Part One: Susannah

PART ONE

SUSANNAH

Williamsburg

Christmas, 1896

1

THE LETTER FROM MISS EDEN HAD COME.

Pharoah, the old coloured butler, carried it towards his master’s bedroom upstairs, where Miss Susannah sat reading to her father in front of the fire.

Marse Ransom, he knew, had been fretting to hear. Time was getting short, till Christmas. If Miss Eden was coming home she better get a move on.

Hardly missed a year, she hadn’t, since she married the Yankee gentleman and went up North to live. Once when young Marse Bracken was getting born, back about ’69, it was, she didn’t come, and that time along early in the ’8o’s when little Miss Virginia had almost died of diphtheria—that kept them home, and one other time—Pharaoh’s dimming memory fumbled at it

—must be three times she’d missed, maybe four—four Christmases out of round about thirty—that was pretty good. It never seemed rightly Christmas without Miss Eden there, and her children. Turned out real well, Miss Eden’s marriage had, for all Captain Murray was a Yankee and took her away to Washington and New York with him. Captain Murray was rich too, which was something nobody hereabouts was any more….

Pharaoh’s long, spindly legs in narrow trousers strapped under the instep, and his tail coat, and his thin black neck inside the stiff white collar, gave him the look of an elderly insect as he ascended the broad stairs, but his progress was full of purpose, and the square envelope with its New York postmark was tenderly held in his gnarled fingers. He paused outside Ransom Day’s door and cocked an ear to the panel. The room was quiet, as it would be if the old man had dropped off to sleep. Sue often sat patiently, the book in her lap, waiting till he roused again rather than disturb his light slumber by trying to tiptoe away.

Her care of him was infinitely loving, for she never ceased trying to make up to him for her mother’s death in fever-stricken Richmond during the war. It seemed sometimes that he did not want to live—but here he was at eighty-one, the last of his generation, frail, sad, broken, but with a mind quite clear, and a lively interest in his surviving children and their offspring.

There were three of them left to call him Father—Susannah, and her sister Eden, and their eldest brother Dabney, who had lost a leg at Drewry’s Bluff in ’64.

Pharaoh’s soft scratch at the door did not rouse his master, and he opened to Sue’s quick gesture for silence. He put the letter in her hand and departed soundlessly, thinking as he often did how pretty she still was, with only a few silver threads in her coppery hair, and the most elegant shape in Williamsburg even with the outlandish way styles were nowadays since they left off their hoops; not weighing a pound more than she had when she was a girl, seemed like, and the smile that showed her little white teeth and the dimple at the corner of her mouth—for the thousandth time Pharaoh mourned the incomprehensible fact that Miss Sue, the darling of them all, had never married.

Sue opened the letter softly, with an eye on her father’s bent head.

DEAREST SUE—[Eden had written]

You must be fit to kill me for so much delay and uncertainty, but things have really been at sixes and sevens here, and I could not look ahead. I may as well break it to you at once, I suppose—Bracken’s wife has left him.

There, and doesn’t it look awful, down in black and white! My only son’s marriage gone on the rocks, and his life smashed up by a creature we none of us ever liked or trusted, though our worst suspicions of her never quite equalled the facts. I won’t say Lisl has broken his heart, because for that to happen he would have had to love her very dearly, and I am sure he stopped doing that some time ago.

You will ask me how he takes it, and I can only say—like Bracken.

He is defiant to the point of flippancy, lest we pity him. And he is close-mouthed to the point of rudeness, lest we come at the truth, which I fear is far worse than I can imagine. We all knew that Lisl was wildly extravagant, of course, because Bracken has twice had to ask his father

for help with debts, though Cabot made him a very generous arrangement in the partnership, and he has had his pay as Special Correspondent to the paper as well, with travelling expenses extra. Lisl has a passion for diamonds, she is really mad about them, and he gave her all he could afford, but she would buy more and send the bills to him. She entertained on a scale suitable for Royalty—one evening party could swallow a month of Bracken’s income. Her gowns, of course, were famous, and the dressmaker’s bills naturally came home to roost.

Well, we knew all that, it went with her type of beauty and her European ideas of high society—and her notorious indiscretions of speech! But there was something more, towards the end, and he does not mean for us to know what it was.

We are giving out here that she has returned to Vienna for a family visit, and that Bracken finds it impossible to take a holiday abroad just now. But we know that she will never set foot in his house again, and her religion does not sanction divorce, and what future does that leave Bracken, at twenty-seven? No wife, no home, no children—and he is not the celibate type, I don’t have to tell you, he’s like Sedgwick, quick and kind and loving, and always irresistible to women. It seems almost more than I can bear, but then, Lisl has always been that!

So now I shall pack up the pieces of Bracken and bring them down to you for healing. Cabot is in a towering rage about the whole thing, and is convinced that Bracken must have a stiff job at once to occupy his mind, and has decided to send him to London in the spring to open an office in Fleet Street for the newspaper. It is almost too much responsibility, but with the election over, and lacking a good war at the moment, Cabot considers London the next best thing for keeping Bracken absorbed and leaving him no time to brood. He will have to be in Washington for the inauguration in March, and we sail immediately after that, in time to have Virginia presented at one of the May Drawing Rooms.

Now, Sue, honey, seriously—this is the year for you to come with us! Each time before when I have asked you to go abroad you have had some reason for refusing—Dabney and Charl were having a baby, or Sedgwick’s boy was coming of age, or Father had had an illness. This time we won’t take No for an answer. You owe it to yourself to see

something of the world while you are still young enough to enjoy it, and next summer in England will be exciting, with special doings on account of the Jubilee. Moreover, launching my daughter Virginia into society is going to be fun. She is rather a beauty if I do say it as shouldn’t! Please come, Sue. I shall argue it out with you when I get there.

As our plans stand now, we shall arrive there on Thursday evening.

Please inform the family of the situation and beg them to use all possible tact with Bracken, as I’m sure they will. Give my love to everybody—no one knows how good it will seem to be in Williamsburg again, where there are no Lisls and no upheavals, and where Bracken can draw a long breath. Why on earth couldn’t he have chosen some nice Virginia girl (like ourselves when we were young!) instead of this exotic Austrian, who has meant nothing but trouble, one way or another, ever since he first set eyes on her!

Love,

EDEN

Sue read the letter twice through and then sat with it in her fingers, frowning at the fire. Poor Bracken—not because his foreign wife had deserted him, but because he would still not be free of her, to make a new start and live the life he was meant to. But surely there must be some way, even though Lisl did say she was a Catholic. Precious little she cared about religion, except as an excuse! Sedgwick would know, Sue thought. She must go and tell Sedgwick about this at once.

Moving very cautiously, holding her full poplin skirts close to keep them from rustling, she rose and slipped across the room and whisked out the door before her father roused. Sometimes one was justified in taking advantage of his feebleness, she considered, especially when something came up about which she wished to consult her cousin Sedgwick, who was a lawyer and therefore knew everything. Besides, as Eden had mentioned in her letter, Bracken was more like Sedgwick Sprague than like his own father. Somehow in Bracken the Sprague strain, three times bred into his mother’s family through the marriage of first cousins, was dominant; while by a streak of heredity, Sedgwick’s own son was a changeling, unaccountable anywhere in the family history.

Sue put on her hat and the little fur jacket which Eden had given her for Christmas two years before, and set off for Sedgwick’s office, which was up over the bank in the Duke of Gloucester Street. It was a grey, chilly day in December, and the shabby little town looked derelict and bleak.

