As Bertram walked back to Florence, down the steep, cobble-paved lanes,
between the high villa walls, draped now with flowering cyclamen, while
glimpses of the lily-city came and went before him, something like a
phantom of Ruth Adgate floated by his side. Her voice was in his ears,
the scent of her garments was in his nostrils; he saw her face, her
eyes, her smiling red mouth, her fragile nervous body. “I have never met
a woman who--who moved me so--troubled me so,” he said. “Is it possible
that I am in love with her? Already?” It seemed premature, it seemed
unlikely; yet why couldn't he get her from his mind?
Be thou chaste as ice, pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. He
thought as he had thought again and again to-day, of Mrs. Wilberton.
“Just so certainly,” he argued, “as a woman is alone in the world,
and young, and good-looking, just so certainly must slanderous
tongues select her for their victim. Add wealth,--which trebles her
conspicuousness,--which excites a thousand envies,--and--well, the Lord
help her and those who profess themselves her friends. That exquisite
young girl! Her fine old father was a moneylender, and she is paying the
Pontycrofts to push her in society. Likely stories: Yet how are you to
prevent people telling and believing them?”
He raised his hands towards the blue empyrean, and let them fall heavily
back beside him, as one summoning angels and archangels to mark the
relentless logic of evil. And the nine peasants who just then rattled
past him in a cart drawn by a single donkey, rolled their eyes, and
muttered among themselves, “Another mad Inglese.”
“But oh, ye Powers,” he groaned, groaned in the silence of his spirit,
while audibly he laughed with laughter that really was sardonic,
“if Ponty knew, if Ponty half suspected!” Pontycroft was a man with
magnificent capacities for anger. If Pontycroft should come to know,
as any day he might, as some day he almost inevitably must,--it was
not pleasant to picture the rage that would fill him. And would it
not extend, that rage of his, “to us, his friends,” Bertram had to ask
himself, “for not having put him on his guard, for not having given him
a hint?” Alas, it almost certainly would. “What! You, my friends,
you heard the beastly things people were saying, and you never warned
me--you left me in fatuous ignorance of them!” Yes; bitter, scathing,
would be Pontycroft's reproaches; and yet, and yet--Imagining a little
the case of the man who should undertake to convey that warning, Bertram
was conscious of a painful inward chill. “It is not for me to do it--no,
I should simply never have the courage.” The solution of the whole
difficulty, of course, would be her marriage. “She should marry someone
with a name and a position--a name and a position great enough in
themselves to stifle scandal. If she should marry----” Well, a Prince of
the house of Bertrandoni, for example.... But he did not get so far as
quite to say these words. At the mere dim adumbration of the idea, he
stopped short, stood still, and waited for his nerves to cease tingling,
his heart to pound less violently.
“Is it conceivable that I am in love with a girl I've only seen twice in
my life? And what manner of likelihood is there that she would have me?
She refuses everyone, Ponty says; and that odious little Stuart Seton
says she is in love with Ponty himself. No, I don't suppose I have the
ghost of a chance. Still--still--she certainly didn't look or behave as
if she was in love with Ponty; and that odious little Seton is just an
odious little romancer; and as for her refusing everyone, _tant va la
cruche à l'eau_----! Anyhow, a man may try, a man may pay his court. And
if--But, good Heavens, I am forgetting my mother. What would my mother
say?”
There were abundant reasons why the sudden recollection of his mother
should give him pause. His mother was by no means simply the Duchess of
Oltramare, the consort of the Pretender to a throne. She was something,
to her own way of measuring, much greater than this: she was an
Austrian and a Wohenhoffen. Mere Semi-Royal Bertrandoni, mere Dukes of
Oltramare, mere Pretenders to the throne of Altronde, might marry whom
they would; lineage, blood, quarterings, they might dispense with. But
to a Wohenhoffen, to a noble of the noblesse of Austria, lineage, blood,
quarterings were as essential as the breath of life. And Ruth Adgate was
an American. And--have Americans quarterings? A daughter-in-law without
them would, in all literalness, be less acceptable to his proud old
Austrian Wohenhoffen of a mother, than a daughter-in-law without her
five senses or without hands and feet; would be a thing, in fact,
unthinkable. For people without quarterings, to the mind of your
Austrian Wohenhoffens, constitute an entirely separate, not order,
not estate, an entirely separate Race, an alien species, no more to be
intermarried with than Esquimaux or Zulus.
