The spring freshness of London, had long since departed. A crowded season; much animation in Parliament, where the government, to its own amazement, had rather gained than lost ground; industrial trouble at home, and foreign complications abroad; and in London the steady growth of a new plutocracy, the result, so far, of American wealth and American brides. In the first week of July, the outward things of the moment might have been thus summed up by any careful observer.
On a certain Tuesday night, the debate on a private member's bill unexpectedly collapsed, and the House rose early. Ashe left the House with his secretary, but parted from him at the corner of Birdcage Walk, and crossed the park alone. He meant to join Kitty at a party in Piccadilly; there was just time to go home and dress; and he walked at a quick pace.
Two members sitting on the same side of the House with himself were also going home. One of them noticed the Under-Secretary.
"A very ineffective statement Ashe made to-night—don't you think so?" he said to his companion.
"Very! Really, if the government can't take up a stronger line, the general public will begin to think there's something in it."
"Oh, if you only shriek long enough and sharp enough in England something's sure to come of it. Cliffe and his group have been playing a very shrewd game. The government will get their agreement approved all right, but Cliffe has certainly made some people on our side uneasy. However—"
"However, what?" said the other, after a moment.
"I wish I thought that were the only reason for Ashe's change of tone," said the first speaker, slowly.
"What do you mean?"
The two were intimate personal friends, belonging, moreover, to a group of evangelical families well known in English life; but even so, the answer came with reluctance:
"Well, you see, it's not very easy to grapple in public with the man whose name all smart London happens to be coupling with that of your wife!"
"I say"—the other stood still, in genuine consternation and distress—"you don't mean to say that there's that in it!"
"You notice that the difference is not in what Ashe says, but in how he says it. He avoids all personal collision with Cliffe. The government stick to their case, but Ashe mentions everybody but Cliffe, and confutes all arguments but his. And meanwhile, of course, the truth is that Cliffe is the head and front of the campaign, and if he threw up to-morrow, everything would quiet down."
"And Lady Kitty is flirting with him at this particular moment? Damned bad taste and bad feeling, to say the least of it!"
"You won't find one of the Bristol lot consider that kind of thing when their blood is up!" said the other. "You remember the tales of old Lord Blackwater?"
"But is there really any truth in it? Or is it mere gossip?"
"Well, I hear that the behavior of both of them at Grosville Park last week was such that Lady Grosville vows she will never ask either of them again. And at Ascot, at Lord's, the opera, Lady Kitty sits with him, talks with him, walks with him, the whole time, and won't look at any one else. They must be asked together or neither will come—and 'society,' as far as I can make out, thinks it a good joke and is always making plans to throw them together."
"Can't Lady Tranmore do anything?"
"I don't know. They say she is very unhappy about it. Certainly she looks ill and depressed."
"And Ashe?"
His companion hesitated. "I don't like to say it, but, of course, you know there are many people who will tell you that Ashe doesn't care twopence what his wife does so long as she is nice to him, and he can read his books and carry on his politics as he pleases!"
"Ashe always strikes me as the soul of honor," said the other, indignantly.
"Of course—for himself. But a more fatalist believer in liberty than Ashe doesn't exist—liberty especially to damn yourself—if you must and will."
"It would be hard to extend that doctrine to a wife," said the other, with a grave, uncomfortable laugh.
Meanwhile the man whose affairs they had been discussing walked home, wrapped in solitary and disagreeable thought. As he neared the Marlborough House corner a carriage passed him. It was delayed a moment by other carriages, and as it halted beside him Ashe recognized Lady M——, the hostess of the fancy ball, and a very old friend of his parents. He took off his hat. The lady within recognized him and inclined slightly—very slightly and stiffly. Ashe started a little and walked on.
The meeting vividly recalled the ball, the terminus a quo indeed from which the meditation in which he had been plunged since entering the park had started. Between six and seven weeks ago, was it? It might have been a century. He thought of Kitty as she was that night—Kitty pirouetting in her glittering dress, or bending over the boy, or holding her face to his as he kissed her on the stairs. Never since had she shown him the smallest glimpse of such a mood. What was wrong with her and with himself? Something, since May, had turned their life topsy-turvy, and it seemed to Ashe that in the general unprofitable rush of futile engagements he had never yet had time to stop and ask himself what it might be.
Why, at any rate, was he in this chafing irritation and discomfort? Why could he not deal with that fellow Cliffe as he deserved? And what in Heaven's name was the reason why old friends like Lady M—— were beginning to look at him coldly, and avoid his conversation?
His mother, too! He gathered that quite lately there had been some disagreeable scene between her and Kitty. Kitty had resented some remonstrance of hers, and for some days now they had not met. Nor had Ashe seen his mother alone. Did she also avoid him, shrink from speaking out her real mind to him?
Well, it was all monstrously absurd!—a great coil about nothing, as far as the main facts were concerned, although the annoyance and worry of the thing were indeed becoming serious. Kitty had no doubt taken a wild liking to Geoffrey Cliffe—
"And, by George!" said Ashe, pausing in his walk, "she warned me."
And there rose in his memory the formal garden at Grosville Park, the little figure at his side, and Kitty's franknesses—"I shall take mad fancies for people. I sha'n't be able to help it. I have one now, for Geoffrey Cliffe."
He smiled. There was the difficulty! If only the people whose envious tongues were now wagging could see Kitty as she was, could understand what a gulf lay between her and the ordinary "fast" woman, there would be an end of this silly, ill-natured talk. Other women might be of the earth earthy. Kitty was a sprite, with all the irresponsibility of such incalculable creatures. The men and women—women especially—who gossiped and lied about her, who sent abominable paragraphs to scurrilous papers—he had one now in his pocket which had reached him at the House from an anonymous correspondent—spoke out of their own vile experience, judged her by their own standards. His mother, at any rate—he proudly thought—ought to know better than to be misled by them for a moment.
