Ever After (47 page)

“Archie, what do you
do
at the Bar?”

“Well, mostly now I just devil for a cranky old silk named Sir Gifford Kerr, on difficult points of law.”

“Do you
like
it?” she persisted curiously.

“Strangely enough, I do, you know.”

“I know what you could do, Archie! You could get Bracken’s divorce for him, that would be sensational enough!”

“Not in my line of country, I’m afraid. It will come up in the Probate and Divorce Court. I’m in the Chancery.”

“He’d pay
anything
to get that settled!” Virginia said.

“Well, it will be a nice plum for somebody, no doubt. His solicitors have already got their eye on the right fellow, you can be sure of that.”

She looked at him a long moment.

“You wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole, would you!”

“I’ve never done a divorce case, that’s all,” said Archie
uncomfortably
. “It’s a special sort of job. My work is all with trusts and equity. You see, we specialize, rather, at the Bar. We do go over sometimes, especially in Criminal Court jobs, but you have to know your ground. No one man can know it all.”

“I see,” she murmured.

“Besides, they’ll take in a Leader, you know.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’ll engage a silk. A Q.C. Not just a junior like me.
Somebody
’s going to land Bracken with a stiffish fee, I expect. Just as soon not be the one. Can’t marry his sister at his expense, what?”

“Do you know what I think? I think Bracken will let us use Farthingale to live in as long as we like.”

“But that’s impossible, I couldn’t look him in the face with such an arrangement,” he objected promptly.

“Oh, there you go again! It’s very selfish of you, Archie, to let your own beastly pride make me so miserable! Just think, if I hadn’t put my own pride in my pocket and practically proposed to you myself, you’d have gone on like this to the end of time and I’d have died a spinster!”

“Would you, by Jove? But there must have been countless other chaps who—”

“There
were,
idiot, but I didn’t
want
them! I said
No
!
Can’t you get it into your thick head, I’m in love with
you
!”

“Well, God knows why, it is pretty thick, isn’t it!” He kissed her again. “I do believe you
are
!” he said then, rather dazed. “It’s jolly good luck for me, but how is Bracken going to take it, when you tell him you want to marry a fellow who hasn’t got a penny?”

“Oh, Bracken knows.”

“
What
?” said Archie, startled.

“Bracken will have something all worked out for us, you’ll see! He doesn’t believe in all this nonsense about money either.”

“I say, Virginia—apart from everything else, you know, and even
if you did have to wring it from me—I have been
hopeless
about you ever since the fancy-dress ball!”

“Then why did you have to go on treating me like grim death and let me go home to America without a word?” she demanded. “I very nearly never came back to England again!”

“Well, I thought that would be all for the best, you know.”

“You didn’t
care
if you broke my heart!”

“My dear girl, such a thing never occurred to me! Besides—” He stopped.

“Well, what?”

“There was Edward. I knew he had so much more to offer you than I had, and I knew he was frightfully gone on you himself, and it wasn’t my place to go barging in—”

“Archie, did you think I cared about the old
title
?”
She glanced around cautiously, for you never knew if some gardener mightn’t come in to nurse the roses and overhear. The greenhouse was empty, except for themselves. Virginia drew closer to him and locked her arms around his waist, a way she had always demonstrated affection for Bracken, who had learned to brace his diaphragm against it. It took the wind out of Archie. “I wouldn’t marry Edward if he was the Prince of Wales!” she said extravagantly.

“Oh, well, in that case—” said Archie, recovering, and a gardener did come in then, and backed out again, and they never heard him

A
marriage
will
take
place
early
in
June
at
St.
Margaret’s,
West
minster,
between
Mr.
Mortimer
Flood
of
Belgrave Square
and
Lady
Clare
Campion,
elder
daughter
of
the
Earl
of
Enstone
…
.

