The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  With the awkwardness of a new intimacy, Guy only said, slowly: “I had no idea.... It’s a beastly world....” He drew a long breath. “Well, then you know who the lady is.... She’s only twenty-three-if that. How can I go off leaving her in God knows what kind of mess?”

  Tony was cool again. “If you want to help her, don’t be seen with her. For one thing, remember that in these cases there is always the possibility of a reconciliation; all the more reason to be discreet.” Seeing that this idea did not rejoice Guy, he drummed his fingers on his desk. “She thinks of you as ‘a friend.’ But you—?”

  Guy found a relief in saying frankly: “If she has left the Duke I shall ask her to marry me. But she’s thought of me only as a friend, and now she may blame me for her being named in that canard. And she may be right to blame me.” He sprang up and again stalked to the window and back, thinking of the Correggio-room incident and what gossip had made of it. “Only—if you knew her, you’d know it’s impossible to associate her with anything sordid. She is—crystalline.” His fists on the edge of Tony’s desk, Guy said desperately: “I must see her.”

  Tony looked up at him with an unencouraging face. “Obviously, that canard may make the Duke and his people believe he has stronger grounds than desertion—he had the right to detain her in his house, you know. They may allege adultery. The truth doesn’t matter—Be she as pure as snow, she shall not escape calumny.” He persisted over Guy’s growl of protest: “If you see her, don’t let people know. I’ll try to find out what’s happening. Be prepared for detectives. For melodrama. Don’t be seen together.”

  Tony stood up and clapped his friend on the shoulder.

  “Seen together!” Guy laughed shortly. “I don’t even know where she is.”

  The evening was clear and windless; starry, with a full moon, and chilly. People crossing Westminster Bridge walked hurriedly, while Guy, leaning on the parapet, repeated to himself: “I don’t even know where she is.”

  Ships, towers, domes... the view was as fair by moonlight as at dawn. “ ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty....’ Then I am dull of soul,” the young man thought, “for all I can think of is Annabel Tintagel.” Would he see her to say goodbye forever, or would he prevail on her to come with him?

  Uncertainty and suspense were new to him. Whereas his father might be said to leap to confusions, actions Guy took equally without forethought usually turned out to be as sensible as if consciously based on “usage et raison.” He had changed his profession without soul-searching; but it had been the logical course if Honourslove was to be saved. There had, of course, been Paquita—But this was different. His new move was a means of escape; and although his mind had been assuring him that it would “work,” his heart contended that any happiness he could know would depend on Annabel’s being... at least not unhappy. If he went away knowing that she was miserable in her marriage ...

  How had it come about that she meant more to him than anything else in life? He hadn’t intended, hadn’t expected, it. When he returned from Brazil he had felt the old attraction; but she was both an unattainable duchess and a “poor little thing” whom he wanted to protect—and his protectiveness included protecting her from caring too much for him.... How fatuous! He had supposed that he ran no danger of affection’s turning into passionate love. Older and more experienced, he could control the situation! ... Then, at some indeterminable moment entre chien et loup, he was in love as violently as if she were a femme fatale and he a callow youth; as deeply as if Paquita and the other women he had loved were only a prelude. A phrase came to him: “Twice or thrice had I loved thee, before I knew thy face or name.”

  Guy felt as if he were wallowing in the trough of the waves: not the mild ripples of the moonlit Thames, but the mountainous breakers of an ocean sea.

  He would try to do whatever was best for her. But—he must see her.

  He had tried Lady Seadown’s house again; although lights and the music of a pianoforte indicated life upstairs, she was still not at home. She might be sheltering her sister from a man with whom she was being falsely linked.

  A police-boat issued from under the arch beneath him. Police! Guy thought of Tony’s warning and trembled for Annabel.... But if Tintagel had found her, rather than sue for divorce he might have sequestered her in some remote Folyat tenement as suppressive as an oubliette....

  Such ideas could enter the head of an engineer only by way of a fevered imagination. Fevered, but suddenly cold, Guy pulled his collar up and left the bridge as Big Ben began to chime the hour. The last stroke of seven sounded as he entered Palace Yard and asked for the Honourable Hector Robinson, who joined him promptly, his ruddy face eager, in the busy lobby of the House. “I hope this is to say you’ve changed your mind about Lowdon, Thwarte? The Party needs you.”

