothy's pride lay in giving an heir to a great family, not in adding another piece of carnality to the human race. Compared with most women, the grace and beauty with which she expressed her state was that of a budding daffodil beside a farrowing sow. So little indeed did Tony realize her condition that in January, on the anniversary of their wedding, he half jestingly rallied her on simulating it to keep him down in Clare. He added other reasons, which offended her so deeply that for the rest of these months she demanded a room to herself. Dorothy knew that by loosening the physical hold she hadover him she was taking a risk, but she staked everything in the future upon the birth of this son, and she declined to imperil his perfection upon earth by unpleasant thoughts in these crucial months of his making. Perhaps, if she had been patient and taken a little trouble to explain her point of view more fully to Tony, he might have understood, but she was so intent upon aiding this other life within her that she could not spare a moment to educate her husband.
The super-dowager of Chatfield had kissed her grandson's wife on Christmas Eve, and when at Candlemas the old lady died Dorothy was sad to think she had not lived to kiss her son. The manner of her death was characteristic. February had come in with a spell of balmy weather, and Lady Chatfield, according to her habit on fine days, insisted upon going out to sun herself in front of the house. In this occupation she was often annoyed by hens invading the drive; to guard herself against their aggression she used always to be armed with several bundles of fagots, which she kept at her side to fling at the aggressive birds. Her son had often begged that she would allow the hens to be kept far enough away from the house to secure her against their trespassing; but the old lady really enjoyed the sport and passed many contented hours shooting at them like this with fagots. Unfortunately, that Candlemas morning, either she had come out insufficiently provided with ammunition or the birds were particularly venturesome. When the luncheon-bell rang there was not a fagot left, and a quantity of hens were clucking with impunity round her still form. At such a crisis her self-propelling chair must have refused to work for the first time; with ammunition exhausted, transport destroyed, communications cut, and the enemy advancing from every point, the old lady had died of exasperation. The dowager, grieved by what in her heart she felt was an unseemly way of dying and faintly puzzled how to picture her mother in the heavenly courts, spenta good deal of time in Little Cherrington church, praying that she would be humble in Paradise. The dowager's childlike and apprehensive fancy played round an apocalyptic vision of her mother criticizing the sit of a halo, or poking with a palm-branch just men in the eye. She confided some of these fears to Mr. Beadon, who tried to impress upon her his own conceptions of Eternal Life, gently and respectfully rebuking her for the materialism of which she was guilty. Dorothy found something most admirable in the super-dowager's death; she wished her own unborn son might inherit his great-grandmother's pertinacity and defiance for the time when, like intrusive poultry, democracy should invade the privileges of his order.
The dowager's loss of her mother was followed in March by a blow that upset her more profoundly. During a fierce gale a large elm-tree in Little Cherrington churchyard was blown down and in its fall broke the Burne-Jones window that commemorated the fourth earl. It was no great loss to art, but the effect upon the dowager was tremendous. The shock of seeing the irreverent winds of March blowing through that colored screen she had set up between herself and the reality of her husband destroyed the figment of him that her pampered imagination had elaborated, and she remembered him as he was—an ill-tempered gambler, a drunken spendthrift, always with that fixed leer of ataxy for a pretty woman ... she remembered how once she had overheard somebody say that Clarehaven was now a rake without a handle. Her conscience was pricked; she must warn Dorothy of what the Clare inheritance might include.
"Dorothy dear," she implored. "I don't like to seem interfering, but I do beg you not to leave Tony alone too much. I fear for him. I—" with whispers and head-shakes she poured out the true story of her married life.
But Dorothy, with her whole being concentrated upon that unborn son, had no vigilance to waste on Tony.If he should go to the bad, let him go. The sins of the fourth earl and the follies of the fifth should all be forgotten in that paragon the sixth. At the same time, the dowager's story left its mark on Dorothy; thenceforward, when she paced the long picture-gallery of Clare, she would often ask herself in affright what passions and vices, what weakness, shame, and folly, had been cloaked by those painted forms of ancestors. She would give him her flesh; but he must inherit from them also; from those unblinking eyes he must derive some of the gleams in his own. But it should be from his mother that he derived most ... then she caught her breath. If that were so he would have in him something of Gilbert Caffyn, of that hypocrite her father. When the dowager's window was broken air was let in upon Dorothy's painted screen as well. She was honest with herself on those mornings when she paced the long gallery; she made no more pretense of romantic origins; the Lonsdale bugle-horn was cracked and useless. By what she was should her son live, not by what she liked to think she might be. Some of the strength that she had summoned for him during those autumnal hours in the little church by the sea she begged now for herself; while she defied those frigid glances that ever watched her progress up and down, up and down that long gallery, she stripped herself of all sham glories and for the sake of him within her dedicated herself to truth. Lady Godiva, riding naked through the streets of Coventry, was not more heroic than Dorothy riding naked through her own mind for the sake of that Lucius-Clare-to-be called by courtesy Viscount Clare.
