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Chapter I

Claudia Waring had always possessed a queer and humorous faculty for picturing circumstances, periods of time, groups of people, as things. Years later, looking back upon her home life, her surroundings as a girl, it all struck her as being, in its smooth, drabbish luxury, like an over-solid chocolate blanc-mange, with too much cornflour and not quite enough chocolate; that sort which developes a species of hard skin over it after it has been made for a short time.

She was the daughter of a parson-squire, a rural dean; very well off and very dull, with that solid and yet not unvindictive dullness of order which felt itself to be waning, even so far back as the early eighties. Claudia herself was born in eighteen hundred and sixty-four—the year of our Lord, as one is bound to say in speaking of a time when people still put D.Y. at the end of any letter containing plans for the future.

There was a tea-party on at the Rectory; the sort of tea-party which follows upon a sewing party, with the humbler members entertained in a plainer way, with unsugared cakes, in the servants’ hall; and they were all, as usual, when he was anywhere in the neighbourhood, talking about the Marquess of Blagden. They did not approve of him; save for one or two of them they did not know him, even by sight, and yet they could no more help talking of him than English people can help talking of the weather, how¬ ever bad; perhaps for this very reason, that he held the same quality of contrariness.

“They say that he is terribly wild, and going from bad to worse. Really I don’t know what our aristocracy is coming to!”

“They say, pray who says?” It was Mrs. Saunders who bit off the question, as one bites a thread. Not that she had any objection to gossip, or held any sort of brief for Lord Blagden; merely because she felt that Miss Fair should not take the liberty of discussing any person so far above her. It was not as though she had anything new to tell; she would have hated her if she had.

“Oh well, everyone’s talking of it. So handsome, but quite shocking. Not that I mind a little wildness in gentle¬ men myself, most people are far too tame for my taste.” Miss Fair spoke with dashing boldness, tossed an equine head as if she herself were ready for any sort of moral or immoral leap. “Though from what I hear I would not like to think of any young girl I was interested in being in

service at the Hall—there is such a thing as- Oh, well,

it’s a matter of history, so there can be nothing very dread¬ ful in mentioning it among other ladies—Seignioral Rights.” She gave a short, half defiant, half triumphant laugh, as at some impropriety—really they did want rous¬ ing up, broadening a little, all these dowdies and tabbies, as her father had called them.

“Dear, dear, and only yesterday I got that pretty little Minnie Davies a place at the Hall, never thinking—why, it must be three years since his lordship was there, and then only for a few days for the election, and the house¬ keeper does train young girls so nicely,” murmured Mrs. Phillpots anxiously.

‘ ‘ I could almost wish he hadn’t come back at all; though it seems dreadful to say that about a gentleman of his po¬ sition, and his own place and all,” said Mrs. Waring, warm¬ ing the teacups in a bowl of hot water. “And, though I’m not sure if I ought to say so, I know that my husband feels that it isn’t—well, quite the best thing for the village. One has to be so much on one’s guard against any sort of bad example, particularly with the boys. Really, there’s nothing they don’t pick up in these days; they seem to have lost all idea of the distinctions of class.”

In picking up things that they ought to leave to their betters; is that what you mean?” Miss Fair pounced with her neighing laugh, for nothing pleased her better than to catch Mrs. Waring out in this fashion.

‘ 4 Well, of course we all know that a gentleman of Lord Blagden’s position must have greater temptations and all that, than other people.”

The Rector’s wife was still vague, but she spoke with a certain air of offended dignity, conscious of Miss Fair’s ill-bred triumph—in her own drawing-room, too. But then: 4 ‘What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?” That was what Claudia had said of her, with her fine young scorn, and been rebuked for it too; but after all Claudia was right, as she so often was. When one felt indolent and sweet tempered, and how often the two things go together, Claudia jarred; but in moments of irritation the things she said had a way of coming back to one, suiting the oc¬ casion.

4 4 Oh, well, I suppose all the aristocracy are tarred with much the same brush; and no wonder, with every sort of excuse made for them.”

