Chapter 26

"She is better," he said to the Duchess one day, abruptly. "Her mind is full of activity. But why, at times, does she still look so miserable--like a person without hope or future?"

The Duchess looked pensive. They were sitting in the corner of one of the villa's terraced walks, amid a scented wilderness of flowers. Above them was a canopy of purple and yellow--rose and wistaria; while through the arches of the pergola which ran along the walk gleamed all those various blues which make the spell of Como--the blue and white of the clouds, the purple of the mountains, the azure of the lake.

"Well, she was in love with him. I suppose it takes a little time," said the Duchess, sighing.

"Why was she in love with him?" said Meredith, impatiently. "As to the Moffatt engagement, naturally, she was kept in the dark?"

"At first," said the Duchess, hesitating. "And when she knew, poor dear, it was too late!"

"Too late for what?"

"Well, when one falls in love one doesn't all at once shake it off because the man deceives you."

"One _should_," said Meredith, with energy. "Men are not worth all that women spend upon them."

"Oh, that's true!" cried the Duchess--"so dreadfully true! But what's the good of preaching? We shall go on spending it to the end of time."

"Well, at any rate, don't choose the dummies and the frauds."

"Ah, there you talk sense," said the Duchess. "And if only we had the French system in England! If only one could say to Julie: 'Now look here, _there's_ your husband! It's all settled--down to plate and linen--and you've _got_ to marry him!' how happy we should all be."

Dr. Meredith stared.

"You have the man in your eye," he said.

The Duchess hesitated.

"Suppose you come a little walk with me in the wood," she said, at last, gathering up her white skirts.

Meredith obeyed her. They were away for half an hour, and when they returned the journalist's face, flushed and furrowed with thought, was not very easy to read.

Nor was his temper in good condition. It required a climb to the very top of Monte Crocione to send him back, more or less appeased, a consenting player in the Duchess's game. For if there are men who are flirts and egotists--who ought to be, yet never are, divined by the sensible woman at a glance--so also there are men too well equipped for this wicked world, too good, too well born, too desirable.

It was in this somewhat flinty and carping mood that Meredith prepared himself for the advent of Jacob Delafield.

* * * * *

But when Delafield appeared, Meredith's secret antagonisms were soon dissipated. There was certainly no challenging air of prosperity about the young man.

At first sight, indeed, he was his old cheerful self, always ready for a walk or a row, on easy terms at once with the Italian servants or boatmen. But soon other facts emerged--stealthily, as it were, from the concealment in which a strong man was trying to keep them.

"That young man's youth is over," said Meredith, abruptly, to the Duchess one evening. He pointed to the figure of Delafield, who was pacing, alone with his pipe, up and down one of the lower terraces of the garden.

The Duchess showed a teased expression.

"It's like something wearing through," she said, slowly. "I suppose it was always there, but it didn't show."

"Name your 'it.'"

"I can't." But she gave a little shudder, which made Meredith look at her with curiosity.

"You feel something ghostly--unearthly?"

She nodded assent; crying out, however, immediately afterwards, as though in compunction, that he was one of the dearest and best of fellows.

"Of course he is," said Meredith. "It is only the mystic in him coming out. He is one of the men who have the sixth sense."

"Well, all I know is, he has the oddest power over people," said Evelyn, with another shiver. "If Freddie had it, my life wouldn't be worth living. Thank goodness, he hasn't a vestige!"

"At bottom it's the power of the priest," said Meredith. "And you women are far too susceptible towards it. Nine times out of ten it plays the mischief."

The Duchess was silent a moment. Then she bent towards her companion, finger on lip, her charming eyes glancing significantly towards the lower terrace. The figures on it were now two. Julie and Delafield paced together.

"But this is the tenth!" she said, in an eager whisper.

Meredith smiled at her, then flung her a dubious "Chi sa?" and changed the subject.

