The Marriage of William Ashe Part 26

So while some Polish gentleman in the main drawing-room, whose name ended in _ski_, challenged his violin to the impossible, Cliffe and Mary retired from observation into a small room thrown open with the rest of the suite, which was in truth the morning-room of the amba.s.sadress.

As soon as they found themselves alone, there was a pause in their conversation; each involuntarily looked at the other. Mary certainly recognized that these years of absence had wrought a noticeable change in the man before her. He had aged. Hard living and hard travelling had left their marks. But, like Lady Tranmore, she also perceived another difference. The eyes bent upon her were indeed, as before, the eyes of a man self-centred, self-absorbed. There was no chivalrous softness in them, no consideration. The man who owned them used them entirely for his own purposes; they betrayed none of that changing instinctive relation towards the human being--any human being--within their range, which makes the charm of so many faces. But they were sadder, more sombre, more restless; they thrilled her more than they had already thrilled her once, in the first moment of her youth.

What was he going to say? From the moment of his first letter to her from j.a.pan, Mary had perfectly understood that he had some fresh purpose in his mind. She was not anxious, however, to precipitate the moment of explanation. She was no longer the young girl whose equilibrium is upset by the mere approach of the man who interests her. Moreover, there was a past between herself and Cliffe, the memory of which might indeed point her to caution. Did he now, after all, want to marry her--because she was rich, and he was comparatively poor, and could only secure an English career at the cost of a well-stored wife? Well, all that should be thought over; by herself no less than by him. Meanwhile her vanity glowed within her, as she thus held him there, alone, to the discomfiture of other women more beautiful and more highly placed than herself; as she remembered his letters in her desk at home; and the secrets she imagined him to have told her. Then again she felt a rush of sudden disquiet, caused by this new aspect--wavering and remote--as though some hidden grief emerged and vanished. He had the haggard air of a man who scarcely sleeps. All that she had ever heard of the French affair rushed through her mind, stirring there an angry curiosity.

These impressions took, however, but a few minutes, while they exchanged some conventionalities. Then Cliffe said, scrutinizing the face and form beside him with that intentness which, from him, was more generally taken as compliment than offence:

"Will you excuse the remark? There are no women who keep their first freshness like Englishwomen."

"Thank you. If we feel fresh, I suppose we look it. As for you, you clearly want a rest."

"No time to think of it, then; I have come home to fight--all I know; to make myself as odious as possible."

Mary laughed.

"You have been doing that so long. Why not try the opposite?"

Cliffe looked at her sharply.

"You think I have made a failure of it?"

"Not at all. You have made everybody furiously uncomfortable, and you see how civil even the Radical papers are to you."

"Yes. What fools!" said Cliffe, shortly. "They'll soon leave that off.

Just now I'm a stick to beat the government with. But you don't believe I shall carry my point?"

The point concerned a particular detail in a pending negotiation with the United States. Cliffe had been denouncing the government for what he conceived to be their coming retreat before American demands. America, according to him, had been playing the bully; and English interests were being betrayed.

Mary considered.

"I think you will have to change your tactics."

"Dictate them, then."

He bent forward, with that sudden change of manner, that courteous sweetness of tone and gesture, which few women could resist. Mary's heart, seasoned though it were, felt a charming flutter. She talked, and she talked well. She had no independence of mind, and very little real knowledge; but she had an excellent reporter's ability; she knew what to remember, and how to tell it. Cliffe listened to her attentively, acknowledging to himself the while that she had certainly gained. She was a far more definite personality than she had been when he last knew her; and her self-possession, her trained manner, rested him. Thank Heaven, she was not a clever woman--how he detested the breed! But she was a useful one. And the smiling commonplace into which she fell so often was positively welcome to him. He had known what it was to court a woman who was more than his equal both in mind and pa.s.sion; and it had left him bitter and broken.

"Well, all this is most illuminating," he said at last. "I owe you immense thanks." And he put out a pair of hands, thin, brown, and weather-stained as his face, and pressed one of hers. "We're very old friends, aren't we?"

"Are we?" said Mary, drawing back.

"So far as any one can be the friend of a chap like me," he said, hastily. "Tell me, are you with Lady Tranmore?"

