As well as a husband, there was an income of something under three thousand a year — which she was to take in hand a little later. And then, of course, there was the fact that she had changed a very doubtful name for a quite indisputable title. For the first year she was very sensitive about the title. It would be clumsy to say that she was a snob. The title was to her the symbol of her emancipation from the sordid conditions of her birth and childhood and her quite natural pride in it led to an incident on the first day of their honeymoon — which cast, one might say, the shadow of the tragedy of six years later.
They put up at the Hotel des Anglais where he astonished and offended her by signing the register as “Mr. and Mrs. Stranack.” And in this connection we hear her voice for the first time. One imagines the words being very clearly enunciated (thanks to her training in the halls) while the new consciousness of rank struggles with the Cockney idiom.
“I felt myself going hot and cold all over, though I didn’t say anything until we were in our room. And then I said: ‘This is a nice thing, Charles,’ I said, ‘if you’re ashamed of me already. And if you’re not, why did you sign Mr. and Mrs. Stranack?’ And then he laughed and said: ‘Well, you see the fact is that jolly old manager-fellow recognized me and that’s how we signed it before. Must be careful, what!’ And I said: ‘Do you mean to say you’ve brought me to the very hotel where you’ve stayed before with some woman? I never knew men treated their wives like that,’ I said. And he laughed again and said: ‘That’s all right, kiddie. She was my wife, too. Married her at the place they call the Mairie.’ ”
Molly was taking no risks. She walked out of the room, called an interpreter and made him take her to the Mairie. Here she obtained the marriage certificate of Marthe Celeste Stranack, nee Frasinier, dated February 15th, 1897 — which she did not want. And the death certificate of the same — dated January 22nd, 1901 — which enabled her to return to the Hotel des Anglais without menace to her technical respectability.
After leaving Paris they went to Bournemouth and spent the summer drifting about English watering-places. In those days Roucester Castle had not been thrown open to the public. It was let until the following September. As soon as the tenancy expired Molly insisted on going to live at the Castle. So there, in the following April (1902) her son was born.
Again it was probably the reaction from her mother that made Molly take her own motherhood with fanatical zeal. It might almost be said that the baby changed the very contours of the countryside. Roucester, which perhaps you know as a noisy little town, was then hardly more than a village. That town was called into being by Molly’s discovery that it was impossible to live in the Castle on three thousand a year. The knowledge made her angry and she wanted to hurt somebody, so she hurt Colonel Boyce.
The Colonel had combined with the duty of tutor those of absentee overseer of the estate. He was an honest, stupid man with the class-morality of a Victorian gentleman. After the debacle he returned as guardian of Molly’s child and with the boy was killed in an air-raid on London in 1917. Only a few days before his death he gave evidence to the Court of Chancery.
“I was aware that the Marchioness had called in a firm of London accountants to examine my books. And I think I may say, without fear of being accused of malice to the dead, that Lady Roucester was disappointed when no defalcation was discovered. In a subsequent interview she asked me a number of questions, particularly in regard to the leases. At the end of our conversation I found myself virtually discharged as an incompetent servant. Thereafter, I understand, the Marchioness managed the estate herself.”
She did. Molly, the ex-music-hall hack and unscrupulous adventuress, took over that rambling, difficult estate and in five years was squeezing out of it a trifle under eleven thousand a year net. If you have driven through this part, you may regret the big factory of the Meat Extract people whose coal barges have spoilt that bit of the river, while Cauldean Hill, of course, has been utterly ruined by the quarry. But you should remember in charity that they are the indirect result of Molly’s conscientious motherhood.
She even made a partially successful attempt to build up her husband, who had now taken on the tremendous importance of being the father of her son. Even that first year she raised enough to attend the Coronation — dragged along with her the reluctant Marquis, protesting, not without truth, that he looked a most frightful ass in miniver and a coronet. She made him attend some of the debates, but neither threats nor tears would induce him to make a speech. He was an indifferent horseman but she soon had money enough to put him back in the traditional position of M.F.H.
Out of it all she took no more than four hundred a year for herself of which nearly three hundred was spent on dress.
In their third year that handful of prosperous and for the most part idle persons who are commonly called “the County” began to approve of what she had done with the Marquis, and in the fourth year they “called,”
Oddly enough, they seem to have liked her. There are no stories of her gaucherie. As she made no secret of her origin and did not claim to be one of them, they willingly gave her the position to which her rank would normally have entitled her.
Her aim was to fulfil her role as adequately as she could in the country. There was no town-house, though she hoped they would be able to afford one by the time Conrad was old enough to go to Eton. Cowes was financially out of reach, so they spent August at the Castle.
It was on an August morning in 1907 — actually Bank Holiday — when there came the next crisis in her life. At exactly half-past twelve she went out, as she had a bit of a headache and intended to potter in the garden until lunch time. But she was still on the terrace when she saw the station victoria coming up the drive.
Disentangling the facts from her own rather verbose account, we gather that she waited on the terrace until the cab was immediately below her. She then called out to the woman sitting in it:
“Hullo! Have you come to see me?”
The woman seemed to be flustered by this informal greeting. She made no answer and let herself be driven on to the entrance. Here she hesitated, then walked along the terrace to where Molly was standing.
“Excuse me asking — but are you Lady Roucester?”
Molly had had a quick look at her and thought she might be an old-time acquaintance of the halls.
“Yes. And I know your face quite well, but since I’ve had the influenza my memory is something awful.”
“Excuse me. But the family name is Stranack, isn’t it? Your husband’s got a girl’s name, hasn’t he? — Jean-Marie. Charles Augustus Jean Marie Stranack? And he’s called—” she consulted a piece of paper — “the Marquis of Roucester and Jarrow. He was born in Roucester and he’s thirty-eight.”
Tears, Molly said, were running down the woman’s cheeks. She took a folded paper out of her purse and gave it to Molly.
“Perhaps you’ll look at this and tell me what we’d better do?”
It was, of course, the certificate of marriage between Charles Stranack and Phyllis Margaret, solemnized in St. Seiriol’s Church, Toronto, on June 30th, 1900.
Toronto — June 30th, 1900 — as against Brighton May 5th, 1901. The two women seem to have stood together for two or three minutes without speaking to each other. They were certainly there at twenty-five minutes to one when the youthful Lord Narley, heir to the Marquisate, passed within a hundred feet of them with his governess.
“Is that your little boy?” asked Phyllis Margaret. “Of course, it’s hard on him but — I really don’t know what’s to be done, I’m sure.”