Lady Rose's Daughter Part 50

She turned upon him suddenly.

"Have you any picture of her?"

He hesitated.

"Yes," he said, at last.

"Have you got it here?"

"Why do you ask, dear one? This one evening is _ours_."

And again he tried to draw her to him. But she persisted.

"I feel sure you have it. Show it me."

"Julie, you and you only are in my thoughts!"

"Then do what I ask." She bent to him with a wild, entreating air; her lips almost touched his cheek. Unwillingly he drew out a letter-case from his breast-pocket, and took from it a little photograph which he handed to her.

She looked at it with eager eyes. A face framed, as it were, out of snow and fire lay in her hand, a thing most delicate, most frail, yet steeped in feeling and significance--a child's face with its soft curls of brown hair, and the upper lip raised above the white, small teeth, as though in a young wonder; yet behind its sweetness, what suggestions of a poetic or tragic sensibility! The slender neck carried the little head with girlish dignity; the clear, timid eyes seemed at once to shrink from and trust the spectator.

Julie returned the little picture, and hid her face with her hands.

Warkworth watched her uncomfortably, and at last drew her hands away.

"What are you thinking of?" he said, almost with violence. "Don't shut me out!"

"I am not jealous now," she said, looking at him piteously. "I don't hate her. And if she knew all--she couldn't--hate me."

"No one could hate her. She is an angel. But she is not my Julie!" he said, vehemently, and he thrust the little picture into his pocket again.

"Tell me," she said, after a pause, laying her hand on his knee, "when did you begin to think of me--differently? All the winter, when we used to meet, you never--you never loved me then?"

"How, placed as I was, could I let myself think of love? I only knew that I wanted to see you, to talk to you, to write to you--that the day when we did not meet was a lost day. Don't be so proud!" He tried to laugh at her. "You didn't think of me in any special way, either. You were much too busy making bishops, or judges, or academicians. Oh, Julie, I was so afraid of you in those early days!"

"The first night we met," she said, pa.s.sionately, "I found a carnation you had worn in your b.u.t.ton-hole. I put it under my pillow, and felt for it in the dark like a talisman. You had stood between me and Lady Henry twice. You had smiled at me and pressed my hand--not as others did, but as though you understood _me_, myself--as though, at least, you wished to understand. Then came the joy of joys, that I could help you--that I could do something for you. Ah, how it altered life for me! I never turned the corner of a street that I did not count on the chance of seeing you beyond--suddenly--on my path. I never heard your voice that it did not thrill me from head to foot. I never made a new friend or acquaintance that I did not ask myself first how I could thereby serve you. I never saw you come into the room that my heart did not leap. I never slept but you were in my dreams. I loathed London when you were out of it. It was paradise when you were there."

Straining back from him as he still held her hands, her whole face and form shook with the energy of her confession. Her wonderful hair, loosened from the thin gold bands in which it had been confined during the evening, fell in a glossy confusion about her brow and slender neck; its black ma.s.ses, the melting brilliance of the eyes, the tragic freedom of the att.i.tude gave both to form and face a wild and poignant beauty.

Warkworth, beside her, was conscious first of amazement, then of a kind of repulsion--a kind of fear--till all else was lost in a hurry of joy and grat.i.tude.

The tears stood on his cheek. "Julie, you shame me--you trample me into the earth!"

He tried to gather her in his arms, but she resisted, Caresses were not what those eyes demanded--eyes feverishly bright with the memory of her own past dreams, Presently, indeed, she withdrew herself from him. She rose and closed the window; she put the lamp in another place; she brought her rebellious hair into order.

"We must not be so mad," she said, with a quivering smile, as she again seated herself, but at some distance from him. "You see, for me the great question is "--her voice became low and rapid--"What am I going to do with the future? For you it is all plain. We part to-night. You have your career, your marriage. I withdraw from your life--absolutely.

But for me--"

She paused. It was the manner of one trying to see her way in the dark.

"Your social gifts," said Warkworth, in agitation, "your friends, Julie--these will occupy your mind. Then, of course, you will, you must marry! Oh, you'll soon forget me, Julie! I pray you may!"

