Ever After (7 page)

But England’s Queen Victoria had gone for her annual holiday on the French Riviera, and London was preparing for the Jubilee, and the season’s débutantes were trying on their Court gowns and rehearsing their Court curtseys.

One of the things which Cabot Murray most firmly believed in, both as editor of the
New
York
Evening
Star
and as a man of wide social influence, was the necessity for solidarity between the
English-speaking
nations—though he never allowed it to sound as dull as that. Instead of the British-Columbia labels often attached by cartoonists to white-robed goddesses of heroic build, he preferred the John Bull-Uncle Sam conception: two brothers of one house, quite capable of having sharp words together, even of landing the other fellow with a bloody nose, but—it was a big But—instantly standing shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the same wall and hitting out as one man if a third party tried to interfere or make capital out of what was only a family brawl.

Cabot himself had always felt keenly a sense of his own kinship with the land from which his forefathers had come, and his children were as much at home in England as in their mother’s native Virginia. He promptly resented the term Anglophile when applied to himself or his policy. It was not Anglophile, he maintained, to recognize and respect the old racial tie, the common stock, the long mutual belief in certain fundamental rights and privileges, some of which had been even more jealously guarded in the island than in America. Uncle Sam had made innovations and improvements. John Bull had obstinately stuck to some things which were better not lost. But basically the link was there, bone-deep, surviving the inevitable dust-ups and misunderstandings any large, career-minded family was heir to.

The
Star
habitually carried a larger percentage of foreign news than most of its competitors. A weekly news letter from London as a Sunday feature was to be one of Bracken’s chores when he arrived there. In it he was to chronicle the special doings of this gilt-edged Jubilee Summer designed to pay tribute to the beloved old Queen who had outlived so many of her enemies and redeemed so many of her mistakes, and who was, after all, Victoria.

Bracken and Virginia viewed the familiar murky skies and dismal docks of Liverpool with blind affection, and they kept their faces to the window-pane on the way up to London in the boat-train and in the cab as they drove from Euston Station to Claridge’s in Brook Street. Not more than half of what they said was intelligible to Sue, but she listened eagerly, trying to learn, and looked at
everything
they pointed out to her, and did not have to pretend to be excited too.

The new American Ambassador, Colonel Hay, was a friend of Cabot’s from the days when Hay had been Lincoln’s secretary, and he had always kept an interested eye on Bracken’s brilliant progress. Mrs. Hay was presenting one of her daughters at a May
Drawing Room
too, and it became a point of honour with the girls to achieve an attitude of blasé composure amounting to indifference to the gay social programme before them. Sue frankly blinked at the glittering Embassy doings. Her naïveté endeared her to the Ambassador and
his wife, and the young Murrays and their Aunt Susannah were made much of in Carlton House Terrace.

The three daughters of Lady Shadwell, Eden’s friend, had all been safely married off long since, and she welcomed the opportunity of sponsoring a débutante again. Sitting beside Sue at the
dressmaker’s
in Bond Street while Virginia was having her fittings, she remarked more than once that she would be presenting one of the prettiest girls of the Season, and inquired in affectionate detail after Marietta and Eden. Marietta, Sue gathered, had not been so much fun because she was shy. Lady Shadwell’s own girls, she confessed quite cheerfully, had been plain, poor dears. Virginia’s insouciance, so amusing to everyone, sprang from a knowledge of her own good looks which she would have been a stupid prig to deny, and the natural confidence in her world with which a happy childhood had endowed her. She was spoilt, maybe, by indulgent parents and a devoted brother. But it gave her a kind of touching buoyancy which caught at the hearts of sadder, wiser people and made them long to cushion her somehow from the
disillusionments
they felt were bound to come. Lady Shadwell was before long so taken with her that she proposed to give her a train-party at her own house in Park Lane after the presentation—one of those festive occasions when all one’s brothers and one’s cousins and one’s beaux with their female belongings turned up to hear about one’s triumph and one’s sensations, and everybody ate an enormous high tea, rather in the spirit of a treat after the dentist.

