Chapter 29

But suppose he were made to feel that there, after all, lay her compensation? She had submitted to a loveless marriage and lost her lover; but the dukedom was to make amends. He knew well that it would be so with nine women out of ten. But the bare thought that it might be so with Julie maddened him. He then was to be for her, in the future, the mere symbol of the vulgarer pleasures and opportunities, while Warkworth held her heart?

Nay!

He stood still, strengthening in himself the glad and sufficient answer. She had refused him twice--knowing all his circumstances. At this moment he adored her doubly for those old rebuffs.

* * * * *

Within twenty-four hours Delafield had received a telegram from his friend at Zanzibar. For the most part it recapitulated the news already sent to Cairo, and thence transmitted to the English papers. But it added the information that Warkworth had been buried in the neighborhood of a certain village on the caravan route to Mokembe, and that special pains had been taken to mark the spot. And the message concluded: "Fine fellow. Hard luck. Everybody awfully sorry here."

These words brought Delafield a sudden look of passionate gratitude from Julie's dark and sunken eyes. She rested her face against his sleeve and pressed his hand.

Lady Blanche also wept over the telegram, exclaiming that she had always believed in Henry Warkworth, and now, perhaps, those busybodies who at Simla had been pleased to concern themselves with her affairs and Aileen's would see cause to be ashamed of themselves.

To Delafield's discomfort, indeed, she poured out upon him a stream of confidences he would have gladly avoided. He had brought the telegram to her sitting-room. In the room adjoining it was Aileen, still, according to her mother's account, very ill, and almost speechless. Under the shadow of such a tragedy it seemed to him amazing that a mother could find words in which to tell her daughter's story to a comparative stranger. Lady Blanche appeared to him an ill-balanced and foolish woman; a prey, on the one hand, to various obscure jealousies and antagonisms, and on the other to a romantic and sentimental temper which, once roused, gloried in despising "the world," by which she generally meant a very ordinary degree of prudence.

She was in chronic disagreement, it seemed, with her daughter's guardians, and had been so from the first moment of her widowhood, the truth being that she was jealous of their legal powers over Aileen's fortune and destiny, and determined, notwithstanding, to have her own way with her own child. The wilfulness and caprice of the father, which had taken such strange and desperate forms in Rose Delaney, appeared shorn of all its attraction and romance in the smaller, more conventional, and meaner egotisms of Lady Blanche.

And yet, in her own way, she was full of heart. She lost her head over a love affair. She could deny Aileen nothing. That was what her casual Indian acquaintances meant by calling her "sweet." When Warkworth's attentions, pushed with an ardor which would have driven any prudent mother to an instant departure from India, had made a timid and charming child of eighteen the talk of Simla, Lady Blanche, excited and dishevelled--was it her personal untidiness which accounted for the other epithet of "quaint," which had floated to the Duchess's ear, and been by her reported to Julie?--refused to break her daughter's heart. Warkworth, indeed, had begun long before by flattering the mother's vanity and sense of possession, and she now threw herself hotly into his cause as against Aileen's odious trustees.

They, of course, always believed the worst of everybody. As for her, all she wanted for the child was a good husband. Was it not better, in a world of fortune-hunters, that Aileen, with her half-million, should marry early? Of money, she had, one would think, enough. It was only the greed of certain persons which could possibly desire more. Birth? The young man was honorably born, good-looking, well mannered. What did you want more? _She_ accepted a democratic age; and the obstacles thrown by Aileen's guardians in the way of an immediate engagement between the young people appeared to her, so she declared, either vulgar or ridiculous.

Well, poor lady, she had suffered for her whims. First of all, her levity had perceived, with surprise and terror, the hold that passion was taking on the delicate and sensitive nature of Aileen. This young girl, so innocent and spotless in thought, so virginally sweet in manner, so guileless in action, developed a power of loving, an absorption of the whole being in the beloved, such as our modern world but rarely sees.

