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.”