At the same time, something must be done. It could not be denied that Kitty had been behaving like a romantic, excitable child with this unscrupulous man, whose record with regard to women was probably wholly unknown to her, however foolishly she might idealize the liaison commemorated in his poems. What had Kitty, indeed, been doing with herself this six weeks? Ashe tried to recall them in detail. Ascot, Lord's, innumerable parties in London and in the country, to some of which he had not been able to accompany her, owing to the stress of Parliamentary and official work. Grosville Park, for instance—he had been stopped at the last moment from going down there by the arrival of some important foreign news, and Kitty had gone alone. She had reappeared on the Monday, pale and furious, saying that she and her aunt had quarrelled, and that she would never go near the Grosvilles either in town or country again. She had not volunteered any further explanation, and Ashe had refrained from inquiry. There were in him certain disgusts and disdains, belonging to his general epicurean conception of existence, which not even his love for Kitty could overcome. One was a disdain for the quarrels of women. He supposed they were inevitable; he saw, by-the-way, that Kitty and Lady Parham were once more at daggers drawn; and Kitty seemed to enjoy it. Well, it was her own affair; but while there was a Greek play, or a Shakespeare sonnet, or even a Blue Book to read, who could expect him to listen?
What had old Lady Grosville been about? He understood that Cliffe had been of the party. And Kitty must have done something to bring down upon her the wrath of the Puritanical mistress of the house.
Well, what was he to do? It was now July. The session would last certainly till the middle of August, and though the American business would be disposed of directly, there was fresh trouble in the Balkan Peninsula, and an anxious situation in Egypt. Impossible that he should think of leaving his post. And as for the chance of a dissolution, the government was now a good deal stronger than it had been before Easter—worse luck!
Of course he ought to take Kitty away. But short of resignation how was it to be done? And what, even, would resignation do—supposing, per impossibile, it could be thought of—but give to gnawing gossip a bigger bone, and probably irritate Kitty to the point of rebellion? Yet how induce her to go with any one else? Lady Tranmore was out of the question. Margaret French, perhaps?
Then, suddenly, Ashe was assailed by an inner laughter, hollow and discomfortable. Things were come to a pretty pass when he must even dream of resigning because a man whom he despised would haunt his house, and absorb the company of his wife; when, moreover, he could not even think of a remedy for such a state of things without falling back dismayed from the certainty of Kitty's temper—Kitty's wild and furious temper.
For during the last fortnight, as it seemed to Ashe, all the winds of tempest had been blowing through his house. Himself, the servants, even Margaret, even the child, had all suffered. He also had lost his temper several times—such a thing had scarcely happened to him since his childhood. He thought of it as of a kind of physical stain or weakness. To keep an even and stoical mind, to laugh where one could not conquer—this had always seemed to him the first condition of decent existence. And now to be wrangling over an expenditure, an engagement, a letter, the merest nothing—whether it was a fine day or it wasn't—could anything be more petty, degrading, intolerable?
He vowed that this should stop. Whatever happened, he and Kitty should not degenerate into a pair of scolds—besmirch their life with quarrels as ugly as they were silly. He would wrestle with her, his beloved, unreasonable, foolish Kitty; he ought, of course, to have done so before. But it was only within the last week or so that the horizon had suddenly darkened—the thing grown serious. And now this beastly paragraph! But, after all, what did such garbage matter? It would of course be a comfort to thrash the editor. But our modern life breeds such creatures, and they have to be borne.
He let himself into a silent house. His letters lay on the hall-table. Among them was a handwriting which arrested him. He remembered, yet could not put a name to it. Then he turned the envelope. "H'm. Lady Grosville!" He read it, standing there, then thrust it into his pocket, thinking angrily that there seemed to be a good many fools in this world who occupied themselves with other people's business. Exaggeration, of course, damnable parti pris! When did she ever see Kitty except with a jaundiced eye? "I wonder Kitty condescends to go to the woman's house! She must know that everything she does is seen there en noir. Pharisaical, narrow-minded Philistines!"
The letter acted as a tonic. Ashe was positively grateful to the "old gorgon" who wrote it. He ran up-stairs, his pulses tingling in defence of Kitty. He would show Lady Grosville that she could not write to him, at any rate, in that strain, with impunity.
He took a candle from the landing, and opened his wife's door in order to pass through her room to his own. As he did so, he ran against Kitty's maid, Blanche, who was coming out. She shrank back as she saw him, but not before the light of his candle had shone full upon her. Her face was disfigured with tears, which were, indeed, still running down her cheeks.
"Why, Blanche!" he said, standing still—then in the kind voice which endeared him to the servants—"I am afraid your brother is worse?"
For the poor brother in hospital had passed through many vicissitudes since his operation, and the little maid's spirits had fluctuated accordingly.
"Oh no, sir—no, sir!" said Blanche, drying her eyes and retreating into the shadows of the room, where only a faint flame of gas was burning. "It's not that, sir, thank you. I was just putting away her ladyship's things," she said, inconsequently, looking round the room.
"That was hardly what caused the tears, was it?" said Ashe, smiling. "Is there anything in which Lady Kitty or I could help you?"
The girl, who had always seemed to him on excellent terms with Kitty, gave a sudden sob.
"Thank you, sir; I've just given her ladyship warning."
"Indeed!" said Ashe, gravely. "I'm sorry for that. I thought you got on here very well."
"I used to, sir, but this last few weeks there's nothing pleases her ladyship; you can't do anything right. I'm sure I've worked my hands off. But I can't do any more. Perhaps her ladyship will find some one else to suit her better."
"Didn't her ladyship try to persuade you to stay?"
"Yes—but—I gave warning once before, and then I stayed. And it's no good. It seems as if you must do wrong. And I don't sleep, sir. It gets on your nerves so. But I didn't mean to complain. Good-night, sir."
"Good-night. Don't sit up for your mistress. You look tired out. I'll help her."
"Thank you, sir," said the maid, in a depressed voice, and went.
Half an hour later, Ashe mounted the staircase of a well-known house in Piccadilly. The evening party was beginning to thin, but in a side drawing-room a fine Austrian band was playing Strauss, and some of the intimates of the house were dancing.
Ashe at once perceived his wife. She was dancing with a clever Cambridge lad, a cousin of Madeleine Alcot's, who had long been one of her adorers. And so charming was the spectacle, so exhilarating were the youth and beauty of the pair, that Ashe presently suspected what was indeed the truth, that most of the persons gathering in the room were there to watch Kitty dance, rather than to dance themselves. He himself watched her, though he professed to be talking to his hostess, a woman of middle age, with honest eyes and a brow of command.
