The Light Heart (5 page)

“I’ll do my best to make you happy, honey,” he said with his familiar, unselfconscious humility, and she put her arms
around his thin shoulders and held him more closely than he was holding her.

“You
will,
Miles—there couldn’t be anybody else—I
will
be happy with you!”

“If I should get that job in Louisville next year—you wouldn’t mind living in Louisville?”

“With you it would be fun! Just the two of us setting out together, like pioneers!”

“Louisville isn’t exactly the backwoods any more,” he drawled. “The trains run pretty regular now.”

She held to him, laughing, with brimming eyes. This was the way she loved him best—joking in his sober way, poking mild, unacrimonious fun at her—easy and cheerful and feeling well, and surely she could make sure he would always feel well, if she never worried him and always watched what he ate and kept him from getting bored and low in his mind by always being interesting and cheerful herself. And he said she was pretty. When she began to earn a little with her writing and could dress better she could be prettier, for him. And finally he would forget all about Virginia.

It never occurred to her in the flurry of her own emotion, that Miles had not uttered the word love.

S
O
P
HOEBE
’s birthday party turned into a betrothal party, with extra ceremonies and gaieties. Miles enjoyed it all immensely, feeling that he had done the right thing for once. Phoebe was radiant and oddly inclined to choke up with happiness and whatever else it was that flooded through her when she looked at the little garnet ring. Sue and Eden, after refraining from a single tell-tale glance at each other, talked it over in Sue’s room the evening before they left for New York.

“I suppose it was only to be expected,” Sue said ruefully. “But I don’t pretend it’s going to be the same thing, sending
Phoebe abroad with a ring on her engagement finger! Miles doesn’t realize, of course—but what he’s done is to bar her from half the fun she was meant to have.”

“Meaning a few harmless little flirtations?” Eden asked sympathetically.

“Meaning,” Sue corrected her steadily, “a chance to find the sort of thing Virginia found.”

“Then you think Miles won’t quite do,” said Eden, turning her own handsome rings in the lamplight, and wondering at her sister’s profound and unspinsterly wisdom.

“Oh, Eden, you, of all people, know very well what I think! Miles is a dear. Lord knows we’re all devoted to him. But think of your Cabot when you first fell in love with him—remember Sedgwick when he was Miles’s age. What
is
it that Miles lacks?”

“Or don’t they come the way they did when we were young?” Eden mused.

“Of course they do, look at Bracken!” Sue pointed out triumphantly. “He’s the younger generation, and whatever it is that Miles hasn’t got, it’s in Bracken. And in Fitz too, since he found himself.”

“Poor Miles has been ill so much since Cuba,” Eden began. “Perhaps if we could get him really
well
—”

“So has Fitz been ill,” Sue reminded her obstinately. “I don’t mean to be hard on Miles, he’s Dabney’s son—but there’s no
grip
to him, Dee, no—no—” Sue spread her hands helplessly, and Eden nodded.

“He certainly hasn’t swept her off her feet,” she agreed. “But he’s what Phoebe wants, Sue, don’t forget that. She has always trailed after him like a puppy, ever since they were babies.”

“How can Phoebe know what she wants?” Sue asked rebelliously.

“You knew. I knew. And we had seen no more of the world than Phoebe has. We’d be wrong to meddle, Sue. People must find their own destiny.”

“But I wonder if they do,” said Sue. “Sometimes I think destiny needs a good strong push from behind.”

Eden smiled at her affectionately.

“You can’t write Phoebe’s romance as though it was in one of your books, honey. She’s a human being, not a pen-
and-ink
person you’ve concocted out of thin air. Phoebe’s got to write her own love story.”

“You’re right, I know,” Sue conceded doubtfully. “But if only he hadn’t got that ring on her finger! No self-respecting man will look twice at her, now that he can see at a glance that she’s spoken for!”

“Well, of all the matchmaking little busybodies!” said Eden admiringly. “It’s no joke to lose them to an English husband, Sue, I can tell you that! You ought to be thankful Phoebe is going to settle down here, with Miles.”

“But I didn’t want her to settle down at all,” said Sue. “Not like that, anyway. I wanted her to have
fun,
Dee—
you
had fun. You had Cabot. Do you honestly believe it will be any fun to marry Miles?”

Eden sighed suddenly, and her slender body wilted in the chair and she put up a hand to shield her face from the fierce, searching eyes of her too-knowing little sister.

“When you put it that way—no,” she confessed behind her hand.
You
had
Cabot
—his hard, leashed strength, his all-seeing, possessive eyes, his big, gentle hands, his laughter—his
irrepressible
, irreverent, invigorating laughter, even in bed—how on earth did Sue know, so surely, about such things as rowdy laughter in bed, and sense that lack in Miles?
You
had
Cabot
—there was a world of wistfulness, even of envy, in those words. And Melicent had Sedgwick. But Sue knew, somehow, what she had missed, and insisted on it for Phoebe, who was
Sedgwick
’s child. “I suppose we couldn’t persuade her to leave off the ring this summer,” Eden said thoughtfully, behind the shielding hand.

