The Marriage of William Ashe Part 32

"She did. She says she is very hard up. If I cared to use it, I have an easy reply."

"What do you mean?"

"I might say,' D---n it, we are, too!'"

Kitty laughed uneasily.

"Don't begin to talk money matters now, William, _please_."

"No, dear, I won't. But we shall really have to draw in."

"You _will_ pay so many debts!" said Kitty, frowning.

Ashe went into a fit of laughter.

"That's my extravagance, isn't it? I a.s.sure you I go on the most approved principles. I divide our available money among the greatest number of hungry claimants it will stretch to. But, after all, it goes a beggarly short way."

"I know mother will think my diamond crescent a horrible extravagance,"

said Kitty, pouting. "But you are the only son, William, and we must behave like other people."

"Dear, don't trouble your little head," he said; "I'll manage it, somehow."

Indeed, he knew very well that he could never bring his own indolent and easy-going temper in such matters to face any real struggle with Kitty over money. He must go to his mother, who now--his father being a hopeless invalid--managed the estates with his own and the agent's help.

It was, of course, right that she should preach to Kitty a little; but she would be sensible and help them out. After all, there was plenty of money. Why shouldn't Kitty spend it?

Any one who knew him well might have observed a curious contrast between his private laxity in these matters and the strictness of his public practice. He was scruple and delicacy itself in all financial matters that touched his public life--directorships, investments, and the like, no less than in all that concerned interest and patronage. He would have been a bold man who had dared to propose to William Ashe any expedient whatever by which his public place might serve his private gain. His proud and fastidious integrity, indeed, was one of the sources of his growing power. But as to private debts--and the tradesmen to whom they were owed--his standards were still essentially those of the Whigs from whom he descended, of Fox, the all-indebted, or of Melbourne, who has left an amusing disquisition on the art of dividing a few loaves and fishes in the shape of bank-notes among a mult.i.tude of creditors.

Not that affairs were as yet very bad. Far from it. But there was little to spare for Madame d'Estrees, who ought, indeed, to want nothing; and Ashe was vaguely meditating his reply to that lady when a face in a carriage near them, which was trying to enter the line, caught his attention.

"Mary!" he said, "a la Sir Joshua--and mother. They don't see us. Query, will Cliffe take the leap to-night? Mother reports a decided increase of ardor on his part. Sorry you don't approve of it, darling!"

"It's just like lighting a lamp to put it out--that's all!" said Kitty, with vivacity. "The man who marries Mary is done for."

"Not at all. Mary's money will give him the pedestal he wants, and trust Cliffe to take care of his own individuality afterwards! Now, if you'll transfer your alarms to _Mary_, I'm with you!"

"Oh! of _course_ he'll be unkind to her. She may lay her account for that. But it's the _marrying_ her!" And Kitty's upper-lip curled under a slow disdain.

William laughed out.

"Kitty, really!--you remind me, please, of Miss Jane Taylor:

"'I did not think there could be found--a little heart so hard!'

Mary is thirty; she would like to be married. And why not? She'll give quite as good as she gets."

"Well, she won't get--anything. Geoffrey Cliffe thinks of no one but himself."

Ashe's eyebrows went up.

"Oh, well, all men are selfish--and the women don't mind."

"It depends on how it's done," said Kitty.

Ashe declared that Cliffe was just an ordinary person, "l'homme sensuel moyen"--with a touch of genius. Except for that, no better and no worse than other people. What then?--the world was not made up of persons of enormous virtue like Lord Althorp and Mr. Gladstone. If Mary wanted him for a husband, and could capture him, both, in his opinion, would have pretty nearly got their deserts.

Kitty, however, fell into a reverie, after which she let him see a face of the same startling sweetness as she had several times shown him of late.

"Do you want me to be nice to her?" She nestled up to him.

"Bind her to your chariot wheels, madam! You can!" said Ashe, slipping a hand round hers.

Kitty pondered.

