The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  Dear Jacky had the crotchety innocence of an American spinster; no—Miss Testvalley quickly enlarged her generalization—the innocence of an American. Unlike the English, she always assumed the best. “Whereas nothing evil under the sun can astonish me.... Not,” Miss Testvalley—who was alone in the sitting-room—muttered with a fine Italian shrug, “that I am exactly English, spinster or no.” Jacky lived in a choice cranny of the world of fashion; she got on well with Lady Churt; she helped make matches that were often, at best, convenient, with the innocence of an ostrich. Apparently it hadn’t entered her head that Annabel might be guiltily in love with someone. (The Reverend Mr. March’s broad-mindedness presumably had not extended to adultery.) Or if it had entered her head, Jacky supposed that Annabel enjoyed the same rarefied sentiment that she herself entertained for Lord Brightlingsea. Miss Testvalley had decided long ago that only ignorance of passion had enabled Miss March to spaniel at heel the very people who had insulted her. That, and—but was it cause or effect?—a deranged sense of reality. A phrenologist palping that busy little head under its curls true and false would certainly be struck by the development of Miss March’s bump of self-delusion.

  The still more engrossing news awaiting Miss Testvalley at Champions was that Sir Helmsley Thwarte at Honourslove had had another fall and was back on crutches, poor gentleman. After a moment’s disappointment and concern, she felt an ashamed relief that she would not, immediately, have to discuss his son with him while concealing what she had learned from Annabel.

  On the day after her return, she received a basket of yellow roses from the Honourslove conservatory and a basket of blushful grapes from the grapery, with a note eloquently expressing Sir Helmsley’s vexation that he could not bear the jolting of a carriage even when his destination was his Laura—for whose comforting presence he longed, for reasons trop complexes et pénibles to confide to a letter. Miss Testvalley composedly asked the man who had brought the offerings to thank Sir Helmsley on behalf of the young ladies and herself and extend their kindest wishes for his rapid recovery.

  Later in the day, following a conversation with the Honourslove messenger, who had partaken of a meal below-stairs, the housekeeper approached Miss Testvalley in the hall with avid speculation in her eyes: “They do say Sir Helmsley’s that beside himself because Mr. Guy won’t be in the Parliament. Right wild, he is!” Folding her arms over an imposing black wool bosom, the woman paused, in evident expectation of a good long talk. With a nod and a non-committal “Oh?” Miss Testvalley went past her into the library.

  Refusing to gossip about the Family helped preserve a self-respect often bruised by disdain or thoughtless discourtesy from above. Having had more than her fair share of “the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes” (not that she was always patient!), Miss Testvalley sometimes reminded herself that the cultured Greeks to whom Roman citizens used to entrust their sons’ education had the legal status of slaves. That was a sour consolation. She found healthier recompense in the play of her nimble irreverent mind over the absurdities of the great. But she would not chatter about them—even if she antagonized domestics already hostile toward a person who put on airs, though her clothes were mended!

  Like all the county, Laura Testvalley knew about Sir Helmsley Thwarte’s near-criminal thriftlessness. (She had discovered the falsity of the rumour that his son too was feckless and had married for money.) She had heard of Sir Helmsley’s legendary uncontrollable fits of rage, ugly and even dangerous; and she knew from personal observation that he was vain (but what man was not?).

  Against all that, Sir Helmsley, besides being charming in his hard-bitten way, was cultivated. Refined by bodily suffering, he had come to delight in the company of a woman who read Petrarch and to identify her, playfully, with Petrarch’s Laura: far more interesting, he maintained, than Dante’s Beatrice; and who had inspired a real, human love, not a tepid idealization! The governess felt an astonished gratitude that he found her attractive as a woman. This was how Daphne, who was metamorphosed into a tree—in fact, into a laurel, Laura thought with a little laugh—might have felt had she found herself changing back from wood into soft sensuous female flesh. As for Sir Helmsley’s offering a middle-aged Cinderella the unimaginable solace of shelter and protection... offering an end to the fear and loneliness that clutched her by the throat at midnight...

