The Marriage of William Ashe Part 39

"Very well, my lady."

Kitty jumped up, waltzed round the room, the white silk skirts of her dressing-gown floating far and wide, then thrust her feet into her slippers, and began to dress as though nothing had happened.

But when her toilette was accomplished, Kitty having dismissed her maid, sat for some time in front of her mirror in a brown study.

"What _is_ the matter with me?" she thought. "William is an angel, and I love him. And I can't do what he wants--I _can't_!" She drew a long, troubled breath. The lips of the face reflected in the gla.s.s were dry and colorless, the eyes had a strange, shrinking expression. "People _are_ possessed--I know they are. They can't help themselves. I began this to punish Mary--and now--when I don't see Geoffrey, everything is odious and dreary. I can't care for anything. Of course, I ought to care for William's politics. I expect I've done him harm--I know I have.

What's wrong with me?"

But suddenly, in the very midst of her self-examination, the emotion and excitement that she had felt of late in her long conversations with Cliffe returned upon her, filling her at once with poignant memory and a keen expectation to which she yielded herself as a wild sea-bird to the rocking of the sea. They had started--those conversations--from her attempt to penetrate the secret history of the man whose poems had filled her with a thrilling sense of feelings and pa.s.sions beyond her ken--untrodden regions, full, no doubt, of shadow and of poison, but infinitely alluring to one whose nature was best summed up in the two words, curiosity and daring. She had not found it quite easy. Cliffe, as we know, had resented the levity of her first attempt. But when she renewed it, more seriously and sweetly, combining with it a number of subtle flatteries, the flattery of her beauty and her position, of the private interest she could not help showing in the man who was her husband's public antagonist, and of an admiration for his poems which was not so much mere praise as an actual covetous sharing in them, a making their ideas and their music her own--Cliffe could not in the end resist her. After all, so far, she only asked him to talk of himself, and for a man of his type the process is the very breath of his being, the stimulus and liberation of all his powers.

So that before they knew they were in the midst of the most burning subjects of human discussion--at first in a manner comparatively veiled and general, then with the sharpest personal reference to Cliffe's own story, as the intimacy between them grew. Jealousy, suffering, the "hard cases" of pa.s.sion--why men are selfish and exacting, why women mislead and torment--the ugly waste and crudity of death--it was among these great themes they found themselves. Death above all--it was to a thought of death that Cliffe's harsh face owed its chief spell perhaps in Kitty's eyes. A woman had died for love of him, crushed by his jealousy and her own self-scorn. So Kitty had been told; and Cliffe's tortured vanity would not deny it. How could she have cared so much? That was the puzzle.

But this vicarious relation had now pa.s.sed into a relation of her own.

Cliffe was to Kitty a problem--and a problem which, beyond a certain point, defied her. The element of s.e.x, of course, entered in, but only as intensifying the contrasts and mysteries of imagination. And he made her feel these contrasts and mysteries as she had never yet felt them; and so he enlarged the world for her, he plunged her, if only by contact with his own bitter and irritable genius, into new regions of sentiment and feeling. For in spite of the vulgar elements in him there were also elements of genius. The man was a poet and a thinker, though he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer. His mind was stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and poetry of his own. He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an unscrupulous way; but he had none the less pa.s.sed through a wealth of tragic circ.u.mstance; he had been face to face with his own soul in the wilds of the earth; he had met every sort of physical danger with contempt; and his arrogant, imperious temper was of the kind which attracts many women, especially, perhaps, women physically small and intellectually fearless, like Kitty, who feel in it a challenge to their power and their charm.

His society, then, had in these six weeks become, for Kitty, a pa.s.sion--a pa.s.sion of the imagination. For the man himself, she would probably have said that she felt more repulsion than anything else. But it was a repulsion that held her, because of the constant sense of reaction, of on-rus.h.i.+ng life, which it excited in herself.

Add to these the elements of mischief and defiance in the situation, the s.n.a.t.c.hing him from Mary, her enemy and slanderer, the defiance of Lady Grosville and all other hypocritical tyrants, the pride of dragging at her chariot wheels a man whom most people courted even when they loathed him, who enjoyed, moreover, an astonis.h.i.+ng reputation abroad, especially in that France which Kitty adored, as a kind of modern Byron, the only Englishman who could still display in public the "pageant of a bleeding heart," without making himself ridiculous, and perhaps enough has been heaped together to explain the infatuation that now, like a wild spring gust on a s.h.i.+ning lake, was threatening to bring Kitty's light bark into dangerous waters.

"I don't care for him," she said to herself, as she sat thinking alone, "but I must see him--I _will_! And I will talk to him as I please, and where I please!"

