"HER HANDS CLASPED IN FRONT OF HER"
With the cold aloofness of one who feels it more dignified to submit than to struggle, she allowed him to assist her in landing. He put her into the Victoria train, travelling himself in another carriage.
As he walked beside her down the platform of Victoria Station, she said to him:
"I shall be obliged if you will tell Evelyn that I have returned."
"I go to her at once."
She suddenly paused, and he saw that she was looking helplessly at one of the newspaper placards of the night before. First among its items appeared: "Critical state of Lord Lackington."
He hardly knew how far she would allow him to have any further communication with her, but her pale exhaustion made it impossible not to offer to serve her.
"It would be early to go for news now," he said, gently. "It would disturb the house. But in a couple of hours from now"--the station clock pointed to 6.15--"if you will allow me, I will leave the morning bulletin at your door."
She hesitated.
"You must rest, or you will have no strength for nursing," he continued, in the same studiously guarded tone. "But if you would prefer another messenger--"
"I have none," and she raised her hand to her brow in mute, unconscious confession of an utter weakness and bewilderment.
"Then let me go," he said, softly.
It seemed to him that she was so physically weary as to be incapable either of assent or resistance. He put her into her cab, and gave the driver his directions. She looked at him uncertainly. But he did not offer his hand. From those blue eyes of his there shot out upon her one piercing glance--manly, entreating, sad. He lifted his hat and was gone.
"Jacob, what brings you back so soon?" The Duchess ran into the room, a trim little figure in her morning dress of blue-and-white cloth, with her small spitz leaping beside her.
Delafield advanced.
"I came to tell you that I got your telegram yesterday, and that in the evening, by an extraordinary and fortunate chance, I met Miss Le Breton in Paris--"
"You met Julie in Paris?" echoed the Duchess, in astonishment.
"She had come to spend a couple of days with some friends there before going on to Bruges. I gave her the news of Lord Lackington's illness, and she at once turned back. She was much fatigued and distressed, and the night was stormy. I put her into the sleeping-car, and came back myself to see if I could be any assistance to her. And at Calais I was of some use. The crossing was very rough."
"Julie was in Paris?" repeated the Duchess, as though she had heard nothing else of what he had been saying.
Her eyes, so blue and large in her small, irregular face, sought those of her cousin and endeavored to read them.
"It seems to have been a rapid change of plan. And it was a great stroke of luck my meeting her."
"But how--and where?"
"Oh, there is no time for going into that," said Delafield, impatiently. "But I knew you would like to know that she was here--after your message yesterday. We arrived a little after six this morning. About nine I went for news to St. James's Square. There is a slight rally."
"Did you see Lord Uredale? Did you say anything about Julie?" asked the Duchess, eagerly.
"I merely asked at the door, and took the bulletin to Miss Le Breton. Will you see Uredale and arrange it? I gather you saw him yesterday."
"By all means," said the Duchess, musing. "Oh, it was so curious yesterday. Lord Lackington had just told them. You should have seen those two men."
"The sons?"
The Duchess nodded.
"They don't like it. They were as stiff as pokers. But they will do absolutely the right thing. They see at once that she must be provided for. And when he asked for her they told me to telegraph, if I could find out where she was. Well, of all the extraordinary chances."
She looked at him again, oddly, a spot of red on either small cheek. Delafield took no notice. He was pacing up and down, apparently in thought.
"Suppose you take her there?" he said, pausing abruptly before her.
"To St. James's Square? What did you tell her?"
"That he was a trifle better, and that you would come to her."
"Yes, it would be hard for her to go alone," said the Duchess, reflectively. She looked at her watch. "Only a little after eleven. Ring, please, Jacob."
The carriage was ordered. Meanwhile the little lady inquired eagerly after her Julie. Had she been exhausted by the double journey? Was she alone in Paris, or was Madame Bornier with her?
Jacob had understood that Madame Bornier and the little girl had gone straight to Bruges.
The Duchess looked down and then looked up.
"Did--did you come across Major Warkworth?"
"Yes, I saw him for a moment in the Rue de la Paix, He was starting for Rome."
The Duchess turned away as though ashamed of her question, and gave her orders for the carriage. Then her attention was suddenly drawn to her cousin. "How pale you look, Jacob," she said, approaching him. "Won't you have something--some wine?"
Delafield refused, declaring that all he wanted was an hour or two's sleep.
"I go back to Paris to-morrow," he said, as he prepared to take his leave. "Will you be here to-night if I look in?"
"Alack! we go to Scotland to-night! It was just a piece of luck that you found me this morning. Freddie is fuming to get away."
Delafield paused a moment. Then he abruptly shook hands and went.
"He wants news of what happens at St. James's Square," thought the Duchess, suddenly, and she ran after him to the top of the stairs. "Jacob! If you don't mind a horrid mess to-night, Freddie and I shall be dining alone--of course we must have something to eat. Somewhere about eight. Do look in. There'll be a cutlet--on a trunk--anyway."
Delafield laughed, hesitated, and finally accepted.
The Duchess went back to the drawing-room, not a little puzzled and excited.
"It's very,veryodd," she said to herself. "And whatisthe matter with Jacob?"
Half an hour later she drove to the splendid house in St. James's Square where Lord Lackington lay dying.
She asked for Lord Uredale, the eldest son, and waited in the library till he came.
He was a tall, squarely built man, with fair hair already gray, and somewhat absent and impassive manners.
At sight of him the Duchess's eyes filled with tears. She hurried to him, her soft nature dissolved in sympathy.
"How is your father?"
"A trifle easier, though the doctors say there is no real improvement. But he is quite conscious--knows us all. I have just been reading him the debate."
"You told me yesterday he had asked for Miss Le Breton," said the Duchess, raising herself on tiptoe as though to bring her low tones closer to his ear. "She's here--in town, I mean. She came back from Paris last night."
Lord Uredale showed no emotion of any kind. Emotion was not in his line.
"Then my father would like to see her," he said, in a dry, ordinary voice, which jarred upon the sentimental Duchess.
"When shall I bring her?"
"He is now comfortable and resting. If you are free--"
The Duchess replied that she would go to Heribert Street at once. As Lord Uredale took her to her carriage a young man ran down the steps hastily, raised his hat, and disappeared.
Lord Uredale explained that he was the husband of the famous young beauty, Mrs. Delaray, whose portrait Lord Lackington had been engaged upon at the time of his seizure. Having been all his life a skilful artist, a man of fashion, and a harmless haunter of lovely women, Lord Lackington, as the Duchess knew, had all but completed a gallery of a hundred portraits, representing the beauty of the reign. Mrs. Delaray's would have been the hundredth in a series of which Mrs. Norton was the first.
"He has been making arrangements with the husband to get it finished," said Lord Uredale; "it has been on his mind."
The Duchess shivered a little.
"He knows he won't finish it?"
"Quite well."
"And he still thinks of those things?"
