Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  “Another of your pupils!” Sir Helmsley continued, with a teasing laugh. He paused, and added tentatively: “And perhaps the most interesting—eh?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Because she’s the most intelligent—or the most unhappy?”

  Miss Testvalley looked up quickly. “Why do you suggest that she’s unhappy?”

  “Oh,” he rejoined, with a slight shrug, “because you’re so incurably philanthropic that I should say your swans would often turn out to be lame ducks.”

  “Perhaps they do. At any rate, she’s the pupil I was fondest of and should most wish to guard against unhappiness.”

  “Ah—” murmured Sir Helmsley, on a half-questioning note.

  “But Lady Glenloe must be ready to start; I’d better go and call the Duchess,” Miss Testvalley added, moving toward the door. There was a sound of voices in the hall, and among them Lady Glenloe’s, calling out: “Cora, Kitty—has any one seen the Duchess? Oh, Mr. Thwarte, we’re looking for the Duchess, and I see you’ve been giving her a last glimpse of your wonderful view…”

  “Not the last, I hope,” said Guy smiling, as he came forward with Annabel.

  “The last for today, at any rate; we must be off at once on our long drive. Mr. Thwarte, I count on you for next Saturday. Sir Helmsley, can’t we persuade you to come too?”

  The drive back to Champions passed like a dream. To secure herself against disturbance, Nan had slipped her hand into Miss Testvalley’s, and let her head droop on the governess’s shoulder. She heard one of the Glenloe girls whisper: “The Duchess is asleep,” and a conniving silence seemed to enfold her. But she had no wish to sleep: her wide-open eyes looked out into the falling night, caught the glint of lights flashing past in the High Street, lost themselves in the long intervals of dusk between the villages, and plunged into deepening night as the low glimmer of the west went out. In her heart was a deep delicious peace such as she had never known before. In this great lonely desert of life stretching out before her she had a friend—a friend who understood not only all she said, but everything she could not say. At the end of the long road on which the regular rap of the horses’ feet was beating out the hours, she saw him standing, waiting for her, watching for her through the night.

  

  XXIX.

  “Do you know, I think Nan’s coming to stay next week!”

  Mrs. Hector Robinson laid down the letter she had been perusing and glanced across the funereal architecture of the British breakfast-table at her husband, who, plunged in The Times, sat in the armchair facing her. He looked up with the natural resentment of the male Briton disturbed by an untutored female in his morning encounter with the news. “Nan—?” he echoed interrogatively.

  Lizzy Robinson laughed—and her laugh was a brilliant affair, which lit up the mid-winter darkness of the solemn pseudo-gothic breakfast-room at Belfield.

  “Well, Annabel, then; Annabel Duchess—”

  “The—not the Duchess of Tintagel?”

  Mr. Robinson had instantly discarded The Times. He sat gazing incredulously at the face of his wife, on which the afterglow of her laugh still enchantingly lingered. Certainly, he thought, he had married one of the most beautiful women in England. And now his father was dead, and Belfield and the big London house, and the Scottish shooting-lodge, and the Lancashire mills which fed them—all for the last year had been his. Everything he had put his hand to had succeeded. But he had never pictured the Duchess of Tintagel at a Belfield house-party, and the vision made him a little dizzy.

  The afterglow of his wife’s amusement still lingered. “The—Duchess—of—Tintagel,” she mimicked him. “Has there never been a Duchess at Belfield before?”

  Mr. Robinson stiffened slightly. “Not this Duchess. I understood the Tintagels paid no visits.”

  “Ushant doesn’t, certainly—luckily for us! But I suppose he can’t keep his wife actually chained up, can he, with all these new laws, and the police prying in everywhere? At any rate, she’s been at Lady Glenloe’s for the last month; and now she wants to know if she can come here.”

  Mr. Robinson’s stare had the fixity of a muscular contraction. “She’s written to ask—?”

  His wife tossed the letter across the monuments in Sheffield plate. “There—if you don’t believe me.”

  He read the short note with a hurriedly assumed air of detachment. “Dear me—who else is coming? Shall you be able to fit her in, do you think?” The detachment was almost too perfect, and Lizzy felt like exclaiming: “Oh, come, my dear—don’t over-do it!” But she never gave her husband such hints except when it was absolutely necessary.

