Part 8

“Ruth, dear, don't feel so.... Darling! I don't wonder, I do not wonder!... But after all, for him, it is an impossible predicament. He is to be pitied. You can do nothing better than to feel sorry for him. He's madly in love with you,--that's too evident. Presently you'll be able to laugh at it,--at him.”

“_Laugh_ at it?” Ruth cried. “Ah, how lightly it hits you! Laugh at it?... I shall never laugh at it, I shall never laugh at it. I can shudder and wonder at the monstrous pride it reveals, the arrogance of a little Princeling called to reign over his obscure little Principality.” She drew herself up.

“Here is that dear old uncle of mine,” said she, tightening her clasp upon the letter she still held in her hand,--“My uncle, who writes to me for the ninetieth time: 'The string is on the latchet of the door, why not come and pay a visit to your old home, have a look at your ancestral acres'?”

“Oh,” exclaimed Ruth rather hysterically, “I _will_ go and have a look at my ancestral acres! And these Wohenhoffens, these Bertrandoni, who are they to fancy themselves privileged to offer me a morganatic marriage with their son? But I execrate them! I execrate everything they represent! I, Ruth Adgate, to have been exposed to it!” And now, again, she began to sob.

Pontycroft looked exceedingly distressed.

“Child, child,” he said, “you may believe that Lucilla and I never remotely dreamed of this dénouement. I'm not in the least surprised at your indignation,--your horror,--but I am not in the least surprised, either, that poor Bertram, in the tangle of his environment, with his tradition, and impelled by a hopeless passion (oh, my prophetic eye), did what he could, has written offering you the only honourable thing he could offer you, a morganatic marriage. Absurd, outrageous though this sounds to you, it is a legal marriage, and remember that the poor chap's in a hole, a dreadful box. Shed rather a pitying tear upon his blighted young affections.... He can't hope to have you, knew probably how you'd take his offer, but he gritted his teeth and made it like the wholly decent chap he is.

“And I would even wax pathetic,” continued Pontycroft, “when I think of him. Could any fate be more depressing than his? _You'll_ never speak to him again! While he, poor fellow, is doomed to marry some sallow Grand Duchess for the sake of the Dynasty. Farewell love, farewell comradry, farewell all the nice, easy-going businesses of life. Buck up and be a Crown Prince! Become a puppet, a puppet on exhibition to your subjects. Whatever you like to do that's gay, that's human, debonair,--you'll have to do it on the sly as though it were a sin, or overcome mountains of public censure. In fact, whether you please yourself or whether you don't--the majority will always find fault with you. Poor Bertram, I say, poor old Bertram.... His proud Wohenhoffen of a mother is the only member of that Royal trio, I fancy, who is thoroughly pleased with the new order of affairs, for Civillo will soon be making matters hot for himself if he doesn't turn over a new leaf.”

V

Ruth dried her eyes.

“You were quite right when you talked of wintering in the North, Harry,” she said at length, still somewhat tremulous. “It doesn't seem as though in the North this could possibly have happened. I think you know,” she took Lucilla's hand, “I think I shall try wintering in the North--I'll accept my uncle's invitation; I'll pull the string on the latchet, I'll go and have a look at the old man and at my bleak New England acres. After all,” added Ruth, with rather a wan smile, “I suppose it's something to have acres, though one has never realised the fact or thought of it before. I haven't an idea what mine are like, but it will be good to walk on them, to feel I've got them. Here I'm always made to feel such a plebeian.--Yes, I'm _made_ to feel such a plebeian. Oh no, not by you,” Ruth clasped Lucilla's hand and looked affectionately, a trifle, too, defiantly towards Pontycroft, “but they all seem to think, even the rather ordinary ones, like Mrs. Wilberton and Stuart Seton, an American exists to be patronised. No pedigree. An American! Well, who knows, perhaps I have a pedigree. I'll go at least where I can't be patronised, where they know about me.”

Pontycroft gave a laugh, which rang not altogether gaily.

“In other words, Miss Adgate must have her experience,” he said.

