Part 74 (2/2)

Their eyes met--his already full of a kind of owners.h.i.+p, tender, confident, humorous even--hers alive with pa.s.sionate anger and resistance.

”_Without a qualm_!” she repeated, in a low voice--”without a qualm! Mon Dieu!”

She turned and looked towards the Adriatic.

”Where are we?” she said, imperiously.

For a gesture of command on Cliffe's part, unseen by her, had sent the boat eastward, spinning before the wind. The lagoon was no longer tranquil. It was covered with small waves; and the roar of the outer sea, though still far off, was already in their ears. The mist lifting showed white, distant crests of foam on a tumbling field of water, and to the north, clothed in tempestuous purple, the dim shapes of mountains.

Kitty raised herself, and beckoned towards the captain of the _bragozzo_.

”Giuseppe!”

”Commanda, Eccellenza!”

The man came forward.

With a voice sharp and clear, she gave the order to return at once to Venice. Cliffe watched her, the veins on his forehead swelling. She knew that he debated with himself whether he should give a counter-order or no.

”A Venezia!” said Kitty, waving her hand towards the sailors, her eyes s.h.i.+ning under the tangle of her hair.

The helm was put round, and beneath a tacking sail the boat swept southward.

With an awkward laugh Cliffe fell back into his seat, stretching his long limbs across the boat. He had spoken under a strong and genuine impulse. His pa.s.sion for her had made enormous strides in these few wild days beside her. And yet the fantastic poet's sense responded at a touch to the new impression. He shook off the heroic mood as he had doffed his Bosnian cloak. In a few minutes, though the heightened color remained, he was chatting and laughing as though nothing had happened.

She, exhausted physically and morally by her conflict with him, hardly spoke on the way home. He entertained her, watching her all the time--a hundred speculations about her pa.s.sing through his brain. He understood perfectly how the insight which she had allowed him into her grief and her remorse had broken down the barriers between them. Her incapacity for silence, and reticence, had undone her. Was he a villain to have taken advantage of it?

Why? With a strange, half-cynical clearness he saw her, as the obstacle that she was, in Ashe's life and career. For Ashe--supposing he, Cliffe, persuaded her--there would be no doubt a first shock of wrath and pain--then a sense of deliverance. For her, too, deliverance! It excited his artist's sense to think of all the further developments through which he might carry that eager, plastic nature. There would be a new Kitty, with new capacities and powers. Wasn't that justification enough?

He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, disengaging it from harsh and hindering conditions. What was there vile in that?

The argument pursued itself.

”The modern judges for himself--makes his own laws, as a G.o.d, knowing good and evil. No doubt in time a new social law will emerge--with new sanctions. Meanwhile, here we are, in a moment of transition, manufacturing new types, exploring new combinations--by which let those who come after profit!”

Little delicate, distinguished thing!--every aspect of her, angry or sweet, sad or wilful, delighted his taste and sense. Moreover, she was _his_ deliverance, too--from an ugly and vulgar entanglement of which he was ashamed. He shrank impatiently from memories which every now and then pursued him of the Ricci's coa.r.s.e beauty and exacting ways. Kitty had just appeared in time! He felt himself rehabilitated in his own eyes. Love may trifle as it pleases with what people call ”law”; but there are certain aesthetic limits not to be transgressed.

The Ricci, of course, was wild and thirsting for revenge. Let her!

Anxieties far more pressing disturbed him. What if he tempted Kitty to this escapade--and the rough life killed her? He saw clearly how frail she was.

But it was the artificiality of her life, the innumerable burdens of civilization, which had brought her to this! Women were not the weaklings they seemed, or believed themselves to be. For many of them, probably for Kitty, a rude and simple life would mean not only fresh mental but fresh physical strength. He had seen what women could endure, for love's or patriotism's sake! Make but appeal to the spirit--the proud and tameless spirit--and how the flesh answered! He knew that his power with Kitty came largely from a certain stoicism, a certain hardness, mingled, as he would prove to her, with a boundless devotion.

Let him carry it through--without fears--and so enlarge her being and his own! And as to responsibilities beyond, as to their later lives--let time take care of its own births. For the modern determinist of Cliffe's type there _is_ no responsibility. He waits on life, following where it leads, rejoicing in each new feeling, each fresh reaction of consciousness on experience, and so links his fatalist belief to that Nietzsche doctrine of self-development at all costs, and the coming man, in which Cliffe's thought antic.i.p.ated the years.

Kitty meanwhile listened to his intermittent talk of Venice, or Bosnia, with all its suggestions of new worlds and far horizons, and scarcely said a word.

But through the background of the brain there floated with her, as with him, a procession of unspoken thoughts. She had received three letters from William. Immediately on his arrival he had tendered his resignation. Lord Parham had asked him to suspend the matter for ten days. Only the pressure of his friends, it seemed, and the consternation of his party had wrung from Ashe a reluctant consent. Meanwhile, all copies of the book had been bought up; the important newspapers had readily lent themselves to the suppression of the affair; private wraths had been dealt with by conciliatory lawyers; and in general a far more complete hus.h.i.+ng-up had been attained than Ashe had ever imagined possible. There was no doubt infinite gossip in the country-houses. But sympathy for Kitty in her grief, for Ashe himself, and Lady Tranmore, had done much to keep it within bounds. The little Dean especially, beloved of all the world, had been incessantly active on behalf of peace and oblivion.

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