Once more the house in St. James’s Square was stiff with powdered footmen in blue livery and silk stockings, and little crowds gathered on the pavement near the door to watch dinner guests in evening dress alight from their carriages in the summer twilight. Dinah was to be one of the bridesmaids and as her presence was required in Town for fittings for her bridesmaid’s dress, she and Bracken lost their week-end rides for the less satisfactory meetings which could be arranged in London. Eden and Virginia, who were not coming up till just in time for the wedding, remained at Farthingale
entertaining
some friends of Cabot’s who had come to stay, so Bracken and Dinah had to take Miss French with them when they went to matinees and picture galleries and the Zoo. Once she let them walk
in the Park for an hour while she was at the dentist’s, and once she accompanied Dinah to tea at his chambers in Ryder Street, which was not much more than round the corner from St. James’s Square.

Bracken noticed with relief that Dinah’s clothes had evolved from the intermediate schoolgirl length and pattern to a style more
suitable
for a very young lady, now that she was allowed to wear Clare’s hand-me-downs. Clare’s things were of course twice too big for her, but Miss French was clever at altering them to fit, or more often making a whole new dress out of two of Clare’s old ones. Bracken would have been very much touched if he had known how the gentle little woman contrived and laboured to dress her darling so that the rich American who was so kind-hearted would be sure to see the wind-flower beauty which clumsy clothes might have obscured. Miss French in her deep secret heart was deliberately match-making. She had taken Bracken’s measure long ago, and she wanted him for Dinah, who had not mentioned the existence of his wife. Miss French never allowed a hint of this daring ambition to cross Dinah’s mind. But she noticed with satisfaction the way Bracken’s eyes lingered on the girl in her charge, and her hopes grew daily and were stitched into every garment she worked at. She was glad too that the sewing-maid’s time was occupied with Clare, for she was jealous of her own devoted part in Dinah’s new grown-up look.

It was a season when everyone wore a bit of lace or chiffon tied around the neck with a filmy bow beneath the chin—an extravagant whimsy, because the perishable bows could be worn only once and often would not bear laundering. Dinah did not suspect that her
chiffoneries
had come out of Miss French’s own money, as well as the shiny black braid lovingly sewn on by hand in a complicated scroll down the front of the overskirt of the blue and tan
polonaise
frock which they put together from two of Clare’s. It wasn’t
everyone
who could wear the trying
polonaise
or
princesse
style, which required a faultless carriage and form. Miss French knew that Dinah, hopelessly thin by Clare’s robust standard of beauty, would soon have the fashionable Lent lily figure—what the French call
fausse
maigre,
and which could wear anything.

Besides the blue
polonaise,
Dinah had for best an embroidered white voile with rose-coloured ribbons and a fitted lace jacket, and the gossamer bow under her chin was always of an indescribable freshness, because it was made of the finest materials Miss French could buy. Dinah supposed that the money for these fragile
accessories
came of an interview Miss French had had with the Earl before they left the Hall. Only Miss French knew, indignantly, how grudging and insufficient Lord Enstone’s response to her request had been—barely enough to provide what had to go underneath. Hats were the most difficult of all, because Clare had not had very many
to start with. But Archie got wind of this problem and contributed a pound, which was spent for a fresh wing and some ribbon, and Dinah, who discovered she liked learning to sew, achieved a very fair copy of a model in
The
Queen.
To go on with the voile they dressed up a discarded white brimmed shape of Clare’s with tulle rosettes and one of her presentation feathers dyed pink.

Bracken perceived that Dinah regarded Miss French now as a friend rather than as a governess, and so he took notice of her in his easy way, which enslaved the dear soul still further. She began to feel that she simply couldn’t bear it if, when her time came to go on to the next family—a spectre that lurks at every governess’s elbow—she couldn’t see Dinah safely into the care of the light-hearted, open-handed, understanding gentleman from New York. Miss French had her own opinion of Clare’s choice, but it didn’t trouble her much for she had never liked Clare, even in the schoolroom. She considered, with a defiant lack of charity, that Clare deserved Mortimer Flood. But to see Dinah sacrificed to a similiar
marriage
de
convenance
would, she was sure, half kill her.

