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Title: The Royal End
       A Romance

Author: Henry Harland

Release Date: May 3, 2016 [EBook #51980]
Last Updated: April 4, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROYAL END ***




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THE ROYAL END

A Romance

By Henry Harland

Author Of “The Cardinal's Snuff-Box”; “My Friend Prospero,” Etc.

London: Hutchinson & Co. Paternoster Row

1909





PART FIRST




THE ROYAL END


I

|BALZATORE, by many coquetries, had long been trying to attract their
attention. At last he had succeeded.

“You have an admirer,” Ruth, with a gleam, remarked to her companion.
“Mercy, how he's ogling you.”

“Yes,” answered Lucilla Dor, untroubled, in that contented, caressing
voice of hers, while, her elbow on the table, with the “languid grace,”
 about which Ruth chaffed her a good deal, she pensively nibbled a fig.
“The admiration is reciprocal. What a handsome fellow he is!”

And her soft blue eyes smiled straight into Balzatore's eager brown
ones.

Quivering with emotion, Balzatore sprang up, and in another second would
have bounded to her side.

“Sit down, sir; where are you going?” sternly interposed Bertram. Placed
with his back towards the ladies, he was very likely unaware of their
existence.

Balzatore sat down, but he gave his head a toss that clearly signified
his opinion of the restraint put upon him: senselessly conventional,
monstrously annoying. And he gave Lucilla Dor a look. Disappointment
spoke in it, homage, dogged--'tis a case for saying so--dogged tenacity
of purpose. “Never fear,” it promised, “I'll find an opportunity yet.”

He found it, sure enough, some twenty minutes later.


II

Ruth and Lucilla had been dining at the Lido, at the new hotel there,
I forget its name, the only decent hotel, in a sandy garden near the
Stabilimento. They had dined in the air, of course, on the terrace,
whence they could watch the sunset burn and die over Venice, and the
moon come up out of the Adriatic. Balzatore had been dining with Bertram
at a neighbouring table.

But now, her eyes intently lifted, as in prayer, Lucilla began to adjust
her veil.

“We can't stop here nibbling figs forever,” she premised, with the
drawl, whimsically plaintive, that she is apt to assume in her regretful
moods. “I think it's time to return to our mosquitoes.”

So they paid their bill, and set off, through the warm night and the
moonlight and the silence, down the wide avenue of plane-trees that
leads from the sea to the lagoon. In the moonlight and the silence, they
were themselves silent at first, walking slowly, feeling the pleasant
solemnity of things. Then, all at once, Lucilla softly sighed.

“Poor Byron,” she said, as from the depths of a pious reverie.

“Byron?” wondered Ruth, called perhaps from reveries of her own. “Why?”

“He used to come here to ride,” explained Lucilla, in a breaking voice.

I'm afraid Ruth tittered. Afterwards they were silent again, the silence
of the night reasserting itself, and holding them like music, till, by
and by, their progress ended at the landing-stage where they had left
their gondola.

“But what has become of the wretched thing?” asked Lucilla, looking
blankly this way and that. For the solitary gondola tied up there
wasn't theirs. She turned vaguely to the men in charge of it, meditating
enquiries: when one of them, with the intuition and the aplomb of his
race, took the words out of her mouth.

“Pardon, Lordessa,” he said, touching his hat. “If you are seeking the
boatmen who brought you here, they went back as soon as they had put you
ashore.”

Lucilla eyed him coldly, distrustfully.

“Went back?” she doubted. “But I told them to wait.”

The man shrugged, a shrug of sympathy, of fatalism. “Ech!” he said.
“They could not have understood.”

Lucilla frowned, weighing credibilities; then her brow cleared, as in
sudden illumination.

“But I did not pay them,” she remembered, and cited the circumstance as
conclusive.

The man, however, made light of it. “Ech!” he said, with genial
confidence. “They belong to your hotel. You will pay them to-morrow.”

“And, anyhow, my dear,” suggested Ruth, intervening, “as they're nowhere
in mortal sight...”

“Don't you see that this is a trick?” Lucilla stopped her, in a heated
whisper. “What you call collusion. They're lurking somewhere round a
corner, so that we shall have to engage these creatures, and be let in
for two fares.”

“Dear me,” murmured Ruth, admiring. “Who would have thought them so
imaginative?”

Lucilla sniffed. “Oh, they're Italians,” she scornfully pointed out.
“Ah, well, the gods love a cheerful victim. You will do,” she said to
the man. “Take us to the Britannia.” And she motioned to Ruth to place
herself under the tent.

But the man, touching his hat again, stood, very deferentially, with
bent back, so as to bar the way.

“Pardon, Lordessa,” he said, “so many excuses--we are private;”
 while his glance, not devoid of vainglory, embracing himself and his
colleague, invited attention to the spruce nautical liveries they were
wearing, and to the silver badges on their arms.

For a moment Lucilla Dor stared stonily at him. “Bother!” she
pronounced, with fervour, under her breath. Then her blue eyes gazed,
wide and wistful, at the moonlit waters, beyond which the lamps along
the Riva twinkled pallid derision. “How are we to get to Venice?” she
demanded helplessly of the universe.

“We must go back for the night to the hotel here,” said Ruth.

“With no luggage? Two women alone? Never heard of such a thing,” scoffed
Lucilla.

“Well then,” Ruth submitted, “I believe the lagoon is nowhere very deep.
We might try to ford it.”

“Oh, if you think it's a laughing matter!” Lucilla, with an ominous
lilt, threw out.

Meanwhile the two gondoliers had been conferring together; they
conducted their conference with so much vehemence, one might have
fancied they were quarelling, but that was only the gondolier of it; and
now, he who had heretofore remained in the background, stepped forward,
and in a tone, all Italian, of respectfully benevolent protection,
addressed Lucilla.

“Scusi, Madama, we will ask our Signore to let you come with us. There
is plenty of room. Only, we must wait till he arrives.”

“Ah,” sighed she, with relief. But in a minute, “Who is your Signore?”
 caution prompted her to ask.

“He is a signorino,” the man replied, and I'm sure he thought the reply
enlightening. “He is very good-natured. He will let you come.”

And it happened just at this point, while they stood there hesitating,
that Balzatore found his opportunity.


III

One heard a tattoo of scampering paws, a sibilance of swift breathing;
and a cold wet nose, followed by a warm furry head, was thrust from
behind under Lucilla's hand.

Startled, she gave an inevitable little feminine cry, and half turned
round--to recognise her late admirer. “Hello, old fellow--is this you?”
 she greeted him, patting his shoulder, stroking his silky ears. “You
take one rather by surprise, you know. Yes, you are a very beautiful,
nice, friendly collie, all the same; and I never saw so handsome a coat,
or so splendid a tail, or such soulful poetic eyes. I am very glad to
renew your acquaintance.” Balzatore waved his splendid tail as if it
were a banner; rubbed his jowl against Lucilla's knee; caracoled and
pranced before her, to display his graces; cocked his head, and blinked
with self-satisfaction; sat down on his haunches, and, tongue lolling
from his black muzzle, panted exultantly, “There! You see how cleverly I
have brought it off.”

“Ecco. That is our Signore's dog,” announced the man who had promised
intercession. “He himself will not be far behind.”

At the word, appeared, approaching, the tall and slender figure of
Bertram, to whom, in a sudden contrapuntal outburst, both gondoliers
began to speak Venetian. They spoke rapidly, turbulently almost, with
many modulations, with lavish gestures, vividly, feelingly, each exposed
the ladies' case.

Bertram, his grey eyes smiling (you know that rather deep-in, flickering
smile of goodwill of theirs), removed his panama hat and said, in
perfectly English English, with the accent of a man praying a particular
favour, “I beg you to let them take you to your hotel.”

The next instant, the gondoliers steadying their craft, Lucilla
murmuring what she could by way of thanks, he had helped them aboard,
and, after a quick order to the men, was bowing god-speed to them
from the landing-stage, while one hand, by the collar, held captive a
tugging, impetuous Balzatore.

“But you?” exclaimed Lucilla, puzzled. “Do you not also go to Venice?”

“Oh, they will come back for me,” said Bertram, lightly.

She gave a slight movement to her head, slight but decisive, a movement
that implied finality.

“We can't think of such a thing,” in the tone of an ultimatum she
declared. “It's extremely good of you to offer us a lift--but we simply
can't accept it if it means inconvenience to yourself.”

And Bertram, of course, at once ceded the point.

Bowing again, “Thank you very much,” he said. “I wasn't sure we
shouldn't be in your way.”

He took his seat, keeping Balzatore restive between his knees.


IV

The gondoliers bent rhythmically to their oars, the gondola went
gently plump-plump, plash-plash, over the smooth water, stirring faint
intermittent breezes; far and wide the lagoon lay dim and blue in a
fume of moonlight, silent, secret, even somehow almost sinister in its
untranslatable suggestions; and before them rose the domes and palaces
of Venice, pale and luminous, with purple blacknesses of shadow, unreal,
mysterious, dream-compelling, as a city built of cloud.

“Perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,” Lucilla--need I mention?--quoted
to herself, and if she didn't quote it aloud, that, I suppose, was due
to the presence of Bertram. She and Ruth sat close together, with their
faces towards the prow, where, like a battle-axe clearing their way
of unseen foes, the ferro swayed and gleamed; he, sidewise, removed a
little to their left. And all three were mum as strangers in a railway
carriage. But, like strangers in a railway carriage, they were no doubt
more or less automatically, subconsciously, taking one another in,
observing, classifying. “I wonder whether he's really English,” Lucilla
thought. He spoke and dressed like an Englishman, to be sure, yet so
many Italians nowadays do that; and, with a private gondola, he
presumably lived in Venice; and there was something--in the aquiline cut
of his features?--in his pointed beard?--that seemed foreign. “Anyhow,
he's a gentleman,” she gratefully reflected; and thereat, her
imagination taking wing, “Suppose he had been an ogre or a bounder?--or
a flamboyant native lady-killer?--or a little fat oily _crafaud de
Juif?_ Besides, he has nice eyes.”

About the nationality of his guests, Bertram, of course, could entertain
no question, nor about their place in the world; in their frocks, their
hats, their poise of head, turn of hand, in the general unself-conscious
selfassurance of their bearing, they wore their social history for daws
to peck at; one's eye, as it rested on them, instinctively supplied a
background of Mayfair, with a perspective of country houses. A thing
that teased him, however, was an absurd sense that he had somewhere seen
Lucilla before, seen her, known her, though he perfectly knew he hadn't.
Her youthfully mature beauty, her bigness, plumpness, smoothness, her
blondeur; those deceptively child-like blue eyes of hers, with their
superficial effect of wondering innocence, and their interior sparkle of
observant, experienced humour, under those improbably dark and regular
brows--such delicate and equal crescents as to avow themselves the
creation of her pencil; the glossy abundance of her light-brown
hair; her full, soft, pleasure-loving mouth and chin, their affluent
good-nature tempered by the danger you divined of a caustic wit in the
upward perk of her rather short nose; the whole easygoing, indolent,
sensuous--sociable, comfortable, indulgent--watchful, critical,
ironic--aura of the woman: no, he told himself, she was not a person
he could ever have known and forgotten, she was too distinctly
differentiated an individual. Then how account for that teasing sense of
recognition? He couldn't account for it, and he couldn't shake it off.

Of Ruth (egregious circumstance) he was aware at the time of noticing no
more than, vaguely, that the young girl under Lucilla's chaperonage was
pretty and pleasant-looking!

All three sat as mum as strangers in a railway carriage, but I can't
think it was the mumness of embarrassment. I can hardly imagine a woman
less shy than Lucilla, a man less shy than Bertram; embarrassment is
an ill it were difficult to conceive befalling either of them. No, I
conjecture it was simply the mumness of people who, having said all that
was essential, were sufficiently unembarrassed not to feel that they
must, nevertheless, bother to say something more. And when, for example,
Bertram, having unwittingly relaxed his grip upon Balzatore's collar,
that irrepressible bundle of life escaped to Lucilla's side and
recommenced his blandishments, they spoke readily and easily enough.

“You mustn't let him bore you,” Bertram said, with a kind of tentative
concern.

“On the contrary,” said Lucilla, “he delights me. He's so friendly, and
so handsome.”

“He's not so handsome as he thinks he is,” said Bertram. “He's the
vainest coxcomb of my acquaintance.”

“Oh, all dogs are vain,” said Lucilla; “that is what establishes the
fellow-feeling between them and us.”

To such modicum of truth as this proposition may not have been without,
Bertram's quiet laugh seemed a tribute.

“I thought he was a collie,” Lucilla continued, in a key of doubt. “But
isn't he rather big for a collie? Is he an Italian breed?”

“He's a most unlikely hybrid,” Bertram answered. “He's half a collie,
and half a Siberian wolf-hound.”

“A wolf-hound?” cried Lucilla, a little alarmed perhaps at the way in
which she'd been making free with him; and she fell back, to put him at
arm's length. “Mercy, how savage that sounds!”

“Yes,” acknowledged Bertram; “but he's a living paradox. The wolf-hound
blood has turned to ethereal mildness in his veins. And he's a very
perfect coward. I've seen him run from a goose, and in the house my cat
holds him under a reign of terror.”

Lucilla's alarm was stilled.

“Poor darling, did they abuse you? No, they shouldn't,” she said, in a
voice of deep commiseration, pressing Balzatore's head to her breast.

But the gondola, impelled by its two stalwart oarsmen, was making
excellent speed. They had passed the sombre mass of San Servolo,
the boscage, silver and sable in moonlight and shadow, of the Public
Gardens; and now, with San Giorgio looming at their left, were threading
an anchored fleet of steamers and fishing-smacks, towards the entrance
of the Grand Canal: whence, already, they could hear the squalid
caterwauling of those rival boatloads of beggars, who, on the vain
theory of their being musicians, are suffered nightly, before the
congeries of hotels, to render the hours hideous and hateful.

And then, in no time, they had reached the water-steps of the Britannia,
and a gold-laced Swiss was aiding mesdames to alight.

“Good night--and thank you so very much,” said Lucilla. “We should have
had to camp at the Lido if you hadn't come to our rescue.”

“I am only too glad to have been of the slightest use,” Bertram assured
her.

“Good night,” said Ruth with a little nod and smile--the first sign she
had made him, the first word she had spoken.

He lifted his hat. Balzatore, fore paws on the seat, tail aloft,
head thrust forward, gave a yelp of reluctant valediction (or was it
indignant protest and recall?). The ladies vanished through the great
doorway; the incident was closed.


V

The incident was closed;--and, in a way, for Bertram, as the event
proved, it had yet to begin. His unknown “guests of hazard” had
departed, disappeared; but they had left something behind them that was
as real as it was immaterial, a sense of fluttering garments, of faint
fleeting perfumes, of delicate and mystic femininity. The incident was
closed, and now, as the strong ashen sweeps bore him rapidly homewards
between the unseen palaces of the Grand Canal, it began to re-enact
itself; and a hundred details, a hundred graces, unheeded at the moment,
became vivid to him. Two women, standing in a rain of moonlight, by the
landing-stage at the Lido, brightly silhouetted against the dim lagoon;
the sudden tumultuous exordium of his men; his own five words with
Lucilla, and the high-bred musical English voice in which she had
answered him; then their presence, gracious and distinguished, there
beside him in the bend of the boat,--their cool, summery toilets, the
entire fineness and finish of their persons; and the wide, moonlit
water, and the play of the moonlight on the ripples born of their
progress, and the wide silence, punctured, as in a sort of melodious
pattern, by the recurrent dip and drip of the oars; it all came back,
but with an atmosphere, a fragrance, but with overtones of suggestion,
even of sentiment, that he had missed. It all came back, unfolding
itself as a continuous picture; and what therein, of all, came back with
the most insistent clearness was the appearance of the young girl who
had so mutely effaced herself in her companion's shadow, and whom, at
the time (egregious circumstance), he had just vaguely noticed as pretty
and pleasant-looking. This came back with insistent, with disturbing
clearness, a visible thing of light in his memory; and he saw, with a
kind of bewilderment at his former blindness, that her prettiness was
a prettiness full of distinctive character, and that if she was
“pleasant-looking” it was with a pleasantness as remote as possible from
insipid sweetness. Even in her figure, which was so far typical as to
be slender and girlish, he could perceive something that marked it as
singular, a latent elasticity of fibre, a hint, as it were, of high
energies quiescent; but when he considered her face, he surprised
himself by actually muttering aloud, “Upon my word, it's the oddest face
I think I have ever seen.” Odd--and pretty? Yes, pretty, or more than
pretty, he was quite confident of that; yet pretty notwithstanding an
absolutely defiant irregularity of features. Or stay--irregularity?
No, unconventionality, rather: for the features in question were
so congruous and coherent with one another, so sequent in their
correlation, as to establish a regularity of their own. The discreet but
resolute salience of her jaw and chin, the assertive lines of her brow
and nose, the crisp chiselling of her lips, the size and shape of her
eyes, and over all the crinkling masses of her dark hair--unconventional
as you will, he said, not attributable to any ready-made category,
but everywhere expressing design, unity of design. “High energies
quiescent,” he repeated. “You discern them in her face as in her figure;
a capacity for emotions and enthusiasms; a temperament that would feel
things with intensity. And yet,” he reflected, perpending his image of
her with leisurely deliberation, “what in her face strikes one first, I
think, what's nearest to the surface, is a kind of sceptic humour,--as
if she took the world with a grain of salt, and were having a quiet
laugh at it in the back of her mind. And then her colouring,” he again
surprised himself by muttering aloud. But when could he have observed
her colouring, he wondered, when, where? Not in the colour-obliterating
moonlight, of course. Where, then? Ah, suddenly he remembered. He saw
her standing under the electric lamps on the steps of the Britannia.
“Good night,” she said, giving him a quick little nod, a brief little
smile. And he saw how red her mouth was, and how red her blood, beneath
the translucent whiteness of her skin, and how in the glow of her brown
eyes there shone a red undergleam, and how in her crinkling masses of
dark hair there were dark-red lights....

The incident was closed, in its substance, really, as matter-of-fact
a little incident as one could fancy; but the savour of it lingered,
persisted, kept recurring, and was sweet and poignant, like a savour of
romance.

“I suppose I shall never see them again,” was his unwilling but stoical
conclusion, as the gondola shot through the water-gate of Cà Bertradoni.
“I wonder who they are.”


VI

He saw them again, however, no later than the next afternoon, and
learned who they were. He was seated with dark, lantern-jawed, deepeyed,
tragical-looking Lewis Vincent, under the colonnade at the Florian,
when they passed, in the full blaze of the sun, down the middle of the
Piazza.

“Hello,” said Vincent, in the light and cheerful voice, that contrasted
so surprisingly with the dejected droop of his moustaches, “there goes
the richest spinster in England.” He nodded towards their retreating
backs.

“Oh?” said Bertram, raising interested eyebrows.

“Yes--the thin girl in grey, with the white sunshade,” Vincent
apprised him. “Been bestowing largesse on the pigeons, let us hope.
The Rubensy-looking woman with her is Lady Dor--a sister of Harry
Pontycroft's. I think you know Pontycroft, don't you?”

Bertram showed animation. “I know him very well indeed--we've been
friends for years--I'm extremely fond of him. That's his sister? I've
never met his people. Dor, did you say her name was?”

“Wife of Sir Frederick Dor, of Dortown, an Irishman, a Roman Catholic,
and a Unionist M.P.,” answered Vincent, and it seemed uncanny in a way
to hear the muse of small-talk speaking from so tenebrous a mien. “The
thin girl is a Miss Ruth Adgate--American, I believe, but domiciled in
England. You must have seen her name in the newspapers--they've had a
lot about her, apropos of one thing or another; and the other day she
distinguished herself at the sale of the Rawleigh collection, by paying
three thousand pounds for one of the Karasai ivories--record price, I
fancy. She's said to have a bagatelle of something like fifty thousand a
year in her own right.”

“Really?” murmured Bertram.

But he could account now for his puzzled feeling last night, that he had
seen Lucilla before. With obvious unlikenesses--for where she was plump
and smooth, pink and white, Harry Pontycroft was brown and lined and
bony--there still existed between her and her brother a resemblance so
intimate, so essential, that our friend could only marvel at his failure
to think of it at once. 'Twas a resemblance one couldn't easily have
localised, but it was intimate and essential and unmistakable.

“So that is Ponty's sister. I see. I understand,” he mused aloud.

“Yes,” said Lewis Vincent, stretching his long legs under the table,
while a soul in despair seemed to gaze from his haggard face. “She looks
like a fair, fat, feminine incarnation of Ponty himself, doesn't she?
Funny thing, family likeness; hard to tell what it resides in. Not
in the features, certainly; not in the flesh at all, I expect. In
the spirit--it's metaphysical. One might know Lady Dor anywhere for
Pontycroft's sister; yet externally she's as unlike him as a pat of
butter is unlike a walnut. But it's the spirit showing through, the
kindred spirit, the sister spirit? What? You don't think so?”

“Oh, yes, I think you're quite right,” answered Bertram, a trifle
perfunctorily perhaps. “By the by, I wish you'd introduce me to her.”

“Who? I?” exclaimed Vincent, sitting up and opening his deep eyes wide,
with a burlesque of astonishment that was plainly intended to convey
a sarcasm. “Bless your soul, _I_ don't know her. I know Pontycroft, of
course, as everybody does--or as everybody did, in the old days, before
he came into his kingdom. It isn't so easy to make his acquaintance
nowadays. But Lady Dor flies with the tippest of the toppest. And I, you
see--well, I'm merely a well-born English gentleman. I ain't a duke, I
ain't a Jew, and I ain't a millionaire cheesemonger.”

He leaned his brow on the tips of his long slender fingers and gloomed
blackly at the marble table-top.

“I see,” said Bertram with a not altogether happy chuckle. “You mean
that she's a snob.”

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

“Oh? How?” asked Bertram.

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

Bertram laughed.

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

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

“Hum,” said Bertram.

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Wilberton fixed him with solemn eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Bertram had his reply ready.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bertram stared, frowning.

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

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

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

Mrs. Wilberton gave him a glance of wonder.

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

Bertram laughed, mirthlessly, grimly even.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.

“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

I don't know how it is that certain people, without doing or saying
anything that can be taken hold of, yet manage to convey to us a very
definite and constant sense that they think themselves our betters. Oh,
of course, there are people who ostentatiously carry their heads in the
air, who openly swagger, patronise, condescend, but those are not the
people I mean. I mean the people who are outwardly all pleasantness and
respectful courtesy, and inwardly very likely all goodwill, and yet--and
yet--we are somehow never allowed for an instant to forget that never
do they for an instant become unconscious of their divinely appointed
superiority.

“La Duchesse d'Oltramare, née Comtesse de Wohenhoffen,” to copy the
legend from her visiting-card, was rather a fat, distinctly an amiable
woman of fifty-something, very smartly turned out in the matter of
costume by those who are surely the cleverest milliners and dressmakers
in the world, the Viennese. She had a milk-white skin, with a little
pink in the scarcely wrinkled cheeks, and plump, smooth, milk-white
hands, with polished, rosy nails. For the rest, her smiling mouth, the
gleam of her grey eyes, and something crisp in the quality of her voice,
seemed to connote wit and a sense of humour. Her son had described
her to himself as the best-natured and the most sociable being alive;
certainly on the morrow, at luncheon, she was all pleasantness, all
cordiality even, to her son's guests; yet never, for an instant, could
one of them forget that she was perpetually conscious of herself as a
great personage, and of them as relatively very small folk indeed. I
wish I could tell, I wish I could understand, how the thing was done.
Of patronage or condescension--of the sort, at any rate, that could be
formulated and resented--there wasn't any trace either in her talk or
in her manner; nor of stiffness, pomposity, selfimportance. All
pleasantness, all cordiality, she seemed to take them at once into
her friendship, almost into her affection--she seemed to conceive (as
Bertram had promised himself she would) a particular liking for each
of them. And her talk was easy, merry, vivacious, intimate.
Yet--yet--yet----

“I'd give a thousand pounds,” said Pontycroft, as they drove home,
“for that woman's secret. She knows how to appear the joiliest old soul
unhung--and to make other people feel like her fiddlers three.”

