Chapter 18

"I am very sorry you thought me rude. I was tired with talking and unpacking, and with literary work--housework, too, if the truth were known. I am no longer a fine lady, and must slave for myself. The thought, also, of an interview with Lord Lackington which faced me, which I went through as soon as you, Dr. Meredith, and Mr. Delafield had gone, unnerved me. You were good to write to me, and I am grateful indeed. As to your appointment, and your career, you owe no one anything. Everything is in your own hands. I rejoice in your good fortune, and I beg that you will let no false ideas with regard to me trouble your mind.

"This afternoon at five, if you can forgive me, you will find me. In the early afternoon I shall be in the British Museum, for my work's sake."

She posted her letter, and went about her daily housework, oppressed the while by a mental and moral nausea. As she washed and tidied and dusted, a true housewife's love growing up in her for the little house and its charming, old-world appointments--a sort of mute relation between her and it, as though it accepted her for mistress, and she on her side vowed it a delicate and prudent care--she thought how she could have delighted in this life which had opened upon her had it come to her a year ago. The tasks set her by Meredith were congenial and within her power. Her independence gave her the keenest pleasure. The effort and conquests of the intellect--she had the mind to love them, to desire them; and the way to them was unbarred.

What plucked her back?

A tear fell upon the old china cup that she was dusting. A sort of maternal element had entered into her affection for Warkworth during the winter. She had upheld him and fought for him. And now, like a mother, she could not tear the unworthy object from her heart, though all the folly of their pseudo-friendship and her secret hopes lay bare before her.

* * * * *

Warkworth came at five.

He entered in the dusk; a little pale, with his graceful head thrown back, and that half-startled, timid look in his wide, blue eyes--that misleading look--which made him the boy still, when he chose.

Julie was standing near the window as he came in. As she turned and saw him there, a flood of tenderness and compunction swept over her. He was going away. What if she never saw him again?

She shuddered and came forward rapidly, eagerly. He read the meaning of her movement, her face; and, wringing her hands with a violence that hurt her, he drew a long breath of relief.

"Why--why"--he said, under his breath--"have you made me so unhappy?"

The blood leaped in her veins. These, indeed, were new words in a new tone.

"Don't let us reproach each other," she said. "There is so much to say. Sit down."

To-day there were no beguiling spring airs. The fire burned merrily in the grate; the windows were closed.

A scent of narcissus--the Duchess had filled the tables with flowers--floated in the room. Amid its old-fashioned and distinguished bareness--tempered by flowers, and a litter of foreign books--Julie seemed at last to have found her proper frame. In her severe black dress, opening on a delicate vest of white, she had a muselike grace; and the wreath made by her superb black hair round the fine intelligence of her brow had never been more striking. Her slender hands busied themselves with Cousin Mary Leicester's tea-things; and every movement had in Warkworth's eyes a charm to which he had never yet been sensible, in this manner, to this degree.

"Am I really to say no more of yesterday?" he said, looking at her nervously.

Her flush, her gesture, appealed to him.

"Do you know what I had before me--that day--when you came in?" she said, softly.

"No. I cannot guess. Ah, you said something about Lord Lackington?"

She hesitated. Then her color deepened.

"You don't know my story. You suppose, don't you, that I am a Belgian with English connections, whom Lady Henry met by chance? Isn't that how you explain me?"

Warkworth had pushed aside his cup.

"I thought--"

He paused in embarrassment, but there was a sparkle of astonished expectancy in his eyes.

"My mother"--she looked away into the blaze of the fire, and her voice choked a little--"my mother was Lord Lackington's daughter."

"Lord Lackington's daughter?" echoed Warkworth, in stupefaction. A rush of ideas and inferences sped through his mind. He thought of Lady Blanche--things heard in India--and while he stared at her in an agitated silence the truth leaped to light.

"Not--not Lady Rose Delaney?" he said, bending forward to her.

She nodded.

"My father was Marriott Dalrymple. You will have heard of him. I should be Julie Dalrymple, but--they could never marry--because of Colonel Delaney."

Her face was still turned away.