Victoria celebrated her eightieth birthday that summer at Windsor, and Flying Fox, the favourite, won the Derby, and at The Hague the Peace Conference was sitting—delegates from twenty-five Sovereign States of the civilized world, convened to discuss “the mitigation, at least, if not the abolition of war.” The humours of the deliberations were somewhat grim, as when one of the
Committees
solemnly ruled by a large majority that the dum-dum bullet must be prohibited. In other quarters the opinion was expressed that the only practical guarantee of peace was the perfection of engines of destruction, and that a submarine boat which could blow up whole fleets with impunity would make maritime nations far more amiable to each other than any veto upon armaments. And Bracken wrote an article for the
Star
based on the assertion that the Conference would do better to concern itself, not with the
conduct
of war, but with its causes.

He had scarcely been surprised to learn that Lisl had by now
disappeared
from Biarritz with Serrano, making it impossible to serve the papers. Spurred on by Bracken’s language, Partridge in an effort to save time applied to the judge in chambers for substitute service, and this was finally granted. Feeling that now they were getting some place, Bracken had a gala dinner at his club with a bottle of wine, all by himself, and wrote the news to his Cousin Sally at Cannes.

Within the week, near the end of a rather trying day at the Fleet Street office, Bracken’s secretary came in and, carefully concealing his own surprise, said that a lady who gave her name as Mrs. Murray was waiting to see him. As Bracken described it later to Eden, the
bottom dropped out of his stomach and Lisl walked in at the door.

He looked at her silently across the room, conscious of a faint
surprise
that she was really so beautiful, except—he had noticed it before—her nose was a little too sharp. She was tall, with a magnificent figure which managed not to seem heavy. She was dressed as always somewhat lavishly with a great deal of lace and ribbon and feathers. But whereas during the time she had lived as his wife in New York it had been in the best of a deliberately ornate taste, now it was sheer low Parisian gaudiness. She was dressed, he found
himself
thinking in that electric moment before either of them spoke, like a fairly high-class madam. Always sleek and confident to the point of felinity, she had now a subtle additional insolence, daring him. And while the familiar, exotic scent she had always used eddied towards him, there was something about her that he missed, without at first defining it. Then he realized that she wasn’t wearing any diamonds. He saw with a still further and separate surprise that even her ears, which had always been pierced for earrings, were bare of ornament.

“It’s not a ghost, Bracken,” she said, and he heard again with renewed aversion the slurred
r
in his name as she spoke it with the old mocking affection and the same clever smile, as though she had read your thoughts and found them indecorous. “You do not see things. It is Lisl. Have you forgotten already?”

He had come slowly to his feet behind the desk, making no gesture of greeting, no effort to return the smile.

“We have been looking for you,” he said grimly.

“So? Well, I have turned up, like the penny. But perhaps I interrupt? I can wait. You take me to dinner, yes?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “If this is absolutely necessary let’s get it over.” And he indicated the visitor’s chair beside his desk.

“Ah, but how good it is to see one of your towering tempers again!” she sighed. “And I am dying for one of your cigarettes, too.”

He noticed as she took it from his proffered case that her gloves were not clean. She had never used to wear a pair but once. He knew that his silence made it difficult for her, and did not speak. When he had held the match she sank gracefully into the chair, and he resumed his own and waited.

“There is no one in the world who can be angry as well as you can, Bracken,” she remarked, two little jets of smoke coming out of her thin nostrils. Her curving painted lips left a mark on the
cigarette
. “Even in a rage you are always a gentleman. This is an art I can appreciate. But you had many arts, Bracken.” Her smile was knowing and intimate, her eyes met his boldly.

“I haven’t time now to hear about my accomplishments,” he said.
“You must have something more important on your mind. Let’s come to the point.”

“Ah, yes, you have the right to be angry,” she conceded graciously. “But you were always big-hearted, Bracken. You always forgave me.”