Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  Most of this was beyond Mrs. St George’s grasp; but the gist of it was consoling, and even flattering. After all, if it was the kind of life Jinny wanted, and if even poor Conchita, and that wretched Jacky March, who’d been so cruelly treated, agreed that London was worth the price—well, Mrs. St George supposed it must be; and anyhow Mrs. Parmore and Mrs. Eglinton must be rubbing their eyes at this very minute over the announcement of Virginia’s engagement in the New York papers. All that London could give, in rank, in honours, in social glory, was only, to Mrs. St George, a knife to stab New York with—and that weapon she clutched with feverish glee. “If only her father rubs the Brightlingseas into those people he goes with at Newport,” she thought vindictively.

  The bell rung by the Duke tinkled languidly and long before a flurried maid appeared; and the Duke, accustomed to seeing double doors fly open on velvet carpets at his approach, thought how pleasant it would be to live in a cottage with too few servants, and have time to notice that the mat was shabby, and the brass knocker needed polishing.

  Mrs. St George and Mrs. Elmsworth were up in town. Yes, he knew that; but might he perhaps see Miss Testvalley? He muttered his name as if it were a term of obloquy, and the dazzled maid curtsied him into the drawing-room and rushed up to tell the governess.

  “Did you tell his Grace that Miss Annabel was in London too?” Miss Testvalley asked.

  No, the maid replied; but his Grace had not asked for Miss Annabel.

  “Ah—” murmured the governess. She knew her man well enough by this time to be aware that this looked serious. “It was me he asked for?” And the maid, evidently sharing her astonishment, declared that it was.

  “Oh, your Grace, there’s no fire!” Miss Testvalley exclaimed, as she entered the drawing-room a moment later and found her visitor standing close to the icy grate. “No, I won’t ring. I can light a fire at least as well as any house-maid.”

  “Not for me, please,” the Duke protested. “I dislike over-heated rooms.” He continued to stand near the hearth. “The—the fact is, I was just noticing, before you came down, that this clock appears to be losing about five minutes a day; that is, supposing it to be wound on Sunday mornings.”

  “Oh, your Grace—would you come to our rescue? That clock has bothered Mrs. St George and Mrs. Elmsworth ever since we came here—”

  But the Duke had already opened the glass case, and with his ear to the dial was sounding the clock as though it were a human lung. “Ah—I thought so!” he exclaimed in a tone of quiet triumph; and for several minutes he continued his delicate manipulations, watched attentively by Miss Testvalley, who thought: “If ever he nags his wife—and I should think he might be a nagger—she will only have to ask him what’s wrong with the drawing-room clock. And how many clocks there must be, at Tintagel and Longlands and Folyat House!”

  “There—but I’m afraid it ought to be sent to a professional,” said the Duke modestly, taking the seat designated by Miss Testvalley.

  “I’m sure it will be all right. Your Grace is so wonderful with clocks.” The Duke was silent, and Miss Testvalley concluded that doctoring the time-piece had been prompted less by an irrepressible impulse than by the desire to put off weightier matters. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “that there’s no one here to receive you. I suppose the maid told you that our two ladies have taken a house in town for a few weeks, to prepare for Miss St George’s wedding.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of that,” said the Duke, almost solemnly. He cast an anxious glance about him, as if in search of something; and Miss Testvalley thought proper to add: “And your young friend Annabel has gone to London with her sister.”

  “Ah—” said the Duke laboriously.

  He stood up, walked back to the hearth, gazed at the passive face of the clock, and for a moment followed the smooth movement of the hands. Then he turned to Miss Testvalley. “The wedding is to take place soon?”

  “Very soon; in about a month. Colonel St George naturally wants to be present, and business will take him back to New York before December. In fact, it was at first intended that the wedding should take place in New York—”

  “Oh—” murmured the Duke, in the politely incredulous tone of one who implies: “Why attempt such an unheard-of experiment?”

  Miss Testvalley caught his meaning and smiled. “You know Lord and Lady Richard were married in New York. It seems more natural that a girl should be married from her own home.”

