Long-past memories of the river’s magic brought a sigh to Miss March’s lips; but she turned it into a smile as she raised her forget-me-not eyes to Lizzy Elmsworth’s imperial orbs. Lizzy returned the look, and the two immediately understood each other.
“Why, Mother, that sounds perfectly lovely. You’d love it too, Mrs. St. George, wouldn’t you?” Lizzy smiled, stooping gracefully to kiss her mother’s friend. She had no idea what punting was, but the fact that it was practised by moonlight suggested the exclusion of rheumatic elders, and a free field—or river, rather—for the exercise of youthful arts. And in those she felt confident of excelling.
XIV.
The lawn before Lady Churt’s cottage (or bungalow, as the knowing were beginning to say) spread sweetly to the Thames at Runnymede. With its long deck-like verandah, its awnings stretched from every window, it seemed to Nan St. George a fairy galleon making, all sails set, for the river. Swans, as fabulous to Nan as her imaginary galleon, sailed majestically on the silver flood; and boats manned by beautiful bare-armed athletes sped back and forth between the flat grass-banks.
At first Nan was the only one of the party on whom the river was not lost. Virginia’s attention travelled barely as far as the circles of calceolarias and lobelias dotting the lawn, and the vases of red geraniums and purple petunias which flanked the door; she liked the well-kept flowers and bright turf, and found it pleasant, on warm afternoons, to sit under an ancient cedar and play at the new-fangled tea-drinking into which they had been initiated by Miss March, with the aid of Lady Churt’s accomplished parlour-maid. Lizzy Elmsworth and Mabel also liked the tea-drinking, but were hardly aware of the great blue-green boughs under which the rite was celebrated. They had grown up between city streets and watering-place hotels, and were serenely unconscious of the “beyondness” of which Nan had confided her mysterious sense to Guy Thwarte.
The two mothers, after their first bewildered contact with Lady Churt’s servants, had surrendered themselves to these accomplished guides, and lapsed contentedly into their old watering-place habits. To Mrs. St. George and Mrs. Elmsworth the cottage at Runnymede differed from the Grand Union at Saratoga only in its inferior size, and more restricted opportunities for gossip. True, Miss March came down often with racy tit-bits from London, but the distinguished persons concerned were too remote to interest the exiles. Mrs. St. George missed even the things she had loathed at Saratoga—the familiarity of the black servants, the obnoxious sociability of Mrs. Closson, and the spectacle of the race-course, with ladies in pink bonnets lying in wait for the Colonel. Mrs. Elmsworth had never wasted her time in loathing anything. She would have been perfectly happy at Saratoga and in New York if her young ladies had been more kindly welcomed there. She privately thought Lizzy hard to please, and wondered what her own life would have been like if she had turned up her nose at Mr. Elmsworth, who was a clerk in the village grocery-store when they had joined their lot; but the girls had their own ideas, and since Conchita Closson’s marriage (an unhappy affair, as it turned out) had roused theirs with social ambition, Mrs. Elmsworth was perfectly willing to let them try their lot in England, where beauty such as Lizzy’s (because it was rarer, she supposed) had been known to raise a girl almost to the throne. It would certainly be funny, she confided to Mrs. St. George, to see one of their daughters settled at Windsor Castle (Mrs. St. George thought it would be exceedingly funny to see one of Mrs. Elmsworth’s); and Miss March, to whom the confidence was passed on, concluded that Mrs. Elmsworth was imperfectly aware of the difference between the ruler of England and her subjects.
“Unfortunately, Their Royal Highnesses are all married,” she said with her instructive little laugh; and Mrs. Elmsworth replied vaguely: “Oh, but aren’t there plenty of other dukes?” If there were, she could trust Lizzy, her tone implied; and Miss March, whose mind was now bent on uniting the dark beauty to Lord Seadown, began to wonder if she might not fail again, this time not as in her own case, but because of the young lady’s too-great ambition.
