The Vanity Girl Part 25

"And oh dear, oh lord, oh my!" he exclaimed, "we must have the jolly old collie down at Clare."

"The collie?" she repeated. "What collie?"

"Your collie." He began to whistle the bewitching tune.

"Please don't. One hears it everywhere," she said, fretfully. "Olive will look after the dog. She's just lost her Pekinese."

CHAPTER IV

I

About the time that the fifth Earl of Clarehaven upset the lares and penates of his house by marrying a Vanity girl the people of Great Britain, having baited with red rags the golden calf of Victorianism until the poor beast had leaped from its pedestal and disappeared in the flowing tide, were now accepting from a lamasery of Liberal reformers the idol of silver speech, forgetting either that silver tarnishes more quickly than gold or that new brooms sweep clean, but soon wear out.

However, the new era lasted for quite a month, and long enough for the Dowager Countess of Clarehaven to reach the conclusion that her son's marriage was a sign of the times. Poets extract consolation for their private woes and joys from observing that nature sympathizes with them.

When they are fain to weep, the skies weep with them; April's weather follows the caprice of the girl next door; even great Ocean laughs when his little friend the rhymester gets two guineas for a sonnet. What is permitted to a poet will not be denied to a countess, and if the dowager considered her chagrin to be a feather in the mighty wing of revolution--to the widows of Conservative peers down in Devons.h.i.+re the return of the Liberal party in 1906 seemed nothing less than revolution--she should not, therefore, be accused of exaggeration.

When in 1880 Lady Augusta Fanhope married the fourth Earl of Clarehaven she brought neither beauty nor wealth to that dissolute and extravagant man of thirty-five, who as a subaltern in the Blues had earned a kind of fame by the size of his debts and by the length of his whiskers. Soon after he succeeded to the t.i.tle fas.h.i.+on made him cut short the whiskers; but his debts increased yearly, and if he had not died during his son's minority there would have been little left for that son to inherit.

n.o.body understood why he married Lady Augusta, herself least of all.

Even when he was still alive she had taken refuge in the Anglican religion; when he died she presented a memorial window by Burne-Jones to Little Cherrington church. By now, when he had been dead ten years and his son was bringing an actress to rule over Clare Court, the dowager had come to regard her late husband as a saint. Fas.h.i.+on had trimmed his whiskers; time had softened his memory; the stained-gla.s.s window had done the rest.

"I'm glad your father never lived to see these dreadful Radicals sweeping the country," she said to her daughters on this January day that before it faded into darkness would bring such changes to Clare.

What the dowager really meant to express was her relief that the last earl was not alive to meet his daughter-in-law; he ought not to have been easily shocked, but marriage with an actress would certainly have shocked him greatly, and his language when shocked was bad. The effect of Dorothy's letter had already worn a little thin; the dowager's pre-figuration of her approximated more closely every moment to an old standing opinion of actresses she had formed from a large collection of letters and photographs left behind by her husband, which she had lacked the courage to burn unread. Her daughters Arabella and Constantia argued that this Dorothy must be a "top-holer" to make their brother so desperate. Last month he had taken them for several long walks and waxed so eloquent over her beauty and charm and virtue that they had accepted his point of view; with less to lose than their mother and unaware of their father's weakness, they saw no reason why an actress should not make Tony as good a wife as anybody.

"But love is blind," said the dowager. None knew the truth of this better than she. "And in any case, dear children, beauty is only skin-deep."

"Luckily for us, mother," said Arabella.

"I think you exaggerate your plainness," the dowager observed. "You do not make the least attempt to bring out your good features. You, dearest Bella, have very nice ankles; but if you wear shoes like that and never pull up your stockings their slimness escapes the eye. And you, Connie, have really beautiful ears; but when you jam your cap down on your head like that you cause them to protrude in a way that cannot be considered becoming."