* * * * *

Delafield, who was a fine oar, had soon taken command of the lake expeditions; and by the help of two stalwart youths from Tremezzo, the four-oar was in use from morning till night. Through the broad lake which lies between Menaggio and Varenna it sped northward to Gravedona; or beneath the shadowy cliffs of the Villa Serbelloni it slipped over deep waters, haunted and dark, into the sunny spaces of Lecco; or it coasted along the steep sides of Monte Primo, so that the travellers in it might catch the blue stain of the gentians on the turf, where it sloped into the lucent wave below, or watch the fishermen on the rocks, spearing their prey in the green or golden shallows.

The weather was glorious--a summer before its time. The wild cherries shook down their snow upon the grass; but the pears were now in bridal white, and a warmer glory of apple-blossom was just beginning to break upon the blue. The nights were calm and moonlit; the dawns were visions of mysterious and incredible beauty, wherein mountain and forest and lake were but the garments, diaphanous, impalpable, of some delicate, indwelling light and fire spirit, which breathed and pulsed through the solidity of rock, no less visibly than through the crystal leagues of air or the sunlit spaces of water.

Yet presently, as it were, a hush of waiting, of tension, fell upon their little party. Nature offered her best; but there was only an apparent acceptance of her bounties. Through the outward flow of talk and amusement, of wanderings on lake or hill, ugly hidden forces of pain and strife, regret, misery, resistance, made themselves rarely yet piercingly felt.

Julie drooped again. Her cheeks were paler even than when Meredith arrived. Delafield, too, began to be more silent, more absent. He was helpful and courteous as ever, but it began to be seen that his gayety was an effort, and now and then there were sharp or bitter notes in voice or manner, which jarred, and were not soon forgotten.

Presently, Meredith and the Duchess found themselves looking on, breathless and astonished, at the struggle of two personalities, the wrestle between two wills. They little knew that it was a renewed struggle--second wrestle. But silently, by a kind of tacit agreement, they drew away from Delafield and Julie. They dimly understood that he pursued and she resisted; and that for him life was becoming gradually absorbed into the two facts of her presence and her resistance.

"_On ne s'appuie que sur ce qui résiste_." For both of them these words were true. Fundamentally, and beyond all passing causes of grief and anger, each was fascinated by the full strength of nature in the other. Neither could ever forget the other. The hours grew electric, and every tiny incident became charged with spiritual meaning.

Often for hours together Julie would try to absorb herself in talk with Meredith. But the poor fellow got little joy from it. Presently, at a word or look of Delafield's she would let herself be recaptured, as though with a proud reluctance; they wandered away together; and once more Meredith and the Duchess became the merest by-standers.

The Duchess shrugged her shoulders over it, and, though she laughed, sometimes the tears were in her eyes. She felt the hovering of passion, but it was no passion known to her own blithe nature.

And if only this strange state of things might end, one way or other, and set her free to throw her arms round her Duke's neck, and beg his pardon for all these weeks of desertion! She said to herself, ruefully, that her babies would indeed have forgotten her.

* * * * *

Yet she stood stoutly to her post, and the weeks passed quickly by. It was the dramatic energy of the situation--so much more dramatic in truth than either she or Meredith suspected--that made it such a strain upon the onlookers.

One evening they had left the boat at Tremezzo, that they might walk back along that most winning of paths that skirts the lake between the last houses of Tremezzo and the inn at Cadenabbia. The sunset was nearly over, but the air was still suffused with its rose and pearl, and fragrant with the scent of flowering laurels. Each mountain face, each white village, either couched on the water's edge or grouped about its slender campanile on some shoulder of the hills, each house and tree and figure seemed still penetrated with light, the glorified creatures of some just revealed and already fading world. The echoes of the evening bell were floating on the lake, and from a boat in front, full of peasant-folk, there rose a sound of singing, some litany of saint or virgin, which stole in harmonies, rudely true, across the water.

"They have been to the pilgrimage church above Lenno," said Julie, pointing to the boat, and in order to listen to the singing, she found a seat on a low wall above the lake.

There was no reply, and, looking round her, she saw with a start that only Delafield was beside her, that the Duchess and Meredith had already rounded the corner of the Villa Carlotta and were out of sight.

