“Another of your pupils!” Sir Helmsley continued, with a teasing laugh. He paused, and added tentatively: “And perhaps the most interesting, eh?”
“Perhaps.”
“Because she’s the most intelligent—or the most unhappy?”
Miss Testvalley looked up quickly. “Why do you suggest that she’s unhappy?”
“Oh,” he rejoined with a slight shrug, “because you’re so incurably philanthropic that I should say your swans would often turn out to be lame ducks.”
“Perhaps they do. At any rate, she’s the pupil I was fondest of, and should most wish to guard against unhappiness.”
“Ah—” murmured Sir Helmsley, on a half-questioning note. “But Lady Glenloe must be ready to start; I’d better go and call the Duchess,” Miss Testvalley added, moving toward the door. There was a sound of voices in the hall, and among them Lady Glenloe’s, calling out: “Cora, Kitty—has anyone seen the Duchess? Oh, Mr. Thwarte, we’re looking for the Duchess, and I see you’ve been giving her a last glimpse of your wonderful view....”
“Not the last, I hope,” said Guy, smiling, as he came forward with Annabel.
“The last for today, at any rate; we must be off at once on our long drive. Mr. Thwarte, I count on you for next Saturday. Sir Helmsley, can’t we persuade you to come too?”
The drive back to Champions passed like a dream. To secure herself against disturbance, Nan had slipped her hand into Miss Testvalley’s, and let her head droop on the governess’s shoulder. She heard one of the Glenloe girls whisper, “The Duchess is asleep,” and a conniving silence seemed to enfold her. But she had no wish to sleep; her wide-open eyes looked out into the falling night, caught the glint of lights flashing past in the High Street, lost themselves in the long intervals of dusk between the villages, and plunged into deepening night as the low glimmer of the west went out. In her heart was a deep delicious peace such as she had never known before. In this great lonely desert of life stretching out before her she had a friend—a friend who understood not only all she said, but everything she could not say. At the end of the long road on which the regular rap of the horses’ feet was beating out the hours, she saw him standing, waiting for her, watching for her through the night.
XXX..
Sir Helmsley Thwarte might cavil at Corisande’s eyes and Kitty’s nose, but the eyes of both Glenloe sisters were bright china-blue and the noses pert, and both sisters had pink cheeks and smooth light-brown hair. At seventeen and eighteen, they were on terms of equable friendship which made Nan reflect sadly on her worship of Jinny and the patronizing bossiness Jinny had given in return. “And they’re happy!” she marvelled. “When I compare them with Ushant’s sisters! who are older, of course ...”
Corisande and Kitty were closeted with a dress-maker. Annabel, Miss Testvalley, and Guy Thwarte sat in the morning-room, where divans and armchairs deeply soft in cushions and bright with chintz cheerfully flouted the demands of elegance, and priceless Ming vases exhaled the fragrant potpourri of home-grown roses.
Guy, on horseback, and Sir Helmsley (whose injury rendered the saddle impossible) in a light and narrow cabriolet, could make the journey from Honourslove cross-country along lanes that tunnelled through overarching hedges, and wide smooth grassy rides, and stubbly old rights-of-way through fields, in half the time it took carriages and wagons obliged to follow the roundabout road that linked a dozen villages; and the father and son frequently called at Champions.
“The Duke’s sisters were not very happy at Kitty and Cora’s age, either; that is when I had them,” Miss Testvalley said. “But Kitty and Cora are very young for their age, mere children. The Duke’s sisters were never children. They leapt from infancy to wearing long dresses and putting their hair up.”
“Almina says she yearns to enter a convent and it’s because of you.”
“Ah?” Miss Testvalley raised finely interrogative eyebrows. “Lady Almina may have been more impressed than I realized when I mentioned that my cousin Maria Rossetti had found great joy as a nun.”
“Well, I would hate lying on a cold stone floor all night and wearing haircloth to lacerate my flesh, but if Almina wants it why shouldn’t she be allowed? The Dowager says it’s High Church mummery. She is very proud of being Low. But what in the world difference does it make?”
