Lady Rose's Daughter Part 71

Then she looked up, and he was startled by her eyes. Where he had expected grief, he saw a shrinking animation.

"Write to me often," she said, imperiously.

"Of course. But don't trouble to answer much. Your hands are so full here."

She frowned.

"Trouble! Why do you spoil me so? Demand--insist--that I should write!"

"Very well," he said, smiling, "I demand--I insist!"

She drew a long breath, and went slowly away from him into the house.

Certainly the antagonism of her secret thoughts, though it persisted, was no longer merely cold or critical. For it concerned one who was not only the master of his own life, but threatened unexpectedly to become the master of hers.

She had begun, indeed, to please her imagination with the idea of a relation between them, which, while it ignored the ordinary relations of marriage, should yet include many of the intimacies and refinements of love. More and more did the surprises of his character arrest and occupy her mind. She found, indeed, no "plaster saint." Her cool intelligence soon detected the traces of a peevish or stubborn temper, and of a natural inertia, perpetually combated, however, by the spiritual energy of a new and other self exfoliating from the old; a self whose acts and ways she watched, sometimes with the held breath of fascination, sometimes with a return of shrinking or fear. That a man should not only appear but be so good was still in her eyes a little absurd. Perhaps her feeling was at bottom the common feeling of the sceptical nature. "We should listen to the higher voices; but in such a way that if another hypothesis were true, we should not have been too completely duped."

She was ready, also, to convict him of certain prejudices and superst.i.tions which roused in her an intellectual impatience. But when all was said, Delafield, unconsciously, was drawing her towards him, as the fowler draws a fluttering bird. It was the exquisite refinement of those spiritual insights and powers he possessed which constantly appealed, not only to her heart, but--a very important matter in Julie's case--to her taste, to her own carefully tempered instinct for the rare and beautiful.

He was the master, then, she admitted, of a certain vein of spiritual genius. Well, here should he lead--and even, if he pleased, command her.

She would sit at his feet, and he should open to her ranges of feeling, delights, and subtleties of moral sensation hitherto unknown to her.

Thus the feeling of ennui and reaction which had marked the first weeks of her married life had now wholly disappeared. Delafield was no longer dull or pedantic in her eyes. She pa.s.sed alternately from moments of intolerable smart and pity for the dead to moments of agitation and expectancy connected with her husband. She thought over their meeting of the night before; she looked forward to similar hours to come.

Meanwhile his relation towards her in many matters was still navely ignorant and humble--determined by the simplicity of a man of some real greatness, who never dreamed of claiming tastes or knowledge he did not possess, whether in small things or large. This phase, however, only gave the more value to one which frequently succeeded it. For suddenly the conversation would enter regions where he felt himself peculiarly at home, and, with the same unconsciousness on his part, she would be made to feel the dignity and authority which surrounded his ethical and spiritual life. And these contrasts--this weakness and this strength--combined with the man-and-woman element which is always present in any situation of the kind, gave rise to a very varied and gradually intensifying play of feeling between them. Feeling only possible, no doubt, for the _raffines_ of this world; but for them full of strange charm, and even of excitement.

Delafield left the little inn for Montreux, Lausanne, and London that afternoon. He bent to kiss his wife at the moment of his departure, in the bare sitting-room that had been improvised for them on the ground floor of the hotel, and as she let her face linger ever so little against his she felt strong arms flung round her, and was crushed against his breast in a hungry embrace. When he released her with a flush and a murmured word of apology she shook her head, smiling sadly but saying nothing. The door closed on him, and at the sound she made a hasty step forward.

"Jacob! Take me with you!"

But her voice died in the rattle and bustle of the diligence outside, and she was left trembling from head to foot, under a conflict of emotions that seemed now to exalt, now to degrade her.

Half an hour after Delafield's departure there appeared on the terrace of the hotel a tottering, emaciated form--Aileen Moffatt, in a black dress and hat, clinging to her mother's arm. But she refused the deck--chair, which they had spread with cushions and shawls.

"No; let me sit up." And she took an ordinary chair, looking round upon the lake and the little flowery terrace with a slow, absorbed look, like one trying to remember. Suddenly she bowed her head on her hands.

"Aileen!" cried Lady Blanche, in an agony.

But the girl motioned her away. "Don't, mummy. I'm all right."

And restraining any further emotion, she laid her arms on the bal.u.s.trade and gazed long and calmly into the purple depths and gleaming snows of the Rhone valley. Her hat oppressed her and she took it off, revealing the abundance of her delicately golden hair, which, in its lack of l.u.s.tre and spring, seemed to share in the physical distress and loss of the whole personality.

The face was that of a doomed creature, incapable now of making any successful struggle for the right to live. What had been sensibility had become melancholy; the slight, chronic frown was deeper, the pale lips more pinched. Yet intermittently there was still great sweetness, the last effort of a "beautiful soul" meant for happiness, and withered before its time.

As Julie stood beside her, while Lady Blanche had gone to fetch a book from the salon, the poor child put out her hand and grasped that of Julie.

"It is quite possible I may get the letter to-night," she said, in a hurried whisper. "My maid went down to Montreux--there is a clever man at the post-office who tried to make it out for us. He thinks it'll be to-night."