Yes, there were plenty of reasons why the recollection of his mother
should dash his soaring fancies. But fancies are stubborn things and by
and bye they began anew to stir their pinions. True, his mother was an
Austrian and a Wohenhoffen, yet at the same time she was the smiling
embodiment of good-humour and good-nature, and she was the most sociable
and the most susceptible soul alive,--she loved to be surrounded by
amusing people, she formed the strongest friendships and attachments. If
she were at Florence now, for example, and if the inhabitants of Villa
Santa Cecilia were presented to her, she would take each of them to her
heart. She would like Pontycroft, she would like Lucilla, above all she
would like Ruth; she would like her for her youth and freshness, for
her prettiness, for her gaiety, for everything. She would like her,
too, because she was a Catholic, the Duchess of Oltramare being an
exceedingly devout daughter of the Church. And it would never occur to
her to ask whether she had quarterings or not--it would never occur to
her that so nice a person could fail to have them. And then--and then,
when the question of quarterings _did_ arise--Well, even Austrians, even
Wohenhoffens, might perhaps gradually be brought to accustom themselves
to new ideas. And then--well, even to a Wohenhoffen, the fact that you
possess a handsome fortune will by no means lessen your attractiveness.
“As I live,” cried this designing son, “I'll write to my mother
to-night, and ask her to come to Florence.”
V
Of course, no sooner had Bertram left them, than Pontycroft turned to
the ladies, and said, “Well----?”
“Well what?” teased Ruth, trying to look as if she didn't understand.
“Boo,” said Pontycroft, making a face at her.
“He's delightful,” said Lucilla; “so simple and unassuming, and
unspoiled. And so romantic--like one of Daudet's _rois en exil_. And he
has such nice eyes, and such a nice slim athletic figure. Do you think
it's true that his people have no hope of coming to the throne? I've
felt it in my bones that we should meet him again, ever since that night
at the Lido. I knew it was all an act of Destiny. How wonderfully he
speaks English--and thinks and feels it. He has quite the English point
of view--he can see a joke. Oh, I've entirely lost my heart, and if I
weren't restrained by a sense of my obligations as a married woman I
should make the most frantic love to him.”
Ruth lay back in her chair, and shook her head, and laughed.
“Oh, your swans, your swans,” she murmured.
“Dear Lady Disdain,” said Ponty, regarding her with an eye that was
meant to wither, “it is better that a thousand geese should be mistaken
for swans, than that a single swan should be mistaken for a goose. Oh,
your geese, your geese!”
“Dear Lord Sententious,” riposted Ruth, “what is the good of making
any mistake at all? Why not take swans for swans, geese for geese, and
blameless little princelings for blameless little princelings? Yes,
your little princeling seemed altogether blameless, an exceedingly
well-meaning, well-mannered little princeling, but I saw no play of
Promethean fire about his head, and when he spoke it sounded as if any
normally intelligent young man was speaking.”
“Had you expected,” Pontycroft with lofty sarcasm inquired, “that, like
the prince in _The Rose and Ring_, he would speak in verse?”
But next morning, in the most unexpected manner, she totally changed her
note. Pontycroft found her seated in the sun on the lawn. It was a cool
morning, and the sun's warmth was pleasant. Here and there a dewdrop
still glistened, clinging to a spear of grass; and the air was still
sweet with the early breath of the earth. In her lap lay side by side
an open letter and an oleander-blossom. Her eyes, Pontycroft perceived,
were fixed upon the horizon, as those of one deep in a brown study.
“You mustn't mind my interrupting,” he said, as he came up. “It's really
in your own interest. It's bad for your little brain to let it think so
hard, and it will do you good to tell me what it was thinking so hard
about.”
Slowly, calmly, Ruth raised her eyes to his. “My little brain was
thinking about Prince Charming,” she apprised him, in a voice that
sounded grave.
Pontycroft's wrinkled brow contracted.
“Prince Charming----?”
“The young Astyanax, the hope of--Altronde,” she explained. “Your
friend, Bertrando Bertrandoni. I was meditating his manifold
perfections.”
Pontycroft shook his head. “I miss the point of your irony,” he
remarked.
