Grace Lorraine: a romance

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. — Introducing Grace Lorraine and

Roger Wynyard . . . . i

Chapter I Introducing Grace Lorraine And Roger Wynyard

I T was a hot afternoon in the earlier part of July, 1914.

Roger Wynyard and Grace Lorraine had just finished their tea on the tennis lawn.

The girl was very, very lovely ; her features were patrician in their clear-cut beauty ; her cheeks were as delicate in colour as a wild rose, and in texture as satin ; her hair was glitteringly fair ; she was her name personified.

She was resting, after three hard sets, on a deck chair, and regarding with admiration the splendid young Englishman, who had just shown the hopelessness of the best woman tennis-player's standing up against a first-class man.

He was seated on the grass in front of her, with his hands clasped round his knees, gazing at her rapturously — a tall, strong boy, of three or four and twenty, whose charm lay not so much in right-down handsomeness, as in the expression of frankness and fearlessness wh.ch comes so naturally to those who excel in active sports.

Something seemed to be troubling him, but he had been gazing at her for several minutes before he got it out.

“ What a pity it is that you are so rich, Grace ! "

She looked at him with steady affection in her candid eyes, which were almost violet in the, depth of their blue.

I

“ I know what you mean, Roger, but I can assure you that it is not that which stands in the way. I couldn’t marry you if you did me the honour of asking me once more.”

“ I shan’t have the face to ask you, but do tell me why you have refused me in advance.”

f “ There are two chief reasons — the greatest is that you take no interest in the things which make life worth living. I don’t think you know the name of a single picture which has been painted, or a single book which has been written, by the artists and authors who have been working at Via Pacis for more than twenty years. You do not bestow a thought on these clever people, except as givers of teas in a rather isolated village, and parents of boys and girls of the tennis age. That is one grievance ; and the other is that, because you have a little income of your own, you dawdle through life, pretending that you are going to be a barrister, but really giving up your whole time to sport. I love sport — I enjoy having a game of golf or tennis with you awfully, but I think that it’s a miserable business to go through life thinking of nothing else. I sometimes hardly have the patience to talk to you about it ! ”

“ Steady on, old girl ! Don’t be so jolly cross about it ! ”

“I’m not cross, Roger — it is too difficult to be cross with you. I’m only trying to make you more worthy of yourself.”

“ I hate being worthy of myself ! It’s too much like the Catechism. You are talking to one whose grandfather, in spite of being the dearest chap in the world, has been compelled by the exigences of his profession to talk to yours truly as if he was a Sunday School.”

“ Well, I’ve said my say, Roger, and perhaps you think that I had no right to say it, but you’re the greatest friend I ever had, so I should have been rather a sneak not to say it.”

" Be a sneak about this, Grace.”

” How can you say this, Roger, when you are so red-hot about the Public-School code ? Why doesn’t the Public- School code stop slacking — the sort of slacking you go

Introducing Grace Lorraine 8

“ What a tyrant we are to-day, Grade ! ”

“ Supposing anything was to happen, and your people lost their money — where would you be ? ’’

" I could always enlist."

“ That would be better than the life you’re leading now."

“ I think it’s rather fun your talking like this, Grace, when you’re going to inherit this splendid old place and the lands all round it, as far as you can see ! "

"It is not so odd as it looks. My mother’s father, Senator Falkland, was one of the rich men in the State of Georgia, but when the four years of Civil War were over, he had only a few hundreds a year left. We in England never think about war, but there is such a thing left in the world."

" I’ve heard something about the Falklands. It’s only natural that it should have made you ... I forget the word."

" Morbid ? "

"Yes, that’s it. Cheer up ! I’ll let you take me round your super-tropical garden.”

" Sub-tropical, Roger."

" Sub-tropical garden, and show me the oranges and lemons and those spiky things."

" Aloes ? "

" Yes, aloes, and palm-trees, and all the other things which ought not to be growing here, if it will make you feel better."

