Chapter 14

How true were those last words, perhaps only Julie knew. She looked back upon all the manoeuvres and influences she had brought to bear--flattery here, interest or reciprocity there, the lures of Crowborough House, the prestige of Lady Henry's drawing-room. Wheel by wheel she had built up her cunning machine, and the machine had worked. No doubt the last completing touch had been given the night before. Her culminating offence against Lady Henry--the occasion of her disgrace and banishment--had been to Warkworth the stepping-stone of fortune.

What "gossamer girl" could have done so much? She threw back her head proudly and heard the beating of her heart.

Lady Henry was fiercely forgotten. She opened the drawing-room door, absorbed in a counting of the hours till she and Warkworth should meet.

Then, amid the lights and shadows of the Duchess's drawing-room, Jacob Delafield rose and came towards her. Her exaltation dropped in a moment. Some testing, penetrating influence seemed to breathe from this man, which filled her with a moral discomfort, a curious restlessness. Did he guess the nature of her feeling for Warkworth? Was he acquainted with the efforts she had been making for the young soldier? She could not be sure; he had never given her the smallest sign. Yet she divined that few things escaped him where the persons who touched his feelings were concerned. And Evelyn--the dear chatterbox--certainly suspected.

"How tired you are!" he said to her, gently. "What a day it has been for you! Evelyn is writing letters. Let me bring you the papers--and please don't talk."

She submitted to a sofa, to an adjusted light, to the papers on her knee. Then Delafield withdrew and took up a book.

She could not rest, however; visions of the morrow and of Warkworth's triumphant looks kept flashing through her. Yet all the while Delafield's presence haunted her--she could not forget him, and presently she addressed him.

"Mr. Delafield!"

He heard the low voice and came.

"I have never thanked you for your goodness last night. I do thank you now--most earnestly."

"You needn't. You know very well what I would do to serve you if I could."

"Even when you think me in the wrong?" said Julie, with a little, hysterical laugh.

Her conscience smote her. Why provoke this intimate talk--wantonly--with the man she had made suffer? Yet her restlessness, which was partly nervous fatigue, drove her on.

Delafield flushed at her words.

"How have I given you cause to say that?"

"Oh, you are very transparent. One sees that you are always troubling yourself about the right and wrong of things."

"All very well for one's self," said Delafield, trying to laugh. "I hope I don't seem to you to be setting up as a judge of other people's right and wrong?"

"Yes, yes, you do!" she said, passionately. Then, as he winced, "No, I don't mean that. But you do judge--it is in your nature--and other people feel it."

"I didn't know I was such a prig," said Delafield, humbly. "It is true I am always puzzling over things."

Julie was silent. She was indeed secretly convinced that he no more approved the escapade of the night before than did Sir Wilfrid Bury. Through the whole evening she had been conscious of a watchful anxiety and resistance on his part. Yet he had stood by her to the end--so warmly, so faithfully.

He sat down beside her, and Julie felt a fresh pang of remorse, perhaps of alarm. Why had she called him to her? What had they to do with each other? But he soon reassured her. He began to talk of Meredith, and the work before her--the important and glorious work, as he naïvely termed it, of the writer.

And presently he turned upon her with sudden feeling.

"You accused me, just now, of judging what I have no business to judge. If you think that I regret the severance of your relation with Lady Henry, you are quite, quite mistaken. It has been the dream of my life this last year to see you free--mistress of your own life. It--it made me mad that you should be ordered about like a child--dependent upon another person's will."

She looked at him curiously.

"I know. That revolts you always--any form of command? Evelyn tells me that you carry it to curious lengths with your servants and laborers."

He drew back, evidently disconcerted.

"Oh, I try some experiments. They generally break down."

"You try to do without servants, Evelyn says, as much as possible."

"Well, if I do try, I don't succeed," he said, laughing. "But"--his eyes kindled--"isn't it worth while, during a bit of one's life, to escape, if one can, from some of the paraphernalia in which we are all smothered? Look there! What right have I to turn my fellow-creatures into bedizened automata like that?"