"Yes--or politics," said Lord Uredale, smiling faintly. "I have written to Mr. Montresor. There are two or three points my father wants to discuss with him."
"And he is not depressed, or troubled about himself?"
"Not in the least. He will be grateful if you will bring him Miss Le Breton."
"Julie, my darling, are you fit to come with me?"
The Duchess held her friend in her arms, soothing and caressing her. How forlorn was the little house, under its dust-sheets, on this rainy, spring morning! And Julie, amid the dismantled drawing-room, stood spectrally white and still, listening, with scarcely a word in reply, to the affection, or the pity, or the news which the Duchess poured out upon her.
"Shall we go now? I am quite ready."
And she withdrew herself from the loving grasp which held her, and put on her hat and gloves.
"You ought to be in bed," said the Duchess. "Those night journeys are too abominable. Even Jacob looks a wreck. But what an extraordinary chance, Julie, that Jacob should have found you! How did you come across each other?"
"At the Nord Station," said Julie, as she pinned her veil before the glass over the mantel-piece.
Some instinct silenced the Duchess. She asked no more questions, and they started for St. James's Square.
"You won't mind if I don't talk?" said Julie, leaning back and closing her eyes. "I seem still to have the sea in my ears."
The Duchess looked at her tenderly, clasping her hand close, and the carriage rolled along. But just before they reached St. James's Square, Julie hastily raised the fingers which held her own and kissed them.
"Oh, Julie," said the Duchess, reproachfully, "I don't like you to do that!"
She flushed and frowned. It was she who ought to pay such acts of homage, not Julie.
"Father, Miss Le Breton is here."
"Let her come in, Jack--and the Duchess, too."
Lord Uredale went back to the door. Two figures came noiselessly into the room, the Duchess in front, with Julie's hand in hers.
Lord Lackington was propped up in bed, and breathing fast. But he smiled as they approached him.
"This is good-bye, dear Duchess," he said, in a whisper, as she bent over him. Then, with a spark of his old gayety in the eyes, "I should be a cur to grumble. Life has been very agreeable. Ah, Julie!"
Julie dropped gently on her knees beside him and laid her cheek against his arm. At the mention of her name the old man's face had clouded as though the thoughts she called up had suddenly rebuked his words to the Duchess. He feebly moved his hands towards hers, and there was silence in the room for a few moments.
"Uredale!"
"Yes, father."
"This is Rose's daughter."
His eyes lifted themselves to those of his son.
"I know, father. If Miss Le Breton will allow us, we will do what we can to be of service to her."
Bill Chantrey, the younger brother, gravely nodded assent. They were both men of middle age, the younger over forty. They did not resemble their father, nor was there any trace in either of them of his wayward fascination. They were a pair of well-set-up, well-bred Englishmen, surprised at nothing, and quite incapable of showing any emotion in public; yet just and kindly men. As Julie entered the house they had both solemnly shaken hands with her, in a manner which showed at once their determination, as far as they were concerned, to avoid anything sentimental or in the nature of a scene, and their readiness to do what could be rightly demanded of them.
Julie hardly listened to Lord Uredale's little speech. She had eyes and ears only for her grandfather. As she knelt beside him, her face bowed upon his hand, the ice within her was breaking up, that dumb and straitening anguish in which she had lived since that moment at the Nord Station in which she had grasped the meaning and the implications of Delafield's hurried words. Was everything to be swept away from her at once--her lover, and now this dear old man, to whom her heart, crushed and bleeding as it was, yearned with all its strength?
Lord Lackington supposed that she was weeping.
"Don't grieve, my dear," he murmured. "It must come to an end some time--'cette charmante promenade à travers la réalité!'"
And he smiled at her, agreeably vain to the last of that French accent and that French memory which--so his look implied--they two could appreciate, each in the other. Then he turned to the Duchess.
"Duchess, you knew this secret before me. But I forgiveyou, and thank you. You have been very good to Rose's child. Julie has told me--and--I have observed--"
"Oh, dear Lord Lackington!" Evelyn bent over him. "Trust her to me," she said, with a lovely yearning to comfort and cheer him breathing from her little face.
He smiled.
"To you--and--"
He did not finish the sentence.
After a pause he made a little gesture of farewell which the Duchess understood. She kissed his hand and turned away weeping.
"Nurse--where is nurse?" said Lord Lackington.
Both the nurse and the doctor, who had withdrawn a little distance from the family group, came forward.
"Doctor, give me some strength," said the laboring voice, not without its old wilfulness of accent.
He moved his arm towards the young homoeopath, who injected strychnine. Then he looked at the nurse.
"Brandy--and--lift me."
All was done as he desired.
"Now go, please," he said to his sons. "I wish to be left with Julie."
For some moments, that seemed interminable to Julie, Lord Lackington lay silent. A feverish flush, a revival of life in the black eyes had followed on the administration of the two stimulants. He seemed to be gathering all his forces.
At last he laid his hand on her arm. "You shouldn't be alone," he said, abruptly.
His expression had grown anxious, even imperious. She felt a vague pang of dread as she tried to assure him that she had kind friends, and that her work would be her resource.
Lord Lackington frowned.
"That won't do," he said, almost vehemently. "You have great talents, but you are weak--you are a woman--you must marry."
Julie stared at him, whiter even than when she had entered his room--helpless to avert what she began to foresee.
"Jacob Delafield is devoted to you. You should marry him, dear--you should marry him."
The room seemed to swim around her. But his face was still plain--the purpled lips and cheeks, the urgency in the eyes, as of one pursued by an overtaking force, the magnificent brow, the crown of white hair.
She summoned all her powers and told him hurriedly that he was mistaken--entirely mistaken. Mr. Delafield had, indeed, proposed to her, but, apart from her own unwillingness, she had reason to know that his feelings towards her were now entirely changed. He neither loved her nor thought well of her.
Lord Lackington lay there, obstinate, patient, incredulous. At last he interrupted her.
"You make yourself believe these things. But they are not true. Delafield is attached to you. I know it."
He nodded to her with his masterful, affectionate look. And before she could find words again he had resumed.
"He could give you a great position. Don't despise it. We English big-wigs have a good time."
A ghostly, humorous ray shot out upon her; then he felt for her hand.
"Dear Julie, why won't you?"
"If you were to ask him," she cried, in despair, "he would tell you as I do."
And across her miserable thoughts there flashed two mingled images--Warkworth waiting, waiting for her at the Sceaux Station, and that look of agonized reproach in Delafield's haggard face as he had parted from her in the dawn of this strange, this incredible day.
And here beside her, with the tyranny of the dying, this dear babbler wandered on in broken words, with painful breath, pleading, scolding, counselling. She felt that he was exhausting himself. She begged him to let her recall nurse and doctor. He shook his head, and when he could no longer speak, he clung to her hand, his gaze solemnly, insistently, fixed upon her.
Her spirit writhed and rebelled. But she was helpless in the presence of this mortal weakness, this affection, half earthly, half beautiful, on its knees before her.
