Francis brushed aside his absent-mindedness with a fine display of winning charm. “Ah yes! I see I’m so excited that I shall soon forget my own name! My lord, this is my sister Marguerite.”
I felt sorry for the girl being so plain, particularly when I saw how jealous she was of her delightful older sister, so I took care to greet her with almost as much enthusiasm as I had greeted Blanche. This surprised everyone, I noticed, especially Blanche, and I realized then that I had deceived myself in thinking that no one could attach any importance to our correspondence with each other. However, even though I had been uncharacteristically naïve, I was still far from being a romantic fool. Resolving firmly that my attitude toward both girls was going to be wholly paternal, I decided I must take care never to favor one sister to the exclusion of the other during my short stay in New York.
But there was no denying that Blanche was extraordinarily beautiful.
III
“I shall miss you considerably when you go to Washington tomorrow, Cousin Edward,” said Blanche to me three weeks later. “Isn’t it possible for you to postpone your visit for a week or two?”
We were in the garden. An elm tree shaded us from the hot afternoon sun as we sat on a wrought-iron bench, and in front of us the lawn had a sickly brownish tinge which reminded me how far I was from home. To our left was a summer house, to our right a waterless fountain, and far away beyond the high wall we could hear the rattle of carriage wheels and the clatter of the horse carts as the traffic plunged up and down Fifth Avenue.
“We have so enjoyed having you in New York,” said Blanche, sighing.
“I’ve enjoyed myself also,” I said. That was much too true, unfortunately. Francis had wined and dined me with a zest that bordered on the feverish, and Blanche had always contrived to be at my elbow just when I was thinking how pleasant it would be to have her company. I admit that I was flattered by such attention, but on reflection I was not altogether surprised. Americans are susceptible to English titles, and, besides, my public career has not been undistinguished. If New York society wished to treat me as a celebrity, I was certainly not about to protest that they made too much fuss over too little.
“I shall come back here after my travels to Washington, Wisconsin and Ohio,” I promised Blanche.
“I can understand you wishing to visit Washington,” said Blanche, pouting very prettily, “because everyone says the state buildings are so fine. And besides, Lord Palmerston wishes you to convey his respects to the President, and of course men are always so interested in politics and diplomacy and that sort of thing. But why, oh, why must you visit Ohio? And Wisconsin! I can’t see why anyone would want to go to Wisconsin.”
“A farmer there has just invented a machine that might revolutionize reaping,” I said, watching the way her rich dark hair lay coiled on the nape of her neck. “And in Ohio they have developed a mutant strain of Indian corn that might be suitable for cultivation in Ireland.”
“I didn’t think anything ever grew in Ireland except potatoes,” said Blanche.
I did not answer. I never discussed Cashelmara.
“Did Cousin Eleanor share your interest in agriculture when she was alive?”
My watch was in my hand although I was unaware of removing it from my pocket. “Dear me,” I said, surprised. “Look at the time! Aren’t you going to be late for your harp lesson?”
“Oh, that horrid harp!” She smiled at me from beneath her lashes, and I noticed the fullness of her wide, mobile mouth. The air in the garden was stifling. I could not imagine how Blanche appeared so cool, and suddenly I longed to press my hot fingers against her pale skin until all the heat in my body had spent itself.
Without stopping to think I said abruptly, “When can I expect Francis to bring you to England to visit me?”
“Why, when you invite us, of course!” she said, laughing, and the next moment she had slipped her arms around my neck and was kissing me lightly on the cheek.
“Blanche …” But she was gone. She was moving swiftly across the lawn, and it was only when she reached the house that she turned, smiled and raised a white-gloved hand in farewell.
I was so shocked, both by her behavior and by the violence of my reaction, that I remained where I was for some minutes after she had disappeared into the house, but at last when I could think coherently again my first thought was to reassure myself. To be shocked by her behavior was foolish. American girls were notoriously forward, and it would be wrong to judge Blanche by the standards I would have set for my own daughters. And my own feelings? But they were known only to myself. I had done nothing foolish and still had every intention of behaving sensibly.
