Ever After (12 page)

He had grounds for divorce, certainly, but his own knowledge that Lisl had left him to live abroad with Hutchinson was not sufficient to secure his freedom in a court of law. He must produce evidence, and witnesses who could swear to having seen his wife living with the California millionaire in some European domicile. There would have to be detectives to trace them and make written statements. There would have to be red tape and wire-pulling and a lot of legal advice.

Perhaps, he thought, it could be done more quietly here in England where the name of Murray was not so well known. The English divorce laws were notoriously complex and inflexible. But if he was going to marry Dinah some day—for a moment he sat contemplating the idea with a growing excitement and
determination
—
be
cause
he was going to marry Dinah, it would be better (if not in fact necessary) to get his divorce in England. Partridge would know. Partridge knew everything. They would have to call off proceedings in New York, which had not made much
progress
, and begin again here. English detectives. None better in the world. Things might go faster that way, these fellows would know the ground, they would be on the scent in no time.

Meanwhile it was rather difficult to explain, at this distance, to his father. Not even Cabot could be expected to understand the sudden, revolutionary thing that had happened to Bracken when he knelt on the boggy ground beside Dinah in the sunrise. He didn’t
understand it himself. He only knew that when he woke that morning he had been lost and rudderless and
finished,
an emotional husk, the merest sorry vestigial remnants of a man, his inmost honour soiled, his pride in tatters, his soul tasting of wormwood, his future not worth a bone button to him—and then Thunderbolt had foozled a gate and there was Dinah and he was alive again.

But he couldn’t say to Cabot, She is the daughter of the Earl of Enstone, because that would conjure up somebody like Lady Clare. And he couldn’t say, She will be sixteen soon, because Cabot was bound to reply that they would have the law on him. And he couldn’t say, She was wearing her brother’s shooting suit, because that made her sound like a tomboy. And he couldn’t tell about Alwyn and the groom and the governess, because that described the bathos and put her in a class with the Little Match Girl, shivering on the doorstep.

After an hour’s struggle he gave up trying to get Dinah on paper—a man who was supposed to make his living by his pen, and he couldn’t describe to his father the girl he wanted to marry!—and drifted downstairs to the drawing room, where he found Sue
dispensing
tea and the rector come to call.

The rector was expounding happily to his audience on how Farthingale was a good hundred and fifty years older than the Hall, which had been built by the third earl about the time that St. John Sprague had left England for the colonies. St. John could never have seen the Hall in its finished state, the rector was saying, though he must have known that it was in process of building.

“He wouldn’t have thought much of it,” Bracken said. “Farthingale is much nicer.”

“Much,” nodded the rector. “I don’t care for the Palladian style, myself. This sort of thing is cosier.”

When they separated to change for dinner, Bracken tapped on Virginia’s door and went in to ask if she and Sue had decided that they wanted to take the house for the summer. Virginia looked surprised.

“But I thought it was all settled!” she cried. “Besides—I think he’d be glad of the money.”

“Well, I only wanted to be sure,” he said vaguely, and Virginia came to him and laid a cool little hand on the line between his eyes.

“Does your head ache again?” she asked gently.

“No. I don’t think so. Why?”

She put her arms around him like a mother.

“Darling, I wish there was something I could do! I wish Lisl was
dead
!”

All his defences sprang up, and a new, unfamiliar apprehension as
well—because naturally no one must suspect how he felt about Dinah. Not for years.

“What made you think of Lisl now?” he asked.

“Because you’re worrying. And when you’re unhappy it’s always Lisl. There’s nothing new, is there?”

“No, just the same old things, I guess.”

“You haven’t heard from her?”

“No. Why should I?”

“I thought you seemed so tired.”

“I am tired. I worked pretty hard in order to get away, and the first night in a strange place, you know—”

“Bracken, you do like it here, don’t you?”

“Very much indeed,” he said guardedly.

“You aren’t just taking the house to please me? That is, you’ll get pleasure out of it too?”

“Bound to. Be very good for me, I should think—quiet—relaxing—good air—horses—”

“That’s what Aunt Sue thought. She said you needed to get away from the office sometimes, right away like this, or you’d work yourself to death before our eyes.”

