* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mother—mother!"

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

"Aileen, darling, what is it?"

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

"He's dead, mother! He's—dead!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXIII

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

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

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

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

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

"Mother—mother!... Dead!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He raised his hand and touched her hair tenderly.

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

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

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

Delafield kissed her hand in silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I will try, mon ami."

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 role?

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 naively 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 raffines of this world; but for them full of strange charm, and even of excitement.

* * * * *

Delafield left the little inn for Montreux, Lausanne, and London that afternoon. He bent to kiss his wife at the moment of his departure, in the bare sitting-room that had been improvised for them on the ground floor of the hotel, and as she let her face linger ever so little against his she felt strong arms flung round her, and was crushed against his breast in a hungry embrace. When he released her with a flush and a murmured word of apology she shook her head, smiling sadly but saying nothing. The door closed on him, and at the sound she made a hasty step forward.

"Jacob! Take me with you!"

But her voice died in the rattle and bustle of the diligence outside, and she was left trembling from head to foot, under a conflict of emotions that seemed now to exalt, now to degrade her.

Half an hour after Delafield's departure there appeared on the terrace of the hotel a tottering, emaciated form—Aileen Moffatt, in a black dress and hat, clinging to her mother's arm. But she refused the deck—chair, which they had spread with cushions and shawls.

"No; let me sit up." And she took an ordinary chair, looking round upon the lake and the little flowery terrace with a slow, absorbed look, like one trying to remember. Suddenly she bowed her head on her hands.

"Aileen!" cried Lady Blanche, in an agony.

But the girl motioned her away. "Don't, mummy. I'm all right."

And restraining any further emotion, she laid her arms on the balustrade and gazed long and calmly into the purple depths and gleaming snows of the Rhone valley. Her hat oppressed her and she took it off, revealing the abundance of her delicately golden hair, which, in its lack of lustre and spring, seemed to share in the physical distress and loss of the whole personality.

The face was that of a doomed creature, incapable now of making any successful struggle for the right to live. What had been sensibility had become melancholy; the slight, chronic frown was deeper, the pale lips more pinched. Yet intermittently there was still great sweetness, the last effort of a "beautiful soul" meant for happiness, and withered before its time.

As Julie stood beside her, while Lady Blanche had gone to fetch a book from the salon, the poor child put out her hand and grasped that of Julie.

"It is quite possible I may get the letter to-night," she said, in a hurried whisper. "My maid went down to Montreux—there is a clever man at the post-office who tried to make it out for us. He thinks it'll be to-night."

"Don't be too disappointed if nothing comes," said Julie, caressing the hand. Its thinness, its icy and lifeless touch, dismayed her. Ah, how easily might this physical wreck have been her doing!

* * * * *

The bells of Montreux struck half-past six. A restless and agonized expectation began to show itself in all the movements of the invalid. She left her chair and began to pace the little terrace on Julie's arm. Her dragging step, the mournful black of her dress, the struggle between youth and death in her sharpened face, made her a tragic presence. Julie could hardly bear it, while all the time she, too, was secretly and breathlessly waiting for Warkworth's last words.

Lady Blanche returned, and Julie hurried away.

She passed through the hotel and walked down the Montreux road. The post had already reached the first houses of the village, and the postman, who knew her, willingly gave her the letters.

Yes, a packet for Aileen, addressed in an unknown hand to a London address, and forwarded thence. It bore the Denga postmark.

And another for herself, readdressed from London by Madame Bornier. She tore off the outer envelope; beneath was a letter of which the address was feebly written in Warkworth's hand: "Mademoiselle Le Breton, 3 Heribert Street, London."

She had the strength to carry her own letter to her room, to call Aileen's maid and send her with the other packet to Lady Blanche. Then she locked herself in....

Oh, the poor, crumpled page, and the labored hand-writing!

"Julie, I am dying. They are such good fellows, but they can't save me. It's horrible.

"I saw the news of your engagement in a paper the day before I left Denga. You're right. He'll make you happy. Tell him I said so. Oh, my God, I shall never trouble you again! I bless you for the letter you wrote me. Here it is.... No, I can't—can't read it. Drowsy. No pain—"

And here the pen had dropped from his hand. Searching for something more, she drew from the envelope the wild and passionate letter she had written him at Heribert Street, in the early morning after her return from Paris, while she was waiting for Delafield to bring her the news of Lord Lackington's state.

