But now, at a stroke, the great fact of sex came rushing in to affect these young girls, who had played with it in a light unknowing way, but had never felt it. They could amuse themselves, and each other, with the amorous advances of Bobby Trench, but the fact that Nancy had omitted to tell Joan of John Spence's visit was portentous, slight as the omission might seem. Their habitual intercourse was one of intimate humour, varied by frank disputes, which never touched the close ties that bound them. But this was a subject on which they could neither joke nor quarrel. It was likely to alter the relations that had always existed between them, if it was not faced at once.
It was impossible for either of them not to face it. For the whole of their lives each had known exactly what was in the mind of the other. Each knew now, and the knowledge could not be ignored.
"Well, he was awfully nice," said Nancy, rather as if she were saying something she did not want to. "I liked him better than ever. But he sent his love to you."
"I don't see why you shouldn't have told me that he had come," said Joan.
But she saw very well, and in the light of her seeing John Spence ceased to be the openly admired friend of her and Nancy's childhood, and became something quite different.
CHAPTER II
A VULGAR THEFT
In the great square dining-room at Kencote the Squire was sitting over his wine, with his eldest and youngest sons.
From the walls looked down portraits of Clintons dead and gone, and of the horses and dogs that they had loved, as well as some pictures that by-gone owners of Kencote had brought back from their travels, or bought from contemporary rising and since famous artists. There were some good pictures at Kencote, but nobody ever took much notice of them, except a visitor now and then.
Yet their presence had its effect on these latest members of a healthy, ancient line. No family portraits went back further than two hundred years, because Elizabethan Kencote, with nearly all its treasures of art and antiquity, had been burnt down, and Georgian Kencote built in its place. Even Georgian Kencote had suffered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the hands of a rich and progressive owner; rooms had been stripped of panelling, windows had been enlarged; and, but for a few old pieces here and there, the furniture was massive but ugly. The Clintons were as old as any commoner's family in England, and had lived at Kencote without any intermission for something like six hundred years; but there was little to show it in their surroundings as they were at present. Only the portraits of the last six or seven generations spoke mutely but insistently of the past, and their prototypes were as well-known by name and character to their descendants as if they had been known in the flesh.
To us, observing Edward Clinton, twentieth century Squire of Kencote, with the eldest son who would some day succeed him, and the youngest son, who had taken to one of those professions to which the younger sons of a line undistinguished for all except wealth and lineage had taken as a matter of course throughout long generations, this background of family portraits is full of suggestion. One might ask how much of the continuity of life and habit it represents is stable, how much of it dependent upon fast-changing circumstance. How far is this robust elderly man, living on his lands and desiring to live nowhere else, and the handsome younger man, whose life has been spent in the centre of all modern happenings—how far are they what they appear to be, representative of the well-to-do classes of modern England; how far is their attitude to the life about them affected by ideas inherent in their long descent? Are they really of the twentieth century, or in spite of superficial modernity, of a time already passed away?
One might say that the life lived by the Squire was the same life, in all but accidentals, as that of the squires who had gone before him, and whose portraits hung on the walls, and that it would be lived in much the same way by the son who was to come after him. And so it was. But the lives of those dead squires had been part of the natural order of things of their time. Their lands had provided for it, and of themselves would provide for it no longer. It was only by the accident of our Squire being a rich man, and being able to leave his son a rich man, that either of them could go on living it. To this extent his life was not based upon his descent, and was indeed as much cut off from that of the previous owners of Kencote as if he had been a man of no ancestry at all, whose wealth, gained elsewhere, enabled him to enjoy an exotic existence as a country gentleman. If wealth disappeared the long chain would be broken, for a reason that would not have broken it before.
But, when that is said, there still remains the whole ponderous weight of tradition, which makes of him something different from the rich outsider who, with no more than a generation or two behind him, or perhaps none at all, comes in to take the place of the dispossessed owner whose land alone will no longer support his state. What that counts for in inherited benevolence and sense of responsibility, qualified by strange spots of blindness where the awakened conscience of a community is beginning to see more clearly, it would be difficult to gauge. What one may say is that some flower whose perfume one can distinguish should be produced of a plant so many centuries rooted; that twenty generations of men preserved from the struggle for existence, and having power over their fellows, should end in something easily distinguishable from a man of yesterday; that such old established gentility should have some feelings not shared by the common mass, some peculiar sense of honour, some quality not dependent upon wealth alone, some clear principle emerging from the mists of prejudice and the mere dislike of all change.
So we come back to the Squire sitting with his sons over their wine, their pictured forebears looking down on them from the walls, and wonder a little whether there is anything in it all, or whether we are merely in the company of a man to whom chance has given the opportunity of ordering his life on obviously opulent lines, like many another with no forebears that he knows anything of.
Dick Clinton had held a commission in His Majesty's Brigade of Guards up to the time of his marriage four years before, and had been very much in the swim of everything that was going on in the world of rank and fashion. Now he lived for the most part quietly at the Dower House, which lay just across the park of Kencote, and busied himself with country pursuits and the management of the estate to which he would one day succeed. He was beginning ever so little to put on flesh, to look more like his father, to lose his interest in the world outside the manor of Kencote and the adjacent lands that went with it. But he was not yet a stay-at-home, as the Squire had long since become, and he and his wife had just returned from a fortnight in London, well primed with the interests of their former associates.
"Have you heard about this business at Brummels?" he said, as he passed the decanter.
The Squire frowned at the mention of Brummels. "No. What business?" he asked.
"Lady Sedbergh has had a pearl necklace stolen. It's said to be worth ten thousand pounds; say five. She says that she kept it in a secret hiding-place, and the only person who could have known where it was is Rachel Amberley. She accuses her of stealing it. There's going to be a pretty scandal."
The Squire frowned more ferociously than ever. "That's the sort of thing that goes on amongst people like that!" he said with disgust. "They have no more sense of honour than a set of convicts. A vulgar theft! And there's hardly one of the whole lot that wouldn't be capable of it."
"Well, I don't know about that," said Dick; "but if Mary Sedbergh can be believed, there's not much doubt that Mrs. Amberley walked off with it. It seems that there's an old hiding-place in the morning-room at