"My social gifts?" she repeated, disregarding the rest of his speech. "I have told you already they have broken down. Society sides with Lady Henry. I am to be made to know my place--I do know it!"

"The d.u.c.h.ess will fight for you."

She laughed.

"The Duke won't let her--nor shall I."

"You'll marry," he repeated, with emotion. "You'll find some one worthy of you--some one who will give you the great position for which you were born."

"I could have it at any moment," she said, looking him quietly in the eyes.

Warkworth drew back, conscious of a disagreeable shock. He had been talking in generalities, giving away the future with that fluent prodigality, that easy prophecy which costs so little. What did she mean?

"_Delafield?"_ he cried.

And he waited for her reply--which lingered--in a tense and growing eagerness. The notion had crossed his mind once or twice during the winter, only to be dismissed as ridiculous. Then, on the occasion of their first quarrel, when Julie had snubbed him in Delafield's presence and to Delafield's advantage, he had been conscious of a momentary alarm. But Julie, who on that one and only occasion had paraded her intimacy with Delafield, thenceforward said not a word of him, and Warkworth's jealousy had died for lack of fuel. In relation to Julie, Delafield had been surely the mere shadow and agent of his little cousin the d.u.c.h.ess--a friendly, knight-errant sort of person, with a liking for the distressed. What! the heir-presumptive of Chudleigh Abbey, and one of the most famous of English dukedoms, when even he, the struggling, penurious officer, would never have dreamed of such a match?

Julie, meanwhile, heard only jealousy in his exclamation, and it caressed her ear, her heart. She was tempted once more, woman-like, to dwell upon the other lover, and again something compelling and delicate in her feeling towards Delafield forbade.

"No, you mustn't make me tell you any more," she said, putting the name aside with a proud gesture. "It would be poor and mean. But it's true. I have only to put out my hand for what you call 'a great position,' I have refused to put it out. Sometimes, of course, it has dazzled me.

To-night it seems to me--dust and ashes. No; when we two have said good-bye, I shall begin life again. And this time I shall live it in my own way, for my own ends. I'm very tired. Henceforth 'I'll walk where my own nature would be leading--it vexes me to choose another guide.'"

And as she spoke the words of one of the chainless souls of history, in a voice pa.s.sionately full and rich, she sprang to her feet, and, drawing her slender form to its full height, she locked her hands behind her, and began to pace the room with a wild, free step.

Every nerve in Warkworth's frame was tingling. He was carried out of himself, first by the rebellion of her look and manner, then by this fact, so new, so astounding, which her very evasion had confirmed.

During her whole contest with Lady Henry, and now, in her present ambiguous position, she had Delafield, and through Delafield the English great world, in the hollow of her hand? This nameless woman--no longer in her first youth. And she had refused? He watched her in a speechless wonder and incredulity.

The thought leaped. "And this sublime folly--this madness--was for _me_?"

It stirred and intoxicated him. Yet she was not thereby raised in his eyes. Nay, the contrary. With the pa.s.sion which was rapidly mounting in his veins there mingled--poor Julie!--a curious diminution of respect.

"Julie!" He held out his hand to her peremptorily. "Come to me again.

You are so wonderful to-night, in that white dress--like a wild muse. I shall always see you so. Come!"

She obeyed, and gave him her hands, standing beside his chair. But her face was still absorbed.

"To be free," she said, under her breath--"free, like my parents, from all these petty struggles and conventions!"

Then she felt his kisses on her hands, and her expression changed.

"How we cheat ourselves with words!" she whispered, trembling, and, withdrawing one hand, she smoothed back the light-brown curls from his brow with that protecting tenderness which had always entered into her love for him. "To-night we are here--together--this one last night! And to-morrow, at this time, you'll be in Paris; perhaps you'll be looking out at the lights--and the crowds on the Boulevard--and the chestnut-trees. They'll just be in their first leaf--I know so well!--and the little thin leaves will be s.h.i.+ning so green under the lamps--and I shall be here--and it will be all over and done with--forever. What will it matter whether I am free or not free? I shall be _alone_! That's all a woman knows."

Her voice died away. Warkworth rose. He put his arms round her, and she did not resist.

"Julie," he said in her ear, "why should you be alone?"

A silence fell between them.