Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/969

897 in love with her? An absurd question! He had paid his heavy tribute to passion if any man ever had, and had already hung up his votive tablet and his garments wet from shipwreck in the temple of the god. But it seemed that, after all said and done, the society of a woman, young, beautiful, and capricious, was still the best thing which the day—the London day at all events—had to bring. At Kitty's suggestion he was collecting and revising a new volume of his poems. He and she quarrelled over them perpetually. Sometimes there was not a line which pleased her; and then, again, she would delight him with the homage of sudden tears in her brown eyes, and a praise so ardent and so refined that it almost compared—as Kitty meant it should—with that of the dead. In the shaded drawing-room, where every detail pleased his taste, Cliffe's harsh voice thundered or murmured verse which was beyond dispute the verse of a poet, and thereby sensuous and passionate. Ostensibly the verse concerned another woman; in truth the slight and lovely figure sitting on the farther side of the flowered hearth, the delicate head bent, the finger-tips lightly joined, entered day by day more directly into the consciousness of the poet. What harm? All he asked was intelligence and response. As to her heart, he made no claim upon it whatever. Ashe, by the way, was clearly not jealous,—a sensible attitude, considering Lady Kitty's strength of will.

Into Cliffe's feeling toward Ashe there entered indeed a number of evil things, determined by quite other relations between the two men,—the relation of the man who wants to the man who has, of the man beaten by the restlessness of ambition to the man who possesses all that the other desires, and affects to care nothing about it,—of the combatant who fights with rage to the combatant who fights with a smile. Cliffe could often lash himself into fury by the mere thought of Ashe's opportunities and Ashe's future, combined with the belief that Ashe's mood towards himself was either contemptuous or condescending. And it was at such moments that he would fling himself with most energy into the establishing of his ascendency over Kitty.

The two men met, when they did meet—which was but seldom,—on perfectly civil terms. If Ashe arrived unexpectedly from the House in the late afternoon to find Cliffe in the drawing-room reading aloud to Kitty, the politics of the moment provided talk enough till Cliffe could decently take his departure. He never dined with them alone, Kitty having no mind whatever for the discomforts of such a party; and in the evenings when he and Kitty met at a small number of houses, where the flirtation was watched nightly with a growing excitement, Ashe's duties kept him at Westminster, and there was nothing to hinder the flow of that small and yet significant incident by which situations of this kind are developed.

Ashe set his teeth. He had made up his mind finally that it was a plague and a tyranny which would pass, and could only be magnified by opposition. But his temper suffered. There were many small quarrels during these weeks between himself and Kitty, quarrels which betrayed the tension produced in him by what was—in essentials—an iron self-control. But they made daily life a sordid unlovely thing, and they gave Kitty an excuse for saying that William was as violent as herself, and for seeking refuge in the exaltations of feeling or of fancy provided by Cliffe's companionship.

Perhaps of all the persons in the drama Lady Tranmore was the most to be pitied. She sat at home, having no heart to go to Bruton Street, and more tied, indeed, than usual by the helpless illness of her husband. Never in all these days did Ashe miss his daily visit to his father. He would come in, apparently his handsome good-humored self, ready to read aloud for twenty minutes, or merely to sit in silence by the sick man, his eyes making affectionate answer every now and then to the dumb looks of Lord Tranmore. Only his mother sought and found that slight habitual contraction of the brow which bore witness to some equally persistent disquiet of the mind. But he kept her at arm's length on the subject of Kitty. She dared not tell him any of the gossip which reached her.

Meanwhile these weeks meant for her not only the dread of disgrace, but the