The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  He had thought he had the wild place to himself, but as he advanced toward the edge of the platform he perceived that his solitude was shared by a young lady who, as yet unaware of his presence, stood wedged in a coign of the ramparts, absorbed in the struggle between wind and sea.

  The Duke gave an embarrassed cough; but, between the waves and the gulls, the sound did not carry far. The girl remained motionless, her profile turned seaward, and the Duke was near enough to study it in detail.

  She had not the kind of beauty to whirl a man off his feet, and his eye was free to note that her complexion, though now warmed by the wind, was naturally pale, that her nose was a trifle too small, and her hair a tawny uncertain mixture of dark and fair. Nothing overpowering in all this; but being overpowered was what the Duke most dreaded. He went in fear of the terrible beauty that is born and bred for the strawberry leaves, and the face he was studying was so grave yet so happy that he felt somehow reassured and safe. This girl, at any rate, was certainly not thinking of dukes; and in the eyes she presently turned to him he saw not himself but the sea.

  He raised his hat, and she looked at him, surprised but not disturbed. “I didn’t know you were there,” she said simply.

  “The grass deadens one’s steps ...” the Duke apologized.

  “Yes. And the birds scream so—and the wind.”

  “I’m afraid I startled you.”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t suppose the place belonged to me....” She continued to scrutinize him gravely, and he wondered whether a certain fearless gravity were not what he liked best in woman. Then suddenly she smiled, and he changed his mind.

  “But I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” she exclaimed. “I’m sure I have. Wasn’t it at Runnymede?”

  “At Runnymede?” he stammered, his heart sinking. The smile, then, had after all been for the Duke!

  “Yes. I’m Nan St. George. My mother and Mrs. Elmsworth have taken a little cottage there—Lady Churt’s cottage. A lot of people come down from London to see my sister, Virginia, and Liz Elmsworth, and I have an idea you came one day—didn’t you? There are so many of them—crowds of young men; and always changing. I’m afraid I can’t remember all their names. But didn’t Teddy de Santos-Dios bring you down the day we had that awful pillow-fight? I know—you’re a Mr. Robinson.”

  In an instant the Duke’s apprehensive mind registered a succession of terrors. First the dread that he had been recognized and marked down; then the more deadly fear that, though this had actually happened, his quick-witted antagonist was clever enough to affect an impossible ignorance. A Mr. Robinson! For a fleeting second the Duke tried to feel what it would be like to be a Mr. Robinson ... a man who might wind his own clocks when he chose. It did not feel as agreeable as the Duke had imagined—and he hastily re-became a duke.

  Yet would it not be safer to accept the proffered alias? He wavered. But no; the idea was absurd. If this girl, though he did not remember ever having seen her, had really been at Runnymede the day he had gone there, it was obvious that, though she might not identify him at the moment (a thought not wholly gratifying to his vanity), she could not long remain in ignorance. His face must have betrayed his embarrassment, for she exclaimed: “Oh, then, you’re not Mr. Robinson? I’m so sorry! Virginia (that’s my sister; I don’t believe you’ve forgotten her)—Virginia says I’m always making stupid mistakes. And I know everybody hates being taken for somebody else; and especially for a Mr. Robinson. But won’t you tell me your name?”

  The Duke’s confusion increased. But he was aware that hesitation was ridiculous. There was no help for it; he had to drag himself into the open. “My name’s Tintagel.”

  Nan’s eyebrows rose in surprise, and her smile enchanted him again. “Oh, but how perfectly splendid! Then of course you know Miss Testvalley?”

  The Duke stared. He had never seen exactly that effect produced by the announcement of his name. “Miss Testvalley?”

  “Oh, don’t you know her? How funny! But aren’t you the brother of those girls whose governess she was? They used to live at Tintagel. I mean Clara and Ermie and Mina....”