All the details of that famous scandal began to come back to him. His companion, her history, her relations to others, to himself, began to appear to him in the most astonishing new lights. So, instead of the mere humble outsider, she belonged all the time to the best English blood? The society in which he had met her was full of her kindred. No doubt the Duchess knew--and Montresor.... He was meshed in a net of thoughts perplexing and confounding, of which the total result was perhaps that she appeared to him as she sat there, the slender outline so quiet and still, more attractive and more desirable than ever. The mystery surrounding her in some way glorified her, and he dimly perceived that so it must have been for others.

"How did you ever bear the Bruton Street life?" he said, presently, in a low voice of wonder. "Lady Henry knew?"

"Oh yes!"

"And the Duchess?"

"Yes. She is a connection of my mother's."

Warkworth's mind went back to the Moffatts. A flush spread slowly over the face of the young officer. It was indeed an extraordinary imbroglio in which he found himself.

"How did Lord Lackington take it?" he asked, after a pause.

"He was, of course, much startled, much moved. We had a long talk. Everything is to remain just the same. He wishes to make me an allowance, and, if he persists, I suppose I can't hurt him by refusing. But for the present I have refused. It is more amusing to earn one's own living." She turned to him with a sharp brightness in her black eyes. "Besides, if Lord Lackington gives me money, he will want to give me advice. And I would rather advise myself."

Warkworth sat silent a moment. Then he took a great resolve.

"I want to speak to you," he said, suddenly, putting out his hand to hers, which lay on her knee.

She turned to him, startled.

"I want to have no secrets from you," he said, drawing his breath quickly. "I told you lies one day, because I thought it was my duty to tell lies. Another person was concerned. But now I can't. Julie!--you'll let me call you so, won't you? The name is already"--he hesitated; then the words rushed out--"part of my life! Julie, it's quite true, there is a kind of understanding between your little cousin Aileen and me. At Simla she attracted me enormously. I lost my head one day in the woods, when she--whom we were all courting--distinguished me above two or three other men who were there. I proposed to her upon a sudden impulse, and she accepted me. She is a charming, soft creature. Perhaps I wasn't justified. Perhaps she ought to have had more chance of seeing the world. Anyway, there was a great row. Her guardians insisted that I had behaved badly. They could not know all the details of the matter, and I was not going to tell them. Finally I promised to withdraw for two years."

He paused, anxiously studying her face. It had grown very white, and, he thought, very cold. But she quickly rose, and, looking down upon him, said:

"Nothing of that is news to me. Did you think it was?"

And moving to the tea-table, she began to make provision for a fresh supply of tea.

Both words and manner astounded him. He, too, rose and followed her.

"How did you first guess?" he said, abruptly.

"Some gossip reached me." She looked up with a smile. "That's what generally happens, isn't it?"

"There are no secrets nowadays," he said, sorely. "And then, there was Miss Lawrence?"

"Yes, there was Miss Lawrence."

"Did you think badly of me?"

"Why should I? I understand Aileen is very pretty, and--"

"And will have a large fortune. You understand that?" he said, trying to carry it off lightly.

"The fact is well known, isn't it?"

He sat down, twisting his hat between his hands. Then with an exclamation he dashed it on the floor, and, rising, he bent over Julie, his hands in his pockets.

"Julie," he said, in a voice that shook her, "don't, for God's sake, give me up! I have behaved abominably, but don't take your friendship from me. I shall soon be gone. Our lives will go different ways. That was settled--alack!--before we met. I am honorably bound to that poor child. She cares for me, and I can't get loose. But these last months have been happy, haven't they? There are just three weeks left. At present the strongest feeling in my heart is--" He paused for his word, and he saw that she was looking through the window to the trees of the garden, and that, still as she was, her lip quivered.

"What shall I say?" he resumed, with emotion. "It seems to me our case stands all by itself, alone in the world. We have three weeks--give them to me. Don't let's play at cross purposes any more. I want to be sincere--I want to hide nothing from you in these days. Let us throw aside convention and trust each other, as friends may, so that when I go we may say to each other, 'Well, it was worth the pain. These have been days of gold--we shall get no better if we live to be a hundred.'"

