The Vanity Girl Part 48

A week later the fifth Earl of Clarehaven was killed in action.

CHAPTER VI

I

Dorothy was at Little Cherrington when the news of Tony's death reached her. The dowager had already vacated Clare Lodge, and with a few of her dearest possessions was now established in Cherrington Cottage. Only extreme necessity could have driven her into that particular abode, because in order for her to go into it, Mr. Greenish had to go out of it, which upset Mr. Greenish so much that he went out of Cherrington altogether, out of Devonshire, even, and as far away as Hampshire. His choice of a county was the dowager's only consolation; Connie lived in Hampshire; the world was small; Mr. Greenish and Bella might even yet come together. Bella, absorbed in her short stories--one of which had been accepted, but not published, and another of which had been published but not paid for--found that the chief objection to being in Cherrington Cottage was the noise that the children made going to and from school. It was strange to find Bella, who in her youth had made as much noise even as Connie, so dependent now upon quiet; but in whatever divine hands mortals fall, their behavior usually changes radically afterward. We all know what love can do for anybody; we all know what the Salvation Army can do for anybody; and if Virgil's account of the c.u.maean Sibyl may be trusted, the transforming influence of Apollo is second to none.

Tony's consideration in securing Cherrington Cottage to his mother could only have been bettered if he had made some provision for a sum of money to maintain it, or, for that matter, herself; delicious as the exterior of it undoubtedly was, the walls were not edible. The sudden stoppage in the payment of her jointure put the dowager in the humiliating position of having to ask her brother, Lord Chatfield, to pay the weekly bills, and it was with the intention of dealing with this matter that Dorothy had gone down much against her will to the scene that was consecrated to her greatest triumph and her greatest failure.

Perhaps the nerves of the usually so genial Uncle Chat had been too much wrought upon by the outbreak of war. As deputy lieutenant of the county he had been harried by a series of telegrams from the War Office, each of which had contradicted its predecessor. He had had to lend not merely all his own horses to England, but to arrange to lend most of his neighbors', some of whom were not quite such willing lenders as his lordship. His eldest son, Paignton, was already at the front in the North Devon Dragoons, and his second son was a.s.sisting an elderly gentleman who had lived in obscurity since Tel-el-Kebir--where he had been jabbed in the liver by a dervish--to command, drill, and generally produce for their country's need the two hundred and ten rustics that at present const.i.tuted the Seventh Service Battalion of the King's Own Devon Light Infantry. His daughters, Lady Maud and Lady Mary, had given him no rest till they were allowed to do something or other; though before he understood what exactly this was the war had lasted many months longer than the greatest pessimist had believed possible. His sister, Lady Jane, in despair of finding anything else to do, was collecting mittens for the soldiers, a hobby which made the ground floor of Chatfield Hall look like a congested wool-warehouse in the city.

At such a moment the problem of his younger sister's financial future struck poor Uncle Chat as much more hopelessly insoluble than it would have seemed in those happy days when he had nothing to talk about except cigars and pigs. Bella immediately after the outbreak of war put down the pen and took up the sword, or in other words yearned to join the V.A.D., and it was the imperative need of finding money for Bella to gratify her patriotism in London that drove the dowager into discussing her finances with her brother. Dorothy, who could not bear the suggestion that Tony had heartlessly left for France without any heed of his family obligations, a suggestion that reflected upon herself, at once turned over to the dowager half of the 2,000 in the bank.

Actually, she only left herself with something over 600, for extra money had had to be found for Tony's equipment and for the payment of bills he had overlooked. There was no reason to suppose that Uncle Chat was really criticizing her behavior in the least; but his air of general irritation gave her the impression that he was, which preyed upon her mind so much that she began to feel almost on a level with her unfortunate namesake who had lost the Derby. She fancied that everybody was ascribing Tony's mad career to his marriage, and thinking that if he had only married a nice girl in his own cla.s.s none of these disasters would have happened. She fancied that the disapproval of the family which had been carefully concealed all these years out of deference to Tony's feelings was now making itself known, she was embittered by the imagined atmosphere of hostility, and she made up her mind that as soon as possible she would cut herself off from the Fanhopes and from what was left of the Clares.

