Ever After (33 page)

“Do you mean they think Spain will attack
us
?”
cried Virginia, and her brother glanced at her under a slanting brow.

“Spain is supposed to have a nice little fleet,” he said
noncommittally
. “Run by a man named Cervera. Until we know exactly where it is
and what he plans to do with it, this is going to be a very naval war.” Again he looked at his father. “I would like to get aboard one of those battleships off Havana,” he said, and Cabot nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do about it,” he said.

“Somebody else can have the damn’ dispatch boat for a while, begging everybody’s pardon for language,” Bracken announced.
“I’ve done my time on her. Hang Johnny for enlisting, he’s just the man I want to take her over. Young Wendell has her now while I’m away, but he’s only a cub, he can’t do it all alone for long. Tampa is going to be Army headquarters, as you probably know,” he added to Cabot. “Why don’t you come down there and see the fun?”

“I might,” said Cabot, and his eyes glinted.

“That volunteer cavalry regiment you mentioned, Uncle Cabot,” Miles said in his unemphatic way. “Could I maybe get into that?”

“Oh,
no
!”
cried his mother quickly. “You’re too young!

But, “I’ll see what I can do about it,” said Cabot again, and Dabney nodded at him gratefully.

“I’ll take your little old dispatch boat,” somebody said, and they all realized incredulously that it was Fitz. “I’ll never be as good as Johnny would, but I reckon I can stay afloat.”

There was a thundering silence. Bracken broke it, sipping his coffee.

“Nice to keep it in the family,” he observed. “You’re hired, Fitz. As of Sunday morning, when I start south again.”

T
OGETHER
in their room that night, Fitz said apologetically, “Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken up like that, without talkin’ it over first with you—”

“Oh, but I was proud!” Gwen assured him, and she didn’t look hurt or sad, but only rather excited. “It was the right thing to do, Fitz, the other boys will be in it and I’m glad you’re going to run the boat, it’s better than enlisting.”

It occurred to Fitz that some girls might have cried or reproached him for volunteering to risk his neck like that after only a week of marriage. But not his girl. Whatever he did, his girl would always back him up.

“Supposin’ I hadn’t offered to take over the boat,” he said,
pursuing
this idea. “Would you have been disappointed?”

“Well, it would have to be up to you, Fitz. I don’t suppose the boat is going to be any picnic, with a real war on. It’s hard to go back to New York without you and start the show, but—I still think it was the right thing to do.”

“And if I’d done the wrong thing,” he insisted, “would you have told me?”

She looked at him gravely, pausing in her undressing with a petticoat in one hand. Her hair was a little loosened, her eyes were sleepy.

“I’ll never have to tell you what’s right,” she said then, after considering the remote possibility he had mentioned. “It’s something you’ll always know better than I do, I guess.”

“Well, I dunno, seems like most of the time I’m gropin’ round in the dark,” he ruminated. “For instance, I hate having you go back to New York alone. Would you any rather let the show go hang and stay here with the family while I’m away?”

“Stay
here
?
Oh, I couldn’t do that, Fitz, I’ve signed a contract! If I walked out on them now up there I’d never get another job in show business as long as I lived.”

“’Tisn’t absolutely necessary you should, you know. You’ve got a husband to support you now, remember?”

She shook her head.

“I’ve got to think of Pa,” she reminded him. “With what I earn in this show if it’s a success I can lay up a year’s keep for Pa if I’m careful.”

“Now, look, honey, when I married you I took on your Pa too, see? You can have all my salary while I’m gone, and if you lived here—”

Gwen was still shaking her head.

“He’s not your responsibility. I wouldn’t feel right for him to cost you money. Besides, the show will keep me busy and I won’t have so much time to eat my heart out for you.”

“Well, if you want it that way—” he murmured, reflecting that she would be bound to find Williamsburg dull anyway, after New York. She’d have more fun in New York doing the show and earning good money. He could never expect her to give up the stage, especially if this show of theirs was a hit..

Some time later, lying very still in the dark beside him, Gwen spoke again.

“Fitz.”

“Mm?”

