Lady Rose's Daughter Part 65

After a fortnight at Camaldoli and Vallombrosa the Delafields turned towards Switzerland. Julie, who was a lover of Rousseau and Obermann, had been also busy with the letters of Byron. She wished to see with her own eyes St. Gingolphe and Chillon, Bevay and Glion.

So one day at the end of May they found themselves at Montreux. But Montreux was already hot and crowded, and Julie's eyes turned in longing to the heights. They found an old inn at Charnex, whereof the garden commanded the whole head of the lake, and there they settled themselves for a fortnight, till business, in fact, should recall Delafield to England. The Duke of Chudleigh had shown all possible kindness and cordiality with regard to the marriage, and the letter in which he welcomed his cousin's new wife had both touched Julie's feelings and satisfied her pride. "You are marrying one of the best of men," wrote this melancholy father of a dying son. "My boy and I owe him more than can be written. I can only tell you that for those he loves he grudges nothing--no labor, no sacrifice of himself. There are no half-measures in his affections. He has spent himself too long on sick and sorry creatures like ourselves. It is time he had a little happiness on his own account. You will give it him, and Mervyn and I will be most grateful to you. If joy and health can never be ours, I am not yet so vile as to grudge them to others. G.o.d bless you! Jacob will tell you that my house is not a gay one; but if you and he will sometimes visit it, you will do something to lighten its gloom."

Julie wondered, as she wrote her very graceful reply, how much the Duke might know about herself. Jacob had told his cousin, as she knew, the story of her parentage and of Lord Lackington's recognition of his granddaughter. But as soon as the marriage was announced it was not likely that Lady Henry had been able to hold her tongue.

A good many interesting tales of his cousin's bride had, indeed, reached the melancholy Duke. Lady Henry had done all that she conceived it her duty to do, filling many pages of note-paper with what the Duke regarded as most unnecessary information.

At any rate, he had brushed it all aside with the impatience of one for whom nothing on earth had now any savor or value beyond one or two indispensable affections. "What's good enough for Jacob is good for me,"

he wrote to Lady Henry, "and if I may offer you some advice, it is that you should not quarrel with Jacob about a matter so vital as his marriage. Into the rights and wrongs of the story you tell me, I really cannot enter; but rather than break with Jacob I would welcome _anybody_ he chose to present to me. And in this case I understand the lady is very clever, distinguished, and of good blood on both sides. Have you had no trouble in your life, my dear Flora, that you can make quarrels with a light heart? If so, I envy you; but I have neither the energy nor the good spirits wherewith to imitate you."

Julie, of course, knew nothing of this correspondence, though from the Duke's letters to Jacob she divined that something of the kind had taken place. But it was made quite plain to her that she was to be spared all the friction and all the difficulty which may often attend the entrance of a person like herself within the circle of a rich and important family like the Delafields. With Lady Henry, indeed, the fight had still to be fought. But Jacob's mother, influenced on one side by her son and on the other by the head of the family, accepted her daughter-in-law with the facile kindliness and good temper that were natural to her; while his sister, the fair-haired and admirable Susan, owed her brother too much and loved him too well to be other than friendly to his wife.

No; on the worldly side all was smooth. The marriage had been carried through with ease and quietness The Duke, in spite of Jacob's remonstrances, had largely increased his cousin's salary, and Julie was already enjoying the income left her by Lord Lackington. She had only to reappear in London as Jacob's wife to resume far more than her old social ascendency. The winning cards had all pa.s.sed into her hands, and if now there was to be a struggle with Lady Henry, Lady Henry would be worsted.

All this was or should have been agreeable to the sensitive nerves of a woman who knew the worth of social advantages. It had no effect, however, on the mortal depression which was constantly Julie's portion during the early weeks of her marriage.

As for Delafield, he had entered upon this determining experiment of his life--a marriage, which was merely a legalized comrades.h.i.+p, with the woman he adored--in the mind of one resolved to pay the price of what he had done. This graceful and stately woman, with her high intelligence and her social gifts, was now his own property. She was to be the companion of his days and the mistress of his house. But although he knew well that he had a certain strong hold upon her, she did not love him, and none of the fusion of true marriage had taken place or could take place. So be it. He set himself to build up a relation between them which should justify the violence offered to natural and spiritual law.

His own delicacy of feeling and perception combined with the strength of his pa.s.sion to make every action of their common day a symbol and sacrament. That her heart regretted Warkworth, that bitterness and longing, an unspent and baffled love, must be constantly overshadowing her--these things he not only knew, he was forever reminding himself of them, driving them, as it were, into consciousness, as the ascetic drives the spikes into his flesh. His task was to comfort her, to make her forget, to bring her back to common peace and cheerfulness of mind.

