The Buccaneers (40 page)

“You have regard for me!—Then,” Sir Helmsley pressed, “then you do not say no?”

“Oh, no,” Laura Testvalley replied, “I do not say no—”

“Then you say yes!” Without more ado, his handsome worn face shining, Sir Helmsley seized her hand and kissed it lingeringly; and as he relinquished it said: “You have made me very happy.”

 
 
Meanwhile Nan stood gazing at the Thames and across at the Battersea shore through a gauzy mist that shimmered green and gold in the pale late-winter sunlight. A string of barges glided by, outstripped by a rowing-boat.... The unresting, changeable river had frolicked past the bungalow at Runnymede some miles ago. Around the next bend, it would surge grandly, mightily, past the Houses of Parliament, where Ushant sat in the Lords and where Guy Thwarte would sit (for of course he would win the election) in the Commons.

 
 
She heard Miss Testvalley call her name, and turned back.

When Sir Helmsley had escorted them to Folyat House and gone on (to business, he said, with his solicitor), Annabel led the governess up into her boudoir, where, remembering, she cried: “Val, you won't believe it! There were some canvasses standing on edge, and when I tipped them over to see, they were Sir Helmsley's Madonna—at least
ten
Madonnas, all identical!”

Miss Testvalley seemed abstracted, as if shaking herself free from some pleasant musing. “Thank heaven
you're
the one who saw them! People want replicas, and Dante Gabriel ... for years he has been too busy or too ill to do them, and so he pays other painters, poor ones, or students, to rough out copies for him to finish. I
had
heard that sometimes all he contributes is his signature, but I didn't know that he was running a factory!” Miss Testvalley cast her speaking eyes up to the puce-and-gold ceiling. “And what's more, he asks for payment for paintings he may not begin for years. Thank heaven too that he didn't ask Sir Helmsley—or you—for money!”

Nan said eagerly: “But he's not mercenary.... And when his wife died, isn't it true that he buried his poems with her?”

Miss Testvalley hesitated. “Yes ... he had his poems buried with poor Lizzy Siddal, but later he ... he lost his vein, he needed to publish, and he had her body exhumed.—No, no,” she said quickly as Nan's mouth opened in horror, “that was human nature; he found he couldn't bear to annihilate his work.... The thing is that he hadn't the courage to retrieve the manuscripts himself, he made someone else do it for him.... Annabel,” Miss Testvalley said with some severity, “you are romantic by nature, which is excellent, but romanticism should include recognition of facts.”

As Nan, at the other end of the sofa on which they had installed themselves, frowned thoughtfully, Miss Testvalley rose briskly, her face again subtly a-glow. “However, my dear, just now, like a sundial, I can think only of happy hours! You're returning to Champions at once? I'll see you there when I bring Corisande and Kitty back. Meanwhile, I'll be with Miss March for a day or so.”

Nan, too, stood up, smiling. “Yes. The carriage will be at the door whenever you say, Val dear.”

“Thank you, Annabel!” Miss Testvalley was pleased out of all proportion to the service itself (though her arrival in a ducal barouche in view of all Curzon Street would provide Jacky March with an innocent thrill). During the last few days she had noted several indications that her favourite pupil was learning to make modest use of her prerogative as Duchess. And whatever happened—in her unwonted mood of joy, Miss Testvalley did not analyze a “whatever” that betrayed her underlying uneasiness as to Annabel's situation—whatever happened, it could do Annabel nothing but good to learn to assert herself.

“Afterward,” she continued, “I'll go on to my family for a bit. But I think I shall not tell them about this latest performance of D.G.R.'s.
Arrivederci,
Annabel!”

XXXII.

When Annabel opened the library door, Lady Glenloe looked up from a large atlas open on the table before her and came, arms open and wind-burnt face beaming, to welcome her back to Champions as a third daughter.

After demanding and receiving a report of the evening at Folyat House and the departure of the bridesmaids for Norfolk, she sat down with a nod of satisfaction and a sigh of frustration. “My dear, Ralph writes that he has been posted to ‘Noru.' In India, I fancy, but I can't find it on the map. Where in the world can it be?”