4 4 Oh, Miss Fair! How can you say such a thing ? Only think of the Duke,” protested Mrs. Phillpots, almost tearfully; for she could no more leave off tears than she could leave off crepe, the monumental wreaths which she hung round the memory of that late husband who had led her such a life of it, as the whole village knew.

44 Whoever does think of a man over ninety? We mayn’t be—well—in our first youth, but all the same, which of us can remember His Grace as a young man? And people say— Oh well, it isn’t only what they say!”

4 4 There is always a certain amount of not very pleasant gossip hanging about the name of any gentleman of high position in the world, and I think that the only course for us ladies is to take no notice of such things.”

It was Mrs. Waring who spoke, a little stiffly, suddenly mindful of her husband’s strictures against anything like gossip in the Rectory drawing-room; the marital bedcham¬ ber was a different affair altogether. Besides, Miss Fair rubbed her up the wrong way as she did everyone else. “I’m sure no one could be more universally respected than the dear Duke-”

“The dear Duke!” repeated Miss Fair rudely. “Oh, well, of course, he is a Duke, and that makes all the differ¬ ence, I suppose. But even you, dear Mrs. Waring, with all your charity, can’t pretend that you’ve not heard the old story of the lady’s maid married off in such a hurry to the head woodman; with that man Knowles and all, sup¬ posedly their son, only a year younger than Lord Blagden and the two of them as like as two peas.—Why, I came across the fellow in the Long Wood yesterday, and it gave me quite a start; I declare I only just saved myself from bowing. ’ ’

“I didn’t know that you were acquainted with his lordship,” broke in Mrs. Phillpots, with one of the sudden ag¬ gressive bleats by which she occasionally asserted herself; then dropped to silence again, sucking the crepe hem of her widow’s veil.

“Well, doesn’t everyone know him, more or less?” Miss Fair tossed her head, glancing round defiantly. “Any¬ how, I, for one, should think it was only civil to bow to a gentleman in his own woods. Though I’m sure I don’t pretend to know what is and what isn’t the proper thing, for I wasn’t brought up with the aristocracy and I must say I’m glad I wasn’t every time I open the paper and read about them and their goings on, divorces and ac¬ tresses, and what not! As for this Lord Blagden, or what¬ ever he calls himself”—it was a trick of hers to talk of people socially above her in this fashion, with a “what¬ ever he calls himself”—“I’m sure if he and that man

Knowles were to change clothes there wouldn’t be a pin to choose between them.”

“Miss Fair! Miss Fair! Really, I think we’ve had enough of this,” interposed Mrs. Waring, her smooth round face, the skin as fine as that of a young girl, flush¬ ing. Such a dreadful thing to say; only imagine Lord Blagden changing clothes with a working man,” was how she put it to her husband later on, repeating fragments of that afternoon’s conversation; adding that, little as she ap¬ proved of his lordship herself, she really would put that beyond him; for she had a curious faculty for missing the essentials in speech or life. “Changing clothes with a common working man; such a horrid, vulgar sort of no¬ tion!”

‘ ‘ There are certain things in life which are best left un¬ commented upon,” she went on now, with some dignity; “and, after all, we cannot expect gentlemen to he quite the same in certain matters as we ladies, however much we may look up to them.”

“Well, I never! For shame—really—really, Mrs. War¬ ing!” Miss Fair’s voice was playful, her chains and bangles rattled. For one moment she broke off, with a strident laugh, while the rest of the party turned and looked at her as though she had been some strange animal; then began again: “I like that—you to say that— 4 we can’t expect gentlemen to be the same, ’ with the Rector and all! Oh, really, fie, fie!”

