The Buccaneers (36 page)

“There's always something to be done next.... I daresay that's the trouble with Annabel—she's never assumed her responsibilities. Once one does, there's no time left for trifles.” The Dowager, half way across the room, stopped abruptly. “But what in the world can she want with those five hundred pounds? Certainly not to pay her dress-maker—that was a stupid excuse,” she reflected; for even to her untrained eye it was evident that Annabel, unlike her sister and her American friends, had never dressed with the elegance her rank demanded. Yet for what else could she need this money—unless indeed (the Dowager shuddered at the thought) to help some young man out of a scrape? The idea was horrible; but the Dowager had heard it whispered that such cases had been known, even in their own circle; and suddenly she remembered the unaccountable incident of her daughter-in-law's taking Guy Thwarte upstairs to her sitting-room in the course of that crazy reel....

XXVIII.

At Champions, the Glenloe place in Gloucestershire, a broad-faced amiable brick house with regular windows and a pillared porch replaced the ancestral towers which had been destroyed by fire some thirty years earlier and now, in ivy-draped ruin, invited the young and romantic to mourn with them by moonlight.

The family did not mourn; least of all Lady Glenloe, to whom airy passages and plain square rooms seemed infinitely preferable to rat-infested moats and turrets, a troublesome overcrowded muniment-room, and the famous family-portraits that were continually having to be cleaned and re-backed; and who, in rehearsing the saga of the fire, always concluded with a sigh of satisfaction: “Luckily they saved the stuffed birds.”

It was doubtful if the other members of the family had ever noticed anything about the house but the temperature of the rooms, and the relative comfort of the armchairs. Certainly Lady Glenloe had done nothing to extend their observations. She herself had accomplished the unusual feat of having only two daughters and four sons; and this achievement, and the fact that Lord Glenloe had lived for years on a ranch in Canada, and came to England but briefly and rarely, had obliged his wife to be a frequent traveller, going from the soldier sons in Canada and India to the gold-miner in South Africa and the Embassy attaché at St. Petersburg, and returning home via the Northwest and the marital ranch.

Such travels, infrequent in Lady Glenloe's day, had opened her eyes to matters undreamed of by most ladies of the aristocracy, and she had brought back from her wanderings a mind tanned and toughened like her complexion by the healthy hardships of the road. Her two daughters, though left at home, and kept in due subordination, had caught a whiff of the gales that whistled through her mental rigging, and the talk at Champions was full of easy allusions to Thibet, Salt Lake City, Tsarskoë, or Delhi, as to all of which Lady Glenloe could furnish statistical items, and facts on plant and bird distribution. In this atmosphere Miss Testvalley breathed more freely than in her other educational prisons, and when she appeared on the station platform to welcome the young Duchess, the latter, though absorbed in her own troubles, instantly noticed the change in her governess. At Longlands, during the Christmas revels, there had been no time or opportunity for observation, much less for private talk; but now Miss Testvalley took possession of Annabel as a matter of course.

“My dear, you won't mind there being no one but me to meet you? The girls and their brothers from Petersburg and Ottawa are out with the guns, and Lady Glenloe sent you all sorts of excuses, but she had an important parish-meeting-something to do with alms-house sanitation—and she thought you'd probably be tired by the journey, and rather glad to rest quietly till dinner.”

Yes—Annabel was very glad. She suspected that the informal arrival had been planned with Lady Glenloe's connivance, and it made her feel like a girl again to be springing up the stairs on Miss Testvalley's arm, with no groom-of-the-chambers bowing her onward, or housekeeper curtseying in advance. “Everything's pot-luck at Champions.” Lady Glenloe had a way of saying it that made pot-luck sound far more appetizing than elaborate preparations; and Annabel's spirits rose with every step.

She had left Longlands with a heavy mind. After a scene of tearful gratitude, Lady Dick, her money in her pocket, had fled to London by the first train, ostensibly to deal with her more pressing creditors; and for another week Annabel had continued to fulfill her duties as hostess to the shooting-party. She had wanted to say a word in private to Guy Thwarte, to excuse herself for her childish outbreak when he had surprised her in the temple; but the day after Conchita's departure he too had gone, called to Honourslove on some local business, and leaving with a promise to the Duke that he would return for the Lowdon election.