* * * * *

The small table d'hote of the Hotel Michel was still further diminished that night. Lady Blanche was with her daughter, and Mrs. Delafield did not appear.

But the moon was hanging in glory over the lake when Julie, unable to bear her room and her thoughts any longer, threw a lace scarf about her head and neck, and went blindly climbing through the upward paths leading to Les Avants. The roads were silver in the moonlight; so was the lake, save where the great mountain shadows lay across the eastern end. And suddenly, white, through pine-trees, "Jaman, delicately tall!"

The air cooled her brow, and from the deep, enveloping night her torn heart drew balm, and a first soothing of the pulse of pain. Every now and then, as she sat down to rest, a waking dream overshadowed her. She seemed to be supporting Warkworth in her arms; his dying head lay upon her breast, and she murmured courage and love into his ear. But not as Julie Le Breton. Through all the anguish of what was almost an illusion of the senses, she still felt herself Delafield's wife. And in that flood of silent speech she poured out on Warkworth, it was as though she offered him also Jacob's compassion, Jacob's homage, mingled with her own.

Once she found herself sitting at the edge of a meadow, environed by the heavy scents of flowers. Some apple-trees with whitened trunks rose between her and the lake a thousand feet below. The walls of Chillon, the houses of Montreux, caught the light; opposite, the deep forests of Bouveret and St. Gingolphe lay black upon the lake; above them rode the moon. And to the east the high Alps, their pure lines a little effaced and withdrawn, as when a light veil hangs over a sanctuary.

Julie looked out upon a vast freedom of space, and by a natural connection she seemed to be also surveying her own world of life and feeling, her past and her future. She thought of her childhood and her parents, of her harsh, combative youth, of the years with Lady Henry, of Warkworth, of her husband, and the life into which his strong hand had so suddenly and rashly drawn her. Her thoughts took none of the religious paths so familiar to his. And yet her reverie was so far religious that her mind seemed to herself to be quivering under the onset of affections, emotions, awes, till now unknown, and that, looking back, she was conscious of a groping sense of significance, of purpose, in all that had befallen her. Yet to this sense she could put no words. Only, in the end, through the constant action of her visualizing imagination, it connected itself with Delafield's face, and with the memory of many of his recent acts and sayings.

It was one of those hours which determine the history of a man or woman. And the august Alpine beauty entered in, so that Julie, in this sad and thrilling act of self-probing, felt herself in the presence of powers and dominations divine.

Her face, stained with tears, took gradually some of the calm, the loftiness of the night. Yet the close-shut, brooding mouth would slip sometimes into a smile exquisitely soft and gentle, as though the heart remembered something which seemed to the intelligence at once folly and sweetness.

What was going on within her was, to her own consciousness, a strange thing. It appeared to her as a kind of simplification, a return to childhood; or, rather, was it the emergence in the grown mind, tired with the clamor of its own egotistical or passionate life, of some instincts, natural to the child, which she, nevertheless, as a child had never known; instincts of trust, of self-abandonment, steeped, perhaps, in those tears which are themselves only another happiness?...

But hush! What are our poor words in the presence of these nobler secrets of the wrestling and mounting spirit!

* * * * *

On the way down she saw another figure emerge from the dark.

"Lady Blanche!"

Lady Blanche stood still.

"The hotel was stifling," she said, in a voice that vainly tried for steadiness.

Julie perceived that she had been weeping.

"Aileen is asleep?"

"Perhaps. They have given her something to make her sleep."

They walked on towards the hotel.

Julie hesitated.

"She was not disappointed?" she said, at last, in a low voice.

"No!" said the mother, sharply. "But one knew, of course, there must be letters for her. Thank God, she can feel that his very last thought was for her! The letters which have reached her are dated the day before the fatal attack began—giving a complete account of his march—most interesting—showing how he trusted her already—though she is such a child. It will tranquillize her to feel how completely she possessed his heart—poor fellow!"

Julie said nothing, and Lady Blanche, with bitter satisfaction, felt rather than saw what seemed to her the just humiliation expressed in the drooping and black-veiled figure beside her.

