The Marriage of William Ashe Part 40

Ashe smoked and smiled. Lady Tranmore saw that his pride, too, had been aroused, and that here he was likely to prove as obstinate as Kitty.

"I wish I could get her out of my mind!" she sighed.

Ashe glanced at her kindly.

"I daresay we shall hold our own. Xanthippe is not beloved, and I don't believe Parham will let her interfere with what he thinks best for the party. Will it pay to put me in the cabinet or not?--that's what he'll ask. I shall be strongly backed, too, by most of our papers."

A number of thoughts ran through Lady Tranmore's brain. With her long experience of London, she knew well what the sudden lowering of a man's "consideration"--to use a French word--at a critical moment may mean. A cooling of the general regard--a breath of detraction coming no one knows whence--and how soon new claims emerge, and the indispensable of yesterday becomes the negligible of to-day!

But even if she could have brought herself to put any of these anxieties into words, she had no opportunity. Kitty's voice was in the hall; the handle turned, and she ran in.

"William! Ah!--I didn't know mother was here."

She went up to Elizabeth, and lightly kissed that lady's cheek.

"Good-morning. William, I just came to tell you that I may be late for dinner, so perhaps you had better dine at the House. I am going on the river."

"Are you?" said Ashe, gathering up his papers. "Wish I was."

"Are you going with the Crashaw's party?" asked Elizabeth. "I know they have one."

"Oh, dear, no!" said Kitty. "I hate a crowd on the river. I am going with Geoffrey Cliffe."

Ashe bent over his desk. Lady Tranmore's eyebrows went up, and she could not restrain the word:

"Alone?"

"_Naturellement_!" laughed Kitty. "He reads me French poetry, and we talk French. We let Madeleine Alcot come once, but her accent was so shocking that Geoffrey wouldn't have her again!"

Lady Tranmore flushed deeply. The "Geoffrey" seemed to her intolerable.

Kitty, arrayed in the freshest of white gowns, walked away to the farther end of the library to consult a _Bradshaw_. Elizabeth, looking up, caught her son's eyes--and the mingled humor and vexation in them, wherewith he appealed to her, as it were, to see the whole silly business as he himself did. Lady Tranmore felt a moment's strong reaction. Had she indeed been making a foolish fuss about nothing?

Yet the impression left by the miserable meditations of her night was still deep enough to make her say--with just a signal from eye and lips, so that Kitty neither saw nor heard--"Don't let her go!"

Ashe shook his head. He moved towards the door, and stood there despatch-box in hand, throwing a last look at his wife.

"Don't be late, Kitty--or I shall be nervous. I don't trust Cliffe on the river. And please make it a rule that, in locks, he stops quoting French poetry."

Kitty turned round, startled and apparently annoyed by his tone.

"He is an excellent oar," she said, shortly.

"Is he? At Oxford we tried him for the Torpids--" Ashe's shrug completed his remark. Then, still disregarding another imploring look from Lady Tranmore, he left the room.

Kitty had flushed angrily. The belittling, malicious note in Ashe's manner had been clear enough. She braced herself against it, and Lady Tranmore's chance was lost. For when, summoning all her courage, and quite uncertain whether her son would approve or blame her, Elizabeth approached her daughter-in-law affectionately, trying in timid and apologetic words to unburden her own heart and reach Kitty's, Kitty met her with one of those outbursts of temper that women like Elizabeth Tranmore cannot cope with. Their moral recoil is too great. It is the recoil of the spiritual aristocrat; and between them and the children of pa.s.sion the links are few, the antagonism eternal.

She left the house, pale, dignified, the tears in her eyes. Kitty ran up-stairs, humming an air from "Faust," as though she would tear it to pieces, put on a flame-colored hat that gave a still further note of extravagance to her costume, ordered a hansom, and drove away.

Whether Kitty got much joy out of the three weeks which followed must remain uncertain. She had certainly routed Mary Lyster, if there were any final satisfaction in that. Mary had left town early, and was now in Somersetshire helping her father to entertain, in order, said the malicious, to put the best face possible on a defeat which this time had been serious. And instead of devoting himself to the wooing of a northern const.i.tuency where he had been adopted as the candidate of a new Tory group, Cliffe lingered obstinately in town, endangering his chances and angering his supporters. Kitty's influence over his actions was, indeed, patent and undenied, whatever might be the general opinion as to her effect upon his heart. Some of Kitty's intimates at any rate were convinced that his absorption in the matter was by now, to say the least, no less eager and persistent than hers. At this point it was by no means still a relation of flattery on Kitty's side and a pleased self-love on his. It had become a duel of two personalities, or rather two imaginations. In fact, as Kitty, learning the ways of his character, became more proudly mistress of herself and him, his interest in her visibly increased. It might almost be said that she was beginning to hold back, and he for the first time pursued.

