Chapter 24
And here beside her, with the tyranny of the dying, this dear babbler wandered on in broken words, with painful breath, pleading, scolding, counselling. She felt that he was exhausting himself. She begged him to let her recall nurse and doctor. He shook his head, and when he could no longer speak, he clung to her hand, his gaze solemnly, insistently, fixed upon her.
Her spirit writhed and rebelled. But she was helpless in the presence of this mortal weakness, this affection, half earthly, half beautiful, on its knees before her.
A thought struck her. Why not content him? Whatever pledges she gave would die with him. What did it matter? It was cruelty to deny him the words--the mere empty words--he asked of her.
"I--I would do anything to please you!" she said, with a sudden burst of uncontrollable tears, as she laid her head down beside him on the pillow. "If he _were_ to ask me again, of course, for your sake, I would consider it once more. Dear, dear friend, won't that satisfy you?"
Lord Lackington was silent a few moments, then he smiled.
"That's a promise?"
She raised herself and looked at him, conscious of a sick movement of terror. What was there in his mind, still so quick, fertile, ingenious, under the very shadow of death?
He waited for her answer, feebly pressing her hand.
"Yes," she said, faintly, and once more hid her face beside him.
Then, for some little time, the dying man neither stirred nor spoke. At last Julie heard:
"I used to be afraid of death--that was in middle life. Every night it was a torment. But now, for many years, I have not been afraid at all.... Byron--Lord Byron--said to me, once, he would not change anything in his life; but he would have preferred not to have lived at all. I could not say that. I have enjoyed it all--being an Englishman, and an English peer--pictures, politics, society--everything. Perhaps it wasn't fair. There are so many poor devils."
Julie pressed his hand to her lips. But in her thoughts there rose the sudden, sharp memory of her mother's death--of that bitter stoicism and abandonment in which the younger life had closed, in comparison with this peace, this complacency.
Yet it was a complacency rich in sweetness. His next words were to assure her tenderly that he had made provision for her. "Uredale and Bill--will see to it. They're good fellows. Often--they've thought me--a pretty fool. But they've been kind to me--always."
Then, after another interval, he lifted himself in bed, with more strength than she had supposed he could exert, looked at her earnestly, and asked her, in the same painful whisper, whether she believed in another life.
"Yes," said Julie. But her shrinking, perfunctory manner evidently distressed him. He resumed, with a furrowed brow:
"You ought. It is good for us to believe it."
"I must hope, at any rate, that I shall see you again--and mamma," she said, smiling on him through her tears.
"I wonder what it will be like," he replied, after a pause. His tone and look implied a freakish, a whimsical curiosity, yet full of charm. Then, motioning to her to come nearer, and speaking into her ear:
"Your poor mother, Julie, was never happy--never! There must be laws, you see--and churches--and religious customs. It's because--we're made of such wretched stuff. My wife, when she died--made me promise to continue going to church--and praying. And--without it--I should have been a bad man. Though I've had plenty of sceptical thoughts--plenty. Your poor parents rebelled--against all that. They suffered--they suffered. But you'll make up--you're a noble woman--you'll make up."
He laid his hand on her head. She offered no reply; but through the inner mind there rushed the incidents, passions, revolts of the preceding days.
But for that strange chance of Delafield's appearance in her path--a chance no more intelligible to her now, after the pondering of several feverish hours, than it had been at the moment of her first suspicion--where and what would she be now? A dishonored woman, perhaps, with a life-secret to keep; cut off, as her mother had been, from the straight-living, law-abiding world.
The touch of the old man's hand upon her hair roused in her a first recoil, a first shattering doubt of the impulse which had carried her to Paris. Since Delafield left her in the early dawn she had been pouring out a broken, passionate heart in a letter to Warkworth. No misgivings while she was writing it as to the all-sufficing legitimacy of love!