Next day there was once more a tinge of color on Aileen's cheeks. Her beautiful hair fell round her once more in a soft life and confusion, and the roses which her mother had placed beside her on the bed were not in too pitiful contrast with her frail loveliness.

"Read it, please," she said, as soon as she found herself alone with Julie, pushing her letter tenderly towards her. "He tells me everything—everything! All he was doing and hoping—consults me in everything. Isn't it an honor—when I'm so ignorant and childish? I'll try to be brave—try to be worthy—"

And while her whole frame was shaken with deep, silent sobs, she greedily watched Julie read the letter.

"Oughtn't I to try and live," she said, dashing away her tears, as Julie returned it, "when he loved me so?"

Julie kissed her with a passionate and guilty pity. The letter might have been written to any friend, to any charming child for whom a much older man had a kindness. It gave a business-like account of their march, dilated on one or two points of policy, drew some humorous sketches of his companions, and concluded with a few affectionate and playful sentences.

But when the wrestle with death began, Warkworth wrote but one last letter, uttered but one cry of the heart, and it lay now in Julie's bosom.

* * * * *

A few days passed. Delafield's letters were short and full of sadness. Elmira still lived; but any day or hour might see the end. As for the father—But the subject was too tragic to be written of, even to her. Not to feel, not to realize; there lay the only chance of keeping one's own courage, and so of being any help whatever to two of the most miserable of human beings.

At last, rather more than a week after Delafield's departure, came two telegrams. One was from Delafield—"Mervyn died this morning. Duke's condition causes great anxiety." The other from Evelyn Crowborough—"Elmira died this morning. Going down to Shropshire to help Jacob."

Julie threw down the telegrams. A rush of proud tears came to her eyes. She swept to the door of her room, opened it, and called her maid.

The maid came, and when she saw the sparkling looks and strained bearing of her mistress, wondered what crime she was to be rebuked for. Julie merely bade her pack at once, as it was her intention to catch the eight o'clock through train at Lausanne that night for England.

* * * * *

Twenty hours later the train carrying Julie to London entered Victoria Station. On the platform stood the little Duchess, impatiently expectant. Julie was clasped in her arms, and had no time to wonder at the pallor and distraction of her friend before she was hurried into the brougham waiting beyond the train.

"Oh, Julie!" cried the Duchess, catching the traveller's hands, as they drove away. "Julie, darling!"

Julie turned to her in amazement. The blue eyes fixed upon her had no tears, but in them, and in the Duchess's whole aspect, was expressed a vivid horror and agitation which struck at Julie's heart.

"What is it?" she said, catching her breath. "What is it?"

"Julie, I was going to Faircourt this morning. First your telegram stopped me. I thought I'd wait and go with you. Then came another, from Delafield. The Duke! The poor Duke!"

Julie's attitude changed unconsciously—instantly.

"Yes; tell me!"

"It's in all the papers to-night—on the placards—don't look out!" And the Duchess lifted her hand and drew down the blinds of the brougham. "He was in a most anxious state yesterday, but they thought him calmer at night, and he insisted on being left alone. The doctors still kept a watch, but he managed in some mysterious way to evade them all, and this morning he was missed. After two hours they found him—in the river that runs below the house!"

There was a silence.

"And Jacob?" said Julie, hoarsely.

"That's what I'm so anxious about," exclaimed the Duchess. "Oh, I am thankful you've come! You know how Jacob's always felt about the Duke and Mervyn—how he's hated the notion of succeeding. And Susan, who went down yesterday, telegraphed to me last night—before this horror—that he was 'terribly strained and overwrought.'"

"Succeeding?" said Julie, vaguely. Mechanically she had drawn up the blind again, and her eyes followed the dingy lines of the Vauxhall Bridge Road, till suddenly they turned away from the placards outside a small stationer's shop which announced: "Tragic death of the Duke of Chudleigh and his son."

The Duchess looked at her curiously without replying. Julie seemed to be grappling with some idea which escaped her, or, rather, was presently expelled by one more urgent.

"Is Jacob ill?" she said, abruptly, looking her companion full in the face.

"I only know what I've told you. Susan says 'strained and overwrought.' Oh, it'll be all right when he gets you!"

