"Here we are," said Sir Richard Lyster, moving down a dark passage 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'Estrées 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'Estrées—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'Estrées 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'Estrées 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 amusement.
And what Madame d'Estrées 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'Estrées was now intent on something more and different.
For in the four years which had now elapsed since the Ashe's marriage this lively lady had known adversity. She had been forced to leave London, as we have seen, by the pressure of certain facts in her past history so ancient and far removed when their true punishment began that she no doubt felt it highly unjust that she should be punished for them at all. Her London debts had swallowed up what then remained to her of fortune; and, afterwards, the allowance from the Ashes was all she had to depend on. Banished to Paris, she fell into a lower stratum of life, at a moment when her faithful and mysterious friend, Markham Warington, was held in Scotland by the first painful symptoms of his sister's last illness, and could do but little for her. She had, in fact, known the sordid shifts and straits of poverty, though the smallest moral effort would have saved her from them. She had kept disreputable company, she had been miserable, and base; and although shame is not easy to persons of her temperament, it may perhaps be said that she was ashamed of this period of her existence. Appeals to the Ashes yielded less and less, and Warington seemed to have forsaken her. She awoke at last to a panic-stricken fear of darker possibilities and more real suffering than any she had yet known, and under the stress of this fear she collapsed physically, writing both to Warington and to the Ashes in a tone of mingled reproach and despair.