Ever After (48 page)

“I’ve had time to change,” he reminded her briefly.

“You have had time to fall in love again, yes?”

“You rather cured me of that, Lisl.”

She leaned forward, watching him.

“There is no one? In all this time?”

“Why should you care?”

“I do care. Because now I know what I threw away.”

“Bit late, isn’t it?” And then, as she was silent, watching him through the smoke of the cigarette as she had used to do, he added with an edge of impatience, “Why have you come here? What do you want?”

“Perhaps not quite what you think. You would never love me again, would you—not the way it was, though that is something to remember, yes?—but you could be kind, Bracken, as always you were, even when I was wicked. I know now how wrong I was. I am sorry. Let me come back I will be
good.”

His incredulous surprise was so intense that it was like a clock ticking in the silent room, while he stared at her. He forced
himself
to answer sanely a thing he could hardly believe he had heard at all.

“That’s impossible,” he said, and found his lips were stiff.

“I shan’t be any trouble to
you now. Bracken—I tell you the truth. It is over with Hutchinson. Long ago. Since then I keep selling things to live—what I got from him, what I had from you—till now it is all gone. Lately I
do not live very well. I have time to think—to remember—to regret. I come back to you. I wear sackcloth and ashes, but I am still your wife.”

“That is all over too,” he said. “And you are not, I think, telling the whole truth. Try again. What really happened?”

She paused to scrutinize him, her eyes full of the open appraisal she gave all men. She thought how well he looked, how fresh—how desirable. His lean, fine hands, so completely in repose, even now, under stress—his lean, long body, so at ease in its chair, so perfectly conditioned—his quiet, expensive clothes, worn with such casualness, his general air of unconcerned well-being—money did that for a man. Money—and love of a woman, to give him that ingrained indifference to all women but the one. She revised her plans a little.

“Well, you will get it out of me,” she shrugged. “I make a clean breast. Hutchinson became impossible with his jealous rages. He
was a dull man, Bracken, not like you, and clumsy—” Her wide, unembarrassed gaze slid from his eyes to his lips, ran over the breadth of his shoulders, rested on his hands, so that for the first time he stirred uncomfortably and felt the nerves at the back of his neck crisp with disgust. “He was noisy, and he bored me, and he made threats—it was so that I had no friends—I had to have peace—I had to save myself. So there was a man from the Argentine—young, handsome, so amusing—not rich—but very in love with me. I went with him.”

“Mm-hm. Then what?”

“Wherever we went, Hutchinson came. I do not know how he did it, he bought detectives, I think. Always he followed. He did nothing, he was just there, and he watched. We tried everything to lose him. No. Finally it got on poor Jorge’s nerves. He could not stand the watching. Even behind a locked door, Jorge could feel him—watching. So now Jorge is gone. With him go my jewels. I have nothing. I make a mistake in Jorge, you see.”

“I see. And why not go back to Hutchinson instead of me?”

“I am afraid.”

He laughed.

“You aren’t afraid of the devil!”

“That was once, maybe. Now I have been ill. I have been lonely and sad. I think of you all the time. I am penitent. I come home.”

“No, I’m afraid you don’t do anything of the kind,” he said quietly. “I’m through, Lisl. You know that.”

If she had raged at him in the old way now, if she had tried to browbeat him, he could have hated her in the old way and been done with it. But when she began to wheedle, he felt a little sick.

“I don’t think you quite understand, Bracken. I come on my knees to you. I was foolish. I was wicked. I was mad. Not now. Ah, Bracken, I make no nuisance of myself, I promise. I ask no questions, I make no claims. I know I have no right to these things any more. I ask very little, really—yes?” Watching him narrowly, she shifted her attack once more. “Well, then, if not under your roof—you have, perhaps, a little
ménage
?—then a simple place somewhere of my own, here in England where one feels so safe. You can afford that, yes? You will not miss the money—say, twenty thousand pounds? And so I make no trouble.”

“So that’s it,” he said, beginning to see.

“You would not like it to be known here in London that your wife is in want?” she suggested softly, with her curving smile, almost as though she spoke words of love. “You would not like to have your wife go on the streets here—yes?”

