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.