The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  Annabel stood staring at her husband without speaking. She was too young to understand the manifold inhibitions, some inherited, some peculiar to his own character, which made it impossible for him to act promptly and spontaneously; but she knew him to be by nature not an unkind man, and this increased her bewilderment.

  Suddenly a flood of words burst from her. “You tell me to be careful about my health in the very same breath that you say you can’t be bothered about these poor people, and that their child’s dying is a small matter, to be looked after by the agent. It’s for the sake of your own child that you forbid me to go to see them—but I tell you I don’t want a child if he’s to be brought up with such ideas, if he’s to be taught, as you have been, that it’s right and natural to live in a palace with fifty servants, and not care for the people who are slaving for him on his own land, to make his big income bigger! I’d rather be dead than see a child of mind taught to grow up as—as you have!”

  She broke down and dropped into a seat, hiding her face in her hands. Her husband looked at her without speaking. Nothing in his past experience had prepared him for such a scene, and the consciousness that he did not know how to deal with it increased his irritation. Had Annabel gone mad—or was it only what the doctors called her “condition”? In either case, he felt equally incapable of resolute and dignified action. Of course, if he were told that it was necessary, owing to her “condition,” he would, send these Linfrys—a shiftless lot—money and food, would ask the doctor to see the boy oftener; though it went hard with him to swallow his own words, and find himself again under a woman’s orders. At any rate, he must try to propitiate Annabel, to get her into a more amenable mood; and as soon as possible must take her back to Longlands, where she would be nearer a London physician, accustomed to bringing dukes into the world.

  “Annabel,” he said, going up to her, and laying his hand on her bent head.

  She started to her feet. “Let me alone,” she exclaimed, and brushed past him to the door. He heard her cross the hall and go up the stairs in the direction of her own rooms; then he turned back to his desk. One of the drawing-room clocks stood there before him, disembowelled; and as he began (with hands that still shook a little) to put it cautiously together, he remembered his mother’s comment: “Women are not always as simple as clocks.” Had she been right?

  After a while, he laid aside the works of the clock and sat staring helplessly before him. Then it occurred to him that Annabel, in her present mood, was quite capable of going contrary to his orders, and sending for a carriage to drive her back to the Linfrys’—or heaven knew where. He rang again, and asked for his own servant. When the man came, the Duke confided in him that Her Grace was in a somewhat nervous state, and that the doctors wished her to be kept quiet, and not to drive out again that afternoon. Would Bowman therefore see the head coachman at once, and explain that, even if Her Grace should ask for a carriage, some excuse must be found.... They were not, of course, to say anything to implicate the Duke, but it must be so managed that Her Grace should not be able to drive out again that day.

  Bowman acquiesced, with the look of respectful compassion which his face often wore when he was charged with his master’s involved and embarrassed instructions; and the Duke, left alone, continued to sit idly at his writing-table.

  Annabel did not reappear that afternoon; and when the Duke, on his way up to dress for dinner, knocked at her sitting-room door, she was not there. He went on to his own dressing-room, but on the way met his wife’s maid, and asked if Her Grace were already dressing.

  “Oh, no, Your Grace. I thought the Duchess was with Your Grace....”

  A little chill caught him about the heart. It was nearly eight o’clock, for they dined late at Tintagel; and the maid had not yet seen her mistress! The Duke said with affected composure: “Her Grace was tired this afternoon. She may have fallen asleep in the drawing-room”—though he could imagine nothing less like the alert and restless Annabel.

  Oh, no, the maid said again; Her Grace had gone out on foot two or three hours ago, and had not yet returned.

  “On foot?”

  “Yes, Your Grace. Her Grace asked for her pony-carriage; but I understood there were orders—”

  The Duke interrupted irritably: “The doctor’s orders were that Her Grace should not go out at all today.”

  The maid lowered her lids as if to hide her incredulous eyes, and he felt that she was probably acquainted with every detail of the day’s happenings. The thought sent the blood up to the roots of his pale hair, and he challenged her nervously. “You must at least know which way Her Grace said she was going.”

