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Page 14
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.
The town above them swung to the left, to the right, to
the left again, as the road wound upward through the trees,
and the towers began to glow in the descending sun. As they
drew near, Philip saw the heads of people gathering black
upon the walls, and he knew well what was happening--how the
news was spreading that a stranger was in sight, and the
beggars were aroused from their content and bid to adjust
their deformities; how the alabaster man was running for his
wares, and the Authorized Guide running for his peaked cap
and his two cards of recommendation--one from Miss M'Gee,
Maida Vale, the other, less valuable, from an Equerry to the
Queen of Peru; how some one else was running to tell the
landlady of the Stella d'Italia to put on her pearl necklace
and brown boots and empty the slops from the spare bedroom;
and how the landlady was running to tell Lilia and her boy
that their fate was at hand.
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