The Royal End. Harland Henry
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 in her bonnet to dance and twinkle, and again she sank back in her chair.
Bertram sat forward on the edge of his, hands clasping its arms. “Yes? Yes?” he prompted.
“She's an American,” said Mrs. Wilberton, speaking with an effect of forced calm. “Her name is Ruth Adgate. She's an American of worse than common extraction, but she's immensely rich. It's really difficult to see in what she's better than an ordinary adventuress, but she has a hundred thousand pounds a year. And she's bought the Pontycrofts—Henry Pontycroft and his sister—she's bought them body and soul.”
Her voice indicated a full stop, and she allowed her face and attitude to relax, as one whose painful message was delivered.
But Bertram looked perplexed. An adventuress? Of worse than common extraction? That fresh young girl, with her prettiness, her fineness? His impulse was to cry out, “Allons donc!” And then—the Pontycrofts? Frowning perplexity, he repeated his visitor's words: “Bought the Pontycrofts? I don't think I understand.”
“Oh, it's a thing that's done,” Mrs. Wilberton assured him, on a note that was like a wail. “One knows that it is done. It's a part of the degeneracy of our times. But the Pontycrofts! One would have thought them above it. And the Adgate woman! One would have thought that even people who are willing to sell themselves must draw the line somewhere. But no. Money is omnipotent. So, for money, the Pontycrofts have taken her to their bosoms; presented her; introduced her to every one; and they'll end, of course, by capturing a title for her. Another 'international marriage.' Another instance of American gold buying the due of well-born English girls over their heads.”
Bertram smiled—partly, it may be, at the passion his guest showed, but partly from relief. He had dreaded what was coming: what had come was agreeably inconclusive and unconvincing.
“I see,” he said. “But surely this seems in the last degree improbable. What makes you think it?”
“Oh, it isn't that I think it,” Mrs. Wilberton cried, with a movement that lifted the matter high above the plane of mere personal opinion; “it's known—it's known.”
But Bertram knitted his brows again. “How can such a thing be known?” he objected.
“At most, it can only be a suspicion or an inference. What makes you suspect it? What do you infer it from?”
“Why, from the patent facts,” said Mrs. Wilberton, giving an upward motion to her pretty little white-gloved hands. “They take her everywhere. They've presented her. They've introduced her to the best people. She's regularly lancée in their set. I myself was loth, loth to believe it. But the facts—they'll bear no other construction.”
Bertram smiled again. “Yes,” he said. “But why should you suppose that they do all this for money?”
His question appeared to take the lady's breath away. She sat up straight, lips parted, and gazed at him with something like stupefaction. “For what other earthly reason should they do it?” she was able, at last, in honest bewilderment, to gasp out.
“One has heard of such a motive-power as love,” Bertram, with deference, submitted. “Why shouldn't they do it because they like the girl—because she's their friend?”
Mrs. Wilberton breathed freely, and in her turn smiled. “Ah, my dear Prince,” she said, with a touch of pity, “you don't know our English world. People in the Pontycroft's position don't take up nameless young Americans for love. Their lives are too full, too complicated. And it means an immense amount of work, of bother—you can't get a new-comer