The girls laughed; they were too much interested in country life to bother about their appearance. Boots were made to keep out moisture and get a good grip of muddy slopes: caps were meant to stay on one's head, not to show off one's ears. Besides, they were ugly; they had decided as much when they were still children, and, now that they were twenty-one and nineteen, would be foolish to begin repining. Arabella's ankles might be slim, but her teeth were large and prominent; her eyes were pale as the wintry sky above them; her hands were knotted and raw; her nose stuck to her face like a piece of mud thrown at a fence; her hair resembled seaweed. As for Constantia, her nose was much too large; so was her tongue; so were her hands; her eyes were globular, like marbles of brown agate; everything protruded; she was like a person who has been struck on the back of the head in a crowd.

"The question is," said Arabella, "are we to drive over to Exeter to meet them? Because if we are I must tell Crowdy to see about putting us up some sandwiches."

"Well, unless you're very eager to go," the dowager pleaded, "I should appreciate your company. Were I left quite alone, I might get a headache, and I am so anxious to appear cheerful. I think we ought to a.s.sume that Dorothy will be as nervous as we are. I think it would be kind to a.s.sume that."

"I vote for letting Deac.o.c.k take the car by himself," Constantia declared. "I always feel awkward at meeting even old friends at a station, and it'll be so awfully hard to talk with the wind humming in my ears."

When the noise of the car had died away among the knolls and hollows of the great park the dowager turned to her daughters:

"It's such a fine day for the season of the year that perhaps I might take a little drive in the chaise."

It was indeed a fine day of silver and faint celeste, such a one as in January only the West Country can give. The leafless woods and isolated clumps of trees breathed a dusky purple bloom like fruit; the gra.s.s was peac.o.c.k green. The dowager, moved by the brilliance of the landscape and the weather to a complete apprehension of the fact that she was no longer mistress of Clare, had been seized with a desire to take a last sentimental survey of her dominion. Although her daughters had made other plans for the morning, they willingly put them aside to encourage such unwonted energy. While the pony was being harnessed, the dowager took Arabella's arm and walked up and down the pergola that ran like a battlement along a spur of the gardens and was the most conspicuous object to those approaching Clare Court through the park.

"It's too late to change it before Dorothy comes," she decided, mournfully. "But I do hope that there will be no more taking of Mr.

Tufton's advice. I'm sure that curved seat he persuaded me to put at the end was a mistake. People deposit seats in gardens without thinking.

n.o.body will ever sit there. It simply means that one will always have to walk round it. So unnecessary! I do hope that Dorothy will give orders to remove it."

"Connie," Arabella exclaimed, with a joyful gurgle, "don't you love the way mother practises the idea of Dorothy? She used to be just the same when we were expecting a new governess."

Her sister, who was munching an apple, nodded her agreement without speaking.

The dowager was about to propose a descent by the terraces to visit her water-lily pool (which would have involved a tiresome climb up again for nothing, because the rose-hearted water-lilies of summer were nothing now but blobs of decayed vegetation) when the wheels of the chaise crackled on the drive and the girls insisted that if she were going to have enough time for an expedition before lunch she must start at once.

Clare Court viewed from the southeast appeared as a long, low house of gray stone with no particular indication of its age for the unprofessional observer, to whom, indeed, the chief feature might have seemed the four magnolias that covered it with their large glossy leaves, the rufous undersides of which, mingling with the stone, gave it a warmth of color that otherwise it would have lacked. The house was built on a moderate elevation, the levels of which were s.p.a.cious enough to allow for ornamental gardens on the south side of the drive; these had been laid out in the Anglo-Italian manner with pergolas and statuary, yews instead of cypresses, and box-bordered terraces leading gradually down to the ornamental pool overhung on the far side by weeping willows. The kitchens and servants' quarters on either side of the house were masked by shrubberies and groves of tall pines, in the ulterior gloom of which the drive disappeared on the way to the stables and the home farm.

The dowager got into the chaise, and the pony, a dapple gray of some antiquity, proceeded at a pace that did not make it difficult for the two girls, who by now had summoned to heel half a dozen dogs of various breeds, to keep up with it on foot.

"Shall we turn aside and look at the farm?" Constantia suggested, where the road forked.

"No, I think I'd like to drive down to the sea first of all," said the dowager.

"Bravo, mother!" both her daughters applauded.

