The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  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 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 that 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 for 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 you! 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 oneself 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 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 isn’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 skin-flint! No, I suppose he wouldn’t; and I suppose you haven’t yet learned 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 suc
h 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.

  XXVI.

  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 fields of rain-cloud. That was England, she thought; not only the English scene but the English life was perptually 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 “Earthly Paradise,” Guy Thwarte had said.... The Garden of Eden, with which no other garden could compare—

  Not that faire field

  Of Enna, where Proserpin gathring flowrs

  Herself a fairer flowre by gloomie Dis

  Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain

  To seek her through the world ...

  Pain had no place in the garden where Correggio’s lovers lived “in unreproved pleasures free....” The thought that she had even imagined Ushant as a iover—imagined him, any more than his mother, approving of pleasure—made Annabel 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 repaying? 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.

  Of “the girls,” Lizzy and Mabel Elmsworth had married men who were rich though devoid of title. But Virginia 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 yachting 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.

  Virginia had spoken of a privilege which she, loveliest of the newcomers, had not yet enjoyed. Two pregnancies had prevented her from going into society; next, the Prince of Wales had gone to India for many months; lastly, her father-in-law’s uncle Lord John Brightlingsea had died. Lord John, known as the only man in England more absent-minded than his nephew, had still enjoyed excellent health on the day when he forgot to breathe. Family mourning had drastically curtailed activity at Allfriars; and in town, though Conchita nonchalantly abbreviated the observance of secluded grief, Virginia had behaved with meticulous, if peevish, decorum. In December, she had at last been able to accept an invitation to Marlborough House. But when Nan asked about the event during the Christmas house-party at Longlands, Jinny had said bitingly, “The Princess of Wales received us. He was elsewhere.” Nan’s puzzled “What difference does that make?” had incurred the scathing look her sister had so often bestowed on her in their childhood. “You—little—goose!” Virginia had said, between her teeth.

  Annabel wanted nothing of what her sister and her sister’s friends were fighting for; their needs did not stir her imagination; she was inattentive to their hints, 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.

  It was Conchita’s appeal which first roused her sympathy. “You don’t know what it is,” Lady Dick had said, “to be in love with one man and tied to another”: and instantly the barriers of Nan’s indifference had broken down. It was wrong—it was no doubt dreadfully wrong—but it was human, it was understandable, it made her frozen heart thaw in soft participation. “It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all,” she thought, considering her own desolate plight....

  But such thoughts were pure self-indulgence; her immediate business was the finding of the five hundred pounds to lift Conchita’s weight of debt.

  When there was a big shooting-party at Longlands, every hour of the Duke’s day was disposed of in advance, and Nan regarded this as a compensation for the boredom of the occasion. She was resolved never again to expose herself to the risks of those solitary months at Tintagel, with an Ushant at leisure to dissect his grievances as he did his clocks. After much reflection, she scribbled a note to him: “Please let me know after breakfast when I can see you”—and to her surprise, when the party rose from the sumptuous repast which always fortified the guns at Longlands, the Duke followed her into the east drawing-room, where the ladies were accustomed to assemble in the mornings with th
eir needle-work and correspondence.

  “If you’ll come to my study for a moment, Annabel.”

  “Now—?” she stammered, not expecting so prompt a response.

  The Duke consulted his watch. “I have a quarter of an hour before we start.” She hesitated, and then, reflecting that she might have a better chance of success if there were no time to prolong the discussion, rose and followed him.

  The Duke’s study at Longlands had been created by a predecessor imbued with loftier ideas of his station, and the glories befitting it, than the present Duke could muster. In size, and splendour of ornament, it seemed singularly out of scale with the nervous little man pacing its stately floor; but it had always been “the Duke’s study,” and must therefore go on being so till the end of time.

  Ushant had seated himself behind his monumental desk, as if to borrow from it the authority he did not always know how to assert unaided. His wife stood before him without speaking. He lifted his head, and forced one of the difficult smiles he had inherited from his mother. “Yes—?”

  “Oh, Ushant—I don’t know how to begin; and this room always frightens me. It looks as if people came here only when you sent for them to be sentenced.”

  The Duke met this with a look of genuine bewilderment. Could it be, the look implied, that his wife imagined there was some link between the peerage and the magistracy? “Well, my dear—?”