Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  The governess sat down on the hard chair beside the bed, and her eyes filled with tears. Flowers, she had noticed, did not abound in the States; at least not in summer. In winter, in New York, you could see them banked up in tiers in the damp heat of the florists’ windows; plumy ferns, forced lilac, and those giant roses, red and pink, which rich people offered to each other so lavishly in long white card-board boxes. It was very odd; the same ladies who exchanged these costly tributes in mid-winter lived through the summer without a flower, or with nothing but a stiff bed of dwarf foliage plants before the door, or a tub or two of the inevitable hydrangeas. Yet some one had apparently managed to snatch these flowers from the meagre border before the hotel porch, and had put them there to fill Miss Testvalley’s bedroom with scent and colour. And who could have done it but her new pupil?

  Quarter of an hour later Miss Testvalley, her thick hair re-braided and glossed with brilliantine, her black merino exchanged for a plum-coloured silk with a crochet lace collar, and lace mittens on her small worn hands, knocked at the door of the Misses St George. It opened, and the governess gave a little “oh!” of surprise. Virginia stood there, a shimmer of ruffled white drooping away from her young throat and shoulders. On her heaped-up wheat-coloured hair lay a wreath of cornflowers; and a black velvet ribbon with a locket hanging from it intensified her fairness like the black stripe on a ring-dove’s throat.

  “What elegance for a public dining-room!” thought Miss Testvalley; and then reflected: “But no doubt it’s her only chance of showing it.”

  Virginia opened wondering blue eyes, and the governess explained: “The supper-bell has rung, and I thought you and your sister might like me to go down with you.”

  “Oh—” Virginia murmured; and added: “Nan’s lost her slipper. She’s hunting for it.”

  “Very well; shall I help her? And you’ll go down and excuse us to your mamma?”

  Virginia’s eyes grew wider. “Well, I guess mother’s used to waiting,” she said, as she sauntered along the corridor to the staircase.

  Nan St George lay face downward on the floor, poking with a silk parasol under the wardrobe. At the sound of Miss Testvalley’s voice she raised herself sulkily. Her small face was flushed and frowning. (“None of her sister’s beauty,” Miss Testvalley thought.) “It’s there, but I can’t get at it,” Nan proclaimed.

  “My dear, you’ll tumble your lovely frock—”

  “Oh, it’s not lovely. It’s one of Jinny’s last year’s organdies.”

  “Well, it won’t improve it to crawl about on the floor. Is your shoe under the wardrobe? Let me try to get it. My silk won’t be damaged.”

  Miss Testvalley put out her hand for the sunshade, and Nan scrambled to her feet. “You can’t reach it,” she said, still sulkily. But Miss Testvalley, prostrate on the floor, had managed to push a thin arm under the wardrobe, and the parasol presently re-appeared with a little bronze slipper on its tip. Nan gave a laugh.

  “Well, you are handy!” she said.

  Miss Testvalley echoed the laugh. “Put it on quickly, and let me help you to tidy your dress. And, oh dear, your sash is untied—.” She spun the girl about, re-tied the sash and smoothed the skirt with airy touches; for all of which, she noticed, Nan uttered no word of thanks.

  “And your handkerchief, Annabel?” In Miss Testvalley’s opinion no lady should appear in the evening without a scrap of lace-edged cambric, folded into a triangle and held between gloved or mittened fingertips. Nan shrugged. “I never know where my handkerchiefs are—I guess they get lost in the wash, wandering round in hotels the way we do.”

  Miss Testvalley sighed at this nomadic wastefulness. Perhaps because she had always been a wanderer herself she loved orderly drawers and shelves, and bunches of lavender between delicately fluted under-garments.

  “Do you always live in hotels, my dear?”

  “We did when I was little. But father’s bought a house in New York now. Mother made him do it because the Elmsworths did. She thought maybe, if we had one, Jinny’d be invited out more; but I don’t see much difference.”

