Chapter 28

Gradually the great mountains at the head of the lake freed themselves from the last wandering cloud-wreaths. On the rock faces of the Rochers de Naye the hanging pine-woods, brushed with snow, came into sight. The white walls of Glion shone faintly out, and a pearly gold, which was but a pallid reflection of the Italian glory, diffused itself over mountain and lake. The sun was grudging; there was no caress in the air. Aileen shivered a little in her shawls, and when Julie spoke of Italy the girl's enthusiasm and longing sprang, as it were, to meet her, and both were conscious of another slight link between them.

Suddenly a sound of steps came to them from below.

"My husband," said Julie, rising, and, going to the balustrade, she waved to Delafield, who had come up from Montreux by one of the steep vineyard paths. "I will tell him you are here," she added, with what might have been taken for the shyness of the young wife.

She ran down the steps leading from the terrace to the lower garden. Aileen looked at her mother.

"Isn't she wonderful?" she said, in an ardent whisper. "I could watch her forever. She is the most graceful person I ever saw. Mother, is she like Aunt Rose?"

Lady Blanche shook her head.

"Not in the least," she said, shortly. "She has too much manner for me."

"Oh, mother!" And the girl caught her mother's hand in caressing remonstrance, as though to say: "Dear little mother, you must like her, because I do; and you mustn't think of Aunt Rose, and all those terrible things, except for pity."

"Hush!" said Lady Blanche, smiling at her a little excitedly. "Hush; they're coming!"

Delafield and Julie emerged from the iron staircase. Lady Blanche turned and looked at the tall, distinguished pair, her ugly lower lip hardening ungraciously. But she and Delafield had a slight previous acquaintance, and she noticed instantly the charming and solicitous kindness with which he greeted her daughter.

"Julie tells me Miss Moffatt is still far from strong," he said, returning to the mother.

Lady Blanche only sighed for answer. He drew a chair beside her, and they fell into the natural talk of people who belong to the same social world, and are travelling in the same scenes.

Meanwhile Julie was sitting beside the heiress. Not much was said, but each was conscious of a lively interest in the other, and every now and then Julie would put out a careful hand and draw the shawls closer about the girl's frail form. The strain of guilty compunction that entered into Julie's feeling did but make it the more sensitive. She said to herself in a vague haste that now she would make amends. If only Lady Blanche were willing--

But she should be willing! Julie felt the stirrings of the old self-confidence, the old trust in a social ingenuity which had, in truth, rarely failed her. Her intriguing, managing instinct made itself felt--the mood of Lady Henry's companion.

* * * * *

Presently, as they were talking, Aileen caught sight of an English newspaper which Delafield had brought up from Montreux. It lay still unopened on one of the tables of the terrace.

"Please give it me," said the girl, stretching out an eager hand. "It will have Tiny's marriage, mamma! A cousin of mine," she explained to Julie, who rose to hand it to her. "A very favorite cousin. Oh, thank you."

She opened the paper. Julie turned away, that she might relieve Lady Blanche of her teacup.

Suddenly a cry rang out--a cry of mortal anguish. Two ladies who had just stepped out upon the terrace from the hotel drawing-room turned in terror; the gardener who was watering the flower-boxes at the farther end stood arrested.

"Aileen!" shrieked Lady Blanche, running to her. "What--what is it?"

The paper had dropped to the floor, but the child still pointed to it, gasping.

"Mother--mother!"

Some intuition woke in Julie. She stood dead-white and dumb, while Lady Blanche threw herself on her daughter.

"Aileen, darling, what is it?"

The girl, in her agony, threw her arms frantically round her mother, and dragged herself to her feet. She stood tottering, her hand over her eyes.

"He's dead, mother! He's--dead!"

The last word sank into a sound more horrible even than the first cry. Then she swayed out of her mother's arms. It was Julie who caught her, who laid her once more on the deck-chair--a broken, shrunken form, in whom all the threads and connections of life had suddenly, as it were, fallen to ruin. Lady Blanche hung over her, pushing Julie away, gathering the unconscious girl madly in her arms. Delafield rushed for water-and-brandy. Julie snatched the paper and looked at the telegrams.

