Chapter 21

The slim, young fellow, so boyishly elegant in his well-cut evening-dress, received the ovation offered to him with an evident pleasure which tried to hide itself in the usual English ways. He had been very pale when he came in. But his cheek reddened as Montresor grasped him by the hand, as the two generals bade him a cordial godspeed, as Sir Wilfrid gave him a jesting message for the British representative in Egypt, and as the ladies present accorded him those flattering and admiring looks that woman keeps for valor.

Julie counted for little in these farewells. She stood _apart_ and rather silent. "_They_ have had their good-bye," thought the Duchess, with a thrill she could not help.

"Three days in Paris?" said Sir Wilfrid. "A fortnight to Denga--and then how long before you start for the interior?"

"Oh, three weeks for collecting porters and supplies. They're drilling the escort already. We should be off by the middle of May."

"A bad month," said General Fergus, shrugging his shoulders.

"Unfortunately, affairs won't wait. But I am already stiff with quinine," laughed Warkworth--"or I shall be by the time I get to Denga. Good-bye--good-bye."

And in another moment he was gone. Miss Le Breton had given him her hand and wished him "Bon voyage," like everybody else.

The party broke up. The Duchess kissed her Julie with peculiar tenderness; Delafield pressed her hand, and his deep, kind eyes gave her a lingering look, of which, however, she was quite unconscious; Meredith renewed his half-irritable, half-affectionate counsels of rest and recreation; Mrs. Montresor was conventionally effusive; Montresor alone bade the mistress of the house a somewhat cold and perfunctory farewell. Even Sir Wilfrid was a little touched, he knew not why; he vowed to himself that his report to Lady Henry on the morrow should contain no food for malice, and inwardly he forgave Mademoiselle Julie the old romancings.

XVIII

It was twenty minutes since the last carriage had driven away. Julie was still waiting in the little hall, pacing its squares of black-and-white marble, slowly, backward and forward.

There was a low knock on the door.

She opened it. Warkworth appeared on the threshold, and the high moon behind him threw a bright ray into the dim hall, where all but one faint light had been extinguished. She pointed to the drawing-room.

"I will come directly. Let me just go and ask Léonie to sit up."

Warkworth went into the drawing-room. Julie opened the dining-room door. Madame Bornier was engaged in washing and putting away the china and glass which had been used for Julie's modest refreshments.

"Léonie, you won't go to bed? Major Warkworth is here."

Madame Bornier did not raise her head.

"How long will he be?"

"Perhaps half an hour."

"It is already past midnight."

"Léonie, he goes to-morrow."

"Très bien. Mais--sais-tu, ma chère, ce n'est pas convenable, ce que tu fais là!"

And the older woman, straightening herself, looked her foster-sister full in the face. A kind of watch-dog anxiety, a sulky, protesting affection breathed from her rugged features.

Julie went up to her, not angrily, but rather with a pleading humility.

The two women held a rapid colloquy in low tones--Madame Bornier remonstrating, Julie softly getting her way.

Then Madame Bornier returned to her work, and Julie went to the drawing-room.

Warkworth sprang up as she entered. Both paused and wavered. Then he went up to her, and roughly, irresistibly, drew her into his arms. She held back a moment, but finally yielded, and clasping her hands round his neck she buried her face on his breast.

They stood so for some minutes, absolutely silent, save for her hurried breathing, his head bowed upon hers.

"Julie, how can we say good-bye?" he whispered, at last.

She disengaged herself, and, seeing his face, she tried for composure.

"Come and sit down."

She led him to the window, which he had thrown open as he entered the room, and they sat beside it, hand in hand. A mild April night shone outside. Gusts of moist air floated in upon them. There were dim lights and shadows in the garden and on the shuttered facade of the great house.

"Is it forever?" said Julie, in a low, stifled voice. "Good-bye--forever?"

She felt his hand tremble, but she did not look at him. She seemed to be reciting words long since spoken in the mind.

"You will be away--perhaps a year? Then you go back to India, and then--"

She paused.