Guy laughed. “I don’t think the Church of England goes in for haircloth nowadays.” But he turned to Miss Testvalley, as to a higher authority.
The governess hesitated. When a dreamy young Annabel was being prepared for marriage, etiquette had been put forward as more momentous than the Thirty-nine Articles of a Church to which she was hastily introduced.—Miss Testvalley said only: “It makes all the difference to some people. My cousin Christina Rossetti refused two suitors, men she liked—or loved, I’ve never known—because they were too Low.”
She rose promptly, as if glad to be freed from a vexing subject, when Sir Helmsley entered and announced:
“Lady Glenloe informs me, firstly, that Kitty and Corisande are about to be released; secondly, that she would be delighted to ride with you now, Duchess; and, thirdly, that you, Miss Testvalley, have expressed a willingness to show me the work that’s being done—under your supervision, I collect?—on the new glass-house.”
Annabel, who found the very mention of theology boring, simply wanted people to have food, shelter, and a doctor for a sick child. The Duke had forbidden her to deal personally with his tenants, hence the catastrophe which had ruined their marriage: for more and more she felt that it was ruined.
At Champions, she soon learned, on the first hint of illness in the village Lady Glenloe set off in her pony-cart, clutching a battered leather bag known to contain mystic elixirs, with a terrine of calf’s-foot jelly at her feet. Whereas at Longlands ... The Dowager Duchess knit things for a “poor basket.” Annabel had seen her at her work of charity, her hard little eyes snapping as the needles clicked at the orders of her stubby little fingers. The Dowager chose gray yarn, and a green like ... like the slime on a pond, Nan had once decided, searching for comparisons. She inflicted ugliness, even if it was useful ugliness, on people she disapproved of, like the poor ... and like me, Nan thought, suddenly seeing the horn-buttoned dressing-gown in a new light, as a form of punishment.
In the Champions library, Nan found in a collection of Travels in Eastern Europe the legend of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, whose heathen husband, the King, forbade her to feed the poor on pain of death. The Queen stole out of the palace one morning carrying a basket of loaves of bread. He saw her and demanded that she show him what she had. When she removed the cloth that covered them, the loaves had been turned into roses.
Was the King subsequently converted? The version of the legend Nan had happened on did not say. When she had tried to help the poor against the Duke’s command, God had worked no miracle. He had punished her by killing her unborn child. That, she knew, was what Ushant’s mother believed: and probably Ushant as well, though Ushant had never said so.
The stuffed birds rescued from the fire in the old Champions shared the new glossy-oak library with trophies of post-conflagration Glenloe travels. On the book-shelves, Voyages and Explorations jostled witch-masks, scrimshaw-work, and guislas, and a corner of the Feraghan rug was occupied by an enormous and handsome globe of the world which, unlike its counterpart at Allfriars, had lost some of its varnish as the result of much fingering by intending travellers with itineraries to plot.
When Guy came to call, he often found Annabel curled in a window-seat in the pleasant sunny room, reading.
In Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary Condensed, she had encountered an unattractive husband of an earlier day than the King of Hungary. “As the place of Pluto’s residence was obscure and gloomy,” she read, “all the goddesses refused to marry him; but he determined to obtain by force what was denied to his solicitations.” Visiting Sicily after an earthquake caused by his brother Neptune, he saw Proserpine, daughter of his sister Cer
es and his brother Jupiter, gathering flowers in the field of Enna. “He became enamoured of her,” Annabel learned, “and immediately carried her away to the underworld. Proserpine called upon her attendants for help, but in vain; and she became the wife of her ravisher and the queen of hell.” (“Poor Queen,” thought Annabel, seeing in her mind’s eye the slight young girl in the Naxos fragment.) “Pluto sat on a throne of sulphur.... The dog Cerberus watched at his feet, the harpies hovered around him. Proserpine sat on his left, and near to her stood the Eumenides, with their heads covered with snakes.”