The rocky front of the plateau above the sea, on which the house stood, faced due south, and was so protected from other points by an amphitheatre of hills, that almost anything which grows on the Riviera could be made to flourish there in the open air. It was laid out in the Italian style, with paths and terraces, and stairways hewn out of the rock, and its ledges and crevices had been filled with semi-tropical shrubs and flowers, regardless of expense.

This garden was Grace Lorraine’s greatest joy, and Roger Wynyard’s failure to appreciate it was a cardinal sin in her eyes. He tried hard to understand it on this July evening, but it was of no use. Grace was worried over the futility of the country gentleman’s existence.

i*

The best, like Roger’s uncle, took a sympathetic interest in their tenants, but few of them, if they were living on their estates, did anything except enjoy themselves, whether their enjoyment took the form of sport or gardening or breeding prize animals. Most of them, in the days before the war, apart from their pleasures, were content to keep themselves, like their horses, in what they called “ condition.”

She liked them extremely to meet at social functions. They were brave and charming, and, if they were unmarried, reckoned up all the advantages she offered as a wife. But not one of them had ever entered the door of the Via Pacis Fellowship, which represented the solitary attempt to bring this huge peninsula of Devon into touch with the work of the world.

They were drones, and Roger in a way was the worst of them, because the others had the welfare of their estates to look after — if they did look after it — whereas he lived the life which they did, without having anything to look after.

But he had her affection because they had been brought up together since they were children, and he had the most charming disposition of any man she had ever met. For he was generosity and chivalry personified, and had not one trace of “ swank,” though his cricket had made him the idol of Rugby and Oxford, and he was the favourite nephew of the local Earl.

Grace, in her way, was his opposite. For though the County considered her arrogant because she insisted on living her life in her own way, instead of theirs, and refused offers of marriage from the most eligible men on the mere ground that she could not love them, the beautiful heiress of Via Pacis spent her days with the members of the Fellowship and their families exactly as if she were one of themselves. She craved for companionship in her studies, and intellectual society, and recognized that the Arts are a republic in which only success and genius count.

Chapter II

HOW THE ABBEY OF VIA PACIS WAS BESTOWED ON THE LORRAINES BY KING HENRY VIII

HE monastery and lands of Via Pads had been the

J. property of the Lorraines for nearly four hundred years. The first of the family to own them was Jean- Baptiste de Lorraine, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, who came over in the suite of Catherine of Aragon, and was dismissed by her on account of his fondness for the society of Colet and Erasmus, and other students of the New Learning, who were far more closely associated in her eyes with the spread of anti-papal ideas than the revival of the ancient Greek language. King Henry, the finest royal scholar of his age, sympathized with him, and gave him a post in his own household, so that they might study together, which they did with great profit, Jean-Baptiste acquainting the King with the latest discoveries of the New Learning, and keeping a kind of register of them, which is among the most treasured possessions of the library at Windsor Castle.

When King Henry suppressed the monasteries, and distributed their wealth, he did not forget the discharged Gentleman of his wife’s Bedchamber, who had suffered for his learning, but gave him the ruins and the revenues of the great Abbey of Via Pacis. Furthermore, when Jean- Baptiste de Lorraine took himself a wife, who in good time bore him a son, King Henry became its godfather, from which time every eldest son of the Lorraines had always been given the name of Henry at his baptism.

The Henry Lorraine who, at the age of thirty, succeeded to the property in the eighties, a great student and an accomplished man, had been a frequent visitor to Italy, where public institutions of all kinds are housed in expropriated monasteries, and because he hated the thought of such a splendid tract of Devonshire serving no useful purpose, conceived the idea of restoring the monastery of Via Pacis, and making it the seat of an institution which should be of great benefit to the public, and cause posterity to remember the Lorraines, when their name was lost from the lands, with his death and the marriage of his daughter.

