The Last September Read Free

the locked bookcases. Then he heard his aunt and Mrs. Montmorency beginning to come upstairs.

CHAPTER TWO
    THE Naylors and the Montmorencys had always known each other; it was an affair of generations. Hugo had stayed at Danielstown as a boy for months together, and knew the place as well as his own house, he told Francie, and certainly liked it better. He had expressed this preference, which had come as a shock to her, when they were first engaged. She was pained as by an expression of irreligion. She consoled herself and rehabilitated him secretly by remembering he had had a stepfather and could never have known the meaning of family life—she had a delicate woman’s strong feeling for “naturalness.” She intended to make up to him for the deficiencies of his childhood, but, almost immediately after their marriage, Hugo sold Rockriver. Now she would always blame herself for not having dissuaded him, but he had been so set at the time on an idea of going to Canada and she so foolishly anxious to compensate him for what she was not by going there with him and thriving. So when the idea of Canada failed they had no home, and she, after all, no vocation. As for Hugo, he had expected little of life.
    Francie had heard all her life of the Naylors of Danielstown; her cousins and theirs had married; but Ireland is large and she had not met them till she came to Danielstown on a bridal visit. Then, of course, they had known each other always; there had been no beginning. She knew she had never in all her life been so happy as on that first visit; time, loose-textured, had had a shining undertone, happiness glittered between the moments. She had had, too, very strongly a sense of return, of having been awaited. Rooms, doorways had framed a kind of expectancy of her; some trees in the distance, the stairs, a part of the garden seemed always to have been lying secretly at the back of her mind.
    It was, also, on that first and only other visit, that she had made friends with Myra—that in itself was memorable. Myra was “interesting,” cultivated, sketched beautifully, knew about books and music. She had been to Germany, Italy, everywhere that one visits acquisitively. It had been a bond to discover that Francie and Myra must have been in Germany at the same time, the summer of ‘92, though without meeting. Myra was the same age as Francie—they had been presented the same year, though not at the same Drawing-room—and thought of Hugo as quite a boy: she could not help showing it. Sometimes, guessing what she had shown, she would laugh and say something clever and quite irrelevant to cover the awk wardness. For Hugo was ten years younger than both of them, Francie’s husband.
    Francie and Myra had had long remarkable talks about almost everything, confidential if not alarmingly intimate—walking, driving, on the seat by the Caroline allspice tree and at the head of the stairs at night—where their candle-flames stooped from their vehemence.
    When at the end of that visit the Montmorencys left Danielstown this had seemed to Francie more of a pause than a break in the continuity. “Next spring,” they all four promised each other, shaking hands and kissing at the foot of the steps—It was then autumn, the bronze trees were sifted through by the wind and shivered along the outlines— “Next summer, Hugo,” Myra exclaimed, “at latest !” and the last view they had of her was as standing bright and imperative. Only as they drove away did the trees run watery into the sky and Francie’s lids prick: she slipped her hand into Hugo’s under the rug. And, pressing it, he had alone to continue the business of turning and yearning and waving back till a bend in the avenue.
    She had felt, perhaps, a chilly breath from the future. Between their smart turning out, with a roll of carriage-wheels, through the gates with their clipped laurels, and their swerving in with a grind of motor brakes twelve years afterwards, nothing