Read Online The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton - Free Book Online

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    Ought not Miss Testvalley to find some pretext for knocking at Conchita’s door, gathering her charges back to safety, and putting it in their power to say that their governess had assisted at the little party? Her first impulse was to go; but governesses who act on first impulses seldom keep their places. “As long as there’s so much noise,” she thought, “there can’t be any mischief...” and at that moment, in a pause of the singing, she caught Nan’s trill of little-girl laughter. Miss Testvalley started up and went to her door; but once more she drew back. Better wait and see—interfering might do more harm than good. If only some exasperated neighbour did not ring to have the rejoicings stopped!
    At length music and laughter subsided. Silence followed. Miss Testvalley, drawing an austere purple flannel garment over her night-dress, unbolted her door and stole out into the passage. Where it joined the main corridor she paused and waited. A door had opened half way down the corridor—Conchita’s door—and the governess saw a flutter of light dresses, and heard subdued laughter and good nights. Both the St. George and Elmsworth families were lodged below, and in the weak glimmer of gas she made sure of four girls hurrying toward her wing. She drew back hastily. Glued to her door, she listened, and heard a heavy but cautious step passing by, and a throaty voice humming “Champagne Charlie.” She drew a breath of relief, relit her candle, and sat down before her glass to finish her toilet for the night.
    Her hair carefully waved on its pins, her evening prayer recited, she slipped into bed and blew out the light. But sleep did not come, and she lay in the sultry darkness and listened, she hardly knew for what. At last she heard the same heavy step returning cautiously, passing her door, gaining once more the main corridor—the step she would have known in a thousand, the way she used to listen for at Allfriars after midnight, groping down the long passage to the governess’s room.
    She started up. Forgetful of crimping-pins and bare feet, she opened her door again. The last flicker of gas had gone out, and, secure in the blackness, she crept after the heavy step to the corner. It sounded ahead of her half way down the long row of doors; then it stopped, a door opened... and Miss Testvalley turned back on leaden feet....
    Nothing of that fugitive adventure at Allfriars had ever been known. Of that she was certain. An ill-conditioned youth, the boon companion of his father’s grooms, and a small brown governess, ten years his elder, and known to be somewhat curt and distant with everyone except her pupils and their parents—who would ever have thought of associating the one with the other? The episode had been brief; the peril was soon over; and when, the very same year, Lord Richard was solemnly banished from his father’s house, it was not because of his having once or twice stolen down the school-room passage at undue hours, but for reasons so far more deplorable that poor Lady Brightlingsea, her reserve utterly broken down, had sobbed out on Miss Testvalley’s breast: “Anything, anything else I know his father would have forgiven.” (Miss Testvalley wondered....)

VI.
    When Colonel St. George bought his house in Madison Avenue it seemed to him fit to satisfy the ambitions of any budding millionaire. That it had been built and decorated by one of the Tweed ring who had come to grief earlier than his more famous fellow-criminals, was to Colonel St. George convincing proof that it was a suitable setting for wealth and elegance. But social education is acquired rapidly in New York, even by those who have to absorb it through the cracks of the sacred edifice; and Mrs. St. George had already found out that no one lived in Madison Avenue, that the front hall should have been painted Pompeian red with a stencilled frieze, and