The Marriage of William Ashe Part 23

"Lord Parham would pa.s.s you over?"

"Not at all. But I can't work in public with a man whom I must cut in private. It wouldn't amuse me. So if you're decided, Kitty, write to Danieli's for rooms."

He lit his cigarette, and went out with a perfect nonchalance and good-temper.

Kitty was to have gone to a ball. She countermanded her maid's preparations, and sent the maid to bed. In due time all the servants went to bed, the front door being left on the latch as usual for Ashe's late return. About midnight a little figure slipped into the child's nursery. The nurse was fast asleep. Kitty sat beside the child, motionless, for an hour, and when Ashe let himself into the house about two o'clock he heard a little rustle in the hall, and there stood Kitty, waiting for him.

"Kitty, what are you about?" he said, in pretended amazement. But in reality he was not astonished at all. His life for months past had been pitched in a key of extravagance and tumult. He had been practically certain that he should find Kitty in the hall.

With great tenderness he half led, half carried her up-stairs. She clung to him as pa.s.sionately as, before dinner, she had repulsed him. When they reached their room, the tired man, dropping with sleep, after a Parliamentary wrestle in which every faculty had been taxed to the utmost, took his wife in his arms; and there Kitty sobbed and talked herself into a peace of complete exhaustion. In this state she was one of the most exquisite of human beings, with words, tone, and gestures of a heavenly softness and languor. The evil spirit went out of her, and she was all ethereal tenderness, sadness, and remorse. For more than two years, scenes like this had, in Ashe's case, melted into final delight and intoxication which more than effaced the memory of what had gone before. Now for several months he had dreaded the issue of the crisis, no less than the crisis itself. It left him unnerved as though some morbid sirocco had pa.s.sed over him.

When Kitty at last had fallen asleep, Ashe stood for some time beside his dressing-room window, looking absently into the cloudy night, too tired even to undress. A gusty northwest wind tore down the street and beat against the windows. The unrest without increased the tension of his mind and body. Like Lady Tranmore, he had, as it were, stepped back from his life, and was looking at it--the last three years of it in particular--as a whole. What was the net result of those years? Where was he? Whither were he and Kitty going? A strange pang shot through him. The mere asking of the question had been as the lifting of the lamp of Psyche.

The scene that night in the House of Commons had been for him a scene of conflict; in the main, also, of victory. His virile powers, capacities, and ambitions had been at their height. He had felt the full spell of the English political life, with all its hard fighting joy, the exhilaration which flows from the vastness of the interests on which it turns, and the intricate appeal it makes, in the case of a man like himself, to a hundred inherited apt.i.tudes, tastes, and traditions.

And here he stood in the darkness, wondering whether indeed the best of his life were not over--the prey of forebodings as strong and vagrant as the gusts outside.

Birds of the night! He forced himself to bed, and slept heavily. When he woke up, the May sun was shining into his room. Kitty, in the freshest of morning dresses, was sitting on his bed like a perching bird, waiting impatiently till his eyes should open and she could ask him his opinion on her dress for the ball. The savor and joy of life returned upon him in a flood. Kitty was the prettiest thing ever seen; he had scored off those Tory fellows the night before; the Parhams' dinner was all right; and life was once more kind, manageable, and full of the most agreeable possibilities. A certain indolent impatience in him recoiled from the mere recollection of the night before. The worry was over; why think of it again?

VIII

Meanwhile Lady Tranmore had reached home, and after one of those pathetic hours in her husband's room which made the secret and sacred foundation of her daily life, she expected Mary Lyster, who was to dine at Tranmore House before the two ladies presented themselves at a musical party given by the French Amba.s.sadress. Before her guest's arrival, Lady Tranmore wandered about her rooms, unable to rest, unable even to read the evening papers on Ashe's speech, so possessed was she still by her altercation with Kitty, and by the foreboding sense of what it meant. William's future was threatened; and the mother whose whole proud heart had been thrown for years into every successful effort and every upward step of her son, was up in arms.

Mary Lyster arrived to the minute. She came in, a tall gliding woman, her hair falling in rippled waves on either side of her face, which in its ample comeliness and placidity reminded the Italianate Lady Tranmore of many faces well known to her in early Siennese or Florentine art.

Mary's dress to-night was of a n.o.ble red, and the glossy brown of her hair made a harmony both with her dress and with the whiteness of her neck that contented the fastidious eye of her companion. "Polly" was now thirty, in the prime of her good looks. Lady Tranmore's affection for her, which had at one time even included the notion that she might possibly become William Ashe's wife, did not at all interfere with a shrewd understanding of her limitations. But she was daughterless herself; her family feeling was strong; and Mary's society was an old and pleasant habit one could ill have parted with. In her company, moreover, Mary was at her best.

Elizabeth Tranmore never discussed her daughter-in-law with her cousin.

Loyalty to William forbade it, no less than a strong sense of family dignity. For Mary had spoken once--immediately after the engagement--with energy--nay, with pa.s.sion; prophesying woe and calamity. Thenceforward it was tacitly agreed between them that all root-and-branch criticism of Kitty and her ways was taboo. Mary was, indeed, on apparently good terms with her cousin's wife. She dined occasionally at the Ashes', and she and Kitty met frequently under the wing of Lady Tranmore. There was no cordiality between them, and Kitty was often sharply or sulkily certain that Mary was to be counted among those hostile forces with which, in some of her moods, the world seemed to her to bristle. But if Mary kept, in truth, a very sharp tongue for many of her intimates on the subject of Kitty, Lady Tranmore at least was determined to know nothing about it.

