Lady Rose's Daughter Part 42

"The fact is well known, isn't it?"

He sat down, twisting his hat between his hands. Then with an exclamation he dashed it on the floor, and, rising, he bent over Julie, his hands in his pockets.

"Julie," he said, in a voice that shook her, "don't, for G.o.d's sake, give me up! I have behaved abominably, but don't take your friendship from me. I shall soon be gone. Our lives will go different ways. That was settled--alack!--before we met. I am honorably bound to that poor child. She cares for me, and I can't get loose. But these last months have been happy, haven't they? There are just three weeks left. At present the strongest feeling in my heart is--" He paused for his word, and he saw that she was looking through the window to the trees of the garden, and that, still as she was, her lip quivered.

"What shall I say?" he resumed, with emotion. "It seems to me our case stands all by itself, alone in the world. We have three weeks--give them to me. Don't let's play at cross purposes any more. I want to be sincere--I want to hide nothing from you in these days. Let us throw aside convention and trust each other, as friends may, so that when I go we may say to each other, 'Well, it was worth the pain. These have been days of gold--we shall get no better if we live to be a hundred.'"

She turned her face to him in a tremulous amazement and there were tears on her cheek. Never had his aspect been so winning. What he proposed was, in truth, a mean thing; all the same, he proposed it n.o.bly.

It was in vain that something whispered in her ear: "This girl to whom he describes himself as 'honorably bound' has a fortune of half a million. He is determined to have both her money and my heart." Another inward voice, tragically generous, dashed down the thought, and, at the moment, rightly; for as he stood over her, breathless and imperious, to his own joy, to his own exaltation, Warkworth was conscious of a new sincerity flowing in a tempestuous and stormy current through all the veins of being.

With a sombre pa.s.sion which already marked an epoch in their relation, and contained within itself the elements of new and unforeseen developments, she gazed silently into his face. Then, leaning back in her chair, she once more held out to him both her hands.

He gave an exclamation of joy, kissed the hands tenderly, and sat down beside her.

"Now, then, all your cares, all your thoughts, all your griefs are to be mine--till fate call us. And I have a thousand things to tell you, to bless you for, to consult you about. There is not a thought in my mind that you shall not know--bad, good, and indifferent--if you care to turn out the rag-bag. Shall I begin with the morning--my experiences at the club, my little nieces at the Zoo?" He laughed, but suddenly grew serious again. "No, your story first; you owe it me. Let me know all that concerns you. Your past, your sorrows, ambitions--everything."

He bent to her imperiously. With a faint, broken smile, her hands still in his, she a.s.sented. It was difficult to begin, then difficult to control the flood of memory; and it had long been dark when Madame Bornier, coming in to light the lamp and make up the fire, disturbed an intimate and searching conversation, which had revealed the two natures to each other with an agitating fulness.

Yet the results of this memorable evening upon Julie Le Breton were ultimately such as few could have foreseen.

When Warkworth had left her, she went to her own room and sat for a long while beside the window, gazing at the dark shrubberies of the Cureton House garden, at the few twinkling, distant lights.

The vague, golden hopes she had cherished through these past months of effort and scheming were gone forever. Warkworth would marry Aileen Moffatt, and use her money for an ambitious career. After these weeks now lying before them--weeks of dangerous intimacy, dangerous emotion--she and he would become as strangers to each other. He would be absorbed by his profession and his rich marriage. She would be left alone to live her life.

A sudden terror of her own weakness overcame her. No, she could not be alone. She must place a barrier between herself and this--this strange threatening of illimitable ruin that sometimes rose upon her from the dark. "I have no prejudices," she had said to Sir Wilfrid. There were many moments when she felt a fierce pride in the element of lawlessness, of defiance, that seemed to be her inheritance from her parents. But to-night she was afraid of it.

Again, if love was to go, _power_, the satisfaction of ambition, remained. She threw a quick glance into the future--the future beyond these three weeks. What could she make of it? She knew well that she was not the woman to resign herself to a mere pining obscurity.

Jacob Delafield? Was it, after all, so impossible?

For a few minutes she set herself deliberately to think out what it would mean to marry him; then suddenly broke down and wept, with inarticulate cries and sobs, with occasional reminiscences of her old convent's prayers, appeals half conscious, instinctive, to a G.o.d only half believed.

XVI

Delafield was walking through the Park towards Victoria Gate. A pair of beautiful roans pulled up suddenly beside him, and a little figure with a waving hand bent to him from a carriage.

