Lady Henry, too, watched Julie's exit from the room.
"So now she supposes herself in love with Jacob?" she thought, with amusement, as she resumed her seat.
"What if Delafield refuses to be made a duke?" said Sir Wilfrid, in her ear.
"It would be a situation new to the Constitution," said Lady Henry, composedly. "I advise you, however, to wait till it occurs."
The northern express rushed onward through the night. Rugby, Stafford, Crewe had been left behind. The Yorkshire valleys and moors began to show themselves in pale ridges and folds under the moon. Julie, wakeful in her corner opposite the little, sleeping Duchess, was conscious of an interminable rush of images through a brain that longed for a few unconscious and forgetful moments. She thought of the deferential station-master at Euston; of the fuss attending their arrival on the platform; of the arrangements made for stopping the express at the Yorkshire Station, where they were to alight.
Faircourt? Was it the great Early-Georgian house of which she had heard Jacob speak--the vast pile, half barrack, half palace, in which, according to him, no human being could be either happy or at home?
And this was now his--and hers? Again the whirl of thoughts swept and danced round her.
A wild, hill country. In the valleys, the blackness of thick trees, the gleam of rivers, the huge, lifeless factories; and beyond, the high, silver edges, the sharp shadows of the moors.... The train slackened, and the little Duchess woke at once.
"Ten minutes to three. Oh, Julie, here we are!"
The dawn was just coldly showing as they alighted. Carriages and servants were waiting, and various persons whose identity and function it was not easy to grasp. One of them, however, at once approached Julie with a privileged air, and she perceived that he was a doctor.
"I am very glad that your grace has come," he said, as he raised his hat. "The trouble with the Duke is shock, and want of sleep."
Julie looked at him, still bewildered.
"How long has my husband been ill?"
He walked on beside her, describing in as few words as possible the harrowing days preceding the death of the boy, Delafield's attempts to soothe and control the father, the stratagem by which the poor Duke had outwitted them all, and the weary hours of search through the night, under a drizzling rain, which had resulted, about dawn, in the discovery of the Duke's body in one of the deeper holes of the river.
"When the procession returned to the house, your husband"--the speaker framed the words uncertainly--"had a long fainting-fit. It was probably caused by the exhaustion of the search--many hours without food--and many sleepless nights. We kept him in his room all day. But towards evening he insisted on getting up. The restlessness he shows is itself a sign of shock. I trust, now you are here, you may be able to persuade him to spare himself. Otherwise the consequences might be grave."
The drive to the house lay mainly through a vast park, dotted with stiff and melancholy woods. The morning was cloudy; even the wild roses in the hedges and the daisies in the grass had neither gayety nor color. Soon the house appeared--an immense pile of stone, with a pillared centre, and wings to east and west, built in a hollow, gray and sunless. The mournful blinds drawn closely down made of it rather a mausoleum for the dead than a home for the living.
At the approach of the carriage, however, doors were thrown open, servants appeared, and on the steps, trembling and heavy-eyed, stood Susan Delafield.
She looked timidly at Julie, and then, as they passed into the great central hall, the two kissed each other with tears.
"He is in his room, waiting for you. The doctors persuaded him not to come down. But he is dressed, and reading and writing. We don't believe he has slept at all for a week."
"Through there," said Susan Delafield, stepping back. "That is the door."
"SHE FOUND HERSELF KNEELING BESIDE HIM"
Julie softly opened it, and closed it behind her. Delafield had heard her approach, and was standing by the table, supporting himself upon it. His aspect filled Julie with horror. She ran to him and threw her arms round him. He sank back into his chair, and she found herself kneeling beside him, murmuring to him, while his head rested upon her shoulder.
"Jacob, I am here! Oh, I ought to have been here all through! It's terrible--terrible! But, Jacob, you won't suffer so--now I'm here--now we're together--now I love you, Jacob?"
Her voice broke in tears. She put back the hair from his brow, kissing him with a tenderness in which there was a yearning and lovely humility. Then she drew a little away, waiting for him to speak, in an agony.
