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,”