The Buccaneers (18 page)

“And shall we see some beautiful houses too? I love seeing houses that are so ancient and so lovely that the people who live there have them in their bones.”

Miss Testvalley looked at her pupil sharply. “What an odd expression! Did you find it in a book?” she asked, for the promiscuity of Nan's reading sometimes alarmed her.

“Oh, no. It was what that young Mr. Thwarte said to me about Honourslove. It's why he's going away for two years—so that he can make a great deal of money and come back and spend it on Honourslove.”

“H'm—from what I've heard, Honourslove could easily swallow a good deal more than he's likely to make in two years, or even ten,” said Miss Testvalley. “The father and son are both said to be very extravagant, and the only way for Mr. Guy Thwarte to keep up his ancestral home will be to bring a great heiress back to it.”

Nan looked thoughtful. “You mean, even if he doesn't love her?”

“Oh, well, I daresay he'll love her—or be grateful to her, at any rate.”

“I shouldn't think gratitude was enough,” said Nan with a sigh. She was silent again for a while, and then added: “Mr. Thwarte has read all your cousin's poems—Dante Gabriel's, I mean.”

Miss Testvalley gave her a startled glance. “May I ask how you happened to find that out?”

“Why, because there's a perfectly beautiful picture by your cousin in Sir Helmsley's study, and Mr. Thwarte showed it to me. And so we talked of his poetry too. But Mr. Thwarte thinks there are other poems even more wonderful than ‘The Blessed Damozel.' Some of the sonnets in The House of Life, I mean. Do you think they're more beautiful, Miss Testvalley?”

The governess hesitated; she often found herself hesitating over the answers to Nan's questions. “You told Mr. Thwarte that you'd read some of those poems?”

“Oh, yes; I told him I'd read every one of them.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said ... he said he'd felt from the first that he and I would be certain to like the same things; and he loved my liking Dante Gabriel. I told him he was your cousin, and that you were devoted to him.”

“Ah—well, I'm glad you told him that, for Sir Helmsley Thwarte is an old friend of my cousin's, and one of his best patrons. But you know, Nan, there are people who don't appreciate his poetry—don't appreciate how beautiful it is—and I'd rather you didn't proclaim in public that you've read it all. Some people are so stupid that they wouldn't exactly understand a young girl's caring for that kind of poetry. You see, don't you, dear?”

“Oh, yes. They'd be shocked, I suppose, because it's all about love. But that's why I like it, you know,” said Nan composedly.

Miss Testvalley made no answer, and Nan went on in a thoughtful voice: “Shall we see some other places as beautiful as Honourslove?”

The governess reflected. She had not contemplated a round of sight-seeing for her pupil, and Cornwall did not seem to have many sights to offer. But at length she said: “Well, Trevennick is not so far from Tintagel. If the family are away I might take you there, I suppose. You know the old Tintagel was supposed to have been King Arthur's castle.”

Nan's face lit up. “Where the Knights of the Round Table were? Oh, Miss Testvalley, can we see that too? And the mere where he threw his sword Excalibur? Oh, couldn't we start tomorrow, don't you think?”

Miss Testvalley felt relieved. She had been slightly disturbed by Nan's allusion to Honourslove, and the unexpected glimpse it gave of an exchange of confidences between Guy Thwarte and her pupil; but she saw that in another moment the thought of visiting the scenes celebrated in Tennyson's famous poems had swept away all other fancies. The Idylls
of
the King had been one of Nan's magic casements, and Miss Testvalley smiled to herself at the ease with which the girl's mind flitted from one new vision to another.

“A child still, luckily,” she thought, sighing, she knew not why, at what the future might hold for Nan when childish things should be put away.

XV.

