The Marriage of William Ashe Part 81

Of course they disobeyed her. They made what search in Venice they could, without rousing a scandal, and Ashe rushed out to join it, using the special means at a minister's disposal. But it was fruitless. Kitty vanished like a wraith in the dawn; and the living world of action and affairs knew her no more.

XXIV

"Well, I must have a carriage!" said William Ashe to the landlord of one of the coaching inns of Domo Dossola--"and if you can't give me one for less, I suppose I shall have to pay this most ridiculous charge. Tell the man to put to at once."

The landlord who owned the carriages, and would be sitting snugly at home while the peasant on the box faced the elements in consideration of a large number of extra francs to his master, retired with a deferential smile, and told Emilio to bring the horses.

Meanwhile Ashe finished an indifferent dinner, paid a large bill, and went out to survey the preparations for departure, so far as the pelting rain in the court-yard would let him. He was going over the Simplon, starting rather late in the day, and the weather was abominable. His valet, Richard Dell, kept watch over the luggage and encouraged the ostlers, with a fairly stoical countenance. He was an old traveller, and though he would have preferred not to travel in a deluge, he disliked Italy, as a country of sour wine, and would be glad to find himself across the Alps. Moreover, he knew the decision of his master's character, and, being a man of some ability and education, he took a pride in the loftiness of the affairs on which Ashe was generally engaged. If Mr. Ashe said that he _must_ get to Geneva the following morning, and to London the morning after, on important business--why, he _must_, and it was no good talking about weather.

They rattled off through the streets of Domo Dossola, Dell in front with the driver, under a waterproof hood and ap.r.o.n, Ashe in the closed landau behind, with a plentiful supply of books, newspapers, and cigars to while away the time.

At Isella, the frontier village, he took advantage of the custom-house formalities and of a certain lull in the storm to stroll a little in front of the inn. On the Italian side, looking east, there was a certain wild lifting of the clouds, above the lower course of the stream descending from the Gondo ravine; upon the distant meadows and mountain slopes that marked the opening of the Tosa valley, storm-lights came and went, like phantom deer chased by the storm-clouds; beside him the swollen river thundered past, seeking a thirsty Italy; and behind, over the famous Gondo cleft, lay darkness, and a pelting tumult of rain.

Ashe turned back to the carriage, bidding a silent farewell to a country he did not love--a country mainly significant to him of memories which rose like a harsh barrier between his present self and a time when he, too, fleeted life carelessly, like other men, and found every hour delightful. Never, as long as he lived, should he come willingly to Italy. But his mother this year had fallen into such an exhaustion of body and mind, caused by his father's long agony, that he had persuaded her to let him carry her over the Alps to Stresa--a place she had known as a girl and of which she often spoke--for a Whitsuntide holiday. He himself was no longer in office. A coalition between the Tories and certain dissident Liberals had turned out Lord Parham's government in the course of a stormy autumn session, some eight months before. It had been succeeded by a weak administration, resting on two or three loosely knit groups--with Ashe as leader of the Opposition. Hence his comparative freedom, and the chance to be his mother's escort.

But at Stresa he had been overtaken by some startling political news--news which seemed to foreshadow an almost immediate change of ministry; and urgent telegrams bade him return at once. The coalition on which the government relied had broken down; the resignation of its chief, a "transient and embarra.s.sed phantom," was imminent; and it was practically certain, in the singular dearth of older men on his own side, since the retirement of Lord Parham, that within a few weeks, if not days, Ashe would be called upon to form an administration....

The carriage was soon on its way again, and presently, in the darkness of the superb ravine that stretches west and north from Gondo, the tumult of wind and water was such that even Ashe's slackened pulses felt the excitement of it. He left the carriage, and, wrapped in a waterproof cape, breasted the wind along the water's edge. Wordsworth's magnificent lines in the "Prelude," dedicated to this very spot, came back to him, as to one who in these later months had been able to renew some of the literary habits and recollections of earlier years

"--Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light!"

But here on this wild night were only tumult and darkness; and if Nature in this aspect were still to be held, as Wordsworth makes her, the Voice and Apocalypse of G.o.d, she breathed a power pitiless and terrible to man. The fierce stream below, the tiny speck made by the carriage and horses straining against the hurricane of wind, the forests on the farther bank climbing to endless heights of rain, the flowers in the rock crannies lashed and torn, the gloom and chill which had thus blotted out a June evening: all these impressions were impressions of war, of struggle and attack, of forces unfriendly and overwhelming.

A certain restless and melancholy joy in the challenge of the storm, indeed, Ashe felt, as many another strong man has felt before him, in a similar emptiness of heart. But it was because of the mere provocation of physical energy which it involved; not, as it would have been with him in youth, because of the infinitude and vastness of nature, breathing power and expectation into man:

"Effort, and expectation and desire-- And something evermore about to be!"

He flung the words upon the wind, which scattered them as soon as they were uttered, merely that he might give them a bitter denial, reject for himself, now and always, the temper they expressed. He had known it well, none better!--gone to bed, and risen up with it--the mere joy in the "mere living." It had seasoned everything, twined round everything, great and small--a day's trout-fishing or deer-stalking; a new book, a friend, a famous place; then politics, and the joys of power.

