Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  Most amusing of all is to watch our good Blanche, her faithful daughters, and her other guests, struggling with the strange beings suddenly thrust upon them. Your little friend (the only one with whom one can converse, by the way) told me that when Lady Brightlingsea heard of Dick Marable’s engagement to the Brazilian beauty she cabled to the St Georges’ governess: “Is she black?” Well, the attitude of Longlands toward its transatlantic guests is not much more enlightened than Selina Brightlingsea’s. Their bewilderment is so great that, when one of the girls spoke of archery clubs being fashionable in the States, somebody blurted out: “I suppose the Indians taught you?”; and I am constantly expecting them to ask Mrs. St George how she heats her wigwam in winter.

  The only exceptions are Seadown, who contributes little beyond a mute adoration of the beauty, and—our host, young Tintagel. Strange to say, he seems curiously alert and informed about his American visitors; so much so that I’m wondering if his including them in the party is due only to a cousinly regard for Seadown. My short study of the case has almost convinced me that his motives are more interested. His mother, of course, has no suspicion of this—when did our Blanche ever begin to suspect anything until it was emblazoned across the heavens? The first thing she said to me (in explaining the presence of the St Georges) was that, since so many of our young eligibles were beginning to make these mad American marriages, she thought that Tintagel should see a few specimens at close quarters. Sancta simplicitas! If this is her object, I fear the specimens are not well-chosen. I suspect that Tintagel had them invited because he’s very nearly, if not quite, in love with the younger girl, and being a sincere believer in the importance of Dukes, wants her family to see what marriage with an English Duke means.

  How far the St Georges are aware of all this, I can’t say. The only one I suspect of suspecting it is the young Annabel; but these Americans, under their forth-coming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath. At any rate the young lady seems to understand something of her environment, which is a sealed book to the others. She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though some one had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle. I fancy the sower is the little brown governess of whom you spoke (her pupil says she is little and brown). Miss Annabel asks so many questions about English life in town and country, about rules, customs, traditions, and their why and wherefore, that I sometimes wonder if she is not preparing for a leading part on the social stage; then a glimpse of utter simplicity dispels the idea, and I remember that all her country-people are merciless questioners, and conclude that she has the national habit, but exercises it more intelligently than the others. She is intensely interested in the history of this house, and has an emotional sense at least of its beauties; perhaps the little governess—that odd descendant of old Testavaglia’s—has had a hand in developing this side also of her pupil’s intelligence.

  Miss Annabel seems to be devoted to this Miss Testvalley, who is staying on with the family though both girls are out, and one on the brink of marriage, and who is apparently their guide in the world of fashion—odd as such a rôle seems for an Italian revolutionary. But I understood she had learned her way about the great world as governess in the Brightlingsea and Tintagel households. Her pupil, by the way, tells me that Miss Testvalley knows all about the circumstances in which my D. G. Rossetti was painted, and knows also the mysterious replica with variants which is still in D.G.’s possession, and which he has never been willing to show me. The girl, the afternoon she came to Honourslove, apparently looked closely enough at my picture to describe it in detail to her governess, who says that in the replica the embroidered border of the cloak is peach-coloured instead of blue…

  All this has stirred up the old collector in me, and when the St Georges go to Allfriars, where they have been asked to stay before the wedding, Miss Annabel has promised to try to have the governess invited, and to bring her to Honourslove to see the picture. What a pity you won’t be there to welcome theml The girl’s account of the Testavaglia and her family excites my curiosity almost as much as this report about the border of the cloak.

  After the above, which reads, I flatter myself, not unlike a page of Saint Simon, the home chronicle will seem tamer than ever. Mrs. Bolt has again upset everything in my study by having it dusted. The chestnut mare has foaled, and we’re getting on with the ploughing. We are having too much rain—but when haven’t we too much rain in England? The new grocer at Little Ausprey threatens to leave, because he says his wife and the non-conformist minister—but there, you always pretend to hate village scandals, and as I have, for the moment, none of my own to tempt your jaded palate, I will end this confession of an impenitent but blameless parent.

  Your aff”

  H.T.

  P.S. The good Blanche asked anxiously about you—your health, plans and prospects, the probable date of your return; and I told her I would give a good deal to know myself. Do you suppose she has her eye on you for Ermie or Almina? Seadown’s defection was a hard blow; and if I’m right about Tintagel, Heaven help her!

  

  Book III.

  XIX.

  The windows of the Correggio room at Longlands overlooked what was known as the Duchess’s private garden, a floral masterpiece designed by the great Sir Joseph Paxton, of Chatsworth and Crystal Palace fame. Beyond an elaborate cast-iron fountain swarmed over by chaste divinities, and surrounded by stars and crescents of bedding plants, an archway in the wall of yew and holly led down a grass avenue to the autumnal distances of the home park. Mist shrouded the slopes dotted with mighty trees, the bare woodlands, the lake pallidly reflecting a low uncertain sky. Deer flitted spectrally from glade to glade, and on remoter hill-sides blurred clusters of sheep and cattle were faintly visible. It had rained heavily in the morning, it would doubtless rain again before night; and in the Correggio room the drip of water sounded intermittently from the long reaches of roof-gutter and from the creepers against the many-windowed house-front.

