Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  But Annabel gradually learned that it was not only one’s self that changed. The ceaseless mysterious flow of days wore down and altered the shape of the people nearest one, so that one seemed fated to be always a stranger among strangers. The mere fact, for instance, of Annabel St George’s becoming Annabel Tintagel had turned her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Tintagel, into a Dowager Duchess, over whose diminished head the mighty roof of Longlands had shrunk into the modest shelter of a lovely little rose-clad dower-house at the gates of the park. And every one else, as far as Annabel’s world reached, seemed to have changed in the same way.

  That, at times, was the most perplexing part of it. When, for instance, the new Annabel tried to think herself back on to the verandah of the Grand Union Hotel, waiting for her father and his stock-broker friends to return from the races, or in the hotel ball-room with the red damask curtains, dancing with her sister, with Conchita Closson and the Elmsworth girls, or with the obscure and infrequent young men who now and then turned up to partner their wasted loveliness—when she thought, for instance, of Roy Gilling, and the handkerchief she had dropped, and he had kissed and hidden in his pocket—it was like looking at the flickering figures of the magic lanterns she used to see at children’s parties. What was left, now, of those uncertain apparitions, and what relation, say, did the Conchita Closson who had once seemed so ethereal and elusive, bear to Lady Dick Marable, beautiful still, though she was growing rather too stout, but who had lost her lovely indolence and detachment, and was now perpetually preoccupied about money, and immersed in domestic difficulties and clandestine consolations; or to Virginia, her own sister Virginia, who had seemed to Annabel so secure, so aloof, so disdainful of everything but her own pleasures, but who, as Lady Seadown, was enslaved to that dull half-asleep Seadown, absorbed in questions of rank and precedence, and in awe—actually in awe—of her father-in-law’s stupid arrogance, and of Lady Brightlingsea’s bewildered condescensions?

  Yes; changed, every one of them, vanished out of recognition, as the lost Annabel of the Grand Union had vanished. As she looked about her, the only figures which seemed to have preserved their former outline were those of her father and his business friends; but that, perhaps, was because she so seldom saw them, because when they appeared, at long intervals, for a hurried look at transatlantic daughters and grandchildren, they brought New York with them, solidly and loudly, remained jovially unconscious of any change of scene and habits greater than that between the east and west shores of the Hudson, and hurried away again, leaving behind them cheques and christening mugs, and unaware to the last that they had been farther from Wall Street than across the ferry.

  Ah, yes—and Laura Testvalley, her darling old Val! She too had remained her firm sharp-edged self. But then she too was usually away, she had not suffered the erosion of daily contact. The real break with the vanished Annabel had come, the new Annabel sometimes thought, when Miss Testvalley, her task at the St Georges’ ended, had vanished into the seclusion of another family which required “finishing”. Miss Testvalley, since she had kissed the bride after the great Tintagel wedding, nearly three years ago, had re-appeared only at long intervals, and as it were under protest. It was one of her principles—as she had often told Annabel—that a governess should not hang about her former pupils. Later they might require her—there was no knowing, her subtle smile implied; but once the school-room was closed, she should vanish with the tattered lesson-books, the dreary school-room food, the cod-liver oil and the chilblain cures.

  Perhaps, Annabel thought, if her beloved Val had remained with her, they might between them have rescued the old Annabel, or at least kept up communications with her ghost—a faint tap now and then against the walls which had built themselves up about the new Duchess. But as it was, there was the new Duchess isolated in her new world, no longer able to reach back to her past, and not having yet learned how to communicate with her present.

  She roused herself from these vain musings, and took up her pen. A final glance at the list had shown her that one invitation had been forgotten—or, if not forgotten, at least postponed.

  Dear Mr. Thwarte,

  The Duke tells me you have lately come back to England, and he hopes so much that you can come to Longlands for our next shooting-party, on the 18th. He asks me to say that he is anxious to have a talk with you about the situation at Lowdon. He hopes you intend to stand if Sir Hercules Loft is obliged to resign, and wishes you to know that you will have his full support.

