Henry Harland

“ Ruth queried with a gleam.
“No—No,—” replied Pontycroft reflectively, “no,—but if one hasn't really tried it since one's callow days the idea does speak to one. It isn't all beautiful prattle,” he assured her, “but the idea does appeal to one. As one grows old one prefers to be comfortable. A pabulum of beauty is all very well for young things like yourself here and Lucilla who still hug the precious foolish delusion that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ Poor old Rutherford is fond of recalling that memorable luncheon to this day. Ruth's joyous soul frothed into fun which sounded at times so exactly like Pontycroft that he seemed to be at her elbow. For a reason not hard to seek, to sophisticated minds, General Adgate, too, seemed in high spirits. Rutherford—well—we know what infatuated young men are—excellent company because they laugh at a word, could applaud the dullest saw. Neither Ruth nor General Adgate spoke in saws; by a saw we mean the easy pert phrase, la phrase toute faite which passes so readily for wit in any land. ”

“ But at that instant—while Ruth indulged, I grieve to acknowledge it, the spirit of mockery—a thunderous crash broke the unison of lively voices. The score of people in the rooms flew to the windows. There, tossed to earth, abased from glory, prone upon the ground—imploring boughs lifted to heaven, a wreck—there lay the monster Adgate elm, one of the hoary elms in the carriage sweep. It lay there as neatly cut as with a scimitar. The splendid tree was literally slashed in twain by the Blizzard's invisible weapon, the prostrate thing loomed, portentous, to twenty pairs of eyes. ”

“ While she entertained them with tales of Italy, which they could never hear enough about, Ruth Adgate reflected that the lives of her grandmothers must have been just such quiet, such repressed, contented lives as these.
Mrs. Leffingwell and Miss Massington, types of New England's most exquisite product—the old lady. The old lady who, with all her gentle unworldliness, is a patrician to her finger tips. As the perfume of rose-leaves is preserved in a fine porcelain jar—so the hushed fragrance of these temperate lives emanates, yet stays, to the end. ”

“ The young person who has tasted most of the sweets of European civilisation, walked in marble halls, refused a Duke, run away from the outrage offered her dignity by the offer of a morganatic marriage with a Crown Prince,—the lovesick girl who wandered through the moonlight at the Lido, floated upon the silent lagoons of Venice, discoursed with wits in lovely gardens in Florence, and herself the cause of wit in others, hung upon their discourse—that was quite another person! That was but an early incarnation, never the real Miss Adgate. ”

“ Surely, a girl of Miss Adgate's beauty and wealth would need little assistance in finding one, if she really cared about it. And anyhow, to act as her matrimonial agent—that again is a thing of which Harry Pontycroft would be incapable. But, for my part, I can't believe that Miss Adgate has any such desire. She looks to me like a young woman of mind and heart, with ideas and ideals, who would either marry for love pure and simple, or not at all. ”

“ Come! Don't be a croaker. I never knew you to croak like this before.”
“Hang it all,” answered Ponty, “I never had occasion. She's refused every one. Why does she suddenly make up her mind to accept this one? Well, I only hope it isn't because she thinks at last she has got her money's worth of titular dignity. Her Serene Highness the Princess!”
“Goodness gracious!” said Lucilla. “I don't understand you. Would you wish her to go on refusing people until she died an old maid?”
“I'll tell you one thing, anyhow—but under the rose,” said Ponty.
“Yes?” said Lucilla, with curiosity. ”

“ For the first time, she perceived that General Adgate recalled Pontycroft in a measure. Tall, thin, spare, his aquiline features were like Pontycroft's, his bearing was that of a distinguished man. “He has Harry Pontycroft's air of knowing that he knows,” reflected Ruth softly; tenderly to her soul she quoted a line Pontycroft long ago had ironically applied to himself:
“He who Knows that he Knows, follow him.” ”

