The Marriage of William Ashe Part 33

Kitty smiled and nodded, but did not hurry her pace by a second. The staircase was not so full as it had been, and she knew well as she mounted it, her slender figure drawn to its full height, her eyes flashing greeting and challenge to those in the gallery, the diamond genius on her spear glittering above her, that she held the stage, and that the play would not begin without her.

And indeed her dress, her brilliance, and her beauty let loose a hum of conversation--not always friendly.

"What is she?" "Oh, something mythological! She's in the next quadrille." "My dear, she's Diana! Look at her bow and quiver, and the moon in her hair." "Very incorrect!--she ought to have the towered crown!" "Absurd, such a little thing to attempt Diana! I'd back Actaeon!"

The latter remark was spoken in the ear of Louis Harman, who stood in the gallery looking down. But Harman shook his head.

"You don't understand. She's not Greek, of course; but she's fairyland.

A child of the Renaissance, dreaming in a wood, would have seen Artemis so--dressed up and glittering, and fantastic--as the Florentines saw Venus. Small, too, like the fairies!--slipping through the leaves; small hounds, with jewelled collars, following her!"

He smiled at his own fancy, still watching Kitty with his painter's eyes.

"She has seen a French print somewhere," said Cliffe, who stood close by. "More Versailles in it than fairyland, I think!"

"It is _she_ that is fairyland," said Harman, still fascinated.

Cliffe's expression showed the sarcasm of his thought. Fairy, perhaps!--with the touch of malice and inhuman mischief that all tradition attributes to the little people. Why, after that first meeting, when the conversation of a few minutes had almost swept them into the deepest waters of intimacy, had she slighted him so, in other drawing-rooms and on other occasions? She had actually neglected and avoided him--after having dared to speak to him of his secret! And now Ashe's letter of the morning had kindled afresh his sense of rancor against a pair of people, too prosperous and too arrogant. The stroke in the _Times_ had, he knew, gone home; his vanity writhed under it, and the wish to strike back tormented him, as he watched Ashe mounting behind his wife, so handsome, careless, and urbane, his jewelled cap dangling in his hand.

The quadrille of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses was over. Kitty had been dancing with a fine clumsy Mars, in ordinary life an honest soldier and deer-stalker, the heir to a Scotch dukedom; having as her _vis-a-vis_ Madeleine Alcot--as the Flora of Botticelli's "Spring"--and slim as Mercury in fantastic Renaissance armor. All the divinities of the Pantheon, indeed, were there, but in Gallicized or Italianate form; scarcely a touch of the true antique, save in the case of one beautiful girl who wore a Juno dress of white whereof the clinging folds had been arranged for her by a young Netherlands painter, Mr. Alma Tadema, then newly settled in this country. Kitty at first envied her; then decided that she herself could have made no effect in such a gown, and threw her the praises of indifference.

When, to Kitty's sharp regret, the music stopped and the glittering crew of immortals melted into the crowd, she found behind her a row of dancers waiting for the quadrille which was to follow. This was to consist entirely of English pictures revived--Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney--and to be danced by those for whose families they had been originally painted. As she drew back, looking eagerly to right and left, she came across Mary Lyster. Mary wore her hair high and powdered--a black silk scarf over white satin, and a blue sash.

"Awfully becoming!" said Kitty, nodding to her. "Who are you?"

"My great-great aunt!" said Mary, courtesying. "You, I see, go even farther back."

"Isn't it fun?" said Kitty, pausing beside her. "Have you seen William?

Poor dear! he's so hot. How do you do?" This last careless greeting was addressed to Cliffe, whom she now perceived standing behind Mary.

Cliffe bowed stiffly.

"Excuse me. I did not see you. I was absorbed in your dress. You are Artemis, I see--with additions."

"Oh! I am an 'article de Paris,'" said Kitty. "But it seems odd that some people should take me for Joan of Arc." Then she turned to Mary. "I think your dress is quite lovely!" she said, in that warm, shy voice she rarely used except for a few intimates, and had never yet been known to waste on Mary. "Don't you admire it enormously, Mr. Cliffe?"

"Enormously," said Cliffe, pulling at his mustache. "But by now my compliments are stale."

"Is he cross about William's letter?" thought Kitty. "Well, let's leave them to themselves."

Then, as she pa.s.sed him, something in the silent personality of the man arrested her. She could not forbear a look at him over her shoulder.

"Are you--Oh! of course, I remember--" for she had recognized the dress and cap of the Spanish grandee.

Cliffe did not reply for a moment, but the harsh significance of his face revived in her the excitable interest she had felt in him on the day of his luncheon in Hill Street; an interest since effaced and dispersed, under the influence of that serenity and home peace which had shone upon her since that very day.

"I should apologize, no doubt, for not taking your advice," he said, looking her in the eyes. Their expression, half bitter, half insolent, reminded her.

"Did I give you any advice?" Kitty wrinkled up her white brows. "I don't recollect."

Mary looked at her sharply, suspiciously. Kitty, quite conscious of the look, was straightway p.r.i.c.ked by an elfish curiosity. Could she carry him off--trouble Mary's possession there and then? She believed she could. She was well aware of a certain relation between herself and Cliffe, if, at least, she chose to develop it. Should she? Her vanity insisted that Mary could not prevent it.