She lived, she breathed for Warkworth. Her health, always frail, suffered from their separation. She became a thin and frail vision--a "gossamer girl" indeed. The ordinary life of travel and society lost all hold upon her; she passed through it in a mood of weariness and distaste that was in itself a danger to vital force. The mother became desperately alarmed, and made a number of flurried concessions. Letters, at any rate, should be allowed, in spite of the guardians, and without their knowledge. Yet each letter caused emotions which ran like a storm-wind through the child's fragile being, and seemed to exhaust the young life at its source. Then came the diphtheria, acting with poisonous effect on a nervous system already overstrained.

And in the midst of the mother's anxieties there burst upon her the sudden, incredible tale that Warkworth--to whom she herself was writing regularly, and to whom Aileen, from her bed, was sending little pencilled notes, sweetly meant to comfort a sighing lover--had been entangling himself in London with another, a Miss Le Breton, positively a nobody, as far as birth and position were concerned, the paid companion of Lady Henry Delafield, and yet, as it appeared, a handsome, intriguing, unscrupulous hussy, just the kind of hawk to snatch a morsel from a dove's mouth--a woman, in fact, with whom a little bread-and-butter girl like Aileen might very well have no chance.

Emily Lawrence's letter, in the tone of the candid friend, written after her evening at Crowborough House, had roused a mingled anguish and fury in the mother's breast. She lifted her eyes from it to look at Aileen, propped up in bed, her head thrown back against the pillow, and her little hands closed happily over Warkworth's letters; and she went straight from that vision to write to the traitor.

The traitor defended and excused himself by return of post. He implored her to pay no attention to the calumnious distortion of a friendship which had already served Aileen's interests no less than his own. It was largely to Miss Le Breton's influence that he owed the appointment which was to advance him so materially in his career. At the same time he thought it would be wise if Lady Blanche kept not only the silly gossip that was going about, but even this true and innocent fact, from Aileen's knowledge. One never knew how a girl would take such things, and he would rather explain it himself at his own time.

Lady Blanche had to be content. And meanwhile the glory of the Mokembe appointment was a strong factor in Aileen's recovery. She exulted over it by day and night, and she wrote the letters of an angel.

The mother watched her writing them with mixed feelings. As to Warkworth's replies, which she was sometimes allowed to see, Lady Blanche, who had been a susceptible girl, and the heroine of several "affairs," was secretly and strongly of opinion that men's love-letters, at any rate, were poor things nowadays, compared with what they had been.

But Aileen was more than satisfied with them. How busy he must be, and with such important business! Poor, harassed darling, how good of him to write her a word--to give her a thought!

* * * * *

And now Lady Blanche beheld her child crushed and broken, a nervous wreck, before her life had truly begun. The agonies which the mother endured were very real, and should have been touching. But she was not a touching person. All her personal traits--her red-rimmed eyes, her straggling hair, the slight, disagreeable twist in her nose and mouth--combined, with her signal lack of dignity and reticence, to stir the impatience rather than the sympathy of the by-stander.

"And mamma was so fond of her," Julie would say to herself sometimes, in wonder, proudly contrasting the wild grace and originality of her disgraced mother with the awkward, slipshod ways of the sister who had remained a great lady.

Meanwhile, Lady Blanche was, indeed, perpetually conscious of her strange niece, perpetually thinking of the story her brothers had told her, perpetually trying to recall the sister she had lost so young, and then turning from all such things to brood angrily over the Lawrence letter, and the various other rumors which had reached her of Warkworth's relations to Miss Le Breton.

What was in the woman's mind now? She looked pale and tragic enough. But what right had she to grieve--or, if she did grieve, to be pitied?

Jacob Delafield had been fool enough to marry her, and fate would make her a duchess. So true it is that they who have no business to flourish do flourish, like green bay-trees.

