The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  Yes—a ghost. That was it. Annabel St. George was dead, and Annabel Tintagel did not know how to question the dead, and would therefore never be able to find out why and how that mysterious change had come about....

  “The greatest mistake,” she mused, her chin resting on her clasped hands, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the dim reaches of the park, “the greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things.... I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call ‘experience.’ But by the time we’ve got that we’re no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.”

  Of course, she could have found plenty of external reasons: a succession of incidents, leading, as a trail leads across a desert, from one point to another of the original Annabel’s career. But what was the use of recapitulating these points, when she was no longer the Annabel whom they had led to this splendid and lonely room set in the endless acres of Longlands?

  The curious thing was that her uncertainty and confusion of mind seemed to have communicated themselves to the new world into which she found herself transplanted—and that she was aware of the fact. “They don’t know what to make of me, and why should they, when I don’t know what to make of myself?” she had once said, in an unusual burst of confidence, to her sister, Virginia, who had never really understood her confidences, and who had absently rejoined, studying herself while she spoke in her sister’s monumental cheval-glass, and critically pinching her waist between thumb and fore-finger: “My dear, I’ve never yet met an Englishman or an Englishwoman who didn’t know what to make of a duchess, if only they had the chance to try. The trouble is, you don’t give them the chance.”

  Yes; Annabel supposed it was that. Fashionable London had assimilated with surprising rapidity the lovely transatlantic invaders. Hostesses who only two years ago would have shuddered at the clink of tall glasses and the rattle of cards, now threw their doors open to poker-parties, and offered intoxicating drinks to those to whom the new-fangled afternoon tea seemed too reminiscent of the school-room. Hands trained to draw from a Broad-wood the dulcet cadences of “La Sonnambula” now thrummed the banjo to “Juanita” or “The Swanee River.” Girls, and even young matrons, pinned up their skirts to compete with the young men in the new game of lawn-tennis on lordly lawns; smoking was spreading from the precincts reserved for it to dining-room and library (it was even rumoured that “the Americans” took sly whiffs in their bedrooms!); Lady Seadown was said to be getting up an amateur Negro minstrel performance for Christmas, which she and Seadown would spend at Longlands, and as for the wild games introduced into country-house parties, there was no denying that, even after a hard day’s hunting or shooting, they could tear the men from their after-dinner torpor.

  A blast of outer air had freshened the stagnant atmosphere of Belgravian drawing-rooms, and while some sections of London society still shuddered (or affected to shudder) at “the Americans,” others, and the uppermost among them, openly applauded and imitated them. But in both groups the young Duchess of Tintagel remained a figure apart. The Dowager Duchess spoke of her as “my perfect daughter-in-law,” but praise from the Dowager Duchess had about as much zest as a Sunday-school diploma. In the circle where the pace was set by Conchita Marable, Virginia Seadown, and Lizzy Elmsworth (now married to the brilliant young Conservative member of Parliament, Mr. Hector Robinson), the circle to which, by kinship and early associations, Annabel belonged, she was as much a stranger as in the straitest fastnesses of the peerage. “Annabel has really managed,” Conchita drawled with her slow smile, “to be considered unfashionable among the unfashionable”—and the phrase clung to the young Duchess, and catalogued her once for all.

  One side of her loved, as much as the others did, dancing, dressing up, midnight romps, practical jokes played on the pompous and elderly; but the other side, the side which had dominated her since her arrival in England, was passionately in earnest and beset with vague dreams and ambitions, in which a desire to better the world alternated with a longing for solitude and poetry.

  If her husband could have kept her company in either of these regions, she might not have given a thought to the rest of mankind. But in the realm of poetry the Duke had never willingly risked himself since he had handed up his vale at Eton, and a great English nobleman of his generation could hardly conceive that he had anything to learn regarding the management of his estates from a little American girl whose father appeared to be a cross between a stock-broker and a professional gambler, and whom he had married chiefly because she seemed too young and timid to have any opinions on any subject whatever.

