Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  “Darling—you’re all alone? Ushant’s not lurking anywhere?” she questioned, peering about the room with an air of mystery.

  Annabel shook her head. “No. He doesn’t often come here before dinner.”

  “Then he’s a very stupid man, my dear,” Lady Dick rejoined, her smile resting approvingly on her hostess. “Nan, do you know how awfully lovely you’re growing? I always used to tell Jinny and the Elmsworths that one of these days you’d beat us all; and I see the day’s approaching…”

  Annabel laughed, and her friend drew back to inspect her critically. “If you’d only burn that alms-house dressing-gown, with the horrid row of horn buttons down the front, which looks as if your mother-in-law had chosen it—ah, she did? To discourage midnight escapades, I suppose? Darling, why don’t you strike, and let me order your clothes for you—and especially your underclothes? It would be a lovely excuse for running over to Paris, and with your order in my pocket I could get the dress-makers to pay all my expenses, and could bring you back a French maid who’d do your hair so that it wouldn’t look like a bun just out of the baking-pan. Oh, Nan—fancy having all you’ve got—the hair and the eyes, and the rank, and the power, and the money..

  Annabel interrupted her. “Oh, but, Conchie, I haven’t got much money.”

  Lady Dick’s smiling face clouded, and her clear gray eyes grew dark. “Now why do you say that? Are you afraid of being asked to help an old friend in a tight place, and do you want to warn me off in advance?”

  Annabel looked at her in surprise. “Oh, Conchita, what a beastly question! It doesn’t sound a bit like you… Do sit down by the fire. You’re shaking all over—why, I believe you’re crying!”

  Annabel put an arm around her friend’s shoulder, and drew her down into an armchair near the hearth, pulling up a low stool for herself, and leaning against Lady Dick’s knee with low sounds of sympathy. “Tell me, Conchie darling—what’s wrong?”

  “Oh, my child, pretty nearly everything.” Drawing out a scrap of lace and cambric, Lady Dick applied it to her beautiful eyes; but the tears continued to flow, and Annabel had to wait till they had ceased. Then Lady Dick, tossing back her tumbled curls, continued with a rainbow smile: “But what’s the use? They’re all things you wouldn’t understand. What do you know about being head over ears in debt, and in love with one man while you’re tied to another—tied tight in one of these awful English marriages, that strangle you in a noose when you try to pull away from them?”

  A little shiver ran over Annabel. What indeed did she know of these things? And how much could she admit to Conchita—or for that matter to any one—that she did know? Something sealed her lips, made it, for the moment, impossible even to murmur the sympathy she longed to speak out. She was benumbed, and could only remain silent, pressing Conchita’s hands, and deafened by the reverberation of Conchita’s last words: “These awful English marriages, that strangle you in a noose when you try to pull away from them.” If only Conchita had not put that into words!

  “Well, Nan—I suppose now I’ve horrified you past forgiveness,” Lady Dick continued, breaking into a nervous laugh. “You never imagined things of that sort could happen to anybody you knew, did you? I suppose Miss Testvalley told you that only wicked Queens in history books had lovers. That’s what they taught us at school… In real life everything ended at the church door, and you just went on having babies and being happy ever after—eh?”

  “Oh, Conchie, Conchie,” Nan murmured, flinging her arms about her friend’s neck. She felt suddenly years older than Conchita, and mistress of the bitter lore the latter fancied she was revealing to her. Since the tragic incident of the Linfry child’s death, Annabel had never asked her husband for money, and he had never informed himself if her requirements exceeded the modest allowance traditionally allotted to Tintagel Duchesses. It had always sufficed for his mother, and why suggest to his wife that her needs might be greater? The Duke had never departed from the rule inculcated by the Dowager on his coming of age: “In dealing with tenants and dependents, always avoid putting ideas into their heads”—which meant, in the Dowager’s vocabulary, giving them a chance to state their needs or ventilate their grievances; and he had instinctively adopted the same system with his wife. “People will always think they want whatever you suggest they might want,” his mother had often reminded him; an axiom which had not only saved him thousands of pounds, but protected him from the personal importunities which he disliked even more than the spending of money. He was always reluctant to be drawn into unforeseen expenditure, but he shrank still more from any emotional outlay, and was not sorry to be known (as he soon was) as a landlord who referred all letters to his agents, and resolutely declined personal interviews.

