"After all, when the pricks and pains of this great wrench are over, shall we not all acknowledge that it is best the crash should have come? You have suffered and borne too much. Now we shall see you expand in a freer and happier life. The Duchess has asked me to dinner to-morrow—the note has just arrived—so that I shall soon have the chance of hearing from you some of those details I so much want to know. But before then you will write?

"As for me, I am full of alternate hopes and fears. General Fergus, as we walked home, was rather silent and bearish—I could not flatter myself that he had any friendly intentions towards me in his mind. But Montresor was more than kind, and gave me some fresh opportunities of which I was very glad to avail myself. Well, we shall know soon.

"You told me once that if, or when, this happened, you would turn to your pen, and that Dr. Meredith would find you openings. That is not to be regretted, I think. You have great gifts, which will bring you pleasure in the using. I have got a good deal of pleasure out of my small ones. Did you know that once, long ago, when I was stationed at Gibraltar, I wrote a military novel?

"No, I don't pity you because you will need to turn your intellect to account. You will be free, and mistress of your fate. That, for those who, like you and me, are the 'children of their works,' as the Spaniards say, is much.

"Dear friend—kind, persecuted friend!—I thought of you in the watches of the night—I think of you this morning. Let me soon have news of you."

Julie put the letter down upon her knee. Her face stiffened. Nothing that she had ever received from him yet had rung so false.

Grief? Complaint? No! Just a calm grasp of the game—a quick playing of the pieces—so long as the game was there to play. If he was appointed to this mission, in two or three weeks he would be gone—to the heart of Africa. If not—

Anyway, two or three weeks were hers. Her mind seemed to settle and steady itself.

She got up and went once more carefully through the house, giving her attention to it. Yes, the whole had character and a kind of charm. The little place would make, no doubt, an interesting and distinguished background for the life she meant to put into it. She would move in at once—in three days at most. Ways and means were for the moment not difficult. During her life with Lady Henry she had saved the whole of her own small rentes. Three hundred pounds lay ready to her hand in an investment easily realized. And she would begin to earn at once.

Therese—that should be her room—the cheerful, blue-papered room with the south window. Julie felt a strange rush of feeling as she thought of it. How curious that these two—Leonie and little Therese—should be thus brought back into her life! For she had no doubt whatever that they would accept with eagerness what she had to offer. Her foster-sister had married a school-master in one of the Communal schools of Bruges while Julie was still a girl at the convent. Leonie's lame child had been much with her grandmother, old Madame Le Breton. To Julie she had been at first unwelcome and repugnant. Then some quality in the frail creature had unlocked the girl's sealed and often sullen heart.

While she had been living with Lady Henry, these two, the mother and child, had been also in London; the mother, now a widow, earning her bread as an inferior kind of French governess, the child boarded out with various persons, and generally for long periods of the year in hospital or convalescent home. To visit her in her white hospital bed—to bring her toys and flowers, or merely kisses and chat—had been, during these years, the only work of charity on Julie's part which had been wholly secret, disinterested, and constant.



XII

It was a somewhat depressed company that found its straggling way into the Duchess's drawing-room that evening between tea and dinner.

Miss Le Breton did not appear at tea. The Duchess believed that, after her inspection of the house in Heribert Street, Julie had gone on to Bloomsbury to find Madame Bornier. Jacob Delafield was there, not much inclined to talk, even as Julie's champion. And, one by one, Lady Henry's oldest habitues, the "criminals" of the night before, dropped in.

Dr. Meredith arrived with a portfolio containing what seemed to be proof-sheets.

"Miss Le Breton not here?" he said, as he looked round him.

The Duchess explained that she might be in presently. The great man sat down, his portfolio carefully placed beside him, and drank his tea under what seemed a cloud of preoccupation.

Then appeared Lord Lackington and Sir Wilfrid Bury. Montresor had sent a note from the House to say that if the debate would let him he would dash up to Grosvenor Square for some dinner, but could only stay an hour.

"Well, here we are again—the worst of us!" said the Duchess, presently, with a sigh of bravado, as she handed Lord Lackington his cup of tea and sank back in her chair to enjoy her own.

"Speak for yourselves, please," said Sir Wilfrid's soft, smiling voice, as he daintily relieved his mustache of some of the Duchess's cream.

"Oh, that's all very well," said the Duchess, throwing up a hand in mock annoyance; "but why weren't you there?"

"I knew better."

"The people who keep out of scrapes are not the people one loves," was the Duchess's peevish reply.

"Let him alone," said Lord Lackington, coming for some more tea-cake. "He will get his deserts. Next Wednesday he will be tete-a-tete with Lady Henry."

"Lady Henry is going to Torquay to-morrow," said Sir Wilfrid, quietly.

"Ah!"

There was a general chorus of interrogation, amid which the Duchess made herself heard.

"Then you've seen her?"

"To-day, for twenty minutes—all she was able to bear. She was ill yesterday. She is naturally worse to-day. As to her state of mind—"

The circle of faces drew eagerly nearer.

"Oh, it's war," said Sir Wilfrid, nodding—"undoubtedly war—upon the Cave—if there is a Cave."

"Well, poor things, we must have something to shelter us!" cried the Duchess. "The Cave is being aired to-day."

The interrogating faces turned her way. The Duchess explained the situation, and drew the house in Heribert Street—with its Cyclops-eye of a dormer window, and its Ionian columns—on the tea-cloth with her nail.

"Ah," said Sir Wilfrid, crossing his knees reflectively. "Ah, that makes it serious."

"Julie must have a place to live in," said the Duchess, stiffly.

"I suppose Lady Henry would reply that there are still a few houses in London which do not belong to her kinsman, the Duke of Crowborough."

"Not perhaps to be had for the lending, and ready to step into at a day's notice," said Lord Lackington, with his queer smile, like the play of sharp sunbeams through a mist. "That's the worst of our class. The margin between us and calamity is too wide. We risk too little. Nobody goes to the workhouse."

Sir Wilfrid looked at him curiously. "Do I catch your meaning?" he said, dropping his voice; "is it that if there had been no Duchess, and no Heribert Street, Miss Le Breton would have managed to put up with Lady Henry?"

Lord Lackington smiled again. "I think it probable.... As it is, however, we are all the gainers. We shall now see Miss Julie at her ease and ours."

"You have been for some time acquainted with Miss Le Breton?"

"Oh, some time. I don't exactly remember. Lady Henry, of course, is an old friend of mine, as she is of yours. Sometimes she is rude to me. Then I stay away. But I always go back. She and I can discuss things and people that nobody else recollects—no, as far as that's concerned, you're not in it, Bury. Only this winter, somehow, I have often gone round to see Lady Henry, and have found Miss Le Breton instead so attractive—"

"Precisely," said Sir Wilfrid, laughing; "the whole case in a nutshell."

"What puzzles me," continued his companion, in a musing voice, "is how she can be so English as she is—with her foreign bringing up. She has a most extraordinary instinct for people—people in London—and their relations. I have never known her make a mistake. Yet it is only five years since she began to come to England at all; and she has lived but three with Lady Henry. It was clear, I thought, that neither she nor Lady Henry wished to be questioned. But, do you, for instance—I have no doubt Lady Henry tells you more than she tells me—do you know anything of Mademoiselle Julie's antecedents?"

Sir Wilfrid started. Through his mind ran the same reflection as that to which the Duke had given expression in the morning—"she ought to reveal herself!" Julie Le Breton had no right to leave this old man in his ignorance, while those surrounding him were in the secret. Thereby she made a spectacle of her mother's father—made herself and him the sport of curious eyes. For who could help watching them—every movement, every word? There was a kind of indelicacy in it.

His reply was rather hesitating. "Yes, I happen to know something. But I feel sure Miss Le Breton would prefer to tell you herself. Ask her. While she was with Lady Henry there were reasons for silence—"

"But, of course, I'll ask her," said his companion, eagerly, "if you suppose that I may. A more hungry curiosity was never raised in a human breast than in mine with regard to this dear lady. So charming, handsome, and well bred—and so forlorn! That's the paradox of it. The personality presupposes a milieu—else how produce it? And there is no milieu, save this little circle she has made for herself through Lady Henry.... Ah, and you think I may ask her? I will—that's flat—I will!"

And the old man gleefully rubbed his hands, face and form full of the vivacity of his imperishable youth.

"Choose your time and place," said Sir Wilfrid, hastily. "There are very sad and tragic circumstances—"

Lord Lackington looked at him and nodded gayly, as much as to say, "You distrust me with the sex? Me, who have had the whip-hand of them since my cradle!"

Suddenly the Duchess interrupted. "Sir Wilfrid, you have seen Lady Henry; which did she mind most—the coming-in or the coffee?"

Bury returned, smiling, to the tea-table.

"The coming-in would have been nothing if it had led quickly to the going-out. It was the coffee that ruined you."

"I see," said the Duchess, pouting—"it meant that it was possible for us to enjoy ourselves without Lady Henry. That was the offence."

"Precisely. It showed that you were enjoying yourselves. Otherwise there would have been no lingering, and no coffee."

"I never knew coffee so fatal before," sighed the Duchess. "And now"—it was evident that she shrank from the answer to her own question—"she is really irreconcilable?"