  Miss Testvalley—Sir Helmsley chose to call her Miss Testavaglia, in honour of her illustrious antecedents—was too familiar with disappointment to dare succumb to hope. There were obstacles to the match of which, almost certainly, Sir Helmsley had as yet no suspicion. For he believed that his son was still fancy free.

  What was certain was that her post at Champions was nearing its end, though whether she would go on to become the lady of a baronet, or vanish into a struggle for subsistence unarmed by references from great ladies, was in the lap of gods whom Miss Testvalley knew to be capricious. Anticipating the day when she would leave her pupils for good, she firmly brought them back from weeks of frivolity to school-work; and while Cora and Kitty, amenable if not all that studious, plodded through assignments in French and the history of art, she drew up a Reading List which she presented to them in a session held not in the school-room, with its homely vestiges of the nursery, but in the library. They were books by authors, some of whom they already knew, which they should know and would be glad they knew as time passed. “Shakespeare, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Browning. Hamilton’s History of Philosophy. Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. Lord Bacon’s Essays. Read Jane Eyre (though some disapprove of it). Coppée’s Elements of Logic. Homer in Pope’s translation.” As the two pairs of china-blue eyes fixed upon her grew rounder and bluer, the governess ended, smiling: “And I hope you’ll read Manzoni’s Triumph of Liberty and some poems of Leopardi’s, which I have translated, though not so well as they deserve; I’ve re-copied them, to place in this library for you.”

  “But, Miss Testvalley,” Cora gasped, in panic, “there must be at least a hundred books! How long a time do we have to read them in?”

  “Oh, years! As long as you like. Only don’t think of them as lessons, but as great books which will enlarge your experience. As Lord Bacon says, ‘Reading maketh a full man’—or woman! You will be happier, more resourceful for knowing them.”

  “How many years,” Kitty asked, “did it take the Duchess to read them?”

  XXXVII.

  “If Her Grace isn’t there, ask where she can be reached.”

  Guy Thwarte sealed an envelope and gave it to his manservant Spaulding in the hushed writing-room of his club, where he had been putting up while in London.

  He had been occupied by meetings with his colleagues, with City bankers, with representatives of the King of the Hellenes; with manufacturers of steel rails and directors of railway companies who might have old rolling-stock to sell. Immersion in work saved him from thinking of Annabel. But whenever he lifted his head from papers, her face, dimpling or wet with tears, a rainbow face, was there; and her soft voice, with its lingering American intonations, was a strain of music always at the back of his head.

  Guy did not regret his hasty decision to leave England. He knew from experience that work would deaden memory. New work, a new country—and a new language. He had been assured that in Greece everybody who was anybody spoke fluent French or English; but he wanted to talk with nobodies, as he had talked Portuguese with workmen in Brazil, and would have learned the local Indian dialect if he had remained. A knack for languages had made his teachers direct him into the diplomatic, where he had found that only French mattered. Now a little white-haired man with the archaic profile and the archaic grimace, Mr. Demosthenes Goussias, was giving him a few lessons in modern Greek (the Greek of Eton being incomprehensible to present-day Hellenes).

  He knew he wouldn’t go on forever repeating Byron’s “Zoe mou, sas agapo (Annabel, sas agapo)” like a love-dazed automaton. But in the meantime he had before him Annabel’s pale, shocked
expression and tragic eyes when he had burst upon her in the park at Champions. He couldn’t go away without seeing her. He would ask forgiveness for his boorish outburst, tell her that he was going away, wish her happiness, and leave.

  As Guy pondered his future, the club porter brought him a letter from his father angrily demanding an explanation of his absence from Honourslove and informing him that Lady Glenloe had said that her girls would soon be home and that the Duchess had left Champions to stay with people called Robinson, at Belfield, near London.

  Annabel at Belfield?!—Guy would have been there himself if he hadn’t written telling Mrs. Robinson that he couldn’t come, on the truthful pretext of business. They would have been under the same roof.... Probably better that he hadn’t gone... he might not have kept to his resolution.... Was she still there?—He couldn’t very well go now, himself.... Besides, he didn’t want to see her for the last time in a crush....