Her small frame stiffened under the obstinacy of her resolution. Kitty's will at a moment of this kind was a fatality--so strong was it, and so irrational.

Meanwhile, down-stairs, Ashe himself was wrestling with another phase of the same situation. Lady Tranmore's note had said: "I shall be with you almost immediately after you receive this, as I want to catch you before you go to the Foreign Office."

Accordingly, they were in the library, Ashe on the defensive, Lady Tranmore nervous, embarra.s.sed, and starting at a sound. Both of them watched the door. Both looked for and dreaded the advent of Kitty.

"Dear William," said his mother at last, stretching her hand across a small table which stood between them and laying it on her son's, "you'll forgive me, won't you?--even if I do seem to you prudish and absurd. But I am afraid you _ought_ to tell Kitty some of the unkind things people are saying! You know I've tried, and she wouldn't listen to me. And you ought to beg her--yes, William, indeed you ought!--not to give any further occasion for them."

She looked at him anxiously, full Of that timidity which haunts the deepest and tenderest affections. She had just given him to read a letter from Lady Grosville to herself. Ashe ran through it, then laid it down with a gesture of scorn.

"Kitty apparently enjoyed a moonlight walk with Cliffe. Why shouldn't she? Lady Grosville thinks the moon was made to sleep by--other people don't."

"But, William!--at night--when everybody had gone to bed--escaping from the house--they two alone!"

Lady Tranmore looked at him entreatingly, as though driven to protest, and yet hating the sound of her own words.

Ashe laughed. He was smoking with an air so nonchalant that his mother's heart sank. For she divined that criticism in the society around her which she was never allowed to hear. Was it true, indeed, that his natural indolence could not rouse itself even to the defence of a young wife's reputation?

"All the fault of the Grosvilles," said Ashe, after a moment, lighting another cigarette, "in shutting up their great heavy house, and drawing their great heavy curtains on a May night, when all reasonable people want to be out-of-doors. My dear mother, what's the good of paying any attention to what people like Lady Grosville say of people like Kitty?

You might as well expect Deborah to hit it off with Ariel!"

"William, don't laugh!" said his mother, in distress. "Geoffrey Cliffe is not a man to be trusted. You and I know that of old. He is a boaster, and--"

"And a liar!" said Ashe, quietly. "Oh! I know that."

"And yet he has this power over women--one ought to look it in the face. William, dearest William!" she leaned over and clasped his hand close in both hers, "do persuade Kitty to go away from London now--at once!"

"Kitty won't go," said Ashe, quietly, "I am sorry, dear mother. I hate that you should be worried. But there's the fact. Kitty won't go!"

"Then use your authority," said Lady Tranmore.

"I have none."

"William!" Ashe rose from his seat, and began to walk up and down. His aspect of competence and dignity, as of a man already accustomed to command and destined to a high experience, had never been more marked than at the very moment of this helpless utterance. His mother looked at him with mingled admiration and amazement.

Presently he paused beside her.

"I should like you to understand me, mother. I cannot fight with Kitty.

Before I asked her to marry me, I made up my mind to that. I knew then and I know now that nothing but disaster could come of it. She must be free, and I shall not attempt to coerce her."

"Or to protect her!" cried his mother.

"As to that, I shall do what I can. But I clearly foresaw when we married that we should scandalize a good many of the weaker brethren."

He smiled, but, as it seemed to his mother, with some effort.

"William! as a public man--"

He interrupted her.

"If I can be both Kitty's husband and a public man, well and good. If not, then I shall be--"

"Kitty's husband?" cried Lady Tranmore, with an accent of bitterness, almost of sarcasm, of which she instantly repented her. She changed her tone.

"It is, of course, Kitty, first and foremost, who is concerned in your public position," she said, more gently. "Dearest William--she is so young still--she probably doesn't quite understand, in spite of her great cleverness. But she _does_ care--she _must_ care--and she ought to know what slight things may sometimes affect a man's prospects and future in this country."

Ashe said nothing. He turned on his heel and resumed his pacing. Lady Tranmore looked at him in perplexity.

"William, I heard a rumor last night--"

He held his cigarette suspended.

"Lord Crashaw told me that the resignations would certainly be in the papers this week, and that the ministry would go on--after a rearrangement of posts. Is it true?"

Ashe resumed his cigarette.

"True--as to the facts--so far as I know. As to the date, Lord Crashaw knows, I think, no more than I do. It may be this week, it may be next month."

"Then I hear--thank goodness I never see her," Elizabeth went on, reluctantly--"that that dreadful woman, Lady Parham, is more infuriated than ever--"

"With Kitty? Let her be! It really doesn't matter an old shoe, either to Kitty or me."

"She can be a most bitter enemy, William. And she certainly influences Lord Parham."