Williamsburg had been the capital of Virginia once, with a Governor’s Palace and a State House and a famous tavern called the Raleigh where Sue’s great-grandmother had danced and dined as a bride after Yorktown—

Grandmother Tabitha Day, who could remember when George Washington was only a Burgess and went to dine with the British Royal Governor, wearing powder and his blue Virginia militia uniform with red facings. It was all gone now. The capital had moved to Richmond during the war with England, and even the young ladies’ Academy which in the Sixties had stood on the ground had been torn away so that its bricks could be used by the railway, leaving the upper end of the Duke of Gloucester Street barren and empty. The Palace had burned down after Yorktown and was further demolished by Federal troops in ’62. A modest residence or two occupied its site, and the depot encroached where once the pleached walks and clipped yews of the Royal gardens had been. Fire had destroyed the Raleigh in ’59, and Lane’s store had taken its place. The College, which remained closed for some years after Lee’s surrender, was running again, with seven professors and more than a hundred students, but for the more professional courses like Law and Medicine everybody had to go to the new University at Charlottesville—new, that is, in Thomas Jefferson’s time.

The town was poverty-pinched and forgotten and forlorn, the last of its prosperity swept away by the War Between the States. Chickens foraged undisturbed in its wide, unpaved Duke of Gloucester Street—Sue was one of those who refused to call it Main Street as the careless younger generation did—and cows were let graze in the shade of the old mulberry trees which lined each side of the road. The Palace Green, once a well-kept lawn, was weed-grown and never got mowed. Everybody was poor since the war, even the Spragues, though Sedgwick was the best lawyer on the Peninsular and kept pretty busy—and of course there was his wife’s legacy from her father’s estate, which he would never touch for himself….

The doctor’s sagging buggy went by, bumping over the frost-hardened ruts of the road, and Sue responded to his greeting absent-mindedly, and walked on, thinking about Bracken.

Somewhere there must be a girl who was meant for him, and who but for this hasty, hectic marriage with Lisl Olezi might still come to reign in his luxurious little house just around the corner from his father’s brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue—the house Bracken had bought and lavishly furnished for his lovely, exacting bride four years ago. The family had always called her “the Austrian”—in the same hostile tone the French had once used, Sue always thought, in speaking of Marie Antoinette by the same term, though strictly speaking Lisl was half Hungarian.

Bracken had met her at the Austrian Embassy while he was Washington Correspondent to his father’s New York newspaper. She was cousin or niece to somebody there, and must have come fortune-hunting to America.

When anyone so good-looking and—his mother’s word was no exaggeration—irresistible as Bracken was actually had money as well, Lisl was sure to try for him.

Whether his very substantial income had proved to be less than she supposed, or whether she had always meant to tap his father’s resources as well, or whether she merely had a heedless passion for spending money, it was not long before Bracken had been forced to remonstrate, diffidently at first, then more firmly, and finally—he was not a meek man—with justifiable heat. Lisl had called him stingy, and a lot of other things, in that lisping accent he had once found so charming—she could never even manage the r in his given name correctly, and it was strange how irritating a thing like that could become. There were sulks and scenes and passionate reconciliations, and then always the confession, sometimes tearful and contrite, sometimes bold and arrogant, of new expenditures. She was beautiful, and deserved to be adorned. She was artful with her loving—

experienced, said Eden, her nose very high—and after each quarrel knew how to enslave him again.

So much Sue had known for some time now. She had seen Lisl just once, when Bracken brought her to Williamsburg for Christmas the year they were married, and Sue had decided then that Lisl had no tenderness and no sense of humour, and hence was no wife for Bracken. The next year Lisl had contrived to be ill at Christmas time—too ill to travel, not too ill for the gaieties of the season in New York. And for the two years after that she had kept Bracken abroad through December. Now she had gone to Europe again—and alone.

Sue came to the narrow dark stairs beside the entrance to the bank and went up them, holding her blue poplin skirts daintily, and turned to the right, and there was the familiar door with SEDGWICK SPRAGUE, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, on it in faded black and gold letters. The office was rather faded-looking too, and the once handsome stuffed black leather furniture was worn and patched and came off on your clothes in a fine brown powder, like the old calf bindings of the thick books that lined the walls. The mahogany desk to the right of the door as you went in was empty. Sedgwick had sat there once, when his father was the senior partner, and Sedgwick’s son should be sitting there now. Sedgwick refused to accept another apprentice, though he needed help. The job was Fitz’s, if ever he wanted it. But the desk remained empty.

Sedgwick was alone and rose to meet her with both hands extended in welcome—placed her tenderly in the visitor’s chair facing his desk, lowered the blind an inch lest the light strike into her eyes, and returned to her side to receive her gloves and handbag before she could be put to the trouble of laying them down herself. It was always that way when she came to the office. Whatever he was doing stopped. Everything was set aside in order that she might find herself the centre of the universe, empress of his world.

They were double first cousins—her father and his mother both Days, her mother and his father both Spragues—and they had grown up together.

Once, a long time before the war, they had been in love and were forbidden to marry because of their close relationship. Faithfully they had kept their resolution never to speak of it again. They didn’t have to. His face, when she came unexpectedly upon his sight—her smile, when they looked at each other as they did now in their wordless satisfaction at being together—that was enough. She had never grudged him his peaceful marriage with the sister of Eden’s Yankee husband, his well-run home, his son and daughter.

She had made up her mind long before it happened that he must marry some day and not go maimed and lacking all his life for love of herself.

And as for her, she had never left Williamsburg, and no man had ever crossed her horizon who could disturb the deep serenity of her lifelong devotion to Sedgwick. Since the first blinding shock of rebellion that day so long ago when she was sixteen, there had been no repining and no bitterness. After all, they saw each other nearly every day, and Melicent was

her dear friend, the very person she had hoped he would marry since marry he must, and the children were almost like her own….

Her life on those terms had made her a mysteriously enchanting creature, a girl playing at womanhood even while her hair turned grey—a girl untouched and virginal and yet awakened and chastened by love. It was impossible to think of Susannah Day as a spinster, or to realize that she was now passing imperceptibly from her forties into her fifties, still slender, with a rounded high bosom and that misplaced dimple in her ready smile.

And the books she wrote and published every two or three years were mature and knowing and warm-blooded, and had kept the simple Household running in comparative comfort during the long years of her father’s invalidism.

She held fast to her handbag as Sedgwick’s hands closed on it, delaying to extract Eden’s letter and give it to him.

“You’d better read it yourself,” she told him. “It’s all about Bracken.”

And she added as his expressive eyebrows rose—“They’ll be here in time for Christmas. That part’s all right.”

She sat watching him while he read, telling over again to herself the familiar sum of things she loved best about him; his fine head bent now above Eden’s letter, the thick straight hair greying at the edges and left long to the top of his collar in the back; the old-fashioned black stock he still wore with such an air; his crisp white linen and brushed broadcloth frock coat—people had begun to call him Colonel now when he travelled, but he had been only a captain of cavalry when Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

His long hands held the letter lightly, flipping over its pages—he always moved so neatly. Watching his hands today, Sue was hardly aware that at the back of her memory lay a rainswept night in ’62 when she had passed along rows of wounded, bandaged men on stretchers, here in Williamsburg, sure that she would be able to pick out Sedgwick even though his face be covered and unrecognizable, if she could just see his hands….

At last Sedgwick folded the letter tidily and replaced it in its envelope and laid it on top of Sue’s handbag which was on the corner of the desk.

Her eyes waited on his face. As usual, he began where she might least expect his attention to focus.

“Am I irresistible to women?” he queried, with a sidelong look, his brows askew.

“Oh, Sedgie! Inevitably! ” Her dimple showed.

“You mean you had noticed it yourself?” he inquired in feigned surprise, leaning towards her across the desk with wistful eyes on her ever-changing face.

