Upon the garden side of Caermere is a very large conservatory, built nearly fifty years ago, at the close of the life of the last duchess. The poor lady left no other mark of her meek existence upon the buildings, and it was thought at the time that she would never have ventured upon even this, had it not been that every one was mad for the moment about the wonderful palace of glass reared in London for the First Exhibition.
In area and height, and in the spacious pretensions of its dome, the structure still suggests irresistibly the period of its inception. It is as ambitious as it is self-conscious; its shining respectability remains superior to all the wiles of climbers and creeping vines. The older servants cherish traditions of “Her Grace’s glass,” as it used to be called. She had the work begun on her fortieth birthday, and precisely a year later it happened that she was wheeled in from the big morning room, and left at her own desire to recline in solitude under the palms beneath the dome, and that when they went to her at last she was dead. The circumstance that Shakespeare is supposed also to have died on the anniversary of his birth, has somehow come to be an integral part of the story, as it is kept alive now in the humbler parts of the Caermere household, but the duchess had nothing else in common with the poet. The very face of her, in her maturer years, is but dimly remembered. The portrait in the library is of a young Lady Clarissa, with pale ringlets and a childishly sweet countenance, and clad in the formal quaintness of the last year of King George the Fourth. She became the duchess, but in turn the duchess, seemed to become somebody else. That was the way with the brides brought home to Caermere. The pictures in the library show them all girlish, and innocently pretty, and for the most part fair-haired. Happily there is no painted record of what they were like when, still in middle life, they bade a last goodbye to the dark-skinned, big-shouldered sons they had borne, and perhaps made a little moan that no daughters were ever given to mothers at Caermere, and turned their sad faces to the wall.
The crystal house had memories of another and more recent mistress, the countess. She had come six years after the other went, she had lived for twelve years—a silent, colorless, gently unhappy life—and then had faded away out of sight. It was this Lady Porlock who had caused the orchid houses to be built at the inner side of the conservatory, and it was in her time, too, that the gifted Cheltnam was fetched from her own father’s house in Berkshire to be head gardener at Caermere. Her fame is indeed irrevocably linked with his, for the tea-rose of his breeding, bearing her maiden-name of the Hon. Florence Denson, is scarcely less well known than this hybrid sweet-briar the Countess of Porlock.
And now, in the third generation, still another lady had for some years enjoyed special property rights in this great glass apartment.
Lady Cressage came into the conservatory from the large morning room, with a large volume in her hand, and an irresolute look on her face. She glanced about at the several couches piled with cushions and furs, at an easy-chair beyond—and yawned slightly. Then she wandered over to a row of early chrysanthemums, and, putting the book under her arm, occupied herself with the destruction of a few tiny beginnings of buds in the lower foliage. In this she employed as pincers the delicately tinted nails of a very shapely finger and thumb, and at the sign of some slight discoloration of these she stopped the work. From a glance at the nails, she went to a musing scrutiny of this whole right hand of hers, holding it up, and turning it from one composition of graceful curves to another. It had been called the most beautiful hand in England, but this morning its owner, upon a brief and rather listless inspection of its charms, yawned again. Finally she seated herself in the chair and, after a languid search for the place in her book, began to read.
Half reclining thus, with the equable and shadowless light of the glass house about her, the young widow made a picture curiously different from any in the library within. All the dead and gone brides of the Torrs had been painted in bright attire; Lady Cressage wore a belted gown of black cloth, unrelieved save by a softened line of white at the throat and wrists. The others, without exception, had signified by elaborate hair-dressing not less than by dutifully vacuous facial expressions, their comprehension of the requirements of the place they had been called upon to fill; Lady Cressage’s bistre hair was gathered in careless fashion to a loose knot at the back of the head, and in her exquisitely modeled face there was no hint whatever of docility or awed submission to any external claims. The profile of this countenance, outlined for the moment against a cluster of vividly purple pleroma blossoms, had the delicacy of a rare flower, but it conveyed also the impression of resolute and enduring force. If the dome above could have generated voices of its own, these would have murmured to one another that here at last was a woman whom Caermere could not break or even easily bend.
In the season of 1892, London had heard a good deal of this lady. She was unknown before, and of her belongings people to this day knew and cared very little. There was a General Kervick enumerated in the retired list, who had vegetated into promotion in some obscure corner of India, and now led an equally inconspicuous existence somewhere in the suburbs—or was it in West Kensington? He had never belonged to a service club, but an occasional man encountered him once in a while at the Oriental, where he was supposed by the waiters to have an exceptional knowledge of peppers and chutneys. The name of his wife had been vaguely associated with charitable committees, or subscription committees, and here and there some one remembered having heard that she was distantly related to somebody. The elder Kervicks never secured a much more definite place in London’s regard—even after this remarkable daughter had risen like a planet to dim the fixed stars of the season.
