Chapter XV: Part IV: Storm (4)

Half-way to the bend of the canal beyond the Accademia, Ashe turned and gave a long look at the balcony. No one was there. But just as the gondola was passing 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 balustrade 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 canal. 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 passing 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'Estrées, and did not ask Miss French to accompany her.

She set out accordingly with the two gondoliers. But she had hardly passed 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 passed 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 passion with which they were infused. Had the passion 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 noble and solitary shore, 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.

"How do you do?" she said, mechanically, and would have passed 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 shore 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 multitude," 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 Shelley 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 _tête-à-tête_, 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.

"The Ricci? Why do you want to know, madame?"

She made a contemptuous lip.

"I knew her first," said Cliffe, "some years ago in Milan. She was then at La Scala--walking on--paid for her good looks. Then somebody sent her to Paris to the Conservatoire, which she only left this spring. This is her first Italian engagement. Her people are shopkeepers here--in the Merceria--which helped her. She is as vain as a peacock and as dangerous as a pet panther."

"Dangerous!" Kitty's scorn had passed into her voice.

"Well, Italy is still the country of the knife," said Cliffe, lightly--"and I could still hire a bravo or two--in Venice--if I wanted them."

"Does the Ricci hire them?"

Cliffe shrugged his shoulders.

"She'd do it without winking, if it suited her." Then, after a pause--"Do you still wonder why I should have chosen her society?"

"Oh no," said Kitty, hastily. "You told me."

"As much as a _friend_ cares to know?"

She nodded, flushing, and dropped the subject.

Cliffe's mouth still smiled, but his eyes studied her with a veiled and sinister intensity.

"I have not seen the lady for a week," he resumed. "She pesters me with notes. I promised to go and see her in a new play to-morrow night, but--"

"Oh, go!" said Kitty--"by all means go!"

"'Ruy Blas' in Italian? I think not. Ah! did you see that gleam on the Campanile?--marvellous!... Miladi, I have a question to ask you."

"_Dites!_" said Kitty.

"Did you put me into your book?"

"Certainly."

"What kind of things did you say?"

"The worst I could!"

"Ah! How shall I get a copy?" said Cliffe, musing.

She made no answer, but she was conscious of a sudden movement--was it of terror? At the bottom of her soul was she, indeed, afraid of the man beside her?

"By-the-way," he resumed, "you promised to tell me your news of this morning. But you haven't told me a word!"

She turned away. She had gathered her furs around her, and her face was almost hidden by them.

"Nothing is settled," she said, in a cold, reluctant voice.

"Which means that you won't tell me anything more?"

She was silent. Her lip had a proud line which piqued him.

"You think I am not worthy to know?"

Her eye gleamed.

"What does it matter to you?"

"Oh, nothing! I should have been glad to hear that all was well, and Ashe's mind at rest about his prospects."

"His prospects!" she repeated, with a scorn which stung. "How _dare_ we mention his name here at all?"

Cliffe reddened.

"I dare," he said, calmly.

Kitty looked at him--a quivering defiance in face and frame; then bent forward.

"Would you like to know--who is the best--the noblest--the handsomest--the most generous--the most delightful man I have ever met?"

Each word came out winged and charged with a strange intensity of passion.

"Do I?" said Cliffe, raising his eyebrows--"do I want to know?"

Her look held him.

"My husband, William Ashe!"

And she fell back, flushed and breathless, like one who throws out a rebel and challenging flag.

Cliffe was silent a moment, observing her.

"Strange!" he said, at last. "It is only when you are miserable you are kind. I could wish you miserable again, _chérie_."

Tone and look broke into a sombre wildness before which she shrank. Her own violence passed away. She leaned over the side of the boat, struggling with tears.

"Then you have your wish," was her muffled answer.

The three bronzed Venetians, a father and two sons, who were working the _bragozzo_ glanced curiously at the pair. They were persuaded that these charterers of their boat were lovers flying from observation, and the unknown tongue did but stimulate guessing.

Cliffe raised himself impatiently.

They were nearing a point where the line of _murazzi_ they had been following--low breakwaters of great strength--swept away from them outward and eastward towards a distant opening. On the other side of the channel was a low line of shore, broadening into the Lido proper, with its scattered houses and churches, and soon lost in the mist as it stretched towards the south.