"No. I go to her in a few days--till I leave London."

"Don't go away," he said, suddenly and insistently. "Don't go away."

Mary could not help a slight wavering in the eyes that perforce met his.

Then he said, abruptly, as she rose:

"By-the-way, they tell me Ashe is a great man."

She caught the note of incredulous contempt in his voice and laughed.

"They say he'll be in the cabinet directly."

"And Lady Kitty, I understand, is a scandal to G.o.ds and men, and the most fashionable person in town?"

"Oh, not now," said Mary. "That was last year."

"You mean people are tired of her?"

"Well, after a time, you know, a naughty child--"

"Becomes a bore. Is she a bore? I doubt; I very much doubt."

"Go and see," said Mary. "When do you lunch there?"

"I think to-morrow. Shall I find you?"

"Oh no. I am not at all intimate with Lady Kitty."

Cliffe's slight smile, as he followed her into the large drawing-room, died under his mustache. He divined at once the relation between the two, or thought he did.

As for Mary, she caught her last sight of Cliffe, standing bareheaded on the steps of the emba.s.sy, his lean distinction, his ugly good looks marking him out from the men around him. Then, as they drove away she was glad that the darkness hid her from Lady Tranmore. For suddenly she could not smile. She was filled with the perception that if Geoffrey Cliffe did not now ask her to marry him, life would utterly lose its savor, its carefully cherished and augmented savor, and youth would abandon her. At the same time she realized that she would have to make a fight of it, with every weapon she could muster.

IX

"Wasn't I expected?" said Darrell, with a chilly smile.

"Oh yes, sir--yes, sir!" said the Ashes' butler, as he looked distractedly round the drawing-room. "I believe her ladyship will be in directly. Will you kindly take a seat?"

The man's air of resignation convinced Darrell that Lady Kitty had probably gone out without any orders to her servants, and had now forgotten all about her luncheon-party--a state of things to which the Hill Street household was, no doubt, well accustomed.

"I shall claim some lunch," he thought to himself, "whatever happens.

These young people want keeping in their place. Ah!"

For he had observed, placed on a small easel, the print of Madame de Longueville in costume, and he put up his eye-gla.s.s to look at it. He guessed at once that its appearance there was connected with the fancy ball which was now filling London with its fame, and he examined it with some closeness. "Lady Kitty will make a stir in it--no doubt of that!"

he said to himself, as he turned away. "She has the keenest _flair_ of them all for what produces an effect. None of the others can touch her--Mrs. Alcot--none of them!"

He was thinking of the other members of a certain group, at that time well known in London society--a group characterized chiefly by the beauty, extravagance, and audacity of the women belonging to it. It was by no means a group of mere fashionables. It contained a large amount of ability and accomplishment; some men of aristocratic family, who were also men of high character, with great futures before them; some persons from the literary or artistic world, who possessed, besides their literary or artistic gifts, a certain art of agreeable living, and some few others--especially young girls--admitted generally for some peculiar quality of beauty or manner outside the ordinary canons. Money was really presupposed by the group as a group. The life they belonged to was a life of the rich, the houses they met in were rich houses. But money as such had no power whatever to buy admission to their ranks; and the members of the group were at least as impatient of the claims of mere wealth as they were of those of mere virtue.

On the whole the group was an element of ferment and growth in the society that had produced it. Its impatience of convention and restraint, the exaltation of intellectual or artistic power which prevailed in it, and even the angry opposition excited by its pretensions and its exclusiveness, were all, perhaps, rather profitable than harmful at that moment of our social history. Old customs were much shaken; the new were shaping themselves, and this daring coterie of young and brilliant people, living in one another's houses, calling one another by their Christian names, setting a number of social rules at defiance, discussing books, making the fame of artists, and, now and then, influencing politics, were certainly helping to bring the new world to birth. Their foes called them "The Archangels," and they themselves had accepted the name with complacency.

Kitty, of course, was an Archangel, so was Mrs. Alcot. Cliffe had belonged to them before his travels began. Louis Harman was more or less of their tribe, and Lady Tranmore, though not herself an Archangel, entertained the set in London and in the country. Like various older women connected with the group, she was not of them, but she "harbored"