"It is a delight to see Lady Kitty dance," she said to him, smiling. "But she is tired. I am sure she wants the country."
"Like my boy," said Ashe. "I wish to goodness they'd both go."
"Oh, I know it's hard to leave the husband toiling in town!" said his companion, who, as the daughter, wife, and mother of politicians, had had a long experience of official life.
Ashe glanced at her—at her face moulded by kind and scrupulous living—with a sudden relief from tension. Clearly no gossip had reached her. He lingered beside her, for the sheer pleasure of talking to her. But their tête-à-tête was soon interrupted by the approach of Lady Parham, with a daughter—a slim and silent girl, to whom, it was whispered, her mother was giving "a last chance" this season, before sending her into the country as a failure, and bringing out her younger sister.
Lady Parham greeted the hostess with effusion. It was a rich house, and these small, informal dances were said to be more helpful to matrimonial development than larger affairs. Then she perceived Ashe, and her whole manner changed. There was a very evident bristling, and she gave him a greeting deliberately careless.
"Confound the woman!" thought Ashe, and his own pride rose.
"Working as hard as usual, Lady Parham?" he asked her, with a smile.
"If you like to put it so," was the stiff reply. "There is, of course, a good deal of going out."
"I hope, if I may say so, you don't allow Lord Parham to do too much of it."
"Lord Parham never was better in his life," said Lord Parham's spouse, with the air of putting down an impertinence.
"That's good news. I must say when I saw him this afternoon I thought he seemed to be feeling his work a good deal."
"Oh, he's worried," said Lady Parham, sharply. "Worried about a good many things." She turned suddenly, and looked at her companion—an insolent and deliberate look.
"Ah, that's where the wives come in!" replied Ashe, unperturbed. "Look at Mrs. Loraine. She has the art to perfection—hasn't she? The way she cushions Loraine is something wonderful to see."
Lady Parham flushed angrily. The suggested comparison between herself, and that incessant rattle and blare of social event through which she dragged her husband—conducting thereby a vulgar campaign of her own, as arduous as his and far more ambitious—and the ways and character of gentle Mrs. Loraine, absorbed in the man she adored, scatter-brained and absent-minded towards the rest of the world, but for him all eyes and ears, an angel of shelter and protection—this did not now reach the Prime Minister's wife for the first time. But she had no opportunity to launch a retort, even supposing she had one ready, for the music ceased, and the tide of dancers surged towards the doors. It brought Kitty abruptly face to face with Lady Parham.
"Oh! how d'you do?" said Kitty, in a tone that was already an offence, and she held out a small hand with an indescribably regal air.
Lady Parham just touched it, glanced at the owner from top to toe, and walked away. Kitty slipped in beside Ashe for a moment, with her back to the wall, laughing and breathless.
"I say, Kitty," said Ashe, bending over her and speaking in her small ear, "I thought Lady Parham was eternally obliged to us. What's wrong with her?"
"Only that I can't stand her," said Kitty. "What's the good of trying?" She looked up, a flame of mutiny in her cheeks.
"What, indeed?" said Ashe, feeling as reckless as she. "Her manners are beyond the bounds. But look here, Kitty, don't you think you'll come home? You know you do look uncommonly tired."
Kitty frowned.
"Home? Why, I'm only just beginning to enjoy myself! Take me into the cool, please," she said to the boy who had been dancing with her, and who still hovered near, in case his divinity might allow him yet a few more minutes. But as she put out her hand to take his arm, Ashe saw her waver and look suddenly across the room.
A group parted that had been clustering round a farther door, and Ashe perceived Cliffe, leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed. He was surrounded by pretty women, with whom he seemed to be carrying on a bantering warfare. Involuntarily Ashe watched for the recognition between him and Kitty. Did Kitty's lips move? Was there a signal? If so, it passed like a flash; Kitty hurried away, and Ashe was left, haughtily furious with himself that, for the first time in his life, he had played the spy.
He turned in his discomfort to leave the dancing-room. He himself enjoyed society frankly enough. Especially since his marriage had he found the companionship of agreeable women delightful. He went instinctively to seek it, and drive out this nonsense from his mind. Just inside the larger drawing-room, however, he came across Mary Lyster, sitting in a corner apparently alone. Mary greeted him, but with an evident coldness. Her manner brought back all the preoccupations of his walk from the House. In spite of her small cordiality, he sat down beside her, wondering with a vicarious compunction at what point her fortunes might be, and how Kitty's proceedings might have already affected them. But he had not yet succeeded in thawing her when a voice behind him said:
"This is my dance, I think, Miss Lyster. Where shall we sit it out?"
Ashe moved at once. Mary looked up, hesitated visibly, then rose and took Geoffrey Cliffe's arm.
"Just read your remarks this evening," said Cliffe to Ashe. "Well, now, I suppose to-morrow will see your ship in port?"
For it was reasonably expected that the morrow would see the American agreement ratified by a substantial ministerial majority.
"Certainly. But you may at least reflect that you have lost us a deal of time."
"And now you slay us," said Cliffe. "Ah, well—'dulce et decorum est,' etcetera."
"Don't imagine that you'll get many of the honors of martyrdom," laughed Ashe—in Cliffe's eyes an offensive and triumphant figure, as he leaned carelessly upon a marble pedestal that carried a bust of Horace Walpole.
"Why?" Cliffe's hand had gone instinctively to his mustache. Mary had dropped his arm, and now stood quietly beside him, pale and somewhat jaded, her fine eyes travelling between the speakers.
"Why? Because the heresies have no martyrs. The halo is for the true Church!"
"H'm!" said Cliffe, with a reflective sneer. "I suppose you mean for the successful?"
"Do I?" said Ashe, with nonchalance. "Aren't the true Church the people who are justified by the event?"
"The orthodox like to think so," said Cliffe. "But the heretics have a way of coming out top."