“A long time ago,” she answered steadily. It was the nearest allusion they had made for years to the tragedy of their youth, and her gaze as it met his was smiling and sweet.

“Still?” he asked briefly, and—

“Always,” she nodded.

He sat a moment, looking down at his clasped hands on the desk in front of him.

“It oughtn’t to be like that,” he said finally. “I’ve gone on—I married little saint Melicent, I’ve got my children—”

“I’ve got them too, Sedgie,” she reminded him. “And that was the way it had to be. You see, I’m still thanking God you weren’t killed in the war.

I’ve had all these years since then to see you—and tell you things—I’ve been very happy, Sedgie, really I have.”

“I believe by some miracle you have been,” he said, and raised another point in Eden’s letter which it had not occurred to her to discuss. “Now, about your going abroad in the spring,” he began. “I think you ought to, you know.”

“My book won’t be done,” she said at once.

“Well, leave it undone. You won’t need the money, Eden will see to all that.”

“D-don’t you think it—seems a good deal—”

“My dear child, Cabot is rolling in the stuff! We’re all so used to being poor down here, it is beyond our conception that a man may have, not just enough, but more than enough! Cabot has steel mills and Cabot has a flourishing newspaper, don’t forget! No doubt Eden’s dress allowance would pay all my expenses for a year. You will go with her, won’t you, Sue?”

“You’re awfully anxious to be rid of me, all of a sudden,” she complained.

“It’s as Eden says—you must see something of the world while you are still young enough to enjoy it.”

“This is my world,” said Sue. “Here in Williamsburg.”

He shook his head.

“It’s not enough,” he said.

“It’s all you’ve had, Sedgie.”

“To my regret.”

“You mean you wanted to go abroad?”

He shifted impatiently in his chair.

“If this is our day for telling the truth to each other, I haven’t been a country lawyer by choice, all my life,” he confessed. “I always coveted Dabney’s year at the Legation before the war. Later I envied Cabot his vagabond existence as a reporter, before he married Eden.”

“Why, Sedgie, I never dreamed—”

“I particularly wanted to go to England, you always knew that.”

“Well, yes, in a way, we all talked about it, but—”

“Suppose you go to England for me, in the spring.”

“But, Sedgie, I—”

“Go down to Gloucestershire and see the old family place—the place our great-grandfather St. John came from, the house the plantation here was named for—Farthingale. Find out who is living there now and what it looks like. I’ve often wondered. Besides, you might get a new book out of it, you never know.”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “I might.”

“You will go, then?”

“Well, I—I’ll talk to Father. I’ll see how he is when the time comes.

Sedgie—what about Bracken?”

“Oh, Bracken, poor devil, he’s in for a bad time. But I’m not surprised, are you?”

“Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Well—women don’t, as a rule, leave men who are irresistible.”

Sedgwick made a small rude noise.

“Don’t you see the answer to that?”

“What answer? Eden doesn’t say—”

“She doesn’t say anything about a financial settlement, does she?”

“I d-didn’t think there was one.”

“And if there wasn’t one, what is the expensive Lisl going to live on after she is no longer under Bracken’s roof? Not her precious diamonds!”

“But I still don’t see—”

“Why, Miss Innocence, it’s plain as the nose on your funny little face, if Eden can’t see it for herself! Lisl has found somebody who can buy her more diamonds than Bracken ever can, and Bracken is resigning in his favour!”

Sue gazed at him in awe.

“What it is to be a lawyer!” she marvelled. “Is that what he is so afraid they’ll find out?”

“Bracken can be as close-mouthed as he likes, but I’ll bet Cabot knows the other fellow’s name and even the amount of his income!” His eyes sharpened, his lazy pose drew together, his lips slipped into a sardonic smile. “I wonder,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing.” But their eyes met, and now Sue was not far behind him.

“Oh, Sedgie, you don’t think Cabot would ever—”

“Cabot tried to buy her off in the beginning.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Nobody was supposed to,” he admitted. “But that’s where Bracken’s being so irresistible came in. She wouldn’t let go of him for any sum Cabot offered. He’s always hated her very—bootlaces, and I was just thinking, if Cabot found a way to sic her on to some sucker with a diamond mine, as it were, that would be another way of buying her off, wouldn’t it!”

“But Cabot would never deliberately break up the marriage—”

“The marriage was already broken up, long since. It was only a question of getting rid of her.”

“But if she won’t divorce him—” Sue began.

“Ah, but he can divorce her if he can prove infidelity! Cabot may be counting on something like that.”

“Do you think Eden suspects?”

“Darling Eden. You can never be sure what she knows and what she misses. Anyway, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Don’t dwell on it, will you.

As for Bracken—he’ll want handling for a while.”

“Yes, even if he’s stopped loving her, it must be so humiliating to a man when his wife leaves him!” Sue ruminated. “Even if he hated her, it must be a blow to his pride—”

“Don’t envy lawyers for their wisdom, my dear,” he said with a smile.

“You have put your finger on Bracken’s trouble. It’s the insult to his manhood he’s feeling now. What a trollop that woman is! It always stuck out of her a mile. Bracken was a fool, anyone could see what she was! Why did he have to marry her, anyway, he could have had her, if he’d tried, enough to cure him, right there in Washington!”

“Sedgie, how you talk! Perhaps she was too clever for that.”

“No doubt she was. And no doubt this fellow with the diamond mine, whoever he is, lacks Bracken’s chivalrous feelings. If he were proposing marriage, we’d hear about a divorce fast enough!”

Sue looked horrified.

“Oh, Sedgie, this is awful! I didn’t realize! Can’t you do something?”

“Honey, I’m not a wizard, though I’ve often wished I were. In a case like this, Cabot’s bankroll can probably do more than the Law. He may have something up his sleeve, it’s hard to beat Cabot for ever.”

“I dread having to tell Father,” she reflected.

“It won’t be any surprise to him either,” said Sedgwick philosophically.

“He’s seen her. He knows. Tell me what you’ve been doing.” They hadn’t had a talk since the day before yesterday and were in arrears. Their eyes held without effort or urgency, drawing comfort and serenity from each other. Their lost dream had died peacefully in his careful hands a long time ago, leaving behind it only an abiding need, disciplined and docile now, but never icebound. They were infinitely contented together, that was all.

Nearly all. “Tell me things,” he said affectionately.

“Well—let’s see.” It was an old game they had got very good at.

“Mammy and I have been turning out the rooms to get ready for the guests.

And I’m trying to finish my chapter before everybody arrives and catches me at the wrong place. And I’m fixing over my black velvet to wear at the party. I reckon that’s about all. At breakfast we were counting up the ones who were coming this year and the ones who—won’t be here. One list is very short and the other one is lengthening. Sedgie, have you heard from Sally?”

“Not a line? Our Sally done flew de coop, Sue.”

“For ever?”

“It looks like it.”

They both paused to consider his sister Sally, the beauty of the family, who had married and buried three elderly husbands in quick succession and gone to live on their combined bequests in a large, gaudy villa on the French Riviera. Once when Eden was abroad she had gone to see Sally and confessed to Sedgwick afterwards that she had been a little scandalized.

The house was full of foreigners and small yapping dogs, said Eden, and Sally had begun to speak English with a French accent, and—Sally painted her face. There was more, which Sue as an unmarried woman was not supposed to suspect.

“I was wondering what her Christmas gifts this year would be,” Sue said. At Christmas time and for birthdays and coming-of-age parties, Sally’s presents were magnificent and unexpected and seldom arrived on time. For Bracken’s twenty-first birthday she had sent a cheque with instructions that it was to buy him the best Virginia-bred saddle-horse to be found. For Fitz’s coming-of-age she had sent a Swiss watch of such splendour that he wasn’t allowed to wear it on weekdays. For the girls she usually sent gowns from Worth or Paquin, too elaborate to be of any use. Sue had a special interest in Sally’s presents this year, because for the first time she had interfered by giving a hint. She was wishing now that she hadn’t. Sedgwick might not be pleased.