"Ecco!--il Porto del Lido!" said the older boatman, pointing far away to a line of deeper color beneath a dark and lowering sky.

Kitty bent over the side of the boat staring towards the dim spot he showed her--where was the mouth of the sea.

"Kitty!" said Cliffe's voice beside her, hoarse and hurried--"one word, and I tell these fellows to set their helm for Trieste. This boat will carry us well--and the wind is with us."

She turned and looked him in the face.

"And then?"

"Then? We'll think it out together, Kitty--together!" He bent his lips to her hand, bending so as to conceal the action from the sailors. But she drew her hand away.

"You and I," she said, fiercely--"would tire of each other in a week!"

"Have the courage to try! No!--you should not tire of me in a week! I would find ways to keep you mine, Kitty--cradled, and comforted, and happy."

"Happy!" Her slight laugh was the forlornest thing. "Take me out to sea--and drop me there--with a stone round my neck. That might be worth doing--perhaps."

He surveyed her unmoved.

"Listen, Kitty! This kind of thing can't go on forever."

"What are you waiting for?" she said, tauntingly. "You ought to have gone last week."

"I am not going," he said, raising himself by a sudden movement--"till you come with me!"

Kitty started, her eyes riveted to his.

"And yet go I will! Not even you shall stop me, Kitty. I'll take the help I've gathered back to those poor devils--if I die for it. But you'll come with me--you'll come!"

She drew back--trembling under an impression she strove to conceal.

"If you will talk such madness, I can't help it," she said, with shortened breath.

"Yes--you'll come!" he said, nodding. "What have you to do with Ashe, Kitty, any longer? You and he are already divided. You have tried life together and what have you made of it? You're not fit for this mincing, tripping London life--nor am I? And as for morals--- I'll tell you a strange thing, Kitty." He bent forward and grasped her hands with a force which hurt--from which she could not release herself. "I believe--yes, by God, I believe!--that I am a better man than I was before I started on this adventure. It's been like drinking at last at the very source of life--living, not talking about it. One bitter night last February, for instance, I helped a man--one of the insurgents--who had taken to the mountains with his wife and children--to carry his wife, a dying woman, over a mountain-pass to the only place where she could possibly get help and shelter. We carried her on a litter, six men taking turns. The cold and the fatigue were such that I shudder now when I think of it. Yet at the end I seemed to myself a man reborn. I was happier than I had ever been in my life. Some mystic virtue had flowed into me. Among those men and women, instead of being the selfish beast I've been all these years, I can forget myself. Death seems nothing--brotherhood--liberty!--everything! And yet--"

His face relaxed, became ironical, reflective. But he held the hands close, his grasp of them hidden by the folds of fur which hung about her.

"And _yet_--I can say to you without a qualm--put this marriage which has already come to naught behind you--and come with me! Ashe cramps you. He blames you--you blame yourself. What _reality_ has all that? It makes you miserable--it wastes life. _I_ accept your nature--I don't ask you to be anything else than yourself--your wild, vain, adorable self! Ashe asks you to put restraint on yourself--to make painful efforts--to be good for his sake--the sake of something outside. _I_ say--come and look at the elemental things--death and battle--hatred, solitude, love. _They'll_ sweep us out of ourselves!--no need to strive and cry for it--into the great current of the world's being--bring us close to the forces at the root of things--the forces which create--and destroy. Dip your heart in that stream, Kitty, and feel it grow in your breast. Take a nurse's dress--put your hand in mine--and come! I can't promise you luxuries or ease. You've had enough of those. Come and open another door in the House of Life! Take starving women and hunted children into your arms--- feel with them--weep with them--look with them into the face of death! Make friends with nature--with rocks, forests, torrents--with night and dawn, which you've never seen, Kitty! They'll love you--they'll support you--the rough people--and the dark forests. They'll draw nature's glamour round you--they'll pour her balm into your soul. And I shall be with you--beside you!--your guardian--your lover--your _lover_, Kitty--till death do us part."

He looked at her with the smile which was his only but sufficient beauty; the violent, exciting words flowed in her ear, amid the sound of rising waves and the distant talk of the fishermen. His hand crushed hers; his mad, imploring eyes repelled and constrained her. The wild hungers and curiosities of her being rushed to meet him; she heard the echo of her own words to Ashe: "More life--more _life_!--even though it lead to pain--and agony--and tears!"