“She's insufferable,” said Lucilla irritably. “I should think a
Pontycroft and the wife of an English baronet is as good as six foreign
duchesses. I should like to put her in her place.”

“A Pontycroft, as much as you will,” concurred her brother suavely, “but
you're only the wife of an Irish baronet, dear girl. No, it's something
subtle, unseizable. Every word, look, gesture, hailed you as her friend
and equal, and all of them together delicately kept you reminded that
she was deigning hugely to honour a nobody. It's sheer odylic force.”

“She ate like five,” Lucilla went spitefully on. “She was helped twice
to everything. And she emptied at least a whole bottle of wine.”

“Ah, well, as for that,” Ponty said, “a healthy appetite is a sign that
its owner is human at the red-ripe of the heart. You didn't, by the by,
do so badly yourself.”

“And she consumed her food with an _air_,” Lucilla persisted, “with a
kind of devotional absorption, as if feeding herself was a religious
sacrifice.”

“And I suppose you noticed also that she called Ruth 'my dear'?” Ponty
asked.

“Yes, as if she was a dairymaid,” sniffed Lucilla. “I wonder you didn't
turn and rend her.”

“Oh, I liked her,” Ruth replied. “You see, we mere Americans are so
inured to being treated with affability and put at our ease by our
English cousins that we scarcely notice such things in foreigners.”

“Well, it's lucky you like her,” said Ponty, wagging his head, “for
you're in a fair way to see a good bit of her, if events move as they're
moving. The crucial question, of course, is whether _she_ liked _you_.
If she did, I should call the deal as good as done.”

The “deal” seemed, at any rate, to advance a measurable step when,
on the following afternoon, the Duchess called at the villa, for the
purpose, as Pontycroft afterwards put it to Ruth, of “taking up your
character.”

“Dearest Lady Dor,” she said, beaming upon every one, and I wish I could
render the almost cooing loving-kindness of her intonation, “you will
forgive me if I come like this _à l'improviste?_ Yes? I was so anxious
to see you again, and when people are mutually sympathetic, it is a pity
to let time or etiquette delay the progress of their friendship, don't
you think? Oh, kind Mr. Pontycroft,” she purred, as Ponty handed her
a cup of tea. “Dear little Miss Adgate,” as Ruth passed the bread and
butter.

They drank their tea in the great hall, and afterwards, linking her
arm familiarly in Lucilla's, “Dearest Lady Dor,” she pronounced, in
the accents of one pleading for a grace, “I am so anxious to see your
beautiful garden! You will show it to me? Yes? My son has told me so
much about it.”

And when she and Lucilla, under their sunshades, were alone in the
garden-paths, “The outlook is magnificent,” she vowed, with enthusiasm.
“You have Florence at your feet. Superb. Oh, the lovely roses! I might
pick one--a little one? Yes? Ah, so kind. I wanted to ask about your
charming little friend, that nice Miss Adgate.”

“Oh?” said Lucilla, in a tone of some remoteness.

But the Duchess did not appear to notice it. “Yes,” she blithely
pursued. “You don't mind? My son has told me so much about her. She is
an American, I think?”

“Yes,” said Lucilla.

The Duchess's eyes glowed with admiration.

“Your ilex trees are wonderful--I have never seen grander ones. I am
really envious. She has nice manners, and is distinguished-looking as
well as pretty. I believe she is also--how do you say in English--_très
bien dotée?_”

“She has about thirty thousand a year, I believe,” said Lucilla.

The Duchess stood still and all but gasped. “Thirty thousand pounds?
Pounds sterling?” Then she resumed her walk. “But that is princely. That
is nearly a million francs.”

“It is a decent income,” Lucilla admitted.

“And she is also, of course, what you call--well born?” the Duchess
threw out, as if the question were superfluous and its answer foregone.

“She is what we call a gentlewoman,” answered Lucilla.

“To be sure--of course,” said the Duchess, “but--but without a title?”

“In England titles are not necessary to gentility--as I believe they are
in Austria,” Lucilla mentioned.

“To be sure--of course,” said the Duchess. “Her parents, I think, are
not living?”

“No--they are dead,” Lucilla redundantly responded.

“Ah, so sad,” murmured the Duchess, with a sympathetic movement of her
bonnet. “But then she is quite absolute mistress of her fortune? What a
responsibility for one so young. And to crown all, she is a good pious
Catholic?”

“She is a Catholic,” said Lucilla.

“The house, from here, is really imposing--really _signorile_,” the
Duchess declared, considering it through her silver-framed double
eyeglass. “There are no houses like these old Florentine villas. Ah,
they were a lovely race. You see, my son is very much interested in her.
I have never known him to show so much interest in a girl before. It is
natural I should wish to inform myself, is it not? If you will allow me,
dear Lady Dor, to make you a confidence, I should be so glad to see him
married.”

“Yes,” said Lucilla. “I suppose,” she hesitated, “I suppose it is quite
possible for him, in spite of his belonging to a reigning house, to
marry a commoner?”

The Duchess looked vague. “A reigning house?” she repeated, politely
uncomprehending.

“The Bertrandoni-Altronde,” Lucilla disjointedly explained.

“Oh,” said the Duchess, with a little toss of the head. “The Bertrandoni
do not count. They have not reigned for three generations, and they will
never reign again. They have no more chance of reigning than they
have of growing wings. The Altrondesi would not have them if they came
bringing paradise in their hands. My husband's pretensions are absurd,
puerile. He keeps them up merely that he may a little flatter himself
that he is not too flagrantly the inferior of his wife. No, the
Bertrandoni do not count. It is the Wohenhoffens who count. The
Wohenhoffens were great lords and feudal chiefs in Styria centuries
before the first Bertrandoni won his coat of arms. It was already a vast
waiving of rank, it was just not a mésalliance, when a Wohenhoffen gave
his daughter to a Bertrandoni in marriage. If my son were a Wohenhoffen
in the male line, then indeed he could not possibly marry a commoner.
But he is, after all, only a Bertrandoni. Even so, he could not marry
a commoner of any of the Continental states--he could not marry outside
the Almanach de Gotha. But in England, as you say, it is different.
There all are commoners except the House of Peers, and a title is
not necessary to good _noblesse_. In any case, it would be for the
Wohenhoffens, not for the Bertrandoni, to raise objections.”

“I see,” said Lucilla.

The Duchess, by a gesture, proposed a return to the house.

“Thank you so much,” she said, “for receiving me so kindly, and for
answering all my tiresome questions. You have set my mind quite at ease.
Your garden is perfect--even more beautiful than my son had led me to
expect. And the view of Florence! You have children of your own? Ah,
daughters. No, boys? Ah, but you are young. The proper thing for him to
do, of course, as she is without parents, would be to address himself to
your good brother?”

“As it is not my brother whom he wishes to marry,” said Lucilla, “I
should think the proper thing might be for him to address the young lady
herself.”

The Duchess laughed. “Ah, you English are so unconventional,” she said.

But after the Duchess had left them, and Lucilla had reported her
cross-examination, “You see,” said Ponty, with an odd effect of
discontent in the circumstance, “it is as I told you--the deal is
practically done. Now that mamma has taken up your character, and
found it satisfactory, it only remains for--for Mr. Speaker to put the
question. Well,” his voice sounded curiously joyless, “I wish you joy.”

“Thank you,” said Ruth, who did not look especially joyful.

There was a silence for a few minutes; then Ponty got up and strolled
off into the garden; whither, in a few minutes more, Lucilla followed
him.

“What's the matter, Harry?” she asked. “You seem a bit hipped.”

He gave her a rather forced smile. “I feel silly and grown old,” he
said. “Suppose it's all a ghastly mistake?”

“A mistake----?” Lucilla faltered.

“Oh,” he broke out, with a kind of gloomy petulance, “it was all very
well so long as it hung fire. One joked about it, chaffed her about it.
Deep down in one's inside one didn't believe it would ever really come
to anything. But now? Marriage, you see, when you examine the bare
bones of it, is a damnably serious business. After all, it involves
sanctities. Suppose she doesn't care for him?”

Lucilla looked bewildered. “Dear me,” she said. “The other day you
assured me that she did.”

“Perhaps she does--but suppose she doesn't? I was talking in the air.
Down deep one didn't believe. But this official visit from Mamma! We're
suddenly at grip with an actuality. If she doesn't care for him--by
Jove,” he nodded portentously, “you and I will have something to answer
for. It's a threadbare observation, but all at once it glitters with
pristine truth, that a woman who marries a man without loving him sells
her soul to the devil.”

“If she doesn't love him, she won't accept him. Why should she?” said
Lucilla.

“And the worst of selling your soul to the devil,” Pontycroft went
morosely on, “is that the sly old beggar gives you nothing for it.
Legends like Faust, where he gives beauty, youth, wealth, unlimited
command of the pleasures of the world and the flesh, are based upon
entire misinformation as to his real way of doing business. Look here;
the devil has been acquiring souls continuously for the past five
thousand years. Practice has made him a perfect dab at the process--and
he was born a perfect Jew. You may be sure he doesn't go about paying
the first price asked--not he. He bides his time. He waits till he
catches you in a scrape, or desperately hard up, or drunk, or out of
your proper cool wits with anger, pride, lust, whichever of the seven
deadly impulses you will, and then he grinds you like a money-lender, or
chouses you like a sharper at a fair. Silver or gold gives he none,
at most a handful of gilded farthings. And I know one man to whom he
gave--well, guess. Nothing better than a headache the next morning. Oh,
trust the devil. He knows his trade.”

“Goodness gracious!” said Lucilla, and eyed her brother with perplexity.
The wrinkles of his brow were black and deep. “You are in a state of
mind. What has happened to you? Don't be a bird of evil omen. There's
no question here of souls or devils--it's just a question of a very
suitable match between young people who are fond of each other. Come!
Don't be a croaker. I never knew you to croak like this before.”

“Hang it all,” answered Ponty, “I never had occasion. She's refused
every one. Why does she suddenly make up her mind to accept this one?
Well, I only hope it isn't because she thinks at last she has got her
money's worth of titular dignity. Her Serene Highness the Princess!”

“Goodness gracious!” said Lucilla. “I don't understand you. Would you
wish her to go on refusing people until she died an old maid?”

“I'll tell you one thing, anyhow--but under the rose,” said Ponty.

“Yes?” said Lucilla, with curiosity.

“I'll bet you nine and elevenpence three-farthings that I can beat you
at a game of tennis.”

“Oh,” said Lucilla, dashed. But after a moment, cheerfully, “Done,” she
assented. “I don't want to win your money--but anything to restore you
to your normal self.” They set off for the tennis court.


IV

And then, all at once, out of the blue came that revolution which, for
nine days more or less, made obscure little Altronde the centre of the
world's attention.

It happened, as will be remembered, when the Grand Duke was at luncheon,
entertaining the officers of his guard; and it must have been a highly
amusing scene. Towards the end of the refection, Colonel Benedetti,
contrary to all usage and etiquette, rose and said, “Gentlemen, I give
you the Grand Duke.” Whereupon twenty gallant uniforms sprang to their
feet crying, “The Grand Duke! the Grand Duke!” with hands extended
towards that monarch. Only each hand held, instead of a charged bumper
of champagne, a charged revolver.

Massimiliano, according to his genial daily custom, was already
comfortably intoxicated, but at this he fell abruptly sober. White, with
chattering teeth, “What do you mean? What do you want?” he asked.

Colonel Benedetti succinctly explained, while the twenty revolvers
continued to cover his listener. “Speaking for the army and people of
Altronde, I beg to inform Your Highness that we are tired of you--tired
of your rule and tired of your extravagant and disgusting habits. I hold
in my hand an Act of Abdication, which Your Highness will be good enough
to sign.” He thrust an elaborately engrossed parchment under the Duke's
nose, and offered him a fountain pen.

“This is treason,” said Massimiliano. “It is also,” was his happy
anti-climax, “a gross abuse of hospitality.”

“Sign--sign!” sang one-and-twenty martial voices.

“But I should read the document first. Do I abdicate in favour of my
son?”

“Your Highness has no legitimate son,” Benedetti politely reminded him,
“and Altronde has no throne for a bastard. You abdicate in favour of
Civillo Bertrandoni, Duke of Oltramare, already our sovereign in the
rightful line.”

Massimiliano plucked up a little spirit. “Bertrandoni--the hereditary
enemy of my house? That I will never do. You may shoot me if you will.”

“It is not so much a question of shooting,” said the urbane Colonel.
“We cover Your Highness with our firearms merely to ensure his august
attention. It is a question of perpetual imprisonment in a fortress--and
deprivation of alcoholic stimulants.” Massimiliano's jaw dropped.

“Whereas,” the Colonel added, “in the event of peaceful abdication,
Your Highness receives a pension of one hundred thousand francs, and can
reside anywhere he likes outside the Italian peninsula--in Paris, for
example, where alcohol in many agreeable forms is plentiful and cheap.”

“Sign--sign!” sang twenty voices, with a lilt of gathering impatience.

Of course poor Massimiliano signed, Civillo forthwith was proclaimed
from the palace steps, and at five o'clock that afternoon, amid
much popular rejoicing, he entered his capital. He had happened,
providentially, to be sojourning incognito in the nearest frontier town.


V

When next morning the news reached Villa Santa Cecilia, by the medium of
a dispatch in the _Fieramosca_, we may believe it caused excitement.

“But it can't be true,” said Lucilla. “Only two days ago the Duchess
assured me--in all good faith, I'm certain--that her husband had no more
chance of regaining his throne than he had of growing wings, and Bertram
himself has always scoffed at the idea.”

“Yes,” said Ponty. “But perhaps Bertram and his mother were not entirely
in the Pretender's confidence. This story, for a fake, is surprisingly
apropos of nothing, and surprisingly circumstantial. No, I'm afraid it's
true.”

He reread the dispatch, frowning, seeking discrepancies.

“Oh, it's manifestly true,” was his conclusion. “I suppose I ought to
go down to the Lung 'Arno, and offer Bertram our congratulations. And
as for you”--he bowed to Ruth,--“pray accept the expression of our
respectful homage. Here, instead of an empty title, is the reversion of
a real grand-ducal crown. And you a mere little American! What trifling
results from mighty causes flow. A People rise in Revolution--that
a mere little American girl may adorn her brown-red hair with a
grand-ducal crown.”

“The People don't appear to have had any voice in the matter,” said
Lucilla, poring over the paper. “It was just a handful of officers. It
was what they call a Palace Revolution.”

“It was what the judicious call a Comic Opera Revolution,” said Ponty.
“It was a Palace version of Box and Cox.”

He went down to the Lung 'Arno, and found Bertram, pale, agitated, in
the midst of packing.

“Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't talk of congratulations,” the troubled
young man cried, walking up and down the floor, and all but wringing
his hands, while his servant went methodically on folding trousers and
waistcoats. “This may be altogether the worst thing that could possibly
have happened, so far as I'm concerned.”

“I see you're packing,” Pontycroft remarked.

“Yes--we've had a telegram from my father ordering us to join him at
once. We leave at twelve o'clock by a special train. My dear chap, I'm
sick. I'm in a cold perspiration. Feel my hands.” His hands were indeed
cold and wet. He pressed one of them to his side. “And there's something
here that weighs like a ton of ice. I can hardly breathe.”

“The remedy indicated,” said Ponty, “is a brandy-and-soda.”

Bertram's gesture pushed the remedy from him.

“A single spoonful would make me drunk,” he said. “I'm as nearly as
possible off my head already. I feel as if I were going out to be
hanged. If it weren't for my mother--some one's got to go with her--upon
my word, I'd funk it, and take the consequences.”

“_Allons donc_,” Ponty remonstrated. “A certain emotion is what you must
expect--it's part of the game. But think of your luck. Think of your
grandeurs. Think of the experience, the adventure, that's before you. To
be a real, actual, practising Royalty, a Royal Heir Apparent. Think of
the new angle of view from which you'll be able to look at life.”

“Luck? Don't speak of it,” Bertram groaned. “If I had known, if I had
dreamed. But we were kept in the dark absolutely. Oh, it was outrageous
of the old man. We had a right at least to be warned, hadn't we? Since
it involves our entire destinies? Since every one of our hopes, plans,
intentions, great or small, is affected by it? We had a right to be
warned, if not to be consulted. But never a word--until this
morning--first the newspaper--and then his wire. Think of my mother
being left to learn the thing from a newspaper. And then his wire: 'Come
at once to Altronde.' I feel like a conscript. I feel like a man
suddenly summoned from freedom to slavery.”

“You'll find your chains bearable--you'll find them interesting,”
 Ponty said. “You leave at noon by a special train. Is there any way,
meanwhile, in which I can be useful to you?”

“Yes--no--no. Unless you can devise some way to get me out of the mess.
The special train is for my mother. In her own fashion she's as much
upset as I am. She could not travel _coram publico_, poor lady.”

“No, of course not. I hope you will make her my compliments,” said
Ponty, rising.

“Thank you. And you will say good-bye to Lady Dor for us and--and to
Miss Adgate,” Bertram responded. But there was a catch in his voice, and
he grew perceptibly paler. “I--I,” he stumbled, hesitated, “I will write
to you as soon as I know where I am.”

Ponty went home thoughtful; thoughtful, but conscious of an elusive
inward satisfaction. This rather puzzled him. “It's the sort of thing
one feels when one has succeeded in evading an unpleasant duty--a
sentiment of snugness, safety, safety and relief. But what unpleasant
duty have I succeeded in evading?” he asked himself. Yet there it
was--the comfortable sense of a duty shirked.

“I'm in doubt whether to hail you as the Queen Elect of Yvetot, or to
offer you my condolences upon the queering of your pitch,” he said to
Ruth. “He loved and rode away. He certainly loved, and he's as certainly
riding away--at twelve o'clock to-day, by a special train. I supposed
he would charge me with a message for you--but no--none except a
commonplace good-bye. No promise, nothing compromising, nothing that
could be used as evidence against him. However, he said he'd write--as
soon as he knew whether he was standing on his head or on his heels.
One thing, though, you might do--there's still time. You might go to the
railway station and cover his flight with mute reproaches. Perhaps the
sight of your distraught young face would touch his conscience. You
might get the necessary word from him before the train started.”

“Be quiet, Harry,” said Lucilla. “You shan't chaff her any longer.
Prince Bertrandoni is a man of honour--and he's as good as pledged to
her already. This is a merely momentary interruption. As soon as he's
adjusted his affairs to the new conditions, he'll come back.”

“Ay, we know these comings back,” answered Ponty, ominously. “But a wise
fisherman lands his fish while it's on the hook, and doesn't give it
a chance of swimming away and coming back. I see a pale face at the
window, watching, waiting; and I hear a sad voice murmuring, 'He cometh
not.'”

“You're intolerable,” Lucilla cried out, with an impatient gesture.
“Ruth, don't pay him the least attention.”

“Oh, don't mind me,” said Ruth. “I'm vastly amused. Faithful are the
wounds of a friend.”

“There's just one element of hope,” Ponty ended, “and that is that
even to demi-semi Royalty a matter of thirty thousand a year must be a
consideration.”

A column from Altronde in the _Fieramosca_ of the morrow gave a glowing
description of Bertram's and his mother's arrival, which Pontycroft
translated at the breakfast table: how the Grand Duke, in the uniform
of a general, met and tenderly embraced them as they stepped from
the train, and drove with them in a “lando di gala” through streets
brilliant with flags and thronged by cheering subjects, to the Palace,
escorted by the selfsame regiment of guards whose officers the other day
had so summarily cooked the goose of Massimiliano. “That is pretty and
touching,” was Ponty's comment, “but listen to this--this is rich. The
Grand Duke introduced them to his people, in a proclamation, as 'my most
dear and ever dutiful son, and my beloved consort, the companion and
consoler of my long exile!' What so false as truth is? Well, there's
nothing either true or false but thinking makes it so. And the mayor and
corporation, in a loyal address, welcomed Bertram as the 'heir to the
virtues as well as to the throne of his august progenitor.' His august
progenitor's virtues were jewels which, during his career in Paris, at
any rate, he modestly concealed. However! Oh, but here--here's something
that really _is_ interesting. 'The festivities of the evening were
terminated by a banquet, at which the Grand Duke graciously made a
speech.' Listen to one of the things he said: 'It has been represented
to me as the earnest aspiration of my people that my solemn coronation
should be celebrated at the earliest possible date. But unhappily, the
crown of my fathers has been sullied by contact with the brows of a
usurping dynasty. That crown I will never wear. A new, a virgin crown
must be placed upon the head of your restored legitimate sovereign. And
I herewith commission my dear son, whom Heaven has endowed, among many
noble gifts, with the eye and the hand of an artist, to design a crown
which shall be worthy of his sire, himself, and his posterity.' Well,
that will keep Bertram out of mischief. I see him from here--see
and hear him--bending over his drawing-board, with busy pencil, and
whistling 'The girl I left behind me.'”

And then a servant entered bearing a telegram.

“What will you give me,” Ponty asked, when he had opened and glanced at
it, “if I'll read this out?”

“Whom's it from?” asked Lucilla.

“The last person on earth that you'd expect,” he answered. “Come, what
will you give?”

“I believe it's from Prince Bertrandoni himself,” cried Lucilla, agog.
“If it is, we'll give you fits if you _don't_ read it out--and at once.”
 She showed him her clenched fist.

“Very good. Under that threat, I'll read it,” remarked Ponty, and he
read: “Arrived safely, but homesick for dear Villa Santa Cecilia. My
mother joins her thanks to mine for your constant kindness. Will write
as soon as an hour of tranquillity permits. Please give my affectionate
greetings to Lady Dor and Miss Adgate, and beg them not to forget their
and your devoted Bertram.”

“There!” crowed Lucilla. “What did I tell you?”

Ponty looked up blankly. “What did you tell me?”

“That he would come back--that this was only a momentary interruption.”

“Does he say anything about coming back?” Ponty asked, scrutinizing the
straw-coloured paper. “That must have missed my eye.”

“Boo,” said Lucilla. “What does he mean by the hope of an early
reunion?”

“A slip of the pen for blessed resurrection, I expect,” said Ponty.

“Boo,” said Lucilla. “It's the message of a man obviously, desperately,
in love--yearning to communicate with his loved one--but to save
appearances, or from lover-like timidity perhaps, addressing his
communication to a third person. That telegram is meant exclusively
for Ruth, and _you're_ merely used as a gooseberry. Oh, Ruth, I _do_
congratulate you.” Ruth vaguely laughed.




