Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/963

Rh "Very well, my lady."

Kitty jumped up, waltzed round the room, the white silk skirts of her dressing-gown floating far and wide, then thrust her feet into her slippers, and began to dress as though nothing had happened.

But when her toilet was accomplished, Kitty, having dismissed her maid, sat for some time in front of her mirror in a brown study.

"What is the matter with me?" she thought. "William is an angel, and I love him. And I can't do what he wants—I can't!" She drew a long, troubled breath. The lips of the face reflected in the glass were dry and colorless, the eyes had a strange shrinking expression. "People are possessed—I know they are. They can't help themselves. I began this to punish Mary,—and now—when I don't see Geoffrey, everything is odious and dreary. I can't care for anything. Of course I ought to care for William's politics. I expect I've done him harm—I know I have. What's wrong with me?"

But suddenly, in the very midst of her self-examination the emotion and excitement that she had felt of late in her long conversations with Cliffe returned upon her, filling her at once with poignant memory and a keen expectation to which she yielded herself as a wild sea-bird to the rocking of the sea. They had started—those conversations—from her attempt to penetrate the secret history of the man whose poems had filled her with a thrilling sense of feelings and passions beyond her ken,—untrodden regions, full no doubt of shadow and of poison, but infinitely alluring to one whose nature was best summed up in the two words curiosity and daring. She had not found it quite easy. Cliffe, as we know, had resented the levity of her first attempt. But when she renewed it, more seriously and sweetly, combining with it a number of subtle flatteries, the flattery of her beauty and her position, of the private interest she could not help showing in the man who was her husband's public antagonist, and of an admiration for his poems which was not so much mere praise as an actual covetous sharing in them, a making their ideas and their music her own,—Cliffe could not in the end resist her. After all, so far, she only asked him to talk of himself, and for a man of his type the process is the very breath of his being, the stimulus and liberation of all his powers.

So that, before they knew, they were in the midst of the most burning subjects of human discussion,—at first in a manner comparatively veiled and general, then with the sharpest personal reference to Cliffe's own story, as the intimacy between them grew. Jealousy, suffering, the "hard cases" of passion,—why men are selfish and exacting, why women mislead and torment,—the ugly waste and crudity of death,—it was among these great themes they found themselves. Death above all,—it was to a thought of death that Cliffe's harsh face owed its chief spell perhaps in Kitty's eyes. A woman had died for love of him, crushed by his jealousy and her own self-scorn. So Kitty had been told; and Cliffe's tortured vanity would not deny it. How could she have cared so much? That was the puzzle.

But this vicarious relation had now passed into a relation of her own. Cliffe was to Kitty a problem,—and a problem which, beyond a certain point, defied her. The element of sex of course entered in, but only as intensifying the contrasts and mysteries of imagination. And he made her feel these contrasts and mysteries, as she had never yet felt them; and so he enlarged the world for her,—he plunged her, if only by contact with his own bitter and irritable genius, into new regions of sentiment and feeling. For, in spite of the vulgar elements in him, there were also elements of genius. The man was a poet and a thinker, though he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer. His mind was stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and poetry of his own. He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an unscrupulous way; but he had none the less passed through a wealth of tragic circumstance; he had been face to face with his own soul in the wilds of the earth; he had met every sort of physical danger with contempt; and his arrogant imperious temper was of the kind which attracts many women, especially perhaps women physically small, and intellectu-