“ General Adgate's niece, lovely and rich, admirable combination—Miss Adgate (Ruth Adgate, they already called her, didn't she belong to them?) had arrived. The event, discreetly mentioned in the Oldbridge Morning Herald, stared them in the face. Some boasted a glimpse of her, the day before, seated in the brougham beside her uncle; a pretty girl with reddish brown hair. Others had seen of her nothing but her outward manifestations on the luggage cart—two big brass-bound cork trunks, a cabin trunk, precisely similar, a square hat-box, a dressing case and a dark-eyed Italian maid. ”

“ Miss Adgate had Miranda's approbation for inoculating Oldbridge with levity. She consulted General Adgate:
“Anything you like, Ruth. Anything you like to keep you here contented.” And he was not in the least fired by her schemes and had nothing further to say. But Miss Adgate sat down at this and scribbled fifty notes, selecting her first guests from all the worlds held in the one London World—the men, the women she liked, whose work she liked; the people who could be irrelevant at a pinch, amused, amusing. ”

“ A far panoply of purple hills, marking the borderland, shutting away the boisterous outer world as by a charmed circle, enclosed the small, the joyous world of the little inland town, the valley and the seven hills of Oldbridge.
Pontycroft approached mechanically, slowly. He stood by Ruth's side, he looked off with her at this exquisite efflorescence of spring in the new world.
“It's a beautiful view,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “Europe could scarcely do better.... And so Lucilla told you?” he queried, carelessly. “Put not thy trust in woman. ”

“ Human life is like a city; and a city seen from a distance”—he waved his cigarette towards Florence—“is like human life taken as a whole. Taken piecemeal, bit by bit, as it passes, life dismays us, and terribly tries our faith, by the Evil it presents: the pain, disease, foul play, inequalities, injustices, what you will: just as a city, when we are in its streets, revolts us with its dirt, decay, squalor, stagnant air, noise, confusion, and its sordid population. ”

“ If you will allow me, dear Lady Dor, to make you a confidence, I should be so glad to see him married.”
“Yes,” said Lucilla. “I suppose,” she hesitated, “I suppose it is quite possible for him, in spite of his belonging to a reigning house, to marry a commoner?”
The Duchess looked vague. “A reigning house?” she repeated, politely uncomprehending.
“The Bertrandoni-Altronde,” Lucilla disjointedly explained.
“Oh,” said the Duchess, with a little toss of the head. “The Bertrandoni do not count. They have not reigned for three generations, and they will never reign again. ”

“ Comfortable and serene among park-like meadows, life in them goes on with a simple dignity and ease; and if they are the sometime innocent cause of the sin of pride to the families who inherit them, they are sources of arcadian joys to the stranger within their gates. For they are all spotless and restful—and fragrant of the breaths of several hundred years of new-mown hay, rose-arbours, and aromatic pinks, blown through the windows. ”

“ Ruth's friends were in the maddest spirits. Punch flowed, quips, cranks, peals of laughter made the house resound. The Blizzard adding, at it always does, a fresh elixir, more oxygen to the already supercharged New England atmosphere, Ruth, too, felt unaccountably elated. Her eyes sparkled while the winds howled and hooted, and bullied and tore; the unassuaged tempers of five thousand demons seemed about to take their fill of hate upon an innocent, well-meaning world, but a rosy colour bloomed in Miss Adgate's usually pale cheeks. ”

“ Home, home, home,” murmured Pontycroft, “sweet home is the tune we'll all be whistling within a month. Lucilla will carol it from her bog because it isn't considered polite to whistle in Ireland; but I, from my Saxon heath and Ruth from God's country will imitate the blackbirds. Could any tune be more acceptable to the Nonconformist conscience? Ruth, you perceive, already begins to dominate! Columbia, Ruler of the sea and wave—see how she sends us about our neglected and obvious affairs. High-ho for Winter in the North,” said Ponty. ”

“ A column from Altronde in the Fieramosca of the morrow gave a glowing description of Bertram's and his mother's arrival, which Pontycroft translated at the breakfast table: how the Grand Duke, in the uniform of a general, met and tenderly embraced them as they stepped from the train, and drove with them in a “lando di gala” through streets brilliant with flags and thronged by cheering subjects, to the Palace, escorted by the selfsame regiment of guards whose officers the other day had so summarily cooked the goose of Massimiliano. ”