Gone! Here he was, hurrying back to England, to take perhaps in his still young hand the helm of her vast fortunes; and of all the old "expectation and desire," the old pa.s.sion of hope, the old sense of the magic that lies in things unknown and ways untrodden, he seemed to himself now incapable. He would do his best, and without the political wrestle life would be too trifling to be borne; but the relish and the savor were gone, and all was gray.

Ah!--he remembered one or two storm-walks with Kitty in their engaged or early married days--in Scotland chiefly. As he trudged up this Swiss pa.s.s he could see stretches of Scotch heather under drifting mist, and feel a little figure in its tweed dress flung suddenly by the wind and its own soft will against his arm. And then, the sudden embrace, and the wet, fragrant cheek, and her Voice--mocking and sweet!

Oh, G.o.d! where was she now? The shock of her disappearance from Venice had left in some ways a deeper mark upon him than even the original catastrophe. For who that had known her could think of such a being, alone, in a world of strangers, without a peculiar dread and anguish?

That she was alive he knew, for her five hundred a year--and she had never accepted another penny from him since her flight--was still drawn on her behalf by a banking firm in Paris. His solicitors, since the failure of their first efforts to trace her after Cliffe's death, had made repeated inquiries; Ashe had himself gone to Paris to see the bankers in question. But he was met by their solemn promise to Kitty to keep her secret inviolate. Madame d'Estrees supplied him with the name of the convent in which Kitty had been brought up; but the mother superior denied all knowledge of her. Meanwhile no course of action on Kitty's part could have restored her so effectually to her place in Ashe's imagination. She haunted his days and nights. So also did his memory of the Dean's pet.i.tion. Insensibly, without argument, the whole att.i.tude of his mind thereto had broken down; since he had been out of office, and his days and nights were no longer absorbed in the detail of administration and Parliamentary leadership, he had been the defenceless prey of grief; yearning and pity and agonized regret, rising from the deep subconscious self, had overpowered his first recoil and determination; and in the absence of all other pa.s.sionate hope, the one desire and dream which still lived warm and throbbing at his heart was the dream that still in some crowd, or loneliness, he might again, before it was too late, see Kitty's face and the wildness of Kitty's eyes.

And he believed much the same process had taken place in his mother's feeling. She rarely spoke of Kitty; but when she did the doubt and soreness of her mind were plain. Her own life had grown very solitary.

And in particular the old friendship between her and Polly Lyster had entirely ceased to be. Lady Tranmore shivered when she was named, and would never herself speak of her if she could help it. Ashe had tried in vain to make her explain herself. Surely it was incredible that she could in any way blame Mary for the incident at Verona? Ashe, of course, remembered the pa.s.sage in his mother's letter from Venice, and they had the maid Blanche's report to Lady Tranmore, of Kitty's intentions when she left Venice, of her terror when Cliffe appeared--of her swoon. But he believed with the Dean that any treacherous servant could have brought about the catastrophe. Vincenzo, one of the gondoliers who took Kitty to the station, had seen the luggage labelled for Verona; no doubt Cliffe had bribed him; and this explanation was, indeed, suggested to Lady Tranmore by the maid. His mother's suspicion--if indeed she entertained it--was so hideous that Ashe, finding it impossible to make his own mind harbor it for an instant, was harrowed by the mere possibility of its existence; as though it represented some hidden sore of consciousness that refused either to be probed or healed.

As he labored on against the storm all thought of his present life and activities dropped away from him; he lived entirely in the past. "What is it in me," he thought, "that has made the difference between my life and that of other men I know--that weakened me so with Kitty?" He canva.s.sed his own character, as a third person might have done.

The Christian, no doubt, would say that his married life had failed because G.o.d had been absent from it, because there had been in it no consciousness of higher law, of compelling grace.

Ashe pondered what such things might mean. "The Christian--in speculative belief--fails under the challenge of life as often as other men. Surely it depends on something infinitely more primitive and fundamental than Christianity?--something out of which Christianity itself springs? But this something--does it really exist--or am I only cheating myself by fancying it? Is it, as all the sages have said, the pursuit of some eternal good, the identification of the self with it--the 'dying to live'? And is this the real meaning at the heart of Christianity?--at the heart of all religion?--the everlasting meaning, let science play what havoc it please with outward forms and statements?"

Had he, perhaps, _doubted the soul?_

He groaned aloud. "O my G.o.d, what matter that I should grow wise--if Kitty is lost and desolate?"

And he trampled on his own thoughts--feeling them a mere hypocrisy and offence.

As they left the Gondo ravine and began to climb the zigzag road to the Simplon inn, the storm grew still wilder, and the driver, with set lips and dripping face, urged his patient beasts against a deluge. The road ran rivers; each torrent, carefully channelled, that pa.s.sed beneath it brought down wood and soil in choking abundance; and Ashe watched the downward push of the rain on the high, exposed banks above the carriage.

