The Marriage of William Ashe

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Ah!—he remembered one or two storm-walks with Kitty in their engaged or early married days—in Scotland chiefly. As he trudged up this Swiss pass he could see stretches of Scotch heather under drifting mist, and feel a little figure in its tweed dress flung suddenly by the wind and its own soft will against his arm. And then, the sudden embrace, and the wet, fragrant cheek, and her Voice—mocking and sweet!

Oh, God! where was she now? The shock of her disappearance from Venice had left in some ways a deeper mark upon him than even the original catastrophe. For who that had known her could think of such a being, alone, in a world of strangers, without a peculiar dread and anguish? That she was alive he knew, for her five hundred a year—and she had never accepted another penny from him since her flight—was still drawn on her behalf by a banking firm in Paris. His solicitors, since the failure of their first efforts to trace her after Cliffe's death, had made repeated inquiries; Ashe had himself gone to Paris to see the bankers in question. But he was met by their solemn promise to Kitty to keep her secret inviolate. Madame d'Estrées supplied him with the name of the convent in which Kitty had been brought up; but the mother superior denied all knowledge of her. Meanwhile no course of action on Kitty's part could have restored her so effectually to her place in Ashe's imagination. She haunted his days and nights. So also did his memory of the Dean's petition. Insensibly, without argument, the whole attitude of his mind thereto had broken down; since he had been out of office, and his days and nights were no longer absorbed in the detail of administration and Parliamentary leadership, he had been the defenceless prey of grief; yearning and pity and agonized regret, rising from the deep subconscious self, had overpowered his first recoil and determination; and in the absence of all other passionate hope, the one desire and dream which still lived warm and throbbing at his heart was the dream that still in some crowd, or loneliness, he might again, before it was too late, see Kitty's face and the wildness of Kitty's eyes.

And he believed much the same process had taken place in his mother's feeling. She rarely spoke of Kitty; but when she did the doubt and soreness of her mind were plain. Her own life had grown very solitary. And in particular the old friendship between her and Polly Lyster had entirely ceased to be. Lady Tranmore shivered when she was named, and would never herself speak of her if she could help it. Ashe had tried in vain to make her explain herself. Surely it was incredible that she could in any way blame Mary for the incident at Verona? Ashe, of course, remembered the passage in his mother's letter from Venice, and they had the maid Blanche's report to Lady Tranmore, of Kitty's intentions when she left Venice, of her terror when Cliffe appeared—of her swoon. But he believed with the Dean that any treacherous servant could have brought about the catastrophe. Vincenzo, one of the gondoliers who took Kitty to the station, had seen the luggage labelled for Verona; no doubt Cliffe had bribed him; and this explanation was, indeed, suggested to Lady Tranmore by the maid. His mother's suspicion—if indeed she entertained it—was so hideous that Ashe, finding it impossible to make his own mind harbor it for an instant, was harrowed by the mere possibility of its existence; as though it represented some hidden sore of consciousness that refused either to be probed or healed.

As he labored on against the storm all thought of his present life and activities dropped away from him; he lived entirely in the past. "What is it in me," he thought, "that has made the difference between my life and that of other men I know—that weakened me so with Kitty?" He canvassed his own character, as a third person might have done.

The Christian, no doubt, would say that his married life had failed because God had been absent from it, because there had been in it no consciousness of higher law, of compelling grace.

Ashe pondered what such things might mean. "The Christian—in speculative belief—fails under the challenge of life as often as other men. Surely it depends on something infinitely more primitive and fundamental than Christianity?—something out of which Christianity itself springs? But this something—does it really exist—or am I only cheating myself by fancying it? Is it, as all the sages have said, the pursuit of some eternal good, the identification of the self with it—the 'dying to live'? And is this the real meaning at the heart of Christianity?—at the heart of all religion?—the everlasting meaning, let science play what havoc it please with outward forms and statements?"

Had he, perhaps, doubted the soul?

He groaned aloud. "O my God, what matter that I should grow wise—if Kitty is lost and desolate?"

And he trampled on his own thoughts—feeling them a mere hypocrisy and offence.

As they left the Gondo ravine and began to climb the zigzag road to the Simplon inn, the storm grew still wilder, and the driver, with set lips and dripping face, urged his patient beasts against a deluge. The road ran rivers; each torrent, carefully channelled, that passed beneath it brought down wood and soil in choking abundance; and Ashe watched the downward push of the rain on the high, exposed banks above the carriage. Once they passed a fragment of road which had been washed away; the driver pointing to it said something sulkily about "frane" on the "other side."