Nan went on to a history of the Crimean War. Did he know, she asked Guy Thwarte, that Miss Testvalley’s cousin Eliza Polidori had worked with Miss Nightingale? ... And had he read the report on the slums of London?
Guy said reluctantly: “England is in my blood, I can’t criticize England without criticizing myself. But when I came home I saw that many people are as poor as the wretched creatures I saw in Brazil. Or almost.”
His brows lowered as he thought of Brazil, and of Paquita: six weeks out of a convent when they married; poignantly sweet, innocent, and incurious. He had adored her. She had been happy with him; that, he knew. But would she have remained happy if she had lived? When he made his precipitate return to England (his father said the Thwarte motto should be, not “I follow my duty,” but “I follow my impulse”), a well-wisher had let him know that he was believed to have left Brazil a rich man thanks to his late wife. The truth was that, when he learned that his father-in-law was systematically working to death the enslaved men, women, and children who mined his ore, he had cut all financial ties with Don Carlos. Paquita had died before she knew of the breach. How would she have felt if her father had demanded that she take sides? Would she have understood, at all?
One day, Guy, having ridden over from Honourslove alone, found the library empty. Her Grace, he was told, had said that she was going for a long walk, perhaps as far as Chipping, and not to hold luncheon back. He was standing, hands in pockets, at a window, frowning over nothing, when the girls came in. The girls were always coming in.—Well, it was their house! And they were perfectly nice girls ... nice children.
Corisande had a book to return. “Kitty!” Lady Glenloe called from the doorway. “I want you, my dear.” With a “Yes, Mamma,” Kitty departed.
Lady Glenloe’s collie-like driving of an eligible young man into a pen with a marriageable daughter gave Miss Testvalley private amusement. More experienced in girls than many mothers, the governess could have told Lady Glenloe that Kitty and Cora, petted since birth by the four indulgent older brothers who came and went, were too immature to dream about Guy Thwarte, who was at least thirty. Furthermore, Miss Testvalley had an unamused, disquieting sense that Guy Thwarte’s heart was not whole.
Guy guessed his father’s motive in suggesting so often that they visit Champions. He had no intention of proposing marriage either to Corisande or to Catharine, but to say so might precipitate one of Sir Helmsley’s all-too-well-known volcanic eruptions of rage; Guy affected stolid ignorance of the paternal wishes, hoping that they might lose themselves in the sands.... The visits served a half-forgotten purpose of his own. He had felt it his duty to ascertain whether his father had taken a freakish fancy to the “little brown governess.” Impossible to judge during the Christmas festivities at Longlands, but at Champions Guy’s surveillance had a twofold result. He saw that his father took Miss Testvalley aside, paid her “attentions”—but in order, evidently, to leave the field free for his son to court her pupils ... one of her pupils. Guy also saw that Miss Testvalley, with her brilliant eyes and her quick intelligence, would not have been a ridiculous object of infatuation. He hoped she would not be misled by his father’s gallantry.... Her eyes were splendid. ... Still, the Duchess’s sweeter, dark-fringed eyes, so often sad, were more captivating.... What was it she’d said about being the captive of her mistakes? ... Hardly aware of the line his thoughts were taking, Guy wished the little Duchess were here now....
However, the Duchess was not here, and Cora was; and, with a show of avuncular interest, Guy asked Cora what the book was.
“Browning.” Cora handed it to him politely. “Miss Testvalley had us read selections.”
“And which poems do you like best?”
“Kitty likes the Cavalier Tunes; I,” Cora said, “prefer mediaeval wickedness.... Mr. Thwarte, oh, do please excuse me, but it’s almost time for our history lesson.”
Leafing through the volume after Corisande’s skirts had whisked through the door, Guy caught the title “My Last Duchess.”
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive....
The Duke of Ferrara was showing a guest the art treasures in his palazzo:
She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘t was all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift.
Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.