And he threw out an accusing hand towards the two powdered footmen, who were removing the coffee-cups and making up the fire in the next room, while the magnificent groom of the chambers stood like a statue, receiving some orders from the Duchess.

Julie, however, showed no sympathy.

"They are only automata in the drawing-room. Down-stairs they are as much alive as you or I."

"Well, let us put it that I prefer other kinds of luxury," said Delafield. "However, as I appear to have none of the qualities necessary to carry out my notions, they don't get very far."

"You would like to shake hands with the butler?" said Julie, musing. "I knew a case of that kind. But the butler gave warning."

Delafield laughed.

"Perhaps the simpler thing would be to do without the butler."

"I am curious," she said, smiling--"very curious. Sir Wilfrid, for instance, talks of going down to stay with you?"

"Why not? He'd come off extremely well. There's an ex-butler, and an ex-cook of Chudleigh's settled in the village. When I have a visitor, they come in and take possession. We live like fighting-cocks."

"So nobody knows that, in general, you live like a workman?"

Delafield looked impatient.

"Somebody seems to have been cramming Evelyn with ridiculous tales, and she's been spreading them. I must have it out with her."

"I expect there is a good deal in them," said Julie. Then, unexpectedly, she raised her eyes and gave him a long and rather strange look. "Why do you dislike having servants and being waited upon so much, I wonder? Is it--you won't be angry?--that you have such a strong will, and you do these things to tame it?"

Delafield made a sudden movement, and Julie had no sooner spoken the words than she regretted them.

"So you think I should have made a jolly tyrannical slave-owner?" said Delafield, after a moment's pause.

Julie bent towards him with a charming look of appeal--almost of penitence. "On the contrary, I think you would have been as good to your slaves as you are to your friends."

His eyes met hers quietly.

"Thank you. That was kind of you. And as to giving orders, and getting one's way, don't suppose I let Chudleigh's estate go to ruin! It's only"--he hesitated--"the small personal tyrannies of every day that I'd like to minimize. They brutalize half the fellows I know."

"You'll come to them," said Julie, absently. Then she colored, suddenly remembering the possible dukedom that awaited him.

His brow contracted a little, as though he understood. He made no reply. Julie, with her craving to be approved--to say what pleased--could not leave it there.

"I wish I understood," she said, softly, after a moment, "what, or who it was that gave you these opinions."

Getting still no answer, she must perforce meet the gray eyes bent upon her, more expressively, perhaps, than their owner knew. "That you shall understand," he said, after a minute, in a voice which was singularly deep and full, "whenever you choose to ask."

Julie shrank and drew back.

"Very well," she said, trying to speak lightly. "I'll hold you to that. Alack! I had forgotten a letter I must write."

And she pretended to write it, while Delafield buried himself in the newspapers.

XIII

Julie's curiosity--passing and perfunctory as it was--concerning the persons and influences that had worked upon Jacob Delafield since his college days, was felt in good earnest by not a few of Delafield's friends. For he was a person rich in friends, reserved as he generally was, and crotchety as most of them thought him. The mixture of self-evident strength and manliness in his physiognomy with something delicate and evasive, some hindering element of reflection or doubt, was repeated in his character. On the one side he was a robust, healthy Etonian, who could ride, shoot, and golf like the rest of his kind, who used the terse, slangy ways of speech of the ordinary Englishman, who loved the land and its creatures, and had a natural hatred for a poacher; and on another he was a man haunted by dreams and spiritual voices, a man for whom, as he paced his tired horse homeward after a day's run, there would rise on the grays and purples of the winter dusk far-shining "cities of God" and visions of a better life for man. He read much poetry, and the New Testament spoke to him imperatively, though in no orthodox or accustomed way. Ruskin, and the earlier work of Tolstoy, then just beginning to take hold of the English mind, had affected his thought and imagination, as the generation before him had been affected by Carlyle, Emerson, and George Sand.