  The Duke looked doubtful. “Have they the necessary churches?” he asked.

  “Quite adequate,” said Miss Testvalley drily.

  There was another and heavier silence before the Duke continued: “And does Mrs. St George intend to remain in London, or will she take a house in the country?”

  “Oh, neither. After the wedding Mrs. St George will go to her own house in New York. She will sail immediately with the Colonel.”

  “Immediately—” echoed the Duke. He hesitated. “And Miss Annabel—?”

  “Naturally goes home with her parents. They wish her to have a season in New York.”

  This time the silence closed in so oppressively that it seemed as though it had literally buried her visitor. She felt an impulse to dig him out, but repressed it.

  At length the Duke spoke in a hoarse unsteady voice. “It would be impossible for me—er—to undertake the journey to New York.”

  Miss Testvalley gave him an amused glance. “Oh, it’s settled that Lord Seadown’s wedding is to be in London.”

  “I—I don’t mean Seadown’s. I mean—my own,” said the Duke. He stood up again, walked the length of the room, and came back to her. “You must have seen, Miss Testvalley… It has been a long struggle, but I’ve decided…”

  “Yes?”

  “To ask Miss Annabel St George—”

  Miss Testvalley stood up also. Her heart was stirred with an odd mixture of curiosity and sympathy. She really liked the Duke—but could Annabel ever be brought to like him?

  “And so I came down today, in the hope of consulting with you—”

  Miss Testvalley interrupted him. “Duke, I must remind you that arranging marriages for my pupils is not included in my duties. If you wish to speak to Mrs. St George—”

  “But I don’t!” exclaimed the Duke. He looked so startled that for a moment she thought he was about to turn and take flight. It would have been a relief to her if he had. But he coughed nervously, cleared his throat, and began again.

  “I’ve always understood that in America it was the custom to speak first to the young lady herself. And knowing how fond you are of Miss St George, I merely wished to ask—”

  “Yes, I am very fond of her,” Miss Testvalley said gravely.

  “Quite so. And I wished to ask if you had any idea whether her… her feelings in any degree corresponded with mine,” faltered the anxious suitor.

  Miss Testvalley pondered. What should she say? What could she say? What did she really wish to say? She could not, at the moment, have answered any of these questions; she knew only that, as life suddenly pressed closer to her charge, her impulse was to catch her fast and hold her tight.

  “I can’t reply to that, your Grace. I can only say that I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” repeated the Duke in surprise.

  “Nan in some ways is still a child. She judges many things as a child would—”

  “Yes! That’s what I find so interesting… so unusual…”

  “Exactly. But it makes your question unanswerable. How can one answer for a child who can’t yet answer for herself?”

  The Duke looked crestfallen. “But it’s her childish innocence, her indifference to money and honours and—er—that kind of thing, that I value so immensely…”

  “Yes. But you can hardly regard her as a rare piece for your collection.”

  “I don’t know, Miss Testvalley, why you should accuse me of such ideas…”

  “I don’t accuse you, your Grace. I only want you to understand tha
t Nan is one thing now, but may be another, quite different, thing in a year or two. Sensitive natures alter strangely after their first contact with life.”

  “Ah, but I should make it my business to shield her from every contact with life!”

  “I’m sure you would. But what if Nan turned out to be a woman who didn’t want to be shielded?”

  The Duke’s countenance expressed the most genuine dismay. “Not want to be shielded? I thought you were a friend of hers,” he stammered.

  “I am. A good friend, I hope. That’s why I advise you to wait, to give her time to grow up.”

  The Duke looked at her with a hunted eye, and she suddenly thought: “Poor man! I daresay he’s trying to marry her against some one else. Running away from the fatted heiress… But Nan’s worth too much to be used as an alternative.”

  “To wait? But you say she’s going back to the States immediately.”

  “Well, to wait till she returns to England. She probably will, you know.”

  “Oh, but I can’t wait!” cried the Duke, in the astonished tone of the one who has never before been obliged to.