I was beginning to be confused, however, about what constituted sensible behavior. I had never been prejudiced against Americans, but did one marry them? Almost certainly not. The Marriotts were, in their own way, aristocracy, but by English standards they would be considered vulgar as well as foreign. But was I the kind of man who would be cowed by society’s conventions, as if I were a newly arrived member of the middle classes with no confidence in my social position?
“I’ll do as I damned well please,” I said to the listless birds on the sundial, “whatever that may be.”
It was curious that I worried more about Blanche’s nationality than her age, but girls of twenty often married older men; there was nothing unusual about that. Of course she shared none of my deeper interests, but did I really want a woman whose sole virtue lay in her intellectual companionship? I thought not.
I sat thinking for a long time about what I did want, and then at last I returned to the house. It was quiet inside. Amelia had taken the children out, Marguerite had as usual hidden herself away somewhere—I had hardly seen her since my arrival—and Francis to my knowledge had not yet returned from his chambers in Wall Street. Upstairs I heard the soft, halting chords of Blanche’s harp, and I decided to listen to her in the little drawing room next to the music room where she was taking her lesson. The two rooms were joined by a communicating door, which as usual stood ajar. Taking care to make no noise that might disturb her, I sat down, picked up a magazine in which I had no interest and listened with amusement as Blanche complained to her music master what a difficult instrument the harp was to play.
I thought she played remarkably well.
I had just settled down to enjoy a pleasant half hour when there was an interruption. Sharp footsteps rang outside, the door of the music room opened from the corridor and Francis’ voice said curtly, “Blanche, I want to talk to you alone.”
“For heaven’s sake, Francis, I’m in the middle of my lesson!”
“I wouldn’t care if you were in the middle of your prayers. Good day to you, Mr. Parker.”
“Good day, sir,” stammered the little music master. “If you wish me to wait downstairs …”
“I don’t. You can get out. Now, Blanche,” said my host when they were alone in the music room after this gross display of rudeness and ill-breeding, “what the devil do you think you’re doing?”
“Francis! How dare you use such dreadful language to me!”
“And how dare you behave like a whore in a concert saloon! I saw you just now in the garden!”
“Well, you told me to be pleasant to him!”
“I didn’t tell you to behave like a trollop! My God, what sort of an upbringing will the old fool think I’ve given you? You’ve probably ruined us both in his eyes!”
“Well, if I have it’s all your fault! I never wanted to have anything to do with Cousin Edward. It was you, huffing and puffing at me ever since that beastly financial crash two years ago—write to Cousin Edward, keep Cousin Edward sweet, flatter Cousin Edward to pieces—”
“If you knew as much as I know about bankruptcy you’d see how important it is to keep on good terms with rich relatives!”
“Yes—an English relative! You, who despise Europe and everything European! What a hypocrite you are, Francis! It sickens me to listen to you some
times.”
“Be quiet!” shouted Francis. “Don’t you dare have the impertinence to speak to me like that!”
“Impertinence! Who talks of impertinence? It was pretty considerable impertinent of you, don’t you think, to tell me to go simpering after an old man!”
I left the room.
The corridor was shadowed and cool. Leaning against the wall, I pressed my forehead against the dark wallpaper, but when I realized I could still hear the voices raised in argument, I moved, groping my way along the corridor as if I were blind.
My fingers found a recess in the wall. I had reached a door I had never noticed before, and wanting nothing except to find some corner where I could be alone, I fumbled with the handle and blundered into the room beyond.
When the door was shut I closed my eyes and leaned back against the panels. There was a long moment of absolute silence, and then, just before I heard the small polite cough, my instinct told me that I was not alone in the room.
I remembered to straighten my back before I opened my eyes.
Marguerite was watching me from a chair by the window, and as I looked at her mutely I remembered that when I had first arrived at the house I had greeted her with almost as much enthusiasm as I had greeted Blanche.