But here, in this cold neighborhood of the grave--brought back to gaze in spirit; on her mother's tragedy--she shrank, she trembled. Her proud intelligence denied the stain, and bade her hate and despise her rescuer. And, meanwhile, things also inherited and inborn, the fruit of a remoter ancestry, rising from the dimmest and deepest caverns of personality, silenced the clamor of the naturalist mind. One moment she felt herself seized with terror lest anything should break down the veil between her real self and this unsuspecting tenderness of the dying man; the next she rose in revolt against her own fear. Was she to find herself, after all, a mere weak penitent--meanly grateful to Jacob Delafield? Her heart cried out to Warkworth in a protesting anguish.
So absorbed in thought was she that she did not notice how long the silence had lasted.
"He seems to be sleeping," said a low voice beside her.
She looked up to see the doctor, with Lord Uredale. Gently releasing herself, she kissed Lord Lackington's forehead, and rose to her feet.
Suddenly the patient opened his eyes, and as he seemed to become aware of the figures beside him, he again lifted himself in bed, and a gleam most animated, most vivacious, passed over his features.
"Brougham's not asked," he said, with a little chuckle of amusement. "Isn't it a joke?"
The two men beside him looked at each other. Lord Uredale approached the bed.
"Not asked to what, father?" he said, gently.
"Why, to the Queen's fancy ball, of course," said Lord Lackington, still smiling. "Such a to-do! All the elderly sticks practising minuets for their lives!"
A voluble flow of talk followed--hardly intelligible. The words "Melbourne" and "Lady Holland" emerged--the fragment, apparently, of a dispute with the latter, in which "Allen" intervened--the names of "Palmerston" and "that dear chap, Villiers."
Lord Uredale sighed. The young doctor looked at him interrogatively.
"He is thinking of his old friends," said the son. "That was the Queen's ball, I imagine, of '42. I have often heard him describe my mother's dress."
But while he was speaking the fitful energy died away. The old man ceased to talk; his eyelids fell. But the smile still lingered about his mouth, and as he settled himself on his pillows, like one who rests, the spectators were struck by the urbane and distinguished beauty of his aspect. The purple flush had died again into mortal pallor. Illness had masked or refined the weakness of mouth and chin; the beautiful head and countenance, with their characteristic notes of youth, impetuosity, a kind of gay detachment, had never been more beautiful.
The young doctor looked stealthily from the recumbent figure to the tall and slender woman standing absorbed and grief-stricken beside the bed. The likeness was as evident to him as it had been, in the winter, to Sir Wilfrid Bury.
* * * * *
As he was escorting her down-stairs, Lord Uredale said to his companion, "Foster thinks he may still live twenty-four hours."
"If he asks for me again," said Julie, now shrouded once more behind a thick, black veil, "you will send?"
He gravely assented.
"It is a great pity," he said, with a certain stiffness--did it unconsciously mark the difference between her and his legitimate kindred?--"that my sister Lady Blanche and her daughter cannot be with us."
"They are in Italy?"
"At Florence. My niece has had an attack of diphtheria. She could neither travel nor could her mother leave her."
Then pausing in the hall, he added in a low voice, and with some embarrassment:
"My father has told you, I believe, of the addition he has made to his will?"
Julie drew back.
"I neither asked for it nor desired it," she said, in her coldest and clearest voice.
"That I quite understand," said Lord Uredale. "But--you cannot hurt him by refusing."
She hesitated.
"No. But afterwards--I must be free to follow my own judgment."
"We cannot take what does not belong to us," he said, with some sharpness. "My brother and I are named as your trustees. Believe me, we will do our best."
Meanwhile the younger brother had come out of the library to bid her farewell. She felt that she was under critical observation, though both pairs of gray eyes refrained from any appearance of scrutiny. Her pride came to her aid, and she did not shrink from the short conversation which the two brothers evidently desired. When it was over, and the brothers returned to the hall after putting her into the Duchess's carriage, the younger said to the elder:
"She can behave herself, Johnnie."
They looked at each other, with their hands in their pockets. A little nod passed between them--an augur-like acceptance of this new and irregular member of the family.
"Yes, she has excellent manners," said Uredale. "And really, after the tales Lady Henry has been spreading--that's something!"
