The Buccaneers (25 page)

Well—Seadown is to marry the beauty, a Miss St. George, of New York. Rumours, of course, are rife about the circumstances of the marriage. Seadown is said to have been trapped by a clever manoeuvre; but as this report probably emanates from Lady Churt—the Ariadne in the case—it need not be taken too seriously. We know that American business men are “smart,” but we also know that their daughters are beautiful; and, having seen the young lady who has supplanted Ariadne, I have no difficulty in believing that her “beaux yeux” sufficed to let Seadown out of prison—for friends and foes agree that the affair with the relentless Idina had become an imprisonment. They also say that Papa St. George is very wealthy, and that consideration must be not without weight—its weight in gold—to the Brightlingseas. I hope they will not be disappointed, but, as you know, I am no great believer in transatlantic fortunes—though I trust, my dear fellow, that the one you are now amassing is beyond suspicion. Otherwise I should find it hard to forgo your company much longer.

It's an odd chance that finds me in an atmosphere so different from that of our shabby old house, on the date fixed for the despatch of my monthly chronicle. But I don't want to miss the South American post, and it may amuse you to have a change from the ordinary small beer of Honourslove. Certainly the contrast is not without interest; and perhaps it strikes me the more because of my disintegrating habit of seeing things through other people's eyes, so that at this moment I am viewing Longlands, not as a familiar and respected monument, but as the unheard-of and incomprehensible phenomenon that a great English country-seat offers to the unprejudiced gaze of the American backwoodsman and his females. I refer to the St. George party, who arrived the day before yesterday, and are still in the first flush of their bewilderment.

The Duchess and her daughters are of course no less bewildered. They have no conception of a society not based on aristocratic institutions, with Inveraray, Welbeck, Chatsworth, Longlands, and so forth as its main supports; and their guests cannot grasp the meaning of such institutions or understand the hundreds of minute observances forming the texture of an old society. This has caused me, for the first time in my life, to see from the outside at once the absurdity and the impressiveness of our great ducal establishments, the futility of their domestic ceremonial, and their importance as custodians of historical tradition and of high (if narrow) social standards. My poor friend Blanche would faint if she knew that I had actually ventured to imagine what an England without dukes might be, perhaps may soon be; but she would be restored to her senses if she knew that, after weighing the evidence for and against, I have decided that, having been afflicted with dukes, we'd better keep 'em. I need hardly add that such problems do not trouble the St. Georges, who have not yet reached the stage of investigating social origins.

I can't imagine how the Duchess and the other ladies deal with Mrs. St. George and her daughters during the daily absence of the guns; but I have noticed that American young ladies cannot be kept quiet for an indefinite time by being shown views of Vesuvius and albums of family water-colours.

Luckily, it's all right for the men. The shooting has never been better, and Seadown, who is in his element, has had the surprise of finding that his future father-in-law is not precisely out of his. Colonel St. George is a good shot; and it is not the least part of the joke that he is decidedly bored by covert shooting, an institution as new to him as dukedoms, and doesn't understand how a man who respects himself can want to shoot otherwise than over a dog. But he accommodates himself well enough to our effete habits, and is in fact a big good-natured easy-going man, with a kind of florid good looks, too-new clothes, and a collection of funny stories, some of which are not new enough.

As to the ladies, what shall I say? The beauty is a beauty, as I discovered (you may remember) the moment she appeared at Honourslove. She is precisely what she was then: the obvious, the finished exemplar, of what she professes to be. And, as you know, I have always had a preference for the icily regular. Her composure is unshakeable; and under a surface of American animation I imagine she is as passive as she looks. She giggles with the rest, and says, “Oh, girls,” but on her lips such phrases acquire a classic cadence. I suspect her of having a strong will and knowing all the arts of exaction. She will probably get whatever she wants in life, and will give in return only her beautiful profile. I don't believe her soul has a full face. If I were in Seadown's place I should probably be as much in love with her as he is. As a rule I don't care for interesting women; I mean in the domestic relation. I prefer a fine figure-head embodying in a beautiful form a solid bulk of usage and conformity. But I own that figure-heads lack conversation....

Your little friend is not deficient in this respect; and she is also agreeable to look upon. Not beautiful; but there is a subtler form of loveliness, which the unobservant confuse with beauty, and which this young Annabel is on the way to acquire. I say “on the way” because she is still a bundle of engaging possibilities rather than a finished picture. Of the mother there is nothing to say, for that excellent lady evidently requires familiar surroundings to bring out such small individuality as she possesses. In the unfamiliar she becomes invisible; and Longlands and she will never be visible to each other.

Most amusing of all is to watch our good Blanche, her faithful daughters, and her other guests, struggling with the strange beings suddenly thrust upon them. Your little friend (the only one with whom one can converse, by the way) told me that when Lady Brightlingsea heard of Dick Marable's engagement to the Brazilian beauty she cabled to the St. Georges' governess: “Is she black?” Well, the attitude of Longlands towards its transatlantic guests is not much more enlightened than Selina Brightlingsea's. Their bewilderment is so great that, when one of the girls spoke of archery clubs being fashionable in the States, somebody blurted out: “I suppose the Indians taught you?”; and I am constantly expecting them to ask Mrs. St. George how she heats her wigwam in winter.

The only exceptions are Seadown, who contributes little beyond a mute adoration of the beauty, and—our host, young Tintagel. Strange to say, he seems curiously alert and informed about his American visitors; so much so that I'm wondering if his including them in the party is due only to a cousinly regard for Seadown. My short study of the case has almost convinced me that his motives are more interested. His mother, of course, has no suspicion of this—when did our Blanche ever begin to suspect anything until it was emblazoned across the heavens? The first thing she said to me (in explaining the presence of the St. Georges) was that, since so many of our young eligibles were beginning to make these mad American marriages, she thought that Tintagel should see a few specimens at close quarters.
Sancta simplicitas!
If this is her object, I fear the specimens are not well chosen. I suspect that Tintagel had them invited because he's very nearly, if not quite, in love with the younger girl, and, being a sincere believer in the importance of dukes, wants her family to see what marriage with an English duke means.