PART FOURTH


I

|FOR quite a week--wasn't it?--obscure little Altronde held the centre
of the stage. The newspapers of France and England, as well as those of
Italy, had daily paragraphs. Belated details, coming in like stragglers
after a battle, gave vividness to the story. Massimiliano, at Paris,
plaintively indignant, overflowed in interviews. In interviews also, in
speeches, in proclamations, Civillo adumbrated, magniloquently, vaguely,
his future policy. There were “Character Sketches,” reminiscent,
anecdotal, of Civillo, “By a lifelong Friend,” of Massimiliano, “By a
Former Member of his Household,” etc. etc. There were even character
sketches of poor Bertram, “By an Old Harrovian,” “By One who knew him at
Cambridge,” which I hope he enjoyed reading. In the illustrated papers,
of course, there were portraits. And in some of the weightier
periodicals the past history of Altronde was recalled, a bleak,
monotonous history, little more than a catalogue of murders....

With dagger thrusts and cups of poison, for something like three long
sad hundred years, the rival houses of Bertrandoni and Ceresini had
played the game of give and take. Finally, there were leading articles
condemning the revolution as an act of brigandage, hailing it as a
forward step towards liberty and light. And then, at the week's end, the
theme was dropped.

We may believe that the newspapers were read with interest at Villa
Santa Cecilia, and that to the mistress of that household, on the
subject of Altronde, they never seemed to contain enough.

“It's almost as if we'd had a hand in the affair,” she reflected; “but
these scrappy newspaper accounts leave us with no more knowledge than as
if we were complete outsiders. Why don't they give more particulars? Why
aren't they more _intime?_”

“I'll tell you what,” said Ponty, “let's go there. It's only half a
day's journey. There we can study the question on the spot.”

“Yes, and look as if we were running after him. No, thank you,” sniffed
Lucilla.

“I dare say we should look a little like accusing spirits, if he saw
us,” Ponty admitted.

“But let's go in disguise. We can shave our heads, stain our skins,
wear elastic-sided boots and pass ourselves off as an Albanian currant
merchant and his family travelling to improve our minds in foreign
politics.”

“I see Ruth and myself,” Lucilla yawned, “swathed in embroideries and
wearing elasticsided boots, and presently we should be arrested as
spies, and when our innocent curiosity had been well aired by the press,
we should look to Bertram Bertrandoni more like accusing spirits than
ever.”

“You women,” growled Pontycroft, extracting a cigarette from his
cigarette case, “are so relentlessly cautious! You have no faith in the
unexpected! That's why you'll never know the supreme content of throwing
your bonnets over the mills, regardless of consequences.”

“The Consequences!” Lucilla retorted, “they're too obvious. We should be
left bareheaded, _et voilà tout!_”

“Ah, well--there you are,” replied Ponty, and touched a match to his
cigarette.

Yes, we may believe that the newspapers were read with interest at the
Villa Santa Cecilia and that they gave the man there occasion for what
his sister called “a prodigious deal of jawing.”

“Well, my poor Ariadne,” he commiserated, “ginger is still hot in the
mouth, and Naxos is still a comfortable place of sojourn. Our star has
been snatched from us and borne aloft to its high orbit in the heavens;
we from our lowly coigne of earth can watch and unselfishly rejoice at
its high destiny. Of course, the one thing to regret is that you didn't
nail him when you had him. Nail the wild star to its track in the half
climbed Zodiac,” he advised, sententious.

And in spirit ripe for mischief, Ponty bethought him of a long-forgotten
poem, and he went all the way down to Vieusseux to procure a volume of
the works of Wordsworth. Henceforth, dreamily, from time to time, he
would fall to repeating favourite lines. For nearly a day Ruth bore,
with equanimity tempered by repartee, a volley of verse:

               “He was a lovely youth, I guess”

said Ponty,

               “The panther in the wilderness

               Was not so fair as he.”

“I cannot dispute it. He was good-looking,” Ruth suavely returned.

“But,”--this he let fall from the terrace an hour later, to Ruth engaged
below in snipping dead leaves from Lucilla's clambering rose bushes,--

               “But, when his father called, the youth

               Deserted his poor bride, and Ruth

               Could never find him more.”

“Fathers make, like mothers, I imagine, a poor substitute for brides,”
 said Ruth. She glanced at him with amusement. “Never, my nurse used to
tell me, is a good while. Did that foolish youth find his bride?” she
added, absorbed apparently in her occupation, “when he came back to
claim her? As he did at last, you may rest assured.”

Pontycroft made no reply to this question, but he placed his book on the
table and prepared to descend the steps:

               “God help thee, Ruth,”

he exclaimed.

               “Such pains she had

               That she in half a year went mad.”

“I'm sure she would have gone mad in twenty-four hours if you had been
by to persecute the poor thing,” answered Ruth. She beat a hasty retreat
towards the Pergola, whither, she knew, Ponty's laziness would check
pursuit of her.

“When Ruth was left half desolate,” Ponty, casually, after luncheon,
observed--

               “Her lover took another state.

               And Ruth not thirty years old.”

“Ruth, it seems to me, was old enough to have known better,” retorted
his victim with asperity. “You haven't scanned that last line properly
either. 'And Ruth not thirty years old' gives the correct lilt.” Ruth
sat down to write her letters. She turned her back with deliberation
upon her tormentor, who answered: “Oh, yes, thanks,” and went off
murmuring and tattooing on his fingers,--

               “And Ruth not thirty years old....”


II

Towards five o'clock of that day, Lucilla and Ruth, spurred and
booted--hatted and gloved from their afternoon's drive, appeared for tea
upon the terrace. Ponty without loss of time opened fire:

               “A slighted child, at her own will,

               Went wandering over dale and hill

               In thoughtless freedom bold.”

“Only that I can't wander, in thoughtless freedom bold, over dale and
hill in this fair false land of Italy,” cried Ruth, exasperated, “I
should start at once for a fortnight's walking tour. I feel an excessive
desire to remove myself from a deluge of poetic allusions which
threatens to get on my nerves. Moreover,” she added severely, “I quite
fail to see their application.”

She sat down, drew her gloves off with a little militant air, and
prepared to pour the tea which the servant had placed upon a table
at her elbow. In the fine October weather the terrace, provided with
abundance of tables, chairs and rugs, made, with its superb view over
Florence, the pleasantest of _al fresco_ extensions to the drawing-room.

“There, there, there, Ruthie!” soothed Pontycroft, “don't resent a
little natural avuncular chaff. _I must play the fool or play the
devil_. You wouldn't wish to suppress my devouring curiosity, would you?
Here's a situation brimful of captivating possibilities. You wouldn't
have me sit in unremunerative silence, in sterile torpor before this
case of a little American girl, who, on any day of the week, may be
called to assume the exalted rôle of Crown Princess of Altronde?”

“Yes,” frowned Ruth, “I should very much like to suppress your
devouring curiosity; I should like extremely to reduce you to a state
of unremunerative silence, torpor, on that verily sterile topic. And,
moreover, so far as I can see, the Royal Incident may now be billeted
closed, for weal or for woe.”

“One can never be quite sure about these Royal Incidents,” her tormentor
persisted, “that's the lark about 'em--they're never closed. For sheer
pig-headed obstinacy give me a Crown Prince. Our friend Bertram is
capable of letting his Queen Mamma in for a deal of trouble in view of
present circumstances, if she should, as she's likely to do--want now to
marry him off to some Semi-Royalty or German Grand Duchess or another.”

“_Si puo_,” riposted Ruth with hauteur, “I withdraw myself in advance
from the competition. And I should like, please, to be spared any more
allusions to the subject.”

But here Lucilla, who had been sipping her tea and worshipping the view,
interrupted them:

“Do _please_ cease from wrangling,” she implored. “Hold your breaths
both of you--and behold!”

A haze all golden,--an impalpable dust of gold,--filled the entire
watch-tower of the Heavens. Florence, twice glorified, lay bathed in
yellow light that filtered benignantly upon roofs and gardens, played,
glanced, upon Duomo, Campanile, and Baptistry. The Arno had become a way
of gold. Webs of yellow gauze, spun across the streets and reflected by
a thousand windows, made, among the many gardens, a burnished background
for the twigs and branches of dark aspiring cypresses, glossy leaved
ilexes.

Ruth and Pontycroft held their breaths, and, for a moment, there was a
silence.

“I wonder,” Lucilla said at length,--she gave a little soft sigh
of satisfaction,--“I wonder what Prince Bertrandoni has done with
Balzatore.... Taken him, do you suppose, to reign over the dogs of
Altronde? I miss that dog sadly.”

“Balzatore?--Oh,” said Ponty, “Balzatore is throning it at the Palazzo
Reale.... He has a special attendant who waits on him, sees to his
bodily comforts; prepares his food, takes him for his walks,--for of
course Bertram is far too involved in Court functions, too tied by
etiquette and the fear of Anarchists to go for long solitary rambles;
and Balzatore bullies the servants, one and all, you may be sure. Dogs,
even the best of 'em, are shocking snobs. In a measure Balzatore is
enjoying himself. It hardly requires a pen'orth of imagination to be
positive of it. And,” Pontycroft continued, “I hear that the Palazzo
Bertrandoni has been leased for a number of years to an American
painter. By the way, it seems that Bertram's bookcases, which,
saving your presences, I grieve to state, were filled with very light
literature--the writings of decadent poets, people who begin with a
cynicism”--Pontycroft paused, hesitated for the just word.

“A cynicism with which nobody ends!” Ruth interjected.

“Invaluable young thing! Thanks awfully. Who begin, as you say, with a
cynicism with which nobody ends, as you quite aptly infer. Filled, too,
I regret to state, with rare editions, a trifle, well--perhaps a bit
eighteenth century--and with yellow paper-covered French novels. These
bookcases are expiating a life of frivolity within the four walls of
a Convent. They were offered by Bertram's mother to some Sisters of
Charity whose temporal welfare she looks after. The good nuns were glad
to have the shelves for their poor schools and have packed them with
edifying books.... So it happens that to-day they ornament both sides
of the Convent-Parloir, and thus it is that Bertram's bookshelves are
atoning for the gay, wild, extravagant, old days within convent walls.”

Lucilla tittered. “Shall our end be as exemplary?” Ruth asked, pensive,
“or will it fade away into chill and nothingness--like the glory of
this,” she smiled at Pontycroft, “April afternoon? B-r-r-r-----” She
gave a little shiver.

Pontycroft pulled himself to his feet.

“Tut, tut!” said he. He proffered two white garments which lay over the
back of a chair to Ruth and to his sister. “What are these melancholy
sentiments? Aren't you contented? Aren't you satisfied, aren't you
pleased here?” he asked, and he eyed Ruth inquisitorially.

“Oh yes,--oh yes, I am,” Ruth quickly assured him. “But I do get, now
and then, tiresome conscientious scruples. In these halcyon hours I
wonder if it isn't my duty to go and have a look at my dear old uncle,
all alone there, in America.”

“Ruth--my dear Ruth!” cried Lucilla.

“Why doesn't your 'dear old uncle' come and have a look at you? I think
it's _his_ duty to do so; I've thought so for many a day.”

“Oh, he's bound to his fireside, I suppose,” Ruth answered, a touch of
melancholy in her voice. “He's wedded to his chimney corner, his books.
At seventy-two it's a bore, perhaps, to go wandering into foreign
parts.”

“Foreign parts!” Lucilla cried with some scorn. “Are we Ogres?
Barbarians? Do we live in the Wilds of America?”

“My dear infant, beware,” cautioned Pontycroft, “beware of the
rudiments in your nature of that terrible New England instrument of
torture, the Nonconformist Conscience. Despite your Catholic upbringing
it will, if you indulge it, I fear, lead you to your ruin. The
Nonconformist conscience, I beg you to believe, makes cowards of us all.
Now I should suggest a much better plan, and one I have always approved
of. Let's _pack up our duds_, as the saying goes, in your country; let's
return to sane and merry England; let us for the future and since the
pinch of Winter is at our heels, Summer in the South and Winter in the
North.”

“England?” gasped Lucilla and Ruth in one breath.

“Why not?” enquired the man of the family. “You are, after all, never so
comfortable anywhere, in Winter, as in an English Country House. Roaring
fires, invisible hot-water pipes; cozy dark days, libraries full of
books, Mudie by post two hours away. Wassailing and Christmas waits;
holly and mistletoe, hey for an English winter, sing I! Plum pudding,
mince pies, tenants to tip, neighbours, hospitalities.”

“Ugh,” Lucilla wailed, “Perish the awful thought! Neighbours 'calling in
sensible, slightly muddy boots' (as your favourite author too truthfully
has it), in tweeds and short skirts;--and for conversation--Heaven
defend us! The turnip crops, the Pytchley, penny readings, and the
latest gossip anent a next-door neighbour. Night all the day--night
again at night--and whisky-and-soda at eleven, day or night,--eternally
variegated by that boring, semper-eternal Bridge. You'll have to go
without me,” declared Lucilla flatly.

“Have you generally Wintered in the North, Summered in the South?” Ruth
queried with a gleam.

“No--No,--” replied Pontycroft reflectively, “no,--but if one hasn't
really tried it since one's callow days the idea does speak to one. It
isn't all beautiful prattle,” he assured her, “but the idea does appeal
to one. As one grows old one prefers to be comfortable. A pabulum of
beauty is all very well for young things like yourself here and Lucilla
who still hug the precious foolish delusion that Beauty is Truth, Truth
Beauty.”

Pontycroft's indolent glance encompassed Florence,--that fair spectacle
she presents, in the aura of twilight,--the exquisite hour, _l'heure
exquise_. Her amphitheatre of hills,--her white villas, even now charged
with rose by the evening glow,--aglow her churches, her gardens
and black cypresses. “Yet this is all too like,” he commented, “the
enchanter's dream,--at a puff!... No! Fact, Fact, solid Fact is the
desideratum! Fact's your miracle in a nutshell. What you and Lucilla
call Truth alters with every fresh discovery of man, his climate,
education, point of view. Man carries your Beauty in his eye, ears,
senses. But Fact, humanly speaking, Fact doesn't give you the least
trouble. There it is. Did it never occur to you how splendidly reposeful
a fact it is that a turnip field's a turnip field, until you sow beans
to rejuvenate it? And here's another, equally comforting: The spider
spins its web from its own vitals. Ah, Facts spare one such a deal of
thinking, such a lot of enthusiasm!... In your country, my dear young
thing,” Pontycroft turned to Ruth, “in your strange, weird, singular,
incomprehensible country they sow buckwheat cakes when the turf on the
lawn's been killed by frosts; and when the buckwheat cakes have grown,
and blossomed--they plough them back into the earth, and sow their
grass--and in a month you have your velvet robe again. In similar manner
the fact that a cozy English Winter's a cozy English Winter is one
agreeably worthy your attention.”

“This flummery of rose bushes,” went on Pontycroft, while his arm
described a semicircle,--“this romance of nodding trees laden with
oranges ornamental to the landscape; this volubility of heliotrope,
mimosa, violets in January, all, all--in a conspiracy to lure one to sit
out o' doors and catch an internal, infernal chill,” he sneezed; “all
this taken together is not worth that one fine solid indisputable
British Fact, a comfortable English Winter! Uncompromising cold without,
cheer within.”

“But it's not Winter yet,” Lucilla argued plaintively, “it's only
October. Hadn't you better apply the fact of an overcoat to what you've
been telling us? You've plunged _me_ into anything but a state of cheer
with your sophistries--this absurd juggling with the doleful joys of an
English Winter!”

“_Apropos_ of the joys of an English Winter, I wonder whether the post
has come?” said Ruth, jumping up. “Pietro's delicacy about disturbing
us at tea Lucilla won't call mere laziness. I'll send him for your
overcoat,” she added, with a laughing nod, and vanished through the
French windows.


III

“Ah,--you see!”

Pontycroft after Ruth's departure ponderated thus on the tone of
significance, to his sister. “Ah, ha! You see.... She's eager for news.
She's expecting something.... She's on the watch for every post.”

“You're quite off the scent, Harry,” returned his sister languidly.
Lucilla, it was plain, was still disturbed by her brother's chaff.

“It's her uncle's semi-annual missive she's so eagerly on the lookout
for. The child nourishes a perfect hero-worship for the old man; she
writes to him six times to his one. His letters come with military
precision, once in a six month. They're invariably brief, and they
invariably wind up with this hospitable apophthegm, 'Remember the
string's on the latchet of the door whenever you choose to pull it.
Whenever you care to look upon your home in Oldbridge you will find a
hearty welcome from your affectionate uncle,' then a sabre thrust, his
name,--presumably.”

Lucilla rose, with that languid grace she was so famous for. She went
to the edge of the terrace and leaned upon the balustrade, where she
remained, silently taking in her fill of the peaceful landscape.


IV

Ten minutes elapsed.

Pontycroft, in silence, smoked and wafted the rings of his cigarette
towards Florence. And then Ruth reappeared.

She looked pale in the dusk, agitated. In her hands were a couple of
letters, she held out one to Lucilla.

“Read it,”--her voice trembled,--“Tell me what I have done to be
so insulted,” she commanded; and then she turned away her face, and
suddenly she began to weep. Pontycroft watched her in consternation. He
had never, in all the years he had known her, he had never seen Ruth in
tears.

Lucilla took the letter, blazoned with a gold crown. She read down the
page, she turned over to the next, she read on to the end.

“May I see it?--May I see it, Ruth?” Pontycroft asked gently.

Ruth bowed her head. As Pontycroft read she looked at him, her hands
lying idly in her lap; and she saw his face cloud as he read. But he,
having finished the communication, fell silent for a moment.

“Poor Bertram!” he let fall at last, dropping the letter upon the table.

“_Poor_ Bertram!” cried Ruth. She dabbed her eyes, she made an immense,
unsuccessful effort to control herself, quell the ire in her heart.

“Poor Bertram!” she broke forth scornfully. “What have I done, _what can
I have done_, to be subjected to such an indignity? Did I lead him on?
If I had encouraged him! Lucilla, speak, speak the truth. You both know
I did nothing of the sort!” And Ruth stamped her foot. “Has the Heir
Apparent to that obscure little Principality called Altronde had any
encouragement from me of any kind?... Notwithstanding his visits here,
notwithstanding the amusement you've had at my expense!” Ruth looked
wrathfully at Pontycroft. “And this, this deliberate, this detestable,
this cold-blooded proposition. And you can say '_Poor_ Bertram'!” But
then she fell to sobbing violently.

Lucilla flew to her, folded protecting arms about her.

“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

Ruth, in a misery of wild light-headedness, responded as well as she
could to the civilities of her two travelling companions, while they
drove through narrow, animated streets. They reached the docks. There
lay the massive ship, its relentless black hulk resting abroadside, in
ominous expectation of some mysterious coming change. Ruth walked up
the white gangway. The turmoil, the excited crowd, the stolid
stewards,--lolling,--indifferent yet curious sentinels,--the ragged
throng of emigrants passing endlessly into the forecastle, the noise
of clanking wains and girders hoisting trunks and freight into mid air,
all, gave to her a sense of doom, of the finality of things in chaos....
Half an hour passed before she was able to go to her room. Telegrams
were handed to her, even flowers, fruit; thus rapidly does news spread;
she had to talk with friends of the Bolingbrokes come to bid them
God-speed, to look pleasant and pleased as everybody else did.

But when at last Ruth closed the door of her cabin behind her, she
took a little step forward and with a cry threw herself upon the couch.
Regardless of Paolina, who was already opening bags and unfolding
dresses, she permitted herself the luxury of a passionate outburst of
grief. A tornado of pent misery racked her; she pressed her face into
the linen pillow to deaden the sound of her sobbing, her hands against
her breast.

“Signorina, Signorina, do not feel so badly,” cried the good Italian
maid, dropping Ruth's lace and beribboned morning gown and running
towards her. “Oh, do not weep. It is very sad to have to leave our
lovely Italian land, so beautiful, so _carina_. But do not weep so! What
will the Signora Dor say if I allow you to make yourself ill? Think!
It is I who should be weeping. It is I who am leaving all behind me,
my country, my sister, my mother, and yet I do not weep.” But the tears
belied her words and welled from her eyes.

Ruth clasped the girl's hand affectionately. She felt grateful for the
warm Italian heart. Paolina at least was there, to keep her recollected
in the exquisite life she was forsaking. Why she was forsaking it, now
seemed to her an absolutely incomprehensible riddle. For the nonce she
could remember not one of her substantial reasons for doing so.

Paolina withdrew the pins from Ruth's hat, removed it from her hair and
put it away.

“You have crushed your pretty hat, Signorina,” she said, reproachfully.
Then, very much in the tone a mother would use to distract a child:

“You did not see how pale the Signor Pontycroft looked when he said
good-bye,” she added, “and Maria told me the Signora had not slept the
whole night, but kept going constantly to your door and listening to
know whether you were asleep. They love you very much. It must be good
to be loved so much,” the girl continued wistfully. “That must comfort
you. And you will soon come back to them, to Italy, when you have seen
your Signor uncle and your American home--for I am very sure they cannot
live without you.”

“Oh, Paolina, I am so unhappy,” Ruth said, simply. “But leave me,”
 she smiled to the girl through her tears, “I will call you when I feel
better.”

Paolina turned to go, then came back, lifted Ruth's hand, kissed it. “I
hope you will pardon me, Signorina,” she added shyly, “_Scusi_, if I
say, we must always smile, it pleases God better.”

And Paolina left the room.

For a long while, Ruth, quite still, battled with her feelings. A fresh
passion of grief overtook her.... When at last it had spent itself, she
drew her Rosary, which she carried in the gold bag in her hand, from
its sheath. Slowly, the sweetness of the five decades passed into her
spirit, she felt comforted. Peace filled her heart. There was only, now
and then, the ache, where before there had been uncontrollable despair.
She stood up, bathed her face, rang for Paolina, and began removing the
tortoise-shell pins from her hair.

“Paolina,” she cried, as the maid entered the room. “Paolina,” she
twisted her hair again into its thick coil, “we are going to enjoy
ourselves now! No more tears, no more regrets. You are quite right. We
must smile to the good God if we wish Him to smile on us! Make haste and
give me a short skirt and a warm coat, and my cap and veil. I long to
get out and breathe the air and fill my eyes with a sight of the shores
of Italy.”

At dinner and during the rest of the evening, as they steamed down the
coast towards Naples, Ruth was an irresistible _precis_ of smiles and
vivacity. The Bolingbrokes were captivated.

“Richard,” the young Mrs. Bolingbroke told her lord when they were
alone together, “that Miss Adgate is a most charmin' girl. What was
that nonsense Mrs. Wilberton retailed about her runnin' away from Henry
Pontycroft whom she's hopelessly in love with? She is in love with no
man! You can't deceive me!” Mrs. Bolingbroke cried gaily. “It's easy
to see from the fun she's positively bubblin' over with that her heart
isn't weighted by any hopeless passion. She's never been in America
before she says, and it's the great adventure of her life.... She's
goin' to visit an old uncle, whom she's never seen but adores. Her
childlike enjoyment of doin' it quite alone (she has her maid with her)
and her eagerness about it, is quite fascinatin'. Although she is
so rich, she's evidently seen very little of the world,” said Mrs.
Bolingbroke, who happened to be a year Ruth's junior, but had the
feeling of knowing the world thoroughly from within and from without.

“Yes,” her husband answered guardedly; he remembered that a First
Secretary must show diplomatic reticence in his judgments, even to his
wife. “Yes, Miss Adgate does seem rather a decent sort. I dare say the
story is all a fabrication. She does seem a nice sort of unsophisticated
young creature and I dare say the story's all a fabrication. Just the
pretty charitable way people have of talking. I can see no objection to
your enjoying as much of her society as you like, Isabel.”