On this particular evening, however, Lady Tranmore's self-control failed her, for the first time in three years. She had not talked five minutes with her guest before she perceived that Mary's mind was, in truth, brimful of gossip--the gossip of many drawing-rooms--as to Kitty's escapade with the Prince, Kitty's relations to Lady Partham, Kitty's parties, and Kitty's whims. The temptation was too great; her own guard broke down.

"I hear Kitty is furious with the Parhams," said Mary, as the two ladies sat together after their rapid dinner. It was a rainy night, and the fire to which they had drawn up was welcome.

Lady Tranmore shook her head sadly.

"I don't know where it is to end," she said, slowly.

"Lady Parham told me yesterday--you don't mind my repeating it?"--Mary looked up with a smile--"she was still dreadfully afraid that Kitty would play her some trick about next Friday. She knows that Kitty detests her."

"Oh no," said Lady Tranmore, in a vague voice, "Kitty couldn't--impossible!"

Mary turned an observant eye upon her companion's conscious and troubled air, and drew conclusions not far from the truth.

"And it's all so awkward, isn't it?" she said, with sympathy, "when apparently Lady Parham is as much Prime Minister as he is."

For in those days certain great houses and political ladies, though not at the zenith of their power, were still, in their comparative decline, very much to be reckoned with. When Lady Parham talked longer than usual with the French Amba.s.sador, his Austrian and German colleagues wrote anxious despatches to their governments; when a special mission to the East of great importance had to be arranged, n.o.body imagined that Lord Parham had very much to do with the appointment of the commissioner, who happened to have just engaged himself to Lady Parham's second girl. No young member on the government side, if he wanted office, neglected Lady Parham's invitations, and admission to her more intimate dinners was still almost as much coveted as similar favors had been a generation before in the case of Lady Jersey, or still earlier, in that of Lady Holland. She was a small old woman, with a shrewish face, a waxen complexion, and a brown wig. In spite of short sight, she saw things that escaped most other people; her tongue was rarely at a loss; she was, on the whole, a good friend, though never an unreflecting one; and what she forgave might be safely reckoned as not worth resenting.

Elizabeth Tranmore received Mary's remark with reluctant consent. Lady Parham--from the English aristocratic stand-point--was not well-born.

She had been the daughter of a fashionable music-master, whose blood was certainly not Christian. And there were many people beside Lady Tranmore who resented her domination.

"It will be so perfectly easy when the moment comes to invent some excuse or other for shelving William's claims," sighed Ashe's mother.

"n.o.body is indispensable, and if that old woman is provoked, she will be capable of any mischief."

"What do you want for William?" said Mary, smiling.

"He ought, of course, to have the Home Office!" replied Lady Tranmore, with fire.

Mary vowed that he would certainly have it. "Kitty is so clever, she will understand how important discretion is, before things go too far."

Lady Tranmore made no answer. She gazed into the fire, and Miss Lyster thought her depressed.

"Has William ever interfered?" she asked, cautiously.

Lady Tranmore hesitated.

"Not that I know of," she said, at last. "Nor will he ever--in the sense in which any ordinary husband would interfere."

"I know! It is as though he had a kind of superst.i.tion about it. Isn't there a fairy story, in which an elf marries a mortal on condition that if he ever ill-treats her, her people will fetch her back to fairyland?

One day the husband lost his temper and spoke crossly; instantly there was a crash of thunder and the elf-wife vanished."

"I don't remember the story. But it's like that--exactly. He said to me once that he would never have asked her to marry him if he had not been able to make up his mind to let her have her own way--never to coerce her."

But having said this, Lady Tranmore repented. It seemed to her she had been betraying William's affairs. She drew her chair back from the fire, and rang to ask if the carriage had arrived. Mary took the hint. She arrayed herself in her cloak, and chatted agreeably about other things till the moment for their departure came.

As they drove through the streets, Lady Tranmore stole a glance at her companion.

"She is really very handsome," she thought--"much better-looking than she was at twenty. What are the men about, not to marry her?"

It was indeed a puzzle. For Mary was increasingly agreeable as the years went on, and had now quite a position of her own in London, as a charming woman without angles or apparent egotisms; one of the initiated besides, whom any dinner-party might be glad to capture. Her relations, near and distant, held so many of the points of vantage in English public life that her word inevitably carried weight. She talked politics, as women of her cla.s.s must talk them to hold their own; she supported the Church; and she was elegantly charitable, in that popular sense which means that you subscribe to your friends' charities without setting up any of your own. She was rich also--already in possession of a considerable fortune, inherited from her mother, and prospective heiress of at least as much again from her father, old Sir Richard Lyster, whose house in Somersetshire she managed to perfection. In the season she stayed with various friends, or with Lady Tranmore, Sir Richard being now infirm, and preferring the country. There was a younger sister, who was known to have married imprudently, and against her father's wishes, some five or six years before this. Catharine was poor, the wife of a clergyman with young children. Lady Tranmore sometimes wondered whether Mary was quite as good to her as she might be. She herself sent Catharine various presents in the course of the year for the children.

--Yes, it was certainly surprising that Mary had not married. Lady Tranmore's thoughts were running on this tack when of a sudden her eyes were caught by the placard of one of the evening papers.

"Interview with Mr. Cliffe. Peace a.s.sured." So ran one of the lines.

"Geoffrey Cliffe home again!" Lady Tranmore's tone betrayed a shade of contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt.

"We shall have to get on without our daily telegram. Poor London!"

If at that moment it had occurred to her to look at her companion, she would have seen a quick reddening of Mary's cheeks.

"He has had a great success, though, with his telegrams!" replied Miss Lyster. "I should have thought one couldn't deny that."