The Marriage of William Ashe Part 74

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

She turned and looked him in the face.

"And then?"

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

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

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

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

He surveyed her unmoved.

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

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

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

Kitty started, her eyes riveted to his.

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

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

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

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

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

"And _yet_--I can say to you without a qualm--put this marriage which has already come to naught behind you--and come with me! Ashe cramps you. He blames you--you blame yourself. What _reality_ has all that? It makes you miserable--it wastes life. _I_ accept your nature--I don't ask you to be anything else than yourself--your wild, vain, adorable self!

Ashe asks you to put restraint on yourself--to make painful efforts--to be good for his sake--the sake of something outside. _I_ say--come and look at the elemental things--death and battle--hatred, solitude, love.

_They'll_ sweep us out of ourselves!--no need to strive and cry for it--into the great current of the world's being--bring us close to the forces at the root of things--the forces which create--and destroy. Dip your heart in that stream, Kitty, and feel it grow in your breast. Take a nurse's dress--put your hand in mine--and come! I can't promise you luxuries or ease. You've had enough of those. Come and open another door in the House of Life! Take starving women and hunted children into your arms--- feel with them--weep with them--look with them into the face of death! Make friends with nature--with rocks, forests, torrents--with night and dawn, which you've never seen, Kitty! They'll love you--they'll support you--the rough people--and the dark forests.

They'll draw nature's glamour round you--they'll pour her balm into your soul. And I shall be with you--beside you!--your guardian--your lover--your _lover_, Kitty--till death do us part."

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

Then she wrenched herself away--suddenly, contemptuously.

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

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

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

Their eyes met--his already full of a kind of owners.h.i.+p, tender, confident, humorous even--hers alive with pa.s.sionate anger and resistance.

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

She turned and looked towards the Adriatic.

"Where are we?" she said, imperiously.

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

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

"Giuseppe!"

"Commanda, Eccellenza!"

The man came forward.

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

"A Venezia!" said Kitty, waving her hand towards the sailors, her eyes s.h.i.+ning under the tangle of her hair.

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

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

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

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

He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, disengaging it from harsh and hindering conditions. What was there vile in that?

The argument pursued itself.

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

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

The Ricci, of course, was wild and thirsting for revenge. Let her!

Anxieties far more pressing disturbed him. What if he tempted Kitty to this escapade--and the rough life killed her? He saw clearly how frail she was.

But it was the artificiality of her life, the innumerable burdens of civilization, which had brought her to this! Women were not the weaklings they seemed, or believed themselves to be. For many of them, probably for Kitty, a rude and simple life would mean not only fresh mental but fresh physical strength. He had seen what women could endure, for love's or patriotism's sake! Make but appeal to the spirit--the proud and tameless spirit--and how the flesh answered! He knew that his power with Kitty came largely from a certain stoicism, a certain hardness, mingled, as he would prove to her, with a boundless devotion.

Let him carry it through--without fears--and so enlarge her being and his own! And as to responsibilities beyond, as to their later lives--let time take care of its own births. For the modern determinist of Cliffe's type there _is_ no responsibility. He waits on life, following where it leads, rejoicing in each new feeling, each fresh reaction of consciousness on experience, and so links his fatalist belief to that Nietzsche doctrine of self-development at all costs, and the coming man, in which Cliffe's thought antic.i.p.ated the years.

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

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