I tried to speak, but to my horror I found that speech was beyond me, and it was instead Marguerite who rescued the situation. She said in a sympathetic but practical voice, “Can I help you, Cousin Edward?” And as she spoke I realized with a painful surge of gratitude that she had not forgotten my earlier kindness to her.
IV
Marguerite had been sitting at a table crowded with chessmen, but now she stood up. She was small, no more than five feet tall, and her wiry, sandy hair was dragged back reluctantly into the fashionable chignon at the back of her neck. She had a sharp, pointed little face, with a long thin nose and an angular chin, and her blue eyes were narrow, as if she regarded the world with acute suspicion. I learned later that she was shortsighted. When she stood up from the chess table I saw the pince-nez dangling from a black ribbon around her neck, but it did not occur to me that her suspicious expression sprang merely from her efforts to perceive her surroundings.
“You don’t look at all well,” she said. “Please, won’t you sit down?” She was looking at me in concern. I managed to say, “Thank you. I’m not used to the heat. In England …” But I could say no more at that moment. I sat down in the chair that faced hers across the chess table and stared at the array of ivory figures on the familiar black and white squares.
“Do you play chess?” said Marguerite. She was examining a white pawn with scrupulous care. “This particular game is from a book that Francis gave me years ago. Francis used to be very good at chess, but he never plays nowadays because he’s too busy making money, so I play on my own. Amelia says girls aren’t supposed to play chess, but I’ve always thought that’s a very silly rule.”
I had recovered myself enough to say in a normal voice, “How strange! That’s exactly what my wife always said.”
“Your wife? Did she? How splendid! Did she play chess herself?”
“Yes. She too had an older brother who taught her.”
“And was she good at it?”
“She sometimes let me win, yes.”
Marguerite laughed, and it was only then that I remembered that I never spoke of Eleanor.
“Will you finish this game with me?” she asked.
“If you like. Yes, with pleasure.” All memory died, drowned in the fascinating abstractions of the chessboard. I turned to the familiar figures as if they were long-lost friends and groped yearningly for the moves that had once lain at the tip of my mental reflexes.
“You’re much too good for me!” exclaimed Marguerite in admiration after the last move had been played.
“On the contrary, you play very well, and I’m slow through lack of practice.”
“When was the last time you played?”
“Oh, that was fourteen years ago,” I said. “At Cashelmara.”
“Ah yes. Your Irish estate.” She began to rearrange the chessmen on the board. “Fourteen years is a very long time. Why is it that you remember so clearly when you last played chess?”
I opened my mouth to make some brief evasive answer, but instead my voice said, “Because I was in Ireland on the eve of the famine. Because my wife had been desperately ill after the birth of our last child, and the journey to Ireland was the first she had undertaken in months. Because we brought our son Louis to Ireland despite the fact that we always kept the children in England for fear of disease. Because the day after Eleanor and I played chess for the last time Louis fell ill with typhus and within a week he was dead.”
She was staring at me. I noticed there were freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“He was eleven years old,” I said.
“Did your wife herself die soon after that?”
The question took me aback. I had been expecting some meaningless platitude intended to express her sympathy.
“No,” I said after a pause. “My wife lived for another six years.”
“Yet you never played chess again. Why was that? Was she angry with you? Did she blame you for your son’s death?”
Startled by her sharpness, I said unevenly, “It was my fault in part. I shouldn’t have insisted on taking them both to Ireland with me, but I thought the change would benefit Eleanor, and Louis was growing up, anxious to see the estate which would one day be his.”
“Then why did she blame you?”
“She was already suffering from ill-health, and the shock of his death … disturbed her. When we returned from Ireland to Warwickshire she refused to see anyone and seldom ventured from the house.”
“She went into seclusion, you mean?”
“Yes. There was a complete nervous collapse—other reasons for our estrangement too, of course, but …” I began to wonder if I had taken leave of my senses. I had never spoken of the estrangement before. Perhaps the combination of heat and shock had affected me more seriously than I had supposed.