Dorothy had chosen Lucius for his name after that other viscount who was Secretary of State to Charles I, that Lucius Cary who was killed at Newbury and whose story she had happened upon while reading tales of the great dead. If Lucius, Viscount Clare, could be like Lucius, Viscount Falkland, what would West Kensington matter? What would the Vanity mean, or that flatround the corner? What would signify the plebeian soul of her father?
The only person at present to whom Dorothy confided the name she had chosen was Arabella. The two girls had been very sympathetic during those winter months, and had entirely devoted themselves to their sister-in-law. At first, when she had withdrawn herself every day to go and meditate in Clarehaven church, they had been shy of intruding upon her; but their interest in family affairs, from those of guinea-pigs to those of cottagers, had become so much a part of their ordinary life that they could not resist trying to obtain Dorothy's permission for them to be interested in hers. Connie, whose main object was to watch over Dorothy's physical well-being, was ready to give it as much devotion as she would have given to a favorite mare in foal or to a litter of blind retriever pups; Arabella, who had inherited some of the dowager's ability to dream, was content to sit for as long as Dorothy wanted her company and talk of nothing except the future greatness of her nephew. Connie brought pillows for Dorothy's back; Arabella brought her books, in one of which Dorothy read about that very noble gentleman, Lucius Cary.
In February Clarehaven went up to town, partly because shooting was over, partly because he did not want to attend his grandmother's funeral. His behavior was commented upon harshly by Fanhopes and Clares alike; barely two years after her marriage Dorothy found that she, who was supposed to have been going to bring the families to ruin and disgrace, was now regarded as their salvation. Whatever she said was listened to with respect, whatever she did was regarded with approval. Before her pregnancy, Dorothy's conceit would have been gratified by such deference; now it only possessed a value for her son's sake. She longed more than ever for general esteem; but she coveted it for him, that he might grow up with pride and confidence in his mother.
When primroses lightened the woods of Clare like an exquisite dawn between the dusk of violets and the deep noon of bluebells, Connie exercised her authority over her half of Dorothy, forbade so much reading indoors, and prescribed walks. Dorothy now haunted the recesses of the woodland; when Tony, who had received a number of reproachful letters for staying in town at such a time, came back, she was gentler with him than any of the others were.
Those days spent in watching the deer, already snow-flecked to match the dappled sunlight of the woods, had been so enriched by contemplation of the active grace and beauty of these wild things that Dorothy discovered in herself a new affection for Tony, an affection born of gratitude to him, because it was he who had given her all this. He came back on a murmurous afternoon of mid-May. Dorothy was sitting upon the summit of a knoll where a few tall beeches scarcely troubled the sunlight with their high fans of lucent green. Beneath her ran a meadow threaded with the gold of cowslips, and while she stared into cuckoo-haunted distances she heard above the buzzing of the bees the sound of his car. Starting up, she waved to him, so that he stopped the car and ran up the slope to greet her.
"Why, Doodles, what's the matter?" he exclaimed. "You've been crying."
He was embarrassed by her hot wet cheeks when she pressed them to his.
"No, they're happy tears," she said. "I was thinking of him and that one day all this will be his." She caught the landscape in a gesture. "All the autumn, Tony, I prayed for him to be great and strong, and all the winter that he might be great and good. Now I think I should be happy if he did nothing more remarkable than love this land—his land. Tony, don't you feel how wonderful it is that you and I should give somebody all this?"
Formerly, when Dorothy had talked about their son,the father had not been able to grasp that there would ever be such a person. Now in this month before the birth he experienced a sudden awe in regarding his wife. That embrace she had given him for welcome, her figure, the look in her eyes—they were strange to him; she was strange to him—a new mysterious creature that awed him as an abstraction of womanhood, not as a lovely girl that granted or refused him kisses.