“I suppose that wouldn’t be fair to Miles,” said Sue, and sighed again. “No, I reckon he’s been and done it. Maybe
marriage will bring him out some. Gwen did wonders for Fitz, though that wasn’t at all the same thing.”

“Phoebe’s happy, anyway,” said Eden. “She wanted Miles, and now she’s got him. We mustn’t interfere.”

“Oh, no,” Sue said hastily. “We must never interfere.”

In New York the following week they bought Phoebe the loveliest clothes they could find, and Eden’s obliging
dressmaker
worked day and night to complete the outfit before sailing time. Phoebe watched her own Cinderella
transformation
with an almost impersonal fascination, as though she stood aside and saw some other girl enjoying all this good fortune. There were printed muslins and figured foulards and
embroidered
voiles, evening frocks in white lace and blue satin and mousseline de soie—velvet tea-gowns trimmed with fur for chilly days, other tea-gowns of crêpe de chine and kilted chiffon (you wore tea-gowns at breakfast in English country houses)—an opera wrap of white velvet and miniver—tweeds for the country with neat matching toques—chiffon blouses for the theatre, white linen for river parties, a lace and tussore silk coat for Ascot, a grey walking costume trimmed with chinchilla—slippers and parasols and boas and fans, gloves in three different lengths, and hats and hats and hats….

When Phoebe protested belatedly about extravagance and began to show an inconvenient interest in the prices of things, they reminded her that she would have Virginia and Dinah to live up to—and suggested that she call it a trousseau, with which to impress all Charlottesville next winter and make Miles proud. The summer would be just a sort of dress
rehearsal
for her début in Charlottesville as Miles’s bride. And besides, if the King should happen to look her way …

Farthingale
Summer,
1902

T
HEY sailed at the end of the month, for Bracken wanted to deposit his mother and Phoebe safely in Gloucestershire and say Hello all round before he and Dinah dashed off to Spain to see the coronation of young King Alfonzo, which was to take place in Madrid a few weeks before that of Edward in London in June.

The voyage would have passed uneventfully if it had not been for Miles’s ring. Phoebe laid it on the shelf above the wash-basin in the
Ladies
when she went to wash her hands before lunch on the second day out. And being unaccustomed to wearing a ring at all, and becoming engrossed in a discussion of the ping-pong game in the ship’s gymnasium where Dinah had just royally trounced her, Phoebe forgot the ring and left it there on the shelf. When she rushed back for it half an hour later any number of other people had washed their hands at the same basin and the ring was gone. The purser, who was wearily familiar with countless tearful women who had done the same thing, was as sympathetic as he could manage to be, and pinned up a notice offering a reward, but the ring was not returned.

Phoebe wept piteously and begged to know what she was
going to tell Miles, and was advised to say nothing about it till she got back, and by no means to let it spoil her enjoyment of the summer. But she remained inconsolable for hours. Eden remarked privately to Bracken that Sue would probably be pleased to hear of the loss, and Bracken said no doubt it was Fate. Anyway, the very next day the first officer suggested that Phoebe might like to see the engines, and the day after that the ship’s doctor, a most delightful man, asked them all to take coffee and liquers with him in the lounge after dinner—it was Phoebe he wanted to talk to—and the day after that the Captain invited her up on the bridge.

They arrived at Liverpool on a cold wet day and went straight down to Virginia at Farthingale to see the baby, who had been born in February and christened Daphne. Virginia happened to have had an easy time during her first
confinement
, and therefore was convinced that people made too much fuss about having babies. She would not get it into her head that things sometimes went far otherwise, and told everybody that she meant to have another just as soon as possible, as there was absolutely nothing to it—if, the implication was, you knew how.

Eden, who had always nearly died, held her peace with a slight effort for the sake of Dinah, who was serenely hopeful that some day soon she would start a baby herself and was delighted to hear how simple it was. “Of course it’s a bore not to hunt, if it’s coming in the winter,” Virginia would add carelessly. “I shall manage better next time. Winifred had her little Hubert in November and was out again before the season ended.” Winifred had married Dinah’s and Archie’s brother Edward, who had succeeded to the earldom the year before on the death of their father. The earlier splendours of the Hall, a fine Georgian pile which was the preferred seat of the Earls of Enstone, were reviving under Winifred’s vigorous reign, for she was an heiress with a half million in coal.

