The Marriage of William Ashe Part 54

There could be no question that in all external matters Lord Parham was that evening magnificently entertained by the Home Secretary and Lady Kitty Ashe. The chef was extravagantly good; the wines, flowers, and service lavish to a degree which made both Ashe and Lady Tranmore secretly uncomfortable. Lady Tranmore in particular detested "show,"

influenced as much by aristocratic instinct as by moral qualms; and there was to her mind a touch of vulgarity in the entertaining at Haggart, which might be tolerated in the case of financiers and _nouveaux riches_, while, as connected with her William and his wife, who had no need whatever to bribe society, it was unbecoming and undignified. Moreover, the winter had been marked by a financial crisis caused entirely by Kitty's extravagance. A large sum of money had had to be raised from the Tranmore estates; times were not good for the landed interest, and the head agent had begun to look grave.

If only William would control his wife! But Haggart contained one of those fine, slowly gathered libraries which make the distinction of so many English country-houses; and in the intervals of his official work, which even in holiday time was considerable, Ashe could not be beguiled from the beloved company of his books to help Kitty sign checks, or scold her about expenditure.

So Kitty signed and signed; and the smaller was Ashe's balance, the more, it seemed, did Kitty spend. Then, of course, every few months, there were deficits which had to be made good. And as to the debts which acc.u.mulated, Lady Tranmore preferred not to think about them. It all meant future trouble and clipping of wings for William; and it all entered into that deep and hidden resentment, half anxious love, half alien temperament, which Elizabeth Tranmore felt towards Ashe's wife.

However--to repeat--Lord Parham, as far as the fleshpots went, was finely treated. Kitty was in full force, glittering in a spangled dress, her dazzling face and neck, and the piled ma.s.ses of her hair, thrown out in relief against the panelled walls of the dining-room with a brilliance which might have tempted a modern Rembrandt to paint an English Saskia. Eddie Helston, on her left, could not take his eyes from her. And even Lord Parham, much as he disliked her, acknowledged, during the early courses, that she was handsome, and in her own way--thank G.o.d!

it was not the way of any womankind belonging to him--good company.

He saw, too, or thought he saw, that she was anxious to make him amends for her behavior of the afternoon. She restrained herself, and talked politics. And within the lines he always observed when talking to women, lines dictated by a contempt innate and ineradicable, Lord Parham was quite ready to talk politics too. Then--it suddenly struck him that she was pumping him, and with great adroitness. Ashe, he knew, wanted an early place in the session for a particular measure in which he was interested. Lord Parham had no mind to give him the precedence that he wanted; was, in fact, determined on something quite different. But he was well aware by now that Ashe was a person to be reckoned with; and he had so far taken refuge in vagueness--an amiable vagueness, by which Ashe, on their walk before dinner, had been much taken in, misled no doubt by the strength of his own wishes.

And now here was Lady Kitty--whom, by-the-way, it was not at all easy to take in--trying to "manage" him, to pin him to details, to wheedle him out of a pledge!

Lord Parham, presently, looked at her with cold, smiling eyes.

"Ah! you are interested in these things, Lady Kitty? Well--tell me your views. You women have such an instinct--"

--whereby the moth was kept hovering round the flame. Till, in a flash, Kitty awoke to the fact that while she had been listening happily to her own voice, taking no notice whatever of the signals which William endeavored to send her from the other end of the table--while she had been tripping gayly through one indiscretion after another, betraying innumerable things as to William's opinions and William's plans that she had infinitely better not have betrayed--Lord Parham had said nothing, betrayed nothing, promised nothing. A quiet smile--a courteous nod--and presently a shade of mockery in the lips--the meaning of them, all in a moment, burst on Kitty.

Her face flamed. Thenceforward it would be difficult to describe the dinner. Conversationally, at Kitty's end it became an uproar. She started the wildest topics, and Lord Parham had afterwards a bruised recollection as of one who has been dragged or driven, Caliban-like, through brake and thicket, pinched and teased and pelted by elfish fingers, without one single uncivil speech or act of overt offence to which an angry guest could point. With each later course, the Prime Minister grew stiffer and more silent. Endurance was written in every line of his fighting head and round, ungraceful shoulders, in his veiled eyes and stolid mouth. Lady Tranmore gave a gasp of relief when at last Kitty rose from her seat.

The evening went no better. Lord Parham was set down to cards with Kitty, Eddie Helston, and Lord Grosville. Lord Grosville, his partner, played, to the Premier's thinking, like an idiot, and Lady Kitty and the young man chattered and sparred, so that all reasonable play became impossible. Lord Parham lost more than he at all liked to lose, and at half-past ten he pleaded fatigue, refused to smoke, and went to his room.