“Miss Adgate's had all she wants of the old world.--She must be on with the new. Besides, her pride's been wounded.... A prince has offered her matrimony, morganatic but honourable marriage. That won't do for her. She's wounded in her feelings, outraged by the suggestion, and she includes the whole of Europe in her resentment. _Oh, my dear young lady_” said Pontycroft after another moment's silence, “don't talk to me of pride! You Americans are the devil for pride. Ruth, you've been toadied to and you fancy you've been patronised.... Well, well, have your experience. What great results from little causes flow! Prove to us that you're not only as good but a great deal better than any of us. We poor humble folk, we'll submit to anything, if when you've had your experience and are satisfied, you'll come back to us. But you don't mean it, you don't mean it! Or, if you go you'll return, you'll not forsake your adopted country, your father's friends, your's.”

Ruth's eyes darkened.

“Haven't you always, both of you, been too good to me?” she cried, reproachfully. “Ever since I was a little child, you and Lucilla, you know that you two have been, ever shall be, in my heart of hearts. But I must get away from all this; I must do something!... I must find myself!” she cried. “Say what you will, think what you like, this proposition is too loathsome. It has opened my eyes to so many things I had only felt, before! It may be all a question of wounded pride, as you say, but I know it's the proper sort of pride. I've seen it now, the whole, whole, unfriendly situation, in a flash. Lucilla,” she pleaded, “you'll sympathise with me; you won't condemn me if I go, you'll never think I love you an ounce the less?”

Lucilla stroked Ruth's hand.

“My dear,” said she, “the thing's a sheer incredible bolt out of the blue, incredible! I believe,” she said, rounding upon her brother, “I believe it's the outcome of Pontycroft's foolish talk,--the result of his passion for being paradoxical or perish. Here we were--having our teas quite innocently in the garden, like the dear nice people we are,--perfectly happy, absolutely content,--as why shouldn't we be in this paradise?” Lucilla opened her blue eyes wide upon the landscape and glanced accusingly at Pontycroft. “But you've precipitated us into a mess,” she said to him, “with your ribald talk about wintering in our water-soaked British Islands. Then comes this ridiculous letter,--and, of course, Ruth can't sit still under it. Yes, it is perhaps after all, a wholesome notion of yours, Ruth, a visit to your own country. It's the best bath you can take to wash out the taste left by Bertram's well-meant but preposterous letter. Besides,” she laughed, “you'll come back to us! America can't gobble you up for ever. But what shall we do without you!--And as for Harry, I feel sorry for him. He'll find no one to give him the change when he's in the mood for teasing, no one to keep him in his proper place. He'll become unbearable.”

“Oh,” fleered Pontycroft, “if Ruth forsakes us I will go back to _my_ native land! I'll go where I can toast my shins before my fireside and experience the solid comforts of a British Winter.... I'll go home to my duties, go where I can worry my tenants, read Mudie the livelong day; feel that I, too, am somebody!”

Ruth smiled, rather forlornly.

“I want you to observe,” Pontycroft with mock contrition enlarged, “how one evil deed begets a quantity of others--a congeries of miseries out of which, at last, good springeth like the flowering beanstalk. In idle hour (mark the magic potency of words), I speak of wintering in the North. Now as you've been told more than once,--idleness is the parent of wickedness. Lucilla assures me that in my paradoxical idleness I am a parent to a quite unexpected degree. Now observe,--the offer of a morganatic marriage follows speedily on the heels of my sin, the sin of an idle paradox. Then Ruth becomes guilty of the sin of anger--tossing her pretty head and stamping her pretty foot, she declares she won't play in our yard any longer. She stamps her pretty foot and announces she's going back to her own New England apple orchard. The rudiments of her Nonconformist, New England conscience, thoroughly roused,--her thoughts fly towards home and her aged uncle. In my remorse, I, in virtue not to be outdone, decide to go back to my duties. Lucilla, conventionalised British matron that _au fond_ she is, spite of her protests, already, because she must, assembles to her soul her list of social obligations at Dublin, the frocks to plan, and the dinner parties to give prior to the coming out and Presentation at Court of her eldest child. Home, home, home,” murmured Pontycroft, “sweet home is the tune we'll all be whistling within a month. Lucilla will carol it from her bog because it isn't considered polite to whistle in Ireland; but I, from my Saxon heath and Ruth from God's country will imitate the blackbirds. Could any tune be more acceptable to the Nonconformist conscience? Ruth, you perceive, already begins to dominate! Columbia, Ruler of the sea and wave--see how she sends us about our neglected and obvious affairs. High-ho for Winter in the North,” said Ponty. “But meantime I'm going to array myself for dinner and here comes Pietro.”

