Part 3

“There was Newhampton, for instance,” Seton complacently babbled on, “the little Duke. Of course, with her supplies, she's had more or less the whole unmarried peerage after her, to pick and choose from; but she never turned a hair till Newhampton offered himself. Then she regularly broke down, and blew the gaff. A Duke! Well, a Duke's a Duke, and human nature couldn't stand it. She told him with tears in her eyes that he'd given her the hardest day's work she'd ever had to do. For I'd marry you like a shot, she said, only I'm unlucky enough to be in love with another man. Pontycroft for a fiver, said Newhampton, who's not such a fool as he looks. And, by Jove, if she didn't coolly up and tell him he was right! But the fun of it is that meantime Ponty's sister comes in for the reversion. If not the rose, she's near the rose, and she gets the golden dew. A private portable millionaire, who loves you for your brother and never shies at a bill, is a jolly convenient addition to a Christian family.”

Bertram said nothing. He stood looking down the exiguous thoroughfare, over the heads of the passers-by, a cloud of preoccupation on his brow. Lewis Vincent, Mrs. Wilberton, and now this little cad of a Seton--three witnesses. But where was truth?

“Anyhow,” the little cad, never scenting danger, in a minute went blandly on, “I hope you'll give me an evening. Miss Adgate is sure to amuse you, and Lady Dor is a person you really ought to know.”

“Thank you,” said Bertram, deliberately weighting his rudeness with a ceremonious bow, “I don't think I should care to make their acquaintance under your auspices.”

And therewith he resumed his interrupted walk, leaving Seton, open-mouthed, roundeyed, to the enjoyment of a fine view of his back.

By and bye, having (to cool his anger) marched twice round the Piazza, he entered San Marco, bidding Balzatore await his return outside. In the sombre loveliness of one of the chapels a rosary was being said. Among the score or so of women kneeling there, he saw, with a strange jump of the heart, Ruth Adgate and Lady Dor.

He turned hastily away, not to spy upon their devotions. But what he had seen somehow restored the natural sweetness of things. And the vision of a delicate head bowed in prayer accompanied him home.

PART SECOND

I

|PONTYCROFT was really, as men go, a tallish man,--above, at any rate, what they call the medium height,--say five feet ten or eleven. But seated, like a Turk or a tailor--as he was seated now on the lawn of Villa Santa Cecilia, and as it was very much his ridiculous custom to sit,--with his head sunk forward and his legs curled up beneath him, making a mere torso of himself, he left you rather with an impression of him as short. That same sunken head, by the by, was a somewhat noticeable head; noticeably big; covered by a thick growth, close-cropped, of fawn-coloured hair; broad, with heavy bumps over the thick fawn-coloured eyebrows; the forehead traversed by many wrinkles, vertical and horizontal, deep almost as if they had been scored with a knife. It was a white forehead, but the face below, abruptly from the hat-line, was as brown as sun and open air could burn it, red-brown and lean, showing its sub-structure of bone: not by any means a handsome face; nay, with its short nose, perilously near a snub, its forward-thrust chin, deeply-cleft in the middle, its big mouth and the short fawn-coloured moustache that bristled on the lip, decidedly a plain face; yet decidedly too, somehow, a distinguished, very decidedly a pleasing face--shrewd, humorous, friendly; capable, trustworthy--lighted by grey eyes that seemed always to be smiling.

They were certainly smiling at this moment, as he looked off towards Florence, (where it lay under a thin drift of pearl-dust in the sun-filled valley), and spoke in his smiling masculine voice.

“Up at the villa--down in the city,” he said. “I never _could_ sympathise with that Italian person of quality. Surely, it's a thousand times jollier to be up at the villa. Then one can look down upon the city, and admire it as a feature of the landscape, and thank goodness one isn't there.”

Ruth's eyes (with the red glint in them) laughed at him. She sat leaning back on a rustic bench, a few yards away, under a mighty ilex. She wore a frock of pale green muslin, and her garden-hat had fallen on the ground beside her, so that what breeze there was could make free with her hair.

