The Buccaneers (41 page)

“You mean ... he may not like her inviting herself here?”

“Her doing so is certainly unconventional.”

“But she's been staying alone at Champions for a month.”

Mr. Robinson was still dubious. “Lady Glenloe's a relative. And besides, her visit to Champions is none of our business. But if you have any reason to think—”

His wife interrupted him. “What I think is that Nan's dying of boredom, and longing for a change; and if the Duke let her go to Champions, where she was among strangers, I don't see how he can object to her coming here, to an old friend from her own country. And Mabel will be here too! I'd like to see him refuse to let her stay with me,” cried Lizzy in what her husband called her “Hail Columbia voice.”

Mr. Robinson's frown relaxed. Lizzy so often found the right note. This was probably another instance of the advantage, for an ambitious man, of marrying someone by nationality and upbringing entirely detached from his own social problems. He now regarded as a valuable asset the breezy independence of his wife's attitude, which at first had alarmed him. “It's one of the reasons of their popularity,” he reflected. There was no doubt that London society was getting tired of pretences and compliances, of conformity and uniformity. The free and easy Americanism of this little band of invaders had taken the world of fashion by storm, and Hector Robinson was too alert not to have noted the renovation of the social atmosphere. “Wherever the men are amused, fashion is bound to follow,” was one of Lizzy's axioms; and certainly, from their future sovereign to his most newly knighted subject, the men were amused in Mayfair's American drawing-rooms.

 
 
 
 
At Champions, after another unhappy night, Nan had Mabbit help her into her riding-habit and went wanly down into the breakfast-room, where she put on a bright face and asked Lady Glenloe if she might have Comet, the old chestnut gelding she had used when they had ridden before. “I'd like the exercise,” she said.

“Of course, of course! The air will do you good. I knew the alakar would help,” Lady Glenloe said, pleased. “Llewellyn can go with you.”

“Oh, thanks,” Annabel said quickly, “but I don't need a groom. I won't go far; I thought I'd just wander about.”

Llewellyn, a short wiry man whose dark face revealed his Celtic origin, had a lad lead Comet out of his stall, fetch a side-saddle, and tack him up. As he helped Annabel to mount, he nodded toward a long black head looking over another stall door. “I'll not be a minute, Your Grace—”

“No,” Nan said firmly, “I won't need you. I'm not going far ... and I won't run Comet at a fence,” she added with a half-smile, understanding the focus of the head groom's concern. Comet was a notorious sluggard, but Llewellyn was grumpily protective of every horse in the stables. “Don't worry about him.”

On a childhood holiday on a farm in New York State she and Jinny had tucked up their pinafores and ridden a broad-backed Shetland pony astride, to their mother's horror; in New York they had taken riding lessons at Dickel's Riding Academy, and in London they had ridden a few times in Hyde Park. But after her marriage Ushant had discouraged Nan's riding, even before her miscarriage. She knew that Llewellyn—and Lady Glenloe, and the girls—had, rightly, no opinion of her as a horsewoman. But she could stay on a lazy old mount, at a walk, and she needed to be alone. Until she could escape ... She had written inviting herself to Lizzy's....

Patting the indifferent Comet on the neck, she walked him sedately through the yard and the paddock into the park, where she let him have his way, a dragging way that suited her inner desolation. The whispers of approaching spring, the tender green shoots of crocuses in the reviving grass—nothing drew her from her sad reflections until, approaching the principal entrance to the park, she heard fast hoof-beats in the lane outside the wall. A moment later Guy Thwarte, on a roan mare, trotted in between the old escutcheoned stone posts of a gate that was always kept open.

Nan's heart seemed to turn over inside her, and her hands on the reins became tight fists as she halted.

Guy, equally startled, reined in so abruptly that his horse reared a little. As he pulled it in he raised his hat.

“Duchess! ... I thought you were in London.”

“It's only me,” Annabel stammered, her heart beating almost to suffocation. “They won't ... Kitty and Cora won't be back till next week.... I'm sorry,” she finished as Guy frowned at her.

“Cora, Kitty, what do you mean?” he demanded.

“Well, of course, you've come to see them ... one of them....” Nan tried to keep her voice steady and was grateful for Comet's calming lethargy beneath her.

