Ever After

O
NCE
more I take this opportunity to thank Mrs. F. G. King and the staff of the New York Society Library for their services, so cheerfully rendered, and also Miss May Davenport Seymour of the Museum of the City of New York. At Williamsburg, Miss Mary McWilliams continues to be my dear friend in need, and I am indebted for time and hospitality to Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Chorley, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Bath, Mrs. George Coleman, Mrs. Isobel Hubbard, Judge Frank Armistead, Dr. W. G. Swem, Mr. Rutherford Goodwin, Mr. A. T. Love, and Mrs. Eleanor Duncan. Colonel Arthur F. Crosby, Officers Reserve Corps, U.S. Army, retired, very kindly lent me personal letters and files regarding the Rough Riders, and I am grateful to Lieutenant-Colonel W. E. G. Ord-Statter of the British Army, Major C. B. Ormerod of the British Information Services, Captain G. M. Game of the British Territorial Army, Dr. K. C. Waddell of the Henry Ford Hospital, Mr. Herbert Satterlee, and Miss Elizabeth Garthwaite for the trouble they have taken to answer by letter and in consultation what must often have seemed to them foolish questions about Kitchener’s Egyptian Army, Court
presentations
, English divorce laws and Scotland Yard procedure, malaria and yellow fever, the Cuban campaign, and the half-forgotten, spacious days of the Nineties, which were not altogether gay. To those of us who cannot quite remember, I hope the book will bring glimpses of a vanished world. And I hope that those who lived in it will feel at home again.

E.T.
1945

T
HE LETTER FROM MISS EDEN HAD COME.

Pharoah, the old coloured butler, carried it towards his master’s bedroom upstairs, where Miss Susannah sat reading to her father in front of the fire. Marse Ransom, he knew, had been fretting to hear. Time was getting short, till Christmas. If Miss Eden was coming home she better get a move on. Hardly missed a year, she hadn’t, since she married the Yankee gentleman and went up North to live. Once when young Marse Bracken was getting born, back about ’69, it was, she didn’t come, and that time along early in the ’8o’s when little Miss Virginia had almost died of diphtheria—that kept them home, and one other time—Pharaoh’s dimming memory fumbled at it—must be three times she’d missed, maybe four—four Christmases out of round about thirty—that was pretty good. It never seemed rightly Christmas without Miss Eden there, and her children. Turned out real well, Miss Eden’s marriage had, for all Captain Murray was a Yankee and took her away to Washington and New York with him. Captain Murray was rich too, which was something nobody hereabouts was any more….

Pharaoh’s long, spindly legs in narrow trousers strapped under the instep, and his tail coat, and his thin black neck inside the stiff white collar, gave him the look of an elderly insect as he ascended the broad stairs, but his progress was full of purpose, and the square envelope with its New York postmark was tenderly held in his gnarled fingers. He paused outside Ransom Day’s door and cocked an ear to the panel. The room was quiet, as it would be if the old man had dropped off to sleep. Sue often sat patiently, the book in her lap, waiting till he roused again rather than disturb his light slumber by trying to tiptoe away.

Her care of him was infinitely loving, for she never ceased trying to make up to him for her mother’s death in fever-stricken
Richmond
during the war. It seemed sometimes that he did not want to live—but here he was at eighty-one, the last of his generation, frail, sad, broken, but with a mind quite clear, and a lively interest in his surviving children and their offspring. There were three of them
left to call him Father—Susannah, and her sister Eden, and their eldest brother Dabney, who had lost a leg at Drewry’s Bluff in ’64.

Pharaoh’s soft scratch at the door did not rouse his master, and he opened to Sue’s quick gesture for silence. He put the letter in her hand and departed soundlessly, thinking as he often did how pretty she still was, with only a few silver threads in her coppery hair, and the most elegant shape in Williamsburg even with the
outlandish
way styles were nowadays since they left off their hoops; not weighing a pound more than she had when she was a girl, seemed like, and the smile that showed her little white teeth and the dimple at the corner of her mouth—for the thousandth time Pharaoh mourned the incomprehensible fact that Miss Sue, the darling of them all, had never married.

Sue opened the letter softly, with an eye on her father’s bent head.

Sue read the letter twice through and then sat with it in her fingers, frowning at the fire. Poor Bracken—not because his foreign wife had deserted him, but because he would still not be free of her, to make a new start and live the life he was meant to. But surely there must be some way, even though Lisl did say she was a Catholic. Precious little she cared about religion, except as an excuse! Sedgwick would know, Sue thought. She must go and tell Sedgwick about this at once.

Moving very cautiously, holding her full poplin skirts close to keep them from rustling, she rose and slipped across the room and whisked out the door before her father roused. Sometimes one was justified in taking advantage of his feebleness, she considered, especially when something came up about which she wished to consult her cousin Sedgwick, who was a lawyer and therefore knew everything. Besides, as Eden had mentioned in her letter, Bracken was more like Sedgwick Sprague than like his own father. Somehow in Bracken the Sprague strain, three times bred into his mother’s family through the marriage of first cousins, was dominant; while by a streak of heredity, Sedgwick’s own son was a changeling, unaccountable anywhere in the family history.

