ALICE, COUNTESS OF BECTIVE
THE SUNDERED STREAMS
CHAPTER I
The English language, flexible and rich though it be, lacks words in which to convey the subtler social distinctions. We have had to go abroad for ‘nouveau-riche’ and ‘parvenu,’ to say nothing of ‘Philistia,’ ‘Bohemia,’ the ‘demi-monde,’ and all the other geographical names that we have taken from the atlas of the human world to describe some small corner in our own little parish. But, as our civilization grows more and more complex, so does our borrowed vocabulary grow less and less adequate, until nowadays we find not a few fine differences in our microcosm which no word of our own or of any other nation avails to identify. The ‘Arrived’ and the ‘New-rich’ are familiar figures, but what of those many families who suddenly become wealthy and prominent after many generations of well-bred obscurity? They cannot fairly be described as ‘nouveau-riche’ or ‘parvenu’; they have been there all the time, though not in evidence; to brand them with the stigma of novelty would be manifestly unfair. They have antiquity without importance—a vast difference, in the eyes of social astronomers, between them and the blazing stars of wealth that so suddenly emerge from the black night of genealogical non-existence. As well compare a dazzling meteor, here and gone in a flash, with a genuine star which, after æons of inconspicuousness, abruptly swells into a luminary of the first magnitude. To describe such fixed lights in our English hemisphere a new word must first be coined in another language, and then borrowed. Such people are not ‘nouveau-riche’; they are ‘renrichis.’ And to this class belonged the Dadds of Darnley-on-Downe—that obscure dynasty from which it is now necessary to show the gradual genesis, through many quiet generations, of Kingston Darnley, its apostate offspring.
Among soft Kentish meadows sleeps the little metropolis of Darnley-on-Downe. It lies on the grassy plain like a neat poached egg on a vast green plate, and, over all, the blue vault of heaven makes a domed lid. The Downe meanders placidly at the foot of its gardens, and comfortable little Georgian houses speak of agelong ease and decent leisure. Darnley-on-Downe has no local peer, no local palace; rank and fashion, therefore, are represented only by these dignified dwellings of red brick, each enclosed in shrubberies of rose and laurel and lilac, each tenanted by some family well known for generations in Darnley-on-Downe.
As Cranford was, as Highbury was, so also was Darnley-on-Downe—placid, happy and exclusive, intolerant of all new-comers and of all change. Mrs. John succeeded Mrs. Joshua, and Mr. Reuben Mr. James; and no outsider was ever permitted to disturb the orderly dynasties that so long had ruled in the little town. Crowns fell, but the serenity of Darnley-on-Downe remained unruffled, and the collapse of the Corsican ogre took no higher rank in general conversation than the misdoings of Mrs. Blessing’s Matilda, or the strange theft of Miss Minna Dadd’s Leghorns. So, talking only to themselves, and only of themselves, the aristocracy of Darnley-on-Downe passed inconspicuously from the nursery to the grave, through the leisurely old days when the peace of the country contrasted so strongly with the restless misery of the great cities, and, in the absence of halfpenny morning papers, only rare rumours filtered down into the provinces of a young Queen gradually making her seat secure on a dishonoured and endangered throne.
Nowadays Cranford, probably, plays pit, and motors hoot beneath the walls of Donwell Abbey. Nowadays clash and clangour fill the one main street of Darnley-on-Downe, and the Georgian houses are being swept away to make room for glassy palaces of art-nouveau design. But, in the days when Fortune swooped so suddenly on the Dadds, only peace and slumber haunted the Market Place and St. Eldred’s.
Clean, humble, small, and quiet, the cottages and shops of the working-classes lined the broad pavement, with here a neat bank fronted by Corinthian pilasters, and there a rambling, wide-mouthed inn, haunted by loafing dogs and ostlers full of leisure. Then came the church, solid and unassuming, very essence made visible of that orderly if unimpassioned spirit that then possessed the Church of England. Under its shadow, flanked by tall clipped obelisks of yew, squatted the solid square of the vicarage, with green lawn and beds of roses leading down to the wicket that opened on the roadway. And beyond this again began a wide, ancient avenue of limes, fragrant and tranquil, on whose either side stretched that series of red-brick houses in which the Upper Ten of Darnley-on-Downe discreetly led its days, and formed an aristocracy no less rigid, no less zealous for birth and tradition than that higher world called ‘county,’ with which it had nothing to do, and yet so much in common. St. Eldred’s was the name of this provincial faubourg, and the wayfarer, passing down its green length, might divine its exclusive character from the lack of any invidious distinction made between the houses. The identity of each was kept sacred for the elect, and the outsider was to know nothing. In our own assertive time each gate would bear a curly Gothic title—‘Chatsworth,’ ‘Arundel,’ ‘Sandringham’ would gratify our loyal eyes. In those days Mrs. Blessing knew Miss Dadd’s house, and Miss Dadd knew Mrs. Blessing’s. This knowledge was held to be amply sufficient, and it was even felt that to share it with the unprivileged world at large would be profane and vulgar. Thus the unguided stranger would have travelled uninstructed past gateway after gateway, past trim red wall after trim red wall, without being able to attribute any definite personality to the dweller in each cloistered precinct. And therefore he must necessarily have passed on his way without gathering any idea of the extent to which the Dadds dominated St. Eldred’s.
All the dwellers in these houses lived in a small way, and all of them drew their incomes from some retail trade. ‘County’ people, from their own high circle, contemplating these lesser worlds, would never have guessed the intense and silent arrogance with which, in turn, these lesser worlds looked down on the struggling aspirants from beneath, on the new and unknown persons who painfully fought to win a footing in St. Eldred’s. But, in the close ring of this aristocracy, the Dadds were certainly the ruling dynasty. Had the wayfarer been privileged with a guide, he would have learned that every fourth house in St. Eldred’s enshrined a Dadd or the relation of a Dadd. Here dwelt Mrs. Reuben Dadd; yonder Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Dadd; and, not a stone’s-throw farther, was the house of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. As for the head of the family, Mr. Dadd, with his consort, dwelt in a stout-pillared edifice which even an uninstructed stranger must have seen to be the residence of a presiding Power.