The Marriage of William Ashe

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Kitty was apparently asleep when Ashe returned. He had sat late with his hosts—men prominent in the Risorgimento and in the politics of the new kingdom—discussing the latest intricacies of the Roman situation and the prospects of Italian finance. His mind was all alert and vigorous, ranging over great questions and delighting in its own strength. To come in contact with these able foreigners, not as the mere traveller but as an important member of an English government, beginning to be spoken of by the world as one of the two or three men of the future—this was a new experience and a most agreeable one. Doors hitherto closed had opened before him; information no casual Englishman could have commanded had been freely poured out for him; last, but not least, he had at length made himself talk French with some fluency, and he looked back on his performance of the evening with a boy's complacency.

For the rest, Venice was a mere trial of his patience! As his gondola brought him home, struggling with wind and wave, Ashe had no eye whatever for the beauty of this Venice in storm. His mind was in England, in London, wrestling with a hundred difficulties and possibilities. The old literary and speculative habit was fast disappearing in the stress of action and success. His well-worn Plato or Horace still lay beside his bedside; but when he woke early, and lit a candle carefully shaded from Kitty, it was not to the poets and philosophers that he turned; it was to a heap of official documents and reports, to the letters of political friends, or an unfinished letter of his own, the phrases of which had perhaps been running through his dreams. The measures for which he was wrestling against the intrigues of Lord Parham and Lord Parham's clique filled all his mind with a lively ardor of battle. They were the children—the darlings—of his thoughts.

Nevertheless, as he entered his wife's dim-lit room the eager arguments and considerations that were running through his head died away. He stood beside her, overwhelmed by a rush of feeling, alive through all his being to the appeal of her frail sweetness, the helplessness of her sleep, the dumb significance of the thin, blue-veined hand—eloquent at once of character and of physical weakness—which lay beside her. Her face was hidden, but the beautiful hair with its childish curls and ripples drew him to her—touched all the springs of tenderness.

It was a loveliness so full, it seemed, of meaning and of promise. Hand, brow, mouth—they were the signs of no mere empty and insipid beauty. There was not a movement, not a feature, that did not speak of intelligence and mind.

And yet, were he to wake her now and talk to her of the experience of his evening, how little joy would either get out of it.

Was it because she had no intellectual disinterestedness? Well, what woman had! But other women, even if they saw everything in terms of personality, had the power of pursuing an aim, steadily, persistently, for the sake of a person. He thought of Lady Palmerston—of Princess Lieven fighting Guizot's battles—and sighed.

By Jove! the women could do most things, if they chose. He recalled Kitty's triumph in the great party gathered to welcome Lord Parham, contrasting it with her wilful and absurd behavior to the man himself. There was something bewildering in such power—combined with such folly. In a sense, it was perfectly true that she had insulted her husband's chief, and jeopardized her husband's policy, because she could not put up with Lord Parham's white eyelashes.

Well, let him make his account with it! How to love her, tend her, make her happy—and yet carry on himself the life of high office—there was the problem! Meanwhile he recognized, fully and humorously, that she had married a political sceptic—and that it was hard for her to know what to do with the enthusiast who had taken his place.

Poor, pretty, incalculable darling! He would coax her to stay abroad part of the Parliamentary season—and then, perhaps, lure her into the country, with the rebuilding and refurnishing of Haggart. She must be managed and kept from harm—and afterwards indulged and spoiled and fêted to her heart's content.

If only the fates would give them another child!—a child brilliant and lovely like herself, then surely this melancholy which overshadowed her would disperse. That look—that tragic look—she had given him on the day of the fête, when she spoke of "separation"! The wild adventure with the lamp had been her revenge—her despair. He shuddered as he thought of it.