“Will the family have to
know about Pa? Couldn’t we just say I had to go back on account of having signed a contract and wanting to help out with your show? They might not understand—they might think Pa was a real loony, and he’s not, it was just that fall. I mean, it’s nothing that might come out in our children, I wouldn’t want anybody to think it was hereditary—”

“Sure, we can just say the show can’t go on without you,” he agreed. “The only question that’s botherin’ me is, how am I goin’ to get along myself?”

Bracken sought out his parents in private the next day and handed Eden a folded piece of note-paper.

“I don’t want to sound melodramatic,” he began rather gravely
for him. “But I’ve written down there the address of Dinah’s brother Archie, and if anything should happen to me in this silly war we’re starting I want you to write him just how it was, and ask him to tell her the best way he can. Not that I expect it to be necessary. But Scovel damn’ near got shot against a wall when they caught him, and from now on it’s going to be open season on American journalists in Cuba. They blame the American Press for starting the war, and they consider every correspondent a spy, and they’re not far wrong, at that. Your own dispatches are your death warrant if you’re caught with ’em on you.”

“Then I hope you’ll be very careful to swallow yours, my dear, the minute you’re caught,” Eden said with a brave smile, to show him she knew there was nothing for her to be anxious about. And Cabot said that swallowing Bracken’s dispatches would be certain death for anybody, which wasn’t really a very good joke, as he knew very well, and then there was a little silence.

“You wouldn’t care to tell us about your Dinah?” Cabot suggested delicately, for they knew only that she was the still
unconscious
cause of the shift in divorce proceedings to the English courts, that she was very young and an Earl’s daughter, lived in an enormous Georgian house near Farthingale, and had hair almost the same colour as Eden’s. Beyond that Bracken had never gone, and they had as usual respected his silences and promised themselves that Eden would get a look at her during the summer and then things would be clearer. But now Eden’s sailing would be indefinitely postponed on account of the war, and Dinah remained a mystery.

Bracken walked over to the window and stood looking out into the garden, his long, picturesquely clad body sagging a little as he realized anew that he was not spending Easter in Gloucestershire this year, but far otherwise. Easter had become a sort of anniversary in his mind, with associations as important and personal as birthdays.

The disinclination to speak of Dinah which had plagued him so long was still there. But now, with so much uncertainty before him, the yearning to see her again and the need to share with someone his intense preoccupation with her rose up and choked him. Standing at the window with his back to the room, choosing his words, controlling his voice to an unemotional monotone, he began.

“It is very important, I think, that Dinah shouldn’t know just yet how I feel about her,” he said carefully. “Especially in case I don’t come back from Cuba in a position to—carry out my plans for her. She was sixteen last September and compared to Virginia is young for her age. If she should never see me again she will forget me and, presumably, make a good marriage and have some sort of life of her own. That is why I am not leaving a letter for her. I won’t have
her saddened by the loss of anything but a strange, brief friendship. Archie would be the one to handle that.”

“Yes, dear, but there won’t be any need for Archie,” Eden remarked firmly as he paused. “Go on about Dinah.”

“It’s difficult,” he admitted after a moment, staring through the window, his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know why, but it is. I have been in love before, more or less, I don’t have to tell you, and we’ve always joked about it in a normal sort of way—except in the case of Lisl, there wasn’t anything funny about that, was there! This thing with Dinah scares me. I have no choice. I am possessed. I didn’t see it coming, there was no beginning, there is no end. Dinah is
mine
, it is impossible to imagine that anything can prevent me from marrying her. That is why I have forced myself to consider the alternative, and provide for it through Archie.”

“Does she—has she noticed the same thing?” Eden asked gently.