  “The Duchess said nothing to me, Your Grace. But I understand she sent to the stables and, finding she could not have a carriage, walked away through the park.”

  “That will do.... There’s been some unfortunate misunderstanding about Her Grace’s orders,” stammered the Duke, turning away to his dressing-room.

  The day had been raw and cloudy, and with the dusk rain had begun, and was coming down now in a heavy pour that echoed through the narrow twisting passages of the castle and made their sky-lights rattle. And in this icy down-pour his wife, his Duchess, the expectant mother of future dukes, was wandering somewhere on foot, alone and unprotected. Anger and alarm contended in the Duke. If anyone had told him that marrying a simple unworldly girl, hardly out of the school-room, would add fresh complications to a life already over-burdened with them, he would have scoffed at the idea. Certainly he had done nothing to deserve such a fate. And he wondered now why he had been so eager to bring it upon himself. Though he had married for love only a few months before, he was now far more concerned with Annabel as the mother of his son than for her own sake. The first weeks with her had been very sweet—but since then her presence in his house had seemed only to increase his daily problems and bothers. The Duke rang and ordered Bowman to send to the stables for the station-brougham, and when it arrived he drove down at break-neck speed to the Linfrys’ cottage. But Nan was not there. The Duke stared at Mrs. Linfry blankly. He did not know where to go next, and it mortified him to reveal his distress and uncertainty to the coachman. “Home!” he ordered angrily, getting into the carriage again; and the dark drive began once more. He was half way back when the carriage stopped with a jerk, and the coachman, scrambling down from the box, called to him in a queer frightened voice.

  The Duke jumped out and saw the man lifting a small dripping figure into the brougham. “By the mercy of God, Your Grace ... I think the Duchess has fainted.”

  “Drive like the devil.... Stop at the stables to send a groom for the doctor,” stammered the Duke, pressing his wife in his arms. The rest of the way back was as indistinct to him as to the girl who lay so white on his breast. Bowed over her in anguish, he remembered nothing till the carriage drove under the echoing gate-tower at Tintagel, and lights and servants pressed confusedly about them. He lifted Annabel out, and she opened her eyes and took a few steps across the hall. “Oh—am I here again?” she said, with a little laugh; then she swayed forward, and he caught her as she fell....

  To the Duchess of Tintagel who was signing the last notes of invitation for the Longlands shooting-party, the scene at Tintagel and what had followed now seemed as remote and legendary as the tales that clung about the old ruins of Arthur’s castle. Annabel had put herself hopelessly in the wrong. She had understood it without being told, she had acknowledged it and wept over it at the time; but the irremediable had been done, and she knew that never, in her husband’s eyes, would any evidence of repentance atone for that night’s disaster.

  The miscarriage which had resulted from her mad expedition through the storm had robbed the Duke of a son; of that he was convinced. He, the Duke of Tintagel, wanted a son, he had a right to expect a son, he would have had a son, if this woman’s criminal folly had not destroyed his hopes. The physicians summoned in consultation spoke of the necessity of many months of repose.... Even they did not se
em to understand that a duke must have an heir, that it is the purpose for which dukes make the troublesome effort of marrying.

  It was now well over a year since that had happened, and after long weeks of illness a new Annabel—a third Annabel—had emerged from the ordeal. Life had somehow, as the months passed, clumsily readjusted itself. As far as words went, the Duke had forgiven his wife; they had left the solitude of Tintagel as soon as the physicians thought it possible for the Duchess to be moved; and now, in their crowded London life, and at Longlands, where the Dowager had seen to it that all the old ceremonial was re-established, the ducal pair were too busy, too deeply involved in the incessant distractions and obligations of their station, to have time to remember what was over and could not be mended.

