Part Two: Sir Gratian

PART TWO

SIR GRATIAN

London

Summer, 1897

1

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

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

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

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

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

“You mustn’t say that.”

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

“It’s all right.” Her hand pressed his briefly, then put it away from her.

“Don’t baby me, Sedgie, I’m not quite responsible today. Too much excitement, I reckon—” She turned her head from him, to look out the window. The tears stopped, as if by magic.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure, you won’t be seasick. They say champagne is good for it.

Apparently if you’re drunk enough you just don’t care!”

Their bad moment passed. And as the train sped northward through country famous for what had happened there more than thirty years before, he talked on, quietly but vividly, spreading before her his memories of cavalry days with Jeb Stuart. On a road to the right, just after you left Richmond, lay Yellow Tavern where Stuart had got his death wound; from

Gordonsville and Orange, Lee and Jackson had led their army to the Wilderness; at Culpeper the same bedraggled army had licked its wounds after Gettysburg; Sedgwick’s mother and sister had waited in the baking heat of Bristoe while the cannon at Manassas boomed; and at Manassas itself Sedgwick had first heard gunfire, and there the Federal Army had twice broken and fallen back on Washington. Sue listened enthralled. He had never been willing to talk about the war right after it ended.

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

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

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

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

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

Sue smiled back quickly and shook her head.

“Are you tired?” he asked gently.

“Not very.”

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

“Oh, come, Bracken, I’m not senile!”

Bracken laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

“And you got well?”

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

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

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

“Somewhere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While she hesitated he spoke again.

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

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

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

in the house a day before she was sitting beside him again, at Eden’s piano now, listening to new tunes he had thought up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

One of the things which Cabot Murray most firmly believed in, both as editor of the New York Evening Star and as a man of wide social influence, was the necessity for solidarity between the English-speaking nations—

though he never allowed it to sound as dull as that. Instead of the British-Columbia labels often attached by cartoonists to white-robed goddesses of heroic build, he preferred the John Bull-Uncle Sam conception: two brothers of one house, quite capable of having sharp words together, even of landing the other fellow with a bloody nose, but—it was a big But—

instantly standing shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the same wall and hitting out as one man if a third party tried to interfere or make capital out of what was only a family brawl.

Cabot himself had always felt keenly a sense of his own kinship with the land from which his forefathers had come, and his children were as much at home in England as in their mother’s native Virginia. He promptly resented the term Anglophile when applied to himself or his policy. It was not Anglophile, he maintained, to recognize and respect the old racial tie, the

common stock, the long mutual belief in certain fundamental rights and privileges, some of which had been even more jealously guarded in the island than in America. Uncle Sam had made innovations and improvements. John Bull had obstinately stuck to some things which were better not lost. But basically the link was there, bone-deep, surviving the inevitable dust-ups and misunderstandings any large, career-minded family was heir to.

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

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

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

The three daughters of Lady Shadwell, Eden’s friend, had all been safely married off long since, and she welcomed the opportunity of sponsoring a débutante again. Sitting beside Sue at the dressmaker’s in Bond Street while Virginia was having her fittings, she remarked more than once that she would be presenting one of the prettiest girls of the Season, and inquired in affectionate detail after Marietta and Eden. Marietta, Sue gathered, had not

been so much fun because she was shy. Lady Shadwell’s own girls, she confessed quite cheerfully, had been plain, poor dears. Virginia’s insouciance, so amusing to everyone, sprang from a knowledge of her own good looks which she would have been a stupid prig to deny, and the natural confidence in her world with which a happy childhood had endowed her. She was spoilt, maybe, by indulgent parents and a devoted brother. But it gave her a kind of touching buoyancy which caught at the hearts of sadder, wiser people and made them long to cushion her somehow from the disillusionments they felt were bound to come. Lady Shadwell was before long so taken with her that she proposed to give her a train-party at her own house in Park Lane after the presentation—one of those festive occasions when all one’s brothers and one’s cousins and one’s beaux with their female belongings turned up to hear about one’s triumph and one’s sensations, and everybody ate an enormous high tea, rather in the spirit of a treat after the dentist.