“I’m pretty tough. You tell her not to worry.”

“We promised Mother we’d take good care of you, you know.”

“Did you, Ginny? That’s funny, I promised her the same thing about you!”

“Bracken—is she
very
beautiful?”

“Who? Mother?” he asked perversely.

“Lady Clare, idiot”

Virginia was much too clever, sensing already some new
preoccupation
on his part. Without compunction he threw Lady Clare to the wolves.

“Devastating,” he said.

That night he went to bed with a stack of books as usual and a bedside lamp, prepared to read himself slowly into insensibility—and awoke with sunlight streaming into the room to find that he had slept like a baby for eight solid hours. Convalescents did that, he knew. People who had nearly died and then suddenly taken a turn for the better. Apparently he was going to get well now.

Sue gazed up at him from the breakfast-table in astonishment.

“Bracken, you look like a new man already! I told Virginia this place would be good for you. It’s the air. Did you sleep?”

“I did.”

“Are you going for a ride?”

“I am.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Virginia, “and—”

“No, you won’t,” he told her rudely. “Solitude is what I need.
No offence, Ginny, but down here I can suddenly hear myself think. It’s a new sensation.”

“Unh-hunh!” said Virginia just as rudely, and he knew she suspected a rendezvous with Lady Clare, or at least a desire on his part to moon over her by himself, and he allowed another opportunity to correct a false impression to go by.

He rode firmly in the opposite direction from the Hall and the village, determined not to succumb until after lunch, when he meant to ride again on the pretext of trying a different horse. Returning about eleven, he found that a note had arrived from the Hall inviting them all to lunch on Monday, and offering the shortness of their present visit to Farthingale as an excuse for the informality. Sir Gratian was artlessly pleased that Lord Enstone was after all disposed to be neighbourly with his American friends, and Virginia gave Bracken an extremely knowing look and murmured, “You did make a hit, didn’t you, darling! Do you think the Viscount will react to me the same way?”

“Why not try the Earl?” he countered brazenly.

About three o’clock that afternoon he entered the stable-yard of the Hall by the same back route through the lane, turned his horse over to the smiling Arthur, and walked round to the garden front as he had done with Alwyn. The servants’ grapevine functioned
perfectly
, and just as he was discovering that there was no bell on that side, the door was opened by Nash, who looked concerned, and said the family had all gone out to lunch and not come back yet.

“I wasn’t expected,” Bracken reassured him. “I only came to inquire about Lady Dinah.”

“She’s confined to her room, I’m afraid, sir. The doctor said she ought to keep off it for several days.”

“Very sensible. Do you think I could see her?”

This caused Nash to look surprised, and he said with his head a little on one side, “Well, I’m afraid the governess isn’t in either, sir. She had an errand in the village.”

“Sounds awfully dull for a youngster with a game leg,” said Bracken cunningly. “Might cheer her up a bit if I looked in for a few minutes, don’t you think? You see, I was there when she took the toss, so we’re quite chums now—”

Nash smiled indulgently, for Bracken was one of those fabulous people who have a way with children, servants, and dogs.

“If you care to step into the tapestry room and wait, sir, I’ll go up and inquire,” he said, and opened wide the door.

The tapestry room was a small parlour—small, anyway, by the standards of the Hall, which is to say that it was not large enough to house a good echo—on the right of the terrace door. Its long
windows
looked south across the lawns to the river. It had no pictures,
only Gobelins, on its walls, and the furniture was lavish
Louis-Quatorze
, much gilded. But Bracken was not really aware of his surroundings.

He paced the floor, nervous as a boy before his first dance. He was thinking that he ought to have brought her something—chocolates or flowers. He noticed a dozen pink rosebuds, freshly gathered in the greenhouse, still with a dewy look, gracefully arranged in a blue Sèvres vase on the cabinet. They looked defenceless and shy in the regal room. Lonely too, he thought. He removed them from the vase and dried the stems on his handkerchief, just as Nash opened the door again and said, “I think it will be all right for you to go up, sir. Will you come this way?”