Without her two friends, Annabel felt herself more than ever alone. She knew that the Duke, according to his lights, had behaved generously to her; and she would have liked to feel properly grateful. But she was conscious only of a bewildered resentment. She was sure she had done right in helping Conchita Marable, and she could not understand why an act of friendship should have to be expiated like a crime, and in a way so painful to her pride.

She felt that she and her husband would never be able to reach an understanding, and, this being so, it did not greatly matter which of the two was at fault. “I guess it was our parents, really, for making us so different,” was her final summing up to Laura Testvalley, in the course of that first unbosoming.

The astringent quality of Miss Testvalley's sympathy had always acted on Annabel like a tonic. Miss Testvalley was not one to weep with you, but to show you briskly why there was no cause for weeping. Now, however, she remained silent for a long while after listening to her pupil's story; and when she spoke, it was with a new softness. “My poor Nan, life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.”

Annabel threw herself on the brown cashmere bosom which had so often been her refuge. “Of course you know, you darling old Val. I think there's nothing in the world you don't know.” And her tears broke out in a releasing shower.

Miss Testvalley let them flow; apparently she had no bracing epigram at hand. But when Nan had dried her eyes, and tossed back her hair, the governess remarked quietly: “I'd like you to try a change of air first; then we'll talk this all over. There's a good deal of fresh air in this house, and I want you to ventilate your bewildered little head.”

Annabel looked at her with a certain surprise. Though Miss Testvalley was often kind, she was seldom tender, and Nan had a sudden intuition of new forces stirring under the breast-plate of brown cashmere. She looked again, more attentively, and then said: “Val, your hair's grown ever so much thicker; and you do it in a new way.”

“I—Do I?” For the first time since Annabel had known her, Miss Testvalley's brown complexion turned to a rich crimson. The colour darted up, flamed, and faded, all in a second or two; but it left the governess's keen little face suffused with a soft inner light like—why, yes, Nan perceived with a start, like that velvety glow on Conchita's delicate cheek. For a moment, neither of the women spoke; but some quick current of understanding seemed to flash between them.

Miss Testvalley laughed. “Oh, my hair ... you think? Yes; I have been trying a new hair-lotion—one of those wonderful French things. You didn't know I was such a vain old goose? Well, the truth is, Lady Churt was staying here (you know she's a cousin); and after she left, one of the girls found a bottle of this stuff in her room, and just for fun we—that is, I ... Well, there's my silly secret....” She laughed again, and tried to flatten her upstanding ripples with a pedantic hand. But the ripples sprang up defiantly, and so did her colour. Nan kept an intent gaze on her.

“You look ten years younger; you look
young,
I mean, Val dear,” she corrected herself with a smile.

“Well, that's the way I want you to look, my child. No; don't ring for your maid—not yet! First let me look through your dresses and tell you what to wear this evening. You know, dear, you've never thought enough about the little things; and one fine day, if one doesn't, they may suddenly grow into tremendously big ones.” She lowered her fine lids. “That's the reason I'm letting my hair wave a little more. Not too much, you think? ... Tell me, Nan, is your maid clever about hair?”

Nan shook her head. “I don't believe she is. My mother-in-law found her for me,” she confessed, remembering Conchita's ironic comment on the horn buttons of her dressing-gown.... “Lady Churt?—Is that the Lady Churt Jinny and Lizzy and Mabel once told us about?”

“The same. She stopped here on her way from one house-party to another. To tell the truth, Lady Glenloe was a bit unhappy. That old scandal with Lord Seadown hasn't been forgotten, and neither Lady Glenloe nor I was sure about letting Kitty and Cora meet her. But she couldn't very well be refused when she wrote to invite herself; and it was a simple family dinner, none of the sons was here, even; and nothing was said that the girls shouldn't have heard. They saw nothing remarkable about her except, as I say, her wonderful French paints and powders and lotions!”

