The Buccaneers (10 page)

No such calculations troubled the dancing men. They had found three new beauties to waltz with—and how they waltzed! The rumour that London dancing was far below the New York standard was not likely to find credit with anyone who had danced with the Ladies Marable. The tall fair one—was she the Lady Honoria?—was perhaps the more harmonious in her movements; but the Lady Ulrica, as befitted her flashing good looks, was as nimble as a gypsy; and if Conchita Closson polka-ed and waltzed as well as the English girls, these surpassed her in the gliding elegance of the square dance, which they performed, it was observed, with such enjoyment, such innocent
abandon,
that they had little to say to their partners beyond a smiling “yes,” a laughing “no,” or a blushing “thank you.”

At supper they were as bewitching as on the floor—and as conspicuously silent. Nowhere in the big supper-room, about the flower-decked tables, was the talk merrier, the laughter louder (a shade too loud, perhaps?—but that was the fault of the young men), than in the corner where the three girls, enclosed in a dense body-guard of admirers, feasted on champagne and terrapin. As Mrs. Eglinton, with some bitterness, afterward remarked to Mrs. Parmore, the allegation that English girls had no conversation must be true; but theirs was a
speaking
silence. Their eyes and smiles were eloquent! She hoped it would teach their own girls that they need not chatter like magpies.

In the small hours of the same night a knock at her door waked Miss Testvalley out of an uneasy sleep. She sat up with a start and, lighting her candle, beheld a doleful little figure in a beribboned pink wrapper.

“Why, Annabel—aren't you well?” she exclaimed, setting down her candle beside the Book of Common Prayer and two other books which always lay together on her night-table.

“Oh, don't call me Annabel, please! I can't sleep, and I feel so lonely....”

“My poor Nan! Come and sit on the bed. What's the matter, child? You're half frozen!” Miss Testvalley, thankful that before going to bed she had wound her white net scarf over her crimping-pins, sat up and drew the quilt around her pupil.

“I'm not frozen; I'm just lonely. I did want to go that ball,” Nan confessed, throwing her arms about her governess.

“Well, my dear, there'll be plenty of other balls for you when the time comes.”

“Oh, but will there? I'm not a bit sure; and Jinny's not either. She only got asked to this one because Lord Richard fixed it up. I don't know how he did it; but I suppose those old Assembly scare-crows are such snobs—”

“Annabel!”

“Oh, bother! When you know they are. If they hadn't been, wouldn't they have invited Jinny and Lizzy long ago to all their parties?”

“I don't think that question need trouble us. Now that your sister and Lizzy Elmsworth have been seen, they're sure to be invited again; and when your turn comes...”

Suddenly she felt herself pushed back against her pillows by her pupil's firm young hands. “Miss Testvalley! How can you talk like that, when you know the only way they got invited—”

Miss Testvalley, rearing herself up severely, shook off Nan's clutch. “Annabel! I've no idea how they were invited; I can't imagine what you mean. And I must ask you not to be impertinent.”

Nan gazed at her for a moment, and then buried her face among the pillows in a wild rush of laughter.

“Annabel!” the governess repeated, still more severely; but Nan's shoulders continued to shake with mirth.

“My dear, you told me you'd waked me up because you felt lonely. If all you wanted was someone to giggle with, you'd better go back to bed, and wait for your sister to come home.”

Nan lifted a penitent countenance to her governess. “Oh, she won't be home for hours. And I promise I won't laugh any more. Only it is so funny! But do let me stay a little longer; please! Read aloud to me, there's a darling; read me some poetry, won't you?”

She wriggled down under the bed-quilt and, crossing her arms behind her, laid her head back against them, so that her brown curls overflowed on the pillow. Her face had gone wistful again, and her eyes were full of entreaty.

Miss Testvalley reached out for
Hymns Ancient and Modern.
But after a moment's hesitation she put it back beside the prayer-book, and took up instead the volume of poetry which always accompanied her on her travels.