  “Decent of you to say so.” Guy shook hands. “But I’m leaving the country, to be away for some time. I ought to see the Duchess of Tintagel, on business of my father’s” (a lie Guy had decided on), “or get a letter to her, before I go. I think she’s been staying with you; would you know where she can be reached?”

  “She’s not at Folyat House?” Hector began hypocritically. He had always resented a man born into the ancient gentry, a man with a casual self-assurance that came, unfairly, of “birth.” Since learning of Thwarte’s withdrawal from candidacy (though supported by a duke!), Hector had also felt a wondering contempt for a man who could knowingly ruin his own career. And there was a rumour in the House that Thwarte was going abroad (South Africa some said)—a rumour Mr. Robinson could now tell his colleagues was confirmed! Mr. Robinson knew as never before the intoxication of being an insider in the inmost centre of the capital of the world.

  Lizzy’s plan called for Guy’s learning where Nan was. (“Unless they meet, nothing will happen,” she had argued; “if he went abroad without seeing her, it might all fizzle out. She might go back to the Duke; or he might charge desertion, which takes ages.”) But Lizzy didn’t wish to be known as the person who revealed Nan’s whereabouts. When the message came that Guy’s man had a letter to deliver to the Duchess, Virginia had been in the room, and therefore Lizzy had told her servant simply to say that the Duchess was no longer at Belfield. Hector could safely give the information now. But, seeing Thwarte’s drawn face, he spoke out of sudden fellow-feeling, as well as calculation, when he went on: “If not, I rather think she’s gone to a former governess, Miss, ah ...”

  “Testvalley. Miss Testvalley. Where?”

  “In Denmark Hill. I don’t know the number.”

  “Thanks, Robinson.” Guy wrung Hector’s hand.

  “He is leaving England!—though he didn’t say where he’s going. Somebody said tonight, Turkey. And the whisper is that Tintagel is taking steps....”

  “Imagine,” Lizzy murmured, “of the whole lot of us, little Nan in a scandal! It’s ironical.”

  Hector had come home at ten, and sat in his study amid piles of White Papers and ranks of Hansards with a whisky and soda at his elbow and Lizzy across the hearth. All their guests except Mabel had left.

  “And scandal mostly false,” Lizzy added.

  “Mostly?” Hector’s tone made it a challenge. “Is there any truth whatever—?”

  Lizzy politicly treated the question as a simple request for information. “Nan is certainly in love with Guy Thwarte, but I don’t think there’s anything ‘going on.’ And I don’t think she’s run away from the Duke because she expects to marry Guy. But no one is going to believe it’s all innocent, with gossip spreading as it is.... Mabel says that Mabbit, when she was packing Nan’s things to send on, told her, sanctimoniously, she was ‘sure there was nothing in what the head groom at Champions said about Her Grace’s having an assignation with Mr. Thwarte in the park one morning.’ ”

  Hector made a sound of disgust.

  “We’re all at the mercy of our lady’s-maids,” Lizzy said philosophically; “though how Mabbit could ta
lk that way about Nan, who couldn’t have been sweeter to her... ! Mabel loathes her.”

  “Why keep her?” There were times when Hector wished to dissociate himself from his wife’s machinations.

  “The stakes are high,” Lizzy reminded him.

  “But just how do you bring Mabel and the Duke together?”

  Lizzy chose to overlook the personal pronoun. “You remember that funny little Jacky March? She’s close to Lady Brightlingsea and friendly with the Dowager. Mabel’s going to call on her, naturally; she introduced us to London, you know. Mabel has a beautiful bit of antique silver she bought at an auction, to give her. Paul Revere work; it seems he was an ancestor of Miss March’s.” Hector’s blank face revealed an abysmal ignorance of the ancestral silversmith’s name, but Lizzy went on without breaking step to enlighten him. “Her forte is ‘facilitating social contacts,’ especially match-making. The Runnymede bungalow was her idea. She will naturally mention Mabel to the Dowager Duchess. That comes first.”