Once or twice he had the grace to ask himself where it was all to end.

Was he in love with her? An absurd question! He had paid his heavy tribute to pa.s.sion if any man ever had, and had already hung up his votive tablet and his garments wet from shipwreck in the temple of the G.o.d. But it seemed that, after all said and done, the society of a woman, young, beautiful, and capricious, was still the best thing which the day--the London day, at all events--had to bring. At Kitty's suggestion he was collecting and revising a new volume of his poems. He and she quarrelled over them perpetually. Sometimes there was not a line which pleased her; and then, again, she would delight him with the homage of sudden tears in her brown eyes, and a praise so ardent and so refined that it almost compared--as Kitty meant it should--with that of the dead. In the shaded drawing-room, where every detail pleased his taste, Cliffe's harsh voice thundered or murmured verse which was beyond dispute the verse of a poet, and thereby sensuous and pa.s.sionate. Ostensibly the verse concerned another woman; in truth, the slight and lovely figure sitting on the farther side of the flowered hearth, the delicate head bent, the finger-tips lightly joined, entered day by day more directly into the consciousness of the poet. What harm?

All he asked was intelligence and response. As to her heart, he made no claim upon it whatever. Ashe, by-the-way, was clearly not jealous--a sensible att.i.tude, considering Lady Kitty's strength of will.

Into Cliffe's feeling towards Ashe there entered, indeed, a number of evil things, determined by quite other relations between the two men--the relation of the man who wants to the man who has, of the man beaten by the restlessness of ambition to the man who possesses all that the other desires, and affects to care nothing about it--of the combatant who fights with rage to the combatant who fights with a smile.

Cliffe could often lash himself into fury by the mere thought of Ashe's opportunities and Ashe's future, combined with the belief that Ashe's mood towards himself was either contemptuous or condescending. And it was at such moments that he would fling himself with most resource into the establishing of his ascendency over Kitty.

The two men met when they did meet--which was but seldom--on perfectly civil terms. If Ashe arrived unexpectedly from the House in the late afternoon to find Cliffe in the drawing-room reading aloud to Kitty, the politics of the moment provided talk enough till Cliffe could decently take his departure. He never dined with them alone, Kitty having no mind whatever for the discomforts of such a party; and in the evenings when he and Kitty met at a small number of houses, where the flirtation was watched nightly with a growing excitement, Ashe's duties kept him at Westminster, and there was nothing to hinder that flow of small and yet significant incident by which situations of this kind are developed.

Ashe set his teeth. He had made up his mind finally that it was a plague and a tyranny which would pa.s.s, and could only be magnified by opposition. But his temper suffered. There were many small quarrels during these weeks between himself and Kitty, quarrels which betrayed the tension produced in him by what was--in essentials--an iron self-control. But they made daily life a sordid, unlovely thing, and they gave Kitty an excuse for saying that William was as violent as herself, and for seeking refuge in the exaltations of feeling or of fancy provided by Cliffe's companionship.

Perhaps of all the persons in the drama, Lady Tranmore was the most to be pitied. She sat at home, having no heart to go to Hill Street, and more tied indeed than usual by the helpless illness of her husband.

Never, in all these days, did Ashe miss his daily visit to his father.

He would come in, apparently his handsome, good-humored self, ready to read aloud for twenty minutes, or merely to sit in silence by the sick man, his eyes making affectionate answer every now and then to the dumb looks of Lord Tranmore. Only his mother sought and found that slight habitual contraction of the brow which bore witness to some equally persistent disquiet of the mind. But he kept her at arm's-length on the subject of Kitty. She dared not tell him any of the gossip which reached her.

Meanwhile these weeks meant for her not only the dread of disgrace, but the disappointment of a just ambition, the humiliation of her mother's pride. The political crisis approached rapidly, and Ashe's name was less and less to the front. Lady Parham was said to be taking an active part in the consultations and intrigues that surrounded her husband, and it was well known by now to the inner circle that her hostility to the Ashes, and her insistence on the fact that cabinet ministers must be beyond reproach, and their wives persons to whose houses the party can go without demeaning themselves, were likely to be of importance.