  “Their governess?” It suddenly dawned on the Duke how little he knew about his sisters. The fact of being regarded as a mere appendage to these unimportant females was a still sharper blow to his vanity; yet it gave him the reassurance that even now the speaker did not know she was addressing a duke. Incredible as such ignorance was, he was constrained to recognize it. “She knows me only as their brother,” he thought. “Or else,” he added, “she knows who I am and doesn’t care.”

  At first neither alternative was wholly pleasing; but after a moment’s reflection he felt a glow of relief. “I remember my sisters had a governess they were devoted to,” he said, with a timid affability.

  “I should think so! She’s perfectly splendid. Did you know she was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s own cousin?” Nan continued, her enthusiasm rising, as it always did when she spoke of Miss Testvalley.

  The Duke’s perplexity deepened; and it annoyed him to have to grope for his answers in conversing with this prompt young woman. “I’m afraid I know very few Italians—”

  “Oh, well, you wouldn’t know him; he’s very ill, and hardly sees anybody. But don’t you love his poetry? Which sonnet do you like best in The House of Life? I have a friend whose favourite is the one that begins: ‘When do I see thee most, beloved one?’ ”

  “I—the fact is, I’ve very little time to read poetry,” the Duke faltered.

  Nan looked at him incredulously. “It doesn’t take much time if you really care for it. But lots of people don’t—Virginia doesn’t.... Are you coming down soon to Runnymede? Miss Testvalley and I are going back next week. They just sent me here for a little while to get a change of air and some bathing, but it was really because they thought Runnymede was too exciting for me.”

  “Ah,” exclaimed the Duke, his interest growing, “you don’t care for excitement, then?” (The lovely child!)

  Nan pondered the question. “Well, it all depends.... Everything’s exciting, don’t you think so? I mean sunsets and poetry, and swimming out too far in a rough sea.... But I don’t believe I care as much as the others for practical jokes: frightening old ladies by dressing up as burglars with dark lanterns, or putting wooden rattlesnakes in people’s beds—do you?”

  It was the Duke’s turn to hesitate. “I—Well, I must own that such experiences are unfamiliar to me; but I can hardly imagine being amused by them.”

  His mind revolved uneasily between the alternatives of disguising himself as a burglar or listening to a young lady recite poetry; and to bring the talk back to an easier level he said: “You’re staying in the neighbourhood?”

  “Yes. At Trevennick, at the inn. I love it here, don’t you? You must live somewhere near here, I suppose?”

  Yes, the Duke said; his place wasn’t above three miles away. He’d just walked over from there.... He broke off, at a loss how to go on; but his interlocutor came to the rescue.

  “I suppose you must know the vicar at Polwhelly? Miss Testvalley’s gone to see him this afternoon. That’s why I came up here alone. I promised and swore I wouldn’t stir out of the inn garden—but how could I help it, when the sun suddenly came out?”

  “How indeed?” echoed the Duke, attempting one of his difficult smiles. “Will your governess be very angry, do you think?”

  “Oh, fearfully, at first. But afterward she’ll understand. Only I do want to get back before she comes in, or she’ll be worried....” She turned back to the rampart for a last look at the sea; but the deepening fog had blotted out everything. “I must really go,” she said, “or I’ll never find my way down.”

  The Duke’s gaze followed hers. Was this a tentative invitation to guide her back to the inn? Should he offer to do so? Or would the governess disapprove of this even more than of her charge’s wandering off alone in the fog? “If you’ll allow me—may I see you back to Trevennick?” he suggested.

&nbs
p; “Oh, I wish you would. If it’s not too far out of your way?”

  “It’s—it’s on my way,” the Duke declared, lying hurriedly; and they started down the steep declivity. The slow descent was effected in silence, for the Duke’s lie had exhausted his conversational resources, and his companion seemed to have caught the contagion of his shyness. Inwardly he was thinking: “Ought I to offer her a hand? Is it steep enough—or will she think I’m presuming?”

  He had never before met a young lady alone in a ruined castle, and his mind, nurtured on precedents, had no rule to guide it. But nature cried aloud in him that he must somehow see her again. He was still turning over the best means of effecting another meeting—an invitation to the castle, a suggestion that he should call on Miss Testvalley?—when, after a slippery descent from the ruins, and an arduous climb up the opposite cliff, they reached the fork of the path where it joined the lane to Trevennick.