Then she wrenched herself away--suddenly, contemptuously.

"Of course, that's all nonsense--romantic nonsense. You've perhaps forgotten that I am one of the women who don't stir without their maid."

Cliffe's expression changed. He thrust his hands into his pockets.

"Oh, well, if you must have a maid," he said, dryly, "that settles it. A maid would be the deuce. And yet--I think I could find you a Bosnian girl--strong and faithful--"

Their eyes met--his already full of a kind of ownership, tender, confident, humorous even--hers alive with passionate anger and resistance.

"_Without a qualm_!" she repeated, in a low voice--"without a qualm! Mon Dieu!"

She turned and looked towards the Adriatic.

"Where are we?" she said, imperiously.

For a gesture of command on Cliffe's part, unseen by her, had sent the boat eastward, spinning before the wind. The lagoon was no longer tranquil. It was covered with small waves; and the roar of the outer sea, though still far off, was already in their ears. The mist lifting showed white, distant crests of foam on a tumbling field of water, and to the north, clothed in tempestuous purple, the dim shapes of mountains.

Kitty raised herself, and beckoned towards the captain of the _bragozzo_.

"Giuseppe!"

"Commanda, Eccellenza!"

The man came forward.

With a voice sharp and clear, she gave the order to return at once to Venice. Cliffe watched her, the veins on his forehead swelling. She knew that he debated with himself whether he should give a counter-order or no.

"A Venezia!" said Kitty, waving her hand towards the sailors, her eyes shining under the tangle of her hair.

The helm was put round, and beneath a tacking sail the boat swept southward.

With an awkward laugh Cliffe fell back into his seat, stretching his long limbs across the boat. He had spoken under a strong and genuine impulse. His passion for her had made enormous strides in these few wild days beside her. And yet the fantastic poet's sense responded at a touch to the new impression. He shook off the heroic mood as he had doffed his Bosnian cloak. In a few minutes, though the heightened color remained, he was chatting and laughing as though nothing had happened.

* * * * *

She, exhausted physically and morally by her conflict with him, hardly spoke on the way home. He entertained her, watching her all the time--a hundred speculations about her passing through his brain. He understood perfectly how the insight which she had allowed him into her grief and her remorse had broken down the barriers between them. Her incapacity for silence, and reticence, had undone her. Was he a villain to have taken advantage of it?

Why? With a strange, half-cynical clearness he saw her, as the obstacle that she was, in Ashe's life and career. For Ashe--supposing he, Cliffe, persuaded her--there would be no doubt a first shock of wrath and pain--then a sense of deliverance. For her, too, deliverance! It excited his artist's sense to think of all the further developments through which he might carry that eager, plastic nature. There would be a new Kitty, with new capacities and powers. Wasn't that justification enough? He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, disengaging it from harsh and hindering conditions. What was there vile in that?

The argument pursued itself.

"The modern judges for himself--makes his own laws, as a god, knowing good and evil. No doubt in time a new social law will emerge--with new sanctions. Meanwhile, here we are, in a moment of transition, manufacturing new types, exploring new combinations--by which let those who come after profit!"

Little delicate, distinguished thing!--every aspect of her, angry or sweet, sad or wilful, delighted his taste and sense. Moreover, she was _his_ deliverance, too--from an ugly and vulgar entanglement of which he was ashamed. He shrank impatiently from memories which every now and then pursued him of the Ricci's coarse beauty and exacting ways. Kitty had just appeared in time! He felt himself rehabilitated in his own eyes. Love may trifle as it pleases with what people call "law"; but there are certain æsthetic limits not to be transgressed.

The Ricci, of course, was wild and thirsting for revenge. Let her! Anxieties far more pressing disturbed him. What if he tempted Kitty to this escapade--and the rough life killed her? He saw clearly how frail she was.

