But meanwhile it befell that, in London, he was stricken with influenza
and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short but sharp--had it
lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight
really in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters--the ladies
with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins
tending to the massive--left for him, at the door of his lodgings,
flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he pulled through;
but his convalescence was slow and his weakness out of proportion to the
muffled shock. He came out, but he went about lame; it tired him to
paint--he felt as if he had been ill three months. He strolled in
Kensington Gardens when he should have been at work; he sat long on
penny chairs and helplessly mused and mooned. Addie desired him to
return to Paris, but there were chances under his hand that he felt he
had just wit enough left not to relinquish. He would have gone for a
week to the sea--he would have gone to Brighton; but Mrs. Bracken had to
be finished--Mrs. Bracken was so soon to sail. He just managed to finish
her in time--the day before the date fixed for his breaking ground on a
greater business still, the circumvallation of Mrs. Dunn. Mrs. Dunn duly
waited on him, and he sat down before her, feeling, however, ere he
rose, that he must take a long breath before the attack. While asking
himself that night, therefore, where he should best replenish his lungs
he received from Addie, who had had from Mrs. Bracken a poor report of
him, a communication which, besides being of sudden and startling
interest, applied directly to his case.
His friend wrote to him under the lively emotion of having from one day
to another become aware of a new relative, an ancient cousin, a
sequestered gentlewoman, the sole survival of "the English branch of the
family," still resident, at Flickerbridge, in the "old family home," and
with whom, that he might immediately betake himself to so auspicious a
quarter for change of air, she had already done what was proper to place
him, as she said, in touch. What came of it all, to be brief, was that
Granger found himself so placed almost as he read: he was in touch with
Miss Wenham of Flickerbridge, to the extent of being in correspondence
with her, before twenty-four hours had sped. And on the second day he
was in the train, settled for a five-hours' run to the door of this
amiable woman who had so abruptly and kindly taken him on trust and of
whom but yesterday he had never so much as heard. This was an
oddity--the whole incident was--of which, in the corner of his
compartment, as he proceeded, he had time to take the size. But the
surprise, the incongruity, as he felt, could but deepen as he went. It
was a sufficiently queer note, in the light, or the absence of it, of
his late experience, that so complex a product as Addie should have ANY
simple insular tie; but it was a queerer note still that she should have
had one so long only to remain unprofitably unconscious of it. Not to
have done something with it, used it, worked it, talked about it at
least, and perhaps even written--these things, at the rate she moved,
represented a loss of opportunity under which as he saw her, she was
peculiarly formed to wince. She was at any rate, it was clear, doing
something with it now; using it, working it, certainly, already
talking--and, yes, quite possibly writing--about it. She was in short
smartly making up what she had missed, and he could take such comfort
from his own action as he had been helped to by the rest of the facts,
succinctly reported from Paris on the very morning of his start.
It was the singular story of a sharp split--in a good English
house--that dated now from years back. A worthy Briton, of the best
middling stock, had, during the fourth decade of the century, as a very
young man, in Dresden, whither he had been despatched to qualify in
German for a stool in an uncle's counting-house, met, admired, wooed and
won an American girl, of due attractions, domiciled at that period with
her parents and a sister, who was also attractive, in the Saxon capital.
He had married her, taken her to England, and there, after some years of
harmony and happiness, lost her. The sister in question had, after her
death, come to him and to his young child on a visit, the effect of
which, between the pair, eventually defined itself as a sentiment that
was not to be resisted. The bereaved husband, yielding to a new
attachment and a new response, and finding a new union thus prescribed,
had yet been forced to reckon with the unaccommodating law of the land.
Encompassed with frowns in his own country, however, marriages of this
particular type were wreathed in smiles in his sister's-in-law, so that
his remedy was not forbidden. Choosing between two allegiances he had
let the one go that seemed the least close, and had in brief
transplanted his possibilities to an easier air. The knot was tied for
the couple in New York, where, to protect the legitimacy of such other
children as might come to them, they settled and prospered. Children
came, and one of the daughters, growing up and marrying in her turn,
was, if Frank rightly followed, the mother of his own Addie, who had
been deprived of the knowledge of her indeed, in childhood, by death,
and been brought up, though without undue tension, by a stepmother--a
character breaking out thus anew.
The breach produced in England by the invidious action, as it was there
held, of the girl's grandfather, had not failed to widen--all the more
that nothing had been done on the American side to close it. Frigidity
had settled, and hostility had been arrested only by indifference.
Darkness therefore had fortunately supervened, and a cousinship
completely divided. On either side of the impassable gulf, of the
impenetrable curtain, each branch had put forth its leaves--a foliage
wanting, in the American quarter, it was distinct enough to Granger, of
no sign or symptom of climate and environment. The graft in New York had
taken, and Addie was a vivid, an unmistakable flower. At Flickerbridge,
or wherever, on the other hand, strange to say, the parent stem had had
a fortune comparatively meagre. Fortune, it was true, in the vulgarest
sense, had attended neither party. Addie's immediate belongings were as
poor as they were numerous, and he gathered that Miss Wenham's
pretensions to wealth were not so marked as to expose the claim of
kinship to the imputation of motive. To this lady's single identity the
original stock had at all events dwindled, and our young man was
properly warned that he would find her shy and solitary. What was
singular was that in these conditions she should desire, she should
endure, to receive him. But that was all another story, lucid enough
when mastered. He kept Addie's letters, exceptionally copious, in his
lap; he conned them at intervals; he held the threads.
He looked out between whiles at the pleasant English land, an April
AQUARELLE washed in with wondrous breadth. He knew the French thing, he
knew the American, but he had known nothing of this. He saw it already
as the remarkable Miss Wenham's setting. The doctor's daughter at
Flickerbridge, with nippers on her nose, a palette on her thumb and
innocence in her heart, had been the miraculous link. She had become
aware even there, in our world of wonders, that the current fashion for
young women so equipped was to enter the Parisian lists. Addie had
accordingly chanced upon her, on the slopes of Montparnasse, as one of
the English girls in one of the thorough-going sets. They had met in
some easy collocation and had fallen upon common ground; after which the
young woman, restored to Flickerbridge for an interlude and retailing
there her adventures and impressions, had mentioned to Miss Wenham, who
had known and protected her from babyhood, that that lady's own name of
Adelaide was, as well as the surname conjoined with it, borne, to her
knowledge, in Paris, by an extraordinary American specimen. She had then
recrossed the Channel with a wonderful message, a courteous challenge,
to her friend's duplicate, who had in turn granted through her every
satisfaction. The duplicate had in other words bravely let Miss Wenham
know exactly who she was. Miss Wenham, in whose personal tradition the
flame of resentment appeared to have been reduced by time to the palest
ashes--for whom indeed the story of the great schism was now but a
legend only needing a little less dimness to make it romantic--Miss
Wenham had promptly responded by a letter fragrant with the hope that
old threads might be taken up. It was a relationship that they must
puzzle out together, and she had earnestly sounded the other party to it
on the subject of a possible visit. Addie had met her with a definite
promise; she would come soon, she would come when free, she would come
in July; but meanwhile she sent her deputy. Frank asked himself by what
name she had described, by what character introduced him to
Flickerbridge. He mainly felt on the whole as if he were going there to
find out if he were engaged to her. He was at sea really now as to which
of the various views Addie herself took of it. To Miss Wenham she must
definitely have taken one, and perhaps Miss Wenham would reveal it. This
expectation was in fact his excuse for a possible indiscretion.