  Spaulding took Guy’s note for delivery by hand to Annabel at Belfield, where the servant at the door said that Her Grace had left for London; and subsequently took it to Folyat House, where a footman stated that Her Grace was not at home, but then, looking behind him, whispered to his confrère that Her Grace weren’t at Longlands neither: a dereliction of duty which Spaulding, although he gave his master only the gist of the reply, recognized as symptomatic of grave domestic upheaval. In the Thwarte establishment too there was disturbance. Spaulding had wondered at Mr. Thwarte’s strange decision not to run for Lowdon (he had looked forward to being the private gentleman of an M.P.); and when he heard of the move to heathen parts he decided, after mulling it over, to tell his employer that he would prefer to stay in England and trusted he might hope for a favourable reference.

  Guy in person went twice to a house in Mayfair where Lady Seadown was not at home. On his third enquiry at Lady Richard Marable’s, two streets away, he was told that Lady Richard had returned to town, and as he mounted the narrow red-carpeted stairs Conchita rushed down to meet him.

  “Where? If only I knew!”—Conchita talked over her shoulder as she led him up into her little L-shaped drawing-room, where he shook his head at the offer of a chair and stood tensely as she continued: “How could that woman tell such lies!” Seeing Guy’s blank face, Conchita cried, “You don’t know about Bainton House?” She pushed him down on to a sofa and sat beside him: “H.R.H. was there, and Idina Churt said, in the loudest possible voice—and you know her quietest voice is a shriek—she told everyone present that Nan had wheedled eight hundred pounds out of the Duke to give to you—”

  As Guy’s mouth dropped, Conchita sobbed, “Idina Churt is a dangerous woman; they ought to have someone walk in front of her waving a red lantern to warn people. It was me Nan lent money to—five hundred pounds, not eight!—money I desperately needed, but I wish now I hadn’t asked for. She’s my dearest friend, ever since Saratoga, my best friend.”

  Guy got up, at once taut and befuddled. “Please, Lady Richard, I can make no sense.... Why in God’s name would this Lady Churt want to harm Annabel?”

  “Why, to get at Jinny! Seadown threw her over to marry Jinny! Didn’t you know?” Conchita demanded. “Darling, everyone knew! And just now—You see, we were all at Belfield, and we were invited over to Bainton, and H.R.H. was there. He saw Jinny, and everyone could see he was absolutely bowled over. He’d had Idina hanging on his arm, but he simply forgot that she existed. So, you see, it was the second time Jinny had a triumph over Idina....”

  Guy passed a hand over his forehead.

  “So, Idina screamed out that Nan got the money from the Duke to pay you because you had been in Nan’s bedroom at Christmas—”

  Guy’s bewilderment became horror. He looked aghast at Conchita, wondering if she were mad, or he, as she hurtled on with her story.

  “—Then, when we were back at Belfield, Nan had a command from Ushant to come to Folyat House, though I don’t think he knew about Bainton; the Marlborough House set is not his style. So she went, and then she came back to Belfield—in a hansom, darling!—and told us she had left Ushant.”

  “What—?” Guy almost shouted.

  Conchita paused, as if only now aware of her visitor’s special interest in the story she was telling. When she resumed it was with a significant smile. “Yes! She’d run away from him! Then, only no one knew but Lizzy, because we were all at tea, she went off bag and baggage, except that actually she only took a little valise. She even left her jewel-case behind, her maid said.”

  “But where”—Guy asked between his teeth—“did she go?”

  Conchita sadly shook her pretty auburn head.

  His visit to Conchita Marable left Guy in a turmoil of emotions. He was agonized in Annabel’s behalf. That she—shy, a stranger to smart society, transparently candid and vulnerable—should have been exposed to an attack that would have been scarifying even for a blasée woman of the world—!

  But... she had left Ushant! And if she truly meant to be free of her magnificent, burdensome marriage he would no longer be prohibited from telling her how he felt. They might be able to share a future....