Tony in his last letter had proposed that he and she should go on the stage when he came home, which of course would have been ridiculous; but, now that Tony was dead, there was surely nothing to prevent her return to the stage. When she got back to town she might go and ask Sir John Richards if he could not find a part in the autumn production at the Vanity Theater. Whatever was now lacking to her voice, whatever the years had added to her appearance, and notwithstanding the wear and tear that had added very little, would be counterbalanced in the eyes of the British public by the privilege of reading upon the program the name of the Countess of Clarehaven. Nothing was any longer owing to the family name; no, indeed, except Bella still bore it, and if third-rate stories were to appear in third-rate magazines under the signature of Arabella Clare, there was no reason why a bill of the play should not advertise the Countess of Clare. It happened that Harry Tufton had come down to Cherrington to a.s.sist at the memorial service which was to be held in Clarehaven church. Dorothy supposed that he was anxious to keep in with the Chatfields, and in speaking to him about her project she was not actuated by any desire for the sympathy of an old friend. She asked his advice in a practical spirit, because he was connected with the theater, and when he tried to discourage her by hinting at the fickleness of public affection, she discerned in his opposition to her plan nothing except the tired anxiety of one who was being importuned by an old friend to give the best advice compatible with the minimum of trouble to himself. Tufton's doubtfulness of her capacity still to attract the favor of an audience had the effect of strengthening her resolve to test his opinion; she asked him with that indifferent smile of hers, which had lost none of its magic of provocation, if he really thought that the British public was as fickle as himself. Tufton protested against the imputation, and excused himself for the evasion of friendship implicit in his att.i.tude by pleading that the War Office kept him so very busy nowadays.

"Of course it was an awful blow when they wouldn't accept me for active service," he said, earnestly. "Heart, don't you know."

"Oh, your heart is weak," she inquired, with a mocking air of concern.

"I suppose the very idea of war produced palpitations. Don't strain it going up-stairs in Whitehall."

"Somebody must do the work at home," he said, irritably.

"Yes, I feel so sorry for you poor Cinderellas," she murmured. "But never mind, you'll always be able to feel that if it wasn't for you the poor fellows at the front, don't you know, wouldn't be able to get along. I suppose you call yourselves the n.o.ble army of martyrs?"

It had been fun to twist the tail of that ship's rat, Dorothy thought, when she saw him hurry away from Cherrington to catch the first train back to town after the service.

The news of Tony's death had reached Cherrington on the morning of the day that Dorothy was going back to the flat. When she had made over half of her money to the dowager and was clear of the fancied atmosphere of hostility at Chatfield, she had begun to feel penitently that she had misjudged her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. It had seemed dreadful to leave them here in this cottage almost within sight and sound of the changes at Clare Court, and she had invited them to come and stay with her in Halfmoon Street until the flat was given up. The dowager had been unwilling to leave the country, and when the news of her son's death arrived was firm in her determination to remain in Cherrington.

"He was born here," she said, "and it is here that I shall always think of him best. I don't think I can afford to put up a window to his memory; he must just have a simple stone slab. I should like to copy that inscription at Rhodes. Do you remember it? 'Anthony, Fifth Earl of Clarehaven. With G.o.d. 1914.'"

Dorothy's grief at the death of Tony had for the moment been kept in control by the tremendous effort she had been called upon to make in facing the future; it was the future which had occupied her mind to the exclusion of any contemplation of the past. Now when her mother-in-law spoke these simple words she burst into tears. They linked Tony with so many generations of his house; and they brought home to her almost as a visible fact his death. She had spent so many years perpetually on the verge, as it were, of broken promises, of resolutions never carried out, of little optimisms and extenuations, that when the announcement of his death arrived it was more than usually true in her case that she did not at first realize it. The telegraphic form in which the news had been conveyed to her involuntarily merged itself with so many telegrams in the past which had turned out false, and only when the dowager stated his death like this in terms that admitted of no doubt did Dorothy suddenly confront the reality. She remembered that once a telegram had arrived almost on this very date to say that Tony could not get away from camp in time to be present at the annual show. There was no annual show this year--war had obliterated it--but on the afternoon of this day on which she had meant to return to town she walked, instead, about the field where the show had customarily been held, and so vivid was the familiar scene of hot women and blazing dahlias that she was transported back in imagination and found herself excusing on the ground of his military duties her husband's absence from this spectral exhibition. A farmer, one of her late tenants, pa.s.sed her while she was wandering over the field, touched his cap, and begged to express his sorrow at the news.

"'Tis going to be a handsome year for partridges, too," he said. "But there, my lady, his lordship of late never seemed to care for partridges so much as he belonged. I remember when he was a youngster he'd regular walk me off my feet, as the saying is, after they birds. And he was uncommon fond of land-rails. Yes, it always seemed to give him a sort of extra pleasure, as you might say, when he could get a shot at a land-rail."

The reproach that was implied in the farmer's first words was mitigated by these reminiscences of Tony as a boy, and Dorothy thought that if her son had lived he would already be over six years old and within measurable distance of shooting his first land-rail in the company of the burly farmer beside her. Her son! Would it have made any difference to Tony if he had had an heir? Ought she to thank G.o.d or reproach Him for her childlessness?

Three days later Mr. Beadon sang for the late earl a requiem at Clarehaven church. Whoever should be the new owner of Clare--n.o.body had materialized from that mysterious firm of Reinhardt & Co.--he was not yet flaunting his proprietorship. The mourners pa.s.sed slowly through the somber groves of pines and looked back at the empty house across the short herbage burnished by the drought of August, and the house empty and solemn, perhaps more solemn because it had not been dressed for grief, eyed with all its windows their progress seaward.

