Part 2

But Vincent put in a quick disclaimer. “Oh, no; oh dear, no. I don't know that she's a snob--any more than every one is in England. I mean that she happens to belong to the set that counts itself the smartest, just as I happen not to. It's mostly a matter of accident, I imagine. You fall where you fall. She isn't to blame for having fallen among the rich and great; and she looks like a very decent sort. But I say, if you really want to meet her, of course it would be the easiest thing in the world--for _you_.”

“Oh? How?” asked Bertram.

“Why,” answered Vincent, with the inflection and the gesture of a man expounding the self-evident, “drop her a line at her hotel,--no difficulty in finding out where she's staying; at the Britannia, probably. Tell her you're an old friend of her brother's, and propose to call. I hope I don't need to say whether she'll jump at the chance when she sees your name.”

Bertram laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “I don't think I should care to do that.”

“Hum,” said Vincent. “Of course,” he added after a minute, as a sort of _envoi_ to his tale, “rumour has it that Pontycroft and the heiress are by way of making a match. Well, why not? It would be inhuman to let her pass out of the family. Heigh? and the girl is really very pretty. Yes, I expect before a great while we'll read in the _Morning Post_ that a marriage has been arranged.”

“Hum,” said Bertram.

And then the next afternoon he saw them still again, and learned still more about them. Mrs. Wilberton, the brisk, well-dressed, elderly-handsome, amiably-worldly wife of the Bishop of Lanchester, was having tea with him on his balcony, when all at once she leaned forward, waved her hand, and bestowed her most radiant smile, her most gracious bow, upon the occupants of a passing gondola. Afterwards, turning to Bertram, her finely-modelled, fresh-complexioned face, under its pompadour of grey hair, charged with mystery and significance. “Do you know those women?” she asked.

Well, strictly speaking, he didn't know them; and his visitor's countenance was a promise as well as a provocative to curiosity; so I hope he was justified in answering, “Who are they?”

The mystery and significance in Mrs. Wilberton's face had deepened to solemnity, to solemnity touched with severity. She sank back a little in her red-and-white cane armchair and slowly, solemnly shook her head. “Ah, it's a sad scandal,” she said, making her voice low and impressive.

But this was leagues removed from anything that Bertram had bargained for. “A scandal?” he repeated, looking blank.

Mrs. Wilberton fixed him with solemn eyes.

“Have you ever heard,” she asked, “of a man, one of our great landowners, the head of one of our oldest families, a very rich man, a man named Henry Pontycroft?”

Bertram smiled, though there was anxiety in his smile, though there was suspense. “I know Henry Pontycroft very well,” he answered.

“Do you?” said she. “Well, the elder of those two women was Henry Pontycroft's sister, Lucilla Dor.”

Her voice died away and she gazed at her listener in silence, meaningly, as if this announcement in itself contained material for pause and rumination.

But Bertram was anxious, was in suspense. “Yes?” he said, his eyes, attentive and expectant, urging her to continue.

“But it's the other,” she presently did continue, “it's the young woman with her. Of course one has read of such things in the papers--one knows that they are done--but when they happen under one's own eyes, in one's own set! And she a Pontycroft! The other, the young woman with Lucilla Dor,--oh, it's quite too disgraceful.”

Again Mrs. Wilberton shook her head, this time with a kind of horrified violence, causing the jet spray in her bonnet to dance and twinkle, and again she sank back in her chair.

Bertram sat forward on the edge of his, hands clasping its arms. “Yes? Yes?” he prompted.

“She's an American,” said Mrs. Wilberton, speaking with an effect of forced calm. “Her name is Ruth Adgate. She's an American of worse than common extraction, but she's immensely rich. It's really difficult to see in what she's better than an ordinary adventuress, but she has a hundred thousand pounds a year. And she's bought the Pontycrofts--Henry Pontycroft and his sister--she's bought them body and soul.”

Her voice indicated a full stop, and she allowed her face and attitude to relax, as one whose painful message was delivered.

But Bertram looked perplexed. An adventuress? Of worse than common extraction? That fresh young girl, with her prettiness, her fineness? His impulse was to cry out, “Allons donc!” And then--the Pontycrofts? Frowning perplexity, he repeated his visitor's words: “Bought the Pontycrofts? I don't think I understand.”