Delafield's gaze was fixed upon her. He was very pale, and suddenly Julie's breath seemed to fail her.

"I don't think I can bear it any longer," he said, as he came close to her.

"Bear what?"

"That you should look as you do now."

Julie made no reply. Her eyes, very sad and bitter, searched the blue dimness of the lake in silence.

Delafield sat down on the wall beside her. Not a soul was in sight. At the Cadenabbia Hotel, the _table d'hôte_ had gathered in the visitors; a few boats passed and repassed in the distance, but on land all was still.

Suddenly he took her hand with a firm grasp.

"Are you never going to forgive me?" he said, in a low voice.

"I suppose I ought to bless you."

Her face seemed to him to express the tremulous misery of a heart deeply, perhaps irrevocably, wounded. Emotion rose in a tide, but he crushed it down.

He bent over her, speaking with deliberate tenderness.

"Julie, do you remember what you promised Lord Lackington when he was dying?"

"Oh!" cried Julie.

She sprang to her feet, speechless and suffocated. Her eyes expressed a mingled pride and terror.

He paused, confronting her with a pale resolution.

"You didn't know that I had seen him?"

"Know!"

She turned away fiercely, choking with sobs she could hardly control, as the memory of that by-gone moment returned upon her.

"I thought as much," said Delafield, in a low voice. "You hoped never to hear of your promise again."

She made no answer; but she sank again upon the seat beside the lake, and supporting herself on one delicate hand, which clung to the coping of the wall, she turned her pale and tear-stained face to the lake and the evening sky. There was in her gesture an unconscious yearning, a mute and anguished appeal, as though from the oppressions of human character to the broad strength of nature, that was not lost on Delafield. His mind became the centre of a swift and fierce debate. One voice said: "Why are you persecuting her? Respect her weakness and her grief." And another replied: "It is because she is weak that she must yield--must allow herself to be guided and adored."

He came close to her again. Any passer-by might have supposed that they were both looking at the distant boat and listening to the pilgrimage chant.

"Do you think I don't understand why you made that promise?" he said, very gently, and the mere self-control of his voice and manner carried a spell with it for the woman beside him. "It was wrung out of you by kindness for a dying man. You thought I should never know, or I should never claim it. Well, I am selfish. I take advantage. I do claim it. I saw Lord Lackington only a few hours before his death. 'She mustn't be alone,' he said to me, several times. And then, almost at the last, 'Ask her again. She'll consider it--she promised.'"

Julie turned impetuously.

"Neither of us is bound by that--neither of us."

Delafield smiled.

"Does that mean that I am asking you now because he bade me?"

A pause. Julie must needs raise her eyes to his. She flushed red and withdrew them.

"No," he said, with a long breath, "you don't mean that, and you don't think it. As for you--yes, you are bound! Julie, once more I bring you my plea, and you must consider it."

"How can I be your wife?" she said, her breast heaving. "You know all that has happened. It would be monstrous."

"Not at all," was his quiet reply. "It would be natural and right. Julie, it is strange that I should be talking to you like this. You're so much cleverer than I--in some ways, so much stronger. And yet, in others--you'll let me say it, won't you?--I could help you. I could protect you. It's all I care for in the world."

"How can I be your wife?" she repeated, passionately, wringing her hands.

"Be what you will--at home. My friend, comrade, housemate. I ask nothing more--_nothing_." His voice dropped, and there was a pause. Then he resumed. "But, in the eyes of the world, make me your servant and your husband!"

"I can't condemn you to such a fate," she cried. "You know where my heart is."

Delafield did not waver.

"I know where your heart was," he said, with firmness. "You will banish that man from your thoughts in time. He has no right to be there. I take all the risks--all."

"Well, at least for you, I am no hypocrite," she said, with a quivering lip. "You know what I am."

"Yes, I know, and I am at your feet."

The tears dropped from Julie's eyes. She turned away and hid her face against one of the piers of the wall.