High up in the first column was the one she sought.

"CAIRO, _June_ 12.--Great regret is felt here at the sudden and tragic news of Major Warkworth's death from fever, which seems to have occurred at a spot some three weeks' distance from the coast, on or about May 25. Letters from the officer who has succeeded him in the command of the Mokembe expedition have now reached Denga. A fortnight after leaving the coast Major Warkworth was attacked with fever; he made a brave struggle against it, but it was of a deadly type, and in less than a week he succumbed. The messenger brought also his private papers and diaries, which have been forwarded to his representatives in England. Major Warkworth was a most promising and able officer, and his loss will be keenly felt."

Julie fell on her knees beside her swooning cousin. Lady Blanche, meanwhile, was loosening her daughter's dress, chafing her icy hands, or moaning over her in a delirium of terror.

"My darling--my darling! Oh, my God! Why did I allow it? Why did I ever let him come near her? It was my fault--my fault! And it's killed her!"

And clinging to her child's irresponsive hands, she looked down upon her in a convulsion of grief, which included not a shadow of regret, not a gleam of pity for anything or any one else in the world but this bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, which lay stricken there.

But Julie's mind had ceased to be conscious of the tragedy beside her. It had passed for the second time into the grasp of an illusion which possessed itself of the whole being and all its perceptive powers. Before her wide, terror-stricken gaze there rose once more the same piteous vision which had tortured her in the crisis of her love for Warkworth. Against the eternal snows which close in the lake the phantom hovered in a ghastly relief--emaciated, with matted hair, and purpled cheeks, and eyes--not to be borne!--expressing the dumb anger of a man, still young, who parts unwillingly from life in a last lonely spasm of uncomforted pain.

XXIII

It was midnight in the little inn at Charnex. The rain which for so many nights in this miserable June had been beating down upon the village had at last passed away. The night was clear and still--a night when the voice of mountain torrents, far distant, might reach the ear suddenly--sharply pure--from the very depths of silence.

Julie was in bed. She had been scarcely aware of her maid's help in undressing. The ordinary life was, as it were, suspended. Two scenes floated alternately before her--one the creation of memory, the other of imagination; and the second was, if possible, the more vivid, the more real of the two. Now she saw herself in Lady Henry's drawing-room; Sir Wilfrid Bury and a white-haired general were beside her. The door opened and Warkworth entered--young, handsome, soldierly, with that boyish, conquering air which some admired and others disliked. His eyes met hers, and a glow of happiness passed through her.

Then, at a stroke, the London drawing-room melted away. She was in a low bell-tent. The sun burned through its sides; the air was stifling. She stood with two other men and the doctor beside the low camp-bed; her heart was wrung by every movement, every sound; she heard the clicking of the fan in the doctor's hands, she saw the flies on the poor, damp brow.

And still she had no tears. Only, existence seemed to have ended in a gulf of horror, where youth and courage, repentance and high resolve, love and pleasure were all buried and annihilated together.

That poor girl up-stairs! It had not been possible to take her home. She was there with nurse and doctor, her mother hanging upon every difficult breath. The attack of diphtheria had left a weakened heart and nervous system; the shock had been cruel, and the doctor could promise nothing for the future.

"Mother--mother!... _Dead!_"

The cry echoed in Julie's ears. It seemed to fill the old, low-ceiled room in which she lay. Her fancy, preternaturally alive, heard it thrown back from the mountains outside--returned to her in wailing from the infinite depths of the lake. She was conscious of the vast forms and abysses of nature, there in the darkness, beyond the walls of her room, as something hostile, implacable....

And while he lay there dead, under the tropical sand, she was still living and breathing here, in this old Swiss inn--Jacob Delafield's wife, at least in name.

There was a knock at her door. At first she did not answer it. It seemed to be only one of the many dream sounds which tormented her nerves. Then it was repeated. Mechanically she said "Come in."