As to poor Rose--sometimes there would rise on Lady Blanche's mind the sudden picture of herself and the lost, dark-eyed sister, scampering on their ponies through the country lanes of their childhood; of her lessons with Rose, her worship of Rose; and then of that black curtain of mystery and reprobation which for the younger child of sixteen had suddenly descended upon Rose and all that concerned her.

But Rose's daughter! All one could say was that she had turned out as the child of such proceedings might be expected to turn out--a minx. The aunt's conviction as to that stood firm. And while Rose's face and fate had sunk into the shadows of the past, even for her sister, Aileen was _here_, struggling for her delicate, threatened life, her hand always in the hand of this woman who had tried to steal her lover from her, her soft, hopeless eyes, so tragically unconscious, bent upon the bold intriguer.

What possessed the child? Warkworth's letters, Julie's company--those seemed to be all she desired.

And at last, in the June beauty and brilliance, when a triumphant summer had banished the pitiful spring, when the meadows were all perfume and color, and the clear mountains, in a clear sky, upheld the ever-new and never-ending pomp of dawn and noon and night, the little, wasted creature looked up into Julie's face, and, without tears, gasped out her story.

"These are his letters. Some day I'll--I'll read you some of them; and this--is his picture. I know you saw him at Lady Henry's. He mentioned your name. Will you please tell me everything--all the times you saw him, and what he talked of? You see I am much stronger. I can bear it all now."

* * * * *

Meanwhile, for Delafield, this fortnight of waiting--waiting for the African letters, waiting for the revival of life in Aileen--was a period of extraordinary tension, when all the powers of nerve and brain seemed to be tested and tried to the utmost. He himself was absorbed in watching Julie and in dealing with her.

In the first place, as he saw, she could give no free course to grief. The tragic yearning, the agonized tenderness and pity which consumed her, must be crushed out of sight as far as possible. They would have been an offence to Lady Blanche, a bewilderment to Aileen. And it was on her relation to her new-found cousin that, as Delafield perceived, her moral life for the moment turned. This frail girl was on the brink of perishing because death had taken Warkworth from her. And Julie knew well that Warkworth had neither loved her nor deserved her--that he had gone to Africa and to death with another image in his heart.

There was a perpetual and irreparable cruelty in the situation. And from the remorse of it Julie could not escape. Day by day she was more profoundly touched by the clinging, tender creature, more sharply scourged by the knowledge that the affection developing between them could never be without its barrier and its mystery, that something must always remain undisclosed, lest Aileen cast her off in horror.

It was a new moral suffering, in one whose life had been based hitherto on intellect, or passion. In a sense it held at bay even her grief for Warkworth, her intolerable compassion for his fate. In sheer dread lest the girl should find her out and hate her, she lost insensibly the first poignancy of sorrow.

These secrets of feeling left her constantly pale and silent. Yet her grace had never been more evident. All the inmates of the little _pension_, the landlord's family, the servants, the visitors, as the days passed, felt the romance and thrill of her presence. Lady Blanche evoked impatience of ennui. She was inconsiderate; she was meddlesome; she soon ceased even to be pathetic. But for Julie every foot ran, every eye smiled.

Then, when the day was over, Delafield's opportunity began. Julie could not sleep. He gradually established the right to read with her and talk with her. It was a relation very singular, and very intimate. She would admit him at his knock, and he would find her on her sofa, very sad, often in tears, her black hair loose upon her shoulders. Outwardly there was often much ceremony, even distance between them; inwardly, each was exploring the other, and Julie's attitude towards Delafield was becoming more uncertain, more touched with emotion.

What was, perhaps, most noticeable in it was a new timidity, a touch of anxious respect towards him. In the old days, what with her literary cultivation and her social success, she had always been the flattered and admired one of their little group. Delafield felt himself clumsy and tongue-tied beside her. It was a superiority on her part very natural and never ungraceful, and it was his chief delight to bring it forward, to insist upon it, to take it for granted.

But the relation between them had silently shifted.

