The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  “There’s such a feeling. When two people have reached it together it’s—well, they are ‘beyond.’ ” He broke off. “You see now why I wanted you to come to Honourslove,” he said in an odd new voice.

  She was still looking at him thoughtfully. “You knew I’d understand.”

  “Oh, everything!”

  She sighed for pleasure; but then: “No. There’s one thing I don’t understand. How you go away and leave it all for so long.”

  He gave a nervous laugh. “You don’t know England. That’s part of our sense of beyondness. I’d do more than that for those old stones.”

  Nan bent her eyes to the worn flags on the terrace. “I see; that was stupid of me.”

  For no reason at all the quick colour rushed to her temples again; and the young man coloured too. “It’s a beautiful view,” she stammered, suddenly self-conscious.

  “It depends who looks at it,” he said.

  She dropped to her feet, and turned to gaze away over the shimmering distances. Guy Thwarte said nothing more, and for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.

  Sir Helmsley, after fulminating in advance against the foreign intruders, had been all smiles on their arrival. Guy was used to such sudden changes of the paternal mood, and knew that feminine beauty could be counted on to produce them. His father could never, at the moment, hold out against deep lashes and brilliant lips, and no one knew better than Virginia St. George how to make use of such charms.

  “That red-haired witch from Brazil has her wits about her,” Sir Helmsley mumbled that evening over his after-dinner cigar. “I don’t wonder she stirs them up at Allfriars. Gad, I should think Master Richard Marable had found his match.... But your St. George girl is a goddess ... patuit dea—I think I like ’em better like that ... divinely dull ... just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession....” He leaned back in his armchair and looked sharply across the table at his son, who sat with bent head, drawing vague arabesques on the mahogany. “Guy, my boy—that kind are about as expensive to acquire as the Venus of Milo; and as difficult to fit into domestic life.”

  Guy Thwarte looked up with an absent smile. “I daresay that’s what Seadown’s thinking, sir.”

  “Seadown?”

  “Well, I suppose your classical analogies are meant to apply to the eldest Miss St. George, aren’t they?”

  Father and son continued to look at each other, the father perplexed, the son privately amused. “What? Isn’t it the eldest—?” Sir Helmsley broke out.

  Guy shook his head, and his father sank back with a groan. “Good Lord, my boy! I thought I understood you. Sovran beauty ... and that girl has it.”

  “I suppose so, sir.”

  “You suppose—?”

  Guy held up his head and cleared his throat. “You see, sir, it happens to be the younger one—”

  “The younger one? I didn’t even notice her. I imagined you were taking her off my hands so that I could have a better chance with the beauties.”

  “Perhaps in a way I was,” said Guy. “Though I think you might have enjoyed talking to her almost as much as gazing at the goddess.”

  “H’m. What sort of talk?”

  “Well, she came to a dead point before the Rossetti in the study, and at once began to quote ‘The Blessed Damozel.’ ”

  “That child? So the Fleshly School has penetrated to the backwoods! Well, I don’t know that it’s exactly the best food for the family breakfast-table.”

  “I imagine she came on it by chance. It appears she has a wonderful governess who’s a cousin of the Rossettis.”

  “Ah, yes. One of old Testavaglia’s descendants, I suppose. What a queer concatenation of circumstances, to doom an Italian patriot to bring up a little Miss Jonathan!”

  “I think it was rather a happy accident to give her someone with whom she could talk of poetry.”

  “Well—supposing you were to leave that to her governess? Eh? I say, Guy, you don’t mean—?”

  His son paused before replying. “I’ve nothing to add to what I told you the other day, sir. My South American job comes first; and God knows what will have become of her when I get back. She’s only eighteen and I’ve only seen her twice....”

  “Well, I’m glad you remember that,” his father interjected. “I never should have, at your age.”

  “Oh, I’ve given it thought enough, I can assure you,” Guy rejoined, still with his quiet smile.

  Sir Helmsley rose from his chair. “Shall we finish our smoke on the terrace?”