This present phase of his life, however, was the outcome of much that was turbulent and shapeless in his first youth. He seemed to himself to have passed through Oxford under a kind of eclipse. All that he could remember of two-thirds of his time there was an immoderate amount of eating, drinking, and sleeping. A heavy animal existence, disturbed by moments of unhappiness and remorse, or, at best, lightened by intervals and gleams of friendship with two or three men who tried to prod him out of his lethargy, and cherished what appeared, to himself in particular, a strange and unreasonable liking for him. Such, to his own thinking, had been his Oxford life, up to the last year of his residence there.

Then, when he was just making certain of an ignominious failure in the final schools, he became more closely acquainted with one of the college tutors, whose influence was to be the spark which should at last fire the clay. This modest, heroic, and learned man was a paralyzed invalid, owing to an accident in the prime of life. He had lost the use of his lower limbs--"dead from the waist down." Yet such was the strength of his moral and intellectual life that he had become, since the catastrophe, one of the chief forces of his college. The invalid-chair on which he wheeled himself, recumbent, from room to room, and from which he gave his lectures, was, in the eyes of Oxford, a symbol not of weakness, but of touching and triumphant victory. He gave himself no airs of resignation or of martyrdom. He simply lived his life--except during those crises of weakness or pain when his friends were shut out--as though it were like any other life, save only for what he made appear an insignificant physical limitation. Scholarship, college business or college sports, politics and literature--his mind, at least, was happy, strenuous, and at home in them all. To have pitied him would have been a mere impertinence. While in his own heart, which never grieved over himself, there were treasures of compassion for the weak, the tempted, and the unsuccessful, which spent themselves in secret, simple ways, unknown to his most intimate friends.

This man's personality it was which, like the branch of healing on bitter waters, presently started in Jacob Delafield's nature obscure processes of growth and regeneration. The originator of them knew little of what was going on. He was Delafield's tutor for Greats, in the ordinary college routine; Delafield took essays to him, and occasionally lingered to talk. But they never became exactly intimate. A few conversations of "pith and moment"; a warm shake of the hand and a keen look of pleasure in the blue eyes of the recumbent giant when, after one year of superhuman but belated effort, Delafield succeeded in obtaining a second class; a little note of farewell, affectionate and regretful, when Delafield left the university; an occasional message through a common friend--Delafield had little more than these to look back upon, outside the discussions of historical or philosophical subjects which had entered into their relation as pupil and teacher.

And now the paralyzed tutor was dead, leaving behind him a volume of papers on classical subjects, the reputation of an admirable scholar, and the fragrance of a dear and honored name. His pupils had been many; they counted among the most distinguished of England's youth; and all of them owed him much. Few people thought of Delafield when the list of them was recited; and yet, in truth, Jacob's debt was greater than any; for he owed this man nothing less than his soul.

No doubt the period at Oxford had been rather a period of obscure conflict than of mere idleness and degeneracy, as it had seemed to be. But it might easily have ended in physical and moral ruin, and, as it was--thanks to Courtenay--Delafield went out to the business of life, a man singularly master of himself, determined to live his own life for his own ends.

In the first place, he was conscious, like many other young men of his time, of a strong repulsion towards the complexities and artificialities of modern society. As in the forties, a time of social stir was rising out of a time of stagnation. Social settlements were not yet founded, but the experiments which led to them were beginning. Jacob looked at the life of London, the clubs and the country-houses, the normal life of his class, and turned from it in aversion. He thought, sometimes, of emigrating, in search of a new heaven and a new earth, as men emigrated in the forties.

But his mother and sister were alone in the world--his mother a somewhat helpless being, his sister still very young and unmarried. He could not reconcile it to his conscience to go very far from them.