  “Well, I shall have to help you to go over your linen,” the governess continued; but Nan showed no interest in the offer. Miss Testvalley saw before her a cold impatient little face—and yet…

  “Annabel,” she said, slipping her hand through the girl’s thin arm, “how did you guess I was fond of flowers?”

  The blood rose from Nan’s shoulders to her cheeks, and a half-guilty smile set the dimples racing across her face. “Mother said we’d acted like a lot of savages, getting up that circus at the station—and what on earth would you think of us?”

  “I think that I shall like you all very much; and you especially, because of those flowers.”

  Nan gave a shy laugh. “Lord Richard said you’d like them.”

  “Lord Richard?”

  “Yes. He says in England everybody has a garden, with lots of flowers that smell sweet. And so I stole them from the hotel border… He’s crazy about Conchita, you know. Do you think she’ll catch him?”

  Miss Testvalley stiffened. She felt her upper lip lengthen, though she tried to smile. “I don’t think it’s a question that need concern us, do you?”

  Nan stared. “Well, she’s my greatest friend—after Jinny, I mean.”

  “Then we must wish her something better than Lord Richard. Come, my dear, or those wonderful American griddle-cakes will all be gone.”

  Early in her career Miss Testvalley had had to learn the difficult art of finding her way about—not only as concerned the tastes and temper of the people she lived with, but the topography of their houses. In those old winding English dwellings, half fortress, half palace, where suites and galleries of stately proportions abruptly tapered off into narrow twists and turns, leading to unexpected rooms tucked away in unaccountable corners, and where school-room and nurseries were usually at the far end of the labyrinth, it behoved the governess to blaze her trail by a series of private aids to memory. It was important, in such houses, not only to know the way you were meant to take, but the many you were expected to avoid, and a young governess turning too often down the passage leading to the young gentlemen’s wing, or getting into the way of the master of the house in his dignified descent to the breakfast-room, might suddenly have her services dispensed with. To any one thus trained the simple plan of an American summer hotel offered no mysteries; and when supper was over and, after a sultry hour or two in the red and gold ball-room, the St George ladies ascended to their apartments, Miss Testvalley had no difficulty in finding her way up another flight to her own room. She was already aware that it was in the wing of the hotel, and had noted that from its window she could look across into that from which, before supper, she had seen Miss Closson signal to her brother and Lord Richard, who were smoking on the gravel below.

  It was no business of Miss Testvalley’s to keep watch on what went on in the Closson rooms—or would not have been, she corrected herself, had Nan St George not spoken of Conchita as her dearest friend. Such a tie did seem to the governess to require vigilance. Miss Closson was herself an unknown quantity, and Lord Richard was one only too well-known to Miss Testvalley. It was therefore not unnatural that, after silence had fallen on the long corridors of the hotel, the governess, finding sleep impossible in her small suffocating room, should put out her candle, and gaze across from her window at that from which she had seen Conchita lean.

  Light still streamed from it, though midnight was past, and presently came laughter, and the twang of Santos-Dios’s guitar, and a burst of youthful voices joining in song. Was her pupil’s among them? Miss Testvalley could not be sure; but soon, detaching itself from Teddy de Santos-Dios’s reedy tenor, she caught the hoarse barytone of another voice.

  Imprudent children! It was bad enough to be gathered at that hour in a room with a young man and a guitar; but at least the young man was Miss Closson’s brother, and Miss Testvalley had noticed, at the supper-table, much exchan
ge of civilities between the St Georges and the Clossons. But Richard Marable—that was inexcusable, that was scandalous! The hotel would be ringing with it tomorrow…

  Ought not Miss Testvalley to find some pretext for knocking at Conchita’s door, gathering her charges back to safety, and putting it in their power to say that their governess had assisted at the little party? Her first impulse was to go; but governesses who act on first impulses seldom keep their places. “As long as there’s so much noise,” she thought, “there can’t be any mischief…” and at that moment, in a pause of the singing, she caught Nan’s trill of little-girl laughter. Miss Testvalley started up, and went to her door; but once more she drew back. Better wait and see—interfering might do more harm than good. If only some exasperated neighbour did not ring to have the rejoicings stopped!

