The Marriage of William Ashe Part 36

Lady Parham greeted the hostess with effusion. It was a rich house, and these small, informal dances were said to be more helpful to matrimonial development than larger affairs. Then she perceived Ashe, and her whole manner changed. There was a very evident bristling, and she gave him a greeting deliberately careless.

"Confound the woman!" thought Ashe, and his own pride rose.

"Working as hard as usual, Lady Parham?" he asked her, with a smile.

"If you like to put it so," was the stiff reply. "There is, of course, a good deal of going out."

"I hope, if I may say so, you don't allow Lord Parham to do too much of it."

"Lord Parham never was better in his life," said Lord Parham's spouse, with the air of putting down an impertinence.

"That's good news. I must say when I saw him this afternoon I thought he seemed to be feeling his work a good deal."

"Oh, he's worried," said Lady Parham, sharply. "Worried about a good many things." She turned suddenly, and looked at her companion--an insolent and deliberate look.

"Ah, that's where the wives come in!" replied Ashe, unperturbed. "Look at Mrs. Loraine. She has the art to perfection--hasn't she? The way she cushions Loraine is something wonderful to see."

Lady Parham flushed angrily. The suggested comparison between herself, and that incessant rattle and blare of social event through which she dragged her husband--conducting thereby a vulgar campaign of her own, as arduous as his and far more ambitious--and the ways and character of gentle Mrs. Loraine, absorbed in the man she adored, scatter-brained and absent-minded towards the rest of the world, but for him all eyes and ears, an angel of shelter and protection--this did not now reach the Prime Minister's wife for the first time. But she had no opportunity to launch a retort, even supposing she had one ready, for the music ceased, and the tide of dancers surged towards the doors. It brought Kitty abruptly face to face with Lady Parham.

"Oh! how d'you do?" said Kitty, in a tone that was already an offence, and she held out a small hand with an indescribably regal air.

Lady Parham just touched it, glanced at the owner from top to toe, and walked away. Kitty slipped in beside Ashe for a moment, with her back to the wall, laughing and breathless.

"I say, Kitty," said Ashe, bending over her and speaking in her small ear, "I thought Lady Parham was eternally obliged to us. What's wrong with her?"

"Only that I can't stand her," said Kitty. "What's the good of trying?"

She looked up, a flame of mutiny in her cheeks.

"What, indeed?" said Ashe, feeling as reckless as she. "Her manners are beyond the bounds. But look here, Kitty, don't you think you'll come home? You know you do look uncommonly tired."

Kitty frowned.

"Home? Why, I'm only just beginning to enjoy myself! Take me into the cool, please," she said to the boy who had been dancing with her, and who still hovered near, in case his divinity might allow him yet a few more minutes. But as she put out her hand to take his arm, Ashe saw her waver and look suddenly across the room.

A group parted that had been cl.u.s.tering round a farther door, and Ashe perceived Cliffe, leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed. He was surrounded by pretty women, with whom he seemed to be carrying on a bantering warfare. Involuntarily Ashe watched for the recognition between him and Kitty. Did Kitty's lips move? Was there a signal? If so, it pa.s.sed like a flash; Kitty hurried away, and Ashe was left, haughtily furious with himself that, for the first time in his life, he had played the spy.

He turned in his discomfort to leave the dancing-room. He himself enjoyed society frankly enough. Especially since his marriage had he found the companionship of agreeable women delightful. He went instinctively to seek it, and drive out this nonsense from his mind.

Just inside the larger drawing-room, however, he came across Mary Lyster, sitting in a corner apparently alone. Mary greeted him, but with an evident coldness. Her manner brought back all the preoccupations of his walk from the House. In spite of her small cordiality, he sat down beside her, wondering with a vicarious compunction at what point her fortunes might be, and how Kitty's proceedings might have already affected them. But he had not yet succeeded in thawing her when a voice behind him said:

"This is my dance, I think, Miss Lyster. Where shall we sit it out?"

Ashe moved at once. Mary looked up, hesitated visibly, then rose and took Geoffrey Cliffe's arm.

"Just read your remarks this evening," said Cliffe to Ashe. "Well, now, I suppose to-morrow will see your ship in port?"

For it was reasonably expected that the morrow would see the American agreement ratified by a substantial ministerial majority.

"Certainly. But you may at least reflect that you have lost us a deal of time."

"And now you slay us," said Cliffe. "Ah, well--'_dulce et decorum est_,'

etcetera."

"Don't imagine that you'll get many of the honors of martyrdom," laughed Ashe--in Cliffe's eyes an offensive and triumphant figure, as he leaned carelessly upon a marble pedestal that carried a bust of Horace Walpole.

"Why?" Cliffe's hand had gone instinctively to his mustache. Mary had dropped his arm, and now stood quietly beside him, pale and somewhat jaded, her fine eyes travelling between the speakers.