“You forget that my husband is a clergyman.” Mrs. Waring took refuge in the unanswerable answer, her smooth face pink with anger, turning aside, very markedly, to speak to Mrs. Phillpots. Really, that Fair woman was be¬ yond words. This was what came of trying to be nice to a person who had come from goodness knows where, was of no sort of class whatever. “An iron founder,” that’s what she said her father was, and pray where was the dif¬ ference between an iron founder and an iron-monger ? And even so, “iron founder!” What was that Claudia had said about the daughter spending her time picking over the rubbish-tins that Thomas, her father, had made ? ’’

Anyhow, there was nothing in her—Mrs. Waring’s—re¬ mark that could possibly necessitate Miss Fair taking off her hat and holding it up in front of her face, under the playful pretence of hiding her blushes. Merely that gen¬ tlemen were different. Well, everyone knew that gentle¬ men were different. It would not have entered her head to prove her case by any citation of the divorce laws, for that was the sort of thing which really nice people never so much as thought of; but there it was, the acknowledged fact, and everything went to prove it. For instance, there was nothing so very dreadful in a young man of her own class kissing a pretty housemaid, while it was quite un¬ thinkable for any girl, even the least nice, to kiss, or be kissed by, a waiter. In any case nothing could excuse that vulgar personality—or was it a joke?—'The Rector and all!”

"Won't you turn back your veil, Mrs. Phillpots, and try one of the little scones while they are really hot, and you too, Mrs. Saunders and Miss Ogelvie? And ... oh, here is Claudia!” She broke off with a breath of relief; though, properly speaking, it was Francie, too ; who came into the room, and Francie was the elder, and married, and spoken of as never having given anyone any trouble, while Claudia was entirely different in this, as in every other way.

All the same it was to Claudia that she turned in any moment of difficulty, and maybe her most common plaint,

‘ ‘ I never can understand Claudia, she is so entirely differ¬ ent to me,” with the occasional addition of—though this was for the family alone—"there’s something,—well, al¬ most like a trace of coarseness about Claudia,” explained this; for do we not all turn, in our most difficult moments, to something altogether alien to ourselves?”

"Claudia dear, do hand round the cakes, and give Mrs. Fielden that little stool to put her cup on—it’s so awkward holding it. ‘A pretty little stool V Yes, isn't it, quite a common little stool, too; but Gertie, who's really quite clever at that sort of thing, enamelled it and painted it, with those dear little birds, and the apple blossom and all, and now no one would know what it really was. Though, of course, it is a little better made than the ordinary stools, which are actually used for milking."

Mrs. Fielden bent over the stool, raising her cup a little to look at it the better. “How sweetly pretty! And those dear little robins; so beautifully done, so like life, one would recognise them anywhere!"

“Bullfinches," said Claudia shortly, and moved towards Miss Fair, holding out the plate of cakes as though it were a pistol.

“Now I wonder if I am to be allowed to have one?" Miss Fair stuck out her lower jaw in a grimace which made her look more like an over-toothed cab-horse than ever and picked out the only cake with chocolate on it. “I've been a naughty girl as usual, you know. You and I are a pretty pair, always getting ourselves into hot water, eh, Claudia ?'' she added, her upper lip wrinkling traversely as she smiled, while the girl's half veiled eyes filled with contempt over the assumption of equality. “She's always talking about getting into hot water. If only she would get into it with soap and a scrubbing brush!" That's what Claudia said in the semi-privacy of her own bedroom shared with “poor Francie" now that Francie's husband was abroad.

Having supplied the needs of the entire party, and more —for Mrs. Phillpots voiced the general feeling when she complained to little Miss Ogelvie later on walking home from the Rectory: ‘* Hot cakes, and those sweet things al¬

ways give me the most excruciating indigestion, but Claudia Waring pokes them under my nose so that I daren’t even hint at bread-and-butter"—the girl went and stood by the decorated fireplace, with one foot hooked up on the fender behind her; while her mother, wishing that she would try to be a little more ladylike, almost wished that she had kept away, as one might do with a deity evoked in moments of stress and then altogether in the way in a domesticated household; forgetful of the fashion in which her daughter had fulfilled her function in diverting the stream of talk well away from the enormities of Lord Blagden; those differences between ladies and gentlemen to which it was not thought of applying the words “sex,” a word, indeed, never so much as heard in those days when a cat was “she” and a dog “he”; a dog “a dog” and a bitch “a lady dog,” and love matrimony; for—“You must never allow yeurself to begin to care for a man until he has proposed to you,” was the commandment laid down to young girls—with obedience and compliance thrown in; and everything else the sheer dreadfulness of “those sort of people.”