It would be cynical to say that at such a moment Mr. Beadon derived a positive pleasure from conducting a ma.s.s of requiem for the dead earl, and if for a moment he regarded with a kind of gloomy triumph Squire Kingdon's inevitable conformity to the majestic ritual of woe expressed by the catafalque from which depended the dead earl's hatchment, he made up by the grave eloquence of his funeral oration for any fleeting pettiness. The windows of the little church on the cliff were wide open to the serene air, and if ever the preacher fell mute for a s.p.a.ce to recover from his emotion the plaint of the tide was heard in a monody above the mourners' tears; but above the preacher's voice, above all the sounds of nature in communion with human grief, there was continuously audible a gay chattering of birds among the tombs, of whinchats and stonechats that were mobilizing along these cliffs, unaware that there was anything very admirable or very adventurous about their impending migration. A cynic listening to those birds might have criticized the rector's sermon for its exaggeration of the spirit in which the young earl had set out to Flanders; a cynic might have given himself leave to doubt if the fifth Earl of Clarehaven was inspired by the same spirit as inspired Sir Gilbert Clare to defend Rhodes against the Moslem; but, whatever the spirit in which he had set forth, no cynic could impugn the spirit in which he had died; no living man, indeed, had any longer the right to sneer at his frailties and follies or to condemn his vices and his extravagance. Besides, a cynic contemporary with Sir Gilbert Clare may have questioned the spirit in which the Hospitaller had watched the cliffs of Devon fade out in the sunset. Who knows? There were stonechats and whinchats then as now.

On the morning after the requiem Dorothy was confronted with the possibility of an event that in its significance, should it come to fruition, would obliterate all that had happened in the past and would provide her in the future with a task so tremendous that she almost fell on her knees then and there to pray for strength and wisdom to sustain it. This was the possibility that she was going to have a child.

Such a prospect changed every plan for the future that she had been making and destroyed her freedom in the very moment it had been given back to her by the death of her husband. Her intention of proving to Harry Tufton that she could again be a favorite of the public must now be relinquished; her ambition to withdraw haughtily from the protection of Lord Chatfield must presumably be abandoned. Yet need they? She should not be too impulsive. Who now except herself had the right to say a word about her child's future? Who else could claim to be the guardian of its destiny? If she was right about her condition, she should rejoice that Tony was dead. If he had been alive and in that mood he was in before the outbreak of war solved his future so rapidly and so completely, this wonderful prospect would only have led to recriminations, even to open hatred. It would have been he who had robbed their child of its inheritance, and she could never have refrained from taunting him with his egotism. Nor was it likely that he would have been reformed by the prospect of being a father; he had not shown much inclination that way in the early years of their marriage; and even if for a while he had changed his habits, he would gradually have relapsed, and, moreover, with his genial and indulgent character he would have held out not merely a bad, but also an attractive, example, which would doubtless have been eagerly and a.s.siduously imitated by any child of his. Yes, but now the future lay in her hands ... and meanwhile she must not be too sure that she was going to have a child at all, nor, even if it were established that she was, must she make too many plans in advance, because everything would be ruled by whether it was a boy or a girl. If it should be a girl, she might go back to the stage next year; she would only be thirty-one next March. It was odd how much younger thirty-one seemed than thirty. But if it should be a boy ...

well, even if it should be a boy, why should she not go back to the stage and by her own exertions keep him, educate him, prepare him to be what he must be--landless, houseless, moneyless, but still the sixth Earl of Clarehaven? Stoic, indeed, should be his training, and his n.o.bility should be won as well as conferred.

Several days of uncertainty went by, and finally Dorothy decided to ask Doctor Lane his opinion of her condition. He was a very old man now and no longer in practice, but at least he would know how to keep a secret, and a secret she intended his opinion to remain at present. Already plans were seething in her head for the immediate future, and when Doctor Lane a.s.sured her that she was going to have a baby, without saying a word even to the dowager she left next day for London.

Dorothy, who had been fancying that Tony's family wanted to be rid of her, soon found that, on the contrary, they would not let her alone, and when the lease expired at Michaelmas and while she was still wondering where she was going to live next, she received an invitation to join the dowager, Bella, and Lady Jane at the Chatfield town mansion in Grosvenor Square. It appeared that Lady Jane had by this time become so inextricably entangled in unknitted wool that the only way she could disentangle herself was by coming up to town to continue there with proper help the preparation of mittens against the winter cold.

"Not that it will be necessary," everybody said, "but it's as well to be prepared, and of course it _might_ drag on till the spring."