Warkworth was physically conscious, as it were, of a letter he carried in his coat-pocket--a letter from Lady Blanche Moffatt which had reached him that morning, the letter of a _grande dame_, reduced to undignified remonstrance by sheer maternal terror--terror for the health and life of a child as fragile and ethereal as a wild rose in May. Reports had reached her; but no--they could not be true! She bade him be thankful that not a breath of suspicion had yet touched Aileen. As for herself, let him write and reassure her at once. Otherwise--

And the latter part of the letter conveyed a veiled menace that Warkworth perfectly understood.

No--in that direction, no escape; his own past actions closed him in. And henceforth, it was clear, he must walk more warily.

But how blame himself for these feelings of which he was now conscious towards Julie Le Breton--the strongest, probably, that a man not built for passion would ever know. His relation towards her had grown upon him unawares, and now their own hands were about to cut it at the root. What blame to either of them? Fate had been at work; and he felt himself glorified by a situation so tragically sincere, and by emotions of which a month before he would have secretly held himself incapable.

Resolutely, in this last meeting with Julie, he gave these emotions play. He possessed himself of her cold hands as she put her desolate question--"And then?"--and kissed them fervently.

"Julie, if you and I had met a year ago, what happened in India would never have happened. You know that!"

"Do I? But it only hurts me to _think it away_ like that. There it is--it has happened."

She turned upon him suddenly.

"Have you any picture of her?"

He hesitated.

"Yes," he said, at last.

"Have you got it here?"

"Why do you ask, dear one? This one evening is _ours_."

And again he tried to draw her to him. But she persisted.

"I feel sure you have it. Show it me."

"Julie, you and you only are in my thoughts!"

"Then do what I ask." She bent to him with a wild, entreating air; her lips almost touched his cheek. Unwillingly he drew out a letter-case from his breast-pocket, and took from it a little photograph which he handed to her.

She looked at it with eager eyes. A face framed, as it were, out of snow and fire lay in her hand, a thing most delicate, most frail, yet steeped in feeling and significance--a child's face with its soft curls of brown hair, and the upper lip raised above the white, small teeth, as though in a young wonder; yet behind its sweetness, what suggestions of a poetic or tragic sensibility! The slender neck carried the little head with girlish dignity; the clear, timid eyes seemed at once to shrink from and trust the spectator.

Julie returned the little picture, and hid her face with her hands. Warkworth watched her uncomfortably, and at last drew her hands away.

"What are you thinking of?" he said, almost with violence. "Don't shut me out!"

"I am not jealous now," she said, looking at him piteously. "I don't hate her. And if she knew all--she couldn't--hate me."

"No one could hate her. She is an angel. But she is not my Julie!" he said, vehemently, and he thrust the little picture into his pocket again.

"Tell me," she said, after a pause, laying her hand on his knee, "when did you begin to think of me--differently? All the winter, when we used to meet, you never--you never loved me then?"

"How, placed as I was, could I let myself think of love? I only knew that I wanted to see you, to talk to you, to write to you--that the day when we did not meet was a lost day. Don't be so proud!" He tried to laugh at her. "You didn't think of me in any special way, either. You were much too busy making bishops, or judges, or academicians. Oh, Julie, I was so afraid of you in those early days!"

"The first night we met," she said, passionately, "I found a carnation you had worn in your button-hole. I put it under my pillow, and felt for it in the dark like a talisman. You had stood between me and Lady Henry twice. You had smiled at me and pressed my hand--not as others did, but as though you understood _me_, myself--as though, at least, you wished to understand. Then came the joy of joys, that I could help you--that I could do something for you. Ah, how it altered life for me! I never turned the corner of a street that I did not count on the chance of seeing you beyond--suddenly--on my path. I never heard your voice that it did not thrill me from head to foot. I never made a new friend or acquaintance that I did not ask myself first how I could thereby serve you. I never saw you come into the room that my heart did not leap. I never slept but you were in my dreams. I loathed London when you were out of it. It was paradise when you were there."

