Ever After (4 page)

The Spragues came to supper the first evening, completing the circle which Ransom Day surveyed fondly from his armchair at the
head of the table. He noted with regret the absence of babies from the festivities. There used always to be babies, it seemed to him. Who would be getting married next, he wondered. His clear, serene gaze came to rest on Miles and Phoebe, seated together on the right-hand side of the table. Perhaps. They were only second cousins. But Miles was devoting himself tonight to his cousin Virginia Murray, who sat on his other hand. She came between Phoebe and Miles in age, as she would turn eighteen in the spring, and with a Court presentation in view she had suddenly become a young lady. Virginia was dark like her father, with a heart-shaped, minxish face, long, slender soaring eyebrows, and a closed, mysterious, “grown-up” smile. Ransom beheld her with a mild concern. A heart-breaker. Eden’s daughter was bound to be that, but he was sure that Eden herself at seventeen had been less aware of her own potentialities. Virginia was wrapping Miles around her little finger just for the fun of it. Would Phoebe mind?
Ransom
brooded gently at his descendants and relations, silent himself in the candlelit merriment which ran up and down the long, glittering table.

His gaze caught the glance of Eden’s husband, the Yankee Cabot Murray, and a look flashed between them—friendly, full of
comprehension
. Each of them recalled in that instant the first time Cabot had sat at this table, a stranger, but with Eden’s heart already in his possession, and the long, bitter years of civil war still to come. Ransom smiled into his son-in-law’s eyes, and Cabot smiled back affectionately. Once they had not known how to take this fellow, Ransom thought, but that was over now. A blind man could see that Eden was happy and content and still in love with her husband.

Ransom sought and found the face of their son Bracken, who had come with the shadow of his broken marriage upon him. The family were all being very careful not to stare at Bracken, the first among them ever to be deserted by his wife. Bracken seemed anything but self-conscious. He sat at the corner of the table between Phoebe and Sue and obviously entertained them both. How he resembles Sedgwick, Ransom thought, and what a queer thing inheritance is—or do I mean heredity?—but then, he thought, ours is a queer family, three lines all juggled in together—we’ve even got French blood, way back—perhaps it came out in Sally—perhaps it’s in
Virginia
too—that smile, as though she knew something you didn’t know—provocative—at her age—dear, dear, thought Ransom, poor Miles—poor lots of people, before she’s safely married—and as for Fitz, something on his mother’s side, I suppose, that we’ll never know—music—yes, of course, music up to a point in all of us, and his mother did have a lovely singing voice as a girl—but music like a disease—that’s not accountable—

“Tired, Father?” asked Eden’s voice on his left, and her soft, warm hand was laid on his beside his plate.

“With all this fun going on?” he asked wistfully. “How could I be tired? You’re very beautiful tonight, my dear,” he added with his childlike, searching scrutiny.

“Thank you, Father.” Her fingers pressed his. “My husband said the same thing, just before we came down stairs to supper. I’ll begin to thing it’s true!”

“You were always prettier than Sally, I thought,” he said, slipping back thirty-five years between breaths.

“You never said so before!”

“Didn’t want to turn your head. Cabot knew it,
though—didn’t he?”

Cabot, who sat next to his wife as the custom was at these family parties, looked round at the sound of his name and demanded to know what it was he knew.

“The difference between Sally and Eden when they were girls,” said Ransom.

“Ho!” said Cabot with something like a snort. “
What
a difference!”

“That’s our beauty now,” Ransom continued, nodding towards Virginia, and Eden’s eyes were proud. “You’ve got your work cut out, giving that girl a London season. D’you want her to marry a duke?”

“Heavens, no!” cried Eden. “We’ll bring her back, never fear! She’s not like Sally either!”

“She’s a flirt,” Ransom warned them. “You wait. She even makes eyes at Sedgwick at his age, and he laps it up. Look at them!”

“Don’t you worry about her, sir.” Cabot smiled at his father-
in-law’s
forebodings. “She’s an honest little soul, and always thinks straight and for keeps like her mother.”

“Aren’t you pleased with us, Father?” Eden teased him. “Don’t you think we’re a credit to you, on the whole?”

“Yes, you are,” he nodded, and his withered fingers clung to her hand while his gaze travelled down the table again, clouded, and came to rest. “I sometimes wonder where Fitz gets his odd ways,” he remarked with apparent irrelevance.