The Duke of Tintagel was a young man burdened with scruples. This was probably due to the fact that his father, the late Duke, had had none. During all his boyhood and youth the heir had watched the disastrous effects of not considering trifles. It was not that his father had been either irresponsible or negligent. The late Duke had had no vices; but his virtues were excessively costly. His conduct had always been governed by a sense of the overwhelming obligations connected with his great position. One of these obligations, he held, consisted in keeping up his rank; the other, in producing an heir. Unfortunately, the Duchess had given him six daughters before a son was born, and two more afterward in the attempt to provide the heir with a younger brother; and although daughters constitute a relatively small charge on a great estate, still, a duke's daughters cannot (or so their parent thought) be fed, clothed, educated, and married at as low a cost as young women of humbler origin. The Duke's other obligation, that of keeping up his rank, had involved him in even heavier expenditure. Hitherto Longlands, the seat in Somersetshire, had been thought imposing enough even for a duke; but its owner had always been troubled by the fact that the new castle at Tintagel, built for his great-grandfather in the approved Gothic style of the day, and with the avowed intention of surpassing Inveraray, had never been inhabited. The expense of completing it, and living in it in suitable state, appeared to have discouraged its creator; and for years it stood abandoned on its Cornish cliff, a sadder ruin than the other, until it passed to the young Duke's father. To him it became a torment, a reproach, an obsession; the Duke of Tintagel must live at Tintagel as the Duke of Argyll lived at Inveraray, with a splendour befitting the place; and the carrying out of this resolve had been the late Duke's crowning achievement.

His young heir, who had just succeeded him, had as keen a sense as his father of ducal duties. He meant, if possible, to keep up in suitable state both Tintagel and Longlands, as well as Folyat House, his London residence; but he meant to do so without the continued drain on his fortune which his father had been obliged to incur. The new Duke hoped that, by devoting all his time and most of his faculties to the care of his estate and the personal supervision of his budget, he could reduce his cost of living without altering its style; and the indefatigable Duchess, her numerous daughters notwithstanding, found time to second the attempt. She was not the woman to let her son forget the importance of her aid; and though a perfect understanding had always reigned between them, recent symptoms made it appear that the young Duke was beginning to chafe under her regency.

Soon after his visit to Runnymede, he and his mother sat together in the Duchess's boudoir in the London house, a narrow lofty room on whose crowded walls authentic Raphaels were ultimately mingled with water-colours executed by the Duchess's maiden aunts and photographs of shooting-parties at the various ducal estates. The Duchess invariably arranged to have this hour alone with her son, when breakfast was over, and her daughters (of whom death or marriage had claimed all but three) had gone their different ways. The Duchess had always kept her son to herself, and the Ladies Clara, Ermyntrude, and Almina Folyat would never have dreamed of intruding on them.

At present, as it happened, all three were in the country, and Folyat House had put on its summer sack-cloth; but the Duchess lingered on, determined not to forsake her son till he was released from his Parliamentary duties.

“I was hoping,” she said, noticing that the Duke had twice glanced at the clock, “that you'd manage to get away to Scotland for a few days. Isn't it possible? The Hopeleighs particularly wanted you to go to them at Loch Skarig. Lady Hopeleigh wrote yesterday to ask me to remind you....”

The Duchess was small of stature, with firm round cheeks, a small mouth, and quick dark eyes under an anxiously wrinkled forehead. She did not often smile, and when, as now, she attempted it, the result was a pucker similar to the wrinkles on her brow. “You know that someone else will be very grieved if you don't go,” she insinuated archly.

The Duke's look passed from faint ennui to marked severity. He glanced at the ceiling, and made no answer.

“My dear Ushant,” said the Duchess, who still called him by the title he had borne before his father's death, “surely you can't be blind to the fact that poor Jean Hopeleigh's future is in your hands. It is a serious thing to have inspired such a deep sentiment....”

The Duke's naturally inexpressive face had become completely expressionless, but his mother continued: “I only fear it may cause you a lasting remorse....”

“I will never marry anyone who hunts me down for the sake of my title,” exclaimed the Duke abruptly.

His mother raised her neat dark eyebrows in a reproachful stare. “For your title? But, my dear Ushant, surely Jean Hopeleigh ...”

“Jean Hopeleigh is like all the others. I'm sick of being tracked like a wild animal,” cried the Duke, who looked excessively tame.

