Part 4

“Yes,” agreed Bertram, smiling, “one has noticed that.” Then, thoughtful-eyed, pacing the floor, the world-traveller spoke: “But America is very big, and very heterogeneous in its elements, and the novelists leave a good deal out. There's no such thing as American society,--there are innumerable different societies, unassimilated, unaffiliated, and one must pick and choose. Besides, Oldbridge--didn't you say--is in New England? New England is an extraordinary little world apart, as unlike the rest of the country as--as a rural dean is unlike a howling dervish. The rest of the country is in the making, a confusion of materials that don't match; New England is finished, completed; and of a piece. Take Boston, for instance,--I really don't know a more interesting town. It's pretty, it's even stately; it's full of colour and character; it's full of expression,--it expresses its race and its history. And as for society, Boston society is as thoroughbred as any I have ever encountered--easy, hospitable, with standards, with traditions, and at the same time with a faint breath of austerity, a little remainder of Puritanism, that is altogether surprising and amusing, and in its effect rather tonic. No, no, there's nothing to shrink from in New England--unless, perhaps, its winter climate. It can't be denied that they sometimes treat you to sixty degrees of frost.”

Pontycroft blew a long stream of smoke, “I'll ask you to repeat that sermon to Ruth herself.”

Bertram halted, guiltily hung his head. “I beg your pardon--my text ran away with me. But why doesn't--if Miss Adgate won't go to America, why doesn't America come to her? Why doesn't General Adgate come to Europe?” Pontycroft's brows knotted themselves again. “Ah, why indeed?” he echoed. “Hardly for want of being asked, at any rate. Ruth has asked him, my sister has asked him, I have asked him. And it seems a smallish enough thing to do. But in his way, I imagine he's as unlike other folk as his brother was in his. He's a bachelor--wedded, apparently, to his chimney-corner. There's no dislodging him--at least by the written word. So Ruth, you see, is rather peculiarly alone in the world, as I'm afraid she sometimes rather painfully feels. She has Lucilla and me, a kind of honorary sister and brother, and in England she has her old governess, Miss Nettleworth, a cousin of Charlie Nettleworth, who lives with her, and might be regarded as a stipendiary aunt. And that's all, unless you count heaps of acquaintances, and scores of wise youths who'd like to marry her. But she appears to have devoted herself to spinsterhood. One and all, she refuses 'em as fast as they come up. She's even refused a duke, which is accounted, I suppose, the most heroic thing a girl in England can do.”

“Oh----?” said Bertram, in a tone that by no means disguised his eagerness to hear more.

“Yes--Newhampton,” said Ponty. “As he tells the story himself, there's no reason why I shouldn't repeat it. His people--mother and sister--had been at him for months to propose to her, and at last (they were staying in the same country house) he took her for a walk in the shrubberies and did his filial and fraternal duty. I'm not sure whether you know him? The story isn't so funny unless you do. He's a tiny little chap, only about six-and-twenty, beardless, rosy-gilled--looks for all the world like a boy fresh from Eton. 'By Jove, I thought my hour had struck,' says he. 'I'd no idea I should come out of it a free man. Well, it shows that honesty _is_ the best policy, after all. I told her honestly that my heart was a burnt-out volcano--that I hoped I should make a kind and affectionate husband--but that I had had my _grande passion_, and could never love again; if she chose to accept me on that understanding--well, I was at her disposal. After which I stood and quaked, waiting for my doom. But she--she simply laughed. And then she said I was the honestest fellow she'd ever known, and had made the most original proposal she'd ever listened to, which she wouldn't have missed for anything; and to reward me for the pleasure I'd given her, she would let me off--decline my offer with thanks. Yes, by Jove, she regularly rejected me--me, a duke--with the result that we've been the best of friends ever since.' And so indeed they have,” concluded Ponty with a laugh.

Bertram laughed too--and thought of Stuart Seton.

“The Duchess-mother, though,” Ponty went on, “was inconsolable--till I was fortunate enough to console her. I discovered that she had an immensely exaggerated notion of Ruth's wealth, and mentioned the right figures. 'Dear me,' she cried, 'in that case Ferdie has had a lucky escape. He surely shouldn't let himself go under double that.' But now”--Ponty laughed again--“observe how invincible is truth. There are plenty of people in England who'll tell you that they were actually engaged, and that when it came to settlements, finding she wasn't so rich as he'd supposed, Newhampton cried off.”

Bertram had resumed his walk about the room. Presently, “You know Stuart Seton, of course?” he asked, coming to a standstill.

“Of course,” said Ponty. “Why?”

“What do you think of him?” asked Bertram.

“'A fine puss-gentleman that's all perfume,'” Ponty laughed. “Oh, he's a harmless enough little beast, but it's a pity he oils his hair.”

“Hum,” said Bertram, with an air of profound thought.

Ponty looked at his watch.

“I say,” he cried, starting up; “it's time we were off.”