Eden glanced quickly at her husband, and found his steadying, ironic eyes waiting. Then they both looked away, and Eden changed the subject from Fitz without replying.

Sue’s seating arrangements had not permitted Melicent to sit next her brother Cabot, who was many years older than herself, a grown man for her childish worship which had never diminished. After supper when the family settled into groups and clusters in
the drawing room, she slid a possessive hand under his elbow and drew him away to a corner sofa, murmuring, “I want to talk to you.”

“Well, of course you do,” he agreed obtusely. “How are things, anyway? You look remarkably healthy, it seems to me.”

“Really, Cabot, can’t you say I look
nice
, or something?”

“It is nice to look healthy,” he insisted. “Happy too. We’re a lucky pair, you and I.”

“Oh, Cabot, what’s to become of poor Bracken?”

“He’s going to London, as soon as we see McKinley into the White House in March.”

“Yes, I know, but—his
life
, Cabot! It’s ruined!”

“I hope not,” he said briefly.

“Do you think he can get a divorce?”

“Might.”

His jaw set grimly, his heavy, carven lips were hard. She could see that his son’s trouble had hit him cruelly, but that he did not intend to expound to her his views on the subject. Melicent sighed.

“I’m not so lucky about Fitz, either,” she said. “Cabot, will you help me?”

“If I can. Anything special?”

“Yes. I thought—now don’t jump down my throat, will you!—I thought perhaps you would be willing to give him a job on the paper.”

“
Fitz
?
Doing what, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, I thought—with Bracken going away, there might be a vacancy somewhere.”

“My dear girl, Bracken was brought up in a newspaper office. Fitz never even saw the inside of one.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean in Bracken’s
place
, I only thought—
someone
will have to move up into Bracken’s place, and someone else will move up into his place, and so on, and finally there might be room somewhere at the bottom for Fitz.”

“Bracken’s departure won’t mean a sort of General Post in the office, Melicent. And I somehow don’t see Fitz as a leg-man, chasing fires and going round the police stations.”

“Please, Cabot—I’m so worried.”

“What does Sedgwick think about this?”

“I—haven’t asked him.”

He tried to see her face, for this was serious. She would not meet his eyes, but sat winding her handkerchief round and round her forefinger and then unwinding it, only to begin again.

“Mean to say you’ve quarrelled with Sedgwick?” he demanded.

“Oh,
no
!” That brought her eyes up, shocked and limpid. “Sedgwick and I don’t quarrel! It’s just—we can’t seem to talk together about Fitz any more. Sedgwick isn’t—isn’t
friends
with
Fitz any more, Cabot, it’s frightening, I’ve got to think of
something
. You see—Fitz is so
different
.”

“Yes, I know. He’s not cut to the family pattern anywhere, is he!”

“It oughtn’t to matter so much, so far as I can see. But it does, Cabot, Sedgwick takes it dreadfully to heart that Fitz doesn’t seem to—fit in anywhere, teaching like Dabney, or—practising law with his father. But I can’t get Fitz to see how important it is that he should do something, and—you see, he doesn’t earn
anything
, and looks to me for pocket-money, even, and—that seems to make Sedgwick perfectly furious.”

“Well, so it should.”

“But what can I
do
, Cabot, I love them both so terribly, and I can’t help seeing both sides of it. This—estrangement makes things very uncomfortable at home. Even Phoebe feels it, and—it just can’t go on. So I thought—”

“Well, how do we know that Fitz would come to New York if I offered him a job?”

“Sue might help. He listens to her. Sometimes I th-think she knows him better than I do.”

“Jealous?”

“N-no. But he’s always turned to her in the strangest way.”

“Because she’s always spoilt him.”

“Perhaps. But you will give him a place on the paper, Cabot? To please me?”

“Well, I’ll think about it, my dear, you’ve rather sprung it on me, haven’t you!”

T
HAT
night in their bedroom Eden, hairbrush in hand, broke a thoughtful silence.

“Cabot, did Melicent speak to you about giving Fitz a job?”

“She did.”

“Well, are you going to?”

“Don’t know. What do
you
think?”

“I think it would be rather a responsibility, having him with us in New York. He’s not like Bracken.”

“He’s not like anybody around here, either. That seems to be his trouble.”

“Ought we to tell, Cabot?”