The dogs, understanding from their mistresses' accents that some delightful project was in the air, began to bark loudly while they scampered through the scraggy rhododendrons and put up shrilling blackbirds with as much gusto as if they were partridges. The drive kept in the shadow of the pines for about two hundred yards, until where the trees began to grow smaller and spa.r.s.er it emerged upon a s.p.a.cious sward that between bare uplands went rolling down to the sea a mile away. To one looking back Clare Court now appeared under a strangely altered aspect as a gray pile rising starkly from a wide lawn and unmellowed by anything except the salt northwest wind; even the dowager and her daughters, who had lived in it all these years, could never repress an exclamation of wonder each time they emerged from the dim pinewood and beheld it thus. On the other side of the house there had been sunlight and a rich prospect of parkland losing itself in trees and a carefully cultivated seclusion. Here was nothing except a line of gray-green downs undulating against s.p.a.ce, in a dip of which was the s.h.i.+mmer of fusing sky and sea. Except at midsummer the pines were tall enough to cut off the low westering sun from the house, and on this January day from where they were standing in pale sunlight the gray pile seemed frozen. The sense of desolation was increased by a walled-up door in the center of the house, above which angelic supporters sustained the full moon of Clare on a stone escutcheon. The first baronet had failed to establish his right to the three chevronels originally borne by that great family and had been granted arms that accorded better with the rococo taste of his period.

"I've always wanted to plant a hedge of those hydrangeas with black stalks in front of the pines," said the dowager, pensively, "but unless they come blue they wouldn't look nice, and perhaps they wouldn't be able to stand the wind on this side. But the effect would be lovely in summer. Blue sky! Blue sea! Blue hydrangeas! Dark pine-trees and vivid gra.s.s! It really would be a wonderful effect. Of course, it may be that Tony's wife will be quite interested in flowers. One never can tell.

Come along, Clement." Clement was the pony, so-called because he was such a saint.

The drive now skirted the edge of the downs in a gradual descent to Clarehaven, a small cove formed by green headlands as if earth had thrust out a pair of fists to scoop up some of the sea for herself. The ruins of two round towers were visible on both headlands; on the slopes of the westernmost stood a little church surrounded by tumble-down tombstones that, even as the bodies of those whom they recorded had become part of the earth on which they lived, were themselves growing yearly less distinguishable from the outcrops of stone that no mortal had set upon these cliffs. Two cottages marked the end of the drive, which lost itself beyond them in a rocky beach that was strewn with fragments of ancient masonry. At sight of the chaise several children had bolted into the cottages like disturbed rabbits, and presently a couple of women tying on clean ap.r.o.ns came out to greet the countess and offer the hospitality of their homes. Their husbands, one of whom was called Bitterplum, the other less picturesquely Smith, were mermen of toil, fishers in summer and for the rest of the year agricultural laborers.

"It's very kind of you, Mrs. Smith, and of you, too, Mrs. Bitterplum,"

said the dowager, "but I can only stay a few minutes. What a beautiful day, isn't it? You must get ready to welcome his lords.h.i.+p, you know.

He'll be bringing her ladys.h.i.+p to see you very shortly. Are Bitterplum and Smith quite well?"

"Oh ess, ess, ess," murmured the wives, wiping their mouths with their ap.r.o.ns. Then Mrs. Smith volunteered:

"Parson Beadon's to the church."

At this moment a black figure appeared from the little building, and after experiencing some difficulty in locking the church door behind him hurried down the path to meet the important visitors. Mr. Beadon, the rector of Clarehaven-c.u.m-Cherringtons, was a tall, lean man, the ascetic cast of whose countenance had been tempered by matrimony as the indigestible loaf of his dogma had been leavened by expediency. Although Lord Clarehaven was patron of the living that included Great Cherrington, its church warden was a fierce squire who owned most of the land round; here Mr. Beadon was nearly evangelical, with nothing more vicious than a surpliced choir to mark the corruption of nineteen hundred years of Christianity. At Little Cherrington, where the dowager wors.h.i.+ped and where she had her stained-gla.s.s window of the fourth earl, he indulged in linen vestments as a dipsomaniac might indulge in herb beer; but at Clarehaven, with none except Mrs. Bitterplum and Mrs. Smith to mark his goings on, he used to have private orgies of hagiolatry, from one of which he was now returning.

