The Royal End. Harland Henry
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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