Ever After (21 page)

“’Morning,” he said dryly, and rose from the bench with a weary slowness.

“Bit of a hangover?” asked Bracken sympathetically, hoping that would do.

“No. Crossed in love,” said Sir Gratian grimly, and turned to pace along beside him. “I don’t have to tell you more, do I!”

“There is a legend in our family,” Bracken began in a light, impersonal tone, and slid a hand through Sir Gratian’s elbow, matching his step, “which I had from my father, who got it from my mother, who was there at the time, that Aunt Sue fell in love at a tender age with a boy who was her double first cousin, plus. They weren’t allowed to marry, and he went away to join the cavalry. But now they still live in the same town, see each other every day, and seem to keep quite cheerful on it. This is the first time she has ever left him. I suppose she feels that no matter what has happened to her, he’s still waiting.”

“I didn’t know,” said Sir Gratian, after a moment.
“She mentioned her father—”

“Her father was just an excuse. It’s Cousin Sedgwick that takes her back. I’m supposed to be very like him, so you can see what bad taste she has.”

“She might do worse, at that,” said Sir Gratian. “Thank you for telling me.”

When they entered the dining room arm-in-arm ten minutes later,
chatting of this and that, Bracken felt entirely justified in having suppressed the fact of Sedgwick’s happy marriage to Melicent.

T
HE
purchase of Farthingale was completed in Mr. Partridge’s office in London before Sir Gratian departed for Egypt, and Bracken felt a new contentment, an end-of-the-journey peace, as though St. John Sprague had stretched out a friendly hand across the generations to guide him home. Now his roots could go down into the soil of England where Dinah’s were, and their lives even now could run parallel until they became one. It gave him the right to be in Gloucestershire as much as he liked, to be casual and friendly and underfoot, and gradually she would learn to count on him.

The Græco-Turkish war had come to a disastrous end for the Greeks, and the Powers were negotiating a laborious peace. The news from the North-West Indian Frontier became increasingly grave, and young Hilton was ordered on to Calcutta. Kitchener, who abhorred correspondents, was conducting his campaign towards Omdurman in Egyptian darkness so far as the Press was concerned. He kept the men from the London dailies boxed up in a fortified village a hundred miles behind the end of the railway, and remained impervious, unlike the British Indian régime, to blandishment or prayers. The Kaiser visited the Czar in August, with a full programme of manœuvres, fireworks, illuminations, processions, and State banquets. The two absolute monarchs pledged each other publicly as gentlemen, emperors, and friends, to keep the peace of Europe, and the next day witnessed together the most impressive military review of their respective reigns.

Suddenly it was August. You knew the summer was nearly gone because the sweet, melancholy cry of the lavender-women was heard in dusty Mayfair. The West End of London emptied itself into the country houses, the clubs closed for cleaning, the streets came up for repairs, and the City dozed. August was the Silly Season in the journalistic world, which as usual abandoned itself to stories about sea serpents, prize marrows, lost causes, and weather superstitions, so Bracken allowed himself a few days in the country.

He had subscribed three hundred pounds to the Hunt, and had bought Sunbeam from Lord Alwyn for sentimental reasons, with the provision that she was to return to her home stables to board during his necessary absences from England. They all went out for a day’s cubbing, though the scent was catchy owing to drought and the
ground was hard enough to lame a carelessly ridden horse. “The thing about cubbing,” said Alwyn, though not in any spirit of real complaint, “is that you have to get up so bloody early in the morning, what?” He was at first inclined to pamper Virginia, and held back to see her over the walls. This got her dander up, and Bracken’s heart was in his mouth more than once while she demonstrated to Alwyn that she was as good a horsewoman at least as his sister Clare. Even Sue did a bit of larking over a locked gate for the honour of the family. Bracken found it good to hear hound music again, and the lovely heart-shaking double notes of the horn blowing them out, and the stout Hunt-servant noises in the coverts. And next year, he promised himself, he would have Dinah at his side on a good horse of her very own.

Her sixteenth birthday was celebrated by a luncheon party at Farthingale early in September which Archie came all the way down from London to attend. But the presence of Alwyn and her father lay heavy on the meal, which never achieved either the dignity of a real anniversary nor the spontaneous gaiety of a children’s party. Because the music box gift was already in her possession, Bracken had brought the largest and most assorted box of sweets Fortnum and Mason could supply, and was not aware that it passed for his only present to her in the eyes of her family. Some cautious instinct had prompted Dinah not to exhibit the music box, which she regarded as their secret.

Sue had chosen for her a pink coral pin set with pearls; the Queen of Italy was said to have brought coral back into fashion. Virginia gave Dinah a tiny live Indian tortoise, its shell studded with jewels. These were worn on the shoulder with a gold chain, watch-fashion, by prankish
élegantes
in Town, but everyone agreed that it would be best for Dinah’s to live in a basin with a bit of sand and greenery, where it would be much happier, and it was plied with titbits from her plate which it would have none of. Virginia explained at some length that the man in the shop had said it would eat bits of raw meat chopped up fine, and had shown her how to tickle it under the chin to make it open its mouth. Lord Enstone at that point decreed that the tortoise could wait for its lunch until after they had left the table.

