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.”