Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/964

894 ally fearless, like Kitty, who feel in it a challenge to their power and their charm.

His society then had in these six weeks become, for Kitty, a passion,—a passion of the imagination. For the man himself, she would probably have said that she felt more repulsion than anything else. But it was a repulsion that held her, because of the constant sense of reaction, of onrushing life, which it excited in herself.

Add to these the element of mischief and defiance in the situation, the snatching him from Mary, her enemy and slanderer, the defiance of Lady Grosville and all other hypocritical tyrants, the pride of dragging at her chariot wheels a man whom most people courted even when they loathed him, who enjoyed moreover an astonishing reputation abroad, especially in that France which Kitty adored, as a kind of modern Byron, the only Englishman who could still display in public the "pageant of a bleeding heart," without making himself ridiculous,—and perhaps enough has been heaped together to explain the infatuation, that now like a wild spring gust on a shining lake was threatening to bring Kitty's light bark into dangerous waters.

"I don't care for him," she said to herself, as she sat thinking alone,—"but I must see him;—I will! And I will talk to him as I please, and where I please!"

Her small frame stiffened under the obstinacy of her resolution. Kitty's will at a moment of this kind was a fatality,—so strong was it, and so irrational.

Meanwhile, down-stairs, Ashe himself was wrestling with another phase of the same situation. Lady Tranmore's note had said, "I shall be with you almost immediately after you receive this, as I want to catch you before you go to the Foreign Office."

Accordingly, they were in the library, Ashe on the defensive, Lady Tranmore nervous, embarrassed, and starting at a sound. Both of them watched the door. Both looked for and dreaded the advent of Kitty.

"Dear William!" said his mother at last, stretching her hand across a small table which stood between them and laying it on her son's—"you'll forgive me, won't you?—even if I do seem to you prudish and absurd. But I am afraid—you ought to tell Kitty some of the unkind things people are saying! You know I've tried, and she wouldn't listen to me. And you ought to beg her—yes, William, indeed you ought!—not to give any further occasion for them."

She looked at him anxiously, full of that timidity which haunts the deepest and tenderest affections. She had just given him to read a letter from Lady Grosville to herself. Ashe ran through it, then laid it down with a gesture of scorn.

"Kitty apparently enjoyed a moonlight walk with Cliffe. Why shouldn't she? Lady Grosville thinks the moon was made to sleep by,—other people don't."

"But, William!—at night,—when everybody had gone to bed,—escaping from the house,—they two alone!"

Lady Tranmore looked at him entreatingly, as though driven to protest, and yet hating the sound of her own words.

Ashe laughed. He was smoking with an air so nonchalant that his mother's heart sank. For she divined that criticism in the society around her which she was never allowed to hear. Was it true, indeed, that his natural indolence could not rouse itself even to the defence of a young wife's reputation?

"All the fault of the Grosvilles," said Ashe, after a moment, lighting another cigarette,—"in shutting up their great heavy house and drawing their great heavy curtains on a May night, when all reasonable people want to be out-of-doors. My dear mother, what's the good of paying any attention to what people like Lady Grosville say of people like Kitty? You might as well expect Deborah to hit it off with Ariel!"

"William,—don't laugh!" said his mother in distress—"Geoffrey Cliffe is not a man to be trusted. You and I know that of old. He is a boaster, and—"

"And a liar!" said Ashe, quietly. "Oh! I know that!"

"And yet he has this power over women,—one ought to look it in the face. William!—dearest William!"—she leaned over and clasped his hand close in both hers—"do persuade Kitty to go away from London now—at once!"