With his eyes holding hers, he reached for the telephone and called Partridge’s number.

“I have here in my office,” he said clearly into the mouthpiece when Partridge answered, “a woman calling herself my wife who is unfortunately still entitled to use my name. She has just put it to me that if I give her twenty thousand pounds it will be unnecessary for her to go on the streets. Is that blackmail or isn’t it?”

“Well, no, not quite,” said Partridge cautiously. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid we shall have to cope with that. But you must not make appointments to see her alone—”

“I made no appointment to see her and I am not inclined to call in the office-boy as chaperon,” Bracken cut in. “She is here. What do I do now?”

“Get her address, first of all. Has she a lawyer?”

“Shouldn’t think so.”

“Tell her I will see her here tomorrow at three. Make it seem as though we were considering the payment of at least part of her demand. You are not to be present. Get rid of her now as fast as you can, and don’t see her again.”

“That’s easy to say,” said Bracken.

“And I had better see you before I see her.”

“Dine with me, then. Seven o’clock tonight, at the club.”

Partridge promised to be there, and Bracken hung up. He asked Lisl for her address, and wrote down the number in a dingy
Bloomsbury
street. “Lodgings?” he asked.

“Yes. Not very nice ones.”

“You’ll find my lawyer in the Middle Temple,” he said, handing her the name and address on a slip of paper. “Go to see him there tomorrow at three. He secured evidence at Biarritz for divorce, which I intend to use as soon as possible. I will of course make some provision for your support.” He rose and crossed the room to the door. “I have an engagement now. Please excuse me.” He stood with his hand on the doorknob, waiting.

For a moment he thought she would not go. She sat looking at him from across the room, and her eyes had gone cold and
unwinking
, like a cobra’s. Even without the mention of divorce, there was something in the look of him as he stood there by the door, the man she had once possessed with all his young ardour and loyalty, that told her quite plainly that now he belonged to someone else. It was not just that his love for her was ended. Somehow in his easy,
confident
carriage in the face of her proposals, in his added maturity, in his cool aloofness which could afford courtesy instead of anger, she read his love for someone else. But it was not Bracken she hated for that. It was the other woman.

She rose and walked towards him slowly, with her long, feline step, and he opened the door to the clatter of the outer office where a dozen people were at work.

“I shall find out who she is,” she said, looking into his eyes, and went.

Bracken more or less felt his way back to his chair and sat for a while, staring blindly at the top of the desk where the pad lay with the Bloomsbury address written on it. Then he tore off the top page, put it into his coat pocket, took his hat and left the office.

Outside a fine drizzle was falling, and the air was warm and heavy. Bracken walked westward, unaware, along Fleet Street and the Strand, his hat still in his hand because he had forgotten to put it on. People glanced twice at his white face as he passed, crossing-sweepers paused to stare after him, cabbies pulled up sharply to miss him by inches, a policeman put out a hand and saved him from going under a brewer’s team—he was unaware. Somewhere inside him a hammer was pounding—
let
me
come
back
—
I
am
still
your
wife
—
I
am
penitent
—
you
can
afford
that,
yes?
—
I
shall
find
out
who
she
is
—I SHALL FIND OUT WHO SHE IS….

Westward along the Strand he walked in the drizzle, past Charing Cross, into Pall Mall, through the corner of St. James’s Square to King Street—bare-headed, unseeing, homing by instinct till he came to Ryder Street. Meakins, his manservant, opened the door to him, saying words still madder than anything he had heard from Lisl—

“Lady Dinah has been waiting half an hour, sir.”

“Here?”

“In the drawing room, sir. Might I suggest that you change your coat, sir? It’s raining.”

Bracken gave Meakins his hat, passed a hand across his hair, and turned silently towards the closed drawing room door.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but you hadn’t ordered dinner for
tonight
. Shall I—?”

“No. I’m dining out. Not dressing. You may go.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Bracken opened the drawing room door. Dinah was sittting in a corner of the divan, looking frightened.

T
HE
afternoon had begun badly in St. James’s Square.