Julie made no reply. She sat motionless, and the Duchess, stealing another glance at her, must needs, even in this tragic turmoil, allow herself the reflection that she was a more delicate study in black-and-white, a more refined and accented personality than ever.

"You won't mind," said Evelyn, timidly, after a pause; "but Lady Henry is staying with me, and also Sir Wilfrid Bury, who had such a bad cold in his lodgings that I went down there a week ago, got the doctor's leave, and carried him off there and then. And Mr. Montresor's coming in. He particularly wanted, he said, just to press your hand. But they sha'n't bother you if you're tired. Our train goes at 10.10, and Freddie has got the express stopped for us at Westonport—about three in the morning."

The carriage rolled into Grosvenor Square, and presently stopped before Crowborough House. Julie alighted, looked round her at the July green of the square, at the brightness of the window-boxes, and then at the groom of the chambers who was taking her wraps from her—the same man who, in the old days, used to feed Lady Henry's dogs with sweet biscuit. It struck her that he was showing her a very particular and eager attention.

* * * * *

Meanwhile in the Duchess's drawing—room a little knot of people was gathered—Lady Henry, Sir Wilfrid Bury, and Dr. Meredith. Their demeanor illustrated both the subduing and the exciting influence of great events. Lady Henry was more talkative than usual. Sir Wilfrid more silent.

Lady Henry seemed to have profited by her stay at Torquay. As she sat upright in a stiff chair, her hands resting on her stick, she presented her characteristic aspect of English solidity, crossed by a certain free and foreign animation. She had been already wrangling with Sir Wilfrid, and giving her opinion freely on the "socialistic" views on rank and property attributed to Jacob Delafield. "If he can't digest the cake, that doesn't mean it isn't good," had been her last impatient remark, when Sir Wilfrid interrupted her.

"Only a few minutes more," he said, looking at his watch. "Now, then, what line do we take? How much is our friend likely to know?"

"Unless she has lost her eyesight—which Evelyn has not reported—she will know most of what matters before she has gone a hundred yards from the station," said Lady Henry, dryly.

"Oh, the streets! Yes; but persons are often curiously dazed by such a gallop of events."

"Not Julie Le Breton!"

"I should like to be informed as to the part you are about to play," said Sir Wilfrid, in a lower voice, "that I may play up to it. Where are you?"

Both looked at Meredith, who had walked to a distant window and was standing there looking out upon the square. Lady Henry was well aware that he had not forgiven her, and, to tell the truth, was rather anxious that he should. So she, too, dropped her voice.

"I bow to the institutions of my country," she said, a little sparkle in the strong, gray eye.

"In other words, you forgive a duchess?"

"I acknowledge the head of the family, and the greater carries the less."

"Suppose Jacob should be unforgiving?"

"He hasn't the spirit."

"And she?"

"Her conscience will be on my side."

"I thought it was your theory that she had none?"

"Jacob, let us hope, will have developed some. He has a good deal to spare."

Sir Wilfrid laughed. "So it is you who will do the pardoning?"

"I shall offer an armed and honorable peace. The Duchess of Chudleigh may intrigue and tell lies, if she pleases. I am not giving her a hundred a year."

There was a pause.

"Why, if I may ask," said Sir Wilfrid, at the end of it, "did you quarrel with Jacob? I understand there was a separate cause:"

Lady Henry hesitated.

"He paid me a debt," she said, at last, and a sudden flush rose in her old, blanched cheek.

"And that annoyed you? You have the oddest code!"

Lady Henry bit her lip.

"One does not like one's money thrown in one's face."

"Most unreasonable of women!"

"Never mind, Wilfrid. We all have our feelings."

"Precisely. Well, no doubt Jacob will make peace. As for—Ah, here comes Montresor!"

A visible tremor passed through Lady Henry. The door was thrown open, and the footman announced the Minister for War.

"Her grace, sir, is not yet returned."

Montresor stumbled into the room, and even with his eye-glasses carefully adjusted, did not at once perceive who was in it.

Sir Wilfrid went towards him.

"Ah, Bury! Convalescent, I hope?"

"Quite. The Duchess has gone to meet Mrs. Delafield."

"Mrs.—?" Montresor's mouth opened. "But, of course, you know?"