But it was the artificiality of her life, the innumerable burdens of civilization, which had brought her to this! Women were not the weaklings they seemed, or believed themselves to be. For many of them, probably for Kitty, a rude and simple life would mean not only fresh mental but fresh physical strength. He had seen what women could endure, for love's or patriotism's sake! Make but appeal to the spirit--the proud and tameless spirit--and how the flesh answered! He knew that his power with Kitty came largely from a certain stoicism, a certain hardness, mingled, as he would prove to her, with a boundless devotion. Let him carry it through--without fears--and so enlarge her being and his own! And as to responsibilities beyond, as to their later lives--let time take care of its own births. For the modern determinist of Cliffe's type there _is_ no responsibility. He waits on life, following where it leads, rejoicing in each new feeling, each fresh reaction of consciousness on experience, and so links his fatalist belief to that Nietzsche doctrine of self-development at all costs, and the coming man, in which Cliffe's thought anticipated the years.

* * * * *

Kitty meanwhile listened to his intermittent talk of Venice, or Bosnia, with all its suggestions of new worlds and far horizons, and scarcely said a word.

But through the background of the brain there floated with her, as with him, a procession of unspoken thoughts. She had received three letters from William. Immediately on his arrival he had tendered his resignation. Lord Parham had asked him to suspend the matter for ten days. Only the pressure of his friends, it seemed, and the consternation of his party had wrung from Ashe a reluctant consent. Meanwhile, all copies of the book had been bought up; the important newspapers had readily lent themselves to the suppression of the affair; private wraths had been dealt with by conciliatory lawyers; and in general a far more complete hushing-up had been attained than Ashe had ever imagined possible. There was no doubt infinite gossip in the country-houses. But sympathy for Kitty in her grief, for Ashe himself, and Lady Tranmore, had done much to keep it within bounds. The little Dean especially, beloved of all the world, had been incessantly active on behalf of peace and oblivion.

All this Kitty read or guessed from William's letters. After all, then, the harm had not been so great! Why such a panic!--such a hurry to leave her!--when she was ill--and sorry? And now how curtly, how measuredly he wrote! Behind the hopefulness of his tone she read the humiliation and soreness of his mind--and said to herself, with a more headlong conviction than ever, that he would never forgive her.

No, _never!_--and especially now that she had added a thousandfold to the original offence. She had never written to him since his departure. Margaret French, too, was angry with her--had almost broken with her.

* * * * *

They left their boat on the Riva, and walked to the _Piazza_, through the now starry dusk. As they passed the great door of St. Mark's, two persons came out of the church. Kitty recognized Mary Lyster and Sir Richard. She bowed slightly; Sir Richard put his hand to his hat in a flurried way; but Mary, looking them both in the face, passed without the smallest sign, unless the scorn in face and bearing might pass for recognition.

Kitty gasped.

"She cut me!" she said, in a shaking voice.

"Oh no!" said Cliffe. "She didn't see you in the dark."

Kitty made no reply. She hurried along the northern side of the Piazza, avoiding the groups which were gathered in the sunset light round the flocks of feeding pigeons, brushing past the tables in front of the cafe's, still well filled on this mild evening.

"Take care!" said Cliffe, suddenly, in a low, imperative voice.

Kitty looked up. In her abstraction she saw that she had nearly come into collision with a woman sitting at a café table and surrounded by a noisy group of men.

With a painful start Kitty perceived the mocking eyes of Mademoiselle Ricci. The Ricci said something in Italian, staring the while at the English lady; and the men near her laughed, some furtively, some loudly.

Cliffe's face set. "Walk quickly!" he said in her ear, hurrying her past.

When they had reached one of the narrow streets behind the Piazza, Kitty looked at him--white and haughtily tremulous. "What did that mean?"

"Why should you deign to ask?" was Cliffe's impatient reply. "I have ceased to go and see her. I suppose she guesses why."

"I will have no rivalry with Mademoiselle Ricci!" cried Kitty.

"You can't help it," said Cliffe, calmly. "The powers of light are always in rivalry with the powers of darkness."

And without further pleading or excuse he stalked on, his gaunt form and striking head towering above the crowded pavement. Kitty followed him with difficulty, conscious of a magnetism and a force against which she struggled in vain.

* * * * *

About a week afterwards Kitty shut herself up one evening in her room to write to Ashe. She had just passed through an agitating conversation with Margaret French, who had announced her intention of returning to England at once, alone, if Kitty would not accompany her. Kitty's hands were trembling as she began to write.

