Ever After

Elswyth Thane

Description

This is Volume 3 of The Williamsburg Series. In Ever After, Bracken Murray visits London duing the Jubilee summer of 1897 after his wife deserts him. Here he falls in love with an English girl. Meanwhile back in the USA his cousin Fitz rescues a music-hall singer who falls in love with him.
Elswyth Thane has successfully held the interest in this third and fourth generation story; and in the use of the Spanish-American war background she has once again sustained her pattern of war as a leavening force. Many familiar figures cross the pages, but the canvas has wider ranch, Williamsburg, New York, London, and county England as well as grim scenes in Cuba's battlegrounds.

Sujets

• Romance historique
• Fiction
• Romance
• Historical

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 10 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644263
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ever After
by Elswyth Thane

First published in 1945
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

EVER AFTER

by ELSWYTH THANE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONCE more I take this opportunity to thank Mrs. F. G. King and the staff of the New York Society Library for their services, so cheerfully rendered, and also Miss May Davenport Seymour of the Museum of the City of New York. At Williamsburg, Miss Mary McWilliams continues to be my dear friend in need, and I am indebted for time and hospitality to Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Chorley, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Bath, Mrs. George Coleman, Mrs. Isobel Hubbard, Judge Frank Armistead, Dr. W. G. Swem, Mr. Rutherford Goodwin, Mr. A. T. Love, and Mrs. Eleanor Duncan. Colonel Arthur F. Crosby, Officers Reserve Corps, U.S. Army, retired, very kindly lent me personal letters and files regarding the Rough Riders, and I am grateful to Lieutenant-Colonel W. E. G. Ord-Statter of the British Army, Major C. B. Ormerod of the British Information Services, Captain G. M. Game of the British Territorial Army, Dr. K. C. Waddell of the Henry Ford Hospital, Mr. Herbert Satterlee, and Miss Elizabeth Garthwaite for the trouble they have taken to answer by letter and in consultation what must often have seemed to them foolish questions about Kitchener’s Egyptian Army, Court presentations, English divorce laws and Scotland Yard procedure, malaria and yellow fever, the Cuban campaign, and the half-forgotten, spacious days of the Nineties, which were not altogether gay. To those of us who cannot quite remember, I hope the book will bring glimpses of a vanished world. And I hope that those who lived in it will feel at home again.

E.T. 1945
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, exce