“Irony?” protested she, with spirit. “When was I ever ironical? He's
perfectly delightful--so unassuming and unspoiled; and so romantic,
like a king in exile. And with such a nice thin figure, and such large
sagacious eyes. And he speaks such chaste and classic English, and is
so quick to take a joke. If I weren't restrained by a sense of what's
becoming to me as a single woman, I should make desperate love to him.”
Pontycroft shook his head again. “I still miss the point,” he said.
“I express myself blunderingly, I know,” said Ruth. “You see, it's
somewhat embarrassing for a girl to have to avow such sentiments. But
really and truly and honestly, and all jesting apart, I think he's an
extremely nice young man, quite the nicest that I've met for a long,
long while.”
“You sang a different song yesterday,” said Pontycroft, bewilderment and
suspicion mingled in his gaze.
“_La nuit porte conseil_,” Ruth reminded him. “I've had leisure in which
to revise my impressions. He's a fellow who can talk, a fellow who's
curious about things. I hope we shall see a great deal of him.”
She lifted up her oleander, pressed it to her face, and took a deep
inhalation. “Bless its red fragrant heart,” she said.
“I never can tell when you are sincere,” Ponty hopelessly complained.
“I'm always sincere--but seldom serious,” Ruth replied. “What's the good
of being serious? Isn't levity the soul of wit? Come, come! Life's grim
enough, in all conscience, without making it worse by being serious.”
“I give you up,” said Ponty. “You're in one of your mystifying moods,
and your long-suffering friends must wait until it passes.” Then nodding
towards the open letter in her lap, “Whom's your letter from?” he asked.
“I don't know,” said Ruth, smiling with what seemed to him artificial
brightness.
“Don't know? Haven't you read it?” he demanded.
“Oh yes, I've read it. But I don't know whom it's from, because it isn't
signed. It's what they call anonymous,” Ruth suavely answered. “Now
isn't _that_ exciting?”
“Anonymous?” cried Ponty, bristling up.
“Who on earth can be writing anonymous letters to a child like you?
What's it about?”
“By the oddest of coincidences,” said Ruth, “it's about _you_.”
“About _me?_” Ponty faltered, a hundred new wrinkles adding themselves
to his astonished brow: “An anonymous letter--to _you_--about me?”
“Yes,” said Ruth pleasantly. “Would you care to read it?” She held it up
to him. He took it.
Written in a weak and sprawling hand, clearly feminine, on common white
paper, it ran, transliterated into the conventional spelling of our day,
as follows:--
“Miss Ruth Adgate, Madam.--I thought you might like to know that your
friend, H. Pontycroft, Esq. who passes himself off for a bachelor is a
married man, eighteen years ago being married privately to a lady whose
father kept a public in Brighton of the name of Ethel Driver. The lady
lives at 18 Spring Villas Beckenham Road Highgate off a mean pittance
from her husband who is ashamed of her and long ago cast off.
“Yours, a sincere well-wisher.”
Pontycroft's wrinkles, as he read, concentrated themselves into one
frown of anger, and the brown-red of his face darkened to something like
purple. At last he tore the letter lengthwise and crosswise into tiny
fragments, and thrust them into the side pocket of his coat.
“Let me see the envelope,” he said, reaching out his hand. But there was
nothing to be got from the envelope. It was postmarked Chelsea, and
had been addressed to Ruth's house in town, and thence forwarded by her
servants.
“Who could have written it? And why? Why?” he puzzled aloud.
“The writer thought I 'might like to know,'” said Ruth, quoting the text
from memory. “But, of course, it's none of my business--so I don't ask
whether it is true.”
“No, it's none of your business,” Ponty agreed, smiling upon her
gravely, his anger no longer uppermost. “But I hope you won't quite
believe the part about the 'pittance.' My solicitors pay all her
legitimate expenses, and if I don't allow her any great amount of actual
money, that's because she has certain unfortunate habits which it's
better for her own sake that she shouldn't indulge too freely. Well,
well, you see how the sins of our youth pursue us. And now--shall we
speak of something else?”
“Poor Harry,” said Ruth, looking at him with eyes of tender pity. “Speak
of something else? Oh yes, by all means,” she assented briskly.
“Let's return to Astyanax. When do you think he will pay his visit of
digestion?”