But for a time he seemed unable to speak. He feebly released himself, as though he could not bear the emotion she offered him, and his eyes closed.
"Jacob, come and lie down!" she said, in terror. "Let me call the doctors."
He shook his head, and a faint pressure from his hand bade her sit beside him.
"I shall be better soon. Give me time. I'll tell you--"
Then silence again. She sat holding his hand, her eyes fixed upon him. Time passed, she knew not how. Susan came into the room--a small sitting-room in the east wing--to tell her that the neighboring bedroom had been prepared for herself. Julie only looked up for an instant with a dumb sign of refusal. A doctor came in, and Delafield made a painful effort to take the few spoonfuls of food and stimulant pressed upon him. Then he buried his face in the side of the arm-chair.
"Please let us be alone," he said, with a touch of his old peremptoriness, and both Susan and the doctor obeyed.
But it was long before he could collect energy enough to talk. When he did, he made an effort to tell her the story of the boy's death, and the father's self-destruction. He told it leaning forward in his chair, his eyes on the ground, his hands loosely joined, his voice broken and labored. Julie listened, gathering from his report an impression of horror, tragic and irremediable, similar to that which had shaken the balance of his own mind. And when he suddenly looked up with the words, "And nowIam expected to take their place--to profit by their deaths! What rightful law of God or man binds me to accept a life and a responsibility that I loathe?" Julie drew back as though he had struck her. His face, his tone were not his own--there was a violence, a threat in them, addressed, as it were, specially toher. "If it were not for you," his eyes seemed to say, "I could refuse this thing, which will destroy me, soul and body."
She was silent, her pulses fluttering, and he resumed, speaking like one groping his way:
"I could have done the work, of course--I have done it for five years. I could have looked after the estate and the people. But the money, the paraphernalia, the hordes of servants, the mummery of the life! Why, Julie, should we be forced into it? What happiness--I ask you--what happiness can it bring to either of us?"
And again he looked up, and again it seemed to Julie that his expression was one of animated hostility and antagonism--antagonism to her, as embodying for the moment all the arguments--of advantage, custom, law--he was, in his own mind, fighting and denying. With a failing heart she felt herself very far from him. Was there not also something in his attitude, unconsciously, of that old primal antagonism of the man to the woman, of the stronger to the weaker, the more spiritual to the more earthy?
"You think, no doubt," he said, after a pause, "that it is my duty to take this thing, even if Icouldlay it down?"
"I don't know what I think," she said, hurriedly. "It is very strange, of course, what you say. We ought to discuss it thoroughly. Let me have a little time."
He gave an impatient sigh, then suddenly rose.
"Will you come and look at them?"
She, too, rose and put her hand in his.
"Take me where you will."
"It is not horrible," he said, shading his eyes a moment. "They are at peace."
With a feeble step, leaning on her arm, he guided her through the great, darkened house. Julie was dimly aware of wide staircases, of galleries and high halls, of the pictures of past Delafields looking down upon them. The morning was now far advanced. Many persons were at work in the house, but Julie was conscious of them only as distant figures that vanished at their approach. They walked alone, guarded from all intrusion by the awe and sympathy of the unseen human beings around them.
Delafield opened the closed door.
The father and son lay together, side by side, the boy's face in a very winning repose, which at first sight concealed the traces of his long suffering; the father's also--closed eyes and sternly shut mouth--suggesting, not the despair which had driven him to his death, but, rather, as in sombre triumph, the all-forgetting, all-effacing sleep which he had won from death.
They stood a moment, till Delafield fell on his knees. Julie knelt beside him. She prayed for a while; then she wearied, being, indeed, worn out with her journey. But Delafield was motionless, and it seemed to Julie that he hardly breathed.
She rose to her feet, and found her eyes for the first time flooded with tears. Never for many weeks had she felt so lonely, or so utterly unhappy. She would have given anything to forget herself in comforting Jacob. But he seemed to have no need of her, no thought of her.