"Does that mean you chaps are going to win at the next election? I devoutly hope you may—we're all as stale as ditch-water—and as for places, anybody's welcome to mine!" And so saying, Ashe lounged away, attracted by the bow and smile of a pretty Frenchwoman, with whom it was always agreeable to chat.
"Ashe trifles it as usual," said Cliffe, as he and Mary forced a passage into one of the smaller rooms. "Is there anything in the world that he really cares about?"
Mary looked at him with a start. It was almost on her lips to say, "Yes! his wife." She only just succeeded in driving the words back.
"His not caring is a pretence," she said. "At least, Lady Tranmore thinks so. She believes that he is becoming absorbed in politics—much more ambitious than she ever thought he would be."
"That's the way of mothers," said Cliffe, with a sarcastic lip. "They have got to make the best of their sons. Tell me what you are going to do this summer."
He had thrown one arm round the back of a chair, and sat looking down upon her, his colorless fair hair falling thick upon his brow, and giving by contrast a strange inhuman force to the dark and singular eyes beneath. He had a way of commanding a woman's attention by flashes of brusquerie, melting when he chose into a homage that had in it the note of an older world, a world that had still leisure for, passion and its refinements, a world still within sight of that other which had produced the Carte du tendre. Perhaps it was this, combined with the virilities, not to be questioned, of his aspect, the signs of hard physical endurance in the face burned by desert suns, and the suggestions of a frame too lean and gaunt for drawing-rooms, that gave him his spell and preserved it.
Mary's conversation with him consisted at first of much cool fencing on her part, which gradually slipped back, as he intended it should, into some of the tones of intimacy. Each meanwhile was conscious of a secret range of thoughts—hers concerned with the effort and struggle, the bitter disappointments and disillusions of the past six weeks; and his with the schemes he had cherished in the East and on the way home, of marrying Mary Lyster, or more correctly, Mary Lyster's money, and so resigning himself to the inevitable boredoms of an English existence. For her the mental horizon was full of Kitty—Kitty insolent, Kitty triumphant. For him, too, Kitty made the background of thought—environed, however, with clouds of indecision and resistance that would have raised happiness in Mary could she have divined them.
For he was now not easy to capture. There had been enough and more than enough of women in his life. The game of politics must somehow replace them henceforth, if, indeed, anything were still worth while, except the long day in the saddle and the dawn of new mornings in untrodden lands.
Mingled, all these, with hot dislike of Ashe, with the fascination of Kitty, and a kind of venomous pleasure in the commotion produced by his pursuit of her; inter penetrated, moreover, through and through with the memory of his one true feeling, and of the woman who had died, alienated from and despising him. He and Mary passed a profitless half-hour. He would have liked to propitiate her, but he had no notion what he should do with the propitiation, if it were reached. He wanted her money, but he was beginning to feel with restlessness that he could not pay the cost. The poet in him was still strong, crossed though it were by the adventurer.
He took her back to the dancing-room. Mary walked beside him with a dull, fierce sense of wrong. It was Kitty, of course, who had done it—Kitty who had taken him away from her.
"That's finished," said Cliffe to himself, with a long breath of relief, as he delivered her into the hands of her partner. "Now for the other!"
Thenceforward, no one saw Kitty and no one danced with her. She spent her time in beflowered corners, or remote drawing-rooms, with Geoffrey Cliffe. Ashe heard her voice in the distance once or twice, answering a voice he detested; he looked into the supper-room with a lady on his arm, and across it he saw Kitty, with her white elbow on the table and her hand propping a face that was turned—half mocking and yet wholly absorbed—to Cliffe. He saw her flitting across vistas or disappearing through far doorways, but always with that sinister figure in attendance.
His mind was divided between a secret fury—roused in him by the pride of a man of high birth and position, who has always had the world at command, and now sees an impertinence offered him which he does not know how to punish—and a mood of irony. Cliffe's persecution of Kitty was a piece of confounded bad manners. But to look at it with the round, hypocritical eyes some of these people were bringing to bear on it was really too much! Let them look to their own affairs—they needed it.
At last the party broke up. Kitty touched him on the shoulder as he was standing on the stairs, apparently absorbed in a teasing skirmish with a charming child in her first season, who thought him the most delightful of men.
"I'm ready, William."
He turned sharply, and saw that she was alone.
"Come along, then! In five minutes more I should have been asleep on the stairs."
They descended. Kitty went for her cloak. Ashe sent for the carriage. As he was standing on the steps Cliffe pushed past him and called for a hansom. It came in the rear of two or three carriages already under the portico. He ran along the pavement and jumped in. The doors were just being shut by the linkman when a little figure in a white cloak flew down the steps of the house and held up a hand to the driver of the hansom.
"Do you see that?" said Lady Parham, in a voice of suppressed but contemptuous amazement, as she turned to Mary Lyster, who was driving home with her. "Call my carriage, please!" she said, imperiously, to one of the footmen at the door. Her carriage, as it happened, was immediately behind the hansom; but the hansom could not move because of the small lady who had jumped upon the step and was leaning eagerly forward.
There was a clamor of shouting voices: "Move on, cabby! Move on!" "Stand clear, ma'am, please," said the driver, while Cliffe opened the door of the cab, and seemed about to jump down again.
"Who is it?" said an impatient judge behind Lady Parham. "What's the matter?"
Lady Parham shrugged her shoulders.
"It's Lady Kitty Ashe," whispered the débutante, who was the judge's daughter, "talking to Mr. Cliffe. Isn't she pretty?"
A sudden silence fell upon the group in the porch. Kitty's high, clear laugh seemed to ring back into the house. Then Ashe ran down the steps.
"Kitty, don't stop the way." He peremptorily drew her back.
Cliffe raised his hat, fell back into the hansom, and the man whipped up his horse.
Kitty came back to the outer hall with Ashe. Her cheeks had a rose flush, her wild eyes laughed at the crowd on the steps, without really seeing them.
"Are you going with Lady Parham?" she said, absently, to Mary Lyster.
"Yes."
Kitty looked up and Ashe saw the two faces as she and Mary confronted each other—the contempt in Mary's, the startled wrath in Kitty's.
"Come, Miss Lyster!" said Lady Parham, and pushing past the Ashes without a good-night, she hurried to her carriage, drawing up the glass with a hasty hand, though the night was balmy.
