Ever After (44 page)

He paused arid took Dinah’s letter out of its envelope and read it again, wondering how much he dared to say in reply to her artless anxiety for his welfare, so freely expressed as soon as she learned that he would be under fire in Cuba. Miss French could not have been looking over her shoulder when she wrote: …
and
if
anything
happens
to
you
there
it
will
happen
to
me
too,
and
if
you
die
I
am 
sure
to
just
die
of
loneliness
myself
and
follow
you
to
heaven,
like
the
poor
little
heathen
girl
in
the
legend
who
followed
the
Crusader
king
across
the
world
with
only
his
name
as
a
password
….

Did she know what she was saying, and did she mean it the way it sounded? Did she really think of him like that, as a bulwark against her loneliness? Because that might mean she was beginning to think of him permanently—as a fixture in her life—as a man she might cleave to, forsaking all others—

A
WEEK BEFORE THEY WERE TO SAIL VIRGINIA CAUGHT A COLD AND
developed a deep bronchial cough which threatened pneumonia. Bracken suppressed all his impulses, postponed their sailing
reservations
, and wrote again to Dinah to explain one more delay. He had to write to Partridge too.

As soon as he had returned to New York he communicated with Partridge to inquire the status of his suit for divorce, and had already received a most unsatisfactory reply. The mousy, smooth-shaven man who had accompanied Bracken to Cannes had gone on with his
investigations
, aided by a photograph of Lisl, and had finally caught up with her at Biarritz. She was living at an hotel there as the travelling companion and
amie,
not of Hutchinson but of a South American named Serrano—which, wrote Partridge philosophically, was a
distinction
without a difference and would have served their purpose just as well. But Partridge went on to say that it was no good serving the papers until Bracken had established something like a permanent residence in England. And as the date of his return had appeared to be indefinitely delayed by the state of affairs in Cuba, Partridge had not seen fit to keep Lisl under observation at Bracken’s expense during all those intervening months. And what that amounted to was that once Bracken returned to England and took up his residence there as planned, she would have to be found all over again and duly served with papers. So except for the evidence they were not really much forwarder, Partridge concluded rather callously, and asked for Bracken’s sailing date. When he had read that exasperating letter Bracken walked up and down the room and swore at Partridge. As he cooled off a little he was able to see that Partridge had acted only with his customary prudence and economy. But Lisl might be anywhere by now.

Virginia got better slowly, and in the middle of February she was still coughing, and tired very easily, and Eden worried because she seemed so low in her mind. Bracken went into her room one evening to cheer her up and found her in tears.

“Here, here,” he said firmly. “I thought you were getting well.”

“Oh, Bracken, please let’s go back to England!”

“Well, my dear child, that’s what we’re trying to do, just as soon as you’re able!”

“B-but the doctor says I m-mustn’t start for another month!” she quavered.

“
What?
I never heard of such a thing!”

“He says a winter sailing would be too risky for my chest. Oh, Bracken, you don’t think I’m going to die of tuberculosis!”

“Good Lord, no, nobody in our family ever does that!” he
reassured
her.

“He says I’m badly underweight and run down. He says—”

“Oh, damn the doctor, Ginny, what does he mean by scaring you to death like this? Maybe you aren’t quite the thing just now, but you’ll be all right as soon as the weather warms up. Easter comes early this year, and we’re going to be in England for Easter. You tell the doctor that, with my compliments!”

Virginia looked more cheerful.

“I began to think maybe I was going to just pine away,” she said doubtfully.

“For love? That doesn’t run in our family either!” But he sat down beside her, really fascinated by such constancy. She had not had a word from Archie Campion since she left England, and yet his remembered image still outshone all the pleasant realities with which her life had been filled in the interim. He wondered how many proposals she had passed up, for Archie, who had done little but ignore her from the beginning. “I think it’s just stubbornness,” he said, to try her.

Virginia began to lay pleats in her damp handkerchief, and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. He noticed that her long, curving lashes cast pathetic shadows on her pale cheeks, and a wave of tenderness for so pretty and so funny a sister ran through him.