  “The great thing is that I shall be able to form her,” he had said to his mother, on the dreadful day when he had broken the news of his engagement to the horrified Duchess; and the Duchess had replied, with a flash of unwonted insight: “You’re very skilful, Ushant; but women are not quite as simple as clocks.”

  As simple as clocks. How like a woman to say that! The Duke smiled. “Some clocks are not at all simple,” he said with an air of superior knowledge.

  “Neither are some women,” his mother rejoined; but there both thought it prudent to let the discussion drop.

  Annabel stood up and looked about the room. It was large and luxurious, with walls of dark-green velvet framed in heavily carved and gilded oak. Everything about its decoration and furnishings—the towering malachite vases, the ponderous writing-table supported on winged geniuses in ormolu, the heavily foliaged wall-lights, the Landseer portrait, above the monumental chimney-piece, of her husband as a baby, playing with an elder sister in a tartan sash—all testified to a sumptuous “re-doing,” doubtless dating from the day when the present Dowager had at last presented her lord with an heir. A stupid, oppressive room—somebody else’s room, not Annabel’s ... But on three of the velvet-panelled walls hung the famous Correggios; in the half-dusk of an English November they were like rents in the clouds, tunnels of radiance reaching out to pure sapphire distances. Annabel looked at the golden limbs, the parted lips gleaming with laughter, the abandonment of young bodies under shimmering foliage. On dark days—and there were many—these pictures were her sunlight. She speculated about them, wove stories about them, and hung them with snatches of verse from Miss Testvalley’s poet cousin. How was it they went?

  Beyond all depth away

  The heat lies silent at the brink of day:

  Now the hand trails upon the viol-string

  That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,

  Sad with the whole of pleasure.

  Were there such beings anywhere, she wondered, save in the dreams of poets and painters, such landscapes, such sunlight? The Correggio room had always been the reigning Duchess’s private boudoir, and at first it had surprised Annabel that her mother-in-law should live surrounded by scenes before which Mrs. St. George would have veiled her face. But gradually she understood that, in a world as solidly buttressed as the Dowager Duchess’s by precedents, institutions, and traditions, it would have seemed more subversive to displace the pictures than to hear the children’s Sunday-school lessons under the laughter of those happy pagans. The Correggio room had always been the Duchess’s boudoir, and the Correggios had always hung there. “It has always been like that,” was the Dowager’s invariable answer to any suggestion of change; and she had conscientiously brought up her son in the same creed.

  The Duke (who privately considered that his works of art not only conferred prestige on Longlands but were glorified by being there) told Annabel, “They are a trust,” when, accompanied by Mr. Rossiter, his curator, a plump hands-rubbing man nervously eager to please, he first showed her the boudoir. “It is deplorable,” he observed to Mr. Rossiter, who groaned assent, “that Sir Helmsley Thwarte sold his Titian, to an American, I fancy. Things should stay where they belong. Now he’s left with his Holbein, which I think is inferior?”

  “Oh, but
it’s very, very fine, and worth a great deal, Your Grace!—far less than the Titian, to be sure; but the Titian is—was—hors concours.”

  Though she had been married for over two years, it was for her first big house-party at Longlands that the new Duchess was preparing. The first months after her marriage had been spent at Tintagel, in a solitude deeply disapproved of by the Duke’s mother, who for the second time found herself powerless to influence her son. The Duke gave himself up with a sort of dogged abandonment to the long-dreamed-of delights of solitude and domestic bliss. The ducal couple (as the Dowager discovered with horror, on her first visit to them) lived like any middle-class husband and wife, tucked away in a wing of the majestic pile, where two butlers and ten footmen should have been drawn up behind the dinner-table, and a groom-of-the-chambers have received the guests in the great hall. Grooms-of-the-chambers, butlers, and footmen had all been relegated to Longlands, and to his mother’s dismay only two or three personal servants supplemented the understudies who had hitherto sufficed for Tintagel’s simple needs on his trips to Cornwall.