“Just because she’s so stinkin’ rich, Sally thinks she needn’t bother to write anything but cheques any more,” Sedgwick said rather huffily.

It was nearly lunch-time, and when Sue rose to go Sedgwick said he would walk along with her. She stood waiting in the dingy hall while he turned to lock the door behind him. There was the sound of running feet on the stairs and a small coloured boy came into view at headlong speed.

When he saw them he halted on the top step, holding to the newel-post and gasping for breath.

“Oh, Marse Sedgwick—Miss Melicent say please you come home dis minute, suh!”

“Something wrong at home?”

“No, suh. Essept Miss Sally’s Chris’mas gif’ fo’ Marse Fitz done come.”

“Well, what is it?”

“A pinano, suh.”

“Piano! ”

“Bigges’ ole pinano you all eveh did see!” His eyes rolled to include Susannah, his small arms flung wide to include all space. “Miss Melicent say no room in de parloh—no room in de po’ch—no room in de kerridge-house, even, foh any sech pinano. She say eff’n you all move out, bag an’

baggage, de pinano kin come in, no ways else.”

Sue was shaking with laughter, and Sedgwick turned on her accusingly.

“Well, it was you that brought up these presents from Sally,” he said.

“Now come and see one!”

“Fitz did want a piano, Sedgie.”

“What’s the matter with the one he always had?”

“It’s old. It belonged to your mother. He wants one of those new grand pianos.”

“You don’t suppose he had the cheek to write and tell her so!”

“No. I did.”

2

THERE had never been anyone in the family like Sedgwick’s son Fitz, and nobody knew what to do about him. Easy enough to say it was the Yankee blood in him, his mother being Cabot Murray’s sister. But while the son born to Cabot and Eden was oddly all Sprague, Fitz was neither Murray nor Sprague to any visible degree.

The Sprague men were strong and gay and unruly, enterprising, virile, and irresistible (even as Eden said) to women. The Murrays were a tough, adventurous, passionate, intensely masculine breed of men with a flair for making money. And the Days were likely to be bookish, thoughtful, homekeeping, loving people. Fitz didn’t fit in anywhere. He was lazy and easygoing and idle, he never studied, he had never earned a penny, he had no ambition or aim in life, and he liked it that way. He didn’t even fall in love, he said it was too much trouble. He had a strange sort of hobby, though. He collected songs.

He had learned how to write music on blank score paper, he had a true ear and a pleasant untrained voice, and he spent hours among the darkies learning and setting down their songs. More than once he had mentioned that he would like to go to New Orleans and Memphis and Charleston just to see what songs he could find there. But travel cost money, and Fitz never

had a cent of his own, and Sedgwick wouldn’t allow him to take money from his mother for any such nonsense as that. And so Fitz drifted, and sang his darky songs, and played any instrument he got hold of, and now and then he sulked a bit, and the girls were all disgusted with him.

It was very worrying for Sedgwick, who had gone into his own father’s law office as a partner when the war ended, and by perpetual diligence and unlimited natural charm had contrived to make a living. Not that Fitz wasn’t charming. He was. But it was a charm which sat amiably on its spine with its feet up, so to speak. Fitz hadn’t an enemy in the world. Which just showed you, said his father, who had plenty and loved them all for adding zest to life.

When they reached the Sprague house in England Street the grand piano, still enclosed, legs and all, in its raw pine packing-case, stood impressively blocking the path which led from the gate between low clipped box hedges to the porch steps. Three men from the express company, Micah the Spragues’ coloured butler, Shadrach their gardener, and two little coloured boys stood around it in attitudes of patient despair.

They all brightened visibly when Sedgwick and Sue appeared at the gate, and they watched the approach of the master of the house with cautious hope. The small coloured child who attended him ran ahead into the house to announce his arrival, and Melicent came out on to the porch with a shawl around her shoulders. She was followed by Phoebe, who looked just like her mother and was nearly sixteen. Fitz was nowhere.

Melicent, who had once or twice rather wished for a grand piano herself, was not so sure now. She was pretty and brown-haired, and her mouth turned up at the corners and she was the first to admit that she adored Sedgwick to the verge of lunacy.

“Hello, darling!” she cried at sight of him. “Hello, Sue! What ever are we going to do with this thing?” But even while she tried to look vexed it was plain that she thought the grand piano great fun. To Melicent almost everything was fun that happened to her since her marriage to Sedgwick had rescued her from the gloomy household which had imprisoned her childhood. Both she and Phoebe looked to him for the instant solution of any dilemma. Their bright, waiting eyes were now full of confidence that a grand piano more or less would be nothing to him.

“Where’s Fitz?” asked Sedgwick, eyeing the packing-case warily. “It’s his problem, after all.”

“He’s gone down to the Carters’, I think. He didn’t say when he would be home. But it can’t just go on sitting there, can it!”

“And of course it won’t be quite so big when it’s been uncrated,” Sue murmered at his elbow.

Sedgwick sent for tools and the men from the express company began to knock the crate apart, there in the path, while the family went in to look at the parlour and see what could be done there. It was not a small room, but it had been lived in a great many years, and things had accumulated. By actual measurement Sedgwick discovered that the piano would fit nicely into the corner to the left of the bow window, provided that several familiar pieces of furniture, including the old upright, were done away with. These were removed by Micah and Shadrach to stand somewhat at random in the middle of the library floor, and a way was cleared for Sally’s gift.

Before these arrangements could be completed, however, Fitz turned in at the gate and came rather dazedly up the path. Sue was the first to see him, and she went out on the porch and then, instead of hailing him, stood watching the lad who was, in spite of everything, her favourite of all the younger generation.

Fitz stood in the brick path between the low box hedges, gazing at the grand piano, most of whose dark glossy surface was now uncovered. He stood quite motionless, with his hat pushed back on his high, round forehead, just taking it in. Fitz was of average height, and slouched a little, not making the most of his inches. His eyes were a clear grey, with a dark-ringed iris, and long curving lashes enhanced their natural candour. His nose was straight and good, his lips sensitive yet firm, his face, broad at the eye level, narrowed to a boyish chin. His clothes were always casual, and yet he always looked exceedingly clean. Because his gentle voice drawled more than the rest of them did, they told him he talked like a darky, but nobody had ever heard him raise it for emphasis. As always, Sue’s heart crinkled with foolish love of him.

Hypnotized by the piano, he failed to see her standing there on the porch looking down at him. With a last crack of wood and the scream of long nails wrenched loose, the pine case came away, and the men with the hammers and screw-drivers paused to regard him curiously.

“Would you be Mr. Fitzhugh Sprague, then?” one of them asked, with reference to the label on the board in his hand.

Fitz nodded, not taking his eyes from the piano.

“Then you’re the feller it belongs to.”

“Yes,” Fitz agreed like a sleepwalker. “Oh, yes, we belong to each other.” His thin, blunt-tipped fingers touched the mahogany lid which covered the keys. It rose on hidden hinges and dropped back soundlessly on little rubber knobs, and the harlequin keyboard was there. His right hand hovered and then came to rest almost timidly, and the piano awoke to sweet treble harmony in G. “Lordy,” he muttered to himself. “Oh, Lord-a-massy, hear that tone.” His left hand came home to the bass.

“How about givin’ us a tune, sir?” suggested one of the men from the express company.

“Sure, what’ll you have?” Fitz edged the still crated piano bench crosswise in the path with his foot and sat down on the end of it, his fingers wandering among the keys.

