Part 5

“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?”

PART THIRD

I

|HE paid his visit of digestion as soon as, with any sort of countenance, he could--he paid it the next afternoon; and when he had gone, Pontycroft accused Ruth of having “flirted outrageously” with him.

Ruth, her head high, repudiated the charge with a great show of resentment. “Flirted? I was civil to him because he is a friend of yours. If you call that flirting, I shall know how to treat him the next time we meet.”

“Brava!” applauded Ponty, gently clapping his hands. Then he knotted their bony fingers round his knees, leaned back lazily, and surveyed her with laughing eyes. “Beauty angered, Innocence righteously indignant! You draw yourself up to the full height of your commanding figure in quite the classic style; your glances flash like fierce Belinda's, when she flew upon the Baron; and I never saw anything so haughty as the elevated perk of your pretty little nosebud. But

How say you? O my dove----

let us not come to blows about a word. I don't know what recondite meanings you may attach to 'flirting'; but when a young woman hangs upon a man's accents, as if his lips were bright Apollo's lute strung with his hair, and responds with her own most animated conversation, and makes her very handsomest eyes at him, and falls one by one into all her most becoming poses, and appears rapt into oblivion of the presence of other people--flirting is what ordinary dictionary-fed English folk call it.”

And he gave his head a jerk of satisfaction, as one whose theorem was driven home.

Ruth tittered--a titter that was an admission of the impeachment. “Well? What would you have?” she asked, with a play of the eyebrows. “I take it for granted that you haven't produced this young man without a purpose, and I have never known you to produce any young man for any purpose except one. So the more briskly I lead him on, the sooner will he come to--to what, if I am not mistaken”--she tilted her chin at an angle of inquiry--“dictionary-fed English folk call the scratch.”

Pontycroft gave his head a shake of disapproval. “No, no; Bertram is too good a chap to be trifled with,” he seriously protested. “You shouldn't lead him on at all, if you mean in the end, according to what seems your incorrigible habit, to put him off.” Ruth's eyebrows arched themselves in an expression of simplicity surprised.

“Why should you suppose that I mean anything of the sort?”

Pontycroft studied her with a frown. “You unconscionable little pickle! Do you mean that you would accept him?”

“I don't know,” she answered slowly, reflecting. “He's a very personable person. And he's a prince--which, of course, rather dazzles my democratic fancy. And I suppose he's well enough off not to be after a poor girl merely for her money. And--well--on the whole--don't you see?--well--perhaps a poor girl might go further and fare worse.”

She pointed her stammering conclusion by a drop of the eyelids and a tiny wriggle of the shoulders.

“In fact, when you said you would die a bachelor, you never thought you would live to be married,” Pontycroft commented, making a face, slightly wry, the intention of which wasn't clear. He felt about his pockets for his cigarette case, lighted a cigarette, and smoked half an inch of it in silence. “At any rate,” he went on, “here's news for your friends. And what--by the by--what about deathless Aphrodite? 'The only man you ever really cared for'--what becomes of that poor devil?”

A light kindled in Ruth's eyes; not an entirely friendly light; a light that seemed to threaten. But all she said was, “How do you know that that poor devil isn't Bertram Bertrandoni himself?”

The gesture with which Pontycroft flicked the ash from his cigarette proclaimed him a bird not to be caught with chaff.

“Gammon,” he said. “You'd never seen him.”

“Never seen him?” retorted Ruth, her face astonished and reproachful. “You are forgetting Venice. Why shouldn't I have lost my young affections to him that night at Venice? You haven't a notion how romantic it all was, with the moonlight and everything, and Lucilla quoting Byron, and then Astyanax, in a panama hat, dashing to our assistance like a knight out of a legend. Isn't it almost a matter of obligation for distressed females to fall in love with the knights who dash to their assistance.”

“Hruff,” growled Pontycroft, smoking, “why do you waste these pearls of sophistry on me?”

Ruth laughed.

“All right,” she unblushingly owned up. “The only man I've ever seriously cared for isn't Bertrando Bertrandoni. But what then? Let us look at it as men of the world. What has that poor devil got to do with the question of my marriage? You yourself told me that he was the last man alive I should think of leading to the altar. You said the persons we care for in our calf-period are always the wrong persons. And what some people say carries double weight, because”--that not entirely friendly light flickered again in her eyes for a second--“because they teach by example as well as precept.”

And of course the words weren't out of her mouth before she regretted them.

Pontycroft said nothing, made no sign. It may be that his sun-burned skin flushed a little, that the lines of his forehead wavered. He sat with his homely face turned towards Florence, and appeared to be considering the effect of his cigarette-smoke on the view.

Ruth waited, and the interval seemed long. She looked guilty, she looked frightened, her eyes downcast, her lips parted, a conscious culprit, bowing her head to receive the blow she had provoked. But no blow fell. She waited as long as flesh and blood could stand the suspense. At last she sprang up.