Dinah considered that Edward had been very lucky to get Winifred—who had married him at eighteen when she was
just out and had not taken time to look round. There was nothing wrong with Edward, of course—unless you compared him to Archie, who was Dinah’s favourite brother. Edward had tried very hard for Virginia once, against his own better judgment, but she had chosen to marry a mere Honourable instead of becoming Edward’s countess, and Dinah for one quite saw why. Edward would be an unimaginative lover and a domineering husband. In Winifred, young as she was, he had got a wife who domineered right back at him, in a
perfectly
well-bred way, but she didn’t have that chin for nothing, and she took to horses and the sporting, strenuous life at the Hall with enthusiasm. She rode well and fearlessly over stiff wall-country which required nerve and decision and staying power, danced equally well and tirelessly at the Hunt balls, and managed the rather complicated household at the Hall to the admiration of all beholders.

The old Earl had had five sons and two daughters, of whom Edward was of course the eldest. Then came John, who was a successful Conservative MP and seldom left London where he lived in an ornate little house in Eaton Square with a dull and browbeaten wife and one small daughter. Oliver was a captain in a Lancer regiment and had gone to South Africa with Kitchener and carried dispatches under fire and got the DSO Having been severely wounded in the same fight which had killed Gratian Forbes-Carpenter, Oliver had arrived back in England at the first of the year, trailing clouds of glory, and was now convalescing on sick leave at the Hall. Archie, who had married Virginia Murray, came next, and was known in the family as the brainy one, being a great reader of books and a rising young barrister in the Chancery Court. Clare, the family beauty, who had come out the year of the Jubilee, married for money and had an establishment in Belgrave Square and a bull-necked, doting husband in the City, and an infant son. Dinah, who was so young when Bracken fell in love with her that he had to wait for her to grow up a little, was now only twenty, but carried off her position as a famous journalist’s
wife with complete aplomb. And Gerald, the youngest, was still at Eaton.

Phoebe said it all sounded rather like the family intricacies at Williamsburg and was prepared to assimilate all of Virginia’s and Bracken’s acquired relations as easily and with as little shyness as the youngest members of a large family usually show in the presence of other people’s brothers and sisters and their offspring. The more Phoebe heard about life at the Hall, and at Farthingale, the more it seemed to her that England was going to be just like home.

She didn’t see them all at once when she reached Farthingale on that wet afternoon about tea time. Archie would not have a motor car because he said they smelled, so a smart barouche with matched bays was waiting at the station—horses, Virginia was accustomed to point out with entire good humour, had no smell whatever.

The carriage passed through a backward countryside—the village of Upper Briarly was a mile and three-quarters from its railway station on the banks of the little river Windrush, which ran right down the middle of the only street, with a
triple-arched
stone bridge above the old ford. The Hall lay on the left across the river when you had driven through the village, and Farthingale was a mile farther on. To reach the house you came up an avenue of chestnuts which made a dramatic turn and presented the west front to view—golden Cotswold stone, with a sharp, steep roof-line and narrow mullioned windows in rows, and a branch of the Windrush flowing almost level with its clipped grassy banks at the edge of the green lawn. Only the bravest flowers were out in that inclement spring—lemony primroses, forget-me-nots bluer than the pale English sky, wallflowers, daffodils—Phoebe had seen pictures of Farthingale, but she exclaimed with delight at the reality.

Tea was waiting before the drawing-room fire, and
Virginia
in ruby velvet and old lace flung herself into her mother’s arms with touching abandon and began at once to tell about the baby. You would have thought nobody had ever had a
baby before. Eden listened politely to a lot of things she already knew, and drank hot tea out of the old Worcester cups, and realized once more that Cabot was gone forever and would not be with her when she first beheld her remarkable grandchild. Dinah and Archie were full of family news, to which Bracken and Phoebe attended with interest, and then they all adjourned to
the nursery to admire Virginia’s achievement, which Archie said irreverently looked to him pretty much like all the other babies he had ever seen.

Phoebe took to Archie at once. He was like Dinah in a way—fair, with a fine jaw-line and small bones. He was clean-shaven and wore an eyeglass and by all accounts looked marvellous in his barrister’s wig and gown. Phoebe felt acquainted with Archie on account of Father, recognizing in him the same dry lawyer’s logic, the same glinting wit, the same amusing air of having summed up. Virginia’s slim brunette beauty and
vivacious
ways set him off to advantage, too. They were a delightful pair, still visibly enchanted with each other, though they tried to hide it with understatement and golden-wedding airs. Phoebe could see that Archie was the one for Virginia, and that Miles would never have done. But one couldn’t say that, could one, to Miles? Any more than one could confess in the first letter home that one had left his poor little ring on the shelf in the
Ladies.

I
T
HAD
been arranged that they should dine quietly at
Farthingale
the first evening, in case Eden was tired, and all go to lunch at the Hall the following day. Easter had passed, but the Hall was still fairly full of visitors, though John and his family had returned to London and Gerald had gone back to school.

