“I guess your own daughters are pretty enough without having to demean themselves running after that girl. I can’t keep Nan away from her.” Mrs. St George knew that Nan was the Colonel’s favourite, and she spoke with an inward tremor. But it would never do to have this fashionable new governess (who had been with the Russell Parmores of Tarrytown, and with the Duchess of Tintagel in England) imagine that her new charges were hand in glove with the Clossons.
Colonel St George tilted himself back in his chair, felt for a cigar and lit it thoughtfully. (He had long since taught Mrs. St George that smoking in her bedroom was included among his marital rights.) “Well,” he said, “what’s wrong with the Clossons, my dear?”
Mrs. St George felt weak and empty inside. When he looked at her in that way, half laughing, half condescending, all her reasons turned to a puff of mist. And there lay the jewel on the dressing-table—and timorously she began to understand. But the girls must be rescued, and a flicker of maternal ardour stirred in her. Perhaps in his large careless way her husband had simply brushed by the Clossons without heeding them.
“I don’t know any of the particulars, naturally. People do say… but Mrs. Closson (if that’s her name) is not a woman I could ever associate with, so I haven’t any means of knowing…”
The Colonel gave his all-effacing laugh. “Oh, well—if you haven’t any means of knowing, we’ll fix that up all right. But I’ve got business reasons for wanting you to make friends with Mrs. Closson first; we’ll investigate her history afterward.”
Make friends with Mrs. Closson! Mrs. St George looked at her husband with dismay. He wanted her to do the thing that would most humiliate her; and it was so important tty him that he had probably spent his last dollar on this diamond bribe. Mrs. St George was not unused to such situations; she knew that a gentleman’s financial situation might at any moment necessitate compromises and concessions. All the ladies of her acquaintance were inured to them; up one day, down the next, as the secret gods of Wall Street decreed. She measured her husband’s present need by the cost of the probably unpaid for jewel, and her heart grew like water.
“But, Colonel-”
“Well, what’s wrong with the Clossons, anyhow? I’ve done business with Closson off and on for some years now, and I don’t know a squarer fellow. He’s just put me on to a big thing, and if you’re going to wreck the whole business by turning up your nose at his wife…”
Mrs. St George gathered strength to reply: “But, Colonel, the talk is that they’re not even married…”
Her husband jumped up and stood before her with flushed face and irritated eyes. “If you think I’m going to let my making a big rake-off depend on whether the Clossons had a parson to tie the knot, or only the town-clerk…”
“I’ve got the girls to think of,” his wife faltered.
“It’s the girls I’m thinking of, too. D’you suppose I’d sweat and slave down town the way I do if it wasn’t for the girls?”
“But I’ve got to think of the girls they go with, if they’re to marry nice young men.”
“The nice young men’ll show up in larger numbers if I can put this deal through. And what’s the matter with the Closson girl? She’s as pretty as a picture.”
Mrs. St George marvelled once more at the obtuseness of the most brilliant men. Wasn’t that one of the very reasons for not encouraging the Closson girl?
“She powders her face, and smokes cigarettes…”
“Well, don’t our girls and the two Elmsworths do as much? I’ll swear I caught a whiff of smoke when Nan kissed me just now.”
Mrs. St George grew pale with horror. “If you’ll say that of your daughters you’ll say anything!” she protested.
There was a knock at the door, and without waiting for it to be answered Virginia flew into her father’s arms. “Oh, father, how sweet of you! Nan gave me the locket. It’s too lovely; with my monogram on it—and in diamonds!”
She lifted her radiant lips, and he bent to them with a smile. “What’s that new scent you’re using, Miss St George? Or have you been stealing one of your papa’s lozenges?” He sniffed and then held her at arm’s-length, watching her quick flush of alarm, and the way in which her deeply fringed eyes pleaded with his.
“See here, Jinny. Your mother says she don’t want you to go with the Closson girl because she smokes. But I tell her I’ll answer for it that you and Nan would never follow such a bad example—eh?”
Their eyes and their laugh met. Mrs. St George turned from the sight with a sense of helplessness. “If he’s going to let them smoke now…”
“I don’t think your mother’s fair to the Closson girl, and I’ve told her so. I want she should be friends with Mrs. Closson. I want her to begin right off. Oh, here’s Nan,” he added, as the door opened again. “Come along, Nan; I want you to stick up for your friend Conchita. You like her, don’t you?”