  The Duchess, at the window, stood gazing out over what seemed a measureless perspective of rain-sodden acres. Then, with a sigh, she turned back to the writing-table and took up her pen. A sheet of paper lay before her, carefully inscribed in a small precise hand:

  To a Dowager Duchess.

  To a Duchess.

  To a Marchioness.

  To the wife of a Cabinet Minister who has no rank by birth.

  To the wife of a Bishop.

  To an Ambassador.

  The page was inscribed: “Important”, and under each head-line was a brief formula for beginning and ending a letter. The Duchess scrutinized this paper attentively; then she glanced over another paper bearing a list of names, and finally, with a sigh, took from a tall mahogany stand a sheet of note-paper with “Longlands House” engraved in gold under a ducal coronet, and began to write.

  After each note she struck a pencil line through one of the names on the list, and then began another note. Each was short, but she wrote slowly, almost laboriously, like a conscientious child copying out an exercise; and at the bottom of the sheet she inscribed her name, after assuring herself once more that the formula preceding her signature corresponded with the instructions before her. At length she reached the last note, verified the formula, and for the twentieth time wrote out underneath: “Annabel Tintagel”.

  There before her, in orderly sequence, lay the invitations to the first big shooting-party of the season at Longlands, and she threw down her pen with another sigh. For a minute or two she sat with her elbows on the desk, her face in her hands; then she uncovered her eyes, and looked again at the note she had just signed.

  “Annabel Tintagel,” she said slowly: “who is Annabel Tintagel?”

  The question was one which she had put to herself more than once during the last months, and the answer was always the same: s
he did not know. Annabel Tintagel was a strange figure with whom she lived, and whose actions she watched with a cold curiosity, but with whom she had never arrived at terms of intimacy, and never would. Of that she was now sure.

  There was another perplexing thing about her situation. She was now, to all appearances, Annabel Tintagel, and had been so for over two years; but before that she had been Annabel St George, and the figure of Annabel St George, her face and voice, her likes and dislikes, her memories and moods, all that made up her tremulous little identity, though still at the new Annabel’s side, no longer composed the central Annabel, the being with whom this strange new Annabel of the Correggio room at Longlands, and the Duchess’s private garden, felt herself really one. There were moments when the vain hunt for her real self became so perplexing and disheartening that she was glad to escape from it into the mechanical duties of her new life. But in the intervals she continued to grope for herself, and to find no one.

  To begin with, what had caused Annabel St George to turn into Annabel Tintagel? That was the central problem! Yet how could she solve it, when she could no longer question that elusive Annabel St George, who was still so near to her, yet as remote and unapproachable as a plaintive ghost?

  Yes—a ghost. That was it. Annabel St George was dead, and Annabel Tintagel did not know how to question the dead, and would therefore never be able to find out why and how that mysterious change had come about…

  “The greatest mistake,” she mused, her chin resting on her clasped hands, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the dim reaches of the park, “the greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things… I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call ‘experience’. But by the time we’ve got that we’re no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.”

  Of course she could have found plenty of external reasons; a succession of incidents, leading, as a trail leads across a desert, from one point to another of the original Annabel’s career. But what was the use of recapitulating these points, when she was no longer the Annabel whom they had led to this splendid and lonely room set in the endless acres of Longlands?

  The curious thing was that her uncertainty and confusion of mind seemed to have communicated themselves to the new world into which she found herself transplanted—and that she was aware of the fact. “They don’t know what to make of me, and why should they, when I don’t know what to make of myself?” she had once said, in an unusual burst of confidence, to her sister Virginia, who had never really understood her confidences, and who had absently rejoined, studying herself while she spoke in her sister’s monumental cheval glass, and critically pinching her waist between thumb and fore-finger: “My dear, I’ve never yet met an Englishman or an Englishwoman who didn’t know what to make of a Duchess, if only they had the chance to try. The trouble is you don’t give them the chance.”

  Yes; Annabel supposed it was that. Fashionable London had assimilated with surprising rapidity the lovely transatlantic invaders. Hostesses who only two years ago would have shuddered at the clink of tall glasses and the rattle of cards, now threw their doors open to poker-parties, and offered intoxicating drinks to those to whom the new-fangled afternoon tea seemed too reminiscent of the school-room. Hands trained to draw from a Broadwood the dulcet cadences of “La Sonnambula” now thrummed the banjo to “Juanita” or “The Swanee River”. Girls, and even young matrons, pinned up their skirts to compete with the young men in the new game of lawn-tennis on lordly lawns, smoking was spreading from the precincts reserved for it to dining-room and library (it was even rumoured that “the Americans” took sly whiffs in their bedrooms!), Lady Seadown was said to be getting up an amateur nigger-minstrel performance for the Christmas party at Allfriars, and as for the wild games introduced into country-house parties, there was no denying that, even after a hard day’s hunting or shooting, they could tear the men from their after-dinner torpor.