  Miss Testvalley smiled. “I’m afraid you must say that to Annabel herself, not to me.”

  “I thought you were my friend. I hoped you’d advise me…”

  “You don’t want me to advise you, Duke. You want me to agree with you.”

  The Duke considered this for some time without speaking; then he said: “I suppose you’ve no objection to giving me the London address?” and the governess wrote it down for him with her same disciplined smile.

  

  XVIII.

  Longlands House, October 25

  To Sir Helmsley Thwarte, Bart. Honourslove, Lowdon, Glos.

  My dear Sir Helmsley,

  It seems an age since you have given Ushant and me the pleasure of figuring among the guns at Longlands; but I hope next month you will do us that favour.

  You are, as you know, always a welcome guest; but I will not deny that this year I feel a special need for your presence. I suppose you have heard that Selina Brightlingsea’s eldest boy is marrying an American—so that there will soon be two daughters-in-law of that nationality in the family. I make no comment beyond saying that I fail to see why the virtue and charms of our English girls are not sufficient to satisfy the hearts of our young men. It is useless, I suppose, to argue such matters with the interested parties; one can only hope that when experience has tested the more showy attractions of the young ladies from the States, the enduring qualities of our own daughters will re-assert themselves. Meanwhile I am selfishly glad that it is poor Selina, and not I, on whom such a trial has been imposed.

  But to come to the point. You know Ushant’s exceptionally high standards, especially in family matters, and will not be surprised to hear that he feels we ought to do our cousinly duty toward the Brightlingseas by inviting Seadown, his fiancée, and the latter’s family (a Colonel and Mrs. St George, and a younger daughter), to Longlands. He says it would not matter half as much if Seadown were marrying one of our own kind; and though I do not quite follow this argument, I respect it, as I do all my dear son’s decisions. You see what is before me, therefore; and though you may not share Ushant’s view, I hope your own family feeling will prompt you to come and help me out with all these strange people.

  The shooting is especially good this year, and if you could manage to be with us from the 10th to the 18th of November, Ushant assures me the sport will be worthy of your gun.

  Believe me

  Yours very sincerely

  Blanche Tintagel

  Longlands House, November 15

  To Guy Thwarte Esqre

  Care of the British Consulate General Rio Janeiro

  (To be forwarded)

  My dear Boy,

  Look on the above address and marvel! You who know how many years it is since I have allowed myself to be dragged into a Longlands shooting-party will wonder what can have caused me to succumb at last.

  Well—queerly enough, a sense of duty! I have, as you know, my (rare) moments of self-examination and remorse. One of these penitential phases coincided with Blanche Tintagel’s invitation, and as it was re-inforced by a moving appeal to my tribal loyalty, I thought I ought to respond, and I did. After all, Tintagel is our Duke, and Longlands is our Dukery, and we local people ought all to back each other up in subversive times like these.

  The reason of Blanche’s cry for help will amuse you. Do you remember, one afternoon just before you left for Brazil, having asked me to invite to Honourslove two American young ladies, friends of Lady Dick Marable’s, who were staying at Allfriars? You were so urgent that my apprehensions were aroused; and I imagine rightly. But being softhearted I yielded, and Lady Richard appeared with an enchantress, and the enchantress’s younger sister, who seemed to me totally eclipsed by her elder, though you apparently thought otherwise. I’ve no doubt you will recall the incident.

  Well—Seadown is to marry the beauty, a Miss St George, of New York. Rumours, of course, are rife about the circumstances of the marriage. Seadown is said to have been trapped by a clever manoeuvre; but as this report probably emanates from Lady Churt—the Ariadne in the case—it need not be taken too seriously. We know that American business men are “smart”, but we also know that their daughters are beautiful; and having seen the young lady who has supplanted Ariadne, I have no difficulty in believing that her “beaux yeux” sufficed to let Seadown out of prison—for friends and foes agree that the affair with the relentless Idina had become an imprisonment. They also say that Papa St George is very wealthy, and that consideration must be not without weight—its weight in gold—to the Brightlingseas. I hope they will not be disappointed, but as you know I am no great believer in transatlantic fortunes—though I trust, my dear fellow, that the one you are now amassing is beyond suspicion. Otherwise I should find it hard to forego your company much longer.