  All this flashed through Annabel, but was swept away by Conchita’s next words: “In love with one man and married to another…” Yes; that was a terrible fate indeed… and yet, and yet… might one perhaps not feel less lonely with such a sin on one’s conscience than in the blameless isolation of an uninhabited heart?

  “Darling, can you tell me… anything more? Of course I want to help you; but I must find out ways. I’m almost as much of a prisoner as you are, I fancy; perhaps more. Because Dick’s away a good deal, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes, almost always; but his duns are not. The bills keep pouring in. What little money there is is mine, and of course those people know it… But I’m stone-broke at present, and I don’t know what I shall do if you can’t help me out with a loan.” She drew back, and looked at Nan beseechingly. “You don’t know how I hate talking to you about such sordid things… You seem so high above it all, so untouched by anything bad.”

  “But, Conchie, it’s not being bad to be unhappy—”

  “No, darling; and goodness knows I’m unhappy enough. But I suppose it’s wrong to try to console myself—in the way I have. You must think so, I know; but I can’t live without affection, and Miles is so understanding, so tender…”

  Miles Dawnly, then—Two or three times Nan had wondered—had noticed things which seemed to bespeak a tender intimacy; but she had never been sure… The blood rushed to her forehead. As she listened to Conchita she was secretly transposing her friend’s words to her own use. “Oh, I know, I know, Conchie—”

  Lady Dick lifted her head quickly, and looked straight into her friend’s eyes. “You know—?”

  “I mean, I can imagine… how hard it must be not to…”

  There was a long silence. Annabel was conscious that Conchita was waiting for some word of solace—material or sentimental, or if possible both; but again a paralyzing constraint descended on her. In her girlhood no one had ever spoken to her of events or emotions below the surface of life, and she had not yet acquired words to express them. At last she broke out with sudden passion: “Conchie—it’s all turned out a dreadful mistake, hasn’t it?”

  “A dreadful mistake—you mean my marriage?”

  “I mean all our marriages. I don’t believe we’re any of us really made for this English life. At least I suppose not, for they seem to take so many things for granted here that shock us and make us miserable; and then they’re horrified by things we do quite innocently—like that silly reel last night.”

  “Oh—you’ve been hearing about the reel, have you? I saw the old ladies putting their heads together on the sofa.”

  “If it’s not that it’s something else. I sometimes wonder—” She paused again, struggling for words. “Conchie, if we just packed up and went home to live, would they really be able to make us come back here, as my mother-in-law says? Perhaps I could cable to father for our passage-money—”

  She broke off, perceiving that her suggestion had aroused no response. Conchita threw herself back in her armchair, her eyes wide with an unfeigned astonishment. Suddenly she burst out laughing.

  “You little darling! Is that your panacea? Go back to Saratoga and New York—to the Assemblies and the Charity balls? Do you really imagine you’d like tha
t better?”

  “I don’t know… Don’t you, sometimes?”

  “Never! Not for a single minute!” Lady Dick continued to gaze up laughingly at her friend. She seemed to have forgotten her personal troubles in the vision of this grotesque possibility. “Why, Nan, have you forgotten those dreary endless summers at the Grand Union, and the Opera boxes sent on off-nights by your father’s business friends, and the hanging round, fishing for invitations to the Assemblies and knowing we’d never have a look-in at the Thursday Evening dances?… Oh, if we were to go over on a visit, just a few weeks’ splash in New York or Newport, then every door would fly open, and the Eglintons and Van der Luydens, and all the other old toadies, would be fighting for us, and fawning at our feet; and I don’t say I shouldn’t like that—for a while. But to be returned to our families as if we’d been sent to England on ‘appro’, and hadn’t suited—no, thank youl And I wouldn’t go for good and all on any terms—not for all the Astor diamonds! Why, you dear little goose, I’d rather starve and freeze here than go back to all the warm houses and the hot baths, and the emptiness of everything—people and places. And as for you, an English Duchess, with everything the world can give heaped up at your feet—you may not know it now, you innocent infant, but you’d have enough of Madison Avenue and Seventh Regiment balls inside of a week—and of the best of New York and Newport before your first season was over.—There—does the truth frighten you? If you don’t believe me, ask Jacky March, or any of the poor little American old maids, or wives or widows, who’ve had a nibble at it, and have hung on at any price, because London’s London, and London life the most exciting and interesting in the world, and once you’ve got the soot and the fog in your veins you simply can’t live without them; and all the poor hangers-on and left-overs know it as well as we do.”