Thus it happened that safe in her husband's blessing upon the
friendship, Mrs. Bolingbroke, all unsuspected by Ruth, became her
champion.




PART FIFTH


I

|AN Indian summer day, idle and tender, lay over hills and woods,
meadows, river. The quaint little Old Town of Oldbridge, set among apple
orchards and gardens and avenues of elms, received this last Benediction
of Nature with an agreeable _ouf!_ of respite from imminent grim winter
approaches.

It is difficult to account, by any utilitarian motive on the part of our
“brown and green old Mother Earth,” for her November caprice of a New
England Indian summer, though I make no doubt the scientists will have
some prosaic reason to give which we are asked to take upon faith. But
since fruit, in New England, is garnered in September, and the toughest
plants are burned to a crimson glory by October frosts, no ripened fruit
or renewal of leaves defend the vagary. And so--will-he nill-he, we
praise Heaven which made our “bounteous mother” feminine forsooth; we
gratefully credit the enchanted fortnight to her bountiful illogical
womanhood.

The Old Town of Oldbridge, then, basking under the Indian summer's
morning blandishment while it sipped its mocha and partook of
grape-fruit towards eight of the clock, pushed an agreeable
_ouf!_--awake to agreeable titillations of excitement. General Adgate's
niece, lovely and rich, admirable combination--Miss Adgate (Ruth Adgate,
they already called her, didn't she belong to them?) had arrived. The
event, discreetly mentioned in the Oldbridge _Morning Herald_, stared
them in the face. Some boasted a glimpse of her, the day before, seated
in the brougham beside her uncle; a pretty girl with reddish brown hair.
Others had seen of her nothing but her outward manifestations on the
luggage cart--two big brass-bound cork trunks, a cabin trunk, precisely
similar, a square hat-box, a dressing case and a dark-eyed Italian maid.

The man of all work, Jo, brought this luggage into the house, with
the gardener's assistance, and up to Ruth's rooms. Now he wiped the
perspiration from his face. Arms akimbo, brows warped in puzzled frown,
he glared at the encumbrances.

“Well, I be durned!” he burst forth. “Glad I ain't got any of them
things to carry round when I go a travelling. One carpet bag's big
enough for me, when I visit my folks, to Falls Junction.”

“Lucky you're glad,” Martha, the efficient, the tart, the very tart
housemaiden snapped, and put him instantly in his place. “Not likely
soon, we'll catch you towering it with a valet and trunks.”


II

As to the unconscious subject of comment and curiosity, Miss Ruth
Adgate,--Miss Adgate was ecstatic. Her heart in its rapture wanted to,
did, engulf the house, and the land and the hill, and the inmates of
the Old Adgate place, and the entire town of Oldbridge. Something new,
something strange had indeed happened for her joy had begun to bubble
and ferment from the moment her foot passed the threshold of the house.
No--from the hour the train, on its sideline to Oldbridge, had begun to
move beside the river, bearing her for thirty minutes from one little
way-station to another.

The sentiment of an autumnal New England landscape spread beneath clean
thoughtless blue skies,--vistas of grey rocks and sedges by the river at
the one hand,--where the dark green savins, reminding her of cypresses
in Italy, sprang through the grey clefts;--and across the river, hills,
low, wooded, interspersed with green and brown and orange
pastures, through which cropped the same venerable grey New England
rock,--harmonious and austere,--this perspective, enchanting in its
tonic beauty, was grievously, alas! debased and disfigured.

Ignoble little wooden packing cases liberally dotted by the way screamed
with the crudest colours, 'the crudest rainbow scale disgorges on the
palate.' Gigantic hoardings, flaunting ridiculous local remedies and
foods for every prevalent disease or dyspeptic stomach insolently
stared at one;--the very backs and sides of barns and packing cases were
decorated with their insignia!

“They need a Thames Conservancy, a County Council, something,” Ruth
protested to her outraged sense of beauty, “to save this splendid river,
control such unpuritanical abandonments to colour and commerce.”

Miss Adgate, you perceive, was naïvely confident--oh, serene British
confidence! that taste governs the world, that the world rays and rules
so soon as the world discovers it is acting in bad taste.

But these blemishes were, after all, insignificant affairs--details
incidental to an untutored modern public. What Miss Adgate's inward
vision vividly perceived through the windows of the shabby long car with
its soiled velvet cushions, and air of unworldliness,--which pleased
her,--its smell of stale apples and anthracite coal smoke which didn't
please her,--was the _land_. The land without a flaw of commerce! Hidden
lives that took her blood back three hundred years, led her imagination.

Undeniably, the effect of this country was not one of abundance....
It was not varied and enhanced by a thousand fair human touches;
the neglected land was uncouthly rough.... Nor was it in the least
suggestive of the poetry, art, emotion,--the loves, the hates--of
nineteen hundred vanished sumptuous years. (One might have likened it
rather to the starved and simple beggar-maid waiting for the King.)
But it was hers, it was _hers!_... She was _of it!_... Miss Adgate was
deliciously cognisant that this fact filled her heart to overflowing
with sweet content.

“This land saw my forbears!... This land for three hundred years gave
them all they asked of life.... It opened its heart to them, therefore
I love it, therefore I love it!” she repeated softly to herself. “And if
this elation is patriotism--the mere patriotism dubbed Reflex Egotism by
the cynics,--well--poor dears! What dear poor dears the cynics be!”

Miss Ruth Adgate gave a pleased sigh and turned her eyes again upon the
view. They fell upon a bit of grey rock, a group of savins and scarlet
barberry bushes loitering beside a piece of water... a composition Diaz
would have thankfully imprinted, for reproduction, on his retina. The
little pool, from brink to brink, coyly reflected these and the clear
blue sky, and in the foreground twenty feet of hoarding bore the legend:
“Try Grandpa Luther's Syrup of Winter-green for your Baby's Tantrums.”

Ruth fell back with rather a rueful laugh.


III

“Next station?--O--Oldbridge,” sang out the cherubic faced conductor and
Ruth's heart began to palpitate.

“I _will_ smile,” she said, “I won't be absurd.” And she fixed her gaze
resolutely on the landscape, arrested, at once, by some subtle change in
it.

Perceptibly, the meadows displayed a softer, more velvety grass; the
trees grew, more finely luxuriant, the cliffs rose boldly. A hint of
human intention, the touch of elegance, a something thoroughbred, spoke
aloud.... The few last miles through which Miss Adgate jolted gave
symptoms of civilisation.

“O--O--ldbridge!”

The guard intoned it nasally, with complete resignation,--a twenty
years' fatiguing habit; and an intimation too, in his voice, that the
goal of human travel had been reached. The train slackened.... One saw,
spanning the river, a black bridge latticing the green and the blue;
one caught glimpses of a town, white houses scattered up the slopes of
wooded hills.

Several trim white yachts rested on the water; small sailboats glided,
hither and yon, and little skiffs and slim rowboats floated by to
a leisurely motion, manned by a single young oarsman, a girl seated
hatless, in the bow. The gay scene under the yellow sunlight, the
rippling, the smiling river, the warm waning afternoon--alive,
sparkling, seemed an invitation to her full of promise.

“Come, Paolina,” said Ruth, with inward trepidation. “Come, Paolina.”

Miss Adgate summoned her courage as the train stopped with a jerk.

She passed--heroic effort--through the car to the platform, while
Paolina took the dressing-case and followed, moved like her mistress and
as tremulous.

Ruth scanned the faces in the friendly brick station. The white head,
the features, familiar from photograph presentment, were--not there!
But a hand, extended at the last step to help her descend, caused her
to turn. Her arms in an instant had flung themselves impulsively about a
figure which stood at her side.

“Uncle!” cried Ruth. Her heart ceased to pound, her nervousness gave way
to an immense inward satisfaction. Tears sprang to her eyes--but,
what did it matter? My heroine would be less charming were she less
impressionable and one does not gather upon every bush, an uncle _in
loco parentis_.

“Well, well, my dear!--we've got you here at last, Ruth,” said the tall,
thin, old man. He looked down at her fondly, a good face full of kindly
scrutiny.

“You've brought belongings of sorts?” General Adgate enquired as he
conducted Ruth towards the carriage whilst the young girl felt half a
dozen pairs of curious eyes fixed upon her.

“If that's your maid tell her there's a seat for her in the luggage
cart near Jobias,” said General Adgate. He handed his niece into the
brougham, Paolina received her instructions, they drove off.


IV

And for a moment they sped in silence, up a side street, into an open
square of shops and brick buildings, for all the world like the High
Street of any English Provincial town.

“But how English it looks!” Ruth exclaimed.

“Does it? Why not?” said General Adgate. “However,” he added, “we pride
ourselves, further on, that we're distinctively American.”

The brick buildings surely enough dissolved into avenues set with superb
elms. Big comfortable houses encircled by verandas,--many adorned
with those fluted Corinthian columns, mark in Oldbridge of the early
nineteenth century,--all snugly set back among flower gardens and lawns,
emanated peace, prosperity, good will.

“This place must be Arcady in summer.... How charming it is,” Ruth
cried, delighted. “These gardens in flower, these trees in leaf----”

“It's not so bad,” said General Adgate, dryly. “Longfellow christened it
the Rose of New England.”

“But------,” he added, “we call this the City of Oldbridge, a modern
matter. You, Ruth, belong to the Court End of the town--you are of what
we call the Old Town.”

Vastly amused at the distinction, a Yankee Faubourg Saint Germain,
Ruth plied him with questions. In five minutes the agreeable news that
she,--the last of the house of Adgate in America, Ruth Adgate verily
the salt of the earth, tracing a clean English ancestry back to the
crusades, to mistier periods beyond, here held her Yankee acres in grant
first from an English Sovereign, and, without a drop of blood-shed from
Indian Sachems,--gave to her humourous sense of proportion somewhat to
smile over.

On they went,--under endless prospects of arching elm trees, whose
branches threw oblique attenuated shadows among the rays of the
descending sun. A few soft clouds at the horizon were tinted rosy
and red. Then the very blue, blue sky, suffused with violet and rose,
suddenly flared. Far and wide, from earth to zenith, far and wide the
sky burst into a glorious scarlet conflagration.

The city lay behind, meadows stretched broadly at either side, and
to the right a pretty line of hill and wood etched itself against the
blushing clouds.

“The beginning of your acres, my dear,” said the old man, bowing his
head. “There they lie, untouched, just as James the First ceded them
to your forefathers, just as the Indian Sachems of the Mohegan Tribe
confirming the gift, withdrew from 'em. The bit of wood there is known
to this day as the Wigwam and the last Indian hut in this State
disappeared when it was destroyed by fire a hundred years ago.”

They had passed a road that wandered into the woodland, they were
rolling smartly by stone walls that shut in a goodly reach of close-cut
lawn all seamed and scarred by grey jutments of rock, which rising,
mounting, reached a hill through terraced gardens trimly laid and
skirting the summit. The carriage took a sharp sweep upward into a
gravelled drive, rolled on a few paces, stopped abruptly before a brown,
rambling house,--Miss Adgate had reached the end of her journey.

“Welcome home,” said General Adgate, as he helped Ruth to alight. He
bent down, kissed her, and led her up the steps into the house.


V

It was morning. It was nine of the clock. Miss Adgate walked, alone,
through a path that penetrated to the Wigwam. Almost hidden by a thicket
of sweet fern, juniper, barberry and briar which grew at either side,
which clung too affectionately to her skirts and from which she had
difficulty in disengaging herself, the path, she thought, might have led
her to the Palace of The Sleeping Beauty.

It was morning, as I have said, and it was the morning of her first
day, and early abroad, Miss Adgate strolled in a pleasant sort of
reverie,--thinking of nothing, perhaps, or thinking of a number of
things. The Indian summer sunshine filtered upon her through half-bare
branches not quite denuded of their yellow and purple and scarlet
leafage; and every now and then a leaf came fluttering down in the light
breeze. A squirrel, now and then, darted out along a branch, paused--and
like an Italian lizard, all a-gleam and a-whisk, gleamed, whisked, and
disappeared. But Ruth knew two little black beadlike eyes still watched
her, as she went, from behind the lattice-screen of twigs.

Every now and then she passed a formidable, a monumental boulder;
moss-grown; covered with grey lichen; dropped there by some glacier,
æons since, unless Heaven, it occurred to her, had placed it where it
stood, and why not? for picturesque intent?... Every now and then a
tardy bluejay flitted by, lighted upon a branch and sent forth his
imperious _cha, cha, cha!_... Or a woodpecker, in the distance, made
his tapping noise as he sounded the trees for his meal. A dry twig
would break, suddenly,--come tumbling head foremost down, down through a
rustle of leaves, and all these sounds struck upon Miss Adgate's ears
in her reverie, gave her exquisite pleasure. She enjoyed the romance and
the solitude of this wild wood; she delighted in the knowledge that
she was walking safely through her own preserves; and _treve de
compliments_, her uncle had left her upon a brief good-bye after
an early breakfast. Ruth burned to discover alone, he knew, her
domain--General Adgate had divined it without a hint.

“You'll want to take a walk this morning through your woods, Ruth,”
 said he. “Cross the hill,--you'll find a road to the right leading by
a brook,--follow the road,--it takes you over the brook by a bridge and
soon becomes a path. No one will molest you, it's yours.”

“What, the brook as well?” queried she, feeling, somehow, like a very
little girl in his presence.

“Yes, and the brook as well. You can't get away from your
preserves,--they stretch on for miles.”

So it was that Miss Adgate, abroad at nine o'clock, happened to be off
for a matutinal stroll through paths wet and dewy, glad of her freedom,
glad to be alone in a new world, surrender herself to the romance of a
new train of thought.

She came, presently, to a clearing in the wood. The path ended,
abruptly, at a flat bed of rock which descended for some hundred feet to
another opening in the wood. There were bayberry and barberry and fern
along the way, slashed scarlet by the frosts; there were fifty plants
she promised to herself to learn the names of, which gave forth strong,
sweet scents in the hot sun. Ruth sat down. A swish, through the dry
leaves, a stir of the brown grass, told of the frightened escape of some
little living thing, and set her heart to palpitating unaccountably with
love for it.

Her mood had become a trifle exalted, her perceptions quickened by
her promenade. Each insect, bird, bush she came upon began to assume a
personality; claimed the privilege to live upon her land. She was the
suzerain of their little lives; she could have held a court of justice;
she could have dispensed favours, played their games, ruled them, thrown
herself into their griefs and joys, with heart and soul. Seated here, in
the warm sun, on the warm stone checked with patches of green and brown
club-moss, she inhaled the crisp fragrance of the bushes under the sun's
kisses; she looked afar, on to the trees below and over their heads at
the vivid sky, and upon faraway violet hills, and upon green and orange,
brown and guileless meadows. The world seemed good and wonderful, and
she felt exceedingly content.

“The Ruth Adgate who spent twenty years of her life in Europe is no
more,” she thought, lightly. “The young person who has tasted most of
the sweets of European civilisation, walked in marble halls, refused a
Duke, run away from the outrage offered her dignity by the offer of a
morganatic marriage with a Crown Prince,--the lovesick girl who wandered
through the moonlight at the Lido, floated upon the silent lagoons of
Venice, discoursed with wits in lovely gardens in Florence, and herself
the cause of wit in others, hung upon their discourse--that was quite
another person! That was but an early incarnation, never the real Miss
Adgate. _This_ is the real Miss Adgate! In spite of every influence to
the contrary,--the product of her native land.”

Lucilla, Pontycroft--Pontycroft, Lucilla! How far away they seemed....
Their names stirred her heart as she pronounced them. But even so--was
not this best? The present Miss Adgate in a short skirt, a blue, soft
felt hat, tip-tilted over her eyes, a stick in her hand, her thoughts
for all society; Miss Adgate with this hardy New England nature for
background,--Ruth Adgate taking a solitary walk upon her own land, with
the feeling that good will and satisfaction smiled at her because of
her presence there, was not this the Real person who had found her true
niche in the world?

“How singular,” she reflected. “The transformation has taken place
overnight. It is almost as though I had been here forever! And to-day
I feel as though I had a destiny--as though Fate had something up her
sleeve here for me. I've begun like one of Henry Harland's heroines and
I'm convinced that whatever the Powers are preparing for me--I shall
accept it here,--just as I accept all this--gratefully, gaily, without
demur.”

Ruth glanced at the violet hills and the guileless meadows and a thrill
passed through her. She jumped up, a white hand held to shade her face.

“_Basta!_ I've rested long enough, the sun here is too hot,” said Miss
Adgate. “I think I'll discover what lies beyond, in the heart of that
wood there,” and off she started, blushing at her emotion.

A company of crows in a distant field caw-cawed, querulously, at her.
Their raucous voices fitted the rough woodland, the vigorous autumn
smells, the haze of the mellow golden morning. She came again to the
little brown brook gurgling quietly over its bed of brown stones and
leaves and the fancy took her to follow its course. Wet feet were of no
consequence, determined to see all of her possessions Ruth skirted its
purling side and discovered presently that here the brook, lifted from
the earth by hand of artifice, was confined to a long, shallow, wooden
aqueduct, an aqueduct open to the air and to the tracery of boughs
above and to blue skies reflected in the water. Through this conduit
the little brook bubbled and bounded, clear as crystal; icy cold to the
touch as she dipped her hand in and let the water run along her wrist.

“Ah,” thought the young lady, “this must be our famous spring!--I've
reached the headquarters of the Nile or I'm very near them.” And through
the trees in truth, she perceived, further on, a rough hut, built to
protect the stream's source from inroads of man and beasts.

She sat herself on a fallen tree trunk, leaned back and gazed with
half-closed eyelids into the network of branches--oaks, larches, birch,
hazel, maple,--nearly bare of foliage. Here again, the ground, checkered
with green moss-patches was interspersed with little plants, “which must
be all a-flower in the spring,” thought Ruth and she vowed that when
spring came she would return to pluck them.

Then--presto!... Without a note of warning--the agreeable independence
of her mood vanished. Lucilla, Pontycroft!... Her mind, her heart, her
very soul yearned for them. And a homesick longing for the finished, for
the humanly beautiful, the artistically beautiful,--an intense craving
and desire for a familiar European face--smote her.

“But,-----” she puzzled, “would they, those I want most to see, _could
they endure this wilderness?_ No--not Lucilla! Not Lucilla with her love
of luxury and her disdain of short skirts.” She laughed. “Pontycroft?
Perhaps,” her heart fluttered. She knew he doted upon old, formal
gardens, well-clipped lawns; had delight in the glorious army of
letters and of art,--that he found in the society too, of princes,
entertainment. Still, it might be possible.... He would, at all events,
have some whimsical thing to say about it all. She began to fancy that
she heard his voice.

“If he were here,” Ruth told herself, “I should ask him to interpret
the horrid vision I had last night.” Ruth shivered as she recalled it;
rapidly she began an imaginary conversation.

“I was lying in the big, carved, four-post family bedstead in my
bedroom,” Ruth informed him. “I was half asleep and half awake and I saw
myself coming up the steps into the house just as I did when I arrived.
As I came, the house door opened, quickly, from within, and four people
rushed towards me, with open arms. One was my father.--He clasped me
tenderly and said: 'Welcome, welcome home!'... Behind him, a tall,
large, old man clasped me in his arms and he cried: 'Welcome, welcome
home!' Then came another and with the same words bade me welcome; I felt
very happy, and so glad that I had come! But running down the stairs of
the house arrived a tiny, meagre, old lady, whose corkscrew curls bobbed
at either side her face. She cried: 'Welcome, welcome!' in a shrill,
high voice, seizing me in her embrace. 'Welcome!' she cried again, 'but
_look out!--We can bite!_' And as she said it her two sharp white teeth
went through my lips till I screamed with pain and started up--all
a-tremble--and then I fell back onto the bed and shook for an hour.”

“My sweet child!” the sane amused voice of Pontycroft made reply.
“These old four-post family bedsteads are dangerous affairs to sleep in.
_Quant-à-moi_, I've always avoided 'em.... I'll have nothing whatever
to do with them. If my great-aunt, from whom I inherited Pontycroft, had
not been of my way o' thinking I should have sold those at Pontycroft to
the old furniture dealer in the village. Fortunately, that fearless lady
lifted the obloquy of the act from my shoulders by disposing of them
herself. One day, while my uncle, her husband, scoured the high seas
under Nelson, she got rid of all the old family four-posters. When he
returned from the war and asked what had become of 'em she acknowledged
she'd discovered a preference for bronze beds and had sent to France for
a dozen. But he was far too thankful to be at home again. 'Peace now,
at any price,' said he. And he never mentioned four-posters to his
lady-wife again, but slept and snored contentedly, for forty odd years,
in a red-gold, steel enamelled affair, free of family traditions. You'd
better follow my aunt's example, Ruth. Send to Boston for a nice new
white enamelled bedstead with a nice new wire mattress and let no more
family ghosts worry your ingenuous small head.”

“But, what did it mean? After all, it happened, or I'm mad,” Ruth
laughing, heard herself insist.

“Oh,” said Pontycroft,--he gave her one of his droll glances--“if you
want your midnight vision interpreted you must ask some older sage,
even, than I, to do it. I should say, were it not too obvious to be
true, that apple pie with an under crust....”

“Nonsense,” interrupted Ruth.

“The sort invented by your French ancestress, Priscilla Mulline
Alden (I've heard she was a rare _cordon bleu_)” went on Pontycroft,
unperturbed, “together with New England brown bread--but--that's all too
obvious to be true... what are you laughing at?” he queried, artlessly.

“I'm laughing at the Brown Bread,” retorted Ruth, and she laughed aloud,
“there wasn't any.”

“There should have been,” said Ponty, with a deprecating lift of the
eyebrows. “It's _de rigueur_ with baked beans.”

“But your little story,” he continued, lighting his cigarette, “belongs
probably to those mysterious reflex actions of ancestry acting on a
sensitive nervous organisation. You can't expect me to explain them.
See, though, that you do look out. Don't, manifestly, offend your
ancestors and they won't offend you, and there's my interpretation.”

Again Ruth laughed aloud, gleefully, at the tones of Ponty's voice and
again a little thrill of pain and hope pierced her breast. She looked
at her watch. It was almost noon and she turned towards home through the
glade, by the path along the brook.


VI

But the adventure of her walk had not come to an end yet.

The path widened into a grass-grown road. The day was so hot she
regretted she hadn't brought her sunshade, but she walked with light
buoyant steps, unreflecting,--amused by the antics of two blue, belated
butterflies who, not perished with the summer, convinced it had come
back a little, danced ahead of her chasing the shadows; they fluttered
to the right and to the left, and came at last to rest upon a withered
mullen stalk a few yards in advance of her. Ruth watched them while they
sought greedily, making a rapid tour of the dried stem, for some lone
flower upon which to replenish their hungry attenuated little stomachs.
She almost held her breath, as she paused to watch the quest and she
wished she might, by a wave of her stick, restore fresh succulence to
the weeds, when--

“Halt, stop!” cried a voice.

Instinctively, Ruth shrank back.

“There's a snake ahead of you--there--just across the path. Don't move!”
 cried the voice.

Miss Adgate stood perfectly still. She saw a man run by her; she heard
the sharp report of a gun. The smell of gunpowder filled her nostrils
and the terror of the sudden cry made her feel sick.

“There he is!” cried the owner of the voice.