Guy looked at the forlorn white face under the jaunty riding-hat, at the violet smudges beneath the great dark eyes which looked away from him.

“What on earth?” He made a wide gesture with his crop. “What—? I stopped coming because—”

“Yes, I know—we know,” Nan said hastily—she couldn't bear to hear
him
say it—“but they are still away.”

“For God's sake!” Guy sounded desperately angry. “Do you mean—? Can you—? I stopped coming because of you. How could I think of anyone else when I know you? How could I care—?” As Nan stared at him with a white intensity, he said roughly: “I can't have you, and it's impossible having to see you—”

He broke off as Llewellyn came up from behind Nan at an easy trot and touched his cap to both of them.

“Your Grace, her ladyship says as I must ride with you.” The groom's bold black eyes went back and forth between the Duchess and the flushed and agitated young man beside her.

“Please make my apologies to Lady Glenloe,” Guy said to Nan. “I can't come to luncheon after all, because I have to go to Lowdon.” With a last long stern look at her, he raised his hat again and trotted out of the park.

 
 
“If that fellow hadn't come, I'd have taken her in my arms. And she'd never have forgiven me.” Guy cantered on with no destination in mind. “It is intolerable.... As my father says, Tintagel is our Duke. I am the Duke's candidate for Lowdon.” He trotted through a somnolent hamlet and left it at a reckless gallop. “If I win, it will be thanks to his interest. I shall be ‘his man in the Commons,' with endless meetings and visits, dinners at Longlands and Folyat House. And Annabel at his side....”

He must immediately tell the committee that he was withdrawing, so that they could look for a new candidate.

But he'd still be living in the Duke's fief.

Impossible. England would be impossible. He must go to London and make arrangements—at once.

 
 
The next morning, Guy was in Leadenhall Street, weaving his way through a crowd of City workers toward the office of his old engineering firm.

BOOK FOUR

XXXIII.

Three middle-aged ladies sat in the jungle warmth of a centrally heated drawing-room, decorated in the French Empire style, in a mansion in Fifth Avenue, New York City, while outside the windows a heavy snowfall whitened the leafless branches of the trees in the Central Park.

Mrs. Elmsworth (whose mansion it was), Mrs. St. George, and Mrs. Closson had long since taken for granted their acceptance, in varying degrees, by the best New York society as mothers of daughters who had married, severally, a duke, an earl who would become a marquis, a courtesy lord who was the earl's brother, a prominent young British statesman widely regarded as a future prime minister, and an American multi-millionaire who was a benefactor of causes dear to van der Luyden, Parmore, and Eglinton hearts.

Three summers ago at Runnymede, when Mrs. St. George and Mrs. Elmsworth had come downstairs in the bungalow to learn that while they dozed the afternoon away Virginia had become Lord Seadown's fiancée, they were told by Mabel and Conchita and, tearfully, by Virginia herself, how Lizzy had sacrificed herself to Virginia's advantage. Mrs. Elmsworth had not been resentful; and Mrs. St. George, knowing that
she
would not have been so generous, had salved her conscience, when they returned to New York, by pushing and pulling Mrs. Elmsworth up a few steps of the great staircase that mounted to the Parmores, Eglintons, and van der Luydens. A relatively lowly station seemed appropriate to a woman who tended to be red of face and short of breath because of overly rigid whaleboning. Mrs. Elmsworth's coarseness was also betrayed by her cheerful unawareness that she—and Mrs. Closson—were being condescended to by their old friend.

Neither Mrs. Elmsworth nor Mrs. Closson, however, was possessed by the almost religious zeal that had driven Mrs. St. George to fight for entry into the circle of Knickerbocker families whom she revered as “aristocracy” superior to any in the Old World. Mrs. St. George had emerged from the battle victorious, and feared a shift in fortune no more than she feared that the storm outside, fast becoming a blizzard, would blow in the windows of Mrs. Elmsworth's salon.

