The Buccaneers

at this intrusion. “Where did you come from? Why aren’t you out with the guns?” she stammered.

“I was to have been; but a message came from Low- don to say that Sir Hercules is worse, and Ushant has asked me to prepare some notes in case the election comes on sooner than we expected. So I wandered up the hill to clear my ideas a little.”

Nan stood looking at him with a growing sense of resentment. Hitherto his presence had roused only friendly emotions; his nearness had even seemed a vague protection against the unknown and the inimical. But in her present mood that nearness seemed a deliberate intrusion — as though he had forced himself upon her out of some unworthy curiosity, had seized the chance to come upon her unawares.

“Won’t you tell me why you are crying?” he insisted gently.

Her childish anger flamed. “I’m not crying,” she retorted, hurriedly pushing her handkerchief into her pocket. “And I don’t know why you should follow me here. You must see that I want to be alone.”

The young man drew back, surprised. He too, since the distant day of their first talk at Honourslove, had felt between them the existence of a mysterious understanding which every subsequent meeting had renewed, though in actual words so little had passed between them. He had imagined that Annabel was glad he should feel this, and her sudden rebuff was like a blow. But her distress was so evident that he did not feel obliged to take her words literally.

“I had no idea of following you,” he answered. “I didn’t even know you were here; but since I find you in such distress, how can I help asking if there’s nothing I can do?”

“No, no, there’s nothing!” she cried, humiliated that this man of all others should surprise her in her childish wretchedness. “Well, yes — I am crying... now... You can see I am, I suppose?” She groped for the handkerchief. “But if anybody could do anything for me, do you suppose I’d be sitting here and just bearing it? It’s because there’s nothing... nothing... any one can do, that I’ve come here to get away from people, to get away from everything... Can’t you understand that?” she ended passionately.

“I can understand your feeling so — yes. I’ve often thought you must.” She gave him a startled look, and her face crimsoned. “But can’t you see,” he pursued, “that it’s hard on a friend — a man who’s ventured to think himself your friend — to be told, when he sees you in trouble, that he’s not wanted, that he can be of no use, that even his sympathy’s unwelcome?”

Annabel continued to look at him with resentful eyes. But already the mere sound of his voice was lessening the weight of her loneliness, and she answered more gently: “You’re very kind—”

“Oh, kind!” he echoed impatiently.

“You’ve always been

large sum. Has your dress-maker led you on rather farther than your means would justify?”

Nan reddened. Her dress-maker! She wondered if Ushant had ever noticed her clothes? But might he not be offering her the very pretext she needed? She hated having to use one, but since she could think of no other way of getting what she wanted, she resolved to surmount her scruples.

“Well, you see, I’ve never known exactly what my means were... but I do want this money...”

“Never known what your means were? Surely it’s all clearly enough written down in your marriage settlements.”

“Yes; but sometimes one is tempted to spend a trifle more...”

“You must have been taught very little about the value of money to call five hundred pounds a trifle.”

Annabel broke into a laugh. “You’re teaching me a lot about it now.”

The Duke’s temples grew red under his straw-coloured hair, and she saw that her stroke had gone home.

“It’s my duty to do so,” he remarked drily. Then his tone altered, and he added, on a conciliatory note: “I hope you’ll bear the lesson in mind; but of course if you’ve incurred this debt it must be paid.”

“Oh, Ushant-”

He raised his hand to check her gratitude. “Naturally... If you’ll please tell these people to send me their bill.” He rose stiffly, with another glance at his watch. “I said a quarter of an hour — and I’m afraid it’s nearly up.”

Nan stood crestfallen between her husband and the door. “But you don’t understand...” (She wondered whether it was not a mistake to say that to him so often?) “I mean,” she hurriedly corrected herself, “it’s really no use your bothering... If you’ll just make out the cheque to me I’ll—”

The Duke stopped short. “Ah—” he said slowly. “Then it’s not to pay your dress-maker that you want it?”

Nan’s quick colour flew to her forehead. “Well, no- it’s not. I — I want it for... my private charities...”

“Your private charities? Is your allowance not paid regularly? All your private expenditures are supposed to be included in it. My mother was always satisfied with that arrangement.”