"I say, Doodles, I feel an awful brute for going away like that."
She laughed lightly.
"You needn't. I was happier alone. Don't look so disconsolate. I'm glad you've come now."
"I didn't stay up for the Derby," he pleaded, in extenuation of his neglect.
She laughed again.
"Tony, you haven't yet heard his name. I've chosen Lucius."
"That's a rum name. Why Latin all of a sudden? Or if Latin, why not Marcus Antoninus, don't you know?"
"It's a name I like very much."
He looked at her suspiciously.
"Who did you know called Lucius?"
"Nobody. It's a name I like. That's all."
"You promise me you never knew anybody called Lucius?" He had caught her hand.
"Never."
"All right. You can have it."
But the nimbus round her motherhood was for the husband melted by the breath of jealousy. Let children come to interrupt their love, she would be his again soon; and what trumpery she made of those women with whom he had played in London as a lonely child plays with dolls.
Dorothy's confinement was expected about the middle of June. When the nurse arrived, for the first time in all these months she began to have fears. She never doubted that the baby would be a boy; but she had darkfancies of monstrosity and madness, and the nurse had all she could do to reassure her. The weather during the first week of the month was damp and gusty; after that gilded May-time it seemed worse than it really was. The rustling of the vexed foliage held a menace that the sharp whistle of the winter gales had lacked. However, by the middle of the month the weather had changed for the better, and the last day was perfect.
When Dorothy's travail began in the afternoon, the nurse asked for the mowing of the lawns to be stopped, because she thought the noise would irritate her patient. Dorothy, however, told her that she liked the noise; in the comparatively long intervals between the first pains the mower consoled her with its pretense of mowing away the minutes and thus of audibly bringing the time of her achievement nearer.
The car was sent off to Exeter for another doctor, notwithstanding Dorothy's wish that nobody except Doctor Lane should attend her. The old gentleman had much endeared himself by his lessons in natural history, and that he should crown his teaching by a practical demonstration of his knowledge struck her as singularly appropriate. Doctor Lane himself expressed great anxiety for assistance, because it looked as if the confinement was going to be long and difficult. So hard was her labor, indeed, that when the Exeter doctor arrived it was decided to give her chloroform.
"Nothing's the matter, is it?" she murmured, perceiving that preparations were going on round her. "Why doesn't he come? Nurse," she called, "if babies take a long time, it means usually that the head is very large, doesn't it?"
"Very often, my lady, yes. Oh yes, it does mean that very often. Try and lie a little bit easier, dear. That's right."
"I think I'm rather glad," said Dorothy, painfully. "Lord Salisbury had an enormous head."
"Fever?" whispered Doctor Lane, in apprehensively questioning tones. "Tut, tut!"
Dorothy tried to smile at the silly old thing; but the pain was too much for smiles.
There was another long consultation, and presently she heard Lord Clarehaven being sent for.
"What's the matter?" she asked, sharply. "I'm not going to die, am I? I won't. I won't. He mustn't be brought up by anybody else."
The nurse patted her hand. Outside some argument was going on, rising and falling like the lawn-mower.
"A pity it's so dark," Dorothy murmured. "The mower had stopped, and I liked the humming. All that talking in the corridor isn't so restful. What's the time?"
"About half past ten, my lady."
A mighty pain racked her, a rending pain that seemed to leave her with reluctance as if it had failed to hurt her enough. Her whole body shivered when the pain passed on, and she had a feeling that it was a personality, so complete was it, a personality that was only waiting in a corner of the room and gathering new strength to rend her again.
Delirium touched her with hot fingers. It seemed that her body was like the small triangle of uncut corn round which the reaper relentlessly hums. It was coming again; it would tear the fibers of her again; it was coming; the humming was nearer every moment. In an effort to check the incommunicable experiences of fever, she asked if it was not the lawn-mower that was humming.
"No, dear, it's the doctors talking to his lordship."
"What about?"
The humming ceased, for they gave her chloroform. When she came to herself she lay for a second or two with closed eyes; then slowly, luxuriously nearly, she opened them wide to look at her son. There was nobody.
"Where is he?" she gasped, sitting up, dizzy and sickwith the drug, but with all her nerves strung to unnatural, uncanny perceptiveness.