* * * * *

"I am glad--oh! so glad, William--that you _have_ withdrawn your resignation--that people have come forward so splendidly, and _made_ you withdraw it--that Lord Parham is behaving decently--and that you have been able to get hold of all those copies of the book. I always hoped it would not be quite so bad as you thought. But I know you must have gone through an awful time--and I'm _sorry_.

"William, I want to tell you something--for I can't go on lying to you--or even just hiding the truth. I met Geoffrey Cliffe here--before you left--and I never told you. I saw him first in a gondola the night of the serenata--and then at the Armenian convent. Do you remember my hurrying you and Margaret into the garden? That was to escape meeting him. And that same afternoon when I was in the unused rooms of the Palazzo Vercelli--the rooms they show to tourists--he suddenly appeared--and somehow I spoke to him, though I had never meant to do so again.

"Then when you left me I met him again--that afternoon--and he found out I was very miserable and made me tell him everything. I know I had no right to do so--they were your secrets as well as mine. But you know how little I can control myself--it's wretched, but it's true.

"William, I don't know what will happen. I can't make out from Margaret whether she has written to you or not--she won't tell me. If she has, this letter will not be much news to you. But, mind, I write it of my own free will, and not because Margaret may have forced my hand. I should have written it anyway. Poor old darling!--she thinks me mad and bad, and to-night she tells me she can't take the responsibility of looking after me any longer. Women like her can never understand creatures like me--and I don't want her to. She's a dear saint, and as true as steel--not like your Mary Lysters! I could go on my knees to her. But she can't control or save me. Not even you could, William. You've tried your best, and in spite of you I'm going to perdition, and I can't stop myself.

"For, William, there's something broken forever between you and me. I know it was I who did the wrong, and that you had no choice but to leave me when you did. But yet you _did_ leave me, though I implored you not. And I know very well that you don't love me as you used to--why should you?--and that you never can love me in the same way again. Every letter you write tells me that. And though I have deserved it all, I can't bear it. When I think of coming home to England, and how you would try to be nice to me--how good and dear and magnanimous you would be, and what a beast I should feel--I want to drown myself and have done.

"It all seems to me so hopeless. It is my own nature--- the stuff out of which I am cut--that's all wrong. I may promise my breath away that I will be discreet and gentle and well behaved, that I'll behave properly to people like Lady Parham, that I'll keep secrets, and not make absurd friendships with absurd people, that I'll try and keep out of debt, and so on. But what's the use? It's the _will_ in me--the something that drives, or ought to drive--that won't work. And nobody ever taught me or showed me, that I can remember, till I met you. In Paris at the Place Vendôme, half the time I used to live with maman and papa, be hideously spoiled, dressed absurdly, eat off silver plate, and make myself sick with rich things--and then for days together maman would go out or away, forget all about me, and I used to storm the kitchen for food. She either neglected me or made a show of me; she was my worst enemy, and I hated and fought her--till I went to the convent at ten. When I was fourteen maman asked a doctor about me. He said I should probably go mad--and at the convent they thought the same. Maman used to throw this at me when she was cross with me.

"Well, I don't repeat this to make you excuse me and think better of me--- it's all too late for that--but because I am such a puzzle to myself, and I try to explain things. I _did_ love you, William--I believe I do still--but when I think of our living together again, my arms drop by my side and I feel like a dead creature. Your life is too great a thing for me. Why should I spoil or hamper it? If you loved me, as you did once--if you still thought _everything_ worth while, then, if I had a spark of decency left, I might kill myself to free you, but I should never do--what I may do now. But, William, you'll forget me soon. You'll pass great laws, and make great speeches, and the years when I tormented you--and all my wretched ways--will seem such a small, small thing.

"Geoffrey says he loves me. And I think he does, though how long it will last, or may be worth, no one can tell. As for me, I don't know whether I love him. I have no illusion about him. But there are moments when he absolutely holds me--when my will is like wax in his hands. It is because, I think, of a certain grandness--_grandeur_ seems too strong--in his character. It was always there; because no one could write such poems as his without it. But now it's more marked, though I don't know that it makes him a better man. He thinks it does; but we all deceive ourselves. At any rate, he is often superb, and I feel that I could die, if not for him, at least with him. And he is not unlikely to die in some heroic way. He went out as you know simply as correspondent and to distribute relief, but lately he has been fighting for these people--of course he has!--and when he goes back he is to be one of their regular leaders. When he talks of it he is noble, transformed. It reminds me of Byron--his wicked life here--and then his death at Missolonghi. Geoffrey can do such base, cruel things--and yet--

