Ever After (46 page)

He had to let it go at that, though he knew it wasn’t nonsense. He had to go on allowing Dinah’s sublime inexperience of the
arrière
pens
é
e
to retrieve his own reckless utterances, frustrated and enchanted by the way she accepted without blinking remarks which other girls would have tripped over and taken him up on. Virginia in Dinah’s place with, say, Archie instead of himself, would by now have been blushing prettily and behaving like a three-days’ bride. But he was grateful that it was so. Dinah went to his head and spring was in his blood and he felt gay and heedless and
experimental
. He longed perversely for Dinah just once to betray consciousness that he was a man, attractive enough, and that she was a female. His irreverent impulse was to impinge, ever so little, on that touching choirboy innocence of hers with his own surging emotion. And yet the last thing he wanted was to propose to Dinah in the subjunctive mood. If and when I get my divorce, will you marry me. Oh, no. That wasn’t good enough for Dinah. When he was in the clear, then he would ask her and they wouldn’t have to wait. Meanwhile, she baffled him. Not that he didn’t enjoy that too.

But Dinah, who was so much deeper than even he had any idea, was hearing over and over inside her head those apparently careless
words on the hill….
then
I
shall
be
free
to
marry
again
….
and
shall
you?
….
I
hope
so
…. And while she had never really thought as far as marrying Bracken herself, those few words seemed to demonstrate once more her own chronic negligible state—too young, too thin, too schoolgirlish and dull to be anything but his faithful friend, for that she would be all her life, while he married someone like Clare, only nicer, who would grace his home as a wife should, a brilliant hostess, a famous beauty—all the things a person with red hair and no figure and a country education couldn’t possibly be….

Dinah ate her scrambled eggs and poured his second cup of coffee the way he liked it, and went on talking sensibly, replying to his questions about the past winter, recalling anecdotes for his
amusement
which she had saved up to tell him—how someone had left the front door at the Hall open early one morning and some deer from the park had come right into the entrance hall and cornered a timid housemaid with her duster till her screams aroused the rest of the household—“You’d have thought she was being murdered at least, and they were only asking for apples, they wouldn’t hurt a fly!”—and how a fox, hard-pressed on a six-mile point in the Friday country roundabout Moreton, set his mask straight for Blockley’s Farm and went to ground in the kitchen, where he was killed, and it made the most awful mess, because it was a very muddy day, besides the blood and all, but old Blockley only halloo’d them on and said Better the kitchen than his hen-house any day—and how Edward riding Thunderbolt had come down hard at the first water-jump in the point-to-point, and made a terrific splash, and Thunderbolt was found to have damaged himself so badly he had to be shot—

“That must have been just the least little bit in the world
satisfactory
to you,” Bracken suggested, and Dinah after an instant’s shocked surprise burst into delighted laughter.

It was the first time, he thought, that he had ever heard her laugh aloud, and Eden entered as she finished. Dinah jumped to her feet and made a schoolgirl curtsey when she was presented to Bracken’s mother, who barely refrained from taking her at once into her arms. Eden accepted the rather limp bunch of primroses and anemones with joy and spent some time propping them up in a small glass vase fetched by Melchett, while Dinah diffidently resumed her chair beside the urns. Then Eden said she thought she would have another cup of tea if they could spare it, and Dinah said Oh, there was lots, and poured it with grave dignity. As she did so, Eden noticed with a mother’s eye that Dinah’s poor little hands were red and chapped because it had not occurred to anyone to give her a lotion, and she thought, If we don’t get her out of that tomb of a house she’ll be having chilblains too, before she’s much older. All
that was maternal in Eden rose up to take Dinah to its heart. And the look in Bracken’s eyes for his oblivious darling was something his mother had never seen there before.

Then Archie wandered in, clad in his well-worn riding clothes and polished boots, and more tea was sent for, and another chair drawn up, though he assured them he had already fed, thanks very much.

“Virginia will be down presently,” Bracken said, answering Archie’s unspoken question at once. “The fact is, we’re being rather careful of her and she breakfasts in bed since her illness.”