A thought struck her. Why not content him? Whatever pledges she gave would die with him. What did it matter? It was cruelty to deny him the words--the mere empty words--he asked of her.
"I--I would do anything to please you!" she said, with a sudden burst of uncontrollable tears, as she laid her head down beside him on the pillow. "If hewereto ask me again, of course, for your sake, I would consider it once more. Dear, dear friend, won't that satisfy you?"
Lord Lackington was silent a few moments, then he smiled.
"That's a promise?"
She raised herself and looked at him, conscious of a sick movement of terror. What was there in his mind, still so quick, fertile, ingenious, under the very shadow of death?
He waited for her answer, feebly pressing her hand.
"Yes," she said, faintly, and once more hid her face beside him.
Then, for some little time, the dying man neither stirred nor spoke. At last Julie heard:
"I used to be afraid of death--that was in middle life. Every night it was a torment. But now, for many years, I have not been afraid at all.... Byron--Lord Byron--said to me, once, he would not change anything in his life; but he would have preferred not to have lived at all. I could not say that. I have enjoyed it all--being an Englishman, and an English peer--pictures, politics, society--everything. Perhaps it wasn't fair. There are so many poor devils."
Julie pressed his hand to her lips. But in her thoughts there rose the sudden, sharp memory of her mother's death--of that bitter stoicism and abandonment in which the younger life had closed, in comparison with this peace, this complacency.
Yet it was a complacency rich in sweetness. His next words were to assure her tenderly that he had made provision for her. "Uredale and Bill--will see to it. They're good fellows. Often--they've thought me--a pretty fool. But they've been kind to me--always."
Then, after another interval, he lifted himself in bed, with more strength than she had supposed he could exert, looked at her earnestly, and asked her, in the same painful whisper, whether she believed in another life.
"Yes," said Julie. But her shrinking, perfunctory manner evidently distressed him. He resumed, with a furrowed brow:
"You ought. It is good for us to believe it."
"I must hope, at any rate, that I shall see you again--and mamma," she said, smiling on him through her tears.
"I wonder what it will be like," he replied, after a pause. His tone and look implied a freakish, a whimsical curiosity, yet full of charm. Then, motioning to her to come nearer, and speaking into her ear:
"Your poor mother, Julie, was never happy--never! There must be laws, you see--and churches--and religious customs. It's because--we're made of such wretched stuff. My wife, when she died--made me promise to continue going to church--and praying. And--without it--I should have been a bad man. Though I've had plenty of sceptical thoughts--plenty. Your poor parents rebelled--against all that. They suffered--they suffered. But you'll make up--you're a noble woman--you'll make up."
He laid his hand on her head. She offered no reply; but through the inner mind there rushed the incidents, passions, revolts of the preceding days.
But for that strange chance of Delafield's appearance in her path--a chance no more intelligible to her now, after the pondering of several feverish hours, than it had been at the moment of her first suspicion--where and what would she be now? A dishonored woman, perhaps, with a life-secret to keep; cut off, as her mother had been, from the straight-living, law-abiding world.
The touch of the old man's hand upon her hair roused in her a first recoil, a first shattering doubt of the impulse which had carried her to Paris. Since Delafield left her in the early dawn she had been pouring out a broken, passionate heart in a letter to Warkworth. No misgivings while she was writing it as to the all-sufficing legitimacy of love!
But here, in this cold neighborhood of the grave--brought back to gaze in spirit; on her mother's tragedy--she shrank, she trembled. Her proud intelligence denied the stain, and bade her hate and despise her rescuer. And, meanwhile, things also inherited and inborn, the fruit of a remoter ancestry, rising from the dimmest and deepest caverns of personality, silenced the clamor of the naturalist mind. One moment she felt herself seized with terror lest anything should break down the veil between her real self and this unsuspecting tenderness of the dying man; the next she rose in revolt against her own fear. Was she to find herself, after all, a mere weak penitent--meanly grateful to Jacob Delafield? Her heart cried out to Warkworth in a protesting anguish.
So absorbed in thought was she that she did not notice how long the silence had lasted.
"He seems to be sleeping," said a low voice beside her.
She looked up to see the doctor, with Lord Uredale. Gently releasing herself, she kissed Lord Lackington's forehead, and rose to her feet.
Suddenly the patient opened his eyes, and as he seemed to become aware of the figures beside him, he again lifted himself in bed, and a gleam most animated, most vivacious, passed over his features.
"Brougham's not asked," he said, with a little chuckle of amusement. "Isn't it a joke?"
The two men beside him looked at each other. Lord Uredale approached the bed.
"Not asked to what, father?" he said, gently.
"Why, to the Queen's fancy ball, of course," said Lord Lackington, still smiling. "Such a to-do! All the elderly sticks practising minuets for their lives!"
A voluble flow of talk followed--hardly intelligible. The words "Melbourne" and "Lady Holland" emerged--the fragment, apparently, of a dispute with the latter, in which "Allen" intervened--the names of "Palmerston" and "that dear chap, Villiers."
Lord Uredale sighed. The young doctor looked at him interrogatively.
"He is thinking of his old friends," said the son. "That was the Queen's ball, I imagine, of '42. I have often heard him describe my mother's dress."
But while he was speaking the fitful energy died away. The old man ceased to talk; his eyelids fell. But the smile still lingered about his mouth, and as he settled himself on his pillows, like one who rests, the spectators were struck by the urbane and distinguished beauty of his aspect. The purple flush had died again into mortal pallor. Illness had masked or refined the weakness of mouth and chin; the beautiful head and countenance, with their characteristic notes of youth, impetuosity, a kind of gay detachment, had never been more beautiful.
The young doctor looked stealthily from the recumbent figure to the tall and slender woman standing absorbed and grief-stricken beside the bed. The likeness was as evident to him as it had been, in the winter, to Sir Wilfrid Bury.
As he was escorting her down-stairs, Lord Uredale said to his companion, "Foster thinks he may still live twenty-four hours."
"If he asks for me again," said Julie, now shrouded once more behind a thick, black veil, "you will send?"
He gravely assented.
"It is a great pity," he said, with a certain stiffness--did it unconsciously mark the difference between her and his legitimate kindred?--"that my sister Lady Blanche and her daughter cannot be with us."
"They are in Italy?"
"At Florence. My niece has had an attack of diphtheria. She could neither travel nor could her mother leave her."
Then pausing in the hall, he added in a low voice, and with some embarrassment:
"My father has told you, I believe, of the addition he has made to his will?"
Julie drew back.
"I neither asked for it nor desired it," she said, in her coldest and clearest voice.
"That I quite understand," said Lord Uredale. "But--you cannot hurt him by refusing."
She hesitated.
"No. But afterwards--I must be free to follow my own judgment."
"We cannot take what does not belong to us," he said, with some sharpness. "My brother and I are named as your trustees. Believe me, we will do our best."
