She replied decisively again, "As far as I have seen him, I do."At that moment the carriage entered a little wood, which lay brown and sombre across the cultivated hill.The trees of the wood were small and leafless, but noticeable for this--that their stems stood in violets as rocks stand in the summer sea.There are such violets in England, but not so many.Nor are there so many in Art, for no painter has the courage.The cart-ruts were channels, the hollow lagoons; even the dry white margin of the road was splashed, like a causeway soon to be submerged under the advancing tide of spring.
Philip paid no attention at the time: he was thinking what to say next.
But his eyes had registered the beauty, and next March he did not forget that the road to Monteriano must traverse innumerable flowers.
"As far as I have seen him, I do like him," repeated Miss Abbott, after a pause.
He thought she sounded a little defiant, and crushed her at once.
"What is he, please? You haven't told me that.
What's his position?"
She opened her mouth to speak, and no sound came from it.Philip waited patiently.She tried to be audacious, and failed pitiably.
"No position at all.He is kicking his heels, as my father would say.You see, he has only just finished his military service.""As a private?"
"I suppose so.There is general conscription.
He was in the Bersaglieri, I think.Isn't that the crack regiment?""The men in it must be short and broad.They must also be able to walk six miles an hour."She looked at him wildly, not understanding all that he said, but feeling that he was very clever.Then she continued her defence of Signor Carella.
"And now, like most young men, he is looking out for something to do.""Meanwhile?"
"Meanwhile, like most young men, he lives with his people--father, mother, two sisters, and a tiny tot of a brother."There was a grating sprightliness about her that drove him nearly mad.He determined to silence her at last.
"One more question, and only one more.What is his father?""His father," said Miss Abbott."Well, I don't suppose you'll think it a good match.But that's not the point.
I mean the point is not--I mean that social differences--love, after all--not but what--I'
Philip ground his teeth together and said nothing.
"Gentlemen sometimes judge hardly.But I feel that you, and at all events your mother--so really good in every sense, so really unworldly--after all, love-marriages are made in heaven.""Yes, Miss Abbott, I know.But I am anxious to hear heaven's choice.You arouse my curiosity.Is my sister-in-law to marry an angel?""Mr.Herriton, don't--please, Mr.Herriton--a dentist.
His father's a dentist."
Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain.
He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion.A dentist!
A dentist at Monteriano.A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer.He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.
Romance only dies with life.No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us.But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.
A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
It was going from Philip now, and therefore he gave the cry of pain.
"I cannot think what is in the air," he began.
"If Lilia was determined to disgrace us, she might have found a less repulsive way.A boy of medium height with a pretty face, the son of a dentist at Monteriano.Have I put it correctly? May I surmise that he has not got one penny? May I also surmise that his social position is nil? Furthermore--""Stop! I'll tell you no more."
"Really, Miss Abbott, it is a little late for reticence.
You have equipped me admirably!"
"I'll tell you not another word!" she cried, with a spasm of terror.Then she got out her handkerchief, and seemed as if she would shed tears.After a silence, which he intended to symbolize to her the dropping of a curtain on the scene, he began to talk of other subjects.
They were among olives again, and the wood with its beauty and wildness had passed away.But as they climbed higher the country opened out, and there appeared, high on a hill to the right, Monteriano.The hazy green of the olives rose up to its walls, and it seemed to float in isolation between trees and sky, like some fantastic ship city of a dream.Its colour was brown, and it revealed not a single house--nothing but the narrow circle of the walls, and behind them seventeen towers--all that was left of the fifty-two that had filled the city in her prime.Some were only stumps, some were inclining stiffly to their fall, some were still erect, piercing like masts into the blue.
It was impossible to praise it as beautiful, but it was also impossible to damn it as quaint.
Meanwhile Philip talked continually, thinking this to be great evidence of resource and tact.It showed Miss Abbott that he had probed her to the bottom, but was able to conquer his disgust, and by sheer force of intellect continue to be as agreeable and amusing as ever.He did not know that he talked a good deal of nonsense, and that the sheer force of his intellect was weakened by the sight of Monteriano, and by the thought of dentistry within those walls.