For a few moments none of those left on the steps spoke, except to fret in undertones for an absent carriage. Then Ashe saw his own groom, and stormed at him for delay. In another minute he and Kitty were in the carriage, and the figures under the porch dropped out of sight.
"Better not do that again, Kitty, I think," said Ashe.
Kitty glanced at him. But both voice and manner were as usual. "Why shouldn't I?" she said, haughtily; he saw that she had grown very white. "I was telling Geoffrey where to find me at Lord's."
Ashe winced at the "Archangelism" of the Christian name.
"You kept Lady Parham waiting."
"What does that matter?" said Kitty, with an angry laugh.
"And you did Cliffe too much honor," said Ashe. "It's the men who should stand on the steps—not the women!"
Kitty sat erect. "What do you mean?" she said, in a low, menacing voice.
"Just what I say," was the laughing reply.
Kitty threw herself back in her corner, and could not be induced to open her lips or look at her companion till they reached home.
On the landing, however, outside her bedroom, she turned and said: "Don't, please, say impertinent things to me again!" And drawn up to her full height, the most childish and obstinate of tragedy queens, she swept into her room.
Ashe went into his dressing-room. And almost immediately afterwards he heard the key turn in the lock which separated his room from Kitty's.
For the first time since their marriage! He threw himself on his bed, and passed some sleepless hours. Then fatigue had its way. When he awoke, there was a gray dawn in the room, and he was conscious of something pressing against his bed. Half asleep, he raised himself and saw Kitty, in a long white dressing-gown, sitting curled up on the floor, or rather on a pillow, her head resting on the edge of the bed. In a glass opposite he saw the languid grace of her slight form and the cloud of her hair.
"Kitty"—he tried to shake himself into full consciousness—"do go to bed!"
"Lie down," said Kitty, lifting her arm and pressing him down, "and don't say anything. I shall go to sleep."
He lay down obediently. Presently he felt that her cheek was resting on one of his hands, and in his semi-consciousness he laid the other on her hair. Then they both fell asleep.
His dreams were a medley of the fancy ball and of some pageant scene in which Iris and Ceres appeared, and there was a rustic dance of maidens and shepherds. Then a murmur as of thunder ran through the scene, followed by darkness. He half woke, in a hot distress, but the soft cheek was still there, his hand still felt the silky curls, and sleep recaptured him.
When Ashe woke up in earnest he was alone. He sprang up in bed and looked round the darkened room, ashamed of his long sleep; but there was no sign of Kitty.
After dressing, he knocked, as usual, at Kitty's door.
"Oh, come in," cried Kitty's lightest voice. "Margaret's here; but if you don't mind her, she won't mind you."
Ashe entered. Kitty, as was her wont four days out of the seven, was breakfasting in bed. Margaret French was beside her with a batch of notes, mostly bills and unanswered invitations, with which she was trying to make Kitty cope.
"Excuse me, Mr. Ashe," Margaret lifted a smiling face. "I had to be out on business for my brother all day, so I thought I'd come early and remind Kitty of some of these tiresome things while there was still a chance of finding her."
"I don't know why guardian angels excuse themselves," said Ashe, as they shook hands.
"Oh, dear, what a lot of them there are!" said Kitty, tossing over the notes with a bored air. "Refuse them all, Margaret; I'm tired to death of dining out."
"Not all, I think," pleaded Margaret. "Here's that nice woman—you remember—who wanted to thank Mr. Ashe for what he'd done for her son. You promised to dine with her."
"Did I?" Kitty wriggled with annoyance. "Well, then, I suppose we must. What did William do for her? When I ask him to do something for the nicest boys in the world, he won't lift a finger."
"I gave him some introductions in Berlin," laughed Ashe. "What you generally want me to do, Kitty, is to stuff the public service with good-looking idiots. And there I really can't oblige you."
"Every one knows that corruption gets the best men," said Kitty. "Hullo, what's that?" and she lifted a dinner-card, and looked at it strangely.
"My dear Kitty! when did it come?" exclaimed Margaret French, in dismay.
It was a dinner-card, whereby Lord and Lady Parham requested the honor of Mr. and Lady Kitty Ashe's company at dinner, on a date somewhere within the first week of July.
Ashe bent over to look at it.
"I think that came ten days ago," he said, quietly. "I imagined Kitty accepted it."
"I never thought of it from that day to this," said Kitty, who had clasped her hands behind her head and was staring at the ceiling. "Say, please, that"—she spaced out the words deliberately—"Mr. and Lady Kitty Ashe—are unable to accept—Lord and Lady Parham's invitation—etc.—"
"Kitty!" said Margaret, firmly, "there must be a 'regret' and a 'kind.' Think! Ten days! The party is next week!"
"No 'regret,' and no 'kind'!" said Kitty, still staring overhead. "It's my affair, please, Margaret, altogether. And I'll see the note before it goes, or you'll be putting in civilities."
Margaret, in despair, looked entreatingly at Ashe. He and she had often conspired before this to soften down Kitty's enormities. But he said nothing—made not the smallest sign.
With difficulty Margaret got a few more directions out of Kitty, over whom a shade of sombre taciturnity had now fallen. Then, saying she would write the notes down-stairs and come back, she gathered up her basketful of letters and departed.
As soon as she was alone with Ashe, Kitty took up a novel beside her, and pretended to be absorbed in it.
He hesitated a moment, then he stooped over her and took her hand.
"Why did you come in to visit me, Kitty?" he said, in a low voice.
"I don't know," was her indifferent reply, and her hand pulled itself away, though not with violence.
"I wish I could understand you, Kitty." His tone was not quite steady.
"Well, I don't understand myself!" said Kitty, shortly, reaching out for a bunch of roses that Margaret had just brought her, and burying her face among them.
"Perhaps, if you submitted the problem to me," said Ashe, laughing, "we might be able to thresh it out together!"
He folded his arms and leaned against the foot of the bed, delighting his eyes with the vision of her amid the folds of muslin and lace, and all the costly refinements of pillow and coverlet with which she liked to surround herself at that hour of the morning. She might have been a French princess of the old regime, receiving her court.