“Yes; but did your mother never have unexpected calls — ? Sometimes one has to help in an emergency...”

The two faced each other in a difficult silence. At length the Duke straightened himself, and said with an attempt at ease: “I’m willing to admit that emergencies may arise; but if you ask me to advance five hundred pounds at a moment’s notice it’s only fair that I should be told why you need it.”

Their eyes met, and a flame of resistance leapt into Nan’s. “I’ve told you it’s for a private charity.”

“My dear, there should be nothing private between husband and wife.”

She laughed impatiently. “Are you trying to say you won’t give me the money?”

“I’m saying quite the contrary. I’m ready to give it if you’ll tell me what you

“But, Conchie, it’s not being bad to be unhappy—”

“No, darling; and goodness knows I’m unhappy enough. But I suppose it’s wrong to try to console myself — in the way I have. You must think so, I know; but I can’t live without affection, and Miles is so understanding, so tender...”

Miles Dawnly, then — Two or three times Nan had wondered — had noticed things which seemed to bespeak a tender intimacy; but she had never been sure... The blood rushed to her forehead. As she listened to Conchita she was secretly transposing her friend’s words to her own use. “Oh, I know, I know, Conchie—”

Lady Dick lifted her head quickly, and looked straight into her friend’s eyes. “You know — ?”

“I mean, I can imagine... how hard it must be not to...”

There was a long silence. Annabel was conscious that Conchita was waiting for some word of solace — material or sentimental, or if possible both; but again a paralyzing constraint descended on her. In her girlhood no one had ever spoken to her of events or emotions below the surface of life, and she had not yet acquired words to express them. At last she broke out with sudden passion: “Conchie — it’s all turned out a dreadful mistake, hasn’t it?”

“A dreadful mistake — you mean my marriage?”

“I mean all our marriages. I don’t believe we’re any of us really made for this English life. At least I suppose not, for they seem to take so many things for granted here that shock us and make us miserable; and then they’re horrified by things we do quite innocently — like that silly reel last night.”

“Oh — you’ve been hearing about the reel, have you? I saw the old ladies putting their heads together on the sofa.”

“If it’s not that it’s something else. I sometimes wonder—” She paused again, struggling for words. “Conchie, if we just packed up and went home to live, would they really be able to make us come back here, as my mother- in-law says? Perhaps I could cable to father for our passage-money—”

She broke off, perceiving that her suggestion had aroused no response. Conchita threw herself back in her armchair, her eyes wide with an unfeigned astonishment. Suddenly she burst out laughing.

“You little darling! Is that your panacea? Go back to Saratoga and New York — to the Assemblies and the Charity balls? Do you really imagine you’d like that better?”

“I don’t know... Don’t you, sometimes?”

“Never! Not for a single minute!” Lady Dick continued to gaze up laughingly at her friend. She seemed to have forgotten her personal troubles in the vision of this grotesque possibility. “Why, Nan, have you forgotten those dreary endless summers at the Grand Union, and the Opera boxes sent on off-nights by your father’s business friends, and the hanging round, fishing for invitations to the Assem

all the other places are foreign. And he hates anything foreign. There are lots of things he’s never done that he feels quite sure he’d hate.”

Guy was silent. Again he seemed to himself to be eaves-dropping — unintentionally leading her on to say more than she meant; and the idea troubled him.

He turned back to his study of the pictures. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he began again after a pause, “that to enjoy them in their real beauty—”

“I ought to persuade Ushant to send them back where they belong?”

“I didn’t mean anything so drastic. But did it never occur to you that if you had the courage to sweep away all those... those touching little — er... family mementoes—” His gesture ranged across the closely covered walls, from illuminated views of Vesuvius in action to landscapes by the Dowager Duchess’s great-aunts, funereal monuments worked in hair on faded silk, and photographs in heavy oak frames of ducal relatives, famous race-horses, Bishops in lawn sleeves, and undergraduates grouped about sporting trophies.

Annabel coloured, but with amusement, not annoyance. “Yes; it did occur to me; and one day I smuggled in a ladder and took them all down — every one.”

“By jove, you did? It must have been glorious.”

