The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton

Author:Edith Wharton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

XXI.

Those quiet months in Cornwall, which already seemed so much more remote from the actual Annabel than her girlhood at Saratoga, had been of her own choosing. She did not admit to herself that her first sight of the ruins of the ancient Tintagel had played a large part in her wooing; that if the Duke had been only the dullest among the amiable but dull young men who came to the bungalow at Runnymede she would hardly have given him a second thought. But the idea of living in that magic castle by the sad western sea had secretly tinged her vision of the castle’s owner; and she had thought that he and she might get to know each other more readily there than anywhere else. And now, in looking back, she asked herself if it were not her own fault that the weeks at Tintagel had not brought the expected understanding. Instead, as she now saw, they had only made husband and wife more unintelligible to each other. To Annabel, the Cornish castle spoke with that rich low murmur of the past which she had first heard in its mysterious intensity the night when she had lain awake in the tapestried chamber at Allfriars, beside the sleeping Virginia, who had noticed only that the room was cold and shabby. Though the walls of Tintagel were relatively new, they were built on ancient foundations, and crowded with the treasures of the past; and nearby was the mere of Excalibur, and from her windows she could see the dark-gray sea, and sometimes, at night-fall, the mysterious barge with black sails putting out from the ruined castle to carry the dead King to Avalon.

Of all this, nothing existed for her husband. He saw the new Tintagel only as a costly folly of his father’s which family pride obliged him to keep up with fitting state, in spite of the unfruitful acres which made its maintenance so difficult. In shouldering these cares, however, he did not expect his wife to help him, save by looking her part as a beautiful and angelically pure young duchess whose only duties consisted in bestowing her angelic presence on entertainments for the tenantry and agricultural prizegivings. The Duke had grown up under the iron rod of a mother who, during his minority, had managed not only his property, but his very life, and he had no idea of letting her authority pass to his wife. Much as he dreaded the duties belonging to his great rank, deeply as he was oppressed by them, he was determined to perform them himself, were it ever so hesitatingly and painfully, and not to be guided by anyone else’s suggestions.

To his surprise, such suggestions were not slow in coming from Annabel. She had not yet learned that she was expected to remain a loving and adoring looker-on, and in her daily drives over the estate (in the smart pony-chaise, with its burnished trappings and gay piebald ponies) she often, out

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