“Now, listen very quietly, or I won't go on.” Almost solemnly, she began to read.

 
 
Miss Testvalley read slowly, chantingly, with a rich murmur of vowels, and a lingering stress on the last word of the last line, as though it symbolized something grave and mysterious. Seven...

“That's lovely,” Nan sighed. She lay motionless, her eyes wide, her lips a little parted.

“I shouldn't have cared much for that kind of dress, should you? I suppose it had angel sleeves, if she was in heaven. When I go to my first ball I want to have a dress that
fits;
and I'd like it to be pale-blue velvet, embroidered all over with seed-pearls, like I saw....”

“My dear, if you want to talk about ball-dresses, I should advise you to go to the sewing-room and get the maid's copy of
Butterick's Magazine,”
said Miss Testvalley icily.

“No, no! I want to hear the poem—I do! Please read it to me, Miss Testvalley. See how good I am.”

Miss Testvalley resumed her reading. The harmonious syllables flowed on, weaving their passes about the impatient young head on the pillow. Presently Miss Testvalley laid the book aside, and folding her hands continued her murmur of recital.

 
 
She paused, hesitating for the next line, and Nan's drowsy eyes drifted to her face. “How heavenly! But you know it all by heart.”

“Oh, yes; I know it by heart.”

“I never heard anything so lovely. Who wrote it?”

“My cousin Dante Gabriel.”

“Your own cousin?” Nan's eyes woke up.

“Yes, dear. Listen:

“Do you mean to say he's your very own cousin? Aren't you madly in love with him, Miss Testvalley?”

“Poor Dante Gabriel! My dear, he's a widower, and very stout—and has caused all the family a good deal of trouble.”

Nan's face fell. “Oh—a widower? What a pity... If I had a cousin who was a poet I should be madly in love with him. And I should desert my marble palace to flee with him to the isles of Greece.”

“Ah—and when are you going to live in a marble palace?”

“When I'm an ambassadress, of course. Lord Richard says that ambassadresses... Oh, darling, don't stop! I do long to hear the rest.... I do, really....”

Miss Testvalley resumed her recital, sinking her voice as she saw Nan's lids gradually sink over her questioning eyes till at last the long lashes touched her cheeks. Miss Testvalley murmured on, ever more softly, to the end; then, blowing out the candle, she slid down to Nan's side so softly that the sleeper did not move. “She might have been my own daughter,” the governess thought, composing her narrow frame to rest, and listening in the darkness to Nan's peaceful breathing.

 
 
Miss Testvalley did not fall asleep herself. She was speculating rather nervously over the meaning of her pupil's hysterical burst of giggling. She was delighted that Lord Richard had succeeded in getting invitations to the ball for Virginia and Lizzy Elmsworth; but she could not understand why Nan regarded his having done so as particularly droll. Probably, she reflected, it was because the invitations had been asked for and obtained without Mrs. St. George's knowledge. Everything was food for giggles when that light-hearted company were together, and nothing amused them more than to play a successful trick on Mrs. St. George. In any case, the girls had had their evening—and a long evening it must have been, since the late-November dawn was chilling the windows when Miss Testvalley at length heard Virginia on the stairs. Lord Richard Marable, as it turned out, had underrated his family's interest in his projected marriage. No doubt, as Miss Testvalley had surmised, his announcement of the event had been late in reaching them; but the day before the wedding a cable came. It was not, however, addressed to Lord Richard, or to his bride, but to Miss Testvalley, who, having opened it with surprise (for she had never before received a cable), read it in speechless perplexity.