  Yet sometimes unwelcome remembrance forced itself upon them. After the move to Longlands, when Annabel was strong enough to walk a fifth of a mile, the Duke had taken her from the Correggio room to the classical sculpture gallery, again accompanied by Mr. Rossiter, who had pointed out busts of the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan, Roman copies of Greek Athenas and Apollos, and black-and-umber pottery of various periods. Nan was reproaching herself for an ignorance of the “classical” which must explain her tepid response to the exhibits, when, approaching the far end of the gallery, she caught her breath at the sight of a bas-relief in warm, almost breathing, marble. A seated woman had one hand on the shoulder of a young girl who was turning away from her. Both figures were in profile. Their drapery rippled as if the stone were liquid, but in their sad faces was the stillness of eternity.

  Annabel stood transfixed. “It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.... Is it Greek?”

  “Yes, Your Grace, from Naxos.” Mr. Rossiter spoke instructively. “It represents Demeter, or Ceres, goddess of fields and crops, and her daughter Persephone, or Proserpine, who, as you know, was abducted by Dis, or Pluto, god of the underworld. Ceres, disguised as a peasant woman, sought her everywhere. She neglected the agriculture of men, and her absence brought winter. Jupiter commanded Pluto to restore Ceres’ daughter to earth for six months of every year. It is a pre-scientific explanation of the seasons.”

  “I believe the bas-relief is of considerable artistic importance,” said the Duke, “but one cannot take great satisfaction in a fragment.”

  As Annabel looked a question, Mr. Rossiter explained, “It is one side of a throne which originally had a high back and sides. The other side was described by an eighteenth-century traveller who saw the throne entire. It depicted Hera—Juno—seated with an infant on her knees. She, of course, was the goddess who protected women in childbirth.”

  Annabel winced, and the Duke stiffened. Mr. Rossiter went on hastily: “Its present whereabouts are unknown.”

  “It is probably in America,” the Duke said dourly.

  “Probably, pirates that they are over there! ... That is ...” Mr. Rossiter, having floundered from one gaffe to another, rattled off more information: “Bonaparte took the sculpture as loot, but the British captured the ship it was on and rescued it. Unfortunately, by the time Your Grace’s great-grandfather Tintagel purchased this, the central part and the other side had vanished.”

  “It should not have been allowed to leave England,” said the Duke.

  “But why,” Annabel asked, “should it not be returned to Naxos?”

  The two men smiled indulgently. But the Duke, morose again, repeated: “There is no satisfaction in owning a fragment.”

  Since then, Annabel had sometimes gone to look at the relief by herself, without Mr. Rossiter’s well-meaning commentary. Grave, beyond merriment, it was the antithesis of the Correggios, yet gave her a sense of happiness. It was like the music for the Dance of the Blessed Spirits in the opera Orphée, which she had seen in London in the months before Jinny’s marriage, sad, calm, and sweet.... Perhaps it was the “beyondness” of the Elysian Fields.

  Annabel gradually learned that it was not only one’s self that changed. The ceaseless, mysterious flow of days wore down and altered the shape of the people nearest one, so that one seemed fated to be always a stranger among strangers. The mere fact, for instance, of Annabel St. George’s becoming Annabel Tintagel had turned her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Tintagel, into a dowager duchess, over whose diminished head the mighty roof of Longlands had shrunk into the modest shelter of a lovely little rose-clad dower-house at the gates of the park. And everyone else, as far as Annabel’s world reached, seemed to have changed in the same way.

