The Marriage of William Ashe Part 77

And cautiously, playfully, lest she should s.n.a.t.c.h it from him, he unfolded it before her.

Without signature and without date, the soiled half-sheet contained this message, written in Italian and in a disguised handwriting:

"Too many spectators. Come to Verona to-night.

"K."

Kitty looked at it, and then at the face beside her--infused with a triumphant power and pa.s.sion. She seemed to shrink upon herself, and her head fell back against one of the supports of the _pergola_. One of the blue lights from above fell with ghastly effect upon the delicate tilted face and closed eyes. Cliffe bent over her in a sharp alarm, and saw that she had fainted away.

PART V

REQUIESCAT

"Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens, Dusk the hall with yew!"

XXIII

"How strange!" thought the Dean, as he once more stepped back into the street to look at the front of the Home Secretary's house in Hill Street. "He is certainly in town."

For, according to the _Times_, William Ashe the night before had been hotly engaged in the House of Commons fighting an important bill, of which he was in charge, through committee. Yet the blinds of the house in Hill Street were all drawn, and the Dean had not yet succeeded in getting any one to answer the bell.

He returned to the attack, and this time a charwoman appeared. At sight of the Dean's legs and ap.r.o.n, she dropped a courtesy, or something like one, informing him that they had workmen in the house and Mr. Ashe was "staying with her ladyship."

The Dean took the Tranmores' number in Park Lane and departed thither, not without a sad glance at the desolate hall behind the charwoman and at the darkened windows of the drawing-room overhead. He thought of that May day two years before when he had dropped in to lunch with Lady Kitty; his memory, equally effective whether it summoned the detail of an English chronicle or the features of a face once seen, placed firm and clear before him the long-chinned fellow at Lady Kitty's left, to whose villany that empty and forsaken house bore cruel witness. And the little lady herself--what a radiant and ethereal beauty! Ah me! ah me!

He walked on in meditation, his hands behind his back. Even in this May London the little Dean was capable of an abstracted spirit, and he had still much to think over. He had his appointment with Ashe. But Ashe had written--evidently in a press of business--from the House, and had omitted to mention his temporary change of address. The Dean regretted it. He would rather have done his errand with Lady Kitty's injured husband on some neutral ground, and not in Lady Tranmore's house.

At Park Lane, however, he was immediately admitted.

"Mr. Ashe will be down directly, sir," said the butler, as he ushered the visitor into the commodious library on the ground-floor, which had witnessed for so long the death-in-life of Lord Tranmore. But now Lord Tranmore was bedridden up-stairs, with two nurses to look after him, and to judge from the aspect of the tables piled with letters and books, and from the armful of papers which a private secretary carried off with him as he disappeared before the Dean, Ashe was now fully at home in the room which had been his father's.

There was still a fire in the grate, and the small Dean, who was a chilly mortal, stood on the rug looking nervously about him. Lord Tranmore had been in office himself, and the room, with its bookshelves filled with volumes in worn calf bindings, its solid writing-tables and leather sofas, its candlesticks and inkstands of old silver, slender and simple in pattern, its well-worn Turkey carpet, and its political portraits--"the Duke," Johnny Russell, Lord Althorp, Peel, Melbourne--seemed, to the observer on the rug, steeped in the typical habit and reminiscence of English public life.

Well, if the father, poor fellow, had been distinguished in his day, the son had gone far beyond him. The Dean ruminated on a conversation wherewith he had just beguiled his cup of tea at the Athenaeum--a conversation with one of the shrewdest members of Lord Parham's cabinet, a "new man," and an enthusiastic follower of Ashe.

"Ashe is magnificent! At last our side has found its leader. Oh! Parham will disappear with the next appeal to the country. He is getting too infirm! Above all, his eyes are nearly gone; his oculist, I hear, gives him no more than six months' sight, unless he throws up. Then Ashe will take his proper place, and if he doesn't make his mark on English history, I'm a Dutchman. Oh! of course that affair last year was an awful business--the two affairs! When Parliament opened in February there were some of us who thought that Ashe would never get through the session. A man so changed, so struck down, I have seldom seen. You remember what a handsome boy he was, up to last year even! Now he's a middle-aged man. All the same, he held on, and the House gave him that quiet sympathy and support that it can give when it likes a fellow. And gradually you could see the life come back into him--and the ambition.

By George! he did well in that trade-union business before Easter; and the bill that's on now--it's masterly, the way in which he's piloting it through! The House positively likes to be managed by him; it's a sight worthy of our best political traditions. Oh yes, Ashe will go far; and, thank G.o.d, that wretched little woman--what has become of her, by-the-way?--has neither crushed his energy nor robbed England of his services. But it was touch and go."

To all of which the Dean had replied little or nothing. But his heart had sunk within him; and the doubtfulness of a certain enterprise in which he was engaged had appeared to him in even more startling colors than before.

However, here he was. And suddenly, as he stood before the fire, he bowed his white head, and said to himself a couple of verses from one of the Psalms for the day:

"Who will lead me into the strong city: who will bring me into Edom?

Oh, be thou our help in trouble: for vain is the help of man."

The door opened, and the Dean straightened himself impetuously, every nerve tightening to its work.

"How do you do, my dear Dean?" said Ashe, enclosing the frail, ascetic hand in both his own. "I trust I have not kept you waiting. My mother was with me. Sit there, please; you will have the light behind you."

"Thank you. I prefer standing a little, if you don't mind--and I like the fire."

Ashe threw himself into a chair and shaded his eyes with his hand. The Dean noticed the strains of gray in his curly hair, and that aspect, as of something withered and wayworn, which had invaded the man's whole personality, balanced, indeed, by an intellectual dignity and distinction which had never been so commanding. It was as though the stern and constant wrestle of the mind had burned away all lesser things--the old, easy grace, the old, careless pleasure in life.

"I think you know," began the Dean, clearing his throat, "why I asked you to see me?"

"You wished, I think, to speak to me--about my wife," said Ashe, with difficulty.

Under his sheltering hand, his eyes looked straight before him into the fire.

The Dean fidgeted a moment, lifted a small Greek vase on the mantel-piece, and set it down--then turned round.

"I heard from her ten days ago--the most piteous letter. As you know, I had always a great regard for her. The news of last year was a sharp sorrow to me--as though she had been a daughter. I felt I must see her.

So I put myself into the train and went to Venice."

Ashe started a little, but said nothing.

"Or, rather, to Treviso, for, as I think you know, she is there with Lady Alice."

"Yes, that I had heard."

The Dean paused again, then moved a little nearer to Ashe, looking down upon him.

"May I ask--stop me if I seem impertinent--how much you know of the history of the winter?"

"Very little!" said Ashe, in a low voice. "My mother got some information from the English consul at Trieste, who is a friend of hers--to whom, it seems, Lady Kitty applied; but it did not amount to much."

The Dean drew a small note-book from a breast-pocket and looked at some entries in it.

"They seem to have reached Marinitza in November If I understood aright, Lady Kitty had no maid with her?"

"No. The maid Blanche was sent home from Verona."

"How Lady Kitty ever got through the journey!--or the winter!" said the Dean, throwing up his hands. "Her health, of course, is irreparably injured. But that she did not die a dozen times over, of hardship and misery, is the most astonishing thing! They were in a wretched village, nearly four thousand feet up, a village of wooden huts, with a wooden hospital. All the winter nearly they were deep in snow, and Lady Kitty worked as a nurse. Cliffe seems to have been away fighting, very often, and at other times came back to rest and see to supplies."

"I understand she pa.s.sed as his wife?" said Ashe.

The Dean made a sign of reluctant a.s.sent.