  “Thank you so much; but you needn’t come any further. There’s the inn just below,” the young lady said, smiling.

  “Oh, really? You’d rather—? Mayn’t I?”

  She shook her head. “No, really,” she mimicked him lightly; and with a quick wave of dismissal she started down the lane.

  The Duke stood motionless, looking irresolutely after her, and wondering what he ought to have said or done. “I ought to have contrived a way of going as far as the inn with her,” he said to himself, exasperated by his own lack of initiative. “It comes of being always hunted, I suppose,” he added, as he watched her slight outline lessen down the hill.

  Just where the descent took a turn toward the village, Nan encountered a familiar figure panting upward.

  “Annabel—I’ve been hunting for you everywhere!”

  Annabel laughed and embraced her duenna. “You weren’t expected back so soon.”

  “You promised me faithfully that you’d stay in the garden. And in this drenching fog—”

  “Yes; but the fog blew away after you’d gone, and I thought that let me off my promise. So I scrambled up to the castle—that’s all.”

  “That’s all? Over a mile away, and along those dangerous slippery cliffs?”

  . “Oh, it was all right. There was a gentleman there who brought me back.”

  “A gentleman—in the ruins?”

  “Yes. He says he lives somewhere round here.”

  “How often have I told you not to let strangers speak to you?”

  “He didn’t. I spoke to him. But he’s not really a stranger, darling; he thinks he knows you.”

  “Oh, he does, does he?” Miss Testvalley gave a sniff of incredulity.

  “I saw he wanted to ask if he could call,” Nan continued, “but he was too shy. I never saw anybody so scared. I don’t believe he’s been around much.”

  “I daresay he was shocked by your behaviour.”

  “Oh, no. Why should he have been? He just stayed with me while we were getting up the cliff; after that I said he musn’t come any farther. Why, there he is still—at the top of the lane, where I left him. I suppose he’s been watching to see that I got home safely. Don’t you call that sweet of him?”

  Miss Testvalley released herself from her pupil’s arm. Her eyes were not only keen but far-sighted. They followed Nan’s glance, and rested on the figure of a young man who stood above them on the edge of the cliff. As she looked, he turned slowly away.

  “Annabel! Are you sure that was the gentleman?”

  “Yes ... He’s funny. He says he has no time to read poetry. What do you suppose he does instead?”

  “But it’s the Duke of Tintagel!” Miss Testvalley suddenly declared.

  “The Duke? That young man?” It was Nan’s turn to give an incredulous laugh. “He said his name was Tintagel, and that he was the brother of those girls at the castle; but I thought of course he was a younger son. He never said he was the Duke.”

  Miss Testvalley gave an impatient shrug. “They don’t go about shouting out their titles. The family name is Folyat. And he has no younger brother, as it happens.”

  “Well, how was I to know all that? Oh, Miss Testvalley,” exclaimed Nan, spinning around on her governess, “but if he’s the Duke he’s the one Miss March wants Jinny to marry!”

  “Miss March is full of brilliant ideas.”

  “I don’t call that one particularly brilliant. At least, not if I was Jinny, I shouldn’t. I think,” said Nan, after a moment’s pondering, “that the Duke’s one of the stupidest young men I ever met.”

  “Well,” rejoined her governess severely, “I hope he thinks nothing worse than that of you.”

  XVII.

  The Mr. Robinson for whom Nan St. George had mistaken the Duke of Tintagel was a young man much more confident of his gifts, and assured as to his future, than that retiring nobleman. There was nothing within the scope of his understanding which Hector Robinson did not know, and mean at some time to make use of. His grandfather had been first a miner and then a mine-owner in the North; his father, old Sir Downman Robinson, had built up one of the biggest cotton-industries in Lancashire, and been rewarded with a knighthood, and Sir Downman’s only son meant to turn the knighthood into a baronetcy, and the baronetcy into a peerage. All in good time.