Apart from this there were two sorts of wickedness; the wickedness of those people w T ho were really wicked, and the social sin of those who were “peculiar.”

The old Duke had once said of Claudia that if Mrs. Waring did not look out, that girl of hers would commit the unpardonable sin of originality. And that was two years ago when he had driven over to see the Rector about some business, in his enormous barouche with its peculiarly arrogant-looking horses—“the sort of horses one thinks of when one reads of the chariots of God and the horses thereof,” as Claudia herself put it, irreverently enough— and was sitting throned mid his cushions, with the entire Waring family gathered together upon the Rectory steps. He had even added: “The girl with that don’t-care-adamn look, ’ ’ to make sure of his aim; with the sly eye of an aged libertine glancing round a rather noble nose at Claudia, seated sideways on the parapet of the steps, one leg dangling, tossing a small leather ball, the plaything of the hour, on the end of a long piece of fine elastic.

The saying had rankled in Mrs. Waring’s mind. If a girl was once “peculiar,” one never knew what might fol¬ low; for it was certainly the peculiar people who did the more than peculiar things, and no doubt about it Claudia was—well, not exactly like other people, as they were known in the county.

This trick of standing instead of sitting, almost like a man, for instance. Of course a girl ought to be erect, but there was something verging upon immodesty in the set of Claudia’s shoulders, the frank, rather scornful directness of her gaze. Even her dress, the over-long pleated skirt, the heavy pleated polonaise, the tight bodice, with its com¬ pact line of small buttons down the front, and high stif¬ fened collar of the same material topped by a line of still stiffer white, was, somehow or other, incapable of reducing her to the dull every-day level of altogether “niceness.”

Then there was her hair. Fringes were the fashion, so much the fashion that a girl looked bare, almost indecent, without one. But Claudia hated fringes, and in any matter which involved no actual question of right and wrong it seemed easier to give way to her; while after all it did not matter so very much, for the girl’s forehead was low, actually low, in a family with foreheads like babies’ tombstones. “I’m sure I don’t know who she takes after; it must be someone on your side of the family,” was what Mrs. Waring would say to her husband, quite depressed by Claudia’s forehead; no whit comforted by the fact that it was very broad and white, while her smooth dark hair grew in a widow’s peak at either side, not only relieving it, but displaying—with that effect of pride which hung about everything appertaining to her—the full beauty of her eye¬ brows, so delicately curved as to seem, at first sight, almost straight above her brown eyes: golden brown and clear as a stream, startlingly bright in moments of animation, sullen now, and half closed beneath their white lids.

‘ ‘ The same old lot, ’ ’ she was thinking, not worth so much as a glance wasted upon them. 4 ‘You really ought to learn to look people in the face, Claudia,” was what her mother said. And then again, likely enough just after: “Claudia,

I wish you wouldn’t stare at people in that odd sort of fashion; it does make you look so peculiar!” For once really interested, Claudia did stare, and no mistake about it, either.—But these people, pheugh! She knew them all by heart, the sort of people who went to sewing parties and mothers’ meetings; so different from the people one saw at the meets, so beautifully groomed and shining, with a rather nice sort of well-conditioned hardness, like their horses.

She had declared to Francie, and she had rather an ugly way of saying those sort of things, with her small, faintly aquiline nose in the air, that she would know the smell of a sewing party if she came across it in heaven; that raw calico smell all mixed up with people’s best clothes, which makes it just a little like church, but not quite the same; and, oh, ever so different to the mothers’ meetings, all warm flannel and rather sour milk.

“I bet you I know the smell of every cottage in the village, and every Rectory from Oxford to Stow-on-the- Wold, the smell of chapel people and the smell of church people. I could go through them blindfold.”

“Well, anyhow there’s one thing you don’t know, and that is what you smell like yourself,” retorted Francie; who was capable of a counter retort at rare intervals, and when her own feelings were in no way involved, for then she wept.