“Was it as bad as that?” asked Archie, surprised into lowering his guard, for Dinah had only told him that Bracken wrote Virginia had a heavy cold.

“It was nearly pneumonia,” said Bracken solemnly. “She’s had a wretched time, and we’re lucky it wasn’t worse. You’ll notice how thin she is, but don’t say anything, we try to keep her cheerful.”

Eden turned for a long look at him, as this was not his customary off-hand attitude about his sister. Bracken met her eyes blandly, and offered Archie a cigarette. Eden then had another look at Archie. Brother of the Viscount. Nicer than the Viscount. She liked what she saw.

At that moment there was a scurry of feet in the hall and Virginia arrived on the threshold, obviously under the impression that she was beating Archie to the dining room. At sight of him she checked neatly and entered with a royal leisure, wearing a cashmere tea-gown the colour of heliotrope with flowing sleeves and a foam of lace from throat to hem.

“Dinah,
darling,
it’s lovely of you to come over our very first morning!” she cried, enfolding Dinah in a sisterly embrace. “How nice you look—quite grown up! And
Archie,
is that really you? This
is
a surprise! Are you all still drinking tea? Would there be another drop for me? Dinah’s pouring out—doesn’t she look cute in Mother’s chair?”

Archie insisted that she should take his cup, which he hadn’t yet touched, and still another cup was brought for him, and they all settled down around the table again and nibbled rather cold toast and marmalade while Bracken and Virginia were brought up to date on the news of the countryside. Eden began to see daylight on Virginia, as Bracken had thought she would. Finally, out of
consideration
for the servants she rose, saying, “Children, we must let them clear away. Come into the morning-room and tell me more.”

But Archie said they really must be going, as some people were arriving by the morning train from Town, and anyway perhaps Virginia ought to rest—and she must be sure to drink plenty of Bovril, he added earnestly, that was the stuff, it had got the Governor back on his feet in no time after his influenza. Virginia, the picture
of health, said she was allowed to go out now on mild days, and Archie told her firmly that the wind still had fangs and she must on no account risk getting chilled.

“But I get so
bored,
staying in all day!” she wailed, and Archie said Oh, well, in that case, would it be any good if he popped back for tea. Bracken assured him warmly that the sight of any new face, even that of Archie Campion, would cheer her up no end, and Archie said Right-o, he would bring his face back round about
four-thirty
, and departed with Dinah.

The door had barely closed behind them when Virginia hurled herself round her brother’s neck so that her feet left the floor, crying, “Bracken, you’re
wonderful
!” and danced away to review her wardrobe.

Bracken and his mother were left looking at each other quizzically.

“So that’s how it is,” said Eden.

“I thought you’d catch on,” he agreed.

There seemed still something to be said between them. Eden went and put her arms around him.

“Don’t have any doubts about Dinah, my dear. Just have patience.”

“But did you ever see anything so
young
?”
he asked hopelessly.

“You watch. She’ll grow up all of a sudden and start mothering you!” Eden promised.

T
HUS
Archie cast his dearly bought discretion to the spring winds and allowed himself to convince himself that it wouldn’t hurt just to look at Virginia now and then, and try to cheer her up a bit,
because
after all, pneumonia was no joke—and at the end of a week’s teas and walks and rides and visits to the greenhouses at the Hall he was most wretchedly in love, just as he had known all along he would be.

And Lord Alwyn, who had been carefully cultivating a taste for the rather bovine daughter of a rich stock-broker friend of Clare’s fiancé, was put right off the whole idea by the proximity of Virginia’s dark-eyed vivacity, which as he pointed out to himself over and over again, was nothing, if you came down to it, but sheer American
impudence
and would be wholly unsuitable in a peer’s wife. But
within
the month Alwyn proposed to Virginia again, and got the same answer, which was quite incomprehensible to him and made him very snappish for days.

