Lady Rose's Daughter Part 70

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 peris.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion. In a sense it held at bay even her grief for Warkworth, her intolerable compa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed, 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 att.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+fted.

"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 s.h.i.+ver 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 pa.s.sion. 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 att.i.tude, as of a child leaning, wistfully looking in your face, asking to be led, to be wrestled and reasoned with.

The days, as they pa.s.sed, 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 embarra.s.sment, "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 ant.i.thesis 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 pa.s.s 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.