The credit for having discovered and launched Miss Kervick came generally to be ascribed to Lady Selton, but perhaps this turned upon the fact that she lent her house in Park Lane for the culminating scene in the spectacular triumph of that young person. No doubt there were others who would have placed still bigger houses at the disposal of a bride whose wedding was, in many respects, the most interesting of the year, and some of these may have had as good a claim to the privilege as Lady Selton. As matters turned out, however, they were given no cause to repine. The marriage was not a success, and within one short year Lady Selton herself had grown a little shy about assuming responsibility for it. A year later she was quite prepared to repudiate all share in it, and after that people ceased to remember about it all, until the shock of the tragedy came to stir polite London into startled whisperings.
Hardly within the memory of living folk had a family been dealt such a swift succession of deadly blows as these which were rained upon the Torrs in the first half of 1896.
The Earl of Porlock had been the heir of dukedom since most people could remember, and had got himself called to the House of Lords in his own right, apparently as a kind of protest against his father’s unconscionable longevity, at least a dozen years before his own end came. It was not to be supposed that he desired a peerage for any other reason, since he had never chosen to seek a seat in the House of Commons, and indeed, save upon one occasion connected with ground game, made no use whatever of his legislative powers after they had been given to him. He cared nothing for politics, and read scarcely more in newspapers than in books. Up to middle life, he had displayed a certain tendency toward interest in fat stock and a limited number of allied agricultural topics, but the decline in farming values had turned him from this. In his earlier years, too, he had enjoyed being identified with the sporting set of his class in London, and about the racing circuit, but this association he also dropped out of as he grew older, partly because late nights bored him, partly because he could no longer afford to jeopardize any portion of his income. He came at last to think of his mastership of hounds as his principal tie to existence on land. He liked it all, from the sailing sweep over the highest barrier in an exceptionally rough country, to the smell of the kennels of an early morning across the frozen yards. This life with the horses and dogs, and with the people who belonged to the horses and dogs, offered fewer temptations to the evil temper in his blood than any other, and with growing years his dislike for the wear and tear of getting angry had become a controlling instinct. He continued to use bad language with an appropriate show of fervency, when occasion required, but he had got out of the way of scalding himself with rage inside. He even achieved a grim sort of jocularity toward the close. In the last year of his life a tenant-farmer, speaking to a toast, affirmed of him that “a truer sportsman, nor yet a more humorous and affable nobleman, has never taken the chair at a puppy-walk luncheon within my recollection,” and this tribute to his geniality both pleased and impressed the earl. He was then in his sixty-second year, and he might have lived into a mellowed, and even jovial old age, under the influence of this praise, had there been no unwritten law ending the hunting season in the early spring.
The earl cared very little for otters and rats, and almost nothing at all for salmon, so that when April came he usually went to his yacht, and practically lived aboard it until November. Sometimes he made long cruises in this substantial and comfortable vessel, which he delighted in navigating himself. He was lying in at Bremerhaven, for example, in May, when one of a sheaf of telegrams scattered along the line of North Sea ports in search of him, brought the news that his youngest son Joseph, who had drifted into Mashonaland after the collapse of the Jameson adventure, had been killed in the native rebellion. Upon consideration, the earl could not see that a post-haste return to England would serve any useful end. He sailed westward, however, after some telegraphic communication with England, and made his leisurely way down the Channel and round Cornwall to Milford Haven, where his wont was to winter his yacht, and where most of his crew were at home. The fact that he and the vessel were well known in this port rendered it possible to follow in detail subsequent events.
It was on the 10th of June that Lord Porlock came to anchor in Milford, and went ashore, taking the afternoon train for Shrewsbury. He returned on the 14th, accompanied by his eldest son and heir, Lord Cressage. This latter personage was known only from hearsay at Milford, and local observation of him was therefore stimulated by a virgin curiosity. It was noted that Viscount Cressage—a stalwart and rubicund young man of more than his father’s height, but somewhat less swarthy of aspect—was laboring under very marked depression. He hung about the hotel, during the delay incident upon cleaning up the yacht, taking on new stores and altering some of the sailing gear, in a plainly moping mood, saying little to his father and never a word to any one else. A number of witnesses were able to make it clear that at first he did not intend to sail forth, but was merely bearing his father company while the latter remained in harbor.