Meanwhile the younger brother had come out of the library to bid her farewell. She felt that she was under critical observation, though both pairs of gray eyes refrained from any appearance of scrutiny. Her pride came to her aid, and she did not shrink from the short conversation which the two brothers evidently desired. When it was over, and the brothers returned to the hall after putting her into the Duchess's carriage, the younger said to the elder:
"She can behave herself, Johnnie."
They looked at each other, with their hands in their pockets. A little nod passed between them--an augur-like acceptance of this new and irregular member of the family.
"Yes, she has excellent manners," said Uredale. "And really, after the tales Lady Henry has been spreading--that's something!"
"Oh, I always thought Lady Henry an old cat," said Bill, tranquilly. "That don't matter."
The Chantrey brothers had not been among Lady Henry'shabitués. In her eyes, they were the dull sons of an agreeable father. They were humorously aware of it, and bore her little malice.
"No," said Uredale, raising his eyebrows; "but the 'affaire Warkworth'? If there's any truth in what one hears, that's deuced unpleasant."
Bill Chantrey whistled.
"It's hard luck on that poor child Aileen that it should be her own cousin interfering with her preserves. By-the-way"--he stooped to look at the letters on the hall table--"do you see there's a letter for father from Blanche? And in a letter I got from her by the same post, she says that she has told him the whole story. According to her, Aileen's too ill to be thwarted, and she wants the governor to see the guardians. I say, Johnnie"--he looked at his brother--"we'll not trouble the father with it now?"
"Certainly not," said Uredale, with a sigh. "I saw one of the trustees--Jack Underwood--yesterday. He told me Blanche and the child were more infatuated than ever. Very likely what one hears is a pack of lies. If not, I hope this woman will have the good taste to drop it. Father has charged me to write to Blanche and tell her the whole story of poor Rose, and of this girl's revealing herself. Blanche, it appears, is just as much in the dark as we were."
"If this gossip has got round to her, her feelings will be mixed. Oh, well, I've great faith in the money," said Bill Chantrey, carelessly, as they began to mount the stairs again. "It sounds disgusting; but if the child wants him I suppose she must have him. And, anyway, the man's off to Africa for a twelvemonth at least. Miss Le Breton will have time to forget him. One can't say that either he or she has behaved with delicacy--unless, indeed, she knew nothing of Aileen, which is quite probable."
"Well, don't ask me to tackle her," said Uredale. "She has the ways of an empress."
Bill Chantrey shrugged his shoulders. "And, by George! she looks as if she could fall in love," he said, slowly. "Magnificent eyes, Johnnie. I propose to make a study of our new niece."
"Lord Uredale!" said a voice on the stairs.
The young doctor descended rapidly to meet them.
"His lordship is asking for some one," he said. "He seems excited. But I cannot catch the name."
Lord Uredale ran up-stairs.
Later in the day a man emerged from Lackington House and walked rapidly towards the Mall. It was Jacob Delafield.
He passed across the Mall and into St. James's Park. There he threw himself on the first seat he saw, in an absorption so deep that it excited the wondering notice of more than one passer-by.
After about half an hour he roused himself, and walked, still in the same brown study, to his lodgings in Jermyn Street. There he found a letter which he eagerly opened.
"DEAR JACOB,--Julie came back this morning about one o'clock. I waited for her--and at first she seemed quite calm and composed. But suddenly, as I was sitting beside her, talking, she fainted away in her chair, and I was terribly alarmed. We sent for a doctor at once. He shakes his head over her, and says there are all the signs of a severe strain of body and mind. No wonder, indeed--our poor Julie! Oh, how Iloathesome people! Well, there she is in bed, Madame Bornier away, and everybody. I simplycan'tgo to Scotland. But Freddie is just mad. Do, Jacob, there's a dear, go and dine with him to-night and cheer him up. He vows he won't go north without me.PerhapsI'll come to-morrow. I could no more leave Julie to-night than fly.
"She'll be ill for weeks. What I ought to do is to take her abroad. She'sverydear and good; but, oh, Jacob, as she lies there Ifeelher heart's broken. And it's not Lord Lackington. Oh no! though I'm sure she loved him.Dogo to Freddie, there's a dear."
"No, that I won't!" said Delafield, with a laugh that choked him, as he threw the letter down.
He tried to write an answer, but could not achieve even the simplest note. Then he began a pacing of his room, which lasted till he dropped into his chair, worn out with the sheer physical exhaustion of the night and day. When his servant came in he found his master in a heavy sleep. And, at Crowborough House, the Duke dined and fumed alone.
"Why does any one stay in England whocanmake the trip to Paradise?" said the Duchess, as she leaned lazily back in the corner of the boat and trailed her fingers in the waters of Como.
It was a balmy April afternoon, and she and Julie were floating through a scene enchanted, incomparable. When spring descends upon the shores of the Lago di Como, she brings with her all the graces, all the beauties, all the fine, delicate, and temperate delights of which earth and sky are capable, and she pours them forth upon a land of perfect loveliness. Around the shores of other lakes--Maggiore, Lugano, Garda--blue mountains rise, and the vineyards spread their green and dazzling terraces to the sun. Only Como can show in unmatched union a main composition, incomparably grand and harmonious, combined with every jewelled, or glowing, or exquisite detail. Nowhere do the mountains lean towards each other in such an ordered splendor as that which bends round the northern shores of Como. Nowhere do buttressed masses rise behind each other, to right and left of a blue water-way, in lines statelier or more noble than those kept by the mountains of the Lecco Lake, as they marshal themselves on either hand, along the approaches to Lombardy and Venetia; bearing aloft, as though on the purple pillars of some majestic gateway, the great curtain of dazzling cloud which, on a sunny day, hangs over the Brescian plain--a glorious drop-scene, interposed between the dwellers on the Como Mountains, and those marble towns, Brescia, Verona, Padua, which thread the way to Venice.
And within this divine frame-work, between the glistening snows which still, in April, crown and glorify the heights, and those reflections of them which lie encalmed in the deep bosom of the lake, there's not a foot of pasture, not a shelf of vineyard, not a slope of forest where the spring is not at work, dyeing the turf with gentians, starring it with narcissuses, or drawing across it the first golden net-work of the chestnut leaves; where the mere emerald of the grass is not in itself a thing to refresh the very springs of being; where the peach-blossom and the wild-cherry and the olive are not perpetually weaving patterns on the blue, which ravish the very heart out of your breast. And already the roses are beginning to pour over the walls; the wistaria is climbing up the cypresses; a pomp of camellias and azaleas is in all the gardens; while in the grassy bays that run up into the hills the primrose banks still keep their sweet austerity, and the triumph of spring over the just banished winter is still sharp and new.
