The Marriage of William Ashe Part 30

"You are not a bad-looking pair," he said, kissing first Kitty and then the baby. "But he's rather pale, Kitty. I think he wants the country."

Kitty said nothing, but she lifted the little white embroidered frock and looked at the twisted foot. Then Ashe felt her shudder.

"Dear, don't be morbid!" he cried, resentfully. "He will have so much brains that n.o.body will remember that. Think of Byron."

Kitty did not seem to have heard.

"I remember so well when I first saw his foot--after your mother told me--and they brought him to me," she said, slowly. "It seemed to me it was the end--"

"The end of what?"

"Of my dream."

"What _do_ you mean, Kitty!"

"Do you remember the mask in the 'Tempest'? First Iris, with saffron wings, and rich Ceres, and great Juno--"

She half closed her eyes.

"Then the nymphs and the reapers--dancing together on 'the short-gra.s.sed green,' the sweetest, gayest show--"

She breathed the words out softly. "Then, suddenly--"

She sat up stiffly and struck her small hands together:

"Prospero starts and speaks. And in a moment--without warning--with 'a strange, hollow, and confused noise'"--she dragged the words drearily--"_they heavily vanish_. That"--she pointed, shuddering, to the child's foot--"was for me the sign of Prospero."

Ashe looked at her with anxiety, finding it indeed impossible to laugh at her.

She was very pale, her breath came with difficulty, and she trembled from head to foot. He tried to draw her into his arms, but she held him away.

"That first year I had been so happy," she continued, in the same voice.

"Everything was so perfect, so glorious. Life was like a great pageant, in a palace. All the old terrors went. I often had fears as a child--fears I couldn't put into words, but that overshadowed me. Then when I saw Alice--the shadow came nearer. But that was all gone. I thought G.o.d was reconciled to me, and would always be kind to me now.

And then I saw that foot, and I knew that He hated me still. He had burned His mark into my baby's flesh. And I was never to be quite happy again, but always in fear, fear of pain--and death--and grief--"

She paused. Her large eyes gazed into vacancy, and her whole slight frame showed the working of some mysterious and pitiful distress.

A wave of poignant alarm swept through Ashe's mind, coupled also with a curious sense of something foreseen. He had never witnessed precisely this mood in her before; but now that it was thus revealed, he was suddenly aware "that something like it had been for long moving obscurely below the surface of her life. He took the child and laid him on the floor, where he rolled at ease, cooing to himself. Then he came back to Kitty, and soothed her with extraordinary tenderness and skill.

Presently she looked at him, as though some obscure trouble of which she had been the victim had released her, and she were herself again.

"Don't go away just yet," she said, in a voice which was still low and shaken. He came close to her, again put his arms round her, and held her on his breast in silence.

"That is heavenly!" he heard her say to herself after a while, in a whisper.

"Kitty!" His eyes grew dim and he stooped to kiss her.

"Heavenly--" she went on, still as though following out her own thought rather than speaking to him, "because one _yields_--_yields_! Life is such tension--always."

She closed her eyes quickly, and he watched the beautiful lashes lying still upon her cheek. With an emotion he could not explain--for it was not an emotion of the senses, just as her yielding had not been a yielding of the senses but a yielding of the soul--he continued to hold her in his arms, her life, her will given to him wholly, sighed out upon his heart.

Then gradually she recovered her balance; the normal Kitty came back.

She put out her hand and touched his face.

"You must go back to the House, William."

"Yes, if you are all right."

She sat up, and began to rearrange some of her hair that had slipped down.

"You have carried us both into such heights and depths, darling!" said Ashe, after he had watched her a little in silence, "that I have forgotten to tell you the gossip I brought back from mother this morning."

Kitty paused, interrogatively. She was still pale.

"Do you know that mother is convinced Mary Lyster has made up her mind to marry Cliffe?"

There was a pause, then Kitty said, with incredulous contempt: "He would never _dream_ of marrying her!"

"Not so sure! She has a great deal of money, and Cliffe wants money badly."

Ashe began to put his papers together. Kitty questioned him a little more, intermittently, as to what his mother had said. When he had left her, she sat for long on the sofa, playing with some flowers she had taken from her dress, or sombrely watching the child, as it lay on the floor beside her.

X

"My lady! It's come!"

The maid put her head in just to convey the good news. Kitty was in her bedroom walking up and down in a fury which was now almost speechless.

The housemaid was waiting on the stairs. The butler was waiting in the hall. Till that hurried knock was heard at the front door, and the much-tried Wilson had rushed to open it, the house had been wrapped in a sort of storm silence. It was ten o'clock on the night of the ball. Half Kitty's costume lay spread out upon her bed. The other half--although since seven o'clock all Kitty's servants had been employed in rushing to Fanchette's establishment in New Bond Street, at half-hour intervals, in the fastest hansoms to be found--had not yet appeared.

However, here at last was the end of despair. A panting boy dragged the box into the hall, the butler and footman carried it up-stairs and into their mistress's room, where Kitty in a white peignoir stood waiting, with the brow of Medea.

"The boy that brought it looked just fit to drop, my lady!" said the maid, as she undid the box. She was a zealous servant, but she was glad sometimes to chasten these great ones of the land by insisting on the seamy side of their pleasures.

Kitty paused in the eager task of superintendence, and turned to the under-housemaid, who stood by, gazing open-mouthed at the splendors emerging from the box.

"Run down and tell Wilson to give him some wine and cake!" she said, peremptorily. "It's all Fanchette's fault--odious creature!--running it to the last like this--after all her promises!"

The housemaid went, and soon sped back. For no boy on earth would she have been long defrauded of the sight of her ladyship's completed gown.

"Did Wilson feed him?" Kitty flung her the question as she bent, alternately frowning and jubilant, over the creation before her.

"Yes, my lady. It was quite a little fellow. He said his legs were just run off his feet," said the girl, growing confused as the moon-robe unfolded.