"My DEAREST WILLIAM,—I have seen Kitty. With some difficulty she consented to let me go and see her yesterday evening about nine o'clock.
"I arrived between six and seven, having travelled straight through without a break, except for an hour or two at Milan, and immediately on arriving I sent a note to Margaret French. She came in great distress, having just had a fresh scene with Kitty. Oh, my dear William, her report could not well be worse. Since she wrote to us Kitty seems to have thrown over all precautions. They used to meet in churches or galleries, and go out for long days in the gondola or a fishing-boat together, and Kitty would come home alone and lie on the sofa through the evening, almost without speaking or moving. But lately he comes in with her, and stays hours, reading to her, or holding her hand, or talking to her in a low voice, and Margaret cannot stop it.
"Yet she has done her best, poor girl! Knowing what we all knew last year, it filled her with terror when she first discovered that he was in Venice and that they had met. But it was not till it had gone on about a week, with the strangest results on Kitty's spirits and nerves, that she felt she must interfere. She not only spoke to Kitty, but she spoke and wrote to him in a very firm, dignified way. Kitty took no notice—only became very silent and secretive. And he treated poor Margaret with a kind of courteous irony which made her blood boil, and against which she could do nothing. She says that Kitty seems to her sometimes like a person moving in sleep—only half conscious of what she is doing; and at others she is wildly excitable, irritable with everybody, and only calming down and becoming reasonable when this man appears.
"There is much talk in Venice. They seem to have been seen together by various London friends who knew—about the difficulties last year. And then, of course, everybody is aware that you are not here—and the whole story of the book goes from mouth to mouth—and people say that a separation has been arranged—and so on. These are the kind of rumors that Margaret hears, especially from Mary Lyster, who is staying in this hotel with her father, and seems to have a good many friends here.
"Dearest William—I have been lingering on these things because it is so hard to have to tell you what passed between me and Kitty. Oh! my dear, dear son, take courage. Even now everything is not lost. Her conscience may awaken at the last moment; this bad man may abandon his pursuit of her; I may still succeed in bringing her back to you. But I am in terrible fear—and I must tell you the whole truth.
"Kitty received me alone. The room was very dark—only one lamp that gave a bad light—so that I saw her very indistinctly. She was in black, and, as far as I could see, extremely pale and weary. And what struck me painfully was her haggard, careless look. All the little details of her dress and hair seemed so neglected. Blanche says she is far too irritable and impatient in the mornings to let her hair be done as usual. She just rolls it into one big knot herself and puts a comb in it. She wears the simplest clothes, and changes as little as possible. She says she is soon going to have done with all that kind of thing, and she must get used to it. My own impression is that she is going through great agony of mind—above all, that she is ill—ill in body and soul.
"She told me quite calmly, however, that she had made up her mind to leave you; she said that she had written to you to tell you so. I asked her if it was because she had ceased to love you. After a pause she said 'No.' Was it because some one else had come between you? She threw up her head proudly, and said it was best to be quite plain and frank. She had met Geoffrey Cliffe again, and she meant henceforward to share his life. Then she went into the wildest dreams about going back with him to the Balkans, and nursing in a hospital, and dying—she hopes!—of hard work and privations. And all this in a torrent of words—and her eyes blazing, with that look in them as though she saw nothing but the scenes of her own imagination. She talked of devotion—and of forgetting herself in other people. I could only tell her, of course, that all this sounded to me the most grotesque sophistry and perversion. She was forgetting her first duty, breaking her marriage vow, and tearing your life asunder. She shook her head, and said you would soon forget her. 'If he had loved me he would never have left me!' she said, again and again, with a passion I shall never forget.
"Of course that made me very angry, and I described what the situation had been when you reached London—Lord Parham's state of mind—and the consternation caused everywhere by the wretched book. I tried to make her understand what there was at stake—the hopes of all who follow you in the House and the country—the great reforms of which you are the life and soul—your personal and political honor. I impressed on her the endless trouble and correspondence in which you had been involved—and how meanwhile all your Home Office and cabinet work had to be carried on as usual, till it was decided whether your resignation should be withdrawn or no. She listened with her head on her hands. I think with regard to the book she is most genuinely ashamed and miserable. And yet all the time there is this unreasonable, this monstrous feeling that you should not have left her!
"As to the scandalous references to private persons, she said that Madeleine Alcot had written to her about the country-house gossip. That wretched being, Mr. Darrell, seems also to have written to her, trying to save himself through her. And the only time I saw her laugh was when she spoke of having had a furious letter from Lady Grosville about the references to Grosville Park. It was like the laugh of a mischievous, unhappy child.
"Then we came back to the main matter, and I implored her to let me take her home. First I gave her your letter. She read it, flushed up, and threw it away from her. 'He commands me!' she said, fiercely. 'But I am no one's chattel.' I replied that you had only summoned her back to her duty and her home, and I asked her if she could really mean to repay your unfailing love by bringing anguish and dishonor upon you? She sat dumb, and her stubbornness moved me so that I fear I lost my self-control and said more, much more—in denunciation of her conduct—than I had meant to do. She heard me out, and then she got up and looked at me very bitterly and strangely. I had never loved her, she said, and so I could not judge her. Always from the beginning I had thought her unfit to be your wife, and she had known it, and my dislike of her, especially during the past year, had made her hard and reckless. It had seemed no use trying. I just wanted her dead, that you might marry a wife who would be a help and not a stumbling-block. Well, I should have my wish, for she would soon be as good as dead, both to you and to me.
"All this hurt me deeply, and I could not restrain myself from crying. I felt so helpless, and so doubtful whether I had not done more harm than good. Then she softened a little, and asked me to let her go to bed—she would think it all over and write to me in the morning....
"So, my dear William, I can only pray and wait. I am afraid there is but little hope, but God is merciful and strong. He may yet save us all.
"But whatever happens, remember that you have nothing to reproach yourself with—that you have done all that man could do. I should telegraph to you in the morning to say, 'Come, at all hazards,' but that I feel sure all will be settled to-morrow one way or the other. Either Kitty will start with me—or she will go with Geoffrey Cliffe. You could do nothing—absolutely nothing. God help us! She seems to have some money, and she told me that she counted on retaining her jointure."