“Oh, it's a thing that's done,” Mrs. Wilberton assured him, on a note that was like a wail. “One knows that it is done. It's a part of the degeneracy of our times. But the Pontycrofts! One would have thought _them_ above it. And the Adgate woman! One would have thought that even people who are willing to sell themselves must draw the line somewhere. But no. Money is omnipotent. So, for money, the Pontycrofts have taken her to their bosoms; presented her; introduced her to every one; and they'll end, of course, by capturing a title for her. Another 'international marriage.' Another instance of American gold buying the due of well-born English girls over their heads.”

Bertram smiled,--partly, it may be, at the passion his guest showed, but partly from relief. He had dreaded what was coming: what had come was agreeably inconclusive and unconvincing.

“I see,” he said. “But surely this seems in the last degree improbable. What makes you think it?”

“Oh, it isn't that _I_ think it,” Mrs. Wilberton cried, with a movement that lifted the matter high above the plane of mere personal opinion; “it's known,--it's known.”

But Bertram knitted his brows again. “How can such a thing be _known?_” he objected.

“At most, it can only be a suspicion or an inference. What makes you suspect it? What do you infer it _from?_”

“Why, from the patent facts,” said Mrs. Wilberton, giving an upward motion to her pretty little white-gloved hands. “They take her everywhere. They've presented her. They've introduced her to the best people. She's regularly _lancée_ in their set. I myself was loth, loth to believe it. But the facts--they'll bear no other construction.”

Bertram smiled again. “Yes,” he said. “But why should you suppose that they do all this for money?”

His question appeared to take the lady's breath away. She sat up straight, lips parted, and gazed at him with something like stupefaction. “For what other earthly reason should they do it?” she was able, at last, in honest bewilderment, to gasp out.

“One has heard of such a motive-power as love,” Bertram, with deference, submitted. “Why shouldn't they do it because they like the girl--because she's their friend?”

Mrs. Wilberton breathed freely, and in her turn smiled. “Ah, my dear Prince,” she said, with a touch of pity, “you don't know our English world. People in the Pontycroft's position don't take up nameless young Americans for love. Their lives are too full, too complicated. And it means an immense amount of work, of bother--you can't get a new-comer accepted without bestirring yourself, without watching, scheming, soliciting, contriving. And what's your reward? Your friends find you a nuisance, and no one thanks you. There's only one reward that can meet the case--payment in pounds sterling from your client's purse.”

But Bertram's incredulity was great. “Harry Pontycroft is himself rich,” he said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wilberton at once assented, “he's rich _now_. But he wasn't always rich. There were those lean years when he was merely his cousin's heir--and that's a whole chapter of the story. Besides, is his sister rich? Is Freddie Dor rich?”

“Ah, about that of course I know nothing,” Bertram had with humility to admit.

“Freddie Dor is an Irish baronet, whose sole fortune consists of an Irish bog. Then where does Lucilla Dor get her money? She spends--there's no limit to the extravagance with which she spends, to the luxury in which she lives. She has a great house in town, a great house in the country--Lord Bylton's place, Knelworth Castle--she's taken it on a lease. She has a villa near Florence. She entertains like a duchess. She has a box at the opera. She has motor-cars and electric broughams--you know what _they_ cost. And sables and diamonds, she has as many as an Indian begum. Where does she get her money?”

Mrs. Wilberton eyed him with a kind of triumphant fierceness. Bertram had an uncomfortable laugh.

“It's conceivable,” he suggested, “that her husband's bog produces peat. But I should imagine, in the absence of other evidence, that her brother subsidises her.”

Mrs. Wilberton stared at him for a second doubtfully. “Of course you're not serious,” she said. “Brothers? Brothers don't do things on quite such a lavish scale.”

“Oh, but Ponty's different,” Bertram argued. “Ponty's eccentric. I could imagine Ponty doing things on a scale all his own. Anyhow, I don't see what there is to connect Lady Dor's affluence with Miss Adgate.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Wilberton, with an air of being about to clench the matter, “the connection is unfortunately glaring. Lady Dor's affluence dates precisely from the moment of Miss Adgate's entrance upon the scene.” And with an air of _having_ clenched the matter, she threw back her head.

