The Marriage of William Ashe Part 69

"You overstate the difference!"

"Between the past and the present? What does that mean?"

She dropped her eyes a moment, then raised them.

"Do you often go to San Lazzaro?"

He bowed.

"I had a suspicion that the vision at the window--though it was there only an instant--was you! So you saw Mademoiselle Ricci?"

His tone was a.s.surance itself. Kitty disdained to answer. Her slight gesture bade him let her pa.s.s through; but he ignored it.

"I find her kind, Lady Kitty. She listens to me--I get sympathy from her."

"And you want sympathy?"

Her tone stung him. "As a hungry man wants food --as an artist wants beauty. But I know where I shall _not_ get it."

"That is always a gain!" said Kitty, throwing back her little head. "Mr.

Cliffe, pray let me bid you good-bye."

He suddenly made a step forward. "Lady Kitty!"--his deep-set, imperious eyes searched her face--"I can't restrain myself. Your look--your expression--go to my heart. Laugh at me if you like. It's true. What have you been doing with yourself?"

He bent towards her, scrutinizing every delicate feature, and, as it seemed, shaken with agitation. She breathed fast.

"Mr. Cliffe, you must know that any sympathy from you to me--is an insult! Kindly let me pa.s.s."

He, too, flushed deeply.

"Insult is a hard word, Lady Kitty. I regret that poem."

She swept forward in silence, but he still stood in the way.

"I wrote it--almost in delirium. Ah, well"--he shook his head impatiently--"if you don't believe me, let it be. I am not the man I was. The perspective of things is altered for me." His voice fell.

"Women and children in their blood--heroic trust--and brute hate--the stars for candles--the high peaks for friends--those things have come between me and the past. But you are right; we had better not talk any more. I hear old Federigo coming up the stairs. Good-night, Lady Kitty--good-night!"

He opened the door. She pa.s.sed him, and, to her own intense annoyance, a bunch of pale roses she carried at her belt brushed against the doorway, so that one broke and fell. She turned to pick it up, but it was already in Cliffe's hand. She held out hers, threateningly.

"I think not." He put it in his pocket. "Here is Federigo. Good-night."

It was quite dark when Kitty reached home. She groped her way up-stairs and opened the door of the _salon_. So weary was she that she dropped into the first chair, not seeing at first that any one was in the room.

Then she caught sight of a brown-paper parcel, apparently just unfastened, on the table, and within it three books, of similar shape and size. A movement startled her.

"William!"

Ashe rose slowly from the deep chair in which he had been sitting. His aspect seemed to her terrified eyes utterly and wholly changed. In his hand he held a book like those on the table, and a paper-cutter. His face expressed the remote abstraction of a man who has been wrestling his way through some hard contest of the mind.

She ran to him. She wound her arms round him.

"William, William! I didn't mean any harm! I didn't! Oh, I have been so miserable! I tried to stop it--I did all I could. I have hardly slept at all--since we talked--you remember? Oh, William, look at me! Don't be angry with me!"

Ashe disengaged himself.

"I have asked Blanche to pack for me to-night, Kitty. I go home by the early train to-morrow."

"Home!"

She stood petrified; then a light flashed into her face.

"You'll buy it all up? You'll stop it, William?"

Ashe drew himself together.

"I am going home," he said, with slow decision, "to place my resignation in the hands of Lord Parham."

XXI

Kitty fell back in silence, staring at William. She loosened her mantle and threw it off, then she sat down in a chair near the wood fire, and bent over it, s.h.i.+vering.

"Of course you didn't mean that, William?" she said, at last.

Ashe turned.

"I should not have said it unless I had meant every word of it. It is, of course, the only thing to be done."

Kitty looked at him miserably. "But you _can't_ mean that--that you'll resign because of that book?"

She pulled it towards her and turned over the pages with a hand that trembled. "That would be too foolis.h.!.+"

Ashe made no reply. He was standing before the fire, with his hands in his pockets, and a face half absent, half ironical, as though his mind followed the sequences of a far distant future.

"William!" She caught the sleeve of his coat with a little cry. "I wrote that book because I thought it would help you."

His attention came back to her.

"Yes, Kitty, I believe you did."

She gulped down a sob. His tone was so odd, so remote.

"Many people have done such things. I know they have. Why--why, it was only meant--as a skit--to make people laugh! There's _no_ harm in it, William."

Ashe, without speaking, took up the book and looked back at certain pages, which he seemed to have marked. Kitty's feeling as she watched him was the feeling of the condemned culprit, held dumb and strangled in the grip of his own sense of justice, and yet pa.s.sionately conscious how much more he could say for himself than anybody is ever likely to say for him.