On the night following her interview with Lady Tranmore, Kitty went from one restless, tormented dream into another, but towards morning she fell into one of a different kind. She dreamed she was in a country of great mountains. The peaks were snow-crowned, vast glaciers filled the chasms on their flanks, forests of pines clothed the lower sides of the hills, and the fields below were full of spring flowers. She saw a little Alpine village, and a church with an old and slender campanile. A plain stone building stood by—it seemed to be an inn of the old-fashioned sort—and she entered it. The dinner-table was ready in the low-roofed salle-à-manger, and as she sat down to eat she saw that two other guests were at the same table. She glanced at them, and perceived that one was William and the other her child, Harry, grown older—and transfigured. Instead of the dull and clouded look which had wrung her heart in the old days, against which she had striven, patiently and impatiently, in vain, the blue eyes were alive with mind and affection. It was as if the child beheld his mother for the first time and she him. As he recognized her he gave a cry of joy, waving one hand towards her while with the other he touched his father on the arm. William raised his head. But when he saw his wife his face changed. He rose from his seat, and drawing the little boy into his arms he walked away. Kitty saw them disappear into a long passage, indeterminate and dark. The child's face over his father's shoulder was turned in longing towards his mother, and as he was carried away he stretched out his little hands to her in lamentation.
Kitty woke up bathed in tears. She sprang out of bed and threw the window nearest to her open to the night. The winter night was mild, and a full moon sailed the southern sky. Not a sound on the water, not a light in the palaces; a city of ebony and silver, Venice slept in the moonlight. Kitty gathered a cloak and some shawls round her, and sank into a low chair, still crying and half conscious. At his inn, some few hundred yards away, between her and the Piazzetta, was Geoffrey Cliffe waking too?—making his last preparations? She knew that all his stores were ready, and that he proposed to ship them and the twenty young fellows, Italians and Dalmatians, who were going with him to join the insurgents, that morning, by a boat leaving for Cattaro. He himself was to follow twenty-four hours later, and it was his firm and confident expectation that Kitty would go with him—passing as his wife. And, indeed, Kitty's own arrangements were almost complete, her money in her purse, the clothes she meant to take with her packed in one small trunk, some of the Tranmore jewels which she had been recently wearing ready to be returned on the morrow to Lady Tranmore's keeping, other jewels, which she regarded as her own, together with the remainder of her clothes, put aside, in order to be left in the custody of the landlord of the apartment till Kitty should claim them again.
One more day—which would probably see the departure of Margaret French—one more wrestle with Lady Tranmore, and all the links with the old life would be torn away. A bare, stripped soul, dependent henceforth on Geoffrey Cliffe for every crumb of happiness, treading in unknown paths, suffering unknown things, probing unknown passions and excitements—it was so she saw herself; not without that corroding double consciousness of the modern, that it was all very interesting, and as such to be forgiven and admired.
Notwithstanding what she had said to Ashe, she did believe—with a clinging and desperate faith—that Cliffe loved her. Had she really doubted it, her conduct would have been inexplicable, even to herself, and he must have seemed a madman. What else could have induced him to burden himself with a woman on such an errand and at such a time? She had promised, indeed, to be his lieutenant and comrade—and to return to Venice if her health should be unequal to the common task. But in spite of the sternness with which he put that task first—a sternness which was one of his chief attractions for Kitty—she knew well that her coming threw a glamour round it which it had never yet possessed, that the passion she had aroused in him, and the triumph of binding her to his fate, possessed him—for the moment at any rate—heart and soul. He had the poet's resources, too, and a mind wherewith to organize and govern. She shrank from him still, but she already envisaged the time when her being would sink into and fuse with his, and like two colliding stars they would flame together to one fiery death.
Thoughts like these ran in her mind. Yet all the time she saw the high mountains of her dream, the old inn, the receding face of her child on William's shoulder; and the tears ran down her cheeks. The letter from William that Lady Tranmore had given her lay on a table near. She took it up, and lit a candle to read it.
"Kitty—I bid you come home. I should have started for Venice an hour ago, after reading Miss French's letter, but that honor and public duty keep me here. But mother is going, and I implore and command you, as your husband, to return with her. Oh, Kitty, have I ever failed you?—have I ever been hard with you?—that you should betray our love like this? Was I hard when we parted—a month ago? If I was, forgive me, I was sore pressed. Come home, you poor child, and you shall hear no reproaches from me. I think I have nearly succeeded in undoing your rash work. But what good will that be to me if you are to use my absence for that purpose to bring us both to ruin? Kitty, the grass is not yet green on our child's grave. I was at Haggart last Sunday, and I went over in the dusk to put some flowers upon it. I thought of you without a moment's bitterness, and prayed for us both, if such as I may pray. Then next morning came Miss French's letter. Kitty, have you no heart—and no conscience? Will you bring disgrace on that little grave? Will you dig between us the gulf which is irreparable, across which your hand and mine can never touch each other any more? I cannot and I will not believe it. Come back to me—come back!"
She reread it with a melting heart—with deep, shaking sobs. When she first glanced through it the word "command" had burned into her proud sense; the rest passed almost unnoticed. Now the very strangeness in it as coming from William—the strangeness of its grave and deep emotion—held and grappled with her.
Suddenly—some tension of the whole being seemed to give way. Her head sank back on the chair, she felt herself weak and trembling, yet happy as a soul new-born into a world of light. Waking dreams passed through her brain in a feverish succession, reversing the dream of the night—images of peace and goodness and reunion.
Minutes—hours—passed. With the first light she got up feebly, found ink and paper, and began to write.
From Lady Tranmore to William Ashe:
"Oh! my dearest William—at last a gleam of hope.
"No letter this morning. I was in despair. Margaret reported that Kitty refused to see any one—had locked her door, and was writing. Yet no letter came. I made an attempt to see Geoffrey Cliffe, who is staying at the 'Germania,' but he refused. He wrote me the most audacious letter to say that an interview could only be very painful, that he and Kitty must decide for themselves, that he was waiting every hour for a final word from Kitty. It rested with her, and with her only. Coercion in these matters was no longer possible, and he did not suppose that either you or I would attempt it.
"And now comes this blessed note—a respite at least! 'I am going to Verona to-night with Blanche. Please let no one attempt to follow me. I wish to have two days alone—absolutely alone. Wait here. I will write. K.'
"... Margaret French, too, has just been here. She was almost hysterical with relief and joy—and you know what a calm, self-controlled person she is. But her dear, round face has grown white, and her eyes behind her spectacles look as though she had not slept for nights. She says that Kitty will not see her. She sent her a note by Blanche to ask her to settle all the accounts, and told her that she should not say good-bye—it would be too agitating for them both. In two days she should hear. Meanwhile the maid Blanche is certainly going with Kitty; and the gondola is ordered for the Milan train this evening.
