She had heard a laughing aside of Conchita’s, “Guy Thwarte’s no longer a detrimental,” and had paid no heed. But how could she have failed to understand that he would be pursued? No; not merely pursued, she had to face the worst—the obvious—that he would of course, for every reason, want to marry? “Oh,” she moaned, shaken by waves of anguish, not knowing to whom she might be pleading, “don’t let me be jealous of them.... It would be contemptible....”
But Annabel, who had never been in love and had never been jealous, was jealous, and it was that cruellest of passions, striking like lightning, that showed her that she was in love.... Contemptible or not, she could not be here when they came home and Guy resumed his visits. (Visits, but to which one?) She could not stay. But neither could she go back to Longlands....
Her pillow wet with tears, the Duchess of Tintagel tossed and turned all night.
“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 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 late-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—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—Duchess—of—Tintagel.” Still amused, his wife 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 we 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 overdo 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 solid 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 an eye for 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 dubious. “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. And Mabel will be here too! 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 someone by nationality and upbringing 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.
At Champions, after another unhappy night, Nan h
ad Mabbit help her into her riding-habit and went wanly down into the breakfast-room, where she put on a bright face and asked Lady Glenloe if she might have Comet, the old chestnut gelding she had used when they had ridden before. “I’d like the exercise,” she said.
“Of course, of course! The air will do you good. I knew the alakar would help,” Lady Glenloe said, pleased. “Llewellyn can go with you.”
“Oh, thanks,” Annabel said quickly, “but I don’t need a groom. I won’t go far; I thought I’d just wander about.”
Llewellyn, a short wiry man whose dark face revealed his Celtic origin, had a lad lead Comet out of his stall, fetch a side-saddle, and tack him up. As he helped Annabel to mount, he nodded toward a long black head looking over another stall door. “I’ll not be a minute, Your Grace—”
“No,” Nan said firmly, “I won’t need you. I’m not going far ... and I won’t run Comet at a fence,” she added with a half-smile, understanding the focus of the head groom’s concern. Comet was a notorious sluggard, but Llewellyn was grumpily protective of every horse in the stables. “Don’t worry about him.”
On a childhood holiday on a farm in New York State she and Jinny had tucked up their pinafores and ridden a broad-backed Shetland pony astride, to their mother’s horror; in New York they had taken riding lessons at Dickel’s Riding Academy, and in London they had ridden a few times in Hyde Park. But after her marriage Ushant had discouraged Nan’s riding, even before her miscarriage. She knew that Llewellyn—and Lady Glenloe, and the girls—had, rightly, no opinion of her as a horsewoman. But she could stay on a lazy old mount, at a walk, and she needed to be alone. Until she could escape ... She had written inviting herself to Lizzy’s....
Patting the indifferent Comet on the neck, she walked him sedately through the yard and the paddock into the park, where she let him have his way, a dragging way that suited her inner desolation. The whispers of approaching spring, the tender green shoots of crocuses in the reviving grass—nothing drew her from her sad reflections until, approaching the principal entrance to the park, she heard fast hoof-beats in the lane outside the wall. A moment later Guy Thwarte, on a roan mare, trotted in between the old escutcheoned stone posts of a gate that was always kept open.
Nan’s heart seemed to turn over inside her, and her hands on the reins became tight fists as she halted.
Guy, equally startled, reined in so abruptly that his horse reared a little. As he pulled it in he raised his hat.
“Duchess! ... I thought you were in London.”
“It’s only me,” Annabel stammered, her heart beating almost to suffocation. “They won’t ... Kitty and Cora won’t be back till next week.... I’m sorry,” she finished as Guy frowned at her.
“Cora, Kitty, what do you mean?” he demanded.
“Well, of course, you’ve come to see them ... one of them....” Nan tried to keep her voice steady and was grateful for Comet’s calming lethargy beneath her.
Guy looked at the forlorn white face under the jaunty riding-hat, at the violet smudges beneath the great dark eyes which looked away from him.
“What on earth?” He made a wide gesture with his crop. “What—? I stopped coming because—”
“Yes, I know—we know,” Nan said hastily—she couldn’t bear to hear him say it—“but they are still away.”
“For God’s sake!” Guy sounded desperately angry. “Do you mean—? Can you—? I stopped coming because of you. How could I think of anyone else when I know you? How could I care—?” As Nan stared at him with a white intensity, he said roughly: “I can’t have you, and it’s impossible having to see you—”
He broke off as Llewellyn came up from behind Nan at an easy trot and touched his cap to both of them.
“Your Grace, her ladyship says as I must ride with you.” The groom’s bold black eyes went back and forth between the Duchess and the flushed and agitated young man beside her.
“Please make my apologies to Lady Glenloe,” Guy said to Nan. “I can’t come to luncheon after all, because I have to go to Lowdon.” With a last long stern look at her, he raised his hat again and trotted out of the park.
“If that fellow hadn’t come, I’d have taken her in my arms. And she’d never have forgiven me.” Guy cantered on with no destination in mind. “It is intolerable.... As my father says, Tintagel is our Duke. I am the Duke’s candidate for Lowdon.” He trotted through a somnolent hamlet and left it at a reckless gallop. “If I win, it will be thanks to his interest. I shall be ‘his man in the Commons,’ with endless meetings and visits, dinners at Longlands and Folyat House. And Annabel at his side....”