And in the heart and sense of Julie Le Breton, as she sat beside the Duchess, listening absently to the talk of the old boatman, who, with his oars resting idly in his hands, was chattering to the ladies, a renewing force akin to that of the spring was also at its healing and life-giving work. She had still the delicate, tremulous look of one recovering from a sore wrestle with physical ill; but in her aspect there were suggestions more intimate, more moving than this. Those who have lain down and risen up with pain; those who have been face to face with passion and folly and self-judgment; those who have been forced to seek with eagerness for some answer to those questions which the majority of us never ask, "Whither is my life leading me--and what is it worth to me or to any other living soul?"--these are the men and women who now and then touch or startle us with the eyes and the voice of Julie, if, at least, we have the capacity that responds. Sir Wilfrid Bury, for instance, prince of self-governed and reasonable men, was not to be touched by Julie. For him, in spite of her keen intelligence, she was thetype passionné, from which he instinctively recoiled--the Duke of Crowborough the same. Such men feel towards such women as Julie Le Breton hostility or satire; for what they ask, above all, of the women of their world is a kind of simplicity, a kind of lightness which makes life easier for men.
But for natures like Evelyn Crowborough--or Meredith--or Jacob Delafield--the Julie-type has perennial attractions. For these are allchildren of feeling, allied in this, however different in intelligence or philosophy. They are attracted by the storm-tossed temperament in itself; by mere sensibility; by that which, in the technical language of Catholicism, suggests or possesses "the gift of tears." At any rate, pity and love for her poor Julie--however foolish, however faulty--lay warm in Evelyn Crowborough's breast; they had brought her to Como; they kept her now battling on the one hand with her husband's angry letters and on the other with the melancholy of her most perplexing, most appealing friend.
"I had often heard" [wrote the sore-tried Duke] "of the ravages wrought in family life by these absurd and unreasonable female friendships, but I never thought that it would be you, Evelyn, who would bring them home to me. I won't repeat the arguments I have used a hundred times in vain. But once again I implore and demand that you should find some kind, responsible person to look after Miss Le Breton--I don't care what you pay--and that you yourself should come home to me and the children and the thousand and one duties you are neglecting.
"As for the spring month in Scotland, which I generally enjoy so much, that has been already entirely ruined. And now the season is apparently to be ruined also. On the Shropshire property there is an important election coming on, as I am sure you know; and the Premier said to me only yesterday that he hoped you were already up and doing. The Grand Duke of C---- will be in London within the next fortnight. I particularly want to show him some civility. But what can I do without you--and how on earth am I to explain your absence?
"Once more, Evelyn, I beg and I demand that you should come home."
To which the Duchess had rushed off a reply without a post's delay.
"Oh, Freddie, you are such a wooden-headed darling! As if I hadn't explained till I'm black in the face. I'm glad, anyway, you didn't say command; that would really have made difficulties.
"As for the election, I'm sure if I was at home I should think it very good fun. Out here I am extremely doubtful whether we ought to do such things as you and Lord M---- suggest. A duke shouldn't interfere in elections. Anyway, I'm sure it's good for my character to consider it a little--though I quite admit you may lose the election.
"The Grand Duke is a horrid wretch, and if he wasn't a grand duke you'd be the first to cut him. I had to spend a whole dinner-time last year in teaching him his proper place. It was very humiliating, and not at all amusing. You can have a men's dinner for him. That's all he's fit for.
"And as for the babies, Mrs. Robson sends me a telegram every morning. I can't make out that they have had a finger-ache since I went away, and I am sure mothers are entirely superfluous. All the same, I think about them a great deal, especially at night. Last night I tried to think about their education--if only I wasn't such a sleepy creature! But, at any rate, I never in my life tried to think about it at home. So that's so much to the good.
"Indeed, I'll come back to you soon, you poor, forsaken, old thing! But Julie has no one in the world, and I feel like a Newfoundland dog who has pulled some one out of the water. The water was deep; and the life's only just coming back; and the dog's not much good. But he sits there, for company, till the doctor comes, and that's just what I'm doing.
"I know you don't approve of the notions I have in my head now. But that's because you don't understand. Why don't you come out and join us? Then you'd like Julie as much as I do; everything would be quite simple; and I shouldn't be in the least jealous.
"Dr. Meredith is coming here, probably to-night, and Jacob should arrive to-morrow on his way to Venice, where poor Chudleigh and his boy are."
Thebreva, or fair-weather wind, from the north was blowing freshly yet softly down the lake. The afternoon sun was burning on Bellaggio, on the long terrace of the Melzi villa, on the white mist of fruit-blossom that lay lightly on the green slopes above San Giovanni.
Suddenly the Duchess and the boatman left the common topics of every day by which the Duchess was trying to improve her Italian--such as the proposed enlargement of the Bellevue Hotel, the new villas that were springing up, the gardens of the Villa Carlotta, and so forth. Evelyn had carelessly asked the old man whether he had been in any of the fighting of '59, and in an instant, under her eyes, he became another being. Out rolled a torrent of speech; the oars lay idly on the water; and through the man's gnarled and wrinkled face there blazed a high and illumining passion. Novara and its beaten king, in '49; the ten years of waiting, when a whole people bode its time, in a gay, grim silence; the grudging victory of Magenta; the fivefold struggle that wrenched the hills of San Martino from the Austrians; the humiliations and the rage of Villafranca--of all these had this wasted graybeard made a part. And he talked of them with the Latin eloquence and facility, as no veteran of the north could have talked; he was in a moment the equal of these great affairs in which he had mingled; so that one felt in him the son of a race which had been rolled and polished--a pebble, as it were, from rocks which had made the primeval frame-work of the world--in the main course and stream of history.
Then from the campaign of '59 he fell back on the Five Days of Milan in '48--the immortal days, when a populace drove out an army, and what began almost in jest ended in a delirium, a stupefaction of victory. His language was hot, broken, confused, like the street fighting it chronicled. Afterwards--a further sharpening and blanching of the old face--and he had carried them deep into the black years of Italy's patience and Austria's revenge. Throwing out a thin arm, he pointed towards town after town on the lake shores, now in the brilliance of sunset, now in the shadow of the northern slope--Gravedona, Varenna, Argegno--towns which had each of them given their sons to the Austrian bullet and the Austrian lash for the ransom of Italy.
He ran through the sacred names--Stazzonelli, Riccini, Crescieri, Ronchetti, Ceresa, Previtali--young men, almost all of them, shot for the possession of a gun or a knife, for helping their comrades in the Austrian army to desert, for "insulting conduct" towards an Austrian soldier or officer.
Of one of these executions, which he had himself witnessed at Varese--the shooting of a young fellow of six-and-twenty, his own friend and kinsman--he gave an account which blanched the Duchess's cheeks and brought the big tears into her eyes. Then, when he saw the effect he had produced, the old man trembled.
"Ah, eccellenza," he cried, "but it had to be! The Italians had to show they knew how to die; then God let them live. Ecco, eccellenza!"
And he drew from his breast-pocket, with shaking hands, an old envelope tied round with string. When he had untied it, a piece of paper emerged, brown with age and worn with much reading. It was a rudely printed broadsheet containing an account of the last words and sufferings of the martyrs of Mantua--those conspirators of 1852--from whose graves and dungeons sprang, tenfold renewed, the regenerating and liberating forces which, but a few years later, drove out the Austrian with the Bourbon, together.
