And who should have contradicted her?
The green miles were rolled up like a length of silk; milestones fluttered like paper in the wake of the car; and by five o'clock they were driving through the lodge gates. Mrs. Crawley with nine little Crawleys, the fruit of Mr. Crawley's spare time from the peach-house at Clare, flung a few primroses into the car and cheered their new lady. Dorothy thought the primroses were very pretty and stood up to nod her thanks; she did not realize that even an earl's estate in Devonshire might find it hard to produce so many primroses in the month of January; but she looked so beautiful standing up in the car that Mrs. Crawley felt the exertions of her large and ubiquitous family were well rewarded. The car leaped forward again, followed by shrill cheers that lingered upon the evening air and echoed many times in Dorothy's heart. The spellbound hush of landed property held earth in thrall, and the countess wished to enjoy it.
"Not too fast through the park," she begged.
The car slowed down; at the top of the first incline from which the house was visible it stopped to give Dorothy a moment in which to admire her great possessions. The whole sky was plumed with multitudinous small clouds rosy as the ruffled throats of linnets in spring; on the summit of the last long incline before them Clare Court with its gardens and terraces and gleaming pergola dreamed in the enchantment of the wintry sunsets; in the dark groves on either side the trunks of the pines glowed like pillars of fire. Nothing broke the stillness except a mistlethrush singing very loud from an oak-tree close at hand, and when the bird was silent the lowing of a cow far away on some other earth, it seemed. Suddenly from woodland near the drive came a sound like pattering leaves; a line of fallow deer rippled forth and broke into startled groups that nosed the air now vibrant with the noise of dogs approaching.
"How lovely!" Dorothy exclaimed. "You never told me there were deer," she added, reproachfully, as if the absence of deer had been the one thing that all this time had kept her from accepting Clarehaven's hand. "And how divine it must be here in summer."
"Well, if you hadn't been such a timid little deer, we might have been here, anyway, last October."
Dorothy might have retorted that if Clarehaven had not been so bold a hart she might have been here the summer before last; but she did not remind him of that little flat round the corner, because the herd dashed off to a more remote corner of the park at sight of several dogs scampering down the drive with loud yaps of excitement, and Tony's sisters running behind. Dorothy jumped out of the car to meet her relations for the first time, glad to encounter them like this with dogs barking and so much of the conversation directed to keeping them in order, for she had half expected in that preludial hush to behold the dowager materializing from the misty dusk like a gigantic genie from an uncorked jar.
"Only two hours from Exeter. Pretty good for the old boneshaker, what?" said Tony. "Deacock drove her along like a thoroughbred."
The chauffeur touched his cap and, smiling complacently, leaned over to pat the tires of the car.
"Mother's waiting at the house," said Arabella. "She would have driven down in the chaise to meet Dorothy, but she didn't know exactly when you'd be here and was so afraid of catching cold just when she most wanted not to."