He tried the bar, amid an inner revolt that only increased with time. And the bar implied London, and the dinners and dances of London, which, for a man of his family, the probable heir to the lands and moneys of the Chudleighs, were naturally innumerable. He was much courted, in spite, perhaps because, of his oddities; and it was plain to him that with only a small exercise of those will-forces he felt accumulating within him, most of the normal objects of ambition were within his grasp. The English aristocratic class, as we all know, is no longer exclusive. It mingles freely with the commoner world on apparently equal terms. But all the while its personal and family cohesion is perhaps greater than ever. The power of mere birth, it seemed to Jacob, was hardly less in the England newly possessed of household suffrage than in the England of Charles James Fox's youth, though it worked through other channels. And for the persons in command of this power, a certain _appareil de vie_ was necessary, taken for granted. So much income, so many servants, such and such habits--these things imposed themselves. Life became a soft and cushioned business, with an infinity of layers between it and any hard reality--a round pea in a silky pod.

And he meanwhile found himself hungry to throw aside these tamed and trite forms of existence, and to penetrate to the harsh, true, simple things behind. His imagination and his heart turned towards the primitive, indispensable labors on which society rests--the life of the husbandman, the laborer, the smith, the woodman, the builder; he dreamed the old, enchanted dream of living with nature; of becoming the brother not of the few, but of the many. He was still reading in chambers, however, when his first cousin, the Duke, a melancholy semi-invalid, a widower, with an only son tuberculous almost from his birth, arrived from abroad. Jacob was brought into new contact with him. The Duke liked him, and offered him the agency of his Essex property. Jacob accepted, partly that he might be quit of the law, partly that he might be in the country and among the poor, partly for reasons, or ghosts of reasons, unavowed even to himself. The one terror that haunted his life was the terror of the dukedom. This poor, sickly lad, the heir, with whom he soon made warm friends, and the silent, morbid Duke, with the face of Charles V. at St. Just--he became, in a short time, profoundly and pitifully attached to them. It pleased him to serve them; above all did it please him to do all he could, and to incite others to do all they could, to keep these two frail persons cheered and alive. His own passionate dread lest he should suddenly find himself in their place, gave a particular poignancy to the service he was always ready to render them of his best.

The Duke's confidence in him had increased rapidly. Delafield was now about to take over the charge of another of the Duke's estates, in the Midlands, and much of the business connected with some important London property was also coming into his hands. He had made himself a good man of business where another's interests were concerned, and his dreams did no harm to the Duke's revenues. He gave, indeed, a liberal direction to the whole policy of the estate, and, as he had said to Julie, the Duke did not forbid experiments.

As to his own money, he gave it away as wisely as he could, which is, perhaps, not saying very much for the schemes and Quixotisms of a young man of eight-and-twenty. At any rate, he gave it away--to his mother and sister first, then to a variety of persons and causes. Why should he save a penny of it? He had some money of his own, besides his income from the Duke. It was disgusting that he should have so much, and that it should be, apparently, so very easy for him to have indefinitely more if he wanted it.

He lived in a small cottage, in the simplest, plainest way compatible with his work and with the maintenance of two decently furnished rooms for any friend who might chance to visit him. He read much and thought much. But he was not a man of any commanding speculative or analytic ability. It would have been hard for him to give any very clear or logical account of himself and his deepest beliefs. Nevertheless, with every year that passed he became a more remarkable _character_--his will stronger, his heart gentler. In the village where he lived they wondered at him a good deal, and often laughed at him. But if he had left them, certainly the children and the old people would have felt as though the sun had gone out.