"Don't be too disappointed if nothing comes," said Julie, caressing the hand. Its thinness, its icy and lifeless touch, dismayed her. Ah, how easily might this physical wreck have been her doing!

The bells of Montreux struck half-past six. A restless and agonized expectation began to show itself in all the movements of the invalid.

She left her chair and began to pace the little terrace on Julie's arm.

Her dragging step, the mournful black of her dress, the struggle between youth and death in her sharpened face, made her a tragic presence. Julie could hardly bear it, while all the time she, too, was secretly and breathlessly waiting for Warkworth's last words.

Lady Blanche returned, and Julie hurried away.

She pa.s.sed through the hotel and walked down the Montreux road. The post had already reached the first houses of the village, and the postman, who knew her, willingly gave her the letters.

Yes, a packet for Aileen, addressed in an unknown hand to a London address, and forwarded thence. It bore the Denga postmark.

And another for herself, readdressed from London by Madame Bornier. She tore off the outer envelope; beneath was a letter of which the address was feebly written in Warkworth's hand: "Mademoiselle Le Breton, 3 Heribert Street, London."

She had the strength to carry her own letter to her room, to call Aileen's maid and send her with the other packet to Lady Blanche. Then she locked herself in....

Oh, the poor, crumpled page, and the labored hand-writing!

"Julie, I am dying. They are such good fellows, but they can't save me.

It's horrible.

"I saw the news of your engagement in a paper the day before I left Denga. You're right. He'll make you happy. Tell him I said so. Oh, my G.o.d, I shall never trouble you again! I bless you for the letter you wrote me. Here it is.... No, I can't--can't read it. Drowsy. No pain--"

And here the pen had dropped from his hand. Searching for something more, she drew from the envelope the wild and pa.s.sionate letter she had written him at Heribert Street, in the early morning after her return from Paris, while she was waiting for Delafield to bring her the news of Lord Lackington's state.

The small _table d'hote_ of the Hotel Michel was still further diminished that night. Lady Blanche was with her daughter, and Mrs.

Delafield did not appear.

But the moon was hanging in glory over the lake when Julie, unable to bear her room and her thoughts any longer, threw a lace scarf about her head and neck, and went blindly climbing through the upward paths leading to Les Avants. The roads were silver in the moonlight; so was the lake, save where the great mountain shadows lay across the eastern end. And suddenly, white, through pine-trees, "Jaman, delicately tall!"

The air cooled her brow, and from the deep, enveloping night her torn heart drew balm, and a first soothing of the pulse of pain. Every now and then, as she sat down to rest, a waking dream overshadowed her. She seemed to be supporting Warkworth in her arms; his dying head lay upon her breast, and she murmured courage and love into his ear. But not as Julie Le Breton. Through all the anguish of what was almost an illusion of the senses, she still felt herself Delafield's wife. And in that flood of silent speech she poured out on Warkworth, it was as though she offered him also Jacob's compa.s.sion, Jacob's homage, mingled with her own.

Once she found herself sitting at the edge of a meadow, environed by the heavy scents of flowers. Some apple-trees with whitened trunks rose between her and the lake a thousand feet below. The walls of Chillon, the houses of Montreux, caught the light; opposite, the deep forests of Bouveret and St. Gingolphe lay black upon the lake; above them rode the moon. And to the east the high Alps, their pure lines a little effaced and withdrawn, as when a light veil hangs over a sanctuary.

Julie looked out upon a vast freedom of s.p.a.ce, and by a natural connection she seemed to be also surveying her own world of life and feeling, her past and her future. She thought of her childhood and her parents, of her harsh, combative youth, of the years with Lady Henry, of Warkworth, of her husband, and the life into which his strong hand had so suddenly and rashly drawn her. Her thoughts took none of the religious paths so familiar to his. And yet her reverie was so far religious that her mind seemed to herself to be quivering under the onset of affections, emotions, awes, till now unknown, and that, looking back, she was conscious of a groping sense of significance, of purpose, in all that had befallen her. Yet to this sense she could put no words.

Only, in the end, through the constant action of her visualizing imagination, it connected itself with Delafield's face, and with the memory of many of his recent acts and sayings.

It was one of those hours which determine the history of a man or woman.

And the august Alpine beauty entered in, so that Julie, in this sad and thrilling act of self-probing, felt herself in the presence of powers and dominations divine.

Her face, stained with tears, took gradually some of the calm, the loftiness of the night. Yet the close-shut, brooding mouth would slip sometimes into a smile exquisitely soft and gentle, as though the heart remembered something which seemed to the intelligence at once folly and sweetness.

What was going on within her was, to her own consciousness, a strange thing. It appeared to her as a kind of simplification, a return to childhood; or, rather, was it the emergence in the grown mind, tired with the clamor of its own egotistical or pa.s.sionate life, of some instincts, natural to the child, which she, nevertheless, as a child had never known; instincts of trust, of self-abandonment, steeped, perhaps, in those tears which are themselves only another happiness?...

But hush! What are our poor words in the presence of these n.o.bler secrets of the wrestling and mounting spirit!