  Even after their return to London and Longlands the young couple continued to disturb the Dowager Duchess’s peace of mind. The most careful and patient initiation into the functions of the servants attending on her had not kept Annabel from committing what seemed to her mother-in-law inexcusable, perhaps deliberate blunders; such as asking the groom-of-the-chambers to fetch her a glass of water, or bidding one of the under house-maids to lace up her dinner-dress when her own maid was accidentally out of hearing.

  “It’s not that she’s stupid, you know, my dear,” the Dowager avowed to her old friend Miss Jacky March, “but she puts one out, asking the reason of things that have nothing to do with reasons—such as why the housekeeper doesn’t take her meals with the upper servants, but only comes in for dessert. What would happen next, as I said to her, in a house where the housekeeper did take her meals with the upper servants? That sort of possibility never occurs to the poor child; yet I really can’t call her stupid. I often find her with a book in her hand. I think she thinks too much about things that oughtn’t to be thought about,” wailed the bewildered Duchess. “And the worst of it is that dear Ushant doesn’t seem to know how to help her”—her tone implying that, in any case, such a task should not have been laid on him. And Miss Jacky March murmured her sympathy.

  XXI.

  Those quiet months in Cornwall, which already seemed so much more remote from the actual Annabel than her girlhood at Saratoga, had been of her own choosing. She did not admit to herself that her first sight of the ruins of the ancient Tintagel had played a large part in her wooing; that if the Duke had been only the dullest among the amiable but dull young men who came to the bungalow at Runnymede she would hardly have given him a second thought. But the idea of living in that magic castle by the sad western sea had secretly tinged her vision of the castle’s owner; and she had thought that he and she might get to know each other more readily there than anywhere else. And now, in looking back, she asked herself if it were not her own fault that the weeks at Tintagel had not brought the expected understanding. Instead, as she now saw, they had only made husband and wife more unintelligible to each other. To Annabel, the Cornish castle spoke with that rich low murmur of the past which she had first heard in its mysterious intensity the night when she had lain awake in the tapestried chamber at Allfriars, beside the sleeping Virginia, who had noticed only that the room was cold and shabby. Though the walls of Tintagel were relatively new, they were built on ancient foundations, and crowded with the treasures of the past; and nearby was the mere of Excalibur, and from her windows she could see the dark-gray sea, and sometimes, at night-fall, the mysterious barge with black sails putting out from the ruined castle to carry the dead King to Avalon.

  Of all this, nothing existed for her husband. He saw the new Tintagel only as a costly folly of his father’s which family pride obliged him to keep up with fitting state, in spite of the unfruitful acres which made its maintenance so difficult. In shouldering these cares, however, he did not expect his wife to help him, save by looking her part as a beautiful and angelically pure young duchess whose only duties consisted in bestowing her angelic presence on entertainments for the tenantry and agricultural prizegivings. The Duke had grown up under the iron rod of a mother who, during his minority, had managed not only his property, but his very life, and he had no idea of letting her authority pass to his wife. Much as he dreaded the duties belonging to his great rank, deeply as he was oppressed by them, he was determined to perform them himself, were it ever so hesitatingly and painfully, and not to be guided by anyone else’s suggestions.

  To his surprise, such suggestions were not slow in coming from Annabel. She had not yet learned that she was expected to remain a loving and adoring looker-on, and in her daily drives over the estate (in the smart pony-chaise, with its burnished trappings and gay piebald ponies) she often, out of sheer loneliness, stopped for a chat at toll-gates, farm-houses and cottages, made purchases at the village shops, scattered toys and lollipops among the children, and tried to find out from their mothers what she could do to help them. It had filled her with wonder to learn that for miles around, both at Longlands and Tintagel, all these people in the quaint damp cottages and the stuffy little shops were her husband’s tenants and dependents; that he had the naming of the rectors and vicars of a dozen churches, and that even the old men and women in the mouldy alms-houses were there by virtue of his bounty. But when she had grasped the extent of his power it seemed to her that to help and befriend those who depended on him was the best service she could render him. Nothing in her early bringing-up had directed her mind towards any kind of organized beneficence, but she had always been what she called “sorry for people,” and it seemed to her that there was a good deal to be sorry about in the lot of these people who depended solely, in health and sickness, on a rich man’s whim.

