Read Ebook: The Royal End: A Romance by Harland Henry

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Ebook has 972 lines and 57167 words, and 20 pages

At the word, appeared, approaching, the tall and slender figure of Bertram, to whom, in a sudden contrapuntal outburst, both gondoliers began to speak Venetian. They spoke rapidly, turbulently almost, with many modulations, with lavish gestures, vividly, feelingly, each exposed the ladies' case.

Bertram, his grey eyes smiling , removed his panama hat and said, in perfectly English English, with the accent of a man praying a particular favour, "I beg you to let them take you to your hotel."

The next instant, the gondoliers steadying their craft, Lucilla murmuring what she could by way of thanks, he had helped them aboard, and, after a quick order to the men, was bowing god-speed to them from the landing-stage, while one hand, by the collar, held captive a tugging, impetuous Balzatore.

"But you?" exclaimed Lucilla, puzzled. "Do you not also go to Venice?"

"Oh, they will come back for me," said Bertram, lightly.

She gave a slight movement to her head, slight but decisive, a movement that implied finality.

"We can't think of such a thing," in the tone of an ultimatum she declared. "It's extremely good of you to offer us a lift--but we simply can't accept it if it means inconvenience to yourself."

And Bertram, of course, at once ceded the point.

Bowing again, "Thank you very much," he said. "I wasn't sure we shouldn't be in your way."

He took his seat, keeping Balzatore restive between his knees.

The gondoliers bent rhythmically to their oars, the gondola went gently plump-plump, plash-plash, over the smooth water, stirring faint intermittent breezes; far and wide the lagoon lay dim and blue in a fume of moonlight, silent, secret, even somehow almost sinister in its untranslatable suggestions; and before them rose the domes and palaces of Venice, pale and luminous, with purple blacknesses of shadow, unreal, mysterious, dream-compelling, as a city built of cloud.

About the nationality of his guests, Bertram, of course, could entertain no question, nor about their place in the world; in their frocks, their hats, their poise of head, turn of hand, in the general unself-conscious selfassurance of their bearing, they wore their social history for daws to peck at; one's eye, as it rested on them, instinctively supplied a background of Mayfair, with a perspective of country houses. A thing that teased him, however, was an absurd sense that he had somewhere seen Lucilla before, seen her, known her, though he perfectly knew he hadn't. 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; the whole easygoing, indolent, sensuous--sociable, comfortable, indulgent--watchful, critical, ironic--aura of the woman: no, he told himself, she was not a person he could ever have known and forgotten, she was too distinctly differentiated an individual. Then how account for that teasing sense of recognition? He couldn't account for it, and he couldn't shake it off.

Of Ruth he was aware at the time of noticing no more than, vaguely, that the young girl under Lucilla's chaperonage was pretty and pleasant-looking!

All three sat as mum as strangers in a railway carriage, but I can't think it was the mumness of embarrassment. I can hardly imagine a woman less shy than Lucilla, a man less shy than Bertram; embarrassment is an ill it were difficult to conceive befalling either of them. No, I conjecture it was simply the mumness of people who, having said all that was essential, were sufficiently unembarrassed not to feel that they must, nevertheless, bother to say something more. And when, for example, Bertram, having unwittingly relaxed his grip upon Balzatore's collar, that irrepressible bundle of life escaped to Lucilla's side and recommenced his blandishments, they spoke readily and easily enough.

"You mustn't let him bore you," Bertram said, with a kind of tentative concern.

"On the contrary," said Lucilla, "he delights me. He's so friendly, and so handsome."

"He's not so handsome as he thinks he is," said Bertram. "He's the vainest coxcomb of my acquaintance."

"Oh, all dogs are vain," said Lucilla; "that is what establishes the fellow-feeling between them and us."

To such modicum of truth as this proposition may not have been without, Bertram's quiet laugh seemed a tribute.

"I thought he was a collie," Lucilla continued, in a key of doubt. "But isn't he rather big for a collie? Is he an Italian breed?"

"He's a most unlikely hybrid," Bertram answered. "He's half a collie, and half a Siberian wolf-hound."

"A wolf-hound?" cried Lucilla, a little alarmed perhaps at the way in which she'd been making free with him; and she fell back, to put him at arm's length. "Mercy, how savage that sounds!"

"Yes," acknowledged Bertram; "but he's a living paradox. The wolf-hound blood has turned to ethereal mildness in his veins. And he's a very perfect coward. I've seen him run from a goose, and in the house my cat holds him under a reign of terror."

Lucilla's alarm was stilled.

"Poor darling, did they abuse you? No, they shouldn't," she said, in a voice of deep commiseration, pressing Balzatore's head to her breast.