Moreover, Ashe's success in the House of Commons was no longer what it had been earlier in the session. The party papers had cooled. Elizabeth Tranmore felt a blight in the air. Yet William, with his position in the country, his high ability, and the social weight belonging to the heir of the Tranmore peerage and estates, was surely not a person to be lightly ignored! Would Lord Parham venture it?

At last the resignations of the two ministers were in the _Times_; there were communications between the Queen and the Premier, and London plunged with such ardor as is possible in late July into the throes of cabinet-making. Kitty insisted petulantly that of course all would be well; William's services were far too great to be ignored; though Lord Parham would no doubt slight him if he dared. But the party and the public would see to that. The days were gone by when vulgar old women like Lady Parham could have any real influence on political appointments. Otherwise, who would condescend to politics?

Ashe brought her amusing reports from the House or the clubs of the various intrigues going on, and, as to his own chances, refused to discuss them seriously. Once or twice when Kitty, in his presence, insisted on speaking of them to some political intimate, only to provoke an evident embarra.s.sment, Ashe suffered the tortures which proud men know. But he never lost his tone of light detachment, and the conclusion of his friends was that, as usual, "Ashe didn't care a b.u.t.ton."

The hours pa.s.sed, however, and no sign came from the Prime Minister.

Everything was still uncertain; but Ashe had realized that at least he was not to be taken into the inner counsels of the party. The hopes and fears, the heartburnings and rivalries of such a state of things are proverbial. Ashe wondered impatiently when the beastly business would be over, and he could get off to Scotland for the air and sport of which he was badly in need.

It was a Friday, in the first week of August. Ashe was leaving the Athenaeum with another member of the House when a newspaper boy rushing along with a fresh bundle of papers pa.s.sed them with the cry, "New cabinet complete! Official list!" They caught him up, s.n.a.t.c.hed a paper, and read. Two men of middle age, conspicuous in Parliament, but not hitherto in office, one of them of great importance as a lawyer, the other as a military critic, were appointed, the one to the Home Office, the other to the Ministry of War; there had been some shuffling in the minor offices, and a new Privy Seal had dawned upon the world. For the rest, all was as before, and in the formal list the name of the Honorable William Travers Ashe still remained attached to the Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs.

Ashe's friend shrugged his shoulders, and avoided looking at his companion. "A bomb-sh.e.l.l, to begin with," he said; "otherwise the flattest thing out."

"On the contrary," laughed Ashe. "Parham has shown a wonderful amount of originality. If you and I are taken by surprise, what will the public be? And they'll like him all the better--you'll see. He has shown courage and gone for new men--that's what they'll say. _Vive_ Parham!

Well, good-bye. Now, please the Lord, we shall get off--and I may be among the grouse this day week."

He stopped on his way out of the club to discuss the list with the men coming in. He was conscious that some would have avoided him. But he had no mind to be avoided, and his caustic, good-humored talk carried off the situation. Presently he was walking homeward, swinging his stick with the gayety of a school-boy expecting the holidays.

As he mounted St. James's Street a carriage descended. Ashe mechanically took off his hat to the half-recognized face within, and as he did so perceived the icy bow and triumphant eyes of Lady Parham.

He hurried along, fighting a curious sensation, as of a physical bruising and beating. The streets were full of the news, and he was stopped many times by mere acquaintances to talk of it. In Savile Row he turned into a small literary club of which he was a member, and wrote a letter to his mother. In very affectionate and amusing terms it begged her not to take the disappointment too seriously. "I think I won't come round to-night. But expect me first thing to-morrow."

He sent the note by messenger and walked home. When he reached Hill Street it was close on eight. Outside the house he suddenly asked himself what line he was going to take with Kitty.

Kitty, however, was not at home. As far as he could remember she had gone coaching with the Alcots into Surrey, Geoffrey Cliffe, of course, being of the party. Presently, indeed, he discovered a hasty line from her on his study table, to say that they were to dine at Richmond, and "Madeleine" supposed they would get home between ten and eleven. Not a word more. Like all strong men, Ashe despised the meditations of self-pity. But the involuntary reflection that on this evening of humiliation Kitty was not with him--did not apparently care enough about his affairs and his ambitions to be with him--brought with it a soreness which had to be endured.

The next moment, he was inclined to be glad of her absence. Such things, especially in the first shock of them, are best faced alone. If, indeed, there were any shock in the matter. He had for some time had his own shrewd previsions, and he was aware of a strong inner belief that his defeat was but temporary.