Straining back from him as he still held her hands, her whole face and form shook with the energy of her confession. Her wonderful hair, loosened from the thin gold bands in which it had been confined during the evening, fell in a glossy confusion about her brow and slender neck; its black masses, the melting brilliance of the eyes, the tragic freedom of the attitude gave both to form and face a wild and poignant beauty.

Warkworth, beside her, was conscious first of amazement, then of a kind of repulsion--a kind of fear--till all else was lost in a hurry of joy and gratitude.

The tears stood on his cheek. "Julie, you shame me--you trample me into the earth!"

He tried to gather her in his arms, but she resisted, Caresses were not what those eyes demanded--eyes feverishly bright with the memory of her own past dreams, Presently, indeed, she withdrew herself from him. She rose and closed the window; she put the lamp in another place; she brought her rebellious hair into order.

"We must not be so mad," she said, with a quivering smile, as she again seated herself, but at some distance from him. "You see, for me the great question is "--her voice became low and rapid--"What am I going to do with the future? For you it is all plain. We part to-night. You have your career, your marriage. I withdraw from your life--absolutely. But for me--"

She paused. It was the manner of one trying to see her way in the dark.

"Your social gifts," said Warkworth, in agitation, "your friends, Julie--these will occupy your mind. Then, of course, you will, you must marry! Oh, you'll soon forget me, Julie! I pray you may!"

"My social gifts?" she repeated, disregarding the rest of his speech. "I have told you already they have broken down. Society sides with Lady Henry. I am to be made to know my place--I do know it!"

"The Duchess will fight for you."

She laughed.

"The Duke won't let her--nor shall I."

"You'll marry," he repeated, with emotion. "You'll find some one worthy of you--some one who will give you the great position for which you were born."

"I could have it at any moment," she said, looking him quietly in the eyes.

Warkworth drew back, conscious of a disagreeable shock. He had been talking in generalities, giving away the future with that fluent prodigality, that easy prophecy which costs so little. What did she mean?

"_Delafield?"_ he cried.

And he waited for her reply--which lingered--in a tense and growing eagerness. The notion had crossed his mind once or twice during the winter, only to be dismissed as ridiculous. Then, on the occasion of their first quarrel, when Julie had snubbed him in Delafield's presence and to Delafield's advantage, he had been conscious of a momentary alarm. But Julie, who on that one and only occasion had paraded her intimacy with Delafield, thenceforward said not a word of him, and Warkworth's jealousy had died for lack of fuel. In relation to Julie, Delafield had been surely the mere shadow and agent of his little cousin the Duchess--a friendly, knight-errant sort of person, with a liking for the distressed. What! the heir-presumptive of Chudleigh Abbey, and one of the most famous of English dukedoms, when even he, the struggling, penurious officer, would never have dreamed of such a match?

Julie, meanwhile, heard only jealousy in his exclamation, and it caressed her ear, her heart. She was tempted once more, woman-like, to dwell upon the other lover, and again something compelling and delicate in her feeling towards Delafield forbade.

"No, you mustn't make me tell you any more," she said, putting the name aside with a proud gesture. "It would be poor and mean. But it's true. I have only to put out my hand for what you call 'a great position,' I have refused to put it out. Sometimes, of course, it has dazzled me. To-night it seems to me--dust and ashes. No; when we two have said good-bye, I shall begin life again. And this time I shall live it in my own way, for my own ends. I'm very tired. Henceforth 'I'll walk where my own nature would be leading--it vexes me to choose another guide.'"

And as she spoke the words of one of the chainless souls of history, in a voice passionately full and rich, she sprang to her feet, and, drawing her slender form to its full height, she locked her hands behind her, and began to pace the room with a wild, free step.

Every nerve in Warkworth's frame was tingling. He was carried out of himself, first by the rebellion of her look and manner, then by this fact, so new, so astounding, which her very evasion had confirmed. During her whole contest with Lady Henry, and now, in her present ambiguous position, she had Delafield, and through Delafield the English great world, in the hollow of her hand? This nameless woman--no longer in her first youth. And she had refused? He watched her in a speechless wonder and incredulity.

The thought leaped. "And this sublime folly--this madness--was for _me_?"