"Oh, I always thought Lady Henry an old cat," said Bill, tranquilly. "That don't matter."
The Chantrey brothers had not been among Lady Henry's _habitués_. In her eyes, they were the dull sons of an agreeable father. They were humorously aware of it, and bore her little malice.
"No," said Uredale, raising his eyebrows; "but the 'affaire Warkworth'? If there's any truth in what one hears, that's deuced unpleasant."
Bill Chantrey whistled.
"It's hard luck on that poor child Aileen that it should be her own cousin interfering with her preserves. By-the-way"--he stooped to look at the letters on the hall table--"do you see there's a letter for father from Blanche? And in a letter I got from her by the same post, she says that she has told him the whole story. According to her, Aileen's too ill to be thwarted, and she wants the governor to see the guardians. I say, Johnnie"--he looked at his brother--"we'll not trouble the father with it now?"
"Certainly not," said Uredale, with a sigh. "I saw one of the trustees--Jack Underwood--yesterday. He told me Blanche and the child were more infatuated than ever. Very likely what one hears is a pack of lies. If not, I hope this woman will have the good taste to drop it. Father has charged me to write to Blanche and tell her the whole story of poor Rose, and of this girl's revealing herself. Blanche, it appears, is just as much in the dark as we were."
"If this gossip has got round to her, her feelings will be mixed. Oh, well, I've great faith in the money," said Bill Chantrey, carelessly, as they began to mount the stairs again. "It sounds disgusting; but if the child wants him I suppose she must have him. And, anyway, the man's off to Africa for a twelvemonth at least. Miss Le Breton will have time to forget him. One can't say that either he or she has behaved with delicacy--unless, indeed, she knew nothing of Aileen, which is quite probable."
"Well, don't ask me to tackle her," said Uredale. "She has the ways of an empress."
Bill Chantrey shrugged his shoulders. "And, by George! she looks as if she could fall in love," he said, slowly. "Magnificent eyes, Johnnie. I propose to make a study of our new niece."
"Lord Uredale!" said a voice on the stairs.
The young doctor descended rapidly to meet them.
"His lordship is asking for some one," he said. "He seems excited. But I cannot catch the name."
Lord Uredale ran up-stairs.
* * * * *
Later in the day a man emerged from Lackington House and walked rapidly towards the Mall. It was Jacob Delafield.
He passed across the Mall and into St. James's Park. There he threw himself on the first seat he saw, in an absorption so deep that it excited the wondering notice of more than one passer-by.
After about half an hour he roused himself, and walked, still in the same brown study, to his lodgings in Jermyn Street. There he found a letter which he eagerly opened.
* * * * *
"DEAR JACOB,--Julie came back this morning about one o'clock. I waited for her--and at first she seemed quite calm and composed. But suddenly, as I was sitting beside her, talking, she fainted away in her chair, and I was terribly alarmed. We sent for a doctor at once. He shakes his head over her, and says there are all the signs of a severe strain of body and mind. No wonder, indeed--our poor Julie! Oh, how I _loathe_ some people! Well, there she is in bed, Madame Bornier away, and everybody. I simply _can't_ go to Scotland. But Freddie is just mad. Do, Jacob, there's a dear, go and dine with him to-night and cheer him up. He vows he won't go north without me. _Perhaps_ I'll come to-morrow. I could no more leave Julie to-night than fly.
"She'll be ill for weeks. What I ought to do is to take her abroad. She's _very_ dear and good; but, oh, Jacob, as she lies there I _feel_ her heart's broken. And it's not Lord Lackington. Oh no! though I'm sure she loved him. _Do_ go to Freddie, there's a dear."
* * * * *
"No, that I won't!" said Delafield, with a laugh that choked him, as he threw the letter down.
He tried to write an answer, but could not achieve even the simplest note. Then he began a pacing of his room, which lasted till he dropped into his chair, worn out with the sheer physical exhaustion of the night and day. When his servant came in he found his master in a heavy sleep. And, at Crowborough House, the Duke dined and fumed alone.