“You are not an Italian person of quality, you see,” she said. “You are a beef-eating Britisher, and retain a barbaric fondness for the greenwood tree. You are like Peter Bell, who never felt the witchery of the soft blue sky. You have never felt the witchery of brick and mortar.”

Pontycroft, puffing his cigarette, regarded her through the smoke with a feint of thoughtful curiosity.

“The worst thing about the young people of your generation,” he remarked, assuming the tone of one criticising from an altitude, “is that you have no conversation. Talk, among you, consists exclusively of personalities--gossip or chaff. Now, I was on the point of drawing a really rather neat little philosophical analogy; and you, instead of playing flint to steel, instead of encouraging me with a show of intelligent interest, check my inspiration with idle, personal chaff. Still, hatless young girls in greenery-whitery frocks, if they have plenty of reddish hair, add a very effective note to the foreground of a garden; and I suppose one should be content with them as they are.”

Ruth ostentatiously “composed a face,” bending her head at the angle of intentness, lifting her eyebrows, making her eyes big and rapt.

“There,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I hope _that_ is a show of intelligent interest. Let me hear your really rather neat little philosophical analogy.”

“No,” said Pontycroft, with a melancholy shake of the head, “that is only a show of the irreverence of youth for age. What is the fun of my being a hundred years your elder, if you are not to treat me with proportionate respect? And as for my analogy (which, perhaps, on second thoughts, is not so neat as I fancied), if I give it utterance, I shall do so simply for the sake of clarifying it to myself. It has reference to the everlasting problem of evil. Human life is like a city; and a city seen from a distance”--he waved his cigarette towards Florence--“is like human life taken as a whole. Taken piecemeal, bit by bit, as it passes, life dismays us, and terribly tries our faith, by the Evil it presents: the pain, disease, foul play, inequalities, injustices, what you will: just as a city, when we are in its streets, revolts us with its dirt, decay, squalor, stagnant air, noise, confusion, and its sordid population. But just as the city seen from a distance, just as Florence seen from here, loses all its piecemeal ugliness, and melts into a beautiful and harmonious unity, so human life viewed as a whole.... Well, you have my analogy--which, perhaps, after all, is really rather banal. Ah me, I wish I could marry you off. Why do you so systematically refuse all the brilliant offers that I so tirelessly contrive for you?”

But Ruth seemed not to have heard his question, though he underlined it by looking up at her with a frown of grave anxiety.

“Unfortunately for us human beings,” she said, “no one has yet invented a process by which we can _live_ our life as a whole. It's all very well to talk of viewing it, but we have to _live_ it; and we have to live it piecemeal, bit by bit.”

“Well,” demanded Pontycroft, cheerfully inconsequent, “what can we ask better? Given health, wealth, and a little wisdom, it's extremely pleasant to live our life piecemeal. It's extremely pleasant to take it bit by bit, when the bits are sweet. And what, for instance, could be a sweeter bit than this?” His lean brown hand described a comprehensive circle. “A bright, crisp, cool, warm September morning; a big beautiful garden, full of fragrant airs; Italian sunshine, and the shade of ilexes; oleanders in blossom; cool turf to lie on, and a fountain tinkling cool music near at hand; then, beyond there, certainly the loveliest prospect in the world to feed our eyes--Val d'Arno, with its olive-covered hills, its cypresses, its white-walled villas, and Florence shining like a cut gem in the midst. Add good tobacco to smoke, and a simple child in white-green muslin, with plenty of reddish hair, to try one's analogies upon. What could man wish better? Why don't you get married? Why do you so perversely reject all the eligible suitors that I trot out for your inspection?”

Ruth's eyes laughed at him again. It was a laugh of frank amusement, but I think there was something dangerous in it too, a quick flash of mockery, even of menace and defiance.

“Among the train there is a swain I dearly lo' mysel',” she lightly sang, her head thrown back. “But you've never trotted _him_ out. I don't get married'--detestable expression--because the only man I've ever seriously cared for has never asked me.” She sighed--regretfully, resignedly; and made him a comical little face.

Pontycroft studied her for a moment. Then, “Ho!” he scoffed. “A good job, too. I wasn't aware that you'd ever seriously cared for any one; but if you have--believe me, he's the last man living you should think of tying up with. The people we care for in our calf-period are always the wrong people.”