However, she restrained herself and moved on. Presently looking back, she saw them still together, Cliffe leaning against the pedestal of a bust, Mary beside him. There was an animation in her eyes, a rose of pleasure on her cheek which stirred in Kitty a queer, sudden sympathy.

"I _am_ a little beast!" she said to herself. "Why shouldn't she be happy?"

Then, perceiving Lady Tranmore at the end of the ballroom, she made her way thither surrounded by a motley crowd of friends. She walked as though on air, "raining influence." And as Lady Tranmore caught the glitter of the diamond crescent, and beheld the small divinity beneath it, she, too, smiled with pleasure, like the other spectators on Kitty's march. The dress was monstrously costly. She knew that. But she forgot the inroad on William's pocket, and remembered only to be proud of William's wife. Since the Parhams' party, indeed, the unlooked-for submission of Kitty, and the clearing of William's prospects, Lady Tranmore had been sweetness itself to her daughter-in-law.

But her fine face and brow were none the less inclined to frown. She herself as Katharine of Aragon would have shed a dignity on any scene, but she was in no sympathy with what she beheld.

"We shall soon all of us be ashamed of this kind of thing," she declared to Kitty. "Just as people now are beginning to be ashamed of enormous houses and troops of servants."

"No, please! Only bored with them!" said Kitty. "There are so many other ways now of amusing yourself--that's all."

"Well, this way will die out," said Lady Tranmore. "The cost of it is too scandalous--people's consciences p.r.i.c.k them."

Kitty vowed she did not believe there was a conscience in the room; and then, as the music struck up, she carried off her companion to some steps overlooking the great marble gallery, where they had a better view of the two lines of dancers.

It is said that as a nation the English have no gift for pageants. Yet every now and then--as no doubt in the Elizabethan mask--they show a strange felicity in the art. Certainly the dance that followed would have been difficult to surpa.s.s even in the ripe days and motherlands of pageantry. To the left, a long line, consisting mainly of young girls in their first bloom, dressed as Gainsborough and his great contemporaries delighted to paint these flowers of England--the folds of plain white muslin crossed over the young breast, a black velvet at the throat, a rose in the hair, the simple skirt showing the small pointed feet, and sometimes a broad sash defining the slender waist. Here were Stanleys, Howards, Percys, Villierses, Butlers, Osbornes--soft slips of girls bearing the names of England's rough and turbulent youth, bearing themselves to-night with a shy or laughing dignity, as though the touch of history and romance were on them. And facing them, the youths of the same families, no less handsome than their sisters and brides--in Romney's blue coats, or the splendid red of Reynolds and Gainsborough.

To and fro swayed the dancers, under the innumerable candles that filled the arched roof and upper walls of the ballroom; and each time the lines parted they disclosed at the farther end another pageant, to which that of the dance was in truth subordinate--a dais hung with blue and silver, and upon it a royal lady whose beauty, then in its first bloom, has been a national possession, since as, the "sea-king's daughter" she brought it in dowry to her adopted country. To-night she blazed in jewels as a Valois queen, with her court around her, and as the dancers receded, each youth and maiden seemed instinctively to turn towards her as roses to the sun.

"Oh, beautiful, beautiful world!" said Kitty to herself, in an ecstasy, pressing her small hands together; "how I love you!--_love_ you!"

Meanwhile Darrell and Harman stood side by side near the doorway of the ballroom, looking in when the crowd allowed.

"A strange sight," said Harman. "Perhaps they take it too seriously."

"Ah! that is our English upper cla.s.s," said Darrell, with a sneer. "Is there anything they take lightly?--_par exemple!_ It seems to me they carry off this amus.e.m.e.nt better than most. They may be stupid, but they are good-looking. I say, Ashe"--he turned towards the new-comer who had just sauntered up to them--"on this exceptional occasion, is it allowed to congratulate you on Lady Kitty's gown?"

For Kitty, raised upon her step, was at the moment in full view.

Ashe made some slight reply, the slightest of which indeed annoyed the thin-skinned and morbid Darrell, always on the lookout for affronts. But Louis Harman, who happened to observe the Under-Secretary's glance at his wife, said to himself, "By George! that queer marriage is turning out well, after all."

The Tudor and Marie Antoinette quadrilles had been danced. There was a rumor of supper in the air.

"William!" said Kitty, in his ear, as she came across him in one of the drawing-rooms, "Lord Hubert takes me in to supper. Poor me!" She made an extravagant face of self-pity and swept on. Lord Hubert was one of the sons of the house, a stupid and inarticulate guardsman, Kitty's b.u.t.t and detestation. Ashe smiled to himself over her fate, and went back to the ballroom in search of his own lady.

Meanwhile Kitty paused in the next drawing-room, and dismissed her following.

"I promised to wait here for Lord Hubert," she said. "You go on, or you'll get no tables."

And she waved them peremptorily away. The drawing-room, one of a suite which looked on the garden, thinned temporarily. In a happy fatigue, Kitty leaned dreamily over the ledge of one of the open windows, looking at the illuminated s.p.a.ce below her. Amid the colored lights, figures of dream and fantasy walked up and down. In the midst flashed a flame-colored fountain. The sounds of a Strauss waltz floated in the air. And beyond the garden and its trees rose the dull roar of London.

A silk curtain floated out into the room under the westerly breeze, then, returning, sheathed Kitty in its folds. She stood there hidden, amusing herself like a child with the thought of startling that great heavy goose, Lord Hubert.