Mr. Partridge, who was Cabot’s solicitor, with offices in the Temple, had some Fleet Street quarters ready for inspection. Bracken decided to settle in there at once without looking further and gather his London staff, which was headed by the same agent the
Star
had depended on for years, a sombre, efficient man named Nelson. Meanwhile Bracken contemplated the lovely little war in Crete wistfully—Richard Harding Davis was already there—but Bracken refrained from rushing off to see it too because his father had impressed on him that the establishment of the London office came before anything else. Also he had promised Eden to see that Sue enjoyed herself in England, and that nothing should be spared to make Virginia’s presentation summer a success.

The house known as Farthingale, Mr. Partridge was able to report, was now owned by a Major Sir Gratian Forbes-Carpenter, who had recently inherited it from his aunt, now deceased, and who had promptly put it up for sale. By a fortunate coincidence, Mr. Partridge continued, glancing triumphantly over his spectacles at the three attentive faces before him, Major Forbes-Carpenter was now in England on sick leave, having been severely wounded during the battle of Firket on the Nile, in which—Mr. Partridge had been
given to understand—he had played a distinguished part. The Major had replied cordially to Mr. Partridge’s letter of inquiry—here Mr. Partridge produced the Major’s letter and handed it to Bracken with a little flourish—and doubtless it would be
convenient
, if one so desired, to arrange a meeting with him and discuss a visit to the house in question, which, as they would perceive by the Major’s letter, remained exactly as it was at the death of the Major’s aforesaid aunt the previous year.

“What sort of house is it, did you find that out?” asked Bracken as soon as he could get a word in edgewise, and Mr. Partridge
produced
the Estate Agents’ sales advertisements with another flourish. “‘Old stone-built residence with gabled, stone-tiled roof,’” Bracken read aloud from it. “‘Near a picturesque Cotswold village. Hunting with the Heythrop. Lounge-hall, oak-panelled
dining room
, library, 2 other reception rooms, 7 principal and 5 secondary bedrooms, master’s bathroom, servants’ hall and servants’ bathroom, convenient domestic offices. Gravitation water. Delightful grounds with roses, herbaceous borders, kitchen garden, orchard, roomy stables and paddock, stream which provides good fishing. About 14½ acres. Freehold for sale. Will let furnished. Immediate
possession
.’” He referred to the letter in his hand. “Writes from the United Service Club,” he said. “I might try and get him to come to dinner at Claridge’s and we’ll talk about going down to see the house.” His eyes went back to the advertisement. “‘Will let furnished,’” he reflected, and glanced at Mr. Partridge, under a slanted eyebrow. “Heythrop country, eh? Not too far from London for week-ends?”

“Well, of course it’s not Surrey,” said Mr. Partridge cautiously. “A good deal will depend on the train service.”

“You might look into that,” said Bracken, and Mr. Partridge made a note of it, and Virginia said, “Oh, Bracken, what a lark! A house of our very own, this summer—
could
we?”

“Well, the place has got a bathroom!” Bracken grinned. “I must be able to get back and forth to Town, of course.
Farthingale
would have to be your show during the week, if we took it. You and Aunt Sue would have to run it.”

“It would be fun,” said Virginia without hesitation. “We could have people down to stay. After all those lovely house-parties we’ve gone to, we could have house-parties of our own!”

Sue looked from one to the other helplessly. House-parties. Without Eden there to tell her what to do.

When Major Forbes-Carpenter came to dine with them he was not, to Virginia’s disappointment, wearing the uniform of an officer of Kitchener’s Egyptian Army, sword, head-dress, boots, spurs, and decorations. Like any British officer on leave, he was in mufti,
and at the moment conventional black and white evening dress. But the Major’s evening dress had been cut by the best tailor in Savile Row and was worn with a cavalry air; and he walked, of necessity, with a cane which could not disguise a most interesting limp.