Ashe was perfectly aware of the failure of the evening, and the discomfort of his guest. But he said nothing, and Kitty avoided his neighborhood. Meanwhile, between him and his mother a certain tacit understanding began to make itself felt. They talked quietly, in corners, of the arrangements for the speech and fete of the morrow. So far, they had been too much left to Kitty. Ashe promised his mother to look into them. He and she combined for the protection of Lord Parham.

When about one o'clock Ashe went to bed, Kitty either was or pretended to be fast asleep. The room was in darkness save for the faint illumination of a night-light, which just revealed to Ashe the delicate figure of his wife, lying high on her pillows, her cheek and brow hidden in the confusion of her hair.

One window was wide open to the night, and once more Ashe stood lost in "recollection" beside it, as on that night in Hill Street, more than a year before. But the thoughts which on that former occasion had been still as tragic and unfamiliar guests in a mind that repelled them had now, alack, lost their strangeness; they entered habitually, unannounced--frequent, irritating, deplorable.

Had the relation between himself and Kitty ever, in truth, recovered the shock of that incident on the river--of his night of restlessness, his morning of agonized alarm, and the story to which he listened on her return? It had been like some physical blow or wound, easily healed or conquered for the moment, which then, as time goes on, reveals a hidden series of consequences.

Consequences, in this case, connected above all with Kitty's own nature and temperament. The excitement of Cliffe's declaration, of her own resistance and dramatic position, as between her husband and her lover, had worked ever since, as a poison in Kitty's mind--Ashe was becoming dismally certain of it. The absurd incident of the night before with the photograph had been enough to prove it.

Well, the thing, he supposed, would right itself in time. Meanwhile, Cliffe had been dismissed, and this foolish young fellow Eddie Helston must soon follow him. Ashe had viewed the affair so far with an amused tolerance; if Kitty liked to flirt with babes it was her affair, not his. But he perceived that his mother was once more becoming restless, under the general _inconvenance_ of it; and he had noticed distress and disapproval in the little Dean, Kitty's stanchest friend.

Luckily, no difficulty there! The lad was almost as devoted to him--Ashe--as he was to Kitty. He was absurd, affected, vain; but there was no vice in him, and a word of remonstrance would probably reduce him to abject regret and self-reproach. Ashe intended that his mother should speak it, and as he made up his mind to ask her help, he felt for the second time the sharp humiliation of the husband who cannot secure his own domestic peace, but must depend on the aid of others. Yet how could he himself go to young Helston? Some men no doubt could have handled such an incident with dignity. Ashe, with his critical sense for ever playing on himself and others; with the touch of moral shirking that belonged to his inmost nature; and, above all, with his half-humorous, half-bitter consciousness that whoever else might be a hero, he was none: Ashe, at least, could and would do nothing of the sort. That he should begin now to play the tyrannous or jealous husband would make him ridiculous both in his own eyes and other people's.

And yet Kitty must somehow be protected from herself!... Then--as to politics? Once, in talking with his mother, he had said to her that he was Kitty's husband first, and a public man afterwards. Was he prepared now to make the statement with the same simplicity, the same whole-heartedness?

Involuntarily he moved closer to the bed and looked down on Kitty.

Little, delicate face!--always with something mournful and fretful in repose.

He loved her surely as much as ever--ah! yes, he loved her. His whole nature yearned over her, as the wife of his youth, the mother of his poor boy. Yet, as he remembered the mood in which he had proposed to her, that defiance of the world and life which had possessed him when he had made her marry him, he felt himself--almost with bitterness--another and a meaner man. No!--he was _not_ prepared to lose the world for her--the world of high influence and ambition upon which he had now entered as a conqueror. She _must_ so control herself that she did not ruin all his hopes--which, after all, were hers--and the work he might do for his country.

What incredible perversity and caprice she had shown towards Lord Parham! How was he to deal with it--he, William Ashe, with his ironic temper and his easy standards? What could he say to her but "Love me, Kitty!--love yourself!--and don't be a little fool! Life might be so amusing if you would only bridle your fancies and play the game!"

As for loftier things, "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control"--duty--and the pa.s.sion of high ideals--who was he to prate about them? The little Dean, perhaps!--most spiritual of worldlings.

Ashe knew himself to be neither spiritual nor a hypocrite. A certain measure, a certain order and harmony in life--laughter and good-humor and affection--and, for the fight that makes and welds a man, those great political and social interests in the midst of which he found himself--he asked no more, and with these he would have been abundantly content.

He sighed and frowned, his muscles stiffening unconsciously. Yes, for both their sakes he must try and play the master with Kitty, ridiculous as it seemed.

