The Marriage of William Ashe Part 80

Three days later the Dean--a somewhat shrunken and diminished figure, in ordinary clerical dress, without the buckles and silk stockings that typically belonged to him--stood once more at the entrance of a small villa outside the Venetian town of Treviso.

He was very weary, and as he sought disconsolately through all his pockets for the wherewithal to pay his fly, while the spring rain pattered on his wide-awake, he produced an impression as of some delicate, draggled thing, which would certainly have gone to the heart of his adoring wife could she have beheld it. The Dean's ways were not sybaritic. He pecked at food and drink like a bird; his clothes never caused him a moment's thought; and it seemed to him a waste of the night to use it for sleeping. But none the less did he go through life finely looked after. Mrs. Winston dressed him, took his tickets and paid his cabs, and without her it was an arduous matter for the Dean to arrive at any destination whatever. As it was, in the journey from Paris he had lost one of the two bags which Mrs. Winston had packed for him, and he looked remorsefully at the survivor as it was deposited on the steps beside him.

It did not, however, remain on the steps. For when Lady Alice's maid-housekeeper appeared, she informed the Dean, with a certain flurry of manner, that the ladies were not at home. They had gone off that morning--suddenly--to Venice, leaving a letter for him, should he arrive.

"_Fermate!_" cried the Dean, turning towards the cab, which was trailing away, and the man, who had been scandalously overpaid, came back with alacrity, while the Dean stepped in to read the letter.

When he came out again he was very pale and in a great haste. He bade the man replace the bag and drive him at once to the railway-station.

On the way thither he murmured to himself, "Horrible!--horrible!"--and both the letter and a newspaper which had been enclosed in it shook in his hands.

He had half an hour to wait before the advent of the evening train for Venice, and he spent it in a quiet corner poring over the newspaper. And not that newspaper only, for he presently became aware that all the small, ill-printed sheets offered him by an old newsvender in the station were full of the same news, and some with later detail--nay, that the people walking up and down in the station were eagerly talking of it.

An Englishman had been a.s.sa.s.sinated in Venice. It seemed that a body had been discovered early on the preceding morning floating in one of the small ca.n.a.ls connecting the Fondamente Nuove with the Grand Ca.n.a.l. It had been stabbed in three places; two of the wounds must have been fatal. The papers in the pocket identified the murdered man as the famous English traveller, poet, and journalist, Mr. Geoffrey Cliffe. Mr.

Cliffe had just returned from an arduous winter in the Balkans, where he had rendered superb service to the cause of the Bosnian insurgents. He was well known in Venice, and the terrible event had caused a profound sensation there. No clew to the outrage had yet been obtained. But Mr.

Cliffe's purse and watch had not been removed.

The Dean arrived in Venice by the midnight train, and went to the hotel on the Riva whither Lady Alice had directed him. She was still up, waiting to see him, and in the dark pa.s.sage outside Kitty's door she told him what she knew of the murder. It appeared that late that night a startling arrest had been made--of no less a person than the Signorina Ricci, the well-known actress of the Apollo Theatre, and of two men supposed to have been hired by her for the deed. This news was still unknown to Kitty--she was in bed, and her companion had kept it from her.

"How is she?" asked the Dean.

"Frightfully excited--or else dumb. She let me give her something to make her sleep. Strangely enough, she said to me this morning on the way from Treviso: 'It is a woman--and I know her!'"

The following day, when the Dean entered the dingy hotel sitting-room, a thin figure in black came hurriedly out of the bedroom beside it, and Kitty caught him by the hand.

"Isn't it horrible?" she said, staring at him with her changed, dark-rimmed eyes. "She tried once, in Bosnia. One of the Italians who came out with us--she had got hold of him. Do you think--he suffered?"

Her voice was quite quiet. The Dean shuddered.

"One of the stabs was in the heart," he said. "But try and put it from you, Lady Kitty. Sit down." He touched her gently on the shoulder.

Kitty nodded.

"Ah, then," she said--"_then_ he couldn't have suffered--could he? I'm glad."

She let the Dean put her in a chair, and, clasping her hands round her knees, she seemed to pursue her own thoughts.

Her aspect affected him almost beyond bearing. Ashe's brilliant wife?--London's spoiled child?--this withered, tragic little creature, of whom it was impossible to believe that, in years, she was not yet twenty-four? So bewildered in mind, so broken in nerve was she, that it was not till he had sat with her some time, now entering perforce into the cloud of horror that brooded over her, now striving to drag her from it, that she asked him about his visit to England.

He told her in a faltering voice.

She received it very quietly, even with a little, queer, twisting laugh.

"I thought he wouldn't. Was Lady Tranmore there?"

The Dean replied that Lady Tranmore had been there.

"Ah, then, of course there was no chance," said Kitty. "When one is as good as that, one never forgives."

She looked up quickly. "Did William say he forgave me?"

The Dean hesitated.

"He said a great deal that was kind and generous."

A slight spasm pa.s.sed over Kitty's face.

"I suppose he thought it ridiculous to talk of forgiving. So did I--once."

She covered her eyes with her hands--removing them to say, impatiently:

"One can't go on being sorry every moment of the day. No, one can't! Why are we made so? William would agree with me there."