XXI
"Why does any one stay in England who _can_ make the trip to Paradise?" said the Duchess, as she leaned lazily back in the corner of the boat and trailed her fingers in the waters of Como.
It was a balmy April afternoon, and she and Julie were floating through a scene enchanted, incomparable. When spring descends upon the shores of the Lago di Como, she brings with her all the graces, all the beauties, all the fine, delicate, and temperate delights of which earth and sky are capable, and she pours them forth upon a land of perfect loveliness. Around the shores of other lakes--Maggiore, Lugano, Garda--blue mountains rise, and the vineyards spread their green and dazzling terraces to the sun. Only Como can show in unmatched union a main composition, incomparably grand and harmonious, combined with every jewelled, or glowing, or exquisite detail. Nowhere do the mountains lean towards each other in such an ordered splendor as that which bends round the northern shores of Como. Nowhere do buttressed masses rise behind each other, to right and left of a blue water-way, in lines statelier or more noble than those kept by the mountains of the Lecco Lake, as they marshal themselves on either hand, along the approaches to Lombardy and Venetia; bearing aloft, as though on the purple pillars of some majestic gateway, the great curtain of dazzling cloud which, on a sunny day, hangs over the Brescian plain--a glorious drop-scene, interposed between the dwellers on the Como Mountains, and those marble towns, Brescia, Verona, Padua, which thread the way to Venice.
And within this divine frame-work, between the glistening snows which still, in April, crown and glorify the heights, and those reflections of them which lie encalmed in the deep bosom of the lake, there's not a foot of pasture, not a shelf of vineyard, not a slope of forest where the spring is not at work, dyeing the turf with gentians, starring it with narcissuses, or drawing across it the first golden net-work of the chestnut leaves; where the mere emerald of the grass is not in itself a thing to refresh the very springs of being; where the peach-blossom and the wild-cherry and the olive are not perpetually weaving patterns on the blue, which ravish the very heart out of your breast. And already the roses are beginning to pour over the walls; the wistaria is climbing up the cypresses; a pomp of camellias and azaleas is in all the gardens; while in the grassy bays that run up into the hills the primrose banks still keep their sweet austerity, and the triumph of spring over the just banished winter is still sharp and new.
And in the heart and sense of Julie Le Breton, as she sat beside the Duchess, listening absently to the talk of the old boatman, who, with his oars resting idly in his hands, was chattering to the ladies, a renewing force akin to that of the spring was also at its healing and life-giving work. She had still the delicate, tremulous look of one recovering from a sore wrestle with physical ill; but in her aspect there were suggestions more intimate, more moving than this. Those who have lain down and risen up with pain; those who have been face to face with passion and folly and self-judgment; those who have been forced to seek with eagerness for some answer to those questions which the majority of us never ask, "Whither is my life leading me--and what is it worth to me or to any other living soul?"--these are the men and women who now and then touch or startle us with the eyes and the voice of Julie, if, at least, we have the capacity that responds. Sir Wilfrid Bury, for instance, prince of self-governed and reasonable men, was not to be touched by Julie. For him, in spite of her keen intelligence, she was the _type passionné_, from which he instinctively recoiled--the Duke of Crowborough the same. Such men feel towards such women as Julie Le Breton hostility or satire; for what they ask, above all, of the women of their world is a kind of simplicity, a kind of lightness which makes life easier for men.
But for natures like Evelyn Crowborough--or Meredith--or Jacob Delafield--the Julie-type has perennial attractions. For these are all _children of feeling_, allied in this, however different in intelligence or philosophy. They are attracted by the storm-tossed temperament in itself; by mere sensibility; by that which, in the technical language of Catholicism, suggests or possesses "the gift of tears." At any rate, pity and love for her poor Julie--however foolish, however faulty--lay warm in Evelyn Crowborough's breast; they had brought her to Como; they kept her now battling on the one hand with her husband's angry letters and on the other with the melancholy of her most perplexing, most appealing friend.