"You _judge_--you are always judging," she had said once, impatiently, to Delafield. And now it was round these judgments, these inward verdicts of his, on life or character, that she was perpetually hovering. She was infinitely curious about them. She would wrench them from him, and then would often shiver away from him in resentment.

He, meanwhile, as he advanced further in the knowledge of her strange nature, was more and more bewildered by her--her perversities and caprices, her brilliancies and powers, her utter lack of any standard or scheme of life. She had been for a long time, as it seemed to him, the creature of her exquisite social instincts--then the creature of passion. But what a woman through it all, and how adorable, with those poetic gestures and looks, those melancholy, gracious airs that ravished him perpetually! And now this new attitude, as of a child leaning, wistfully looking in your face, asking to be led, to be wrestled and reasoned with.

The days, as they passed, produced in him a secret and mounting intoxication. Then, perhaps for a day or two, there would be a reaction, both foreseeing that a kind of spiritual tyranny might arise from their relation, and both recoiling from it....

One night she was very restless and silent. There seemed to be no means of approach to her true mind. Suddenly he took her hand--it was some days since they had spoken of Warkworth--and almost roughly reminded her of her promise to tell him all.

She rebelled. But his look and manner held her, and the inner misery sought an outlet. Submissively she began to speak, in her low, murmuring voice; she went back over the past--the winter in Bruton Street; the first news of the Moffatt engagement; her efforts for Warkworth's promotion; the history of the evening party which had led to her banishment; the struggle in her own mind and Warkworth's; the sudden mad schemes of their last interview; the rush of the Paris journey.

The mingled exaltation and anguish, the comparative absence of regret with which she told the story, produced an astonishing effect on Delafield. And in both minds, as the story proceeded, there emerged ever more clearly the consciousness of that imperious act by which he had saved her.

Suddenly she stopped.

"I know you can find no excuse for it all," she said, in excitement.

"Yes; for all--but for one thing," was his low reply.

She shrank, her eyes on his face.

"That poor child," he said, under his breath.

She looked at him piteously.

"Did you ever realize what you were doing?" he asked her, raising her hand to his lips.

"No, no! How could I? I thought of some one so different--I had never seen her--"

She paused, her wide--seeking gaze fixed upon him through tears, as though she pleaded with him to find explanations--palliatives.

But he gently shook his head.

Suddenly, shaken with weeping, she bowed her face upon the hands that held her own. It was like one who relinquishes all pleading, all defence, and throws herself on the mercy of the judge.

He tenderly asked her pardon if he had wounded her. But he shrank from offering any caress. The outward signs of life's most poignant and most beautiful moments are generally very simple and austere.

XXIV

"You have had a disquieting letter?"

The voice was Julie's. Delafield was standing, apparently in thought, at the farther corner of the little, raised terrace of the hotel. She approached him with an affectionate anxiety, of which he was instantly conscious.

"I am afraid I may have to leave you to-night," he said, turning towards her, and holding out the letter in his hand.

It contained a few agitated lines from the Duke of Chudleigh.

"They tell me my lad can't get over this. He's made a gallant fight, but this beats us. A week or two--no more. Ask Mrs. Delafield to let you come. She will, I know. She wrote to me very kindly. Mervyn keeps talking of you. You'd come, if you heard him. It's ghastly--the cruelty of it all. Whether I can live without him, that's the point."

"You'll go, of course?" said Julie, returning it.

"To-night, if you allow it."

"Of course. You ought."

"I hate leaving you alone, with this trouble on your hands," said Jacob, in some agitation. "What are your plans?"

"I could follow you next week. Aileen comes down to-day. And I should like to wait here for the mail."

"In five days, about, it should be here," said Delafield.

There was a silence. She dropped into a chair beside the balustrade of the terrace, which was wreathed in wistaria, and looked out upon the vast landscape of the lake. His thought was, "How can the mail matter to her? She cannot suppose that he had written--"

Aloud he said, in some embarrassment, "You expect letters yourself?"