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

The house known as Farthingale, Mr. Partridge was able to report, was now owned by a Major Sir Gratian Forbes-Carpenter, who had recently inherited it from his aunt, now deceased, and who had promptly put it up for sale. By a fortunate coincidence, Mr. Partridge continued, glancing triumphantly over his spectacles at the three attentive faces before him, Major Forbes-Carpenter was now in England on sick leave, having been severely wounded during the battle of Firket on the Nile, in which—Mr.

Partridge had been given to understand—he had played a distinguished part.

The Major had replied cordially to Mr. Partridge’s letter of inquiry—here Mr. Partridge produced the Major’s letter and handed it to Bracken with a

little flourish—and doubtless it would be convenient, if one so desired, to arrange a meeting with him and discuss a visit to the house in question, which, as they would perceive by the Major’s letter, remained exactly as it was at the death of the Major’s aforesaid aunt the previous year.

“What sort of house is it, did you find that out?” asked Bracken as soon as he could get a word in edgewise, and Mr. Partridge produced the Estate Agents’ sales advertisements with another flourish. “‘Old stone-built residence with gabled, stone-tiled roof,’” Bracken read aloud from it.

“‘Near a picturesque Cotswold village. Hunting with the Heythrop. Lounge-hall, oak-panelled dining room, library, 2 other reception rooms, 7 principal and 5 secondary bedrooms, master’s bathroom, servants’ hall and servants’

bathroom, convenient domestic offices. Gravitation water. Delightful grounds with roses, herbaceous borders, kitchen garden, orchard, roomy stables and paddock, stream which provides good fishing. About 14½ acres.

Freehold for sale. Will let furnished. Immediate possession.’” He referred to the letter in his hand. “Writes from the United Service Club,” he said. “I might try and get him to come to dinner at Claridge’s and we’ll talk about going down to see the house.” His eyes went back to the advertisement.

“‘Will let furnished,’” he reflected, and glanced at Mr. Partridge, under a slanted eyebrow. “Heythrop country, eh? Not too far from London for week-ends?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia and Sue had spent some time reading up on the Nile campaign in back numbers of the illustrated papers, assimilating as they went that General Kitchener, Sirdar or Commander-in-Chief of the Egytian Army, had turned it into an excellent fighting force under British officers. The battle of Firket, they learned, was considered a triumph of strategy. “Rough and difficult was the road by which the river force advanced that dark night,” they read, “so dark that foothold among the boulders had to be felt for. Orders were given in whispers, no talking in the ranks, no smoking—

thus did Hunter’s division advance upon the doomed and sleeping village.

Meanwhile Murdoch, commanding the flank attack, made his detour, timing himself to strike when Hunter struck. The flanking column, while still on the desert heights, grew apprehensive that they would be late for the battle and covered the last four miles at a gallop. With the first ray of dawn the blow fell. Torn by the fire of the infantry, by shrapnel, and by the hail of Maxim bullets, the surprised Dervishes made a good fight of it as they always do, but what remained of them was overwhelmed and swept away like chaff.”

Bracken said captiously that it was bad dispatch-writing, much too flowery. But he had no fault to find with their Major Forbes-Carpenter and his brigade of Soudanese Lancers. “The senior officer was twice wounded,”

they read, “first by the butt of a rifle which had been fired at him without effect while he was pursuing an Emir, and afterwards by a spear in the upper leg. The effective work done by his brigade in twice breaking through the Dervishes as they were gathering for a charge was of the greatest value.”

Sue and Virginia regarded their guest with round-eyed respect when he arrived at Claridge’s. He was a slender man, not as young as he had been, not as tall as Bracken, square-shouldered, lean-hipped, with a moustache

more closely clipped than was the Mayfair fashion. In spite of his long illness from wounds, he was tanned bronze by the Egyptian sun. His hair was grizzled round the ears, and his direct grey eyes were hooded like an eagle’s, the full upper lid making a straight line across the iris, which gave him the look of frowning severity until he smiled. He was known affectionately to his troops as Carpers, because of his martinet ways

—“Button up, chaps, Old Carpers is coming!” the word would run ahead of him through the camp. But he was as watchful of their comfort and their honour as a mother, they would tell you, and the two of them who had risked their lives at Firket to get him out from under his dead horse and bring him back under fire to their own lines could have been matched a dozen times over and to spare.

