The Marriage of William Ashe Part 42

"I suppose you want me to tell you the story?"

All Kitty in the words! Her frankness, her daring, and the impatient, realistic tone she was apt to impose upon emotion--they were all there.

Ashe rose and began to walk up and down.

"Tell me your part in it," he said, at last--"and as little of that fellow as may be."

Kitty was silent. Ashe, looking at her, saw a curious shade of reverie, a kind of dreamy excitement steal over her face.

"Go on, Kitty!" he said, sharply. Then, restraining himself, he added, with all his natural courtesy--"I beg your pardon, Kitty, but the sooner we get through with this the better."

The mist in which her expression had been for a moment wrapped fell away. She flushed deeply.

"I told you I had done nothing vile!" she said, pa.s.sionately. "Did you believe me?"

Their eyes met in a shock of challenge and reply.

"Those things are not to be asked between you and me," he said, with vehemence, and he held out his hand. She just touched it--proudly. Then she drew a long breath.

"The day was--just like other days. He read me his poems--in a cool place we found under the bank. I thought he was rather absurd now and then--and different from what he had been. He talked of our going away--and his not seeing me--and how lonely he was. And of course I was awfully sorry for him. But it was all right till--"

She paused and looked at Ashe.

"You remember the inn near Hamel Weir--a few miles from Windsor--that lonely little place."

Ashe nodded.

"We dined there. Afterwards we were to row to Windsor and come home by a train about ten. We finished dinner early. By-the-way, there were two other people there--Lady Edith Manley and her boy. They had rowed down from somewhere--"

"Did Lady Edith--"

"Yes--she spoke to me. She was going back to town--to the Holland House party--"

"Where she probably met mother?"

"She did meet her!" cried Kitty. She pointed to a letter which she had thrown down as she entered. "Your mother sent round this note to me this morning--to ask when I should be at home. And Wilson sent word--There!

Of course I know she thinks I'm capable of anything."

She looked at him, defiant, but very miserable and pale.

"Go on, please," said Ashe.

"We finished dinner early. There was a field behind the inn, and then a wood. We strolled into the wood, and then Geoffrey--well, he went mad!

He--"

She bit her lip fiercely, struggling for composure--and words.

"He proposed to you to throw me over?" said Ashe, as white as she.

With a sudden gesture she held out her arms--like a piteous child.

"Oh! don't stand there--and look at me like that--I can't bear it."

Ashe came--unwillingly. She perceived the reluctance, and with a flaming face she motioned him back, while she controlled herself enough to pour out her story. Presently Ashe was able to reconstruct with tolerable clearness what had occurred. Cliffe, intoxicated by the long day of intimacy and of solitude, by Kitty's beauty and Kitty's folly, aware that parting was near at hand, and trusting to the wildness of Kitty's temperament, had suddenly a.s.sumed the language of the lover--and a lover by no means uncertain of his ultimate answer. So long as they understood each other--that, indeed, for the present, was all he asked. But she must know that she had broken off his marriage with Mary Lyster, and reopened in his nature all the old founts of pa.s.sion and of storm. It had been her sovereign will that he should love her; it had been achieved. For her sake--knowing himself for the seared and criminal being that he was--for Ashe's sake--he had tried to resist her spell. In vain. A fatal fusion of their two natures--imaginations--sympathies--had come about. Each was interpenetrated by the other; and retreat was impossible.

A kind of sombre power, indeed--the power of the poet and the dreamer--seemed to have spoken from Cliffe's strange wooing. He had taken no particular pains to flatter her, or to conceal his original hesitation. He put her own action in a hard, almost a brutal light. It was plain that he thought she had treated her husband badly; that he warned her of a future of treachery and remorse. At the same time he let her see that he could not doubt but that she would face it. They still had the last justifying cards in their hands--pa.s.sion, and the courage to go where pa.s.sion leads. When those were played, they might look each other and the world in the face. Till then they were but triflers--mean souls--fit neither for heaven nor for h.e.l.l.

Ashe's whole being was soon in a tumult of rage under the sting of this report, as he was able to piece it out from Kitty. But he kept his self-command, and by dint of it he presently arrived at some notion of her own share in the scene. Horror, recoil, disavowal--a wild resentment of the charges heaped upon her, of the pitiless interpretation of her behavior which broke from those harsh lips, of the incredulity pa.s.sing into something like contempt with which Cliffe had endured her wrath and received her protestations--then a blind flight through the fields to the little wayside station, where she hoped to catch the last train; the arrival and departure of the train while she was still half a mile from the line, and her shelter at a cottage for the night; these things stood out plainly, whatever else remained in obscurity. How far she had provoked her own fate, and how far even now she was delivered from the morbid spell of Cliffe's personality, Ashe would not allow himself to ask. As she neared the end of her story, it was as though the great tempest wave in which she had been struggling died down, and with a merciful rush bore him to a sh.o.r.e of deliverance. She was there beside him; and she was still his own.

He had been leaning over the side of a chair, his chin on his hand, his eyes fixed upon her, while she told her tale. It ended in a burst of self-pity, as she remembered her collapse in the cottage, the impossibility of finding any carriage in the small hamlet of which it made part, the faint weariness of the night--

"I never slept," she said, piteously. "I got up at eight for the first train, and now I feel"--she fell back in her chair, and whispered desolately with shut eyes--"as if I should like to die!"

Ashe knelt down beside her.

"It's my fault, too, Kitty. I ought to have held you with a stronger hand. I hated quarrelling with you. But--oh, my dear, my dear--"

She met the cry in silence, the tears running over her cheeks. Roughly, impetuously, he gathered her in his arms and kissed her, as though he would once more re-knit and reconsecrate the bond between them. She lay pa.s.sively against him, the tangle of her fair hair spread over his shoulder--too frail and too exhausted for response.

"This won't do," he said, presently, disengaging himself; "you must have some food and rest. Then we'll think what shall be done."

She roused herself suddenly as he went to the door.

"Why aren't you at the Foreign Office?"

"I sent a message early. Lawson came"--Lawson was his private secretary--"but I must go down in an hour."

"William!"

Kitty had raised herself, and her eyes shone large and startled in the small, tear-stained face.

"Yes." He paused a moment.

"William, is the list out?"

"Yes."

Kitty tottered to her feet.

"Is it all right?"

"I suppose so," he said, slowly. "It doesn't affect me."

And then, without waiting, he went into the hall and closed the door behind him. He wrote a note to the Foreign Office to say that he should not be at the office till the afternoon, and that important papers were to be sent up to him. Then he told Wilson to bring wine and sandwiches into the library for Lady Kitty, who had been detained by an accident on the river the night before, and was much exhausted. No visitors were to be admitted, except, of course, Lady Tranmore or Miss French.

When he returned to the library he found Kitty with crimson cheeks, her hands locked behind her, walking up and down. As soon as she saw him she motioned to him imperiously.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE GATHERED HER IN HIS ARMS"]