An excited young man presented upon the muzzle of his gun a viscous two
feet of snake, an object that limply resembled the straight, flat limb
of a tree. “A copperhead. 'Tis the only deadly dangerous beast in these
harmless woods. As I'm alive, if you had put your foot on him you would,
indeed, have found him deadly.”

He extended the flabby thing for Ruth's inspection, but the young lady
looked away--her arm instinctively went out to clutch at something.

“No cause for fright, Miss Adgate,” said the young chap. He proffered a
hand to steady her. “I'm afraid I gave you a terrible scare,” he added,
apologetic, and he looked at her with concern, “but that was better
than the bite. You're quite white; sit down a moment. You'll soon feel
better.”

Ruth covered her face with her hands.

“Thank God!” she said, with an involuntary shudder, but she did not sit
down.

“Are there many of those creatures in the woods?” she asked, but she
felt ashamed of her weakness.

“No, especially not at this time of year. The warm sun brought this
one out. You should never walk about here in low shoes, though, Miss
Adgate.”

“You know my name,” Ruth said, surprised.

“I take it for granted you're General Adgate's niece, having a walk
through your woods. The whole town knows you arrived last night,”
 answered the young man, with a bow, smiling at her.

His smile was pleasant, he looked at her with friendly interest.
In shabby tweeds and a pair of leggings, a game-bag slung over his
shoulder, he was evidently out for a day's shooting.

“Don't think I'm a trespasser, though I can't show you my permit. But
your uncle and I are old friends,” he vouchsafed. “I'm privileged, I
must tell you, to shoot here when I like. In fact, I rather fancy
the quail you sat down to at supper last night was the product of my
game-bag.”

It occurred to Ruth that this remark came somehow with bad taste--the
speaker's eyes shone, however, with so kindly a light she hadn't the
heart to resent it.

“You are a marvellous shot,” was all she said.

“I served under your uncle in the Cuban War,” the young man told her.
“We had sharp fighting then, Miss Adgate. But we're well drilled, here
in Oldbridge--not a man jack of us but can pick an ace on a playing
card at fifty paces. That's all due to your uncle who supervises the
rifle-practice at the Armoury, to say nothing of coaching us in military
tactics, which he's past master in.”

“Ah!” said Ruth, interested. “I supposed he was the most peaceable of
retired military men.”

“Peaceable and retired if you like. But in times of peace, prepare for
war.... The way we are made to answer up to call on drill nights would
cause your blood to freeze, Miss Adgate.”

“_Ma ché!_ I thought I'd come to a quiet, sleepy New England town where
all was love and peace! The day after I arrive I learn I am in a hotbed
of militarism,” laughed Ruth.

“You're right,” the young man replied seriously, striding beside her.
“General Adgate, you see, has been through two wars. He received
his brevet of General in the war between the North and the South. He
realises the importance of preparing for emergencies, now that we've
taken our place among the nations. He's a splendid chap. Not one of us
but would walk or fight our way to death for him.... And it's always
been so. Why, they tell this story when he was just a Captain, in
the War of Secession. The enemy was pouring bomb and shell into his
entrenchments. He ordered his soldiers on their bellies, and in the
midst of the cannonading up he got, stood,--coolly lighting a cigarette:
'Now, my men,' said he, 'rush for them!' The men rose in a body, leapt
the entrenchments, fell upon the enemy. Of course the enemy was routed!
we captured and brought back guns and ammunition with cheers to camp.
Then it was, I believe, he was breveted General Adgate.”

Ruth had a shiver of pride as she listened. “But now,” continued her
informant, “worse luck, in these cowardly moneyed times, there's no
fun to be got out of war! You stand up, of course, to be slaughtered
wholesale. Now--the best shot has little hope of bringing down his
man--there's nothing to practise on but quail and partridge in the old
General's woods.”

“And snakes,” put in Ruth, laughing.

“Snakes,” repeated the young fellow, with a merry laugh. “Thrice blessed
copperheads!” went his mental reservation,--so quickly is youth inflamed
in America. “But a bounty's on every one of these wretches, Miss
Adgate,” he said aloud (and Ruth, fortunately, perhaps, was not a mind
reader.) “They've almost disappeared. Truth is, like the rest of us,
this one came out to welcome you, poor devil, and he's met with a sad
end! Since the new law a snake may not look at a lady.”

They had reached, as they strolled, the foot of the Adgate hill. As they
neared the gate the young man paused.

“I must bid you good-bye,” said he, lifting his hat, “it's long past
noon,--almost your luncheon hour.”

“Oh,” Ruth suggested, “since you and my uncle are friends won't you come
in to us for lunch? You shall go back to your shooting, your rescuing of
damsels, when we've refreshed you. I dare say there's some of that quail
left,” she added, with an occult smile.

“Miss Adgate,”--the young man visibly struggled with temptation....
“Miss Adgate,” he looked into the pretty flushed face and he felt
himself smitten to the heart's core. “That's very good of you; I'm
afraid, though, you don't know our New England customs. You've a
hospitable, beautiful English habit, but you've not been here long
enough to know that we don't ask folk unexpected-like to lunch; not
unless they're blood relatives or bosom friends. Tradition, ceremony,
convention forbid it and a gorgon more awful still. Her name
is--Maria-Jane!”

“Oh!...” Ruth laughed. “But she's paid for that! It is part of her
duty....”

“Ah, _dear_ Miss Adgate, you won't find it easy. Love won't buy them,
money won't purchase them, though I dare say,--you'll have a way with
you will make them see black white. But if you risk asking me, I won't,
and for your sake--accept--though I'm horribly tempted to. Besides,
think of it, tradition, ceremony, convention.”

Ruth felt herself getting angry. Here was a youth she didn't care
twopence for, who had done her more than a civility, but who presumed to
instruct her in a provincial code of manners. She would show him she was
mistress of her household--then be done with him.

“What ceremony, what convention?” she demanded coldly.

“Oh,” the young man replied undaunted, “no one wants his neighbour to
know he sits down to a joint, a couple of vegetables and apple pie for
his midday meal. We make such a lot of fuss here when we ask people to
eat with us.”

“But that's precisely the staple of every one's luncheon in England,
from Commoner to Lord,” cried Ruth. “No one makes a secret of it--it's
called the children's dinner. Whatever frills may be added, there or
here, the joint, the vegetables and the pudding, which amounts to the
pie, are invariably present and the most patronised. I assure you it's
the luncheon every one ought to eat. And now,” she commanded, “open
the gate and shut it behind you, and be satisfied to partake of our
vegetables, our joint and our pudding without further ado.”

“I accept,” said the delighted young fellow. “But if General Adgate
turns me out-o'-doors, I shall bend to the New England custom I was
brought up in and not hold you responsible for my discomfiture.”

They ascended the hill, over the softest, greenest turf; they went under
the apple trees despoiled of apples,--passed through the rustic gate,
and entered the garden. To the youth, the garden was all fragrant of
blossoms which must have burst into flower over night. Such delusive
things have a trick of happening, in New England, to an old garden, to
welcome the desired person, and Ruth, though she didn't suspect it, had
already become the desired person in the eyes of her victim. The syringa
tree under which they went spread for them a miraculous white canopy;
the white pinks threw forth aromatic scents which penetrated by the door
into the house as Ruth brought her companion to General Adgate, seated
before a rousing wood fire reading his newspapers in the drawing-room.


VII

Miss Adgate preceded her companion.

“Uncle,” she boldly proclaimed, “I've brought a friend of yours to
luncheon.” General Adgate looked up from his book. “Why--Rutherford!
glad to see you,” he said, shaking hands none too cordially. “So,” he
smiled as he pushed a chair forward for Ruth, “my niece waylaid you, did
she?”

“No,” Ruth told him. “I was waylaid by a serpent in our woods. Mr.
Rutherford happened by at the right moment to rescue me.” Then Ruth went
to the ancient gilt mirror above the fireplace and withdrew the pins
from her hat and rang for Paolina.

“So you saved the lady's life,” General Adgate chuckled. “Well done,
Rutherford, my son--a plausible opening to the story to
please the matter-of-fact public. As though the public were
matter-of-fact!--Nothing is really improbable enough for the public,
provided life's in the telling. We're ready to swallow the most
unconscionable lies! But though you've lost no time in making the
opening ordinary, Rutherford, we shall see what may be done to reward
you.”

“Oh,” objected Rutherford, with happy laughter,--“you of all men should
know it--the service of Beauty brings its own reward to those lucky
enough to serve it?”

“Lunch is served, Miss,” announced Martha patly, putting her head in at
the door.

“Oh, a plate, please, Martha, for this gentleman,” said Ruth.

A shade (was it a look of displeasure?) crept into Martha's face; the
reply came meekly. “Yes, Miss,” she answered--and disappeared.

Miss Adgate threw a gay glance at Rutherford, he returned it with one he
meant to make eloquent of his admiration. But Ruth was saying, in that
ravishing voice of hers: “Shall we go in?” She swept by him into the
low-ceilinged, white-panelled dining-room with an air of dignity in her
slim, young figure which Rutherford thought suited it to perfection.


VIII

Poor old Rutherford is fond of recalling that memorable luncheon to
this day. Ruth's joyous soul frothed into fun which sounded at times so
exactly like Pontycroft that he seemed to be at her elbow. For a reason
not hard to seek, to sophisticated minds, General Adgate, too, seemed
in high spirits. Rutherford--well--we know what infatuated young men
are--excellent company because they laugh at a word, could applaud the
dullest saw. Neither Ruth nor General Adgate spoke in saws; by a saw
we mean the easy pert phrase, _la phrase toute faite_ which passes
so readily for wit in any land. General Adgate was an accomplished
raconteur. He could tell a story with an economy of language, a grace
worthy the subtlest story-writers; the point, unexpected when it came,
brought the house down. Ruth listened--astonished, and led him on.
Rutherford's haww-hawws, more appreciative than musical, provided the
essential base to the trio.

When lunch was over Ruth ordered coffee to be served in the
drawing-room. “You're a daring creature! I've never had the courage to
ask Martha to do that,” objected General Adgate.

“But don't you always have coffee after luncheon?” she asked.

“Yes, but I must e'en drink it where it's brought to me, at table.”

“Poor dear! You see the advantage of having a woman by who fears
nothing.”

“I see the advantage of having a fair niece to minister to my poor human
wants,” gallantly responded the General. “And to make life extremely
worth while, hey Rutherford?”

“Miss Adgate is an adorable hostess. If I don't envy you as her uncle,
General, it is because I find her perfect as Lady of Barracks Hill,”
 said Rutherford. He said it with a flush and with the fear upon him that
he had said too much.

But Martha just then had entered bearing the coffee; Ruth, indicating
the Japanese tea-table, took no notice of his speech. The table, the
shining silver Georgian service on its silver tray were placed before
her.

“Where did you get this old service, Uncle?” Ruth asked as she lifted the
elongated, graceful coffee-pot by its ebony handle and began to pour the
coffee.

“Martha must have unearthed that from the cupboard upstairs,” answered
her uncle. “The salver has been put away for years. It belonged to your
great-grandmother. But how did they manage to give it such a polish?”

“Miss Adgate's maid helped me, sir,” Martha vouchsafed in her primmest
voice. “We tried that new powder. It took no time at all.”

She left the room with her chin up as who should say: “We know the
proper thing to do, when there's someone at hand who knows we ought to
know it.”

“Well!” exclaimed Rutherford, confounded.

“Ruth's a mistress as gives satisfaction,” General Adgate laughed
softly while Martha's footsteps receded towards the kitchen. “I believe,
Rutherford, we'll be having our afternoon tea here yet, in the British
fashion.”

“_Ma, da vero! come si fa?_” cried Ruth, lapsing into Italian in her
surprise, “don't you _always_ have afternoon tea?”

“We have _tea_, Miss Adgate,” Rutherford answered merrily, “tea with
cold meat, stewed fruit and cake at six o'clock. Not a minute later,
mind you. Martha and Bridget have something better to do than to be
serving even you all day. By seven of the clock one is off with one's
young man or running over to mother's.... You need not inquire at what
hour we get back, we have the latch-key, and your breakfast's generally
served on time.” Ruth cast a wild look at General Adgate.

He bowed his diminished head: “I'm afraid it's true,” he murmured.

“Is it--a--universal habit,--in Oldbridge?” asked Ruth, her eyes
dancing.

“It has to be the universal habit,” answered Rutherford. “We simply
can't help ourselves. We could get no one at all to wait upon us if we
didn't conform to it. The--the--and the--are the only people in town
who are known to have late dinners and that's because, hopelessly
Europeanised, they don't care what they pay their girls, and keep a
butler. Even they are obliged to dine at seven;--besides,” laughed
Rutherford, “late dinners _ain't 'ealthy!_”

“After all,” said Ruth, thoughtfully, “the custom is primitive, not to
say Puritan; I think it suits Oldbridge. Our forefathers had to do with
less service I suppose. And as you say, late dinners _ain't 'ealthy_.
But Paolina shall give us our afternoon tea, at four, Uncle. It will
make her feel at home to serve it to us. But aren't you famished for
some music? I want to try the Steinway. This morning when I came down I
raised the lid and saw the name.”

She rose from her corner of the sofa and seated herself at the piano.
_Oft have I travelled in those Realms of Gold_... Presently she had
started her two companions, travelling, journeying _in those Realms of
Gold_ which Chopin opens to the least of musicians. Chopin's austerity
of perfect beauty wrought in a sad sincerity,--entered the New England
drawing-room. To General Adgate's ears the music seemed to lend voice
at last,--give expression, at last,--to holy, self-repressed, patient
lives,--lives of the dead and the gone--particles of whose spirit still
clung, perhaps, to the panelled walls, pervaded, perhaps, the air of the
old room. To Ruth, this incomplete New England world, which something
more than herself and less than herself was, for the nonce, infatuated
with, possessed by,--which yet, to certain of her perceptions,--revealed
itself as a milieu approaching to semi-barbarism, Oldbridge, melted
away. At her own magic touch, Italian landscapes, rich in dreams,
rich in love, abundant; decked forth in fair realities, intellectual
joys,--complete and vibrant of absolute beauty, harmonious,
suggestive,--rose, took shape before her.

“_I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls_, among pink fragrant oleanders,” she
repeated, smiling to her thoughts as she played and forgot the present.

Rutherford, Rutherford,--oh,--of course--Rutherford found in those
heavenly chords and melodies what every lover finds in Chopin.

Ruth turned around upon her piano stool.

“Have you had enough?” she asked, smiling.

“Enough?” exclaimed the lovesick youth. “I, for one could never have
enough.”

“_Toujours perdrix!_” said Ruth and lifted up a warning finger.

“Play us something else, child,” said her uncle in a matter-of-fact tone
intended to disperse sentimentality. “Let us hear your Russians and a
little Schubert.”

And so Ruth played the Valse Lente from the Fifth Tschaikowsky Symphony
and the famous Rachmaninoff which, I believe, everybody plays, and
finished at last with the Fourth Fugue of the immortal Bach.

“There!” she exclaimed, “I'm tired.”

“And so am I,” said the transcriber, laying down the pen.

IX

Young Rutherford bounded from his chair. The tall clock in the hall, as
though loth to mark the passage of Time,--Time,--who had been its friend
for something more than a hundred and fifty years,--the steadfast old
clock began to mark three very slow, slow notes.

“Miss Adgate, forgive me! I suppose I ought to go, you should be left to
rest!” he held out his hand. “I've never known any pleasure comparable
to this afternoon's. May I come again? The whole of Oldbridge shall envy
me to-day,--I'm too vain not to tell them where I've lunched. Good-bye,
goodbye,” he repeated. He gave Ruth a furtive glance and flushed, very
red.

“Good-bye, Rutherford,” said General Adgate. He smiled indulgence to the
young man who still malingered. “We'll see you to-night,” he reassured
him, with a nod. “Ruth, you're to make yourself splendid tonight. I'm
to take you to dine at the Wetherbys. They are giving a dinner party
in your honour, for knowing you were not ridden yet with engagements
I accepted for you. There will be some sort of a reception
afterwards--you'd call it _At Home_ wouldn't you? Everyone's coming.
Everybody wants to meet Miss Adgate.” He laughed, as though well
pleased.

“I believe he's proud of me,” thought Miss Adgate, gratefully.

The door at last closed on Rutherford. Niece and uncle stood together
in the hall, where the voice of the family time-piece, its brass
face marking the phases of the sun and moon, underlined the pervading
stillness of the house with an austere, admonitative, solemn
“tick-tack!”

“Ruth,” said her uncle abruptly, “why did you come to America?”

“Why?--To see you, of course,” Ruth said, her tone one of innocent
surprise, but she felt a little guilty catch at her heart.

“Oh,--me!” her uncle said. “You young witch, you never crossed the seas
to look at an old man. It was as much my business to cross them to look
after you. Come,” said he, with a look of raillery, “there was some
precipitating cause. You came in a hurry. Something happened--for you
might have put your journey off for another year. Something occurred, to
induce you--to come--in a hurry.”

Ruth hesitated. She gave a light laugh--then she looked away. “Shall I
really tell you?” she asked.

“The sooner you tell me,” said the old General, “the better,--for then
we'll understand one another.”

“I left Europe,”--Ruth said, embarrassed, “because--because--I wanted
to see--my uncle--and have a look at my ancestral acres!” she still
prevaricated, yet dimpling with amusement.

“Your ancestral acres!”--repeated her uncle, sceptically. “Well?” he
encouraged.

“Oh--well--because,--if you must have another reason still,
well--because--well--I felt sore.”

“Why?” said General Adgate.

“Why?” said Ruth with a persistent and feminine reluctance to reveal
her real self, speak her true reasons: “Uncle,--I wish--you wouldn't ask
me!”

“Out with it,” said her uncle.

“Bertram, Crown Prince of Altronde, wanted me to marry him
morganatically. I felt outraged, though they told me it would be a legal
marriage. Harry Pontycroft and Lucilla sympathised with my disgust and
packed me off. And--that is why.”

The old man looked grave. “Damned European whelps,” he muttered. “No
wonder your Puritan ancestors shook that dust from their souls. You did
well,” he said, patting Ruth on the back.


X

Ruth went upstairs without another word. The upper hall was lined with
bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. “I must add a library to this
dear place,” she said to herself while she sought for a book. She was
tired,--she wanted to lie down, she wanted to wash from her mind the
impressions of the day; she felt completely fagged.

General Adgate came upstairs behind her while she was peering along
the shelves of calf-bound books. The shelves seemed to hold only a
monotonous row on row of histories and works of philosophy.

“Take this,” he said as he passed her, and, pausing, he removed a book
from an upper shelf and handed it to her.

This was a volume of Governor Bradford's History of New England.

“But,” Ruth weakly objected, “I wanted a novel!”

“You'll find that more interesting than any novel,” General Adgate threw
over his shoulder as he proceeded on to his own apartments.

O Reflex Egotism! Ruth found the book more interesting than any novel.




PART SIXTH


I

|THE Old Town of Oldbridge is rich of one pleasant winding highway along
whose route are scattered its prettiest demesnes. Time was, once, when
this sun-spattered, tree-bordered thoroughfare enjoyed its dream of
peace in drowsy quietude, under spreading lindens and over-arching elms.
To-day, however, it stirs in its dream.

Yet its ancient houses stand placidly enough. Comfortable and serene
among park-like meadows, life in them goes on with a simple dignity and
ease; and if they are the sometime innocent cause of the sin of pride to
the families who inherit them, they are sources of arcadian joys to the
stranger within their gates. For they are all spotless and restful--and
fragrant of the breaths of several hundred years of new-mown hay,
rose-arbours, and aromatic pinks, blown through the windows. These old
Colonial homes speak eloquently of good life past, of still better life
present--to come.

The trolley-track and the pretty road keep company a bit, together; they
both turn to the left and passing in all say twenty houses, reach the
Common and the Post Office, where a dozen or so more hipped roofs,
set among quiet flower gardens and apple orchards lend tradition and a
quaint distinction to the really lovely old Green.

The boys of Oldbridge have pre-empted this Green, the most popular of
Sports Clubs, and here, after school, as their forbears did, as their
fathers and grandfathers did, here they play and tumble and wrestle and
fight. From here they cross the road to enter the Public School House, a
red brick building which, thirty years ago, supplanted the Dames School,
and which balances the old brick Meeting House at the further end.

The haunt, trysting-place, council chamber--where every mischievous
plot is hatched, such is the Common. Whence the eternal Boy, lured by
near-flowing waters of the Mantic joins his pals upstream for a swim,
plays uproarious pranks there, ties a chap's clothes into a hard knot
on the bank and when he comes dripping out in search of them chants, in
raucous chorus: “_Chaw raw beef--the beef is tough!_”

In Winter, the frozen River Mantic makes an unrivalled skating ground;
and the Oldbridge Boy still builds his ice-fortress on the Common,
stocks it (ammunition of snow-balls)--and leads his regiment to victory.
Here he coasts or hitches his sledge to a huge one fleetly passing, gets
a glorious ride--comes home, nose and fingers frost-bitten, exceeding
argumentative; talking in loud imperious voice; in truth a very dog of
wintry joys.

Too often, after supper, the Boy of Oldbridge takes delectable but
stolen interest in the conversation of the village Post Master and his
cronies. By the door in Summer--round the stove in Winter, he and
they discuss the politics of the hour to many hoary anecdotes between.
Pastime sternly prohibited by parents requiring infinite discretion!
Thus one steals with muffled tread down by back stairs, one issues forth
by back windows, one whistles to one's _fides achates_--and off.

Miss Adgate, who to her regret had never been a small boy, never would
be, was none the less of opinion that boys are the most amusing imps and
she soon exercised her opportunity for making the acquaintance of a New
England lad, Master Jack Enderfield, the twelve-year-old son of Mrs.
Enderfield, who lived in the Enderfield House on the Common. Mr.
Enderfield, after preaching to his world for fifteen years, had left it,
with, he feared on his death-bed, little advantage to its soul. He had
gone leaving a library full of theological tracts and treatises, of
philosophic books and pamphlets, a comfortable fortune inherited from
collateral great-aunts,--and a son, Jack. Jack was blond, blue-eyed,
curly haired, of an enquiring expansive nature towards those in whom he
felt confidence, and a diverting person. Having met Miss Adgate at
his mother's, when she returned the lady's call he considered himself
entitled to drop in when he liked at Barracks Hill.

“She's got such stunning hair, mother, and such white hands.... And when
she talks it makes a fellow feel good. She uses such pretty words and
her voice is low and round. And she listens to a man and draws him out.”

“But, my dear, it may not be convenient for Miss Adgate to receive you
so often,” said Mrs. Enderfield. “Miss Adgate has other people to see,
other things to do.”

“Oh, she has always time to see me,” replied Jack, with a wave of
the hand. “She told Martha to say she was out the other day when the
Wetherbys called. She took me up to her sitting room and showed me a lot
of jolly European things and gave me this paper knife.” Jack drew from
an inside pocket, offering it for inspection, a Venetian filagree paper
knife wrapped in soiled and crumpled tissue paper.

The maternal heart could not withstand such obvious proof of favouritism
towards her idol. Though warned not to wear his welcome out, Jackie
descended frequently upon Barracks Hill, but this, though it concerns,
runs ahead, of the story.


II

Miss Adgate received calls for a month; paid them--was dined--was
less wined than vastly cocktailed,--in simple or elaborate New England
fashion. She returned these hospitalities and she discovered that
Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old held agreeable people. If they treated
her a little as an Egeria she accepted the rôle without fuss and gave to
modesty its due.