Bertram bent his brow, as one in troubled thought. Then, presently, reviewing his impressions, “I never saw a nicer-looking girl,” he said. “I never saw a face that expressed finer or higher qualities. She doesn't look in the least like a girl with low ambitions,--like one who would try to buy her way into society, or pay people to find her a titled husband. And where, in all this, does Harry Pontycroft himself come in? I think you said that she had bought them both, brother and sister.”

“Ah,” cried Mrs. Wilberton, triumphing again, “you touch the very point. Harry Pontycroft was head over ears in debt to Miss Adgate's father.”

“Oh----?” said Bertram, his eyebrows going up.

“It's wheels within wheels,” said the lady. “Miss Adgate's father was a mysterious American who, for reasons of his own, had left his country, and never went back. He never went to his embassy, either: you can make what you will of that. And even in Europe he had no settled abode; he lived in hotels; he was always flitting--London,--Paris, Rome, Vienna. And wherever he went, though he knew no one else, he knew troops of young men--_young_ men, mark, and young men with expectations. He wasn't received at his embassy; he wasn't received in a single decent house; he was an utter outcast and pariah; but he always managed to surround himself with troops of young men who had expectations. He was nothing more or less, in short, than a money-lender. Yes, your 'nice-looking' girl with the face full of high qualities, whom you think incapable of low ambitions, is just the daughter of a common money-lender--nothing better than that. And Henry Pontycroft was one of his victims. This, of course, was while Pontycroft was poor--while his rich cousin was alive and flourishing. And then, when the old usurer had him completely in his toils, he proposed a compact. If Pontycroft would exert his social influence on behalf of his daughter, and get her accepted in the right circles, Adgate would forgive him his debt, and pay him handsomely into the bargain. The next one knew, Miss Adgate was living with Lucilla Dor, like a member of the family, and Lucilla was beginning to spend money. Not long afterwards old Adgate died, and his daughter came into his millions. And so the ball goes on. They haven't ensnared a Duke for her yet, but that will only be a question of time.”

Mrs. Wilberton tilted her head a little to one side, and smiled at poor Bertram with the smile, satisfied yet benevolent, of one who had successfully brought off a promised feat--a smile of friendly challenge to criticise or reply.

But Bertram had his reply ready.

“A compact,” he said. “How can any human being have any knowledge of such a compact, except the parties to it? Besides, _I_ know Harry Pontycroft--I've known him for years, intimately. He would be utterly incapable of such a thing. Sell his 'social influence' for money? Worse still, sell his sister's? Old Adgate may have been a moneylender, and Harry Pontycroft may have owed him money. But to get out of it by a proceeding so ignoble as that--his character is the negation of the very idea. And then, a titled husband! Surely, a girl of Miss Adgate's beauty and wealth would need little assistance in finding one, if she really cared about it. And anyhow, to act as her matrimonial agent--that again is a thing of which Harry Pontycroft would be incapable. But, for my part, I can't believe that Miss Adgate has any such desire. She looks to me like a young woman of mind and heart, with ideas and ideals, who would either marry for love pure and simple, or not at all.”

His visitor's lips compressed themselves--but failed to hide her amusement. “Oh, looks!” she said. “Ideas, ideals? What do we know of the ideas and ideals of those queer people? Shylock's daughter. You may be sure that whatever their ideals may be, they're very different from any we're familiar with. A young woman who never had a _home_, whose childhood was passed in _hotels_.” Mrs. Wilberton shuddered.

“Yes,” agreed Bertram, “that's sad to think of. But Shylock's daughter--even Shylock's daughter married for love.”

“If you come to that,” Mrs. Wilberton answered him, “it's as easy to love a peer as a peasant.”

“By the bye,” questioned Bertram, thinking of Lewis Vincent, “if the Pontycrofts are really as mercenary as all this would show them to be, why doesn't Ponty marry her himself? He's not a peer, to be sure, but in England the headships of some of your ancient untitled families almost outrank peerages, do they not?”

Mrs. Wilberton's face resumed its look of mystery. “Henry Pontycroft would be only too glad to marry her--if he could,” she said. “But alack-a-day for him, he can't, and for the best of reasons. He is already married.”

Bertram stared, frowning.