Mrs. Elmsworth also missed the friendly bustle of the Grand Union, the gentlemen coming from New York on Saturdays with the Wall Street news, and the flutter created in the dining-room when it got round that Mr. Elmsworth had made another hit on the market; but she soon resigned herself to the routine of bésique with Mrs. St. George. At first she too was chilled by the silent orderliness of the household; but though both ladies found the maid-servants painfully unsociable, and were too much afraid of the cook ever to set foot in the kitchen, they enjoyed the absence of domestic disturbances, and the novel experience of having every wish anticipated.
Meanwhile, the bungalow was becoming even more attractive than when its owner inhabited it. Parliament sat exceptionally late that year, and many were the younger members of both Houses, chafing to escape to Scotland, and the private secretaries and minor government officials, still chained to their desks, who found compensations at the cottage on the Thames. Reinforced by the guardsmen quartered at Windsor, they prolonged the river season in a manner unknown to the oldest inhabitants. The weather that year seemed to be in connivance with the American beauties, and punting by moonlight was only one of the midsummer distractions to be found at Runnymede.
To Lady Richard Marable the Thames-side cottage offered a happy escape from her little house in London, where there were always duns to be dealt with, and unpaid servants to be coaxed to stay. She came down often, always bringing the right people with her, and combining parties, and inventing amusements, which made invitations to the cottage as sought after as cards to the Royal enclosure. There was not an ounce of jealousy in Conchita’s easy nature. She was delighted with the success of her friends, and proud of the admiration they excited. “We’ve each got our own line,” she said to Lizzy Elmsworth, “and if we only back each other up we’ll beat all the other women hands down. The men are blissfully happy in a house where nobody chaperons them, and they can smoke in every room, and gaze at you and Virginia, and laugh at my jokes, and join in my Deep South songs. It’s too soon yet to know what Nan St. George and Mab will contribute; but they’ll probably develop a line of their own, and the show’s not a bad one as it is. If we stick to the rules of the game, and don’t play any low-down tricks on each other” (“Oh, Conchita,” Lizzy protested, with a beautiful pained smile), “we’ll have all London in our pocket next year.”
No one followed the Runnymede revels with a keener eye than Miss Testvalley. The invasion of England had been her own invention, and from a thousand little signs she already knew it would end in conquest. But from the outset she had put her charges on their guard against a too-easy triumph. The young men were to be allowed as much innocent enjoyment as they chose; but Miss Testvalley saw to it that they remembered the limits of their liberty. It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank; but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony, as English girls of good family. When Tony Grant-Johnston, a young man with a candid freckled face and curly ginger hair, asked if he might bring his sister, with whom he was staying while he studied law, Miss Testvalley drew herself up and looked at him in a manner such that, without appearing surprised, he changed colour and murmured unhappily: “I see ... I’m sorry.”
“Miss Testvalley, why were you so stern?” Annabel asked. “I like him.”
“He is a very agreeable young man,” her governess rejoined; “but he knows he ought not to have suggested bringing his sister, Mrs. Cholmondeley, whose divorce was in the papers last month.”
“Mother is death on divorced women,” Nan said, “but she never says why.”
“I gather that American custom is different,” replied Miss Testvalley, “but the Church of England does not recognize remarriage by a divorced woman. She may be legally married in a Registrar’s office, but the marriage is not sacrament
al.”
Miss Testvalley sighed at her pupil’s blank face. Annabel had in certain respects the instincts of a noble pagan. Religious doctrine, happily, lay outside the governess’s sphere; it was, however, her duty to clarify the social aspects of marriage. “A woman is divorced because she has deserted her husband or has a ... is in love with another man. Or is alleged to be,” she added punctiliously. “A divorced woman is cast out by good society.”
“Even when she marries the man she’s in love with, and it’s legal even if it isn’t in a church?”
“Even then. Divorce,” Miss Testvalley explained, “is intended to punish her, not to make her life pleasanter.”
“But that isn’t fair,” Nan protested.
When Miss Testvalley was young—the liberal Testavaglias imposed no censorship on their daughters’ reading—she had followed the debates on the Divorce Act in The Times, and she remembered that the House of Lords had badly wanted a clause prohibiting a divorced woma. from marrying the “co-respondent” on whose account she was sued. “Nevertheless, Annabel, the fact is that a divorced woman is a social outcast.”