  A blast of outer air had freshened the stagnant atmosphere of Belgravian drawing-rooms, and while some sections of London society still shuddered (or affected to shudder) at “the Americans”, others, and the uppermost among them, openly applauded and imitated them. But in both groups the young Duchess of Tintagel remained a figure apart. The Dowager Duchess spoke of her as “my perfect daughter-in-law”, but praise from the Dowager Duchess had about as much zest as a Sunday-school diploma. In the circle where the pace was set by Conchita Marable, Virginia Seadown and Lizzy Elmsworth (now married to the brilliant young Conservative member of Parliament, Mr. Hector Robinson), the circle to which, by kinship and early associations, Annabel belonged, she was as much a stranger as in the straitest fastnesses of the peerage. “Annabel has really managed,” Conchita drawled with her slow smile, “to be considered unfashionable among the unfashionable—” and the phrase clung to the young Duchess, and catalogued her once for all.

  One side of her loved, as much as the others did, dancing, dressing up, midnight romps, practical jokes played on the pompous and elderly; but the other side, the side which had dominated her since her arrival in England, was passionately in earnest and beset with vague dreams and ambitions, in which a desire to better the world alternated with a longing for solitude and poetry.

  If her husband could have kept her company in either of these regions she might not have given a thought to the rest of mankind. But in the realm of poetry the Duke had never willingly risked himself since he had handed up his Vale at Eton, and a great English nobleman of his generation could hardly conceive that he had anything to learn regarding the management of his estates from a little American girl whose father appeared to be a cross between a stock-broker and a professional gambler, and whom he had married chiefly because she seemed too young and timid to have any opinions on any subject whatever.

  “The great thing is that I shall be able to form her,” he had said to his mother, on the dreadful day when he had broken the news of his engagement to the horrified Duchess; and the Duchess had replied, with a flash of unwonted insight: “You’re very skilful, Ushant; but women are not quite as simple as clocks.”

  As simple as clocks. How like a woman to say that! The Duke smiled. “Some clocks are not at all simple,” he said with an air of superior knowledge.

  “Neither are some women,” his mother rejoined; but there both thought it prudent to let the discussion drop.

  Annabel stood up and looked about the room. It was large and luxurious, with walls of dark green velvet framed in heavily carved and gilded oak. Everything about its decoration and furnishings—the towering malachite vases, the ponderous writing-table supported on winged geniuses in ormolu, the heavily foliaged wall-lights, the Landseer portrait, above the monumental chimney-piece, of her husband as a baby, playing with an elder sister in a tartan sash—all testified to a sumptuous “re-doing”, doubtless dating from the day when the present Dowager had at last presented her lord with an heir. A stupid oppressive room—somebody else’s room, not Annabel’s… But on three of the velvet-panelled walls hung the famous Correggios; in the half-dusk of an English November they were like rents in the clouds, tunnels of radiance reaching to pure sapphire distances. Annabel looked at the golden limbs, the parted lips gleaming with laughter, the abandonment of young bodies under shimmering foliage. On dark days—and there were many—these pictures were her sunlight. She speculated about them, wove stories around them, and hung them with snatches of verse from Miss Testvalley’s poet-cousin. How was it they went?

  Beyond all depth away

  The heat lies silent at the brink of day:

  Now the hand trails upon the viol-string

  That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,

  Sad with the whole of pleasure.

  Were there such beings anywhere, she wondered, save in the dreams of poets and painters, such landscapes, such sunlight? The Correggio room had always been the reigning Duchess
’s private boudoir, and at first it had surprised Annabel that her mother-in-law should live surrounded by scenes before which Mrs. St George would have veiled her face. But gradually she understood that in a world as solidly buttressed as the Dowager Duchess’s by precedents, institutions and traditions, it would have seemed far more subversive to displace the pictures than to hear the children’s Sunday-school lessons under the laughter of those happy pagans. The Correggio room had always been the Duchess’s boudoir, and the Correggios had always hung there. “It has always been like that,” was the Dowager’s invariable answer to any suggestion of change; and she had conscientiously brought up her son in the same creed.

  Though she had been married for over two years it was for her first big party at Longlands that the new Duchess was preparing. The first months after her marriage had been spent at Tintagel, in a solitude deeply disapproved of by the Duke’s mother, who for the second time found herself powerless to influence her son. The Duke gave himself up with a sort of dogged abandonment to the long dreamed-of delights of solitude and domestic bliss. The ducal couple (as the Dowager discovered with dismay, on her first visit to them) lived like any middle-class husband and wife, tucked away in a wing of the majestic pile where two butlers and ten footmen should have been drawn up behind the dinner-table, and a groom-of-the-chambers have received the guests in the great hall. Groom-of-the-chambers, butlers and footmen had all been relegated to Longlands, and to his mother’s dismay only two or three personal servants supplemented the understudies who had hitherto sufficed for Tintagel’s simple needs on his trips to Cornwall.