She turned her face to him in a tremulous amazement and there were tears on her cheek. Never had his aspect been so winning. What he proposed was, in truth, a mean thing; all the same, he proposed it nobly.

It was in vain that something whispered in her ear: "This girl to whom he describes himself as 'honorably bound' has a fortune of half a million. He is determined to have both her money and my heart." Another inward voice, tragically generous, dashed down the thought, and, at the moment, rightly; for as he stood over her, breathless and imperious, to his own joy, to his own exaltation, Warkworth was conscious of a new sincerity flowing in a tempestuous and stormy current through all the veins of being.

With a sombre passion which already marked an epoch in their relation, and contained within itself the elements of new and unforeseen developments, she gazed silently into his face. Then, leaning back in her chair, she once more held out to him both her hands.

He gave an exclamation of joy, kissed the hands tenderly, and sat down beside her.

"Now, then, all your cares, all your thoughts, all your griefs are to be mine--till fate call us. And I have a thousand things to tell you, to bless you for, to consult you about. There is not a thought in my mind that you shall not know--bad, good, and indifferent--if you care to turn out the rag-bag. Shall I begin with the morning--my experiences at the club, my little nieces at the Zoo?" He laughed, but suddenly grew serious again. "No, your story first; you owe it me. Let me know all that concerns you. Your past, your sorrows, ambitions--everything."

He bent to her imperiously. With a faint, broken smile, her hands still in his, she assented. It was difficult to begin, then difficult to control the flood of memory; and it had long been dark when Madame Bornier, coming in to light the lamp and make up the fire, disturbed an intimate and searching conversation, which had revealed the two natures to each other with an agitating fulness.

* * * * *

Yet the results of this memorable evening upon Julie Le Breton were ultimately such as few could have foreseen.

When Warkworth had left her, she went to her own room and sat for a long while beside the window, gazing at the dark shrubberies of the Cureton House garden, at the few twinkling, distant lights.

The vague, golden hopes she had cherished through these past months of effort and scheming were gone forever. Warkworth would marry Aileen Moffatt, and use her money for an ambitious career. After these weeks now lying before them--weeks of dangerous intimacy, dangerous emotion--she and he would become as strangers to each other. He would be absorbed by his profession and his rich marriage. She would be left alone to live her life.

A sudden terror of her own weakness overcame her. No, she could not be alone. She must place a barrier between herself and this--this strange threatening of illimitable ruin that sometimes rose upon her from the dark. "I have no prejudices," she had said to Sir Wilfrid. There were many moments when she felt a fierce pride in the element of lawlessness, of defiance, that seemed to be her inheritance from her parents. But to-night she was afraid of it.

Again, if love was to go, _power_, the satisfaction of ambition, remained. She threw a quick glance into the future--the future beyond these three weeks. What could she make of it? She knew well that she was not the woman to resign herself to a mere pining obscurity.

Jacob Delafield? Was it, after all, so impossible?

For a few minutes she set herself deliberately to think out what it would mean to marry him; then suddenly broke down and wept, with inarticulate cries and sobs, with occasional reminiscences of her old convent's prayers, appeals half conscious, instinctive, to a God only half believed.

XVI

Delafield was walking through the Park towards Victoria Gate. A pair of beautiful roans pulled up suddenly beside him, and a little figure with a waving hand bent to him from a carriage.

"Jacob, where are you off to? Let me give you a lift?"

The gentleman addressed took off his hat.

"Much obliged to you, but I want some exercise. I say, where did Freddie get that pair?"

"I don't know, he doesn't tell me. Jacob, you must get in. I want to speak to you."

Rather unwillingly, Delafield obeyed, and away they sped.

"J'ai un tas de choses à vous dire," she said, speaking low, and in French, so as to protect herself from the servants in front. "Jacob, I'm _very_ unhappy about Julie."

Delafield frowned uncomfortably.

"Why? Hadn't you better leave her alone?"