Further comment seemed unnecessary. It was unlikely that her ingenuous, morally sensitive pupil would ever sink into the mire of the divorce court.
Miss Testvalley, when she persuaded the St. Georges to come to England, had rejoiced at the thought of being once more near her family; but she soon found that her real centre of gravity was in the little house at Runnymede. She performed the weekly pilgrimage to Denmark Hill in the old spirit of filial piety; but the old enthusiasm was lacking. Her venerable relatives (thanks to her earnings in America) were now comfortably provided for; but they had grown too placid, too static, to occupy her. Her natural inclination was for action and conflict, and all her thoughts were engrossed by her young charges. Miss March was an admirable lieutenant, supplying the social experience which Miss Testvalley lacked; and between them they administered the cottage at Runnymede like an outpost in a conquered province.
Miss March, who was without Miss Testvalley’s breadth of vision, was slightly alarmed by the audacities of the young ladies, and secretly anxious to improve their social education.
“I don’t think they understand yet what a duke is,” she sighed to Miss Testvalley, after a Sunday when Lord Seadown had unexpectedly appeared at the cottage with his cousin the young Duke of Tintagel.
Miss Testvalley laughed. “So much the better! I hope they never will. Look at the well-brought-up American girls who’ve got the peerage by heart, and spend their lives trying to be taken for members of the British aristocracy. Don’t they always end by marrying curates or army-surgeons—or just not marrying at all?”
A reminiscent pink suffused Miss March’s cheek. “Yes... sometimes; perhaps you’re right.... But I don’t think I shall ever quite get used to Lady Richard’s Spanish dances; or to the peculiar words in some of her songs.”
“Lady Richard’s married, and needn’t concern us,” said Miss Testvalley. “What attracts the young men is the girls’ naturalness, and their not being afraid to say what they think.” Miss March sighed again, and said she supposed that was the new fashion; certainly it gave the girls a better chance....
Lord Seadown’s sudden appearance at the cottage seemed in fact to support Miss Testvalley’s theory. Miss March remembered Lady Churt’s emphatic words when the lease had been concluded. “I’m ever so much obliged to you, Jacky. You’ve got me out of an awfully tight place by finding tenants for me, and getting such a good rent out of them. I only hope your American beauties will want to come back next year. But I’ve forbidden Seadown to set foot in the place while they’re there, and if Conchita Marable coaxes him down you must swear you’ll let me know, and I’ll see it doesn’t happen again.”
Miss March had obediently sworn; but she saw now that she must conceal Lord Seadown’s visits instead of denouncing them. Poor Idina’s exactions were obviously absurd. If she chose to let her house she could not prevent her tenants from receiving anyone they pleased; and it was clear that the tenants liked Seadown, and that he returned the sentiment, for after his first visit he came often. Lady Churt, luckily, was in Scotland; and Miss March trusted to her remaining there till the lease of the cottage had expired.
The Duke of Tintagel did not again accompany his friend. He was a young man of non-committal appearance and manner, and it was difficult to say what impression the American beauties made on him; but, to Miss March’s distress, he had apparently made little if any on them.
“They don’t seem in the least to realize that he’s the greatest match in England,” Miss March said with a shade of impatience. “Not that there would be the least chance ... I understand the Duchess has already made her choice; and the young Duke is a perfect son. Still, the mere fact of his coming...”
“Oh, he came merely out of curiosity. He’s always been rather a dull young man, and I daresay all the noise and the nonsense simply bewildered him.”
“Oh, but you know him, of course, don’t you? You were at Tintagel before you went to America. Is it true that he always does what his mother tells him?”
“I don’t know. But the young men about whom that is said usually break out sooner or later,” said the governess with a shrug.
