The Marriage of William Ashe Part 72

Kitty said not a word, and in another minute he was gone. The Italian servants congregated below at the water-gate sent laughing "A rivederlas" after the handsome, good-tempered Englishman, whom they liked and regretted; the gondola moved off; Kitty heard the plash of the water. But she held back from the window.

Half-way to the bend of the ca.n.a.l beyond the Accademia, Ashe turned and gave a long look at the balcony. No one was there. But just as the gondola was pa.s.sing out of sight, Kitty slipped onto the balcony. She could see only the figure of Piero, the gondolier, and in another second the boat was gone. She stayed there for many minutes, clinging to the bal.u.s.trade and staring, as it seemed, at the sparkle of autumnal sun which danced on the green water and on the red palace to her right.

All the morning Kitty on her sofa pretended to write letters. Margaret French, working or reading behind her, knew that she scarcely got through a single note, that her pen lay idle on the paper, while her eyes absently watched the palace windows on the other side of the ca.n.a.l.

Miss French was quite certain that some tragic cause of difference between the husband and wife had arisen. Kitty, the indiscreet, had for once kept her own counsel about the book, and Ashe had with his own hands packed away the volumes which had arrived the night before; so that she could only guess, and from that delicacy of feeling restrained her as much as possible.

Once or twice Kitty seemed on the point of unburdening herself. Then overmastering tears would threaten; she would break off and begin to write. At luncheon her look alarmed Miss French, so white was the little face, so large and restless the eyes. Ought Mr. Ashe to have left her, and left her apparently in anger? No doubt he thought her much better.

But Margaret remembered the worst days of her illness, the anxious looks of the doctors, and the anguish that Kitty had suffered in the first weeks after her child's death. She seemed now, indeed, to have forgotten little Harry, so far as outward expression went; but who could tell what was pa.s.sing in her strange, unstable mind? And it often seemed to Margaret that the signs of the past summer were stamped on her indelibly, for those who had eyes to see.

Was it the perception of this pity beside her that drove Kitty to solitude and flight? At any rate, she said after luncheon that she would go to Madame d'Estrees, and did not ask Miss French to accompany her.

She set out accordingly with the two gondoliers. But she had hardly pa.s.sed the Accademia before she bid her men take a cross-cut to the Giudecca. On these wide waters, with their fresher air and fuller sunshine, a certain physical comfort seemed to breathe upon her.

"Piero, it is not rough! Can we go to the Lido?" she asked the gondolier behind her.

Piero, who was all smiles and complaisance, as well he might be with a lady who scattered _lire_ as freely as Kitty did, turned the boat at once for that channel "Del Orfano" where the bones of the vanquished dead lie deep amid the ooze.

They pa.s.sed San Giorgio, and were soon among the piles and sand-banks of the lagoon. Kitty sat in a dream which blotted the sunshine from the water. It seemed to her that she was a dead creature, floating in a dead world. William had ceased to love her. She had wrecked his career and destroyed her own happiness. Her child had been taken from her. Lady Tranmore's affection had been long since alienated. Her own mother was nothing to her; and her friends in society, like Madeleine Alcot, would only laugh and gloat over the scandal of the book.

No--everything was finished! As her fingers hanging over the side of the gondola felt the touch of the water, her morbid fancy, incredibly quick and keen, fancied herself drowned, or poisoned--lying somehow white and cold on a bed where William might see and forgive her.

Then with a start of memory which brought the blood rushing to her face, she thought of Cliffe standing beside the door of the great hall in the Vercelli palace--she seemed to be looking again into those deep, expressive eyes, held by the irony and the pa.s.sion with which they were infused. Had the pa.s.sion any reference to her?--or was it merely part of the man's nature, as inseparable from it as flame from the volcano? If William had cast her off, was there still one man--wild and bad, indeed, like herself, but poet and hero nevertheless--who loved her?

She did not much believe it; but still the possibility of it lured her, like some dark gulf that promised her oblivion from this pain--pain which tortured one so impatient of distress, so hungry for pleasure and praise.

In those days the Lido was still a n.o.ble and solitary sh.o.r.e, without the degradations of to-day.

Kitty walked fast and furiously across the sandy road, and over the shingles, turning, when she reached the firm sand, southward towards Malamocco. It was between four and five, and the autumn afternoon was fast declining. A fresh breeze was on the sea, and the short waves, intensely blue under a wide, clear heaven, broke in dazzling foam on the red-brown sand.

She seemed to be alone between sea and sky, save for two figures approaching from the south--a fisher-boy with a shrimping-net and a man walking bareheaded. She noticed them idly. A mirage of sun was between her and them, and the agony of remorse and despair which held her blunted all perceptions.