  Meanwhile, as a partner in his father’s big company, and director in various City enterprises, and as Conservative M.P. for one of the last rotten boroughs in England, he had his work cut out for him, and could boast that his thirty-five years had not been idle ones.

  It was only on the social side that he had hung fire. In coming out against his father as a Conservative, and thus obtaining without difficulty his election to Lord Saltmire’s constituency, Mr. Robinson had flattered himself that he would secure a footing in society as readily as in the City. Had he made a miscalculation? Was it true that fashion had turned toward Liberalism, and that a young Liberal M.P. was more likely to find favour in the circles to which Mr. Robinson aspired?

  Perhaps it was true; but Mr. Robinson was a Conservative by instinct, by nature, and in his obstinate self-confidence was determined that he would succeed without sacrificing his political convictions. And at any rate, when it came to a marriage, he felt reasonably sure that his Conservatism would recommend him in the families from which he intended to choose his bride.

  Mr. Robinson, surveying the world as his oyster, had already (if the figure be allowed) divided it into two halves, each in a different way designed to serve his purpose. The one, which he labelled “Mayfair,” held out possibilities of immediate success. In that set, which had already caught the Heir to the Throne in its glittering meshes, there were ladies of the highest fashion who, in return for pecuniary favours, were ready and even eager to promote the ascent of gentlemen with short pedigrees and long purses. As a member of Parliament, he had a status which did away with most of the awkward preliminaries; and he found it easy enough to pick up, among his masculine acquaintances, an introduction to that privileged group beginning to be known as “the Marlborough set.”

  But it was not in this easy-going world that he meant to marry. Socially as well as politically, Mr. Robinson was a true Conservative, and it was in the duller half of the London world, the half he called “Belgravia,” that he intended to seek a partner. But into those uniform cream-coloured houses where dowdy dowagers ruled, and flocks of marriageable daughters pined for a suitor approved by the family, Mr. Robinson had not yet forced his way. The only interior known to him in that world was Lord Saltmire’s, and in this he was received on a strictly Parliamentary basis. He had made the immense mistake of not immediately recognizing the fact, and of imagining, for a mad moment, that the Earl of Saltmire, who had been so ready to endow him with a seat in Parliament, would be no less disposed to welcome him as a brother-in-law. But Lady Audrey de Salis, plain, dowdy, and one of five unmarried sisters, had refused him curtly and all too definitely; and the shock had thrown him back into the arms of Mayfair. Obviously he had aspired too high, or been too impatient ; but it was in h
is nature to be aspiring and impatient, and if he was to succeed it must be on the lines of his own character.

  So he had told himself as he looked into his glass on the morning of his first visit to the cottage at Runnymede, whither Teddy de Santos-Dios was to conduct him. Mr. Robinson saw in his mirror the energetic reddish features of a young man with a broad short nose, a dense crop of brown hair, and a heavy brown moustache. He had been among the first to recognize that whiskers were going out, and had sacrificed as handsome a pair as the City could show. When Mr. Robinson made up his mind that a change was coming, his principle was always to meet it half way; and so the whiskers went. And it did make him look younger to wear only the fashionable moustache. With that, and a flower in the buttonhole of his Poole coat, he could take his chance with most men, though he was aware that the careless un-self-consciousness of the elect was still beyond him. But in time he would achieve that too.

  Certainly he could not have gone to a better school than the bungalow at Runnymede. The young guardsmen, the budding M.P.’s and civil servants, who frequented it were all of the favoured caste whose ease of manner Mr. Robinson envied; and nowhere were they so easy as in the company of the young women already familiar to fashionable London as “the Americans.” Mr. Robinson returned from that first visit enchanted and slightly bewildered, but with the fixed resolve to go back as often as he was invited. Before the day was over he had lent fifty pounds to Teddy de Santos-Dios, and lost another fifty at poker to the latter’s sister, Lady Richard Marable, thus securing a prompt invitation for the following week; and after that he was confident of keeping the foothold he had gained.