  They went out together into the twilight, and strolled up and down, as their habit was, in silence. Guy Thwarte knew that Sir Helmsley’s mind was as crowded as his own with urgent passionate thoughts clamouring to be expressed. And there was so little time left in which to utter them! To the young man his father’s step and his own sounded as full of mystery as the tread of the coming years. After a while they made one of their wonted pauses, and stood leaning against the balustrade above the darkening landscape.

  “Eh, well—what are you thinking of?” Sir Helmsley broke out, with one of his sudden jerks of interrogation.

  Guy pondered. “I was thinking how strange and far-off everything here seems to me already. I seem to see it all as sharply as things in a dream.”

  Sir Helmsley gave a nervous laugh. “H’m. And I was thinking that the strangest thing about it all was to hear common-sense spoken about a young woman under the roof of Honourslove.” He pressed his son’s arm, and then turned abruptly away, and they resumed their walk in silence; for in truth there was nothing more to be said.

  XIII.

  A dark-haired girl who was so handsome that the heads nearest her were all turned her way stood impatiently at a crowded London street-corner. It was a radiant afternoon of July; and the crowd which had checked her advance had assembled to see the fine ladies in their state carriages on the way to the last Drawing-room of the season.

  “I don’t see why they won’t let us through. It’s worse than a village circus,” the beauty grumbled to her companion, a younger girl who would have been pretty save for that dazzling proximity, but who showed her teeth too much when she laughed. She laughed now.

  “What’s wrong with just staying where we are, Liz? It beats any Barnum show I ever saw, and the people are ever so much more polite. Nobody shoves you. Look at that antique yellow coach coming along now, with the two powdered giants hanging on at the back—oh, Liz!—and the old mummy inside. I guess she dates way back beyond the carriage. But look at her jewels, will you? My goodness—and she’s got a real live crown on her head!”

  “Shut up, Mab—everybody’s looking at you,” Lizzy Elmsworth rejoined, still sulkily, though in spite of herself she was beginning to be interested in the scene.

  The younger girl laughed again. “They’re looking at you, you silly. It rests their eyes, after all the scare-crows in those circus-chariots. Liz, why do you suppose they dress up like queens at the waxworks, just to go to an afternoon party?”

  “It’s not an ordinary party. It’s the Queen’s Drawing-room.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for the Queen if she has to feast her eyes for long on some of these beauties.... Oh, good; the carriages are moving. Better luck next time. This next carriage isn’t half as grand, but maybe it’s pleasanter inside.... Oh!” Mab Elmsworth suddenly exclaimed, applying a sharp pinch to her sister’s arm.

  “ ‘Oh’ what? I don’t see anything so wonderful—”

  “Why, look, Lizzy! Reach up on your tip-toes. In the third carriage—if it isn’t the St. George girls! Look, look! When they move again they’ll see us.”

  “Nonsense. There are dozens of people between us. Besides, I don’t believe it is.... How in the world should they be here?”

  “Why, I guess Conchita fixed it up. Or don’t they present people through our Legation?”

  “You have to have letters to th
e Minister. Who on earth’d have given them to the St. Georges?”

  “I don’t know; but there they are. Oh, Liz, look at Jinny, will you? She looks like a queen herself—a queen going to her wedding, with that tulle veil and the feathers.... Oh, mercy, and there’s little Nan! Well, the headdress isn’t as becoming to her—she hasn’t got the style, has she? Now, Liz! The carriages are moving.... I’m not tall enough—you reach up and wave. They’re sure to see us if you do.”

  Lizzy Elmsworth did not move. “I can survive not being seen by the St. George girls,” she said coldly. “If only we could get out of this crowd.”

  “Oh, just wait till I squeeze through, and make a sign to them! There—. Oh, thank you so much.... Now they see me! Jinny—Nan—do look! It’s Mab....”

  Lizzy caught her sister by the arm. “You’re making a show of us; come away,” she whispered angrily.

  “Why, Liz ... just wait a second. I’m sure they saw us....”

  “I’m sure they didn’t want to see us. Can’t you understand? A girl screaming at the top of her lungs from the side-walk ... Please come when I tell you to, Mabel.”