"Absolutely. Let me beg you to take it for granted."

"She won't see any of us—not me?"

Sir Wilfrid hesitated.

"Make the Duke your ambassador."

The Duchess laughed, and flushed a little.

"And Mr. Montresor?"

"Ah," said Sir Wilfrid in another tone, "that's not to be lightly spoken of."

"You don't mean—"

"How many years has that lasted?" said Sir Wilfrid, meditatively.

"Thirty, I think—if not more. It was Lady Henry who told him of his son's death, when his wife daren't do it."

There was a silence. Montresor had lost his only son, a subaltern in the Lancers, in the action of Alumbagh, on the way to the relief of Lucknow.

Then the Duchess broke out:

"I know that you think in your heart of hearts that Julie has been in fault, and that we have all behaved abominably!"

"My dear lady," said Sir Wilfrid, after a moment, "in Persia we believe in fate; I have brought the trick home."

"Yes, yes, that's it!" exclaimed Lord Lackington—it! When Lady Henry wanted a companion—and fate brought her Miss Le Breton—"

"Last night's coffee was already drunk," put in Sir Wilfrid.

Meredith's voice, raised and a trifle harsh, made itself heard.

"Why you should dignify an ugly jealousy by fine words I don't know. For some women—women like our old friend—gratitude is hard. That is the moral of this tale."

"The only one?" said Sir Wilfrid, not without a mocking twist of the lip.

"The only one that matters. Lady Henry had found, or might have found, a daughter—"

"I understand she bargained for a companion."

"Very well. Then she stands upon her foolish rights, and loses both daughter and companion. At seventy, life doesn't forgive you a blunder of that kind."

Sir Wilfrid silently shook his head. Meredith threw back his blanched mane of hair, his deep eyes kindling under the implied contradiction.

"I am an old comrade of Lady Henry's," he said, quickly. "My record, you'll find, comes next to yours, Bury. But if Lady Henry is determined to make a quarrel of this, she must make it. I regret nothing."

"What madness has seized upon all these people?" thought Bury, as he withdrew from the discussion. The fire, the unwonted fire, in Meredith's speech and aspect, amazed him. From the corner to which he had retreated he studied the face of the journalist. It was a face subtly and strongly lined by much living—of the intellectual, however, rather than the physical sort; breathing now a studious dignity, the effect of the broad sweep of brow under the high-peaked lines of grizzled hair, and now broken, tempestuous, scornful, changing with the pliancy of an actor. The head was sunk a little in the shoulders, as though dragged back by its own weight. The form which it commanded had the movements of a man no less accustomed to rule in his own sphere than Montresor himself.

To Sir Wilfrid the famous editor was still personally mysterious, after many years of intermittent acquaintance. He was apparently unmarried; or was there perhaps a wife, picked up in a previous state of existence, and hidden away with her offspring at Clapham or Hornsey or Peckham? Bury could remember, years before, a dowdy old sister, to whom Lady Henry had been on occasion formally polite. Otherwise, nothing. What were the great man's origins and antecedents—his family, school, university? Sir Wilfrid did not know; he did not believe that any one knew. An amazing mastery of the German, and, it was said, the Russian tongues, suggested a foreign education; but neither on this ground nor any other connected with his personal history did Meredith encourage the inquirer. It was often reported that he was of Jewish descent, and there were certain traits, both of feature and character, that lent support to the notion. If so, the strain was that of Heine or Disraeli, not the strain of Commerce.

At any rate, he was one of the most powerful men of his day—the owner, through The New Rambler, of an influence which now for some fifteen years had ranked among the forces to be reckoned with. A man in whom politics assumed a tinge of sombre poetry; a man of hatreds, ideals, indignations, yet of habitually sober speech. As to passions, Sir Wilfrid could have sworn that, wife or no wife, the man who could show that significance of mouth and eye had not gone through life without knowing the stress and shock of them.

Was he, too, beguiled by this woman?—he, too? For a little behind him, beside the Duchess, sat Jacob Delafield; and, during his painful interview that day with Lady Henry, Sir Wilfrid had been informed of several things with regard to Jacob Delafield he had not known before. So she had refused him—this lady who was now the heart of this whirlwind? Permanently? Lady Henry had poured scorn on the notion. She was merely sure of him; could keep him in a string to play with as she chose. Meanwhile the handsome soldier was metal more attractive. Sir Wilfrid reflected, with an inward shrug, that, once let a woman give herself to such a fury as possessed Lady Henry, and there did not seem to be much to choose between her imaginings and those of the most vulgar of her sex.

So Jacob could be played with—whistled on and whistled off as Miss Le Breton chose? Yet his was not a face that suggested it, any more than the face of Dr. Meredith. The young man's countenance was gradually changing its aspect for Sir Wilfrid, in a somewhat singular way, as old impressions of his character died away and new ones emerged. The face, now, often recalled to Bury a portrait by some Holbeinesque master, which he had seen once in the Basle Museum and never forgotten. A large, thin-lipped mouth that, without weakness, suggested patience; the long chin of a man of will; nose, bluntly cut at the tip, yet in the nostril and bridge most delicate; grayish eyes, with a veil of reverie drawn, as it were, momentarily across them, and showing behind the veil a kind of stern sweetness; fair hair low on the brow, which was heavy, and made a massive shelter for the eyes. So looked the young German who had perhaps heard Melanchthon; so, in this middle nineteenth century, looked Jacob Delafield. No, anger makes obtuse; that, no doubt, was Lady Henry's case. At any rate, in Delafield's presence her theory did not commend itself.

But if Delafield had not echoed them, the little Duchess had received Meredith's remarks with enthusiasm.

"Regret! No, indeed! Why should we regret anything, except that Julie has been miserable so long? She has had a bad time. Every day and all day. Ah, you don't know—none of you. You haven't seen all the little things as I have."

"The errands, and the dogs," said Sir William, slyly.

The Duchess threw him a glance half conscious, half resentful, and went on:

"It has been one small torture after another. Even when a person's old you can't bear more than a certain amount, can you? You oughtn't to. No, let's be thankful it's all over, and Julie—our dear, delightful Julie—who has done everybody in this room all sorts of kindnesses, hasn't she?"

An assenting murmur ran round the circle.

"Julie's free! Only she's very lonely. We must see to that, mustn't we? Lady Henry can buy another companion to-morrow—she will. She has heaps of money and heaps of friends, and she'll tell her own story to them all. But Julie has only us. If we desert her—"

"Desert her!" said a voice in the distance, half amused, half electrical. Bury thought it was Jacob's.

"Of course we sha'n't desert her!" cried the Duchess. "We shall rally round her and carry her through. If Lady Henry makes herself disagreeable, then we'll fight. If not, we'll let her cool down. Oh, Julie, darling—here you are!"

The Duchess sprang up and caught her entering friend by the hand.

"And here are we," with a wave round the circle. "This is your court—your St. Germain."

"So you mean me to die in exile," said Julie, with a quavering smile, as she drew off her gloves. Then she looked at her friends. "Oh, how good of you all to come! Lord Lackington!" She went up to him impetuously, and he, taken by surprise, yielded his hands, which she took in both hers. "It was foolish, I know, but you don't think it was so bad, do you?"

She gazed up at him wistfully. Her lithe form seemed almost to cling to the old man. Instinctively, Jacob, Meredith, Sir Wilfrid Bury withdrew their eyes. The room held its breath. As for Lord Lackington, he colored like a girl.

"No, no; a mistake, perhaps, for all of us; but more ours than yours, mademoiselle—much more! Don't fret. Indeed, you look as if you hadn't slept, and that mustn't be. You must think that, sooner or later, it was bound to come. Lady Henry will soften in time, and you will know so well how to meet her. But now we have your future to think of. Only sit down. You mustn't look so tired. Where have you been wandering?"

And with a stately courtesy, her hand still in his, he took her to a chair and helped her to remove her heavy cloak.

"My future!" She shivered as she dropped into her seat.

How weary and beaten-down she looked—the heroine of such a turmoil! Her eyes travelled from face to face, shrinking—unconsciously appealing. In the dim, soft color of the room, her white face and hands, striking against her black dress, were strangely living and significant. They spoke command—through weakness, through sex. For that, in spite of intellectual distinction, was, after all, her secret. She breathed femininity—the old common spell upon the blood.

"I don't know why you're all so kind to me," she murmured. "Let me disappear. I can go into the country and earn my living there. Then I shall be no more trouble."

Unseen himself, Sir Wilfrid surveyed her. He thought her a consummate actress, and revelled in each new phase.

The Duchess, half laughing, half crying, began to scold her friend. Delafield bent over Julie Le Breton's chair.

"Have you had some tea?"

The smile in his eyes provoked a faint answer in hers. While she was declaring that she was in no need whatever of physical sustenance, Meredith advanced with his portfolio. He looked the editor merely, and spoke with a business-like brevity.

"I have brought the sheets of the new Shelley book, Miss Le Breton. It is due for publication on the 22d. Kindly let me have your review within a week. It may run to two columns—possibly even two and a half. You will find here also the particulars of one or two other things—let me know, please, what you will undertake."

Julie put out a languid hand for the portfolio.

"I don't think you ought to trust me."

