Ever After (6 page)

“They want you to go next week, with Cabot and Eden.”

“Hm-mm.” He shook his head. “Got me a best girl now, name of Steinway.”

“Fitz. They want me to go to London with Virginia in the spring.”

“Don’t you do it. Much too far.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got to. Eden can’t, because Marietta is having a baby.”

“Good for Marietta. Didn’t lose any time, did she!”

“Don’t you see, Fitz? We’re in for it, both of us. But I would have some time in New York before we sail.”

“Mean you’ve gone and given in to them?” he asked in
surprise
.

“Yes. And so must you, this time.”

“Why must I?”

“Sometimes it’s best to give in to things, Fitz. Besides—I’d feel better about my part of it if you were going to be in New York too, this spring. I wouldn’t feel so strange.”

His hands came to rest in silence. He sat looking up at her thoughtfully.

“You dead serious about this?”

“Yes, Fitz.”

“You
want
me to go to New York?”

“Yes, Fitz.”

“Kind of interferes with my plans,” he ruminated. “I figured on doin’ a little real composin’, now that I’ve got that piano. She sings to me, she does. Want to hear one she sang?”

Sue nodded and he turned back to the keyboard.

“She calls it
Sun
Goin’
Down
on
Me
,” he said, and almost beneath his breath he began to sing the plaint of an old darky man who feels his days are drawing in.

Tears rose to Sue’s eyes as she listened; swift, childish, understanding tears, both for the patient dolour of the words and the melancholy beauty of their setting, the invention of this odd, footling lad she loved….

Sue put her arms around his neck from behind and laid her wet cheek
against his.

“Oh, Fitz, honey, that’s the nicest you’ve ever done!”

“Why, look at you, Cousin Sue, if you aren’t crying!” He pulled her down on the bench beside him, an arm around her waist. “You get all the dirty jobs around here, don’t you! ‘Make Fitz see he’s got to stop foolin’ and take this job in New York,’ they said, didn’t they! ‘You talk Fitz into it, he always listens to you’—was that what they said? All right, honey, Fitz hears you, dry those tears, now. I’ll go to New York, or Timbuctoo, whenever they like. And by the time you get there I’ll know my way around and we’ll paint the town, huh? Yessir, we’ll go to all the minstrel shows and eat peanuts and throw the shells on the floor, and—and we’ll go to Grand Opera too, that’s what we’ll do, and I’ll blow you to champagne supper at Delmonico’s out of my salary—huh? Don’t you cry, now, honey, we’ll live through this, both of us, and I’ll do what you want, and you do what they want, and by this time next year I’ll get myself fired and you’ll have Virginia married oft and we’ll both be right back where we are now, and then maybe they’ll let us alone again, huh?” He took out his handkerchief and dried her eyes and then, still holding her in one arm: “Listen,” he said, and his right hand began making chords:

Sue lay awake a long time that night, in the room she and Eden had shared as girls. Alone in the dark, she faced her trouble squarely, as she always did. And she knew beyond any doubt that it wasn’t the strangeness of buying a wardrobe in New York, or the dread of sea-sickness on the North Atlantic, or the unknown terrors of life in Claridge’s Hotel, or shyness of the English family now in possession of the house called Farthingale—it wasn’t any of these, half as much as it was the intolerable prospect of those empty days when it would be impossible, for the first time since the war had ended, to see Sedgwick or hear his voice for weeks on end. This was what it was to be only his first double cousin after all, and not his wife. She had no right to insist on staying here beside him, he had no right to go with her. They were severed, all over again, by their close blood tie. Sedgwick belonged to Melicent, not to her. And so she must journey alone to the old house in Gloucestershire where Great-Grandfather St. John Sprague had been born, and try to bring back to Sedgwick something of what he wanted to see.

She pulled the pillow over her head and wept the loneliest, bitterest tears she had shed since her stricken teens. And over the way in England Street, Fitz sat with all the doors shut and one lamp burning and the soft pedal down, playing, playing—taking leave of his lady, his angel, the grand piano.