  That, at times, was the most perplexing part of it. When, for instance, the new Annabel tried to think herself back onto the verandah of the Grand Union Hotel, waiting for her father and his stock-broker friends to return from the races, or in the hotel ball-room with the red damask curtains, dancing with her sister, Conchita Closson, and the Elmsworth girls, or with the obscure and infrequent young men who now and then turned up to partner their wasted loveliness—when she thought, for instance, of Roy Gilling and the handkerchief she had dropped, and he had kissed and hidden in his pocket—it was like looking at the flickering figures of the magic lanterns she used to see at children’s parties. What was left, now, of those uncertain apparitions, and what relation, say, did the Conchita Closson who had once seemed so ethereal and elusive bear to Lady Dick Marable, beautiful still, though she was growing rather too stout, but who had lost her lovely indolence and detachment, and was now perpetually preoccupied about money, and immersed in domestic difficulties and clandestine consolations—or to Virginia, her own sister Virginia, who had seemed to Annabel so secure, so aloof, so disdainful of everything but her own pleasures, but who, as Lady Seadown, was enslaved to that dull half-asleep Seadown, absorbed in questions of rank and precedence, and in awe—actually in awe—of her father-in-law’s stupid arrogance, and of Lady Brightlingsea’s bewildered condescensions?

  Yes; changed, every one of them, vanished out of recognition, as the lost Annabel of the Grand Union had vanished. As she looked about her, the only figures which seemed to have preserved their former outline were those of her father and his business friends; but that, perhaps, was because she so seldom saw them, because when they appeared, at long intervals, for a hurried look at transatlantic daughters and grandchildren, they brought New York with them, solidly and loudly, remained jovially unconscious of any change of scene and habits greater than that between the east and west shores of the Hudson, and hurried away again, leaving behind them cheques and christening-mugs, and unaware to the last that they had been farther from Wall Street than across the ferry.

  Perhaps Mabel Elmsworth was unchanged; no one knew. Mabel had gone back to America after Virginia’s wedding to Seadown and almost immediately had married. Mrs. Elmsworth had described Caleb Whittaker as an “older” widower from Magnesia, Illinois, and very rich. He collected “pictures and things.” Mabel had stood godmother, by proxy, at the christening of Virginia’s first-born son. (Lizzy, Jinny’s first choice, had suggested that she ask poor Mabel, to whom it would mean so much, so far away from her friends....) Mabel had sent silver mugs, silver spoons, and a golden bowl. Her rare letters told Lizzy that she was well, sent love to all the girls, and wished they’d come and visit.

  Ah, yes—and Laura Testvalley, her darling old Val! She had remained her firm sharp-edged self. But then she too was usually away, she had not suffered the erosion of daily contact. The real break with the vanished Annabel had come, the new Annabel sometimes thought, when Miss Testvalley, her task at the St. Georges’ ended, had vanished into the seclusion of another family which required “finishing.” Miss Testvalley, since she had kissed the bride after the great Tintagel wedding, had re-appeared only at long intervals, and as it were under protest. It was one of her principles—as she had often told Annabel—that a governess should not hang about her former pupils. Later they might require her—there was no knowing, her subtle smile implied—but, once the school-room was closed, she should vanish with the tattered lesson-books, the dreary school-room food, the cod-l
iver oil, and the chilblain cures.

  Perhaps, Annabel thought, if her beloved Val had remained with her, they might between them have rescued the old Annabel, or at least kept up communication with her ghost—a faint tap now and then against the walls which had built themselves up about the new Duchess. But as it was, there was the new Duchess isolated in her new world, no longer able to reach back to her past, and not having yet learned how to communicate with her present.

  “In fact”—the realization came to Annabel—“the Duchess Ushant has in his possession is only a fragment. And he doesn’t value fragments highly.”

  She roused herself from these vain musings, and took up her pen. A final glance at the list had shown her that one invitation had been forgotten—or, if not forgotten, at least postponed.

  Dear Mr. Thwarte,

  The Duke tells me that you have lately come back to England, and he hopes so much that you can come to Longlands for our next shooting-party, on the 18th. He asks me to say that he is anxious to have a talk with you about the situation at Lowdon. He hopes you intend to stand if Sir Hercules Loft is obliged to resign, and wishes you to know that you will have his full support.

  Yours sincerely,

  Annabel Tintagel

  Underneath she added: “P.S. Perhaps you’d remember me if I signed Nan St. George.” But what was the sense of that, when there was no longer anyone of that name? She tore the note up, and re-wrote it without adding the postscript.