"What do you want of her?" said Lord Lackington, briskly. "'Chatter about Harriet?' I could write you reams of that myself. I once saw Harriet."

"Ah!"

Meredith, with whom the Shelley cult was a deep-rooted passion, started and looked round; then sharply repressed the eagerness on his tongue and sat down by Miss Le Breton, with whom, in a lowered voice, he began to discuss the points to be noticed in the sheets handed over to her. No stronger proof could he have given of his devotion to her. Julie knew it, and, rousing herself, she met him with a soft attention and docility; thus tacitly relinquishing, as Bury noticed with amusement, all talk of "disappearance."

Only with himself, he suspected, was the fair lady ill at ease. And, indeed, it was so. Julie, by her pallor, her humility, had thrown herself, as it were, into the arms of her friends, and each was now vying with the other as to how best to cheer and console her. Meanwhile her attention was really bent upon her critic—her only critic in this assembly; and he discovered various attempts to draw him into conversation. And when Lord Lackington, discomfited by Meredith, had finished discharging his literary recollections upon him, Sir Wilfrid became complaisant; Julie slipped in and held him.

Leaning her chin on both hands, she bent towards him, fixing him with her eyes. And in spite of his antagonism he no longer felt himself strong enough to deny that the eyes were beautiful, especially with this tragic note in them of fatigue and pain.

"Sir Wilfrid"—she spoke in low entreaty—"you must help me to prevent any breach between Lady Henry and Mr. Montresor."

He looked at her gayly.

"I fear," he said, "you are too late. That point is settled, as I understand from herself."

"Surely not—so soon!"

"There was an exchange of letters this morning."

"Oh, but you can prevent it—you must!" She clasped her hands.

"No," he said, slowly, "I fear you must accept it. Their relation was a matter of old habit. Like other things old and frail, it bears shock and disturbance badly."

She sank back in her chair, raising her hands and letting them fall with a gesture of despair.

One little stroke of punishment—just one! Surely there was no cruelty in that. Sir Wilfrid caught the Horatian lines dancing through his head:

"Just oblige me and touch With your wand that minx Chloe— But don't hurt her much!"

Yet here was Jacob interposing!—Jacob, who had evidently been watching his mild attempt at castigation, no doubt with disapproval. Lover or no lover—what did the man expect? Under his placid exterior, Sir Wilfrid's mind was, in truth, hot with sympathy for the old and helpless.

Delafield bent over Miss Le Breton.

"You will go and rest? Evelyn advises it."

She rose to her feet, and most of the party rose, too.

"Good-bye—good-bye," said Lord Lackington, offering her a cordial hand. "Rest and forget. Everything blows over. And at Easter you must come to me in the country. Blanche will be with me, and my granddaughter Aileen, if I can tempt them away from Italy. Aileen's a little fairy; you'd be charmed with her. Now mind, that's a promise. You must certainly come."

The Duchess had paused in her farewell nothings with Sir Wilfrid to observe her friend. Julie, with her eyes on the ground, murmured thanks; and Lord Lackington, straight as a dart to-night, carrying his seventy-five years as though they were the merest trifle, made a stately and smiling exit. Julie looked round upon the faces left. In her own heart she read the same judgment as in their eyes: "The old man must know!"

The Duke came into the drawing-room half an hour later in quest of his wife. He was about to leave town by a night train for the north, and his temper was, apparently, far from good.

The Duchess was stretched on the sofa in the firelight, her hands behind her head, dreaming. Whether it was the sight of so much ease that jarred on the Duke's ruffled nerves or no, certain it is that he inflicted a thorny good-bye. He had seen Lady Henry, he said, and the reality was even worse than he had supposed. There was absolutely nothing to be said for Miss Le Breton, and he was ashamed of himself to have been so weakly talked over in the matter of the house. His word once given, of course, there was an end of it—for six months. After that, Miss Le Breton must provide for herself. Meanwhile, Lady Henry refused to receive the Duchess, and would be some time before she forgave himself. It was all most annoying, and he was thankful to be going away, for, Lady Rose or no Lady Rose, he really could not have entertained the lady with civility.

"Oh, well, never mind, Freddie," said the Duchess, springing up. "She'll be gone before you come back, and I'll look after her."

The Duke offered a rather sulky embrace, walked to the door, and came back.

"I really very much dislike this kind of gossip," he said, stiffly, "but perhaps I had better say that Lady Henry believes that the affair with Delafield was only one of several. She talks of a certain Captain Warkworth—"

"Yes," said the Duchess, nodding. "I know; but he sha'n't have Julie."

Her smile completed the Duke's annoyance.

"What have you to do with it? I beg, Evelyn—I insist—that you leave Miss Le Breton's love affairs alone."

"You forget, Freddie, that she is my friend."

The little creature fronted him, all wilfulness and breathing hard, her small hands clasped on her breast.

With an angry exclamation the Duke departed.

* * * * *

At half-past eight a hansom dashed up to Crowborough House. Montresor emerged.

He found the two ladies and Jacob Delafield just beginning dinner, and stayed with them an hour; but it was not an hour of pleasure. The great man was tired with work and debate, depressed also by the quarrel with his old friend. Julie did not dare to put questions, and guiltily shrank into herself. She divined that a great price was being paid on her behalf, and must needs bitterly ask whether anything that she could offer or plead was worth it—bitterly suspect, also, that the query had passed through other minds than her own.

After dinner, as Montresor rose with the Duchess to take his leave, Julie got a word with him in the corridor.

"You will give me ten minutes' talk?" she said, lifting her pale face to him. "You mustn't, mustn't quarrel with Lady Henry because of me."

He drew himself up, perhaps with a touch of haughtiness.

"Lady Henry could end it in a moment. Don't, I beg of you, trouble your head about the matter. Even as an old friend, one must be allowed one's self-respect."

"But mayn't I—"

"Nearly ten o'clock!" he cried, looking at his watch. "I must be off this moment. So you are going to the house in Heribert Street? I remember Lady Mary Leicester perfectly. As soon as you are settled, tell me, and I will present myself. Meanwhile "—he smiled and bent his black head towards her—"look in to-morrow's papers for some interesting news."

He sprang into his hansom and was gone.

Julie went slowly up-stairs. Of course she understood. The long intrigue had reached its goal, and within twelve hours the Times would announce the appointment of Captain Warkworth, D.S.O., to the command of the Mokembe military mission. He would have obtained his heart's desire—through her.

How true were those last words, perhaps only Julie knew. She looked back upon all the manoeuvres and influences she had brought to bear—flattery here, interest or reciprocity there, the lures of Crowborough House, the prestige of Lady Henry's drawing-room. Wheel by wheel she had built up her cunning machine, and the machine had worked. No doubt the last completing touch had been given the night before. Her culminating offence against Lady Henry—the occasion of her disgrace and banishment—had been to Warkworth the stepping-stone of fortune.

What "gossamer girl" could have done so much? She threw back her head proudly and heard the beating of her heart.

Lady Henry was fiercely forgotten. She opened the drawing-room door, absorbed in a counting of the hours till she and Warkworth should meet.

Then, amid the lights and shadows of the Duchess's drawing-room, Jacob Delafield rose and came towards her. Her exaltation dropped in a moment. Some testing, penetrating influence seemed to breathe from this man, which filled her with a moral discomfort, a curious restlessness. Did he guess the nature of her feeling for Warkworth? Was he acquainted with the efforts she had been making for the young soldier? She could not be sure; he had never given her the smallest sign. Yet she divined that few things escaped him where the persons who touched his feelings were concerned. And Evelyn—the dear chatterbox—certainly suspected.

"How tired you are!" he said to her, gently. "What a day it has been for you! Evelyn is writing letters. Let me bring you the papers—and please don't talk."

She submitted to a sofa, to an adjusted light, to the papers on her knee. Then Delafield withdrew and took up a book.

She could not rest, however; visions of the morrow and of Warkworth's triumphant looks kept flashing through her. Yet all the while Delafield's presence haunted her—she could not forget him, and presently she addressed him.

"Mr. Delafield!"

He heard the low voice and came.

"I have never thanked you for your goodness last night. I do thank you now—most earnestly."

"You needn't. You know very well what I would do to serve you if I could."

"Even when you think me in the wrong?" said Julie, with a little, hysterical laugh.

Her conscience smote her. Why provoke this intimate talk—wantonly—with the man she had made suffer? Yet her restlessness, which was partly nervous fatigue, drove her on.

Delafield flushed at her words.

"How have I given you cause to say that?"

"Oh, you are very transparent. One sees that you are always troubling yourself about the right and wrong of things."

"All very well for one's self," said Delafield, trying to laugh. "I hope I don't seem to you to be setting up as a judge of other people's right and wrong?"

"Yes, yes, you do!" she said, passionately. Then, as he winced, "No, I don't mean that. But you do judge—it is in your nature—and other people feel it."

"I didn't know I was such a prig," said Delafield, humbly. "It is true I am always puzzling over things."

Julie was silent. She was indeed secretly convinced that he no more approved the escapade of the night before than did Sir Wilfrid Bury. Through the whole evening she had been conscious of a watchful anxiety and resistance on his part. Yet he had stood by her to the end—so warmly, so faithfully.

