The Marriage of William Ashe Part 66

Meanwhile Kitty, Margaret French, and Sir Richard kept up intermittent remarks, pausing at every other phrase to gather the crumbs that fell from the table of the other two.

Kitty was very weary, and a dead weight had fallen on her spirits. If Sir Richard had thought her bad form ten minutes before, his unspoken mind now declared her stupid. Meanwhile Kitty was saying to herself, as she watched her husband and Mary:

"I used to amuse William just as well--last year!"

When the door closed on them, Kitty fell back on her cushions with an "ouf!" of relief. William came back in a few minutes from showing the visitors the back way to their hotel, and stood beside his wife with an anxious face.

"They were too much for you, darling. They stayed too long."

"How you and Mary chattered!" said Kitty, with a little pout. But at the same moment she slipped an appealing hand into his.

Ashe clasped the hand, and laughed.

"I always told you she was an excellent gossip."

Sir Richard and Mary pursued their way through the narrow _calles_ that led to the Piazza. Sir Richard was expatiating on Ashe's folly in marrying such a wife.

"She looks like an actress!--and as to her conversation, she began by telling me outrageous stories and ended by not having a word to say about anything. The bad blood of the Bristols, it seems to me, without their brains."

"Oh no, papa! Kitty is very clever. You haven't heard her recite. She was tired to-night."

"Well, I don't want to flatter you, my dear!" said the old man, testily, "but I thought it was pathetic--the way in which Ashe enjoyed your conversation. It showed he didn't get much of it at home."

Mary smiled uncertainly. Her whole nature was still aglow from that contact with Ashe's delightful personality. After months of depression and humiliation, her success with him had somehow restored those illusions on which cheerfulness depends.

How ill Kitty looked--and how conscious! Mary was impetuously certain that Kitty had betrayed her knowledge of Cliffe's presence in Venice; and equally certain that William knew nothing. Poor William!

Well, what can you expect of such a temperament--such a race? Mary's thoughts travelled confusedly towards--and through--some big and dreadful catastrophe.

And then? After it?

It seemed to her that she was once more in the Park Lane drawing-room; the familiar Morris papers and Burne-Jones drawings surrounded her; and she and Elizabeth Tranmore sat, hand in hand, talking of William--a William once more free, after much folly and suffering, to reconstruct his life....

"Here we are," said Sir Richard Lyster, moving down a dark pa.s.sage towards the brightly lit doorway of their hotel.

With a start--as of one taken red-handed--Mary awoke from her dream.

XX

Madame d'Estrees and her friend, Donna Laura, occupied the _mezzanin_ of the vast Vercelli palace. The palace itself belonged to the head of the Vercelli family. It was a magnificent erection of the late seventeenth century, at this moment half furnished, dilapidated, and forsaken. But the _entresol_ on the eastern side of the _cortile_ was in good condition, and comfortably fitted up for the occasional use of the Principe. As he was wintering in Paris, he had let his rooms at an ordinary commercial rent to his kinswoman, Donna Laura. She, a soured and melancholy woman, unmarried in a Latin society which has small use or kindness for spinsters, had seized on Marguerite d'Estrees--whose acquaintance she had made in a Mont d'Or hotel--and was now keeping her like a caged canary that sings for its food.

Madame d'Estrees was quite willing. So long as she had a sofa on which to sit enthroned, a sufficiency of new gowns, a maid, cigarettes, breakfast in bed, and a supply of French novels, she appeared the most harmless and engaging of mortals. Her youth had been cruel, disorderly, and vicious. It had lasted long; but now, when middle age stood at last confessed, she was lapsing, it seemed, into amiability and good behavior. She was, indeed, fast forgetting her own history, and soon the recital of it would surprise no one so much as herself.

It was five o'clock. Madame d'Estrees had just established herself in the silk-panelled drawing-room of Donna Laura's apartment, expectant of visitors, and, in particular, of her daughter.

In begging Kitty to come on this particular afternoon, she had not thought fit to mention that it would be Donna Laura's "day." Had she done so, Kitty, in consideration of her mourning, would perhaps have cried off. Whereas, really--poor, dear child!--what she wanted was distraction and amus.e.m.e.nt.

And what Madame d'Estrees wanted was the presence beside her, in public, of Lady Kitty Ashe. Kitty had already visited her mother privately, and had explored the antiquities of the Vercelli palace. But Madame d'Estrees was now intent on something more and different.

For in the four years which had now elapsed since the Ashe's marriage this lively lady had known adversity. She had been forced to leave London, as we have seen, by the pressure of certain facts in her past history so ancient and far removed when their true punishment began that she no doubt felt it highly unjust that she should be punished for them at all. Her London debts had swallowed up what then remained to her of fortune; and, afterwards, the allowance from the Ashes was all she had to depend on. Banished to Paris, she fell into a lower stratum of life, at a moment when her faithful and mysterious friend, Markham Warington, was held in Scotland by the first painful symptoms of his sister's last illness, and could do but little for her. She had, in fact, known the sordid shifts and straits of poverty, though the smallest moral effort would have saved her from them. She had kept disreputable company, she had been miserable, and base; and although shame is not easy to persons of her temperament, it may perhaps be said that she was ashamed of this period of her existence. Appeals to the Ashes yielded less and less, and Warington seemed to have forsaken her. She awoke at last to a panic-stricken fear of darker possibilities and more real suffering than any she had yet known, and under the stress of this fear she collapsed physically, writing both to Warington and to the Ashes in a tone of mingled reproach and despair.