"Two P.M. There is one thing that troubles me, and I must confess it. I did not see that across Kitty's letter in the corner was written 'Tell nobody about this letter.' And Polly Lyster happened to be with me when it came. She has been au courant of the whole affair for the last fortnight—that is, as an on-looker. She and Kitty have only met once or twice since Mary reached Venice; but in one way or another she has been extraordinarily well informed. And, as I told you, she came to see me directly I arrived and told me all she knew. You know her old friendship for us, William? She has many weaknesses, and of late I have thought her much changed, grown very hard and bitter. But she is always very loyal to you and me—and I could not help betraying my feeling when Kitty's note reached me. Mary came and put her arms round me, and I said to her, 'Oh, Mary, thank God!—she's broken with him! She's going to Verona to-night on the way home!' And she kissed me and seemed so glad. And I was very grateful to her for her sympathy, for I am beginning to feel my age, and this has been rather a strain. But I oughtn't to have told her!—or anybody! I see, of course, what Kitty meant. It is incredible that Mary should breathe a word—or if she did that it should reach that man. But I have just sent her a note to Danieli's to warn her in the strongest way.
"Beloved son—if, indeed, we save her—we will be very good to her, you and I. We will remember her bringing up and her inheritance. I will be more loving—more like Christ. I hope He will forgive me for my harshness in the past.... My William!—I love you so! God be merciful to you and to your poor Kitty!"
"Will the signora have her dinner outside or in the salle-à-manger?"
The question was addressed to Kitty by a little Italian waiter belonging to the Albergo San Zeno at Verona, who stood bent before her, his white napkin under his arm.
"Out here, please—and for my maid also."
The speaker moved wearily towards the low wall which bounded the foaming Adige, and looked across the river. Far away the Alps that look down on Garda glistened under the stars; the citadel on its hill, the houses across the river were alive with lights; to the left the great mediæval bridge rose, a dark, ponderous mass, above the torrents of the Adige. Overhead, the little outside restaurant was roofed with twining vine-stems from which the leaves had fallen; colored lights twinkled among them and on the white tables underneath. The night was mild and still, and a veiled moon was just rising over the town of Juliet.
"Blanche!"
"Yes, my lady?"
"Bring a chair, Blanchie, and come and sit by me."
The little maid did as she was told, and Kitty slipped her hand into hers with a long sigh.
"Are you very tired, my lady?"
"Yes—but don't talk!"
The two sat silent, clinging to each other.
A step on the cobble-stones disturbed them. Blanche looked up, and saw a gentleman issuing from a lane which connected the narrow quay whereon stood the old Albergo San Zeno with one of the main streets of Verona.
There was a cry from Kitty. The stranger paused—looked—advanced. The little maid rose, half fierce, half frightened.
"Go, Blanche, go!" said Kitty, panting; "go back into the hotel."
"Not unless your ladyship wishes me to leave you," said the girl, firmly.
"Go at once!" Kitty repeated, with a peremptory gesture. She herself rose from her seat, and with one hand resting on the table awaited the new-comer. Blanche looked at her—hesitated—and went.
Geoffrey Cliffe came to Kitty's side. As he approached her his eyes fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head. In his own expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the real, poetry adequate and overflowing.
"Kitty!—why did you do this?" he said to her, passionately, as he caught her hand.
Kitty snatched it away, trembling under his look. She began the answer she had devised while he was crossing the flagged quay towards her. But Cliffe paid no heed. He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she sank back powerless into her chair as he bent over her.
"Cruel—cruel child, to play with me so! Did you mean to put me to a last test?—or did your hard little heart misgive you at the last moment? I cross-examined your landlady—I bribed the servants—the gondoliers. Not a word! They were loyal—or you had paid them better. I went back to my hotel in black despair. Oh, you artist!—you plotter! Kitty—you shall pay me this some day! And there—there on my table—all the time—lay your little crumpled note!"
"What note?" she gasped—"what note?"
"Actress!" he said, with an amused laugh.
And cautiously, playfully, lest she should snatch it from him, he unfolded it before her.
Without signature and without date, the soiled half-sheet contained this message, written in Italian and in a disguised handwriting:
"Too many spectators. Come to
Verona to-night.
"K."
Kitty looked at it, and then at the face beside her—infused with a triumphant power and passion. She seemed to shrink upon herself, and her head fell back against one of the supports of the pergola. One of the blue lights from above fell with ghastly effect upon the delicate tilted face and closed eyes. Cliffe bent over her in a sharp alarm, and saw that she had fainted away.
"Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens,
Dusk the hall with yew!"
"How strange!" thought the Dean, as he once more stepped back into the street to look at the front of the Home Secretary's house in Hill Street. "He is certainly in town."
For, according to the Times, William Ashe the night before had been hotly engaged in the House of Commons fighting an important bill, of which he was in charge, through committee. Yet the blinds of the house in Hill Street were all drawn, and the Dean had not yet succeeded in getting any one to answer the bell.
He returned to the attack, and this time a charwoman appeared. At sight of the Dean's legs and apron, she dropped a courtesy, or something like one, informing him that they had workmen in the house and Mr. Ashe was "staying with her ladyship."
The Dean took the Tranmores' number in Park Lane and departed thither, not without a sad glance at the desolate hall behind the charwoman and at the darkened windows of the drawing-room overhead. He thought of that May day two years before when he had dropped in to lunch with Lady Kitty; his memory, equally effective whether it summoned the detail of an English chronicle or the features of a face once seen, placed firm and clear before him the long-chinned fellow at Lady Kitty's left, to whose villany that empty and forsaken house bore cruel witness. And the little lady herself—what a radiant and ethereal beauty! Ah me! ah me!
He walked on in meditation, his hands behind his back. Even in this May London the little Dean was capable of an abstracted spirit, and he had still much to think over. He had his appointment with Ashe. But Ashe had written—evidently in a press of business—from the House, and had omitted to mention his temporary change of address. The Dean regretted it. He would rather have done his errand with Lady Kitty's injured husband on some neutral ground, and not in Lady Tranmore's house.
At Park Lane, however, he was immediately admitted.
"Mr. Ashe will be down directly, sir," said the butler, as he ushered the visitor into the commodious library on the ground-floor, which had witnessed for so long the death-in-life of Lord Tranmore. But now Lord Tranmore was bedridden up-stairs, with two nurses to look after him, and to judge from the aspect of the tables piled with letters and books, and from the armful of papers which a private secretary carried off with him as he disappeared before the Dean, Ashe was now fully at home in the room which had been his father's.
There was still a fire in the grate, and the small Dean, who was a chilly mortal, stood on the rug looking nervously about him. Lord Tranmore had been in office himself, and the room, with its bookshelves filled with volumes in worn calf bindings, its solid writing-tables and leather sofas, its candlesticks and inkstands of old silver, slender and simple in pattern, its well-worn Turkey carpet, and its political portraits—"the Duke," Johnny Russell, Lord Althorp, Peel, Melbourne—seemed, to the observer on the rug, steeped in the typical habit and reminiscence of English public life.