The fact of their recent bereavement accounted in a general way for their reticence with each other, but it was impossible not to see that the younger man had something besides the death of a brother on his mind. When, on the second day of their waiting, the tide began to fill in which on its turn was to bear out the yacht, his nervous preoccupation grew painfully manifest. He walked across many times to the headland; he fidgeted in and out of the bar, taking drinks for which he obviously had no relish, and looking over and over again in the railway time-tables for information which he seemed incapable of fixing in his memory. At last, when everything was ready, and the earl stood with his hand out to say good-bye to his son, the latter had suddenly, and upon the evident impulse of the moment, declared with some excitement that he also would go. People remembered that he had said, as if in defensive explanation of his hasty resolve: “Perhaps that will teach her a lesson!” His father had only remarked “Rot!”—and with that the yacht sailed off, a heaving white patch against the blackening west.
But what followed was too grossly unreasoning to afford a lesson to anybody. The morning newspapers of the 18th contained in one column confirmation of the earlier report that the Hon. Anselm Torr, second son of the earl of Porlock, had been a passenger on the ill-fated “Drummond Castle,” and had gone down with the rest in the night off Ushant; and in another column a telegram from Porthstinian, announcing the total loss of a large yacht, on the rocks known as the Bishop and Clerks, with all on board. The evening papers followed with the rumor that the lost yacht was the “Minstrel,” with both Lord Porlock and his son, Lord Cressage, on board; but it was not until the next afternoon that the public possessed all the facts in this extraordinary affair. Then it happened that the edge was rather taken off the horror of the tragic coincidence, by the announcement that these sudden deaths brought forward as next heir to the dukedom Captain Edward Torr, late of the —th Hussars, who was better known, perhaps, as the husband of Miss Cora Bayard. The thought of Cora as a prospective duchess made such a direct appeal to the gayer side of the popular mind, that the gruesome terrors surrounding her advancement were lost to sight. When, a few days later, it was stated that the venerable Duke of Glastonbury had suffered a stroke of paralysis, and lay at Caermere in a critical state, the news only made more vivid the picture of the music-hall dancer turned into Her Grace which the public had in its mind’s eye. Her radiant portrait in the photographic weeklies and budgets was what remained uppermost in the general memory.
For a time, however, in that little fraction of the public which is called Society, the figure of another woman concentrated interest upon itself, in connection with the Torr tragedy. The fact that a music-hall person was to wear a great title had no permanent hold upon the imagination of this class. They would probably see rather less of her then than now—and the thing had no longer the charm of the unusual. But they had known Lady Cressage. They had admired her, followed after her, done all sorts of nice things for her, in that season of her wonderful triumph as the most beautiful girl, and the most envied bride, in London. After her marriage she had been very little in evidence, it was true; one hardly knew of any other reigning beauty who had let the sceptre slip through her fingers so promptly and completely. What was the secret of it all? It could not be said that she had lost her good looks, or that she was lacking in cleverness. There was no tangible scandal against her; to the contrary, she seemed rather surprisingly indifferent to men’s company. Of course, it was understood that her marriage was unhappy, but that was scarcely a reason for allowing herself to be so wholly snuffed out of social importance. Everybody knew what the Torrs were like as husbands, and everybody would have been glad to be good to her. But in some unaccountable way, without quite producing the effect of rebuffing kindness, she had contrived to lapse from the place prepared for her. And now those last words from the lips of poor young Cressage—“Perhaps that will teach her a lesson!”—sifted their way from the coroner’s inquest in a Welsh village up to London, and set people thinking once more. Who could tell? It might be that the fault was not all on one side. According to the accounts of Milford, he was in a state of visible excitement and mental distress. The very fact of his going off alone in a yacht with his father, of whom he notoriously saw as little as possible on dry land, showed that he must have been greatly upset. And his words could mean nothing save that it was a quarrel with his wife which had sent him off to what proved to be his death. What was this quarrel about? And was it the woman, after all, who was to blame? Echoes of these questions, and of their speculative and varied answers, kept themselves alive here and there in London till Parliament rose in August. They were lost then in the general flutter toward the moors.
Lady Cressage, meantime, had not quitted Caermere or disclosed any design of doing so, and it is there we return to her, where she sat at her ease under the palms in the glass-house, with a book open before her.
The spattering reports of a number of guns, not very far away, caused her presently to lift her head, but after an instant, with a fleeting frown, she went back to her book. The racket continued, and finally she closed the volume, listened with a vexed face for a minute or two and then sprang to her feet.
