Part 66 (1/2)
Meanwhile Kitty, Margaret French, and Sir Richard kept up intermittent remarks, pausing at every other phrase to gather the crumbs that fell from the table of the other two.
Kitty was very weary, and a dead weight had fallen on her spirits. If Sir Richard had thought her bad form ten minutes before, his unspoken mind now declared her stupid. Meanwhile Kitty was saying to herself, as she watched her husband and Mary:
”I used to amuse William just as well--last year!”
When the door closed on them, Kitty fell back on her cus.h.i.+ons with an ”ouf!” of relief. William came back in a few minutes from showing the visitors the back way to their hotel, and stood beside his wife with an anxious face.
”They were too much for you, darling. They stayed too long.”
”How you and Mary chattered!” said Kitty, with a little pout. But at the same moment she slipped an appealing hand into his.
Ashe clasped the hand, and laughed.
”I always told you she was an excellent gossip.”
Sir Richard and Mary pursued their way through the narrow _calles_ that led to the Piazza. Sir Richard was expatiating on Ashe's folly in marrying such a wife.
”She looks like an actress!--and as to her conversation, she began by telling me outrageous stories and ended by not having a word to say about anything. The bad blood of the Bristols, it seems to me, without their brains.”
”Oh no, papa! Kitty is very clever. You haven't heard her recite. She was tired to-night.”
”Well, I don't want to flatter you, my dear!” said the old man, testily, ”but I thought it was pathetic--the way in which Ashe enjoyed your conversation. It showed he didn't get much of it at home.”
Mary smiled uncertainly. Her whole nature was still aglow from that contact with Ashe's delightful personality. After months of depression and humiliation, her success with him had somehow restored those illusions on which cheerfulness depends.
How ill Kitty looked--and how conscious! Mary was impetuously certain that Kitty had betrayed her knowledge of Cliffe's presence in Venice; and equally certain that William knew nothing. Poor William!
Well, what can you expect of such a temperament--such a race? Mary's thoughts travelled confusedly towards--and through--some big and dreadful catastrophe.
And then? After it?
It seemed to her that she was once more in the Park Lane drawing-room; the familiar Morris papers and Burne-Jones drawings surrounded her; and she and Elizabeth Tranmore sat, hand in hand, talking of William--a William once more free, after much folly and suffering, to reconstruct his life....
”Here we are,” said Sir Richard Lyster, moving down a dark pa.s.sage towards the brightly lit doorway of their hotel.
With a start--as of one taken red-handed--Mary awoke from her dream.
XX
Madame d'Estrees and her friend, Donna Laura, occupied the _mezzanin_ of the vast Vercelli palace. The palace itself belonged to the head of the Vercelli family. It was a magnificent erection of the late seventeenth century, at this moment half furnished, dilapidated, and forsaken. But the _entresol_ on the eastern side of the _cortile_ was in good condition, and comfortably fitted up for the occasional use of the Principe. As he was wintering in Paris, he had let his rooms at an ordinary commercial rent to his kinswoman, Donna Laura. She, a soured and melancholy woman, unmarried in a Latin society which has small use or kindness for spinsters, had seized on Marguerite d'Estrees--whose acquaintance she had made in a Mont d'Or hotel--and was now keeping her like a caged canary that sings for its food.
Madame d'Estrees was quite willing. So long as she had a sofa on which to sit enthroned, a sufficiency of new gowns, a maid, cigarettes, breakfast in bed, and a supply of French novels, she appeared the most harmless and engaging of mortals. Her youth had been cruel, disorderly, and vicious. It had lasted long; but now, when middle age stood at last confessed, she was lapsing, it seemed, into amiability and good behavior. She was, indeed, fast forgetting her own history, and soon the recital of it would surprise no one so much as herself.
It was five o'clock. Madame d'Estrees had just established herself in the silk-panelled drawing-room of Donna Laura's apartment, expectant of visitors, and, in particular, of her daughter.
In begging Kitty to come on this particular afternoon, she had not thought fit to mention that it would be Donna Laura's ”day.” Had she done so, Kitty, in consideration of her mourning, would perhaps have cried off. Whereas, really--poor, dear child!--what she wanted was distraction and amus.e.m.e.nt.
And what Madame d'Estrees wanted was the presence beside her, in public, of Lady Kitty Ashe. Kitty had already visited her mother privately, and had explored the antiquities of the Vercelli palace. But Madame d'Estrees was now intent on something more and different.