He sat down beside her, and Julie felt a fresh pang of remorse, perhaps of alarm. Why had she called him to her? What had they to do with each other? But he soon reassured her. He began to talk of Meredith, and the work before her—the important and glorious work, as he naively termed it, of the writer.

And presently he turned upon her with sudden feeling.

"You accused me, just now, of judging what I have no business to judge. If you think that I regret the severance of your relation with Lady Henry, you are quite, quite mistaken. It has been the dream of my life this last year to see you free—mistress of your own life. It—it made me mad that you should be ordered about like a child—dependent upon another person's will."

She looked at him curiously.

"I know. That revolts you always—any form of command? Evelyn tells me that you carry it to curious lengths with your servants and laborers."

He drew back, evidently disconcerted.

"Oh, I try some experiments. They generally break down."

"You try to do without servants, Evelyn says, as much as possible."

"Well, if I do try, I don't succeed," he said, laughing. "But"—his eyes kindled—"isn't it worth while, during a bit of one's life, to escape, if one can, from some of the paraphernalia in which we are all smothered? Look there! What right have I to turn my fellow-creatures into bedizened automata like that?"

And he threw out an accusing hand towards the two powdered footmen, who were removing the coffee-cups and making up the fire in the next room, while the magnificent groom of the chambers stood like a statue, receiving some orders from the Duchess.

Julie, however, showed no sympathy.

"They are only automata in the drawing-room. Down-stairs they are as much alive as you or I."

"Well, let us put it that I prefer other kinds of luxury," said Delafield. "However, as I appear to have none of the qualities necessary to carry out my notions, they don't get very far."

"You would like to shake hands with the butler?" said Julie, musing. "I knew a case of that kind. But the butler gave warning."

Delafield laughed.

"Perhaps the simpler thing would be to do without the butler."

"I am curious," she said, smiling—"very curious. Sir Wilfrid, for instance, talks of going down to stay with you?"

"Why not? He'd come off extremely well. There's an ex-butler, and an ex-cook of Chudleigh's settled in the village. When I have a visitor, they come in and take possession. We live like fighting-cocks."

"So nobody knows that, in general, you live like a workman?"

Delafield looked impatient.

"Somebody seems to have been cramming Evelyn with ridiculous tales, and she's been spreading them. I must have it out with her."

"I expect there is a good deal in them," said Julie. Then, unexpectedly, she raised her eyes and gave him a long and rather strange look. "Why do you dislike having servants and being waited upon so much, I wonder? Is it—you won't be angry?—that you have such a strong will, and you do these things to tame it?"

Delafield made a sudden movement, and Julie had no sooner spoken the words than she regretted them.

"So you think I should have made a jolly tyrannical slave-owner?" said Delafield, after a moment's pause.

Julie bent towards him with a charming look of appeal—almost of penitence. "On the contrary, I think you would have been as good to your slaves as you are to your friends."

His eyes met hers quietly.

"Thank you. That was kind of you. And as to giving orders, and getting one's way, don't suppose I let Chudleigh's estate go to ruin! It's only"—he hesitated—"the small personal tyrannies of every day that I'd like to minimize. They brutalize half the fellows I know."

"You'll come to them," said Julie, absently. Then she colored, suddenly remembering the possible dukedom that awaited him.

His brow contracted a little, as though he understood. He made no reply. Julie, with her craving to be approved—to say what pleased—could not leave it there.

"I wish I understood," she said, softly, after a moment, "what, or who it was that gave you these opinions."

Getting still no answer, she must perforce meet the gray eyes bent upon her, more expressively, perhaps, than their owner knew. "That you shall understand," he said, after a minute, in a voice which was singularly deep and full, "whenever you choose to ask."

Julie shrank and drew back.

"Very well," she said, trying to speak lightly. "I'll hold you to that. Alack! I had forgotten a letter I must write."

And she pretended to write it, while Delafield buried himself in the newspapers.



XIII

Julie's curiosity—passing and perfunctory as it was—concerning the persons and influences that had worked upon Jacob Delafield since his college days, was felt in good earnest by not a few of Delafield's friends. For he was a person rich in friends, reserved as he generally was, and crotchety as most of them thought him. The mixture of self-evident strength and manliness in his physiognomy with something delicate and evasive, some hindering element of reflection or doubt, was repeated in his character. On the one side he was a robust, healthy Etonian, who could ride, shoot, and golf like the rest of his kind, who used the terse, slangy ways of speech of the ordinary Englishman, who loved the land and its creatures, and had a natural hatred for a poacher; and on another he was a man haunted by dreams and spiritual voices, a man for whom, as he paced his tired horse homeward after a day's run, there would rise on the grays and purples of the winter dusk far-shining "cities of God" and visions of a better life for man. He read much poetry, and the New Testament spoke to him imperatively, though in no orthodox or accustomed way. Ruskin, and the earlier work of Tolstoy, then just beginning to take hold of the English mind, had affected his thought and imagination, as the generation before him had been affected by Carlyle, Emerson, and George Sand.

This present phase of his life, however, was the outcome of much that was turbulent and shapeless in his first youth. He seemed to himself to have passed through Oxford under a kind of eclipse. All that he could remember of two-thirds of his time there was an immoderate amount of eating, drinking, and sleeping. A heavy animal existence, disturbed by moments of unhappiness and remorse, or, at best, lightened by intervals and gleams of friendship with two or three men who tried to prod him out of his lethargy, and cherished what appeared, to himself in particular, a strange and unreasonable liking for him. Such, to his own thinking, had been his Oxford life, up to the last year of his residence there.

Then, when he was just making certain of an ignominious failure in the final schools, he became more closely acquainted with one of the college tutors, whose influence was to be the spark which should at last fire the clay. This modest, heroic, and learned man was a paralyzed invalid, owing to an accident in the prime of life. He had lost the use of his lower limbs—"dead from the waist down." Yet such was the strength of his moral and intellectual life that he had become, since the catastrophe, one of the chief forces of his college. The invalid-chair on which he wheeled himself, recumbent, from room to room, and from which he gave his lectures, was, in the eyes of Oxford, a symbol not of weakness, but of touching and triumphant victory. He gave himself no airs of resignation or of martyrdom. He simply lived his life—except during those crises of weakness or pain when his friends were shut out—as though it were like any other life, save only for what he made appear an insignificant physical limitation. Scholarship, college business or college sports, politics and literature—his mind, at least, was happy, strenuous, and at home in them all. To have pitied him would have been a mere impertinence. While in his own heart, which never grieved over himself, there were treasures of compassion for the weak, the tempted, and the unsuccessful, which spent themselves in secret, simple ways, unknown to his most intimate friends.

This man's personality it was which, like the branch of healing on bitter waters, presently started in Jacob Delafield's nature obscure processes of growth and regeneration. The originator of them knew little of what was going on. He was Delafield's tutor for Greats, in the ordinary college routine; Delafield took essays to him, and occasionally lingered to talk. But they never became exactly intimate. A few conversations of "pith and moment"; a warm shake of the hand and a keen look of pleasure in the blue eyes of the recumbent giant when, after one year of superhuman but belated effort, Delafield succeeded in obtaining a second class; a little note of farewell, affectionate and regretful, when Delafield left the university; an occasional message through a common friend—Delafield had little more than these to look back upon, outside the discussions of historical or philosophical subjects which had entered into their relation as pupil and teacher.

And now the paralyzed tutor was dead, leaving behind him a volume of papers on classical subjects, the reputation of an admirable scholar, and the fragrance of a dear and honored name. His pupils had been many; they counted among the most distinguished of England's youth; and all of them owed him much. Few people thought of Delafield when the list of them was recited; and yet, in truth, Jacob's debt was greater than any; for he owed this man nothing less than his soul.

No doubt the period at Oxford had been rather a period of obscure conflict than of mere idleness and degeneracy, as it had seemed to be. But it might easily have ended in physical and moral ruin, and, as it was—thanks to Courtenay—Delafield went out to the business of life, a man singularly master of himself, determined to live his own life for his own ends.

In the first place, he was conscious, like many other young men of his time, of a strong repulsion towards the complexities and artificialities of modern society. As in the forties, a time of social stir was rising out of a time of stagnation. Social settlements were not yet founded, but the experiments which led to them were beginning. Jacob looked at the life of London, the clubs and the country-houses, the normal life of his class, and turned from it in aversion. He thought, sometimes, of emigrating, in search of a new heaven and a new earth, as men emigrated in the forties.

But his mother and sister were alone in the world—his mother a somewhat helpless being, his sister still very young and unmarried. He could not reconcile it to his conscience to go very far from them.

He tried the bar, amid an inner revolt that only increased with time. And the bar implied London, and the dinners and dances of London, which, for a man of his family, the probable heir to the lands and moneys of the Chudleighs, were naturally innumerable. He was much courted, in spite, perhaps because, of his oddities; and it was plain to him that with only a small exercise of those will-forces he felt accumulating within him, most of the normal objects of ambition were within his grasp. The English aristocratic class, as we all know, is no longer exclusive. It mingles freely with the commoner world on apparently equal terms. But all the while its personal and family cohesion is perhaps greater than ever. The power of mere birth, it seemed to Jacob, was hardly less in the England newly possessed of household suffrage than in the England of Charles James Fox's youth, though it worked through other channels. And for the persons in command of this power, a certain appareil de vie was necessary, taken for granted. So much income, so many servants, such and such habits—these things imposed themselves. Life became a soft and cushioned business, with an infinity of layers between it and any hard reality—a round pea in a silky pod.