About this time she began to wonder if the atmosphere of Runnymede were not a little too stimulating for Nan’s tender sensibilities. Since Teddy de Santos-Dios, who had joined his sister in London, had taken to coming down with her for Sundays, the fun had grown fast and furious. Practical jokes were Teddy’s chief accomplishment, and their preparations involved rather too much familiarity with the upper ranges of the house, too much popping in and out of bedrooms, and too many screaming midnight pillow-fights. Miss Testvalley saw that Nan, whose feelings always rushed to extremes, was growing restless and excited, and she felt the need of shielding the girl and keeping her apart. That the others were often noisy, and sometimes vulgar, did not disturb Miss Testvalley; they were obviously in pursuit of husbands, and had probably hit on the best way of getting them. Seadown was certainly very much taken by Lizzy Elmsworth; and two or three other young men had fallen victims to Virginia’s graces. But it was too early for Nan to enter the matrimonial race, and when she did, Miss Testvalley hoped it would be for different reasons, and in a different manner. She did not want her pupil to engage herself after a night of champagne and song on the river; her sense of artistic fitness rejected the idea of Nan’s adopting the same methods as her elders.
Mrs. St. George was slightly bewildered when the governess suggested taking her pupil away from the late hours and the continuous excitements at the cottage. It was not so much the idea of parting from Nan, as of losing the moral support of the governess’s presence, that troubled Mrs. St. George. “But, Miss Testvalley, why do you want to go away? I never know how to talk to those servants, and I never can remember the titles of the young men that Conchita brings down, or what I ought to call them.”
“I’m sure Miss March will help you with all that. And I do think Nan ought to get away for two or three weeks. Haven’t you noticed how thin she’s grown? And her eyes are as big as saucers. I know a quiet little place in Cornwall where she could have some bathing, and go to bed every night at nine.”
To everyone’s surprise, Nan offered no objection. The prospect of seeing new places stirred her imagination, and she seemed to lose all interest in the gay doings at the cottage when Miss Testvalley told her that, on the way, they would stop at Exeter, where there was a very beautiful cathedral.
“And shall we see some beautiful houses too? I love seeing houses that are so ancient and so lovely that the people who live there have them in their bones.”
Miss Testvalley looked at her pupil sharply. “What an odd expression! Did you find it in a book?” she asked, for the promiscuity of Nan’s reading sometimes alarmed her.
“Oh, no. It was what that young Mr. Thwarte said to me about Honourslove. It’s why he’s going away for two years
—so that he can make a great deal of money and come back and spend it on Honourslove.”
“H’m—from what I’ve heard, Honourslove could easily swallow a good deal more than he’s likely to make in two years, or even ten,” said Miss Testvalley. “The father and son are both said to be very extravagant, and the only way for Mr. Guy Thwarte to keep up his ancestral home will be to bring a great heiress back to it.”
Nan looked thoughtful. “You mean, even if he doesn’t love her?”
“Oh, well, I daresay he’ll love her—or be grateful to her, at any rate.”
“I shouldn’t think gratitude was enough,” said Nan with a sigh. She was silent again for a while, and then added: “Mr. Thwarte has read all your cousin’s poems—Dante Gabriel’s, I mean.”
Miss Testvalley gave her a startled glance. “May I ask how you happened to find that out?”
“Why, because there’s a perfectly beautiful picture by your cousin in Sir Helmsley’s study, and Mr. Thwarte showed it to me. And so we talked of his poetry too. But Mr. Thwarte thinks there are other poems even more wonderful than ‘The Blessed Damozel.’ Some of the sonnets in The House of Life, I mean. Do you think they’re more beautiful, Miss Testvalley?”
The governess hesitated; she often found herself hesitating over the answers to Nan’s questions. “You told Mr. Thwarte that you’d read some of those poems?”
“Oh, yes; I told him I’d read every one of them.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said ... he said he’d felt from the first that he and I would be certain to like the same things; and he loved my liking Dante Gabriel. I told him he was your cousin, and that you were devoted to him.”
“Ah—well, I’m glad you told him that, for Sir Helmsley Thwarte is an old friend of my cousin’s, and one of his best patrons. But you know, Nan, there are people who don’t appreciate his poetry—don’t appreciate how beautiful it is—and I’d rather you didn’t proclaim in public that you’ve read it all. Some people are so stupid that they wouldn’t exactly understand a young girl’s caring for that kind of poetry. You see, don’t you, dear?”
The Buccaneers Page 13