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

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

income besides his pay, and no prospect of more. The only thing to do was to put the place on the market and perhaps later on invest the money he got for it in a much smaller house into which he would, he supposed, retire and bore himself to death, if he survived his usefulness in the field.

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

He broke off in the middle of a sentence, as though struck by a startling idea. He looked from one to the other of them, his eyes coming last to Sue, who looked back inquiringly.

“I say,” he began with sudden diffidence. “Would you care to—well, no, I suppose not, but just in case—that is, we might all go down there for Easter, you know, if you’ve nothing better to do.”

“Oh!” cried Virginia. “Oh, Bracken, let’s!”

The Major’s eyes waited on Sue. He sat leaning a little forward, waiting for her to speak. But Sue, for whom things sometimes began to whirl, was silent, so he said:

“I think you’d be comfortable there, I’m only just back from having a look myself, and they did me quite well. My aunt’s cook stayed on in the house as caretaker, and she could wangle enough maids in the village to look after us. As a matter of fact, I’m afraid the old lady rather goes with the house. I haven’t the heart to turn her out, at least until it’s sold—”

“Of course we’d be comfortable!” said Virginia, and trod on Bracken’s foot under the table to indicate to him that she simply had to go to Farthingale for Easter.

“Won’t you please say you’ll come?” the Major entreated Sue.

“Why, yes—if the children would like to—” she began uncertainly. “I think it would be delightful.”

“Are the children willing?” he demanded of Bracken, with his severe eagle’s glance.

“Quite willing,” Bracken said at once. “If you’re sure it will be convenient to you.”

“That’s settled, then,” said the Major with relief. “I’ll write Mrs. Poole at once to engage some maids and have things ready for us. My aunt had a very poor opinion of men, and the indoor staff has always been entirely female. By the way, when is Easter this year?”

“Round about the nineteenth, I think,” said Bracken. “Will that give you enough time?”

“Too much time,” said the Major with another look at Sue. “I shan’t know what to do with myself till then. I say, couldn’t we take in a theatre together or something like that in the meanwhile?”

“Aunt Sue would go to the theatre every night of her life if she could,”

Virginia said, a little patronizingly.

“Splendid! Let’s go and see Mrs. Pat!”

“As Lady Hamilton?” Bracken raised his eyebrows and flicked a glance at his charges. “Do you think they’re old enough for that sort of thing?”

“Oh, possibly not,” said the Major, taking him quite seriously. “Well, then, what would you like to see?” he inquired of Sue.

“Rosemary,” she replied with a note of defiance.

“But, darling, you saw that last Tuesday evening!” Virginia objected, and Sue’s dimple showed.

“I liked it. I want to see it again.”

“Rosemary it is!” said the Major, without asking anyone else’s preference. “We’ll dine at Gatti’s, what, and go on to the play. I’ll see about the tickets tomorrow. Which night would suit you best?”

Sue looked appealingly at Bracken. It was one of the times when she felt her inadequacy as Eden’s substitute, for she was sure that Eden would have been able to keep all their engagements in her head, whereas she herself had to write them all down in a little book which was never to hand when she needed it. But Bracken took out his own engagement book and consulted it and said not before next Wednesday.

“Wednesday, as ever is!” cried the Major, who apparently had no need to consult his own engagements. And— Five days to go, he thought. Five days too many. Good Lord, what’s the matter with me, I’m thinking like a

subaltern in love! His hooded, eagle’s eyes went back to Sue. In love. But that’s impossible. My leave is up in July.

3

SUE, all unconscious, went on serenely if a little bewilderedly through her fascinating days as Virginia’s chaperone. On the Wednesday morning at breakfast as they laid their plans for the day, before Bracken set off for Fleet Street, he said:

“Isn’t it tonight that Aunt Sue’s conquest is taking us to see Rosemary?”