As she vaguely looked round her, she saw that beside the dead man was a table holding some violets--the only flowers in the room--some photographs, and a few well--worn books. Softly she took up one. It was a copy of theMeditations of Marcus Aurelius, much noted and underlined. It would have seemed to her sacrilege to look too close; but she presently perceived a letter between its pages, and in the morning light, which now came strongly into the room through a window looking on the garden, she saw plainly that it was written on thin, foreign paper, that it was closed, and addressed to her husband.
"Jacob!"
She touched him softly on the shoulder, alarmed by his long immobility.
He looked up, and it appeared to Julie as though he were shaking off with difficulty some abnormal and trancelike state. But he rose, looking at her strangely.
"Jacob, this is yours."
He took the book abruptly, almost as if she had no right to be holding it. Then, as he saw the letter, the color rushed into his face. He took it, and after a moment's hesitation walked to the window and opened it.
She saw him waver, and ran to his support. But he put out a hand which checked her.
"It was the last thing he wrote," he said; and then, uncertainly, and without reading any but the first words of the letter, he put it into his pocket.
Julie drew back, humiliated. His gesture said that to a secret so intimate and sacred he did not propose to admit his wife.
They went back silently to the room from which they had come. Sentence after sentence came to Julie's lips, but it seemed useless to say them, and once more, but in a totally new way, she was "afraid" of the man beside her.
She left him shortly after, by his own wish.
"I will lie down, and you must rest," he said, with decision.
So she bathed and dressed, and presently she allowed the kind, fair-haired Susan to give her food, and pour out her own history of the death-week which she and Jacob had passed through. But in all that was said, Julie noticed that Susan spoke of her brother very little, and of his inheritance and present position not at all. And once or twice she noticed a wondering or meditative expression in the girl's charming eyes as they rested on herself, and realized that the sense of mystery, of hushed expectancy, was not confined to her own mind.
When Susan left her at nine o'clock, it was to give a number of necessary orders in the house. The inquest was to be held in the morning, and the whole day would be filled with arrangements for the double funeral. The house would be thronged with officials of all sorts. "Poor Jacob!" said the sister, sighing, as she went away.
But the tragic tumult had not yet begun. The house was still quiet, and Julie was for the first time alone.
She drew up the blinds, and stood gazing out upon the park, now flooded with light; at the famous Italian garden beneath the windows, with its fountains and statues; at the wide lake which filled the middle distance; and the hills beyond it, with the plantations and avenues which showed the extension of the park as far as the eye could see.
Julie knew very well what it all implied. Her years with Lady Henry, in connection with her own hidden sense of birth and family, had shown her with sufficient plainness the conditions under which the English noble lives. Shewasactually, at that moment, Duchess of Chudleigh; her strong intelligence faced and appreciated the fact; the social scope and power implied in those three words were all the more vivid to her imagination because of her history and up-bringing. She had not grown to maturityinside, like Delafield, but as an exile from a life which was yet naturally hers--an exile, full, sometimes, of envy, and the passions of envy.
It had no terrors for her--quite the contrary--this high social state. Rather, there were moments when her whole nature reached out to it, in a proud and confident ambition. Nor had she any mystical demurrer to make. The originality which in some ways she richly possessed was not concerned in the least with the upsetting of class distinctions, and as a Catholic she had been taught loyally to accept them.
The minutes passed away. Julie sank deeper and deeper into reverie, her head leaning against the side of the window, her hands clasped before her on her black dress. Once or twice she found the tears dropping from her eyes, and once or twice she smiled.
She was not thinking of the tragic circumstances amid which she stood. From that short trance of feeling even the piteous figures of the dead father and son faded away. Warkworth entered into it, but already invested with the passionless and sexless beauty of a world where--whether it be to us poetry or reality--"they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Her warm and living thoughts spent themselves on one theme only--the redressing of a spiritual balance. She was no longer a beggar to her husband; she had the wherewithal to give. She had been the mere recipient, burdened with debts beyond her paying; now--
And then it was that her smiles came--tremluous, fugitive, exultant.
A bell rang in the long corridor, and the slight sound recalled her to life and action. She walked towards the door which separated her from the sitting-room where she had left her husband, and opened it without knocking.