  At that moment Virginia St. George turned her head toward Mab’s gesticulating arm. Her face, under its halo of tulle and arching feathers, was so lovely that the eyes in the crowd deserted Lizzy Elmsworth. “Well, they’re not all mummies going to Court,” a man said good-naturedly; and the group about him laughed.

  “Come away, Mabel,” Miss Elmsworth repeated. She did not know till that moment how much she would dislike seeing the St. George girls in the glory of their Court feathers. She dragged her reluctant sister through a gap in the crowd, and they turned back in the direction of the hotel where they were staying.

  “Now I hope you understand that they saw us, and didn’t want to see us!”

  “Why, Liz, what’s come over you? A minute ago you said they couldn’t possibly see us.”

  “Now I’m sure they did, and made believe not to. I should have thought you’d have had more pride than to scream at them that way among all those common people.”

  The two girls walked on in silence.

  Mrs. St. George and her two daughters had, they hardly knew how (with Colonel St. George’s too-hearty encouragement), drifted, or been whirled, into Miss Testvalley’s wild project of a London season; and now, on a hot July afternoon, when Mrs. St. George would have been so happy sipping her lemonade in friendly company on the Grand Union verandah, she sat in the melancholy exile of a London hotel, and wondered when the girls would get back from that awful performance they called a Drawing-room.

  There had been times—she remembered ruefully—when she had not been happy at Saratoga, had felt uncomfortable in the company of the dubious Mrs. Closson, and irritated by the vulgar exuberance of Mrs. Elmsworth; but such was her present loneliness that she would have welcomed either with open arms. And it was precisely as this thought crossed her mind that the buttons knocked on the door to ask if she would receive Mrs. Elmsworth.

  “Oh, my dear!” cried poor Mrs. St. George, falling on her visitor’s breast; and two minutes later the ladies were mingling their loneliness, their perplexities, their mistrust of all things foreign and unfamiliar, in an ecstasy of interchanged confidences.

  The confidences lasted so long that Mrs. Elmsworth did not return to her hotel until after her daughters. She found them alone in the dark shiny sitting-room which so exactly resembled the one inhabited by Mrs. St. George, and saw at once that they were out of humour with each other, if not with the world. Mrs. Elmsworth disliked gloomy faces, and on this occasion felt herself entitled to resent them, since it was to please her daughters that she had left her lazy pleasant cure at Bad Ems to give them a glimpse of the London season.

  “Well, girls, you look as if you were just home from a funeral,” she remarked, breathing heavily from her ascent of the hotel stairs, and restraining the impulse to undo the upper buttons of her strongly whale-boned Paris dress.

  “Well, we are. We’ve just seen all the old corpses in London dressed up for that circus they call a Drawing-room,” said her eldest daughter.

  “They weren’t all corpses, though,” Mab interrupted. “What do you think, Mother? We saw Jinny and Nan St. George, rigged out to kill, feathers and all, in the procession!”

  Mrs. Elmsworth manifested no surprise. “Yes, I know. I’ve just been sitting with Mrs. St. George, and she told me the girls had gone to the Drawing-room. She said Conchita Marable fixed it up for them. So you see it’s not so difficult, after all.”

  Lizzy shrugged impatiently. “If Conchita has done it for them we can’t ask her to do it again for us. Besides, it’s too late; I saw in the paper it was the last Drawing-room. I told you we ought to have come a month ago.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said her mother good-naturedly. “There was a Miss March came in while I was with Mrs. St. George—such a sweet little woman. An American; but she’s lived for years in London, and knows everybody. Well, she said going to a Drawing-room didn’t really amount to anything; it just gave the girls a chance to dress up and see a fine show. She says the thing is to be in the Prince of Wales’s set. That’s what all the smart women are after. And it seems that Miss March’s friend Lady Churt is very intimate with the Prince and has introduced Conchita to him, and he’s crazy about her Spanish songs. Isn’t that funny, girls?”

  “It may be very funny. But I don’t see how it’s going to help us,” Lizzy grumbled.