  Yours sincerely

  Annabel Tintagel

  Underneath she added: “P.S. Perhaps you’d remember me if I signed Nan St George.” But what was the sense of that, when there was no longer any one of that name? She tore the note up, and re-wrote it without adding the postscript.

  

  XXI.

  Guy Thwarte had not been back at Honourslove long enough to expect a heavy mail beside his breakfast plate. His four years in Brazil had cut him off more completely than he had realized from his former life; and he was still in the somewhat painful stage of picking up the threads.

  “Only one letter? Lucky devil, I envy you!” grumbled Sir Helmsley, taking his seat at the other end of the table and impatiently pushing aside a stack of newspapers, circulars and letters.

  The young man glanced with a smile at his father’s correspondence. He knew so well of what it consisted: innumerable bills, dunning letters, urgent communications from book-makers, tradesmen, the chairman of political committees or art-exhibitions, scented notes from enamoured ladies, or letters surmounted by mysterious symbols from astrologers, palmists or alchemists—for Sir Helmsley had dabbled in most of the arts, and bent above most of the mysteries. But today, as usual, his son observed, the bills and the dunning letters predominated. Guy would have to put some order into that; and probably into the scented letters too.

  “Yes, I’m between two worlds yet—’powerless to be born’ kind of feeling,” he said as he took up the solitary note beside his own plate. The writing was unknown to him, and he opened the envelope with indifference.

  “Oh, my dear fellow—don’t say that; don’t say ‘powerless’,” his father rejoined, half-pleadingly, but with a laugh. “There’s such a lot waiting to be done; we all expect you to put your hand to the plough without losing a minute. I was lunching at Longlands the other day and had a long talk with Ushant. With old Sir Hercules Loft in his dotage for the last year, there’s likely to be a vacancy at Lowdon at any minute, and the Duke’s anxious to have you look over the ground without losing any time, especially as that new millionaire from Glasgow is said to have some chance of getting in.”

  “Oh, well—” Guy was glancing over his letter while his father spoke. He knew Sir Helmsley’s great desire was to see him in the House of Commons, an ambition hitherto curbed by the father’s reduced fortune, but brought into the foreground again since the son’s return from exile with a substantial bank account.

  Guy looked up from his letter. “Tintagel’s been talking to you about it, I see.”

  “You see? Why—has he written to you already?”

  “No. But she has. The new American Duchess—the little girl I brought here once, you remember?” He handed the letter to his father, whose face expressed a growing satisfaction as he read.

  “Well—that makes it plain sailing. You’ll go to Longlands, of course?”

  “To Longlands?” Guy hesitated. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to.”

  “But if Tintagel wants to see you about the seat? You ought to look over the ground. There may not be much time to lose.”

  “Not if I’m going to stand—certainly.”

  “If!” shouted Sir Helmsley, bringing down his fist with a crash that set the Crown Derby cups dancing. “Is that what you’re not sure of? I thought we were agreed before you went away that it was time there was a Thwarte again in the House of Commons.”

  “Oh—before I went away,” Guy murmured. His father’s challenge,
calling him back suddenly to his old life, the traditional life of a Thwarte of Honourslove, had shown him for the first time how far from it all he had travelled in the last years, how remote had become the old sense of inherited obligations which had once seemed the very marrow of his bones.

  “Now you’ve made your pile, as they say out there,” Sir Helmsley continued, attempting a lighter tone, but unable to disguise his pride in the incredible fact of his son’s achievement—a Thwarte who had made money!—“now that you’ve made your pile, isn’t it time to think of a career? In my simplicity, I imagined it was one of your principal reasons for exiling yourself.”

  “Yes; I suppose it was,” Guy acquiesced.

  After this, for a while, father and son faced one another in silence across the breakfast-table, each, as is the way of the sensitive, over-conscious of the other’s thoughts. Guy, knowing so acutely what was expected of him, was vainly struggling to become again the young man who had left England four years earlier; but strive as he would he could not yet fit himself into his place in the old scheme of things. The truth was, he was no longer the Guy Thwarte of four years ago, and would probably never recover that lost self. The break had been too violent, the disrupting influences too powerful. Those dark rich stormy years of exile lay like a raging channel between himself and his old life, and his father’s summons only drove him back upon himself.