The Duchess gave a deep sigh. “Ushant—!”

“Well?”

“You haven't-it's not possible—formed an imprudent attachment? You're not concealing anything from me?”

The Duke's smiles were almost as difficult as his mother's, but his muscles made an effort in that direction. “I shall never form an attachment until I meet a girl who doesn't know what a duke is!”

“Well, my dear, I can't think where one could find a being so totally ignorant of everything on which England's greatness rests,” said the Duchess impressively.

“Then I shan't marry.”

“Ushant—!”

“I'm sorry, Mother—”

She lifted her sharp eyes to his. “You remember that the roof at Tintagel has still to be paid for?”

“Yes.”

“Dear Jean's settlements would make all that so easy. There's nothing the Hopeleighs wouldn't do....”

The Duke interrupted her. “Why not marry me to a Jewess? Some of those people in the City could buy up the Hopeleighs and not feel it.”

The Duchess drew herself up. Her lips trembled, but no word came. Her son stalked out of the room. From the threshold he turned to say: “I shall go down to Tintagel on Friday night to go over the books with Blair.” His mother could only bend her head; his obstinacy was beginning to frighten her.

 
The Duke got into the train on the Friday with a feeling of relief. His high and continuous sense of his rank was combined with a secret desire for anonymity. If he could have had himself replaced in the world of fashion and politics by a mechanical effigy of the Duke of Tintagel, while he himself went obscurely about his private business, he would have been a happier man. He was as firmly convinced as his mother that the greatness of England rested largely on her dukes. The Dukes of Tintagel had always had a strong sense of public obligation; and the young Duke was determined not to fall below their standard. But his real tastes were for small matters, for the minutiae of a retired and leisurely existence. When he was a little boy his secret longing had been to be a clock-maker; or rather (since their fabrication might have been too delicate a business) a man who sold clocks and sat among them in his little shop, watching them, doctoring them, taking their temperature, feeling their pulse, listening to their chimes, oiling, setting, and regulating them. The then Lord Ushant had never avowed this longing to his parents; even in petticoats he had understood that a future duke can never hope to keep a clock-shop. But often, wandering through the great saloons and interminable galleries of Longlands and Tintagel, he had said to himself with a beating heart: “Some day I'll wind all those clocks myself, every Sunday morning, before breakfast.”

Later he felt that he would have been perfectly happy as a country squire, arbitrating in village disputes, adjusting differences between vicar and school-master, sorting fishing-tackle, mending broken furniture, doctoring the dogs, re-arranging his collection of stamps; instead of which, fate had cast him for the centre front of the world's most brilliant social stage.

Undoubtedly his mother had been a great help. She enjoyed equally the hard work and the pompous ceremonial incumbent on conscientious dukes; and the poor young Duke was incorrigibly conscientious. But his conscience could not compel him to accept a marriage arranged by his mother. That part of his life he intended to arrange for himself. His departure for Tintagel was an oblique reply to the Duchess's challenge. She had told him to go to Scotland, and he was going to Cornwall instead. The mere fact of being seated in a train which was hurrying westward was a declaration of independence. The Duke longed above all to be free, to decide for himself; and though he was ostensibly going to Tintagel on estate business, his real purpose was to think over his future in solitude.

If only he might have remained unmarried! Not that he was without the feelings natural to young men; but the kind of marriage he was expected to make took no account of such feelings. “I won't be hunted—I won't!” the Duke muttered as the train rushed westward, seeing himself as a panting quarry pursued by an implacable pack of would-be Duchesses. Was there no escape? Yes. He would dedicate his public life entirely to his country, but in private he would do as he chose. Valiant words, and easy to speak when no one was listening; but with his mother's small hard eyes on him, his resolves had a way of melting. Was it true that if he did not offer himself to Jean Hopeleigh the world might accuse him of trifling with her? If so, the sooner he married someone else the better. The chief difficulty was that he had not yet met anyone whom he really wanted to marry.