"But I haven't yet told you. He asks me to go with him, back to the fighting-lines in upper Bosnia. There seems to be a great deal that women can do. I shall wear a nurse's uniform, and probably nurse at a little hospital he founded--high up in one of the mountain valleys. I know this will almost make you laugh. You will think of me, not knowing how to put on a button without Blanche--and wanting to be waited on every moment. But you'll see; there'll be nothing of that sort. I wonder whether it's hardship I've been thirsting for all my life--even when I seemed such a selfish, luxurious little ape?

"At the same time, I think it will kill me--and that would be the best end of all. To have some great, heroic experience, and then--'cease upon the midnight with no pain!...'

"Oh, if I thought you'd care very, _very_ much, I should have pain--horrible pain. But I know you won't. Politics have taken my place. Think of me sometimes, as I was when we were first married--and of Harry--my little, little fellow!

"--Maman and I have had a ghastly scene. She came to scold me for my behavior--to say I was the talk of Venice. _She!_ Of course I know what she means. She thinks if I am divorced she will lose her allowance--and she can't bear the thought of that, though Markham Warington is quite rich. My heart just _boiled_ within me. I told her it is the poison of her life that works in me, and that whatever I do, _she_ has no right to reproach me. Then she cried--and I was like ice--and at last she went. Warington, good fellow, has written to me, and asked to see me. But what is the use?

"I know you'll leave me the £500 a year that was settled on me. It'll be so good for me to be poor--and dressed in serge--and trying to do something else with these useless hands than writing books that break your heart. I am giving away all my smart clothes. Blanche is going home. Oh, William, William! I'm going to shut this, and it's like the good-bye of death--a mean and ugly--_death_.

"... Later. They have just brought me a note from Danieli's. So Margaret did write to you, and your mother has come. Why did you send her, William? She doesn't love me--and I shall only stab and hurt her. Though I'll try not--for your sake."

Two days later Ashe received almost by the same post which brought him the letter from Kitty, just quoted, the following letter from his mother:

"My DEAREST WILLIAM,--I have seen Kitty. With some difficulty she
consented to let me go and see her yesterday evening about nine
o'clock.

"I arrived between six and seven, having travelled straight through
without a break, except for an hour or two at Milan, and
immediately on arriving I sent a note to Margaret French. She came
in great distress, having just had a fresh scene with Kitty. Oh, my
dear William, her report could not well be worse. Since she wrote
to us Kitty seems to have thrown over all precautions. They used to
meet in churches or galleries, and go out for long days in the
gondola or a fishing-boat together, and Kitty would come home alone
and lie on the sofa through the evening, almost without speaking
or moving. But lately he comes in with her, and stays hours,
reading to her, or holding her hand, or talking to her in a low
voice, and Margaret cannot stop it.

"Yet she has done her best, poor girl! Knowing what we all knew
last year, it filled her with terror when she first discovered that
he was in Venice and that they had met. But it was not till it had
gone on about a week, with the strangest results on Kitty's spirits
and nerves, that she felt she must interfere. She not only spoke to
Kitty, but she spoke and wrote to him in a very firm, dignified
way. Kitty took no notice--only became very silent and secretive.
And he treated poor Margaret with a kind of courteous irony which
made her blood boil, and against which she could do nothing. She
says that Kitty seems to her sometimes like a person moving in
sleep--only half conscious of what she is doing; and at others she
is wildly excitable, irritable with everybody, and only calming
down and becoming reasonable when this man appears.

"There is much talk in Venice. They seem to have been seen together
by various London friends who knew--about the difficulties last
year. And then, of course, everybody is aware that you are not
here--and the whole story of the book goes from mouth to mouth--and
people say that a separation has been arranged--and so on. These
are the kind of rumors that Margaret hears, especially from Mary
Lyster, who is staying in this hotel with her father, and seems to
have a good many friends here.

"Dearest William--I have been lingering on these things because it
is so hard to have to tell you what passed between me and Kitty.
Oh! my dear, dear son, take courage. Even now everything is not
lost. Her conscience may awaken at the last moment; this bad man
may abandon his pursuit of her; I may still succeed in bringing her
back to you. But I am in terrible fear--and I must tell you the
whole truth.