“ Italian sunshine, and the shade of ilexes; oleanders in blossom; cool turf to lie on, and a fountain tinkling cool music near at hand; then, beyond there, certainly the loveliest prospect in the world to feed our eyes—Val d'Arno, with its olive-covered hills, its cypresses, its white-walled villas, and Florence shining like a cut gem in the midst. Add good tobacco to smoke, and a simple child in white-green muslin, with plenty of reddish hair, to try one's analogies upon. What could man wish better? Why don't you get married? ”

“ But Ruth seemed not to have heard his question, though he underlined it by looking up at her with a frown of grave anxiety.
“Unfortunately for us human beings,” she said, “no one has yet invented a process by which we can live our life as a whole. It's all very well to talk of viewing it, but we have to live it; and we have to live it piecemeal, bit by bit.”
“Well,” demanded Pontycroft, cheerfully inconsequent, “what can we ask better? Given health, wealth, and a little wisdom, it's extremely pleasant to live our life piecemeal. ”

“ But no—God's world, man's life—they leave you cold, they fail to interest you; you glance indifferently at them, they hardly seem worth your serious attention, you shrug and turn away. 'Tis a world that God created, and you treat it as if it were a child's mud-pie! Good heavens! And the worst of it is that the people who do that are mightily proud of themselves in their smug fashion. Curiosity is a vice and a weakness; they are above it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ The dazzling town, her flashing panoply of palaces, villas, gardens, churches, mounting up, and up—her hill, leaning firmly against the background of blue skies, blue as the Virgin Mary's robe.
“The imagination, the purpose, in those lines of architecture, those formal gardens!” cried Ruth. “How daring, uncompromising, beauty is in this land of Italy. And see, the Mediterranean, all sparkle and laughter there at her feet!” ”

“ Her youthfully mature beauty, her bigness, plumpness, smoothness, her blondeur; those deceptively child-like blue eyes of hers, with their superficial effect of wondering innocence, and their interior sparkle of observant, experienced humour, under those improbably dark and regular brows—such delicate and equal crescents as to avow themselves the creation of her pencil; the glossy abundance of her light-brown hair; her full, soft, pleasure-loving mouth and chin, their affluent good-nature tempered by the danger you divined of a caustic wit in the upward perk of her rather short nose ”

“ Lucilla opened her blue eyes wide upon the landscape and glanced accusingly at Pontycroft. “But you've precipitated us into a mess,” she said to him, “with your ribald talk about wintering in our water-soaked British Islands. Then comes this ridiculous letter,—and, of course, Ruth can't sit still under it. Yes, it is perhaps after all, a wholesome notion of yours, Ruth, a visit to your own country. It's the best bath you can take to wash out the taste left by Bertram's well-meant but preposterous letter. Besides,” she laughed, “you'll come back to us! America can't gobble you up for ever. ”

“ Ruth was saying to herself.
“You know, I think I'm a goose,” she let fall at last, smiling at Pontycroft through her tears.
“My sweet child,” said Pontycroft, “we must aye live and learn! And you're so young that living and learning may still be supposed to hold elements of interest. There's a lot ahead of you that's new and strange, so dry your pretty eyes, and Sursum Corda.” ”

“ What dear poor dears the cynics be!”
Miss Ruth Adgate gave a pleased sigh and turned her eyes again upon the view. They fell upon a bit of grey rock, a group of savins and scarlet barberry bushes loitering beside a piece of water... a composition Diaz would have thankfully imprinted, for reproduction, on his retina. The little pool, from brink to brink, coyly reflected these and the clear blue sky, and in the foreground twenty feet of hoarding bore the legend: “Try Grandpa Luther's Syrup of Winter-green for your Baby's Tantrums.” ”

“ Such delusive things have a trick of happening, in New England, to an old garden, to welcome the desired person, and Ruth, though she didn't suspect it, had already become the desired person in the eyes of her victim. The syringa tree under which they went spread for them a miraculous white canopy; the white pinks threw forth aromatic scents which penetrated by the door into the house as Ruth brought her companion to General Adgate, seated before a rousing wood fire reading his newspapers in the drawing-room. ”

“ 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. ”