"Why? Because the heresies have no martyrs. The halo is for the true Church!"

"H'm!" said Cliffe, with a reflective sneer. "I suppose you mean for the successful?"

"Do I?" said Ashe, with nonchalance. "Aren't the true Church the people who are justified by the event?"

"The orthodox like to think so," said Cliffe. "But the heretics have a way of coming out top."

"Does that mean you chaps are going to win at the next election? I devoutly hope you may--_we_'re all as stale as ditch-water--and as for places, anybody's welcome to mine!" And so saying, Ashe lounged away, attracted by the bow and smile of a pretty Frenchwoman, with whom it was always agreeable to chat.

"Ashe trifles it as usual," said Cliffe, as he and Mary forced a pa.s.sage into one of the smaller rooms. "Is there anything in the world that he really cares about?"

Mary looked at him with a start. It was almost on her lips to say, "Yes!

his wife." She only just succeeded in driving the words back.

"His not caring is a pretence," she said. "At least, Lady Tranmore thinks so. She believes that he is becoming absorbed in politics--much more ambitious than she ever thought he would be."

"That's the way of mothers," said Cliffe, with a sarcastic lip. "They have got to make the best of their sons. Tell me what you are going to do this summer."

He had thrown one arm round the back of a chair, and sat looking down upon her, his colorless fair hair falling thick upon his brow, and giving by contrast a strange inhuman force to the dark and singular eyes beneath. He had a way of commanding a woman's attention by flashes of brusquerie, melting when he chose into a homage that had in it the note of an older world, a world that had still leisure for, pa.s.sion and its refinements, a world still within sight of that other which had produced the _Carte du tendre_. Perhaps it was this, combined with the virilities, not to be questioned, of his aspect, the signs of hard physical endurance in the face burned by desert suns, and the suggestions of a frame too lean and gaunt for drawing-rooms, that gave him his spell and preserved it.

Mary's conversation with him consisted at first of much cool fencing on her part, which gradually slipped back, as he intended it should, into some of the tones of intimacy. Each meanwhile was conscious of a secret range of thoughts--hers concerned with the effort and struggle, the bitter disappointments and disillusions of the past six weeks; and his with the schemes he had cherished in the East and on the way home, of marrying Mary Lyster, or more correctly, Mary Lyster's money, and so resigning himself to the inevitable boredoms of an English existence.

For her the mental horizon was full of Kitty--Kitty insolent, Kitty triumphant. For him, too, Kitty made the background of thought--environed, however, with clouds of indecision and resistance that would have raised happiness in Mary could she have divined them.

For he was now not easy to capture. There had been enough and more than enough of women in his life. The game of politics must somehow replace them henceforth, if, indeed, anything were still worth while, except the long day in the saddle and the dawn of new mornings in untrodden lands.

Mingled, all these, with hot dislike of Ashe, with the fascination of Kitty, and a kind of venomous pleasure in the commotion produced by his pursuit of her; inter penetrated, moreover, through and through with the memory of his one true feeling, and of the woman who had died, alienated from and despising him. He and Mary pa.s.sed a profitless half-hour. He would have liked to propitiate her, but he had no notion what he should do with the propitiation, if it were reached. He wanted her money, but he was beginning to feel with restlessness that he could not pay the cost. The poet in him was still strong, crossed though it were by the adventurer.

He took her back to the dancing-room. Mary walked beside him with a dull, fierce sense of wrong. It was Kitty, of course, who had done it--Kitty who had taken him away from her.

"That's finished," said Cliffe to himself, with a long breath of relief, as he delivered her into the hands of her partner. "Now for the other!"

Thenceforward, no one saw Kitty and no one danced with her. She spent her time in beflowered corners, or remote drawing-rooms, with Geoffrey Cliffe. Ashe heard her voice in the distance once or twice, answering a voice he detested; he looked into the supper-room with a lady on his arm, and across it he saw Kitty, with her white elbow on the table and her hand propping a face that was turned--half mocking and yet wholly absorbed--to Cliffe. He saw her flitting across vistas or disappearing through far doorways, but always with that sinister figure in attendance.

His mind was divided between a secret fury--roused in him by the pride of a man of high birth and position, who has always had the world at command, and now sees an impertinence offered him which he does not know how to punish--and a mood of irony. Cliffe's persecution of Kitty was a piece of confounded bad manners. But to look at it with the round, hypocritical eyes some of these people were bringing to bear on it was really too much! Let them look to their own affairs--they needed it.

At last the party broke up. Kitty touched him on the shoulder as he was standing on the stairs, apparently absorbed in a teasing skirmish with a charming child in her first season, who thought him the most delightful of men.

"I'm ready, William."