“Oh, don’t I, though? Who should know if I don’t? Like a nice, well-bred horse,” cried Claudia, who was never at a loss for an answer, and did not care what it was either; would say the most shocking things rather than be beaten, give anyone else the last word. “My goodness! I ought to know, for I perfectly remember being a Centaur in my last life—flash chestnut, with one white stocking.”

“Claudia, how can you! Why, that was ages back in the old Greek days; and it wasn’t real either, only mythology.”

‘ ‘ Only mythology—only mythology! Isn’t that just like you? Why, all religions are mythologies.”

* * Claudia! ’ ’

11 * Claudia!’ 1 Claudia!’ For goodness sake don’t go on bleating Claudia like that! Anyhow, how can you know Centaurs weren’t real; you were never one yourself.— What were you, I wonder. A white mouse?”

“Claudia, really you are—” began Francie, flushed and hurt; but her sister broke in upon her, chanting mockingly:

‘ ‘ I am, I am, I am; and I was, I was, I was—a Centaur —a noble Centaur!”

“There never were any, I tell you. Anyhow, where’s the sense of saying that you were ever anything before you were born?” persisted Francie in her literal way.

“I like that. Who would know if I didn’t? And what right have you to say that there were never any Centaurs? How could people possibly imagine them if there weren’t —things like that, too lovely to be just invented—that’s what I’d like to know?”

“Well, anyhow, they were only men, the half of them that wasn’t horse. Whoever heard of a female Centaur?”

“Rot! If you didn’t hear of them it was only because they were taken for granted—I ought to know if anyone does, considering that I was one. We talk of men, don’t we? The Bible talks of men w r hen it means men and women. It was the same way with us Centaurs—foals and mares—stallions ”

“Claudia!”

“All Centaurs—lovely, flowing-tailed Centaurs.”

“Oh, you’re mad. Do stop it now and get undressed.”

But the words slid past Claudia. Erect with shining eyes, her left foot, what she would have called her “near fore”—for she was like that, launching off upon the most extravagant fancies, beating herself up into a condition where she more than half believed them, though never al¬ together—pawing the ground.

“Oh, don’t I remember it, just:—

‘The Centaurs In the upper glens

Of Pelion, in the streams Where red-berried ashes fringe The clear brown shallow pools;

With steaming flanks, and heads,

Rear’d proudly, snuffing The mountain wind.’

. . The wind and the smell of the rain; wet sweetbriar, and one’s own wet tail slashing one’s side; the ripples round one’s pasterns, and-”

* ‘ Claudia, Claudia, stop it.—Where on earth did you get it, anyhow?”

‘‘That? Oh, that’s Matthew Arnold, most of it at least, and quite, quite proper:

With steaming flanks , and heads,

Rear’d proudly-’

Look here—a Centauress! See me as a Centauress.”

They were undressing. She had got down to nothing more than a rather outgrown chemise—and that was an¬ other of Claudia’s faults, she never would undress in the orthodox way, slipping off her clothes under the shelter of her night-gown—all the same she began to prance and jump with astounding agility.

“I don’t know what you think of yourself,” said Francie, very crossly; “but I do know one thing, and that is that Mama’s 'quite right when she says she believes you don’t so much as know the meaning of the word decency— hopping about with next to nothing on. ’ ’

“Oh, that’s what she says, does she?” Claudia came to a sudden pause, rigid and alert.

“Well, if not exactly that—” muttered Francie, who was always hedging, one way or another.

“Oh, don’t be ‘an ass,’ Francie! She said that—she did say it, eh?” Claudia’s tone was low, and so dangerous that Francie, who knew she had no business to repeat things, grew scared.

‘‘Well, she-”

‘ ‘ Oh, so she did say it, did she ? I like that; I must say I like that! And from a married woman, too! ’ ’

“Claudia, to speak of our own mother like that!”

“Well, isn’t she married? And if she’s married, where’s the harm of speaking of her as a married woman, the same as any other woman? After all, if she wasn’t married where should we be, eh?”