“Noru, Nohru ... ?” Obligingly, Nan turned and began to search the big globe.

“You say Sir Helmsley was there when you visited Miss Testvalley's cousin?” Lady Glenloe, pleased with events, vouchsafed a confidence. “Of course, you've seen that I hope his son will marry one of my girls.”

Bent over the globe, Nan put her hand to her heart as if she had been stabbed.

“And I'm sure that Sir Helmsley hopes so too. You've noticed how he takes Miss Testvalley off to chat so that Guy can be alone with Corisande or Catharine? Tell me, have you noticed any signs of preference?—on Guy's part, that is?” Lady Glenloe cocked a cheerful head expectantly.

As the countries of the world rolled past in varnished yellows, pale greens, and pinks—as the small world that was herself was suddenly decentralized—Nan drew on a courage she hadn't known was in her.

“No.” She turned to Lady Glenloe. “No. They are both dears.”

 
 
“Is Your Grace ill?” Mabbit, who was arranging gloves in a drawer, looked up with a frown and a tone of repressed annoyance, as of one improperly interrupted in performance of a duty, when Nan took refuge in her room.

“No,” Nan said, without looking at her. “You may go.”

“Yes,” she moaned, throwing herself on her bed when Mabbit had left. “Yes, I am ill. I am in love. I never knew.... And what am I to do ... ? I didn't know....”

 
 
“You are pale,” Lady Glenloe said compunctiously, when Nan came down to dinner. “I ought not to have allowed you to go to London and back in such a short time, especially since the Dowager said you were run-down and needed change of air. Fortunately, I have a special decoction that may help.”

So her mother-in-law had engineered the invitation to Champions. But it didn't matter. Nan submitted to a dose of
alakar
(“which they use in the Caucasus; Piers says it accounts for their longevity, along with that curious curd
yahoor”
), grateful to be supplied with a plausible cover for heartache.

 
Incurable
heartache; for there was no remedy. Alone at last in her canopied bed, the fierce Nan St. George who had cried out that she would kill a beastly governess revived, like a free-spirited dryad breaking from long captivity in a granite boulder—to savage
herself.
How could she, who used to make believe she was Yseult and Guinevere and Nicolette and mooned over Rossetti's “fleshly” verse, how could—First she'd imagined that she was in love when she wasn't, letting the magic of Camelot enshroud the Duke's dull lovelessness in Celtic mist. Then she had really fallen in love: and not known. She had delighted in the Correggios, even looked at them with Guy Thwarte, but stupidly had seen only their sunny joyousness, not their passion. She had let her love grow, nourished it, and not known.

She had heard a laughing aside of Conchita's, “Guy Thwarte's no longer a detrimental,” and had paid no heed. But how could she have failed to understand that he would be pursued? No; not merely pursued, she had to face the worst—the obvious—that he would of course, for every reason, want to marry? “Oh,” she moaned, shaken by waves of anguish, not knowing to whom she might be pleading, “don't let me be jealous of them.... It would be contemptible....”

But Annabel, who had never been in love and had never been jealous, was jealous, and it was that cruellest of passions, striking like lightning, that showed her that she was in love.... Contemptible or not, she could not be here when
they
came home and Guy resumed his visits. (Visits, but to which one?) She could not stay. But neither could she go back to Longlands....

Her pillow wet with tears, the Duchess of Tintagel tossed and turned all night.

 
“Do you know, I think Nan's coming to stay next week!”

Mrs. Hector Robinson laid down the letter she had been perusing and glanced across the funereal architecture of the British breakfast-table at her husband, who, plunged in
The
Times, sat in the armchair facing her. He looked up with the natural resentment of the Briton disturbed by an untutored female in his morning encounter with the news. “Nan—?” he echoed interrogatively.

Lizzy Robinson laughed—and her laugh was a brilliant affair, which lit up the late-winter darkness of the solemn pseudo-Gothic breakfast-room at Belfield.

“Well, Annabel, then; Annabel Duchess—”

“The—not the Duchess of Tintagel?”