Ruth raised her eyebrows. “Calf-period? How pretty--but how sadly misapplied. I'm twenty-four years old. Besides, the person I care for is the right person, the rightest of all right persons, absolutely the one rightest person in the world.”

“Who is he?” Pontycroft asked carelessly, lighting a fresh cigarette.

Still again Ruth's eyes laughed at him. “What's his name and where's his hame I dinna care to tell,” again she sang.

“Pooh!” said Pontycroft, blowing the subject from him in a whiff of smoke. “He's a baseless fabrication. He's a herring you've just invented to draw across the trail of my inquiries. But even if he were authentic, he wouldn't matter, since he's well-advised enough not to sue for your hand. Have you ever heard of a man called Bertrando Bertrandoni?”

“Bertrando Bertrandoni--Phoebus! what a name!” laughed Ruth.

“Yes,” assented Pontycroft, “it's a trifle cumbrous, also perhaps a trifle flamboyant. So his English friends (he was educated in England, and you'd never know he wasn't English) have docked it to simple Bertram. Have you ever heard of him?”

“I don't think so,” said Ruth, shaking her head.

“And yet he's a pretty well-known man,” said Pontycroft. “He writes--every now and then you'll see an article of his in one of the reviews. He paints, too--you'll see his pictures at the Salon; and plays the fiddle, and sings. A jack-of-many-trades, but, by exception, really rather a dab at 'em all. A sportsman besides--goes in for yachtin', huntin', fencin'. But over and above all that, a thorough good sort and a most amusing companion--a fellow who can talk, a fellow who's curious about things. Finally, a Serene and Semi-Royal Highness.”

“Oh?” questioned Ruth, wondering.

“Ah,” said Pontycroft, “you prick up your pretty ears. Yes, a Serene and Semi-Royal Highness. Has it ever struck you how chuckle-headed--saving their respect--our ancestors were? I suppose they drank the wrong sort of tea. Anyhow, they were mistaken about nearly everything, and most of their mistakes they elevated to the dignity of maxims. Now, for example, they had a maxim about Silence being golden, and another about Curiosity being a vice. It's pitiful to think of the enormous number of more or less tedious anecdotes they laboriously imagined to illustrate and enforce those two profound untruths. Silence golden? My dear, silence is simply piggish. Your silent man is simply a monstrous Egotist, who, in what should be the reciprocal game of conversation, takes without giving--allows himself to be entertained, perhaps enriched, at his interlocuter's expense, and is too soddenly self-complacent to feel that he owes anything in return. Oh, I know, you'll plead shyness for him--you'll tell me he doesn't speak because he's shy. In a certain number of cases, I grant, that is the fact. But what then? Why, shyness is Egotism multiplied by itself. Your shy person is a person so sublimely (or infernally) conscious of his own existence and his own importance, so penetrated by the conviction that he is the centre of the Universe and that all eyes are fixed upon him, and therewith so concerned about the effect he may produce, the figure he may cut, that he dare not move lest he shouldn't produce an heroic effect or cut an Olympian figure. And then, curiosity! A vice? Look here. You are born, with eyes, ears, and a brain, into a world that God created. You have eyes, ears, and a brain, and all round you is a world that God created--and yet you are not curious about it. A world that God created, and that man, your duplicate man, lives in; a world in which everything counts, small things as well as big things--the farthest planet and the trifling-est affair of your next-door neighbour, the course of Empire and the price of figs. But no--God's world, man's life--they leave you cold, they fail to interest you; you glance indifferently at them, they hardly seem worth your serious attention, you shrug and turn away. 'Tis a world that God created, and you treat it as if it were a child's mud-pie! Good heavens! And the worst of it is that the people who do that are mightily proud of themselves in their smug fashion. Curiosity is a vice and a weakness; they are above it. My sweet child, no single good thing has ever happened to mankind, no single forward step has ever been taken in what they call human progress, but it has been primarily due to some one's 'curiosity.'” He brought the word out with a flourish, making it big. Then he lay back, and puffed hard at his cigarette.