Virginia and Sue had spent some time reading up on the Nile campaign in back numbers of the illustrated papers, assimilating as they went that General Kitchener, Sirdar or Commander-in-Chief of the Egytian Army, had turned it into an excellent fighting force under British officers. The battle of Firket, they learned, was considered a triumph of strategy. “Rough and difficult was the road by which the river force advanced that dark night,” they read, “so dark that foothold among the boulders had to be felt for. Orders were given in whispers, no talking in the ranks, no smoking—thus did Hunter’s division advance upon the doomed and sleeping village. Meanwhile Murdoch, commanding the flank attack, made his detour, timing himself to strike when Hunter struck. The flanking column, while still on the desert heights, grew apprehensive that they would be late for the battle and covered the last four miles at a gallop. With the first ray of dawn the blow fell. Torn by the fire of the infantry, by shrapnel, and by the hail of Maxim bullets, the surprised Dervishes made a good fight of it as they always do, but what remained of them was overwhelmed and swept away like chaff.”

Bracken said captiously that it was bad dispatch-writing, much too flowery. But he had no fault to find with their Major
Forbes-Carpenter
and his brigade of Soudanese Lancers. “The senior officer was twice wounded,” they read, “first by the butt of a rifle which had been fired at him without effect while he was pursuing an Emir, and afterwards by a spear in the upper leg. The effective work done by his brigade in twice breaking through the Dervishes as they were gathering for a charge was of the greatest value.”

Sue and Virginia regarded their guest with round-eyed respect when he arrived at Claridge’s. He was a slender man, not as young as he had been, not as tall as Bracken, square-shouldered,
lean-hippe
d, with a moustache more closely clipped than was the Mayfair fashion. In spite of his long illness from wounds, he was tanned bronze by the Egyptian sun. His hair was grizzled round the ears, and his direct grey eyes were hooded like an eagle’s, the full upper lid making a straight line across the iris, which gave him the look of frowning severity until he smiled. He was known affectionately to his troops as Carpers, because of his martinet ways—“Button up, chaps, Old Carpers is coming!” the word would run ahead of him through the camp. But he was as watchful of their comfort and their honour as a mother, they would tell you, and the two of them
who had risked their lives at Firket to get him out from under his dead horse and bring him back under fire to their own lines could have been matched a dozen times over and to spare.

Virginia of course made eyes at him during dinner, and he gave her his ready smile which showed his small, even teeth, and answered her carefully boned-up questions about the Nile campaign with patient courtesy and invisible amusement. Meanwhile, he wondered about Miss Day. She said so little and she looked so sweet. He had never seen anything like that dimple at the corner of her mouth, and her low voice with its soft Virginia cadence he found quite enchanting. Miss Day. And what on earth were the men in America made of that this delightful creature should be still
unmarried
?

At this point the Major’s own thoughts surprised him. He was anything but a ladies’ man, and since the death of his wife in India years before, he had been all soldier, demanding active service with his men rather than cushy staff jobs, existing on a minimum of leave, living for the Army and the service he rendered to it till he had become, he was sure, a very dull dog indeed. The death of his elderly Aunt Sophie had been no grief to him, as he had not seen her for years, and he knew perfectly well that there was no sentiment in the making of the will which left Farthingale to him. She had long been a widow, childless, almost the last of her family. She had no other heirs, except an ancient cousin or two, who had received legacies. As her sister’s only child, he was the logical beneficiary. But her income stopped with her death and she had not been able to leave him the money to keep up the estate as she had done in her lifetime. Liking comfort, and always considerate of her ageing servants, she had put in the bathrooms and a telephone only a short time before she died. Farthingale was no good to a man who had no family and no intentions or entanglements, only a small income besides his pay, and no prospect of more. The only thing to do was to put the place on the market and perhaps later on invest the money he got for it in a much smaller house into which he would, he supposed, retire and bore himself to death, if he survived his usefulness in the field.

Something of all this he explained to them with engaging
frankness
, and assured them of his willingness to let Farthingale to them for the summer if it met with their approval when they saw it. He heard with the keenest interest that their ancestor St. John Sprague had been born in the house in 1749, and listened attentively while Bracken diagrammed how it was that neither his own name nor Sue’s was Sprague. The Major admitted that he had no idea how his aunt, whose name was Twombley, had acquired the house. So far as he knew, she had always had it. As a boy, he had sometimes
been taken there by his mother to stay, at Easter holidays and so on….