I
T WAS SEDGWICK, THOUGH, WHO ACCOMPANIED SUE TO WASHINGTON
on the first leg of the journey in March. Bracken was there, reporting the inauguration, but his time was too full for him to make the additional trip to Williamsburg. Though Sue insisted she could perfectly well find her way to Washington alone, at her age, Sedgwick wouldn’t hear of such a thing, and Melicent entirely agreed that he should drop everything and deliver Sue into Bracken’s care at Willard’s Hotel.

It was with a kind of guilty joy that they glanced at each other as the train began to move. Sue’s eyes were very bright above her fur collar, Sedgwick’s smile had a quirk in it. He dared to voice what was in both their minds.

“I feel as though somebody ought to be throwing rice at us,” he said.

“Oh, Sedgie, what a thing to say after all these years!”

“And we’re still not old enough for it to be entirely safe.”

“You mustn’t say that.”

“It doesn’t do anybody any harm, my dear, for me to admit now and then that I have never stopped loving you.” To his horror her shining eyes filled, overflowed, and tears rolled down her cheeks. He had almost forgotten how Sue cried, without any warning, her quivering face quite undistorted, looking like a
rain-wet
flower. “Honey,
don’t
! I never meant to upset you, I only said—”

“It’s all right.” Her hand pressed his briefly, then put it away from her. “Don’t baby me, Sedgie, I’m not quite responsible today. Too much excitement, I reckon—” She turned her head from him, to look out the window. The tears stopped, as if by magic.

He sat beside her in silence, his dread of the separation which was ahead of them growing with every mile. He still believed that it was right for her to go abroad now that the chance had come again. He still held his lifelong determination never to try to
keep her selfishly to what was at best an arid sort of companionship, however precious it was to them both. But he found himself wondering these days how he could ever have made a life for
himself
without it. Because Sue was there, in the same town, smiling and sweet and cheerful, not crushed, not grieving, not bitter, he had found with innocent, loving Melicent a form of peace and happiness. But already the prospect of even a few months empty of Sue’s presence had made him feel drained and frustrated and irritable. And now a cold, stealthy fear was invading his midriff—suppose something happened, suppose she never came back, suppose….

His quick, impatient spirit, disciplined so long, rose insurgent. They were all right as they had been, why must Eden suddenly upset the apple-cart, creating a situation which dragged to the fore old aches and agonies lulled by custom and routine and security? He and Sue could manage as long as they were left alone to do without each other in their own hard-won way. But now to be wrenched apart like this, jerked back to consciousness of what they really meant to each other, forced to find a new philosophy and a new endurance—and all just because Marietta was having morning sickness and thought she was going to die!

But even while rebellion seethed within him, the habit of a
lifetime
prevailed, and he produced a casual remark to restore
equilibrium
.

“Bet you were journey-proud last night and didn’t sleep a wink,” he said, and her dimple showed.

“I was. But Eden says she always is, even going back and forth to Washington. On the other hand, she’s never seasick. Do you think that runs in the family too?”

“Sure, you won’t be seasick. They say champagne is good for it. Apparently if you’re drunk enough you just don’t care!”

Their bad moment passed. And as the train sped northward through country famous for what had happened there more than thirty years before, he talked on, quietly but vividly, spreading before her his memories of cavalry days with Jeb Stuart. On a road to the right, just after you left Richmond, lay Yellow Tavern where Stuart had got his death wound; from Gordonsville and Orange, Lee and Jackson had led their army to the Wilderness; at Culpeper the same bedraggled army had licked its wounds after Gettysburg; Sedgwick’s mother and sister had waited in the baking heat of Bristoe while the cannon at Manassas boomed; and at Manassas itself Sedgwick had first heard gunfire, and there the Federal Army had twice broken and fallen back on Washington. Sue listened enthralled. He had never been willing to talk about the war right after it ended.

