own father’s house in Berkshire to be head gardener at Caermere. Her fame is indeed irrevocably linked with his, for the tea-rose of his breeding, bearing her maiden-name of the Hon. Florence Denson, is scarcely less well known than this hybrid sweet-briar the Countess of Porlock.
And now, in the third generation, still another lady had for some years enjoyed special property rights in this great glass apartment.
Lady Cressage came into the conservatory from the large morning room, with a large volume in her hand, and an irresolute look on her face. She glanced about at the several couches piled with cushions and furs, at an easy-chair beyond—and yawned slightly. Then she wandered over to a row of early chrysanthemums, and, putting the book under her arm, occupied herself with the destruction of a few tiny beginnings of buds in the lower foliage. In this she employed as pincers the delicately tinted nails of a very shapely finger and thumb, and at the sign of some slight discoloration of these she stopped the work. From a glance at the nails, she went to a musing scrutiny of this whole right hand of hers, holding it up, and turning it from one composition of graceful curves to another. It had been called the most beautiful hand in England, but this morning its owner, upon a brief and rather listless inspection of its charms, yawned again. Finally she seated herself in the chair and, after a languid search for the place in her book, began to read.
Half reclining thus, with the equable and shadowless light of the glass house about her, the young widow made a picture curiously different from any in the library within. All the dead and gone brides of the Torrs had been painted in bright attire; Lady Cressage wore a belted gown of black cloth, unrelieved save by a softened line of white at the throat and wrists. The others, without exception, had signified by elaborate hair-dressing not less than by dutifully vacuous facial expressions, their comprehension of the requirements of the place they had been called upon to fill; Lady Cressage’s bistre hair was gathered in careless fashion to a loose knot at the back of the head, and in her exquisitely modeled face there was no hint whatever of docility or awed submission to any external claims. The profile of this countenance, outlined for the moment against a cluster of vividly purple pleroma blossoms, had the delicacy of a rare flower, but it conveyed also the impression of resolute and enduring force. If the dome above could have generated voices of its own, these would have murmured to one another that here at last was a woman whom Caermere could not break or even easily bend.
In the season of 1892, London had heard a good deal of this lady. She was unknown before, and of her belongings people to this day knew and cared very little. There was a General Kervick enumerated in the retired list, who had vegetated into promotion in some obscure corner of India, and now led an equally inconspicuous existence somewhere in the suburbs—or was it in West Kensington? He had never belonged to a service club, but an occasional man encountered him once in a while at the Oriental, where he was supposed by the waiters to have an exceptional knowledge of peppers and chutneys. The name of his wife had been vaguely associated with charitable committees, or subscription committees, and here and there some one remembered having heard that she was distantly related to somebody. The elder Kervicks never secured a much more definite place in London’s regard—even after this remarkable daughter had risen like a planet to dim the fixed stars of the season.
The credit for having discovered and launched Miss Kervick came generally to be ascribed to Lady Selton, but perhaps this turned upon the fact that she lent her house in Park Lane for the culminating scene in the spectacular triumph of that young person. No doubt there were others who would have placed still bigger houses at the disposal of a bride whose wedding was, in many respects, the most interesting of the year, and some of these may have had as good a claim to the privilege as Lady Selton. As matters turned out, however, they were given no cause to repine. The marriage was not a success, and within one short year Lady Selton herself had grown a little shy about assuming responsibility for it. A year later she was quite prepared to repudiate all share in it, and after that people ceased to remember about it all, until the shock of the tragedy came to stir polite London into startled whisperings.
Hardly within the memory of living folk had a family been dealt such a swift succession of deadly blows as these which were rained upon the Torrs in the first half of 1896.
The Earl of Porlock had been the heir of dukedom since most people could remember, and had got himself called to the House of Lords in his own right, apparently as a kind of protest against his father’s unconscionable longevity, at least a dozen years before his own end came. It was not to be supposed that he desired a peerage for any other reason, since he had never chosen to seek a seat in the House of Commons, and indeed, save upon one occasion connected with ground game, made no use whatever of his legislative powers after they had been given to him. He cared nothing for politics, and read scarcely more in newspapers than in books. Up to middle life, he had displayed a certain tendency toward interest in fat stock and a limited number of allied agricultural topics, but the decline in farming values had turned him from this. In his earlier years, too, he had enjoyed being identified with the sporting set of his class in London, and about the racing circuit, but this association he also dropped out of as he grew older, partly because late nights bored him, partly because he could no longer afford to jeopardize any portion of his income. He came at last to think of his mastership of hounds as his principal tie to existence on land. He liked it all, from the sailing sweep over the highest barrier in an exceptionally rough country, to the smell of the kennels of an early morning across the frozen yards. This life with the horses and dogs, and with the people who belonged to the horses and dogs, offered fewer temptations to the evil temper in his blood than any other, and with growing years his dislike for the wear and tear of getting angry had become a controlling instinct. He continued to use bad language with an appropriate show of fervency, when occasion required, but he had got out of the way of scalding himself with rage inside. He even achieved a grim sort of jocularity toward the close. In the last year of his life a tenant-farmer, speaking to a toast, affirmed of him that “a truer sportsman, nor yet a more humorous and affable nobleman, has never taken the chair at a puppy-walk luncheon within my recollection,” and this tribute to his geniality both pleased and impressed the earl. He was then in his sixty-second year, and he might have lived into a mellowed, and even jovial old age, under the influence of this praise, had there been no unwritten law ending the hunting season in the early spring.
The earl cared very little for otters and rats, and almost nothing at all for salmon, so that when April came he usually went to his yacht, and practically lived aboard it until November. Sometimes he made long cruises in this substantial and comfortable vessel, which he delighted in navigating himself. He was lying in at Bremerhaven, for example, in May, when one of a sheaf of telegrams scattered along the line of North Sea ports in search of him, brought the news that his youngest son Joseph, who had drifted into Mashonaland after the collapse of the Jameson adventure, had been killed in the native rebellion. Upon consideration, the earl could not see that a post-haste return to England would serve any useful end. He sailed westward, however, after some telegraphic communication with England, and made his leisurely way down the Channel and round Cornwall to Milford Haven, where his wont was to winter his yacht, and where most of his crew were at home. The fact that he and the vessel were well known in this port rendered it possible to follow in detail subsequent events.
It was on the 10th of June that Lord Porlock came to anchor in Milford, and went ashore, taking the afternoon train for Shrewsbury. He returned on the 14th, accompanied by his eldest son and heir, Lord Cressage. This latter personage was known only from hearsay at Milford, and local observation of him was therefore stimulated by a virgin curiosity. It was noted that Viscount Cressage—a stalwart and rubicund young man of more than his father’s height, but somewhat less swarthy of aspect—was laboring under very marked depression. He hung about the hotel, during the delay incident upon cleaning up the yacht, taking on new stores and altering some of the sailing gear, in a plainly moping mood, saying little to his father and never a word to any one else. A number of witnesses were able to make it clear that at first he did not intend to sail forth, but was merely bearing his father company while the latter remained in harbor.
The fact of their recent