Well, if the father, poor fellow, had been distinguished in his day, the son had gone far beyond him. The Dean ruminated on a conversation wherewith he had just beguiled his cup of tea at the Athenæum—a conversation with one of the shrewdest members of Lord Parham's cabinet, a "new man," and an enthusiastic follower of Ashe.
"Ashe is magnificent! At last our side has found its leader. Oh! Parham will disappear with the next appeal to the country. He is getting too infirm! Above all, his eyes are nearly gone; his oculist, I hear, gives him no more than six months' sight, unless he throws up. Then Ashe will take his proper place, and if he doesn't make his mark on English history, I'm a Dutchman. Oh! of course that affair last year was an awful business—the two affairs! When Parliament opened in February there were some of us who thought that Ashe would never get through the session. A man so changed, so struck down, I have seldom seen. You remember what a handsome boy he was, up to last year even! Now he's a middle-aged man. All the same, he held on, and the House gave him that quiet sympathy and support that it can give when it likes a fellow. And gradually you could see the life come back into him—and the ambition. By George! he did well in that trade-union business before Easter; and the bill that's on now—it's masterly, the way in which he's piloting it through! The House positively likes to be managed by him; it's a sight worthy of our best political traditions. Oh yes, Ashe will go far; and, thank God, that wretched little woman—what has become of her, by-the-way?—has neither crushed his energy nor robbed England of his services. But it was touch and go."
To all of which the Dean had replied little or nothing. But his heart had sunk within him; and the doubtfulness of a certain enterprise in which he was engaged had appeared to him in even more startling colors than before.
However, here he was. And suddenly, as he stood before the fire, he bowed his white head, and said to himself a couple of verses from one of the Psalms for the day:
"Who will lead me into the strong city: who will bring me into
Edom?
Oh, be thou our help in trouble: for vain is the help of man."
The door opened, and the Dean straightened himself impetuously, every nerve tightening to its work.
"How do you do, my dear Dean?" said Ashe, enclosing the frail, ascetic hand in both his own. "I trust I have not kept you waiting. My mother was with me. Sit there, please; you will have the light behind you."
"Thank you. I prefer standing a little, if you don't mind—and I like the fire."
Ashe threw himself into a chair and shaded his eyes with his hand. The Dean noticed the strains of gray in his curly hair, and that aspect, as of something withered and wayworn, which had invaded the man's whole personality, balanced, indeed, by an intellectual dignity and distinction which had never been so commanding. It was as though the stern and constant wrestle of the mind had burned away all lesser things—the old, easy grace, the old, careless pleasure in life.
"I think you know," began the Dean, clearing his throat, "why I asked you to see me?"
"You wished, I think, to speak to me—about my wife," said Ashe, with difficulty.
Under his sheltering hand, his eyes looked straight before him into the fire.
The Dean fidgeted a moment, lifted a small Greek vase on the mantel-piece, and set it down—then turned round.
"I heard from her ten days ago—the most piteous letter. As you know, I had always a great regard for her. The news of last year was a sharp sorrow to me—as though she had been a daughter. I felt I must see her. So I put myself into the train and went to Venice."
Ashe started a little, but said nothing.
"Or, rather, to Treviso, for, as I think you know, she is there with Lady Alice."
"Yes, that I had heard."
The Dean paused again, then moved a little nearer to Ashe, looking down upon him.
"May I ask—stop me if I seem impertinent—how much you know of the history of the winter?"
"Very little!" said Ashe, in a low voice. "My mother got some information from the English consul at Trieste, who is a friend of hers—to whom, it seems, Lady Kitty applied; but it did not amount to much."
The Dean drew a small note-book from a breast-pocket and looked at some entries in it.
"They seem to have reached Marinitza in November If I understood aright, Lady Kitty had no maid with her?"
"No. The maid Blanche was sent home from Verona."
"How Lady Kitty ever got through the journey!—or the winter!" said the Dean, throwing up his hands. "Her health, of course, is irreparably injured. But that she did not die a dozen times over, of hardship and misery, is the most astonishing thing! They were in a wretched village, nearly four thousand feet up, a village of wooden huts, with a wooden hospital. All the winter nearly they were deep in snow, and Lady Kitty worked as a nurse. Cliffe seems to have been away fighting, very often, and at other times came back to rest and see to supplies."
"I understand she passed as his wife?" said Ashe.
The Dean made a sign of reluctant assent.
"They lived in a little house near the hospital. She tells me that after the first two months she began to loathe him, and she moved into the hospital to escape him. He tried at first to melt and propitiate her; but when he found that it was no use, and that she was practically lost to him, he changed his temper, and he might have behaved to her like the tyrant he is but that her hold over the people among whom they were living, both on the fighting-men and the women, had become by this time greater than his own. They adored her, and Cliffe dared not ill-treat her. And so it went on through the winter. Sometimes they were on more friendly terms than at others. I gather that when he showed his dare-devil, heroic side she would relent to him, and talk as though she loved him. But she would never go back—to live with him; and that after a time alienated him completely. He was away more and more; and at last she tells me there was a handsome Bosnian girl, and—well, you can imagine the rest. Lady Kitty was so ill in March that they thought her dying, but she managed to write to this consul you spoke of at Trieste, and he sent up a doctor and a nurse. But this you probably know?"
"Yes," said Ashe, hoarsely. "I heard that she was apparently very ill when she reached Treviso, but that she had rallied under Alice's nursing. Lady Alice wrote to my mother."
"Did she tell Lady Tranmore anything of Lady Kitty's state of mind?" said the Dean, after a pause.
Ashe also was slow in answering. At last he said:
"I understand there has been great regret for the past."
"Regret!" cried the Dean. "If ever there was a terrible case of the dealings of God with a human soul—"
He began to walk up and down impetuously, wrestling with emotion.
"Did she give you any explanation," said Ashe, presently, in a voice scarcely audible—"of their meeting at Verona? You know my mother believed—that she had broken with him—that all was saved. Then came a letter from the maid, written at Kitty's direction, to say that she had left her mistress—and they had started for Bosnia."
"No; I tried. But she seemed to shrink with horror from everything to do with Verona. I have always supposed that fellow in some way got the information he wanted—bought it no doubt—and pursued her. But that she honestly meant to break with him I have no doubt at all."
Ashe said nothing.
"Think," said the Dean, "of the effect of that man's sudden appearance—of his romantic and powerful personality—your wife alone, miserable—doubting your love for her—"
Ashe raised his hand with a gesture of passion.