But—vanity of vanities!—“Now that we're here,” she and Mrs. Elmsworth sometimes said, echoing the Preacher, “what good is it?” and Mrs. Closson, amiably echoing her two friends, would sigh: “What good?” When Colonel St. George observed after a van der Luyden dinner: “Well, my dear, as the French say, the price of moving in high society is eternal boredom,” his wife blamed it on his liking the vulgar company of race-goers and card-players, and... those women. (On today's visit at Mrs. Elmsworth's, Mrs. St. George's round featureless face under its fair tower of sculpted curls, crimps, and plaits was ornamented right and left by a pair of large emerald ear-drops which the Colonel had handed her on his return from a business trip to New Or-leans.) Yet she had to admit to herself now and then that the big dinners,
“soirées,”
balls, and weddings to which they were invited were all much of a muchness and, unless you had a daughter to settle in life, presented no challenge.

Of course, in her right mind Mrs. St. George knew that it was thrilling to be bored in the society of van der Luydens, Eglintons, and Parmores. A pistol shot makes no sound if nobody hears it. Her eminence was brilliant less in itself than because of the thousands on thousands of women who read of it, and envied. Mrs. St. George held little stock in imagination. Annabel's “suppose that's” and “if only's” had always irked her. But she pictured with a soaring fancy, and a freedom from geographical pedantry that rivalled Lady Brightlingsea's, those women in their multitudes, from Manhattan on through the Middle West—Montana, Illinois, and the great wheat-fields of Utah—to the Pacific Coast. To know that they would see her name in the proper paragraphs in society columns and read, in interviews by society reporters, her views on benefit concerts and divorce, and her descriptions of the home-life of her daughter the Duchess—for nothing in life, or indeed in the afterlife, would Mrs. St. George have relinquished all that.

Moreover, there
was
a challenge! A revelation had come to Mrs. St. George one morning on the road to the Parmores' such that she cried, in the poet's spirit if not his precise words: “Say not the struggle naught availeth!” In twenty years or so, Jinny's two sons would be of marriageable age; and Jinny'd have others. And surely
some
day Annabel would begin to produce heirs. Without going so far as to advocate the infant betrothals of the wicked European past, Mrs. St. George envisaged an array of noble grandsons in England who would be a compelling attraction to American mothers of baby girls who would duly reach eighteen and come out. Already, if far-seeing prospective grand-mothers, her contemporaries, were cultivating her acquaintance, it could only be with match-making in mind; and she could look forward to a place in their very tabernacle, at those
inteem
dinners she was always hearing of, to which
she
was not invited, she was sure, only because the guests were all members of the family.

 
Meanwhile, since the present grandeur of Mrs. Elmsworth, Mrs. St. George, and Mrs. Closson savoured sweetest when set against the past they had shared in Saratoga and New York City, and against deeper, murkier pasts known only partially to each other, the three matrons often met on slight or no pretext. The theme of today's convocation, though, was not trivial. They were talking about the recently widowed Mabel Whittaker,
née
Elmsworth.

Caleb Whittaker, the Steel King, a man so inordinately rich as to be invulnerable to the “market” that affected Elmsworths, Clossons, and St. Georges, had been a hero of industry and a celebrated patron of the arts for many years. But his apotheosis had come with his marriage late in life to the young and beautiful Miss Mabel Elmsworth, after which funds that had nourished the cultural life of Magnesia, Illinois, were extended to support the art and music of New York, New York. It was known that Mr. Whittaker's wife had guided the extension of his beneficence to New York, and in particular that she had inspired his gift to the newly founded, though not yet opened, Metropolitan Museum of his Meissoniers, Winterhalters, and Bouguereaus.

The Steel King's vast remaining private collection, now his widow's, included Old Masters (Titians, Raphaels, Correggios); sculptures (Berninis, Clodions, Houdons, classical pieces); prints (Rembrandts and Dürers).... New York looked forward to a Golden Age of donation and patronage. But last week, after gracious farewells to her fellow-devotees of the arts, Mabel had departed for Europe with her infant daughter, Rosabel Whittaker, and it was to discuss this move that her mother had convened Mesdames St. George and Closson.

Mrs. St. George felt obscurely that Mabel was taking unfair advantage—was, as the Colonel might have said, jumping the gun—in transporting her baby in its very cradle from New York to the scene of international action. But Mrs. Elmsworth exuded maternal pride, not grandmotherly calculation.