How far the St. Georges are aware of all this, I can't say. The only one I suspect of suspecting it is the young Annabel; but these Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath. At any rate, the young lady seems to understand something of her environment, which is a sealed book to the others. She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle. I fancy the sower is the little brown governess of whom you spoke (her pupil says she is little and brown). Miss Annabel asks so many questions about English life in town and country, about rules, customs, traditions, and their why and wherefore, that I sometimes wonder if she is not preparing for a leading part on the social stage; then a glimpse of utter simplicity dispels the idea, and I remember that all her country-people are merciless questioners, and conclude that she has the national habit, but exercises it more intelligently than the others. She is immensely interested in the history of this house, and has an emotional sense at least of its beauties; perhaps the little governess—that odd descendant of old Testavaglia's—has had a hand in developing this side also of her pupil's intelligence.

Miss Annabel seems to be devoted to this Miss Testvalley, who is staying on with the family though both girls are out, and one on the brink of marriage, and who is apparently their guide in the world of fashion—odd as such a role seems for an Italian revolutionary. But I understood she had learned her way about the great world as governess in the Brightlingsea and Tintagel households. Her pupil, by the way, tells me that Miss Testvalley knows all about the circumstances in which my D. G. Rossetti was painted, and knows also the mysterious replica with variants which is still in D.G.'s possession, and which he has never been willing to show me. The girl, the afternoon she came to Honourslove, apparently looked closely enough at my picture to describe it in detail to her governess, who says that in the replica the embroidered border of the cloak is
peach-coloured
instead of blue....

All this has stirred up the old collector in me, and when the St. Georges go to Allfriars, where they have been asked to stay before the wedding, Miss Annabel has promised to try to have the governess invited, and to bring her to Honourslove to see the picture. What a pity you won't be there to welcome them! The girl's account of the Testavaglia and her family excites my curiosity almost as much as this report about the border of the cloak.

After the above, which reads, I flatter myself, not unlike a page of Saint-Simon, the home chronicle will seem tamer than ever. Mrs. Bolt has again upset everything in my study by having it dusted. The chestnut mare has foaled, and we're getting on with the ploughing. We are having too much rain—but when haven't we too much rain in England? The new grocer at Little Ausprey threatens to leave, because he says his wife and the non-conformist minister—But there, you always pretend to hate village scandals, and as I have, for the moment, none of my own to tempt your jaded palate, I will end this confession of an impenitent but blameless parent.

Your aff
^te
H.T
_.

 
P.S. The good Blanche asked anxiously about you—your health, plans, and prospects, the probable date of your return—and I told her I would give a good deal to know myself. Do you suppose she has her eye on you for Ermie or Almina? Seadown's defection was a hard blow; and if I'm right about Tintagel, heaven help her!

BOOK THREE

XX.

The windows of the Correggio room at Longlands overlooked what was known as the Duchess's private garden, a floral masterpiece designed by the great Sir Joseph Paxton, of Chatsworth and Crystal Palace fame. Beyond an elaborate cast-iron fountain swarmed over by chaste divinities, and surrounded by stars and crescents of bedding plants, an archway in the wall of yew and holly led down a grass avenue to the autumnal distances of the home park. Mist shrouded the slopes dotted with mighty trees, the bare woodlands, the lake pallidly reflecting a low uncertain sky. Deer flitted spectrally from glade to glade, and on remoter hill-sides blurred clusters of sheep and cattle were faintly visible. It had rained heavily in the morning; it would doubtless rain again before night; and in the Correggio room the drip of water sounded intermittently from the long reaches of roof-gutter and from the creepers against the many-windowed house-front.

The Duchess, at the window, stood gazing out over what seemed a measureless perspective of rain-sodden acres. Then, with a sigh, she turned back to the writing-table and took up her pen. A sheet of paper lay before her, carefully inscribed in a small precise hand:

 
To a Dowager Duchess.

To a Duchess.

To a Marchioness.

To the wife of a Cabinet Minister who has no rank by birth.

To the wife of a Bishop.

To an Ambassador.

 
The page was inscribed: “Important,” and under each headline was a brief formula for beginning and ending a letter. The Duchess scrutinized this paper attentively; then she glanced over another paper bearing a list of names, and finally, with a sigh, took from a tall mahogany stand a sheet of note-paper with “Longlands House” engraved in gold under a ducal coronet, and began to write.

After each note she struck a pencil line through one of the names on the list, and then began another note. Each was short, but she wrote slowly, almost laboriously, like a conscientious child copying out an exercise; and at the bottom of the sheet she inscribed her name, after assuring herself once more that the formula preceding her signature corresponded with the instructions before her. At length she reached the last note, verified the formula, and for the twentieth time wrote out underneath: “Annabel Tintagel.”

There before her, in orderly sequence, lay the invitations to the first big shooting-party of the season at Longlands, and she threw down her pen with another sigh. For a minute or two she sat with her elbows on the desk, her face in her hands; then she uncovered her eyes, and looked again at the note she had just signed.

“Annabel Tintagel,” she said slowly: “Who is Annabel Tintagel?”

 
The question was one which she had put to herself more than once during the last months, and the answer was always the same: she did not know. Annabel Tintagel was a strange figure with whom she lived, and whose actions she watched with a cold curiosity, but with whom she had never arrived at terms of intimacy, and never would. Of that she was now sure.