The dowager was leaning over the bed and begging her to lie down.
"What's burning my face?" cried Dorothy.
"It must be my tears," her mother-in-law sobbed.
"Why are you crying? My boy, where is he? Where is he? Oh, tell me, tell me, please tell me!"
The dowager and the nurse were looking at each other pitifully.
"Dorothy, my poor child, he was born dead."
The mother shrieked, for a pain that cut her ten thousand times more sharply than all the pains of her travail united in a single spasm.
"It was a question, dear, of saving your life or losing the baby's."
"You're lying to me," Dorothy shrieked. "It was a monster! I know that. It was a monster, and it had to be strangled. Oh, Doctor Lane, Doctor Lane, why did you let them bring another doctor? You promised me you wouldn't."
"No, no," said the dowager. "It was a perfect little boy with such lovely little hands and toes. Everything perfect; but his head was too large, dear. It was a question of you or him, and of course Tony insisted that he should be sacrificed."
"Where is he? Tony!"
Her husband came in and knelt by the bed.
"Why did you do that? Why? Why didn't you let me die? He would have been so much better than me. Can't you understand? Can't you understand?"
Everybody had stolen from the room to leave them together; but when he leaned over to kiss her she struck him on the mouth.
"You only wanted me for one thing," she cried.
"Doodles, don't treat me like this. I can't express myself. I never imagined that anything could be sohorrible. I was asked to decide. You don't suppose I could have lived with a cursed child who had killed you!"
"How dare you curse him?"
"Dorothy, we'll have another. Don't be so miserable."
Suddenly she felt that nothing mattered.
"Will we?" she asked, indifferently.
"And we'll go up to town this autumn."
"Yes, there's nothing to keep us here," she said, "now."
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE Curzon Street was the dowry that the third Marquess of Longlan provided for his daughter, Lady Caroline Lacey, on her marriage in 1818 with Viscount Clare, the only son of the second Earl of Clarehaven. It was a double-fronted Georgian house with a delicate fanlight over the door, from which a fan-shaped flight of steps guarded by a pair of tall iron flambeau-stands led down to the pavement. That famous old beau, the first marquess, had given an eye to the architecture, and, being himself a man of fine proportions, had seen to it that the rooms of his new house would set off his figure to advantage. Solid without being stolid, dignified but never pompous, graceful but nowhere flimsy, and for everybody except the servants, who lived like corpses in a crypt, convenient—the town residence of Lord Clarehaven was as desirable as those desirable young men of Assyria upon whom in their blue clothes Aholah doted not less promiscuously than house-agents have doted upon a good biblical word.
When the second earl took charge of his wife's dowry, the fashions of the Regency were in the meridian, and the house was decorated and furnished to suit the prevailing mode. Apart from the verse of the period, there have been few manifestations of art and craft more detestable either for beauty or for comfort than those of the Regency. Great bellying lumps of furniture as fat and foul as the First Gentleman himself, and with as muchsuperfluity of ornament as the First Gentleman's own clothes, were introduced into 129 Curzon Street to spoil the fine severity of the Georgian structure. Ugly furniture was added by the third earl, whose taste—he was a vice-chamberlain of the royal household in the 'fifties—was affected by his position as a mind is affected by misfortune. The dowager during the esthetic ardors that glowed upon the first years of her married life hung a few green and yellow draperies in the drawing-room, and during the early 'nineties she stocked these with woolen spiders or with butterflies of silk and velvet; in fact, when the fifth earl took over the control of his town house it was filled from the cellars to the attics with the accumulated abominations of eighty-five barbarous years. No doubt he would never have noticed the ugliness of the furniture if the discomfort of it had not been so obtrusive; but when he was planning to live merrily with his bride in Curzon Street he invited Messrs. Waring & Gillow to bring the house up to date with its own period and the present, allowing them a free hand with everything except the chairs, beds, and sofas, of which it was stipulated that none was to rate form or style above comfort. On the whole the result was an improvement; and since there are always enough relays of new competitors in the race for originality, purchasers were soon found even for those triads of chairs that are still seen in mid-Victorian drawing-rooms like empty cruets upon the mantelpiece of a coffee-room, and Tony was able to get a good price for the furniture of Gillows, who were by now as thoroughly worm-eaten as their handicraft. The arrangement with the decorators being modified by Dorothy's unwillingness to live in London, he postponed the complete renovation of the house to that happy date in the future when he and she should agree that East West, town's best.