Thus it was that not till she was close upon him did her dazzled sight recognize Geoffrey Cliffe.

He saw her first, and stopped in motionless astonishment on the edge of the sand. She almost ran against him, when his voice arrested her.

"Lady Kitty!"

She put her hand to her breast, wavered, and came to a stand-still. He saw a little figure in black between him and those "gorgeous towers and cloud-capped palaces" of Alpine snow, which dimly closed in the north; and beneath the drooping hat a face even more changed and tragic than that which had haunted him since their meeting of the day before.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "SHE THOUGHT OF CLIFFE STANDING BESIDE THE DOOR OF THE GREAT HALL."]

"How do you do?" she said, mechanically, and would have pa.s.sed him.

But he stood in her path. As he stared at her an impulse of rage ran through him, resenting the wreck of anything so beautiful--rage against Ashe, who must surely be somehow responsible.

"Aren't you wandering too far, Lady Kitty?" His voice shook under the restraint he put upon it. "You seem tired--very tired--and you are perhaps farther from your gondola than you think."

"I am not tired."

He hesitated.

"Might I walk with you a little, or do you forbid me?"

She said nothing, but walked on. He turned and accompanied her. One or two questions that he put to her--Had she companions?--Where had she left her gondola?--remained unanswered. He studied her face, and at last he laid a strong hand upon her arm.

"Sit down. You are not fit for any more walking."

He drew her towards some logs of driftwood on the upper sand, and she sank down upon them. He found a place beside her.

"What is the matter with you?" he said, abruptly, with a harsh authority. "You are in trouble."

A tremor shook her--as of the prisoner who feels on his limbs the first touch of the fetter.

"No, no!" she said, trying to rise; "it is nothing. I--I didn't know it was so far. I must go home."

His hand held her.

"Kitty!"

"Yes." Her voice was scarcely audible.

"Tell me what hurts you! Tell me why you are here, alone, with a face like that! Don't be afraid of me! Could I lift a finger to harm a mother that has lost her child? Give me your hands." He gathered both hers into the warm shelter of his own. "Look at me--trust me! My heart has grown, Kitty, since you knew me last. It has taken into itself so many griefs--so many deaths. Tell me your griefs, poor child!--tell me!"

He stooped and kissed her hands--most tenderly, most gravely.

Tears rushed into her eyes. The wild emotions that were her being were roused beyond control. Bending towards him she began to pour out, first brokenly, then in a torrent, the wretched, incoherent story, of which the mere telling, in such an ear, meant new treachery to William and new ruin for herself.

XXII

On a certain cloudy afternoon, some ten days later, a fishing-boat, with a patched orange sail, might have been seen scudding under a light northwesterly breeze through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon.

The boat presently neared the sh.o.r.e of one of the cultivated _lidi_--islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards--which, with the _murazzi_ or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea. On the _lido_ along which the boat was coasting, the vintage was long since over and the fruit gathered; the last yellow and purple leaves in the orchards, "a pestilent-stricken mult.i.tude," were to-day falling fast to earth, under the sighing, importunate wind. The air was warm; November was at its mildest. But all color and light were drowned in floating mists, and darkness lay over the distant city. It was one of those drear and ghostly days which may well have breathed into the soul of Sh.e.l.ley that superb vision of the dead generations of Venice, rising, a phantom host from the bosom of the sunset, and sweeping in "a rapid mask of death"

over the shadowed waters that saw the birth and may yet furnish the tomb of so vast a fame.

Two persons were in the boat--Kitty, wrapped in sables, her straying hair held close by a cap of the same fur--and Geoffrey Cliffe. They had been wandering in the lagoons all day, in order to escape from Venice and observers--first at Torcello, then at San Francesco, and now they were ostensibly coming home in a wide sweep along the northern _lidi_ and _murazzi_, that Cliffe might show his companion, from near by, the Porto del Lido, that exit from the lagoons where the salt lakes grow into the sea.

A certain wildness and exaltation, drawn from the solitudes around them and from their _tete-a-tete_, could be read in both the man and the woman. Cliffe watched his companion incessantly. As he lay against the side of the boat at her feet, he saw her framed in the curving sides of the stern, and could read her changing expressions. Not a happy face!--that he knew! A face haunted by shadows from an underworld of thought--pursuing furies of remorse and fear. Not the less did he triumph that he had it _there_, in his power; nor had the flashes of terror and wavering will which he discerned in any way diminished its beauty.

"How long have you known--that woman?" Kitty asked him, suddenly, after a pause broken only by the playing of the wind with the sail.

Cliffe laughed.