But Mrs. St George’s resentment was stiffening. She could fight for her daughters, helpless as she was for herself. “If you’re going to rely on the girls to choose who they associate with! They say the girl’s name isn’t Closson at all. Nobody knows what it is, or who any of them are. And the brother travels round with a guitar tied with ribbons. No nice girls will go with your daughters if you want them seen everywhere with those people.”
The Colonel stood frowning before his wife. When he frowned she suddenly forgot all her reasons for opposing him, but the blind instinct of opposition remained. “You wouldn’t invite the Clossons to join us at supper tonight?” he suggested.
Mrs. St George moistened her dry lips with her tongue. “Colonel—”
“You won’t?”
“Girls, your father’s joking,” she stammered, turning with a tremulous gesture to her daughters. She saw Nan’s eyes darken, but Virginia laughed—a laugh of complicity with her father. He joined in it.
“Girls, I see your mother’s not satisfied with the present I’ve brought her. She’s not as easily pleased as you young simpletons.” He waved his hand to the dressing-table, and Virginia caught up the morocco box. “Oh, mother—is this for you? Oh, I never saw anything so beautiful! You must invite Mrs. Closson, just to see how envious it makes her. I guess that’s what father wants you to do—isn’t it?”
The Colonel looked at her sympathetically. “I’ve told your mother the plain truth. Closson’s put me on to a good thing, and the only return he wants is for you ladies to be a little humane to his women-folk. Is that too unreasonable? He’s coming today, by the afternoon train, bringing two young fellows with him, by the way—his step-son and a young Englishman who’s been working out in Brazil on Mrs. Closson’s estancia. The son of an Earl, or something. How about that, girls? Two new dancing-partners! And you ain’t any too well off in that line, are you?” This was a burning question, for it was common knowledge that, if their dancing-partners were obscure and few, it was because all the smart and eligible young men of whom Virginia and the Elmsworths read in the “society columns” of the newspapers had deserted Saratoga for Newport.
“Mother knows we generally have to dance with each other,” Virginia murmured sulkily.
“Yes—or with the beaux from Buffalo!” Nan laughed.
“Well, I call that mortifying; but of course, if your mother disapproves of Mrs. Closson, I guess the young fellows that Closson’s bringing’ll have to dance with the Elmsworth girls instead of you.”
Mrs. St George stood trembling beside the dressing-table. Virginia had put down the box, and the diamonds sparkled in a sunset ray that came through the slats of the shutters.
Mrs. St George did not own many jewels, but it suddenly occurred to her that each one marked the date of a similar episode. Either a woman, or a business deal—something she had to be indulgent about. She liked trinkets as well as any woman, but at that moment she wished that all of hers were at the bottom of the sea. For each time she had yielded—as she knew she was going to yield now. And her husband would always think that it was b
ecause he had bribed her…
The re-adjustment of seats necessary to bring together the St George and Closson parties at the long hotel supper-table caused a flutter in the room. Mrs. St George was too conscious of it not to avoid Mrs. Elmsworth’s glance of surprise; but she could not deafen herself to Mrs. Elmsworth’s laugh. She had always thought the woman had an underbred laugh. And to think that, so few seasons ago, she had held her chin high in passing Mrs. Elmsworth on the verandah, just as she had done till this very afternoon—and how much higher!—in passing Mrs. Closson. Now Mrs. Elmsworth, who did not possess the art of the lifted chin, but whispered and nudged and giggled where a “lady” would have sailed by—now it would be in her power to practise on Mrs. St George these vulgar means of reprisal. The diamond spray burned like hot lead on Mrs. St George’s breast; yet through all her misery there pierced the old thrill of pride as the Colonel entered the dining-room in her wake, and she saw him reflected in the other women’s eyes. Ah, poor Mrs. Elmsworth, with her black-whiskered undertaker, and Mrs. Closson with her cipher of a husband—and all the other ladies, young or elderly, of whom not one could boast a man of Colonel St George’s quality! Evidently, like Mrs. St George’s diamonds, he was a costly possession, but (unlike the diamonds, she suspected) he had been paid for—oh, how dearly!—and she had a right to wear him with her head high.