  The discovery that her interest in them was distasteful to the Duke came to her as a great shock, and left a wound that did not heal. Coming in one day, a few months after their marriage, from one of her exploring expeditions, she was told that His Grace wished to speak to her in his study, and she went in eagerly, glad to seize the chance of telling him at once about the evidences of neglect and poverty she had come upon that very afternoon.

  “Oh, Ushant, I’m so glad you’re in! Could you come with me at once to the Linfrys’ cottage, down by St. Gildas’s; you know, that damp place under the bridge, with the front covered with roses? The eldest boy’s down with typhoid, and the drains ought to be seen to at once if all the younger ones are not to get it.” She spoke in haste, too much engrossed in what she had to say to notice the Duke’s expression. It was his silence that roused her; and when she looked at him she saw that his face wore what she called its bolted look—the look she most disliked to see on it. He sat silent, twisting an ivory paper-cutter between his fingers.

  “May I ask who told you this?” he asked at length, in a voice like his mother’s when she was rebuking an upper housemaid.

  “Why, I found it out myself. I’ve just come from there.”

  The Duke stood up, knocking the paper-cutter to the floor.

  “You’ve been there? Yourself? To a house where you tell me there is typhoid fever? In your state of health? I confess, Annabel—” His lips twitched nervously under his scanty blond moustache.

  “Oh, bother my state of health! I feel all right, really I do. And you know the doctors have ordered me to walk and drive every day.”

  “But not go and sit with Mrs. Linfry’s sick children, in a house reeking with disease.”

  “But, Ushant, I just had to! There was no one to see about them. And if the house reeks with disease, whose fault is it but ours? They’ve no sick-nurse, and nobody to help the mother, or tell her what to do; and the doctor comes only every other day.”

  “Is it your idea, my dear, that I should provide every cottage on my estates, here and elsewher
e, with a hospital nurse?” the Duke asked ironically.

  “Well, I wish you would! At least there ought to be a nurse in every village, and two in the bigger ones; and the doctor ought to see his patients every day; and the drains—Ushant, you must come with me at once and smell the drains!” cried Nan in a passion of entreaty.

  She felt the Duke’s inexpressive eyes fixed coldly on her.

  “If your intention is to introduce typhoid fever at Tintagel, I can imagine no better way of going about it,” he began. “But perhaps you don’t realize that, though it may not be as contagious as typhus, the doctors are by no means sure...”

  “Oh, but they are sure; only ask them! Typhoid comes from bad drains and infected milk. It can’t hurt you in the least to go down and see what’s happening at the Linfrys’; and you ought to, because they’re your own tenants. Won’t you come with me now? The ponies are not a bit tired, and I told William to wait—”

  “I wish you would not call Armson by his Christian name; I’ve already told you that in England head grooms are called by their surnames.”

  “Oh, Ushant, what can it matter? I call you by your surname, but I never can remember about the others. And the only thing that matters now...”

  The Duke walked to the hearth, and pulled the embroidered bell-rope beside the chimney. To the footman who appeared he said: “Please tell Armson that Her Grace will not require the pony-chaise any longer this afternoon.”

  “But—” Annabel burst out; then she stood silent till the door closed on the servant. The Duke remained silent also.

  “Is that your answer?” she asked at length, her breath coming quickly.

  He lifted a more friendly face. “My dear child, don’t look so tragic. I’ll see Blair; he shall look into the drains. But do try to remember that these small matters concern my agent more than they do me; and that they don’t concern you at all. My mother was very much esteemed and respected at Tintagel, but though she managed my affairs so wisely, it never occurred to her to interfere directly with the agent’s business, except as regards Christmas festivities, and the annual school-treat. Her holding herself aloof increased the respect that was felt for her; and my wife could not do better than to follow her example.”