“Positively this is too bad!” she declared aloud, to herself.
Unexpectedly, as she turned, she found confronting her another young woman, also clad in black, even to the point of long gloves, and a broad hat heavy with funereal plumes. In her hand she held some unopened letters, and on her round, smooth, pretty countenance there was a doubtful look.
“Good-mornin’, dear,” said this newcomer. Her voice, not unmusical in tone, carried the suggestion of being produced with sedulous regard to a system. “There were no letters for you.”
There was a momentary pause, and then Lady Cressage, as if upon deliberation, answered, “Good-morning—Cora.” She turned away listlessly as she spoke.
“Ah, so it is one of my ‘Cora’ days, after all,” said the other, with a long breath of ostentatious reassurance. “I never know in the least where to have you, my dear, you know—and particularly this mornin’; I made sure you’d blame me for the guns.”
“Blame”—commented Lady Cressage, musingly—“I no longer blame anybody for anything. I’ve long since done with my fancy for playing at being God, and distributing judgments about among people.”
“Oh, you’re quite right about this shootin’ the home covers,” protested the other. “I gave Eddy a fair bit of my mind about it—but you know what he is, when once he’s headed in a given direction. You might as well talk soft to the east wind. And, for that matter, I was dead against his bringin’ these men down here at all—though it may surprise you to hear it.”
Lady Cressage, still looking away, shook her head very slightly. “No—I don’t find myself particularly surprised,” she said, with an effect of languor. “Really, I can’t be said to have given the matter a thought, one way or the other. It is neither my business nor my wish to form opinions about your husband’s friends. We were speaking of something else, were we not?”
“Why, yes,” responded Mrs. Edward; “I mentioned that sometimes I’m ‘Cora,’ and sometimes it’s very much the other way about. I merely mentioned it—don’t think I mean to complain—only I began calling you Edith from the start—from the first day I came here, after the—after the——”
“I know you did. It was very kind of you,” murmured Edith, but with no affectation of gratitude in her voice. Then, slowly, she turned her eyes toward her companion, and added in a more considerate tone: “But then you are by nature a much kindlier person than I am.”
“Oh, yes, you say that,” put in the other, “but it isn’t true, you know. It’s only that I’ve seen more of the world, and am so much older than you are. That’s what tells, my dear—it’s years that smooths the temper down, and rubs off one’s sharp corners—of course, if one has some sense to start with. I assure you, Edith, that when I was your age I was a perfect tiger-cat.”
Lady Cressage smiled in a wan fashion, as if in despite of her mood. “You always make such a point of your seniority,” she said, not unamiably, “but when I look at you, I can never believe you’re of any age at all. I seem a thousand years old beside you.” Mrs. Edward showed some dazzling teeth in her pleased appreciation of the compliment. Her smile was as characteristic as her voice, in its studiously regular and equable distribution. The even parting of her bright lips, with their symmetrical inner lines of white, was supported to a nicety of proportional value by eyelashes and eyes.
“It’s what I’ve been saying,” she commented, with frank enjoyment. “It’s good temper that does the trick.”
To tell the truth, Mrs. Edward’s was a face which bore no visible relation to years. It was of rounded oval in contour, with beautifully chiseled small features, a faultless skin which was neither fair nor dark and fine large eyes that seemed sometimes blue, and as often something else. In these eyes there lay always, within touch of the surface, a latent smile, ready to beam, to sparkle, to dance, to languish in mellow softness or glitter in cool abstract recognition of pleasantries afloat, all at the instant bidding of the lips below. These lips, delicately arched and of vivid warmth of color, were as restricted in their movements as is the mercury in a thermometer. They did not curl sidewise upon occasion; they never pouted, or pulled themselves inward together under the stress of sudden emotion. They did nothing but separate, in perfectly balanced measure, sometimes by only a hair’s breadth, again in the freest fashion, but always in painstaking harmony with the spirit of the glance above. Students of this smile, or rather of this range of graded smiles, ordinarily reached the conclusion that it was the lips which gave the signal to the eyes. Certain it is that they worked together in trained accord, and that the rest of the face did nothing at all. The white forehead furrowed itself with no lines of puzzled thought; there was not the shadow of a wrinkle at the corners of the little mouth, or about the shapely brown lashes—and it seemed incredible that time should ever bring one.
Beside this serene and lovely mask—in the placidity of which one found the pledge of an easy temper along with the promise of unfailing youth—the face of Lady Cressage was still beautiful, but in a restless and strenuous way. If she did produce the effect of being the older of the two, it was because Mrs. Edward’s countenance had nothing to do with any such standard of comparison.
