The Marriage of William Ashe Part 82

Ashe made a fierce effort to still the thumping in his breast and decide what he should do. For the guests there was only one door of entrance or exit, and to reach it he must pa.s.s close beside the new-comer.

He laid down his newspaper. She heard the rustling, and involuntarily looked round.

There was a slight sound--an exclamation. She rose. He heard and saw her coming, and sat tranced and motionless, his eyes bent upon her. She came tottering, clinging to the chairs, her hand on her side, till she reached the corner where he was.

"William!" she said, with a little, glad sob, under her breath--"William!"

He himself could not speak. He stood there gazing at her, his lips moving without sound. It seemed to him that she turned her head a moment, as though to look for some one beside him--with an exquisite tremor of the mouth.

"Isn't it strange?" she said, in the same guarded voice. "I had a dream once--a valley--and mountains--and an inn. You sat here--just like this--and--"

She put up her hands to her eyes a moment, s.h.i.+vered, and withdrew them.

From her expression she seemed to be waiting for him to speak. He moved and stood beside her.

"Where can we talk?" he said, with difficulty. She shook her head vaguely, looking round her with that slight frown, complaining and yet sweet, which was like a touch of fire on memory.

The waitress came back into the room.

"It _is_ odd to have met you here!" said Kitty, in a laughing voice.

"Let us go into the _salon de lecture_. The maids want to clear away.

Please bring your newspaper."

Fraulein Anna looked at them with a momentary curiosity, and went on with her work. They pa.s.sed into the pa.s.sage-way outside, which was full of smokers overflowing from the crowded room beyond, where the humbler frequenters of the inn ate and drank.

Kitty glanced round her in bewilderment. "The _salon de lecture_ will be full, too. Where shall we go?" she said, looking up.

Ashe's hand clinched as it hung beside him. The old gesture--and the drawn, emaciated face--they pierced the heart.

"I told my servant to arrange me a sitting-room up-stairs," he said, hurriedly, in her ear. "Will you go up first?--number ten."

She nodded, and began slowly to mount the stairs, coughing as she went.

The man whom Ashe had taken for a Genevese professor looked after her, glanced at his neighbor, and shrugged his shoulders. "Phthisique," he said, with a note of pity. The other nodded. "Et d'un type tres avance!"

They moved towards the door and stood looking into the night, which was dark with intermittent rain. Ashe studied a map of the commune which hung on the wall beside him, till at a moment when the pa.s.sage had become comparatively clear he turned and went up-stairs.

The door of his improvised _salon_ was ajar. Beyond it his valet was coming out of his bedroom with wet clothes over his arm. Ashe hesitated.

But the man had been with him through the greater part of his married life, and was a good heart. He beckoned him back into the room he was leaving, and the two stepped inside.

"Dell, my good fellow, I want your help. I have just met my wife here--Lady Kitty. You understand. Neither of us, of course, had any idea. Lady Kitty is very ill. We wish to have a conversation--uninterrupted. I trust you to keep guard."

The young man, son of one of the Haggart gardeners, started and flushed, then gave his master a look of sympathy.

"I'll do my best, sir."

Ashe nodded and went back to the next room. He closed the door behind him. Kitty, who was sitting by the fire, half rose. Their eyes met. Then with a stifled cry he flung himself down, kneeling beside her, and she sank into his arms. His tears fell on her face, anguish and pity overwhelmed him.

"You may!" she said, brokenly, putting up her hand to his cheek, and kissing him--"you may! I'm not mad or wicked now--and I'm dying!"

Agonized murmurs of love, pardon, self-abas.e.m.e.nt pa.s.sed between them. It was as though a great stream bore them on its breast; an awful and majestic power enwrapped them, and made each word, each kiss, wonderful, sacramental. He drew himself away at last, holding her hair back from her brow and temples, studying her features, his own face convulsed.

"Where have you been? Why did you hide from me?"

"You forbade me," she said, stroking his hair. "And it was quite right.

The dear Dean told me--and I quite understood. If I'd gone to Haggart then there'd have been more trouble. I should have tried to get my old place back. And now it's all over. You can give me all I want, because I can't live. It's only a question of months, perhaps weeks. n.o.body could blame you, could they? People don't laugh when--it's death. It simplifies things so--doesn't it?"