Delafield attempted no caress. He quietly set himself to draw the life that he had to offer her, the comradeship that he proposed to her. Not a word of what the world called his "prospects" entered in. She knew very well that he could not bring himself to speak of them. Rather, a sort of ascetic and mystical note made itself heard in all he said of the future, a note that before now had fascinated and controlled a woman whose ambition was always strangely tempered with high, poetical imagination.

Yet, ambitious she was, and her mind inevitably supplied what his voice left unsaid.

"He will have to fill his place whether he wishes it or no," she said to herself. "And if, in truth, he desires my help--"

Then she shrank from her own wavering. Look where she would into her life, it seemed to her that all was monstrous and out of joint.

"You don't realize what you ask," she said, at last, in despair. "I am not what you call a good woman--you know it too well. I don't measure things by your standards. I am capable of such a journey as you found me on. I can't find in my own mind that I repent it at all. I can tell a lie--you can't. I can have the meanest and most sordid thoughts--you can't. Lady Henry thought me an intriguer--I am one. It is in my blood. And I don't know whether, in the end, I could understand your language and your life. And if I don't, I shall make you miserable."

She looked up, her slender frame straightening under what was, in truth, a noble defiance.

Delafield bent over her and took both her hands forcibly in his own.

"If all that were true, I would rather risk it a thousand times over than go out of your life again--a stranger. Julie, you have done mad things for love--you should know what love is. Look in my face--there--your eyes in mine! Give way! The dead ask it of you--and it is God's will."

And as, drawn by the last, low-spoken words, Julie looked up into his face, she felt herself enveloped by a mystical and passionate tenderness that paralyzed her resistance. A force, superhuman, laid its grasp upon her will. With a burst of tears, half in despair, half in revolt, she submitted.

XXII

In the first week of May, Julie Le Breton married Jacob Delafield in the English Church at Florence. The Duchess was there. So was the Duke--a sulky and ill-resigned spectator of something which he believed to be the peculiar and mischievous achievement of his wife.

At the church door Julie and Delafield left for Camaldoli.

"Well, if you imagine that I intend to congratulate you or anybody else upon that performance you are very much mistaken," said the Duke, as he and his wife drove back to the "Grand Bretagne" together.

"I don't deny it's--risky," said the Duchess, her hands on her lap, her eyes dreamily following the streets.

"Risky!" repeated the Duke, shrugging his shoulders. "Well, I don't want to speak harshly of your friends, Evelyn, but Miss Le Breton--"

"Mrs. Delafield," said the Duchess.

"Mrs. Delafield, then"--the name was evidently a difficult mouthful--"seems to me a most undisciplined and unmanageable woman. Why does she look like a tragedy queen at her marriage? Jacob is twice too good for her, and she'll lead him a life. And how you can reconcile it to your conscience to have misled me so completely as you have in this matter, I really can't imagine."

"Misled you?" said Evelyn.

Her innocence was really a little hard to bear, and not even the beauty of her blue eyes, now happily restored to him, could appease the mentor at her side.

"You led me plainly to believe," he repeated, with emphasis, "that if I helped her through the crisis of leaving Lady Henry she would relinquish her designs on Delafield."

"Did I?" said the Duchess. And putting her hands over her face she laughed rather hysterically. "But that wasn't why you lent her the house, Freddie."

"You coaxed me into it, of course," said the Duke.

"No, it was Julie herself got the better of you," said Evelyn, triumphantly. "You felt her spell, just as we all do, and wanted to do something for her."

"Nothing of the sort," said the Duke, determined to admit no recollection to his disadvantage. "It was your doing entirely."

The Duchess thought it discreet to let him at least have the triumph of her silence, smiling, and a little sarcastic though it were.

"And of all the undeserved good fortune!" he resumed, feeling in his irritable disapproval that the moral order of the universe had been somehow trifled with. "In the first place, she is the daughter of people who flagrantly misconducted themselves--_that_ apparently does her no harm. Then she enters the service of Lady Henry in a confidential position, and uses it to work havoc in Lady Henry's social relations. That, I am glad to say, _has_ done her a little harm, although not nearly as much as she deserves. And finally she has a most discreditable flirtation with a man already engaged--to her own cousin, please observe!--and pulls wires for him all over the place in the most objectionable and unwomanly manner."

