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 failing, 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.