But in the eyes of the other guests it was not only the Colonel’s entrance that was reflected. Mrs. St George saw there also the excitement and curiosity occasioned by the re-grouping of seats, and the appearance, behind Mrs. Closson—who came in with her usual somnambulist’s walk, and thick-lashed stare—of two young men, two authentic new dancers for the hotel beauties. Mrs. St George knew all about them. The little olive-faced velvet-eyed fellow, with the impudently curly black hair, was Teddy de Santos-Dios, Mr. Closson’s Brazilian step-son, over on his annual visit to the States; the other, the short heavy-looking young man with a low forehead pressed down by a shock of drab hair, an uncertain mouth under a thick drab moustache, and small eyes, slow, puzzled, not unkindly yet not reliable, was Lord Richard Marable, the impecunious younger son of an English Marquess, who had picked up a job on the Closson estancia, and had come over for his holiday with Santos-Dios. Two “foreigners”, and certainly ineligible ones, especially the little black popinjay who travelled with his guitar—but, after all, dancers for the girls, and therefore not wholly unwelcome even to Mrs. St George, whose heart often ached at the thought of the Newport ball-rooms, where black coat-tails were said to jam every doorway; while at Saratoga the poor girls—
Ah, but there they were, the girls!—the privileged few whom she grouped under that designation. The fancy had taken them to come in late, and to arrive all together; and now, arm-in-arm, a blushing bevy, they swayed across the threshold of the dining-room like a branch hung with blossoms, drawing the dull middle-aged eyes of the other guests from lobster salad and fried chicken, and eclipsing even the refulgent Colonel-happy girls, with two new dancers for the week-end, they had celebrated the unwonted wind-fall by extra touches of adornment: a red rose in the fold of a fichu, a loose curl on a white shoulder, a pair of new satin slippers, a fresh moiré ribbon.
Seeing them through the eyes of the new young men Mrs. St George felt their collective grace with a vividness almost exempt from envy. To her, as to those two foreigners, they embodied “the American girl”, the world’s highest achievement; and she was as ready to enjoy Lizzy Elmsworth’s brilliant darkness, and that dry sparkle of Mab’s, as much as her own Virginia’s roses, and Nan’s alternating frowns and dimples. She was even able to recognize that the Closson girl’s incongruous hair gilded the whole group like a sunburst. Could Newport show anything lovelier, she wondered half-bitterly, as she seated herself between Mr. Closson and young Santos-Dios.
Mrs. Closson, from the Colonel’s right, leaned across the table with her soft ambiguous smile. “What lovely diamonds, Mrs. St George! I wish I hadn’t left all mine in the safe at New York!”
Mrs. St George thought: “She means the place isn’t worth bringing jewels to. As if she ever went out anywhere in New York!” But her eyes wandered beyond Mrs. Closson to Lord Richard Marable; it was the first time she had ever sat at table with any one even remotely related to a British nobleman, and she fancied the young man was ironically observing the way in which she held her fork. But she saw that his eyes, which were sand-coloured like his face, and sandy-lashed, had found another occupation. They were fixed on Conchita Closson, who sat opposite to him; they rested on her unblinkingly, immovably, as if she had been a natural object, a landscape or a cathedral, that one had travelled far to see, and had the right to look at as long as one chose. “He’s drinking her up like blotting-paper. I thought they were better brought up over in England!” Mrs. St George said to herself, austerely thankful that he was not taking such liberties with her daughters (“but men always know the difference,” she reflected), and suddenly not worrying any longer about how she held her fork.
IV.