They found Washington gone rather flat after the inauguration, but Bracken got tickets for the theatre and that night they saw Mrs. Leslie Carter in
The
Heart
of
Maryland.
Although Sue knew considerably more about the war than Mr. Belasco, who had written the piece, her mood at the theatre was as uncritical as a child’s and she wept unashamedly over the tangled skein of Mrs. Carter’s
unhappy
love. Only after it was over did she say thoughtfully, “We didn’t really behave much like that, did we, down our way.” Sedgwick remarked with a grin that he had noticed the villain was a Yankee. To which Bracken replied that he knew at least one true story where the Yankee got the girl. But none of them knew that their Yankee had won his Eden, without any of Mr. Belasco’s complicated heroics, in the shadow of the rope which awaits any secret agent in war-time.

The play had filled their evening, and had even caused Sue to overlook for a time that tomorrow morning she must say goodbye to Sedgwick and see him start back to Williamsburg, while she and Bracken waited for the New York train. That moment was upon her all too soon. Sedgwick took her hand and said, “Well, honey, take care of yourself—” and then they both discovered that they didn’t know how to say goodbye to each other for more than a few days. With Bracken looking on, Sedgwick bent and kissed her cheek, and found his throat rather tight. “Don’t you get lost,” he said, and was gone, before she had found a word to comfort him.

So then it was Bracken sitting beside her in a train, and
Washington
lay behind them, and Sue began to long childishly for a sight of Eden in a strange world. Bracken, who had his own thoughts, was unusually silent, and she forgot her private misery in
contemplation
of his. She stole sidelong glances at him—the thick straight hair and long profile, the mobile brows and generous, well-cut mouth—he could have been Sedgwick’s son as he sat there. And mine, Sue thought. Sedgwick’s son and mine might have been like this….

Bracken turned and caught her looking at him, and his face relaxed into a smile.

“Sorry,” he said. “Did you say something?”

Sue smiled back quickly and shook her head.

“Are you tired?” he asked gently.

“Not very.”

“It’s a beastly long trip,” he sympathized. “Mother will tuck you up with a cup of tea and a hot-water bottle when we get home.”

“Oh, come, Bracken, I’m not senile!”

Bracken laughed.

“Maybe I was feeling a bit senile myself,” he said. “I’ve had
a very ageing time, Aunt Sue. And I don’t mean inaugurating McKinley, either!”

“It will be easier now, won’t it?” she ventured.

“Much. I thought for a while I’d have to light out for the Klondike or somewhere, but the London office is a better idea.”

“You—like England, don’t you?” she queried, seeking reassurance on what was ahead of her. “That is—you all seem to spend a lot of time there.”

“You’ll like it too,” he promised with understanding. “It’s easy to feel at home there. I was only seven years old the first time they took me there, and Virginia wasn’t even born. I’d had measles and was very peaky, and they were worried about my health. Father took a house in Buckinghamshire and got me a pony and a groom and turned me loose. I’d know that place, foot by foot, if I saw it again now.”

“And you got well?”

“I flourished to such an extent that I haven’t been ill since then! I suppose England is some sort of ancestral memory with our family. Our roots are there. Virginia feels the same way about it that I do.”

“It’s our Anglo-Saxon stock,” said Sue. “Sedgwick is like that too. And when I was very young I used to write stories laid in England, though I really knew nothing about it. The first story I ever sold was about London in the eighteenth century. Cabot bought it for the Trenton paper.”

“I never heard about that,” he said, interested. “Have you got a copy of it?”

“Somewhere.”

“Well, now you can do another story about England, first hand. Just where is this house Cousin Sedgwick is so set on your seeing?”

“In the Cotswold Hills. I’ve got it all written out.”

“It’s lovely hunting country,” said Bracken. “I had some good days there only two years ago, with the Badminton pack. We’ll all go down from London and see it in the spring.”

She felt that he was making an effort to entertain her, and laid her hand on his sleeve.

“Don’t talk if you’d rather not. You must have things to—to think about.”

“I have a great many things I’d rather not think about! You needn’t be tactful, Aunt Sue, because my wife has left me. She had already left me, in fact, some time ago.” His lips twisted. “I ought to be used to it by now!”

It was difficult to know what to say to that. You couldn’t point out that there were lots of other girls, because Bracken was not free to fall in love again. You couldn’t say Good Riddance, because
that cast reflections on his judgment in the first place. And you couldn’t say I’m Sorry, because he so obviously wasn’t.

