Mrs. Warrens Daughter | Page 9

I saw the daguerreotype portrait), and how
they became possessed of so much money, and why she went back to
live with her mother between the birth of her second child and the near
advent of her third. But in how very few cases do we know their whole
story, do we even care to know more than is sufficient for our purpose

in issuing or accepting invitations? There are the Dombeys--the
Gorings as they're now called, who live near us. I've seen the tombstone
of Lucilla Smith in Goring churchyard, but I don't know for a fact that
Lord Goring was the father of Lucilla's son (who was killed in the war).
I guess he was, from this and that, from what Mrs. Legg told me, and
what I overheard at the Sterns'. If he wasn't, then he has only himself to
thank for the wrong assumption: I mean, from his goings-on.
Then again, the Clementses, who live at the Grange. I feel instinctively
they are nice people, but I haven't the least idea who she was and how
he made his money, though from his acreage and his motors I am
entitled to assume he has a large income. She seems to know a lot
about Spain; but I don't feel encouraged to ask her: "Was your father in
the wine trade? Is that why you know Xeres so well?" Clements
himself has in his study an enlarged photograph of a handsome woman
with a kind of mourning wreath round the frame--beautifully carved. Is
it the portrait of a former wife? Or of a sister who committed suicide?
Or was it merely bought in Venice for the sake of the carving? Perhaps
I shall know some day--if it matters. In a moment of expansion during
the Railway Strike, Mrs. Clements will say: "That was poor Walter's
first. She died of acute dyspepsia, poor thing, on their marriage tour,
and was buried at Venice. Don't ever allude to it because he feels it so
dreadfully." And my curiosity will have been rewarded for its long and
patient restraint. Clements' little finger on his left hand is mutilated. I
have never asked why--a lawn-mowing machine? Or a bite from some
passionate mistress in a buried past? I note silently that he disapproves
of palmistry--
But about Honoria Fraser, to whom I was introduced by Mr. George
Bernard Shaw twenty years ago: She was born in 1872, as _Who's
Who_ will tell you; also that she was the daughter and eldest child of a
famous physician (Sir Meldrum Fraser) who wrought some marvellous
cures in the 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties, chiefly by dieting and
psycho-therapy. (He got his knighthood in the first jubilee year for
reducing to reasonable proportions the figure of good-hearted,
thoroughly kindly, and much loved Princess Mary of Oxford.)
He--Honoria's father--was married to a beautiful woman, a relation of

Bessie Rayner Parkes, with inherited advanced views on the Rights and
Position of Woman. Lady Fraser was, indeed, an early type of
Suffragist and also wrote some poetry which was far from bad. They
had two children: Honoria, born, as I say, in 1872; and John (John
Stuart Mill Fraser was his full name--too great a burden to be borne)
four years later than Honoria, who was devoted to him, idolized him, as
did his mother and father. Honoria went to Bedford College and
Newnham; John to one of the two most famous of our public schools (I
need not be more precise), with Cambridge in view afterwards.
But in the case of John a tragedy occurred. He had risen to be head of
the school; statesmen with little affectation applauded him on speech
days. He had been brilliant as a batsman, was a champion swimmer,
and facile princeps in the ineptitudes of the classics; and showed a
dazzling originality in other studies scarcely within the school
curriculum. Further he was growing out of boy gawkiness into a
handsome youth of an Apolline mould, when, on the morning of his
eighteenth birthday, he was found dead in his bed, with a bottle of
cyanide of potassium on the bed-table to explain why.
All else was wrapt in mystery ... at any rate it was a mystery I have no
wish to lay bare. The death and the inquest verdict, "Suicide while of
unsound mind, due to overstudy," broke his father's heart and his
mother's: in the metaphorical meaning of course, because the heart is an
unemotional pump and it is the brain and the nerve centres that suffer
from our emotions. Sir Meldrum Fraser died a year after his son. He
left a fortune of eighty thousand pounds. Half of this went at once to
Honoria and the other half to the life-use of Lady Fraser with a
reversion to her