“Under the Bamboo Tree, maybe,” said the man, and winked at his companions, deluded that the owner of so elegant an instrument would be able to play nothing less than a nocturne at best. But—

“If I like-a you and you like-a me,

And we like-a both the same,

I’d like to say, this very day,

I’d like to change your name—”

obliged the piano promptly, and their faces lighted up and they began to hum, and one of them beat time with his hat as though leading a whole orchestra. At first Fitz whistled softly under his breath. Then his crooning, plaintive baritone emerged almost imperceptibly into the open, and soon they were a fine quartet with the pedal going, and the three little coloured boys piping up in perfect key.

“If I love-a you and you love-a me, And we love-a both the same,

One live as two, two live as one,

Un -der the bamboo tree—”

It was the purest ragtime magnificently played, and passers-by on their way home to lunch began to linger, while Sue stood laughing on the porch and Melicent came out of the house to find that the song had spread to a cluster of beaming faces at the gate and was being echoed from within, where Micah and Shadrach under Phoebe’s supervision were rolling the old upright along the hall towards its exile in the library.

The Bamboo Tree ended with a full choral effect, and Melicent ran down the steps and caught Fitz’s arm.

“Do stop, darling, you’re disturbing the whole neighbourhood! Besides, the men can bring it in now, we’ve made room.”

“Listen,” said Fitz, his young face brooding and serious above the keys like a mother’s above a cradle, and he played a major chord and allowed the strings to vibrate to a vanishing point on the still, cold air. “Listen to this,”

he said, and began a series of arpeggi, his fingers caressing ripples of crystal sound from the keys.

“Yes, dear, it’s beautiful,” his mother agreed affectionately. “But do come away now so the men can—”

“Isn’t she a lady,” he marvelled, slipping into a progression of chords in the whole tone scale. “Isn’t she an angel? Listen to that—!”

“Fitz!” shouted Sedgwick from the porch, where Micah and Shadrach stood grinning behind him. “Leave it alone now, and let’s get it into the house.” At a sign from him the two coloured men came down the steps and joined the express men, and they all laid hold on the glossy mahogany and drew the piano slowly from under Fitz’s hands. He sat there on the crated bench and watched it go.

“Careful, now,” he admonished them gently, and looked up at his mother. “Where did it come from? Is it you I thank?”

“Your Aunt Sally sent it.”

“From France? How did she know that was what I wanted?”

“I told her,” said Sue, joining them in the path. “It’s from New York, she must have cabled. And it’s your Christmas present, Fitz, you’re not supposed to have it now.”

“It’s a little late to try and hide it,” he remarked, watching its dignified progress up the steps of the porch.

“Fitz, darling, thank your Cousin Sue for going to so much trouble for you,” his mother prodded him lovingly.

“I do,” he said, and his grey eyes left the piano reluctantly again and came to Sue’s face. “I always thank my Cousin Sue—even without grand pianos. I’ll thank her any day for just being around where we can look at her.” And he rose from the case and kissed Sue warmly on both cheeks, and then drifted away down the path to watch the piano being manœuvred through the front door.

“He’s in a sort of trance,” said Melicent with understanding and strolled towards the gate, her arm around Sue’s waist.

“If I don’t get along home fast,” Sue said, “Father will be sitting down to lunch without me. Dabney and Charl arrive this evening, you know. Miles is coming with them, but not Belle, her babies are still whooping.”

“Our Christmases get smaller and smaller,” Melicent sighed. “Each year now it seems as though somebody’s babies are sick, or somebody has got married and can’t come. This time we’ll have Dabney’s three, and five Murrays, and us four Spragues, and you and Uncle Ransom—that’s not very many.”

“Four Murrays,” Sue corrected her. “Lisl isn’t coming.”

“What, again? Do you mean to say Bracken is coming without her?”

“Sedgwick will tell you all about it,” said Sue, edging out the gate. “I really must get home to lunch.”

3

IT WAS true that the family parties seemed to diminish in size, in spite of the new babies.

Eden’s eldest girl, Marietta, had married a professor at Princeton in September and was spending the holidays getting acquainted with his parents somewhere in Pennsylvania. Dabney’s married daughter Belle had twins down with whooping-cough, in Richmond. His son Miles was nineteen, and a student of Charlottesville where Dabney himself had been teaching classes in mathematics ever since the school Ransom had once kept in Williamsburg went to pieces after the war. Dabney had learned to manage his artificial leg so well you could hardly notice, but pretty Charlotte Crabb had been glad to marry him while he still went on crutches during the siege of Richmond.

Dabney’s Miles and Sedgwick’s Phoebe were cousins and had been playmates since babyhood. And while Sedgwick might in moments of discouragement compare his own changeling boy unfavourably with Eden’s Bracken, Dabney had no complaints about Miles. Miles was a Day, through and through—tall and lanky, with a large humorous mouth and thoughtful ways, a natural student—a schoolmaster’s son. He had taught Phoebe her letters, and then taught her to read, and they always gave each other books as presents, and watched the growth of their personal libraries with a miserly eye. Melicent, who had once known a great deal of Tennyson by heart, regarded her intellectual daughter almost with awe, and Sedgwick hoped fervently that Phoebe would outgrow it.

The Murrays arrived in Williamsburg at the end of the week, to find Dabney’s family from Charlottesville already established in Ransom’s house, and there was a great deal of kissing and laughter and reminiscence and the heart-warming, blood-stirring upsurge of kinship that family reunions can bring.

The Spragues came to supper the first evening, completing the circle which Ransom Day surveyed fondly from his armchair at the head of the table. He noted with regret the absence of babies from the festivities. There used always to be babies, it seemed to him. Who would be getting married next, he wondered. His clear, serene gaze came to rest on Miles and Phoebe, seated together on the right-hand side of the table. Perhaps. They were only second cousins. But Miles was devoting himself tonight to his cousin Virginia Murray, who sat on his other hand. She came between Phoebe and Miles in age, as she would turn eighteen in the spring, and with a Court presentation in view she had suddenly become a young lady. Virginia was dark like her father, with a heart-shaped, minxish face, long, slender soaring eyebrows, and a closed, mysterious, “grown-up” smile. Ransom beheld her with a mild concern. A heart-breaker. Eden’s daughter was bound to be that, but he was sure that Eden herself at seventeen had been less aware of her own potentialities. Virginia was wrapping Miles around her little finger just for the fun of it. Would Phoebe mind? Ransom brooded gently at his descendants and relations, silent himself in the candlelit merriment which ran up and down the long, glittering table.

His gaze caught the glance of Eden’s husband, the Yankee Cabot Murray, and a look flashed between them—friendly, full of comprehension.

Each of them recalled in that instant the first time Cabot had sat at this table, a stranger, but with Eden’s heart already in his possession, and the long, bitter years of civil war still to come. Ransom smiled into his son-in-law’s eyes, and Cabot smiled back affectionately. Once they had not known how to take this fellow, Ransom thought, but that was over now. A blind man could see that Eden was happy and content and still in love with her husband.

Ransom sought and found the face of their son Bracken, who had come with the shadow of his broken marriage upon him. The family were all being very careful not to stare at Bracken, the first among them ever to be deserted by his wife. Bracken seemed anything but self-conscious. He sat at the corner of the table between Phoebe and Sue and obviously entertained them both. How he resembles Sedgwick, Ransom thought, and what a queer thing inheritance is—or do I mean heredity?—but then, he thought, ours is a queer family, three lines all juggled in together—we’ve even got French blood, way back—perhaps it came out in Sally—perhaps it’s in Virginia too

—that smile, as though she knew something you didn’t know—provocative

—at her age—dear, dear, thought Ransom, poor Miles—poor lots of people, before she’s safely married—and as for Fitz, something on his mother’s side, I suppose, that we’ll never know—music—yes, of course, music up to a point in all of us, and his mother did have a lovely singing voice as a girl

—but music like a disease—that’s not accountable—

“Tired, Father?” asked Eden’s voice on his left, and her soft, warm hand was laid on his beside his plate.

