The Buccaneers (6 page)

V.

Mrs. St. George had gone to the races with her husband—an ordeal she always dreaded and yet prayed for. Colonel St. George, on these occasions, was so handsome, and so splendid in his light racing-suit and gray top hat, that she enjoyed a larger repetition of her triumph in the hotel dining-room; but when this had been tasted to the full there remained her dread of the mysterious men with whom he was hail-fellow-well-met in the paddock, and the dreadful painted women in open carriages who leered and beckoned (didn't she see them?) under the fringes of their sunshades.

She soon wearied of the show, and would have been glad to be back rocking and sipping lemonade on the hotel verandah; yet, when the Colonel helped her into the carriage, suggesting that if she wanted to meet the new governess it was time to be off, she instantly concluded that the rich widow at the Congress Springs Hotel, about whom there was so much gossip, had made him a secret sign, and was going to carry him off to the gambling-rooms for supper—if not worse. But, when the Colonel chose, his arts were irresistible, and in another moment Mrs. St. George was driving away alone, her heart heavy with this new anxiety superposed on so many others.

When she reached the hotel all the frequenters of the verandah, gathered between the columns of the porch, were greeting with hysterical laughter a motley group who were pouring out of the familiar vehicle from which Mrs. St. George had expected to see Nan descend with the dreaded and longed-for governess. The party was headed by Teddy de Santos-Dios, grotesquely accoutred in a hotel waiter's white jacket, and twanging his guitar to the antics of Conchita's poodle, while Conchita herself, the Elmsworth sisters, and Mrs. St. George's own two girls danced up the steps surrounding a small soberly garbed figure, whom Mrs. St. George instantly identified as the governess. Mrs. Elmsworth and Mrs. Closson stood on the upper step, smothering their laughter in lace handkerchiefs; but Mrs. St. George sailed past them with set lips, pushing aside a shabby-looking young man in overalls who seemed to form part of the company.

“Virginia—Annabel,” she gasped, “what is the meaning... Oh, Miss Testvalley—what
must
you think?” she faltered with trembling lips.

“I think it very kind of Annabel's young friends to have come with her to meet me,” said Miss Testvalley; and Mrs. St. George noted with bewilderment and relief that she was actually smiling, and that she had slipped her arm through Nan's.

For a moment Mrs. St. George thought it might be easier to deal with a governess who was already on such easy terms with her pupil; but by the time Miss Testvalley, having removed the dust of travel, had knocked at her employer's door, the latter had been assailed by new apprehensions. It would have been comparatively simple to receive, with what Mrs. St. George imagined to be the dignity of a duchess, a governess used to such ceremonial; but the disconcerting circumstances of Miss Testvalley's arrival, and the composure with which she had met them, had left Mrs. St. George with her dignity on her hands. Could it be—? But no; Mrs. Russell Parmore, as well as the Duchess, answered for Miss Testvalley's unquestionable respectability. Mrs. St. George fanned herself nervously.

“Oh, come in. Do sit down, Miss Testvalley.” (Mrs. St. George had expected someone taller, more majestic. She would have thought Miss Testvalley insignificant, could the term be applied to anyone coming from Mrs. Parmore.) “I don't know how my daughters can have been induced to do anything so—so undignified. Unfortunately, the Closson girt—” She broke off, embarrassed by the recollection of the Colonel's injunctions.

“The tall young girl with auburn hair? I understand that one of the masqueraders was her brother.”

“Yes; her half-brother. Mrs. Closson is a Brazilian”—but again Mrs. St. George checked the note of disparagement. “Brazilian” was bad enough, without adding anything pejorative. “The Colonel—Colonel St. George—has business relations with Mr. Closson. I never met them before....”

“Ah,” said Miss Testvalley.

“And I'm sure my girls and the Elmsworths would never...”

“Oh, quite so; I understand. I've no doubt the idea was Lord Richard's.”

She uttered the name as though it were familiar to her, and Mrs. St. George caught at Lord Richard. “You knew him already? He appears to be a friend of the Clossons.”

“I knew him in England; yes. I was with Lady Brightlingsea for two years—as his sisters' governess.”