"Dear Lady Kitty!" said the Dean, tenderly--"G.o.d forgives--and with Him there is always hope, and fresh beginning."

Kitty shook her head.

"I don't know what that means," she said. "I wonder whether"--she looked at him with a certain piteous and yet affectionate malice--"if you'd been as deep as I, whether _you_'d know."

The Dean flushed. The hidden wound stung again. Had he, then, no right to speak? He felt himself the elder son of the parable--and hated himself anew.

But he was a Christian, on his Master's business. He must obey orders, even though he could feel no satisfaction, or belief in himself--though he seem to himself such a shallow and perfunctory person. So he did his tender best for Kitty. He spent his loving, enthusiastic, pitiful soul upon her; and while he talked to her she sat with her hands crossed on her lap, and her eyes wandering through the open window to the forests of masts outside and the dancing wavelets of the lagoon. When at last he spoke of the further provision Ashe wished to make for her, when he implored her to summon Margaret French, she shook her head. "I must think what I shall do," she said, quietly; and a minute afterwards, with a flash of her old revolt--"He cannot prevent my going to Harry's grave!"

Early the following morning the murdered man was carried to the cemetery at San Michele. In spite of some attempt on the part of the police to keep the hour secret, half Venice followed the black-draped barca, which bore that flawed poet and dubious hero to his rest.

It was a morning of exceeding beauty. On the mean and solitary front of the Casa dei Spiriti there shone a splendor of light; the lagoon was azure and gold; the main-land a mist of trees in their spring leaf; while far away the cypresses of San Francesco, the slender tower of Torcello, and the long line of Murano--and farther still the majestic wall of silver Alps--greeted the eyes that loved them, as the ear is soothed by the notes of a glorious and yet familiar music.

Amid the crowd of gondolas that covered the shallow stretch of lagoon between the northernmost houses of Venice and the island graveyard, there was one which held two ladies. Alice Wensleydale was there against her will, and her pinched and tragic face showed her repulsion and irritation. She had endeavored in vain to dissuade Kitty from coming; but in the end she had insisted on accompanying her. Possibly, as the boat glided over the water amid a crowd of laughing, chattering Italians, the silent Englishwoman was asking herself what was to be the future of the trust she had taken on herself. Kitty in her extremity had remembered her half-sister's promise, and had thrown herself upon it.

But a few weeks' experience had shown that they were strange and uncongenial to each other. There was no true affection between them--only a certain haunting instinct of kindred. And even this was weakened or embittered by those memories in Alice's mind which Kitty could never approach and Alice never forget. What was she to do with her half-sister, stranded and dishonored as she was?--How content or comfort her?--How live her own life beside her?

Kitty sat silent, her eyes fixed upon the barca which held the coffin under its pall. Her mind was the scene of an infinite number of floating and fragmentary recollections; of the day when she and Cliffe had followed the _murazzi_ towards the open sea; of the meeting at Verona; of the long winter, with its hardship and its horror; and that hatred and contempt which had sprung up between them. Could she love no one, cling faithfully to no one? And now the restless brain, the vast projects, the mixed nature, the half-greatness of the man had been silenced--crushed--in a moment, by the stroke of a knife. He had been killed by a jealous woman--because of his supposed love for another woman, whose abhorrence, in truth, he had earned in a few short weeks.

There was something absurd mingled with the horror--as though one watched the prank of a demon.

Her sensuous nature was tormented by the thought of the last moment. Had he had time to feel despair--the thirst for life? She prayed not. She thought of the Sunday afternoon at Grosville Park when they had tried to play billiards, and Lord Grosville had come down on them; or she saw him sitting opposite to her, at supper, on the night of the fancy ball, in the splendid t.i.tian dress, while she gloated over the thoughts of the trick she had played on Mary Lyster--or bending over her when she woke from her swoon at Verona. Had she ever really loved him for one hour?--and if not, what possible excuse, before G.o.ds or men, was there for this ugly, self-woven tragedy into which she had brought herself and him, merely because her vanity could not bear that William had not been able to love her, for long, far above all her deserts?

William! Her heart leaped in her breast. He was thirty-six--and she not twenty-four. A strange and desolate wonder overtook her as the thought seized her of the years they might still spend on the same earth--members of the same country, breathing the same air--and yet forever separate. Never to see him--or speak to him again!--the thought stirred her imagination, as it were, while it tortured her; there was in it a certain luxury and romance of pain.

Thus, as she followed Cliffe to his last blood-stained rest, did her mind sink in dreams of Ashe--and in the dismal reckoning up of all that she had so lightly and inconceivably lost. Sometimes she found herself absorbed in a kind of angry marvelling at the strength of the old moral commonplaces.

It had been so easy and so exciting to defy them. Stones which the builders of life reject--do they still avenge themselves in the old way?

There was a kind of rage in the thought.

On the way home Kitty expressed a wish to go into St. Mark's alone. Lady Alice left her there, and in the shadow of the atrium Kitty looked at her strangely, and kissed her.

An hour after Lady Alice had reached the hotel a letter was brought to her. In it Kitty bade her--and the Dean--farewell, and asked that no effort should be made to track her. "I am going to friends--where I shall be safe and at peace. Thank you both with all my heart. Let no one think about me any more."