It was difficult, considering the circumstances in which Dorothy had parted from Sylvia and Olive, for any of the girls to avoid a feeling of constraint when they met again; Dorothy, for her part, had to make a great effort not to let her nervousness give an impression that she was being reserved with her old friends. Lonsdale, however, who had fortunately been invited, was very talkative, and Tony was in boisterous spirits, so boisterous, indeed, that once or twice Dorothy looked at him in surprise. When he returned her glance defiantly she wondered if she had not made a mistake in her policy; if before consenting to come down to her husband's level she had properly safeguarded herself. No doubt in spite of her disapproval he would have gambled and drunk and made an ass of himself with the Mainwarings and the Foster-ffrenches, but by withholding herself she would have retained, at any rate, as much power over him as would have kept him outwardly deferential to his wife. Now he was no longer afraid of her.
Dorothy was roused from her abstraction by hearing herself addressed as Cousin Dorothy by Lonsdale. He was in a corner with Sylvia, and they were amusing themselves, presumably at her expense; Dorothy darted an angry look at Sylvia, who shook her head with so mocking a disclaimer that Dorothy gave up the notion of confiding in her old friend. Sylvia evidently still regarded her with hostility and contempt, and was as ready to pour ridicule upon her now as she used to be in the dressing-room on tour. On tour! The days on tour crowded upon her memory. From the corner where Sylvia and Lonsdale were chatting she heard Lily's name mentioned. What was that? Lily had married a croupier in Rio de Janeiro? But how unimportant it was who married what in this world. After so short a time, life lost its tender hues of sunrise or sunset and became garish or dim. On tour! The funny old life trickled confusedly past her vision like a runaway film, and she took Olive's hand affectionately. Olive was as sympathetic as if she had never been treated so heartlessly that day in Brighton, as eager to hear that Dorothy was happy, as eager to accept her assurances that she was. Tears stood in her eyes when she was told about the baby; but somehow her sympathy was not enough for Dorothy, who only awarded her a half-hearted sort of confidence that was sentimentalized to suit the listener. If she could have confided in Sylvia she would have told the story without sparing herself, but Sylvia had snubbed her; and, anyway, the past was not to be recaptured by talking about it.
Notwithstanding Sylvia's indifference, Dorothy went out of her way to invite her often to Curzon Street that autumn and early winter. She was fascinated by her play at baccarat and chemin de fer; she wondered upon what mysterious capital she was drawing, for, though her name was not coupled with any man who would pay her debts, she was apparently able to lose as much money as she chose. It seemed impossible that it should be her own money; but so many things about Sylvia seemed impossible. In January Olive showed symptoms of a tendency to consumption; Sylvia, without waiting an instant to win back any of her losses, took her off to Italy for a long rest.
"I despise Tony, and she despises me," Dorothy thought. "But isn't she right?"
She looked round her at the drawing-room of 129 Curzon Street, where in a foliage of tobacco smoke the faces of the gamblers stared out like fruit, and upon the green tablecloth the cards lay like fallen petals. Was not Sylvia right to despise her for encouraging Mrs. Mainwaring and Captain Keith and Mrs. Foster-ffrench and half a dozen others like them? Was not Sylvia right to despise her for setting out as a countess so haughtily and coming down to this? How she must have laughed when Olive told her about the parting in Brighton, and how little she would believe her tales of rural triumphs like the meet at Five Tree Farm. Sylvia probably considered that she had found her true level in seeing that her gambling guests were kept well supplied with refreshments.
In March even Clarehaven grew tired of baccarat with Captain Keith and the rest of them, and one morning a big new six-cylinder Lee-Lonsdale was driven up to 129 Curzon Street by the junior member of the firm, who wanted to advertise his wares on the Continent. Clarehaven's man and Dorothy's maid took the heavy luggage by train; the car with Dorothy, Lonsdale, Clarehaven, and a chauffeur swept like an arpeggio the road from London to Dover, transhipped to Calais, and made a touring-car record from Paris to Monte Carlo, whence Lonsdale, after booking some orders, returned to England without it. Tony lost five thousand pounds at roulette, a small portion of which he recovered over pigeons. He would probably have lost much more had not Dorothy told him, on a rose-hung night of stars and lamplight, that she was going to have another baby and that she must go back to Clare.
The prospective father was so pleased with the news that he set out to beat the record established by Lonsdale on the way down, drove into a poplar-tree, and smashed the car. Dorothy had a miscarriage and lay ill for a month at a small village between Grenoble and Lyons. Tony was penitent; but he was obviously bored by having to spend this idle month in France, and as soon as Dorothy was well enough to travel and he had assured himself that she was not nervous after the accident, he drove northward faster than ever. They reached Clare at the end of May.
II
The bluebells were out when Dorothy came home, their pervasive sweetness sharpened by the pungency of young bracken; even as sometimes the heavenly clouds imitate the hills and valleys of earth or lie about at sunset like islands in a luminous and windless ocean, so now earth imitated heaven, and the bluebells lay along the woodland like drifts of sky. May was not gone when Dorothy came back; the cuckoo was not even yet much out of tune; the fallow deer did not yet display all their snowy summer freckles; the whitethroat still sang to his lady sitting close in the nettles by the orchard's edge; apple-blossom was still strewn upon the lengthening grass; the orange-tip still danced along the glades; the red and white candles upon the horse-chestnuts were not yet burned out. It was still May; but June like a grave young matron stood close at hand, and May like a girl grown tired of her flowers and of her finery would presently fall asleep in her arms. And like the merry month Dorothy pillowed her head upon the green lap of June. For several weeks she made no allusion to the accident on the way home from Monte Carlo; nor, beyond the perpetually manifest joy she took in the seasonable pageant, did she give any sign of her distaste for the way she and Tony had spent the past year. The problem of what was to happen next autumn was not yet ripe for discussion, and in order to enjoy fully the present peace Dorothy persuaded Clarehaven to accept an invitation to go fishing in Norway, after which he would camp with the yeomanry for three weeks; and then another year would have to be catered for so that not one minute of it should be wasted—in other words, that it should be squeezed as dry as an orange to extract from it the last drop of pleasure. Tony wanted her to come with him to Norway, but she made her health an excuse and sent him off alone.
In July the countess and the dowager were pacing the turf that ran by the edge of that famous golden border now in its prime. The rich light of the summer afternoon flattered the long line of massed hues which had been so artfully contrived. The unfamiliar beauty of the bronzed Himalayan asphodels, of citron kniphofias from Abyssinia and sulphur-lilies from the Caucasus, of ixias tawny as their own African lions, of canary-colored Mexican tigridias and primrose-hooded gladioli that bloom in the rain forest of the Victoria Falls, mingled with the familiar forms of lemon-pale hollyhocks and snapdragons, with violas apricot-stained, and with many common yellow flowers of cottage gardens to which the nurserymen had imparted a subtle and aristocratic shade.