“I can’t tell. It’s too soon. Well, yes, I can tell that she’s drawn to me, likes to be with me, counts on me as a friend. But you’ve no idea how circumspect I’ve been. I let her kiss me goodbye—
let
her, mind you! I stood like a stump and felt her face against mine. It aged me by ten years, but I did it. She was crying—” He struck the window-casing beside him with his closed hand, ricocheted off it back into the room and faced them grimly, one eyebrow askew. “Don’t think I’m kicking about this job that’s ahead of me, because I’m not. I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. If I had got back to England before it started I should have had to leave there at once and go to Cuba, make no mistake about that. I suppose what really gets in amongst me is that I couldn’t bring her with me last autumn. Our times are out of joint, hers and mine. I have to wait. I have a long way to go yet, before I can get to Dinah. I’m going to get to her—somehow—some time. It has to be the longest way round, but Dinah is home for me, journey’s end, and all the rest of it. You won’t need that piece of paper with Archie’s address on it, that’s just a form of crossing my fingers.” He came and bent over his mother’s chair and kissed her lightly. “These red-haired women! he said. “Once they’ve got you by the heart the devil himself can’t save you!”

When he had left the room Eden sat looking down at the paper she held:
The
Hon.
Archibald
Campion,
—
Half
Moon
Street,
London.

“Virginia mentioned an Archie Campion,” she said thoughtfully. “He was the one she liked better than the Viscount who wanted to marry her.”

Cabot had not heard.

“I’m sorry for Bracken,” he said, as though speaking to himself, without meeting her eyes. “I ache for him, Eden. And it is
singularly little use to remember that I myself had to go the longest way round to get you.”

Eden rose and laid her arms around his big shoulders and her cool cheek against his.

“I begin to think you have to earn it,” she said softly. “What comes too easily—remember Lisl—may not be worth having.”

Miles’s twenty-first birthday took place on Saturday with all the trappings—toasts, speeches, gifts, family jokes and ceremonies—heightened and coloured in every instance by the knowledge that the country was at war and that after that one last day together the family would be scattered again, some of it in uncertainty and peril. For Eden and Sue and Charlotte the day held poignancy almost too sharp to bear without tears, for it roused their memories of other days when Cabot had come to say goodbye before catching the last northbound train out of Richmond in ’61; when Sedgwick rode with Jeb Stuart, and Dabney was brought back from Drewry’s Bluff with a shattered leg. Oh, not
again,
they said to each other piteously with white, resigned faces. Not for Bracken and Fitz and Miles. Not every generation, this agony of parting and waiting and picking up the pieces when it was over. Not for their sons, the same ordeal their lovers had miraculously survived….

But already Cabot had promised to lay Miles’s application personally before Theodore Roosevelt for the volunteer cavalry regiment. Already Fitz and Bracken were cheerfully accumulating the ominous paraphernalia of the tropics—nux vomica for fever, rhubarb pills for bowel complaint, talcum powder for saddle chafing, sun cholera drops for diarrhoea, acetate of lead for insect bites, vaseline for sunburn, quinine, calomel, mosquito-nets and abdominal bands—all the feeble, futile safeguards against unknown ills and emergencies. Cabot, an old war-horse smelling powder, was going with them as far as Tampa, that sultry, sandy city which was the bottleneck through which all traffic to and from Key West must pass. Some correspondents had been sweating it out there ever since the
Maine
went down, and more were arriving every day. Now that it had become Army headquarters, everything that happened would happen there, until the Navy had dealt with the missing Cervera and his fleet.

Eden was schooled to journalistic habits and viewed the preoccupation of her men philosophically. Sue thanked God many times a day that Sedgwick’s fifty-six years would keep him at home in Williamsburg this time. But Gwen—not even Fitz had any idea what Gwen was living through while the festivities of Miles’s birthday swirled around her.

Gwen could not remember another war, from which some men had returned more or less intact so that life could go on. She had grown
up ignorant of the stoicism and heart-break of the ’6o’s, which were still woven into the everyday fabric of living in Williamsburg. For Gwen the departure of Fitz for the blockade waters between Cuba and Florida was cataclysm, holocaust, and the end of the world. But Gwen was not an actress tor nothing, and it was impossible to detect her inner panic and desolation. To Fitz she showed only her pride in him and her faith that he would be back safe in time to see the show in its prime. To the family she was the quiet, self-contained, rather mysterious girl who was going back to New York to sing Fitz’s new songs just as though nothing had happened, and they all thought it a little heartless and strange of her, though they might have found it hard to say what else they would have expected her to do.