  Annabel received this in silence. Lady Dick’s tirade filled her with a momentary scorn, followed by a prolonged searching of the heart. Her values, of course, were not Conchita’s values; that she had always known. London society, of which she knew so little, had never had any attraction for her save as a splendid spectacle; and the part she was expected to play in that spectacle was a burden and not a delight. It was not the atmosphere of London but of England which had gradually filled her veins and penetrated to her heart. She thought of the thinness of the mental and moral air in her own home; the noisy quarrels about nothing, the paltry preoccupations, her mother’s feverish interest in the fashions and follies of a society which had always ignored her. At least life in England had a background, layers and layers of rich deep background, of history, poetry, old traditional observances, beautiful houses, beautiful landscapes, beautiful ancient buildings, palaces, churches, cathedrals. Would it not be possible, in some mysterious way, to create for one’s self a life out of all this richness, a life which should somehow make up for the poverty of one’s personal lot? If only she could have talked of it all with a friend… Laura Testvalley, for instance, of whom her need was so much greater now than it had ever been in the school-room. Could she not perhaps persuade Ushant to let her old governess come back to her—?

  Her thoughts had wandered so far from Lady Dick and her troubles that she was almost startled to hear her friend speak.

  “Well, my dear, which do you think worse—having a lover, or owing a few hundred pounds? Between the two I’ve shocked you hopelessly, haven’t I? As much as even your mother-in-law could wish. The Dowager doesn’t like me, you know. I’m afraid I’ll never be asked to Longlands again.” Lady Dick stood up with a laugh, pushing her curls back into their loosened coil. Her face looked pale and heavy.

  “You haven’t shocked me—only made me dreadfully sorry, because I don’t know what I can do…”

  “Oh, well; don’t lie awake over it, my dear,” Lady Dick retorted with a touch of bitterness. “But wasn’t that the dressing-bell? I must hurry off and be laced into my dinner-gown. They don’t like unpunctuality here, do they? And tea-gowns wouldn’t be tolerated at dinner.”

  “Conchie—wait!” Annabel was trembling with the sense of having failed her friend, and been unable to make her understand why. “Don’t think I don’t care—Oh, please don’t think that! The way we live makes it look as if there wasn’t a whim I couldn’t gratify; but Ushant doesn’t give me much money, and I don’t know how to ask for it.”

  Conchita turned back and gave her a long look. “The skinflint! No, I suppose he wouldn’t; and I suppose you haven’t learnt yet how to manage him.”

  Annabel blushed more deeply: “I’m not clever at managing, I’m afraid. You must give me time to look about, to find out—” It had suddenly occurred to her, she hardly knew why, that Guy Thwarte was the one person she could take into her confidence in such a matter. Perhaps he would be able to tell her how to raise the money for her friend. She would pluck up her courage, and ask him the next day.

  “Conchie, dear, by tomorrow evening I promise you…” she began; and found herself instantly gathered to her friend’s bosom.

  “Two hundred pounds would save my life, you darling—and five hundred make me a free woman…”

  Conchita loosened her embrace. The velvet glow suffused her face again, and she turned joyfully toward the door. But on the threshold she paused, and coming back laid her hands on Annabel’s shoulders.

  “Nan,” she said, almost solemnly, “don’t judge me, will you, till you find out for yourself what it’s like.”

