Chapter VI: Part II: Three Years After (2)

"Oh no--excuse me--I don't think he does!" said Mary, quickly. "He said to me, the other day, that he should be very glad to pick his brains when he came home. And then he laughed and said he was a 'deuced clever fellow'--excuse the adjective--and it was a great thing to be 'as free as that chap was'--'without all sorts of boring colleagues and responsibilities.' Wasn't it like William?"

Lady Tranmore sighed.

"William shouldn't say those things."

"Of course, dear, he was only in fun. But I'll lay you a small wager, Cousin Elizabeth, that Kitty will ask Mr. Cliffe to lunch as soon as she knows he is in town."

Lady Tranmore turned away.

"I dare say. No one can answer for what Kitty will do. But Geoffrey Cliffe has said scandalous things of William."

"He won't say them again," said Mary, soothingly. "Besides, William never minds being abused a bit--does he?"

"He should mind," said Lady Tranmore, drawing herself up. "In my young days, our enemies were our enemies and our friends our friends. Nowadays nothing seems to matter. You may call a man a scoundrel one day and ask him to dinner the next. We seem to use words in a new sense--and I confess I don't like the change. Well, Mary, I sha'n't, of course, be rude to any friend of yours. But don't expect me to be effusive. And please remember that my acquaintance with Geoffrey Cliffe is older than yours."

Mary made a caressing reply, and gave her mind for the rest of the drive to the smoothing of Lady Tranmore's ruffled plumes. But it was not easy. As that lady made her way up the crowded staircase of the French Embassy, her fine face was still absent and a little stern.

Mary could only reflect that she had at least got through a first explanation which was bound to be made. Then for a few minutes her mind surrendered itself wholly to the question, "Will he be here?"

* * * * *

The rooms of the French Embassy were already crowded. An ambassador, short, stout, and somewhat morose, his plain features and snub nose emerging with difficulty from his thick, fair hair, superabundant beard, and mustache--with an elegant and smiling ambassadress, personifying amid the English crowd that Paris from which through every fibre she felt herself a pining exile--received the guests. The scene was ablaze with uniforms, for the Speaker had been giving a dinner, and Royalty was expected. But, as Lady Tranmore perceived at once, very few members of the House of Commons were present. A hot debate on some detail of the naval estimates had been sprung on ministers, and the whips on each side had been peremptorily keeping their forces in hand.

"I don't see either William or Kitty," said Mary, after a careful scrutiny not, in truth, directed to the discovery of the Ashes.

"No. I suppose William was kept, and Kitty did not care to come alone."

Mary said nothing. But she was well aware that Kitty was never restrained from going into society by the mere absence of her husband. Meanwhile Lady Tranmore was lost in secret anxieties as to what might have happened in Hill Street. Had there been a quarrel? Something certainly had gone wrong, or Kitty would be here.

"Lady Kitty not arrived?" said a voice, like a macaw's, beside her.

Elizabeth turned and shook hands with Lady Parham. That extraordinary woman, followed everywhere by the attentive observation of the crowd, had never asserted herself more sharply in dress, manner, and coiffure than on this particular evening--so it seemed, at least, to Lady Tranmore. Her ample figure was robed in the white satin of a bride, her wrinkled neck disappeared under a weight of jewels, and her bright chestnut wig, to which the diamond tiara was fastened, positively attacked the spectator, so patent was it and unashamed. Unashamed, too, were the bold, tyrannous eyes, the rouge-spots on either cheek, the strength of the jaw, the close-shut ability of the mouth. Elizabeth Tranmore looked at her with a secret passion of dislike. Her English pride of race, no less than the prejudices of her taste and training, could hardly endure the fact that, for William's sake, she must make herself agreeable to Lady Parham.

Agreeable, however, she tried to be. Kitty had seemed to her tired in the afternoon, and had, no doubt, gone to bed--so she averred.

Lady Parham laughed.

"Well, she mustn't be tired the night of my party next week--or the skies will fall. I never took so much trouble before about anything in my life."

"No, she must take care," said Lady Tranmore. "Unfortunately, she is not strong, and she does too much."

Lady Parham threw her a sharp look.

"Not strong? I should have thought Lady Kitty was made on wires. Well, if she fails me, I shall go to bed--with small-pox. There will be nothing else to be done. The Princess has actually put off another engagement to come--she has heard so much of Lady Kitty's reciting. But you'll help me through, won't you?"

And the wrinkled face and harsh lips fell into a contortion meant for a confidential smile; while through it all the eyes, wholly independent, studied the face beside her--closely, suspiciously--until the owner of it in her discomfort could almost have repeated aloud the words that were ringing in her mind--"I shall _not_ go to Lady Parham's! My note will reach her on the stroke of eight."

"Certainly--I will keep an eye on her!" she said, lightly. "But you know--since her illness--"

"Oh no!" said Lady Parham, impatiently, "she is very well--very well indeed. I never saw her look so radiant. By-the-way, did you hear your son's speech the other night? I did not see you in the gallery. A great pity if you missed it. It was admirable."

Lady Tranmore replied regretfully that she had not been there, and that she had not been able to have a word with him about it since.

"Oh, he knows he did well," said Lady Parham, carelessly. "They all do. Lord Parham was delighted. He could do nothing but talk about it at dinner. He says they were in a very tight place, and Mr. Ashe got them out."

Lady Tranmore expressed her gratification with all the dignity she could command, conscious meanwhile that her companion was not listening to a word, absorbed as she was in a hawklike examination of the room through a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses.

Suddenly the eye-glasses fell with a rattle.

"Good Heavens!" cried Lady Parham. "Do you see who that is talking to Mr. Loraine?"

Lady Tranmore looked, and at once perceived Geoffrey Cliffe in close conversation with the leader of the Opposition. The lady beside her gave an angry laugh.

"If Mr. Cliffe thinks he has done himself any good by these ridiculous telegrams of his, he will find himself mistaken! People are perfectly furious about them."

"Naturally," said Lady Tranmore. "Only that it is a pity to take him seriously."

"Oh, I don't know. He has his following; unfortunately, some of our own men are inclined to think that Parham should conciliate him. Ignore him, I say. Behave as though he didn't exist. Ah! by-the-way"--the speaker raised herself on tiptoe, and said, in an audacious undertone--"is it true that he may possibly marry your cousin, Miss Lyster?"

Lady Tranmore kept a smiling composure. "Is it true that Lord Parham may possibly give him an appointment?"

Lady Parham turned away in annoyance. "Is that one of the inventions going about?"

"There are so many," said Lady Tranmore.

At that moment, however, to her infinite relief, her companion abruptly deserted her. She was free to observe the two distant figures in conversation--Geoffrey Cliffe and Mr. Loraine, the latter a man now verging on old age, white-haired and wrinkled, but breathing still through every feature and every movement the scarcely diminished energy of his magnificent prime. He stood with bent head, listening attentively, but, as Lady Tranmore thought, coldly, to the arguments that Cliffe was pouring out upon him. Once he looked up in a sudden recoil, and there was a flash from an eye famous for its power of majestic or passionate rebuke. Cliffe, however, took no notice, and talked on, Loraine still listening.

"Look at them!" said Lady Parham, venomously, in the ear of one of her intimates. "We shall have all this out in the House to-morrow. The Opposition mean to play that man for all he's worth. Mr. Loraine, too--with his puritanical ways! I know what he thinks of Cliffe. He wouldn't _touch_ him in private. But in public--you'll see--he'll swallow him whole--just to annoy Parham. There's your politician."

And stiff with the angry virtue of the "ins," denouncing the faction of the "outs," Lady Parham passed on.

Elizabeth Tranmore meanwhile turned to look for Mary Lyster. She found her close behind, engaged in a perfunctory conversation, which evidently left her quite free to follow things more exciting. She, too, was watching; and presently it seemed to Lady Tranmore that her eyes met with those of Cliffe. Cliffe paused; abruptly lost the thread of his conversation with Mr. Loraine, and began to make his way through the crowded room. Lady Tranmore watched his progress with some attention. It was the progress, clearly, of a man much in the eye and mouth of the public. Whether the atmosphere surrounding him in these rooms was more hostile or more favorable, Lady Tranmore could not be quite sure. Certainly the women smiled upon him; and his strange face, thinner, browner, more weather-beaten and life-beaten than ever, under its crest of grizzling hair, had the old arrogant and picturesque power, but, as it seemed to her, with something added--something subtler, was it, more romantic than of yore? which arrested the spectator. Had he really been in love with that French woman? Lady Tranmore had heard it rumored that she was dead.

It was not towards Mary Lyster, primarily, that he was moving, Elizabeth soon discovered; it was towards herself. She braced herself for the encounter.

The greeting was soon over. After she herself had said the appropriate things, Lady Tranmore had time to notice that Mary Lyster, whose turn came next, did not attempt to say them. She looked, indeed, unusually handsome and animated; Lady Tranmore was certain that Cliffe had noticed as much, at his first sight of her. But the remarks she omitted showed how minute and recent was their knowledge of each other's movements. Cliffe himself gave a first impression of high spirits. He declared that London was more agreeable than he had ever known it, and that after his three years' absence nobody looked a day older. Then he inquired after Ashe.

Lady Tranmore replied that William was well, but hard-worked; she hoped to persuade him to get a few days abroad at Whitsuntide. Her manner was quiet, without a trace of either discourtesy or effusion. Cliffe began to twist his mustache, a sign she knew well. It meant that he was in truth both irritable and nervous.

"You think they'll last till Whitsuntide?"

"The government?" she said, smiling. "Certainly--and beyond."

"I give them three weeks," said Cliffe, twisting anew, with a vigor that gave her a positive physical sympathy with the tortured mustache. "There will be some papers out to-morrow that will be a bomb-shell."

"About America? Oh, they have been blown up so often! You, for instance, have been doing your best--for months."

His perfunctory laugh answered the mockery of her charming eyes.

"Well--I wish I could make William hear reason."

Lady Tranmore held herself stiffly. The Christian name seemed to her an offence. It was true that in old days he and Cliffe had been on those terms. Now--it was a piece of bad taste.

"Probably what is reason to you is folly to him," she said, dryly.

"No, no!--he _knows_," said Cliffe, with impatience. "The others don't. Parham is more impossible--more crassly, grossly ignorant!" He lifted hands and eyes in protest. "But Ashe, of course, is another matter altogether."

"Well, go and see him--go and talk to him!" said Lady Tranmore, still mocking. "There are no lions in the way."

"None," said Cliffe. "As a matter of fact, Lady Kitty has asked me to luncheon. But does one find Ashe himself in the middle of the day?"

At the mention of her daughter-in-law Elizabeth made an involuntary movement. Mary, standing beside her, turned towards her and smiled.

"Not often." The tone was cold. "But you could always find him at the House." And Lady Tranmore moved away.

"Is there a quiet corner anywhere?" said Cliffe to Mary. "I have such heaps to tell you."

So while some Polish gentleman in the main drawing-room, whose name ended in _ski_, challenged his violin to the impossible, Cliffe and Mary retired from observation into a small room thrown open with the rest of the suite, which was in truth the morning-room of the ambassadress.

As soon as they found themselves alone, there was a pause in their conversation; each involuntarily looked at the other. Mary certainly recognized that these years of absence had wrought a noticeable change in the man before her. He had aged. Hard living and hard travelling had left their marks. But, like Lady Tranmore, she also perceived another difference. The eyes bent upon her were indeed, as before, the eyes of a man self-centred, self-absorbed. There was no chivalrous softness in them, no consideration. The man who owned them used them entirely for his own purposes; they betrayed none of that changing instinctive relation towards the human being--any human being--within their range, which makes the charm of so many faces. But they were sadder, more sombre, more restless; they thrilled her more than they had already thrilled her once, in the first moment of her youth.

What was he going to say? From the moment of his first letter to her from Japan, Mary had perfectly understood that he had some fresh purpose in his mind. She was not anxious, however, to precipitate the moment of explanation. She was no longer the young girl whose equilibrium is upset by the mere approach of the man who interests her. Moreover, there was a past between herself and Cliffe, the memory of which might indeed point her to caution. Did he now, after all, want to marry her--because she was rich, and he was comparatively poor, and could only secure an English career at the cost of a well-stored wife? Well, all that should be thought over; by herself no less than by him. Meanwhile her vanity glowed within her, as she thus held him there, alone, to the discomfiture of other women more beautiful and more highly placed than herself; as she remembered his letters in her desk at home; and the secrets she imagined him to have told her. Then again she felt a rush of sudden disquiet, caused by this new aspect--wavering and remote--as though some hidden grief emerged and vanished. He had the haggard air of a man who scarcely sleeps. All that she had ever heard of the French affair rushed through her mind, stirring there an angry curiosity.

These impressions took, however, but a few minutes, while they exchanged some conventionalities. Then Cliffe said, scrutinizing the face and form beside him with that intentness which, from him, was more generally taken as compliment than offence:

"Will you excuse the remark? There are no women who keep their first freshness like Englishwomen."

"Thank you. If we feel fresh, I suppose we look it. As for you, you clearly want a rest."

"No time to think of it, then; I have come home to fight--all I know; to make myself as odious as possible."

Mary laughed.

"You have been doing that so long. Why not try the opposite?"

Cliffe looked at her sharply.

"You think I have made a failure of it?"

"Not at all. You have made everybody furiously uncomfortable, and you see how civil even the Radical papers are to you."

"Yes. What fools!" said Cliffe, shortly. "They'll soon leave that off. Just now I'm a stick to beat the government with. But you don't believe I shall carry my point?"

The point concerned a particular detail in a pending negotiation with the United States. Cliffe had been denouncing the government for what he conceived to be their coming retreat before American demands. America, according to him, had been playing the bully; and English interests were being betrayed.

Mary considered.

"I think you will have to change your tactics."

"Dictate them, then."

He bent forward, with that sudden change of manner, that courteous sweetness of tone and gesture, which few women could resist. Mary's heart, seasoned though it were, felt a charming flutter. She talked, and she talked well. She had no independence of mind, and very little real knowledge; but she had an excellent reporter's ability; she knew what to remember, and how to tell it. Cliffe listened to her attentively, acknowledging to himself the while that she had certainly gained. She was a far more definite personality than she had been when he last knew her; and her self-possession, her trained manner, rested him. Thank Heaven, she was not a clever woman--how he detested the breed! But she was a useful one. And the smiling commonplace into which she fell so often was positively welcome to him. He had known what it was to court a woman who was more than his equal both in mind and passion; and it had left him bitter and broken.

"Well, all this is most illuminating," he said at last. "I owe you immense thanks." And he put out a pair of hands, thin, brown, and weather-stained as his face, and pressed one of hers. "We're very old friends, aren't we?"

"Are we?" said Mary, drawing back.

"So far as any one can be the friend of a chap like me," he said, hastily. "Tell me, are you with Lady Tranmore?"

"No. I go to her in a few days--till I leave London."

"Don't go away," he said, suddenly and insistently. "Don't go away."

Mary could not help a slight wavering in the eyes that perforce met his. Then he said, abruptly, as she rose:

"By-the-way, they tell me Ashe is a great man."

She caught the note of incredulous contempt in his voice and laughed.

"They say he'll be in the cabinet directly."

"And Lady Kitty, I understand, is a scandal to gods and men, and the most fashionable person in town?"

"Oh, not now," said Mary. "That was last year."

"You mean people are tired of her?"

"Well, after a time, you know, a naughty child--"

"Becomes a bore. Is she a bore? I doubt; I very much doubt."

"Go and see," said Mary. "When do you lunch there?"

"I think to-morrow. Shall I find you?"

"Oh no. I am not at all intimate with Lady Kitty."

Cliffe's slight smile, as he followed her into the large drawing-room, died under his mustache. He divined at once the relation between the two, or thought he did.

As for Mary, she caught her last sight of Cliffe, standing bareheaded on the steps of the embassy, his lean distinction, his ugly good looks marking him out from the men around him. Then, as they drove away she was glad that the darkness hid her from Lady Tranmore. For suddenly she could not smile. She was filled with the perception that if Geoffrey Cliffe did not now ask her to marry him, life would utterly lose its savor, its carefully cherished and augmented savor, and youth would abandon her. At the same time she realized that she would have to make a fight of it, with every weapon she could muster.

IX

"Wasn't I expected?" said Darrell, with a chilly smile.

"Oh yes, sir--yes, sir!" said the Ashes' butler, as he looked distractedly round the drawing-room. "I believe her ladyship will be in directly. Will you kindly take a seat?"

The man's air of resignation convinced Darrell that Lady Kitty had probably gone out without any orders to her servants, and had now forgotten all about her luncheon-party--a state of things to which the Hill Street household was, no doubt, well accustomed.

"I shall claim some lunch," he thought to himself, "whatever happens. These young people want keeping in their place. Ah!"

For he had observed, placed on a small easel, the print of Madame de Longueville in costume, and he put up his eye-glass to look at it. He guessed at once that its appearance there was connected with the fancy ball which was now filling London with its fame, and he examined it with some closeness. "Lady Kitty will make a stir in it--no doubt of that!" he said to himself, as he turned away. "She has the keenest _flair_ of them all for what produces an effect. None of the others can touch her--Mrs. Alcot--none of them!"

He was thinking of the other members of a certain group, at that time well known in London society--a group characterized chiefly by the beauty, extravagance, and audacity of the women belonging to it. It was by no means a group of mere fashionables. It contained a large amount of ability and accomplishment; some men of aristocratic family, who were also men of high character, with great futures before them; some persons from the literary or artistic world, who possessed, besides their literary or artistic gifts, a certain art of agreeable living, and some few others--especially young girls--admitted generally for some peculiar quality of beauty or manner outside the ordinary canons. Money was really presupposed by the group as a group. The life they belonged to was a life of the rich, the houses they met in were rich houses. But money as such had no power whatever to buy admission to their ranks; and the members of the group were at least as impatient of the claims of mere wealth as they were of those of mere virtue.

On the whole the group was an element of ferment and growth in the society that had produced it. Its impatience of convention and restraint, the exaltation of intellectual or artistic power which prevailed in it, and even the angry opposition excited by its pretensions and its exclusiveness, were all, perhaps, rather profitable than harmful at that moment of our social history. Old customs were much shaken; the new were shaping themselves, and this daring coterie of young and brilliant people, living in one another's houses, calling one another by their Christian names, setting a number of social rules at defiance, discussing books, making the fame of artists, and, now and then, influencing politics, were certainly helping to bring the new world to birth. Their foes called them "The Archangels," and they themselves had accepted the name with complacency.

Kitty, of course, was an Archangel, so was Mrs. Alcot. Cliffe had belonged to them before his travels began. Louis Harman was more or less of their tribe, and Lady Tranmore, though not herself an Archangel, entertained the set in London and in the country. Like various older women connected with the group, she was not of them, but she "harbored" them.

Darrell was well aware that he did not belong to them, though personally he was acquainted with almost all the members of the group. He was not completely indifferent to his exclusion; and this fact annoyed him more than the exclusion itself.

He had scarcely finished his inspection of the print when the door again opened and Geoffrey Cliffe entered. Darrell had not yet seen him since his return and since his attack on the government had made him the hero of the hour. Of the newspaper success Darrell was no less jealous and contemptuous than Lady Tranmore, though for quite other reasons. But he knew better than she the intellectual quality of the man, and his disdain for the journalist was tempered by his considerable though reluctant respect for the man of letters.

They greeted each other coolly, while Cliffe, not seeing his hostess, looked round him with annoyance.

"Well, we shall probably entertain each other," said Darrell, as they sat down. "Lady Kitty often forgets her engagements."

"Does she?" said Cliffe, coldly, pretending to glance through a book beside him. It touched his vanity that his hostess was not present, and still more that Darrell should suppose him a person to be forgotten. Darrell, however, who had no mind for any discomfort that might be avoided, made a few dexterous advances, Cliffe's brow relaxed, and they were soon in conversation.

The position of the ministry naturally presented itself as a topic. Two or three retirements were impending, the whole position was precarious. Would the cabinet be reconstructed without a dissolution, or must there be an appeal to the country?

Cliffe was passionately in favor of the latter course. The party fortunes could not possibly be retrieved without a general shuffling of the cards, and an opportunity for some wholly fresh combination involving new blood.

"In any case," said Cliffe, "I suppose our friend here is sure of one or other of the big posts?"

"William Ashe? Oh, I suppose so, unless some intrigue gets in the way." Darrell dropped his voice. "Parham doesn't, in truth, hit it off with him very well. Ashe is too clever, and Parham doesn't understand his paradoxes."

"Also I gather," said Cliffe, with a smile, "that Lady Parham has her say?"

Darrell shrugged his shoulders.

"It sounds incredible that one should still have to reckon with that kind of thing at this time of day. But I dare say it's true."

"However, I imagine Lady Kitty--by-the-way, how much longer shall we give her?"--Cliffe looked at his watch with a frown--"may be trusted to take care of that."

Darrell merely raised his eyebrows, without replying. "What, not a match for one Lady Parham?" said Cliffe, with a laugh. "I should have thought--from my old recollections of her--she would have been a match for twenty?"

"Oh, if she cared to try."

"She is not ambitious?"

"Certainly; but not always for the same thing."

"She is trying to run too many horses abreast?"

"Oh, I am not a great friend," said Darrell, smiling. "I should never dream of analyzing Lady Kitty. Ah!"--he turned his head--"are we not forgotten, or just remembered--which?"

For a rapid step approached, the door opened, and a lady appeared on the threshold. It was not Kitty, however. The new-comer advanced, putting up a pair of fashionable eye-glasses, and looking at the two men in a kind of languid perplexity, intended, as Darrell immediately said to himself, merely to prolong the moment and the effect of her entry. Mrs. Alcot was very tall, and inordinately thin. Her dark head on its slim throat, the poetic lines of the brow, her half-shut eyes, the gleam of her white teeth, and all the delicate detail of her dress, and, one might even say, of her manner, gave an impression of beauty, though she was not, in truth, beautiful. But she had grace and she had daring--the two essential qualities of an Archangel; she was also a remarkable artist, and no small critic.

"Mr. Cliffe," she said, with a start of what was evidently agreeable surprise, "Kitty never told me. When did you come?"

"I arrived a few days ago. Why weren't you at the embassy last night?"

"Because I was much better employed. I have given up crushes. But I would have come--to meet you. Ah, Mr. Darrell!" she added, in another tone, holding out an indifferent hand. "Where is Kitty?" She looked round her.

"Shall we order lunch?" said Darrell, who had given her a greeting as careless as her own.

"Kitty is really too bad; she is never less than an hour late," said Mrs. Alcot, seating herself. "Last time she dined with us I asked her for seven-thirty. She thought something very special must be happening, and arrived--breathless--at half-past eight. Then she was furious with me because she was not the last. But one can't do it twice. Well"--addressing herself to Cliffe--"are you come home to stay?"

"That depends," said Cliffe, "on whether England makes itself agreeable to me."

"What are your deserts? Why should England be agreeable to you?" she replied, with a smiling sharpness. "You do nothing but croak about England."

Thus challenged, Cliffe sat down beside her and they fell into a bantering conversation. Darrell, though inwardly wounded by the small trouble they took to include him, let nothing appear, put in a word now and then, or turned over the pages of the illustrated books.

After five minutes a fresh guest arrived. In walked the little Dean, Dr. Winston, who had originally made acquaintance with Lady Kitty at Grosville Park. He came in overflowing with spirits and enthusiasm. He had been spending the morning in Westminster Abbey with another Dean more famous though not more charming than himself, and with yet another congenial spirit, one of the younger historians, all of them passionate lovers of the rich human detail of the past, the actual men and women, kings, queens, bishops, executioners, and all the shreds and tatters that remained of them. Together they had opened a royal tomb, and the Dean's eyes were sparkling as though the ghost of the queen whose ashes he had been handling still walked and talked with him.

He passed in his light, disinterested way through most sections of English society, though the slave of none; and he greeted Darrell and Mrs. Alcot as acquaintances. Mrs. Alcot introduced Cliffe to him, and the small Dean bowed rather stiffly. He was a supporter of the government, and he thought Cliffe's campaign against them vulgar and unfair.

"Is there no hope of Lady Kitty?" he said to Mrs. Alcot.

"Not much. Shall we go down to lunch?"

"Without our hostess?" The Dean opened his eyes.

"Oh, Kitty expects it," said Mrs. Alcot, with affected resignation, "and the servants are quite prepared. Kitty asks everybody to lunch--then somebody asks her--and she forgets. It's quite simple."

"Quite," said Cliffe, buttoning up his coat, "but I think I shall go to the club."

He was looking for his hat, when again there was a commotion on the stairs--a high voice giving orders--and in burst Kitty. She stood still as soon as she saw her guests, talking so fast and pouring out such a flood of excuses that no one could get in a word. Then she flew to each guest in turn, taking them by both hands--Darrell only excepted--and showing herself so penitent, amusing, and charming that everybody was propitiated. It was Fanchette, of course--Fanchette the criminal, the incomparable. Her dress for the ball. Kitty raised eyes and hands to heaven--it would be a marvel, a miracle. Unless, indeed, she were lying cold and quiet in her little grave before the time came to wear it. But Fanchette's tempers--Fanchette's caprices--no! Kitty began to mimic the great dressmaker torn to pieces by the crowd of fashionable ladies, stopping abruptly in the middle to say to Cliffe:

"You were going away? I saw you take up your hat."

"I despaired of my hostess," said Cliffe, with a smile. Then as he perceived that Mrs. Alcot had taken up the theme and was holding the others in play, he added in a lower voice, "and I was in no mood for second-best."

Kitty's eyes twinkled a moment as she turned them on Madeleine Alcot.

"Ah, _I_ remember--at Grosville Park--what a bad temper you had. You would have gone away furious."

"With disappointment--yes," said Cliffe, as he looked at her with an admiration he scarcely endeavored to conceal. Kitty was in black, but a large hat of white tulle, in the most extravagant fashion of the day, made a frame for her hair and eyes, and increased the general lightness and fantasy of her appearance. Cliffe tried to recall her as he had first seen her at Grosville Park, but his recollection of the young girl could not hold its own against the brilliant and emphatic reality before him.

At luncheon it chafed him that he must divide her with the Dean. Yet she was charming with the old man, who chatted history, art, and Paris to her, with a delightful innocence and ignorance of all that made Lady Kitty Ashe the talk of the town, and an old-fashioned deference besides, that insensibly curbed her manner and her phrases as she answered him. Yet when the Dean left her free she returned to Cliffe, as though in some sort they two had really been talking all the time, through all the apparent conversation with other people.

"I have read all your telegrams," she said. "Why did you attack William so fiercely?"

Cliffe was taken by surprise, but he felt no embarrassment--her tone was not that of the wife in arms.

"I attacked the official--not the man. William knows that."

"He is coming in to-day if possible. He wanted to see you."

"Good news! William knows that he would have hit just as hard in my place."

"I don't think he would," said Kitty, calmly. "He is so generous."

The color rushed to Cliffe's face.

"Well scored! I wish I had a wife to play these strokes for me. I shall argue that a keen politician has no right to be generous. He is at war."

Kitty took no notice. She leaned her little chin on her hand, and her eyes perused the face of her companion.

"Where have you been--all the time--before America?"

"In the deserts--fighting devils," said Cliffe, after a moment.

"What does that mean?" she asked, wondering.

"Read my new book. That will tell you about the deserts."

"And the devils?"

"Ah, I keep them to myself."

"Do you?" she said, softly. "I have just read your poems over again."

Cliffe gave a slight start, then looked indifferent.

"Have you? But they were written three years ago. Dieu merci, one finds new devils like new acquaintances."

She shook her head.

"What do you mean?" he asked her, half amused, half arrested.

"They are always the old," she said, in a low voice. Their eyes met. In hers was the same veiled, restless melancholy as in his own. Together with the dazzling air of youth that surrounded her, the cherished, flattered, luxurious existence that she and her house suggested, they made a strange impression upon him. "Does she mean me to understand that she is not happy?" he thought to himself. But the next moment she was engaged in a merry chatter with the Dean, and all trace of the mood she had thus momentarily shown him had vanished.

Half-way through the luncheon, Ashe came in. He appeared, fresh and smiling, irreproachably dressed, and showing no trace whatever of the hard morning of official work he had just passed through, nor of the many embarrassments which, as every one knew, were weighing on the Foreign Office. The Dean, with his keen sense for the dramatic, watched the meeting between him and Cliffe with some closeness, having in mind the almost personal duel between the two men--a duel of letters, telegrams, or speeches, which had been lately carried on in the sight of Europe and America. For Ashe now represented the Foreign Office in the House of Commons, and had been much badgered by the Tory extremists who followed Cliffe.

Naturally, being Englishmen, they met as though nothing had happened and they had parted the day before in Pall Mall. A "Hullo, Ashe!" and "Hullo, Cliffe! glad to see you back again," completed the matter. The Dean enjoyed it as a specimen of English "phlegm," recalling with amusement his last visit to the Paris of the Second Empire--Paris torn between government and opposition, the _salons_ of the one divided from the _salons_ of the other by a sulphurous gulf, unless when some Lazarus of the moment, some well-known novelist or poet, cradled in the Abraham's bosom of Liberalism, passed amid shrieks of triumph or howls of treason into the official inferno.

Not that there was any avoiding of topics in this English case. Ashe had no sooner slipped into his seat than he began to banter Cliffe upon a letter of a supporter which had appeared in that morning's _Times_. It was written by Lord S., who had played the part of public "fool" for half a generation. To be praised by him was disaster, and Cliffe's flush showed at once that the letter had caused him acute annoyance. He and Ashe fell upon the writer, vying with each other in anecdotes that left him presently close-plucked and bare.

"That's all very well," said Kitty, amid the laughter which greeted the last tale, "but he never told _you_ how he proposed to the second Lady S."

And lifting a red strawberry, which she held poised against her red, laughing lips, she waited a moment--looking round her. "Go on, Kitty," said Ashe, approvingly; "go on."

Thus permitted, Kitty gave one of the little "scenes," arranged from some experience of her own, which were very famous among her intimates. Ashe called them her "parlor tricks," and was never tired of making her exhibit them. And now, just as at Grosville Park, she held her audience. She spoke without a halt, her small features answering perfectly to every impulse of her talent, each touch of character or dialogue as telling as a malicious sense of comedy could make it; arms, hands, shoulders all aiding in the final result--a table swept by a very storm of laughter, in the midst of which Kitty quietly finished her strawberry.

"Well done, Kitty!" Ashe, who sat opposite to her, stretched his hand across, and patted hers.

"Does she love him?" Cliffe asked himself, and could not make up his mind, closely as he tried to observe their relations. He was more and more conscious of the exciting effect she produced on himself, doubly so, indeed, because of that sudden stroke of melancholy wherewith--like a Rembrandt shadow, she had thrown into relief the gayety and frivolity of her ordinary mood.

The stimulus, whatever it was, played upon his vanity. He, too, sought an opening and found it. Soon it was he who was monopolizing the conversation with an account of two days spent with Bismarck in a Prussian country-house, during the triumphant days of the winter which followed on Sadowa. The story was brilliantly told, and of some political importance. But it was disfigured by arrogance and affectation, and Ashe's eyes began to dance a little. Cliffe meanwhile could not forget that he was in the presence of a rival and an official, could not refrain after a while from a note of challenge here and there. The conversation diverged from the tale into matters of current foreign politics. Ashe, lounging and smoking, at first knew nothing, had heard of nothing, as usual. Then a comment or correction dropped out; Cliffe repeated himself vehemently--only to provoke another. Presently, no one knew how, the two men were measured against each other _corps à corps_--the wide knowledge and trained experience of the minister against the originality, the force, the fantastic imagination of the writer.

The Dean watched it with delight. He was very fond of Ashe, and liked to see him getting the better of "the newspaper fellow." Kitty's lovely brown eyes travelled from one to the other. Now it seemed to the Dean that she was proud of Ashe, now that she sympathized with Cliffe. Soon, however, like the god at Philippi, she swept upon the poet and bore him from the field.

"Not a word more politics!" she said, peremptorily, to Ashe, holding up her hand. "_I_ want to talk to Mr. Cliffe about the ball."

Cliffe was not very ready to obey. He had an angry sense of having been somehow shown to disadvantage, and would like to have challenged his host again. But Kitty poured balm into his wounds. She drew him apart a little, using the play of her beautiful eyes for him only, and talking to him in a new voice of deference.

"You're going, of course? Lady M. told me the other day she _must_ have you."

Cliffe, still a little morose, replied that his invitation had been waiting for him at his London rooms. He gave the information carelessly, as though it did not matter to him a straw. In reality, as soon as, while still in America, he had seen the announcement of the ball in one of the New York papers, he had written at once to the Marchioness who was to give it--an old acquaintance of his--practically demanding an invitation. It had been sent indeed with alacrity, and without waiting for its arrival Cliffe had ordered his dress in Paris. Kitty inquired what it was to be.

"I told my man to copy a portrait of Alva."

"Ah, that's right," said Kitty, nodding--"that's right. Only it would have been better if it had been Torquemada."

Rather nettled, Cliffe asked what there might be about him that so forcibly suggested the Grand Inquisitor. Kitty, cigarette in hand, with half-shut eyes, did not answer immediately. She seemed to be perusing his face with difficulty.

"Strength, I suppose," she said at last, slowly. Cliffe waited, then burst into a laugh.

"And cruelty?" She nodded.

"Who are my victims?"

She said nothing.

"Whose tales have you been listening to, Lady Kitty?"

She mentioned the name of a French lady. Cliffe changed countenance.

"Ah, well, if you have been talking to her," he said, haughtily, "you may well expect to see me appear as Diabolus in person."

"No. But it's since then that I've read the poems again. You see, you tell the public so much--"

"That you think you have the right to guess the rest?" He paused, then added, with impatience, "Don't guess, Lady Kitty. You have everything that life can give you. Let my secrets alone."

There was silence. Kitty looking round her saw that Madeleine Alcot was entertaining her other guests, and that she and Cliffe were unobserved. Suddenly Cliffe bent towards her, and said, with roughness, his face struggling to conceal the feeling behind it:

"You heard--and you believed--that I tormented her--that I killed her?"

The anguish in his eyes seemed to strike a certain answering fire from Kitty's.

"Yes, but--"

"But what?"

"I didn't think it very strange--"

Cliffe watched her closely.

"--that a man should be--an inhuman beast--if he were jealous--and desperate. You can sympathize with these things?"

She drew a long breath, and threw away the cigarette she had been holding suspended in her small fingers.

"I don't know anything about them."

"Because," he hesitated, "your own life has been so happy?"

She evaded him. "Don't you think that jealousy will soon be as dead as--saying your prayers and going to church? I never meet anybody that cares enough--to be jealous."

She spoke first with passionate force, then with contempt, glancing across the room at Madeleine Alcot. Cliffe saw the look, and remembered that Mrs. Alcot's husband, a distinguished treasury official, had been for years the intimate friend of a very noble and beautiful woman, herself unhappily married. There was no scandal in the matter, though much talk. Mrs. Alcot meanwhile had her own affairs; her husband and she were apparently on friendly terms; only neither ever spoke of the other; and their relations remained a mystery.

Cliffe bent over to Kitty.

"And yet you said you could understand?--such things didn't seem strange to you."

She gave a little, reckless laugh.

"Did I? It's like the people who think they could act or sing, if they only had the chance. I choose to think I could feel. And of course I couldn't. We've lost the power. All the old, horrible, splendid things are dead and done with."

"The old passions, you mean?"

"And the old poems! _You'll_ never write like that again."

"God forbid!" said Cliffe, under his breath. Then as Kitty rose he followed her with his eyes. "Lady Kitty, you've thrown me a challenge that you hardly understand. Some day I must answer it."

"Don't answer it," said Kitty, hastily.

"Yes, if I can drag the words out," he said, sombrely. She met his look in a kind of fascination, excited by the memory of the story which had been told her, by her own audacity in speaking of it, by the presence of the dead passion she divined lying shrouded and ghastly in the mind of the man beside her. Even the ugly things of which he was accused did but add to the interest of his personality for a nature like hers, greedy of experience, and discontented with the real.

While he on his side was nattered and astonished by her attitude towards him, as Ashe's wife, she would surely dislike and try to trample on him. That was what he had expected.

* * * * *

"I hear you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty," said the Dean, who, having obstinately outstayed all the other guests, had now settled his small person and his thin legs into a chair beside his hostess with a view to five agreeable minutes. He was the most harmless of social epicures, was the Dean, and he felt that Lady Kitty had defrauded him at lunch in favor of that great, ruffling, Byronic fellow Cliffe, who ought to have better taste than to come lunching with the Ashes.

"Am I?" said Kitty, who had thrown herself into the corner of a sofa, and sat curled up there in an attitude which the Dean thought charming, though it would not, he was aware, "have become Mrs. Winston.

"Well, you know best," said the Dean. "But, at any rate, be good and explain to me what is an Archangel."

"Somebody whom most men and all women dislike," said Kitty, promptly.

"Yet they seem to be numerous," remarked the Dean.

"Not at all!" cried Kitty, with an air of offence; "not at all! If they were numerous they would, of course, be popular."

"And in fact they are rare--and detested? What other characteristics have they?"

"Courage," said Kitty, looking up.

"Courage to break rules? I hear they all call one another by their Christian names, and live in one another's rooms, and borrow one another's money, and despise conventionalities. I am sorry you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty."

"I didn't admit that I was," said Kitty, "but if I am, why are you sorry?"

"Because," said the Dean, smiling, "I thought you were too clever to despise conventionalities."

Kitty sat up with revived energy, and joined battle. She flew into a tirade as to the dulness and routine of English life, the stupidity of good people, and the tyranny of English hypocrisy. The Dean listened with amusement, then with a shade of something else. At last he got up to go.

"Well, you know, we have heard all that before. My point of view is so much more interesting--subtle--romantic! Anybody can attack Mrs. Grundy, but only a person of originality can adore her. Try it, Lady Kitty. It would be really worth your while."

Kitty mocked and exclaimed.

"Do you know what that phrase--that name of abomination--always recalls to me?" pursued the old man.

"It bores me, even to guess," was Kitty's petulant reply.

"Does it? I think of some of the noblest people I have ever known--brave men--beautiful women--who fought Mrs. Grundy, and perished."

The Dean stood looking down upon her, with an eager, sensitive expression. Tales that he had heeded very little when he had first heard them ran through his mind; he had thought Lady Kitty's intimate _tête-à-tête_ with her husband's assailant in the press disagreeable and unseemly; and as for Mrs. Alcot, he had disliked her particularly.

Kitty looked up unquelled.

"''Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all--'"

she quoted, with one of her most radiant and provoking smiles.

"Incorrigible!" cried the Dean, catching up his hat. "I see! Once an Archangel--always an Archangel."

"Oh no!" said Kitty. "There may be 'war in heaven.'"

"Well, don't take Mrs. Alcot for a leader, that's all," said the Dean, as he held out a hand of farewell.

"And now I understand!" cried Kitty, triumphantly. "You detest my best friend."

The Dean laughed, protested, and went. Ashe, who had been writing letters while Kitty and the Dean were talking, escorted the old man to the door.

* * * * *

When he returned he found Kitty sitting with her hands in her lap, lost apparently in thought.

"Darling," he said, looking at his watch, "I must be off directly, but I should like to see the boy."

Kitty started. She rang, and the child was brought down. He sat on Kitty's knee, and Ashe coming to the sofa, threw an arm round them both.

"You are not a bad-looking pair," he said, kissing first Kitty and then the baby. "But he's rather pale, Kitty. I think he wants the country."

Kitty said nothing, but she lifted the little white embroidered frock and looked at the twisted foot. Then Ashe felt her shudder.

"Dear, don't be morbid!" he cried, resentfully. "He will have so much brains that nobody will remember that. Think of Byron."

Kitty did not seem to have heard.

"I remember so well when I first saw his foot--after your mother told me--and they brought him to me," she said, slowly. "It seemed to me it was the end--"

"The end of what?"

"Of my dream."

"What _do_ you mean, Kitty!"

"Do you remember the mask in the 'Tempest'? First Iris, with saffron wings, and rich Ceres, and great Juno--"

She half closed her eyes.

"Then the nymphs and the reapers--dancing together on 'the short-grassed green,' the sweetest, gayest show--"

She breathed the words out softly. "Then, suddenly--"

She sat up stiffly and struck her small hands together:

"Prospero starts and speaks. And in a moment--without warning--with 'a strange, hollow, and confused noise'"--she dragged the words drearily--"_they heavily vanish_. That"--she pointed, shuddering, to the child's foot--"was for me the sign of Prospero."

Ashe looked at her with anxiety, finding it indeed impossible to laugh at her.

She was very pale, her breath came with difficulty, and she trembled from head to foot. He tried to draw her into his arms, but she held him away.

"That first year I had been so happy," she continued, in the same voice. "Everything was so perfect, so glorious. Life was like a great pageant, in a palace. All the old terrors went. I often had fears as a child--fears I couldn't put into words, but that overshadowed me. Then when I saw Alice--the shadow came nearer. But that was all gone. I thought God was reconciled to me, and would always be kind to me now. And then I saw that foot, and I knew that He hated me still. He had burned His mark into my baby's flesh. And I was never to be quite happy again, but always in fear, fear of pain--and death--and grief--"

She paused. Her large eyes gazed into vacancy, and her whole slight frame showed the working of some mysterious and pitiful distress.

A wave of poignant alarm swept through Ashe's mind, coupled also with a curious sense of something foreseen. He had never witnessed precisely this mood in her before; but now that it was thus revealed, he was suddenly aware "that something like it had been for long moving obscurely below the surface of her life. He took the child and laid him on the floor, where he rolled at ease, cooing to himself. Then he came back to Kitty, and soothed her with extraordinary tenderness and skill. Presently she looked at him, as though some obscure trouble of which she had been the victim had released her, and she were herself again.

"Don't go away just yet," she said, in a voice which was still low and shaken. He came close to her, again put his arms round her, and held her on his breast in silence.

"That is heavenly!" he heard her say to herself after a while, in a whisper.

"Kitty!" His eyes grew dim and he stooped to kiss her.

"Heavenly--" she went on, still as though following out her own thought rather than speaking to him, "because one _yields_--_yields_! Life is such tension--always."

She closed her eyes quickly, and he watched the beautiful lashes lying still upon her cheek. With an emotion he could not explain--for it was not an emotion of the senses, just as her yielding had not been a yielding of the senses but a yielding of the soul--he continued to hold her in his arms, her life, her will given to him wholly, sighed out upon his heart.

* * * * *

Then gradually she recovered her balance; the normal Kitty came back. She put out her hand and touched his face.

"You must go back to the House, William."

"Yes, if you are all right."

She sat up, and began to rearrange some of her hair that had slipped down.

"You have carried us both into such heights and depths, darling!" said Ashe, after he had watched her a little in silence, "that I have forgotten to tell you the gossip I brought back from mother this morning."

Kitty paused, interrogatively. She was still pale.

"Do you know that mother is convinced Mary Lyster has made up her mind to marry Cliffe?"

There was a pause, then Kitty said, with incredulous contempt: "He would never _dream_ of marrying her!"

"Not so sure! She has a great deal of money, and Cliffe wants money badly."