“Go on,” urged Ruth demurely. “Please don't stop. I like half-truths, and as for quarter-truths, I perfectly adore them.”

“Bertram,” said Pontycroft, “is a fellow who can talk, and a fellow who's curious about things.”

“I see,” said Ruth. “And yet,” she reflected, as one trying to fit together incompatible ideas, “I think you let fall something about his being a Serene and Semi-Royal Highness.”

“My dear,” Pontycroft instructed her, “there are intelligent individuals in all walks of life. There are intelligent princes, there are even intelligent scientific persons. The Bertrandoni are the legitimate grand-dukes of Altronde, the old original dynasty. They were 'hurled from the throne,' I don't know how many years ago, in a revolution, and the actual reigning family, the Ceresini, have been in possession ever since. But Bertram's father is the Pretender. He calls himself the Duke of Oltramare, and lives in Paris--lives there, I grieve to state, in the full Parisian sense--is a professed _viveur_. I met him once, a handsome old boy, military-looking, red-faced, with a white moustache and imperial, and a genially wicked eye. Anyhow, there's one thing to his credit--he had Bertram educated at Harrow and Cambridge, instead of at one of these soul-destroying Continental universities. He and his Duchess never meet. She and Bertram are supposed to live in Venice, at the palace of the family, Cà Bertrandoni, though as a matter of fact you'll rarely find either of them at home. She spends most of her time in Austria, where she was born--a Wohenhoffen, if you please; there's no better blood. And Bertram is generally at the other end of the earth--familiarizing himself with the domestic manners of the Annamites, or the religious practices of the Patagonians. However, I believe lately he's dropped that sort of thing--given up travelling and settled down.”

“This is palpitatingly interesting,” said Ruth. “Is it all apropos of boots?”

Pontycroft put on his hat, and stood up.

“It's apropos,” he answered, “of your immortal welfare. I had a note from Bertram this morning to say he was in Florence, no farther away than that. I'm going down now to call on him, and I'll probably bring him back to luncheon. So tell Lucilla to have a plate laid for him. Also put on your best bib and tucker, and try to behave as nicely as you can. For if you should impress him favourably.... Ah me, I wish I could marry you off.”

“Ah me, I wish you could--to the man I care for,” responded Ruth, with dreamy eyes, and wistfulness real or feigned.

II

“But I have already met them, your sister and Miss Adgate,” Bertram announced, with an occult little laugh. Pontycroft looked his surprise.

“Really? They've kept precious mum about it. When? Where?”

“The other day at Venice,” Bertram laughed. “I even had the honour of escorting them to their hotel in my gondola.”

Pontycroft's face bespoke sudden enlightenment.

“Oho!” he cried. “Then you're the mysterious stranger who came to their rescue when they were benighted at the Lido. They've told me about that. And oh, the quantities of brain-tissue they've expended wondering who you were!”

Bertram chuckled.

“But how,” asked Pontycroft, the wrinkles of his brow tied into puzzled knots, “how did you know who _they_ were?”

“I saw them the next day when I was at the Florian with Lewis Vincent, and he told me,” Bertram explained.

Pontycroft laughed, deeply, silently. “Thank Providence I shall be present at the scene that's coming. The man of the family brings a friend home to luncheon, and lo, the ladies recognise in him their gallant rescuer. It's amazing how Real Life rushes in where Fiction fears to tread. That scene is one which has been banished from literature these thirty years, which no playwright or novelist would dare to touch; yet here is Real Life blithely serving it up to us as if it were quite fresh. It's another instance--and every one has seen a hundred--of Real Life sedulously apeing ill-constructed and unconvincing melodrama.”

Bertram, leaning on the window-sill, and looking down at the yellow flood of the Arno, again softly chuckled.

“Yes,” he said; “but in this case I'm afraid Real Life has received a little adventitious encouragement.” He turned back into the room, the stiff hotel sitting-room, with its gilt-and-ebony furniture, its maroon-and-orange hangings. “The truth is that I've come to Florence for the especial purpose of seeing you--and of seeking this introduction.”

“Oh?” murmured Ponty, bowing. “So much the better, then,” he approved. “Though I beg to observe,” he added, “that this doesn't elucidate the darker mystery--how you knew that we were here.”