Mr. Robinson had instantly discarded
The Times.
He sat gazing incredulously at the face of his wife, on which the afterglow of her laugh still enchantingly lingered. Certainly, he thought, he had married one of the most beautiful women in England. And now his father was dead, and Belfield and the big London house, and the Scottish shooting-lodge, and the Lancashire mills which fed them all—all for the last year had been his. Everything he had put his hand to had succeeded. But he had never pictured the Duchess of Tintagel at a Belfield house-party, and the vision made him a little dizzy.

“The—Duchess—of—Tintagel.” Still amused, his wife mimicked him. “Has there never been a duchess at Belfield before?”

Mr. Robinson stiffened slightly. “Not
this
Duchess. I understood the Tintagels paid no visits.”

“Ushant doesn't, certainly—luckily for us! But I suppose he can't keep his wife actually chained up, can he, with all these new laws, and the police prying in everywhere? At any rate, she's been at Lady Glenloe's for the last month; and now she wants to know if she can come here.”

Mr. Robinson's stare had the fixity of a muscular contraction. “She's written to ask—?”

His wife tossed the letter across the monuments in Sheffield plate. “There—if you don't believe me.”

He read the short note with a hurriedly assumed air of detachment. “Dear me—who else is coming? Shall we be able to fit her in, do you think?” The detachment was almost too perfect, and Lizzy felt like exclaiming: “Oh, come, my dear, don't overdo it!” But she never gave her husband such hints except when it was absolutely necessary.

“Shall I write that she may come?” she asked, with an air of wifely compliance.

Mr. Robinson coughed—in order that his response should not be too eager. “That's for you to decide, my dear. I don't see why not; if she can put up with a rather dull hunting-crowd,” he said, suddenly viewing his other guests from a new angle. “Let me see—there's old Dashleigh—I'm afraid he is a bore—and Hubert Clyde, and Colonel Beagles, and of course Sir Blasker Tripp for Lady Dick Marable—eh?” He smiled suggestively. “And Guy Thwarte; is the Duchess likely to object to Guy Thwarte?”

Lizzy Robinson's smile deepened. “Oh, no; I gather she won't in the least object to him.”

“Why—what do you mean? You don't—”

In his surprise and agitation, Mr. Robinson abandoned all further thought of
The Times.

“Well—it occurs to me that she may conceivably have known he was coming here next week. I know he's been at Champions a good deal during the month she's been spending there. And I—Well, I should certainly have risked asking him to meet her, if he hadn't already been on your list.”

Mr. Robinson looked at his wife's smile, and slowly responded to it. He had always thought he had a prompt mind, as quick as any at the uptake; but there were times when this American girl left him breathless, and even a little frightened. Her social intuitions were uncannily swift; and in his rare moments of leisure from politics and the mills he sometimes asked himself if, with such gifts of divination, she might not some day be building a new future for herself. But there was a solid British baby upstairs in the nursery, and Mr. Robinson was richer than anybody she was likely to come across, except old Blasker Tripp, who of course belonged to Conchita Marable. And she certainly seemed happy, and absorbed in furthering their joint career.... But his chief reason for feeling safe was the fact that her standard of values was identical with his own. Strangely enough, this lovely alien who had been swept into his life on a brief gust of passion, proved to have a respect as profound as his for the concrete realities, and his sturdy unawareness of everything which could not be expressed in terms of bank-accounts or political and social expediency. It was as if he had married Titania, and she had brought with her a vanload of ponderous mahogany furniture exactly matching what he had grown up with at Belfield. And he knew she had an eye for a peerage.

“Yes; but, meanwhile ...” He picked up
The Times,
and began to smooth it out with deliberation, as though seeking a pretext for not carrying on the conversation.

“Well, Hector—?” his wife began impatiently. “I suppose I shall have to answer this.” She had recovered Annabel's letter.

Her husband still hesitated. “My dear—I should be only too happy to see the Duchess here.... But ...” The more he reflected, the bigger grew the But suddenly looming before him. “Have you any way of knowing if—er—the Duke approves?”

Lizzy again sounded her gay laugh. “Approves of Nan's coming here?”

Her husband nodded gravely, and as she watched him her own face grew attentive. She had learned that Hector's ideas were almost always worth considering.