  “But if Miss March helped bring Annabel’s marriage about, will she want to work for the cause of another candidate for duchess?” Parliamentary figures of speech were second nature to Hector.

  “She had nothing to do with that! If anyone helped there—helped the Duke, I mean, not Nan; it was the Duke who wanted Nan, not vice versa—it was Miss Testvalley.—You know, I’m almost positive that Miss March and Lady Brightlingsea had intended me for Seadown, not Jinny. Miss March and I,” Lizzy added pensively, “understand each other.”

  Hector abstained from comment. “Second?”

  “Lord Brightlingsea’s very ill. They say it’s a matter of months.” As Hector’s good-looking face lighted up on receipt of a new item of news, Lizzy continued: “The Duke, his nephew, will stay at Allfriars with the new Marquis and the new Marchioness—Seadown and Virginia.”

  “Marchioness thanks to you.”

  “And now it’s her turn to help us.”

  “But look here!” Hector felt obliged to point out flaws in feminine reasoning. “The Duke won’t want anything to do with Annabel’s sister.”

  “Virginia will make it plain that she disowns Annabel—as, believe me, she does; she is seething!—and sides with the Folyat-Marable family. Among the guests at Allfriars will be one of her oldest friends, Mrs. Whittaker, who’s godmother to the little new Lord Seadown and therefore part of the family.”

  “Ah!” A reminder of reverence for motherhood and the Church. “I hadn’t thought of that,” Hector handsomely acknowledged.

  “Jinny will also make sure that our dear old Miss March is there. She’ll be in widow’s weeds, the same as Lady B., I don’t doubt, for Lord B., who jilted her!” Lizzy laughed with rich amusement at the foible. “I’m told she thinks of Seadown as her son, so I suppose Jinny’s her daughter-in-law! She and Jinny will make Mabel known to the Dowager—and thus to the Duke!”

  XXXVIII.

  In Denmark Hill, London, S.E., Annabel Folyat or Tintagel, calling herself St. George, was hidden away as securely as if she had donned the cap of invisibility. Nobody knew where she was except Lizzy, who wouldn’t tell anyone, and, of course, Miss Testvalley, who had written to say that she could not leave Champions because Lady Glenloe was at Allfriars with Lady Brightlingsea, as Lord Brightlingsea was very ill.

  Miss Testvalley had made no reference to the Thwartes of Honourslove. When she came to London, Nan would ask her to let Guy Thwarte know where she was, even if, as she sensed, Miss Testvalley disapproved of her seeing him. Then he could come or not come as he chose. Nan feared that he was angry because the scandal had caused him to give up his candidacy, yet she believed that he would want to see her again—once. And she would assure him that there’d be no further scandal to harm his career, for she’d be across the Atlantic.... At that point, every time she rehearsed a self-sacrificing farewell speech, Nan would break off and go for a walk through the streets of Camberwell and Peckham to clear her head and whip up her heroism—and return to the Testavaglias’ house having achieved very imperfect success.

  It was a modest brick house set close to the pavement in a suburban street of comfortable mansions environed by spacious gardens and inhabited by wealthy tradesmen. The family had owned it, Nan knew from Miss Testvalley, since their early days as refugees, thanks to a political sympathizer, black sheep of a wine-merchant’s flock (but not the wine-merchant whose son Mr. John Ruskin, also of Denmark Hill, had become the apostle of Dante Gabriel and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). The rebel son had sold the leasehold to old Gennaro Testavaglia, then young and fiery Gennaro Testavaglia, for the nominal sum of twenty guineas. But the rebel had been tamed, had served a term as Lord Mayor and received his knighthood; and for many years Miss Testvalley’s family had had no protector except (though she did not say so) Laura Testavaglia.