Now at Clare, when Dorothy was lying in bed, careless of everything, Tony invited her to choose patterns from the books of wall-papers and chintzes sent down by Messrs.Waring & Gillow. Finding his wife in no mood to choose anything, he decided to gratify as well as he was able the taste she had expressed five or six years ago in the Halfmoon Street flat. The result was a series of what are called "chaste color schemes," which after being debauched by numerous chairs upholstered in glossy scarlet leather became positively meretricious under the temptation of silver-cased blotters and almanacs; four months after Dorothy's confinement the transformation of 129 Curzon Street into the dream of a Vanity girl was complete. She was still in too listless a mood to do anything except give a tired assent to whatever her husband proposed; physically and emotionally she was worn out, and when a second agricultural fête and flower-show was billed for August 25, 1908, she scarcely had the heart to present in person the silver cup and five pounds for the best flowers grown from the seeds she had supplied with such enthusiasm. Every adjunct of the show accentuated her own failure; from the women with their new babies to the chickens and the parsnips, everything seemed a rebuke to her own sterility.
Dorothy's pride might often degenerate into mere self-confidence, but it had hitherto been her mainstay in life; her failure to produce that son had sapped the foundations of pride by destroying self-confidence; her dignity as Tony's wife had been assailed, and she began to fret about the shallowness of her feeling for her husband. She would have been able to support a blow that fell with equal heaviness upon both, because she would have rejoiced in proving to Tony that she was more courageous than he; but he, from want of imagination, had let her feel that she had made a fuss about nothing; his attitude had been such, indeed, that in resuming relations with him she could not dispel the morbid fancy that she was behaving like his kept mistress. Once, in her determination to define their respective views of marriage, she asked him how he could bear to make love to a woman who wasapparently so cold; in his answer he implied that her coldness was rather attractive than otherwise.
"But if you thought I really hated you to come near me?" she pressed.
"You don't really," he replied, and she turned away with a sigh of exasperation at the astonishing lack of sensitiveness in the male.
"You're nervy and strung up just at present," he went on. "And perhaps it has been bad for you to have so much of me all the time. But when you go back to town and find that you're envied by other women...."
"Because I'm married to you?" she interrupted, sharply.
"No, no, Doodles, I'm not so conceited as all that. Envied because you will be the loveliest of them all. But other men will envy me because I've got you for a wife. I don't think you realize how lovely you are."
She did realize it perfectly; but she resented a compliment that was inspired by self-satisfaction.
"The pleasure in being married to me, then," she challenged, "is that you're keeping me from other men? You wouldn't mind if I told you that I hated you, that I only married you to have rank and money, that I hooked you in the way an angler hooks a fat trout?"
"I was quite content to be hooked," said Tony.
"If I were unfaithful to you?"
His eyes hardened for a moment, like those of a groom who is being defied by a jibbing horse.
"Try it, old thing," he advised, and the whistle that lisped gently between his set teeth made expressive the quick breaths of rage that such a question evoked.
It was the day after the flower-show; they were sitting on the curved seat at the end of the pergola. Dorothy's question had an effect upon the conversation as if a painter had begged them to sustain a certain attitude until he could perpetuate it by his art; the stillness of deep summer undisturbed by a bird's note or by a whisper of a falling leaf was like thick green paint from whichtheir forms, hastily sketched in, faintly emerged. Tony's whistle had ceased and he was stroking his mustache as if the action could help him to realize that he was alive. There seemed no reason why they should not sit there forever, like the statues all round, or the ladies and lovers in a picture by Mr. Marcus Stone. It was Tony who broke the spell by getting up and announcing business with somebody somewhere.
