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 ships laden with food and wine; in the course of his seafaring he had discovered a cove on the north coast of Devonshire 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 passing 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. Sir Anthony, the third baronet, took after his great-grandfather and dreamed of sailing north to help the Earl of Mar in 1715. He must often have stood in that now walled-up doorway under the escutcheon of his house and gazed northward between the uplands to the sea; luckily for his successors the days were long past when a Clare could go on board his own ship lying at anchor in Clarehaven as snug as a horse in his stable. Sheriffmuir was far from Devon, but the news of that ambiguous battle reached the baronet before he had taken a rash step forward for a lost cause. Every night for thirty years he was carried to bed drunk, and, though he was never too drunk to sip from a goblet which had not been previously passed across a finger-bowl to the king over the water, he was too drunk and gouty to come out in '45. The nephew who succeeded him two years later worked hard for the second George to atone for his uncle's disaffection, and the family came to be favorably regarded at court. Sir William was a bachelor and hated the sea. When not at St. James's he used to live in Clare Lodge, a trim, red-brick house he had built for himself about a mile eastward of the family mansion, overlooking the hamlet of Little Cherrington and many desirable acres of common land.
Mr. Beadon was discoursing of Sir William when the dowager paused to admire the view from Clare Lodge. An excellent tenant had lately vacated it, and she was wondering how long it would be before she and the girls should be living there. She turned her attention once more to the rector's mild criticism of Sir William, who had not attempted to make Clarehaven a real borough, but who had bought Little Cherrington, and inclosed all the acres he coveted. When he died in 1764, his cousin Anthony enjoyed a tolerably rich inheritance, to which he added by marrying a Miss Arabella Hopley with a dowry of £10,000. This lady, by the death of her brother in a hunting accident, some years later became heiress of Hopley Hall and three thousand acres of good land adjoining the Clare estate; Sir Anthony loyally sent the two members for his borough, which by now was reduced to three or four cottages moldering at the tide's edge, to vote for the government; and on being rewarded in the year 1796 with the barony of Clarehaven, he decided to finish Clare Court. Before his succession he had spent a good deal of time at the famous health resort of Curtain Wells, and he was not satisfied with the sea view that did not include sunshine; it was he who pulled down the kitchens and stables behind and built the present front of Clare Court. His son Gilbert was prominent during the Napoleonic wars for seeing that his tenantry kept a lookout for Bonaparte; and by putting down smuggling he performed a vicarious penance for the deeds of his ancestors. It was he who completed Clare Court; and in 1816, ten years before his death, he was created Earl of Clarehaven and Viscount Clare, a peer of that United Kingdom lately achieved by Pitt with such a mixture of glory and shame. To mark his appreciation of the divine favor the first earl built at Little Cherrington a chapel-of-ease to Clarehaven church, the congregation of which by that time was the three electors of the borough. He then bought the living of Great Cherrington, and presented this shamrock of a cure to his natural son, who became rector of Clarehaven-cum-Cherringtons. This gentleman paid a curate £40 a year to look after the three churches and was last seen in an intoxicated condition on the quay of Boulogne harbor.
The present incumbent, who was anxious that the dowager should not object to a step up he proposed to take next Easter by introducing colored vestments at Little Cherrington and linen vestments at Great Cherrington for those very early services that fierce Squire Kingdon would never get up to attend, perhaps alluded to the history of his predecessor in order to emphasize his own superiority. It was all very discreetly done, even to selecting the moment when the two girls were examining a shepherd's sick dog and therefore out of hearing.
"How different from the late lord," Mr. Beadon sighed. "Mrs. Beadon"—the rector paid tribute to his outraged celibacy by never referring to her as his wife—"Mrs. Beadon often wonders why I don't write a special memoir of him."
The dowager gazed affectionately at the chlorotic window by Burne-Jones.
"Perhaps his life was too quiet," she said. "I think the window is enough."
"Claro non clango. But when Mr. Kingdon dies," said the rector, tartly, "I understand that Mrs. Kingdon will erect an organ to his memory."