In London he showed little or nothing of his peculiar ways and pursuits; was, in fact, as far as anybody knew--outside half a dozen friends--just the ordinary, well-disposed young man, engaged in a business that every one understood. With Lady Henry, his relations, apart from his sympathy with Julie Le Breton, had been for some time rather difficult. She made gratitude hard for one of the most grateful of men. When the circumstances of the Hubert Delafields had been much straitened, after Lord Hubert's death, Lady Henry had come to their aid, and had, in particular, spent fifteen hundred pounds on Jacob's school and college education. But there are those who can make a gift burn into the bones of those who receive it. Jacob had now saved nearly the whole sum, and was about to repay her. Meanwhile his obligation, his relationship, and her age made it natural, or rather imperative, that he should be often in her house; but when he was with her the touch of arrogant brutality in her nature, especially towards servants and dependants, roused him almost to fury. She knew it, and would often exercise her rough tongue merely for the pleasure of tormenting him.

No sooner, therefore, had he come to know the fragile, distinguished creature whom Lady Henry had brought back with her one autumn as her companion than his sympathies were instantly excited, first by the mere fact that she was Lady Henry's dependant, and then by the confidence, as to her sad story and strange position, which she presently reposed in him and his cousin Evelyn. On one or two occasions, very early in his acquaintance with her, he was a witness of some small tyranny of Lady Henry's towards her. He saw the shrinking of the proud nature, and the pain thrilled through his own nerves as though the lash had touched himself. Presently it became a joy to him whenever he was in town to conspire with Evelyn Crowborough for her pleasure and relief. It was the first time he had ever conspired, and it gave him sometimes a slight shock to see how readily these two charming women lent themselves, on occasion, to devices that had the aspect of intrigue, and involved a good deal of what, in his own case, he would have roundly dubbed lying. And, in truth, if he had known, they did not find him a convenient ally, and he was by no means always in their confidence.

Once, about six months after Julie's arrival in Bruton Street, he met her on a spring morning crossing Kensington Gardens with the dogs. She looked startlingly white and ill, and when he spoke to her with eager sympathy her mouth quivered and her dark eyes clouded with tears. The sight produced an extraordinary effect on a man large-hearted and simple, for whom women still moved in an atmosphere of romance. His heart leaped within him as she let herself be talked with and comforted. And when her delicate hand rested in his as they said good-bye, he was conscious of feelings--wild, tumultuous feelings--to which, in his walk homeward through the spring glades of the park, he gave impetuous course.

Romantic, indeed, the position was, for romance rests on contrast. Jacob, who knew Julie Le Breton's secret, was thrilled or moved by the contrasts of her existence at every turn. Her success and her subjection; the place in Lady Henry's circle which Lady Henry had, in the first instance, herself forced her to take, contrasted with the shifts and evasions, the poor, tortuous ways by which, alas! she must often escape Lady Henry's later jealousy; her intellectual strength and her most feminine weaknesses; these things stirred and kept up in Jacob a warm and passionate pity. The more clearly he saw the specks in her glory, the more vividly did she appear to him a princess in distress, bound by physical or moral fetters not of her own making. None of the well-born, well-trained damsels who had been freely thrown across his path had so far beguiled him in the least. Only this woman of doubtful birth and antecedents, lonely, sad, and enslaved amid what people called her social triumphs, stole into his heart--beautified by what he chose to consider her misfortunes, and made none the less attractive by the fact that as he pursued, she retreated; as he pressed, she grew cold.

When, indeed, after their friendship had lasted about a year, he proposed to her and she refused him, his passion, instead of cooling, redoubled. It never occurred to him to think that she had done a strange thing from the worldly point of view--that would have involved an appreciation of himself, as a prize in the marriage market, he would have loathed to make. But he was one of the men for whom resistance enhances the value of what they desire, and secretly he said to himself, "Persevere!" When he was repelled or puzzled by certain aspects of her character, he would say to himself:

"It is because she is alone and miserable. Women are not meant to be alone. What soft, helpless creatures they are!--even when intellectually they fly far ahead of us. If she would but put her hand in mine I would so serve and worship her, she would have no need for these strange things she does--the doublings and ruses of the persecuted." Thus the touches of falsity that repelled Wilfrid Bury were to Delafield's passion merely the stains of rough travel on a fair garment.