Some of these new acquaintances, of a pretty taste in letters, on far
more than nodding terms with art, had, after years spent abroad--fallen
like herself alack, upon a day! Alack the day on which we come to the
disputably sage conclusion that East,--West.... We know, we learn--too
late, sometimes alas, the fatal rest! And they had cast behind them the
dust of the East, and they had turned Westward with a very lively
sense of the superior enchantments of Europe. But once at home a
devout appreciation of the sweet repose ('tis the just phrase), an
imperceptible abandonment to that soothing peace which hovers insidious
over a New England homestead, ah, ye rewards of Virtue! these had
quietly engulfed in sodden well-being, the finer European impressions.

Miss Adgate a little later, perceived that these wise people--settled
ere long unblushingly to New Englandism, never again intended to budge.
They had accepted, deliberately, the prose of life. And Miss Adgate,
enamoured of New England, still kept her head enough to wonder, with
some dismay, whether she, too, if she stayed here, she, too, would
end by looking upon Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old as the be-all and
end-all of existence! So many things spoke here to her heart. Her tender
spirit basked here, all day, in good will. But wasn't Oldbridge just a
trifle lacking in effervescence? And yes--didn't Oldbridge take itself
a bit solemnly? Ah, yes! And--yes--it had a distressing tendency to be
very serious about everything. To none of these states of mind had Ruth
been initiated, and every good Catholic knows that mirth is from God,
dullness from the Devil.

Miss Adgate, who had hitherto lived on the plane of an impersonal, if
somewhat facetious consideration of public matters,--of wit, persiflage;
Miss Adgate found when it came to small gossip that she was an irritated
listener. Carping criticism made her yawn, she became dumb, had
nothing to say. It is indeed a stupid trade! Moreover her soul had ever
disported in innocent folly, in gaiety and witty conversation. She soon
attracted those who cared for the same light stuff and Barracks
Hill became, ere long, the centre of a coterie of frolic, music, and
laughter, where personalities except in the ways of honest chaff were
tabooed--and no one's affairs, wonder of wonders! were commented upon
behind his back.


III

But, after all, Barracks Hill it was, “poetic, historic Barracks Hill,”
 which spoke to her fancy,--held her heart!

This house and the hill of this house were suggestive; packed full of
romance. Ruth, whose temper was a charming compound of mirth love
and poesy,--Ruth who had the soul of a poet in the body of a fair
woman,--Ruth now fell deep in love with reverie.--She spent long days
in a singular sort of trance. Lingering in a room she pondered its
messages--wandering upon the hill, she dreamed and mused. The room
mysteriously unburdened itself of long pent emotions,--joys and woes;
the hill unfolded its soul, opened wide its heart to her; and lonely
desolate ghosts--the ghosts of monotonous, innocent, happy, sorry lives
confided in her--told her their tales of pain; disclosed to her their
rapture of hope, their mysteries of birth and love and aspiration--their
tragedy of denial--and of death.

Ruth hearkened to invisible messengers. As she came and went in the
still house, they floated towards her light as down,--intangible, so
perceptible,--in the quiet house, and through the corridors. But
Love's very breath greeted her on the hill.... Love met her there,
with exuberance by day; Love wept there, in her heart--bitter tears--by
night. Yes, a secret sadness brooded at the core of those ghostly souls.
But a musical refrain, a simple entreaty seemed ever in the air and
its contrapuntal burden: “_Love, love and laughter! Give us love and
laughter!_” they implored--conquered her heart.

“They hope in me!” Ruth thought, wondering and wide-eyed.... “They have
confidence in me! The old place believes in me; it trusts me, it knows
that I love it; it knows I reverence _them_.... It knows, _they_ know,
how my spirit would wish to cull those unfulfilled desires, every one
they long to lighten themselves of, and bring each one to its fruition
if I can. Yes, each of you dear ghosts, you who have been lonely so long
and friendless--you know I'll execute your bidding if I can.”

And, every day, at the little Catholic Parish Church, Ruth said a Rosary
for the house and for the souls that had passed through it. And she
visited the house, from attic to cellar. She was convinced that on one
occasion she saw a veritable ghost who, smiling at her, passed across
the attic. She discovered there, at all events, some fine old pieces
of furniture, white with dust; and she caused these to be cleansed and
polished and placed in the rooms.


IV

One fine December morning Ruth walked with Miranda on the hill. She was
beginning to have projects.

“Miranda!” said she,--“Heaven knows where you picked the name up,” mused
Ruth. “Dear kitten, I believe I'll invite my European friends here! The
fashion is in Europe to come and have a look at America. I'll keep open
house, and you and I and General Adgate shall receive the most famous
people in Europe at Barracks Hill. And we'll show them what they ought
to be curious about, what they've seen only in books,--we'll show them a
beautiful old New England town enriched from all sources yet keeping its
distinct New England flavour. And I'll give to Oldbridge the enlivening
experience,” she said with a gleam, “of hobbing and of nobbing with
every light-minded modern who doesn't take life's trivialities solemnly;
with every human of talent who cultivates the sweet tonic spirit of
levity.”

Miranda listened, his chrysoprase eyes widened--contracted--blazed with
intelligent sympathy.

“I'm with you, if it's anything that has to do with fun,” he loudly
purred.

Miranda was not a kitten--Miranda was a sleek, a superb tortoise-shell
cat. A cat of the masculine persuasion who could have counted six
or seven summers if a day. General Adgate had, in “a tonic spirit of
levity,” christened him at his birth Miranda--it may be because the
Master of Barracks Hill had likened himself that day to Prospero.
Be this as may be, Miranda had kept his youth; his idea of beer and
skittles was still to play at any game he could find a playmate for; he,
at least, was all for sociability.

And it was his friendly habit to follow Ruth, running along the wall of
the terrace at her left as she paced the hill. Now, when she addressed
him, he drew himself lazily, along the warm stones, stretched himself
infinitely, clawed the rough stones deluged in December sunshine, and
assuming an irresistible attitude as she spoke, pricked his ears. Then,
with a bound made across the turf to an apple-tree, mad for a frolic. He
ran up its grey side, lichen-covered, paused, looked down, and jeered at
her over his shoulder.

“Why don't you follow me?” he taunted. Took, the next moment, his leap
over her head, landed at her feet, was scuttling deliriously through
wheel ruts, grass-grown, passage of last year's cartwheels. Burrowing
under accumulations of brown crackling leaves, flattening himself
lengthwise, poking out a pink nose at her, he showed a pair of
questioning, mischievous eyes.

“Send out your invitations,” counselled he, “but first, catch me!”

Ruth plunged to a great rustle of dry leaves, and light and
irresponsible as they Miranda darted to a sheltering juniper. Ruth tried
to seize him--useless vanity, for he was quicksilver. Up another tree
ere she could lay hands on him, he, perhaps not disdainful of a little
petting, and at all events Bon Prince, finally relented; he allowed her
at last to have her way, come close and take him in her arms.

“You're a duck,” said Ruth, laughing, scratching his ears, laying her
cheek against his fur all glossy and fragrant of wood odours. “Such a
mercurial duck! You make me feel thrice welcome here. I believe you are
the spirit of the place. Yes--the little friendly spirit of the house
who attracts and keeps those who love it for its good--who uses every
wile, too, and coquetry to do so.”

Miranda at her words slipped struggling through Ruth's arms to earth,
arched his back, rubbed himself against her skirts, purred loud and
long--circling round her, tail in air and as who should say: “Yes, yes,
no doubt. But let us waste no time in sentiment,” and away he bounded to
a remoter corner of the hill.

“Of course! he's showing me the place,” she cried. In genuine enjoyment
of the sport she ran, eyes brimming with laughter, after the clever
fellow as he trotted on; he beguiled her here and he beguiled her there;
he discovered nooks to her full of interest and variety. And as she
abandoned herself to the game, played and romped with him, it occurred
to her once again that this, all this--was not all this verily part of a
sort of terrestrial Paradise?

Here,--the chimneys of the house just visible below, here, aloof in a
beautiful world,--she stood on the brow of her hill among gnarled fine
old apple trees. She went up to one, she laid her cheek against it.

“Yes, I can understand what a sight you were in the Garden of Eden,” she
whispered. “In Spring, when your rosy blossoms are out,--in Autumn
when you are hung with ripe red and golden fruit! And, yes--Henry
Pontycroft's prophecy is fulfilled.... Here is Eve, sulking in her
native apple orchard!”

                   “Derrièr' chez mon père,

                   Vole, vole mon cour, vole--

                   Derrièr' chez mon père

                   Y a un pommier doux--

                   Tout doux et you!”

“If Adam, or if Pontycroft were here...” she sighed, “I should be vastly
tempted---tout doux et you-,--to tempt either of them. Oh, see how the
rosy horizon is caught in its net woven of grey leafless branches!
The sky is a sumptuous Prussian blue and how it fades at the zenith to
palest azure! All the Royal colour is broken up by bold white clouds,
and--this--ah, this is far too fair a sight for one pair of eyes to
revel in alone. This cries, aloud, for Adam!”

Ruth looked about her. At her feet, oddly enough, curiously enough, a
red firm apple, forgotten there,--untouched by frosts,--at her feet lay
a fine red pippin. She picked it up, she smiled, she wondered....

“But--but--there's only you--old Puss! Here, catch it,” she cried to
Miranda, who came running towards her, scenting the game he loved. With
a gentle toss Ruth threw the apple along the turf and left Miranda to
the ecstatic enjoyment of patting it, pushing it and rolling over it for
quite eleven minutes.


V

Miss Adgate had Miranda's approbation for inoculating Oldbridge with
levity. She consulted General Adgate:

“Anything you like, Ruth. Anything you like to keep you here contented.”
 And he was not in the least fired by her schemes and had nothing further
to say. But Miss Adgate sat down at this and scribbled fifty notes,
selecting her first guests from all the worlds held in the one London
World--the men, the women she liked, whose work she liked; the people
who could be irrelevant at a pinch, amused, amusing. She invited them
to visit her at Barracks Hill during the coming Summer, and in time she
received effusive acceptances to her invitations.


VI

“The Oldbridge Industrial Exhibits opens to-morrow night,” General
Adgate, tentatively, said one day. “Do you care to go? You'll find
all your friends. The Light Infantry Band will play to us. It's rather
jolly.”

If New England days in old New England houses are fruitful (to young
women of “high faculties quiescent”), if they are fecund in long, poetic
dreams,--if life in Oldbridge does offer limitless advantage for the
building of castles in the air--none can deny that it has, too, its own
artless way of playing up to the leading lady.

“I wouldn't be left out for all the planets,” protested Ruth. “I'm
curious to know what the Oldbridge Industries are.”

“In that case----” answered her uncle.

He went off smiling, she could not conceive why.

“Miss Adgate was a sight for the gods,” vowed Rutherford. “Brown velvet,
sables, to suit her brown hair with a red glint in it, and eyes!”

Miss Adgate doubtless was a sight for the gods, when (conducted by
her uncle) she went the following evening to the Oldbridge Industrial
Exhibits. As she was led first by young Rutherford, then by young
Milman, then by young Massington, then by young Leffingwell, and then by
young Wetherby--through a crowd of friends, to every stall and counter
of the big illuminated hall,--as each of these young men explained,
volubly, minutely, each exhibit--little was left, we may believe, of
Oldbridge Industry which Ruth had not at the end fathomed, become well
acquainted with. Pausing at one stall and at another, she ordered with
reckless discrimination, rugs, lawnmowers, carpenter's tools, muslins,
silks, furniture; and a surfeit of glass blown by a little glass-blower
who had quite a local reputation for his designs; linens, too, and rugs
of delicate colour dyed and woven in the neighbourhood upon a hand-loom
a hundred years of age. The tools might do for Jobias. He had confided
to Paolina that his stock was getting rusty; the mowers, asked the
piratical salesman, are not lawnmowers forever getting out of order?

These, Ruth's purchases, she destined for the new wing. She was
furnishing the old Morris House, too. The Morris House General Adgate
had, to her joy, just presented her with. This had been the home of a
maternal greatgrandmother. From its portals, that lady with the patient
eyes (whose portrait, painted by one Jarvis, hung in the drawing-room)
having taken Admiral Richard Adgate for better or for worse under the
Puritan marriage service read by Parson Ebenezer Allsworthy,--that lady
had tripped across the hill to come and reign at Barracks Hill.

The Morris House! Miss Adgate destined it for her Summer overflow of
guests. It is is a quaint and picturesque spot, all nooks and cupboards,
within; of panelled walls and broad brick fireplaces. As its gardens
overlook the purling brook and the Wigwam, it was, thought she, well
suited to the purpose she intended--and it is in fact deserving of far
more attention that this passing word can say for it.


VII

On New Year's Day, Miss Adgate woke to a blizzard.

The New Year in Oldbridge is feasted in that old-time pleasant fashion
which has long ago _passé de mode_ in New York, which is regarded
with disfavour at Boston and in other New England towns. But Oldbridge
perseveres in welcoming the New Year, for this smacks of ancientry, and,
in sooth, the custom is a genial one. 'Tis well known that in Paris,
every hostess, mistress of a salon, is deluged with cards and flowers
and bonbons from Boissier on the New Year. At Rome, too, on the New
Year, and in Vienna and Berlin, is it not considered courteous for a
young man, not alone to leave his card, but to call wherever he has
received a welcome? The servants of the houses he frequents, a hint to
the wise, never allow him to forget his obligations; they pass at his
lodgings betimes on the New Year and receive for their _Buon' Anno_ a
substantial Buono Mano. Oldbridge is, therefore, wholly in touch with
the most modern capitals when it hospitably celebrates the New Year.

As Ruth, accompanied by Paolina, passed, by meadows all sparkling and
white with hoar-frost, from the New Year's Midnight Mass at the
Parish Church, the stars in a clear sky scintillated with suspicious
brilliancy. The usual eager nipping air of a New England Autumn had
until then condensed into just an occasional flurry of snow--or it had
subdued its edge; the days were often warm enough to sit beside open
windows. The American Winter had not begun to show its teeth. But from
her bed to-day Ruth saw the flakes descend--small, dry,--to the rumour
of low complaints, murmurs in the chimney. The flakes had a stealthy, a
persistent look. Ruth, though, was very, sure the storm would prove the
hitherto pretty diversion of a whitened landscape and trees, of a rapid
thaw under warm sun, and Miss Adgate adored these snow falls! She had
never, she thought, seen anything comparable to the white still beauty
of the country and the wood, the gentian blueness of the sky when the
snow had ceased, the clouds had emptied sack and the sun burst forth.
When this happened she would put on a pair of high rubber boots, take a
stick and start for a walk. And when, in her walk, she came across the
marks of little feet along the snow,--squirrel tracks, mole tracks, the
tracks of birds, quail, the larger ones of woodchucks, of foxes,--little
existences living to themselves--which she could never know,
never fathom--her mind would travel off into endless reveries and
speculations.

But her rôle to-day was that of hostess and there would be no going out
to-day after the snowfall. Miss Adgate shortly after breakfast sauntered
into the kitchen to see how matters there were progressing.

Before her, on the kitchen table, an array of angel cake, nut cake,
pound cake, orange cake, maple-sugar cake lacked the supreme touch, and
waited to be frosted. Spread upon a crackled Coalport dish a quantity
of thin, brown, crisp, sugar wafers invited appetite. These wafers were
from a recipe handed down in the Adgate family. Ruth knew the original,
had seen it in Priscilla Mulline Alden's neat cramped little Huguenot
handwriting; it was carefully preserved among the most curious of the
Adgate relics.

Martha, Ellen,--busy preparing endless edible New England subtleties in
the buttery,--Margaret stirring an icing for the cake, General Adgate
expected,--he had promised to come in an hour to brew his famous
punch, the ingredients for which were mellowing and combining in the
dining-room. Everything was, then, well under way, each aide-de-camp was
at his post; the commander-in-chief felt she might safely mount to her
dressing-room to let Paolina put on the robes of state.

Now it must be known that Paolina had taken to her new life with
unexpected cheerfulness; and the reason was shortly to be disclosed.

“Signorina,” Paolina began timidly, while she dressed her mistress's
hair in a high French twist, placed a bow of pale blue ribbon fetchingly
to the left of the coil, poised it there like a butterfly with wings
outspread,--“Signorina--would--you be very angry if I confided to you,
something?”

“It depends upon what the something is, Paolina,” said Ruth absently,
giving her attention to the becoming effect of the bow.

“Oh, Signorina!” sighed Paolina. Suddenly she clasped her hands; she
held them out before her, dropped to her knees. “Oh! Signorina! Jobias
has asked me to marry him!”

“Jobias--has--asked you--to--marry him?” repeated Ruth in astonishment.
Then she began to laugh--laughed in merry peals of musical laughter, her
head thrown back, her face a ripple of mirth.

But Paolina was quite offended.

“Signorina,” she said, and she rose with dignity, “why should it make
you laugh to learn that Tobias has asked me to marry him?”

“Forgive me, Paolina,” Ruth said; “it is not that Jobias has asked you
to marry him that makes me laugh--it is the tone in which you break the
news to me.” Then, gravely: “And what did you say to him, Paolina, when
he asked you to marry him?”

“Signorina, I said I would have to ask you. I said that you were a
mother to me, and that I would have to get your consent.”

“So,--” said Ruth, “you really think of accepting him?”

“I esteem him,” said Paolina, “I think he is a good man. He has saved up
two thousand dollars. He has a nice house across the river which he
lets out, and of which he reserves for himself one room. I think my own
mother would be pleased with the match, if you approve, Signorina.”

“But do you realise,” said Ruth, “that if you marry Jobias you cannot
see your mother again? It costs a deal of money to cross the ocean.
Jobias could not take you--he would have his work to do.”

“Oh, Signorina, but _you_ would take us! I would not leave you, Jobias
said I need not. But when you marry (Jobias says you will surely marry,
before long)”--Paolina nodded her head several times sagaciously--“then
your husband will want a valet, and Jobias says he will be glad to put
himself at your excellencies' services. And then, you will go abroad
for the wedding tour, and you will want to take us. I can then go to my
mother and receive her blessing.”

Ruth caught her breath. “Thus are our lives arranged for us,” she
thought, smiling, “and by whom?” For half an instant she was silent.
Somewhere, among the recesses of memory, Ruth tried to recall such a
conversation. She remembered--she had read it,--why,--it was in one of
Corvo's witty tales.... So does history repeat itself. What the romancer
invents women and men enact.

But just then, crisis of Paolina's life, the knocker at the front door
went rat-tat.

“Good gracious, and I'm not dressed yet. Put my dress on quickly,
Paolina,--we'll finish our talk at some other time,” Ruth exclaimed.

Paolina ran to the bed, lifted the pale blue chiffon gown inlaid with
yellow lace--passed it dexterously, delicately, over Ruth's head, and
began with her adroit, rapid fingers to lace the bodice. Martha knocked
at the door: “Master Jack Enderfield is in the drawing-room, Miss,” she
said in her precise voice. Ruth glanced at the clock--the hands pointed
to ten.

“Tell Master Jack Enderfield I'll be down directly,” she said. Ruth,
standing before the cheval glass, gave a light pat here to her gown, a
touch there to her coiffure--Martha lingered a minute to take the vision
in.

“Yes, Miss,” she said, closed the door, and was gone.

Then Ruth descended the stairs in a froufrou of skirts, wafting an odour
of violets as she went along; and she greeted Master Jack Enderfield at
the drawing-room door with that radiant grace the young man seemed so
well able to appreciate.


VIII

“I thought I'd come early,” Jack explained, as he stood before the
wood-fire in a man-of-the-world attitude: “I knew that when the crowd
began there'd be no chance for me.”

“I'm delighted you came early,” said Ruth. “Won't you sit down?”

Jack sat down. He plunged at once into the subject which was on his
mind.

“It's all nonsense, this talk about a Republic,” he began. “We'd have
been much better off if we'd stuck to England. Oh, we mightn't have been
so rich,” he made a large gesture, “but we'd have been nicer.”

“Jack, these sentiments on the New Year for a child of Liberty, a son of
the Revolution!” Ruth reproved.

“It's not my fault, Miss Adgate, if I'm a son of the Revolution, and I
don't believe in Liberty. I wish my double great-grandfather hadn't come
over here and married my double great-grandmother.” Master Jack stuck
his hands doggedly in his pockets and glowered at the fire.

“Oh, cheer up,” laughed his young hostess. “Accept the inevitable, Jack,
make the best of it! But what can have happened to-day to make you think
ill of Liberty and the Revolution?”

“It's very well for you to sit there, Miss Adgate, sit and poke fun at
me in your soft voice and your beautiful gown,” Jack said, flushing.
“But you know as I do, that this--this country--is rotten--it's going to
the dogs, nothing'll save it!”

“My dear Jack,” accused Ruth, “you've been reading the newspapers!”
 Miss Adgate never would, for her part, so much as look at an American
newspaper; she got all her news by way of England, in the _Morning
Post_.

“The demoralisation's in the air, Miss Adgate, the newspapers only tell
what's happening. But our nation has the impertinence to go on, like
a rooster on a wall, flapping its wings in the world's face and
screeching, 'Admire me! Don't I behave pretty?' No,” continued Jack
impressively, with a look of uncanny wisdom in his blue eyes, “No--I'm
going to skip this country as soon as I can get out of it. Here in quiet
old Oldbridge, we're not so bad, though we do like to play a game among
ourselves; proud of being old and aristocratic and so forth, and we
expect if we're good we'll get to Heaven; some of us, though, don't
remember Charity's the only way to get to Heaven! But the whole
country's talking Choctaw,--with a hare lip--and only a few of us, like
your uncle and old Mrs. Leffingwell and Mr. Massington, know what a good
Anglo-Saxon Ancestry implies. The rest of us cackle like the aforesaid
barnyard fowl.

“Miss Adgate,” went on Jack, briskly, “no wonder! See how we mix affably
with the riff-raff who haven't a language. People who are told by the
blooming Constitution of this land that they're as good as you and me
and make uncouth noises according. This I'm-as-good-as-you idea is all
rot. They're not as good as you and they're not as good as me. I am
better than the Butcher's boy, who hasn't brains enough to know his own
foolish business and forgets to bring my meat. I am better than Ezekiel,
who won't black my boots. Damn him,” said the boy wildly, “why shouldn't
he black my boots? Let him do his honest work, like a man; become a
useful member of society if he wants to get to be my equal! Not spend
his days shirking and complaining through his nose.”

“Dear, _dear_ Jackie!--Have a glass of lemonade, have a cake! America's
not so bad if you can rise above it,” soothed Miss Adgate with, perhaps,
a grain of malice. She rang for refreshments.

“She's the sweetest, prettiest, dearest thing in Oldbridge,” the boy
thought as he followed Ruth's movements with adoring eyes.

“Miss Adgate, am I accountable for what my double great-grandfather
did?” Jack asked suddenly. “I think he played me a low trick. He was
one of these Cavalier people who stuck to Charles the Second. The King,
after he'd come to the throne, offered him the Chancellorship of the
Duchy of Lancaster. But the idiot refused it! He'd tasted blood, he
said. He knew Court life, found it dull!--He wanted one of adventure,
something like the dance he'd been leading with Charles. 'Give me
land, Sire, in Virginia,' he said. 'I'll go out there and extend your
Majesty's importance.'

“Miss Adgate, _he should have stuck to Merry England_. And pray, what
did his great-grandson do? Married a Northerner, became wife-ridden,
dropped his title, sold his lands, went to New England, settled right
here in Oldbridge, his wife's town; and equipped a regiment and fought.
I'm glad to say he got killed, at Lexington. But not without leaving
posterity, of which you see before you the last indignant remnant.”