"Well, then, I won't tell her that I _know_ he's still in love with the Frenchwoman. But it's on the tip of my tongue."

"Heavens!" cried Ashe. "The Vicomtesse D---, the lady of the poems? But she's dead! I thought that was over long ago."

Kitty was silent for a moment, then said, with low-voiced emphasis:

"That any one could write those poems, and then _think_ of Mary!"

"Yes, the poems were fine," said Ashe, "but make-believe!"

Kitty protested indignantly. Ashe bantered her a little on being one of the women who were the making of Cliffe.

"Say what you like!" she said, drawing a quick breath. "But, often and often, he says divine things--divinely! I feel them there!" And she lifted both hands to her breast with an impulsive gesture.

"G.o.ddess!" said Ashe, kissing her hand because enthusiasm became her so well. "And to think that I should have dared to roast the divine one in a _Times_ letter this morning!"

The hall and staircase of Yorkshire House were already filled with a motley and magnificent crowd when Ashe and Kitty arrived. Kitty, still shrouded in her cloak, pushed her way through, exchanging greetings with friends, shrieking a little now and then for the safety of her bow and quiver, her face flushed with pleasure and excitement. Then she disappeared into the cloak-room, and Ashe was left to wonder how he was going to endure his robes through the heat of the evening, and to exchange a laughing remark or two with the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, into whose company he had fallen.

"What are we doing it for?" he asked the young man, whose thin person was well set off by a Tudor dress.

"Oh, don't be superior!" said the other. "I'm going to enjoy myself like a school-boy!"

And that, indeed, seemed to be the att.i.tude of most of the people present. And not only of the younger members of the dazzling company.

What struck Ashe particularly, as he mingled with the crowd, was the alacrity of the elder men. Here was a famous lawyer already nearing the seventies, in the Lord Chancellor's garb of a great ancestor; here an ex-Viceroy of Ireland with a son in the government, magnificent in an Elizabethan dress, his fair bushy hair and reddish beard shining above a doublet on which glittered a jewel given to the founder of his house by Elizabeth's own hand; next to him, a white-haired judge in the robes of Judge Gascoyne; a peer, no younger, at his side, in the red and blue of Mazarin: and showing each and all in their gay complacent looks a clear revival of that former masculine delight in splendid clothes which came so strangely to an end with that older world on the ruins of which Napoleon rose. So with the elder women. For this night they were young again. They had been free to choose from all the ages a dress that suited them; and the result of this renewal of a long-relinquished eagerness had been in many cases to call back a bygone self, and the tones and gestures of those years when beauty is its own chief care.

As for the young men, the young women, and the girls, the zest and pleasure of the show shone in their eyes and movements, and spread through the hall and up the crowded staircase, like a warm, contagious atmosphere. At all times, indeed, and in all countries, an aristocracy has been capable of this sheer delight in its own splendor, wealth, good looks, and acc.u.mulated treasure; whether in the Venice that Petrarch visited; or in the Rome of the Renaissance popes; in the Versailles of the Grand Monarque; or in the Florence of to-day, which still at moments of _festa_ reproduces in its midst all the costumes of the Cinque-cento.

In this English case there was less dignity than there would have been in a Latin country, and more personal beauty; less grace, perhaps, and yet a something richer and more romantic.

At the top of the stairs stood a marquis in a dress of the Italian Renaissance, a Gonzaga who had sat for t.i.tian; beside him a fair-haired wife in the white satin and pearls of Henrietta Maria; while up the marble stairs, watched by a laughing mult.i.tude above, streamed Gainsborough girls and Reynolds women, women from the courts of Elizabeth, or Henri Quatre, of Maria Theresa, or Marie Antoinette, the figures of Holbein and Vandyck, Florentines of the Renaissance, the youths of Carpaccio, the beauties of t.i.tian and Veronese.

"Kitty, make haste!" cried a voice in front, as Kitty began to mount the stairs. "Your quadrille is just called."