  Mrs. Elmsworth gave her easy laugh. “Well, it won’t, if you don’t help yourselves. If you think everybody’s against you, they will be against you. But that Miss March has invited you and Mabel to take tea at her house next week—it seems everybody in England takes tea at five. In the country-houses the women dress up for it, in things they call ‘tea-gowns.’ I wish we’d known that when we were ordering our clothes in Paris. But Miss March will tell you all about it, and a lot more besides.”

  Lizzy Elmsworth was not a good-tempered girl, but she was too intelligent to let her temper interfere with her opportunities. She hated the St. George girls for having got ahead of her in their attack on London, but was instantly disposed to profit by the breach they had made. Virginia St. George was not clever, and Lizzy would be able to guide her; they could be of the greatest use to each other, if the St. Georges could be made to enter into the plan. Exactly what plan, Lizzy herself did not know; but she felt instinctively that, like their native country, they could stand only if they were united.

  Mrs. St. George, in her loneliness, had besought Mrs. Elmsworth to return the next afternoon. She didn’t dare invite Lizzy and Mab, she explained, because her own girls were being taken to see the Tower of London by some of their new friends (Lizzy’s resentment stirred again as she listened); but if Mrs. Elmsworth would just drop in and sit with her, Mrs. St. George thought perhaps Miss March would be coming in too, and then they would talk over plans for the rest of the summer. Lizzy understood at once the use to which Mrs. St. George’s loneliness might be put. Mrs. Elmsworth was lonely too; but this did not greatly concern her daughter. In the St. George and Elmsworth circles unemployed mothers were the rule; but Lizzy saw that, by pooling their solitudes, the two ladies might become more contented, and therefore more manageable. And, having come to lay siege to London, Miss Elmsworth was determined, at all costs, not to leave till the citadel had fallen.

  “I guess I’ll go with you,” she announced, when her mother rose to put on her bonnet for the call.

  “Why, the girls won’t be there; she told me so. She says they’ll be round to see you tomorrow,” said Mrs. Elmsworth, surprised.

  “I don’t care about the girls; I want to see that Miss March.”

  “Oh, well,” her mother agreed. Lizzy was always doing things Mrs. Elmsworth didn’t understand, but Mab usually threw some light on them afterward. And certainly, Mrs. Elmsworth reflected, it became her elder daughter to be in one of her mysterious moods. She had never seen Lizzy look
more goddess-like than when they ascended Mrs. St. George’s stairs together.

  Miss March was not far from sharing Mrs. Elmsworth’s opinion. When the Elmsworth ladies were shown in, Miss March was already sitting with Mrs. St. George. She had returned on the pretext of bringing an invitation for the girls to visit Holland House; but in reality she was impatient to see the rival beauty. Miss Testvalley, the day before, had told her all about Lizzy Elmsworth, whom some people thought, in her different way, as handsome as Virginia, and who was certainly cleverer. And here she was, stalking in ahead of her mother, in what appeared to be the new American style, and carrying her slim height and small regal head with an assurance which might well eclipse Virginia’s milder light.

  Miss March surveyed her with the practised eye of an old frequenter of the marriage-market.

  “Very fair girls usually have a better chance here; but Idina Churt is dark-perhaps, for that reason, this girl might be more likely...” Miss March lost herself in almost maternal musings. She often said to herself (and sometimes to her most intimate friends) that Lord Seadown seemed to her like her own son; and now, as she looked on Lizzy Elmsworth’s dark splendour, she murmured inwardly: “Of course, we must find out first what Mr. Elmsworth would be prepared to do....”

  To Mrs. Elmsworth, whom she greeted with her most persuasive smile, she said engagingly: “Mrs. St. George and I have such a delightful plan to suggest to you. Of course, you won’t want to stay in London much longer. It’s so hot and crowded; and before long it will be a dusty desert. Mrs. St. George tells me that you’re both rather wondering where to go next, and I’ve suggested that you should join her in hiring a lovely little cottage on the Thames belonging to a friend of mine, Lady Churt. It could be had at once, servants and all—the most perfect servants—and I’ve stayed so often with Lady Churt that I know just how cool and comfortable and lazy one can be there. But I was thinking more especially of your daughters and their friends.... The river’s a Paradise at their age... the punting by moonlight, and all the rest....”