“Ah,” laughed Bertram, “the unsleeping vigilance of the Press. Your movements are watched and chronicled. There was a paragraph in the _Anglo-Italian Times_. It fell under my eye the day before yesterday, and--well, you see whether I have let the grass grow. My glimpse of the ladies was extremely brief, but it was enough to make me very keen to meet them again. After all, I have a kind of prescriptive right to know Lady Dor--isn't she the sister of one of my oldest friends? Miss Adgate,” he spoke with respectful hesitancy, “I think I have heard, is an American?”

“Of sorts--yes,” Ponty answered. “But without the feathers. Her father was a New Englander, who came to Europe on the death of his wife, when Ruth was three years old, and never went back. So she's entirely a European product.”

His smiling eyes studied for a moment the flowers and clouds and cupids painted in blue and pink upon the ceiling. Then his theme swept him on.

“He was a very remarkable man, her father. I think he had the widest, the most all-round culture of any man I've ever known; he was beyond question the most brilliant talker. And he was wonderful to look at, with a great old head and a splendid tangle of hair and beard. He was a man who could have distinguished himself ten times over, if he would only have _done_ things--written books, or what not.

“But he positively didn't know what ambition meant; he hadn't a trace of vanity, of the desire to shine, in his whole composition. Therefore he did nothing--except absorb knowledge, and delight his friends with his magnificent talk. He made me the executor of his will, and when he died it turned out that he was vastly richer than any one had thought.. Twenty odd years before, he had taken some wild land in Wyoming for a bad debt, and meanwhile the city of Agamenon had been obliging enough to spring up upon it. So, when Ruth attained her majority, I was able to hand over to her a fortune of about thirty thousand a year.”

“Really?” said Bertram, and thought of Mrs. Wilberton. This rhymed somewhat faultily with the story of a money-lender. Then, while Pontycroft, his legs curled up, sat on the maroon-and-orange sofa, and puffed his eternal cigarette, Bertram took a turn or two about the room. He didn't want to ask questions; he didn't want to seem to pry. But he did want to hear just as much about Ruth Adgate as Pontycroft might be inclined to tell. He didn't want to ask questions, and yet, after a minute, as Pontycroft simply smoked in silence, he ended by asking one.

“I think Miss Adgate is of the Old Religion?”

“Yes--her father was a convert, and a mighty fervent and eloquent one, too,” Ponty replied nowise loth to pursue the subject. “That was what first brought us together. We were staying at the same inn in one of the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and on Sunday morning all three of us tramped off nine miles to hear Mass, Ruth being then about ten. He was a man who never went in for general society. He never went in for anything usual or conventional. His life was extraordinarily detached. But he had his own little group of friends, of old cronies and young disciples, in pretty nearly every town of Europe, so that he never needed to be lonely. And he had a brother, an elder brother, whom he was always going out to America to see; General Adgate, United States Army, retired, residing at Oldbridge, Connecticut. Every spring, every summer, every autumn, old Tom Adgate made his plans to go and visit the General, and then he put the visit off. I think he'd never really got over his grief for the death of his wife, and that he dreaded returning to the places that were associated with her.”

Bertram did not want to ask questions--yet now he asked another.

“But Miss Adgate herself--has she never been to America?”

“No, she won't go,” Pontycroft said. “We've urged her, pressed her to go, Lucilla and I--not to stop, of course--but to see the place, to _faire acte de presence_. Lucilla has even offered to go with her. And the General has written fifty times begging her to come and stay with him at Oldbridge. She really ought to go. It's her native country, and she ought to make its acquaintance. But she seems to have imbibed a prejudice against it. She's been unfortunate in getting hold of some rather terrible American newspapers, printed in all the colours of the rainbow, in which the London correspondents made her and her affairs the subject of their prose. And then she's read some American novels. I'm bound to confess that I can understand her shrinking a bit, if American society is anything like what American novelists depict. The people seem entirely to lack manners,--and the novelists seem ingenuously oblivious of the deficiency. They present the most unmitigated bounders, and appear in all good faith to suppose they are presenting gentlemen and ladies.”