“And you, you find you're reverted to the state of mind of the Cavalier
before he forsook England,” Ruth said thoughtfully. “Jack, you've a
homesick hankering to go back there?”

“Yes, Miss Adgate,” cried the boy. “And, I'll tell you a still greater
secret----”

Jack paused.

“_C'est une journée de confidences_,” thought Ruth, “well?” she
encouraged.

“Miss Adgate, we're not aristocratic,” Jack declared in a low voice.
“We've just become low-down Provincials. But when I'm a man I
mean to go and claim our lands and titles and our position in Devon. I'm
the rightful heir! My father kept the Enderfield Tree in an old desk
in the drawing-room. It's there, at this moment, in a tin tube, on
parchment. I've often brought it out when my mother's at church and had
a good look at it.”

“Try a chocolate,” interposed Ruth soothingly; but the image of the
Enderfield tree in a tube made her laugh as she offered the lacquered
box, inlaid with mother of pearl, which she kept filled for these
occasions.

“You're a Catholic, Miss Adgate,” presently observed the youthful
aristocrat when he had permitted Ruth's sweets to be thrust upon him.

“Yes,” said Ruth urbanely. And--“I wonder whether Jack is preparing to
rend the Faith,” she thought.

“Well,” Jack announced with deliberation,

“I mean to be a Catholic when I'm done with all this.” He swept the
present away with his hand.

“Ah?” said Ruth, surprised. “Why?”

“Oh, it's the only Faith for a Gentleman,” the boy answered. “For a
gentleman and a scholar,” he emendated. “You see we're all compounded
too much of human nature and we're all too much given to thinking. Yet
our thinking leads nowhere,--in the end the flesh and the devil do what
they like with us. We may sit with our heads between our hands, we may
try to reconcile our human nature with idealism until we're ready for
the madhouse, and we'll get to the madhouse, but we won't have solved
the problem. Now a man wants to be decent, and the Catholic Faith (I
got Mary to tell me a lot about it, and I've read about it in some of my
father's books), while it makes allowances for human nature and treats
it in the most sympathetic way, does know how to keep it within bounds.
Why, it's a regular school of Saints! And it honestly recognises that
we're mortal; inheritors of original sin as the spark flies upward. Yet
if we go and confess our sins and try to feel sorry for 'em, we receive
the grace of the Sacrament of Penance and Absolution,--and we can then
receive the Blessed Sacrament. And when we receive the Blessed Sacrament
our souls are developed and fed from God Himself and enabled to dominate
our bodies.”

“I see you've been well instructed,” said Ruth, astonished at this boy's
clear exposition.

“I got Mary to tell me a lot about the Catholic Faith, and I've read
Bellarmine and Saint Augustine and a lot of my father's books,” repeated
the boy, a little wearily. “But what I like best,” he said brightening
again, “is that the Church is down on divorce.”

“What hasn't this singular boy reflected upon,” thought Ruth.

“In a few years I'm going to take the money my father left me, marry,
and go abroad and be a writer, Miss Adgate,” declared Jack.

“Ah,--that might not be a bad idea. Have you selected the young lady?”
 Ruth enquired.

“I've been looking about, among the girls here,” Jack answered, “but I
don't find any I can fall in love with,” he added plaintively. “They're
all rather silly and superficial. I should like to find someone like
you,” he declared with abrupt enthusiasm. “Someone who's pretty, someone
who's a soft sweet voice, thinks about things,--likes to read, that sort
of thing. Yes,” he said, gazing at her, “if you were younger or I older,
I should like you to marry me, I should ask you to marry me.”

“But no divorce,” Ruth threatened merrily.

“No divorce? No--of course not!” said Jack in sober disgust. “When once
we're married it's for better for worse. I shall say that from the
first. Don't we always have to live with people we quarrel with at
first? Look at my mother and Mary. She was for flouncing that girl from
the house the first week, and Mary gave notice, day after she got in.
Then they shook down and my mother thinks Mary's a treasure and Mary'd
cut her hand off for my mother. She would for me, told me so. Gives me
all the cream and pie I want, never tells when I come in late from the
Post Office. No, the sooner you find out you're tied to the person you
love by a hard knot for life,--the sooner you realise that marriage is a
Sacrament, the sooner--if you've got an ounce of sense and the Catholic
Faith to help you--you learn to shake down and be happy. Besides, my
wife shall be in love with me and she'll do exactly as I like,” declared
Master Jack Enderfield.


IX

A gay jingle-jangle, the concord of sleigh-bells, the muffled piaffering
of horses' hoofs and the door-knocker went again rat-tat.... Voices
sounded in the hall, Rutherford and Robert Leffingwell entered the room,
Jack's tête-à-tête was interrupted.

“Good-bye, Miss Adgate,” said Jack, abruptly. He cast a scowl of dislike
at the jovial face of Rutherford. Before Ruth could make reply Jack was
out the front door, and his friend had a glimpse of a pair of boyish
legs leaping the offset.

“Splendid way of getting rid of obstacles,” Rutherford said as he
followed Miss Adgate's eyes, “but what an odd boy it is! We're in for
a blizzard, Miss Adgate,” added he, and he approached the fire and
cheerfully rubbed his hands.

“A Blizzard!” cried Ruth. She ran to the window, followed by her two
guests.

For a moment Ruth and the two young men watched the flakes descend....
They seemed to fall, fall, from limitless Niagaras of snow, from regions
without the world, whose fountain-heads, beyond the skies, might be
situate in those wastes of storm and cloud, where a Teutonic Mythology
places its gods. The trees swayed gently, but even as Ruth watched them
they had begun to bend in torture under a furious gale. Clouds of snow
rose and fell like the billows of the sea....

The temperature capriciously dropped to far below zero. Had not Jobias
been prepared for this by previous knowledge, the house might have
become uninhabitable. But Jobias knew his business and stood by the
furnace. All that day and evening he watched it, fed it;--and left his
post from time to time only to replenish with fresh baskets of logs the
voracious fireplaces in the drawing-rooms, casting above the baskets of
wood a paternal smile, an indulgent glance upon those idle ones gathered
round the flames.

Sledges, meantime, drove up. Guests departed, guests arrived, unruffled
by stress of weather. All, rather, were most obviously exhilarated by
it. Ruth's friends were in the maddest spirits. Punch flowed, quips,
cranks, peals of laughter made the house resound. The Blizzard
adding, at it always does, a fresh elixir, more oxygen to the already
supercharged New England atmosphere, Ruth, too, felt unaccountably
elated. Her eyes sparkled while the winds howled and hooted, and bullied
and tore; the unassuaged tempers of five thousand demons seemed about to
take their fill of hate upon an innocent, well-meaning world, but a
rosy colour bloomed in Miss Adgate's usually pale cheeks. She had never
appeared to such advantage; she had never looked so lovely, appeared so
brilliant, nor been so amusing. Rutherford, as though the storm had
gone to his head, Rutherford watching her covertly, vowed he could throw
himself at her feet before the roomful, and Ruth's intuitions warned
her; she had a feminine inkling of danger. She chatted and she laughed
from her corner by the table laden with excellent things to eat; but
she kept Rutherford at arm's length the while her fancy began to draw
a picture of Pontycroft, standing it beside Rutherford. For the first
time, she perceived that General Adgate recalled Pontycroft in
a measure. Tall, thin, spare, his aquiline features were like
Pontycroft's, his bearing was that of a distinguished man. “He has
Harry Pontycroft's air of knowing that he knows,” reflected Ruth
softly; tenderly to her soul she quoted a line Pontycroft long ago had
ironically applied to himself:

“He who Knows that he Knows, follow him.”

Pontycroft loved to discourse for the pleasure of holding forth. General
Aldgate was reticent. His voice was low, well modulated; one could not
have helped listening to it, or to what he said; even though this had
not been wise or witty if often touched with irony.

Rutherford, of medium stature, had the neck of a bull. His skin,
originally clear, was yet ensanguined by exposure to wind and weather;
he liked an out-of-door life and since he was heir to a fortune and
detested the counting house, his life went in hunting, shooting, and
fishing. He had a shock of black hair, clear black eyes, rather an
attractive habit of darting a keen glance at his interlocutor as he
spoke--a glance that seemed to grasp all there was to see, hidden or
upon the surface, in a flash. But his voice was nasal, his words rushed,
spluttered to be free; they issued chopped in two and left the idea
unformulated. It required some familiarity with the American vernacular
to understand him.

“And he, a college man!” scoffed Miss Adgate.

But at that instant--while Ruth indulged, I grieve to acknowledge it,
the spirit of mockery--a thunderous crash broke the unison of lively
voices. The score of people in the rooms flew to the windows. There,
tossed to earth, abased from glory, prone upon the ground--imploring
boughs lifted to heaven, a wreck--there lay the monster Adgate elm, one
of the hoary elms in the carriage sweep. It lay there as neatly cut as
with a scimitar. The splendid tree was literally slashed in twain by the
Blizzard's invisible weapon, the prostrate thing loomed, portentous, to
twenty pairs of eyes.

With the rest, Ruth stared at the fallen King. There was a lump in her
throat.... No one spoke.... Every man and woman in the room had waxed
intimate with that old tree, had come to man's or woman's estate beside
it; they had played under it, insensibly had come to love it, as a part
of themselves, as a piece of their pleasant, happy lives. This comrade
and landmark was, too, one of the pardonable vanities of Oldbridge.

“Praise Heaven it wasn't the roof,” said, at length, the Master of
Barracks Hill. He knew, though, he would have preferred to have it
the roof. A roof may be replaced. His niece even, did not suspect the
passion of attachment any plant or tree upon his land could stir in him
upon occasion.


X

Perseveringly the snowflakes descended. They continued to fall, fall,
fall, for another thirty-six hours. The wind next morning, though, had
stopped, and debris of yesterday's storm had been removed. A trackless
white garment of snow spread to the furthest reaches of Barracks Hill.

“This is all very weird,” said Ruth to Miranda, as, side by side, they
sat and gazed on leagues and leagues of the white silence. “Miranda,
this is all very well--Blizzards are very stirring; simple homely
pleasures are very pleasing, this landscape is _very beautiful_,
but,-----” Ruth suppressed a yawn.

“Besides, why will young men make geese of themselves? One can't
get away from him, Miranda; a Blizzard even, does not keep him away!
Miranda! If there's an object, my dear kitten, I detest, it's a
sentimental young man.”

“Uncle,” said Ruth, nonchalantly, to General Adgate that evening after
supper, as, with Miranda purring snugly beside her, the three
sat together in the drawing-room, “I have an invitation from the
Bolingbrokes, in Washington. They want me to come to them for a visit.
Would you--would you miss me very much?” she coaxed, and she went to him
and laid a caressing hand on the old man's cheek--“would you mind, very
much, if I were to accept?”

“Mind, my dear?” General Adgate looked at her. “Who am I to say mind?
You are your own mistress. Miss you? That's another pair of sleeves.”

“But suppose I bring them back with me,--I mean the Bolingbrokes,”
 laughed she. “They're such dears.... You'd fall in love with her, the
sauciest sprite in Christendom. And he'll welcome the occasion to talk
international Politics with you! I believe,” Ruth teased,--she drew up
the Empire settle before the fire, she took Miranda to her knees and sat
down again; “I believe that it's my Duty--to go--to go fetch them--to
play with you.” With a final nod of decision Miss Adgate placed
two small, elaborately shod feet, in a pair of high-heeled,
steel-embroidered Florentine shoes, upon the fender; she began, with
equal decision, to remove the wrappers from _The Athenoum, The Saturday
Review_ and a couple of _Morning Posts_.

“Go--my dear,” said the old man gently.

“Dear me! I feel like a brute,” thought Miss Adgate. “What will he do if
I return to England? Oh, why will people get fond of people!”

Miranda purred.... The fire responded; a crisp, little musical
crepitation; the flames licked the wood, the logs consumed themselves,
in a cadenced song of happy Death and blessed Eternity. Punctured
by this music silence entered, cozily, warmly descended upon the New
England drawing-room.




PART SEVENTH


I

|MISS ADGATE accepted the Bolingbrokes' invitation. She spent six weeks
of gaiety in Washington. Indeed it was refreshing to live in the world
again, to mix with people of the world; to have cogent reasons for
dressing exquisitely every night for dinner, to be taken in to dinner by
a facetious attaché, by, even, a complacent, redundant railway magnate;
or, happy compromise, by a Member of the Cabinet, for it is well known
that a Cabinet Minister may be amusing. Through the interchange
of frivolities and banter one could rise, not to more important
matters,--is anything much more important to the world than the light
touch and a witty conversation? But Miss Adgate found refreshment in
living again among people whose thoughts were sometimes occupied
by questions impersonal, of more or less consequence to the world's
history.

Someone possessed of a grain of humour has assured us that the “World is
a good old Chum.”

Miss Adgate found the world at Washington a very good old chum during
those six weeks. “In all but the aesthetic sense,” she reflected,
“America is an interesting land to live in.” Plentiful wherever she
went, tittle-tattle, supplemented by her own observations, helped her
to form an idea of how this unwieldy bulk of a nation calling itself The
United States of America was being rescued from fatuous chaos, a mass
of political corruption and a superfluity of wealth, and lifted into an
arrogant, resolute Power. But a Power whose outlook was as far removed
from the simple hardy traditions of Puritan America as Earth is from
Heaven.

An oligarchy of able men,--a handful,--chosen, directed, inspired by
a man yet abler, more audacious than they,--these were moulding, had
already changed the destiny, the policy of the United States.

Miss Adgate recognised the efforts of the Man at the Helm. He had
followed a fixed idea, and the idea was the Greater Glory of his
Country; he had secured with his henchmen indisputable prestige to
the Nation, and, thanks to his star, his tenacity, his temerity,
America,--feared to-day if not honoured, was powerful. But not alas
approved of! “Damn approval!” (the worm will turn,--the watchword passed
through the land). “We are ourselves.”

The “ourselves” went very far. This at least was the modest, unexpressed
opinion of Miss Adgate,--it was shared, apparently, by the Man at the
Helm. He lectured the Nation like a father. The Nation knowing itself to
be unwholesome, inchoate, something ruthless, listened meekly.

“But,” Ruth reflected from the vantage of a calm and sympathetic
observation: “So many religions, no Faith! Where every man, in
disobedience to Christ, chooses to be his own Pope. Yet the Holy Father
has dedicated America to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.... But
the very elements in America, so violent and so ferocious,--the burning
Summers, the cruel Winters, the appalling cataclysms of Nature, if these
are reproduced in the violent characters of the people, inclined to rape
and rapine on a big or a little scale--at what end, _left to its own
devices_, will the American character issue? Will it,” she wondered,
“become, inflated with power, the great Master Robber of the World? Or
will it perish utterly, hoist by its own petard?”

“_Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Convertere ad Dominum Deum._”... Mournful and
tender, in the melodious, yearning, touching accents of Tenebrae, the
phrase filled her ears.

“No man at the Helm,” she sorrowfully said to herself, “shall save us
for more than his few years of tenure. The race cries for direction, a
sane outlet to its emotions. The sole influence which holds anarchy
at bay is Holy Mother Church, wise men tell us. Yes, the Divine
Authority!.. The sweet miracle of the Catholic Faith may save our people
from ending as a nation of brutes; may open to us the gates of Humility
and show to us the road to the 'Greater Glory of God.'”

And then, Miss Adgate woke with a start from her musings. She shook
her pretty head. She returned to the practice of light banter and witty
causerie, the only efficacious methods within reach, she reflected, of
furthering the millennium her fancy painted for her native land.


II

“My little dear Ruth,” Lucilla wrote, “we're coming on the most
important mission to America. Namely, to see you. Yes, and haven't I a
bagful of news for your Royal Highness!

“We sail by the _Cedric_ on the fifteenth of April, Harry can't leave
until then. To confess the truth, he is in Altronde. Civillo,--of
course you've seen it by the papers,--Civillo is gone to a greater
Principality, Bertram is King.

“I want to see you--oh! And Ruth, I burn with curiosity to look on that
New England of yours. Harry, I'm convinced, is prepared to settle there.
He says, so pathetically, that at his time of life he feels the need of
planting cabbages and that the Upper Gardener at Pontycroft gives notice
when he tries to. He's heard that in New England gardeners are kind,
don't mind a bit; they just let you plant, right down; are affable; make
you settle right down and become one of 'em. But Harry says, too,
he pines at first hand to solve the inwardness of a land destined to
dominate us all.

“Ruth, between you and me, in confidence, if America is to be the future
of Europe--well--then I'm glad I shall be dead.

“But between you and me, my dear, what Henry Pontycroft wants is not
so much to plant cabbages neither is it to study politics... What he
truly-truly wants is a glimpse of the Young Person. He's missed you! Ah!
I have news. Your devoted, Lucilla.”

Over this flippant missive Ruth grew hot, then cold, then faint. And she
sat, for a long moment in a state of emotional upheaval, of senseless
vacuity--the while her head whirled and her heart went thump, thump,
thump! It was an entire quarter of an hour before this commotion
subsided, and left her with soft flutterings at her throat.

“They're coming, they're coming, they're coming! He's coming... I shall
hear his voice, I shall see him. Oh, what has happened? Is it possible
that he's free? Oh, my God, my God, help me to wait,” she cried. She
began to cry and to sob like a little child. She craved, wanted, longed
for, unendurably, overwhelmingly, that he should take her in his arms,
caress and fondle her, and, like a veritable little girl pat her cheek
and soothe her, let her unburden her woes, let her lie, her head in his
breast, while he said to her, “There, little child, there, don't cry.”
 And it was in Pontycroft's voice that the words fell upon her ears, and
it was on Harry Pontycroft's breast that she dried her eyes. And they
were Pontycroft's eyes into which her eyes smiled, when, presently,
mocking him through her tears, but in oh, such heaven of bliss! she
repeated the trite refrain of the tritest, the most foolish of Ballads.

“In God's hands!” said Ruth; she dried her eyes. “Like everything
else....”

She put her hat and jacket on and went for a walk. When she reached the
house an hour later, she had found her peace, and though her eyes were
singularly bright and her manner curiously vivacious, this contributed
the more to her success of the evening at the Bolingbrokes'.

“Ruth--” Mrs. Bolingbroke rushed at her, enfolded her in an impetuous
hug, “you're delicious! Stay in Washington. Stay in Washington for
ever--”

“Come to Barracks Hill with me,” answered the young lady. “I must be
flitting almost at once.”

“No, no, no....” protested Mrs. Bolingbroke. But it was peaceably
arranged at last that the Bolingbrokes, having a _congé_ at Easter,
should come, then, to Barracks Hill.

And so, on the fifteenth day of March, Ruth bade farewell to Washington
and travelled back to Oldbridge.


III

One long month and one entire week to wait. If Time was interminable,
Miss Adgate resolved to make Time bear fruit. She took herself in hand.
She tried to quell the little tremors of joy which kept welling up in
her throat when she thought of the end of those five weeks.

“They'll probably not come. They'll change their minds. If they do
come--it's more than likely some nonsense of Lucilla's!... Well....
Besides I've other businesses to attend to,” the lady said with a most
determined air.

As the least profitless way of passing those interminable days, Ruth set
herself to the task of enhancing the natural beauties of Barracks Hill.
She caused paths to be cut through the woods; she enlarged the flower
gardens; she prepared the Morris House for her June visitors. As to the
library and the music-room they had long since been ready for
occupation. And in the interim of labour Miss Adgate gave a series of
children's parties, calling Jackie Enderfield to her assistance. Her
invitations vested in that young gentleman's hands, he became
cock-of-the-walk among the girls and boys of Oldbridge and Rutherford
was thus kept at bay. Yet notwithstanding these spartan derivatives,
Ruth walked on clouds, smiling at love.

“She breathes roses and lilies,” Miss Deborah Massington declared with
enthusiasm.

Eighty, thereabout, Miss Deborah was sister to Mrs. Leffingwell and her
junior by ten years.

“She has charm,” Mrs. Leffingwell answered, discreetly, while they
watched Ruth's erect young buoyant figure disappear beyond the lindens.
“She makes one feel that everything's all right--better to come. I
wonder...”

Ruth liked an hour spent in these ladies' bow-window; gay and fragrant
window, all vivid of sunshine, filled with blossoming geranium and
heliotrope. While she entertained them with tales of Italy, which they
could never hear enough about, Ruth Adgate reflected that the lives
of her grandmothers must have been just such quiet, such repressed,
contented lives as these.

Mrs. Leffingwell and Miss Massington, types of New England's most
exquisite product--the old lady. The old lady who, with all her gentle
unworldliness, is a patrician to her finger tips. As the perfume
of rose-leaves is preserved in a fine porcelain jar--so the hushed
fragrance of these temperate lives emanates, yet stays, to the end.
White, ethereal, peaceful--and pictorially the replicas of Whistler's
mother, these two ladies were waited upon by a black servant, whose
gorgeous head-gear was the red, blue, and yellow bandanna. Each lady had
her window in the low-ceilinged, white-panelled drawing-room; each
was clad in good black silk; on each white head a cap reposed of fine
Honiton lace--and their gowns were finished with a transparent lace
collar and cuffs. Both ladies were slightly deaf; both were omnivorous
readers, both were eager listeners; both had the sense of humour; and
both were indulgent amused lookers-on at the small games of life which
they were no longer privileged to take part in; and if gracious patience
be a virtue these ladies may well be considered beautiful products of a
fast vanishing Puritan tradition.

Easter fell on the twenty-third of April. The Bolingbrokes arrived at
Barracks Hill the day before Easter, but on the morning of their arrival
came a disastrous piece of news. Almost the whole of Ruth's fortune
had been swept out of existence overnight in one of those cataclysmic
melodramas which melodramatic Nature loves to enact in the United
States. On Good Friday, the twenty-first of April, nineteen hundred
and eight, the town of Wyoming was annihilated by a tornado. The merry
monster chose the small hours before midnight, when, giving rein to his
pranksome cubfulness, he swept men, women, children into Eternity with
hardly a warning.... The mines--they formed the _raison d'être_ of
the town--caved in, flooded by a water spout. The entire district was
reduced to desolation.

Seated at breakfast, in the crispest of white morning confections, Ruth
became informed of this and of her losses through the medium of the
Oldbridge _Morning Herald_, whose items she was reading aloud, a
concession, to her uncle.

General Adgate, far more than his lovely niece, was affected by the
news. Had he not enjoyed vicariously the sense of her wealth? It had
tickled his fancy as well as his family pride to see her squander with a
lavish hand, without so much as a thought of the value of money. It had
pleased his sense of the incongruous that notwithstanding the obvious
joy she took in opening her fingers, in letting the gold slide through
them, she had acquiesced in, nay adopted, many of the Spartan habits of
New England; New England--which has never been purse-proud because she
has never, until lately, had very much money in her purse. Ruth, indeed,
had all she could do to cheer General Adgate.

“If all is lost, save honour,” she consoled, “_I_ have still some
investments in England by the mercy of which I shall not be poverty
stricken. I've as much as three thousand safe pounds a year coming from
there, you old darling,” she cooed. “Harry Pontycroft invested it for me
long ago. That ought to be enough for any woman with economical tastes,”
 she assured him. “And I've a lot in the bank,--Heaven knows how much!
I've never spent anything like my income for I had nothing which seemed
worth spending it upon,--since, ugh!--I detest automobiles, and you know
it. We can still keep open house this summer and never trouble.”

