Lady Rose's Daughter Part 63

"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 d.u.c.h.ess 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.

"But this is the tenth!" she said, in an eager whisper.

Meredith smiled at her, then flung her a dubious "Chi sa?" and changed the subject.

Delafield, who was a fine oar, had soon taken command of the lake expeditions; and by the help of two stalwart youths from Tremezzo, the four-oar was in use from morning till night. Through the broad lake which lies between Menaggio and Varenna it sped northward to Gravedona; or beneath the shadowy cliffs of the Villa Serbelloni it slipped over deep waters, haunted and dark, into the sunny s.p.a.ces of Lecco; or it coasted along the steep sides of Monte Primo, so that the travellers in it might catch the blue stain of the gentians on the turf, where it sloped into the lucent wave below, or watch the fishermen on the rocks, spearing their prey in the green or golden shallows.

The weather was glorious--a summer before its time. The wild cherries shook down their snow upon the gra.s.s; but the pears were now in bridal white, and a warmer glory of apple-blossom was just beginning to break upon the blue. The nights were calm and moonlit; the dawns were visions of mysterious and incredible beauty, wherein mountain and forest and lake were but the garments, diaphanous, impalpable, of some delicate, indwelling light and fire spirit, which breathed and pulsed through the solidity of rock, no less visibly than through the crystal leagues of air or the sunlit s.p.a.ces of water.

Yet presently, as it were, a hush of waiting, of tension, fell upon their little party. Nature offered her best; but there was only an apparent acceptance of her bounties. Through the outward flow of talk and amus.e.m.e.nt, of wanderings on lake or hill, ugly hidden forces of pain and strife, regret, misery, resistance, made themselves rarely yet piercingly felt.

Julie drooped again. Her cheeks were paler even than when Meredith arrived. Delafield, too, began to be more silent, more absent. He was helpful and courteous as ever, but it began to be seen that his gayety was an effort, and now and then there were sharp or bitter notes in voice or manner, which jarred, and were not soon forgotten.

Presently, Meredith and the d.u.c.h.ess found themselves looking on, breathless and astonished, at the struggle of two personalities, the wrestle between two wills. They little knew that it was a renewed struggle--second wrestle. But silently, by a kind of tacit agreement, they drew away from Delafield and Julie. They dimly understood that he pursued and she resisted; and that for him life was becoming gradually absorbed into the two facts of her presence and her resistance.

"_On ne s'appuie que sur ce qui resiste_." For both of them these words were true. Fundamentally, and beyond all pa.s.sing causes of grief and anger, each was fascinated by the full strength of nature in the other.

Neither could ever forget the other. The hours grew electric, and every tiny incident became charged with spiritual meaning.

Often for hours together Julie would try to absorb herself in talk with Meredith. But the poor fellow got little joy from it. Presently, at a word or look of Delafield's she would let herself be recaptured, as though with a proud reluctance; they wandered away together; and once more Meredith and the d.u.c.h.ess became the merest by-standers.

The d.u.c.h.ess shrugged her shoulders over it, and, though she laughed, sometimes the tears were in her eyes. She felt the hovering of pa.s.sion, but it was no pa.s.sion known to her own blithe nature.

And if only this strange state of things might end, one way or other, and set her free to throw her arms round her Duke's neck, and beg his pardon for all these weeks of desertion! She said to herself, ruefully, that her babies would indeed have forgotten her.

Yet she stood stoutly to her post, and the weeks pa.s.sed quickly by. It was the dramatic energy of the situation--so much more dramatic in truth than either she or Meredith suspected--that made it such a strain upon the onlookers.

One evening they had left the boat at Tremezzo, that they might walk back along that most winning of paths that skirts the lake between the last houses of Tremezzo and the inn at Cadenabbia. The sunset was nearly over, but the air was still suffused with its rose and pearl, and fragrant with the scent of flowering laurels. Each mountain face, each white village, either couched on the water's edge or grouped about its slender campanile on some shoulder of the hills, each house and tree and figure seemed still penetrated with light, the glorified creatures of some just revealed and already fading world. The echoes of the evening bell were floating on the lake, and from a boat in front, full of peasant-folk, there rose a sound of singing, some litany of saint or virgin, which stole in harmonies, rudely true, across the water.

"They have been to the pilgrimage church above Lenno," said Julie, pointing to the boat, and in order to listen to the singing, she found a seat on a low wall above the lake.

There was no reply, and, looking round her, she saw with a start that only Delafield was beside her, that the d.u.c.h.ess and Meredith had already rounded the corner of the Villa Carlotta and were out of sight.

Delafield's gaze was fixed upon her. He was very pale, and suddenly Julie's breath seemed to fail her.

"I don't think I can bear it any longer," he said, as he came close to her.

"Bear what?"

"That you should look as you do now."

Julie made no reply. Her eyes, very sad and bitter, searched the blue dimness of the lake in silence.

Delafield sat down on the wall beside her. Not a soul was in sight. At the Cadenabbia Hotel, the _table d'hote_ had gathered in the visitors; a few boats pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed in the distance, but on land all was still.

Suddenly he took her hand with a firm grasp.

"Are you never going to forgive me?" he said, in a low voice.

"I suppose I ought to bless you."

Her face seemed to him to express the tremulous misery of a heart deeply, perhaps irrevocably, wounded. Emotion rose in a tide, but he crushed it down.

He bent over her, speaking with deliberate tenderness.

"Julie, do you remember what you promised Lord Lackington when he was dying?"

"Oh!" cried Julie.

She sprang to her feet, speechless and suffocated. Her eyes expressed a mingled pride and terror.

He paused, confronting her with a pale resolution.

"You didn't know that I had seen him?"

"Know!"

She turned away fiercely, choking with sobs she could hardly control, as the memory of that by-gone moment returned upon her.

"I thought as much," said Delafield, in a low voice. "You hoped never to hear of your promise again."

She made no answer; but she sank again upon the seat beside the lake, and supporting herself on one delicate hand, which clung to the coping of the wall, she turned her pale and tear-stained face to the lake and the evening sky. There was in her gesture an unconscious yearning, a mute and anguished appeal, as though from the oppressions of human character to the broad strength of nature, that was not lost on Delafield. His mind became the centre of a swift and fierce debate. One voice said: "Why are you persecuting her? Respect her weakness and her grief." And another replied: "It is because she is weak that she must yield--must allow herself to be guided and adored."

He came close to her again. Any pa.s.ser-by might have supposed that they were both looking at the distant boat and listening to the pilgrimage chant.

"Do you think I don't understand why you made that promise?" he said, very gently, and the mere self-control of his voice and manner carried a spell with it for the woman beside him. "It was wrung out of you by kindness for a dying man. You thought I should never know, or I should never claim it. Well, I am selfish. I take advantage. I do claim it. I saw Lord Lackington only a few hours before his death. 'She mustn't be alone,' he said to me, several times. And then, almost at the last, 'Ask her again. She'll consider it--she promised.'"

Julie turned impetuously.

"Neither of us is bound by that--neither of us."

Delafield smiled.

"Does that mean that I am asking you now because he bade me?"

A pause. Julie must needs raise her eyes to his. She flushed red and withdrew them.

"No," he said, with a long breath, "you don't mean that, and you don't think it. As for you--yes, you are bound! Julie, once more I bring you my plea, and you must consider it."

"How can I be your wife?" she said, her breast heaving. "You know all that has happened. It would be monstrous."

"Not at all," was his quiet reply. "It would be natural and right.