  At length music and laughter subsided. Silence followed. Miss Testvalley, drawing an austere purple flannel garment over her night-dress, unbolted her door and stole out into the passage. Where it joined the main corridor she paused and waited. A door had opened half way down the corridor—Conchita’s door—and the governess saw a flutter of light dresses, and heard subdued laughter and good nights. Both the St George and Elmsworth families were lodged below, and in the weak glimmer of gas she made sure of four girls hurrying toward her wing. She drew back hastily. Glued to her door she listened, and heard a heavy but cautious step passing by, and a throaty voice humming “Champagne Charlie”. She drew a breath of relief, and sat down before her glass to finish her toilet for the night.

  Her hair carefully waved on its pins, her evening prayer recited, she slipped into bed and blew out the light. But still sleep did not come, and she lay in the sultry darkness and listened, she hardly knew for what. At last she heard the same heavy step returning cautiously, passing her door, gaining once more the main corridor—the step she would have known in a thousand, the step she used to listen for at Allfriars after midnight, groping down the long passage to the governess’s room.

  She started up. Forgetful of crimping-pins and bare feet, she opened her door again. The last flicker of gas had gone out, and secure in the blackness she crept after the heavy step to the corner. It sounded ahead of her half way down the long row of doors; then it stopped, a door opened… and Miss Testvalley turned back on leaden feet…

  Nothing of that fugitive adventure at Allfriars had ever been known. Of that she was certain. An ill-conditioned youth, the boon companion of his father’s grooms, and a small brown governess, ten years his elder, and known to be somewhat curt and distant with every one except her pupils and their parents—who would ever have thought of associating the one with the other? The episode had been brief; the peril was soon over; and when, the very same year, Lord Richard was solemnly banished from his father’s house, it was not because of his having once or twice stolen down the school-room passage at undue hours; but for reasons so far more deplorable that poor Lady Brightlingsea, her reserve utterly broken down, had sobbed out on Miss Testvalley’s breast: “Anything, anything else I know his father would have forgiven.” (Miss Testvalley wondered…)

  

  VI.

  When Colonel St George bought his house in Madison Avenue it seemed to him fit to satisfy the ambitions of any budding millionaire. That it had been built and decorated by one of the Tweed ring, who had come to grief earlier than his more famous fellow-criminals, was to Colonel St George convincing proof that it was a suitable setting for wealth and elegance. But social education is acquired rapidly in New York, even by those who have to absorb it through the cracks of the sacred edifice; and Mrs. St George had already found out that no one lived in Madison Avenue, that the front hall should have been painted Pompeian red with a stencilled frieze, and not with naked Cupids and humming birds on a sky-blue ground, and that basement dining-rooms were unknown to the fashionable. So much she had picked up almost at once from Jinny and Jinny’s school-friends; and when she called on Mrs. Parmore to enquire about the English governess, the sight of the Parmore house, small and simple as it was, completed her disillusionment.

  But it was too late to change. The Colonel, who was insensitive to details, continued to be proud of his house; even when the Elmsworths, suddenly migrating from Brooklyn, had settled themselves in Fifth Avenue he would not admit his mistake, or feel the humiliation of the contrast. And yet what a difference it made to a lady to be able to say “Fifth Avenue” in giving her address to Black, Starr and Frost, or to Mrs. Connelly, the fashionable dress-maker! In establishments like that they classed their customers at once, and “Madison Avenue” stood at best for a decent mediocrity.

  Mrs. St George at first ascribed to this unfortunate locality her failure to make a social situation for her girls; yet after the Elmsworths had come to Fifth Avenue she noted with satisfaction that Lizzy and Mabel were not asked out much more than Virginia. Of course Mr. Elmsworth was an obstacle; and so was Mrs. Elsmworth’s laugh. It was difficult—it was even painful—to picture the Elmsworths dining at the Parmores’ or the Eglintons’. But the St Georges did not dine there either. And the question of ball-going was almost as discouraging. One of the young men whom the girls had met at Saratoga had suggested to Virginia that he might get her a card for the first Assembly; but Mrs. St George, when sounded, declined indignantly, for she knew that in the best society girls did not go to balls without their parents.

