Ever After (3 page)

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.”

T
HERE
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—

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.

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.”

I
T 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.