Chapter III

HOW HENRY LORRAINE XIII. TURNED THE MONASTERY OF VIA PACIS INTO A COLLEGE FOR POOR AUTHORS, ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS

E plunged into the scheme with characteristic i i avidity. He called in the architect of a westcountry cathedral, as likely to be acquainted with monastic buildings ; he wished to combine modem conditions with as little violence as possible to ancient appearances, and he wished to restore faithfully such parts of the great Abbey as were capable of restoration.

On the day when the architect arrived, the Lorraines — Georgia Lorraine was then alive — and the Rector made a tour of the ruins with him. They began with the Great Court, which still had the greater part of its colonnade standing, and the monks’ houses behind it fairly perfect, except for minor defects.

“ Dear me, how very fine ! ” said the architect, when they went into some of the forty monks’ houses, which each had two bedrooms above, and a study or sitting-room and a kitchen below. “ What exactly are you going to do with it, Mr. Lorraine ? ”

“ Make it habitable as a home for professional people who have lost their money.”

“ What other accommodation have you besides these houses, or cells, which might be made habitable ? ”

“ Roughly speaking, the Chapter-House, the Refectory, the monastery kitchen, and other servants’ offices, and parts of the Abbot’s Lodging.”

“ And what shall you do with them ? ”

“Turn the Refectory into a common dining-room, and the Chapter-House into a library and club-room. What remains of the Abbot’s Lodging I shall turn into a residence for the Master, and a residence and an office for the steward.”

“ What will the Master’s duties be ? ”

“ Practically nil, except to see that the steward carries out his duties with a proper regard for the comfort of the inmates. The steward has the largest responsibilities, because he has to provide for their feeding, lighting and wanning.”

“ How many inmates do you propose to have in your endowment, Mr. Lorraine ? ”

“ Forty, I suppose — that is the number of the monks’ houses,” he replied.

But his wife was up in arms.

“ Are you going to run it on the lines of a workhouse,” she inquired, “ with the separation of married couples for your first condition ? ”

She asked it with fine indignation, and indignation was natural to Mrs. Lorraine, an American with severe beauty and a deep blue eye.

“ Instead of forty widows and widowers and separate houses, each with one bedroom and one bathroom and one sitting-room and one kitchen, why not have twenty and allow each person to have a husband or wife or child with them ? I don’t think that is quite grammar, only I’m trying to talk sense, not grammar — and have a bathroom, three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, and turn one kitchen into a pantry, really giving them some of the accommodation which they were accustomed to before they lost their money ? I've lost the thread of my sentence now, but you know what I mean.”

“ They won’t want their kitchen and pantry much,” said the architect. “ I understand that they’re going to have their food in the Refectory ? ”

“ Never mind — they would not feel happy without them.”

“ How are they going to be charged for their food ? ”

The Monastery of Via Pacis 9

asked the architect pertinently. “ That will be a very important matter, whether you have twenty pensioners with relatives, or forty without. Will they pay a fixed rate per day, or just be charged for what they have ? ”

“ I am going to pay for everything — food, lighting, heating and service. They will have no expenses whatever, and will receive a small annual stipend to keep themselves in clothes, and other necessaries.”

“It is the most generous thing I ever heard of ! ” said the architect. “ Have you calculated the expense ? ”

“ I have, and when I have paid for the restoration, equipment and furnishing of the buildings, I am going to hand over to trustees a sufficient amount of securities to produce the sum which will be required for their annual maintenance — merely reserving to myself the permanent right to appoint the Master, steward and beneficiaries of the College of the Fellowship of Via Pacis.”

“ This will take a very large sum, Mr. Lorraine.”

“ More than half my income, I anticipate, but I shall still have more than I require.”

