The Royal End. Harland Henry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