"I had often heard" [wrote the sore-tried Duke] "of the ravages wrought in family life by these absurd and unreasonable female friendships, but I never thought that it would be you, Evelyn, who would bring them home to me. I won't repeat the arguments I have used a hundred times in vain. But once again I implore and demand that you should find some kind, responsible person to look after Miss Le Breton--I don't care what you pay--and that you yourself should come home to me and the children and the thousand and one duties you are neglecting.
"As for the spring month in Scotland, which I generally enjoy so much, that has been already entirely ruined. And now the season is apparently to be ruined also. On the Shropshire property there is an important election coming on, as I am sure you know; and the Premier said to me only yesterday that he hoped you were already up and doing. The Grand Duke of C---- will be in London within the next fortnight. I particularly want to show him some civility. But what can I do without you--and how on earth am I to explain your absence?
"Once more, Evelyn, I beg and I demand that you should come home."
To which the Duchess had rushed off a reply without a post's delay.
"Oh, Freddie, you are such a wooden-headed darling! As if I hadn't explained till I'm black in the face. I'm glad, anyway, you didn't say command; that would really have made difficulties.
"As for the election, I'm sure if I was at home I should think it very good fun. Out here I am extremely doubtful whether we ought to do such things as you and Lord M---- suggest. A duke shouldn't interfere in elections. Anyway, I'm sure it's good for my character to consider it a little--though I quite admit you may lose the election.
"The Grand Duke is a horrid wretch, and if he wasn't a grand duke you'd be the first to cut him. I had to spend a whole dinner-time last year in teaching him his proper place. It was very humiliating, and not at all amusing. You can have a men's dinner for him. That's all he's fit for.
"And as for the babies, Mrs. Robson sends me a telegram every morning. I can't make out that they have had a finger-ache since I went away, and I am sure mothers are entirely superfluous. All the same, I think about them a great deal, especially at night. Last night I tried to think about their education--if only I wasn't such a sleepy creature! But, at any rate, I never in my life tried to think about it at home. So that's so much to the good.
"Indeed, I'll come back to you soon, you poor, forsaken, old thing! But Julie has no one in the world, and I feel like a Newfoundland dog who has pulled some one out of the water. The water was deep; and the life's only just coming back; and the dog's not much good. But he sits there, for company, till the doctor comes, and that's just what I'm doing.
"I know you don't approve of the notions I have in my head now. But that's because you don't understand. Why don't you come out and join us? Then you'd like Julie as much as I do; everything would be quite simple; and I shouldn't be in the least jealous.
"Dr. Meredith is coming here, probably to-night, and Jacob should arrive to-morrow on his way to Venice, where poor Chudleigh and his boy are."
* * * * *
The _breva_, or fair-weather wind, from the north was blowing freshly yet softly down the lake. The afternoon sun was burning on Bellaggio, on the long terrace of the Melzi villa, on the white mist of fruit-blossom that lay lightly on the green slopes above San Giovanni.
Suddenly the Duchess and the boatman left the common topics of every day by which the Duchess was trying to improve her Italian--such as the proposed enlargement of the Bellevue Hotel, the new villas that were springing up, the gardens of the Villa Carlotta, and so forth. Evelyn had carelessly asked the old man whether he had been in any of the fighting of '59, and in an instant, under her eyes, he became another being. Out rolled a torrent of speech; the oars lay idly on the water; and through the man's gnarled and wrinkled face there blazed a high and illumining passion. Novara and its beaten king, in '49; the ten years of waiting, when a whole people bode its time, in a gay, grim silence; the grudging victory of Magenta; the fivefold struggle that wrenched the hills of San Martino from the Austrians; the humiliations and the rage of Villafranca--of all these had this wasted graybeard made a part. And he talked of them with the Latin eloquence and facility, as no veteran of the north could have talked; he was in a moment the equal of these great affairs in which he had mingled; so that one felt in him the son of a race which had been rolled and polished--a pebble, as it were, from rocks which had made the primeval frame-work of the world--in the main course and stream of history.