  “Shall I write that she may come?” she asked, with an air of wifely compliance.

  Mr. Robinson coughed—in order that his response should not be too eager. “That’s for you to decide, my dear. I don’t see why not; if she can put up with a rather dull hunting crowd,” he said, suddenly viewing his other guests from a new angle. “Let me see—there’s old Dashleigh—I’m afraid he is a bore—and Hubert Clyde, and Colonel Beagles, and of course Sir Blasker Tripp for Lady Dick Marable—eh?” He smiled suggestively. “And Guy Thwarte; is the Duchess likely to object to Guy Thwarte?”

  Lizzy Robinson’s smile deepened. “Oh, no; I gather she won’t in the least object to him.”

  “Why—what do you mean? You don’t—”

  In his surprise and agitation Mr. Robinson abandoned all further thought of The Times.

  “Well—it occurs to me that she may conceivably have known he was coming here next week. I know he’s been at Champions a good deal during the month she’s been spending there. And I—well, I should certainly have risked asking him to meet her, if he hadn’t already been on your list.”

  Mr. Robinson looked at his wife’s smile, and slowly responded to it. He had always thought he had a prompt mind, as quick as any at the uptake; but there were times when this American girl left him breathless, and even a little frightened. Her social intuitions were uncannily swift; and in his rare moments of leisure from politics and the mills he sometimes asked himself if, with such gifts of divination, she might not some day be building a new future for herself. But there was a stolid British baby upstairs in the nursery, and Mr. Robinson was richer than anybody she was likely to come across, except old Blasker Tripp, who of course belonged to Conchita Marable. And she certainly seemed happy, and absorbed in furthering their joint career… But his chief reason for feeling safe was the fact that her standard of values was identical with his own. Strangely enough, this lovely alien who had been swept into his life on a brief gust of passion, proved to have a respect as profound as his for the concrete realities, and his sturdy unawareness of everything which could not be expressed in terms of bank accounts or political and social expediency. It was as if he had married Titania, and she had brought with her a vanload of ponderous mahogany furniture exactly matching what he had grown up with at Belfield. And he knew she had her eye on a peerage…

  Yes; but meanwhile—. He picked up The Times, and began to smooth it out with deliberation, as though seeking a pretext for not carrying on the conversation.

  “Well, Hector—?” his wife began impatiently. “I suppose I shall have to answer this.” She had recovered Annabel’s letter.

  Her husband still hesitated. “My dear—I should be only too happy to see the Duchess here… But…” The more he reflected, the bigger grew the But suddenly looming before him. “Have you any way of knowing if—er—the Duke approves?”

  Lizzy again sounded her gay laugh. “Approves of Nan’s coming here?”

  Her husband nodded gravely, and as she watched him her own face grew attentive. She had learned that Hector’s ideas were almost always worth considering.

  “You mean… he may not like her inviting herself here?”

  “Her doing so is certainly unconventional.”

  “But she’s been staying alone at Champions for a month.”

  Mr. Robinson was still dubio
us. “Lady Glenloe’s a relative. And besides, her visit to Champions is none of our business. But if you have any reason to think—”

  His wife interrupted him. “What I think is that Nan’s dying of boredom, and longing for a change; and if the Duke let her go to Champions, where she was among strangers, I don’t see how he can object to her coming here, to an old friend from her own country. I’d like to see him refuse to let her stay with me,” cried Lizzy in what her husband called her “Hail Columbia voice”.

  Mr. Robinson’s frown relaxed. Lizzy so often found the right note. This was probably another instance of the advantage, for an ambitious man, of marrying some one by nationality and up-bringing entirely detached from his own social problems. He now regarded as a valuable asset the breezy independence of his wife’s attitude, which at first had alarmed him. “It’s one of the reasons of their popularity,” he reflected. There was no doubt that London society was getting tired of pretences and compliances, of conformity and uniformity. The free and easy Americanism of this little band of invaders had taken the world of fashion by storm, and Hector Robinson was too alert not to have noted the renovation of the social atmosphere. “Wherever the men are amused, fashion is bound to follow,” was one of Lizzy’s axioms; and certainly, from their future sovereign to his most newly knighted subject, the men were amused in Mayfair’s American drawing-rooms.

