"'Tis going to be a handsome year for partridges, too," he said. "But there, my lady, his lordship of late never seemed to care for partridges so much as he belonged. I remember when he was a youngster he'd regular walk me off my feet, as the saying is, after they birds. And he was uncommon fond of land-rails. Yes, it always seemed to give him a sort of extra pleasure, as you might say, when he could get a shot at a land-rail."
The reproach that was implied in the farmer's first words was mitigated by these reminiscences of Tony as a boy, and Dorothy thought that if her son had lived he would already be over six years old and within measurable distance of shooting his first land-rail in the company of the burly farmer beside her. Her son! Would it have made any difference to Tony if he had had an heir? Ought she to thank God or reproach Him for her childlessness?
Three days later Mr. Beadon sang for the late earl a requiem at Clarehaven church. Whoever should be the new owner of Clare—nobody had materialized from that mysterious firm of Reinhardt & Co.—he was not yet flaunting his proprietorship. The mourners passed slowly through the somber groves of pines and looked back at the empty house across the short herbage burnished by the drought of August, and the house empty and solemn, perhaps more solemn because it had not been dressed for grief, eyed with all its windows their progress seaward.
It would be cynical to say that at such a moment Mr. Beadon derived a positive pleasure from conducting a mass of requiem for the dead earl, and if for a moment he regarded with a kind of gloomy triumph Squire Kingdon's inevitable conformity to the majestic ritual of woe expressed by the catafalque from which depended the dead earl's hatchment, he made up by the grave eloquence of his funeral oration for any fleeting pettiness. The windows of the little church on the cliff were wide open to the serene air, and if ever the preacher fell mute for a space to recover from his emotion the plaint of the tide was heard in a monody above the mourners' tears; but above the preacher's voice, above all the sounds of nature in communion with human grief, there was continuously audible a gay chattering of birds among the tombs, of whinchats and stonechats that were mobilizing along these cliffs, unaware that there was anything very admirable or very adventurous about their impending migration. A cynic listening to those birds might have criticized the rector's sermon for its exaggeration of the spirit in which the young earl had set out to Flanders; a cynic might have given himself leave to doubt if the fifth Earl of Clarehaven was inspired by the same spirit as inspired Sir Gilbert Clare to defend Rhodes against the Moslem; but, whatever the spirit in which he had set forth, no cynic could impugn the spirit in which he had died; no living man, indeed, had any longer the right to sneer at his frailties and follies or to condemn his vices and his extravagance. Besides, a cynic contemporary with Sir Gilbert Clare may have questioned the spirit in which the Hospitaller had watched the cliffs of Devon fade out in the sunset. Who knows? There were stonechats and whinchats then as now.
On the morning after the requiem Dorothy was confronted with the possibility of an event that in its significance, should it come to fruition, would obliterate all that had happened in the past and would provide her in the future with a task so tremendous that she almost fell on her knees then and there to pray for strength and wisdom to sustain it. This was the possibility that she was going to have a child.
Such a prospect changed every plan for the future that she had been making and destroyed her freedom in the very moment it had been given back to her by the death of her husband. Her intention of proving to Harry Tufton that she could again be a favorite of the public must now be relinquished; her ambition to withdraw haughtily from the protection of Lord Chatfield must presumably be abandoned. Yet need they? She should not be too impulsive. Who now except herself had the right to say a word about her child's future? Who else could claim to be the guardian of its destiny? If she was right about her condition, she should rejoice that Tony was dead. If he had been alive and in that mood he was in before the outbreak of war solved his future so rapidly and so completely, this wonderful prospect would only have led to recriminations, even to open hatred. It would have been he who had robbed their child of its inheritance, and she could never have refrained from taunting him with his egotism. Nor was it likely that he would have been reformed by the prospect of being a father; he had not shown much inclination that way in the early years of their marriage; and even if for a while he had changed his habits, he would gradually have relapsed, and, moreover, with his genial and indulgent character he would have held out not merely a bad, but also an attractive, example, which would doubtless have been eagerly and assiduously imitated by any child of his. Yes, but now the future lay in her hands ... and meanwhile she must not be too sure that she was going to have a child at all, nor, even if it were established that she was, must she make too many plans in advance, because everything would be ruled by whether it was a boy or a girl. If it should be a girl, she might go back to the stage next year; she would only be thirty-one next March. It was odd how much younger thirty-one seemed than thirty. But if it should be a boy ... well, even if it should be a boy, why should she not go back to the stage and by her own exertions keep him, educate him, prepare him to be what he must be—landless, houseless, moneyless, but still the sixth Earl of Clarehaven? Stoic, indeed, should be his training, and his nobility should be won as well as conferred.
Several days of uncertainty went by, and finally Dorothy decided to ask Doctor Lane his opinion of her condition. He was a very old man now and no longer in practice, but at least he would know how to keep a secret, and a secret she intended his opinion to remain at present. Already plans were seething in her head for the immediate future, and when Doctor Lane assured her that she was going to have a baby, without saying a word even to the dowager she left next day for London.
Dorothy, who had been fancying that Tony's family wanted to be rid of her, soon found that, on the contrary, they would not let her alone, and when the lease expired at Michaelmas and while she was still wondering where she was going to live next, she received an invitation to join the dowager, Bella, and Lady Jane at the Chatfield town mansion in Grosvenor Square. It appeared that Lady Jane had by this time become so inextricably entangled in unknitted wool that the only way she could disentangle herself was by coming up to town to continue there with proper help the preparation of mittens against the winter cold.
"Not that it will be necessary," everybody said, "but it's as well to be prepared, and of course it might drag on till the spring."
The dowager, who had been worked up by her sister to feel that even though she had given a son to England she was still in debt, and Bella were among the twenty ladies collected by Lady Jane to make mittens, and the spinster was anxious to add Dorothy to her flock, for what between wool and ladies she was become very pastoral. So great pressure was put on Dorothy to make mittens, too. Uncle Chat was very penitent for his behavior over the jointure, and he now insisted that the money Dorothy had shared with her mother-in-law should be returned to her. Had it not been for her condition, she would have taken pleasure in refusing this; in the circumstances she accepted it, but she still did not say a word about her pregnancy, for reasons compounded of superstition and pride. Her experience of child-bearing had destroyed her self-confidence and she felt that she could not bear to have a great fuss made about her and to be installed in state at Chatfield Hall to wait there doing nothing through all this anxious winter of war. Nor did the manufacture of mittens in Grosvenor Square appeal to her. Moreover, it was possible that the news would not be welcome. She could not have borne to see Uncle Chat's face fall again at the prospect of having to support a grandnephew of the same rank as himself, and though she did not think that the dowager would attempt to interfere, or that she would be anything but delighted and tactful, there was the chance that after her son's death she might arrogate to herself a right to spoil her grandson. If Dorothy accepted for him the charity of his grandmother's family, she could not avoid admitting the dowager to the privilege of maternity; but if during the months of expectation she kept close her secret and if it were a boy, untrammeled by any obligations she should be at liberty to make her own decision about his up-bringing. More and more she was forming all her plans to fit the future of a boy, and one of her chief reasons for not relying upon the good will of the family was her desire to spare this son prenatal coddling by coddling herself.