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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
they