"Oh, of course, I know you think me a chatterbox. I don't care. You _must_ let me tell you some fresh news about her. It _isn't_ gossip, and you and I are her best friends. Oh, Freddie's so disagreeable about her. Jacob, you've got to help and advise a little. Now, do listen. It's your duty--your downright catechism duty."

And she poured into his reluctant ear the tale which Miss Emily Lawrence nearly a fortnight before had confided to her.

"Of course," she wound up, "you'll say it's only what we knew or guessed long ago. But you see, Jacob, we didn't _know_. It might have been just gossip. And then, besides"--she frowned and dropped her voice till it was only just audible--"this horrid man hadn't made our Julie so--so conspicuous, and Lady Henry hadn't turned out such a toad--and, altogether, Jacob, I'm dreadfully worried."

"Don't be," said Jacob, dryly.

"And what a creature!" cried the Duchess, unheeding. "They say that poor Moffatt child will soon have fretted herself ill, if the guardians don't give way about the two years."

"What two years?"

"The two years that she must wait--till she is twenty-one. Oh, Jacob, you know that!" exclaimed the Duchess, impatient with him. "I've told you scores of times."

"I'm not in the least interested in Miss Moffatt's affairs."

"But you ought to be, for they concern Julie," cried the Duchess. "Can't you imagine what kind of things people are saying? Lady Henry has spread it about that it was all to see him she bribed the Bruton Street servants to let her give the Wednesday party as usual--that she had been flirting with him abominably for months, and using Lady Henry's name in the most impertinent ways. And now, suddenly, everybody seems to know _something_ about this Indian engagement. You may imagine it doesn't look very well for our poor Julie. The other night at Chatton House I was furious. I made Julie go. I wanted her to show herself, and keep up her friends. Well, it was _horrid_! One or two old frights, who used to be only too thankful to Julie for reminding Lady Henry to invite them, put their noses in the air and behaved odiously. And even some of the nicer ones seemed changed--I could see Julie felt it."

"Nothing of all that will do her any real harm," said Jacob, rather contemptuously.

"Well, no. I know, of course, that her real friends will never forsake her--never, never! But, Jacob"--the Duchess hesitated, her charming little face furrowed with thought--"if only so much of it weren't true. She herself--"

"Please, Evelyn," said Delafield, with decision, "don't tell me anything she may have said to you."

The Duchess flushed.

"I shouldn't have betrayed any confidence," she said, proudly. "And I must consult with some one who cares about her. Dr. Meredith lunched with me to-day, and he said a few words to me afterwards. He's quite anxious, too--and unhappy. Captain Warkworth's always there--always! Even I have been hardly able to see her the last few days. Last Sunday they took the little lame child and went into the country for the whole day--"

"Well, what is there to object to in that?" cried Jacob.

"I didn't say there was anything to object to," said the Duchess, looking at him with eyes half angry, half perplexed. "Only it's so unlike her. She had promised to be at home that afternoon for several old friends, and they found her flown, without a word. And think how sweet Julie is always about such things--what delicious notes she writes, how she hates to put anybody out or disappoint them! And now, not a word of excuse to anybody. And she looks so _ill_--so white, so fixed--like a person in a dream which she can't shake off. I'm just miserable about her. And I hate, _hate_ that man--engaged to her own cousin all the time!" cried the little Duchess, under her breath, as she passionately tore some violets at her waist to pieces and flung them out of the carriage. Then she turned to Jacob.

"But, of course, if you don't care twopence about all this, Jacob, it's no good talking to you!"

Her taunt fell quite unnoticed. Jacob turned to her with smiling composure.

"You have forgotten, my dear Evelyn, all this time, that Warkworth goes away--to mid-Africa--in little more than two weeks."

"I wish it was two minutes," said the Duchess, fuming.

Delafield made no reply for a while. He seemed to be studying the effect of a pale shaft of sunlight which had just come stealing down through layers of thin gray cloud to dance upon the Serpentine. Presently, as they left the Serpentine behind them, he turned to his companion with more apparent sympathy.