At Longlands, last Christmas, Guy had seen a housemaid with a dust-mop grin and make a bob as Annabel darted at her from out of nowhere and cried, “Polly, you’re over the mumps? Wasn’t it beastly? My sister and I had it once—” When, from somewhere, the Duke had appeared, he could not be said to have frowned, but his impassive gaze had wiped all expression from Annabel’s face.
The stodgy, nondescript, petty Duke of Tintagel would not, like Browning’s villain, do away with his wife for promiscuous friendliness, but he could stifle her spirit. “And I’m damned if he’s not doing it,” Guy fumed: and then berated himself. The plight of Annabel Tintagel was no more his affair here than it had been at Longlands. He traced Lady Glenloe to a room where two sempstresses were gathering yards of frothy pale-blue stuff into flounces, and told her that he feared that business would prevent him from coming for some time. Expressing her regret, Lady Glenloe smiled to herself: “He knows that Corisande and Kitty are going away.”
XXXI.
They were going to be bridesmaids to their cousin Victoria Bingham of Over Bacton in Norfolk. Creation of their gowns had disrupted lessons for weeks, and their journey had been under prolonged discussion with General Sir John Bingham, the cousin’s father, who, viewing it as part of a complex military operation, felt duty-bound to provide plans for meeting contingencies ranging from a railway collision to the abduction of the bridesmaids by a gang of London criminals. The correspondence, soldierly on Sir John’s side, was increasingly impatient on that of the bridesmaids’ mother.
Miss Testvalley was to conduct her pupils to London, to an hotel where a Bingham convoy would take them over. (She would not go on; the mediaeval seams of the manor-house would be dangerously stretched by the horde of close relations who had to be put up.) But the hotel was as yet undecided on.
When at last Lady Glenloe threw up her hands and declared that it was easier to get from St. Petersburg to Tashkent than in and out of London, and the Duchess, after hesitation, suggested diffidently, “Would you ... if I ... Suppose I went to London too? We could all stay at Folyat House overnight,” the girls held their breath; and when their mother gratefully returned, “My dear Annabel, how kind!,” they hugged each other for joy.
The Duchess said happily:
“I’ll write to Folyat House to tell them to have things ready ... and I’ll write to Longlands to let the Duke know.”
Perhaps, Annabel thought, bringing bright young company to the great morose mansion in Portman Square would break the dark spell it exercised over its mistress.... At any rate, she would be acting as Duchess in an unexceptionable undertaking. Ushant might even be pleased.
Gritty smoke from the locomotive billowed past the compartment window as the train bustled toward London. Cinders rained on the scorched grass along the rails; beyond, visible between gusts of smoke, raying out from a distant focus of rounded hills, sped pastures, sheep, fields, hedges, neatly demarcated woods, yellow-gray stone farm-buildings, and huddled hamlets. Now and then the train hooted and puffed to a stop at little stations where Corisande and Kitty pushed the window down and craned to watch two or three passengers descend and board. It was the first time they had been away from home by themselves—or would be by themselves when they left Miss Testvalley. (It didn’t count that they would be accompanied by a maid, assigned to them ad hoc by their mother, who was travelling two carriages forward, second class, with the Duchess’s maid, Mabbit, and their luggage.)
As they came out of a long roaring tunnel, Kitty sighed: “Oh, Duchess, if only you could come to the wedding too!”
“I have something exciting to look forward to myself,” said the Duchess. “Miss Testvalley is taking me to meet Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”
“Oh, what is he like?” Corisande asked Miss Testvalley. “He is the only famous artist we know about from somebody who knows them.”
“Knows him, Cora!” Miss Testvalley wrinkled her brow, considering. “From what critics who understand such matters say, I believe he will have a place in history as a poet and painter. But, apart from that, people—even writers and artists greater than he is—see him as a king. A leader! There’s something about him.... Even now that he’s old and very ill, they’d give their lives for him.... I felt like that myself, from the time I was a little girl.”
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