So James Dadd, misplaced and ill at ease, passed thus through life with occasional spasmodic attempts at the assumption of a defiant self-complacency. He knew that he was an outcast from St. Eldred’s. Even if he would, he could never now return to the red-brick house of his early years. In the flesh, perhaps, he might, but his spirit could never again be admitted within its doors, could never again be admitted to intimacy by the spirit of St. Eldred’s. Rashly he had cut himself off from his own people, and must henceforth face the fact. Nor, though either diffident or vehement in the spending of his money, could he really contemplate returning to the life of Darnley-on-Downe. He had tasted of headier joys—tasted awkwardly, perhaps, and incompletely, but even so the small-beer on which St. Eldred’s had reared him must for evermore be insipid to his palate. Though now he never heard from his brother Robert, he sympathized with his revolt, and resolved that he, too, could never again have any part in the life of Darnley-on-Downe. And at this point, just after the one brief tragic flash of romance that broke into his life, he came across Lady Kirk-Hammerton.
Lady Kirk-Hammerton was the sonless widow of a second-rate Lord Chancellor. Devoid of wealth or breeding, she and her husband had had recourse to blatancy to emphasize their value. Now that he was dead she redoubled the intensity of her methods, and soon acquired that notoriety which she considered synonymous with fame. Bereft of her husband, there was no reason why people should ever take notice of her again, unless her demeanour forced them to do so. Therefore she set herself heroically to the task of making her existence conspicuous in the eye of the world, with such success that, with the best resolve, nobody could succeed in ignoring her. Physically and metaphorically, she shouted her way from place to place, and her conversation blazed no less obtrusively than her gowns. As for a foil, she felt that her brilliancy needed none, and therefore had no reason for tolerating her daughter’s incorrigible respectability. With the more joy, therefore, did she fall upon James Dadd at Naples, and hurl him, not unwilling, into the company of her undesirable offspring.
But if the daughter emphasized the mother’s mature and vehement charms, so did the mother’s overwhelming presence show up the pale grace of the daughter. Lady Adela Vayne-Kingston was pretty, shrinking, mild, domestic—the very type that, in happier circumstances, would have been most dear to St. Eldred’s. She hated her mother’s loud voice and louder manners; her one hope was to marry someone obscure and gentle, who would remove her from the burning atmosphere of Lady Kirk-Hammerton, in whose train, since her girlhood, she had been dragged hither and thither, never protesting, but always reluctant. James Dadd, for his part, found in Lady Adela a reminiscence of his old home-life. She seemed to him the ghost of peaceful St. Eldred’s, with an added touch of worldly experience and travelled charm. Her character, far from repeating her mother’s, harked back to some obscure ancestress, probably in domestic service, and was so meek and placid as to be the very incarnation of all that James Dadd had been brought up to love and respect. On the other hand, this same gentleness of temperament, which St. Eldred’s considered the hall-mark of good breeding, was believed by Lady Kirk-Hammerton to be especially distasteful to those high circles after which she hankered; and she had long, therefore, been eagerly seeking a chance to be rid of the daughter whom her best efforts had failed to render brazen and clamorous. Her delight, accordingly, surpassed all bounds, when at the end of a week’s acquaintance, James Dadd proposed to Lady Adela, and was thankfully accepted.
Though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd had ceased to subscribe to ‘the Paper,’ they yet had their recognised channels for the reception of news. For the butcher conveyed the events of the world to their cook, and she, in turn, laid edited selections before her mistresses. In this way was brought to their notice the approaching marriage between ‘James Dadd, Esq., of Darnley-on-Downe, and the Lady Adela Vayne-Kingston, daughter of the late Earl of Kirk-Hammerton.’
