The Marriage of William Ashe Part 29

"I didn't think it very strange--"

Cliffe watched her closely.

"--that a man should be--an inhuman beast--if he were jealous--and desperate. You can sympathize with these things?"

She drew a long breath, and threw away the cigarette she had been holding suspended in her small fingers.

"I don't know anything about them."

"Because," he hesitated, "your own life has been so happy?"

She evaded him. "Don't you think that jealousy will soon be as dead as--saying your prayers and going to church? I never meet anybody that cares enough--to be jealous."

She spoke first with pa.s.sionate force, then with contempt, glancing across the room at Madeleine Alcot. Cliffe saw the look, and remembered that Mrs. Alcot's husband, a distinguished treasury official, had been for years the intimate friend of a very n.o.ble and beautiful woman, herself unhappily married. There was no scandal in the matter, though much talk. Mrs. Alcot meanwhile had her own affairs; her husband and she were apparently on friendly terms; only neither ever spoke of the other; and their relations remained a mystery.

Cliffe bent over to Kitty.

"And yet you said you could understand?--such things didn't seem strange to you."

She gave a little, reckless laugh.

"Did I? It's like the people who think they could act or sing, if they only had the chance. I choose to think I could feel. And of course I couldn't. We've lost the power. All the old, horrible, splendid things are dead and done with."

"The old pa.s.sions, you mean?"

"And the old poems! _You'll_ never write like that again."

"G.o.d forbid!" said Cliffe, under his breath. Then as Kitty rose he followed her with his eyes. "Lady Kitty, you've thrown me a challenge that you hardly understand. Some day I must answer it."

"Don't answer it," said Kitty, hastily.

"Yes, if I can drag the words out," he said, sombrely. She met his look in a kind of fascination, excited by the memory of the story which had been told her, by her own audacity in speaking of it, by the presence of the dead pa.s.sion she divined lying shrouded and ghastly in the mind of the man beside her. Even the ugly things of which he was accused did but add to the interest of his personality for a nature like hers, greedy of experience, and discontented with the real.

While he on his side was nattered and astonished by her att.i.tude towards him, as Ashe's wife, she would surely dislike and try to trample on him.

That was what he had expected.

"I hear you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty," said the Dean, who, having obstinately outstayed all the other guests, had now settled his small person and his thin legs into a chair beside his hostess with a view to five agreeable minutes. He was the most harmless of social epicures, was the Dean, and he felt that Lady Kitty had defrauded him at lunch in favor of that great, ruffling, Byronic fellow Cliffe, who ought to have better taste than to come lunching with the Ashes.

"Am I?" said Kitty, who had thrown herself into the corner of a sofa, and sat curled up there in an att.i.tude which the Dean thought charming, though it would not, he was aware, "have become Mrs. Winston.

"Well, you know best," said the Dean. "But, at any rate, be good and explain to me what is an Archangel."

"Somebody whom most men and all women dislike," said Kitty, promptly.

"Yet they seem to be numerous," remarked the Dean.

"Not at all!" cried Kitty, with an air of offence; "not at all! If they were numerous they would, of course, be popular."

"And in fact they are rare--and detested? What other characteristics have they?"

"Courage," said Kitty, looking up.

"Courage to break rules? I hear they all call one another by their Christian names, and live in one another's rooms, and borrow one another's money, and despise conventionalities. I am sorry you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty."

"I didn't admit that I was," said Kitty, "but if I am, why are you sorry?"

"Because," said the Dean, smiling, "I thought you were too clever to despise conventionalities."

Kitty sat up with revived energy, and joined battle. She flew into a tirade as to the dulness and routine of English life, the stupidity of good people, and the tyranny of English hypocrisy. The Dean listened with amus.e.m.e.nt, then with a shade of something else. At last he got up to go.

"Well, you know, we have heard all that before. My point of view is so much more interesting--subtle--romantic! Anybody can attack Mrs. Grundy, but only a person of originality can adore her. Try it, Lady Kitty. It would be really worth your while."

Kitty mocked and exclaimed.

"Do you know what that phrase--that name of abomination--always recalls to me?" pursued the old man.

"It bores me, even to guess," was Kitty's petulant reply.

"Does it? I think of some of the n.o.blest people I have ever known--brave men--beautiful women--who fought Mrs. Grundy, and perished."

The Dean stood looking down upon her, with an eager, sensitive expression. Tales that he had heeded very little when he had first heard them ran through his mind; he had thought Lady Kitty's intimate _tete-a-tete_ with her husband's a.s.sailant in the press disagreeable and unseemly; and as for Mrs. Alcot, he had disliked her particularly.

Kitty looked up unquelled.

""Tis better to have fought and lost Than never to have fought at all--'"

she quoted, with one of her most radiant and provoking smiles.

"Incorrigible!" cried the Dean, catching up his hat. "I see! Once an Archangel--always an Archangel."

"Oh no!" said Kitty. "There may be 'war in heaven.'"

"Well, don't take Mrs. Alcot for a leader, that's all," said the Dean, as he held out a hand of farewell.

"And now I understand!" cried Kitty, triumphantly. "You detest my best friend."

The Dean laughed, protested, and went. Ashe, who had been writing letters while Kitty and the Dean were talking, escorted the old man to the door.

When he returned he found Kitty sitting with her hands in her lap, lost apparently in thought.

"Darling," he said, looking at his watch, "I must be off directly, but I should like to see the boy."

Kitty started. She rang, and the child was brought down. He sat on Kitty's knee, and Ashe coming to the sofa, threw an arm round them both.