To this end he began with appealing as much as possible to her intelligence. He warmly encouraged her work for Meredith. From the first days of their marriage he became her listener, scholar, and critic.

Himself interested mainly in social, economical, or religious discussion, he humbly put himself to school in matters of _belles-lettres_. His object was to enrich Julie's daily life with new ambitions and new pleasures, which might replace the broodings of her illness and convalescence, and then, to make her feel that she had at hand, in the companion of that life, one who felt a natural interest in all her efforts, a natural pride in all her successes.

Alack! the calculation was too simple--and too visible. It took too little account of the complexities of Julie's nature, of the ravages and the shock of pa.s.sion. Julie herself might be ready enough to return to the things of the mind, but they were no sooner offered to her, as it were, in exchange for the perilous delights of love, than she grew dumbly restive. She felt herself, also, too much observed, too much thought over, made too often, if the truth were known, the subject of religious or mystical emotion.

More and more, also, was she conscious of strangeness and eccentricity in the man she had married. It often seemed to that keen and practical sense which in her mingled so oddly with the capacity for pa.s.sion that, as they grew older, and her mind recovered tone and balance, she would probably love the world disastrously more and he disastrously less. And if so, the gulf between them, instead of closing, could but widen.

One day--a showery day in early June--she was left alone for an hour, while Delafield went down to Montreux to change some circular notes.

Julie took a book from the table and strolled out along the lovely road that slopes gently downward from Charnex to the old field-embowered village of Brent.

The rain was just over. It had been a cold rain, and the snow had crept downward on the heights, and had even powdered the pines of the Cubly.

The clouds were sweeping low in the west. Towards Geneva the lake was mere wide and featureless s.p.a.ce--a cold and misty water, melting into the fringes of the rain-clouds. But to the east, above the Rhone valley, the sky was lifting; and as Julie sat down upon a midway seat and turned herself eastward, she was met by the full and unveiled glory of the higher Alps--the Rochers de Naye, the Velan, the Dent du Midi. On the jagged peaks of the latter a bright shaft of sun was playing, and the great white or rock-ribbed ma.s.s raised itself above the mists of the lower world, once more unstained and triumphant.

But the cold _bise_ was still blowing, and Julie, s.h.i.+vering, drew her wrap closer round her. Her heart pined for Como and the south; perhaps for the little d.u.c.h.ess, who spoiled and petted her in the common, womanish ways.

The spring--a second spring--was all about her; but in this chilly northern form it spoke to her with none of the ravishment of Italy. In the steep fields above her the narcissuses were bent and bowed with rain; the red-browns of the walnuts glistened in the wet gleams of sun; the fading apple-blossom beside her wore a melancholy beauty; only in the rich, pus.h.i.+ng gra.s.s, with its wealth of flowers and its branching cow-parsley, was there the stubborn life and prophecy of summer.

Suddenly Julie caught up the book that lay beside her and opened it with a hasty hand. It was one of that set of Saint-Simon which had belonged to her mother, and had already played a part in her own destiny.

She turned to the famous "character" of the Dauphin, of that model prince, in whose death Saint-Simon, and Fenelon, and France herself, saw the eclipse of all great hopes.

"A prince, affable, gentle, humane, patient, modest, full of compunctions, and, as much as his position allowed--sometimes beyond it--humble, and severe towards himself."

Was it not to the life? "_Affable, doux, humain--patient, modeste--humble et austere pour soi_"--beyond what was expected, beyond, almost, what was becoming?

She read on to the mention of the Dauphine, terrified, in her human weakness, of so perfect a husband, and trying to beguile or tempt him from the heights; to the picture of Louis Quatorze, the grandfather, shamed in his worldly old age by the presence beside him of this saintly and high-minded youth; of the Court, looking forward with dismay to the time when it should find itself under the rule of a man who despised and condemned both its follies and its pa.s.sions, until she reached that final rapture, where, in a mingled anguish and adoration, Saint-Simon bids eternal farewell to a character and a heart of which France was not worthy.

The lines pa.s.sed before her, and she was conscious, guiltily conscious, of reading them with a double mind.

Then she closed the book, held by the thought of her husband--in a somewhat melancholy reverie.

There is a Catholic word with which in her convent youth she had been very familiar--the word _recueilli_--"recollected." At no time had it sounded kindly in her ears; for it implied fetters and self--suppressions--of the voluntary and spiritual sort--wholly unwelcome to and unvalued by her own temperament. But who that knew him well could avoid applying it to Delafield? A man of "recollection"

living in the eye of the Eternal; keeping a guard over himself in the smallest matters of thought and action; mystically possessed by the pa.s.sion of a spiritual ideal; in love with charity, purity, simplicity of life.