And he meanwhile found himself hungry to throw aside these tamed and trite forms of existence, and to penetrate to the harsh, true, simple things behind. His imagination and his heart turned towards the primitive, indispensable labors on which society rests—the life of the husbandman, the laborer, the smith, the woodman, the builder; he dreamed the old, enchanted dream of living with nature; of becoming the brother not of the few, but of the many. He was still reading in chambers, however, when his first cousin, the Duke, a melancholy semi-invalid, a widower, with an only son tuberculous almost from his birth, arrived from abroad. Jacob was brought into new contact with him. The Duke liked him, and offered him the agency of his Essex property. Jacob accepted, partly that he might be quit of the law, partly that he might be in the country and among the poor, partly for reasons, or ghosts of reasons, unavowed even to himself. The one terror that haunted his life was the terror of the dukedom. This poor, sickly lad, the heir, with whom he soon made warm friends, and the silent, morbid Duke, with the face of Charles V. at St. Just—he became, in a short time, profoundly and pitifully attached to them. It pleased him to serve them; above all did it please him to do all he could, and to incite others to do all they could, to keep these two frail persons cheered and alive. His own passionate dread lest he should suddenly find himself in their place, gave a particular poignancy to the service he was always ready to render them of his best.

The Duke's confidence in him had increased rapidly. Delafield was now about to take over the charge of another of the Duke's estates, in the Midlands, and much of the business connected with some important London property was also coming into his hands. He had made himself a good man of business where another's interests were concerned, and his dreams did no harm to the Duke's revenues. He gave, indeed, a liberal direction to the whole policy of the estate, and, as he had said to Julie, the Duke did not forbid experiments.

As to his own money, he gave it away as wisely as he could, which is, perhaps, not saying very much for the schemes and Quixotisms of a young man of eight-and-twenty. At any rate, he gave it away—to his mother and sister first, then to a variety of persons and causes. Why should he save a penny of it? He had some money of his own, besides his income from the Duke. It was disgusting that he should have so much, and that it should be, apparently, so very easy for him to have indefinitely more if he wanted it.

He lived in a small cottage, in the simplest, plainest way compatible with his work and with the maintenance of two decently furnished rooms for any friend who might chance to visit him. He read much and thought much. But he was not a man of any commanding speculative or analytic ability. It would have been hard for him to give any very clear or logical account of himself and his deepest beliefs. Nevertheless, with every year that passed he became a more remarkable character—his will stronger, his heart gentler. In the village where he lived they wondered at him a good deal, and often laughed at him. But if he had left them, certainly the children and the old people would have felt as though the sun had gone out.

In London he showed little or nothing of his peculiar ways and pursuits; was, in fact, as far as anybody knew—outside half a dozen friends—just the ordinary, well-disposed young man, engaged in a business that every one understood. With Lady Henry, his relations, apart from his sympathy with Julie Le Breton, had been for some time rather difficult. She made gratitude hard for one of the most grateful of men. When the circumstances of the Hubert Delafields had been much straitened, after Lord Hubert's death, Lady Henry had come to their aid, and had, in particular, spent fifteen hundred pounds on Jacob's school and college education. But there are those who can make a gift burn into the bones of those who receive it. Jacob had now saved nearly the whole sum, and was about to repay her. Meanwhile his obligation, his relationship, and her age made it natural, or rather imperative, that he should be often in her house; but when he was with her the touch of arrogant brutality in her nature, especially towards servants and dependants, roused him almost to fury. She knew it, and would often exercise her rough tongue merely for the pleasure of tormenting him.

No sooner, therefore, had he come to know the fragile, distinguished creature whom Lady Henry had brought back with her one autumn as her companion than his sympathies were instantly excited, first by the mere fact that she was Lady Henry's dependant, and then by the confidence, as to her sad story and strange position, which she presently reposed in him and his cousin Evelyn. On one or two occasions, very early in his acquaintance with her, he was a witness of some small tyranny of Lady Henry's towards her. He saw the shrinking of the proud nature, and the pain thrilled through his own nerves as though the lash had touched himself. Presently it became a joy to him whenever he was in town to conspire with Evelyn Crowborough for her pleasure and relief. It was the first time he had ever conspired, and it gave him sometimes a slight shock to see how readily these two charming women lent themselves, on occasion, to devices that had the aspect of intrigue, and involved a good deal of what, in his own case, he would have roundly dubbed lying. And, in truth, if he had known, they did not find him a convenient ally, and he was by no means always in their confidence.

Once, about six months after Julie's arrival in Bruton Street, he met her on a spring morning crossing Kensington Gardens with the dogs. She looked startlingly white and ill, and when he spoke to her with eager sympathy her mouth quivered and her dark eyes clouded with tears. The sight produced an extraordinary effect on a man large-hearted and simple, for whom women still moved in an atmosphere of romance. His heart leaped within him as she let herself be talked with and comforted. And when her delicate hand rested in his as they said good-bye, he was conscious of feelings—wild, tumultuous feelings—to which, in his walk homeward through the spring glades of the park, he gave impetuous course.

Romantic, indeed, the position was, for romance rests on contrast. Jacob, who knew Julie Le Breton's secret, was thrilled or moved by the contrasts of her existence at every turn. Her success and her subjection; the place in Lady Henry's circle which Lady Henry had, in the first instance, herself forced her to take, contrasted with the shifts and evasions, the poor, tortuous ways by which, alas! she must often escape Lady Henry's later jealousy; her intellectual strength and her most feminine weaknesses; these things stirred and kept up in Jacob a warm and passionate pity. The more clearly he saw the specks in her glory, the more vividly did she appear to him a princess in distress, bound by physical or moral fetters not of her own making. None of the well-born, well-trained damsels who had been freely thrown across his path had so far beguiled him in the least. Only this woman of doubtful birth and antecedents, lonely, sad, and enslaved amid what people called her social triumphs, stole into his heart—beautified by what he chose to consider her misfortunes, and made none the less attractive by the fact that as he pursued, she retreated; as he pressed, she grew cold.

When, indeed, after their friendship had lasted about a year, he proposed to her and she refused him, his passion, instead of cooling, redoubled. It never occurred to him to think that she had done a strange thing from the worldly point of view—that would have involved an appreciation of himself, as a prize in the marriage market, he would have loathed to make. But he was one of the men for whom resistance enhances the value of what they desire, and secretly he said to himself, "Persevere!" When he was repelled or puzzled by certain aspects of her character, he would say to himself:

"It is because she is alone and miserable. Women are not meant to be alone. What soft, helpless creatures they are!—even when intellectually they fly far ahead of us. If she would but put her hand in mine I would so serve and worship her, she would have no need for these strange things she does—the doublings and ruses of the persecuted." Thus the touches of falsity that repelled Wilfrid Bury were to Delafield's passion merely the stains of rough travel on a fair garment.

But she refused him, and for another year he said no more. Then, as things got worse and worse for her, he spoke again—ambiguously—a word or two, thrown out to sound the waters. Her manner of silencing him on this second occasion was not what it had been before. His suspicions were aroused, and a few days later he divined the Warkworth affair.

When Sir Wilfrid Bury spoke to him of the young officer's relations to Mademoiselle Le Breton, Delafield's stiff defence of Julie's prerogatives in the matter masked the fact that he had just gone through a week of suffering, wrestling his heart down in country lanes; a week which had brought him to somewhat curious results.

In the first place, as with Sir Wilfrid, he stood up stoutly for her rights. If she chose to attach herself to this man, whose business was it to interfere? If he was worthy and loved her, Jacob himself would see fair play, would be her friend and supporter.

But the scraps of gossip about Captain Warkworth which the Duchess—who had disliked the man at first sight—gathered from different quarters and confided to Jacob were often disquieting. It was said that at Simla he had entrapped this little heiress, and her obviously foolish and incapable mother, by devices generally held to be discreditable; and it had taken two angry guardians to warn him off. What was the state of the case now no one exactly knew; though it was shrewdly suspected that the engagement was only dormant. The child was known to have been in love with him; in two years more she would be of age; her fortune was enormous, and Warkworth was a poor and ambitious man.

There was also an ugly tale of a civilian's wife in a hill station, referring to a date some years back; but Delafield did not think it necessary to believe it.

As to his origins—there again, Delafield, making cautious inquiries, came across some unfavorable details, confided to him by a man of Warkworth's own regiment. His father had retired from the army immediately after the Mutiny, broken in health, and much straitened in means. Himself belonging to a family of the poorer middle class, he had married late, a good woman not socially his equal, and without fortune. They settled in the Isle of Wight, on his half-pay, and harassed by a good many debts. Their two children, Henry and Isabella, were then growing up, and the parents' hopes were fixed upon their promising and good-looking son. With difficulty they sent him to Charterhouse and a "crammer." The boy coveted a "crack" regiment; by dint of mustering all the money and all the interest they could, they procured him his heart's desire. He got unpardonably into debt; the old people's resources were lessening, not expanding; and ultimately the poor father died broken down by the terror of bankruptcy for himself and disgrace for Henry. The mother still survived, in very straitened circumstances.