“I dream about him,” she was confessing, her slender fingers busy with the handkerchief.

“Good heavens!” Bracken murmured, keeping his face straight.

“And it’s a funny thing, in the dreams he’s always fond of me.”

“
How
fond?”

“Well, he—never quite proposes,” she admitted seriously. “But I always wake up feeling as though he
might.
You don’t suppose he’ll have married somebody else by now?”

“We should have heard about that. Dinah writes to me every now and then, you know. Clare is engaged, but Archie seems to be going on just as usual.”

“Oh, Bracken, you might have told me you’d heard again! Who is Clare going to marry?”

“Whom, darling. I don’t know his name, Dinah just said Clare was engaged to a man with pots of money and everyone was pleased, but she (Dinah) was glad
she
didn’t have to marry him.”

“It’s all right for Clare to marry some bounder for his money, but Archie is afraid of mine. Does that make any sense?”

“None whatever,” he assented, knowing exactly how Archie must feel, all the same.

“I thought perhaps if I were dressed very plainly and never wore any jewellery—”

“Ginny, as a matter of pardonable curiosity, why are you so set on Archie?”

She thought for a long minute, gazing into the middle distance.

“I thought you were in love too,” she said then. “Whatever became of that?”

“It’s waiting on the divorce. Which is waiting on my return to England.”

“Oh, poor Bracken, and here I’ve made you a month later by being ill!

“Never mind about that,” he said. “Just answer my question.”

“Could
you
answer it? Could
you
make out a list of reasons why you want to marry whoever it is?”

“Certainly I could. As long as your arm.”

“Well, then, he’s good-looking. And he’s well-born. And he knows how to behave. But those aren’t reasons, I could say that about lots of other people I wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole. I just don’t want anybody but Archie. I’ve tried, honestly I have. But he makes them all seem gauche, and stupid, and bumble-footed.”

And Bracken, thinking of Dinah’s tiny bones and effortless
self-possession
, which had something to do with race and caste and national atmosphere, nodded gravely.

“Ginny, would you say that I was bumble-footed?” he asked humbly.

“Oh,
you,
if you weren’t my brother I’d marry you like a shot!”

“Well, thanks very much,” he said in some surprise.

“A girl could always be comfortable with you,” she went on frankly. “You’ve got yourself on the leash. It’s the difference
between
champagne and raw whisky, I should think. You can get just as tight on champagne, and it’s nicer.”

Bracken stared.

“But that is the wisdom of the ages, speaking,” he said, dazed. “Where did
you
learn it?”

“Oh, I was born knowing that!” she said airily. “And that’s why I want Archie. He’s champagne too. Very dry.”

E
ASTER
was early that year, but spring was late. They arrived at the station at Upper Briarly in Gloucestershire about tea-time on a bleak grey day when the tree-tops were showing just the faintest film of green, tossing in a shrewd wind.

But Virginia’s heart-shaped face was pink-cheeked and sparkling as they drove through the village to Farthingale, and she vied jealously with Bracken in pointing out to Eden all the matters of interest along the way. Eden sat beside her in the barouche, wrapped in sables, enjoying her first sight of England in nearly three years, and
determined
to ignore the ache in her heart which reminded her that Cabot had meant to come to Gloucestershire too and see Dinah and the house.

Bracken, sitting with his back to the horses, looked lovingly on the rolling Cotswold Hills, and when he said, “There’s the Hall on the left,” he felt his heartbeat quicken. Then he caught the warning in Virginia’s eyes and thought how complicated it was getting, now that his mother knew about Dinah but wasn’t supposed to know about Archie. That wouldn’t last of course. Once Eden saw Virginia in the same room with Archie she would guess.

In the drawing room at Farthingale a log fire burned and the
tea-table
stood ready, gleaming with Worcester china and old silver, and there was a big bouquet of
Gloire
de
Dijon
roses from the
greenhouses
at the Hall, with Lord Alwyn’s card. Virginia sniffed them superciliously, caught Bracken’s eye upon her, and grinned.