Dorothy, left alone on the seat, watched his form recede along the pergola, and asked herself in perplexity what she wanted as a substitute for that well-groomed, easy, and assured piece of manhood. If she was trying to tell herself that she pined to love a man without thought of children or considerations of rank and fortune, she could always elope with the first philanderer that presented himself. But she could not imagine any man for whose sake she would sacrifice as much. To be sure, she was not yet twenty-five; there lay before her many long years, one of which a grand passion might shorten to an hour. But could she ever fall in love? It was not merely because she was hard and ambitious that she was not in love with Tony and that she could not imagine herself in love with anybody else. In all her life no man had presented himself whom she could imagine in the occupation of anything like the half of one's personality that being in love would imply. Indeed, if she looked back upon the men she had known, she liked Tony best personally, apart from the material advantages that being married to him offered. Perhaps the mood she was in was nothing more than a morbid fastidiousness caused by physical exhaustion; perhaps by going up to town and leading another sort of life she should be able to view marriage more naturally. She had always criticized other women for the ease with which they fell into a habit of indulging themselves with the traditional prerogatives of their sex. Her own path had always lain so obviously in front of her nose that she had been impatient of theincommunicable aspirations expressed by other women with sighs and yearning glances; to her such women had always appeared like the tiresome people who are proud of not possessing what they would call "the bump of locality." Such dubious and apprehensive temperaments had always irritated her; madness itself was for Dorothy the result of a carefully cultivated hysteria; even illness had always seemed to her only a fraudulent method of securing attention. Was she now to array herself in the trappings of conventional femininity? She bent her mind—and it was not a pliable mind—as straight as she was able, and told herself that even if she failed ultimately to produce an heir no one could question her fitness and willingness to produce an heir. Anything that went wrong in the marriage would not be her fault. As a wife she had justified herself; and if motherhood was to be denied her—oh well, what did all this matter? She was too much exhausted to keep her mind straight, and at the first relaxation of her will it jumped away from her control like the mainspring of a watch, the quivering coils of which, though they were all of a piece, were impossible to trace consecutively to their beginning or end. The monotonous green of late summer depressed her wherever she looked; earth was hot and tired, as hot and tired as one of the women at the show yesterday. Life was not much more varied than a big turnip-field in which two or three coveys of birds were put up, some to be killed, some to be wounded, some to whir away into turnip-fields beyond.
"Which means that I'm still thoroughly exhausted," Dorothy murmured. "But I can't think of the past because he is there, and the future seems dreary because he will never be there."
When at the beginning of October the moment came to drive up to London, the problems of birth and death, of love and happiness, were overshadowed by the refusal of the car to go even as far as Exeter.
"We really must get a Lee-Lonsdale," said Tony. He made this announcement in the same tone, Dorothy reflected bitterly, as he had announced that they would have another baby.
When the butler opened the door of 129 Curzon Street, the house was full of birds' singing.
"Canaries, don't you know, and all that," Tony explained. "I thought you'd like to be reminded of the country."
Dorothy looked at him sharply to see if he was teasing her, but he was serious enough, and for the first time since that night in June when her son was born dead she was able to feel an affection for him so personal and so intimate that if they had been alone at the moment she might have flung herself into his arms. He had taken a box for the theater that night and was most eager for her to dine out with him, but she was much tired after the journey and excused herself. Since he was evidently dismayed by the prospect of an unemployed evening, she begged him to go without her, which after a short and not very stoutly contested argument he agreed to do.
Dorothy went up early to her bedroom, where for a long while she sat at the open window, listening to the traffic. How often she had sat thus at the window of her bedroom in Halfmoon Street and what promises of grandeur had then seemed implicit in the majestic sound. Only three years ago she had still been in Halfmoon Street; she could actually remember one October night like this, an October night when the still warm body of a dead summer was being pricked by wintry spears. On such a night as this Olive had called to her not to take cold, had warned her that it was bad for her voice to sit at an open window. She had been thinking about herself in Debrett and planning to be a marchioness; it was Olive's interruption which had brought home sharply to her the necessity of cutting herself off forever from the theater if she married Clarehaven. Yes, it had been anight just like this, and that other window was not five minutes away from where she was sitting now.
A taxi humming round a distant corner reminded Dorothy of an evening on the lawns at Clare when Doctor Lane had lectured her on the habits of night-jars.
"Country sights and country sounds," she exclaimed, and she shivered in a revulsion against them all, because, though she had proved her ability to share in that country life, the blind overseer Fate had withdrawn her to another environment and the overseer must always be propitiated.