“Oh,” she cried wildly, “why don't you crush me? Why don't you tell me I'm a beast? Why don't you tell me you despise me--loathe me--for being--for being such a cad? Oh, Harry, I am so sorry.”

She stood before him with tight-clasped hands, her whole form rigid in an anguish of contrition. To have taunted him with a thing for which she should have greatly pitied him, a secret she had no right even to know, a grief, a shame, to which in decency she should never remotely have alluded--oh, it was worse than brutal, it was cattish, treacherous, it was base.

But he smiled up at her from calm eyes.

“What's the row?” he asked. “What are you sorry about? You very neatly scored a point, that's all. Besides, on the subject in question, a fellow in the course of years will have said so many stinging things to himself as to have rendered him reasonably tough. And now then”--he gaily shifted his key--“since Bertram isn't the favoured swain, let us hope he soon will be. It's every bit as easy to fall in love with one man as with another, and often a good deal easier. Come--sit down--concentrate your mind upon Bertram's advantages--and remember that words break no bones.”

Ruth's attitude had relaxed, her face had changed, contrition fading into what looked like disappointment, disillusion, and then like a kind of passive bitterness. Pontycroft waved his hand towards her chair. Automatically, absently, she obeyed him, and sat down.

“I must beg pardon,” she said, with rather a bitter little smile, “for my exhibition of emotion. I had forgotten how Englishmen hate such exhibitions. It is vulgar enough to _feel_ strong emotions--a sort of thing that should be left to foreigners and the lower classes; but to _show_ them is to take an out-and-out liberty with the person we show them to, the worst possible bad form. Well, well! Words breaks no bones; 'hearts, though, sometimes,' the poet added: but there again, poets are vulgar-minded, human creatures, born as a general rule at Camberwell, and what can they know of the serene invulnerability of heart that is the test of real good-breeding? Anyhow”--her face changed again, lighting up--“what you say about its being often a good deal easier to fall in love with one man than with another is lamentably true--that's why we don't invariably love with reason. Your thought has elsewhere found expression in song--how does it go?” Her eyes by this time were shining with quite their wonted mirthful fires, yet deep down in them I think one might still have discerned a shadow of despite, as she sang:--

Rien n'y fait, menace ou prière;

L'un parle bien, l'autre se tait;

Et c'est l'autre que je préfère,--

Il n'a rien dit, mais il me plaît.

“Thank goodness,” cried the cheerful voice of Lucilla. “Thank goodness for a snatch of song.” Plump and soft, her brown hair slightly loosened, her fair skin flushed a little by the warmth of the afternoon, she came, with that “languid grace” which has been noted, up the terrace steps, her arms full of fresh-cut roses, so that she moved in the centre of a nebula of perfume. “Only I wish now it had been a blackbird or a thrush. I've spent half an hour wandering in the garden, and not a bird sang once. The silence was quite dispiriting. A garden without birds is a more ridiculous failure than a garden without flowers. I think I shall give this villa up.” She shed her roses into a chair, and let herself, languidly, gracefully, sink into another.

“Birds never do sing in the autumn--do they?” questioned Ruth.

“That's no excuse,” complained Lucilla. “Why don't they? Isn't it what they're made for?”

“Robins do,” said Ponty, “they're singing their blessed little hearts out at this very moment.”

“Where?” demanded Lucilla eagerly, starting up. “I'll go and hear them.”

“In England,” answered her brother; “from every bush and hedgerow.”

“G-r-r-r-h!” Lucilla ejaculated, deep in her throat, turning upon him a face that was meant to convey at once a sense of outrage and a thirst for vengeance, and showing her pretty teeth. “Humbug is such a cheap substitute for wit. Why don't other birds sing? Why don't blackbirds, thrushes?”

“Because,” Pontycroft obligingly explained, “birds are chock-full of feminine human nature. They're the artists of the air, and--you know the proverb--every artist is at heart a woman. June when they woo, December when they wed, they sing--just as women undulate their hair--to beguile the fancy of the male upon whom they have designs. But once he's safely married and made sure of, the feminine spirit of economy asserts itself, and they sing no longer. _A quoi bon?_ They save their breath to cool their pottage.”

“What perfect nonsense,” said Lucilla, curling a scornful lip. “It's a well-known fact that only the male birds sing.”

“Apropos of male and female,” Ponty asked, “has it never occurred to you that some one ought to invent a third sex?”

“A third?” expostulated Ruth, wide-eyed. “Good heavens! Aren't there already two too many?”

“One is too many, if you like,” Ponty distinguished, uncoiling his legs and getting upon his feet, “but two are not enough. There should be a third, for men to choose their sisters from. You women have always been too good for us, and nowadays, with your higher education, you're becoming far too clever. See how Lucilla caught me out on a point in natural history.”

With which he retreated into the house.