Of a truth, Miss Adgate experienced relief,--why?--she did not try to
fathom--at the thought of her diminished fortunes. She might, possibly,
this blithe adventuress, or had she not been expecting guests, she
might, even, have tried to persuade General Adgate to lead her to the
scene of the disaster. I doubt, though, if she would have succeeded.

A fat cheque went instead by the Red Cross Society to the relief of the
sufferers. And lo! the diminishing days were dwindled to a pinpoint.


IV

When Mrs. Bolingbroke heard that Henry Pontycroft and Lucilla Dor were
on the sea, bound for America, she could not contain herself.

“Good gracious, Ruth, what are they comin' for?” she exclaimed,
wide-eyed, gazing at Ruth.

“Don't know,” said Ruth, putting her nose into a bowlful of fresh roses
from Rutherford's hot-houses. “Oddly enough, to see me, perhaps?” she
added, laughing, and she made an effort to look her friend squarely and
jocosely in the face.

“Richard,” said Mrs. Bolingbroke penetratedly to her husband, “Ruth
Adgate is either the most consummate actress or the most innocent dove
the good God has ever, in His ability, wrought from the dust of which we
are made. If the Pontycrofts are on the sea it's for some extraordinary
reason. Ruth either suspects that reason, or she doesn't. But she looked
at me with those clear guileless eyes of hers, when she mentioned their
coming, and I, for one, can imagine any man telling her he'd burn Troy
Town for such a glance. Yet there's that Mr. Rutherford--crazily in love
with her, I'm told,--a splendid match as Americans go. She could marry
him and his money to-morrow if she liked. And since she's so daft about
New England, she could send him into politics and have quite a life. It
will be interesting to see how the Pontycrofts will act when they find
the sources of her income are swept away.”

“That's not a proper remark for you to make, my dear,” replied the
Honourable Richard Bolingbroke, in a tone of unexpected severity. “Henry
Pontycroft's a sensitive, quixotic, high-minded, honourable English
gentleman. He's rich, moreover. Money plays no part in his coming. Lady
Dor I've known since I was a boy. She was a delightful girl, just as
now she's a charming woman. They'll be admirable additions to the house
party, and that's all that concerns you or me. Pontycroft will keep us
in roars of laughter and I'm curious to meet him in New England. You
may be sure he'll like this wonderful old place. He'll feel all the arid
romance of this aristocratic passionate bleak land. Who knows? He may be
the Prince come to wake it, humanise it, with a kiss. Oldbridge will not
have looked upon his like--it won't have heard anything to compare with
him, either, in its three hundred years of existence; never will again;
I hope it may make the best of its opportunity to give him a royal
welcome.”

“I feel crushed,” pouted Mrs. Bolingbroke. “How should I, who've never
met Henry Pontycroft--know he's the paragon of wit and chivalry?”

“That's precisely what Henry Pontycroft is,” her husband answered
gravely, “He _is_ the paragon of wit and chivalry!”

These young folk were pacing side by side in the moonlit garden after
the excellent New England repast, called supper; while Miss Adgate and
her uncle were busy with callers, upon the veranda. The night was the
first of a long series of warm May nights, the moon hung, majestic and
round, over the fringes of wood termed the Wigwam. A rustic bench stood
invitingly under the big syringa, now a perfumed canopy of white. As
they stood on the upper terrace it was easy to distinguish descending
terraces marked by rows of silvery budding irises swollen or in
bloom.... The magic smells of white and purple lilac were touched with
a whiff of apple blossoms from the hill and beyond--below--the Mantic
gleamed in the moonlight amid trees all a feathery, spring incrustation
of minute green foliage.

“This is a divine spot,” said Bolingbroke, suddenly kissing his wife,
“but we must rejoin the others.”

Lucilla Dor and Harry Pontycroft arrived the following day and were
installed in the Morris House at the other side of the hill, where
two neat Irish girls waited upon them under the enlightening, tempered
instruction of Pontycroft's man and of Lucilla's maid.


V

Spring was abroad in her witchery. She had come with a rush, with a good
will, with an--abundance, 'and all of a sudden-like'--as she has, after
many days of dallying, a way of doing in New England. She had been coy;
she had flirted; she had tantalised--a day here, a day there--with dewy
warmth of soft blue skies, her robes diaphanous April cloud. Then she
had veiled her face, vexed for one knew not what offences,--had turned
her coldest shoulder, shed her most frigid tears. She had looked forth,
wreathed again in smiles, while she put wonder-working fingers to shrubs
and branches... and again she had withdrawn herself in deepest greyest
dudgeon.

But now, she was come, come. The birds were building and calling and
fluttering, in all the emotion, the refreshing joy of an ever-renewed
bridalhood. A young male wren who had discovered a bird-house, fixed on
the off-chance of so happy an event as to entice him there--by Jobias,
to the top of a rustic pole in the rose garden--tore his throat open in
the rapture of telling the world what a place for a nest he had found,
and how sweet she was.

“Shameless uxorious creature,” Ponty said, as he came over the hill and
paused to listen to him.

Unaccountably enough, Ruth, as he came into the garden, Ruth issued from
the house dressed in white; dressed in white, without a hat, a watteau
sunshade in her hand.

“Good morning, my pretty maid,” said Pontycroft, “you're not going
a-milking in that costume, are you?” He eyed her sharply with the
quizzical glint she knew well.

“Good morning,” Ruth answered, in perfect composure. Yet at the
anticipation of seeing Pontycroft alone, she had many times felt
the earth quake under her,--“I'm going to call upon Lucilla,” she
vouchsafed.

“Oh, Lucilla's knocked up. I came with a message from her. She wants
me to say she's had her breakfast in bed and won't rise until luncheon.
Lucilla's tired from the journey. You two women must have talked
yourselves weary, if a mere man may judge of such matter. Oh, the hour
at which I caught sight of Paolina conducting you over the hill last
night!” said Ponty.

“It was a beautiful moonlit night,” said Ruth, inhaling the morning air
with delight, “and so,--why not?”

“Why not, indeed,” he agreed. “What a surprise it was, though, to find
the Bolingbrokes here. He's a decent chap.”

“Yes, I like them very much,” Ruth said, absently.

“And your uncle,” Ponty proceeded, “I like _him_ very much,” he
paraphrased. “We held an uproarious pow-wow in the library, the three of
us, last night, while you women discussed chiffons in the music-room.
By-the-bye, that was rather a nice thing that somebody played,” and
Ponty hummed the first bars of the Valse Lente. “You were the musician,
I suspect.”

“I suppose so,” Ruth said, negligently. They were standing beside the
flight of stone steps which leads from the rose-garden to the hill.

“Where are the Bolingbrokes?” enquired Pontycroft.

“Gone for the day, with the Wetherbys, on their yacht. It's a party of
twelve and they expect to come back by moonlight.”

“And why, pray, were not the rest of us included?” he asked.

Ruth began to laugh. “They did include the rest of us,” she answered.
“What _is_ the use of beating about the bush in this fashion? You've
something to tell me, I hear. Say it.” And leaving Pontycroft to
consider her suggestion Ruth ran up the steps and fled lightly over the
carpet woven of white saxifrage and violets thickly strewn among the
turf, to the bench under the big oak at the summit of the hill. Here
she sat herself, opened her blush-rose sunshade and defiantly watched
Pontycroft stroll towards her.

He followed. He stood, deliberating before her for a moment. Then,
bending a knee:

“Your Royal Highness, will your Royal Highness accept the Crown of
Altronde from the hands of the King's unworthy Ambassador?” he asked.

Ruth caught her breath.

“What do you mean?” she queried, in a most violent disappointment of
surprise.

“Your gracious Majesty,” answered Pontycroft, “I mean,--that I am
come all the way from Europe and from a certain small but
not-to-be-sneezed-at Principality called Altronde in order to ask you to
wear with King Bertram, the ermine and the purple.... If we must put it
bluntly, the King implores you to share his throne, his heart and his
crown.”

“Oh,” Ruth said, “how very absurd.”

“Not at all absurd,” said Pontycroft; he still knelt, one knee to earth.

“And he looks every inch Ambassador and not in the least ridiculous,”
 Ruth thought smiling to herself, “in this superlatively ridiculous
posture.”

“The Queen Mama is more than anxious to welcome you with wide-open
arms,” continued Pontycroft.

“Ah?” Ruth slightly raised her eyebrows.

“Yes. It's true she kicked a bit,” said Ponty. He got to his feet and
with his handkerchief flapped a straw or two from his knee. “But Bertram
made a devil of a row; there was no standing it she explained to me with
tears in her eyes. The Queen Mama has had to capitulate, and Bertram's
counting these very moments as ever are, pining to hear you have
accepted him. I'm to go _de ce pas_ to the telegraph office and wire
'yes'--so soon as you've made your haughty little mind up that you'll
have him.”

“Ah,” Ruth said. “It is very interesting----”

But suddenly she felt her heart leap into her throat. She trembled,
yet she spoke resolutely. “Harry,” she said, “Harry--you've told me
something startling and--not very important. But why don't you tell me
that the woman who wrote the letter--is dead?”

An unaccountable stillness fell for an instant over the landscape. Ruth
left her bench under the oak and walked off, walked away to where the
rocks come cropping up along the brow of the hill. The panorama spread
before her was one of fresh, palely verdant meadows and woods; the
Mantic, turbulent from spring freshets, was bordered with trees in the
early paleness of their green leaves; the green frail rondures of the
Wigwam foliage in delicate and varied shades,--these were dappled
with sunlight and blue sky. A far panoply of purple hills, marking the
borderland, shutting away the boisterous outer world as by a charmed
circle, enclosed the small, the joyous world of the little inland town,
the valley and the seven hills of Oldbridge.

Pontycroft approached mechanically, slowly. He stood by Ruth's side, he
looked off with her at this exquisite efflorescence of spring in the new
world.

“It's a beautiful view,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “Europe
could scarcely do better.... And so Lucilla told you?” he queried,
carelessly. “Put not thy trust in woman. She vowed by her most sacred
vows she'd never say a word until I told her to.”

“I dare say I wormed it out of her,” Ruth replied, laughing, and,--it
was too apparent,--she was laughing at him.

“I don't quite gather what it is that makes you so merry this morning,”
 said Pontycroft; “unless it is this heavenly Spring day, and that's
enough for twenty hopes and fears to rap and knock and enter in our
souls.... But please do recollect that while you loiter, considering
the indisputably lovely landscape, there's a chap in Altronde
waiting--impatient's no word for it--for a wire. Kindly give your
attention to the Royal Incident, the real question of actuality, for a
moment, and let me be off as soon as possible to the Post Office.”

“Long ago, I seem to remember,” Ruth said, slowly, “long ago, I seem to
hear myself saying in a garden in Florence, that the Royal Incident was
closed. It is closed. I haven't changed my mind, on the contrary. If you
must of your will leave my hill at this perfect hour and--and be sending
messages to the other side of the world--then, you needs must! But--pray
remember your own favourite saw, that 'opportunity comes once in a
lifetime.' Jobias goes home at noon, can't he take your message? If
Prince, I beg his pardon, King,--if Bertram has to live in suspense for
a few hours, let that be my little revenge. 'If it feed nothing else, it
will feed my revenge,'” laughed Ruth.

Having given expression to this heartless sentiment, she began to tread,
cautiously, among the flowers--the saxifrage, the violets, the little
green-golden buttercups between,--her light steps responding with love
to what she was pleased to think was their caress. From the plain and
from the woods mounted gentle homely sounds, the hautbois of the New
England Spring--the blows of a distant axe, the felling of trees, a
carpenter's hammer taptapping,--and children's cries resounding as they
romped at play; all mounted together, in a joyous choiring, with birds'
songs and twitterings which fell about them from every tree far and
near; the earth, the sky--musical, alive with carols and thanksgiving.

“I bring a garland for your head of flowers fresh and fair,” Ruth
hummed, pacing a little ahead of Pontycroft, and her foot rhythmically
touched ground at each stress of the song.

“'I had, once, a double double grandmother,' my friend Jack Enderfield
is fond of saying,” said Ruth, as she continued her walk to the measure
of the verse. “A great, great, so great _Meregrand!_ She was French.
Her name was Priscilla. Priscilla Mulline. She's rather a person in
New England History--you'll forgive my mentioning her. When the man she
cared for came, as emissary from the man she didn't care for, to ask
her to marry him--do you remember what she answered?” Ruth kept her
eyes fixed upon the tips of her toes, and they, like little mice, little
white mice, went in and out, below the flounces of her gown.

Pontycroft gasped,--took a step towards her. But his lean and bony
face, which for a moment had betrayed him, assumed again the look of
disillusion.

“Oh,” he rejoined, “the foolish girl made hash of her future,
perpetrated a _mot_ which, no doubt, she lived to repent. A _mot_ which
one of your American poets has quite suitably recorded. By it, Miss
Priscilla Mulline lost her chance of making a very good match. She lost
her golden opportunity. She cut off her chances of having a jolly good
time in a big, jolly world.”

“You're abominable,” Ruth said, and permitted herself two actions very
much at variance,--she stamped her foot and she smiled obliquely at the
object of her wrath. “You're abominable. I want you to tell me what she
answered.”

“Oh, you've forgotten it?” said he. “I've well-nigh forgotten it
myself.... I believe, though, she did ask the chap Alden why the deuce
(pardon the expletive) he didn't speak for himself. Am I right?”

“Well, why didn't he?” enquired Ruth, impatiently.

“Because he was a duffer, I suppose,” said Ponty, with a fine effect of
ending the discussion. “But now, my dear young one, be serious. Here's
your chance....” Pontycroft's voice became argumentative. “I've crossed
the ocean to lay a crown at your feet. A crown from which you may get
considerable fun and splendour. Bertram's rich, you're rich. You are,
both of you, handsome, virtuous, clever, and at the mating age. You can
make of your little Principality, your Kingdom, the centre of the
enlightenment and art of Europe. Find me a philosopher, an artist, or a
man of wit who doesn't appreciate a King! Under your wise encouragement
Art, at last, will come into her own.... Oh, think of the poor devils of
hangers-on of Genius you'll be able to lift from Purgatories of
obscurity into the light!”

“You've made one trifling mistake,” interrupted Ruth; “there's something
I have not told you, an element you must omit from the equation of that
Castle in Altronde you are building for me. I'm not rich.... The Town
of Wyoming, let me tell you, is no more. My millions, and a good thing
too--have collapsed. They've shrunken to the few thousands you invested,
ages ago, do you remember? in British Consols? On them I shall run this
dear old place,--I shall dress, modestly----”

“Ruth, Ruth, Ruth!” interrupted Pontycroft, aghast.

“Yes, it all occurred about a week ago while you were at sea, and
that, I suppose, is why you didn't hear of it. These accidents, here
in America, happen so often. Marconi didn't find the item of sufficient
importance, I dare say, to give it a place.”

“Well.... Here's a kettle of fish! Whew!” whistled Pontycroft. “You
young limb of mischief, why didn't you tell me? _Ouf_” cried he, with a
great pant of relief. “_Ouf_,--poor Bertram! He has no luck.” They had
been sauntering, backwards and forward, over a grassy road which runs
up hill and down dale through the green-sward planted with apple trees.
Pontycroft leaned, now, against a tree. He gazed at Ruth without a word.
A rosy-tipped cluster of apple blossoms nodded just above his head.
He reached up, plucked it; and offered it to the lady with the crimson
sunshade who stood in the sunlight before him.

“'Oh, Fairy Godmother! Feel my heart,'” Ruth whispered, under her
breath. “I should like to show you my Riviera,” she said hastily,
reddening under his gaze, and she stuck the apple blossoms into her
belt.

Ruth skirted the grey rocks which crop above the brow of the hill to the
left. She led Pontycroft down a green bank to a patch of brighter green
nestling for quite a distance under the shelter of the overhanging
cliffs. Here were eglantine, here were violets in profusion; Solomon's
seal, red and purple columbine; and the purple liverwort, and a shower
of those frail white wind-flowers called anemones, although in no wise
do they resemble their European cousins. Young ferns, pale green fronds,
sprang vigorously from the clefts in the rocks, juniper and barberry
bushes and a savin lent here and there a hardy note and an added shelter
to the scattering of spring blossoms.

“It's so exclusive here,” laughed Ruth, taking a lichen-covered seat
formed in the grey stone. “These canny flowers have discovered the place
for themselves after the habit of the land.... Sit down,” she invited
him. She crossed her hands in her lap, she looked towards him; a
mischievous light glanced bewitchingly in her dark eyes.

“Dear child,” Pontycroft began--he was trying, very hard, to resume his
paternal air.

“Please don't 'dear child' me any more--I haven't brought you here for
that,” petulantly cried Ruth. “I won't have you for a father and
I've already got an uncle, and I don't think you'd make, for me, a
satisfactory brother.”

“Miss Adgate,” said Pontycroft, he possessed himself of one of her
hands, and examining it carefully (it was, as we know a very white hand
with slim and rosy fingers), “Miss Adgate, I have a proposition to make
to you. Since my schemes, since all my weary plottings and plannings for
a Royal End for you, do, it seems, gang aft agley,--though, and mark my
words, Bertram is no stickler for lucre; but since they've been knocked
flat on the head by a blow of chance, let me suggest that we make a
fresh start, let us consider a new alliance for you.

“Here,” he said--he laid a large bony hand tightly, as though afraid
of its escape, over the little hand he held in his,--“here is a novel,
international situation, a situation, free, thank goodness, of any
blessed complications. Shall you and I,”--he lifted the hand to his lips
again, he touched his lips tenderly to each finger-tip, and Ruth looked
on--“shall you and I get married? Shall we run this dear place together?
Shall we love it, live in it? I had dreamed, for you, infant, of a royal
end. What will you? Heaven mercifully disposes.... But I _had_ dreamed
for you a Royal End!”

“I do not like being proposed to in this manner,” said Ruth, rounding
upon him with a smiling face.

“Oh, my dear, blessed angel little Ruth!” cried Pontycroft, letting
himself go. “Ruth... Hopelessly, hopelessly, denied me--found at last.
Little Lady Precious Ruth! Ruth whom I love, Ruth whom I dote on--Ruth
whom I've worshipped ever since she was a toddling child in her father's
house... Ruth!” Miss Adgate could feel the beating of Pontycroft's
heart as she stayed against his side.

“Shall we live here together?” he asked presently. “You--you--of course
you love this old place! I love it because you do. And Thou, singing
beside me in the Wilderness! It needs us, doesn't it? This peaceful
Wilderness, this New England Garden of Eden!”

“Eden, from which William Rutherford has killed the snake,” laughed Ruth
blinking a crystal tear that rolled down her cheek.

“Rutherford?” Pontycroft frowned, “_who_ is William Rutherford?”

“Oh, nobody. No one in particular,” Ruth hastened to reply. “A mere
mighty hunter before the Lord.” And Pontycroft did not pursue the
subject of William Rutherford.

“But,” said Ruth a trifle anxiously, in a moment, “we must go abroad
from time to time? We could never forsake Pontycroft.

“Oh, hang Pontycroft. Lucilla shall have it for her kids.”

“I want it for mine,” said Ruth. Then she looked away and blushed
crimson--and then she laughed.

“What is the motto, Harry, of your house?” she queried, irrelevantly.
“I've forgotten.”

“It once was,” Pontycroft said, and he smiled at her: “_Super mare,
super fluvia._”

“Once?” said Ruth, a little shyly, “_once?_ And now?”

“_Constantia_, now, henceforth,” he whispered with a throbbing of the
heart.... “But will your uncle be pleased at all this?” he enquired.

“My uncle?” said Ruth, waking from a reverie. “Oh--he would have liked
me to marry Rutherford, I imagine. But if you're awfully nice to him,
and if you let him see how infatuated you are with Barracks Hill--he'll
end, I know, by giving me and you his blessing. But I won't give up
England--and I want Italy, too,--Venice, Rome!” wilfully persisted Ruth.

“You precious little piece of covetous cosmopolitanism! Haven't you
learned that if in Heaven, may be, it is given us to be everywhere--in
this life: One Paradise, one Eden? In this world one Eden shall suffice,
for things learned on earth may or may not be practised in Heaven; but
love is, ever was, the language of repetition. In this life the lesson
is to be contented with a single Paradise.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Miss Adgate, laying her hand on Ponty's mouth. “Oh,
middle-aged sentiment... not in the Catechism. Don't, I beg, say it
again!”

He seized the hand, he pressed his lips to it, he pressed it against his
breast.

“Even an infant like you,” he whispered, “let alone a world-worn chap
like the man you propose to take as a husband, can't stand perpetual
motion.”

“Very well,” Ruth compromised, “shall we alternate with a year in
England, one here, one in Italy, Jobias and Paolina to pack for us. That
will make it easy.”

“Ah,” laughed Pontycroft, “you shall see! The pendulum is bound to
narrow its oscillations! We'll earn a well-needed rest,--_here_.”

“Oh me!” sighed Ruth, “ah me!” cried Ruth. “In that event how charmed
our ancestors will be. But, I forgot! You haven't heard the story.” Ruth
told it gaily and waited, curious to see what Harry Pontycroft would
say.

“Dear young one, these old four-posters,” he began--“are the most
dangerous things to sleep in,” and Ruth was seized with laughter.

“But I'll never sell them to the nearest dealer in old bric-a-brac.
Rather,” she concluded, “we'll do as you advised, we'll take the
greatest care not to offend our forbears. But-----” her forefinger went
up impressively, “but a destiny was in preparation for us--I felt it,
Harry, on the very day after I reached here. Harry, I felt, I knew,
Destiny had something up her sleeve. The day I went for a walk alone,”
 said Ruth, with a serious air. “It is a delicious destiny... to be
married in the little Parish church by that Saint of a Priest and to
live here, 'forever afterwards'!” (with a malicious nod,) “with a break
now and then to Europe.”

“Moreover and because journeys end in lovers' meeting, we'll probably
have a June wedding,” Pontycroft unexpectedly suggested, wise in his
generation.

“A June wedding!... I've built better than I knew,” exclaimed Ruth.
“I've asked a house party of friends, friends of yours, Lucilla's and
mine, to come here in June. Let them haste to the wedding--I'll have
Jackie Enderfield for page and he shall carry my train.”

“Another admirer,” Ponty said resigned.

“The merest bit of a boy of twelve. Without him, without my uncle, these
wits like as not had perished utterly. Jack when he's a man intends to
marry a woman with a low voice and a red glint in her hair. He will turn
Catholic with my consent and go abroad and write. He doesn't believe
either in Divorce--in other words, you perceive he _is_ an intellectual.
But,” she said, rising, “we've forgotten--oh, we've forgotten to send
that message by Jobias to poor King Bertram! We shall have to take it
ourselves.”

Henry Pontycroft and Ruth descended the hill along the violet-sprinkled
road.

“Ruth,” he urged, as they went their way, “for conscience sake,
consider,--consider, little Ruth,” he said, “ah, consider.... It is not
yet too late, infant, and I had dreamed for Ruth Adgate of a Royal End!”

“Ah,” Miss Adgate replied; a little happy sigh escaped from her lips;
she looked down at the apple blossoms in her belt,--strange to say, the
apple blossoms were fresh as though just plucked.

“Harry,” she replied, with a little quizzical look, “I, too, had dreamed
for Ruth Adgate of a Royal End.... Both our dreams have come true! _Love
is the Royal End_.”










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