  Had she really left Ushant, though? Or was Lady Dick, in her exuberant way, exaggerating? Or had she left him only because of a quarrel they might both want to patch up, to avoid a scandal beside which the Bainton House incident would be as nothing? ... “Moreover, she may think that I talked—lied—about the Correggio room,” Guy thought wretchedly as he walked down Park Lane.

  His mind was still a battle-ground for hope and fear when he walked up Holborn next day in a dismal smoking rain.

  Guy had removed his legal affairs from the family firm when his father’s inroads on the fortune left him by his mother created a conflict of interest and a chaos which only a fresh mind could reduce to order. The solicitor whose fresh mind he had called on, Anthony Grant-Johnston, had been at Eton with him. Both had entered the Foreign Office, both had left it for less prestigious but more satisfying careers. Grant-Johnston—stockier now, but his round freckled face still framed by ginger curls—was negotiating, with the solicitor of the engineering firm, the details of Guy’s new post.

  “They want you to find out whether it’s feasible to build a railway in Greece. The study may take several months, and I collect that the feasibility is doubtful?”

  “Ten years ago the Americans linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by completing the Union Pacific. In Greece, ten years ago, Piraeus, the port of Athens, was linked with Athens—seven miles away.” Guy recited these facts as by rote, scowling at the wall over Tony’s head. “Nothing has happened since. The question is, can the line be extended to Larissa?” Guy stood up and, shoving his hands into his pockets, paced the short distance from his chair to a window overlooking Chancery Lane, gray with drizzle, and back.

  “Quite.” Tony looked at his client askance. “Next, there is construction in India which I gather may go on ad infinitum. Besides paying”—Tony read off particulars from a file of papers on his desk—“they propose to make you a partner, sharing general profits. It’s a handsome offer; shall I tell them you agree?” When Guy failed to respond, he asked: “Difficulties?”

  “Not with their terms.” Guy stalked across the room to admire the view of Chancery Lane again, and turned. “I had better tell you.”

  “Pray do.” Tony leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Pray do.”

  Guy sat down again. “A lady whom I know—” he began; and stopped.

  At school, of course, one had not talked about personal matters. Parents, sisters and brothers, girls one might know, were never mentioned. When Guy went back to school after his mother’s funeral he had spoken to no one about it, not even to Tony, a friend; nor had the code of reticence been violated on the occasions, widely separated, when they had met since. Guy was aware that he was crossing a boundary when he went on:

  “This lady has left her husband. So I have been told by a friend of hers.”

  Guy gave what he
took to be the tenor of Conchita’s disorganized story. “If she actually has left him,” he told Tony emphatically at the end, “it’s not on account of me. She thinks of me only as a friend. But if the—if her husband should want to divorce her, this scandal connecting our names might make things far worse for her—and everything the Churt woman said was a damned lie!” Guy realized that he was shouting almost with his father’s ungoverned vehemence. “Tony,” he said more calmly, “I can’t have her made a spectacle of. She’s only a girl, and a foreigner, with no family here—that is, no men of her family—to look after her. Not that I suppose her husband would want publicity, either. He is a peer, in fact a duke, and he has an aversion to being talked about.”

  “No matter what any of you might wish, I don’t see how an open scandal could be avoided.” Tony’s mind was almost visibly running down the short list of extant dukes with foreign wives.

  “She is utterly innocent.—I daresay,” Guy brought out pessimistically, “it’s not easy for a solicitor to believe that possible.”

  “Believe?!” Tony’s good-natured face clouded. “I know! Not as a lawyer, as a brother.” He picked up the dossier before him and smote the table with it. “My sister’s husband was a brute. He put her through hell. She left him and... she was indiscreet, nothing more! But he set detectives on her, and their evidence was accepted in court. She was the guilty party.” Tony threw the papers down and looked levelly at Guy. “I stayed with her for a time. I’d left the F.O., partly on her account, and I was reading for exams at her place in Runnymede. There was a cottage near by which Lady Churt—that same Lady Churt—had let to some jolly American girls.” Tony’s mouth twisted. “I went over once or twice, but their duenna made it clear to me that I would not be allowed to bring my sister.”