Lady Rose's Daughter Part 62

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 pa.s.sing into love? No! It was she, whose hidden, insistent pa.s.sion--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 a.s.sume that her antecedents, her training, and her circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sionately; 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion 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 Therese 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 a.s.signation 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 useless _Aberglaube_.

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 d.u.c.h.ess. 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 G.o.d 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 d.u.c.h.ess'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 pa.s.sionate 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 d.u.c.h.ess and Julie carried him hither and thither about the lake in the four-oar boat which had been hired for the d.u.c.h.ess's pleasure. Here, enthroned between the two ladies, he pa.s.sed luxurious hours, and his talk of politics, persons, and books brought just that stimulus to Julie's intelligence and spirits for which the d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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."

"One _should_," said Meredith, with energy. "Men are not worth all that women spend upon them."

"Oh, that's true!" cried the d.u.c.h.ess--"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 d.u.c.h.ess. "And if only we had the French system in England! If only one could say to Julie: 'Now look here, _there's_ your husband! It's all settled--down to plate and linen--and you've _got_ to marry him!' how happy we should all be."

Dr. Meredith stared.

"You have the man in your eye," he said.

The d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess'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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 a.s.sent; 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."