"Oh yes, I know. But one's tongue has to get oiled. You see Lady Henry?"

Montresor started.

"I am glad to see Lady Henry," he replied, stiffly.

Lady Henry slowly rose and advanced two steps. She quietly held out her hand to him, and, smiling, looked him in the face.

"Take it. There is no longer any cause of quarrel between us. I raise the embargo."

The Minister took the hand, and shook his head.

"Ah, but you had no right to impose it," he said, with energy.

"Oh, for goodness sake, meet me half-way," cried Lady Henry, "or I shall never hold out!"

Sir Wilfrid, whose half-embarrassed gaze was bent on the ground, looked up and was certain that he saw a gleam of moisture in those wrinkled eyes.

"Why have you held out so long? What does it matter to me whether Miss Julie be a duchess or no? That doesn't make up to me for all the months you've shut your door on me. And I was always given to understand, by-the-way, that it wouldn't matter to you."

"I've had three months at Torquay," said Lady Henry, raising her shoulders.

"I hope it was dull to distraction."

"It was. And my doctor tells me the more I fret the more gout I may expect."

"So all this is not generosity, but health?"

"Kiss my hand, sir, and have done with it! You are all avenged. At Torquay I had four companions in seven weeks."

"More power to them!" said Montresor. "Meredith, come here. Shall we accept the pleas?"

Meredith came slowly from the window, his hands behind his back.

"Lady Henry commands and we obey," he said, slowly. "But to-day begins a new world—founded in ruin, like the rest of them."

He raised his fine eyes, in which there was no laughter, rather a dreamy intensity. Lady Henry shrank.

"If you're thinking of Chudleigh," she said, uncertainly, "be glad for him. It was release. As for Henry Warkworth—"

"Ah, poor fellow!" said Montresor, perfunctorily. "Poor fellow!"

He had dropped Lady Henry's hand, but he now recaptured it, enclosing the thin, jewelled fingers in his own.

"Well, well, then it's peace, with all my heart." He stooped and lightly kissed the fingers. "And now, when do you expect our friend?"

"At any moment," said Lady Henry.

She seated herself, and Montresor beside her.

"I am told," said Montresor, "that this horror will not only affect Delafield personally, but that he will regard the dukedom as a calamity."

"Hm!—and you believe it?" said Lady Henry.

"I try to," was the Minister's laughing reply. "Ah, surely, here they are!"

Meredith turned from the window, to which he had gone back.

"The carriage has just arrived," he announced, and he stood fidgeting, standing first on one foot, then on the other, and running his hand through his mane of gray hair. His large features were pale, and any close observer would have detected the quiver of emotion.

A sound of voices from the anteroom, the Duchess's light tones floating to the top. At the same time a door on the other side of the drawing-room opened and the Duke of Crowborough appeared.

"I think I hear my wife," he said, as he greeted Montresor and hurriedly crossed the room.

There was a rustle of quick steps, and the little Duchess entered.

"Freddie, here is Julie!"

Behind appeared a tall figure in black. Everybody in the room advanced, including Lady Henry, who, however, after a few steps stood still behind the others, leaning on her stick.

Julie looked round the little circle, then at the Duke of Crowborough, who had gravely given her his hand. The suppressed excitement already in the room clearly communicated itself to her. She did not lose her self-command for an instant, but her face pleaded.

"Is it really true? Perhaps there is some mistake?"

"I fear there can be none," said the Duke, sadly. "Poor Chudleigh had been long dead when they found him."

"Freddie," said the Duchess, interrupting, "I have told Greswell we shall want the carriage at half-past nine for Euston. Will that do?"

"Perfectly."

Greswell, the handsome groom of the chambers, approached Julie.

"Your grace's maid wishes to know whether it is your grace's wish that she should go round to Heribert Street before taking the luggage to Euston?"

Julie looked at the man, bewildered. Then a stormy color rushed into her cheeks.

"Does he mean my maid?" she said to the Duke, piteously.

"Certainly. Will you give your orders?"

She gave them, and then, turning again to the Duke, she covered her eyes with her hands a moment.

"What does it all mean?" she said, faltering. "It seems as though we were all mad."

"You understand, of course, that Jacob succeeds?" said the Duke, not without coldness; and he stood still an instant, gazing at this woman, who must now, he supposed, feel herself at the very summit of her ambitions.