But the gondola, impelled by its two stalwart oarsmen, was making excellent speed. They had passed the sombre mass of San Servolo, the boscage, silver and sable in moonlight and shadow, of the Public Gardens; and now, with San Giorgio looming at their left, were threading an anchored fleet of steamers and fishing-smacks, towards the entrance of the Grand Canal: whence, already, they could hear the squalid caterwauling of those rival boatloads of beggars, who, on the vain theory of their being musicians, are suffered nightly, before the congeries of hotels, to render the hours hideous and hateful.

And then, in no time, they had reached the water-steps of the Britannia, and a gold-laced Swiss was aiding mesdames to alight.

"Good night--and thank you so very much," said Lucilla. "We should have had to camp at the Lido if you hadn't come to our rescue."

"I am only too glad to have been of the slightest use," Bertram assured her.

"Good night," said Ruth with a little nod and smile--the first sign she had made him, the first word she had spoken.

He lifted his hat. Balzatore, fore paws on the seat, tail aloft, head thrust forward, gave a yelp of reluctant valediction . The ladies vanished through the great doorway; the incident was closed.

The incident was closed;--and, in a way, for Bertram, as the event proved, it had yet to begin. His unknown "guests of hazard" had departed, disappeared; but they had left something behind them that was as real as it was immaterial, a sense of fluttering garments, of faint fleeting perfumes, of delicate and mystic femininity. The incident was closed, and now, as the strong ashen sweeps bore him rapidly homewards between the unseen palaces of the Grand Canal, it began to re-enact itself; and a hundred details, a hundred graces, unheeded at the moment, became vivid to him. Two women, standing in a rain of moonlight, by the landing-stage at the Lido, brightly silhouetted against the dim lagoon; the sudden tumultuous exordium of his men; his own five words with Lucilla, and the high-bred musical English voice in which she had answered him; then their presence, gracious and distinguished, there beside him in the bend of the boat,--their cool, summery toilets, the entire fineness and finish of their persons; and the wide, moonlit water, and the play of the moonlight on the ripples born of their progress, and the wide silence, punctured, as in a sort of melodious pattern, by the recurrent dip and drip of the oars; it all came back, but with an atmosphere, a fragrance, but with overtones of suggestion, even of sentiment, that he had missed. It all came back, unfolding itself as a continuous picture; and what therein, of all, came back with the most insistent clearness was the appearance of the young girl who had so mutely effaced herself in her companion's shadow, and whom, at the time , he had just vaguely noticed as pretty and pleasant-looking. This came back with insistent, with disturbing clearness, a visible thing of light in his memory; and he saw, with a kind of bewilderment at his former blindness, that her prettiness was a prettiness full of distinctive character, and that if she was "pleasant-looking" it was with a pleasantness as remote as possible from insipid sweetness. Even in her figure, which was so far typical as to be slender and girlish, he could perceive something that marked it as singular, a latent elasticity of fibre, a hint, as it were, of high energies quiescent; but when he considered her face, he surprised himself by actually muttering aloud, "Upon my word, it's the oddest face I think I have ever seen." Odd--and pretty? Yes, pretty, or more than pretty, he was quite confident of that; yet pretty notwithstanding an absolutely defiant irregularity of features. Or stay--irregularity? No, unconventionality, rather: for the features in question were so congruous and coherent with one another, so sequent in their correlation, as to establish a regularity of their own. The discreet but resolute salience of her jaw and chin, the assertive lines of her brow and nose, the crisp chiselling of her lips, the size and shape of her eyes, and over all the crinkling masses of her dark hair--unconventional as you will, he said, not attributable to any ready-made category, but everywhere expressing design, unity of design. "High energies quiescent," he repeated. "You discern them in her face as in her figure; a capacity for emotions and enthusiasms; a temperament that would feel things with intensity. And yet," he reflected, perpending his image of her with leisurely deliberation, "what in her face strikes one first, I think, what's nearest to the surface, is a kind of sceptic humour,--as if she took the world with a grain of salt, and were having a quiet laugh at it in the back of her mind. And then her colouring," he again surprised himself by muttering aloud. But when could he have observed her colouring, he wondered, when, where? Not in the colour-obliterating moonlight, of course. Where, then? Ah, suddenly he remembered. He saw her standing under the electric lamps on the steps of the Britannia. "Good night," she said, giving him a quick little nod, a brief little smile. And he saw how red her mouth was, and how red her blood, beneath the translucent whiteness of her skin, and how in the glow of her brown eyes there shone a red undergleam, and how in her crinkling masses of dark hair there were dark-red lights....

The incident was closed, in its substance, really, as matter-of-fact a little incident as one could fancy; but the savour of it lingered, persisted, kept recurring, and was sweet and poignant, like a savour of romance.

"I suppose I shall never see them again," was his unwilling but stoical conclusion, as the gondola shot through the water-gate of C? Bertradoni. "I wonder who they are."

He saw them again, however, no later than the next afternoon, and learned who they were. He was seated with dark, lantern-jawed, deepeyed, tragical-looking Lewis 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?"

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."

"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.

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