Miss French had one of her headaches and was lying down. Clare was having a luncheon for her bridesmaids, but the two youngest, Dinah and the younger Miss Norton-Leigh, were not expected to come because they weren’t out yet, and therefore were considered only one degree higher than the flower-girl, who was seven years old.
Evelyn Norton-Leigh was only fifteen, and gushed. Dinah disliked her, and felt degraded to be paired with her.

Alone in
the schoolroom at the top of the house, waiting for her luncheon tray to come up, Dinah set her music boxes out in a row and began to play them one by one. She had just got to the newest one, with its life-like trilling bird, when a voice behind her said, “Boo! You never thought you’d see
me
today, did you! Oh, what’s that? Let me see!”

Dinah’s hand had gone
behind her instinctively as she whirled to face Evelyn Norton-Leigh, whose idea of a joke was always to creep up on one unexpectedly. Evelyn made a grab and caught her wrist and snatched the silver box out of her fingers.

“It’s a
music box
!
Oh, what fun, how does it work?”

“Give it back, Evelyn, you’ll break it!”

“No, I won’t, how do you start it? Oh, how
marvellous
!” By accident Evelyn’s thumb had found the catch and the bird came up and began to whistle.

“Please, Evelyn, I’m always terrified he’ll get caught! Let me have it!”

“Oh,
look,
you’ve got
lots
of them! Is that one
gold
?
I never saw these before, where did you get them? Let’s play them
all
!”

“I’d rather not,” said Dinah desperately. “I don’t play them very often, I just—hadn’t anything else to do. Luncheon will be up in a minute. Are you going to stay?”

“Yes, all afternoon, isn’t that marvellous?” Evelyn had set one of the other boxes tinkling. Then, still holding the silver one recklessly at an angle so that the flap which covered the grid hung ajar and all the works were upside down, she went on down the line till she had them all going—one for each Christmas and birthday and the bird was extra. “Oh, but none of them is as adorable as the bird!” she cried, and pressed the catch again. “Look, he even moves his wings and his beak when he sings!”

Dinah tried again to capture the box in Evelyn’s hand, but Evelyn dodged out of reach, and since her consuming desire was to be one of the whispering, laughing group of older girls downstairs she seized the first excuse.

“I
must
show this one to Rosalind! The girls will simply
love
it! I
made
Rosalind let me come along to have lunch with you today for a surprise, and I’m
so
glad, I never
dreamed
you had
anything
as lovely as this!”

“No, Evelyn, please don’t take it down there, I’d much rather you didn’t—” Dinah followed helplessly to the top of the stairs, but Evelyn had already reached the flight below and scampered on, Dinah reluctantly at her heels. “It will run down, Evelyn, please give it back to me—”

They arrived breathless at the drawing room door and Evelyn had all the other girls around her instantly, exclaiming over the whistling bird.

“Where did you get it?” Clare was asking, and Evelyn said
carelessly
, “It’s Dinah’s. Hadn’t you seen it?”

“Where did you get it, Dinah?” said Clare, and the other girls, sensing tension, all turned to look at Dinah who had paused in the doorway.

“Bracken gave it to me.”

“Bracken
Murray
?” squealed Evelyn’s sister Rosalind. “That good-looking
American
?
Well, I must say, Dinah, you do fly high!”

“Did he give you all the rest of them too?” demanded Evelyn. “She has lots more upstairs, there’s even a gold one, but I like this the best. Fancy you not
knowing,
Clare, she tried to hide it from me too!”

Clare took the silver box out of Evelyn’s hand.

“How long have you had this, Dinah?”

“He brought it back from America. It’s just a gift.”

Clare was looking at her coldly. Clare had had no gifts from Bracken, except a wedding present, but he seemed determined to spoil Dinah and turn her head. Or was it possible that he—Old jealousy stirred in Clare, and—

“Luncheon is served, my lady,” said a powdered footman into the ominous silence.

“You and Evelyn run along upstairs, Dinah. I’ll keep the music box, I want to show it to Edward.”

“Oh, please, Clare, it belongs to me! Bracken gave it to
me
—”

“Rather too expensive a gift, I’m afraid. We’ll see what Edward says. Now run along, you two, I’ll send for you later.”