  “What what is like? What do you mean, Conchita?”

  “Happiness, darling,” Lady Dick whispered. She pressed a quick kiss on her friend’s cheek; then, as the dressing-bell crashed out its final call, she picked up her rosy draperies and fled down the corridor.

  

  XXV.

  The next morning Annabel, after a restless night, stood at her window watching the dark return of day. Dawn was trying to force a way through leaden mist; every detail, every connecting link, was muffled in folds of rain-cloud. That was England, she thought; not only the English scene but the English life was perpetually muffled. The links between these people and their actions were mostly hidden from Annabel; their looks, their customs, their language, had implications beyond her understanding.

  Sometimes fleeting lights, remote and tender, shot through the fog; then the blanket of incomprehension closed in again. It was like that day in the ruins of Tintagel, the day when she and Ushant had met… As she looked back on it, the scene of their meeting seemed symbolical: in a ruin and a fog… Lovers ought to meet under limpid skies and branches dripping with sunlight, like the nymphs and heroes of Correggio.

  The thought that she had even imagined Ushant as a lover made her smile, and she turned away from the window… Those were dreams, and the reality was: what? First that she must manage to get five hundred pounds for Conchita; and after that, must think about her own future. She was glad she had something active and helpful to do before reverting once more to that dreary problem.

  Through her restless night she had gone over and over every possible plan for getting the five hundred pounds. The idea of consulting Guy Thwarte had faded before the first hint of daylight. Of course he would offer to lend her the sum; and how could she borrow from a friend money she saw no possibility of re-paying? And yet, to whom else could she apply? The Dowager? Her mind brushed past the absurd idea… and past that of her sisters-in-law. How bewildered, how scandalized the poor things would be! Annabel herself, she knew, was bewilderment enough to them: a wife who bore no children, a Duchess who did not yet clearly understand the duties of a groom-of-the-chambers, or know what the Chiltern Hundreds were! To all his people it was as if Ushant had married a savage…

  There was her own family, of course; her sister, her friends the Elmsworths. Annabel knew that in the dizzy up-and-down of Wall Street, which ladies were not expected to understand, Mr. Elmsworth was now “on top”, as they called it. The cornering of a heavy block of railway shares, though apparently necessary to the development of another line,
had temporarily hampered her father and Mr. Closson, and Annabel was aware that Virginia had already addressed several unavailing appeals to Colonel St George. Certainly, if he had cut down the girls’ allowances it was because the poor Colonel could not help himself; and it seemed only fair that his first aid, whenever it came, should go to Virginia, whose husband’s income had to be extracted from the heavily burdened Brightlingsea estate, rather than to the wife of one of England’s wealthiest Dukes.

  One of England’s wealthiest Dukes! That was what Ushant was; and it was naturally to him that his wife should turn in any financial difficulty. But Annabel had never done so since the Linfry incident, and though she knew the sum she wanted was nothing to a man with Ushant’s income, she was as frightened as though she had been going to beg for the half of his fortune.

  The others, of course—Virginia, the Elmsworths and poor Conchita—had long since become trained borrowers and beggars. Money—or rather the want of it—loomed before them at every turn, and they had mastered most of the arts of extracting it from reluctant husbands or parents. This London life necessitated so many expenditures unknown to the humdrum existence of Madison Avenue and the Grand Union Hotel: Court functions, Royal Ascot, the Cowes season, the entertaining of royalties, the heavy cost of pheasant-shooting, deer-stalking and hunting, above all (it was whispered) the high play and extravagant luxury prevailing in the inner set to which the lovely newcomers had been so warmly welcomed. You couldn’t, Virginia had over and over again explained to Annabel, expect to keep your place in that jealously guarded set if you didn’t dress up, live up, play up, to its princely standards. But Annabel had lent an inattentive ear to these hints. She wanted nothing of what her sister and her sister’s friends were fighting for; their needs did not stir her imagination, and they soon learned that, beyond occasionally letting them charge a dress, or a few yards of lace, to her account, she could give them little aid.