While she hesitated he spoke again.

“But it’s going to be dashed inconvenient, losing my amateur status like this,” he said.

She had got rather well acquainted with Bracken by the time they reached New York. He was quick and gay and charming, but thanks to Lisl he had a biting, defensive quality which reminded Sue of Cabot at the same age when he had first come to
Williamsburg
before the war. Bracken had been thoroughly trounced by life before he was thirty. He was taking it pretty well. But it seemed to Sue that he would have been better off with less hard discipline.

She found Fitz acclimatizing himself in all directions with
surprising
ease. His innate serenity was quite unchanged, but the seeming listlessness which grew out of his being a misfit at home and feeling obstinate and defensive about remaining so had vanished. His soft Virginia drawl was if anything even more noticeable than it had been, but a lot of new words and expressions had coloured it. Fitz had discovered vaudeville, where people sang songs and danced to them. Already his head was full of ideas for more songs of his own which a man in black face or a pretty girl in ostrich feathers and flesh-coloured tights could sing and dance to. Sue had not been in the house a day before she was sitting beside him again, at Eden’s piano now, listening to new tunes he had thought up.

Almost simultaneously all New York had discovered a thing called musical comedy, a theatrical innovation from Daly’s, London, imported by Daly’s, New York.
The
Geisha
was its name, and on Sue’s second evening in town they all went to see it. Fitz sat through it silent and absorbed, and Sue herself was so fascinated that she failed for once to be completely aware of his mood. When they got home he sat down at the piano and, beginning with the
finale,
worked his way back through the show, playing by ear each number as he came to it, in reverse order, fumbling sometimes, muttering at his mistakes, and cursing his memory when it lagged.

In the dining room supper had been laid out—welsh rarebit in a chafing-dish over a spirit-lamp, sandwiches, cakes, a fruit compote, lemonade and grape juice, and on the sideboard whisky, brandy, and cracked ice. The rest of them listened, drifting about with their plates and glasses in their hands, while Fitz’s drink stood untouched beside him. Sue saw that he was quite possessed by the evening’s performance, and it occurred to her that Fitz might write a musical comedy of his own some day. It was no more improbable, really, than it had once seemed that she herself would ever publish stories under Harper’s exalted imprint. She wondered about the
chorus girls. But it would not be as though Fitz were up there singing and dancing too. He would only write what they sang and danced to. Besides, some of them looked quite nice.

The next night they all went to the new Weber and Fields Music Hall, where the bar was subordinated to the theatre as entertainment, and where, contrary to music hall custom, drinks were not sold while the curtain was up, and a lady need not fear to hear vulgar language. Again Fitz took in the show in almost motionless silence. Again when they returned to the house he reproduced by ear the songs they had heard on the stage.

“That Lottie Gilson,” Sue ventured cunningly when he paused. “Isn’t she pretty!”

“Who?” said Fitz vaguely, flexing his fingers above the
keyboard
. “Oh, Gilson. It’s a bad lyric. It ought to go like this.” And he played Lottie Gilson’s song for them, rewriting it as he went, and they all agreed it was much better his way. Bracken said why didn’t Fitz send her the new version, she might be grateful, and it might Lead To Something.

“What, me?” said Fitz, and grinned warily. “You tryin’ to get me arrested?”

B
RACKEN
, Sue and Virginia arrived in London early in April. There was trouble brewing in the Balkans, where Turkey was bullying Greece, and Crete was in a state of bloody rebellion against Turkish rule. The Italians were attempting less successfully to bully the Abyssinians, and Spain was waging ruthless war against the insurgents in Cuba. Germany was holding its imperial centenary in Berlin, and the Kaiser and the Czar were openly siding with the Sultan against Christian Greece. British relations with South Africa were becoming “strained to a point which might lead to eventualities”—a diplomatic euphemism which delighted Bracken’s journalistic soul—and General Kitchener was leading the Egyptian Army in a successful campaign against the Khalifa and his Dervishes on the Nile.