That afternoon was hurriedly convened a great meeting of the Dadd family to consider this announcement. Unmixed disapproval filled every bosom in the tribe. The engagement was held equivalent to the abdication of James Dadd from the headship of his race. In two ways the proposed marriage was disliked. It was thoroughly unsuitable to a Dadd; it was thoroughly unworthy of a Dadd. Lady Adela was at once too high and too low to be a fair match of James Dadd. Accident had given her a titular position superior to her lover’s, while her birth was in every way disastrously inferior to his own. Even St. Eldred’s had heard something of Lady Kirk-Hammerton, and it was impossible to imagine that her daughter could, by any stretch of courtesy, be called a lady in the true sense of the word. All the Dadd pride of birth rose up against the thought of connection with a girl without a grandfather—a girl, too, whom uninstructed sections of the world might dare to consider her husband’s social superior. It was felt that James Dadd had inflicted a crowning insult on his family in thus threatening to misally it. Mrs. John, Mrs. Reuben, Mrs. Joshua, coincided in the opinion firmly announced by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd; the young Johns, Reubens, and Joshuas, dissented in nothing; only the peccant James’s sister, now a girl of promising beauty, held her own counsel, and decided to write congratulations to her brother and his destined bride. For in her, too, the blood of great-great-great-grandmother Messiter was at its fell work; her soul longed for change and variety and gaiety; and all these things she saw attainable through James’s marriage with the daughter of that notorious Lady Kirk-Hammerton.
But she was too wise to make her heresy public; and the condemnation of James’s choice was passed without protest by the assembled council. An ultimatum was drafted by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and would have been dispatched on the morrow, with the approval of all, had not the morrow brought news that destroyed every hope of reconciliation with the traitor. It was announced that, with royal permission, James Dadd, of Darnley-on-Downe, would in future be known as James Darnley. St. Eldred’s gasped at the wickedness of this public repudiation.
In point of fact it was Lady Adela, gentle and winning, whose vitality had stirred to a great effort, under great pressure, and had risen to urge upon her lover this change of name. She pointed out that to ask a girl to become Lady Adela Dadd was to exact a sacrifice as far beyond mortal power to grant as beyond mortal justice to demand. James Dadd, recognising that he could never hope to be reincluded in the clan whose nominal sovereign he still was, found himself inclined to consider Lady Adela’s plea in a favourable spirit. Together they decided to adopt the more euphonious name of Darnley, and James Dadd hastened to make his decision public, that thus he might at once be finally cut off from any remonstrances or embassies of his family. He judged the temper of St. Eldred’s rightly. His announcement was taken as an irremediable declaration of war. His name was never mentioned again in Darnley-on-Downe, except as that of one deservedly dead and unregretted. The sceptre passed into the capable hands of Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Dadd, and by silent consent it was agreed that no infant henceforth should bear the dishonoured names of James or Robert. Only James Dadd’s young sister remained hopefully loyal to his memory, and when, a year later, the redoubled severity of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd alone betrayed their secret knowledge that a son had been born to Mr. and Lady Adela Darnley, the one acknowledgment of the event that reached the outlaw from Darnley-on-Downe was a surreptitiously-posted letter of his sister’s. If anything could have aggravated the wrath of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd it would have been the knowledge that the infant, that their own great nephew, had been christened, not James, but Kingston.
Kingston Darnley, indeed! There was a name for a child! You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, said the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd; and they were universally felt to have expressed the situation in all its bearings. And thus, from years of corrupting wealth and secret disloyalty, was generated the culminating disgrace of the Dadds, in Kingston Darnley. Kingston Darnley!
Why, why had great-great-great-grandfather Blessing married a Messiter of eccentric tendencies? And what a curse is money! Better decorum and a competence than stalled peacocks and a marriage with the daughters of Heth! It became the fashion in St. Eldred’s to affect, by contrast, a greater poverty than the circumstances of anyone necessitated. To give two cakes at tea became vulgar, and the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd took to going to church with only one Prayer Book between them. Nothing could have induced St. Eldred’s to confess that it knew anything of the Darnleys, and the various steps in Lady Adela’s progress were sternly ignored by a watchful world. Even when Mr. and Lady Adela Darnley entertained a Princess for some charitable function, the only comment made in St. Eldred’s was the tacit one involved in the simultaneous retirement to bed of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. Another outcast, however, was soon added to James and Robert—another topic for the silence of St. Eldred’s. For, after some secret correspondence, James Darnley’s sister eloped from the care of her aunts, and was next heard of under the wing of her brother’s wife in London. Within a year she had married a stockbroker of abundant wealth. The lips of St. Eldred’s snapped on this fulfilment of the disasters brought about by great-great-great-grandmother Messiter. The old dynasty of Dadd was ended in Darnley-on-Downe. The main royal line was wiped out, and the Reuben Dadds reigned in its stead.