"See here, eccellenza," he said, as he tenderly spread out its tattered folds and gave it into the Duchess's hand. "Have the goodness to look where is that black mark. There you will find the last words of Don Enrico Tazzoli, the half-brother of my father. He was a priest, eccellenza. Ah, it was not then as it is now! The priests were then for Italy. They hanged three of them at Mantua alone. As for Don Enrico, first they stripped him of his priesthood, and then they hanged him. And those were his last words, and the last words of Scarsellini also, who suffered with him.Veda eccellenza! As for me, I know them from a boy."
And while the Duchess read, the old man repeated tags and fragments under his breath, as he once more resumed the oars and drove the boat gently towards Menaggio.
"The multitude of victims has not robbed us of courage in the past, nor will it so rob us in the future--till victory dawns. The cause of the people is like the cause of religion--it triumphs only through its martyrs.... You--who survive--will conquer, and in your victory we, the dead, shall live....
"Take no thought for us; the blood of the forerunners is like the seed which the wise husbandman scatters on the fertile ground....Teach our young men how to adore and how to suffer for a great idea. Work incessantly at that; so shall our country come to birth; and grieve not for us!... Yes, Italy shall be one! To that all things point.WORK!There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome, no opposition that cannot be destroyed. TheHOWand theWHENonly remain to be solved. You, more fortunate than we, will find the clew to the riddle, when all things are accomplished, and the times are ripe.... Hope!--my parents, and my brothers--hope always!--waste no time in weeping."
The Duchess read aloud the Italian, and Julie stooped over her shoulder to follow the words.
"Marvellous!" said Julie, in a low voice, as she sank back into her place. "A youth of twenty-seven, with the rope round his neck, and he comforts himself with 'Italy.' What's 'Italy' to him, or he to 'Italy'?" Not even an immediate paradise. "Is there anybody capable of it now?"
Her face and attitude had lost their languor. As the Duchess returned his treasure to the old man she looked at Julie with joy. Not since her illness had there been any such sign of warmth and energy.
And, indeed, as they floated on, past the glow of Bellaggio, towards the broad gold and azure of the farther lake, the world-defying passion that breathed from these words of dead and murdered Italians played as a bracing and renewing power on Julie's still feeble being. It was akin to the high snows on those far Alps that closed in the lake--to the pure wind that blew from them--to the "gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme," amid which their little boat pressed on towards the shore.
"What matter," cried the intelligence, but as though through sobs--"what matter the individual struggle and misery? These can be lived down. The heart can be silenced--nerves steadied--strength restored. Will and idea remain--the eternal spectacle of the world, and the eternal thirst of man to see, to know, to feel, to realize himself, if not in one passion, then in another. If not in love, then in patriotism--art--thought."
The Duchess and Julie landed presently beneath the villa of which they were the passing tenants. The Duchess mounted the double staircase where the banksia already hung in a golden curtain over the marble balustrade. Her face was thoughtful. She had to write her daily letter to the absent and reproachful Duke.
Julie parted from her with a caress, and paused awhile to watch the small figure till it mounted out of sight. Her friend had become very dear to her. A new humility, a new gratitude filled her heart. Evelyn should not sacrifice herself much longer. When she had insisted on carrying her patient abroad, Julie had neither mind nor will wherewith to resist. But now--the Duke should soon come to his own again.
She herself turned inland for that short walk by which each day she tested her returning strength. She climbed the winding road to Criante, the lovely village above Cadenabbia; then, turning to the left, she mounted a path that led to the woods which overhang the famous gardens of the Villa Carlotta.
Such a path! To the left hand, and, as it seemed, steeply beneath her feet, all earth and heaven--the wide lake, the purple mountains, the glories of a flaming sky. On the calm spaces of water lay a shimmer of crimson and gold, repeating the noble splendor of the clouds; the midgelike boats crept from shore to shore; and, midway between Bellaggio and Cadenabbia, the steam-boat, a white speck, drew a silver furrow. To her right a green hill-side--each blade of grass, each flower, each tuft of heath, enskied, transfigured, by the broad light that poured across it from the hidden west. And on the very hill-top a few scattered olives, peaches, and wild cherries scrawled upon the blue, their bare, leaning stems, their pearly whites, their golden pinks and feathery grays all in a glory of sunset that made of them things enchanted, aerial, fantastical, like a dance of Botticelli angels on the height.
And presently a sheltered bank in a green hollow, where Julie sat down to rest. But nature, in this tranquil spot, had still new pageants, new sorceries wherewith to play upon the nerves of wonder. Across the hollow a great crag clothed in still leafless chestnut-trees reared itself against the lake. The innumerable lines of stem and branch, warm brown or steely gray, were drawn sharp on silver air, while at the very summit of the rock one superb tree with branching limbs, touched with intense black, sprang high above the rest, the proud plume or ensign of the wood. Through the trunks the blaze of distant snow and the purples of craggy mountains; in front the glistening spray of peach or cherry blossom, breaking the still wintry beauty of that majestic grove. And in all the air, dropping from the heaven, spread on the hills, or shimmering on the lake, a diffusion of purest rose and deepest blue, lake and cloud and mountain each melting into the other, as though heaven and earth conspired merely to give value and relief to the year's new birth, to this near sparkle of young leaf and blossom which shone like points of fire on the deep breast of the distance.
On the green ledge which ran round the hollow were children tugging at a goat. Opposite was acontadino'shouse of gray stone. A water-wheel turned beside it, and a stream, brought down from the hills, ran chattering past, a white and dancing thread of water. Everything was very still and soft. The children and the river made their voices heard; and there were nightingales singing in the woods below. Otherwise all was quiet. With a tranquil and stealthy joy the spring was taking possession. Nay--the Angelus! It swung over the lake and rolled from village to village....
The tears were in Julie's eyes. Such beauty as this was apt now to crush and break her. All her being was still sore, and this appeal of nature was sometimes more than she could bear.
Only a few short weeks since Warkworth had gone out of her life--since Delafield at a stroke had saved her from ruin--since Lord Lackington had passed away.
One letter had reached her from Warkworth, a wild and incoherent letter, written at night in a little room of a squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux. Her telegram had reached him, and for him, as for her, all was over.
But the letter was by no means a mere cry of baffled passion. There was in it a new note of moral anguish, as fresh and startling in her ear, coming from him, as the cry of passion itself. In the language of religion, it was the utterance of a man "convicted of sin."
/# "How long is it since that man gave me your telegram? I was pacing up and down the departure platform, working myself into an agony of nervousness and anxiety as the time went by, wondering what on earth had happened to you, when thechef de garecame up: 'Monsieur attend une dépêche?' There were some stupid formalities--at last I got it. It seemed to me I had already guessed what it contained.
"So it wasDelafieldwho met you--Delafield who turned you back?