Sue put on her hat and the little fur jacket which Eden had given her for Christmas two years before, and set off for Sedgwick’s office, which was up over the bank in the Duke of Gloucester Street. It was a grey, chilly day in December, and the shabby little town looked derelict and bleak. Williamsburg had been the capital of Virginia once, with a Governor’s Palace and a State House and a famous tavern called the Raleigh where Sue’s great-grandmother had danced and dined as a bride after Yorktown—Grandmother Tabitha Day, who could remember when George Washington was only a Burgess and went to dine with the British Royal Governor, wearing powder and his blue Virginia militia uniform with red facings. It was all gone now. The capital had moved to Richmond during the war with England, and even the young ladies’ Academy which in the Sixties had stood on the ground had been torn away so that its bricks could be used by the railway, leaving the upper end of the Duke of Gloucester Street barren and empty. The Palace had burned down after Yorktown and was further demolished by Federal troops in ’62. A modest residence or two occupied its site, and the depot encroached where once the pleached walks and clipped yews of the Royal gardens had been. Fire had destroyed the Raleigh in ’59, and Lane’s store had taken its place. The College, which
remained
closed for some years after Lee’s surrender, was running again, with seven professors and more than a hundred students, but for the more professional courses like Law and Medicine everybody
had to go to the new University at Charlottesville—new, that is, in Thomas Jefferson’s time.

The town was poverty-pinched and forgotten and forlorn, the last of its prosperity swept away by the War Between the States. Chickens foraged undisturbed in its wide, unpaved Duke of Gloucester Street—Sue was one of those who refused to call it Main Street as the careless younger generation did—and cows were let graze in the shade of the old mulberry trees which lined each side of the road. The Palace Green, once a well-kept lawn, was weed-grown and never got mowed. Everybody was poor since the war, even the Spragues, though Sedgwick was the best lawyer on the Peninsular and kept pretty busy—and of course there was his wife’s legacy from her father’s estate, which he would never touch for himself….

The doctor’s sagging buggy went by, bumping over the
frost-hardened
ruts of the road, and Sue responded to his greeting
absent-mindedly
, and walked on, thinking about Bracken.

Somewhere there must be a girl who was meant for him, and who but for this hasty, hectic marriage with Lisl Olezi might still come to reign in his luxurious little house just around the corner from his father’s brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue—the house Bracken had bought and lavishly furnished for his lovely, exacting bride four years ago. The family had always called her “the Austrian”—in the same hostile tone the French had once used, Sue always thought, in speaking of Marie Antoinette by the same term, though strictly speaking Lisl was half Hungarian. Bracken had met her at the Austrian Embassy while he was Washington Correspondent to his father’s New York newspaper. She was cousin or niece to somebody there, and must have come fortune-hunting to America. When anyone so good-looking and—his mother’s word was no exaggeration—irresistible as Bracken was actually had money as well, Lisl was sure to try for him.

Whether his very substantial income had proved to be less than she supposed, or whether she had always meant to tap his father’s resources as well, or whether she merely had a heedless passion for spending money, it was not long before Bracken had been forced to remonstrate, diffidently at first, then more firmly, and finally—he was not a meek man—with justifiable heat. Lisl had called him stingy, and a lot of other things, in that lisping accent he had once found so charming—she could never even manage the
r
in his given name correctly, and it was strange how irritating a thing like that could become. There were sulks and scenes and passionate reconciliations, and then always the confession, sometimes tearful and contrite, sometimes bold and arrogant, of new expenditures. She was beautiful, and deserved to be adorned. She was artful with
her loving—
experienced,
said Eden, her nose very high—and after each quarrel knew how to enslave him again.

So much Sue had known for some time now. She had seen Lisl just once, when Bracken brought her to Williamsburg for
Christmas
the year they were married, and Sue had decided then that Lisl had no tenderness and no sense of humour, and hence was no wife for Bracken. The next year Lisl had contrived to be ill at
Christmas
time—too ill to travel, not too ill for the gaieties of the season in New York. And for the two years after that she had kept Bracken abroad through December. Now she had gone to Europe again—and alone.

Sue came to the narrow dark stairs beside the entrance to the bank and went up them, holding her blue poplin skirts daintily, and turned to the right, and there was the familiar door with S
EDGWICK
S
PRAGUE
, A
TTORNEY-AT-
L
AW
, on it in faded black and gold letters. The office was rather faded-looking too, and the once handsome stuffed black leather furniture was worn and patched and came off on your clothes in a fine brown powder, like the old calf
bindings
of the thick books that lined the walls. The mahogany desk to the right of the door as you went in was empty. Sedgwick had sat there once, when his father was the senior partner, and
Sedgwick’s
son should be sitting there now. Sedgwick refused to accept another apprentice, though he needed help. The job was Fitz’s, if ever he wanted it. But the desk remained empty.