"If she had had the smallest love left for me she could have protected herself! I had written to her—she knew—"
His voice broke. The Dean's face quivered.
"My dear fellow—God knows—" He broke off. When he recovered composure he said:
"Let us go back to Lady Kitty. Regret is no word to express what I saw. She is consumed by remorse night and day. She is also still—as far as my eyes can judge—desperately ill. There is probably lung trouble caused by the privations of the winter. And the whole nervous system is shattered."
Ashe looked up. His aspect showed the effect of the words.
"Every provision shall be made for her," he said, in a voice muffled and difficult. "Lady Alice has been told already to spare no expense—to do everything that can be done."
"There is only one thing that can be done for her," said the Dean.
Ashe did not speak.
"There is only one thing that you or any one else could do for her," the Dean repeated, slowly, "and that is to love—and forgive her!" His voice trembled.
"Was it her wish that you should come to me?" said Ashe, after a moment.
"Yes. I found her at first very despairing—and extremely difficult to manage. She regretted she had written to me, and neither Lady Alice nor I could get her to talk. But one day"—the old man turned away, looking into the fire, with his back to Ashe, and with difficulty pursued his story—"one day, whether it was, the sight of a paralyzed child that used to come to Lady Alice's lace-class, or some impression from the service of the mass to which she often goes in the early mornings with her sister, I don't know, but she sent for me—and—and broke down entirely. She implored me to see you, and to ask you if she might live at Haggart, near the child's grave. She told me that according to every doctor she has seen she is doomed, physically. But I don't think she wants to work upon your pity. She herself declares that she has much more vitality than people think, and that the doctors may be all wrong. So that you are not to take that into account. But if you will so far forgive her as to let her live at Haggart, and occasionally to go and see her, that would be the only happiness to which she could now look forward, and she promises that she will follow your wishes in every respect, and will not hinder or persecute you in any way."
Ashe threw up his hands in a melancholy gesture. The Dean understood it to mean a disbelief in the ability of the person promising to keep such an engagement. His face flushed—he looked uncertainly at Ashe.
"For my part," he said, quickly, "I am not going to advise you for a moment to trust to any such promise."
Rising from his seat, Ashe began to pace the room. The Dean followed him with his eyes, which kindled more and more.
"But," he resumed, "I none the less urge and implore you to grant Lady Kitty's prayer."
Ashe slightly shook his head. The little Dean drew himself together.
"May I speak to you—with a full frankness? I have known and loved you from a boy. And"—he stopped a moment, then said, simply—"I am a Christian minister."
Ashe, with a sad and charming courtesy, laid his hand on the old man's arm.
"I can only be grateful to you," he said, and stood waiting.
"At least you will understand me," said the Dean. "You are not one of the small souls. Well—here it is! Lady Kitty has been an unfaithful wife. She does not attempt to deny or cover it. But in my belief she loves you still, and has always loved you. And when you married her, you must, I think, have realized that you were running no ordinary risks. The position and antecedents of her mother—the bringing up of the poor child herself—the wildness of her temperament, and the absence of anything like self-discipline and self-control, must surely have made you anxious? I certainly remember that Lady Tranmore was full of fears."
He looked for a reply.
"Yes," said Ashe, "I was anxious. Or, rather, I saw the risks clearly. But I was in love, and I thought that love could do everything."
The Dean looked at him curiously—hesitated—and at last said:
"Forgive me. Did you take your task seriously enough?—did you give Lady Kitty all the help you might?"
The blue eyes scanned Ashe's face. Ashe turned away, as though the words had touched a sore.
"I know very well," he said, unsteadily, "that I seemed to you and others a weak and self-indulgent fool. All I can say is, it was not in me to play the tutor and master to my wife."
"She was so young, so undisciplined," said the Dean, earnestly. "Did you guard her as you might?"
A touch of impatience appeared in Ashe.
"Do you really think, my dear Dean," he said, as he resumed his walk up and down, "that one human being has, ultimately, any decisive power over another? If so, I am more of a believer in—fate—or liberty—I am not sure which—than you."
The Dean sighed.
"That you were infinitely good and loving to her we all know."
"'Good'—'loving'?" said Ashe, under his breath, with a note of scorn. "I—"
He restrained himself, hiding his face as he hung over the fire.
There was a silence, till the Dean once more placed himself in Ashe's path. "My dear friend—you saw the risks, and yet you took them! You made the vow 'for better, for worse.' My friend, you have, so to speak, lost your venture! But let me urge on you that the obligation remains!"
"What obligation?"
"The obligation to the life you took into your own hands—to the soul you vowed to cherish," said the Dean, with an apostolic and passionate earnestness.
Ashe stood before him, pale, and charged with resolution.
"That obligation—has been cancelled—by the laws of your own Christian faith, no less than by the ordinary laws of society."
"I do not so read it!" cried the Dean, with vivacity. "Men say so, 'for the hardness of their hearts.' But the divine pity which transformed men's idea of marriage could never have meant to lay it down that in marriage alone there was to be no forgiveness."
"You forget your text," said Ashe, steadily. "Saving for the cause—'" His voice failed him.
"Permissive!" was the Dean's eager reply—"permissive only. There are cases, I grant you—cases of impenitent wickedness—where the higher law is suspended, finds no chance to act—where relief from the bond is itself mercy and justice. But the higher law is always there. You know the formula—'It was said by them of old time. But I say unto you—' And then follows the new law of a new society. And so in marriage. If love has the smallest room to work—if forgiveness can find the narrowest foothold—love and forgiveness are imposed on—demanded of—the Christian!—here as everywhere else. Love and forgiveness—not penalty and hate!"
"There is no question of hate—and—I doubt whether I am a Christian," said Ashe, quietly, turning away.
The Dean looked at him a little askance—breathing fast.
"But you are a heart, William!" he said, using the privilege, of his white hairs, speaking as he might have spoken to the Eton boy of twenty years before—"ay, and one of the noblest. You gathered that poor thing into your arms—knowing what were the temptations of her nature, and she became the mother of your child. Now—alas! those temptations have conquered her. But she still turns to you—she still clings to you—and she has no one else. And if you reject her she will go down unforgiven and despairing to the grave."
For the first time Ashe's lips trembled. But his speech was very quiet and collected.