“When you come to think of it,” the latter went on now, “you do seem older than I do, dear—I mean you seem so to me. Of course I know there’s a good six years’ difference between us—and as far as appearance goes, I needn’t say that you’d be the belle of the ball in London as easily as you were four years ago—but all the same you have the knack of making me feel as if I were the youngster, and you the grown-up. I’ve a sister—five years younger than me—and she does the same thing. When she looks at me—just quietly turns her eyes full on me, you know—it seems as if I ought to have a pinafore on, and she have spectacles and a cap. Oh, she used to give me the jumps, that girl did. We haven’t seen much of each other, these last few years; we didn’t hit it off particularly well—but—why, hello! this is odd, if you like!”
“What is it?” asked the other, perfunctorily.
Mrs. Edward had been, shuffling the envelopes in her hand the while she spoke, and idly noting their superscriptions. She held up one of them now, in explanation of her remark.
“Well, talk of the devil, you know—I was speaking of my sister Frank, and here’s a letter from her. She hasn’t written a line to me in—how long is it?—why, it must be—well, certainly not since I was married. Funny, isn’t it? I wonder if it’s anything about the pater.”
She continued to regard the sealed missive absent-mindedly, as if the resource of opening it had not yet suggested itself to her. In the meantime, something else occurred to her, and she turned to face Lady Cressage, who had seated herself again.
“I meant what I said about these men Eddy’s brought down,” she declared. “I didn’t want them to be asked, and I don’t like their being here, any more than you do. Yes, I want to have you understand,” she persisted, as the other offered a gesture of deprecation, “I hope I’m the last person in the world to round on old pals, but really, as I told Eddy, a man in his position must draw the line somewhere. I don’t mind giving a leg-up to old Pirie—in a quiet way, of course—for he’s not half a bad sort by himself; but as for the rest, what are they? I don’t care for their families or their commissions—I’ve seen too much of the world to be taken in by kid of that sort—I say they’re bounders. I never was what you might call keen about them as the right friends for Eddy, even before—I mean in the old days, when it didn’t matter so much what company he kept. But now, with everything so altered, he ought to see that they’re not in his class at all. And that’s just what I can’t get him to do in the least.”
“Men have their own views in these matters. They are often rather difficult to understand,” commented Edith, sententiously.
“I should think so!” began Mrs. Edward. “Why, if I were a man, and in Eddy’s place—”
Her words had ended aimlessly, as her eyes followed the lines of the letter she had at last opened and begun to read. She finished the brief task, and then, going back to the top of the single page, went over it again more attentively. There was something indefinably impressive about the silence in which she did this, and Lady Cressage presently raised an inquiring glance. Mrs. Edward’s face exhibited no marked change of expression, but it had turned deathly pale. The unabated redness of the lips gave this pallor a ghastliness which frightened Edith, and brought her to her feet.
“What in the name—” she began, but the other held up a black-gloved hand.
“Is this something you know about?—something you’ve been putting up?” Cora demanded, in a harsh, ungoverned voice, moving forward as she spoke. “Look at this. Here’s what my sister writes.” She did not offer to show the letter, but huskily read forth its contents:
“‘London, September 30.
“‘My dear Cora: I don’t know whether you will thank me or not, but I feel that some one ought to warn you, if only that you may pull yourself together to meet what is coming. Your house is built of cards, and it is only a question of days, perhaps of hours, when it will be pushed over. Your husband is not the heir, after all. I am truly in great grief at the thought of what this will mean to you, and I can only hope that you will believe me when I sign myself,
“‘Your sincerely affectionate sister,
“‘Frances.’”
The two women exchanged a tense look in which sheer astonishment encountered terror, and mingled with it.
“No, I know nothing of this,” faltered Edith, more in response to the other’s wild eyes than to the half-forgotten inquiries that had prefaced the reading of the letter.
“No trick of a child, eh? What do they call it, posthumous?” Cora panted, still with the rough voice which had shaken off the yoke of tuition.
Edith lifted her head. “That is absurd,” she answered, curtly.
As they confronted each other thus, a moving shadow outside caught their notice. Instinctively turning their eyes, they beheld through the glass a stranger, a slender young man with a soft hat of foreign fashion, striding across the lawn away from the house. He held his head high in the air, and they could see that the hands carried stiffly outstretched at his sides were clenched.
“He struts across the turf as if he owned it,” said Edith, clutching vaguely at the meaningless relief which this interruption seemed to offer.
But Mrs. Edward had sunk info the chair, and buried her face in her black-gloved hands.