Julie drew a long breath. Then she perceived Lady Henry. Instantly, impetuously, she crossed the room. But as she reached that composed and formidable figure, the old timidity, the old fear, seized her. She paused abruptly, but she held out her hand.

Lady Henry took it. The two women stood regarding each other, while the other persons in the room instinctively turned away from their meeting. Lady Henry's first look was one of curiosity. Then, before the indefinable, ennobling change in Julie's face, now full of the pale agitation of memory, the eyes of the older woman wavered and dropped. But she soon recovered herself.

"We meet again under very strange circumstances," she said, quietly; "though I have long foreseen them. As for our former experience, we were in a false relation, and it made fools of us both. You and Jacob are now the heads of the family. And if you like to make friends with me on this new footing, I am ready. As to my behavior, I think it was natural; but if it rankles in your mind, I apologize."

The personal pride of the owner, curbed in its turn by the pride of tradition and family, spoke strangely from these words. Julie stood trembling, her chest heaving.

"I, too, regret—and apologize," she said, in a low voice.

"Then we begin again. But now you must let Evelyn take you to rest for an hour or two. I am sorry you have this hurried journey to-night."

Julie pressed her hands to her breast with one of those dramatic movements that were natural to her.

"Oh, I must see Jacob!" she said, under her breath—"I must see Jacob!"

And she turned away, looking vaguely round her. Meredith approached.

"Comfort yourself," he said, very gently, pressing her hand in both of his. "It has been a great shock, but when you get there he'll be all right."

"Jacob?"

Her expression, the piteous note in her voice, awoke in him an answering sense of pain. He wondered how it might be between the husband and wife. Yet it was borne in upon him, as upon Lady Henry, that her marriage, however interpreted, had brought with it profound and intimate transformation. A different woman stood before him. And when, after a few more words, the Duchess swept down upon them, insisting that Julie must rest awhile, Meredith stood looking after the retreating figures, filled with the old, bitter sense of human separateness, and the fragmentariness of all human affections. Then he made his farewells to the Duke and Lady Henry, and slipped away. He had turned a page in the book of life; and as he walked through Grosvenor Square he applied his mind resolutely to one of the political "causes" with which, as a powerful and fighting journalist, he was at that moment occupied.

Lady Henry, too, watched Julie's exit from the room.

"So now she supposes herself in love with Jacob?" she thought, with amusement, as she resumed her seat.

"What if Delafield refuses to be made a duke?" said Sir Wilfrid, in her ear.

"It would be a situation new to the Constitution," said Lady Henry, composedly. "I advise you, however, to wait till it occurs."

* * * * *

The northern express rushed onward through the night. Rugby, Stafford, Crewe had been left behind. The Yorkshire valleys and moors began to show themselves in pale ridges and folds under the moon. Julie, wakeful in her corner opposite the little, sleeping Duchess, was conscious of an interminable rush of images through a brain that longed for a few unconscious and forgetful moments. She thought of the deferential station-master at Euston; of the fuss attending their arrival on the platform; of the arrangements made for stopping the express at the Yorkshire Station, where they were to alight.

Faircourt? Was it the great Early-Georgian house of which she had heard Jacob speak—the vast pile, half barrack, half palace, in which, according to him, no human being could be either happy or at home?

And this was now his—and hers? Again the whirl of thoughts swept and danced round her.

A wild, hill country. In the valleys, the blackness of thick trees, the gleam of rivers, the huge, lifeless factories; and beyond, the high, silver edges, the sharp shadows of the moors.... The train slackened, and the little Duchess woke at once.

"Ten minutes to three. Oh, Julie, here we are!"

The dawn was just coldly showing as they alighted. Carriages and servants were waiting, and various persons whose identity and function it was not easy to grasp. One of them, however, at once approached Julie with a privileged air, and she perceived that he was a doctor.

"I am very glad that your grace has come," he said, as he raised his hat. "The trouble with the Duke is shock, and want of sleep."

Julie looked at him, still bewildered.

"How long has my husband been ill?"