"I saw him outside the hotel yesterday, and we exchanged a few words. I have always disliked his long, pale face and his high and mighty ways--at any rate, towards plain fellows, who don't belong to the classes, like me. Yesterday I was more than usually anxious to get rid of him.
"So he guessed?
"It can't have been chance. In some way he guessed. And you have been torn from me. My God! If I could only reach him--if I could fling his contempt in his face! And yet--
"I have been walking up and down this room all night. The longing for you has been the sharpest suffering I suppose that I have ever known. For I am not one of the many people who enjoy pain. I have kept as free of it as I could. This time it caught and gripped me. Yet that isn't all. There has been something else.
"What strange, patched creatures we are! Do you know, Julie, that by the time the dawn came I was on my knees--thanking God that we were parted--that you were on your way home--safe--out of my reach? Was I mad, or what? I can't explain it. I only know that one moment I hated Delafield as a mortal enemy--whether he was conscious of what he had done or no--and the next I found myself blessing him!
"I understand now what people mean when they talk of conversion. It seems to me that in the hours I have just passed through things have come to light in me that I myself never suspected. I came of an Evangelical stock--I was brought up in a religious household. I suppose that one can't, after all, get away from the blood and the life that one inherits. My poor, old father--I was a bad son, and I know I hastened his death--was a sort of Puritan saint, with very stern ideas. I seem to have been talking with him this night, and shrinking under his condemnation. I could see his old face, as he put before me the thoughts I had dared to entertain, the risks I had been ready to take towards the woman I loved--the woman to whom I owed a deep debt of eternal gratitude.
"Julie, it is strange how this appointment affects me. Last night I saw several people at the Embassy--good fellows--who seemed anxious to do all they could for me. Such men never took so much notice of me before. It is plain to me that this task will make or mar me. I may fail. I may die. But if I succeed England will owe me something, and these men at the top of the tree--
"Good God! how can I go on writing this to you? It's because I came back to the hotel and tossed about half the night brooding over the difference between what these men--these honorable, distinguished fellows--were prepared to think of me, and the blackguard I knew myself to be. What, take everything from a woman's hand, and then turn and try and drag her in the mire--propose to her what one would shoot a man for proposing to one's sister! Thief and cur.
"Julie--kind, beloved Julie--forget it all! For God's sake, let's cast it all behind us! As long as I live, your name, your memory will live in my heart. We shall not meet, probably, for many years. You'll marry and be happy yet. Just now I know you're suffering. I seem to see you in the train--on the steamer--your pale face that has lighted up life for me--your dear, slender hands that folded so easily into one of mine. You are in pain, my darling. Your nature is wrenched from its natural supports. And you gave me all your fine, clear mind, and all your heart. I ought to be damned to the deepest hell!
"Then, again, I say to myself, if only she were here! If only I had herhere, with her arms round my neck, surely I might have found the courage and the mere manliness to extricate both herself and me from these entanglements. Aileen might have released and forgiven one.
"No, no! It's all over! I'll go and do my task. You set it me. You sha'n't be ashamed of me there.
"Good-bye, Julie, my love--good-bye--forever!" #/
These were portions of that strange document composed through the intervals of a long night, which showed in Warkworth's mind the survival of a moral code, inherited from generations of scrupulous and God-fearing ancestors, overlaid by selfish living, and now revived under the stress, the purification partly of deepening passion, partly of a high responsibility. The letter was incoherent, illogical; it showed now the meaner, now the nobler elements of character; but it was human; it came from the warm depths of life, and it had exerted in the end a composing and appeasing force upon the woman to whom it was addressed. He had loved her--if only at the moment of parting--he had loved her! At the last there had been feeling, sincerity, anguish, and to these all things may be forgiven.
And, indeed, what in her eyes there was to forgive, Julie had long forgiven. Was it his fault if, when they met first, he was already pledged--for social and practical reasons which her mind perfectly recognized and understood--to Aileen Moffatt? Was it his fault if the relations between herself and him had ripened into a friendship which in its turn could only maintain itself by passing into love? No! It was she, whose hidden, insistent passion--nourished, indeed, upon a tragic ignorance--had transformed what originally he had a perfect right to offer and to feel.
So she defended him; for in so doing she justified herself. And as to the Paris proposal, he had a right to treat her as a woman capable of deciding for herself how far love should carry her; he had a right to assume that her antecedents, her training, and her circumstances were not those of the ordinary sheltered girl, and that for her love might naturally wear a bolder and wilder aspect than for others. He blamed himself too severely, too passionately; but for this very blame her heart remembered him the more tenderly. For it meant that his mind was torn and in travail for her, that his thoughts clung to her in a passionate remorse; and again she felt herself loved, and forgave with all her heart.
All the same, he was gone out of her life, and through the strain and the unconscious progress to other planes and phases of being, wrought by sickness and convalescence, her own passion for him even was now a changed and blunted thing.
Was she ashamed of the wild impulse which had carried her to Paris? It is difficult to say. She was often seized with the shuddering consciousness of an abyss escaped, with wonder that she was still in the normal, accepted world, that Evelyn might still be her companion, that Thérèse still adored her more fervently than any saint in the calendar. Perhaps, if the truth were known, she was more abased in her own eyes by the self-abandonment which had preceded the assignation with Warkworth. She had much intellectual arrogance, and before her acquaintance with Warkworth she had been accustomed to say and to feel that love was but one passion among many, and to despise those who gave it too great a place. And here she had flung herself into it, like any dull or foolish girl for whom a love affair represents the only stirring in the pool of life that she is ever likely to know.
Well, she must recapture herself and remake her life. As she sat there in the still Italian evening she thought of the old boatman, and those social and intellectual passions to which his burst of patriotism had recalled her thoughts. Society, literature, friends, and the ambitions to which these lead--let her go back to them and build her days afresh. Dr. Meredith was coming. In his talk and companionship she would once more dip and temper the tools of mind and taste. No more vain self-arraignment, no more useless regrets. She looked back with bitterness upon a moment of weakness when, in the first stage of convalescence, in mortal weariness and loneliness, she had slipped one evening into the Farm Street church and unburdened her heart in confession. As she had told the Duchess, the Catholicism instilled into her youth by the Bruges nuns still laid upon her at times its ghostly and compelling hand. Now in her renewed strength she was inclined to look upon it as an element of weakness and disintegration in her nature. She resolved, in future, to free herself more entirely from a uselessAberglaube.
But Meredith was not the only visitor expected at the villa in the next few days. She was already schooling herself to face the arrival of Jacob Delafield.
It was curious how the mere thought of Delafield produced an agitation, a shock of feeling, which seemed to spread through all the activities of being. The faint, renascent glamour which had begun to attach to literature and social life disappeared. She fell into a kind of brooding, the sombre restlessness of one who feels in the dark the recurrent presence of an attacking and pursuing power, and is in a tremulous uncertainty where or how to meet it.