“Thank Heaven for the trivialities of life,” Lucilla put in with fervour. “Ruth, shall we don our best gowns in honour of the unexpected? Harry may dub this the call to duty; I know it's never anything so dull. I know that the spirit of adventure he's hailed has seized upon both of you, is lifting us all, will-he nill-he, out of our beautiful _dolce far niente_ into something restless, violent, and tiresome. As for me--there's nothing, naught left for me, poor me! to do but to follow your lead.”

“Yes, by all means,” Ruth lightly acquiesced.

“We'll put our best frocks on; and let us hope the call to duty decked in purple and fine linen, masquerading as the spirit of adventure, may lead us up to consummations....” She broke off. “Devoutly to be wished for,” she whispered to herself under her breath.

VI

“If I'm to be made the arbiter of other destinies when my own are more than I can manage” (they were dallying over figs and apricots at breakfast)--“pray, you two good people tell me, kindly, when shall we begin to throw our bonnets over the mill? In other words, on what day and in what month do we start in search of Winter in the North?” Ruth enquired, to a feint of cheerfulness and little dreaming.

“Oh, to-morrow--To-morrow, if you like,” jerked Pontycroft. “Wait not upon the order of your going, but start at once.”

“Start to-morrow!” Lucilla cried, “start to-morrow? Impossible.”

“Why impossible? Nothing is impossible. Ruth wants to go. She said so last night, she more than hints it, to-day. What woman wants, God wants.” Oblivious to the truth that a woman, his sister, panted to remain, Pontycroft glanced at the newspaper at his elbow. “A steamer sails from Genoa tomorrow afternoon, the _Princess Irene_. I'll go down to Humbert's this moment as ever is,” he added, “and have them wire for a deck cabin.”

“No, no,” protested Lucilla. “Why leave all this loveliness at once? Impossible! Besides, we have people coming to dinner tomorrow,” she remembered hopefully. “Thursday. The Newburys and young Worthington. We can't put them off.”

“We can, and we shall,” asseverated Ponty. “There's nothing so dreadful, Lucilla, as these long superfluous drawn-out farewells, these impending good-byes. Send Pietro, if you like, to say we've all responded to a call of duty. Tell your friends in all charity, that when duty calls the wise youth replies: 'I _won't_.' Why?... Because he knows that nine times out of ten duty is only what somebody else thinks he ought to be doing. But tell them duty's only skin deep, by way of advice. Tell them one's response to duty is generally the mere weak living up to somebody else's good opinion of one. Say to them: 'Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.' But say that in this case it's otherwise--we're not wise, and we've answered with one accord: '_I will_.' Say to them that therein lies our folly.--We're exceedingly sorry--sorry, but we must be off. It shall be a seven days' wonder, Florence shall have something to talk about. She needs brisking up. Ruth, I'm off to engage your passage. The sooner you go, the sooner you'll come back to tell us all about it,--tell us whether the play was worth the candle.”

Ponty rang for his stick and his hat, lighted the inevitable cigarette.

“Paolina will pack you up, Ruth, if she has to keep busy until midnight,” he directed, between two puffs. “Lucilla, Pietro can help Maria with your paraphernalia; when I'm back here with our tickets he'll be half through the packing. Lazy duffer though he be, once he begins, he's rapid as radium.” Ponty was gone before either Lucilla or Ruth could protest.

They looked at one another.... What ludicrous extravagance of sudden breaking up! This high-handed method of bringing matters summarily to a climax struck them both. Lucilla and Ruth broke into peals of laughter.