“Pontycroft _married?_” he doubted, his voice falling. “But since when? It must be very recent--and it's astonishing I shouldn't have heard.”

“Oh no, anything but recent,” Mrs. Wilberton returned, a kind of high impersonal pathos in her tone; “and very few people know about it. But it's perfectly true--I have it on the best authority. When he was quite a young man, when he was still an undergraduate, he made a secret marriage--with some low person--a barmaid or music-hall singer or something. He hasn't lived with her for years--it seems she drank, and was flagrantly immoral, and had, in short, all the vices of her class--and most people have supposed him to be a bachelor. But there his wife remains, you see, a hopeless impediment to his marrying the Adgate millions.”

“This is astounding news to me,” said Bertram, with the subdued manner of one who couldn't deny that his adversary had scored. But then, cheering up a little, “Why doesn't he poison her?” he asked. “Or, better still, divorce her? In a country like England, where divorce is easy, why doesn't he divorce her, and so be free to marry whom he will?”

Mrs. Wilberton gave him a glance of wonder.

“Oh, I thought you knew,” she murmured. “The Pontycrofts are Roman Catholics--one of the handful of families in England who have never recanted their Popish errors. But I beg your pardon--you are a Roman Catholic yourself? Of course. Well, surely, your Church doesn't permit divorce.”

Bertram laughed, mirthlessly, grimly even.

“Here is an odd confounding of scruples,” he said. “A man is low enough to take a girl's money for acting as her social tout, but too pious to divorce a woman who must be the curse of his existence.”

“Oh,” replied Mrs. Wilberton, not without a semblance of pride in the circumstance, “our English Roman Catholics are very strict.”

“I noticed,” said Bertram, playing with his watch-chain, “that you bowed very pleasantly when they passed.”

Mrs. Wilberton raised her hands. “I'm not a prig,” she earnestly protested. “Don't think I'm a prig. This thing is known, but it's not official. In England until a thing becomes official, until it gets into the law-courts, we treat it, for all practical purposes, as if it didn't exist. Of course, I bowed to them.... Lucilla Dor, besides being a Pontycroft, is a leader in the most exclusive set; and Miss Adgate, officially, is simply her friend and protégée. And it isn't as if they were the only persons about whom ugly tales are told. If one began cutting one's acquaintances on that score, I don't know where one could stop.”

“Ugly tales,” said Bertram, “yes. But this particular ugly tale--upon my word I can't see a single reason why it should be believed. The only scrap of evidence in support of it, as far as I can make out, is the fact that Lady Dor has a motor-car and a few furs and diamonds. Well, she has also a rich and generous brother. No: I will stake Miss Adgate's face and Harry Pontycroft's honour against all the ugly tales that Gath and Ashkelon between them can produce. I don't believe it, I don't believe it, and I can only wonder that you do.”

Mrs. Wilberton was gathering herself together, evidently with a view to departure. Now she rose, and held out her hand.

“Well, Prince,” she said, laughing, “I must congratulate you upon your faith in human nature. In a man who has seen so much of the world, such an absence of cynicism is beautiful. I feel quite as if I had been playing the part of--what do you call him?--the Devil's Advocate. But”--she nodded gravely, though perhaps there was a tinge of amusement in her gravity--“in this case I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid that your charity is mistaken.”

VII

When he came back from having conducted her to the waterside, he was followed by Balzatore and Rampicante. Rampicante leaped upon his shoulder, rubbed his bristly moustaches approvingly against his cheek, curled his tail about his collar, and, sublimely indifferent to any one's mood but his own, purred an egoist's satisfaction. Balzatore sat down before him, resting his long pointed muzzle on his knee and looked up into his face from alert, troubled, wistful eyes. “What is the matter? What is it that's worrying you?” they asked. For Balzatore knew that his master was not happy.