Mrs. St. George gazed awestruck down this new and resonant perspective. “Lady Brittlesey?” (It was thus that Miss Testvalley had pronounced the name.)

“The Marchioness of Brightlingsea; his mother. It's a very large family. I was with two of the younger daughters, Lady Honoria and Lady Ulrica Marable. I think Lord Richard is the third son. But one saw him at home so very seldom....”

Mrs. St. George drew a deep breath. She had not bargained for this glimpse into the labyrinth of the peerage, and she felt a little dizzy, as though all the Brightlingseas and the Marables were in the room, and she ought to make the proper gestures, and didn't even know what to call them without her husband's being there to tell her. She wondered whether the experiment of an English governess might not after all make life too complicated. And this one's eyebrows were so black and ironical.

“Lord Richard,” continued Miss Testvalley, “always has to have his little joke.” Her tone seemed to dismiss him, and all his titled relations with him. Mrs. St. George was relieved. “But your daughter Annabel—perhaps,” Miss Testvalley continued, “you would like to give me some general idea of the stage she has reached in her different studies?” Her manner was now distinctly professional, and Mrs. St. George's spirits drooped again. If only the Colonel had been there—as he would have been, but for that woman! Or even Nan herself... Mrs. St. George looked helplessly at the governess. But suddenly an inspiration came to her. “I have always left these things to the girls' teachers,” she said with majesty.

“Oh, quite,” Miss Testvalley assented.

“And their father; their father takes a great interest in their studies—when time permits...” Mrs. St. George continued. “But of course his business interests... which are enormous...”

“I think I understand,” Miss Testvalley softly agreed.

Mrs. St. George again sighed her relief. A governess who understood without the need of tiresome explanations—was it not more than she had hoped for? Certainly Miss Testvalley looked insignificant; but the eyes under her expressive eyebrows were splendid, and she had an air of firmness. And the miracle was that Nan should already have taken a fancy to her. If only the other girls didn't laugh her out of it! “Of course,” Mrs. St. George began again, “what I attach most importance to is that my girls should be taught to—to behave like ladies.”

Miss Testvalley murmured: “Oh, yes. Drawing-room accomplishments.”

“I may as well tell you that I don't care very much for the girls they associate with here. Saratoga is not what it used to be. In New York, of course, it will be different. I hope you can persuade Annabel to study.”

She could not think of anything else to say, and the governess, who seemed singularly discerning, rose with a slight bow, and murmured: “If you will allow me ...”

Miss Testvalley's room was narrow and bare; but she had already discovered that the rooms of summer hotels in the States were all like that; the luxury and gilding were reserved for the public parlours. She did not much mind; she had never been used to comfort, and her Italian nature did not crave it. To her mind the chief difference between the governess's room at Tintagel, or at Allfriars, the Brightlingsea seat, and those she had occupied since her arrival in America, was that the former were larger (and therefore harder to heat) and were furnished with threadbare relics of former splendour, and carpets in which you caught your heel; whereas at Mrs. Parmore's, and in this big hotel, though the governess's quarters were cramped, they were neat and the furniture was in good repair. But this afternoon Miss Testvalley was perhaps tired, or oppressed by the heat, or perhaps only by an unwonted sense of loneliness. Certainly it was odd to find one's self at the orders of people who wished their daughters to be taught to “behave like ladies.” (The alternative being—what, she wondered? Perhaps a disturbing apparition like Conchita Closson.)

At any rate, Miss Testvalley was suddenly aware of a sense of far-away-ness, of a quite unreasonable yearning for the dining-room at the back of a certain shabby house at Denmark Hill, where her mother, in a widow's cap of white crape, sat on one side of the scantily filled grate, turning with rheumatic fingers the pages of the Reverend Frederick Maurice's sermons, while, facing her across the hearth, old Gennaro Testavaglia, still heavy and powerful in his extreme age, brooded with fixed eyes in a big parchment-coloured face, and repeated over and over some forgotten verse of his own revolutionary poems. In that room, with its chronic smell of cold coffee and smouldering coals, of Elliman's liniment and human old age, Miss Testvalley had spent some of the most disheartening hours of her life. “
La mia prigione,”
she had once called it; yet was it not for that detested room that she was homesick!