"I must try and explain myself," he said. "Why should we talk of forgiveness? It is not a word that I much understand, or that means much to men of my type and generation. I see what has happened in this way. Kitty's conduct last year hit me desperately hard. It destroyed my private happiness, and but for the generosity of the best friends ever man had it would have driven me out of public life. I warned her that the consequences of the Cliffe matter would be irreparable, and she still carried it through. She left me for that man—and at a time when by her own action it was impossible for me to defend either her or myself. What course of action remained to me? I did remember her temperament, her antecedents, and the certainty that this man, whatever might be his moments of heroism, was a selfish and incorrigible brute in his dealings with women. So I wrote to her, through this same consul at Trieste. I let her know that if she wished it, and if there were any chance of his marrying her, I would begin divorce proceedings at once. She had only to say the word. If she did not wish it, I would spare her and myself the shame and scandal of publicity. And if she left him, I would make additional provision for her which would insure her every comfort. She never sent a word of reply, and I have taken no steps. But as soon as I heard she was at Treviso, I wrote again—or, rather, this time my lawyers wrote, suggesting that the time had come for the extra provision I had spoken of, which I was most ready and anxious to make."
He paused.
"And this," said the Dean, "is all? This is, in fact, your answer to me?"
Ashe made a sign of assent.
"Except," he added, with emotion, "that I have heard, only to-day, that if Kitty wishes it, her old friend Miss French will go out to her at once, nurse her, and travel with her as long as she pleases. Miss French's brother has just married, and she is at liberty. She is most deeply attached to Kitty, and as soon as she heard Lady Alice's report of her state she forgot everything else. Can you not persuade—Kitty"—he looked up urgently—"to accept her offer?"
"I doubt it," said the Dean, sadly. "There is only one thing she pines for, and without it she will be a sick child crossed. Ah! well—well! So to allow her to share your life again—however humbly and intermittently—is impossible?"
It seemed to the Dean that a shudder passed through the man beside him.
"Impossible," said Ashe, sharply. "But not only for private reasons."
"You mean your public duty stands in the way?"
"Kitty left me of her own free will. I have put my hand to the plough again—and I cannot turn back. You can see for yourself that I am not at my own disposal—I belong to my party, to the men with whom I act, who have behaved to me with the utmost generosity."
"Of course Lady Kitty could no longer share your public life. But at Haggart—in seclusion?"
"You know what her personality is—how absorbing—how impossible to forget! No—if she returned to me, on any terms whatever, all the old conditions would begin again. I should inevitably have to leave politics."
"And that—you are not prepared to do?"
The Dean wondered at his own audacity, and a touch of proud surprise expressed itself in Ashe.
"I should have preferred to put it that I have accepted great tasks and heavy responsibilities—and that I am not my own master."
The Dean watched him closely. Across the field of imagination there passed the figure of one who "went away sorrowful, having great possessions," and his heart—the heart of a child or a knight-errant—burned within him.
But before he could speak again the door of the room opened and a lady in black entered. Ashe turned towards her.
"Do you forbid me, William?" she said, quietly—"or may I join your conversation?"
Ashe held out his hand and drew her to him. Lady Tranmore greeted her old friend the Dean, and he looked at her overcome with emotion and doubt.
"You have come to us at a critical moment," he said—"and I am afraid you are against me."
She asked what they had been discussing, though, indeed, as she said, she partly guessed. And the Dean, beginning to be shaken in his own cause, repeated his pleadings with a sinking heart. They sounded to him stranger and less persuasive than before. In doing what he had done he had been influenced by an instinctive feeling that Ashe would not treat the wrong done him as other men might treat it; that, to put it at the least, he would be able to handle it with an ethical originality, to separate himself in dealing with it from the mere weight of social tradition. Yet now as he saw the faces of mother and son together—the mother leaning on the son's arm—and realized all the strength of the social ideas which they represented, even though, in Ashe's case, there had been a certain individual flouting of them, futile and powerless in the end—the Dean gave way.
"There—there!" he said, as he finished his plea, and Lady Tranmore's sad gravity remained untouched. "I see you both think me a dreamer of dreams!"
"Nay, dear friend!" said Lady Tranmore, with the melancholy smile which lent still further beauty to the refined austerity of her face; "these things seem possible to you, because you are the soul of goodness—"
"And a pious old fool to boot!" said the Dean, impatiently. "But I am willing—like St. Paul and my betters—to be a fool for Christ's sake. Lady Tranmore, are you or are you not a Christian?"
"I hope so," she said, with composure, while her cheek flushed. "But our Lord did not ask impossibilities. He knew there were limits to human endurance—and human pardon—though there might be none to God's."
"'Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,'" cried the Dean. "Where are the limits there?"
"There are other duties in life besides that to a wife who has betrayed her husband," she said, steadily. "You ask of William what he has not the strength to give. His life was wrecked, and he has pieced it together again. And now he has given it to his country. That poor, guilty child has no claim upon it."
"But understand," said Ashe, interposing, with an energy that seemed to express the whole man—"while I live, everything—short of what you ask—that can be done to protect or ease her, shall be done. Tell her that."
His features worked painfully. The Dean took up his hat and stick.
"And may I tell her, too," he said, pausing—"that you forgive her?"
Ashe hesitated.
"I do not believe," he said, at last, "that she would attach any more meaning to that word than I do. She would think it unreal. What's done is done."
The Dean's heart leaped up in the typical Christian challenge to the fatal and the irrevocable. While life lasts the lost sheep can always be sought and found; and love, the mystical wine, can always be poured into the wounds of the soul, healing and recreating! But he said no more. He felt himself humiliated and defeated.
Ashe and Lady Tranmore took leave of him with an extreme gentleness and affection. He would almost rather they had treated him ill. Yes, he was an optimist and a dreamer!—one who had, indeed, never grappled in his own person with the worst poisons and corrosions of the soul. Yet still, as he passed along the London streets—marked here and there by the newspaper placards which announced Ashe's committee triumphs of the night before—he was haunted anew by the immortal words:
"One thing thou lackest," ... and "Come, follow me!"
Ah!—could he have done such a thing himself? or was he merely the scribe carelessly binding on other men's shoulders things grievous to be borne? The answering passion of his faith mounted within him—joined with a scorn for the easy conditions and happy, scholarly pursuits of his own life, and a thirst which in the early days of Christendom would have been a thirst for witness and for martyrdom.
Three days later the Dean—a somewhat shrunken and diminished figure, in ordinary clerical dress, without the buckles and silk stockings that typically belonged to him—stood once more at the entrance of a small villa outside the Venetian town of Treviso.
He was very weary, and as he sought disconsolately through all his pockets for the wherewithal to pay his fly, while the spring rain pattered on his wide-awake, he produced an impression as of some delicate, draggled thing, which would certainly have gone to the heart of his adoring wife could she have beheld it. The Dean's ways were not sybaritic. He pecked at food and drink like a bird; his clothes never caused him a moment's thought; and it seemed to him a waste of the night to use it for sleeping. But none the less did he go through life finely looked after. Mrs. Winston dressed him, took his tickets and paid his cabs, and without her it was an arduous matter for the Dean to arrive at any destination whatever. As it was, in the journey from Paris he had lost one of the two bags which Mrs. Winston had packed for him, and he looked remorsefully at the survivor as it was deposited on the steps beside him.
