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- Herausgeber: Henry Harland
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
BALZATORE, by many coquetries, had long been trying to attract their attention. At last he had succeeded."You have an admirer," Ruth, with a gleam, remarked to her companion. "Mercy, how he's ogling you.""Yes," answered Lucilla Dor, untroubled, in that contented, caressing voice of hers, while, her elbow on the table, with the "languid grace," about which Ruth chaffed her a good deal, she pensively nibbled a fig. "The admiration is reciprocal. What a handsome fellow he is!"And her soft blue eyes smiled straight into Balzatore's eager brown ones.Quivering with emotion, Balzatore sprang up, and in another second would have bounded to her side."Sit down, sir; where are you going?" sternly interposed Bertram. Placed with his back towards the ladies, he was very likely unaware of their existence.Balzatore sat down, but he gave his head a toss that clearly signified his opinion of the restraint put upon him: senselessly conventional, monstrously annoying. And he gave Lucilla Dor a look. Disappointment spoke in it, homage, dogged—'tis a case for saying so—dogged tenacity of purpose. "Never fear," it promised, "I'll find an opportunity yet."He found it, sure enough, some twenty minutes later.
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Henry Harland
The Royal End
Table of contents
PART FIRST
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
PART SECOND
I
II
III
IV
V
PART THIRD
I
II
III
IV
V
PART FOURTH
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
PART FIFTH
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
PART SIXTH
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
PART SEVENTH
I
II
III
IV
V
PART FIRST
I
II
III
One heard a tattoo of scampering paws, a sibilance of swift breathing; and a cold wet nose, followed by a warm furry head, was thrust from behind under Lucilla's hand.
Startled, she gave an inevitable little feminine cry, and half turned round—to recognise her late admirer. "Hello, old fellow—is this you?" she greeted him, patting his shoulder, stroking his silky ears. "You take one rather by surprise, you know. Yes, you are a very beautiful, nice, friendly collie, all the same; and I never saw so handsome a coat, or so splendid a tail, or such soulful poetic eyes. I am very glad to renew your acquaintance." Balzatore waved his splendid tail as if it were a banner; rubbed his jowl against Lucilla's knee; caracoled and pranced before her, to display his graces; cocked his head, and blinked with self-satisfaction; sat down on his haunches, and, tongue lolling from his black muzzle, panted exultantly, "There! You see how cleverly I have brought it off."
"Ecco. That is our Signore's dog," announced the man who had promised intercession. "He himself will not be far behind."
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 (you know that rather deep-in, flickering smile of goodwill of theirs), 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.
IV
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.
"Perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," Lucilla—need I mention?—quoted to herself, and if she didn't quote it aloud, that, I suppose, was due to the presence of Bertram. She and Ruth sat close together, with their faces towards the prow, where, like a battle-axe clearing their way of unseen foes, the ferro swayed and gleamed; he, sidewise, removed a little to their left. And all three were mum as strangers in a railway carriage. But, like strangers in a railway carriage, they were no doubt more or less automatically, subconsciously, taking one another in, observing, classifying. "I wonder whether he's really English," Lucilla thought. He spoke and dressed like an Englishman, to be sure, yet so many Italians nowadays do that; and, with a private gondola, he presumably lived in Venice; and there was something—in the aquiline cut of his features?—in his pointed beard?—that seemed foreign. "Anyhow, he's a gentleman," she gratefully reflected; and thereat, her imagination taking wing, "Suppose he had been an ogre or a bounder?—or a flamboyant native lady-killer?—or a little fat oily crafaud de Juif? Besides, he has nice eyes."
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 (egregious circumstance) 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 (or was it indignant protest and recall?). The ladies vanished through the great doorway; the incident was closed.
V
VI
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?"