"We can't do anything, Evelyn, and we've no right whatever to talk of alarm, or anxiety--to _talk_ of it, mind! It's--it's disloyal. Forgive me," he added, hastily, "I know you don't gossip. But it fills me with rage that other people should be doing it."

The brusquerie of his manner disconcerted the little lady beside him. She recovered herself, however, and said, with a touch of sarcasm, tempered by a rather trembling lip:

"Your rage won't prevent their gossiping, Mr. Jacob, I thought, perhaps, your _friendship_ might have done something to stop it--to--to influence Julie," she added, uncertainly.

"My friendship, as you call it, is of no use whatever," he said, obstinately. "Warkworth will go away, and if you and others do their best to protect Miss Le Breton, talk will soon die out. Behave as if you had never heard the man's name before--stare the people down. Why, good Heavens! you have a thousand arts! But, of course, if the little flame is to be blown into a blaze by a score of so-called friends--"

He shrugged his shoulders.

The Duchess did not take his rebukes kindly, not having, in truth, deserved them.

"You are rude and unkind, Jacob," she said, almost with the tears in her eyes. "And you don't understand--it is because I myself am so anxious--"

"For that reason, play the part with all your might," he said, unyieldingly. "Really, even you and I oughtn't to talk of it any more. But there _is_ one thing I want very much to know about Miss Le Breton."

He bent towards her, smiling, though in truth he was disgusted with himself, vexed with her, and out of tune with all the world.

The Duchess made a little face.

"All very well, but after such a lecture as you have indulged in, I think I prefer not to say any more about Julie."

"Do. I'm ashamed of myself--except that I don't retract one word, not one. Be kind, all the same, and tell me--if you know--has she spoken to Lord Lackington?"

The Duchess still frowned, but a few more apologetic expressions on his part restored a temper that had always a natural tendency to peace. Indeed, Jacob's _boutades_ never went long unpardoned. An only child herself, he, her first cousin, had played the part of brother in her life, since the days when she first tottered in long frocks, and he had never played it in any mincing fashion. His words were often blunt. She smarted and forgave--much more quickly than she forgave her husband. But then, with him, she was in love.

So she presently vouchsafed to give Jacob the news that Lord Lackington at last knew the secret--that he had behaved well--had shown much feeling, in fact--so that poor Julie--

But Jacob again cut short the sentimentalisms, the little touching phrases in which the woman delighted.

"What is he going to do for her?" he said, impatiently. "Will he make any provision for her? Is there any way by which she can live in his house--take care of him?"

The Duchess shook her head.

"At seventy-five one can't begin to explain a thing as big as that. Julie perfectly understands, and doesn't wish it."

"But as to money?" persisted Jacob.

"Julie says nothing about money. How odd you are, Jacob! I thought that was the last thing needful in your eyes."

Jacob did not reply. If he had, he would probably have said that what was harmful or useless for men might be needful for women--for the weakness of women. But he kept silence, while the vague intensity of the eyes, the pursed and twisted mouth, showed that his mind was full of thoughts.

Suddenly he perceived that the carriage was nearing Victoria Gate. He called to the coachman to stop, and jumped out.

"Good-bye, Evelyn. Don't bear me malice. You're a good friend," he said in her ear--"a real good friend. But don't let people talk to you--not even elderly ladies with the best intentions. I tell you it will be a fight, and one of the best weapons is"--he touched his lips significantly, smiled at her, and was gone.

The Duchess passed out of the Park. Delafield turned as though in the direction of the Marble Arch, but as soon as the carriage was out of sight he paused and quickly retraced his steps towards Kensington Gardens. Here, in this third week of March, some of the thorns and lilacs were already in leaf. The grass was springing, and the chatter of many sparrows filled the air. Faint patches of sun flecked the ground between the trees, and blue hazes, already redeemed from the dreariness of winter, filled the dim planes of distance and mingled with the low, silvery clouds. He found a quiet spot, remote from nursery-maids and children, and there he wandered to and fro, indefinitely, his hands behind his back. All the anxieties for which he had scolded his cousin possessed him, only sharpened tenfold; he was in torture, and he was helpless.