 
IS SHE BLACK HIS ANGUISHED MOTHER SELINA BRIGHTLINGSEA

 
 
 
For some time the governess pored in vain over this cryptic communication; but at last light came to her, and she leaned her head back against her chair and laughed. She understood just what must have happened. Though there were two splendid globes, terrestrial and celestial, at opposite ends of the Allfriars library, no one in the house had ever been known to consult them; and Lady Brightlingsea's geographical notions, even measured by the family standard, were notoriously hazy. She could not imagine why anyone should ever want to leave England, and her idea of the continent was one enormous fog from which two places called Paris and Rome indistinctly emerged; while the whole Western Hemisphere was little more clear to her than to the forerunners of Columbus. But Miss Testvalley remembered that on one wall of the Vandyke saloon, where the family sometimes sat after dinner, there hung a great tapestry, brilliant in colour, rich and elaborate in design, in the foreground of which a shapely young Negress flanked by ruddy savages and attended by parakeets and monkeys was seen offering a tribute of tropical fruits to a lolling divinity. The housekeeper, Miss Testvalley also remembered, in showing this tapestry to visitors, on the day when Allfriars was open to the public, always designated it as “The Spanish Main and the Americas”—and what could be more natural than that poor bewildered Lady Brightlingsea should connect her son's halting explanations with this instructive scene?

Miss Testvalley pondered for a long time over her reply; then, for once forgetting to make a “governess's answer,” she cabled back to Lady Brightlingsea: NO, BUT COMELY.

VIII.

On a June afternoon of the year 1875, one of the biggest carriages in London drew up before one of the smallest houses in Mayfair—the very smallest in that exclusive quarter, its occupant, Miss Jacqueline March, always modestly averred.

The tiny dwelling, a mere two-windowed wedge, with a bulging balcony under a striped awning, had been newly painted a pale buff, and freshly festooned with hanging pink geraniums and intensely blue lobelias. The carriage, on the contrary, a vast old-fashioned barouche of faded yellow, with impressive armorial bearings, and coachmen and footmen to scale, showed no signs of recent renovation; and the lady who descended from it was, like her conveyance, large and rather shabby though undeniably impressive.

A freshly starched parlour-maid let her in with a curtsey of recognition. “Miss March is in the drawing-room, my lady.” She led the visitor up the narrow stairs and announced from the threshold: “Please, miss, Lady Brightlingsea.”

Two ladies sat in the drawing-room in earnest talk. One of the two was vaguely perceived by Lady Brightlingsea to be small and brown, with burning black eyes which did not seem to go with her stiff purple poplin and old-fashioned beaded dolman.

The other lady was also very small, but extremely fair and elegant, with natural blond curls touched with gray, and a delicate complexion. She hurried hospitably forward.

“Dearest Lady Brightlingsea! What a delightful surprise!—You're not going to leave us, Laura?”

It was clear that the dark lady addressed as Laura was meant to do exactly what her hostess suggested she should not. She pressed the latter's hand in a resolute brown kid glove, bestowed a bow and a slanting curtsey on the Marchioness of Brightlingsea, and was out of the room with the ease and promptness of a person long practised in self-effacement.

Lady Brightlingsea sent a vague glance after the retreating figure. “Now, who was that, my dear? I seem to know....”

Miss March, who had a touch of firmness under her deprecating exterior, replied without hesitation: “An old friend, dear Lady Brightlingsea, Miss Testvalley, who used to be governess to the Duchess's younger girls at Tintagel.”

Lady Brightlingsea's long pale face grew vaguer. “At Longlands? Oh, but of course. It was I who recommended her to Blanche Tintagel.... Testvalley? The name is so odd. She was with us, you know; she was with Honoria and Ulrica before Ma-dame Championnet finished them.”

“Yes, I remember you used to think well of her. I believe it was at Allfriars I first met her.”

Lady Brightlingsea looked plaintively at Miss March. Her face always grew plaintive when she was asked to squeeze one more fact—even one already familiar—into her weary and overcrowded memory. “Oh, yes... oh, yes!”

Miss March, glancing brightly at her guest, as though to reanimate the latter's failing energy, added: “I wish she could have stayed. You might have been interested in her experiences in America....”