The door opened, and Delafield, carrying a light, which he shaded with his hand, stood on the threshold.

"May I come and talk to you?" he said, in a low voice. "I know you are not sleeping."

It was the first time he had entered his wife's room. Through all her misery, Julie felt a strange thrill as her husband's face was thus revealed to her, brightly illumined, in the loneliness of the night. Then the thrill passed into pain--the pain of a new and sharp perception.

Delafield, in truth, was some two or three years younger than Warkworth. But the sudden impression on Julie's mind, as she saw him thus, was of a man worn and prematurely aged--markedly older and graver, even, since their marriage, since that memorable evening by the side of Como when, by that moral power of which he seemed often to be the mere channel and organ, he had overcome her own will and linked her life with his.

She looked at him in a kind of terror. Why was he so pale--an embodied grief? Warkworth's death was not a mortal stroke for _him_.

He came closer, and still Julie's eyes held him. Was it her fault, this--this shadowed countenance, these suggestions of a dumb strain and conflict, which not even his strong youth could bear without betrayal? Her heart cried out, first in a tragic impatience; then it melted within her strangely, she knew not how.

She sat up in bed and held out her hands. He thought of that evening in Heribert Street, after Warkworth had left her, when she had been so sad and yet so docile. The same yearning, the same piteous agitation was in her attitude now.

He knelt down beside the bed and put his arms round her. She clasped her hands about his neck and hid her face on his shoulder. There ran through her the first long shudder of weeping.

"He was so young!" he heard her say through sobs. "So young!"

He raised his hand and touched her hair tenderly.

"He died serving his country," he said, commanding his voice with difficulty. "And you grieve for him like this! I can't pity him so much."

"You thought ill of him--I know you did." She spoke between deep, sobbing breaths. "But he wasn't--he wasn't a bad man."

She fell back on her pillow and the tears rained down her cheeks.

Delafield kissed her hand in silence.

"Some day--I'll tell you," she said, brokenly.

"Yes, you shall tell me. It would help us both."

"I'll prove to you he wasn't vile. When--when he proposed that to me he was distracted. So was I. How could he break off his engagement? Now you see how she loved him. But we couldn't part--we couldn't say good-bye. It had all come on us unawares. We wanted to belong to each other--just for two days--and then part forever. Oh, I'll tell you--"

"You shall tell me all--here!" he said, firmly, crushing her delicate hands in his own against his breast, so that she felt the beating of his heart.

"Give me my hand. I'll show you his letter--his last letter to me." And, trembling, she drew from under her pillow that last scrawled letter, written from the squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux.

No sooner, however, had she placed it in Delafield's hands than she was conscious of new forces of feeling in herself which robbed the act of its simplicity. She had meant to plead her lover's cause and her own with the friend who was nominally her husband. Her action had been a cry for sympathy, as from one soul to another.

But as Delafield took the letter and began to read, her pulses began to flutter strangely. She recalled the phrases of passion which the letter contained. She became conscious of new fears, new compunctions.

For Delafield, too, the moment was one of almost intolerable complexity. This tender intimacy of night--the natural intimacy of husband and wife; this sense, which would not be denied, however sternly he might hold it in check, of her dear form beside him; the little refinements and self-revelations of a woman's room; his half-rights towards her, appealing at once to love, and to the memory of that solemn pledge by which he had won her--what man who deserved the name but must be conscious, tempestuously conscious, of such thoughts and facts?

And then, wrestling with these smarts, these impulses, belonging to the natural, physical life, the powers of the moral being--compassion, self-mastery, generosity; while strengthening and directing all, the man of faith was poignantly aware of the austere and tender voices of religion.

Amid this play of influences he read the letter, still kneeling beside her and holding her fingers clasped in his. She had closed her eyes and lay still, save for the occasional tremulous movement of her free hand, which dried the tears on her cheek.