“I shan’t listen to you, you’re perfectly revolting! And please be quiet now, for I want to say my prayers,” said Francie; and suiting her action to her words, knelt down by her bed, bending forward with her head in her hands, the whole effect of fingers tightly pressed in either ear; not altogether tightly, though, for that was the worst of Claudia; one couldn’t help wanting to hear the things she had to say, however dreadful they might be.

“No sense of decency. Oh, yes, I like that. Just be¬ cause I fool about in my chemise in front of my own sister. —Lord! when one thinks of all the queer things which must happen to people when they’re married, poked away in the same- room. Now that is indecent, if you like.”

But this was too much, even for Francie, and she flung to her feet. “Claudia!”

“I thought you were saying your prayers with your fingers in your ears.”

“How is it possible for me to say my prayers, or do any¬ thing else either while you are talking in that perfectly disgusting way? I shall go and sleep with Gertrude; I can’t stand this!” cried Francie, with the passion of the white mouse she had been likened to; struggling into her dressing-gown with trembling hands, groping for her slip¬ pers under the bed; the tears running down her face, stead¬ fastly averted from her sister; moving all sideways like a crab towards the door, her dressing-gown dragged over her shoulders, for one sleeve was inside out and she simply could not grapple with it. “To say a thing like that!”

“I don’t see anything dreadful about it,” retorted

Claudia. “Anyhow, you ought to know. You wouldn’t be going to have a baby, if you didn’t.”

She shouted the words after Francie who was half out of the door, and laughed loudly as the door slammed to, the sort of laugh she liked to think of as a villain’s; walked up and down the room several times humming to herself, her head in the air; then, sitting down in front of her dressing-table, propped her chin in her hands, re¬ marked that she wondered what on earth made her behave like a beast in the way she did, stared at herself in the glass for a good minute, as though seeking for some answer to her riddle, and began to cry.

After a moment or two she heard someone creep into the room; caught the sound of a gentle snuffling.

“I had to come back for a handkerchief,” muttered Francie, and Claudia knew what had happened.

Gertrude, who was a year older than “poor Francie,” had been engaged with her complicated system of religious exercises—it was whispered in the family that Gertie went through the whole of the evening service with the addition of the litany in her own room every night—and had not welcomed the advent of her sister. If she had done, why on earth couldn’t she have lent her a handker¬ chief ? She was a selfish pig, anyhow; would never consent to share her room with anyone because they “breathed loud” while she was saying her prayers; enwrapping her¬ self in her religion at all the difficult moments of life, as a woman with a mackintosh will enwrap herself; open her umbrella too, and watch her unprotected sisters soak to the skin.

It was the moment for a display of triumph on Claudia’s part, but she did not seize it—and therein lay her special weakness, this letting slip of the very opportunity for striking home—only began to cry the more with an:

“Oh, Francie—I say, I am a beast—I don’t know what makes me such a beast!”

They were in each other’s arms in a moment at this, for there was no trace of malice in poor little Franeie Stevens, who was continually trying to remember to keep things up and failing.

_ "1^ don’t believe she really could be praying all that time, she said at last, and there was no need to mention any names. “I was in the room for five minutes at least, and she must have known that I was crying, but she never even stirred. The fact of the matter is that she’s never forgiven me for marrying Frankie. As if Frankie would ever have looked at her, even if there had been no me. He hates those great hard sorts of girls; he’s told me so; he’s so frightfully sensitive to that sort of thing.”

Claudia wondered how anyone could be bored to look at Frankie himself a second time, anyhow. But for once she kept her thoughts to herself, and only said:

“You might have told me about the baby, Franeie. That’s what made me so mad.”

“I wanted to, but Mama said I mustn’t. She said you would be sure to try and ferret it out.” “Ferret it out” was the expression in use for the display of any desire for knowledge of those things of really more importance than the names of the minor prophets, or Roman emperors, things upon which life itself really depended. “She said that girls of your age oughtn’t to know anything about such things.”