Miss Laura Testvalley stood on the wooden platform of the railway station at Saratoga Springs, N. Y., and looked about her. It was not an inspiriting scene; but she had not expected that it would be, and would not have greatly cared if it had. She had been in America for eighteen months, and it was not for its architectural or civic beauties that she had risked herself so far. Miss Testvalley had small means, and a derelict family to assist; and her successful career as a governess in the households of the English aristocracy had been curtailed by the need to earn more money. English governesses were at a premium in the United States, and one of Miss Testvalley’s former pupils, whose husband was attached to the British Legation in Washington, had recommended her to Mrs. Russell Parmore, a cousin of the Eglintons and the van der Luydens—the best, in short, that New York had to offer. The salary was not as high as Miss Testvalley had hoped for; but her ex-pupil at the Legation had assured her that among the “new” coal and steel people, who could pay more, she would certainly be too wretched. Miss Testvalley was not sure of this. She had not come to America in search of distinguished manners any more than of well-kept railway stations; but she decided on reflection that the Parmore household might be a useful spring-board, and so it proved. Mrs. Russell Parmore was certainly very distinguished, and so were her pallid daughter and her utterly rubbed-out husband; and how could they know that to Miss Testvalley they represented at best a milieu of retired Colonials at Cheltenham, or the household of a minor canon in a cathedral town? Miss Testvalley had been used to a more vivid setting, and accustomed to social dramas and emotions which Mrs. Russell Parmore had only seen hinted at in fiction; and as the pay was low, and the domestic economies were painful (Mrs. Russell Parmore would have thought it ostentatious and vulgar to live largely), Miss Testvalley, after conscientiously “finishing” Miss Parmore (a young lady whom Nature seemed scarcely to have begun), decided to seek, in a different field, ampler opportunities of action. She consulted a New York governesses’ agency, and learned that the “new people” would give “almost anything” for such social training as an accomplished European governess could impart. Miss Testvalley fixed a maximum wage, and in a few days was notified by the agency that Mrs. Tracy St George was ready to engage her. “It was Mrs. Russell Parmore’s reference that did it,” said the black-wigged lady at the desk as they exchanged fees and congratulations. “In New York that counts more than all your Duchesses”; and Miss Testvalley again had reason to rate her own good sense at its just value. Life at the Parmores’, on poor pay and a scanty diet, had been a weary business; but it had been worth while. Now she had in her pocket the promise of eighty dollars a month, and the possibility of a more exciting task; for she understood that the St Georges were very “new”, and the prospect of comparing the manners and customs of the new and the not-new might be amusing. “I wonder,” she thought ironically, “if the Duchess would see the slightest difference…” the Duchess meaning always h
ers, the puissant lady of Tintagel, where Miss Testvalley had spent so many months shivering with cold, and bandaging the chilblains of the younger girls, while the other daughters, with their particular “finishing” duenna, accompanied their parents from one ducal residence to another. The Duchess of Tintagel, who had beaten Miss Testvalley’s salary well-nigh down to the level of an upper house-maid’s, who had so often paid it after an embarrassingly long delay, who had been surprised that a governess should want a fire in her room, or a hot soup for her school-room dinner—the Duchess was now (all unknown to herself) making up for her arrears toward Miss Testvalley. By giving Mrs. Parmore the chance to say, when she had friends to dine: “I happen to know, for instance, that at Tintagel Castle there are only open fires, and the halls and corridors are not heated at all”, Miss Testvalley had gained several small favours from her parsimonious employer: and by telling her, in the strictest confidence, that their Graces had at one time felt a good deal of anxiety about their only son—oh, a simple sweet-natured young man if ever there was one; but then, the temptations which beset a Marquess!—Miss Testvalley had obtained from Mrs. Parmore a letter of recommendation which placed her at the head of the educational sisterhood in the United States.
Miss Testvalley needed this, and every other form of assistance she could obtain. It would have been difficult for either Mrs. Parmore or the Duchess of Tintagel to imagine how poor she was, or how many people had (or so she thought) a lien on her pitiful savings. It was the penalty of the family glory. Miss Testvalley’s grandfather was the illustrious patriot, Gennaro Testavaglia of Modena, fomenter of insurrections, hero of the Risorgimento, author of those once famous historical novels, Arnaldo da Brescia and La Donna della Fortezza, but whose fame lingered in England chiefly because he was the cousin of the old Gabriele Rossetti, father of the decried and illustrious Dante Gabriel. The Testavaglias, fleeing from the Austrian inquisition, had come to England at the same time as the Rossettis, and contracting their impossible name to the scope of English lips, had intermarried with other exiled revolutionaries and anti-papists, producing sons who were artists and agnostics, and daughters who were evangelicals of the strictest pattern, and governesses in the highest families. Laura Testvalley had obediently followed the family tradition; but she had come after the heroic days of evangelical great ladies who required governesses to match; competition was more active, there was less demand for drawing-room Italian and prayerful considerations on the Collects, and more for German and the natural sciences, in neither of which Miss Testvalley excelled. And in the intervening years the mothers and aunts of the family had grown rheumatic and impotent, the heroic old men lingered on in their robust senility, and the drain on the younger generation grew heavier with every year. At thirty-nine Laura had found it impossible, on her English earnings, to keep the grandmother (wife of the Risorgimento hero), and to aid her own infirm mother in supporting an invalid brother and a married sister with six children, whose husband had disappeared in the wilds of Australia. Laura was sure that it was not her vocation to minister to others, but she had been forced into the task early, and continued in it from family pride—and because, after all, she belonged to the group, and the Risorgimento and the Pre-Raphaelites were her chief credentials. And so she had come to America.
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