Only fifteen minutes in which to prepare for supper! (She had been warned that late dinners were still unknown in American hotels.) Miss Testvalley, setting her teeth against the vision of the Denmark Hill dining-room, went up to the chest of drawers on which she had already laid out her modest toilet appointments; and there she saw, between her yellowish-backed brush and faded pincushion, a bunch of freshly gathered geraniums and mignonette. The flowers had certainly not been there when she had smoothed her hair before waiting on Mrs. St. George; nor had they, she was sure, been sent by that lady. They were not bought flowers, but flowers lovingly gathered; and someone else must have entered in Miss Testvalley's absence, and hastily deposited the humble posy.

The governess sat down on the hard chair beside the bed, and her eyes filled with tears. Flowers, she had noticed, did not abound in the States; at least not in summer. In winter, in New York, you could see them banked up in tiers in the damp heat of the florists' windows: plumy ferns, forced lilac, and those giant roses, red and pink, which rich people offered to each other so lavishly in long white card-board boxes. It was very odd; the same ladies who exchanged these costly tributes in mid-winter lived through the summer without a flower, or with nothing but a stiff bed of dwarf foliage plants before the door, or a tub or two of the inevitable hydrangeas. Yet someone had apparently managed to snatch these flowers from the meagre border before the hotel porch, and had put them there to fill Miss Testvalley's bedroom with scent and colour. And who could have done it but her new pupil?

 
 
Quarter of an hour later Miss Testvalley, her thick hair re-braided and glossed with brilliantine, her black merino exchanged for a plum-coloured silk with a crochet lace collar, and lace mittens on her small worn hands, knocked at the door of the Misses St. George. It opened, and the governess gave a little “Oh!” of surprise. Virginia stood there, a shimmer of ruffled white drooping away from her young throat and shoulders. On her heaped-up wheat-coloured hair lay a wreath of corn-flowers; and a black velvet ribbon with a locket hanging from it intensified her fairness like the black stripe on a ring-dove's throat.

“What elegance for a public dining-room!” thought Miss Testvalley; and then reflected: “But no doubt it's her only chance of showing it.”

Virginia opened wondering blue eyes, and the governess explained: “The supper-bell has rung, and I thought you and your sister might like me to go down with you.”

“Oh—” Virginia murmured; and added: “Nan's lost her slipper. She's hunting for it.”

“Very well; shall I help her? And you'll go down and excuse us to your mamma?”

Virginia's eyes grew wider. “Well, I guess Mother's used to waiting,” she said, as she sauntered along the corridor to the staircase.

Nan St. George lay face downward on the floor, poking with a silk parasol under the wardrobe. At the sound of Miss Testvalley's voice she raised herself sulkily. Her small face was flushed and frowning. (“None of her sister's beauty,” Miss Testvalley thought.) “It's there, but I can't get at it,” Nan proclaimed.

“My dear, you'll tumble your lovely frock—”

“Oh, it's not lovely. It's one of Jinny's last-year's organdies.”

“Well, it won't improve it to crawl about on the floor. Is your shoe under the wardrobe? Let me try to get it. My silk won't be damaged.”

Miss Testvalley put out her hand for the sunshade, and Nan scrambled to her feet. “You can't reach it,” she said, still sulkily. But Miss Testvalley, prostrate on the floor, had managed to push a thin arm under the wardrobe, and the parasol presently reappeared with a little bronze slipper on its tip. Nan gave a laugh.

“Well, you
are
handy!” she said.

Miss Testvalley echoed the laugh. “Put it on quickly, and let me help you to tidy your dress. And, oh dear, your sash is untied—” She spun the girl about, re-tied the sash, and smoothed the skirt with airy touches; for all of which, she noticed, Nan uttered no word of thanks.

“And your handkerchief, Annabel?” In Miss Testvalley's opinion no lady should appear in the evening without a scrap of lace-edged cambric, folded into a triangle and held between gloved or mittened finger-tips. Nan shrugged. “I never know where my handkerchiefs are—I guess they get lost in the wash, wandering round in hotels the way we do.”

Miss Testvalley sighed at this nomadic wastefulness. Perhaps because she had always been a wanderer herself, she loved orderly drawers and shelves, and bunches of lavender between delicately fluted under-garments.