"I expect nothing," she said, after a pause. "But Aileen is living on the chance of letters."

"There may be nothing for her--except, indeed, her letters to him--poor child!"

"She knows that. But the hope keeps her alive."

"And you?" thought Delafield, with an inward groan, as he looked down upon her pale profile. He had a moment's hateful vision of himself as the elder brother in the parable. Was Julie's mind to be the home of an eternal antithesis between the living husband and the dead lover--in which the latter had forever the _beau rôle_?

Then, impatiently, Jacob wrenched himself from mean thoughts. It was as though he bared his head remorse-fully before the dead man.

"I will go to the Foreign Office," he said, in her ear, "as I pass through town. They will have letters. All the information I can get you shall have at once."

"Thank you, _mon ami_", she said, almost inaudibly.

Then she looked up, and he was startled by her eyes. Where he had expected grief, he saw a shrinking animation.

"Write to me often," she said, imperiously.

"Of course. But don't trouble to answer much. Your hands are so full here."

She frowned.

"Trouble! Why do you spoil me so? Demand--insist--that I should write!"

"Very well," he said, smiling, "I demand--I insist!"

She drew a long breath, and went slowly away from him into the house. Certainly the antagonism of her secret thoughts, though it persisted, was no longer merely cold or critical. For it concerned one who was not only the master of his own life, but threatened unexpectedly to become the master of hers.

She had begun, indeed, to please her imagination with the idea of a relation between them, which, while it ignored the ordinary relations of marriage, should yet include many of the intimacies and refinements of love. More and more did the surprises of his character arrest and occupy her mind. She found, indeed, no "plaster saint." Her cool intelligence soon detected the traces of a peevish or stubborn temper, and of a natural inertia, perpetually combated, however, by the spiritual energy of a new and other self exfoliating from the old; a self whose acts and ways she watched, sometimes with the held breath of fascination, sometimes with a return of shrinking or fear. That a man should not only appear but be so good was still in her eyes a little absurd. Perhaps her feeling was at bottom the common feeling of the sceptical nature. "We should listen to the higher voices; but in such a way that if another hypothesis were true, we should not have been too completely duped."

She was ready, also, to convict him of certain prejudices and superstitions which roused in her an intellectual impatience. But when all was said, Delafield, unconsciously, was drawing her towards him, as the fowler draws a fluttering bird. It was the exquisite refinement of those spiritual insights and powers he possessed which constantly appealed, not only to her heart, but--a very important matter in Julie's case--to her taste, to her own carefully tempered instinct for the rare and beautiful.

He was the master, then, she admitted, of a certain vein of spiritual genius. Well, here should he lead--and even, if he pleased, command her. She would sit at his feet, and he should open to her ranges of feeling, delights, and subtleties of moral sensation hitherto unknown to her.

Thus the feeling of ennui and reaction which had marked the first weeks of her married life had now wholly disappeared. Delafield was no longer dull or pedantic in her eyes. She passed alternately from moments of intolerable smart and pity for the dead to moments of agitation and expectancy connected with her husband. She thought over their meeting of the night before; she looked forward to similar hours to come.

Meanwhile his relation towards her in many matters was still naïvely ignorant and humble--determined by the simplicity of a man of some real greatness, who never dreamed of claiming tastes or knowledge he did not possess, whether in small things or large. This phase, however, only gave the more value to one which frequently succeeded it. For suddenly the conversation would enter regions where he felt himself peculiarly at home, and, with the same unconsciousness on his part, she would be made to feel the dignity and authority which surrounded his ethical and spiritual life. And these contrasts--this weakness and this strength--combined with the man-and-woman element which is always present in any situation of the kind, gave rise to a very varied and gradually intensifying play of feeling between them. Feeling only possible, no doubt, for the _raffinés_ of this world; but for them full of strange charm, and even of excitement.

* * * * *