... He turned away, remembering his sick child--and went noiselessly to the nursery. There, along the darkened pa.s.sages, he found a night-nurse, sitting working beside a shaded lamp. The child was sleeping, and the report was good. Ashe stole on tiptoe to look at him, holding his breath, then returned to his dressing-room. But a faint call from Kitty pursued him. He opened the door, and saw her sitting up in bed.

"How is he?"

She was hardly awake, but her expression struck him as very wild and piteous. He went to her and took her in his arms.

"Sleeping quietly, darling--so must you!"

She sank back on her pillows, his arm still round her.

"I was there an hour ago," she murmured. "I shall soon wake up--"

But for the moment she was asleep again, her fair head lying against his shoulder. He sat down beside her, supporting her. Suddenly, as he looked down upon her with mingled pa.s.sion, tenderness, and pain, a sharp perception a.s.sailed him. How thin she was--a mere feather's weight! The face was smaller than ever--the hands skin and bone! Margaret French had once or twice bade him notice this, had spoken with anxiety. He bent over his wife and observed her attentively. It was merely the effect of a hot summer, surely, and of a constant nervous fatigue? He would take her abroad for a fortnight in September, if his official work would let him, and perhaps leave her in north Italy, or Switzerland, with Margaret French.

The great day was half-way through, and the throng in Haggart Park and grounds was at its height. A flower-show in the morning; then a tenants'

dinner with a speech from Ashe; and now, in a marquee erected for the occasion, Lord Parham was addressing his supporters in the county.

Around him on the platform sat the Whig gentry, the Radical manufacturers, the town wire-pullers and local agents on whom a great party depended; in front of him stretched a crowded meeting drawn in almost equal parts from the coal-mining districts to the north of Haggart and from the agricultural districts to the south....

The August air was stifling; perspiration shone on the broad brows and cheeks of the farmers sitting in the front half of the audience; Lord Parham's gray face was almost white; his harsh voice labored against the acoustic difficulties of the tent; effort and heat, discomfort and ennui breathed from the packed benches, and from the short-necked, large-headed figure of the Premier.

Ashe sat to the speaker's right, outwardly attentive, inwardly ashamed of his party and his chief. He himself belonged to a new generation, for whom formulae that had satisfied their fathers were empty and dead. But with these formulas Lord Parham was stuffed. A man of average intriguing ability, he had been raised, at a moment of transition, to the place he held, by a consummate command of all the meaner arts of compromise and management, no less than by an invaluable power of playing to the gallery. He led a party who despised him--and he complacently imagined that he was the party. His speech on this occasion bristled with himself, and had, in truth, no other substance; the I's swarmed out upon the audience like wasps.

Ashe groaned in spirit, "We have the ideas," he thought, "but they are d.a.m.ned little good to us--it is the Tories who have the men! Ye G.o.ds!

must we all talk like this at last?"...

Suddenly, on the other side of the platform, behind Lord Parham, he noticed that Kitty and Eddie Helston were exchanging signs. Kitty drew out a tablet, wrote upon it, and, leaning over some white-frocked children of the Lord Lieutenant who sat behind her, handed the torn leaf to Helston. But from some clumsiness he let it drop; at the moment a door opened at the back of the platform, and the leaf, caught by the draught, was blown back across the bench where Kitty and the house-party were sitting, and fluttered down to a resting-place on the piece of red baize wheron Lord Parham was standing--close beside his left foot.

Ashe saw Kitty's start of dismay, her scarlet flush, her involuntary movement. But Lord Parham had started on his peroration. The rustics gaped, the gentry sat expressionless, the reporters toiled after the great man. Kitty all the time kept her eyes fixed on the little white paper; Ashe no less. Between him and Lord Parham there was first the Lord Lieutenant, a portly man, very blind and extremely deaf--then a table with a Liberal peer behind it for chairman.

Lord Parham had resumed his seat. The tent was shaken with cheers, and the smiling chairman had risen.

"Can you ask Lord Parham to hand me on that paper on the floor," said Ashe, in the ear of the Lord Lieutenant, "it seems to have dropped from my portfolio."

The Lord Lieutenant, bending backward behind the chairman as the next speaker rose, tried to attract Lord Parham's attention. Eddie Helston was, at the same time, endeavoring to make his way forward through the crowded seats behind the Prime Minister.

Meanwhile Lord Parham had perceived the paper, raised it, and adjusted his spectacles. He thought it was a communication from the audience--a question, perhaps, that he was expected to answer.

"Lord Parham!" cried the Lord Lieutenant again, "would you--"

"Silence, please! Speak up!"--from the audience, who had so far failed to catch a word of what the new speaker was saying.

"What _is_ the matter? You really can't get through here!" said a gray-haired dowager crossly to Eddie Helston.