Kitty shook her head. The roses fell idly from her hands, and made bright patches of blush pink about her. Ashe went on:
"Anyway, dear, don't give silly tongues too good a handle!"
He threw her a gay comrade's look, as though to say that they both knew the folly of the world, but he perhaps the better, as he was the elder.
"You mean," said Kitty, calmly, "that I am not to talk so much to Geoffrey Cliffe?"
"Is he worth it?" said Ashe. "That's what I want to know—worth the fuss that some people make?"
"It's the fuss and the people that drive one on," said Kitty, under her breath.
"You flatter them too much, darling! Do you think you were quite kind to me last night?—let's put it that way. I looked a precious fool, you know, standing on those steps, while you were keeping old Mother Parham and the whole show waiting!"
She looked at him a moment in silence, at his heightened color and insistent eyes.
"I can't think what made you marry me," she said, slowly.
Ashe laughed, and came nearer.
"And I can't think," he said, in a lower voice, "what made you come—if you weren't a little bit sorry—and lean your dear head against me like that, last night."
"I wasn't sorry—I couldn't sleep," was her quick reply, while her eyes strove to keep up their war with his.
A knock was heard at the door. Ashe moved hastily away. Kitty's maid entered.
"I was to tell you, sir, that your breakfast was ready. And Lady Tranmore's servant has brought this note."
Ashe took it and thrust it into his pocket.
"Get my things ready, please," said Kitty to her maid. Ashe felt himself dismissed and went.
As soon as he was gone, Kitty sprang out of bed, threw on a dressing-gown, and ran across to Blanche, who was bending over a chest of drawers. "Why did you say those foolish things to me yesterday?" she demanded, taking the girl impetuously by the arm, and so startling her that she nearly dropped the clothes she held.
"They weren't foolish, my lady," said Blanche, sullenly, with averted eyes.
"They were!" cried Kitty. "Of course, I'm a vixen—I always was. But you know, Blanche, I'm not always as bad as I have been lately. Very soon I shall be quite charming again—you'll see!"
"I dare say, my lady." Blanche went on sorting and arranging the lingerie she had taken out of the drawer.
Kitty sat down beside her, nursing a bare foot which was crossed over the other.
"You know how I abused you about my hair, Blanche? Well, Mrs. Alcot said, that very night, she never saw it so well done. She thought it must be Pierrefitte's best man. Wasn't it hellish of me? I knew quite well you'd done it beautifully."
The maid said nothing, but a tear fell on one of Kitty's night-dresses.
"And you remember the green garibaldi—last week? I just loathed it—because you'd forgotten that little black rosette."
"No!" said Blanche, looking up; "your ladyship had never ordered it."
"I did—I did! But never mind. Two of my friends have wanted to copy it, Blanche. They wouldn't believe it was done by a maid. They said it had such style. One of them would engage you to-morrow if you really want to go—"
A silence.
"But you won't go, Blanchie, will you?" said Kitty's silver voice. "I'm a horrid fiend, but I did get Mr. Ashe to help your young man—and I did care about your poor brother—and—and—" she stroked the girl's arm—"I do look rather nice when I'm dressed, don't I? You wouldn't like a great gawk to dress, would you?"
"I'm sure I don't want to leave your ladyship," said the girl, choking. "But I can't have no more—"
"No more ructions?" said Kitty, meditating. "H'm, of course that's serious, because I'm made so. Well, now, look here, Blanchie, you won't give me warning again for a fortnight, whatever I do, mind. And if by then I'm past praying for, you may. And I'll import a Russian—or a Choctaw—who won't understand when I call her names. Is that a bargain, Blanchie?"
The maid hesitated.
"Just a fortnight!" said Kitty, in her most seductive tones.
"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 glass 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 passions 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 passion—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 passed 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 sex, 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 passed through a wealth of tragic circumstance; 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 passion—a passion 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-rushing life, which it excited in herself.
Add to these the elements of mischief and defiance in the situation, the snatching 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 astonishing 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 shining 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, embarrassed, 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."
Ashe smoked and smiled. Lady Tranmore saw that his pride, too, had been aroused, and that here he was likely to prove as obstinate as Kitty.
"I wish I could get her out of my mind!" she sighed.
Ashe glanced at her kindly.
"I daresay we shall hold our own. Xanthippe is not beloved, and I don't believe Parham will let her interfere with what he thinks best for the party. Will it pay to put me in the cabinet or not?—that's what he'll ask. I shall be strongly backed, too, by most of our papers."
A number of thoughts ran through Lady Tranmore's brain. With her long experience of London, she knew well what the sudden lowering of a man's "consideration"—to use a French word—at a critical moment may mean. A cooling of the general regard—a breath of detraction coming no one knows whence—and how soon new claims emerge, and the indispensable of yesterday becomes the negligible of to-day!
But even if she could have brought herself to put any of these anxieties into words, she had no opportunity. Kitty's voice was in the hall; the handle turned, and she ran in.
"William! Ah!—I didn't know mother was here."
She went up to Elizabeth, and lightly kissed that lady's cheek.
"Good-morning. William, I just came to tell you that I may be late for dinner, so perhaps you had better dine at the House. I am going on the river."
"Are you?" said Ashe, gathering up his papers. "Wish I was."
"Are you going with the Crashaw's party?" asked Elizabeth. "I know they have one."
"Oh, dear, no!" said Kitty. "I hate a crowd on the river. I am going with Geoffrey Cliffe."
Ashe bent over his desk. Lady Tranmore's eyebrows went up, and she could not restrain the word:
"Alone?"
"Naturellement!" laughed Kitty. "He reads me French poetry, and we talk French. We let Madeleine Alcot come once, but her accent was so shocking that Geoffrey wouldn't have her again!"
Lady Tranmore flushed deeply. The "Geoffrey" seemed to her intolerable. Kitty, arrayed in the freshest of white gowns, walked away to the farther end of the library to consult a Bradshaw. Elizabeth, looking up, caught her son's eyes—and the mingled humor and vexation in them, wherewith he appealed to her, as it were, to see the whole silly business as he himself did. Lady Tranmore felt a moment's strong reaction. Had she indeed been making a foolish fuss about nothing?