The dowager, who had been worked up by her sister to feel that even though she had given a son to England she was still in debt, and Bella were among the twenty ladies collected by Lady Jane to make mittens, and the spinster was anxious to add Dorothy to her flock, for what between wool and ladies she was become very pastoral. So great pressure was put on Dorothy to make mittens, too. Uncle Chat was very penitent for his behavior over the jointure, and he now insisted that the money Dorothy had shared with her mother-in-law should be returned to her. Had it not been for her condition, she would have taken pleasure in refusing this; in the circ.u.mstances she accepted it, but she still did not say a word about her pregnancy, for reasons compounded of superst.i.tion and pride.

Her experience of child-bearing had destroyed her self-confidence and she felt that she could not bear to have a great fuss made about her and to be installed in state at Chatfield Hall to wait there doing nothing through all this anxious winter of war. Nor did the manufacture of mittens in Grosvenor Square appeal to her. Moreover, it was possible that the news would not be welcome. She could not have borne to see Uncle Chat's face fall again at the prospect of having to support a grandnephew of the same rank as himself, and though she did not think that the dowager would attempt to interfere, or that she would be anything but delighted and tactful, there was the chance that after her son's death she might arrogate to herself a right to spoil her grandson.

If Dorothy accepted for him the charity of his grandmother's family, she could not avoid admitting the dowager to the privilege of maternity; but if during the months of expectation she kept close her secret and if it were a boy, untrammeled by any obligations she should be at liberty to make her own decision about his up-bringing. More and more she was forming all her plans to fit the future of a boy, and one of her chief reasons for not relying upon the good will of the family was her desire to spare this son prenatal coddling by coddling herself.

Dorothy might have found it hard to a.n.a.lyze justly all the motives that inspired her to take the step she did; but whatever they were, a hot morning in late September found her sitting at the window of her old room in Lonsdale Road.

II

If outwardly Lonsdale Road presented the same appearance as it had presented on that September morning twelve years ago when Dorothy, after washing her hair, made up her mind to be engaged to Wilfred Curlew, the standpoint from which she now looked out of her window was so profoundly changed that the road itself was trans.m.u.ted by the alchemy of her mind to achieve the significant and incommunicable landscape of a dream. It was as if in looking at Lonsdale Road she were looking at herself, and a much truer self than she ever used to see portrayed in that old mirror upon her dressing-table.

In an upper room of the house opposite a servant was dusting. Down below, amid that immemorial acrid smell of privet, two little girls were busily digging in the front garden. These were the daughters of her second sister, the rightful Dorothy, who was staying with her parents because her husband, Claude Savage, had left Norbiton for France with his regiment of territorials. Mrs. Savage, a dark, neat little woman, as capable a housewife as she had promised to become, and at twenty-eight not quite so annoying as formerly, came into the room from time to time and glanced out of the window to see that her little girls were not making themselves too dirty.

"Hope they're not disturbing you with their chattering."

"No, no," said the countess. "I like listening to them."

Ah, there was Edna down below, not as twelve years ago giggling back from school with Agnes, but wheeling a perambulator and from time to time bending cautiously over to arrange the coverlet over her sleeping baby. Edna was a dull edition of Agnes, and already at twenty-six much more like Mrs. Caffyn than any of her sisters. Her chin was rather furry; she was indefinite, not so indefinite as her mother because modern education had not permitted to her what was formerly considered a prerogative of woman. Edna had been married for about three years to Walter Hume, a young doctor in Golders Green, who was stationed at some northern camp with the R.A.M.C. She, too, was staying with her parents.

"Edna keeps on fussing with the coverlet," said Mrs. Savage, critically.

"But she ought not to be walking along the sunny side of the pavement."

The countess did not pay much attention to the practical sister looking over her shoulders; she was thinking of Agnes and wondering what she was doing, and how her baby was getting on.

"Have you heard from Agnes lately?" she asked.

"Yes. Her husband has gone in for politics. But of course politics out there must be very different from what they are in England. You can't imagine Agnes as the wife of a politician. Tut-tut! Ridiculous!"

"What did she call her little boy?"

"Oh, gracious, don't ask me! Some perfectly absurd name. Could it be Xenophon? I know Claude laughed muchly when he heard it. Thank goodness, he wouldn't have let me choose such names for Mary and Ethel. I suppose Agnes is happy. She seems to be. I sometimes wonder where some of the members of our family get their taste for adventure."

"But you've no idea what a lovely place Aphros is ... it lies in the middle of a circle of islands and...."

"Yes, yes," Mrs. Savage interrupted, "but it's a long way from England, and the idea of living abroad doesn't appeal to me."

"Don't you ever want to travel?"

"Well, Claude and I had planned to go to Switzerland with a party this August, but of course the war put a stop to that."

"By the way, isn't the war rather an adventure for Claude?" the countess asked, with a smile.

"An adventure?" Mrs. Savage echoed. "It's a great inconvenience."