Virginia laughed, and Sue looked uncomprehending.

“Why, Bracken, what do you mean?” Bracken demanded of himself, in exaggerated tones. “Look at her, Ginny! Pretending she doesn’t know she has the Major hog-tied!”

“What nonsense,” said Sue firmly. “It’s Virginia he wants to see, and you know it.”

“Virginia, my neck!” said Bracken inelegantly. “Virginia never worked harder in her sweet life and got nowhere! It’s you he’s after, Aunt Susannah, and I’ve got my eye on him, I don’t trust the Army as far as I can kick it!”

“Now, Bracken, you’ve made her blush!” cried Virginia, accepting her own defeat with entire good nature, and at that Sue got really pink.

“I don’t think it’s nice of you to make fun of an old lady,” she objected, not quite sure how to take them, even now.

“Fun!” shouted Bracken. “I don’t call that fun to have two giddy enchantresses on my hands at the same time! We brought you along to lend respectability to Virginia, if possible, and what happens? You go and hook the Army!”

“But that’s not true, Bracken, I—”

“Did he ask me what I wanted to see tonight? Did Virginia get any say-so? Not at all! You said Rosemary, and to Rosemary we go!

“Well, I’m s-sorry, I never meant—”

“Now, Bracken, stop teasing her!” Virginia went to the rescue. “It’s all right, darling, we don’t in the least mind seeing it again. Behave yourself, Bracken, isn’t it about time you went to work?”

“By the way, when is Easter this year?” remarked Bracken sotto voce, glancing at the clock and picking up his hat. “Oh, I say, that’s much too

long! Whatever will I do with myself till then? Yah, it’s a way they have in the Army!”

There was a silence when he had gone. Then Virginia caught Sue’s troubled, doubtful eyes and laughed again.

“Honey, you look so guilty!” she said. “You mustn’t mind Bracken, and anyway, I think it’s cute.”

“But, Virginia, the Major didn’t really take any notice of me, that is, he was just being kind because I’m not your mother, and he could see that I felt strange here—he’s a very kind-hearted man, you can see that,” she pointed out earnestly.

“Oh, very! I’m sure the Dervishes would agree with you!” said Virginia solemnly.

He sent them flowers, which arrived while they were dressing for dinner.

Camellias for Virginia—and for Sue, red roses. Bracken’s left eyebrow flew up when he saw them, and Virginia pinched him, hard, so he said nothing.

Sue seemed quite unconscious of the significance of red roses, and only said how well they went with her new evening bodice, and how had he guessed what colour she was going to wear. Virginia, choosing a pink silk muslin dress in honour of her camellias, wondered who was going to be chaperoning whom, at this rate.

Sue had always shied from décolletage when dining in a restaurant, and her evening bodice, which was of pale blue Russian net over grey glacé silk, had a high blue satin collar-band topped by a lace Toby-frill which framed her face. The long sleeves were tight from the ruffled wrists to above the elbow, where a wide double net ruffle made fullness to the shoulder. The red roses nestled into a blue satin sash above an embroidered silk skirt. Virginia’s silk muslin was cut with a low V in front, and her long rucked sleeves and kilted flounces edged with lace were the very latest thing. They both wore short brocade theatre jackets banded with fur, and carried fans.

The Major was proud of his handsome party and ordered champagne, which Sue had learned to appreciate, and Bracken alleged that his favourite aunt was rapidly becoming a drunkard. Sue protested hotly that she never had more than one glass, and Bracken agreed that she didn’t as a rule have one in each hand, if that was what she meant. The Major laughed delightedly at this rude family wit, and began to feel as though he had

known these people all his life and would never part with them again. Their easy, unself-conscious affection for each other, their unfailing tenderness even in their teasing, bewitched his lonely heart into yearnings it had not felt for years. He had not been aware that life could be like this, warm and light and laughing, or that women could be so easy to talk to and to entertain.