"Jacob, where are you off to? Let me give you a lift?"

The gentleman addressed took off his hat.

"Much obliged to you, but I want some exercise. I say, where did Freddie get that pair?"

"I don't know, he doesn't tell me. Jacob, you must get in. I want to speak to you."

Rather unwillingly, Delafield obeyed, and away they sped.

"J'ai un tas de choses a vous dire," she said, speaking low, and in French, so as to protect herself from the servants in front. "Jacob, I'm _very_ unhappy about Julie."

Delafield frowned uncomfortably.

"Why? Hadn't you better leave her alone?"

"Oh, of course, I know you think me a chatterbox. I don't care. You _must_ let me tell you some fresh news about her. It _isn't_ gossip, and you and I are her best friends. Oh, Freddie's so disagreeable about her.

Jacob, you've got to help and advise a little. Now, do listen. It's your duty--your downright catechism duty."

And she poured into his reluctant ear the tale which Miss Emily Lawrence nearly a fortnight before had confided to her.

"Of course," she wound up, "you'll say it's only what we knew or guessed long ago. But you see, Jacob, we didn't _know_. It might have been just gossip. And then, besides"--she frowned and dropped her voice till it was only just audible--"this horrid man hadn't made our Julie so--so conspicuous, and Lady Henry hadn't turned out such a toad--and, altogether, Jacob, I'm dreadfully worried."

"Don't be," said Jacob, dryly.

"And what a creature!" cried the d.u.c.h.ess, unheeding. "They say that poor Moffatt child will soon have fretted herself ill, if the guardians don't give way about the two years."

"What two years?"

"The two years that she must wait--till she is twenty-one. Oh, Jacob, you know that!" exclaimed the d.u.c.h.ess, impatient with him. "I've told you scores of times."

"I'm not in the least interested in Miss Moffatt's affairs."

"But you ought to be, for they concern Julie," cried the d.u.c.h.ess. "Can't you imagine what kind of things people are saying? Lady Henry has spread it about that it was all to see him she bribed the Bruton Street servants to let her give the Wednesday party as usual--that she had been flirting with him abominably for months, and using Lady Henry's name in the most impertinent ways. And now, suddenly, everybody seems to know _something_ about this Indian engagement. You may imagine it doesn't look very well for our poor Julie. The other night at Chatton House I was furious. I made Julie go. I wanted her to show herself, and keep up her friends. Well, it was _horrid_! One or two old frights, who used to be only too thankful to Julie for reminding Lady Henry to invite them, put their noses in the air and behaved odiously. And even some of the nicer ones seemed changed--I could see Julie felt it."

"Nothing of all that will do her any real harm," said Jacob, rather contemptuously.

"Well, no. I know, of course, that her real friends will never forsake her--never, never! But, Jacob"--the d.u.c.h.ess hesitated, her charming little face furrowed with thought--"if only so much of it weren't true.

She herself--"

"Please, Evelyn," said Delafield, with decision, "don't tell me anything she may have said to you."

The d.u.c.h.ess flushed.

"I shouldn't have betrayed any confidence," she said, proudly. "And I must consult with some one who cares about her. Dr. Meredith lunched with me to-day, and he said a few words to me afterwards. He's quite anxious, too--and unhappy. Captain Warkworth's always there--always!

Even I have been hardly able to see her the last few days. Last Sunday they took the little lame child and went into the country for the whole day--"

"Well, what is there to object to in that?" cried Jacob.

"I didn't say there was anything to object to," said the d.u.c.h.ess, looking at him with eyes half angry, half perplexed. "Only it's so unlike her. She had promised to be at home that afternoon for several old friends, and they found her flown, without a word. And think how sweet Julie is always about such things--what delicious notes she writes, how she hates to put anybody out or disappoint them! And now, not a word of excuse to anybody. And she looks so _ill_--so white, so fixed--like a person in a dream which she can't shake off. I'm just miserable about her. And I hate, _hate_ that man--engaged to her own cousin all the time!" cried the little d.u.c.h.ess, under her breath, as she pa.s.sionately tore some violets at her waist to pieces and flung them out of the carriage. Then she turned to Jacob.

"But, of course, if you don't care twopence about all this, Jacob, it's no good talking to you!"

Her taunt fell quite unnoticed. Jacob turned to her with smiling composure.

"You have forgotten, my dear Evelyn, all this time, that Warkworth goes away--to mid-Africa--in little more than two weeks."