He walked on beside her, describing in as few words as possible the harrowing days preceding the death of the boy, Delafield's attempts to soothe and control the father, the stratagem by which the poor Duke had outwitted them all, and the weary hours of search through the night, under a drizzling rain, which had resulted, about dawn, in the discovery of the Duke's body in one of the deeper holes of the river.

"When the procession returned to the house, your husband"—the speaker framed the words uncertainly—"had a long fainting-fit. It was probably caused by the exhaustion of the search—many hours without food—and many sleepless nights. We kept him in his room all day. But towards evening he insisted on getting up. The restlessness he shows is itself a sign of shock. I trust, now you are here, you may be able to persuade him to spare himself. Otherwise the consequences might be grave."

The drive to the house lay mainly through a vast park, dotted with stiff and melancholy woods. The morning was cloudy; even the wild roses in the hedges and the daisies in the grass had neither gayety nor color. Soon the house appeared—an immense pile of stone, with a pillared centre, and wings to east and west, built in a hollow, gray and sunless. The mournful blinds drawn closely down made of it rather a mausoleum for the dead than a home for the living.

At the approach of the carriage, however, doors were thrown open, servants appeared, and on the steps, trembling and heavy-eyed, stood Susan Delafield.

She looked timidly at Julie, and then, as they passed into the great central hall, the two kissed each other with tears.

"He is in his room, waiting for you. The doctors persuaded him not to come down. But he is dressed, and reading and writing. We don't believe he has slept at all for a week."

* * * * *

"Through there," said Susan Delafield, stepping back. "That is the door."



Julie softly opened it, and closed it behind her. Delafield had heard her approach, and was standing by the table, supporting himself upon it. His aspect filled Julie with horror. She ran to him and threw her arms round him. He sank back into his chair, and she found herself kneeling beside him, murmuring to him, while his head rested upon her shoulder.

"Jacob, I am here! Oh, I ought to have been here all through! It's terrible—terrible! But, Jacob, you won't suffer so—now I'm here—now we're together—now I love you, Jacob?"

Her voice broke in tears. She put back the hair from his brow, kissing him with a tenderness in which there was a yearning and lovely humility. Then she drew a little away, waiting for him to speak, in an agony.

But for a time he seemed unable to speak. He feebly released himself, as though he could not bear the emotion she offered him, and his eyes closed.

"Jacob, come and lie down!" she said, in terror. "Let me call the doctors."

He shook his head, and a faint pressure from his hand bade her sit beside him.

"I shall be better soon. Give me time. I'll tell you—"

Then silence again. She sat holding his hand, her eyes fixed upon him. Time passed, she knew not how. Susan came into the room—a small sitting-room in the east wing—to tell her that the neighboring bedroom had been prepared for herself. Julie only looked up for an instant with a dumb sign of refusal. A doctor came in, and Delafield made a painful effort to take the few spoonfuls of food and stimulant pressed upon him. Then he buried his face in the side of the arm-chair.

"Please let us be alone," he said, with a touch of his old peremptoriness, and both Susan and the doctor obeyed.

But it was long before he could collect energy enough to talk. When he did, he made an effort to tell her the story of the boy's death, and the father's self-destruction. He told it leaning forward in his chair, his eyes on the ground, his hands loosely joined, his voice broken and labored. Julie listened, gathering from his report an impression of horror, tragic and irremediable, similar to that which had shaken the balance of his own mind. And when he suddenly looked up with the words, "And now I am expected to take their place—to profit by their deaths! What rightful law of God or man binds me to accept a life and a responsibility that I loathe?" Julie drew back as though he had struck her. His face, his tone were not his own—there was a violence, a threat in them, addressed, as it were, specially to her. "If it were not for you," his eyes seemed to say, "I could refuse this thing, which will destroy me, soul and body."

She was silent, her pulses fluttering, and he resumed, speaking like one groping his way:

"I could have done the work, of course—I have done it for five years. I could have looked after the estate and the people. But the money, the paraphernalia, the hordes of servants, the mummery of the life! Why, Julie, should we be forced into it? What happiness—I ask you—what happiness can it bring to either of us?"

And again he looked up, and again it seemed to Julie that his expression was one of animated hostility and antagonism—antagonism to her, as embodying for the moment all the arguments—of advantage, custom, law—he was, in his own mind, fighting and denying. With a failing heart she felt herself very far from him. Was there not also something in his attitude, unconsciously, of that old primal antagonism of the man to the woman, of the stronger to the weaker, the more spiritual to the more earthy?

