Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/799

Rh 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 masque 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. Lie 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 burnt 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