  These subscription balls were a peculiar source of bitterness to Mrs. St George. She could not understand how her daughters could be excluded from entertainment for which one could buy a ticket. She knew all about the balls from her hair-dresser, the celebrated Katie Wood. Katie did everybody’s hair, and innocently planted dagger after dagger in Mrs. St George’s anxious breast by saying: “If you and Jinny want me next Wednesday week for the first Assembly you’d better say so right off, because I’ve got every minute bespoke already from three o’clock on”, or: “If you’re invited to the opening night of the Opera, I might try the new chignon with the bunch of curls on the left shoulder”, or worse still: “I suppose Jinny belongs to the Thursday Evening Dances, don’t she? The débutantes are going to wear wreaths of apple-blossom or rose-buds a good deal this winter—or forget-me-not would look lovely, with her eyes.”

  Lovely, indeed. But if Virginia had not been asked to belong, and if Mrs. St George had vainly tried to have her own name added to the list of the Assembly balls, or to get a box for the opening night of the Opera, what was there to do but to say indifferently: “Oh, I don’t know if we shall be here—the Colonel’s thinking a little of carrying us off to Florida if he can get away…” knowing all the while how much the hair-dresser believed of that excuse, and also aware that, in speaking of Miss Eglinton and Miss Parmore, Katie did not call them by their Christian names…

  Mrs. St George could not understand why she was subjected to this cruel ostracism. The Colonel knew everybody—that is, all the gentlemen he met down town, or at his clubs, and he belonged to many clubs. Their dues were always having to be paid, even when the butcher and the grocer were clamouring. He often brought gentlemen home to dine, and gave them the best champagne and Madeira in the cellar; and they invited him back, but never included Mrs. St George and Virginia in their invitations.

  It was small comfort to learn one day that Jinny and Nan had been invited to act as Conchita Closson’s bridesmaids. She thought it unnatural that the Clossons, who were strangers in New York, and still camping at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, should be marrying their daughter before Virginia was led to the altar. And then the bridegroom!—well, everybody knew that he was only a younger son, and that in England, even in the great aristocratic families, younger sons were of small account unless they were clever enough to make their own way—an ambition which seemed never to have troubled Dick Marable. Moreover, there were dark rumours about him, reports of warning discreetly transmitted through the British Legation in Washington, and cruder tales among the clubs. Still, nothing could alter the fact that Lord Richar
d Marable was the son of the Marquess of Brightlingsea, and that his mother had been a Duke’s daughter—and who knows whether the Eglintons and Parmores, though they thanked heaven their dear girls would never be exposed to such risks, were not half envious of the Clossons? But then there was the indecent haste of it. The young people had met for the first time in August; and they were to be married in November! In good society it was usual for a betrothal to last at least a year; and among the Eglintons and Parmores even that time-allowance was thought to betray an undue haste. “The young people should be given time to get to know each other,” the mothers of Fifth Avenue decreed; and Mrs. Parmore told Miss Testvalley, when the latter called to pay her respects to her former employer, that she for her part hoped her daughter would never consent to an engagement of less than two years. “But I suppose, dear Miss Testvalley, that among the people you’re with now there are no social traditions.”

  “None except those they are making for themselves,” Miss Testvalley was tempted to rejoin; but that would not have been what she called a “governess’s answer”, and she knew a governess should never be more on her guard than when conversing with a former employer. Especially, Miss Testvalley thought, when the employer had a long nose with a slight droop, and pale lips like Mrs. Parmore’s. She murmured that there were business reasons, she understood; Mr. Closson was leaving shortly for Brazil.

  “Ah, so they say. But of course, the rumours one hears about this young man… a son of Lord Brightlingsea’s, I understand? But, Miss Testvalley, you were with the Brightlingseas; you must have known him?”