 
 
Presently Lady Glenloe appeared, brisk and brown, in rough tweed and shabby furs. She was as insensible to heat and cold as she was to most of the finer shades of sensation, and her dress always conformed to the calendar, without taking account of such unimportant trifles as latitudes.

“Ah, I'm glad you've got a good fire. They tell me it's very cold this evening. So delighted you've come, my dear; you must need a change and a rest after a series of those big Longlands parties. I've always wondered how your mother-in-law stood the strain.... Here you'll find only the family—we don't go in for any ceremony at Champions—but I hope you'll like being with my girls.... By the way, dinner may be a trifle late; you won't mind? The fact is, Sir Helmsley Thwarte sent a note this morning to ask if he might come and dine, and bring his son, who's at Honourslove. You know Sir Helmsley, of course? And Guy—he's been with you at Longlands, hasn't he? We must all drive over to Honourslove.... Sir Helmsley's a most friendly neighbour; we see him here very often, don't we, Miss Testvalley?”

The governess's head was bent to the grate, from which a coal had fallen. “When Mr. Thwarte's there, Sir Helmsley naturally likes to take him about, I suppose,” she murmured to the tongs.

“Ah, just so!—Guy ought to marry,” Lady Glenloe announced. “I must get some young people to meet him the next time he comes.... You know that there was an unfortunate marriage at Rio—but, luckily, the young woman died ... leaving him a fortune, I believe. Ah, I must send word at once to the cook that Sir Helmsley likes his beef rather underdone.... Sir Helmsley's very particular about his food.... But now I'll leave you to rest, my dear. And don't make yourself too fine. We're used to pot-luck at Champions.”

Annabel, left alone, stood pondering before her glass. She was to see Guy Thwarte that evening—and Miss Testvalley had reproached her for not thinking enough about the details of her dress and hair. Hair-dressing had always been a much-discussed affair among the St. George ladies, but something winged and impatient in Nan resisted the slow torture of adjusting puffs and curls. Regarding herself as the least noticeable in a group where youthful beauty carried its torch so high, and convinced that, wherever they went, the other girls would always be the centre of attention, Nan had never thought it worth while to waste much time on her inconspicuous person. The Duke had not married her for her beauty—how could she imagine it, when he might have chosen Virginia? Indeed, he had mentioned, in the course of his odd wooing, that beautiful women always frightened him, and that the qualities he especially valued in Nan were her gentleness and her inexperience—“And certainly I was inexperienced enough,” she meditated, as she stood before the mirror; “but I'm afraid he hasn't found me particularly gentle.”

She continued to study her reflection critically, wondering whether Miss Testvalley was right, and she owed it to herself to dress her hair more becomingly, and wear her jewels as if she hadn't merely hired them for a fancy-ball. (The comparison was Miss Testvalley's.) She could imagine taking an interest in her hair, even studying the effect of a flower or a ribbon skilfully placed; but she knew she could never feel at ease under the weight of the Tintagel heirlooms. Luckily, the principal pieces, ponderous coronets and tiaras, massive necklaces and bracelets hung with stones like rocs' eggs, were locked up in a London bank, and would probably not be imposed upon her except at Drawing-rooms or receptions for foreign sovereigns; yet even the less ceremonious ornaments, which Virginia or Conchita would have carried off with such an air, seemed too imposing for her slight presence.

But now, for the first time, she felt a desire to assert herself, to live up to her opportunities. “After all, I'm Annabel Tintagel, and as I can't help myself I might as well try to make the best of it.” Perhaps Miss Testvalley was right. Already she seemed to breathe more freely, to feel a new air in her lungs. It was her first escape from the long oppression of Tintagel and Longlands, and the solemn London house; and freed from the restrictions they imposed, and under the same roof with the only two friends who truly understood her, she felt her spirits rising. “I know I'm always too glad or too sad—like that girl in the German play that Miss Testvalley read to me,” she said to herself, and wondered whether Guy Thwarte knew Clarchen's song, and would think her conceited if she told him she had always felt that a little bit of herself was Clarchen. “There are so many people in me,” she thought; but tonight the puzzling idea of her multiplicity cheered instead of bewildering her.... “There can't be too many happy Nans,” she thought with a smile, as she drew on her long gloves.