"Thank you," he said, at last, with a voice that wavered, as he put the letter down. "Thank you. It was good of you to let me see it. It changes all my thoughts of him henceforward. If he had lived--"

"But he's dead! He's dead!" cried Julie, in a sudden agony, wrenching her hand from his and burying her face in the pillow. "Just when he wanted to live. Oh, my God--my God! No, there's no God--nothing that cares--that takes any notice!"

She was shaken by deep, convulsive weeping. Delafield soothed her as best he could. And presently she stretched out her hand with a quick, piteous gesture, and touched his face.

"You, too! What have I done to you? How you looked, just now! I bring a curse. Why did you want to marry me? I can't tear this out of my heart--I can't!"

And again she hid herself from him. Delafield bent over her.

"Do you imagine that I should be poor-souled enough to ask you?"

Suddenly a wild feeling of revolt ran through Julie's mind. The loftiness of his mood chilled her. An attitude more weakly, passionately human, a more selfish pity for himself would, in truth, have served him better. Had the pain of the living man escaped his control, avenging itself on the supremacy that death had now given to the lover, Delafield might have found another Julie in his arms. As it was, her husband seemed to her perhaps less than man, in being more; she admired unwillingly, and her stormy heart withdrew itself.

And when at last she controlled her weeping, and it became evident to him that she wished once more to be alone, his sensitiveness perfectly divined the secret reaction in her. He rose from his place beside her with a deep, involuntary sigh. She heard it, but only to shrink away.

"You will sleep a little?" he said, looking down upon her.

"I will try, _mon ami_."

"If you don't sleep, and would like me to read to you, call me. I am in the next room."

She thanked him faintly, and he went away. At the door he paused and came back again.

"To-night"--he hesitated--"while the doctors were here, I ran down to Montreux by the short path and telegraphed. The consul at Zanzibar is an old friend of mine. I asked him for more particulars at once, by wire. But the letters can't be here for a fortnight."

"I know. You're very, very good."

* * * * *

Hour after hour Delafield sat motionless in his room, till "high in the Valais depths profound" he "saw the morning break."

There was a little balcony at his command, and as he noiselessly stepped out upon it, between three and four o'clock, he felt himself the solitary comrade of the mist-veiled lake, of those high, rosy mountains on the eastern verge, the first throne and harbor of the light--of the lower forest-covered hills that "took the morning," one by one, in a glorious and golden succession. All was fresh, austere, and vast--the spaces of the lake, the distant hollows of high glaciers filled with purple shadow, the precipices of the Rochers de Naye, where the new snow was sparkling in the sun, the cool wind that blew towards him from the gates of Italy, down the winding recesses of that superb valley which has been a thoroughfare of nations from the beginning of time.

Not a boat on the wide reaches of the lake; not a voice or other sound of human toil, either from the vineyards below or the meadows above. Meanwhile some instinct, perhaps also some faint movements in her room, told him that Julie was no less wakeful than himself. And was not that a low voice in the room above him--the trained voice and footsteps of a nurse? Ah, poor little heiress, she, too, watched with sorrow!

A curious feeling of shame, of self-depreciation crept into his heart. Surely he himself of late had been lying down with fear and rising up with bitterness? Never a day had passed since they had reached Switzerland but he, a man of strong natural passions, had bade himself face the probable truth that, by a kind of violence, he had married a woman who would never love him--had taken irrevocably a false step, only too likely to be fatal to himself, intolerable to her.

Nevertheless, steeped as he had been in sadness, in foreboding, and, during this by-gone night, in passionate envy of the dead yet beloved Warkworth, he had never been altogether unhappy. That mysterious _It_--that other divine self of the mystic--God--the enwrapping, sheltering force--had been with him always. It was with him now--it spoke from the mysterious color and light of the dawn.

How, then, could he ever equal Julie in _experience_, in the true and poignant feeling of any grief whatever? His mind was in a strange, double state. It was like one who feels himself unfairly protected by a magic armor; he would almost throw it aside in a remorseful eagerness to be with his brethren, and as his brethren, in the sore weakness and darkness of the human combat; and then he thinks of the hand that gave the shield, and his heart melts in awe.