"As if everybody didn't do that!" cried the Duchess. "You know, Freddie, that your own mother always used to boast that she had made six bishops and saved the Establishment."

The Duke took no notice.

"And yet there she is! Lord Lackington has left her a fortune--a competence, anyway. She marries Jacob Delafield--rather a fool, I consider, but all the same one of the best fellows in the world. And at any time, to judge from what one hears of the health both of Chudleigh and his boy, she may find herself Duchess of Chudleigh."

The Duke threw himself back in the carriage with the air of one who waits for Providence to reply.

"Oh, well, you see, you can't make the world into a moral tale to please you," said the Duchess, absently.

Then, after a pause, she asked, "Are you still going to let them have the house, Freddie?"

"I imagine that if Jacob Delafield applies to me to let it to _him_, that I shall not refuse him," said the Duke, stiffly.

The Duchess smiled behind her fan. Yet her tender heart was not in reality very happy about her Julie. She knew well enough that it was a strange marriage of which they had just been witnesses--a marriage containing the seeds of many untoward things only too likely to develop unless fate were kinder than rash mortals have any right to expect.

"I wish to goodness Delafield weren't so religious," murmured the Duchess, fervently, pursuing her own thoughts.

"Evelyn!"

"Well, you see, Julie isn't, at all," she added, hastily.

"You need not have troubled yourself to tell me that," was the Duke's indignant reply.

* * * * *

After a fortnight at Camaldoli and Vallombrosa the Delafields turned towards Switzerland. Julie, who was a lover of Rousseau and Obermann, had been also busy with the letters of Byron. She wished to see with her own eyes St. Gingolphe and Chillon, Bevay and Glion.

So one day at the end of May they found themselves at Montreux. But Montreux was already hot and crowded, and Julie's eyes turned in longing to the heights. They found an old inn at Charnex, whereof the garden commanded the whole head of the lake, and there they settled themselves for a fortnight, till business, in fact, should recall Delafield to England. The Duke of Chudleigh had shown all possible kindness and cordiality with regard to the marriage, and the letter in which he welcomed his cousin's new wife had both touched Julie's feelings and satisfied her pride. "You are marrying one of the best of men," wrote this melancholy father of a dying son. "My boy and I owe him more than can be written. I can only tell you that for those he loves he grudges nothing--no labor, no sacrifice of himself. There are no half-measures in his affections. He has spent himself too long on sick and sorry creatures like ourselves. It is time he had a little happiness on his own account. You will give it him, and Mervyn and I will be most grateful to you. If joy and health can never be ours, I am not yet so vile as to grudge them to others. God bless you! Jacob will tell you that my house is not a gay one; but if you and he will sometimes visit it, you will do something to lighten its gloom."

Julie wondered, as she wrote her very graceful reply, how much the Duke might know about herself. Jacob had told his cousin, as she knew, the story of her parentage and of Lord Lackington's recognition of his granddaughter. But as soon as the marriage was announced it was not likely that Lady Henry had been able to hold her tongue.

A good many interesting tales of his cousin's bride had, indeed, reached the melancholy Duke. Lady Henry had done all that she conceived it her duty to do, filling many pages of note-paper with what the Duke regarded as most unnecessary information.

At any rate, he had brushed it all aside with the impatience of one for whom nothing on earth had now any savor or value beyond one or two indispensable affections. "What's good enough for Jacob is good for me," he wrote to Lady Henry, "and if I may offer you some advice, it is that you should not quarrel with Jacob about a matter so vital as his marriage. Into the rights and wrongs of the story you tell me, I really cannot enter; but rather than break with Jacob I would welcome _anybody_ he chose to present to me. And in this case I understand the lady is very clever, distinguished, and of good blood on both sides. Have you had no trouble in your life, my dear Flora, that you can make quarrels with a light heart? If so, I envy you; but I have neither the energy nor the good spirits wherewith to imitate you."