Delafield was sitting at a writing-table in the window. He had apparently been writing; but she found him in a moment of pause, playing absently with the pen he still held.
As she entered he looked up, and it seemed to her that his aspect and his mood had changed. Her sudden and indefinable sense of this made it easier for her to hasten to him, and to hold out her hands to him.
"Jacob, you asked me a question just now, and I begged you to give me time. But I am here to answer it. If it would be to your happiness to refuse the dukedom, refuse it. I will not stand in your way, and I will never reproach you. I suppose"--she made herself smile upon him--"there are ways of doing such a strange thing. You will be much criticised, perhaps much blamed. But if it seems to you right, do it. I'll just stand by you and help you. Whatever makes you happy shall make me happy, if only--"
Delafield had risen impetuously and held her by both hands. His breast heaved, and the hurrying of her own breath would now hardly let her speak.
"If only what?" he said, hoarsely.
She raised her eyes.
"If only,mon ami"--she disengaged one hand and laid it gently on his shoulder--"you will give me your trust, and"--her voice dropped--"your love!"
They gazed at each other. Between them, around them hovered thoughts of the past--of Warkworth, of the gray Channel waves, of the spiritual relation which had grown up between them in Switzerland, mingled with the consciousness of this new, incalculable present, and of the growth and change in themselves.
"You'd give it all up?" said Delafield, gently, still holding her at arm's-length.
"Yes," she nodded to him, with a smile.
"For me? For my sake?"
She smiled again. He drew a long breath, and turning to the table behind him, took up a letter which was lying there.
"I want you to read that," he said, holding it out to her.
She drew back, with a little, involuntary frown.
He understood.
"Dearest," he cried, pressing her hand passionately, "I have been in the grip of all the powers of death! Read it--be good to me!"
Standing beside him, with his arm round her, she read the melancholy Duke's last words:
/# "My Dear Jacob,--I leave you a heavy task, which I know well is, in your eyes, a mere burden. But, for my sake, accept it. The man who runs away has small right to counsel courage. But you know what my struggle has been. You'll judge me mercifully, if no one else does. There is in you, too, the little, bitter drop that spoils us all; but you won't be alone. You have your wife, and you love her. Take my place here, care for our people, speak of us sometimes to your children, and pray for us. I bless you, dear fellow. The only moments of comfort I have ever known this last year have come from you. I would live on if I could, but I must--musthave sleep." #/
Julie dropped the paper. She turned to look at her husband.
"Since I read that," he said, in a low voice, "I have been sitting here alone--or, rather, it is my belief that I have not been alone. But"--he hesitated--"it is very difficult for me to speak of that--even to you. At any rate, I have felt the touch of discipline, of command. My poor cousin deserted. I, it seems"--he drew a long and painful breath--"must keep to the ranks."
"Let us discuss it," said Julie; and sitting down, hand in hand, they talked quietly and gravely.
Suddenly, Delafield turned to her with renewed emotion.
"I feel already the energy, the honorable ambition you will bring to it. But still, you'd have given it up, Julie? You'd have given it up?"
Julie chose her words.
"Yes. But now that we are to keep it, will you hate me if, some day--when we are less sad--I get pleasure from it? I sha'n't be able to help it. When we were at La Verna, I felt that you ought to have been born in the thirteenth century, that you were really meant to wed poverty and follow St. Francis. But now you have got to be horribly, hopelessly rich. And I, all the time, am a worldling, and a modern. What you'll suffer from, I shall perhaps--enjoy."
The word fell harshly on the darkened room. Delafield shivered, as though he felt the overshadowing dead. Julie impetuously took his hand.
"It will be my part to be a worldling--for your sake," she said, her breath wavering. Their eyes met. From her face shone a revelation, a beauty that enwrapped them both. Delafield fell on his knees beside her, and laid his head upon her breast. The exquisite gesture with which she folded her arms about him told her inmost thought. At last he needed her, and the dear knowledge filled and tamed her heart.
THE END