The Ashes sent money, and, though Kitty was at the moment not fit to travel, prepared to come. Warington, who had just closed the eyes of his sister, went at once. He was now the last of his family, without any ties that he could not lawfully break. Within two days of his arrival in Paris, Madame d'Estrees had promised to marry him in three months, to break off all her Paris a.s.sociations, and to give her life henceforward into his somewhat stern hands. The visit to Venice was part of the price that he had had to pay for her decision. Marguerite pleaded, with a shudder, that she must have a little amus.e.m.e.nt before she went to live in Dumfriesshire; and he had been obliged to acquiesce in her arrangement with Donna Laura--stipulating only that he should be their escort and guardian.

What had moved him to such an act? His reasons can only be guessed at.

Warington was a man of religion, a Calvinist by education and inheritance, and of a silent and dreamy temperament. He had been intimate with very few women in his life. His sister had been a second mother to him, and both of them had been the guardians of their younger brother. When this adored brother fell shot through the lungs in the hopeless defence of Lady Blackwater's reputation, it would have been natural enough that Markham should hate the woman who had been the occasion of such a calamity. The sister, a pious and devoted Christian, had indeed hated her, properly and duly, thenceforward. Markham, on the contrary, accepted his brother's last commission without reluctance. In this matter at least Lady Blackwater had not been directly to blame; his mind acquitted her; and her soft, distressed beauty touched his heart.

Before he knew where he was she had made an impression upon him that was to be life-long.

Then gradually he awoke to a full knowledge of her character. He suffered, but otherwise it made no difference. Finding it was then impossible to persuade her to marry him, he watched over her as best he could for some years, pa.s.sing through phases of alternate hope and disgust. His sister's affection for him was clouded by his strange relation to the Jezebel who in her opinion had destroyed their brother.

He could not help it; he could only do his best to meet both claims upon him. During her lingering pa.s.sage to the grave, his sister had nearly severed him from Marguerite d'Estrees. She died, however, just in time, and now here he was in Venice, pa.s.sing through what seemed to him one of the ante-rooms of life, leading to no very radiant beyond. But, radiant or no, his path lay thither. And at the same time he saw that although Marguerite felt him to be her only refuge from poverty and disgrace, she was painfully afraid of him, and afraid of the life into which he was leading her.

The first guest of the afternoon proved to be Louis Harman, the painter and dilettante, who had been in former days one of the _habitues_ of the house in St. James's Place. This perfectly correct yet tolerant gentleman was wintering in Venice in order to copy the Carpaccios in San Giorgio dei Schiavoni. His copies were not good, but they were all promised to artistic fair ladies, and the days which the painter spent upon them were happy and harmless.

He came in gayly, delighted to see Madame d'Estrees in flourishing circ.u.mstances again, delivered apparently from the abyss into which he had found her sliding on the occasion of various chance visits of his own to Paris. Warington's doing, apparently--queer fellow!

"Well!--I saw Lady Kitty in the Piazza this afternoon," he said, as he sat down beside his hostess. Donna Laura had not yet appeared. "Very thin and fragile! But, by Jove! how these English beauties hold their own."

"Irish, if you please," said Madame d'Estrees, smiling.

Harman bowed to her correction, admiring at the same time both the toilette and the good looks of his companion. Dropping his voice, he asked, with a gingerly and sympathetic air, whether all was now well with the Ashe menage. He had been sorry to hear certain gossip of the year before.

Madame d'Estrees laughed. Yes, she understood that Kitty had behaved like a little goose with that _poseur_ Cliffe. But that was all over--long ago.

"Why, the silly child has everything she wants! William is devoted to her--and it can't be long before he succeeds."

"No need to go trifling with poets," said Harman, smiling. "By-the-way, do you know that Geoffrey Cliffe is in Venice?"

Madame d'Estrees opened her eyes. "Est-il possible? Oh! but Kitty has forgotten all about him."

"Of course," said Harman. "I am told he has been seen with the Ricci."

Madame d'Estrees raised her shoulders this time in addition to her eyes.

Then her face clouded.

"I believe," she said, slowly, "that woman may come here this afternoon."

"Is she a friend of yours?" Harman's tone expressed his surprise.

"I knew her in Paris," said Madame d'Estrees, with some hesitation, "when she was a student at the Conservatoire. She and I had some common acquaintance. And now--frankly, I daren't offend her. She has the most appalling temper!--and she sticks at nothing."

Harman wondered what the exact truth of this might be, but did not inquire. And as guests--including Colonel Warington--began to arrive, and Donna Laura appeared and began to dispense tea, the _tete-a-tete_ was interrupted.