He must immediately tell the committee that he was withdrawing, so that they could look for a new candidate.
But he’d still be living in the Duke’s fief.
Impossible. England would be impossible. He must go to London and make arrangements—at once.
The next morning, Guy was in Leadenhall Street, weaving his way through a crowd of City workers toward the office of his old engineering firm.
BOOK FOUR
XXXIII.
Three middle-aged ladies sat in the jungle warmth of a centrally heated drawing-room, decorated in the French Empire style, in a mansion in Fifth Avenue, New York City, while outside the windows a heavy snowfall whitened the leafless branches of the trees in the Central Park.
Mrs. Elmsworth (whose mansion it was), Mrs. St. George, and Mrs. Closson had long since taken for granted their acceptance, in varying degrees, by the best New York society as mothers of daughters who had married, severally, a duke, an earl who would become a marquis, a courtesy lord who was the earl’s brother, a prominent young British statesman widely regarded as a future prime minister, and an American multi-millionaire who was a benefactor of causes dear to van der Luyden, Parmore, and Eglinton hearts.
Three summers ago at Runnymede, when Mrs. St. George and Mrs. Elmsworth had come downstairs in the bungalow to learn that while they dozed the afternoon away Virginia had become Lord Seadown’s fiancée, they were told by Mabel and Conchita and, tearfully, by Virginia herself, how Lizzy had sacrificed herself to Virginia’s advantage. Mrs. Elmsworth had not been resentful; and Mrs. St. George, knowing that she would not have been so generous, had salved her conscience, when they returned to New York, by pushing and pulling Mrs. Elmsworth up a few steps of the great staircase that mounted to the Parmores, Eglintons, and van der Luydens. A relatively lowly station seemed appropriate to a woman who tended to be red of face and short of breath because of overly rigid whaleboning. Mrs. Elmsworth’s coarseness was also betrayed by her cheerful unawareness that she—and Mrs. Closson—were being condescended to by their old friend.
Neither Mrs. Elmsworth nor Mrs. Closson, however, was possessed by the almost religious zeal that had driven Mrs. St. George to fight for entry into the circle of Knickerbocker families whom she revered as “aristocracy” superior to any in the Old World. Mrs. St. George had emerged from the battle victorious, and feared a shift in fortune no more than she feared that the storm outside, fast becoming a blizzard, would blow in the windows of Mrs. Elmsworth’s salon.
But—vanity of vanities!—“Now that we’re here,” she and Mrs. Elmsworth sometimes said, echoing the Preacher, “what good is it?” and Mrs. Closson, amiably echoing her two friends, would sigh: “What good?” When Colonel St. George observed after a van der Luyden dinner: “Well, my dear, as the French say, the price of moving in high society is eternal boredom,” his wife blamed it on his liking the vulgar company of race-goers and card-players, and... those women. (On today’s visit at Mrs. Elmsworth’s, Mrs. St. George’s round featureless face under its fair tower of sculpted curls, crimps, and plaits was ornamented right and left by a pair of large emerald ear-drops which the Colonel had handed her on his return from a business trip to New Or-leans.) Yet she had to admit to herself now and then that the big dinners, “soirées,” balls, and weddings to which they were invited were all much of a muchness and, unless you had a daughter
to settle in life, presented no challenge.
Of course, in her right mind Mrs. St. George knew that it was thrilling to be bored in the society of van der Luydens, Eglintons, and Parmores. A pistol shot makes no sound if nobody hears it. Her eminence was brilliant less in itself than because of the thousands on thousands of women who read of it, and envied. Mrs. St. George held little stock in imagination. Annabel’s “suppose that’s” and “if only’s” had always irked her. But she pictured with a soaring fancy, and a freedom from geographical pedantry that rivalled Lady Brightlingsea’s, those women in their multitudes, from Manhattan on through the Middle West—Montana, Illinois, and the great wheat-fields of Utah—to the Pacific Coast. To know that they would see her name in the proper paragraphs in society columns and read, in interviews by society reporters, her views on benefit concerts and divorce, and her descriptions of the home-life of her daughter the Duchess—for nothing in life, or indeed in the afterlife, would Mrs. St. George have relinquished all that.
Moreover, there was a challenge! A revelation had come to Mrs. St. George one morning on the road to the Parmores’ such that she cried, in the poet’s spirit if not his precise words: “Say not the struggle naught availeth!” In twenty years or so, Jinny’s two sons would be of marriageable age; and Jinny’d have others. And surely some day Annabel would begin to produce heirs. Without going so far as to advocate the infant betrothals of the wicked European past, Mrs. St. George envisaged an array of noble grandsons in England who would be a compelling attraction to American mothers of baby girls who would duly reach eighteen and come out. Already, if far-seeing prospective grand-mothers, her contemporaries, were cultivating her acquaintance, it could only be with match-making in mind; and she could look forward to a place in their very tabernacle, at those inteem dinners she was always hearing of, to which she was not invited, she was sure, only because the guests were all members of the family.
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