Lady Rose's Daughter Part 64

Julie, it is strange that I should be talking to you like this. You're so much cleverer than I--in some ways, so much stronger. And yet, in others--you'll let me say it, won't you?--I could help you. I could protect you. It's all I care for in the world."

"How can I be your wife?" she repeated, pa.s.sionately, wringing her hands.

"Be what you will--at home. My friend, comrade, housemate. I ask nothing more--_nothing_." His voice dropped, and there was a pause. Then he resumed. "But, in the eyes of the world, make me your servant and your husband!"

"I can't condemn you to such a fate," she cried. "You know where my heart is."

Delafield did not waver.

"I know where your heart was," he said, with firmness. "You will banish that man from your thoughts in time. He has no right to be there. I take all the risks--all."

"Well, at least for you, I am no hypocrite," she said, with a quivering lip. "You know what I am."

"Yes, I know, and I am at your feet."

The tears dropped from Julie's eyes. She turned away and hid her face against one of the piers of the wall.

Delafield attempted no caress. He quietly set himself to draw the life that he had to offer her, the comradeship that he proposed to her. Not a word of what the world called his "prospects" entered in. She knew very well that he could not bring himself to speak of them. Rather, a sort of ascetic and mystical note made itself heard in all he said of the future, a note that before now had fascinated and controlled a woman whose ambition was always strangely tempered with high, poetical imagination.

Yet, ambitious she was, and her mind inevitably supplied what his voice left unsaid.

"He will have to fill his place whether he wishes it or no," she said to herself. "And if, in truth, he desires my help--"

Then she shrank from her own wavering. Look where she would into her life, it seemed to her that all was monstrous and out of joint.

"You don't realize what you ask," she said, at last, in despair. "I am not what you call a good woman--you know it too well. I don't measure things by your standards. I am capable of such a journey as you found me on. I can't find in my own mind that I repent it at all. I can tell a lie--you can't. I can have the meanest and most sordid thoughts--you can't. Lady Henry thought me an intriguer--I am one. It is in my blood.

And I don't know whether, in the end, I could understand your language and your life. And if I don't, I shall make you miserable."

She looked up, her slender frame straightening under what was, in truth, a n.o.ble defiance.

Delafield bent over her and took both her hands forcibly in his own.

"If all that were true, I would rather risk it a thousand times over than go out of your life again--a stranger. Julie, you have done mad things for love--you should know what love is. Look in my face--there--your eyes in mine! Give way! The dead ask it of you--and it is G.o.d's will."

And as, drawn by the last, low-spoken words, Julie looked up into his face, she felt herself enveloped by a mystical and pa.s.sionate tenderness that paralyzed her resistance. A force, superhuman, laid its grasp upon her will. With a burst of tears, half in despair, half in revolt, she submitted.

XXII

In the first week of May, Julie Le Breton married Jacob Delafield in the English Church at Florence. The d.u.c.h.ess was there. So was the Duke--a sulky and ill-resigned spectator of something which he believed to be the peculiar and mischievous achievement of his wife.

At the church door Julie and Delafield left for Camaldoli.

"Well, if you imagine that I intend to congratulate you or anybody else upon that performance you are very much mistaken," said the Duke, as he and his wife drove back to the "Grand Bretagne" together.

"I don't deny it's--risky," said the d.u.c.h.ess, her hands on her lap, her eyes dreamily following the streets.

"Risky!" repeated the Duke, shrugging his shoulders. "Well, I don't want to speak harshly of your friends, Evelyn, but Miss Le Breton--"

"Mrs. Delafield," said the d.u.c.h.ess.

"Mrs. Delafield, then"--the name was evidently a difficult mouthful--"seems to me a most undisciplined and unmanageable woman. Why does she look like a tragedy queen at her marriage? Jacob is twice too good for her, and she'll lead him a life. And how you can reconcile it to your conscience to have misled me so completely as you have in this matter, I really can't imagine."

"Misled you?" said Evelyn.

Her innocence was really a little hard to bear, and not even the beauty of her blue eyes, now happily restored to him, could appease the mentor at her side.

"You led me plainly to believe," he repeated, with emphasis, "that if I helped her through the crisis of leaving Lady Henry she would relinquish her designs on Delafield."

"Did I?" said the d.u.c.h.ess. And putting her hands over her face she laughed rather hysterically. "But that wasn't why you lent her the house, Freddie."

"You coaxed me into it, of course," said the Duke.

"No, it was Julie herself got the better of you," said Evelyn, triumphantly. "You felt her spell, just as we all do, and wanted to do something for her."

"Nothing of the sort," said the Duke, determined to admit no recollection to his disadvantage. "It was your doing entirely."

The d.u.c.h.ess thought it discreet to let him at least have the triumph of her silence, smiling, and a little sarcastic though it were.

"And of all the undeserved good fortune!" he resumed, feeling in his irritable disapproval that the moral order of the universe had been somehow trifled with. "In the first place, she is the daughter of people who flagrantly misconducted themselves--_that_ apparently does her no harm. Then she enters the service of Lady Henry in a confidential position, and uses it to work havoc in Lady Henry's social relations.

That, I am glad to say, _has_ done her a little harm, although not nearly as much as she deserves. And finally she has a most discreditable flirtation with a man already engaged--to her own cousin, please observe!--and pulls wires for him all over the place in the most objectionable and unwomanly manner."

"As if everybody didn't do that!" cried the d.u.c.h.ess. "You know, Freddie, that your own mother always used to boast that she had made six bishops and saved the Establishment."

The Duke took no notice.

"And yet there she is! Lord Lackington has left her a fortune--a competence, anyway. She marries Jacob Delafield--rather a fool, I consider, but all the same one of the best fellows in the world. And at any time, to judge from what one hears of the health both of Chudleigh and his boy, she may find herself d.u.c.h.ess of Chudleigh."

The Duke threw himself back in the carriage with the air of one who waits for Providence to reply.

"Oh, well, you see, you can't make the world into a moral tale to please you," said the d.u.c.h.ess, absently.

Then, after a pause, she asked, "Are you still going to let them have the house, Freddie?"

"I imagine that if Jacob Delafield applies to me to let it to _him_, that I shall not refuse him," said the Duke, stiffly.

The d.u.c.h.ess smiled behind her fan. Yet her tender heart was not in reality very happy about her Julie. She knew well enough that it was a strange marriage of which they had just been witnesses--a marriage containing the seeds of many untoward things only too likely to develop unless fate were kinder than rash mortals have any right to expect.

"I wish to goodness Delafield weren't so religious," murmured the d.u.c.h.ess, fervently, pursuing her own thoughts.

"Evelyn!"

"Well, you see, Julie isn't, at all," she added, hastily.

"You need not have troubled yourself to tell me that," was the Duke's indignant reply.