III

There was, however, no such scene at Villa Santa Cecilia as the man of the family (I'm afraid with some malicious glee) had anticipated. The ladies indeed recognised in his friend their gallant rescuer, and no doubt experienced the appropriate emotions, but they made no violent demonstration of them. They laughed, and shook hands, and bade him welcome; Bertram laughed a good deal, too--you know how easily he laughs; and that was all. Then they went in to luncheon, during which meal, while the ball of conversation flew hither, thither, he could observe (and admire) Ruth Adgate to his heart's content: her slender figure, her oddly pretty face, her crinkling dark hair with its wine-coloured lights, her brown eyes with their red underglow, their covert laughter. “High energies quiescent”--his own first phrase came back to him. “There's something tense in her--there's a spring--there's a tense chord. If it were touched--well, one feels how it could vibrate.” A man, in other words, felt that here was a woman with womanhood in her. 'Tis a quality somewhat infrequently met with in women nowadays, and, for men, it has a singular interest and attraction.

Pontycroft, I am sorry to record it, behaved very badly at table. He began by stealing Ruth's bread; then he played balancing tricks--sufficiently ineffectual--with his knife and fork, announcing himself as _élève de Cinquevalli_; then, changing his title to _élève du regretté Sludge_, he produced a series of what he called spirit-rappings, though they sounded rather like the rappings of sole-leather against a chair-round; then he insisted on smoking cigarettes between the courses--“after the high Spanish fashion,” he explained; and finally, assuming the wheedling tone of a spoiled child, he pleaded to be allowed to have his fruit before the proper time. “I want my fruit--mayn't I have my fruit? Ah, _please_ let me.”

“Patience, patience,” said Lucilla, in her most soothing voice, with her benignant smile. “Everything comes at last to him who knows how to wait.”

“Everything comes at once to him who will not wait,” Ponty brazenly retorted, and leaning forward, helped himself from the crystal dish, piled high with purple figs and scarlet africani.

They returned to the garden for coffee, and afterwards Ponty engaged his sister in a game of lawn-golf, leaving Ruth and Bertram to look on from the terrace, where Ruth sat among bright-hued cushions in a wicker chair, and Bertram (conscious of a pleasant agitation) leaned on the lichen-stained marble balustrade.

“Poor Lucilla,” she said to him, the laughter in her eyes coming to the surface, “she hates it, you know. But I suppose Harry honestly thinks it amuses her, and she's too good-natured to undeceive him.”

“There are red notes in her very voice,” said Bertram to himself. “Poor lady,” he said aloud. “'Tis her penalty for having an English brother. A game of one sort or another is an Englishman's sole conception of happiness. And that is the real explanation of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Englishmen take the most serious businesses of life as games--war, politics, commerce, literature, everything. It's that which keeps them sane and makes them successful.”

Ruth looked doubtful. “Anglo-Saxon superiority?” she questioned. “Do you believe in Anglo-Saxon superiority? To be sure, we're always thanking Heaven that we're so much better than our neighbours; but apart from fond delusions, _are_ we better?”

“You're at any rate fresher and lighter-hearted,” Bertram asseverated. “Englishmen always remain boys. We poor Continentals, especially we poor Latins, grow old and sad, or else sour, or else dry and hard. We take life either as a grand melodrama, or as a monotonous piece of prose; and it's all because we haven't your English way of taking it as a game--the saving spirit of sport.”

Ruth laughed a little. “Yes, and a good many Englishwomen remain boys, too,” she added musingly. “How is that beautiful dog of yours?” she asked. “Have you brought him with you to Florence?”

“Balzatore? No, I left him in Venice. He's rather a stickler for his creature-comforts, and the accommodations for dogs in Italian trains are not such as he approves of.”

Ruth opened wide her eyes. “Can they be worse than the accommodations for human beings?” she wondered.

“All I can tell you,” Bertram replied, “is that I once took Balzatore with me to Padua, and he howled conscientiously the whole way. I have never known a human being (barring babies) to do that. They shut him in a kind of drawer, a kind of black hole, under the carriage.”

“Brutes,” said Ruth, with a shudder. “Don't you rather admire our view?” she asked, first glancing up at her companion, and then directing her gaze down the valley.

“There never _were_ such eyes,” said Bertram to himself. “There never _was_ such a view,” he said to her. “With the sky and the clouds and the sun--and the haze, like gold turned to vapour--and the purple domes and pinnacles of Florence. How is it possible for a town to be at the same time so lovely and so dull?”

Ruth glanced up at him again. “Is Florence _dull?_”

“Don't you think so?” he asked, smiling down.

“I'm afraid I don't know it very well,” she answered. “The Ponte Vecchio seems fairly animated--and then there are always the Botticellis.”

“I dare say there are always the Botticellis,” Bertram admitted, laughing. “But the Ponte Vecchio doesn't count--the people there are all Jews. I was thinking of the Florentines.”

“Ah, yes; I see,” said Ruth. “They're chiefly retired Anglo-Indians, aren't they?”

“Well, isn't that,” demanded Bertram, with livelier laughter, “an entire concession of my point?”