Once they pa.s.sed a fragment of road which had been washed away; the driver pointing to it said something sulkily about "_frane"_ on the "other side."

This bad moment, however, proved to be the last and worst, and when they emerged upon the high valley in which stands the village of Simplon, the rain was already lessening and the clouds rolling up the great sides and peaks of the Fletschhorn. Ashe promised himself a comparatively fine evening and a rapid run down to Brieg.

Outside the old Simplon posting-house, however, they presently came upon a crowd of vehicles of every description, of which the drivers were standing in groups with dripping rugs across their shoulders--shouting and gesticulating.

And as they drove up the news was thundered at them in every possible tongue. Between the hospice and Berizal two hundred metres of road had been completely washed away. The afternoon diligence had just got through by a miracle an hour before the accident occurred; before anything else could pa.s.s it would take at least ten or twelve hours'

hard work, through the night, before the laborers now being requisitioned by the commune could possibly provide even a temporary pa.s.sage.

Ashe in despair went into the inn to speak with the landlord, and found that unless he was prepared to abandon books and papers, and make a push for it over mountain paths covered deep in fresh snow, there was no possible escape from the dilemma. He must stay the night. The navvies were already on their way; and as soon as ever the road was pa.s.sable he should know. For not even a future Prime Minister of England could Herr Ludwig do more.

He and Dell went gloomily up the narrow stone stairs of the inn to look at the bedrooms, which were low-roofed and primitive, penetrated everywhere by the roar of a stream which came down close behind the inn.

Through the open door of one of the rooms Ashe saw the foaming ma.s.s, framed as it were in a window, and almost in the house.

He chose two small rooms looking on the street, and bade Dell get a fire lit in one of them, a bed moved out, an arm-chair moved in, and as large a table set for him as the inn could provide, while he took a stroll before dinner. He had some important letters to answer, and he pointed out to Dell the bag which contained them.

Then he stepped out into the muddy street, which was still a confusion of horses, vehicles, and men, and, turning up a path behind the inn, was soon in solitude. An evening of splendor! Nature was still in a tragic, declamatory mood--sending piled thunder-clouds of dazzling white across a sky extravagantly blue, and throwing on the high snow-fields and craggy tops a fierce, flame-colored light. The valley was resonant with angry sound, and the village, now in shadow, with its slender, crumbling campanile, seemed like a cowering thing over which the eagle has pa.s.sed.

The grandeur and the freshness, the free, elemental play of stream and sky and mountain, seized upon a man in whom the main impulses of life were already weary, and filled him with an involuntary physical delight.

He noticed the flowers at his feet, in the drenched gra.s.s which was already lifting up its battered stalks, and along the margins of the streams--deep blue colombines, white lilies, and yellow anemones.

Incomparable beauty lived and breathed in each foot of pasture; and when he raised his eyes from the gra.s.s they fed on visionary splendors of snow and rock, stretching into the heavens.

No life visible--except a line of homing cattle, led by a little girl with tucked-up skirt and bare feet. And--in the distance--the slender figure of a woman walking--stopping often to gather a flower--or to rest? Not a woman of the valley, clearly. No doubt a traveller, weather-bound like himself at the inn. He watched the figure a little, for some vague grace of movement that seemed to enter into and make a part of that high beauty in which the scene was steeped; but it disappeared behind a fold of pasture, and he did not see it again.

In spite of the mult.i.tude of vehicles gathered about the inn there were not so many guests in the _salle-a-manger_, when Ashe entered it, as he had expected. He supposed that a majority of these vehicles must be return carriages from Brieg. Still there was much clatter of talk and plates, and German seemed to be the prevailing tongue. Except for a couple whom Ashe took to be a Genevese professor and his wife, there was no lady in the room.

He lingered somewhat late at table, toying with his orange, and reading a _Journal de Geneve_, captured from a neighbor, which contained an excellent "London letter." The room emptied. The two Swiss handmaidens came in to clear away soiled linen and arrange the tables for the morning's coffee. Only, at a farther table, a _couvert_ for one person, set by itself, remained still untouched.

He happened to be alone in the room when the door again opened and a lady entered. She did not see him behind his newspaper, and she walked languidly to the farther table and sat down. As she did so she was seized with a fit of coughing, and when it was over she leaned her head on her hands, gasping.

Ashe had half risen--the newspaper was crushed in his hand--when the Swiss waitress whom the men of the inn called Fraulein Anna--who was, indeed, the daughter of the landlord--came back.

"How are you, madame?" she said, with a smile, and in a slow English of which she was evidently proud.

"I'm better to-day," said the other, hastily. "I shall start to-morrow.

What a noise there is to-night!" she added, in a tone both fretful and weary.

"We are so full--it is the accident to the road, madame. Will madame have a _the complet_ as before?"

The lady nodded, and Frulein Anna, who evidently knew her ways, brought in the tea at once, stayed chatting beside her for a minute, and then departed, with a long, disapproving look at the gentleman in the corner who was so long over his coffee and would not let her clear away.