“ That’s your own affair, and it is princely munificence. Shall we see what has to be done ? ”

“ I can tell you that in a very few words. I want the outward semblance, and as far as possible the interior also preserved unchanged, but I want each house to have its bathroom, and each room to have its radiator, skilfully concealed behind some appropriate decoration. I shall have furniture designed by an expert from the South Kensington Museum, as much in keeping with the period as possible, and shall call for tenders from leading London firms for carrying it out to his satisfaction.”

“ I can see to that, and as you are giving such a large order, it may not perhaps cost greatly more than buying the furniture ready-made.”

“ Are you going to let me have my way, and have each pair of houses knocked into one ? ” asked beautiful Mrs. Lorraine of her husband.

“ What do you think, Mr. Crocket ? ” he asked the architect.

“ Well, I'm against it — it will alter the character of the building, and give an immense deal of extra work. We are dealing with very thick masonry/’

“Yes, but if you are going to give up half your income to establish this college of Via Pacis, it is worth while to do it right, and if you keep the houses separated as they are, they will only contain one bedroom, a bathroom, a living-room and a kitchen each, which will be a very tight squeeze for a married couple, and an impossibility for a parent and child of opposite sexes,” urged Mrs. Lorraine.

“ You can turn the kitchens into bedrooms if they are not going to be used,” suggested the architect.

“ That will alter the little houses a great deal more than putting a door between each pair,” persisted Mrs. Lorraine, who, like many Americans, had the reformer’s zeal. “ Besides, each house will want a room for keeping buckets and brooms and other cleaning implements.”

“ That won’t form any difficulty,” answered her husband, “ because my guests won’t do the heavy cleaning themselves. I shall have a staff connected with the steward’s department to do that.”

“ Well, what are we to do, Mr. Lorraine ? ” asked the architect. The domestic comfort of the inmates seemed a small matter to him compared with maintaining the monastic character of the little monks’ houses.

“ Georgie shall decide,” replied the Squire.

“I see only one way of deciding,” said Mrs. Lorraine. “ Dad and mumsy are just the sort of people whom you would have into Via Pacis College, and I know what it would mean to them if you kept men and women separate, like monks and nuns ; they wouldn’t be much longer for this world if they were long in the college.”

“ That settles it,” said Mr. Lorraine. “ We are going to have a monastery in which the inmates bid good-bye not to the natural emotions, but only to the cares of the world. Our motto will be plain living, but poetical surroundings, which will lead, we hope, to study, philosophy, and Art — Art being the creation of objects of beauty, in writing, painting, sculpture, or music. I shall choose the inmates of Via Pacis mostly from artists, writers

The Monastery of Via Pacis

and musicians, so that it shall be a little colony of people with creative instincts, settled in the midst of the natural and historical inspirations of Devonshire, a club of congenial spirits, like the artists of Newlyn, forming a pleasant world for ourselves and the Wynyards to live in.

“ And I shall provide a library of ten thousand books, including all I can think of which will stimulate the creativeness of the Fellowship of Via Pacis, when it is formed."

Chapter IV Twenty-four Years Later — The College Of Via Pacis

A T the time that this narrative commences, the Fellowship of Via Pacis — or, as it had come to be called, the Via Pacis School — was known to authors and artists all over the Anglo-Saxon world.

At the moment it consisted of four authoresses, two authors, two actors, four men composers, a lady composer, four painters, a sculptor and two friends of Mr. Lorraine who had no special qualifications.

It had been going for twenty-four years, and had amply justified its existence, for besides the twenty Fellows living in the monastery, and drawing their pensions, there were a dozen others who had made successes, and now had houses or summer bungalows on the estate, and a score or two more in London.

The most important section of the School lived outside of the monastery walls, because no one who had attained sufficient success to pay income-tax could remain a member of the Fellowship. The salaries of both Master and steward were well below the income-tax level. The free board and housing, the stipend of a pound a week, meant the liberty to create for those who had failed in the struggle to make a living, and those who were beginning the struggle without means, and had to be financed until they could win a stipend from such a hard task-mistress as Art, just as an Oxford Fellowship has enabled many a Judge to start at the Bar.