“What are you people so silent about?” asked Pontycroft, coming up with Lucilla from the lawn. Lucilla sank with an ouf of thankfulness into one of the cushioned chairs. Ponty seated himself on the balustrade, near Bertram, and swung his legs.

“Never play lawn-golf with Lucilla,” he warned his listeners. “She cheats like everything. She even poked a ball into a hole with her toe.”

“A very good way of making it go in,” Lucilla answered. “Besides, if I cheated, it was for two good purposes: first, to hurry up the game, which would otherwise have lasted till I dropped; and then to show you how much more inventive and resourceful women are than men.”

She fanned her soft face gently with her pocket-handkerchief.

Ponty turned to Bertram. “Tell us the latest secret tidings from Altronde. What are the prospects of the rightful party?”

“Oh yes, do tell us of Altronde,” said Lucilla, dropping her handkerchief into her lap, and looking up with eagerness in her soft eyes. “I've never met a Pretender before. Do tell us all about it.”

Bertram laughed. “Alas,” he said, “there's nothing about it. There are no tidings from Altronde, and the rightful party (if there is one) has no prospects. And I am not a Pretender--I am merely the son of a Pretender, and my father maintains his pretensions merely as a matter of form--not to let them, in a legal sense, lapse. He is as well aware as any one that there'll never be a restoration.”

“Oh?” said Lucilla, her eyes darkening with disappointment; then, hope dying hard: “But one constantly sees paragraphs in the papers headed 'Unrest in Altronde,' and they seem to enjoy a change of ministry with each new moon.”

“Yes,” admitted Bertram, “there's plenty of unrest--the people being exorbitant drinkers of coffee; and as every deputy aspires to be a minister in turn, they change their ministry as often as they have a leisure moment. 'Tis a state very much divided against itself. But there's one thing they're in a vast majority agreed upon, and that is that they don't want a return of the Bertrandoni.”

“Were you such dreadful tyrants?” questioned Ruth, artlessly serious.

Pontycroft laughed aloud.

“There spoke the free-born daughter of America,” he cried.

“I'm afraid we were, rather,” Bertram seriously answered her. “If History speaks the truth, I'm afraid we rather led the country a dance.”

“In that respect you couldn't have held a candle to your successors,” put in Ponty.

“The Ceresini really are a handful. Let alone their extravagances, and their squabbles with their wives--I've seen Massimiliano staggering-drunk in the streets of his own capital. And then, if you drag in History, History never does speak truth.”

“I marvel the people stand it,” said Lucilla.

“They won't stand it for ever,” said Bertram. “Some day there'll be a revolution.”

“Well----? But then----? Won't your party come in?” she asked.

“Then,” he predicted, “after perhaps a little interregnum, during which they'll try a republic, Altronde will be noiselessly absorbed by the Kingdom of Italy.”

“History never speaks truth, and prophets (with the best will in the world) seldom do,” said Ponty. “Believe as much or as little of Bertram's vaticination as your fancy pleases. In a nation of hot-blooded Southrons like the Altrondesi, anything is possible. For my part, I shouldn't be surprised if their legitimate sovereign were recalled in triumph to-morrow.”

“Perish the thought,” cried Bertram, throwing up his hand, “unless you can provide a substitute to fill what would then become my highly uncomfortable situation.”

Ruth was looking curiously at Pontycroft. “What has History been doing,” she inquired, “to get into your bad graces?”

Pontycroft turned towards her, and made a portentous face.

“History,” he informed her in his deepest voice, “is the medium in which lies are preserved for posterity, just as flies are preserved in amber. History consists of the opinions formed by fallible and often foolish literary men from the testimony of fallible, contradictory, often dishonest, and rarely dispassionate witnesses. The witnesses, either with malice aforethought, or because their faculties are untrained, see falsely, malobserve; then they make false, or at best, faulty records of their malobservations. A century later comes your Historian; studies these false, faulty, contradictory records; picks and chooses among 'em; forms an opinion, the character of which will be entirely determined by his own character--his temperament, prejudices, kind and degree of intelligence, and so forth; and finally publishes his opinion under the title of _The History of Ballywhack_. But the history, please to remark, remains nothing more nor less than an exposition of the private views of Mr. Jones. And please to remark further that no two histories of Ballywhack will be in the least agreement--except upon unessentials. So that if Mr. Jones's history is true, those of Messrs. Brown and Robinson must necessarily be false. No, no, no; if you go to seek Truth in the printed page, seek it in novels, seek it in poems, seek it in fairy tales or fashion papers, but don't waste your time seeking it in histories.”

While the others greeted his peroration with some laughter, Pontycroft lighted a cigarette.

“I'm sure I'd much rather seek it in fashion papers,” drawled Lucilla. “They're so much lighter and easier to hold than great heavy history books, and besides they sometimes really give one ideas.”

“But don't, above all things,” put in Ruth, “seek it in a small volume which I am preparing for the press, and which is to be entitled, _The Paradoxes of Pontycroft._”

IV

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.