Yet the impression left by the miserable meditations of her night was still deep enough to make her say—with just a signal from eye and lips, so that Kitty neither saw nor heard—"Don't let her go!"
Ashe shook his head. He moved towards the door, and stood there despatch-box in hand, throwing a last look at his wife.
"Don't be late, Kitty—or I shall be nervous. I don't trust Cliffe on the river. And please make it a rule that, in locks, he stops quoting French poetry."
Kitty turned round, startled and apparently annoyed by his tone.
"He is an excellent oar," she said, shortly.
"Is he? At Oxford we tried him for the Torpids—" Ashe's shrug completed his remark. Then, still disregarding another imploring look from Lady Tranmore, he left the room.
Kitty had flushed angrily. The belittling, malicious note in Ashe's manner had been clear enough. She braced herself against it, and Lady Tranmore's chance was lost. For when, summoning all her courage, and quite uncertain whether her son would approve or blame her, Elizabeth approached her daughter-in-law affectionately, trying in timid and apologetic words to unburden her own heart and reach Kitty's, Kitty met her with one of those outbursts of temper that women like Elizabeth Tranmore cannot cope with. Their moral recoil is too great. It is the recoil of the spiritual aristocrat; and between them and the children of passion the links are few, the antagonism eternal.
She left the house, pale, dignified, the tears in her eyes. Kitty ran up-stairs, humming an air from "Faust," as though she would tear it to pieces, put on a flame-colored hat that gave a still further note of extravagance to her costume, ordered a hansom, and drove away.
Whether Kitty got much joy out of the three weeks which followed must remain uncertain. She had certainly routed Mary Lyster, if there were any final satisfaction in that. Mary had left town early, and was now in Somersetshire helping her father to entertain, in order, said the malicious, to put the best face possible on a defeat which this time had been serious. And instead of devoting himself to the wooing of a northern constituency where he had been adopted as the candidate of a new Tory group, Cliffe lingered obstinately in town, endangering his chances and angering his supporters. Kitty's influence over his actions was, indeed, patent and undenied, whatever might be the general opinion as to her effect upon his heart. Some of Kitty's intimates at any rate were convinced that his absorption in the matter was by now, to say the least, no less eager and persistent than hers. At this point it was by no means still a relation of flattery on Kitty's side and a pleased self-love on his. It had become a duel of two personalities, or rather two imaginations. In fact, as Kitty, learning the ways of his character, became more proudly mistress of herself and him, his interest in her visibly increased. It might almost be said that she was beginning to hold back, and he for the first time pursued.
Once or twice he had the grace to ask himself where it was all to end. Was he in love with her? An absurd question! He had paid his heavy tribute to passion if any man ever had, and had already hung up his votive tablet and his garments wet from shipwreck in the temple of the god. But it seemed that, after all said and done, the society of a woman, young, beautiful, and capricious, was still the best thing which the day—the London day, at all events—had to bring. At Kitty's suggestion he was collecting and revising a new volume of his poems. He and she quarrelled over them perpetually. Sometimes there was not a line which pleased her; and then, again, she would delight him with the homage of sudden tears in her brown eyes, and a praise so ardent and so refined that it almost compared—as Kitty meant it should—with that of the dead. In the shaded drawing-room, where every detail pleased his taste, Cliffe's harsh voice thundered or murmured verse which was beyond dispute the verse of a poet, and thereby sensuous and passionate. Ostensibly the verse concerned another woman; in truth, the slight and lovely figure sitting on the farther side of the flowered hearth, the delicate head bent, the finger-tips lightly joined, entered day by day more directly into the consciousness of the poet. What harm? All he asked was intelligence and response. As to her heart, he made no claim upon it whatever. Ashe, by-the-way, was clearly not jealous—a sensible attitude, considering Lady Kitty's strength of will.
Into Cliffe's feeling towards Ashe there entered, indeed, a number of evil things, determined by quite other relations between the two men—the relation of the man who wants to the man who has, of the man beaten by the restlessness of ambition to the man who possesses all that the other desires, and affects to care nothing about it—of the combatant who fights with rage to the combatant who fights with a smile. Cliffe could often lash himself into fury by the mere thought of Ashe's opportunities and Ashe's future, combined with the belief that Ashe's mood towards himself was either contemptuous or condescending. And it was at such moments that he would fling himself with most resource into the establishing of his ascendency over Kitty.
The two men met when they did meet—which was but seldom—on perfectly civil terms. If Ashe arrived unexpectedly from the House in the late afternoon to find Cliffe in the drawing-room reading aloud to Kitty, the politics of the moment provided talk enough till Cliffe could decently take his departure. He never dined with them alone, Kitty having no mind whatever for the discomforts of such a party; and in the evenings when he and Kitty met at a small number of houses, where the flirtation was watched nightly with a growing excitement, Ashe's duties kept him at Westminster, and there was nothing to hinder that flow of small and yet significant incident by which situations of this kind are developed.
Ashe set his teeth. He had made up his mind finally that it was a plague and a tyranny which would pass, and could only be magnified by opposition. But his temper suffered. There were many small quarrels during these weeks between himself and Kitty, quarrels which betrayed the tension produced in him by what was—in essentials—an iron self-control. But they made daily life a sordid, unlovely thing, and they gave Kitty an excuse for saying that William was as violent as herself, and for seeking refuge in the exaltations of feeling or of fancy provided by Cliffe's companionship.
Perhaps of all the persons in the drama, Lady Tranmore was the most to be pitied. She sat at home, having no heart to go to Hill Street, and more tied indeed than usual by the helpless illness of her husband. Never, in all these days, did Ashe miss his daily visit to his father. He would come in, apparently his handsome, good-humored self, ready to read aloud for twenty minutes, or merely to sit in silence by the sick man, his eyes making affectionate answer every now and then to the dumb looks of Lord Tranmore. Only his mother sought and found that slight habitual contraction of the brow which bore witness to some equally persistent disquiet of the mind. But he kept her at arm's-length on the subject of Kitty. She dared not tell him any of the gossip which reached her.