“With all this fun going on?” he asked wistfully. “How could I be tired?

You’re very beautiful tonight, my dear,” he added with his childlike, searching scrutiny.

“Thank you, Father.” Her fingers pressed his. “My husband said the same thing, just before we came down stairs to supper. I’ll begin to thing it’s true!”

“You were always prettier than Sally, I thought,” he said, slipping back thirty-five years between breaths.

“You never said so before!”

“Didn’t want to turn your head. Cabot knew it, though—didn’t he?”

Cabot, who sat next to his wife as the custom was at these family parties, looked round at the sound of his name and demanded to know what it was

he knew.

“The difference between Sally and Eden when they were girls,” said Ransom.

“Ho!” said Cabot with something like a snort. “What a difference!”

“That’s our beauty now,” Ransom continued, nodding towards Virginia, and Eden’s eyes were proud. “You’ve got your work cut out, giving that girl a London season. D’you want her to marry a duke?”

“Heavens, no!” cried Eden. “We’ll bring her back, never fear! She’s not like Sally either!”

“She’s a flirt,” Ransom warned them. “You wait. She even makes eyes at Sedgwick at his age, and he laps it up. Look at them!”

“Don’t you worry about her, sir.” Cabot smiled at his father-in-law’s forebodings. “She’s an honest little soul, and always thinks straight and for keeps like her mother.”

“Aren’t you pleased with us, Father?” Eden teased him. “Don’t you think we’re a credit to you, on the whole?”

“Yes, you are,” he nodded, and his withered fingers clung to her hand while his gaze travelled down the table again, clouded, and came to rest. “I sometimes wonder where Fitz gets his odd ways,” he remarked with apparent irrelevance.

Eden glanced quickly at her husband, and found his steadying, ironic eyes waiting. Then they both looked away, and Eden changed the subject from Fitz without replying.

Sue’s seating arrangements had not permitted Melicent to sit next her brother Cabot, who was many years older than herself, a grown man for her childish worship which had never diminished. After supper when the family settled into groups and clusters in the drawing room, she slid a possessive hand under his elbow and drew him away to a corner sofa, murmuring, “I want to talk to you.”

“Well, of course you do,” he agreed obtusely. “How are things, anyway?

You look remarkably healthy, it seems to me.”

“Really, Cabot, can’t you say I look nice, or something?”

“It is nice to look healthy,” he insisted. “Happy too. We’re a lucky pair, you and I.”

“Oh, Cabot, what’s to become of poor Bracken?”

“He’s going to London, as soon as we see McKinley into the White House in March.”

“Yes, I know, but—his life, Cabot! It’s ruined!”

“I hope not,” he said briefly.

“Do you think he can get a divorce?”

“Might.”

His jaw set grimly, his heavy, carven lips were hard. She could see that his son’s trouble had hit him cruelly, but that he did not intend to expound to her his views on the subject. Melicent sighed.

“I’m not so lucky about Fitz, either,” she said. “Cabot, will you help me?”

“If I can. Anything special?”

“Yes. I thought—now don’t jump down my throat, will you!—I thought perhaps you would be willing to give him a job on the paper.”

“Fitz? Doing what, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, I thought—with Bracken going away, there might be a vacancy somewhere.”

“My dear girl, Bracken was brought up in a newspaper office. Fitz never even saw the inside of one.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean in Bracken’s place, I only thought—someone will have to move up into Bracken’s place, and someone else will move up into his place, and so on, and finally there might be room somewhere at the bottom for Fitz.”

“Bracken’s departure won’t mean a sort of General Post in the office, Melicent. And I somehow don’t see Fitz as a leg-man, chasing fires and going round the police stations.”

“Please, Cabot—I’m so worried.”

“What does Sedgwick think about this?”

“I—haven’t asked him.”

He tried to see her face, for this was serious. She would not meet his eyes, but sat winding her handkerchief round and round her forefinger and then unwinding it, only to begin again.

“Mean to say you’ve quarrelled with Sedgwick?” he demanded.

“Oh, no!” That brought her eyes up, shocked and limpid. “Sedgwick and I don’t quarrel! It’s just—we can’t seem to talk together about Fitz any

more. Sedgwick isn’t—isn’t friends with Fitz any more, Cabot, it’s frightening, I’ve got to think of something. You see—Fitz is so different.”

“Yes, I know. He’s not cut to the family pattern anywhere, is he!”

“It oughtn’t to matter so much, so far as I can see. But it does, Cabot, Sedgwick takes it dreadfully to heart that Fitz doesn’t seem to—fit in anywhere, teaching like Dabney, or—practising law with his father. But I can’t get Fitz to see how important it is that he should do something, and—

you see, he doesn’t earn anything, and looks to me for pocket-money, even, and—that seems to make Sedgwick perfectly furious.”

“Well, so it should.”

“But what can I do, Cabot, I love them both so terribly, and I can’t help seeing both sides of it. This—estrangement makes things very uncomfortable at home. Even Phoebe feels it, and—it just can’t go on. So I thought—”

“Well, how do we know that Fitz would come to New York if I offered him a job?”

“Sue might help. He listens to her. Sometimes I th-think she knows him better than I do.”

“Jealous?”

“N-no. But he’s always turned to her in the strangest way.”

“Because she’s always spoilt him.”

“Perhaps. But you will give him a place on the paper, Cabot? To please me?”

“Well, I’ll think about it, my dear, you’ve rather sprung it on me, haven’t you!”

4

THAT night in their bedroom Eden, hairbrush in hand, broke a thoughtful silence.

“Cabot, did Melicent speak to you about giving Fitz a job?”

“She did.”

“Well, are you going to?”

“Don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think it would be rather a responsibility, having him with us in New York. He’s not like Bracken.”

“He’s not like anybody around here, either. That seems to be his trouble.”

“Ought we to tell, Cabot?”

“What good would that do?” They gazed at each other, Cabot sitting on the edge of the bed with one shoe off, Eden brushing out her reddish hair with long, regular strokes. “Well, we can if you like,” he said after a moment. “But it’s going to come as rather a shock to everybody. And just how should we go about it? Shall I take Sedgwick aside and say, By the way, old man, nobody saw fit to mention it at the time of your marriage to her, but the fact is, my sister is not my father’s child.” Cabot shook his head. “He’ll think I’m breaking up in my mind. Or shall I begin at the other end, with something like this: Once upon a time when I was about fourteen, my mother eloped with a vagabond violinist, and Melicent is the innocent fruit of their sin; my poor father found a sort of demented revenge in bringing her up as his own child after our mother died. It sounds, even to me, as though I were having hallucinations.”

“It might help them to understand Fitz, though.”

“In the circumstances, wouldn’t they rather not?”

“Probably. I suppose it is too late now,” Eden ruminated.

“Too late to change what’s in Fitz’s blood, certainly. Melicent had a touch of the same thing, before she fell in love with Sedgwick. As a child she always had a passion for music. A happy marriage seems to have more or less replaced it. Shall we try to get Fitz married, then?”

“Oh, Cabot, you are a chump! Anyway, we made our decision years ago.

Only you and I and Grandmother Day knew—and of course your father.

Gran said not to tell. And Gran was always right. Now we’re the only two people left in the world who know that you and Melicent didn’t have the same father. Let’s not say a word. But let’s take Fitz under our wing. I think perhaps we owe him something.”