"Kitty received me alone. The room was very dark--only one lamp
that gave a bad light--so that I saw her very indistinctly. She was
in black, and, as far as I could see, extremely pale and weary. And
what struck me painfully was her haggard, careless look. All the
little details of her dress and hair seemed so neglected. Blanche
says she is far too irritable and impatient in the mornings to let
her hair be done as usual. She just rolls it into one big knot
herself and puts a comb in it. She wears the simplest clothes, and
changes as little as possible. She says she is soon going to have
done with all that kind of thing, and she must get used to it. My
own impression is that she is going through great agony of
mind--above all, that she is ill--ill in body and soul.

"She told me quite calmly, however, that she had made up her mind
to leave you; she said that she had written to you to tell you so.
I asked her if it was because she had ceased to love you. After a
pause she said 'No.' Was it because some one else had come between
you? She threw up her head proudly, and said it was best to be
quite plain and frank. She had met Geoffrey Cliffe again, and she
meant henceforward to share his life. Then she went into the
wildest dreams about going back with him to the Balkans, and
nursing in a hospital, and dying--she hopes!--of hard work and
privations. And all this in a torrent of words--and her eyes
blazing, with that look in them as though she saw nothing but the
scenes of her own imagination. She talked of devotion--and of
forgetting herself in other people. I could only tell her, of
course, that all this sounded to me the most grotesque sophistry
and perversion. She was forgetting her first duty, breaking her
marriage vow, and tearing your life asunder. She shook her head,
and said you would soon forget her. 'If he had loved me he would
never have left me!' she said, again and again, with a passion I
shall never forget.

"Of course that made me very angry, and I described what the
situation had been when you reached London--Lord Parham's state of
mind--and the consternation caused everywhere by the wretched book.
I tried to make her understand what there was at stake--the hopes
of all who follow you in the House and the country--the great
reforms of which you are the life and soul--your personal and
political honor. I impressed on her the endless trouble and
correspondence in which you had been involved--and how meanwhile
all your Home Office and cabinet work had to be carried on as
usual, till it was decided whether your resignation should be
withdrawn or no. She listened with her head on her hands. I think
with regard to the book she is most genuinely ashamed and
miserable. And yet all the time there is this unreasonable, this
monstrous feeling that you should not have left her!

"As to the scandalous references to private persons, she said that
Madeleine Alcot had written to her about the country-house gossip.
That wretched being, Mr. Darrell, seems also to have written to
her, trying to save himself through her. And the only time I saw
her laugh was when she spoke of having had a furious letter from
Lady Grosville about the references to Grosville Park. It was like
the laugh of a mischievous, unhappy child.

"Then we came back to the main matter, and I implored her to let me
take her home. First I gave her your letter. She read it, flushed
up, and threw it away from her. 'He commands me!' she said,
fiercely. 'But I am no one's chattel.' I replied that you had only
summoned her back to her duty and her home, and I asked her if she
could really mean to repay your unfailing love by bringing anguish
and dishonor upon you? She sat dumb, and her stubbornness moved me
so that I fear I lost my self-control and said more, much more--in
denunciation of her conduct--than I had meant to do. She heard me
out, and then she got up and looked at me very bitterly and
strangely. I had never loved her, she said, and so I could not
judge her. Always from the beginning I had thought her unfit to be
your wife, and she had known it, and my dislike of her, especially
during the past year, had made her hard and reckless. It had seemed
no use trying. I just wanted her dead, that you might marry a wife
who would be a help and not a stumbling-block. Well, I should have
my wish, for she would soon be as good as dead, both to you and to
me.

"All this hurt me deeply, and I could not restrain myself from
crying. I felt so helpless, and so doubtful whether I had not done
more harm than good. Then she softened a little, and asked me to
let her go to bed--she would think it all over and write to me in
the morning....

"So, my dear William, I can only pray and wait. I am afraid there
is but little hope, but God is merciful and strong. He may yet save
us all.