Meanwhile these weeks meant for her not only the dread of disgrace, but the disappointment of a just ambition, the humiliation of her mother's pride. The political crisis approached rapidly, and Ashe's name was less and less to the front. Lady Parham was said to be taking an active part in the consultations and intrigues that surrounded her husband, and it was well known by now to the inner circle that her hostility to the Ashes, and her insistence on the fact that cabinet ministers must be beyond reproach, and their wives persons to whose houses the party can go without demeaning themselves, were likely to be of importance. Moreover, Ashe's success in the House of Commons was no longer what it had been earlier in the session. The party papers had cooled. Elizabeth Tranmore felt a blight in the air. Yet William, with his position in the country, his high ability, and the social weight belonging to the heir of the Tranmore peerage and estates, was surely not a person to be lightly ignored! Would Lord Parham venture it?
At last the resignations of the two ministers were in the Times; there were communications between the Queen and the Premier, and London plunged with such ardor as is possible in late July into the throes of cabinet-making. Kitty insisted petulantly that of course all would be well; William's services were far too great to be ignored; though Lord Parham would no doubt slight him if he dared. But the party and the public would see to that. The days were gone by when vulgar old women like Lady Parham could have any real influence on political appointments. Otherwise, who would condescend to politics?
Ashe brought her amusing reports from the House or the clubs of the various intrigues going on, and, as to his own chances, refused to discuss them seriously. Once or twice when Kitty, in his presence, insisted on speaking of them to some political intimate, only to provoke an evident embarrassment, Ashe suffered the tortures which proud men know. But he never lost his tone of light detachment, and the conclusion of his friends was that, as usual, "Ashe didn't care a button."
The hours passed, however, and no sign came from the Prime Minister. Everything was still uncertain; but Ashe had realized that at least he was not to be taken into the inner counsels of the party. The hopes and fears, the heartburnings and rivalries of such a state of things are proverbial. Ashe wondered impatiently when the beastly business would be over, and he could get off to Scotland for the air and sport of which he was badly in need.
It was a Friday, in the first week of August. Ashe was leaving the Athenæum with another member of the House when a newspaper boy rushing along with a fresh bundle of papers passed them with the cry, "New cabinet complete! Official list!" They caught him up, snatched a paper, and read. Two men of middle age, conspicuous in Parliament, but not hitherto in office, one of them of great importance as a lawyer, the other as a military critic, were appointed, the one to the Home Office, the other to the Ministry of War; there had been some shuffling in the minor offices, and a new Privy Seal had dawned upon the world. For the rest, all was as before, and in the formal list the name of the Honorable William Travers Ashe still remained attached to the Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs.
Ashe's friend shrugged his shoulders, and avoided looking at his companion. "A bomb-shell, to begin with," he said; "otherwise the flattest thing out."
"On the contrary," laughed Ashe. "Parham has shown a wonderful amount of originality. If you and I are taken by surprise, what will the public be? And they'll like him all the better—you'll see. He has shown courage and gone for new men—that's what they'll say. Vive Parham! Well, good-bye. Now, please the Lord, we shall get off—and I may be among the grouse this day week."
He stopped on his way out of the club to discuss the list with the men coming in. He was conscious that some would have avoided him. But he had no mind to be avoided, and his caustic, good-humored talk carried off the situation. Presently he was walking homeward, swinging his stick with the gayety of a school-boy expecting the holidays.
As he mounted St. James's Street a carriage descended. Ashe mechanically took off his hat to the half-recognized face within, and as he did so perceived the icy bow and triumphant eyes of Lady Parham.
He hurried along, fighting a curious sensation, as of a physical bruising and beating. The streets were full of the news, and he was stopped many times by mere acquaintances to talk of it. In Savile Row he turned into a small literary club of which he was a member, and wrote a letter to his mother. In very affectionate and amusing terms it begged her not to take the disappointment too seriously. "I think I won't come round to-night. But expect me first thing to-morrow."
He sent the note by messenger and walked home. When he reached Hill Street it was close on eight. Outside the house he suddenly asked himself what line he was going to take with Kitty.
Kitty, however, was not at home. As far as he could remember she had gone coaching with the Alcots into Surrey, Geoffrey Cliffe, of course, being of the party. Presently, indeed, he discovered a hasty line from her on his study table, to say that they were to dine at Richmond, and "Madeleine" supposed they would get home between ten and eleven. Not a word more. Like all strong men, Ashe despised the meditations of self-pity. But the involuntary reflection that on this evening of humiliation Kitty was not with him—did not apparently care enough about his affairs and his ambitions to be with him—brought with it a soreness which had to be endured.
The next moment, he was inclined to be glad of her absence. Such things, especially in the first shock of them, are best faced alone. If, indeed, there were any shock in the matter. He had for some time had his own shrewd previsions, and he was aware of a strong inner belief that his defeat was but temporary.
Probably, when she had time to remember such trifles, Kitty would feel the shock more than he did. Lady Parham had certainly won this round of the rubber!
He settled to his solitary dinner, but in the middle of it put down Kitty's Aberdeen terrier, which, for want of other company, he was stuffing atrociously, and ran up to the nursery. The nurse was at her supper, and Harry lay fast asleep, a pretty little fellow, flushed into a semblance of health, and with a strong look of Kitty.
Ashe bent down and put his whiskered cheek to the boy's. "Never mind, old man!" he murmured, "better luck next time!"
Then raising himself with a smile, he looked affectionately at the child, noticed with satisfaction his bright color and even breathing, and stole away.
He ran through the comments of the evening papers on the new cabinet list, finding in only two or three any reference to himself, then threw them aside, and seized upon a pile of books and reviews that were lying on his table. He carried them up to the drawing-room, hesitated between a theological review and a new edition of Horace, and finally plunged with avidity into the theological review.
For some two hours he sat enthralled by an able summary of the chief Tübingen positions; then suddenly threw himself back with a stretch and a laugh.
"Wonder what the chap's doing that's got my post! Not reading theology, I'll be bound."
The reflection followed that were he at that moment Home Secretary and in the cabinet, he would not probably be reading it either—nor left to a solitary evening. Friends would be dropping in to congratulate—the modern equivalent of the old "turba clientium."