It did not, however, remain on the steps. For when Lady Alice's maid-housekeeper appeared, she informed the Dean, with a certain flurry of manner, that the ladies were not at home. They had gone off that morning—suddenly—to Venice, leaving a letter for him, should he arrive.
"Fermate!" cried the Dean, turning towards the cab, which was trailing away, and the man, who had been scandalously overpaid, came back with alacrity, while the Dean stepped in to read the letter.
When he came out again he was very pale and in a great haste. He bade the man replace the bag and drive him at once to the railway-station.
On the way thither he murmured to himself, "Horrible!— horrible!"—and both the letter and a newspaper which had been enclosed in it shook in his hands.
He had half an hour to wait before the advent of the evening train for Venice, and he spent it in a quiet corner poring over the newspaper. And not that newspaper only, for he presently became aware that all the small, ill-printed sheets offered him by an old newsvender in the station were full of the same news, and some with later detail—nay, that the people walking up and down in the station were eagerly talking of it.
An Englishman had been assassinated in Venice. It seemed that a body had been discovered early on the preceding morning floating in one of the small canals connecting the Fondamente Nuove with the Grand Canal. It had been stabbed in three places; two of the wounds must have been fatal. The papers in the pocket identified the murdered man as the famous English traveller, poet, and journalist, Mr. Geoffrey Cliffe. Mr. Cliffe had just returned from an arduous winter in the Balkans, where he had rendered superb service to the cause of the Bosnian insurgents. He was well known in Venice, and the terrible event had caused a profound sensation there. No clew to the outrage had yet been obtained. But Mr. Cliffe's purse and watch had not been removed.
The Dean arrived in Venice by the midnight train, and went to the hotel on the Riva whither Lady Alice had directed him. She was still up, waiting to see him, and in the dark passage outside Kitty's door she told him what she knew of the murder. It appeared that late that night a startling arrest had been made—of no less a person than the Signorina Ricci, the well-known actress of the Apollo Theatre, and of two men supposed to have been hired by her for the deed. This news was still unknown to Kitty—she was in bed, and her companion had kept it from her.
"How is she?" asked the Dean.
"Frightfully excited—or else dumb. She let me give her something to make her sleep. Strangely enough, she said to me this morning on the way from Treviso: 'It is a woman—and I know her!'"
The following day, when the Dean entered the dingy hotel sitting-room, a thin figure in black came hurriedly out of the bedroom beside it, and Kitty caught him by the hand.
"Isn't it horrible?" she said, staring at him with her changed, dark-rimmed eyes. "She tried once, in Bosnia. One of the Italians who came out with us—she had got hold of him. Do you think—he suffered?"
Her voice was quite quiet. The Dean shuddered.
"One of the stabs was in the heart," he said. "But try and put it from you, Lady Kitty. Sit down." He touched her gently on the shoulder.
Kitty nodded.
"Ah, then," she said—"then he couldn't have suffered—could he? I'm glad."
She let the Dean put her in a chair, and, clasping her hands round her knees, she seemed to pursue her own thoughts.
Her aspect affected him almost beyond bearing. Ashe's brilliant wife?—London's spoiled child?—this withered, tragic little creature, of whom it was impossible to believe that, in years, she was not yet twenty-four? So bewildered in mind, so broken in nerve was she, that it was not till he had sat with her some time, now entering perforce into the cloud of horror that brooded over her, now striving to drag her from it, that she asked him about his visit to England.
He told her in a faltering voice.
She received it very quietly, even with a little, queer, twisting laugh.
"I thought he wouldn't. Was Lady Tranmore there?"
The Dean replied that Lady Tranmore had been there.
"Ah, then, of course there was no chance," said Kitty. "When one is as good as that, one never forgives."
She looked up quickly. "Did William say he forgave me?"
The Dean hesitated.
"He said a great deal that was kind and generous."
A slight spasm passed over Kitty's face.
"I suppose he thought it ridiculous to talk of forgiving. So did I—once."
She covered her eyes with her hands—removing them to say, impatiently:
"One can't go on being sorry every moment of the day. No, one can't! Why are we made so? William would agree with me there."
"Dear Lady Kitty!" said the Dean, tenderly—"God forgives—and with Him there is always hope, and fresh beginning."
Kitty shook her head.
"I don't know what that means," she said. "I wonder whether"—she looked at him with a certain piteous and yet affectionate malice—"if you'd been as deep as I, whether you'd know."
The Dean flushed. The hidden wound stung again. Had he, then, no right to speak? He felt himself the elder son of the parable—and hated himself anew.
But he was a Christian, on his Master's business. He must obey orders, even though he could feel no satisfaction, or belief in himself—though he seem to himself such a shallow and perfunctory person. So he did his tender best for Kitty. He spent his loving, enthusiastic, pitiful soul upon her; and while he talked to her she sat with her hands crossed on her lap, and her eyes wandering through the open window to the forests of masts outside and the dancing wavelets of the lagoon. When at last he spoke of the further provision Ashe wished to make for her, when he implored her to summon Margaret French, she shook her head. "I must think what I shall do," she said, quietly; and a minute afterwards, with a flash of her old revolt—"He cannot prevent my going to Harry's grave!"
Early the following morning the murdered man was carried to the cemetery at San Michele. In spite of some attempt on the part of the police to keep the hour secret, half Venice followed the black-draped barca, which bore that flawed poet and dubious hero to his rest.
It was a morning of exceeding beauty. On the mean and solitary front of the Casa dei Spiriti there shone a splendor of light; the lagoon was azure and gold; the main-land a mist of trees in their spring leaf; while far away the cypresses of San Francesco, the slender tower of Torcello, and the long line of Murano—and farther still the majestic wall of silver Alps—greeted the eyes that loved them, as the ear is soothed by the notes of a glorious and yet familiar music.
Amid the crowd of gondolas that covered the shallow stretch of lagoon between the northernmost houses of Venice and the island graveyard, there was one which held two ladies. Alice Wensleydale was there against her will, and her pinched and tragic face showed her repulsion and irritation. She had endeavored in vain to dissuade Kitty from coming; but in the end she had insisted on accompanying her. Possibly, as the boat glided over the water amid a crowd of laughing, chattering Italians, the silent Englishwoman was asking herself what was to be the future of the trust she had taken on herself. Kitty in her extremity had remembered her half-sister's promise, and had thrown herself upon it. But a few weeks' experience had shown that they were strange and uncongenial to each other. There was no true affection between them—only a certain haunting instinct of kindred. And even this was weakened or embittered by those memories in Alice's mind which Kitty could never approach and Alice never forget. What was she to do with her half-sister, stranded and dishonored as she was?—How content or comfort her?—How live her own life beside her?