“It’s Bracken I keep thinking of. What do we owe him?” Cabot rose from the bed and came to her where she sat at the dressing-table, the brush in her hand. He knelt beside her and put his arms around her waist and buried his face in her neck and spoke from there, muffled and unhappy.

“Sweetheart, the Murray curse has come upon us. I have some idea of what he’s going through, I was old enough to see what it did to my father when his wife left him for another man.”

“But your father loved his wife.”

“True. And until it happened, she was sweet and virtuous, unlike the Austrian. But the net result is the same. My father and my son, both deserted by their wives. What’s wrong with us Murrays, Eden?”

“Don’t be morbid, my dear. And anyway, you’re safe enough, didn’t you know?”

His arms tightened. She felt his lips against her throat.

“That doesn’t help either of the boys,” he said then.

After the light was out, Eden spoke again in the darkness beside him.

“Cabot. Has Lisl gone with another man—too?”

“Oh, Lord, you weren’t supposed to know! I can never keep a secret from you, can I?”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t know.”

“Man’s reasons, mostly. To save Bracken’s pride.”

“I always knew she was a slut.”

“Eden!” He gathered her into a mighty hug with affectionate mirth. “I don’t know where you learn such words, not from me!”

But Eden lay passive in his arms and nursed her wrath against Lisl.

“Tell me the rest of it now,” she said. “Who is he? How did it happen?”

“He’s got real money.”

“Naturally!”

“Beside him, I’m a pauper. He’s got half a dozen gold-mines in California—came with a letter of introduction to me from that fellow Friedman in Chicago. Wanted to buy the paper out from under me and play politics with it. I managed to convince him that I wasn’t for sale, but meanwhile Lisl’s price-tag was showing and he took up with her.”

“Where?”

“Oh, I got awfully tired of him very soon and passed him on to the Bennett crowd. It was at one of their parties that he met Lisl. After that, all I had to do was duck.”

“Cabot, you mean you saw this thing coming and did nothing to—”

“I might have warned Bracken, I suppose, but they would only have had another row. All right, I confess I lay low and tried to set a trap for Lisl.

And it went wrong. She got away. She was too quick.”

“I don’t—quite understand,” Eden murmured.

“Eden, darling, I thought I foresaw that Lisl would betray Bracken with this Californian, yes, but I meant to catch her at it, and put her through the divorce court. Don’t you see, if I could have got proof of her adultery Bracken was free. I preferred a scandal, if necessary, to what he was enduring from her, and I was pretty sure he would prefer it too. She beat me, blast her. She got on that damn’ boat without giving me any evidence I could use in court. I think she saw my game, that’s what hurts! Of course that fellow Hutchinson went on the same boat. They’re made for each other, they’re both tramps. She’s going to show him Europe, and he’s just the fool to enjoy it as long as his money holds out.”

After a silence Eden said:

“Won’t he want to marry her?”

“He’s not quite fool enough for that,” Cabot replied.

“Then what about Bracken? Must there still be a scandal?”

“What happens in Europe won’t stink too loud over here, I hope.

Anyway, she’s gone, and Bracken’s bank account won’t be bled to death any more, and he isn’t going to be harried into an early grave by a wife he hasn’t been, as we say, living with for some time. Maybe the boat will sink under the weight of her sins. Maybe Hutchinson will shoot her full of lead before he’s through, he all but wore a brace of Colt ·45’s at Delmonico’s!

Let him have her, with our blessing. It’s better this way, hard as it seems.”

“But it still doesn’t leave Bracken free.”

“No. It only leaves him in peace. We shall have to trace them now, to get divorce evidence. It will be a long, expensive, legal business, I’m afraid, but we shall win in the end and write her off somehow.” He shifted cautiously to lay his face against hers. “Oh, my poor dear—tears. Don’t cry, sweetheart, he’ll weather it. Bracken has the stuff he needs, he won’t go under.”

Her arm went round his neck, and she held to him convulsively.

“I feel so wicked,” she sobbed, “to be so happy and safe with you, when everybody else is so miserable!”

5

IN SPITE of the extravagant gifts from Sally and the Murrays, it was a meagre Christmas nowadays by the standards of Ransom’s childhood.

Ransom could remember when the family Christmases were spent at the Sprague plantation called Farthingale, which lay up the river near Westover and was burned down after Cold Harbor in ’64. Ransom could remember a household of twenty guests and as many more darky servants, not counting the pickaninnies; great feasts which went on for hours, and dancing which lasted till dawn in a big south room with six french windows on to a Virginian garden, and the portraits of Grandfather St. John and Grandmother Regina looking down from the walls.

It was all gone now, and even the exquisite Regina’s portrait was ashes.

All gone, except these grandchildren of his own, dancing in the Sprague parlour in England Street while Melicent played waltzes for them on Fitz’s new grand piano. Ransom’s clear, far-seeing eyes followed the drifting couples with interest; Miles and Virginia, Bracken and Phoebe, Fitz and Sue, Eden and Sedgwick, Cabot and Charl—odd how they paired off, with Dabney sitting beside Melicent at the piano. Wasn’t Miles going to dance with anybody but Virginia all evening? What would Phoebe think? Virginia wasn’t for bookish, bedazzled Miles….

“How long does it take to get presented at Court?” Miles was asking jealously.

“About three minutes. You place your right hand four inches below the Queen’s and kiss the air four inches above it, bending very low meanwhile in a Court curtsey—and then you retire backwards, contriving not to trip over your train, and dipping curtseys as quickly and gracefully as possible to all the other members of the Royal Family who happen to be present, as you go. You must on no account touch Her Majesty’s hand with your own, or with your lips. She hates that.”

“And what then?” asked Miles.

“Then you either go in a dizzy splendour to somebody’s train-party—

that means one given specially for débutantes after their presentation—or else, if you haven’t a strong constitution, you go straight home in a state of total collapse and have a hot bath with ammonia in it and go to bed for the rest of the day to recuperate.”

Miles opened his eyes.

“From what?”

“Excitement. Of course I don’t expect it to prostrate me like that, but Marietta says the tension on the staircase and in the Picture Gallery—that’s

the last room before the Presence Chamber—is really devastating, particularly if the Queen herself is receiving the presentations. She doesn’t always. Usually it’s the Princess of Wales or Princess Christian, deputizing.

In that case you don’t kiss her hand, you only curtsey.”

“It sounds very complicated,” Miles puzzled. “Why is it so important?”

“Oh, Miles, really, what a heathen you are! It just is, that’s all! No English girl is anybody at all until she has been presented, and most of them come straight to it from the schoolroom and almost die of stage-fright. Of course it won’t be so bad for me,” Virginia added a little complacently,

“because I’ve already seen something of the world in New York. At least I don’t expect to chuck the bunny in the corridor, like one poor girl the year Marietta made her début.”

Miles was horrified.

“You mean—?”

“Right at the feet of a gentleman-at-arms!”

“B-but what did they do?”

“Well, the girl felt better, of course—pretty shaky, but definitely improved. And everybody sort of made a screen by turning their backs and pretending not to notice, while a tactful footman in powdered hair and white gloves came and tactfully mopped it up with a tactful cloth and tactfully retired. And everybody said it always happens at least once, and drew a breath of relief that now it was over.”

“I should think she would have just died in her tracks,” said Miles.

“Well, if she had, a powdered footman would have tactfully removed the corpse, and everyone would have moved up one place,” said Virginia. “It’s the waiting that destroys you. The Diplomatic Circle goes in first, and that keeps the rest of you hanging about for hours with your train over your arm.”

“Can’t you sit down?”

“Part of the time, if you’re lucky.”

Miles pondered it, as they danced. It was to him another world. He was beginning to feel as though he held Royalty itself in his own arms.