She bowed her head upon her hands in dreariness of spirit. Ultimately, what could such a man want with her? What had she to give him? In what way could she ever be _necessary_ to him? And a woman, even in friends.h.i.+p, must feel herself that to be happy.

Already this daily state in which she found herself--of owing everything and giving nothing--produced in her a secret irritation and repulsion; how would it be in the years to come?

"He never saw me as I am," she thought to herself, looking fretfully back to their past acquaintance. "I am neither as weak as he thinks me--nor as clever. And how strange it is--this _tension_ in which he lives!"

And as she sat there idly plucking at the wet gra.s.s, her mind was overrun with a motley host of memories--some absurd, some sweet, some of an austerity that chilled her to the core. She thought of the difficulty she had in persuading Delafield to allow himself even necessary comforts and conveniences; a laugh, involuntary, and not without tenderness, crossed her face as she recalled a tale he had told her at Camaldoli, of the contempt excited in a young footman of a smart house by the mediocrity and exiguity of his garments and personal appointments generally. "I felt I possessed nothing that he would have taken as a gift," said Delafield, with a grin. "It was chastening."

Yet though he laughed, he held to it; and Julie was already so much of the wife as to be planning how to coax him presently out of a portmanteau and a top-hat that were in truth a disgrace to their species.

And all the time _she_ must have the best of everything--a maid, luxurious travelling, dainty food. They had had one or two wrestles on the subject already. "Why are you to have all the high thinking and plain living to yourself?" she had asked him, angrily, only to be met by the plea, "Dear, get strong first--then you shall do what you like."

But it was at La Verna, the mountain height overshadowed by the memories of St. Francis, that she seemed to have come nearest to the ascetic and mystical tendency in Delafield. He went about the mountain-paths a transformed being, like one long spiritually athirst who has found the springs and sources of life. Julie felt a secret terror. Her impression was much the same as Meredith's--as of "something wearing through" to the light of day. Looking back she saw that this temperament, now so plain to view, had been always there; but in the young and capable agent of the Chudleigh property, in the d.u.c.h.ess's cousin, or Lady Henry's nephew, it had pa.s.sed for the most part unsuspected. How remarkably it had developed!--whither would it carry them both in the future? When thinking about it, she was apt to find herself seized with a sudden craving for Mayfair, "little dinners," and good talk.

"What a pity you weren't born a Catholic!--you might have been a religious," she said to him one night at La Verna, when he had been reading her some of the _Fioretti_ with occasional comments of his own.

But he had shaken his head with a smile.

"You see, I have no creed--or next to none."

The answer startled her. And in the depths of his blue eyes there seemed to her to be hovering a swarm of thoughts that would not let themselves loose in her presence, but were none the less the true companions of his mind. She saw herself a moment as Elsa, and her husband as a modern Lohengrin, coming spiritually she knew not whence, bound on some quest mysterious and unthinkable.

"What will you do," she said, suddenly, "when the dukedom comes to you?"

Delafield's aspect darkened in an instant. If he could have shown anger to her, anger there would have been.

"That is a subject I never think of or discuss, if I can help it," he said, abruptly; and, rising to his feet, he pointed out that the sun was declining fast towards the plain of the Casentino, and they were far from their hotel.

"Inhuman!--unreasonable!" was the cry of the critical sense in her as she followed him in silence.

Innumerable memories of this kind beat on Julie's mind as she sat dreamily on her bench among the Swiss meadows. How natural that in the end they should sweep her by reaction into imaginations wholly indifferent--of a drum-and-trumpet history, in the actual fighting world.

... Far, far in the African desert she followed the march of Warkworth's little troop.

Ah, the blinding light--the African scrub and sand--the long, single line--the native porters with their loads--the handful of English officers with that slender figure at their head--the endless, waterless path with its palms and mangoes and mimosas--the scene rushed upon the inward eye and held it. She felt the heat, the thirst, the weariness of bone and brain--all the spell and mystery of the unmapped, unconquered land.

Did he think of her sometimes, at night, under the stars, or in the blaze and mirage of noon? Yes, yes; he thought of her. Each to the other their thoughts must travel while they lived.

In Delafield's eyes, she knew, his love for her had been mere outrage and offence.

Ah, well, _he_, at least, had needed her. He had desired only very simple, earthy things--money, position, success--things it was possible for a woman to give him, or get for him; and at the last, though it were only as a traitor to his word and his _fiancee_, he had asked for love--asked commonly, hungrily, recklessly, because he could not help it--and then for pardon! And those are things the memory of which lies deep, deep in the pulsing, throbbing heart.

At this point she hurriedly checked and scourged herself, as she did a hundred times a day.