Lady Rose's Daughter Part 68

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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, crus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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--compa.s.sion, 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 G.o.d--my G.o.d! No, there's no G.o.d--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 att.i.tude more weakly, pa.s.sionately 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."