  Annabel was a refugee in a household which her mother would have decried as “low-class.” At the round table that had rubbed threadbare circles on the cheap Turkey carpet in the dining-room, Gennaro and his two old sisters, benign and silent, breakfasted on coffee and thick pieces of bread, unbuttered; their other meals consisted of soup and what they called “pasta,” manufactured daily by the old cook and bonne à tout faire Serafina, accompanied by red wine that Serafina bought by the jug. But the same table, its surface not always innocent of tomato sauce, also served for Gennaro’s halting and vague work on a study of Petrarch; and the walls, like those in all the other rooms, were lined with books in several languages and hung with lithographic portraits of Risorgimento patriots, and faded broadside manifestos of creeds no longer seditious. For the first time, Annabel was among people who cared—had cared—more for ideas than for possessions; and she divined a nobility of the spirit loftier than the noblesse derived from Norman blood.

  Old Testavaglia, his black eyes dimmer than in his portrait, evinced no curiosity as to Fifth Avenue or Wall Street in talking with Nan (whom Laura had introduced as an American). He requested information as to the state of the serfs emancipated by President Lincoln and the recent work of la Signora Harrietta Stowe. Once or twice, his eyes glittering strangely as eras coalesced, he spoke to Nan not only of Garibaldi and Mazzini but of Voltaire and Washington and the Marchese di Lafayetta, and once even of Brutus, in a conspiratorial whisper, tugging an invisible cloak up to cover his lower face, and looking over his shoulder from under an imaginary slouched hat.

  Conversation was confined to meal-times, between which the Testavaglias dozed, read, or slowly wrote; except when Nan, too restless to read, went to the kitchen, where Serafina vouchsafed copious information as to her children and their children and her nephew who had died whose widow, Anna, a cousin from Firenze, was staying with her. The sad-faced Anna, dressed like a Londoner—whereas Serafina dressed exactly as she had in her village in Calabria—told Nan that she wanted to return to Italy. “But I am waiting till I will have more money from the restaurant which I work, I am at the cassa.... One gains more in London, but I would better go.” Anna’s black eyes suddenly glistened with tears. “Italy is more beautiful, and my family will be glad. I have the nostalgia of Italia; I am ... what is the word?”

  “You are ‘homesick,’ ” Nan answered, wondering whether she could work at a restaurant cassa, envying Anna a family whom she would gladden by returning home.

  At night, despondently gazing from her bedroom window at roofs and treetops and stars, Annabel thought of the New York hotels she and Jinny had grown up in. Of Saratoga. Conchita’s wedding. The steamer, and the low undistinguished New York skyline receding as her heart leapt toward the storied beauty she would find in England. And of the myriad changes wrought by a single journey.

  Now a return crossing was ordained. For she couldn’t stay in England. That she would be an embarrassment to everyone she knew was irrelevant. She could not stay on never seeing Guy. Reading, one day, of his engagement to a suitable girl.... How could Miss March have elected to remain, not only seeing her false fiance but actually cultivating the
friendship of his wife? Nan had once warmly sympathized with an elderly lady whose love had been greater than her pride; but she now thought that Miss March’s love must have been of a weedy, sickly variety.

  New York (where else could Nan go?) was a blur of gorgeous private houses like the one her parents had built in Fifth Avenue, and which her mother had described minutely in letters to both daughters; of tasteless public buildings, wretched slums, unhandsome inharmonious streets, noise, confusion; above all, a city where she would have no friends. The people she and Jinny had known, and those their mother now knew, were all in the business of getting married or being married and having children or getting their children married. She would no longer be a jeune fille à marier, but a divorced woman, unfit for the society whence she came, and obliged to earn a living.

  “For I can’t let Father support me as a reward for my making a failure of my life,” she thought as she went into the sitting-room with pen and paper.

  The room was furnished in a style which her mother’s and Mrs. Elmsworth’s decorator might have dubbed “Second-hand Utilitarian,” and it was icy cold. “Even so,” Annabel thought, “it’s England, and I’d rather be here.” Sighing, she began a letter to her governess. “Please thank your anonymous friend for her suggestion,” she wrote:

  But I shan’t have a servant—let alone a lady’s-maid! I must find a way to support myself, in America. I can’t let my father support me—why should he? I count on your advice when you come. I thought I might be able to teach small children, just to read and write, or perhaps work in a settlement-house, or an orphanage. I believe they sometimes give their staff room and board.

  “It will be very exciting,” Nan went on with a great sob, “to be in a different place and be able to do something to help people. I hope to see you soon. Please give my love to Kitty and Cora.”