He let several suns go down on a certain stiffness which he felt toward
his young adviser. But that it was no more than a stiffness was proven
by his eventual reappearance. The Younger in the meantime was more or
less in the dark as to the progress of events. He knew that there was
no break as yet; but his previous acquaintance with Susannah and The
General had not been such as to entitle him to their confidences. He
was accordingly much pleased when the Elder came back.
“This time I am ready for you,” observed that worthy. “And I might add
that she is ready for me.”
The Younger’s intentions had been of the best; but if you make a pass
at a fencer his wrist will spring instinctively into play.
“Which one?” he inquired, with a smile.
“Do you ask?” retorted the Elder.
“I stand corrected. Of course, you will have to take them both. Have
they given their word?”
“Ah--do you mean that the old one will be hard to shake off?” put the
Elder, with something less of assurance.
“Not at all. I mean that neither of them can be shaken off. It is a
particularity of the case. It is like the Siamese twins. Whoever takes
one, takes both. It is the one case of plural marriage tolerated in my
country.”
“In that case,” rejoined the Elder unperturbed, “there will be no
trouble about the settlements.”
The Younger took his pink with a laugh. “Then you have been making the
other thing. Have you asked her yet?”
“No. But it comes to the same. I have sounded her.”
“O! And she rang true? How did you manage it?”
The Elder took his step without a tremour. “I offered her a present and
she accepted it.”
The Younger left him an instant in his security.
“Yes? What was it?”
“An antique pendant. At this moment it is hanging against her heart.”
The Younger took this picture in, but he repressed a laugh.
“My dear marquis, you might give her seventy-three pendants, and I
presume her heart is large enough to hang all of them against it. But
that would prove nothing.”
The Elder looked reproach before he proffered it:
“You assure me she is respectable. How can she receive presents from a
man, how can her mother allow her to receive presents, unless she means
something?”
“Perfectly well,” laughed the Younger irritatingly.
“And is that another, may I ask, of your famous inventions?” put the
Elder with some irony.
“It is perhaps the most famous of all,” replied the younger, without a
qualm. “We are a philosophic people. We take what comes, whether it be
diamonds or bankruptcy.”
“Yes, but young girls!” burst out the Elder. “Can they take diamonds
and keep their characters?”
“Perfectly well! What have diamonds to do with character? The young
girls do not attach the exaggerated importance to material things which
you do here. They receive necklaces, tiaras, stomachers, as the merest
natural tribute to their charms, and as simply as they would receive
wild flowers. It means nothing.”
The Elder gasped.
“And would they be capable of refusing one after that?”
“Perfectly.”
“_Madre di Dio!_ What a society! What taste! What----” He could say no
more. But even in the rapids he felt that the Younger was the only one
to pilot him ashore. “Do you positively mean to tell me, then, that I
am nowhere?”
The Younger relented a little.
“Of course I cannot read the secrets of Susannah’s heart. For all I
know you may be enshrined within its inmost recess. I only tell you
that the pendant, by itself, means nothing.”
The Elder looked lost.
“Do I accomplish nothing, then, by what I have done?”
“Only,” improvised the Younger briskly, “by following it up. A pendant
is very well, but it is not enough. You see, in America anybody might
give her a pendant--the plumber, the ice-man, the under-taker. You must
do more. You must offer solid proofs of your state of heart. You must
find out what Susannah wants. If it is something which can be made to
order, into which you can put something of yourself, all the better.
Then she will know that you are in earnest, and will act accordingly.”
The Elder took it seriously--not in a pique, but as under the enlarging
influence of new ideas.
“I have heard her speak of something,” he uttered slowly,
interrogatively.
“What was it?”
“Do you remember those door knockers at Palazzo Testadura? Bronze? By
Benvenuto Cellini?”
“The Neptune, you mean?”
“Yes. She said she wished they had them at the _villino_. They have
nothing but an iron finger or something, you know. I could have them
copied--by way of a beginning.”
“Yes!” cried the Younger in a final burst of inspiration. “And to give
the personal note, to suggest delicately the idea of your knocking at
her door, you could have the Neptune’s head modeled after your own!”