"His sister," said Delafield's informant, "married one of the big London tailors, whom she met first on the Ryde pier. I happen to know the facts, for my father and I have been customers of his for years, and one day, hearing that I was in Warkworth's regiment, he told me some stories of his brother-in-law in a pretty hostile tone. His sister, it appears, has often financed him of late. She must have done. How else could he have got through? Warkworth may be a fine, showy fellow when there's fighting about. In private life he's one of the most self-indulgent dogs alive. And yet he's ashamed of the sister and her husband, and turns his back on them whenever he can. Oh, he's not a person of nice feeling, is Warkworth—but, mark my words, he'll be one of the most successful men in the army."

There was one side. On the other was to be set the man's brilliant professional record; his fine service in this recent campaign; the bull-dog defence of an isolated fort, which insured the safety of most important communications; contempt of danger, thirst, exposure; the rescue of a wounded comrade from the glacis of the fort, under a murderous fire; facts, all of them, which had fired the public imagination and brought his name to the front. No such acts as these could have been done by any mere self-indulgent pretender.

Delafield reserved his judgment. He set himself to watch. In his inmost heart there was a strange assumption of the right to watch, and, if need be, to act. Julie's instinct had told her truly. Delafield, the individualist, the fanatic for freedom—he, also, had his instinct of tyranny. She should not destroy herself, the dear, weak, beloved woman! He would prevent it.

* * * * *

Thus, during these hours of transition, Delafield thought much of Julie. Julie, on the other hand, had no sooner said good-night to him after the conversation described in the last chapter than she drove him from her thoughts—one might have said, with vehemence.

* * * * *

The Times of the following morning duly contained the announcement of the appointment of Captain Warkworth, D.S.O., of the Queen's Grays, to the command of the military mission to Mokembe recently determined on by her Majesty's government. The mission would proceed to Mokembe as soon as possible, but of two officers who on the ground of especial knowledge would form part of it, under Captain Warkworth's command, one was at present in Canada and the other at the Cape. It would, therefore, hardly be possible for the mission to start from the coast for the interior before the beginning of May. In the same paper certain promotions and distinctions on account of the recent Mahsud campaign were reprinted from the Gazette. Captain Henry Warkworth's brevet majority was among them.

The Times leader on the announcement pointed out that the mission would be concerned with important frontier questions, still more with the revival of the prestige of England in regions where a supine government had allowed it to wither unaccountably. Other powers had been playing a filching and encroaching game at the expense of the British lion in these parts, and it was more than time that he should open his sleepy eyes upon what was going on. As to the young officer who was to command the mission, the great journal made a few civil though guarded remarks. His record in the recent campaign was indeed highly distinguished; still it could hardly be said that, take it as a whole, his history so far gave him a claim to promotion so important as that which he had now obtained.

Well, now he had his chance. English soldiers had a way of profiting by such chances. The Times courteously gave him the benefit of the doubt, prophesying that he would rise to the occasion and justify the choice of his superiors.

The Duchess looked over Julie's shoulder as she read.

"Schemer," she said, as she dropped a kiss on the back of Julie's neck, "I hope you're satisfied. The Times doesn't know what to make of it."

Julie put down the paper with a glowing cheek.

"They'll soon know," she said, quietly.

"Julie, do you believe in him so much?"

"What does it matter what I think? It is not I who have appointed him."

"Not so sure," laughed the Duchess. "As if he would have had a chance without you. Whom did he know last November when you took him up?"

Julie moved to and fro, her hands behind her. The tremor on her lip, the light in her eye showed her sense of triumph.

"What have I done," she said, laughing, "but push a few stones out of the way of merit?"

"Some of them were heavy," said the Duchess, making a little face. "Need I invite Lady Froswick any more?"

Julie threw her arms about her.

"Evelyn, what a darling you've been! Now I'll never worry you again."

"Oh, for some people I would do ten times as much!" cried the Duchess. "But, Julie, I wish I knew why you think so well of this man. I—I don't always hear very nice things about him."

"I dare say not," said Julie, flushing. "It is easy to hate success."

"No, come, we're not as mean as that!" cried the Duchess. "I vow that all the heroes I've ever known had a ripping time. Julie"—she kissed her friend impulsively—"Julie, don't like him too much. I don't think he's good enough."

"Good enough for what?" said Julie's bitter voice. "Make yourself easy about Captain Warkworth, Evelyn; but please understand—anything is good enough for me. Don't let your dear head be troubled about my affairs. They are never serious, and nothing counts—except," she added, recklessly, "that I get a little amusement by the way."

"Julie," cried the Duchess, "as if Jacob—"

Julie frowned and released herself; then she laughed.

"Nothing that one ever says about ordinary mortals applies to Mr. Delafield. He is, of course, hors concours."

"Julie!"

"It is you, Evelyn, who make me mechante. I could be grateful—and excellent friends with that young man—in my own way."

The Duchess sighed, and held her tongue with difficulty.

* * * * *

When the successful hero arrived that night for dinner he found a solitary lady in the drawing-room.

Was this, indeed, Julie Le Breton—this soft, smiling vision in white?

He expected to have found a martyr, pale and wan from the shock of the catastrophe which had befallen her, and, even amid the intoxication of his own great day, he was not easy as to how she might have taken his behavior on the fatal night. But here was some one, all joy, animation, and indulgence—a glorified Julie who trod on air. Why? Because good-fortune had befallen her friend? His heart smote him. He had never seen her so touching, so charming. Since the incubus of Lady Henry's house and presence had been removed she seemed to have grown years younger. A white muslin dress of her youth, touched here and there by the Duchess's maid, replaced the familiar black satin. When Warkworth first saw her he paused unconsciously in surprise.

Then he advanced to meet her, broadly smiling, his blue eyes dancing.

"You got my note this morning?"

"Yes," she said, demurely. "You were much too kind, and much—much too absurd. I have done nothing."

"Oh, nothing, of course." Then, after a moment: "Are you going to tie me to that fiction, or am I to be allowed a little decent sincerity? You know perfectly well that you have done it all. There, there; give me your hand."

She gave it, shrinking, and he kissed it joyously.

"Isn't it jolly!" he said, with a school-boy's delight as he released her hand. "I saw Lord M—— this morning." He named the Prime Minister. "Very civil, indeed. Then the Commander-in-Chief—and Montresor gave me half an hour. It is all right. They are giving me a capital staff. Excellent fellows, all of them. Oh, you'll see, I shall pull it through—I shall pull it through. By George! it is a chance!"

And he stood radiant, rubbing his hands over the blaze.

The Duchess came in accompanied by an elderly cousin of the Duke's, a white-haired, black-gowned spinster, Miss Emily Lawrence—one of those single women, travelled, cultivated, and good, that England produces in such abundance.

"Well, so you're going," said the Duchess, to Warkworth. "And I hear that we ought to think you a lucky man."

"Indeed you ought, and you must," he said, gayly. "If only the climate will behave itself. The blackwater fever has a way of killing you in twenty-four hours if it gets hold of you; but short of that—"

"Oh, you will be quite safe," said the Duchess. "Let me introduce you to Miss Lawrence. Emily, this is Captain Warkworth."

The elderly lady gave a sudden start. Then she quietly put on her spectacles and studied the young soldier with a pair of intelligent gray eyes.

* * * * *

Nothing could have been more agreeable than Warkworth at dinner. Even the Duchess admitted as much. He talked easily, but not too much, of the task before him; told amusing tales of his sporting experience of years back in the same regions which were now to be the scene of his mission; discussed the preparations he would have to make at Denga, the coast town, before starting on his five weeks' journey to the interior; drew the native porter and the native soldier, not to their advantage, and let fall, by the way, not a few wise or vivacious remarks as to the races, resources, and future of this illimitable and mysterious Africa—this cavern of the unknown, into which the waves of white invasion, one upon another, were now pressing fast and ceaselessly, towards what goal, only the gods knew.

A few other men were dining; among them two officers from the staff of the Commander-in-Chief. Warkworth, much their junior, treated them with a skilful deference; but through the talk that prevailed his military competence and prestige appeared plainly enough, even to the women. His good opinion of himself was indeed sufficiently evident; but there was no crude vainglory. At any rate, it was a vainglory of youth, ability, and good looks, ratified by these budding honors thus fresh upon him, and no one took it amiss.

When the gentlemen returned to the drawing-room, Warkworth and Julie once more found themselves together, this time in the Duchess's little sitting-room at the end of the long suite of rooms.

"When do you go?" she asked him, abruptly.

"Not for about a month." He mentioned the causes of delay.

"That will bring you very late—into the worst of the heat?" Her voice had a note of anxiety.

"Oh, we shall all be seasoned men. And after the first few days we shall get into the uplands."

"What do your home people say?" she asked him, rather shyly. She knew, in truth, little about them.

"My mother? Oh, she will be greatly pleased. I go down to the Isle of Wight for a day or two to see her to-morrow. But now, dear lady, that is enough of my wretched self. You—do you stay on here with the Duchess?"

She told him of the house in Heribert Street. He listened with attention.

"Nothing could be better. You will have a most distinguished little setting of your own, and Lady Henry will repent at leisure. You won't be lonely?"