"You think, no doubt," he said, after a pause, "that it is my duty to take this thing, even if I could lay it down?"

"I don't know what I think," she said, hurriedly. "It is very strange, of course, what you say. We ought to discuss it thoroughly. Let me have a little time."

He gave an impatient sigh, then suddenly rose.

"Will you come and look at them?"

She, too, rose and put her hand in his.

"Take me where you will."

"It is not horrible," he said, shading his eyes a moment. "They are at peace."

With a feeble step, leaning on her arm, he guided her through the great, darkened house. Julie was dimly aware of wide staircases, of galleries and high halls, of the pictures of past Delafields looking down upon them. The morning was now far advanced. Many persons were at work in the house, but Julie was conscious of them only as distant figures that vanished at their approach. They walked alone, guarded from all intrusion by the awe and sympathy of the unseen human beings around them.

Delafield opened the closed door.

The father and son lay together, side by side, the boy's face in a very winning repose, which at first sight concealed the traces of his long suffering; the father's also—closed eyes and sternly shut mouth—suggesting, not the despair which had driven him to his death, but, rather, as in sombre triumph, the all-forgetting, all-effacing sleep which he had won from death.

They stood a moment, till Delafield fell on his knees. Julie knelt beside him. She prayed for a while; then she wearied, being, indeed, worn out with her journey. But Delafield was motionless, and it seemed to Julie that he hardly breathed.

She rose to her feet, and found her eyes for the first time flooded with tears. Never for many weeks had she felt so lonely, or so utterly unhappy. She would have given anything to forget herself in comforting Jacob. But he seemed to have no need of her, no thought of her.

As she vaguely looked round her, she saw that beside the dead man was a table holding some violets—the only flowers in the room—some photographs, and a few well—worn books. Softly she took up one. It was a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, much noted and underlined. It would have seemed to her sacrilege to look too close; but she presently perceived a letter between its pages, and in the morning light, which now came strongly into the room through a window looking on the garden, she saw plainly that it was written on thin, foreign paper, that it was closed, and addressed to her husband.

"Jacob!"

She touched him softly on the shoulder, alarmed by his long immobility.

He looked up, and it appeared to Julie as though he were shaking off with difficulty some abnormal and trancelike state. But he rose, looking at her strangely.

"Jacob, this is yours."

He took the book abruptly, almost as if she had no right to be holding it. Then, as he saw the letter, the color rushed into his face. He took it, and after a moment's hesitation walked to the window and opened it.

She saw him waver, and ran to his support. But he put out a hand which checked her.

"It was the last thing he wrote," he said; and then, uncertainly, and without reading any but the first words of the letter, he put it into his pocket.

Julie drew back, humiliated. His gesture said that to a secret so intimate and sacred he did not propose to admit his wife.

They went back silently to the room from which they had come. Sentence after sentence came to Julie's lips, but it seemed useless to say them, and once more, but in a totally new way, she was "afraid" of the man beside her.

* * * * *

She left him shortly after, by his own wish.

"I will lie down, and you must rest," he said, with decision.

So she bathed and dressed, and presently she allowed the kind, fair-haired Susan to give her food, and pour out her own history of the death-week which she and Jacob had passed through. But in all that was said, Julie noticed that Susan spoke of her brother very little, and of his inheritance and present position not at all. And once or twice she noticed a wondering or meditative expression in the girl's charming eyes as they rested on herself, and realized that the sense of mystery, of hushed expectancy, was not confined to her own mind.

When Susan left her at nine o'clock, it was to give a number of necessary orders in the house. The inquest was to be held in the morning, and the whole day would be filled with arrangements for the double funeral. The house would be thronged with officials of all sorts. "Poor Jacob!" said the sister, sighing, as she went away.

But the tragic tumult had not yet begun. The house was still quiet, and Julie was for the first time alone.

She drew up the blinds, and stood gazing out upon the park, now flooded with light; at the famous Italian garden beneath the windows, with its fountains and statues; at the wide lake which filled the middle distance; and the hills beyond it, with the plantations and avenues which showed the extension of the park as far as the eye could see.