  “You’ll have to give me time, sir—I seem to be on both sides of the globe at once,” he muttered at length with bent head.

  Sir Helmsley stood up abruptly, and walking around the table laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “My dear fellow, I’m so sorry. It seems so natural to have you back that I’d forgotten the roots you’ve struck over there… I’d forgotten the grave…”

  Guy’s eyes darkened, and he nodded. “All right, sir…” He stood up also. “I think I’ll take a turn about the stables.” He put the letter from Longlands into his pocket, and walked out alone onto the terrace. As he stood there, looking out over the bare November landscape, and the soft blue hills fading into a low sky, the sense of kinship between himself and the soil began to creep through him once more. What a power there was in these accumulated associations, all so low-pitched, soft and unobtrusive, yet which were already insinuating themselves through his stormy Brazilian years, and sapping them of their reality! He felt himself becoming again the school-boy who used to go nutting in the hazel-copses of the Red Farm, who fished and bathed in the dark pools of the Love, stole nectarines from the walled gardens, and went cub-hunting in the autumn dawn with his father, glorying in Sir Helmsley’s horsemanship, and racked with laughter at his jokes—the school-boy whose heart used to beat to bursting at that bend of the road from the station where you first sighted the fluted chimney-stacks of Honourslove.

  He walked across the terrace, and turning the flank of the house passed under the sculptured lintel of the chapel. A smell of autumn rose from the cold paving, where the kneeling Thwartes elbowed each other on the narrow floor, and under the recumbent effigies the pillows almost mingled their stony fringes. How many there were, and how faithfully hand had joined hand in the endless work of enlarging and defending the family acres! Guy’s glance travelled slowly down the double line, from the armoured effigy of the old fighting Thwarte who had built the chapel to the Thornycroft image of his own mother, draped in her marble slumber, just as the boy had seen her, lying with drawn lids, on the morning when his father’s telegram had called him back from Eton. How many there were—and all these graves belonged to him, all were linked to the same soil and to one another in an old community of land and blood; together for all time, and kept warm by each other’s nearness. And that far-off grave which also belonged to him—the one to which his father had alluded—how remote and lonely it was, off there under tropic skies, among other graves that were all strange to him!

  He sat down and rested his face against the back of the bench in front of him. The sight of his mother’s grave had called up that of his young Brazilian wife, and he wanted to shut out for a moment all those crowding Thwartes, and stand again beside her far-off headstone. What would life at Honourslove have been if he had brought Paquita home with him instead of leaving her among the dazzling white graves at Rio? He sat for a long time, thinking, remembering, trying to strip his mind of conventions and face the hard reality underneath. It was inconceivable to him now that, in the first months of his marriage, he had actually dreamed of severing all ties with home, and beginning life anew as a Brazilian mine-owner. He saw that what he had taken for a slowly matured decision had been no more than a passionate impulse; and its resemblance to his father’s headlong experiments startled him as he looked back. His mad marriage had nearly deflected the line of his life—for a little pale face with ebony hair and curving black lashes he would have sold his birth-right. And long before the black lashes had been drawn down over the quiet eyes he had known that he had come to the end of that adventure…

  All his life, and especially since his mother’s death, Guy Thwarte had been fighting against his admiration for his father, and telling himself that it was his duty to be as little like him as possible; yet more than once he had acted exactly as Sir Helmsley would have acted, or snatched himself back just in time. But in Brazil he had not been in time…

  “One brilliant man’s enough in a family,” he said to himself as he stood up and left the chapel.

  Forgetting his projected visit to the stables, he turned back to the house, and crossing the hall, opened the door of his father’s study. There he found Sir Helmsley seated at his easel, re-touching a delicately drawn water-colour copy of the little Rossetti Madonna above his desk. Sir Helmsley, whose own work was incurably amateurish, excelled in the art of copying, or rather interpreting, the work of others; and his water-colour glowed with the deep brilliance of the original picture.