Archie had eaten his dinners and been called to the Bar at the Inner Temple the previous year and was beginning to be very well thought of as an industrious Junior in the Chancery Court. It was steady work, and paid moderately well, and he had chosen it in preference to the Criminal Court, which was showier but less
profitable
, or the Divorce Court, which was likely to be easier but was considered not quite the thing. By hard work and fond attention to his Leader’s whims, he had amassed fees up to nearly two hundred pounds for his first year, which was pretty good going. In another ten years or so he would take silk, if he could afford it, and there was nothing to prevent him, by the time he was fifty, from being made a King’s Bench judge at five thousand pounds a year, and, if he lived long enough, from becoming Attorney-General.

Meanwhile he had taken to a single eyeglass, which became him, and when Virginia teased him about it he merely remarked that as only one eye was bad two lenses would have been extravagant. When he had got really tired of hearing about it, he did the trick few single-eyeglass men neglected to at least try to learn—he flicked the glass into the air like a coin and caught it in his eye as it came down. Far from silencing Virginia, however, this feat only roused in her an insatiable desire to see him do it again.

Shortly before they all left the Hall to go up to Town for Clare’s wedding, Virginia and Archie were making the usual tour of the greenhouses where the prize-winning roses were grown, and in the warm, scented semi-privacy Virginia suddenly said, “This Mortimer Flood Clare is marrying—tell me honestly, Archie, isn’t he rather a wart?”

“Well, yes, he is, rather,” Archie admitted unwillingly, for Mr. Flood had sort of stuck out as a foreign body on the informal family gatherings at Farthingale and the Hall during the past month—teas on the lawn, luncheon parties, a carriage picnic or two, in which, at least when they were initiated by the American household, the younger members of the Campion family were included.

Mr. Flood had usually been present at these little functions, in
attendance
on Clare. It was difficult to put one’s finger on the trouble with Mr. Flood. He spoke the hunting and county-house idiom, but one was somehow surprised that he had all his
h
’s.
His clothes came from the right tailor, but somehow they always looked new. He laughed in the right places and never told the wrong jokes. But the embarrassing fact remained that he did not quite belong. Young Gerald, home for the Easter holidays and aged fourteen, had come the nearest to putting it in a nutshell. “His collar’s too tight,” he had murmured in a scathing aside to Dinah, just as Mr. Flood was appearing at his picnic-lunch brightest and best. It wasn’t, really. But Mr. Flood’s neck was too thick.

“Then why do you let Clare marry him?” Virginia insisted, when Archie did not rise to defend him.

“Clare thinks she knows what she’s doing. She wants that house in Belgrave Square and fifty thousand a year to spend.”

“Archie, why is it all right for a girl to marry for money, but not for a man?”

“Is it? Besides, men do it every day, I thought.”

“Would you?” she asked softly.

“Good Lord, no!”

“That’s what I mean. Why, would you believe it, there was a man who was terribly in love with me, and—I found out later—he never told me about it because he thought I was an heiress!”

“Well, aren’t you?” he put it to her.

“Not really. Not till I’m twenty-one. And then it’s only ten thousand a year.”

“Pounds?
”

“No, dollars. The capital is all tied up, with trustees and things, Father saw to all that, and I just ask Bracken for what I want to spend. Archie—would you think better of me if I didn’t have a penny in the world?”

“That would be difficult,” he said. “I adore you already.”

“Oh,
Archie
—!”

“Now please don’t misunderstand me,” he added hastily. “I couldn’t possibly ask you to marry me, Virginia, you couldn’t even dress on my income, let alone run an establishment.”

“I could dress on
my
income. Archie, you wouldn’t let a silly prejudice ruin my life?”

“It’s not a silly prejudice and I doubt very much if it will damage your life in the least.”

Virginia stood still in the fragrant aisle beside the
Cloire
de
Dijons
and looked up at him, allowing her large brown eyes to fill with tears.

“I can’t
think
why I love you so!” she whispered. “You’re about the most disagreeable man I ever knew!”

Archie reacted in the only possible way. And when he had kissed her—

“This is completely mad,” he said. “It’s the one thing I swore would never happen. I simply can’t do it, Virginia, have you any idea what my expectations are at the Bar? How could we live, even in the country, on what I earn? With any luck perhaps one day I shall land a sensational case and become famous and my fees will jump. Until then, I shall have to just plod along.”