The sound of the traffic was casting a spell upon Dorothy's tired nerves; she began to take pleasure in it, welcoming it as a sound familiar and cherished over many years. She looked back at herself a year ago sitting in Clarehaven church, with almost a blush for the affectation of it all, or rather for what must have seemed like affectation to other people. She had allowed herself to exaggerate everything, to dream sublimely and wake ridiculously, to be more than she was ever meant to be. Not music of wind and sea, but this dull music of London traffic was the fit accompaniment for her. She knew that now, when her own sighs absorbed in the countless sighs of the millions round her took their place in the great harmony of human sorrow. Above the castanets of hansoms and the horns of motors the omnibuses rolled like drums ... the hansoms were going back, back, the motors were going forward; but the omnibuses were going home, home, home. And was not her own journey through life like journeys she had taken as a child when the omnibus after a glittering evening went home, rumbling and rolling home?
Dorothy had nearly fallen asleep; waking to full consciousness with a start, she laughed at her fancies; quickly shutting the window, she drew the curtains and walked about the golden bedroom as if she would assure herself that the evening was not nearly spent yet, that not forher was some dim omnibus waiting to carry her home ... home. She checked the fresh impulse to dwell upon the monotonous rumble of the traffic and drove the sound from her mind. Of what could she complain, really? What other girl like herself would not envy her good fortune? What other girl would not laugh at her for thinking that life was dull because she had failed at the first attempt to produce a son? In this comfortable bedroom, amid flowers of chintz, was she not already more at home than she had ever been along the herbaceous borders of Clare? The fact was that her life at Clare had been a part sustained with infinite verve and accomplishment through many months, but always a part. Yes, it had been a part which she had sustained so brilliantly that she had nearly ruined the well-mounted but not very brilliant play in which she had been performing. The dowager had been right when she had expressed her fears for the effect upon Tony of his wife's behavior. She had considered her warning as kindly, but quite unnecessary; she had even pitied the poor little beaver-like dowager for likening her own position with that rake of a husband to that which Dorothy occupied in respect of the son. But the dowager had been right. Herself had risked the substance for the shadow, and in her lust for personal success she might abruptly have found that the play had stopped running. Luckily, it was not too late to remedy the mistake. Here was the scene set for a new act in which Tony must be allowed his chance. Poor old boy, he was not asking for much, and he was still so dependent upon her that it would be a pleasure to spoil him a little now. Should she not really be flattered that he loved her more than an heir to his name, his rank, and his fortune? What would it signify if the house of Clare became extinct? Would those ladies in the long gallery, those ladies simpering eternally at sea and sky, be a whit less immobile if children laughed on the lawns below? Would they blink their eyes or move a muscle of their rosy lips? Not they. And if strangers held their beautyin captivity, would they care? Not they. And if the earth fell into the sun so that nothing of poor mortality, not even Shakespeare, endured, would they simper less serenely in the moment before their painted lips blistered and were consumed? Not a whit less serenely. None of the people on other planets would care if the fifth Earl of Clarehaven was the last; even if the people of Mars had a telescope big enough to see what was happening on earth, they would only watch us with less compassion than we watch ants on a burning log.
"And if by chance they have got such a telescope," Dorothy murmured, "how absurd we must look."
Earth shrank to nothing even as she spoke, for on that thought she fell asleep where she was sitting and did not wake until Tony came back.
"Hullo, Doodles! Why do you go to sleep in your chair?" he asked.
"Did you enjoy the theater?"
"Well, as a matter of fact," he admitted, "I didn't use the box. I thought, as you wouldn't come, I'd drop in and have a look at the new show at the Vanity. Pretty good, really. Your friend Olive Fanshawe was in a quintet. She has a few lines to speak, too, and looks very jolly. I wish you'd come with me one night. I think you'd enjoy it."
"I will if you like," said Dorothy.
"No, really?" he exclaimed, his eyes lighting up. "Now, isn't that splendid! I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll have a party for my birthday next week. Dine at the Carlton. Two boxes at the Vanity, and supper afterward at the Savoy. I say I shall enjoy it, Doodles!"
"How old will you be?" she asked, with a smile.
"Twenty-six. Aging fast. Have to hurry up and enjoy ourselves while we can."
"I shall be twenty-five in March," she said.
Then suddenly she seemed able to throw off all her fatigue and to forget all her disappointment.
"Sorry I've been so dull these last few weeks," she murmured. "Tony, do you still love me?"
"You never need ask me that," he said. "But do you love me?"
She nodded.
"Couldn't you say it? You never have, you know. Couldn't you just whisper 'yes'?"
"Yes."
"Cleared it," he shouted, and while he was in his dressing-room she heard him singing: