"How strange!" thought the Dean, as he once more stepped back into the street to look at the front of the Home Secretary's house in Hill Street. "He is certainly in town."
For, according to the Times, William Ashe the night before had been hotly engaged in the House of Commons fighting an important bill, of which he was in charge, through committee. Yet the blinds of the house in Hill Street were all drawn, and the Dean had not yet succeeded in getting any one to answer the bell.
He returned to the attack, and this time a charwoman appeared. At sight of the Dean's legs and apron, she dropped a courtesy, or something like one, informing him that they had workmen in the house and Mr. Ashe was "staying with her ladyship."
The Dean took the Tranmores' number in Park Lane and departed thither, not without a sad glance at the desolate hall behind the charwoman and at the darkened windows of the drawing-room overhead. He thought of that May day two years before when he had dropped in to lunch with Lady Kitty; his memory, equally effective whether it summoned the detail of an English chronicle or the features of a face once seen, placed firm and clear before him the long-chinned fellow at Lady Kitty's left, to whose villany that empty and forsaken house bore cruel witness. And the little lady herself—what a radiant and ethereal beauty! Ah me! ah me!
He walked on in meditation, his hands behind his back. Even in this May London the little Dean was capable of an abstracted spirit, and he had still much to think over. He had his appointment with Ashe. But Ashe had written—evidently in a press of business—from the House, and had omitted to mention his temporary change of address. The Dean regretted it. He would rather have done his errand with Lady Kitty's injured husband on some neutral ground, and not in Lady Tranmore's house.
At Park Lane, however, he was immediately admitted.
"Mr. Ashe will be down directly, sir," said the butler, as he ushered the visitor into the commodious library on the ground-floor, which had witnessed for so long the death-in-life of Lord Tranmore. But now Lord Tranmore was bedridden up-stairs, with two nurses to look after him, and to judge from the aspect of the tables piled with letters and books, and from the armful of papers which a private secretary carried off with him as he disappeared before the Dean, Ashe was now fully at home in the room which had been his father's.
There was still a fire in the grate, and the small Dean, who was a chilly mortal, stood on the rug looking nervously about him. Lord Tranmore had been in office himself, and the room, with its bookshelves filled with volumes in worn calf bindings, its solid writing-tables and leather sofas, its candlesticks and inkstands of old silver, slender and simple in pattern, its well-worn Turkey carpet, and its political portraits—"the Duke," Johnny Russell, Lord Althorp, Peel, Melbourne—seemed, to the observer on the rug, steeped in the typical habit and reminiscence of English public life.
Well, if the father, poor fellow, had been distinguished in his day, the son had gone far beyond him. The Dean ruminated on a conversation wherewith he had just beguiled his cup of tea at the Athenæum—a conversation with one of the shrewdest members of Lord Parham's cabinet, a "new man," and an enthusiastic follower of Ashe.
"Ashe is magnificent! At last our side has found its leader. Oh! Parham will disappear with the next appeal to the country. He is getting too infirm! Above all, his eyes are nearly gone; his oculist, I hear, gives him no more than six months' sight, unless he throws up. Then Ashe will take his proper place, and if he doesn't make his mark on English history, I'm a Dutchman. Oh! of course that affair last year was an awful business—the two affairs! When Parliament opened in February there were some of us who thought that Ashe would never get through the session. A man so changed, so struck down, I have seldom seen. You remember what a handsome boy he was, up to last year even! Now he's a middle-aged man. All the same, he held on, and the House gave him that quiet sympathy and support that it can give when it likes a fellow. And gradually you could see the life come back into him—and the ambition. By George! he did well in that trade-union business before Easter; and the bill that's on now—it's masterly, the way in which he's piloting it through! The House positively likes to be managed by him; it's a sight worthy of our best political traditions. Oh yes, Ashe will go far; and, thank God, that wretched little woman—what has become of her, by-the-way?—has neither crushed his energy nor robbed England of his services. But it was touch and go."
To all of which the Dean had replied little or nothing. But his heart had sunk within him; and the doubtfulness of a certain enterprise in which he was engaged had appeared to him in even more startling colors than before.
However, here he was. And suddenly, as he stood before the fire, he bowed his white head, and said to himself a couple of verses from one of the Psalms for the day:
"Who will lead me into the strong city: who will bring me into Edom?
Oh, be thou our help in trouble: for vain is the help of man."
The door opened, and the Dean straightened himself impetuously, every nerve tightening to its work.
"How do you do, my dear Dean?" said Ashe, enclosing the frail, ascetic hand in both his own. "I trust I have not kept you waiting. My mother was with me. Sit there, please; you will have the light behind you."
"Thank you. I prefer standing a little, if you don't mind—and I like the fire."
Ashe threw himself into a chair and shaded his eyes with his hand. The Dean noticed the strains of gray in his curly hair, and that aspect, as of something withered and wayworn, which had invaded the man's whole personality, balanced, indeed, by an intellectual dignity and distinction which had never been so commanding. It was as though the stern and constant wrestle of the mind had burned away all lesser things—the old, easy grace, the old, careless pleasure in life.
"I think you know," began the Dean, clearing his throat, "why I asked you to see me?"
"You wished, I think, to speak to me—about my wife," said Ashe, with difficulty.
Under his sheltering hand, his eyes looked straight before him into the fire.
The Dean fidgeted a moment, lifted a small Greek vase on the mantel-piece, and set it down—then turned round.
"I heard from her ten days ago—the most piteous letter. As you know, I had always a great regard for her. The news of last year was a sharp sorrow to me—as though she had been a daughter. I felt I must see her. So I put myself into the train and went to Venice."
Ashe started a little, but said nothing.
"Or, rather, to Treviso, for, as I think you know, she is there with Lady Alice."
"Yes, that I had heard."
The Dean paused again, then moved a little nearer to Ashe, looking down upon him.
"May I ask—stop me if I seem impertinent—how much you know of the history of the winter?"
"Very little!" said Ashe, in a low voice. "My mother got some information from the English consul at Trieste, who is a friend of hers—to whom, it seems, Lady Kitty applied; but it did not amount to much."
The Dean drew a small note-book from a breast-pocket and looked at some entries in it.
"They seem to have reached Marinitza in November If I understood aright, Lady Kitty had no maid with her?"
"No. The maid Blanche was sent home from Verona."
"How Lady Kitty ever got through the journey!—or the winter!" said the Dean, throwing up his hands. "Her health, of course, is irreparably injured. But that she did not die a dozen times over, of hardship and misery, is the most astonishing thing! They were in a wretched village, nearly four thousand feet up, a village of wooden huts, with a wooden hospital. All the winter nearly they were deep in snow, and Lady Kitty worked as a nurse. Cliffe seems to have been away fighting, very often, and at other times came back to rest and see to supplies."
"I understand she passed as his wife?" said Ashe.
The Dean made a sign of reluctant assent.
"They lived in a little house near the hospital. She tells me that after the first two months she began to loathe him, and she moved into the hospital to escape him. He tried at first to melt and propitiate her; but when he found that it was no use, and that she was practically lost to him, he changed his temper, and he might have behaved to her like the tyrant he is but that her hold over the people among whom they were living, both on the fighting-men and the women, had become by this time greater than his own. They adored her, and Cliffe dared not ill-treat her. And so it went on through the winter. Sometimes they were on more friendly terms than at others. I gather that when he showed his dare-devil, heroic side she would relent to him, and talk as though she loved him. But she would never go back—to live with him; and that after a time alienated him completely. He was away more and more; and at last she tells me there was a handsome Bosnian girl, and—well, you can imagine the rest. Lady Kitty was so ill in March that they thought her dying, but she managed to write to this consul you spoke of at Trieste, and he sent up a doctor and a nurse. But this you probably know?"
"Yes," said Ashe, hoarsely. "I heard that she was apparently very ill when she reached Treviso, but that she had rallied under Alice's nursing. Lady Alice wrote to my mother."
"Did she tell Lady Tranmore anything of Lady Kitty's state of mind?" said the Dean, after a pause.
Ashe also was slow in answering. At last he said:
"I understand there has been great regret for the past."
"Regret!" cried the Dean. "If ever there was a terrible case of the dealings of God with a human soul—"
He began to walk up and down impetuously, wrestling with emotion.
"Did she give you any explanation," said Ashe, presently, in a voice scarcely audible—"of their meeting at Verona? You know my mother believed—that she had broken with him—that all was saved. Then came a letter from the maid, written at Kitty's direction, to say that she had left her mistress—and they had started for Bosnia."
"No; I tried. But she seemed to shrink with horror from everything to do with Verona. I have always supposed that fellow in some way got the information he wanted—bought it no doubt—and pursued her. But that she honestly meant to break with him I have no doubt at all."
Ashe said nothing.
"Think," said the Dean, "of the effect of that man's sudden appearance—of his romantic and powerful personality—your wife alone, miserable—doubting your love for her—"
Ashe raised his hand with a gesture of passion.
"If she had had the smallest love left for me she could have protected herself! I had written to her—she knew—"
His voice broke. The Dean's face quivered.
"My dear fellow—God knows—" He broke off. When he recovered composure he said:
"Let us go back to Lady Kitty. Regret is no word to express what I saw. She is consumed by remorse night and day. She is also still—as far as my eyes can judge—desperately ill. There is probably lung trouble caused by the privations of the winter. And the whole nervous system is shattered."
Ashe looked up. His aspect showed the effect of the words.
"Every provision shall be made for her," he said, in a voice muffled and difficult. "Lady Alice has been told already to spare no expense—to do everything that can be done."
"There is only one thing that can be done for her," said the Dean.
Ashe did not speak.
"There is only one thing that you or any one else could do for her," the Dean repeated, slowly, "and that is to love—and forgive her!" His voice trembled.
"Was it her wish that you should come to me?" said Ashe, after a moment.
"Yes. I found her at first very despairing—and extremely difficult to manage. She regretted she had written to me, and neither Lady Alice nor I could get her to talk. But one day"—the old man turned away, looking into the fire, with his back to Ashe, and with difficulty pursued his story—"one day, whether it was, the sight of a paralyzed child that used to come to Lady Alice's lace-class, or some impression from the service of the mass to which she often goes in the early mornings with her sister, I don't know, but she sent for me—and—and broke down entirely. She implored me to see you, and to ask you if she might live at Haggart, near the child's grave. She told me that according to every doctor she has seen she is doomed, physically. But I don't think she wants to work upon your pity. She herself declares that she has much more vitality than people think, and that the doctors may be all wrong. So that you are not to take that into account. But if you will so far forgive her as to let her live at Haggart, and occasionally to go and see her, that would be the only happiness to which she could now look forward, and she promises that she will follow your wishes in every respect, and will not hinder or persecute you in any way."
Ashe threw up his hands in a melancholy gesture. The Dean understood it to mean a disbelief in the ability of the person promising to keep such an engagement. His face flushed—he looked uncertainly at Ashe.
"For my part," he said, quickly, "I am not going to advise you for a moment to trust to any such promise."
Rising from his seat, Ashe began to pace the room. The Dean followed him with his eyes, which kindled more and more.
"But," he resumed, "I none the less urge and implore you to grant Lady Kitty's prayer."
Ashe slightly shook his head. The little Dean drew himself together.
"May I speak to you—with a full frankness? I have known and loved you from a boy. And"—he stopped a moment, then said, simply—"I am a Christian minister."
Ashe, with a sad and charming courtesy, laid his hand on the old man's arm.
"I can only be grateful to you," he said, and stood waiting.
"At least you will understand me," said the Dean. "You are not one of the small souls. Well—here it is! Lady Kitty has been an unfaithful wife. She does not attempt to deny or cover it. But in my belief she loves you still, and has always loved you. And when you married her, you must, I think, have realized that you were running no ordinary risks. The position and antecedents of her mother—the bringing up of the poor child herself—the wildness of her temperament, and the absence of anything like self-discipline and self-control, must surely have made you anxious? I certainly remember that Lady Tranmore was full of fears."
He looked for a reply.
"Yes," said Ashe, "I was anxious. Or, rather, I saw the risks clearly. But I was in love, and I thought that love could do everything."
The Dean looked at him curiously—hesitated—and at last said:
"Forgive me. Did you take your task seriously enough?—did you give Lady Kitty all the help you might?"
The blue eyes scanned Ashe's face. Ashe turned away, as though the words had touched a sore.
"I know very well," he said, unsteadily, "that I seemed to you and others a weak and self-indulgent fool. All I can say is, it was not in me to play the tutor and master to my wife."
"She was so young, so undisciplined," said the Dean, earnestly. "Did you guard her as you might?"
A touch of impatience appeared in Ashe.
"Do you really think, my dear Dean," he said, as he resumed his walk up and down, "that one human being has, ultimately, any decisive power over another? If so, I am more of a believer in—fate—or liberty—I am not sure which—than you."
The Dean sighed.
"That you were infinitely good and loving to her we all know."
"'Good'—'loving'?" said Ashe, under his breath, with a note of scorn. "I—"
He restrained himself, hiding his face as he hung over the fire.
There was a silence, till the Dean once more placed himself in Ashe's path. "My dear friend—you saw the risks, and yet you took them! You made the vow 'for better, for worse.' My friend, you have, so to speak, lost your venture! But let me urge on you that the obligation remains!"
"What obligation?"
"The obligation to the life you took into your own hands—to the soul you vowed to cherish," said the Dean, with an apostolic and passionate earnestness.
Ashe stood before him, pale, and charged with resolution.
"That obligation—has been cancelled—by the laws of your own Christian faith, no less than by the ordinary laws of society."
"I do not so read it!" cried the Dean, with vivacity. "Men say so, 'for the hardness of their hearts.' But the divine pity which transformed men's idea of marriage could never have meant to lay it down that in marriage alone there was to be no forgiveness."
"You forget your text," said Ashe, steadily. "Saving for the cause—'" His voice failed him.
"Permissive!" was the Dean's eager reply—"permissive only. There are cases, I grant you—cases of impenitent wickedness—where the higher law is suspended, finds no chance to act—where relief from the bond is itself mercy and justice. But the higher law is always there. You know the formula—'It was said by them of old time. But I say unto you—' And then follows the new law of a new society. And so in marriage. If love has the smallest room to work—if forgiveness can find the narrowest foothold—love and forgiveness are imposed on—demanded of—the Christian!—here as everywhere else. Love and forgiveness—not penalty and hate!"
"There is no question of hate—and—I doubt whether I am a Christian," said Ashe, quietly, turning away.
The Dean looked at him a little askance—breathing fast.
"But you are a heart, William!" he said, using the privilege, of his white hairs, speaking as he might have spoken to the Eton boy of twenty years before—"ay, and one of the noblest. You gathered that poor thing into your arms—knowing what were the temptations of her nature, and she became the mother of your child. Now—alas! those temptations have conquered her. But she still turns to you—she still clings to you—and she has no one else. And if you reject her she will go down unforgiven and despairing to the grave."
For the first time Ashe's lips trembled. But his speech was very quiet and collected.
"I must try and explain myself," he said. "Why should we talk of forgiveness? It is not a word that I much understand, or that means much to men of my type and generation. I see what has happened in this way. Kitty's conduct last year hit me desperately hard. It destroyed my private happiness, and but for the generosity of the best friends ever man had it would have driven me out of public life. I warned her that the consequences of the Cliffe matter would be irreparable, and she still carried it through. She left me for that man—and at a time when by her own action it was impossible for me to defend either her or myself. What course of action remained to me? I did remember her temperament, her antecedents, and the certainty that this man, whatever might be his moments of heroism, was a selfish and incorrigible brute in his dealings with women. So I wrote to her, through this same consul at Trieste. I let her know that if she wished it, and if there were any chance of his marrying her, I would begin divorce proceedings at once. She had only to say the word. If she did not wish it, I would spare her and myself the shame and scandal of publicity. And if she left him, I would make additional provision for her which would insure her every comfort. She never sent a word of reply, and I have taken no steps. But as soon as I heard she was at Treviso, I wrote again—or, rather, this time my lawyers wrote, suggesting that the time had come for the extra provision I had spoken of, which I was most ready and anxious to make."
He paused.
"And this," said the Dean, "is all? This is, in fact, your answer to me?"
Ashe made a sign of assent.
"Except," he added, with emotion, "that I have heard, only to-day, that if Kitty wishes it, her old friend Miss French will go out to her at once, nurse her, and travel with her as long as she pleases. Miss French's brother has just married, and she is at liberty. She is most deeply attached to Kitty, and as soon as she heard Lady Alice's report of her state she forgot everything else. Can you not persuade—Kitty"—he looked up urgently—"to accept her offer?"
"I doubt it," said the Dean, sadly. "There is only one thing she pines for, and without it she will be a sick child crossed. Ah! well—well! So to allow her to share your life again—however humbly and intermittently—is impossible?"
It seemed to the Dean that a shudder passed through the man beside him.
"Impossible," said Ashe, sharply. "But not only for private reasons."
"You mean your public duty stands in the way?"
"Kitty left me of her own free will. I have put my hand to the plough again—and I cannot turn back. You can see for yourself that I am not at my own disposal—I belong to my party, to the men with whom I act, who have behaved to me with the utmost generosity."
"Of course Lady Kitty could no longer share your public life. But at Haggart—in seclusion?"
"You know what her personality is—how absorbing—how impossible to forget! No—if she returned to me, on any terms whatever, all the old conditions would begin again. I should inevitably have to leave politics."
"And that—you are not prepared to do?"
The Dean wondered at his own audacity, and a touch of proud surprise expressed itself in Ashe.
"I should have preferred to put it that I have accepted great tasks and heavy responsibilities—and that I am not my own master."
The Dean watched him closely. Across the field of imagination there passed the figure of one who "went away sorrowful, having great possessions," and his heart—the heart of a child or a knight-errant—burned within him.
But before he could speak again the door of the room opened and a lady in black entered. Ashe turned towards her.
"Do you forbid me, William?" she said, quietly—"or may I join your conversation?"
Ashe held out his hand and drew her to him. Lady Tranmore greeted her old friend the Dean, and he looked at her overcome with emotion and doubt.
"You have come to us at a critical moment," he said—"and I am afraid you are against me."
She asked what they had been discussing, though, indeed, as she said, she partly guessed. And the Dean, beginning to be shaken in his own cause, repeated his pleadings with a sinking heart. They sounded to him stranger and less persuasive than before. In doing what he had done he had been influenced by an instinctive feeling that Ashe would not treat the wrong done him as other men might treat it; that, to put it at the least, he would be able to handle it with an ethical originality, to separate himself in dealing with it from the mere weight of social tradition. Yet now as he saw the faces of mother and son together—the mother leaning on the son's arm—and realized all the strength of the social ideas which they represented, even though, in Ashe's case, there had been a certain individual flouting of them, futile and powerless in the end—the Dean gave way.
"There—there!" he said, as he finished his plea, and Lady Tranmore's sad gravity remained untouched. "I see you both think me a dreamer of dreams!"
"Nay, dear friend!" said Lady Tranmore, with the melancholy smile which lent still further beauty to the refined austerity of her face; "these things seem possible to you, because you are the soul of goodness—"
"And a pious old fool to boot!" said the Dean, impatiently. "But I am willing—like St. Paul and my betters—to be a fool for Christ's sake. Lady Tranmore, are you or are you not a Christian?"
"I hope so," she said, with composure, while her cheek flushed. "But our Lord did not ask impossibilities. He knew there were limits to human endurance—and human pardon—though there might be none to God's."
"'Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,'" cried the Dean. "Where are the limits there?"
"There are other duties in life besides that to a wife who has betrayed her husband," she said, steadily. "You ask of William what he has not the strength to give. His life was wrecked, and he has pieced it together again. And now he has given it to his country. That poor, guilty child has no claim upon it."
"But understand," said Ashe, interposing, with an energy that seemed to express the whole man—"while I live, everything—short of what you ask—that can be done to protect or ease her, shall be done. Tell her that."
His features worked painfully. The Dean took up his hat and stick.
"And may I tell her, too," he said, pausing—"that you forgive her?"
Ashe hesitated.
"I do not believe," he said, at last, "that she would attach any more meaning to that word than I do. She would think it unreal. What's done is done."
The Dean's heart leaped up in the typical Christian challenge to the fatal and the irrevocable. While life lasts the lost sheep can always be sought and found; and love, the mystical wine, can always be poured into the wounds of the soul, healing and recreating! But he said no more. He felt himself humiliated and defeated.
Ashe and Lady Tranmore took leave of him with an extreme gentleness and affection. He would almost rather they had treated him ill. Yes, he was an optimist and a dreamer!—one who had, indeed, never grappled in his own person with the worst poisons and corrosions of the soul. Yet still, as he passed along the London streets—marked here and there by the newspaper placards which announced Ashe's committee triumphs of the night before—he was haunted anew by the immortal words:
"One thing thou lackest," ... and "Come, follow me!"
Ah!—could he have done such a thing himself? or was he merely the scribe carelessly binding on other men's shoulders things grievous to be borne? The answering passion of his faith mounted within him—joined with a scorn for the easy conditions and happy, scholarly pursuits of his own life, and a thirst which in the early days of Christendom would have been a thirst for witness and for martyrdom.
Three days later the Dean—a somewhat shrunken and diminished figure, in ordinary clerical dress, without the buckles and silk stockings that typically belonged to him—stood once more at the entrance of a small villa outside the Venetian town of Treviso.
He was very weary, and as he sought disconsolately through all his pockets for the wherewithal to pay his fly, while the spring rain pattered on his wide-awake, he produced an impression as of some delicate, draggled thing, which would certainly have gone to the heart of his adoring wife could she have beheld it. The Dean's ways were not sybaritic. He pecked at food and drink like a bird; his clothes never caused him a moment's thought; and it seemed to him a waste of the night to use it for sleeping. But none the less did he go through life finely looked after. Mrs. Winston dressed him, took his tickets and paid his cabs, and without her it was an arduous matter for the Dean to arrive at any destination whatever. As it was, in the journey from Paris he had lost one of the two bags which Mrs. Winston had packed for him, and he looked remorsefully at the survivor as it was deposited on the steps beside him.
It did not, however, remain on the steps. For when Lady Alice's maid-housekeeper appeared, she informed the Dean, with a certain flurry of manner, that the ladies were not at home. They had gone off that morning—suddenly—to Venice, leaving a letter for him, should he arrive.
"Fermate!" cried the Dean, turning towards the cab, which was trailing away, and the man, who had been scandalously overpaid, came back with alacrity, while the Dean stepped in to read the letter.
When he came out again he was very pale and in a great haste. He bade the man replace the bag and drive him at once to the railway-station.
On the way thither he murmured to himself, "Horrible!— horrible!"—and both the letter and a newspaper which had been enclosed in it shook in his hands.
He had half an hour to wait before the advent of the evening train for Venice, and he spent it in a quiet corner poring over the newspaper. And not that newspaper only, for he presently became aware that all the small, ill-printed sheets offered him by an old newsvender in the station were full of the same news, and some with later detail—nay, that the people walking up and down in the station were eagerly talking of it.
An Englishman had been assassinated in Venice. It seemed that a body had been discovered early on the preceding morning floating in one of the small canals connecting the Fondamente Nuove with the Grand Canal. It had been stabbed in three places; two of the wounds must have been fatal. The papers in the pocket identified the murdered man as the famous English traveller, poet, and journalist, Mr. Geoffrey Cliffe. Mr. Cliffe had just returned from an arduous winter in the Balkans, where he had rendered superb service to the cause of the Bosnian insurgents. He was well known in Venice, and the terrible event had caused a profound sensation there. No clew to the outrage had yet been obtained. But Mr. Cliffe's purse and watch had not been removed.
The Dean arrived in Venice by the midnight train, and went to the hotel on the Riva whither Lady Alice had directed him. She was still up, waiting to see him, and in the dark passage outside Kitty's door she told him what she knew of the murder. It appeared that late that night a startling arrest had been made—of no less a person than the Signorina Ricci, the well-known actress of the Apollo Theatre, and of two men supposed to have been hired by her for the deed. This news was still unknown to Kitty—she was in bed, and her companion had kept it from her.
"How is she?" asked the Dean.
"Frightfully excited—or else dumb. She let me give her something to make her sleep. Strangely enough, she said to me this morning on the way from Treviso: 'It is a woman—and I know her!'"
The following day, when the Dean entered the dingy hotel sitting-room, a thin figure in black came hurriedly out of the bedroom beside it, and Kitty caught him by the hand.
"Isn't it horrible?" she said, staring at him with her changed, dark-rimmed eyes. "She tried once, in Bosnia. One of the Italians who came out with us—she had got hold of him. Do you think—he suffered?"
Her voice was quite quiet. The Dean shuddered.
"One of the stabs was in the heart," he said. "But try and put it from you, Lady Kitty. Sit down." He touched her gently on the shoulder.
Kitty nodded.
"Ah, then," she said—"then he couldn't have suffered—could he? I'm glad."
She let the Dean put her in a chair, and, clasping her hands round her knees, she seemed to pursue her own thoughts.
Her aspect affected him almost beyond bearing. Ashe's brilliant wife?—London's spoiled child?—this withered, tragic little creature, of whom it was impossible to believe that, in years, she was not yet twenty-four? So bewildered in mind, so broken in nerve was she, that it was not till he had sat with her some time, now entering perforce into the cloud of horror that brooded over her, now striving to drag her from it, that she asked him about his visit to England.
He told her in a faltering voice.
She received it very quietly, even with a little, queer, twisting laugh.
"I thought he wouldn't. Was Lady Tranmore there?"
The Dean replied that Lady Tranmore had been there.
"Ah, then, of course there was no chance," said Kitty. "When one is as good as that, one never forgives."
She looked up quickly. "Did William say he forgave me?"
The Dean hesitated.
"He said a great deal that was kind and generous."
A slight spasm passed over Kitty's face.
"I suppose he thought it ridiculous to talk of forgiving. So did I—once."
She covered her eyes with her hands—removing them to say, impatiently:
"One can't go on being sorry every moment of the day. No, one can't! Why are we made so? William would agree with me there."
"Dear Lady Kitty!" said the Dean, tenderly—"God forgives—and with Him there is always hope, and fresh beginning."
Kitty shook her head.
"I don't know what that means," she said. "I wonder whether"—she looked at him with a certain piteous and yet affectionate malice—"if you'd been as deep as I, whether you'd know."
The Dean flushed. The hidden wound stung again. Had he, then, no right to speak? He felt himself the elder son of the parable—and hated himself anew.
But he was a Christian, on his Master's business. He must obey orders, even though he could feel no satisfaction, or belief in himself—though he seem to himself such a shallow and perfunctory person. So he did his tender best for Kitty. He spent his loving, enthusiastic, pitiful soul upon her; and while he talked to her she sat with her hands crossed on her lap, and her eyes wandering through the open window to the forests of masts outside and the dancing wavelets of the lagoon. When at last he spoke of the further provision Ashe wished to make for her, when he implored her to summon Margaret French, she shook her head. "I must think what I shall do," she said, quietly; and a minute afterwards, with a flash of her old revolt—"He cannot prevent my going to Harry's grave!"
Early the following morning the murdered man was carried to the cemetery at San Michele. In spite of some attempt on the part of the police to keep the hour secret, half Venice followed the black-draped barca, which bore that flawed poet and dubious hero to his rest.
It was a morning of exceeding beauty. On the mean and solitary front of the Casa dei Spiriti there shone a splendor of light; the lagoon was azure and gold; the main-land a mist of trees in their spring leaf; while far away the cypresses of San Francesco, the slender tower of Torcello, and the long line of Murano—and farther still the majestic wall of silver Alps—greeted the eyes that loved them, as the ear is soothed by the notes of a glorious and yet familiar music.
Amid the crowd of gondolas that covered the shallow stretch of lagoon between the northernmost houses of Venice and the island graveyard, there was one which held two ladies. Alice Wensleydale was there against her will, and her pinched and tragic face showed her repulsion and irritation. She had endeavored in vain to dissuade Kitty from coming; but in the end she had insisted on accompanying her. Possibly, as the boat glided over the water amid a crowd of laughing, chattering Italians, the silent Englishwoman was asking herself what was to be the future of the trust she had taken on herself. Kitty in her extremity had remembered her half-sister's promise, and had thrown herself upon it. But a few weeks' experience had shown that they were strange and uncongenial to each other. There was no true affection between them—only a certain haunting instinct of kindred. And even this was weakened or embittered by those memories in Alice's mind which Kitty could never approach and Alice never forget. What was she to do with her half-sister, stranded and dishonored as she was?—How content or comfort her?—How live her own life beside her?
Kitty sat silent, her eyes fixed upon the barca which held the coffin under its pall. Her mind was the scene of an infinite number of floating and fragmentary recollections; of the day when she and Cliffe had followed the murazzi towards the open sea; of the meeting at Verona; of the long winter, with its hardship and its horror; and that hatred and contempt which had sprung up between them. Could she love no one, cling faithfully to no one? And now the restless brain, the vast projects, the mixed nature, the half-greatness of the man had been silenced—crushed—in a moment, by the stroke of a knife. He had been killed by a jealous woman—because of his supposed love for another woman, whose abhorrence, in truth, he had earned in a few short weeks. There was something absurd mingled with the horror—as though one watched the prank of a demon.
Her sensuous nature was tormented by the thought of the last moment. Had he had time to feel despair—the thirst for life? She prayed not. She thought of the Sunday afternoon at Grosville Park when they had tried to play billiards, and Lord Grosville had come down on them; or she saw him sitting opposite to her, at supper, on the night of the fancy ball, in the splendid Titian dress, while she gloated over the thoughts of the trick she had played on Mary Lyster—or bending over her when she woke from her swoon at Verona. Had she ever really loved him for one hour?—and if not, what possible excuse, before gods or men, was there for this ugly, self-woven tragedy into which she had brought herself and him, merely because her vanity could not bear that William had not been able to love her, for long, far above all her deserts?
William! Her heart leaped in her breast. He was thirty-six—and she not twenty-four. A strange and desolate wonder overtook her as the thought seized her of the years they might still spend on the same earth—members of the same country, breathing the same air—and yet forever separate. Never to see him—or speak to him again!—the thought stirred her imagination, as it were, while it tortured her; there was in it a certain luxury and romance of pain.
Thus, as she followed Cliffe to his last blood-stained rest, did her mind sink in dreams of Ashe—and in the dismal reckoning up of all that she had so lightly and inconceivably lost. Sometimes she found herself absorbed in a kind of angry marvelling at the strength of the old moral commonplaces.
It had been so easy and so exciting to defy them. Stones which the builders of life reject—do they still avenge themselves in the old way? There was a kind of rage in the thought.
On the way home Kitty expressed a wish to go into St. Mark's alone. Lady Alice left her there, and in the shadow of the atrium Kitty looked at her strangely, and kissed her.
An hour after Lady Alice had reached the hotel a letter was brought to her. In it Kitty bade her—and the Dean—farewell, and asked that no effort should be made to track her. "I am going to friends—where I shall be safe and at peace. Thank you both with all my heart. Let no one think about me any more."
Of course they disobeyed her. They made what search in Venice they could, without rousing a scandal, and Ashe rushed out to join it, using the special means at a minister's disposal. But it was fruitless. Kitty vanished like a wraith in the dawn; and the living world of action and affairs knew her no more.