They passed out of the church and stood looking down into the lap of the fair landscape outspread before them, talking of other ancestors: of Richard, the second earl, who married the daughter of a marquis and saw Clarehaven disfranchised in 1832, by which time the borough was so rotten that there was nothing perceptible of it except a few seaweed-covered stones at low tide; it was he who destroyed a couple of good farms to provide himself with a park worthy of his rank, which he inclosed with a stone wall and planted trees, the confines of which his descendants now tried proudly to trace in the wintry haze. Lest any want of patriotism should be imputed to the second earl, Mr. Beadon reminded his listeners of how Geoffrey, the third earl, did his duty to his country, first as a member of Parliament for one of the divisions of Devonshire, when he showed the Whigs that the disfranchisement of his borough was not enough to keep a Clare out of Parliament, and afterward as Lord Lieutenant of the county; his duty to his sovereign by acting as Vice-Chamberlain to her Majesty's household. Of his son Gilbert, the fourth earl, enough has been said; though it may be added here that he sold Hopley Hall and many acres besides.
"On the whole, though, I think he was right," said Mr. Beadon. "These Radicals, you know."
"Come and have lunch with us," the dowager invited.
It would be the last independent hospitality she could offer at Clare Court.
II
While the dowager was presiding over lunch at Clare for the last time, while her daughters were getting more and more openly excited about the arrival of their sister-in-law, and while even Mr. Beadon partook of their excitement to such an extent that he ate much less than usual, Dorothy was sitting down to lunch in the restaurant-car of the Western express. Her old life was being left behind more rapidly and with less regret than the country through which the train was traveling. Happiness always widens the waist of an hour-glass. Dorothy was so happy in being a countess that on this railway journey time and space passed with equal speed; and she looked so happy that all those who recognized her or were informed by one of the waiters who she was commented upon her radiant air. They decided with that credulous sentimentality imported into Great Britain with Hengist and Horsa that she must be very deeply in love with her husband; no one suspected that she might be more deeply in love with herself. The head waiter, anxious to pay his own humble tribute to the happy pair, removed the vase of faded flowers from the table they occupied and put in its place another vase of equally faded flowers. If he could have changed the lunch as easily, no doubt he would have done so, but train lunches are as immemorial as elms, and it would have taken more than the marriage of a Vanity girl to a Devonshire nobleman to persuade the Great Western Railway Company that sauce tartare is not the only condiment, and that there are more fish in the sea than the anemic brill.
In days now mercifully forever fled Dorothy had often admired with a touch of envy the select minority of the human race that seemed able to obtain from the staff of a great railway station all the attention it wanted. Now she had entered that select minority, and perhaps nothing brought home more sharply the fact that she was a countess than the attitude of the station-master at Exeter.
"Welcome back to the West, my lord," he said to Clarehaven, who thanked him for his good wishes with the casual rudeness that minor officials of all countries find so attractive in their acknowledged patrons.
A perspiring woman with a little boy in her arms clutched the station-master's sleeve and begged to be informed if the express that was now lying along the platform like a great sleek snake was the slow train to whatever insignificant market-town she was bound. It was annoying for the station-master to have his little chat with Lord Clarehaven interrupted like this, especially by a woman who seemed under the impression that he was a porter. However, the official possessed a store of nobility from which to oblige an importunate inferior, and majestically he condescended to reveal that the slow train would leave in half an hour from the obscure platform it haunted. The station-master was forthwith invited to look after a much-dinted tin box while the perspiring and anxious creature's little boy was accommodated in the cloak-room; before he could protest she had darted off.
"Wonderful what they expect you to do for them, isn't it?" he laughed, with the lordly magnanimity that once inspired the English nation with confidence in the capacity of its chosen representatives to rule the world. At this moment a porter announced that his lordship's car was in the station-yard.