“Yes; that was the trouble. The Duchess—”

She broke off, and he interposed, with an ironic lift to the brows: “But you’re the Duchess.”

“Not the real one. You must have seen that already. I don’t know my part yet, and I don’t believe I ever shall. And my mother-in-law was so shocked that every single picture I’d taken down had to be put back the same day.”

“Ah. that’s natural too. We’re built like that in this tight little island. We fight like tigers against change, and then one fine day accept it without arguing. You’ll see: Ushant will come round, and then his mother will, because he has. It’s only a question of time — and luckily you’ve plenty of that ahead of you.” He looked at her as he spoke, conscious that he was not keeping the admiration out of his eyes, or the pity either, as he had meant to.

Her own eyes darkened, and she glanced away. “Yes; there’s plenty of time. Years and years of it.” Her voice dragged on the word, as if in imagination she were struggling through the long desert reaches of her own future.

“You don’t complain of that, do you?”

“I don’t know; I can’t tell. I’m not as sure as Ushant how I shall feel about things I’ve never tried. But I’ve tried this — and I sometimes think I wasn’t meant for it...” She broke off, and he saw the tears in her eyes.

“My dear child—” he began; and then, half-embarrassed: “For you are a child still, you know. Have you any idea how awfully young you are?”

As soon as he had spoken he reflected that she was too young not to resent any allusion to her inexperience. She laughed. “Plea

“Oh, yes, do tell us,” exclaimed Lady Brightlingsea, coming to anchor between the two. “It’s called the Virginia reel, isn’t it? I thought it was named after my daughter-in-law — Seadown’s wife is called Virginia, you know. But she says no: she used to dance it as a child. It’s an odd coincidence, isn’t it?”

The Dowager was always irritated by Lady Brightling- sea’s vagueness.

Sir Helsmley imparted this information in a loud, almost challenging voice, as he always did when he had to communicate anything unexpected or difficult to account for. Explaining was a nuisance, and somewhat of a derogation. He resented anything that made it necessary, and always spoke as if his interlocutor ought to have known beforehand the answer to the questions he was putting.

After his bad fall in the hunting-field, the year before Guy’s return from Brazil, the county had confidently expected that the lonely widower would make an end by marrying either his hospital nurse or the Gaiety girl who had brightened his solitude during his son’s absence. One or the other of these conclusions to a career over-populated by the fair sex appeared inevitable in the case of a brilliant and unsteady widower. Coroneted heads had been frequently shaken over what seemed a foregone conclusion; and Guy had shared these fears. And behold, on his return, he found the nurse gone, the Gaiety girl expensively pensioned off, and the baronet, slightly lame, but with youth renewed by six months of enforced seclusion, apparently absorbed in a little brown governess who wore violet poplin and heavy brooches of Roman mosaic, but who (as Guy was soon to observe) had eyes like torches, and masses of curly-edged dark hair which she was beginning to braid less tightly, and to drag back less severely from her broad forehead.

Guy stood looking curiously at his father. The latter’s bluster no longer disturbed him; but he was uncomfortably reminded of certain occasions when Sir Helmsley, on the brink of an imprudent investment or an impossible marriage, had blushed and explained with the same volubility. Could this outbreak be caused by one of the same reasons? But no! A middle-aged governess? It was unthinkable. Sir Helmsley had always abhorred the edifying, especially in petticoats; and with his strong well-knit figure, his handsome auburn head, and a complexion clear enough for blushes, he still seemed, in spite of his accident, built for more alluring prey. His real interest, Guy concluded, was no doubt in the Rossetti kinship, and all that it offered to his insatiable imagination. But it made the son wonder anew what other mischief his inflammable parent had been up to during his own long absence. It would clearly be part of his business to look into his father’s sentimental history, and keep a sharp eye on his future. With these thoughts in his mind, Guy stood smiling down paternally on his father.

“Well, sir, it’s all right,” he said. “I’ve

Annabel did not re-appear 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.

Nan in some ways is still a child. She judges many things as a child would—”

I’m sure you would. But what if Nan turned out to be a woman who didn’t want to be shielded?”

You don’t want me to advise you, Duke. You want me to agree with you.”