II

But a week or so later, Bertram having found an almost daily occasion for coming to Villa Santa Cecilia, “It really does begin to look,” Ponty said, in a tone that sounded tentatively exultant, “as if at last we were more or less by way of getting her off our hands. _Unberufen_,” he made haste to add, zealously tapping the arm of his wicker chair.

“Oh----?” Lucilla doubted, her eyebrows going up. Then, on reflection, “It certainly looks,” she admitted, “as if Prince Bertrandoni were very much taken with her. But so many men have been that, poor dears,” she remembered, sighing, “and you know with what fortune.”

“Ah, but in this case I'm thinking of _her_,” Ponty eagerly discriminated. “It's she who seems taken with Prince Bertrandoni. I half believe she's actually in love with him--and, anyhow, I wouldn't mind betting she'd accept him. _Unberufen_.”

Lucilla's soft face wondered. “In love with him?” she repeated. “Why should you think that?”

“Oh, reasons as plentiful as blackberries,” Ponty answered. “The way in which she brightens up at his arrival, absorbs herself in him while he's here, wilts at his departure, and then, during his absence, mopes, pines, muses, falls pensive at all sorts of inappropriate moments, as one whose heart is hugging something secret and bitter-sweet. Of course, I'm only a man, and inexperienced, but I should call these the symptoms of a maid in love--and evidences that she loves her love with a B. However, in love or not, it's plain she likes him immensely, and I'll bet a sovereign she's made up her mind to marry him if he asks her.”

“Oh, he'll ask her fast enough,” Lucilla with confidence predicted. “It's only a question of her giving him a chance.”

Ponty shook his wrinkled brow. “I wish I were cocksure of that,” he said. “You see, after all, he's not as other men. On one side he's a semi-royalty, and there are dynastic considerations; on t'other side he's a Wohenhoffen, and, with every respect for the house of Adgate, I'm doubting whether the Wohenhoffens would quite regard them as even birthish. Of course, she has money, and money might go a long way towards rose-colouring their visions. Still, their vision is a thing he'd have to reckon with. No--I'm afraid he may continue to philander, and let 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,' unless she gives him a good deal more than a mere chance--unless she gives him positive encouragement--unless, in fine, by showing the condition of her own heart she sweeps the poor fellow off his feet. You question whether she's in love with him. Dear child, why shouldn't she be? 'Tis Italy, 'tis springtime, and whither should a young girl's fancy turn? Besides, she has red hair.”

“Springtime?” protested Lucilla. “I thought it was September.”

“So it is,” agreed her brother, flourishing his cigarette. “But September in Italy is proud-pied April under a pseudonym. The April winds are passional for bachelors and dames. Besides, she has red hair.”

“Red hair?” protested Lucilla. “Her hair is brown.”

“So it is,” agreed her brother, with a second flourish. “But the larger includes the less. I did not say she was a red-haired woman. A red-haired woman is red, a black-haired woman is black, and there's an end on't; expect no mystery, no semi-tones, no ambiguities. I said she had red hair, and so she has, since her hair is brown. A brown-haired woman is everything, is infinite variety, is as elusively multi-coloured as a dying dolphin. A brown-haired woman's hair is red, black, blue, green, purple, amber, with their thousand intermediates, according to mood and tense. Oh, give me a brown-haired woman, and surprises, improbabilities, perplexities, will never be to seek. A brown-haired woman has red hair, and red hair means a temperament and a temper. No, I honestly think our little brown-haired friend, in just so far as her hair is red, is feeling foolish about Bertram, and I look hopefully forward (_unberufen_) to the day when her temper or her temperament will get the better of her discretion, and let him see what's what. Then (_unberufen_) his native chivalry will compel him to offer her his hand. Thank goodness she has money.”

“It's very handsome of you,” said Ruth, for the first time coming into the conversation, though she had been present from its inception, “it's very handsome indeed of you to take so much interest in my affairs--and to discuss them so frankly before my face.”

“It _is_ handsome of us,” agreed Pontycroft, chucking his cigarette away, “and I am glad you appreciate it. For we might be discussing the weather, a vastly more remunerative theme. Has it ever struck you how inept the duffers are who taboo the weather as a subject of conversation? There's nothing else in the physical universe so directly vital to man's welfare as the weather, nothing on which his comfort so immediately depends, and nothing (to take a higher ground) that speaks such an eloquent and varied language to his sense of beauty. The music of the wind, the colours of the sky, the palaces and pictures in the clouds! Yet duffers taboo it as a subject of conversation. The weather is the physiognomy of Heaven towards us, its smile or frown. What else should we discuss? Hello, here he comes.”

Bertram came up the garden path and mounted the terrace.

“My mother,” he announced, “is arriving this evening from Vienna. I was wondering whether you would lunch with us to-morrow, to make her acquaintance.”

“Oho,” whispered Ponty in Ruth's ear, “this really does look like business. Madame Mère is coming to look you over.”

III