His own young wife, bearing and losing her first child in India all those years ago, had become in his memory a rather fretful wraith whom it had not been much fun to live with. These hearty American women with their expensive pretty clothes and their spontaneous gaiety and their cosseted confidence that all was for the best in this best of worlds were a revelation to him. And Sue, with those white threads in her coppery hair and some mysterious wisdom in her eyes seemed to him a dream come true—a dream he had hardly known he had. Not young enough to be frightening to a man of his years, but still young enough…. Now, look here, the Major told himself severely, if you go on like this, old boy, you’ll be making a complete ass of yourself.

But before the evening was over, Sue, having had it pointed out to her at breakfast, began to perceive that the Major was perhaps being a little more than kind to her. No one else but Sedgwick had ever listened to her least remark with just the same attentive concern. His lingering gaze, so unlike Sedgwick’s in everything but a sort of wistful adhesiveness, drove her own steady eyes more than once to her plate or to some distant point in the room. She didn’t dare look at Bracken or Virginia, for she felt in them an increasing alertness, a sort of suppressed expectancy which embarrassed and confused her. Sue had never been courted before—poor Sedgwick had hardly had time to begin before that terrible day when Ransom had told them it was impossible, and then everything had been over for them. But Sue had the born writer’s sixth sense about things which lay outside her personal experience, part intuition, part atavistic memory. She had written love scenes in her books, and apart from Sedgwick she knew, in her cultivated imagination, how a man in love behaves. And the Major, apart from the champagne, was behaving besottedly.

Small as her worldly experience had been, by the time she went to bed that night at Claridge’s Sue was forced to recognize that by some freak of male nature, the Major was very much taken with her astonished self. She

had done nothing, she was sure, to bring such a thing to pass. She had minded her own business entirely, while Virginia tried her best to flirt with him. Well, then. But the Major, incredibly, was not interested in Virginia. It was to Virginia’s Aunt Susannah that his seeking, tell-tale eyes returned again and again. And Sue’s reactions came in a rather unexpected sequence.

But he doesn’t know anything about me, she thought first. But I must be years older than he is, she thought next. And then, belatedly—But no one could ever take Sedgie’s place.

Their engagement calendar by then left little room for additions before Easter, but the Major did turn up, looking more than pleased with himself, at several social functions to which they also had been invited. Once, at a tea in Grosvenor Street, he arrived in a group of officers who had been to the Palace for an investiture, wearing full dress uniform and blazing with decorations. He was modesty itself under the smitten stares of Sue and Virginia. But somewhere at the back of his level eyes, in the laughter-wrinkles at their corners, there lurked the look of the cat with canary feathers sticking to its whiskers; he was caught, but the bird was inside—

Sue had seen him at his best, wearing the uniform he loved.

They did go again to dinner and the theatre with him. He had got tickets to the new Savoy opera this time, where Mr. George Grossmith was behaving characteristically as the highly improbable king of a highly impossible country called Vingolia. Never having seen Gilbert and Sullivan, Sue never missed them from this imitation product, and Virginia had long adored the agile Mr. Grossmith.

On the Thursday before Easter Sunday, Bracken and Sue and Virginia descended from the train at the little station of Upper Briarly on Cotswold

—it was the line which ran from London to Oxford to Worcester, and so the service had proved surprisingly good for so remote a place. They found the Major, wearing well-aged tweeds, waiting with a carriage and pair driven by a coachman in his aunt’s brown livery. He had left Town a few days before them in order to see that Mrs. Poole had done everything necessary, and he was determined to entertain his guests in style if it took a year’s pay.

They drove across the wold at sundown to the village of Upper Briarly, which was a mile and three-quarters from its railway station, in a fold of the hills where the infant river Windrush ran. The road was built of yellowish

Cotswold stone, and low stone dry-walls bordered it on either side, enclosing green fields where black-faced lambs frisked on match-stick legs.

The fruit trees were in bloom—snowy pear and plum, and pink peach blossoms in the sheltered corners of the farmyards. The hedgerows were freshly green, and poplars and chestnuts were leafing, though oak and elm were backward still. Pale primroses starred the roadsides, and wood anemones and daffodils showed under the trees. The weather had been unsettled and cool, with sharp showers, but the sun was setting red and the Major said it would be fine tomorrow.

