THE
SUNDERED STREAMS
THE HISTORY OF A MEMORY THAT HAD
NO FULL STOPS
BY
REGINALD FARRER
AUTHOR OF
‘THE GARDEN OF ASIA,’ ‘THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS,’ ETC.
‘Shōshi no kukai hétori nashi: Sodé no furi-awasé mo tashō no en.’
[There is no shore to the bitter Sea of Birth-and-Death: even the
touching of sleeves in passing is the result of some connection in aformer life.]
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W.
1907
[All rights reserved]
TO
‘MILADI’
ALICE, COUNTESS OF BECTIVE
[1]
THE SUNDERED STREAMS
CHAPTER I
The English language, flexible and rich though it be,lacks words in which to convey the subtler social distinctions.We have had to go abroad for ‘nouveau-riche’and ‘parvenu,’ to say nothing of ‘Philistia,’‘Bohemia,’ the ‘demi-monde,’ and all the other geographicalnames that we have taken from the atlas ofthe human world to describe some small corner in ourown little parish. But, as our civilization grows moreand more complex, so does our borrowed vocabularygrow less and less adequate, until nowadays we findnot a few fine differences in our microcosm which noword of our own or of any other nation avails toidentify. The ‘Arrived’ and the ‘New-rich’ arefamiliar figures, but what of those many families whosuddenly become wealthy and prominent after manygenerations of well-bred obscurity? They cannotfairly be described as ‘nouveau-riche’ or ‘parvenu’;they have been there all the time, though not inevidence; to brand them with the stigma of noveltywould be manifestly unfair. They have antiquitywithout importance—a vast difference, in the eyesof social astronomers, between them and the blazingstars of wealth that so suddenly emerge from the black[2]night of genealogical non-existence. As well comparea dazzling meteor, here and gone in a flash, witha genuine star which, after æons of inconspicuousness,abruptly swells into a luminary of the first magnitude.To describe such fixed lights in our English hemispherea new word must first be coined in another language,and then borrowed. Such people are not ‘nouveau-riche’;they are ‘renrichis.’ And to this class belongedthe Dadds of Darnley-on-Downe—that obscuredynasty from which it is now necessary to show thegradual genesis, through many quiet generations, ofKingston Darnley, its apostate offspring.
Among soft Kentish meadows sleeps the littlemetropolis of Darnley-on-Downe. It lies on the grassyplain like a neat poached egg on a vast green plate, and,over all, the blue vault of heaven makes a domed lid.The Downe meanders placidly at the foot of its gardens,and comfortable little Georgian houses speak ofagelong ease and decent leisure. Darnley-on-Downehas no local peer, no local palace; rank and fashion,therefore, are represented only by these dignifieddwellings of red brick, each enclosed in shrubberies ofrose and laurel and lilac, each tenanted by somefamily well known