Carrying the bouquet of pink roses, Bracken followed the old butler up the grand staircase, and through a long gallery lined with portraits, up a less grand staircase, along a narrower passage apparently running between bedrooms, around a corner into another wing, up a third staircase with no pretensions at all, into a gaunt, somewhat dreary room where Dinah lay on a sofa under an eiderdown.

Still looking a bit dubious about the whole thing, Nash left them. He had not, of course, failed to notice the abduction of the pink roses, which was just the cheeky sort of thing a young American gentleman would do, and it rather tickled Nash. He was partial to Dinah and privately disapproved of the way she was snubbed and dragooned by her sister and the Viscount. Besides, when he told her Mr. Murray was downstairs asking to see her Dinah had said, “Oh,
please
let him come up, Nash!” And it wasn’t as though they had kept her in bed today. And Miss French was sure to return at any minute, now….

“Good afternoon,” Dinah greeted Bracken correctly, but her eyes were bright with pleasure. “It’s most awfully good of you to come. What’s the matter? You look—surprised.”

“It’s all those stairs, I expect,” he evaded. “I’m out of breath.” Now that he saw her as presumably she should be dressed, she looked even more pitiably young than she had the day before. Her hair waved loosely on her shoulders, tied back on the top of her head with a blue ribbon, with a soft fringe across her forehead. She was wearing some sort of shapeless blue flannelette garment which had a ruffle at the neck and long sleeves gathered into ruffles at the wrists. Schoolroom, Virginia had said. More like a nursery. “Are you quite sure you’re nearly sixteen?” he inquired anxiously.

“In September.”

“Well, in the meantime, I brought you these.” He presented the roses. “They made me think of you, somehow. They need someone to keep them company.”

She took them in both her hands.

“Did you
really
mean them for me?”

“Who else?”

“It’s always Clare who gets the flowers.”

“Now, you don’t actually think I’d bring Clare roses and then chuck them at you because she isn’t here!”

“Well, but—nobody ever brought me flowers before.”

“Then it’s begun,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I stole those. I don’t know whose they were, but they’re yours now. Shan’t we ask somebody to put them in water?”

“There isn’t anybody, unless you want to ring—and they only come up here if they happen to feel like it, anyway. Miss French has gone into the village on her bicycle to get some knitting wool.”

“Mean to say you’ve been left all alone at the top of the house like this? Suppose you wanted something!”

“I’d have to wait,” she told him philosophically. “There’s a mug in the other room on the wash-handstand. You could put them in that if you like till Miss French comes back.”

He crossed the room and entered Dinah’s bedroom. It too had a kind of dreariness, as though furnished with cast-offs, and the bed was a narrow white iron affair like a hospital. It was his first adult experience of the Spartan cheerlessness of the English nursery floor, and it chilled him to the bone. He poured water from the white china ewer into the mug and returned to place the roses in it where she could see them from the sofa.

“How long are you going to be laid up like this?” lie asked, drawing up a chair. “What did the doctor say?”

“Oh, doctors never really
say
anything, do they? He bandaged it up and told me to keep off it. Miss French thought I ought to stay in bed, but I managed to hobble out here just for a change.”

“Does it hurt much?”

“It’s not comfortable. The bandage seems too tight.”

“Bet you didn’t sleep much. Did they give you anything to send you off?”

“Miss French made me a tisane, but it didn’t do much good.”

“What did you think about?” he ventured to ask.

“Oh, I don’t know. How soon I could ride again, and what Edward will say when he gets round to it—”

“Couldn’t you find anything more cheerful than that to dwell on?”

She looked back at him candidly, with no thought of any possible allusion to his own possible presence in her thoughts. Once more the choirboy simile occurred to him—she was utterly without guile or coquetry. She accepted his roses and his call at their face value, schooled to her own unimportance in the grown-up world. Clare
wasn’t in, so he had come up to be polite to Clare’s little sister. She took no more to herself than that. After Virginia, who had begun to flirt in her cradle, he found Dinah very touching because of such simplicity.