By September Sue had got thoroughly homesick, and Bracken promised her that just as soon as things let up a little more and he felt sure that the London office could run on its own feet for a few weeks he would leave Nelson in charge there and accompany them home to spend Christmas as usual in Williamsburg, returning to London in January. Virginia heard him without enthusiasm. Archie had pelted back to Town the day after the birthday luncheon, and there he stuck, eating his dinners for the Bar and reading Law
day and night in his chambers in Half Moon Street. Lord Alwyn, meanwhile, was becoming a bit tiresome. But all the same, to give up and go home, to turn her back on the man who by his seeming indifference had caught her butterfly heart, was a very difficult dose to take.

Bracken pestered Partridge for news and there was none, until a letter arrived from Eden in New York.

Sue was for sailing at once to attend to Fitz, but Bracken, reading Sally’s letter, had gone rather white and didn’t seem to hear. The next day he left for the Continent and was gone nearly a week, and returned looking sleepless and depressed without having accomplished anything.

Whether or not she had got wind of his coming and wished to avoid him and the small, smooth-shaven man Partridge had sent with him, Lisl had vanished from the gaming tables, taking the man Hutchinson with her. Bracken had gone to see Sally at Cannes, while Partridge’s representative joined up with the sleuth-hound already on the job and they went poking about on their own, as they said, turning over stones.

It was the first time Sally and her cousin Eden’s son had ever met, and they formed a strange, immediate friendship. There was much in her fantastic household which revolted him–the little yapping dogs, the soft-footed, knowing servants, the unexplained presence of a handsome, sullen French youth she called Paul—but Sally herself, with paint on her face and henna on her hair and a French
r
on her tongue when she spoke English, was somehow still kin, and their blood bond spoke as soon as they touched hands.

From her he received further unsavoury details of Lisl’s career. Lisl passed openly as Hutchinson’s mistress, but apparently took satisfaction in considering him beneath her, and treated him with flagrant contempt, while he on his side was subject to wild, jealous rages when he even threatened to take her life, and their quarrels could be heard half-way to Paris. Sally thought Lisl was acting like a fool, for if she drove Hutchinson away from her, at least unless she had found another wealthy protector, where would she be? Sally was full of impractical suggestions for hurrying on the divorce, most of them requiring some highly improbable coincidence as a starting point, and Bracken tried rather wearily to explain Partridge’s course of legal procedure. In the end he had come back to London with nothing to show for his journey but Sally’s faithful promise to keep a sharp eye and ear, and let him know the minute Lisl showed her nose again.

“Let’s go home for Christmas, then,” said Virginia listlessly, laying her arm around his shoulders the evening he arrived in London and told them how it was. “I don’t care if I never see England again!”

Bracken patted her hand sympathetically. Once he had suspected that her perverse interest in Archie Campion arose mainly from the fact that Archie was the only man she had ever looked twice at who had not instantly grovelled. Now he had begun to fear that it went deeper than that. He was glad that she had had the good sense to prefer a younger son to the heir, since Archie was so patently preferable to Alwyn, as Dinah had said, for marrying. No title went with Archie except the mere Honourable. It was pretty obvious that no money went with him either. Lots of money would go with Virginia when she married. Bracken wondered if possibly that was what was biting Archie, and at the same time surmised that Virginia’s money was no drawback in Alwyn’s estimation….

T
HEIR
earliest possible sailing date fell so near to Bracken’s birthday that he talked them into waiting over so that he might have the day at Farthingale. The house was taking on the Murray imprint now. Some needed repairs to the roof and the drains were under way. Wire gauze had been fitted to the windows to keep the flies out. The sparrows’ nests had been cleaned out of the gutterpipes, and the jackdaws’ nests were gone from the chimneys. An extra maid was being trained. The coachman had been put into the claret-coloured livery of Eden’s men-servants in New York, and a smart dog-cart with red wheels and a high-stepping two-year-old had been purchased for station work in place of Aunt Sophie’s stately barouche and matched bays. The cellar was being stocked by a London wine merchant. It would take the hocks two years to settle after the move. And Bracken was looking into the matter of installing a small dynamo for electric light and getting in another bathroom next spring before his parents arrived.

A note from Dinah was waiting for him at Farthingale.

This left Bracken feeling distinctly cheerful. Our hill. The one where she had first ridden towards him in the sunrise. He had not known she thought of it as their hill.

It was a very different sort of morning, though, from the one which saw their first meeting. A frosty night had given way to a threat of drizzle, and wisps of mist clung to the hollows. The sky was low and grey. Even the swallows had gone, and the leafless trees were silent and empty. In London they would be eating breakfast by gaslight and setting forth into a real pea-souper. Here in the Hills, Sunbeam’s feet rustled through brown fallen leaves, and the bare patches were studded with toadstools.