"But whatever happens, remember that you have nothing to reproach
yourself with--that you have done all that man could do. I should
telegraph to you in the morning to say, 'Come, at all hazards,' but
that I feel sure all will be settled to-morrow one way or the
other. Either Kitty will start with me--or she will go with
Geoffrey Cliffe. You could do nothing--absolutely nothing. God help
us! She seems to have some money, and she told me that she counted
on retaining her jointure."

* * * * *

On the night following her interview with Lady Tranmore, Kitty went from one restless, tormented dream into another, but towards morning she fell into one of a different kind. She dreamed she was in a country of great mountains. The peaks were snow-crowned, vast glaciers filled the chasms on their flanks, forests of pines clothed the lower sides of the hills, and the fields below were full of spring flowers. She saw a little Alpine village, and a church with an old and slender campanile. A plain stone building stood by--it seemed to be an inn of the old-fashioned sort--and she entered it. The dinner-table was ready in the low-roofed _salle-à-manger_, and as she sat down to eat she saw that two other guests were at the same table. She glanced at them, and perceived that one was William and the other her child, Harry, grown older--and transfigured. Instead of the dull and clouded look which had wrung her heart in the old days, against which she had striven, patiently and impatiently, in vain, the blue eyes were alive with mind and affection. It was as if the child beheld his mother for the first time and she him. As he recognized her he gave a cry of joy, waving one hand towards her while with the other he touched his father on the arm. William raised his head. But when he saw his wife his face changed. He rose from his seat, and drawing the little boy into his arms he walked away. Kitty saw them disappear into a long passage, indeterminate and dark. The child's face over his father's shoulder was turned in longing towards his mother, and as he was carried away he stretched out his little hands to her in lamentation.

Kitty woke up bathed in tears. She sprang out of bed and threw the window nearest to her open to the night. The winter night was mild, and a full moon sailed the southern sky. Not a sound on the water, not a light in the palaces; a city of ebony and silver, Venice slept in the moonlight. Kitty gathered a cloak and some shawls round her, and sank into a low chair, still crying and half conscious. At his inn, some few hundred yards away, between her and the Piazzetta, was Geoffrey Cliffe waking too?--making his last preparations? She knew that all his stores were ready, and that he proposed to ship them and the twenty young fellows, Italians and Dalmatians, who were going with him to join the insurgents, that morning, by a boat leaving for Cattaro. He himself was to follow twenty-four hours later, and it was his firm and confident expectation that Kitty would go with him--passing as his wife. And, indeed, Kitty's own arrangements were almost complete, her money in her purse, the clothes she meant to take with her packed in one small trunk, some of the Tranmore jewels which she had been recently wearing ready to be returned on the morrow to Lady Tranmore's keeping, other jewels, which she regarded as her own, together with the remainder of her clothes, put aside, in order to be left in the custody of the landlord of the apartment till Kitty should claim them again.

One more day--which would probably see the departure of Margaret French--one more wrestle with Lady Tranmore, and all the links with the old life would be torn away. A bare, stripped soul, dependent henceforth on Geoffrey Cliffe for every crumb of happiness, treading in unknown paths, suffering unknown things, probing unknown passions and excitements--it was so she saw herself; not without that corroding double consciousness of the modern, that it was all very interesting, and as such to be forgiven and admired.

Notwithstanding what she had said to Ashe, she did believe--with a clinging and desperate faith--that Cliffe loved her. Had she really doubted it, her conduct would have been inexplicable, even to herself, and he must have seemed a madman. What else could have induced him to burden himself with a woman on such an errand and at such a time? She had promised, indeed, to be his lieutenant and comrade--and to return to Venice if her health should be unequal to the common task. But in spite of the sternness with which he put that task first--a sternness which was one of his chief attractions for Kitty--she knew well that her coming threw a glamour round it which it had never yet possessed, that the passion she had aroused in him, and the triumph of binding her to his fate, possessed him--for the moment at any rate--heart and soul. He had the poet's resources, too, and a mind wherewith to organize and govern. She shrank from him still, but she already envisaged the time when her being would sink into and fuse with his, and like two colliding stars they would flame together to one fiery death.

Thoughts like these ran in her mind. Yet all the time she saw the high mountains of her dream, the old inn, the receding face of her child on William's shoulder; and the tears ran down her cheeks. The letter from William that Lady Tranmore had given her lay on a table near. She took it up, and lit a candle to read it.

* * * * *