All who tad been members of the Fellowship were

The College of Via Pacis

still free to use the Club-room library, with its thousands of books. It served as a link between those who had sprung from Via Pacis, and those who were still beholden to it.

The Monastery had grown into a place of such beauty that it was a pilgrimage spot for all who came to South Devon. The vast court, surrounded by deep red sandstone colonnades, very ancient and weather-worn, was filled with an old-fashioned monastery garden of paved paths, plots of aromatic herbs, and tall herbaceous plants, faithfully copied from an Italian prototype.

A translation of the old Latin name of the Abbey, The Way of Peace , was carved on the restored entrance-tower, which admitted to the outer or Aboot’s Court, two sides of which were occupied by the Abbot’s Lodging, the Refectory and the Chapter-House, beautiful medieval buildings ; its centre being filled by a lawn of fine old turf, divided into four by stone paths, leading up to a sundial. An archway opposite to the entrance-tower led from the Abbot’s Court to the Great Court. Apart from the Monastery garden, it was like an Oxford College.

The entrance which had once led from the Great Court to the Abbey Church and the cloisters, now led to the gardens laid out among their ruins with such exquisite beauty. In the centre of the nave and each of its aisles, in the centre of the choir and each of its aisles, and in the centre of each transept, there was a flagged path, but the rest of the groundwork of the church was filled in with a carpet of flowers, partly in herbaceous borders, running up to the portions of the walls which still rose to some height above the ground, and partly spread over rude pyramids of fallen masonry. Some of the windows kept their arches and their tracery well ; others were torn into gaps.

The ferns and flowers which love such places were encouraged to wave from every bend in the tracery and crevice in the wall. Only ivy, the common foe of ancient masonry and rock plants, was jealously rooted out.

In the ruined cloister the garth was filled with smooth turf, and the cloister walk still covered with its own flags.

Each little house had its own garden, as in the days of the monks.

Words can express but baldly the atmosphere of perfect peace given to the ancient ruins by the masses of foliage and blossom, blended by Nature and kept in perfection by care, which swathed their bases, and filled their hollows. It was difficult to believe that any rock-garden could be more wonderful or beautiful, even under Italian skies.

Beyond lay the grounds of the Manor House, with lawns for tennis and croquet laid out in them, and woods, and a mountain river running through a little Japanese landscape garden.

The writers and artists, some of them, devoted themselves to purely imaginary work, but the bulk of them sought their inspiration at Seacombe. And some of them had been not a little successful. In order not to depart from their inspiration as their financial position improved, they built houses for themselves on choice sites on the wooded cliffs above the inlet, and continued to haunt Via Pacis. Some of them had had houses of their own long enough to have reared families well on their way to manhood and womanhood and marriage, so that Roger, the Rector’s grandson, and Grace, the Squire’s daughter, had not wanted for young society in that isolated Devonshire village.

Grace’s mother had been dead for many a long day, and the Squire was a man of over sixty. The Rector was nearly ten years older, and the Rector’s daughter-in-law, Lady Cynthia Wynyard, might have been excused if she had grown exercised over Roger’s future, since Roger, after captaining the Rugby and Oxford Elevens, and being a little god at school and college, had shown no signs of being fit for any career which would make his living. He might, of course, become a soldier like his father, and he might, of course, with his athletic record, become a schoolmaster, but that meant independence in neither means nor liberty. He was waiting, in the English fashion, amid the admiration of his neighbours, for something to turn up.

Grace, Mr. Lorraine’s only child, was even more beau-

The College of Via Pacis

tiful than her mother had been ; her features were more delicately-cut ; she was taller, and had much dignity in her slender figure. She, too, was brilliant at games, and public opinion was sure that two persons, so meant for each other, who, when both were at home, had seen each other almost daily since childhood, would make a match of it. It would be natural for such a high-spirited girl to marry a man who had proved his mastery in sport.