“What good would that do?” They gazed at each other, Cabot
sitting on the edge of the bed with one shoe off, Eden brushing out her reddish hair with long, regular strokes. “Well, we can if you like,” he said after a moment. “But it’s going to come as rather a shock to everybody. And just how should we go about it? Shall I take Sedgwick aside and say, By the way, old man, nobody saw fit to mention it at the time of your marriage to her, but the fact is, my sister is not my father’s child.” Cabot shook his head. “He’ll think I’m breaking up in my mind. Or shall I begin at the other end, with something like this: Once upon a time when I was about fourteen, my mother eloped with a vagabond violinist, and Melicent is the innocent fruit of their sin; my poor father found a sort of demented revenge in bringing her up as his own child after our mother died. It sounds, even to me, as though I were having hallucinations.”

“It might help them to understand Fitz, though.”

“In the circumstances, wouldn’t they rather not?”

“Probably. I suppose it is too late now,” Eden ruminated.

“Too late to change what’s in Fitz’s blood, certainly. Melicent had a touch of the same thing, before she fell in love with Sedgwick. As a child she always had a passion for music. A happy marriage seems to have more or less replaced it. Shall we try to get Fitz married, then?”

“Oh, Cabot, you are a chump! Anyway, we made our decision years ago. Only you and I and Grandmother Day knew—and of course your father. Gran said not to tell. And Gran was always right. Now we’re the only two people left in the world who know that you and Melicent didn’t have the same father. Let’s not say a word. But let’s take Fitz under our wing. I think perhaps we owe him something.”

“It’s Bracken I keep thinking of. What do we owe him?” Cabot rose from the bed and came to her where she sat at the dressing-table, the brush in her hand. He knelt beside her and put his arms around her waist and buried his face in her neck and spoke from there, muffled and unhappy. “Sweetheart, the Murray curse has come upon us. I have some idea of what he’s going through, I was old enough to see what it did to my father when his wife left him for another man.”

“But your father loved his wife.”

“True. And until it happened, she was sweet and virtuous, unlike the Austrian. But the net result is the same. My father and my son, both deserted by their wives. What’s wrong with us Murrays, Eden?”

“Don’t be morbid, my dear. And anyway,
you’re
safe enough, didn’t you know?”

His arms tightened. She felt his lips against her throat.

“That doesn’t help either of the boys,” he said then.

After the light was out, Eden spoke again in the darkness beside him.

“Cabot. Has Lisl gone with another man—too?”

“Oh, Lord, you weren’t supposed to know! I can never keep a secret from you, can I?”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t know.”

“Man’s reasons, mostly. To save Bracken’s pride.”

“I always knew she was a slut.”

“
Eden!
”
He gathered her into a mighty hug with affectionate mirth. “I don’t know where you learn such words, not from me!”

But Eden lay passive in his arms and nursed her wrath against Lisl.

“Tell me the rest of it now,” she said. “Who is he? How did it happen?”

“He’s got real money.”

“Naturally!”

“Beside him, I’m a pauper. He’s got half a dozen gold-mines in California—came with a letter of introduction to me from that fellow Friedman in Chicago. Wanted to buy the paper out from under me and play politics with it. I managed to convince him that I wasn’t for sale, but meanwhile Lisl’s price-tag was showing and he took up with her.”

“Where?”

“Oh, I got awfully tired of him very soon and passed him on to the Bennett crowd. It was at one of their parties that he met Lisl. After that, all I had to do was duck.”

“Cabot, you mean you saw this thing coming and did nothing to—”

“I might have warned Bracken, I suppose, but they would only have had another row. All right, I confess I lay low and tried to set a trap for Lisl. And it went wrong. She got away. She was too quick.”

“I don’t—quite understand,” Eden murmured.

“Eden, darling, I thought I foresaw that Lisl would betray Bracken with this Californian, yes, but I meant to catch her at it, and put her through the divorce court. Don’t you see, if I could have got proof of her adultery Bracken was free. I preferred a scandal, if necessary, to what he was enduring from her, and I was pretty sure he would prefer it too. She beat me, blast her. She got on that damn’ boat without giving me any evidence I could use in court. I think she saw my game, that’s what hurts! Of course that fellow Hutchinson went on the same boat. They’re made for each other, they’re both tramps. She’s going to show him Europe, and he’s just the fool to enjoy it as long as his money holds out.”