Kitty sat silent, her eyes fixed upon the barca which held the coffin under its pall. Her mind was the scene of an infinite number of floating and fragmentary recollections; of the day when she and Cliffe had followed the murazzi towards the open sea; of the meeting at Verona; of the long winter, with its hardship and its horror; and that hatred and contempt which had sprung up between them. Could she love no one, cling faithfully to no one? And now the restless brain, the vast projects, the mixed nature, the half-greatness of the man had been silenced—crushed—in a moment, by the stroke of a knife. He had been killed by a jealous woman—because of his supposed love for another woman, whose abhorrence, in truth, he had earned in a few short weeks. There was something absurd mingled with the horror—as though one watched the prank of a demon.
Her sensuous nature was tormented by the thought of the last moment. Had he had time to feel despair—the thirst for life? She prayed not. She thought of the Sunday afternoon at Grosville Park when they had tried to play billiards, and Lord Grosville had come down on them; or she saw him sitting opposite to her, at supper, on the night of the fancy ball, in the splendid Titian dress, while she gloated over the thoughts of the trick she had played on Mary Lyster—or bending over her when she woke from her swoon at Verona. Had she ever really loved him for one hour?—and if not, what possible excuse, before gods or men, was there for this ugly, self-woven tragedy into which she had brought herself and him, merely because her vanity could not bear that William had not been able to love her, for long, far above all her deserts?
William! Her heart leaped in her breast. He was thirty-six—and she not twenty-four. A strange and desolate wonder overtook her as the thought seized her of the years they might still spend on the same earth—members of the same country, breathing the same air—and yet forever separate. Never to see him—or speak to him again!—the thought stirred her imagination, as it were, while it tortured her; there was in it a certain luxury and romance of pain.
Thus, as she followed Cliffe to his last blood-stained rest, did her mind sink in dreams of Ashe—and in the dismal reckoning up of all that she had so lightly and inconceivably lost. Sometimes she found herself absorbed in a kind of angry marvelling at the strength of the old moral commonplaces.
It had been so easy and so exciting to defy them. Stones which the builders of life reject—do they still avenge themselves in the old way? There was a kind of rage in the thought.
On the way home Kitty expressed a wish to go into St. Mark's alone. Lady Alice left her there, and in the shadow of the atrium Kitty looked at her strangely, and kissed her.
An hour after Lady Alice had reached the hotel a letter was brought to her. In it Kitty bade her—and the Dean—farewell, and asked that no effort should be made to track her. "I am going to friends—where I shall be safe and at peace. Thank you both with all my heart. Let no one think about me any more."
Of course they disobeyed her. They made what search in Venice they could, without rousing a scandal, and Ashe rushed out to join it, using the special means at a minister's disposal. But it was fruitless. Kitty vanished like a wraith in the dawn; and the living world of action and affairs knew her no more.
"Well, I must have a carriage!" said William Ashe to the landlord of one of the coaching inns of Domo Dossola—"and if you can't give me one for less, I suppose I shall have to pay this most ridiculous charge. Tell the man to put to at once."
The landlord who owned the carriages, and would be sitting snugly at home while the peasant on the box faced the elements in consideration of a large number of extra francs to his master, retired with a deferential smile, and told Emilio to bring the horses.
Meanwhile Ashe finished an indifferent dinner, paid a large bill, and went out to survey the preparations for departure, so far as the pelting rain in the court-yard would let him. He was going over the Simplon, starting rather late in the day, and the weather was abominable. His valet, Richard Dell, kept watch over the luggage and encouraged the ostlers, with a fairly stoical countenance. He was an old traveller, and though he would have preferred not to travel in a deluge, he disliked Italy, as a country of sour wine, and would be glad to find himself across the Alps. Moreover, he knew the decision of his master's character, and, being a man of some ability and education, he took a pride in the loftiness of the affairs on which Ashe was generally engaged. If Mr. Ashe said that he must get to Geneva the following morning, and to London the morning after, on important business—why, he must, and it was no good talking about weather.
They rattled off through the streets of Domo Dossola, Dell in front with the driver, under a waterproof hood and apron, Ashe in the closed landau behind, with a plentiful supply of books, newspapers, and cigars to while away the time.
At Isella, the frontier village, he took advantage of the custom-house formalities and of a certain lull in the storm to stroll a little in front of the inn. On the Italian side, looking east, there was a certain wild lifting of the clouds, above the lower course of the stream descending from the Gondo ravine; upon the distant meadows and mountain slopes that marked the opening of the Tosa valley, storm-lights came and went, like phantom deer chased by the storm-clouds; beside him the swollen river thundered past, seeking a thirsty Italy; and behind, over the famous Gondo cleft, lay darkness, and a pelting tumult of rain.
Ashe turned back to the carriage, bidding a silent farewell to a country he did not love—a country mainly significant to him of memories which rose like a harsh barrier between his present self and a time when he, too, fleeted life carelessly, like other men, and found every hour delightful. Never, as long as he lived, should he come willingly to Italy. But his mother this year had fallen into such an exhaustion of body and mind, caused by his father's long agony, that he had persuaded her to let him carry her over the Alps to Stresa—a place she had known as a girl and of which she often spoke—for a Whitsuntide holiday. He himself was no longer in office. A coalition between the Tories and certain dissident Liberals had turned out Lord Parham's government in the course of a stormy autumn session, some eight months before. It had been succeeded by a weak administration, resting on two or three loosely knit groups—with Ashe as leader of the Opposition. Hence his comparative freedom, and the chance to be his mother's escort.
But at Stresa he had been overtaken by some startling political news—news which seemed to foreshadow an almost immediate change of ministry; and urgent telegrams bade him return at once. The coalition on which the government relied had broken down; the resignation of its chief, a "transient and embarrassed phantom," was imminent; and it was practically certain, in the singular dearth of older men on his own side, since the retirement of Lord Parham, that within a few weeks, if not days, Ashe would be called upon to form an administration....
The carriage was soon on its way again, and presently, in the darkness of the superb ravine that stretches west and north from Gondo, the tumult of wind and water was such that even Ashe's slackened pulses felt the excitement of it. He left the carriage, and, wrapped in a waterproof cape, breasted the wind along the water's edge. Wordsworth's magnificent lines in the "Prelude," dedicated to this very spot, came back to him, as to one who in these later months had been able to renew some of the literary habits and recollections of earlier years