The obscure tumult within her represented, in fact, a collision between the pagan and Christian conceptions of life. In self-dependence, in personal pride, in her desire to refer all things to the arbitrament of reason, Julie, whatever her practice, was theoretically a stoic and a pagan. But Delafield's personality embodied another "must," another "ought," of a totally different kind. And it was a "must" which, in a great crisis of her life, she also had been forced to obey. There was the thought which stung and humiliated. And the fact was irreparable; nor did she see how she was ever to escape from the strange, silent, penetrating relation it had established between her and the man who loved her and had saved her, against her will.
During her convalescence at Crowborough House, Delafield had been often admitted. It would have been impossible to exclude him, unless she had confided the whole story of the Paris journey to the Duchess. And whatever Evelyn might tremblingly guess, from Julie's own mouth she knew nothing. So Delafield had come and gone, bringing Lord Lackington's last words, and the account of his funeral, or acting as intermediary in business matters between Julie and the Chantrey brothers. Julie could not remember that she had ever asked him for these services. They fell to him, as it were, by common consent, and she had been too weak to resist.
At first, whenever he entered the room, whenever he approached her, her sense of anger and resentment had been almost unbearable. But little by little his courtesy, tact, and coolness had restored a relation between them which, if not the old one, had still many of the outward characters of intimacy. Not a word, not the remotest allusion reminded her of what had happened. The man who had stood before her transfigured on the deck of the steamer, stammering out, "I thank God I had the courage to do it!"--it was often hard for her to believe, as she stole a look at Delafield, chatting or writing in the Duchess's drawing-room, that such a scene had ever taken place.
The evening stole on. How was it that whenever she allowed the thought of Delafield to obtain a real lodgment in the mind, even the memory of Warkworth was for the time effaced? Silently, irresistibly, a wild heat of opposition would develop within her. These men round whom, as it were, there breathes an air of the heights; in whom one feels the secret guard that religion keeps over thoughts and words and acts--her passionate yet critical nature flung out against them. How are they better than others, after all? What right have they over the wills of others?
Nevertheless, as the rose of evening burned on the craggy mountain face beyond Bellaggio, retreating upward, step by step, till the last glorious summit had died into the cool and already starlit blues of night, Julie, held, as it were, by a reluctant and half-jealous fascination, sat dreaming on the hill-side, not now of Warkworth, not of the ambitions of the mind, or society, but simply of the goings and comings, the aspects and sayings of a man in whose eyes she had once read the deepest and sternest things of the soul--a condemnation and an anguish above and beyond himself.
Dr. Meredith arrived in due time, a jaded Londoner athirst for idleness and fresh air. The Duchess and Julie carried him hither and thither about the lake in the four-oar boat which had been hired for the Duchess's pleasure. Here, enthroned between the two ladies, he passed luxurious hours, and his talk of politics, persons, and books brought just that stimulus to Julie's intelligence and spirits for which the Duchess had been secretly longing.
A first faint color returned to Julie's cheeks. She began to talk again; to resume certain correspondences; to show herself once more--at any rate intermittently--the affectionate, sympathetic, and beguiling friend.
As for Meredith, he knew little, but he suspected a good deal. There were certain features in her illness and convalescence which suggested to him a mental cause; and if there were such a cause, it must, of course, spring from her relations to Warkworth.
The name of that young officer was never mentioned. Once or twice Meredith was tempted to introduce it. It rankled in his mind that Julie had never been frank with him, freely as he had poured his affection at her feet. But a moment of languor or of pallor disarmed him.
"She is better," he said to the Duchess one day, abruptly. "Her mind is full of activity. But why, at times, does she still look so miserable--like a person without hope or future?"
The Duchess looked pensive. They were sitting in the corner of one of the villa's terraced walks, amid a scented wilderness of flowers. Above them was a canopy of purple and yellow--rose and wistaria; while through the arches of the pergola which ran along the walk gleamed all those various blues which make the spell of Como--the blue and white of the clouds, the purple of the mountains, the azure of the lake.
"Well, she was in love with him. I suppose it takes a little time," said the Duchess, sighing.
"Why was she in love with him?" said Meredith, impatiently. "As to the Moffatt engagement, naturally, she was kept in the dark?"
"At first," said the Duchess, hesitating. "And when she knew, poor dear, it was too late!"
"Too late for what?"
"Well, when one falls in love one doesn't all at once shake it off because the man deceives you."
"Oneshould," said Meredith, with energy. "Men are not worth all that women spend upon them."
"Oh, that's true!" cried the Duchess--"so dreadfully true! But what's the good of preaching? We shall go on spending it to the end of time."
"Well, at any rate, don't choose the dummies and the frauds."
"Ah, there you talk sense," said the Duchess. "And if only we had the French system in England! If only one could say to Julie: 'Now look here,there'syour husband! It's all settled--down to plate and linen--and you'vegotto marry him!' how happy we should all be."
Dr. Meredith stared.
"You have the man in your eye," he said.
The Duchess hesitated.
"Suppose you come a little walk with me in the wood," she said, at last, gathering up her white skirts.
Meredith obeyed her. They were away for half an hour, and when they returned the journalist's face, flushed and furrowed with thought, was not very easy to read.
Nor was his temper in good condition. It required a climb to the very top of Monte Crocione to send him back, more or less appeased, a consenting player in the Duchess's game. For if there are men who are flirts and egotists--who ought to be, yet never are, divined by the sensible woman at a glance--so also there are men too well equipped for this wicked world, too good, too well born, too desirable.
It was in this somewhat flinty and carping mood that Meredith prepared himself for the advent of Jacob Delafield.
But when Delafield appeared, Meredith's secret antagonisms were soon dissipated. There was certainly no challenging air of prosperity about the young man.
At first sight, indeed, he was his old cheerful self, always ready for a walk or a row, on easy terms at once with the Italian servants or boatmen. But soon other facts emerged--stealthily, as it were, from the concealment in which a strong man was trying to keep them.
"That young man's youth is over," said Meredith, abruptly, to the Duchess one evening. He pointed to the figure of Delafield, who was pacing, alone with his pipe, up and down one of the lower terraces of the garden.
The Duchess showed a teased expression.
"It's like something wearing through," she said, slowly. "I suppose it was always there, but it didn't show."
"Name your 'it.'"
"I can't." But she gave a little shudder, which made Meredith look at her with curiosity.
"You feel something ghostly--unearthly?"
She nodded assent; crying out, however, immediately afterwards, as though in compunction, that he was one of the dearest and best of fellows.
"Of course he is," said Meredith. "It is only the mystic in him coming out. He is one of the men who have the sixth sense."
"Well, all I know is, he has the oddest power over people," said Evelyn, with another shiver. "If Freddie had it, my life wouldn't be worth living. Thank goodness, he hasn't a vestige!"
"At bottom it's the power of the priest," said Meredith. "And you women are far too susceptible towards it. Nine times out of ten it plays the mischief."
The Duchess was silent a moment. Then she bent towards her companion, finger on lip, her charming eyes glancing significantly towards the lower terrace. The figures on it were now two. Julie and Delafield paced together.