It stirred and intoxicated him. Yet she was not thereby raised in his eyes. Nay, the contrary. With the passion which was rapidly mounting in his veins there mingled--poor Julie!--a curious diminution of respect.

"Julie!" He held out his hand to her peremptorily. "Come to me again. You are so wonderful to-night, in that white dress--like a wild muse. I shall always see you so. Come!"

She obeyed, and gave him her hands, standing beside his chair. But her face was still absorbed.

"To be free," she said, under her breath--"free, like my parents, from all these petty struggles and conventions!"

Then she felt his kisses on her hands, and her expression changed.

"How we cheat ourselves with words!" she whispered, trembling, and, withdrawing one hand, she smoothed back the light-brown curls from his brow with that protecting tenderness which had always entered into her love for him. "To-night we are here--together--this one last night! And to-morrow, at this time, you'll be in Paris; perhaps you'll be looking out at the lights--and the crowds on the Boulevard--and the chestnut-trees. They'll just be in their first leaf--I know so well!--and the little thin leaves will be shining so green under the lamps--and I shall be here--and it will be all over and done with--forever. What will it matter whether I am free or not free? I shall be _alone_! That's all a woman knows."

Her voice died away. Warkworth rose. He put his arms round her, and she did not resist.

"Julie," he said in her ear, "why should you be alone?"

A silence fell between them.

"I--I don't understand," she said, at last.

"Julie, listen! I shall be three days in Paris, but my business can be perfectly done in one. What if you met me there after to-morrow? What harm would it be? We are not babes, we two. We understand life. And who would have any right to blame or to meddle? Julie, I know a little inn in the valley of the Bièvre, quite near Paris, but all wood and field. No English tourists ever go there. Sometimes an artist or two--but this is not the time of year. Julie, why shouldn't we spend our last two days there--together--away from all the world, before we say good-bye? You've been afraid here of prying people--of the Duchess even--of Madame Bornier--how she scowls at me sometimes! Why shouldn't we sweep all that away--and be happy! Nobody should ever--nobody _could_ ever know." His voice dropped, became still more hurried and soft. "We might go as brother and sister--that would be quite simple. You are practically French. I speak French well. Who is to have an idea, a suspicion of our identity? The spring there is mild and warm. The Bois de Verrières close by is full of flowers. When my father was alive, and I was a child, we went once, to economize, for a year, to a village a mile or two away. But I knew this place quite well. A lovely, green, quiet spot! With your poetical ideas, Julie, you would delight in it. Two days--wandering in the woods--together! Then I put you into the train for Brussels, and I go my way. But to all eternity, Julie, those days will have been ours!"

At the first words, almost, Julie had disengaged herself. Pushing him from her with both hands, she listened to him in a dumb amazement. The color first deserted her face, then returned in a flood.

"So you despise me?" she said, catching her breath.

"No. I adore you."

She fell upon a chair and hid her eyes. He first knelt beside her, arguing and soothing; then he paced up and down before her, talking very fast and low, defending and developing the scheme, till it stood before them complete and tempting in all its details.

Julie did not look up, nor did she speak. At last, Warkworth, full of tears, and stifled with his own emotions, threw open the window again in a craving for air and coolness. A scent of fresh leaves and moistened earth floated up from the shrubbery beneath the window. The scent, the branching trees, the wide, mild spaces of air brought relief. He leaned out, bathing his brow in the night. A tumult of voices seemed to be echoing through his mind, dominated by one which held the rest defiantly in check.

"Is she a mere girl, to be 'led astray'? A moment of happiness--what harm?--for either of us?"

Then he returned to Julie.

"Julie!" He touched her shoulder, trembling. Had she banished him forever? It seemed to him that in these minutes he had passed through an infinity of experience. Was he not the nobler, the more truly man? Let the moralists talk.

"Julie!" he repeated, in an anguish.

She raised her head, and he saw that she had been crying. But there was in her face a light, a wildness, a yearning that reassured him. She put her arm round him and pressed her cheek to his. He divined that she, too, had lived and felt a thousand hours in one. With a glow of ecstatic joy he began to talk to her again, her head resting on his shoulder, her slender hands crushed in his.