There were five house-guests at the Hall from outside the family, Virginia explained to Phoebe as they all sat round the drawing-room fire at Farthingale that first evening—Charles
Laverham and his sister Penelope, who had married Tommy Chetwynd last winter; and a girl called Rosalind Norton-Leigh, who had been bridesmaid to both Clare and Dinah, and her mamma who never let Rosalind out of her sight if she could help it—a
ubiquitous
woman, Virginia said, but one would put up with far worse for Rosalind’s sake. Then there would be Edward and Winifred, of course, and Oliver, who was still on sick leave, and Clare and her husband, Mortimer Flood, who was rather a wart but meant well and you got used to him.

Charles Laverham had got the VC in South Africa, Virginia went on, and when Phoebe, whose head was by now
swimming
with names, which was understandable but would sort itself out in time, failed to look sufficiently impressed, Virginia elaborated on Charles.

“You don’t get the VC except for ‘conspicuous bravery in the presence of the enemy,’” she informed Phoebe. “Charles is a captain in the Blues—the Horse Guards, you know, with the shiny breast-plates and the plumes—Bracken will take you to see them in Whitehall when you get to London. Charles went out to South Africa with the Household Regiment and saw a lot of fighting.”

“What did he do,” Phoebe asked, “to get the VC?”

“Nobody knows, he won’t talk about it!” Virginia sighed resignedly. “Oliver won’t talk about his DSO either. Men are funny. But the Queen herself pinned the medal on Charles’s chest while he knelt in front of her chair, and it must have been a real satisfaction to Victoria, I should think—Charles is just the last word in soldiers. He’s six foot three to begin with, and his helmet and plume must really scrape the sky.”

“No Guardsman can be less than six feet,” Dinah reminded her. “I remember Oliver was pretty sick about that, he lacked a little less than an inch no matter what he did, and he had set his heart on joining the same regiment because he and Charles had been at school together. But the Lancers are almost as good, I always think,” she added loyally. “Of course there’s
less foreign service with the Household Troops and Charles likes to be in London. Do you think he’s in love with
Rosalind
?” she inquired of Virginia in entirely unconfidential tones.

“It won’t do him any good if he is,” Virginia replied
decidedly
. “Rosalind’s mam
ma
has made up her mind that Rosalind must Marry Well. She’s spoilt two good chances already that I know of,
people that Rosalind might easily have been very happy with—shooed off by Mam
ma
because they hadn’t enough Prospects! And Charles’s prospects, even though he’s a lamb and any girl would be lucky to get him, don’t go beyond the regiment.”

“Isn’t his uncle somebody or other?” Dinah asked idly.

“Marquis of Cleeve, no less! But Uncle Cleeve has two healthy sons of his own, about Charles’s age. One is in India, and one is still in South Africa, and of course something
might
happen to them both, but it isn’t very likely. Charles has enough to live on, from his own father who died a few years back, but barely enough. It’s an expensive life in a regiment like that, as anyone knows, and Charles
will
play polo. I doubt if he’d give up his precious ponies for any woman on earth.”

Archie looked across at Bracken.

“Isn’t it frightening to hear women talk?” he inquired with a shudder. “They’re as cold-blooded and impersonal as a
surgeon
, and as rude as a gossip column in a servants’ hall paper. These two have vivisected Charles Laverham and hung him up to dry before our very eyes, all with the best will in the world!”

“Well, what have I said?” Virginia challenged him. “It’s nothing against Charles that he’s a long way from being Cleeve’s heir, and that Mrs. Norton-Leigh wouldn’t consider anything less than fifty thousand a year for Rosalind!”

“Doesn’t Rosalind have anything to say about it?”
murmured
Eden, who had married for love and got money as well.

“Not very much,” Virginia admitted cheerfully. “Rosalind is pretty vague about life still, and very much under Mam
ma’s
thumb. It’s not like Clare, marrying this man Flood with her
eyes open and her wits about her. Rosalind doesn’t—” She glanced round quickly, remembering there were gentlemen present. “—doesn’t know
anything
,”
she finished with a
comprehensive
gesture. “I shan’t allow my Daphne to grow up with blinkers on like that. She’s going to know exactly what’s what, from the beginning.”

“Judging by her mother,” Archie put in gently, “Daphne was born knowing a lot of things Rosalind will have to find out by trial and error.”

The chat around Virginia’s fireside that evening had more or less cleared things up for Phoebe, but when she walked into the white drawing-room at the Hall next day at lunch time bewilderment set in again. Ten people awaited them there, clustered casually about the two fires in the long room, with its Gainsboroughs over the mantels and its crystal chandeliers and its fragile Adam furniture and old needle-point and brocade draperies. There were six in their own party, and everybody knew everybody except herself, and introductions were
interrupted
and sketchy, and it was difficult to decide which was which and who was married to whom.