Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/230



N the Saturday following the evening at Madame d'Estrées', William Ashe found himself in a Midland train on his way to the Cambridgeshire house of Lady Grosville. While the April country slipped past him—like some blanched face, to which life and color are returning—Ashe divided his time between an idle skimming of the Saturday papers and a no less idle dreaming of Kitty Bristol. He had seen her twice since his first introduction to her. Once on the terrace of the House of Commons, where he had strolled up and down with her for a most amusing and stimulating hour, while her mother entertained a group of elderly politicians. And the following day she had come alone—her own choice—to take tea with Lady Tranmore, on that lady's invitation, as prompted by her son. Ashe himself had arrived towards the end of the visit, and had found a Lady Kitty in the height of the fashion, stiff, mannered, and flushed to a deep red by her own consciousness that she could not possibly be making a good impression. At sight of him she relaxed, and talked a great deal, but not wisely; and when she was gone, Ashe could get very little opinion of any kind from his mother, who had, however, expressed a wish that she should come and visit them in the country.

Since then he frankly confessed to himself that in the intervals of his new official and administrative work he had been a good deal haunted by memories of this strange child, her eyes, her grace,—even in her fits of proud shyness,—and the way in which, as he had put her into her cab after the visit to Lady Tranmore, her tiny hand had lingered in his, a mute astonishing appeal. Haunted, too, by what he heard of her fortunes and surroundings. What was the real truth of Madame d'Estrées' situation? During the week some odd rumors had reached Ashe of financial embarrassment in that quarter, of debts risen to mountainous height, of crisis and possible disappearance. Then these rumors were met by others, to the effect that Colonel Warington, the old friend and support of the D'Estrées' household, had come to the rescue, that the crisis had been averted, and that the three weekly evenings, so well known and so well attended, would go on—and with this latter fact there mingled, as Ashe was well aware, not the slightest breath of scandal, in a case where, so to speak, all was scandal.

And meanwhile what new and dolorous truths had Lady Kitty been learning, as to her mother's story and her mother's position? By Jove, it was hard upon the girl! Darrell was right. Why not leave her to her French friends and relations?—or relinquish her to Lady Grosville? Madame d'Estrées had seen little or nothing of her for years. She could not, therefore, be necessary to her mother's happiness, and there was a real cruelty in thus claiming her, at the very moment of her entrance into society, where Madame d'Estrées could only stand in her way. For although many a man whom the girl might profitably marry was to be found among the mother's guests, the influences of Madame d'Estrées' "evenings" were certainly not matrimonial. Still, the unforeseen was surely the probable in Lady Kitty's case. What sort of a man ought she to marry?—what sort of man could safely take the risks of marrying her?—with that mother in the background?

He descended at the wayside station prescribed to him, and looked round him for fellow guests, much as the card-player examines his hand. Mary Lyster, a cabinet minister—filling an ornamental office and handed on from ministry to ministry as a kind of necessary appendage, the public never knew why,—the minister's second wife, an attaché