After Mr. Beadon had greeted the dowager and the two girls he asked, anxiously, if Tony had arrived, and confided with the air of a very naughty boy that he had been holding a little celebration of St. Anthony with special intention for the happiness of the marriage. St. Anthony was not on the dowager's visiting-list, having no address in the Book of Common Prayer; but she could hardly be cross with the rector for observing his festival, inasmuch as he had the same name as her son. Mr.

Beadon was a good man whose services at Little Cherrington were exactly what she wanted and who had, moreover, written an excellent history of Clarehaven and the Devons.h.i.+re branch of the Clare family. At the same time, the bishop was also a good man, and she devoutly hoped that the Bohemianism of Mr. Beadon's services at Clarehaven would not take away what was left to his episcopal appet.i.te from the claims of diabetes.

"One of Mrs. Bitterplum's children has been serving me," said Mr.

Beadon. "Yes, it was an impressive little--Eucharist." He had brought his lips together for Ma.s.s, and Eucharist came out with such a cough that the dowager begged him not to take cold. Mrs. Bitterplum brought him out a cup of chocolate, a supply of which he kept in her cottage to a.s.suage the pangs of hunger after his long walk and arduous ritual on an empty stomach. He swallowed the chocolate quickly, not to lose the pleasure of company back to Little Cherrington; but with all the heat and hurry of his late breakfast he could not stop talking.

"Mrs. Bitterplum is always kind enough--yes--curious old West Country name...."

Arabella and Constantia had turned away to hide their smiles.

"I have failed hitherto to trace its origin. No.... Oh, indeed yes, when you're ready, Lady Clarehaven. Good day to you, Mrs. Smith. Good day, and thank you, Mrs. Bitterplum."

The pony's head had been turned inland, and Mr. Beadon talked earnestly to the dowager while the chaise was driving slowly back. The topic of the marriage led him along the by-paths of family lore in numerous allusions to the historical importance of the various spots where the dowager lingered during her last drive as mistress of Clare; but the rector's discourse was so much intruded upon by gossip of nothing more than parochial interest that it will be simpler to give a direct abstract of the family history.

In the middle of the thirteenth century a younger member of the great family of Clare whose demesnes stretched east and west from Suffolk to Wales fell in with one of those pirate Mariscos that from Lundy Island swept the Bristol Channel for s.h.i.+ps laden with food and wine; in the course of his seafaring he had discovered a cove on the north coast of Devons.h.i.+re that struck him as an excellent center for piracy on his own account, notwithstanding that his chief patron had recently been hanged, drawn, and quartered. He fortified his cove with round towers at either entrance and thus created Clarehaven, where his descendants for a hundred years or more levied toll on pa.s.sing traffic and made an alliance with the gentleman pirates of Fowey, whom in the reign of Edward III they helped to drive back the discomfited men of Kent from the west. The baser sort of pirates that in time came to haunt Lundy made the less professional exploits of the Clares no longer worth while, and before the close of the fourteenth century they had for many years abandoned the sea and were reaping a more peaceful harvest from the land. During the great days of Elizabeth the old spirit was reincarnate in one or two members of the family, who fared farther than the Bristol Channel and rounded fiercer capes than Land's End; but when in the early years of the seventeenth century a great storm drove the sea to overwhelm Clarehaven, there was not more to destroy than a few cottages belonging to the fishermen that were now all that remained of the medieval pirates. Then came the Great Rebellion, when Anthony Clare, Esquire, mustered his grooms and fishermen to meet Sir Bevil Grenville marching from Cornwall for the king. Finding large Roundhead forces at Bideford between him and Sir Bevil, he retired again to the obscurity of North Devon until the glorious Restoration, when with a relative he appeared in Parliament as member for the borough of Clarehaven, and was created a baronet by Charles II for his loyalty. Sir Anthony, with a borough in his pocket and two thousand acres of land on which to develop agriculture and choose a site for a house, abandoned what was left of the old pirate's keep and began to build Clare Court. He chose an aspect facing the sea, but died before the house was finished; Sir Gilbert, his son, being more interested in digging for badgers than for foundations, suspended building and contented himself with half a house.