The far horizon was the vast parapet of the wold, but the village of Upper Briarly lay snug beside the river at the foot of a wooded slope. No Briarly could well be lower, so it was the only one, and the clear cold stream ran right down the middle of the single street, dividing it into two.

Low green banks sloped to the water’s edge on either side, and a low stone bridge flung its triple arch across just above where the old ford was. Trout lay idle in full view against the clean gravel bottom, their noses upstream.

Beyond the bridge four white ducks rode serenely on the water while others preened themselves on the grassy bank. The old grey village houses faced each other across the broad thoroughfare. Vines garlanded their narrow mullioned windows, wallflowers and forget-me-nots bloomed at their feet.

The gables were small and sharp and capriciously placed in the steep slate roofs. A child in a clean white pinafore looked out of a cottage door as the carriage passed, and waved, and they all waved back.

A mile the other side of the village they could see at a distance a great colonnaded Georgian mansion set on a low hillside above the river, with acres of lawns running down to the water. The Major pointed it out as the favourite country seat of Lord Enstone, and said the Earl was in residence with his family. “I had one of the boys with me at Firket,” he went on. “The third son, I think he is. Led his wing with great dash and got a spear in the wrist. Lucky not to lose his arm, but it wasn’t bad enough even to get him sick leave to England. Lord Enstone is a great old boy himself, one of the very best. They’ll come to call while you’re here, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Jolly,” said Virginia. “What is his wife like?”

“She’s been dead for years, I can hardly remember her. It’s a largish family, rather scattered now. Lord Alwyn, the eldest son, lives here at the Hall, being a bachelor—he’s very keen on hunting. And there’s a younger

boy, down from London for Easter—the one that’s reading for the Bar.

There is also a remarkably beautiful daughter,” he observed for Bracken’s benefit.

“Do you know the Earl well?” asked Sue, impressed.

“Oh, rather, he used to command my regiment! Retired now, of course, but still going strong. I dined there last night, as a matter of fact. Always do, when I’m here. He and Aunt Sophie were cronies, so he’s interested in what becomes of the house, you know. Just a bit stuffy at the idea of Americans having it, but I fixed that, I think!” He smiled round at them all, amused, and added to Bracken, “You’ll find him interesting, if you can get him talking. He’s convinced we’re for it in South Africa, now that the Balkans have boiled over. Greece hasn’t a hope, I’m afraid.”

As a journalist, Bracken had been reluctant to leave London even for a day now that news had begun to trickle in from the Thessalian frontier.

Turkish ships had touched oft the war by firing on Greek ships at Prevesa, and the Turkish Army was advancing through heavy fighting towards Larissa, which was believed to have fallen by now. The Albanian troops around Janina had revolted against their Turkish masters, and the Greek fleet might attack Salonika any day. But the European Concert of Powers, dominated by the Kaiser and the Czar, was blockading Crete in a wrongheaded attempt to let the Balkans fight it out among themselves. There was an uneasy feeling in London that it lacked only an incident now to bring on the general European war which everyone had begun to dread without being able to see why it should seem so inevitable in an enlightened age like the present. It was easy to blame the Balkans, a notoriously contentious region.

But people were also inclined to blame the Kaiser, who always fished in troubled waters.

Since the Fleet Street office of the Star was still in process of organization and not yet functioning as an independent unit, Bracken had decided that it would be better for him to take a holiday now, leaving Nelson to carry on in the usual way, than later on when his personal routine was more fixed. “I don’t care what you do or how you do it,” Cabot’s parting injunction to him had been. “All I care about is what results we get.

I want more news faster. Use money. Use cables. Use the brains you got from me.”

But it was with an envious sigh that Bracken had seen an eager young man named Hilton set out for the Balkan front, where he himself desired to be. Hilton couldn’t whip the London office into working order for him, and Hilton couldn’t play nursemaid and master of ceremonies to Sue and Virginia. So Hilton went to Thessaly and Bracken went to Gloucestershire, and that was the way it was meant to be.