Lady Rose's Daughter Part 76

He took the book abruptly, almost as if she had no right to be holding it. Then, as he saw the letter, the color rushed into his face. He took it, and after a moment's hesitation walked to the window and opened it.

She saw him waver, and ran to his support. But he put out a hand which checked her.

"It was the last thing he wrote," he said; and then, uncertainly, and without reading any but the first words of the letter, he put it into his pocket.

Julie drew back, humiliated. His gesture said that to a secret so intimate and sacred he did not propose to admit his wife.

They went back silently to the room from which they had come. Sentence after sentence came to Julie's lips, but it seemed useless to say them, and once more, but in a totally new way, she was "afraid" of the man beside her.

She left him shortly after, by his own wish.

"I will lie down, and you must rest," he said, with decision.

So she bathed and dressed, and presently she allowed the kind, fair-haired Susan to give her food, and pour out her own history of the death-week which she and Jacob had pa.s.sed through. But in all that was said, Julie noticed that Susan spoke of her brother very little, and of his inheritance and present position not at all. And once or twice she noticed a wondering or meditative expression in the girl's charming eyes as they rested on herself, and realized that the sense of mystery, of hushed expectancy, was not confined to her own mind.

When Susan left her at nine o'clock, it was to give a number of necessary orders in the house. The inquest was to be held in the morning, and the whole day would be filled with arrangements for the double funeral. The house would be thronged with officials of all sorts.

"Poor Jacob!" said the sister, sighing, as she went away.

But the tragic tumult had not yet begun. The house was still quiet, and Julie was for the first time alone.

She drew up the blinds, and stood gazing out upon the park, now flooded with light; at the famous Italian garden beneath the windows, with its fountains and statues; at the wide lake which filled the middle distance; and the hills beyond it, with the plantations and avenues which showed the extension of the park as far as the eye could see.

Julie knew very well what it all implied. Her years with Lady Henry, in connection with her own hidden sense of birth and family, had shown her with sufficient plainness the conditions under which the English n.o.ble lives. She _was_ actually, at that moment, d.u.c.h.ess of Chudleigh; her strong intelligence faced and appreciated the fact; the social scope and power implied in those three words were all the more vivid to her imagination because of her history and up-bringing. She had not grown to maturity _inside_, like Delafield, but as an exile from a life which was yet naturally hers--an exile, full, sometimes, of envy, and the pa.s.sions of envy.

It had no terrors for her--quite the contrary--this high social state.

Rather, there were moments when her whole nature reached out to it, in a proud and confident ambition. Nor had she any mystical demurrer to make.

The originality which in some ways she richly possessed was not concerned in the least with the upsetting of cla.s.s distinctions, and as a Catholic she had been taught loyally to accept them.

The minutes pa.s.sed away. Julie sank deeper and deeper into reverie, her head leaning against the side of the window, her hands clasped before her on her black dress. Once or twice she found the tears dropping from her eyes, and once or twice she smiled.

She was not thinking of the tragic circ.u.mstances amid which she stood.

From that short trance of feeling even the piteous figures of the dead father and son faded away. Warkworth entered into it, but already invested with the pa.s.sionless and s.e.xless beauty of a world where--whether it be to us poetry or reality--"they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Her warm and living thoughts spent themselves on one theme only--the redressing of a spiritual balance. She was no longer a beggar to her husband; she had the wherewithal to give. She had been the mere recipient, burdened with debts beyond her paying; now--

And then it was that her smiles came--tremluous, fugitive, exultant.

A bell rang in the long corridor, and the slight sound recalled her to life and action. She walked towards the door which separated her from the sitting-room where she had left her husband, and opened it without knocking.

Delafield was sitting at a writing-table in the window. He had apparently been writing; but she found him in a moment of pause, playing absently with the pen he still held.

As she entered he looked up, and it seemed to her that his aspect and his mood had changed. Her sudden and indefinable sense of this made it easier for her to hasten to him, and to hold out her hands to him.

"Jacob, you asked me a question just now, and I begged you to give me time. But I am here to answer it. If it would be to your happiness to refuse the dukedom, refuse it. I will not stand in your way, and I will never reproach you. I suppose"--she made herself smile upon him--"there are ways of doing such a strange thing. You will be much criticised, perhaps much blamed. But if it seems to you right, do it. I'll just stand by you and help you. Whatever makes you happy shall make me happy, if only--"

Delafield had risen impetuously and held her by both hands. His breast heaved, and the hurrying of her own breath would now hardly let her speak.

"If only what?" he said, hoa.r.s.ely.

She raised her eyes.

"If only, _mon ami_"--she disengaged one hand and laid it gently on his shoulder--"you will give me your trust, and"--her voice dropped--"your love!"

They gazed at each other. Between them, around them hovered thoughts of the past--of Warkworth, of the gray Channel waves, of the spiritual relation which had grown up between them in Switzerland, mingled with the consciousness of this new, incalculable present, and of the growth and change in themselves.

"You'd give it all up?" said Delafield, gently, still holding her at arm's-length.

"Yes," she nodded to him, with a smile.

"For me? For my sake?"

She smiled again. He drew a long breath, and turning to the table behind him, took up a letter which was lying there.

"I want you to read that," he said, holding it out to her.

She drew back, with a little, involuntary frown.

He understood.

"Dearest," he cried, pressing her hand pa.s.sionately, "I have been in the grip of all the powers of death! Read it--be good to me!"

Standing beside him, with his arm round her, she read the melancholy Duke's last words:

"My Dear Jacob,--I leave you a heavy task, which I know well is, in your eyes, a mere burden. But, for my sake, accept it.

The man who runs away has small right to counsel courage. But you know what my struggle has been. You'll judge me mercifully, if no one else does. There is in you, too, the little, bitter drop that spoils us all; but you won't be alone. You have your wife, and you love her. Take my place here, care for our people, speak of us sometimes to your children, and pray for us. I bless you, dear fellow. The only moments of comfort I have ever known this last year have come from you. I would live on if I could, but I must--_must_ have sleep."

Julie dropped the paper. She turned to look at her husband.

"Since I read that," he said, in a low voice, "I have been sitting here alone--or, rather, it is my belief that I have not been alone. But"--he hesitated--"it is very difficult for me to speak of that--even to you.

At any rate, I have felt the touch of discipline, of command. My poor cousin deserted. I, it seems"--he drew a long and painful breath--"must keep to the ranks."

"Let us discuss it," said Julie; and sitting down, hand in hand, they talked quietly and gravely.

Suddenly, Delafield turned to her with renewed emotion.

"I feel already the energy, the honorable ambition you will bring to it.

But still, you'd have given it up, Julie? You'd have given it up?"

Julie chose her words.

"Yes. But now that we are to keep it, will you hate me if, some day--when we are less sad--I get pleasure from it? I sha'n't be able to help it. When we were at La Verna, I felt that you ought to have been born in the thirteenth century, that you were really meant to wed poverty and follow St. Francis. But now you have got to be horribly, hopelessly rich. And I, all the time, am a worldling, and a modern. What you'll suffer from, I shall perhaps--enjoy."

The word fell harshly on the darkened room. Delafield shivered, as though he felt the overshadowing dead. Julie impetuously took his hand.

"It will be my part to be a worldling--for your sake," she said, her breath wavering. Their eyes met. From her face shone a revelation, a beauty that enwrapped them both. Delafield fell on his knees beside her, and laid his head upon her breast. The exquisite gesture with which she folded her arms about him told her inmost thought. At last he needed her, and the dear knowledge filled and tamed her heart.