  As his son entered he laid down his palette with an embarrassed laugh. “Well, what do you think of it—eh?”

  “Beautiful. I’m glad you’ve not given up your painting.”

  “Eh—? Oh, well, I don’t do much of it nowadays. But I’d promised this little thing to Miss Testvalley,” the baronet stammered, reddening handsomely above his auburn beard.

  Guy echoed, bewildered: “Miss Testvalley?”

  Sir Helmsley coughed and cleared his throat. “That governess, you know—or perhaps you don’t. She was with the little new Duchess of Tintagel before her marriage; came here with her one day to see my Rossettis. She’s Dante Gabriel’s cousin; didn’t I tell you? Remarkable woman—one of the few relations the poet is always willing to see. She persuaded him to sell me a first study of the ‘Bocca Baciata’, and I was doing this as a way of thanking her. She’s with Augusta Glenloe’s girls; I see her occasionally when I go over there.”

  Sir Helsmley imparted this information in a loud, almost challenging voice, as he always did when he had to communicate anything unexpected or difficult to account for. Explaining was a nuisance, and somewhat of a derogation. He resented anything that made it necessary, and always spoke as if his interlocutor ought to have known beforehand the answer to the questions he was putting.

  After his bad fall in the hunting-field, the year before Guy’s return from Brazil, the county had confidently expected that the lonely widower would make an end by marrying either his hospital nurse or the Gaiety girl who had brightened his solitude during his son’s absence. One or the other of these conclusions to a career over-populated by the fair sex appeared inevitable in the case of a brilliant and unsteady widower. Coroneted heads had been frequently shaken over what seemed a foregone conclusion; and Guy had shared these fears. And behold, on his return, he found the nurse gone, the Gaiety girl expensively pensioned off, and the baronet, slightly lame, but with youth renewed by six months of enforced seclusion, apparently absorbed in a little brown governess who wore violet poplin and heavy brooches of Roman mosaic, but who (as Guy was soon to observe) had eyes like torches, and masses of curly-e
dged dark hair which she was beginning to braid less tightly, and to drag back less severely from her broad forehead.

  Guy stood looking curiously at his father. The latter’s bluster no longer disturbed him; but he was uncomfortably reminded of certain occasions when Sir Helmsley, on the brink of an imprudent investment or an impossible marriage, had blushed and explained with the same volubility. Could this outbreak be caused by one of the same reasons? But no! A middle-aged governess? It was unthinkable. Sir Helmsley had always abhorred the edifying, especially in petticoats; and with his strong well-knit figure, his handsome auburn head, and a complexion clear enough for blushes, he still seemed, in spite of his accident, built for more alluring prey. His real interest, Guy concluded, was no doubt in the Rossetti kinship, and all that it offered to his insatiable imagination. But it made the son wonder anew what other mischief his inflammable parent had been up to during his own long absence. It would clearly be part of his business to look into his father’s sentimental history, and keep a sharp eye on his future. With these thoughts in his mind, Guy stood smiling down paternally on his father.

  “Well, sir, it’s all right,” he said. “I’ve thought it over, and I’ll go to Longlands; when the time comes I’ll stand for Lowdon.”

  His father returned the look with something filial and obedient in his glance. “My dear fellow, it’s all right indeed. That’s what I’ve always expected of you.”

  Guy wandered out again, drawn back to the soil of Honourslove as a sailor is drawn to the sea. He would have liked to go over all its acres by himself, yard by yard, inch by inch, filling his eyes with the soft slumbrous beauty, his hands with the feel of wrinkled tree-boles, the roughness of sodden autumnal turf, his nostrils with the wine-like smell of dead leaves. The place was swathed in folds of funereal mist shot with watery sunshine, and he thought of all the quiet women who had paced the stones of the terrace on autumn days, worked over the simple-garden and among the roses, or sat in the oak parlour at their accounts or their needle-work, speaking little, thinking much, dumb and nourishing as the heaps of faded leaves which mulched the soil for coming seasons.