The irresponsible sun glared--into their eyes--played, flamboyant among the glass and silverware of the breakfast table; it winked in prismatic rays from crystal angles of honey pots and threw its splashes of blinding light over the damask table cloth, borrowing rosy tints from a mass of pink geranium in a bowl of Nagasaki ware. It glanced at all the polished surfaces of the old carved oak furniture; the room was one flagrant and joyous outburst of morning sunlight, the garden an invitation to come out, come out and play, and enjoy life from its inception! Elusive, dewy, odorous lovelinesses rested upon it, mounted from it, entreated you to step under the trees, wander among growing tender things, bathed all in a dew and glister. And called to you to come and loiter,--and mark the passage of Aurora and her maidens, hours ago.

“It's just a trifle odd to be swept off one's feet in this whoop-and-begone-with-you manner,” Ruth, with half a laugh, half a sob, commented. “Maugre the thing's to be sooner rather than later, Lucilla, I can't see though why _my_ going should mean yours, too!”

“Dear infant,” Lucilla answered, tenderly, “don't worry.... Whatever should Ponty and myself do here alone? We'd get on one another's nerves in a week and part in a temper. Since things have happened as they have, things are better as they are; leave them to hammer out their own salvation. Things, _I_ find, are very like the little sheep in Mother Goose. You let them alone and they come home, wagging their tails behind them.... But oh, oh, oh,” sighed Lucilla, “how I adore this! How I would stay here forever! It is a blow,” her voice was vibrant of regret.... “But, of course, Harry's right, he's always right. Shall we obey orders?”

“Y--es,” said Ruth. She felt a tightening at her heart, a sudden lump in her throat. The glory of the October morning had all at once departed.... A decided glamour enveloped the project of a visit to her uncle. Moreover, her heart drew her to him. The fine sense of an affront she must fly from had, too, gathered strength in the night; the indignity put upon her by Bertram's letter she must resent. Her pride protested fiercely, she must retaliate even though Ponty should express to Bertram her thanks with refusal of the honour conferred upon her. But now these emotions were quelled by an unspeakable depression, a loneliness, a sense of isolation, of dread, a dread of the Unknown.... The dread swept her off her feet. Dread of something more, too.... How was she,--how was she, Ruth Adgate,--to live away from these two people? To-morrow would mark the beginning of an ocean rolled up between her old life and the new one she would be journeying towards. To-morrow! to-morrow! To-morrow would see the end, for how many, many dreary months, of this beauty laden, gracious existence; the camaraderie of these two people whom she had reason to love best in the world, at whose side she had grown up,--Lucilla and Henry Pontycroft, whom she understood, who understood her! Instinctively, she felt she was electing for herself a grimmer fate, a sterner life and land, than any she had known, could dimly divine....

Yes, the glory of the April morning had departed into chill and nothingness. It might have already been December though it was only October, and Pontycroft had gone to buy her ticket. The first, the irremediable step was taken. She must put the best face she could upon this adventure of her choice.

Lucilla, to whom Ruth and her thoughts were transparent as flies in amber, put her arms about her neck.

“Ruth,” she whispered, “it's because he can't bear the parting, the thought of it. It's going to be a horrible break for him. What we'll either of us do when you're no longer within reach, when you are no longer part of our daily life, I can't imagine. I can't imagine any of it without you, and neither of us will want this, without you.”

Ruth's eyes glowed. Bending forward she kissed Lucilla, and they marched away, arm-inarm, to do their packing.

VII

“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” sighed Juliet.

But the girl of fourteen saw in the act an excuse for endless impassioned kisses. The world-worn poet Haraucourt better understood the disastrous effect of saying good-bye.

“_Partir_” he cries, “_c'est mourir un feu!_”

“To leave, to part, is to die a little.” Unless, indeed, death be a more desirable state than life,--as who in this world can possibly affirm, or deny,--except our Holy Mother Church?--It were safer then, never to leave, never to part. This is perhaps the true course of wisdom, to live in the same spot, content with the same people. They, after all, are sure to be exceedingly like the people one will find elsewhere; and, ten to one, prove to be verily rather nicer, as experience is apt to show. Yet Juliet and Haraucourt are agreed upon one point; parting, whether to the accompaniment of kisses or of death, a little,--parting is a sorrow.

The parting of their ways, to the three occupants of Villa Santa Cecilia, was poignant. To each, after his kind the next twenty-four hours were inexpressibly distressing. Ponty got through them stoically and worked off some of his feelings in an unconscionable and conscienceless number of cigarettes. Lucilla wept and prayed. Ruth said very little and directed her packing in a suffocation of heartache.