“Whisky,” she murmured. “Raw enough to choke you.” Her eyes went wistfully around the warm, lighted room. But because it held no message from Archie, it was as good as empty to her. “Who is at the Hall now?” she asked Melchett the parlourmaid when tea came in.

“They will all be down for Easter, I think, miss. Mr. Archie came yesterday and brought Master Gerald with him, and Mr. John and his wife are expected, and Lady Clare’s fiancé too, I believe.”

“Everybody well?” Bracken asked casually, and his far eyelid drooped at Virginia.

“Yes, sir, except the Earl had influenza at Christmas-time and they all but gave him up. He’s out and about again now, though. I was to say they had sent your horse back, sir, and two others for as long as you’d like to keep them.”

“Splendid,” said Bracken. “That’s very kind of them.”

Melchett was too well trained to add that Lady Dinah had ridden over with the groom who brought the horses and left a note for
Bracken, so it was not until he went up to his room to change that he found it on his mantelpiece.

When he had read it twice he sat down and put his head in his hands, which were not quite steady. Coming home, she had written, unconsciously. Nearly two years since he had first seen her, wearing her brother Gerald’s Norfolk jacket and breeches, with her hair tucked up under a shooting cap. More than a year since he had seen her at all, and now she was seventeen, and tomorrow he would have her back again, all to himself, on the hill. But he thought, I must tell her about Lisl—and that’s what tomorrow come to.

On his way through London he had conferred with Partridge, and the mousy little man had been sent for and again despatched to the Continent. But no amount of reproachful profanity on Bracken’s part could alter the fact that Partridge had allowed the scent to get cold and that now it might take some time to get things under way again. Bracken censured himself, not for the first time, as he rose wearily and began to change to his dinner clothes. He should have told Dinah about the necessity for a divorce before he left England. He was not to blame for the delay in his return, but he could at this rate be to blame for Dinah’s falling in love with a man who had a wife already. I object, he told himself angrily, jerking at his tie, to feeling like a character in a Pinero play. And then, surveying
himself
in the glass in his immaculate black and white—Good Lord, I even
look
like a leading-man, he thought in disgust and went down to the cheerful American custom of cocktails in the drawing room.

He woke as the sun came up and lay a moment, savouring his own excitement, which was almost like stage-fright. His riding clothes were laid out and waiting on a chair. All the time he bathed and shaved and dressed he was telling himself that he must be calm, he
must not lose a grip on things, he must remember to tell her about Lisl. That was quite enough to anchor him to earth. He was going to be free, of course, eventually. But he would certainly not be regarded as free now by Dinah’s family, and it was time Dinah knew what they were up against.

So at last he rode Sunbeam down the chestnut avenue in front of the house again, through the sleepy village where there were still ducks on the stream above the bridge, through the gap in the wall and out across the hillside. Backward spring though it was, the air that morning had the first velvety mildness, the sun had that delicate caressing warmth of Eastertide, and the sky curved pale and virginal without a cloud. The pollard willows were feathered with green, but there was no blossom yet on the fruit trees. Rooks were kissing in the elm-tops, and lapwings lamented joyfully in the meadow grass. And there was added to his own secret inner happiness the reckless, heathen exaltation that stirs in the spring of the year.

Dinah was before him at the rendezvous, dismounted, kneeling in the grass at the edge of the spinney to gather primroses, while staid little Dewdrop grazed near by. She waved as he came up over the crest of the hill, and he waved back and half-way down the slope he swung out of the saddle. As his feet touched the ground Dinah ran to meet him, straight into his outstretched arms, and before either of them had time to think about it, their lips had met. He let her go at once, partly from sheer astonishment, but the kiss had happened in spite of his good intentions.

“Dinah—darling—I do believe you’ve missed me,” he said rather shakily, and Dinah with her arms still hard around his neck and her slight body against his, said, “I feel as though I was the one who had come home!”

It took all he had of resolution after that to say lightly, “Let me look at you,” and hold her away from him, his hands resting on her shoulders.