"_Friend of my soul and of the world, make me thy tool--thy instrument! Thou art Love! Speak through me! Draw her heart to mine_."

At last, knowing that there was no sleep in him, and realizing that he had brooded enough, he made his way out of the hotel and up through the fresh and dew-drenched meadows, where the haymakers were just appearing, to the Les Avants stream. A plunge into one of its cool basins retempered the whole man. He walked back through the scented field-paths, resolutely restraining his mind from the thoughts of the night, hammering out, indeed, in his head a scheme for the establishment of small holdings on certain derelict land in Wiltshire belonging to his cousin.

As he was descending on Charnex, he met the postman and took his letters. One among them, from the Duke of Chudleigh, contained a most lamentable account of Lord Elmira. The father and son had returned to England, and an angry, inclement May had brought a touch of pneumonia to add to all the lad's other woes. In itself it was not much--was, indeed, passing away. "But it has used up most of his strength," said the Duke, "and you know whether he had any to waste. Don't forget him. He constantly thinks and talks of you."

Delafield restlessly wondered when he could get home. But he realized that Julie would now feel herself tragically linked to the Moffatts, and how could he leave her? He piteously told himself that here, and now, was his chance with her. As he bore himself now towards her, in this hour of her grief for Warkworth, so, perhaps, would their future be.

Yet the claims of kindred were strong. He suffered much inward distress as he thought of the father and son, and their old touching dependence upon him. Chudleigh, as Jacob knew well, was himself incurably ill. Could he long survive his poor boy?

And so that other thought, which Jacob spent so much ingenuity in avoiding, rushed upon him unawares. The near, inevitable expectation of the famous dukedom, which, in the case of almost any other man in England, must at least have quickened the blood with a natural excitement, produced in Delafield's mind a mere dull sense of approaching torment. Perhaps there was something non-sane in his repulsion, something that linked itself with his father's "queerness," or the bigotry and fanaticism of his grandmother, the Evangelical Duchess, with her "swarm of parsons," as Sir Wilfrid remembered her. The oddity, which had been violent or brutal in earlier generations, showed itself in him, one might have said, in a radical transposition of values, a singularity of criterion, which the ordinary robust Englishman might very well dismiss with impatience as folly or cant.

Yet it was neither; and the feeling had, in truth, its own logic and history. He had lived from his youth up among the pageants of rank and possession. They had no glamour for him; he realized their burdens, their ineffectiveness for all the more precious kinds of happiness--how could he not, with these two forlorn figures of Chudleigh and his boy always before him? As for imagination and poetry, Delafield, with a mind that was either positive or mystical--the mind, one might say, of the land-agent or the saint--failed to see where they came in. Family tradition, no doubt, carries a thrill. But what thrill is there in the mere possession of a vast number of acres of land, of more houses, new and old, than any human being can possibly live in, of more money than any reasonable man can ever spend, and more responsibilities than he can ever meet? Such things often seemed to Delafield pure calamity--mere burdens upon life and breath. That he could and must be forced, some time, by law and custom, to take them up, was nothing but a social barbarity.

Mingled with all which, of course, was his passionate sense of spiritual democracy. To be throned apart, like a divine being, surrounded by the bought homage of one's fellows, and possessed of more power than a man can decently use, was a condition which excited in Delafield the same kind of contemptuous revolt that it would have excited in St. Francis. "Be not ye called master"--a Christian even of his transcendental and heterodox sort, if he _were_ a Christian, must surely hold these words in awe, at least so far as concerned any mastery of the external or secular kind. To masteries of another order the saint has never been disinclined.

As he once more struck the village street, this familiar whirl of thoughts was buzzing in Delafield's mind, pierced, however, by one sharper and newer. Julie! Did he know--had he ever dared to find out--how she regarded this future which was overtaking them? She had tried to sound _him_; she had never revealed herself.

In Lady Henry's house he had often noticed in Julie that she had an imaginative tenderness for rank or great fortune. At first it had seemed to him a woman's natural romanticism; then he explained it to himself as closely connected with her efforts to serve Warkworth.