  [The text of the novel breaks off at this point. The scenario that follows outlines Edith Wharton’s overall purpose and her conclusion. Judging from the way her original plan corresponds to the completed part of the novel, we may assume that, however she would have worked out in detail the projected final chapters, she would have followed her scenario generally without altering her basic conception and ending.]

  This novel deals with the adventures of three American families with beautiful daughters who attempt the London social adventure in the ‘seventies—the first time the social invasion had ever been tried in England on such a scale.

  The three mothers—Mrs. St George, Mrs. Elmsworth, and Mrs. Closson—have all made an attempt to launch their daughters in New York, where their husbands are in business, but have no social standing (the families, all of very ordinary origin, being from the south-west, or from the northern part of the state of New York). The New York experiment is only partly successful, for though the girls attract attention by their beauty they are viewed distrustfully by the New York hostesses whose verdict counts, their origin being hazy and their appearance what was then called “loud.” So, though admired at Saratoga, Long Branch and the White Sulphur Springs, they fail at Newport and in New York, and the young men flirt with them but do not offer marriage.

  Mrs. St George has a governess for her youngest daughter, Nan, who is not yet out. She knows that governesses are fashionable, and is determined that Nan shall have the same advantages as the daughters of the New York aristocracy, for she suspects that her daughter Virginia’s lack of success, and the failure of Lizzy and Mabel Elmsworth, may have been due to lack of social training. Mrs. St George therefore engages a governess who has been in the best houses in New York and London, and a highly competent middle-aged woman named Laura Testvalley (she is of Italian origin—the name is corrupted from Testavaglia) arrives in the family. Laura Testvalley has been in several aristocratic families in England, but after a run of bad luck has come to the States on account of the great demand for superior “finishing” governesses, and the higher salaries offered. Miss Testvalley is an adventuress, but a great-souled one. She has been a year with the fashionable Mrs. Parmore of New York, who belongs to one of the oldest Knickerbocker families, but she finds the place dull, and is anxious for higher pay and a more lavish household. She recognizes the immense social gifts of the St George girls, and becomes in particular passionately attached to Nan.

  She says to Mrs. St George: “Why try Newport again? Go straight to England first, and come back to America with the prestige of a brilliant London season.”

  Mrs. St George is dazzled, and persuades her husband to let her go. The Closson and Elmsworth girls are friends of the oldest St George girl, and they too persuade their parents to let them try London.

  The three families embark together on the adventure, and though furiously jealous of each other, are clever enough to see the advantage of backing each other up; and Miss Testvalley leads them all like a general.

  In each particular family the sense of solidarity is of course even stronger than it is between members of the group, and as soon as Virginia St George has made a brilliant English marriage she devotes all her energies to finding a husband for Nan.

  But Nan rebels—or at least is not content with the prizes offered. She is, or thinks she is, as ambitious as the others, but it is for more interesting reasons; intellectual, political and artistic. She is the least beautiful but by far the most brilliant and seductive of them all; and to the amazement of the others (and adroitly steered by Miss Testvalley) she suddenly captures the greatest match in England, the young Duke of Tintagel.

  But though she is dazzled for the moment her heart is not satisfied. The Duke is kindly but dull and arrogant, and the man she really loves is young Guy Thwarte, a poor officer in the Guards, the son of Sir Helmsley Thwarte, whose old and wonderfully beautiful place in Gloucestershire, Honourslove, is the scene of a part of the story.

  Sir Helmsley Thwarte, the widowed father of Guy, a clever, broken-down and bitter old worldling, is captivated by Miss Testvalley, and wants to marry her; but meanwhile the young Duchess of Tintagel has suddenly decided to leave her husband and go off with Guy, and it turns out that Laura Testvalley, moved by the youth and passion of the lovers, and disgusted by the mediocre Duke of Tintagel, has secretly lent a hand in the planning of the elopement, the scandal of which is to ring through England for years.

  Sir Helmsley Thwarte discovers what is going on, and is so furious at his only son’s being involved in such an adventure that, suspecting Miss Testvalley’s complicity, he breaks with her, and the great old adventuress, seeing love, deep and abiding love, triumph for the first time in her career, helps Nan to join her lover, who has been ordered to South Africa, and then goes back alone to old age and poverty.

  The Elmsworth and Closson adventures will be interwoven with Nan’s, and the setting will be aristocratic London in the season, and life in the great English country-houses as they were sixty years ago.