As the train passed out from the station at Florence, bearing her with Pontycroft towards Genoa, Ruth's tears gushed like fountains of water. Nor did she in the least try to conceal her distress from Ponty who sat quietly regarding the landscape from the other side of the compartment. It had been arranged that he should return for Lucilla, thus giving to that lady a welcome day's grace, when Ruth had been safely handed over to the Bolingbrokes, friends of Lucilla, a young Secretary from the British Embassy in Rome and his bride, on their way out, to Washington. Their names Ponty had, with relief, discovered among the list, at Humbert's of the ship's passengers.

The varied, finished, complex Tuscan landscape passed all leisurely before their eyes; the olive groves, the orange-pink willows; the white streams romping under grey arches; the villages, the mediaeval cytties, scattered by the way, the rose-coloured or white monasteries and villas on the sun-decked hillsides. From the little old churches and campaniles of the plain, from the convents perched far above them, innumerable silvery peals of chimes came floating, in tune, out of tune, it mattered not. As a matter of fact, they were shockingly out of tune; the quality of the Tuscan air is, however, so extraordinary an embellisher of sound as well as of scene, that all sounds become harmonious, even as every scene arranges itself into a primitive picture, thanks to this most beautifying of mediums.

“How can I leave it, how _can_ I leave it?” Ruth was saying to herself.

“You know, I think I'm a goose,” she let fall at last, smiling at Pontycroft through her tears.

“My sweet child,” said Pontycroft, “we must aye live and learn! And you're so young that living and learning may still be supposed to hold elements of interest. There's a lot ahead of you that's new and strange, so dry your pretty eyes, and _Sursum Corda_.”

“My soul misgives me that the new and strange will contain nothing approaching to this,” Ruth said, nodding her head towards the window. “And I don't think I shall like doing without it,” she added plaintively.

“God's country,” said Pontycroft, “won't look like this, to be sure, nor give you a single blessed one of these fine emotions, these raptures. But after all, it's the first wrench that costs, says the prophet, and since we're not here entirely, he assures us, to amuse ourselves, a visit to God's country may prove a salutary if bitter pill to a young lady surfeited with the sweets of Europe.”

“Dio mio,” Ruth cried, “since when has Pontycroft turned moralist?”

“From the hour he was made to realise the fatal effects of reckless paradox,” Ponty answered, with mock solemnity.

They fell to chaffing one another as naturally as possible and the time flew.

“_Genoa la Suferba, Genoa la Suferba!_ How perfectly, how radiantly the word describes her fits her,” murmured Ruth when, after a succession of tunnels, in the early afternoon, the sumptuous town burst upon them. The dazzling town, her flashing panoply of palaces, villas, gardens, churches, mounting up, and up--her hill, leaning firmly against the background of blue skies, blue as the Virgin Mary's robe.

“The imagination, the purpose, in those lines of architecture, those formal gardens!” cried Ruth. “How daring, uncompromising, beauty is in this land of Italy. And see, the Mediterranean, all sparkle and laughter there at her feet!” She leaned forward; then fell back against the cushions, savouring with heart as well as eyes the brilliant vision.

The train hammered heavily into the station.

“Ge--no--a! Ge--no--a!” The nasal cry reverberated through the glass-covered dome. There was noisy confusion of opening carriage doors, of passengers descending, calling, embracing, greeting; of porters running hither and yon; of trucks of luggage blocking the way amid a commotion of officialdom.

Ruth stood quietly in the uproar, and gazed upon it, and at Ponty's lank figure, while he dealt with the business of the occasion. Her heart was beating tumultuously. She felt a violent impulse to run away and hide herself.

“The beginning of the end,” she cried. “It is the beginning of the end. Why have I done this?”

A moment later she had shaken hands with the Bolingbrokes; she was saying good-bye to Pontycroft from the window of the carriage which was to take her, with her new acquaintances, to the ship.

Ruth's sympathetic Italian maid, waiting and watching in the background, in a hack laden with luggage, murmured to herself: “_Pover a, Poverella!_”

VIII