  It’s an odd chance that finds me in an atmosphere so different from that of our shabby old house, on the date fixed for the despatch of my monthly chronicle. But I don’t want to miss the South American post, and it may amuse you to have a change from the ordinary small beer of Honourslove. Certainly the contrast is not without interest; and perhaps it strikes me the more because of my disintegrating habit of seeing things through other people’s eyes, so that at this moment I am viewing Longlands, not as a familiar and respected monument, but as the unheard-of and incomprehensible phenomenon that a great English country-seat offers to the unprejudiced gaze of the American backwoodsman and his females. I refer to the St George party, who arrived the day before yesterday, and are still in the first flush of their bewilderment.

  The Duchess and her daughters are of course no less bewildered. They have no conception of a society not based on aristocratic institutions, with Inveraray, Welbeck, Chatsworth, Longlands and so forth as its main supports; and their guests cannot grasp the meaning of such institutions or understand the hundreds of minute observances forming the texture of an old society. This has caused me, for the first time in my life, to see from the outside at once the absurdity and the impressiveness of our great ducal establishments, the futility of their domestic ceremonial, and their importance as custodians of historical tradition and of high (if narrow) social standards. My poor friend Blanche would faint if she knew that I had actually ventured to imagine what an England without Dukes might be, perhaps may soon be; but she would be restored to her senses if she knew that, after weighing the evidence for and against, I have decided that, having been afflicted with Dukes, we’d better keep ’em. I need hardly add that such problems do not trouble the St Georges, who have not yet reached the stage of investigating social origins.

  I can’t imagine how the Duchess and the other ladies deal with Mrs. St George and her daughters during the daily absence of the guns; but I have noticed that American young ladies cannot be kept quiet for an indefinite time by being shown views of Vesuvius and albums of family water-colours. />
  Luckily it’s all right for the men. The shooting has never been better, and Seadown, who is in his element, has had the surprise of finding that his future father-in-law is not precisely out of his. Colonel St George is a good shot; and it is not the least part of the joke that he is decidedly bored by covert shooting, an institution as new to him as dukedoms, and doesn’t understand how a man who respects himself can want to shoot otherwise than over a dog. But he accommodates himself well enough to our effete habits, and is in fact a big good-natured easy-going man, with a kind of florid good looks, too new clothes, and a collection of funny stories, some of which are not new enough.

  As to the ladies, what shall I say? The beauty is a beauty, as I discovered (you may remember) the moment she appeared at Honourslove. She is precisely what she was then: the obvious, the finished exemplar, of what she professes to be. And, as you know, I have always had a preference for the icily regular. Her composure is unshakeable; and under a surface of American animation I imagine she is as passive as she looks. She giggles with the rest, and says: “Oh, girls”, but on her lips such phrases acquire a classic cadence. I suspect her of having a strong will and knowing all the arts of exaction. She will probably get whatever she wants in life, and will give in return only her beautiful profile. I don’t believe her soul has a full face. If I were in Seadown’s place I should probably be as much in love with her as he is. As a rule I don’t care for interesting women; I mean in the domestic relation. I prefer a fine figure-head embodying a beautiful form a solid bulk of usage and conformity. But I own that figure-heads lack conversation…

  Your little friend is not deficient in this respect; and she is also agreeable to look upon. Not beautiful; but there is a subtler form of loveliness, which the unobservant confuse with beauty, and which this young Annabel is on the way to acquire. I say “on the way” because she is still a bundle of engaging possibilities rather than a finished picture. Of the mother there is nothing to say, for that excellent lady evidently requires familiar surroundings to bring out such small individuality as she possesses. In the unfamiliar she becomes invisible; and Longlands and she will never be visible to each other.