“Will Bracken go too?”

“Oh, Bracken goes to the levee and makes his bow to the Prince of Wales—wearing knee breeches, silk stockings, and a velvet coat at two o’clock in the afternoon! Wouldn’t you like to see him do it?”

“I reckon what I really meant to ask was how long will you be away,”

Miles reflected.

“All summer. Maybe long enough to get some hunting in the autumn.

But the Drawing Room is in May.”

“I’d like to go to London, I think,” said Miles, though it had never occurred to him before.

“Well, come on, then!”

“Oh, not this spring,” he qualified hastily. “I have to finish school first.”

“This is the year to go. It’s the Jubilee. Victoria has reigned for sixty years, think of that!”

“Heavens, how old is she?”

“Turning seventy-eight.”

“Nearly as old as Grandfather Day,” he marvelled. “His grandmother lived to be a hundred and one. Think what you could remember! And now you can tell your grandchildren that you saw Queen Victoria!”

“Oh, Miles, don’t let’s talk about my grandchildren yet!”

“Would you marry an Englishman, if you got the chance?”

“Of course I shall get the chance, idiot, I’m going to take London by storm and have dozens of proposals!”

“Well, but would you?” he persisted, and his arm tightened a little.

Virginia looked up at him through her eyelashes and smiled her closed, mysterious smile.

“Would it ruin your life if I did?”

“Well, I—I—I—” Miles heard himself stammering and pulled up desperately. “I’d miss you terribly,” he got out.

“Every Christmas!” she nodded.

“We might—see more of each other—after I graduate. That is—if you—

I’ll never forget you as you are tonight!” he stumbled on, caught in the maze of a new emotion. “That dress—the way you’ve got your hair—

you’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw! Please come back—won’t you?”

The music stopped, and they stood still, both rather breathless, looking at each other for a moment before they realized that another waltz was not going to begin at once, and they moved away side by side to a sofa against the wall.

Bracken saw Phoebe’s eyes follow them and he said:

“Don’t worry about Virginia, my dear, she’s just practising.”

“She’s so lovely,” said Phoebe sincerely. “She makes me feel dowdy and plain.”

“Didn’t that gown you’re wearing come from Cousin Sally in Paris?”

“Oh, yes, but we made it over, sort of, because it was so low in the neck, and now it doesn’t look quite right, somehow—not like Virginia’s.”

“Virginia is an awful flirt, but it doesn’t mean anything, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” she assured him stoutly. “Miles and I aren’t—we’re just friends.”

Meanwhile Eden had been saying to Sedgwick as they danced:

“I’m afraid Cabot is going to miss Bracken more than he anticipates, during the coming year. Do you think Fitz might like to take a job on the paper to fill in?”

Sedgwick gave her a surprised glance, and seemed to come to a quick decision.

“It might get him out of the rut,” he said. “Would he really be worth anything to Cabot, though?”

“We won’t know till we try. He might come for six months, and see how it goes.”

“Did Cabot suggest it?”

“We were talking about it last night,” she evaded. “He takes this business of Bracken’s very hard. I thought perhaps if he had another boy to train—one of the family—it might help to occupy his mind—”

“I’m at my wits’ end about Fitz,” Sedgwick confessed. “So I’m willing to try anything now. Shall I have a talk with him about it?”

“Let’s leave it to Sue,” Eden suggested. “Let’s get Sue to put it to him.

She knows how to handle Fitz.”

“Better than I do, I admit! And about her going abroad with you in the spring—I think it’s a fine idea, and I’ve told her so.”

“I’m glad, Sedgwick. You’ll miss her here, I know, but it’s only for a few months.”

“Do you think you can persuade her?”

“I’m going to try. And I’ve still got an ace up my sleeve.”

6

EDEN played her ace next morning when she and Sue settled down for a chat in Sue’s bedroom after breakfast. The letter, she explained, had only been to break it gently.

“The fact is, Sue, honey, you’ve just got to go with Virginia in my place this year. Marietta has started a baby and isn’t at all well and has become an absolutely fraidy-cat and vows she’ll die if I’m not near her the whole time.

So then Virginia threw a perfect fit for fear she’d have to give up being presented and miss the Jubilee, and I promised her you’d go with her instead of me.”

“But I don’t know anything about going to Court and all that!” Sue protested. “I’d be paralysed with fright!”

“You won’t have to go to Court. In fact, you can’t, the lists will be closed. My dear friend Lady Shadwell has arranged everything and is going to act as Virginia’s sponsor, just as she did for Marietta three years ago. But no-child of mine is going to travel without a chaperone. All you’ll have to do is go with her to balls and house-parties and see that she doesn’t go on too much of a spree at the dressmakers’. And you’ll play hostess for Bracken too, of course. We’ve engaged a suite of rooms at Claridge’s Hotel, so you won’t have the bother of housekeeping.”

Sue was looking utterly bewildered.

“But, Eden, I’ve never stayed at an hotel in my life!”

“And it’s high time you did. Virginia has already been abroad half a dozen times, and Bracken knows London as well as he knows New York, it’s a second home to both of them, and so you can rely on them for everything. What’s more, you’ll have the time of your life with them!

Bracken gives the most delightful little parties, and he said himself that you’d look very sweet at the other end of the table. You must come to New York a while before sailing, and we’ll get you some clothes—just leave all that to me, please, you’re not to touch a penny of your own money from the time you leave Williamsburg till you return.”

“B-but Father—” Sue began feebly.

“Father seems stronger than he was last year, doesn’t he? Now, honey, don’t be a stick-in-the-mud, Sedgwick thinks you ought to go, you know he does!”

“He wants me to see the other Farthingale, down in Gloucestershire.”

“Yes, you must do that for him, he asked me to years ago and I’ve never got round to it, I’m ashamed to say. Bracken can ask Cabot’s handyman in London to find out all about it—a Mr. Partridge at the Temple. He’ll write the present owner and arrange for you to visit the house when it’s convenient. If they’re nice people you might accept an invitation to stay, later on. They might allow Bracken to send a man down to photograph the place for Sedgwick, he’d like that. And speaking of Sedgwick—he’s willing that Fitz should come up to New York and work for the paper and see how he likes it. It was Melicent’s idea. She thought it might help Fitz to find himself. Do you think you could persuade him to corned?”

Thus adroitly diverted from her own appalling prospects, Sue agreed to talk to Fitz without delay, and the sisters conferred carefully as to how best to put it to him. While they were still closeted, they heard Sue’s piano being played downstairs.

“There’s Fitz now,” Eden said. “Melicent said she’d send him over this morning. You’d better go down and deal with it, he always listens to you, and Sedgwick is pretty well distracted with him.”

Sue went down the stairs slowly, feeling as though a strong wind had blown through her. Herself to go to London, Fitz to go to New York—

which was going to be worse?

He looked up at her from the piano as she entered the drawing room, rose and kissed her cheek, and settled back on the bench.

“This thing wants tuning again,” he muttered, striking the chords.

“Yes, dear,” she agreed absently, and stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder, wondering how to begin.

“Mother said there was something you wanted to see me about,” he suggested, his hands still moving on the keys.

“Fitz, honey—they want you to go to New York for a while. Bracken’s got to be in London—and they want to have one of the family in the office with Cabot, and—Miles is too young.”

“I couldn’t leave here now,” said Fitz unargumentatively. “My piano has just come.”

“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….

“Ef de sun set red on a weary day,

De skies will clear ef de mornin’s grey,

An’ dat’s what I hope fo’ me.

Ma shadow gettin’ longer ’crost de grass,

Cool ob de evenin’ done come at las’,

De sun goin’ down on me….”

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:

“‘Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home— ”

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.

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