No, his master was not happy. All round him were the light, the lucent colour, the shimmering warmth of Venice in early autumn, woven together in a transparent screen of beauty. The palaces opposite glowed pale gold, pale rose, pale amethyst, in the sun; the water below was dull blue-green and glassy, shot with changing reds and purples, like dark mother-of-pearl; the sky above was like blue-royal velvet; and where he sat, on his marble balcony, amid its ancient, time-worn carvings and traceries, all was cool blue shadow. But I doubt if he saw any of these things. What he saw was the face of Ruth Adgate, that odd, pretty, witty, frank, clear face of hers, those clear frank eyes, with their glint of red, their hint of inner laughter. He saw also the brown, lined, bony, good-humoured, clever, wholesome face of Harry Pontycroft, and the fair, soft, friendly face of Ponty's sister. The charge against these people was very trifling, if you will: it implied no devastating moral turpitude, but it was more ignominious than far graver charges might have been: it implied such petty aims, such sordid doings. To buy “social influence”--to sell services that should in their nature be the spontaneous offerings of kindness,--frequently indeed as one had heard of this branch of commerce, what, when it came to an actual transaction, could be on the part of buyer and seller more contemptible? Bertram vowed in his soul, “No, I don't believe it, I won't believe it.” And yet, for all his firm unfaith, he was not happy. A feeling of malaise, of disgust, almost of physical nausea, possessed him. Oh, why was every one so eager to rub the bloom from the peach? “The worst of it is that Mrs. Wilberton is not a malicious woman,” he said. “She's worldly, frivolous, superficial, anything you like, but not malicious. If one could only dispose of her as malicious, her words wouldn't stick.” And again, by and by, “After all, it's none of my business,--why should I take it to heart?” But somehow he did take it to heart; so that, at last, “Bah!” he cried, “I must go out and walk it off--I must get rid of the nasty taste of it.”

He went out to walk it off, Balzatore scouting a zig-zag course before him, down narrow alleys, over slender bridges. He went out to walk it off, and he walked into the very arms of it. In the multitude of wayfarers--beggars, hawkers, soldiers, priests, and citizens; English tourists, their noses in Baedeker, Dalmatian sailors, piratical-looking, swartskinned, wearing their crimson fezes at an angle that seemed a menace; bare-legged boys, bare-headed girls (sometimes with hair of the proper Venetian red); women in hats, and women in mantillas--in the vociferous, many-hued multitude that thronged the Mercerie, he met Stuart Seton.

Do you know Stuart Seton? He is a small, softly-built, soft-featured, pale, kittenish-looking man, with softly-curling hair and a soft little moustache, with a soft voice and soft languorous manners. A woman's man, you guess at your first glimpse of him, a women's pet; a man whom women will fondle and coddle, and send on errands, and laugh at to his face, and praise to other men; a man, for he has the unhallowed habit of using scent, who actually seems to smell of boudoirs. Bertram did not like him, and now, at their conjunction, stiffened instantly, from the fellow mortal, into the great personage.

“I was on my way to call on you,” said Seton, softly, languidly.

“I am unfortunate in not being at home,” returned Bertram, erect, aloof.

“I wanted to get you to give me an evening to dine,” Seton explained. “I am at the Britannia, and I have some friends there I'd like to present to you.”

“Ah?” said Bertram, his head very much in the air. “Who are your friends?”

“Only two,” said Seton. “One is Lady Dor, a charming woman, sister of Harry Pontycroft, and the other is Pontycroft's Faithful John--a very amusing gel named Adgate.”

Faithful John? The phrase was novel to Bertram, and struck him as unpleasant. “Pontycroft's _what?_” he asked, rather brusquely.

“Yes,” drawled Seton, undisturbed. “It's quite the joke of the period, in England. She is one of those preposterously rich Americans, you know,--hundred and fifty thousand a year, and that sort of thing. Pooty too, and clever, with a sense of humour. But she's gone and fallen desperately in love with poor old Harry Pontycroft, and when he's present, upon my word, she eyes him exactly as a hungry dog eyes a bone. Which must make him feel a trifle queerish, seeing that he's twenty years her senior, and by no means a beauty, and not at all in the marrying line. If he were, you can trust the British mamma to have snapped him up long before this. So she worships him from afar with a hopeless, undying flame. Poor old Ponty! Most fellows, of course, would think themselves in luck, but Ponty has all the tin he knows what to do with, and a wife would suit his book about as well as a tame white elephant. He is dog-in-the-manger in spite of himself. No others need apply.”

Bertram passed his hands across his brow, asking the spirits of the air, I daresay, where is truth? He passed his hand across his brow, while his lips uttered a kind of guttural and enigmatic _Mumph._