Chapter V Introducing Hestia Myrtle

HE Manor House of Via Pads, which adjoins and derives its name from the monastery, is a stately, seventeenth-century house, of red brick, dressed with yellow stone, standing near the mouth of the great Seacombe inlet, and visible from the sea.

It is divided from the fishing village of Seacombe by a crescent of wooded cliffs, with sand below and, until the recent building extensions, an old apple-orchard above, half a mile long.

The Lorraines were at home to the present and past members of the Fellowship every Sunday afternoon when they were at Via Pacis, and the past members used the club-room of the Fellowship, into which Mr. Lorraine had converted the Chapter-House of the Abbey, a very great deal, with the result that something like a School of Art, Music and Authorship had grown up in this South Devon paradise.

The painters chose their subjects largely from the wooded shores of the great Seacombe inlet, or the fine seas beating on the mighty twin capes which guarded its entrance, or the wide sweep of moorland above. The authors made Devonshire antiquities and history their study, or the backgrounds of their novels. The composers had some of them visions of making Via Pacis a Bayreuth or an Oberammergau. But Hestia Myrtle, the lady composer, was an exception. Like Dal Dryander, the most prosperous of the ex-Fellows, who^kept up their

Introducing Hestia Myrtle

connection with the place, she looked to musical-comedy, revues, and popular songs to make her fortune. But unlike Mr. Dryander, she had been unable to sell any of her music, beyond a few songs, for which she received very little.

She was not greatly afflicted by it. The monastery of Via Pacis, where she lived in comfort, without any pecuniary cares, was a haven of rest after her hand-to mouth struggles in Chelsea, and she was popular, not only with her old friend Mr. Sylvester and the past and present members of the Fellowship, but with the Lorraines them selves, and at the Rectory, where the grandson, Roger Wynyard, had just left Oxford.

Hestia, who was a few years his senior, was a lovely creature, so slender and lissom that in spite of her hard ships in London she still looked a girl.

From her Greek mother — her father, a British Naval officer, had married in the Ionian Islands — she inherited the grace and the features of a Greek statue, and her father’s healthy northern blood had filled her clear cheeks with a rich damask, and given her the iron-grey eyes one finds in those who, like Sicilians, have both Greek and Norman ancestry. She dressed her wavy black hair like Peitho’s on the frieze of the Parthenon, in a Greek chignon, with a fillet of thin gold leaves, which had belonged to her mother, to divide the front from the back. But she did not try and dress like a statue. She spent all her income, and all she could earn, in trying to look as dainty as Grace Lorraine.

Hers was a profession which is not “ hard on ” clothes. When she came back from a function at the Manor House there was no need for her to go and change into a tea gown before she sat down to her piano. Indeed, she never did sit down to the piano without being becomingly dressed. She liked to look a picture when she was working. Frank Dicksee, not Bach, was her ideal in Harmony.

She was not encouraged at the Rectory so much as she was at the Manor House and the Grange. It was not that Roger’s mother — the Rector’s daughter-in-law — considered her a child of Belial. Lady Cynthia, being accustomed to a society very different from what she found at Via Pads, was glad of the company of anything so pretty and lively. But she did not care to expose Roger, whom Mr. Lorraine wished his daughter to marry, to the temptations of opportunity. She was therefore very friendly to Hestia when they met on neutral ground, but did not encourage her presence at the Rectory.

Outside the house Hestia was not a danger, since Roger showed so marked a preference for the society of Grace Lorraine.

If Grace was not to marry for a title, these two seemed made for each other. The heiress could afford to marry for love, nor could Roger, who would be comfortably off some day, and on his mother’s side came of the best blood in the County, be called an ineligible.

Yet better matches from the social point of view had often presented themselves to Grace. The young Lord Dartmoor, who seemed to own half Devon, was a declared candidate. However, Grace, though she would not pledge herself to Roger, showed him decidedly more favour than the others.