"Oh no!" But her smile was linked with a sigh.

He came nearer to her.

"You should never be lonely if I could help it," he said, in a low voice.

"When people are nameless and kinless," was her passionate reply, in the same undertone as his, "they must be lonely."

He looked at her with eagerness. She lay back in the firelight, her beautiful brow and eyes softly illuminated. He felt within him a sudden snapping of restraints. Why—why refuse what was so clearly within his grasp? Love has many manners—many entrances—and many exits.

"When will you tell me all that I want to know about you?" he said, bending towards her with tender insistence. "There is so much I have to ask."

"Oh, some time," she said, hurriedly, her pulses quickening. "Mine is not a story to be told on a great day like this."

He was silent a moment, but his face spoke for him.

"Our friendship has been a beautiful thing, hasn't it?" he said, at last, in a voice of emotion. "Look here!" He thrust his hand into his breast-pocket and half withdrew it. "Do you see where I carry your letters?"

"You shouldn't—they are not worthy."

"How charming you are in that dress—in that light! I shall always see you as you are to-night."

A silence. Excitement mounted in their veins. Suddenly he stooped and kissed her hands. They looked into each other's eyes, and the seconds passed like hours.

Presently, in the nearer drawing-room, there was a sound of approaching voices and they moved apart.

"Julie, Emily Lawrence is going," said the Duchess's voice, pitched in what seemed to Julie a strange and haughty note. "Captain Warkworth, Miss Lawrence thinks that you and she have common friends—Lady Blanche Moffatt and her daughter."

Captain Warkworth murmured some conventionality, and passed into the next drawing-room with Miss Lawrence.

Julie rose to her feet, the color dying out of her face, her passionate eyes on the Duchess, who stood facing her friend, guiltily pale, and ready to cry.



XIV

On the morning following these events, Warkworth went down to the Isle of Wight to see his mother. On the journey he thought much of Julie. They had parted awkwardly the night before. The evening, which had promised so well, had, after all, lacked finish and point. What on earth had that tiresome Miss Lawrence wanted with him? They had talked of Simla and the Moffatts. The conversation had gone in spurts, she looking at him every now and then with eyes that seemed to say more than her words. All that she had actually said was perfectly insignificant and trivial. Yet there was something curious in her manner, and when the time came for him to take his departure she had bade him a frosty little farewell.

She had described herself once or twice as a great friend of Lady Blanche Moffatt. Was it possible?

But if Lady Blanche, whose habits of sentimental indiscretion were ingrained, had gossiped to this lady, what then? Why should he be frowned on by Miss Lawrence, or anybody else? That malicious talk at Simla had soon exhausted itself. His present appointment was a triumphant answer to it all. His slanderers—including Aileen's ridiculous guardians—could only look foolish if they pursued the matter any further. What "trap" was there—what mesalliance? A successful soldier was good enough for anybody. Look at the first Lord Clyde, and scores besides.

The Duchess, too. Why had she treated him so well at first, and so cavalierly after dinner? Her manners were really too uncertain.

What was the matter, and why did she dislike him? He pondered over it a good deal, and with much soreness of spirit. Like many men capable of very selfish or very cruel conduct, he was extremely sensitive, and took keen notice of the fact that a person liked or disliked him.

If the Duchess disliked him it could not be merely on account of the Simla story, even though the old maid might conceivably have given her a jaundiced account. The Duchess knew nothing of Aileen, and was little influenced, so far as he had observed her, by considerations of abstract justice or propriety, affecting persons whom she had never seen.

No, she was Julie's friend, the little wilful lady, and it was for Julie she ruffled her feathers, like an angry dove.

So his thoughts had come back to Julie, though, indeed, it seemed to him that they were never far from her. As he looked absently from the train windows on the flying landscape, Julie's image hovered between him and it—a magic sun, flooding soul and senses with warmth. How unconsciously, how strangely his feelings had changed towards her! That coolness of temper and nerve he had been able to preserve towards her for so long was, indeed, breaking down. He recognized the danger, and wondered where it would lead him. What a fascinating, sympathetic creature!—and, by George! what she had done for him!

Aileen! Aileen was a little sylph, a pretty child-angel, white-winged and innocent, who lived in a circle of convent thoughts, knowing nothing of the world, and had fallen in love with him as the first man who had ever made love to her. But this intelligent, full-blooded woman, who could understand at a word, or a half word, who had a knowledge of affairs which many a high-placed man might envy, with whom one never had a dull moment—this courted, distinguished Julie Le Breton—his mind swelled with half-guilty pride at the thought that for six months he had absorbed all her energies, that a word from him could make her smile or sigh, that he could force her to look at him with eyes so melting and so troubled as those with which she had given him her hands—her slim, beautiful hands—that night in Grosvenor Square.

How freedom became her! Dependency had dropped from her, like a cast-off cloak, and beside her fresh, melancholy charm, the airs and graces of a child of fashion and privilege like the little Duchess appeared almost cheap and trivial. Poor Julie! No doubt some social struggle was before her. Lady Henry was strong, after all, in this London world, and the solider and stupider people who get their way in the end were not, she thought, likely to side with Lady Henry's companion in a quarrel where the facts of the story were unquestionably, at first sight, damaging to Miss Le Breton. Julie would have her hours of bitterness and humiliation; and she would conquer by boldness, if she conquered at all—by originality, by determining to live her own life. That would preserve for her the small circle, if it lost her the large world. And the small circle was what she lived for, what she ought, at any rate, to live for.

It was not likely she would marry. Why should she desire it? From any blundering tragedy a woman of so acute a brain would, of course, know how to protect herself. But within the limits of her life, why should she refuse herself happiness, intimacy, love?

His heart beat fast; his thoughts were in a whirl. But the train was nearing Portsmouth, and with an effort he recalled his mind to the meeting with his mother, which was then close upon him.

He spent nearly a week in the little cottage at Sea View, and Mrs. Warkworth got far more pleasure than usual, poor lady, out of his visit. She was a thin, plain woman, not devoid of either ability or character. But life had gone hardly with her, and since her husband's death what had been reserve had become melancholy. She had always been afraid of her only son since they had sent him to Charterhouse, and he had become so much "finer" than his parents. She knew that he must consider her a very ignorant and narrow-minded person; when he was with her she was humiliated in her own eyes, though as soon as he was gone she resumed what was in truth a leading place among her own small circle.

She loved him, and was proud of him; yet at the bottom of her heart she had never absolved him from his father's death. But for his extravagance, and the misfortunes he had brought upon them, her old general would be alive still—pottering about in the spring sunshine, spudding the daisies from the turf, or smoking his pipe beneath the thickening trees. Silently her heart still yearned and hungered for the husband of her youth; his son did not replace him.

Nevertheless, when he came down to her with this halo of glory upon him, and smoked up and down her small garden through the mild spring days, gossiping to her of all the great things that had befallen him, repeating to her, word for word, his conversation with the Prime Minister, and his interview with the Commander-in-Chief, or making her read all the letters of congratulation he had received, her mother's heart thawed within her as it had not done for long. Her ears told her that he was still vain and a boaster; her memory held the indelible records of his past selfishness; but as he walked beside her, his fair hair blown back from his handsome brow, and eyes that were so much younger than the rest of the face, his figure as spare and boyish now as when he had worn the colors of the Charterhouse eleven, she said to herself, in that inward and unsuspected colloquy she was always holding with her own heart about him, that if his father could have seen him now he would have forgiven him everything. According to her secret Evangelical faith, God "deals" with every soul he has created—through joy or sorrow, through good or evil fortune. He had dealt with herself through anguish and loss. Henry, it seemed, was to be moulded through prosperity. His good fortune was already making a better man of him.

Certainly he was more affectionate and thoughtful than before. He would have liked to give her money, of which he seemed to have an unusual store; but she bade him keep what he had for his own needs. Her own little bit of money, saved from the wreck of their fortunes, was enough for her. Then he went into Ryde and brought her back a Shetland shawl and a new table-cloth for her little sitting-room, which she accepted with a warmer kiss than she had given him for years.

He left her on a bright, windy morning which flecked the blue Solent with foam and sent the clouds racing to westward. She walked back along the sands, thinking anxiously of the African climate and the desert hard-ships he was going to face. And she wondered what significance there might be in the fact that he had written twice during his stay with her to a Miss Le Breton, whose name, nevertheless, he had not mentioned in their conversations. Well, he would marry soon, she supposed, and marry well, in circles out of her ken. With the common prejudice of the English middle class, she hoped that if this Miss Le Breton were his choice, she might be only French in name and not in blood.

Meanwhile, Warkworth sped up to London in high spirits, enjoying the comforts of a good conscience.

He drove first to his club, where a pile of letters awaited him—some letters of congratulation, others concerned with the business of his mission. He enjoyed the first, noticing jealously who had and who had not written to him; then he applied himself to the second. His mind worked vigorously and well; he wrote his replies in a manner that satisfied him. Then throwing himself into a chair, with a cigar, he gave himself up to the close and shrewd planning of the preparations necessary for his five weeks' march, or to the consideration of two or three alternative lines of action which would open before him as soon as he should find himself within the boundaries of Mokembe. Some five years before, the government of the day had sent a small expedition to this Debatable Land, which had failed disastrously, both from the diplomatic and the military points of view. He went backward and forward to the shelves of the fine "Service" library which surrounded him, taking down the books and reports which concerned this expedition. He buried himself in them for an hour, then threw them aside with contempt. What blunders and short-sight everywhere! The general public might well talk of the stupidity of English officers. And blunders so easily avoided, too! It was sickening. He felt within himself a fulness of energy and intelligence, a perspicacity of brain which judged mistakes of this kind unpardonable.