“How long was it before you went back to Cashelmara?”
I was struck again by the absence of sympathetic platitudes. “Four years.” I looked around the room. There was a Chinese screen along one wall and a Ming vase on a lacquered table. “Four years,” I repeated, my voice disbelieving, as if I still could not accept the enormity of what I had done. “The famine years. I turned my back for four years on Cashelmara, and when I returned my lands were ruined, my surviving tenants were living like animals and the whole valley was little better than a mass grave.”
She said nothing, but I was no longer aware of her. I could see the corpses by the wayside and the uncultivated fields and the stench of death clinging to the ruined cabins of Clonareen. I could remember going into the church in search of the priest and finding that all the candles had gone out.
“I behaved no better than the worst of the absentee landlords,” I said. “Hundreds of people who should have been in my care died of famine and pestilence.”
“But surely—”
“Oh, of course I’ve tried to make amends since then! I’ve reorganized my estate, I’ve resettled my tenants, I’ve poured money into my lands, I’ve interested myself in all the latest agricultural developments …” I stopped. At last I said in surprise, “I felt so guilty. That’s why I never talked about Cashelmara. And I never talked about Eleanor because I felt guilty about her too. It wasn’t simply Louis’s death. It was all those children and the last nearly killing her.”
I was by the window, though I could not remember having risen to my feet. Outside the brown lawn swam in a blur of brilliant light which heightened the pain behind my eyes. “I was devoted to Eleanor,” I said after a long time. “Our marriage shouldn’t have ended in estrangement. We didn’t deserve it. It was unjust”
A small hot hand touched my wrist. A small clear voice said with passion, “Life’s quite horrid sometimes, isn’t it?
And so unfair! I know just how you feel.” And suddenly I realized that this was what I had wanted to hear ever since my daughter Nell had died—not the endless hushed sympathy, not the religious platitudes, not the unctuous reminders that I should count my blessings, but someone telling me that, yes, life was often brutal and fate was often unjust and I was entitled to grieve and be angry.
“I know just how you feel,” said Marguerite, and I knew that by some miracle she did indeed know and that in her knowledge lay the release from loneliness that I had sought so fruitlessly for so long.
I looked down at her. I no longer felt angry then. I no longer wanted to curse the injustice of death because I was simply grateful that I was still alive. And as I looked at Marguerite across all those years that separated us, I knew not only that I wanted her but that nothing on earth was going to stand in my way.
Chapter Two
I
I HAD NO CHANCE to pursue my interest in Marguerite immediately, for the next day I left New York for Washington to begin two months of travel in the interior of the United States. However, my departure seemed well timed. The thought of remaining a day longer beneath Francis’ roof was at that moment intolerable to me, and although I was anxious to see more of Marguerite, I knew I should take time to reconsider my feelings toward her. As so often happens after an outspoken conversation, I had already begun to regret my frankness, and although I was convinced that Marguerite would be discreet, I wanted her to prove to me by her silence that I could trust her.
It is not my purpose to recount in detail every step of my journey around America. If anyone should ever wish to write my biography I would refer him to the papers I later wrote for the Royal Agricultural Society, “Mutant Strains of Indian Corn in the State of Ohio” and “Mr. John F. Appleby’s Knotter—an Invention to Facilitate Reaping.” My letter to Lord Palmerston on the state of the Union may be preserved somewhere, although from my experience of Palmerston it is far more likely that he tore up the letter and jumped on it. For I advocated a policy of strict noninterference with the internal affairs of the United States, and advocating noninterference to Palmerston was worse than waving a red rag at a bull. However, I had my reasons. On American soil I saw clearly that Americans were touchy about their relationship with England, much as a grown child is often touchy about his relationship with his parents. The Americans believed—with some justification, perhaps—that their country was much misunderstood in England, and although the majority of Americans I met were friendly to me, I was conscious of a large well of anti-British sentiment.
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