And Julie, meanwhile, was saying to herself, "Either I go to him, as he asks, or in a few minutes I must send him away--forever."

And then as she clung to him, so warm and near, her strength failed her. Nothing in the world mattered to her at that moment but this handsome, curly head bowed upon her own, this voice that called her all the names of love, this transformation of the man's earlier prudence, or ambition, or duplicity, into this eager tenderness, this anguish in separation....

"Listen, dear!" He whispered to her. "All my business can be got through the day before you come. I have two men to see. A day will be ample. I dine at the Embassy to-morrow night--that is arranged; the day after I lunch with the Military Secretary; then--a thousand regrets, but I must hurry on to meet some friends in Italy. So I turn my back on Paris, and for two days I belong to Julie--and she to me. Say yes, Julie--my Julie!"

He bent over her, his hands framing her face.

"Say yes," he urged, "and put off for both of us that word--_alone_!"

His low voice sank into her heart. He waited, till his strained sense caught the murmured words which conveyed to him the madness and the astonishment of victory.

* * * * *

Léonie had shut up the house, in a grim silence, and had taken her way up-stairs to bed.

Julie, too, was in her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, her head drooped, her hands clasped before her absently, like Hope still listening for the last sounds of the harp of life. The candle beside her showed her, in the big mirror opposite, her grace, the white confusion of her dress.

She had expected reaction, but it did not come. She was still borne on a warm tide of will and energy. All that she was about to do seemed to her still perfectly natural and right. Petty scruples, conventional hesitations, the refusal of life's great moments--these are what are wrong, these are what disgrace!

Romance beckoned to her, and many a secret tendency towards the lawless paths of conduct, infused into her by the associations and affections of her childhood. The _horror naturalis_ which protects the great majority of women from the wilder ways of passion was in her weakened or dormant. She was the illegitimate child of a mother who had defied law for love, and of that fact she had been conscious all her life.

A sharp contempt, indeed, arose within her for the interpretation that the common mind would be sure to place upon her action.

"What matter! I am my own mistress--responsible to no one. I choose for myself--I dare for myself!"

And when at last she rose, first loosening and then twisting the black masses of her hair, it seemed to her that the form in the glass was that of another woman, treading another earth. She trampled cowardice under foot; she freed herself from--"was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine!"

Then as she stood before the oval mirror in a classical frame, which adorned the mantel-piece of what had once been Lady Mary Leicester's room, her eye was vaguely caught by the little family pictures and texts which hung on either side of it. Lady Mary and her sister as children, their plain faces emerging timidly from their white, high-waisted frocks; Lady 'Mary's mother, an old lady in a white coif and kerchief, wearing a look austerely kind; on the other side a clergyman, perhaps the brother of the old lady, with a similar type of face, though gentler--a face nourished on the _Christian Year_; and above and below them two or three card-board texts, carefully illuminated by Lady Mary Leicester herself:

"Thou, Lord, knowest my down-sitting and my uprising."

"Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."

"Fear not, little flock. It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom."

* * * * *

Julie observed these fragments, absently at first, then with repulsion. This Anglican pietism, so well fed, so narrowly sheltered, which measured the universe with its foot-rule, seemed to her quasi-Catholic eye merely fatuous and hypocritical. It is not by such forces, she thought, that the true world of men and women is governed.

As she turned away she noticed two little Catholic pictures, such as she had been accustomed in her convent days to carry in her books of devotion, carefully propped up beneath the texts.

"Ah, Thérèse!" she said to herself, with a sudden feeling of pain. "Is the child asleep?"

She listened. A little cough sounded from the neighboring room. Julie crossed the landing.

"Thérèse! tu ne dors pas encore?"

A voice said, softly, in the darkness, "Je t'attendais, mademoiselle."

Julie went to the child's bed, put down her candle, and stooped to kiss her.

The child's thin hand caressed her cheek.

"Ah, it will be good--to be in Bruges--with mademoiselle."

Julie drew herself away.

"I sha'n't be there to-morrow, dear."