She smiled, and nestled to him again.

"What do you mean?" he said, almost violently. "Why are you so ill?"

"It was Bosnia first, and then--being miserable--I suppose. And Poitiers was very cold--and the nuns very stuffy, bless them--they wouldn't let me have air enough."

He groaned aloud while he remembered his winter in London, in the forlorn luxury of the Park Lane house.

"Where have you been?" he repeated.

"Oh! I went to the Soeurs Blanches--you remember?--where I used to be.

You went there, didn't you?"--he made a sign of miserable a.s.sent--"but I made them promise not to tell! There was an old mistress of novices there still who used to be very fond of me. She got one of the houses of the Sacre Coeur to take me in--at Poitiers. They thought they were gathering a stray sheep back into the fold, you understand, as I was brought up a Catholic--of sorts. And I didn't mind!" The familiar intonation, soft, complacent, humorous, rose like a ghost between them.

"I used to like going to ma.s.s. But this Easter they wanted to make me 'go to my duties'--you know what it means?--and I wouldn't. I wanted to confess." She shuddered and drew his face down to hers again--"but only once--to--you--and then, well then, to die, and have done with it. You see, I knew one can't get on long with three-quarters of a lung. And they were rather tiresome--they didn't understand. So three weeks ago I drew some money out and said good-bye to them. Oh! they were very kind, and very sorry for me. They wanted me to take a maid, and I meant to.

But the one they found wouldn't come with me when she saw how ill I was--and it all lingered on--so one day I just walked out to the railway-station and went to Paris. But Paris was rainy--and I felt I must see the sun again. So I stayed two nights at a little hotel maman used to go to--horrid place!--and each night I read your speeches in the reading-room--and then I got my things from Poitiers, and started--"

A fit of coughing stopped her, coughing so terrible and destructive that he almost rushed for help. But she restrained him. She made him understand that she wanted certain remedies from her own room across the corridor. He went for them. The door of this room had been shut by the observant Dell, who was watching the pa.s.sage from his own bedroom farther on. When Ashe had opened it he found himself face to face as it were with the foaming stream outside. The window, as he had seen it before, was wide open to the water-fall just beyond it, and the temperature was piercingly cold and damp. The furniture was of the roughest, and a few of Kitty's clothes lay scattered about. As he fumbled for a light, there hovered before his eyes the remembrance of their room in Hill Street, strewn with chiffons and all the elegant and costly trifles that made the natural setting of its mistress.

He found the medicines and hurried back. She feebly gave him directions.

"Now the strychnine!--and some brandy."

He did all he could. He drew some chairs together before the fire, and made a couch for her with pillows and rugs. She thanked him with smiles, and her eyes followed his every movement.

"Tell your man to get some milk! And listen"--she caught his hand. "Lock my door. That nice woman down-stairs will come to look after me, and she'll think I'm asleep."

It was done as she wished. Ashe took in the milk from Dell's hands, and a fresh supply of wood. Then he turned the key in his own door and came back to her. She was lying quiet, and seemed revived.

"How cosey!" she said, with a childish pleasure, looking round her at the bare white walls and scoured boards warmed with the fire-light. The bitter tears swam in Ashe's eyes. He fell into a chair on the other side of the fire, and stared--seeing nothing--at the burning logs.

"You needn't suppose that I don't get people to look after me!" she went on, smiling at him again, one shadowy hand propping her cheek. And she prattled on about the kindness of the chambermaids at Vevey and Brieg, and how one of them had wanted to come with her as her maid. "Oh! I shall find one at Florence if I get there--or a nurse. But just for these few days I wanted to be free! In the winter there were so many people about--so many eyes! I just pined to cheat them--get quit of them. A maid would have bothered me to stay in bed and see doctors--and you know, William, with this illness of mine you're so _restless_!"

"Where were you going to?" he said, without looking up.

"Oh! to Italy somewhere--just to see some flowers again--and the sun.

Only not to Venice!"

There was a silence, which she broke by a sudden cry as she drew him down to her.

"William! you know--I was coming home to you, when that man--found me."

"I know. If it had only been I who killed him!"

"I'm just--_Kitty_!" she said, choking--"as bad as bad can be. But I couldn't have done what Mary Lyster did."