As he was replacing some of the books he had been using in the shelves, the club began to fill up with men coming in to lunch. A great many congratulated him; and a certain number who of old had hardly professed to know him greeted him with cordiality. He found himself caught in a series of short but flattering conversations, in which he bore himself well—neither over-discreet nor too elate. "I declare that fellow's improved," said one man, who might certainly have counted as Warkworth's enemy the week before, to his companion at table. "The government's been beastly remiss so far. Hope he'll pull it off. Ripping chance, anyway. Though what they gave it to him for, goodness knows! There were a dozen fellows, at least, did as well as he in the Mahsud business. And the Staff-College man had a thousand times more claim."

Nevertheless, Warkworth felt the general opinion friendly, a little surprised, no doubt, but showing that readiness to believe in the man coming to the front, which belongs much more to the generous than to the calculating side of the English character. Insensibly his mental and moral stature rose. He exchanged a few words on his way out with one of the most distinguished members of the club, a man of European reputation, whom he had seen the week before in the Commander-in-Chief's room at the War Office. The great man spoke to him with marked friendliness, and Warkworth walked on air as he went his way. Potentially he felt himself the great man's equal; the gates of life seemed to be opening before him.

And with the rise of fortune came a rush of magnanimous resolution. No more shady episodes; no more mean devices; no more gambling, and no more debt. Major Warkworth's sheet was clean, and it should remain so. A man of his prospects must run straight.

He felt himself at peace with all the world. By-the-way, just time to jump into a cab and get to Park Crescent in time for his sister's luncheon. His last interview with his brother-in-law had not been agreeable. But now—he felt for the check-book in his pocket—he was in a position to repay at least half the last sum of money which Bella had lent him. He would go and give it her now, and report news of the mother. And if the two chicks were there—why, he had a free hour and he would take them to the Zoo—he vowed he would!—give them something pleasant to remember their uncle by.

And a couple of hours later a handsome, soldierly man might have been seen in the lion-house at the Zoo, leading a plump little girl by either hand. Rose and Katie Mullins enjoyed a golden time, and started a wholly new adoration for the uncle who had so far taken small notice of them, and was associated in their shrewd, childish minds rather with tempests at home than buns abroad. But this time buns, biscuits, hansom-drives and elephant-rides were showered upon them by an uncle who seemed to make no account of money, while his gracious and captivating airs set their little hearts beating in a common devotion.

"Now go home—go home, little beggars!" said that golden gentleman, as he packed them into a hansom and stood on the step to accept a wet kiss on his mustache from each pink mouth. "Tell your mother all about it, and don't forget your uncle Harry. There's a shilling for each of you. Don't you spend it on sweets. You're quite fat enough already. Good-bye!"

"That's the hardest work I've done for many a long day," he said to himself, with a sigh of relief, as the hansom drove away. "I sha'n't turn nurse-maid when other trades fail. But they're nice little kids all the same.

"Now, then, Cox's—and the City"—he ran over the list of his engagements for the afternoon—"and by five o'clock shall I find my fair lady—at home—and established? Where on earth is Heribert Street?"

* * * * *

He solved the question, for a few minutes after five he was on Miss Le Breton's doorstep. A quaint little house—and a strange parlor-maid! For the door was opened to him by a large-eyed, sickly child, who looked at him with the bewilderment of one trying to follow out instructions still strange to her.



"Yes, sir, Miss Le Breton is in the drawing-room," she said, in a sweet, deliberate voice with a foreign accent, and she led the way through the hall.

Poor little soul—what a twisted back, and what a limp! She looked about fourteen, but was probably older. Where had Julie discovered her?

Warkworth looked round him at the little hall with its relics of country-house sports and amusements; his eye travelled through an open door to the little dining-room and the Russell pastels of Lady Mary's parents, as children, hanging on the wall. The character of the little dwelling impressed itself at once. Smiling; he acknowledged its congruity with Julie. Here was a lady who fell on her feet!

The child, leading him, opened the door to the left.

"Please walk in, sir," she said, shyly, and stood aside.

As the door opened, Warkworth was conscious of a noise of tongues.

So Julie was not alone? He prepared his manner accordingly.

He entered upon a merry scene. Jacob Delafield was standing on a chair, hanging a picture, while Dr. Meredith and Julie, on either side, directed or criticised the operation. Meredith carried picture-cord and scissors; Julie the hammer and nails. Meredith was expressing the profoundest disbelief in Jacob's practical capacities; Jacob was defending himself hotly; and Julie laughed at both.

Towards the other end of the room stood the tea-table, between the fire and an open window. Lord Lackington sat beside it, smiling to himself, and stroking a Persian kitten. Through the open window the twinkling buds on the lilacs in the Cureton House garden shone in the still lingering sun. A recent shower had left behind it odors of earth and grass. Even in this London air they spoke of the spring—the spring which already in happier lands was drawing veils of peach and cherry blossom, over the red Sienese earth or the green terraces of Como. The fire crackled in the grate. The pretty, old-fashioned room was fragrant with hyacinth and narcissus; Julie's books lay on the tables; Julie's hand and taste were already to be felt everywhere. And Lord Lackington with the kitten, beside the fire, gave the last touch of home and domesticity.

"So I find you established?" said Warkworth, smiling, to the lady with the nails, while Delafield nodded to him from the top of the steps and Meredith ceased to chatter.

"I haven't a hand, I fear," said Julie. "Will you have some tea? Ah, Leonie, tu vas en faire de nouveau, n'est-ce pas, pour ce monsieur?"

A little woman in black, with a shawl over her shoulders, had just glided into the room. She had a small, wrinkled face, bright eyes, and a much-flattened nose.

"Tout de suite, monsieur," she said, quickly, and disappeared with the teapot. Warkworth guessed, of course, that she was Madame Bornier, the foster-sister—the "Propriety" of this menage.

"Can't I help?" he said to Julie, with a look at Delafield.

"It's just done," she said, coldly, handing a nail to Delafield. "Just a trifle more to the right. Ecco! Perfection!"

"Oh, you spoil him," said Meredith, "And not one word of praise for me!"

"What have you done?" she said, laughing. "Tangled the cord—that's all!"

Warkworth turned away. His face, so radiant as he entered, had settled into sharp, sudden lines. What was the meaning of this voice, this manner? He remembered that to his three letters he had received no word of reply. But he had interpreted that to mean that she was in the throes of moving and could find no time to write.

As he neared the tea-table, Lord Lackington looked up. He greeted the new-comer with the absent stateliness he generally put on when his mind was in a state of confusion as to a person's identity.

"Well, so they're sending you to D——? There'll be a row there before long. Wish you joy of the missionaries!"

"No, not D——," said Warkworth, smiling. "Nothing so amusing. Mokembe's my destination."

"Oh, Mokembe!" said Lord Lackington, a little abashed. "That's where Cecil Ray, Lord R's second son, was killed last year—lion-hunting? No, it was of fever that he died. By-the-way, a vile climate!"

"In the plains, yes," said Warkworth, seating himself. "As to the uplands, I understand they are to be the Switzerland of Africa."

Lord Lackington did not appear to listen.

"Are you a homoeopath?" he said, suddenly, rising to his full and immense stature and looking down with eagerness on Warkworth.

"No. Why?"

"Because it's your only chance, for those parts. If Cecil Ray had had their medicines with him he'd be alive now. Look here; when do you start?" The speaker took out his note-book.

"In rather less than a month I start for Denga."

"All right. I'll send you a medicine-case—from Epps. If you're ill, take 'em."

"You're very good."

"Not at all. It's my hobby—one of the last." A broad, boyish smile flashed over the handsome old face. "Look at me; I'm seventy-five, and I can tire out my own grandsons at riding and shooting. That comes of avoiding all allopathic messes like the devil. But the allopaths are such mean fellows they filch all our ideas."

The old man was off. Warkworth submitted to five minutes' tirade, stealing a glance sometimes at the group of Julie, Meredith, and Delafield in the farther window—at the happy ease and fun that seemed to prevail in it. He fiercely felt himself shut out and trampled on.

Suddenly, Lord Lackington pulled up, his instinct for declamation qualified by an equally instinctive dread of boring or being bored. "What did you think of Montresor's statement?" he said, abruptly, referring to a batch of army reforms that Montresor the week before had endeavored to recommend to a sceptical House of Commons.

"All very well, as far as it goes," said Warkworth, with a shrug.

"Precisely! We English want an army and a navy; we don't like it when those fellows on the Continent swagger in our faces, and yet we won't pay either for the ships or the men. However, now that they've done away with purchase—Gad! I could fight them in the streets for the way in which they've done it!—now that they've turned the army into an examination-shop, tempered with jobbery, whatever we do, we shall go to the deuce. So it don't matter."