It was a cold, clear morning in February, with a little pale sunshine
playing on the bare trees of the Park. Sir Wilfrid, walking southward
from the Marble Arch to his luncheon with Lady Henry, was gladly
conscious of the warmth of his fur-collared coat, though none the less
ready to envy careless youth as it crossed his path now and then,
great-coatless and ruddy, courting the keen air.
Just as he was about to make his exit towards Mount Street he became
aware of two persons walking southward like himself, but on the other
side of the roadway. He soon identified Captain Warkworth in the slim,
soldierly figure of the man. And the lady? There also, with the help of
his glasses, he was soon informed. Her trim, black hat and her black
cloth costume seemed to him to have a becoming and fashionable
simplicity; and she moved in morning dress, with the same ease and
freedom that had distinguished her in Lady Henry's drawing-room the
night before.
He asked himself whether he should interrupt Mademoiselle Le Breton with
a view to escorting her to Bruton Street. He understood, indeed, that he
and Lady Henry were to be alone at luncheon; Mademoiselle Julie had, no
doubt, her own quarters and attendants. But she seemed to be on her way
home. An opportunity for some perhaps exploratory conversation with her
before he found himself face to face with Lady Henry seemed to him not
undesirable.
But he quickly decided to walk on. Mademoiselle Le Breton and Captain
Warkworth paused in their walk, about no doubt to say good-bye, but,
very clearly, loath to say it. They were, indeed, in earnest
conversation. The Captain spoke with eagerness; Mademoiselle Julie, with
downcast eyes, smiled and listened.
"Is the fellow making love to her?" thought the old man, in some
astonishment, as he turned away. "Hardly the place for it either, one
would suppose."
He vaguely thought that he would both sound and warn Lady Henry. Warn
her of what? He happened on the way home to have been thrown with a
couple of Indian officers whose personal opinion of Harry Warkworth was
not a very high one, in spite of the brilliant distinction which the
young man had earned for himself in the Afridi campaign just closed. But
how was he to hand that sort of thing on to Lady Henry?--and because he
happened to have seen her lady companion and Harry Warkworth together?
No doubt Mademoiselle Julie was on her employer's business.
Yet the little encounter added somehow to his already lively curiosity
on the subject of Lady Henry's companion. Thanks to a remarkable
physical resemblance, he was practically certain that he had guessed the
secret of Mademoiselle Le Breton's parentage. At any rate, on the
supposition that he had, his thoughts began to occupy themselves with
the story to which his guess pointed.
Some thirty years before, he had known, both in London and in Italy, a
certain Colonel Delaney and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the
favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She
was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those
natures--sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge
life--which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be
balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his
military life, silent, narrowly able, and governed by a strict
Anglicanism that seemed to carry with it innumerable "shalts" and "shalt
nots," disagreeable to the natural man or woman, soon found her a tiring
and trying companion. She asked him for what he could not give; she
coquetted with questions he thought it impious to raise; the persons she
made friends with were distasteful to him; and, without complaining, he
soon grew to think it intolerable that a woman married to a soldier
should care so little for his professional interests and ambitions.
Though when she pretended to care for them she annoyed him, if possible,
still more.
As for Lady Rose, she went through all the familiar emotions of the
_femme incomprise_. And with the familiar result. There presently
appeared in the house a man of good family, thirty-five or so,
traveller, painter, and dreamer, with fine, long-drawn features bronzed
by the sun of the East, and bringing with him the reputation of having
plotted and fought for most of the "lost causes" of our generation,
including several which had led him into conflict with British
authorities and British officials. To Colonel Delaney he was an
"agitator," if not a rebel; and the careless pungency of his talk soon
classed him as an atheist besides. In the case of Lady Rose, this man's
free and generous nature, his independence of money and convention, his
passion for the things of the mind, his contempt for the mode, whether
in dress or politics, his light evasions of the red tape of life as of
something that no one could reasonably expect of a vagabond like
himself--these things presently transformed a woman in despair to a
woman in revolt. She fell in love with an intensity befitting her true
temperament, and with a stubbornness that bore witness to the dreary
failure of her marriage. Marriott Dalrymple returned her love, and
nothing in his view of life predisposed him to put what probably
appeared to him a mere legality before the happiness of two people meant
for each other. There were no children of the Delaney marriage; and in
his belief the husband had enjoyed too long a companionship he had never
truly deserved.
So Lady Rose faced her husband, told him the truth, and left him. She
and Dalrymple went to live in Belgium, in a small country-house some
twenty or thirty miles from Brussels. They severed themselves from
England; they asked nothing more of English life. Lady Rose suffered
from the breach with her father, for Lord Lackington never saw her
again. And there was a young sister whom she had brought up, whose image
could often rouse in her a sense of loss that showed itself in
occasional spells of silence and tears. But substantially she never
repented what she had done, although Colonel Delaney made the penalties
of it as heavy as he could. Like Karennine in Tolstoy's great novel, he
refused to sue for a divorce, and for something of the same reasons.
Divorce was in itself impious, and sin should not be made easy. He was
at any time ready to take back his wife, so far as the protection of
his name and roof were concerned, should she penitently return to him.
So the child that was presently born to Lady Rose could not be
legitimized.
Sir Wilfrid stopped short at the Park end of Bruton Street, with a start
of memory.
"I saw it once! I remember now--perfectly."
And he went on to recall a bygone moment in the Brussels Gallery, when,
as he was standing before the great Quintin Matsys, he was accosted with
sudden careless familiarity by a thin, shabbily dressed man, in whose
dark distinction, made still more fantastic and conspicuous by the fever
and the emaciation of consumption, he recognized at once Marriott
Dalrymple.
He remembered certain fragments of their talk about the pictures--the
easy mastery, now brusque, now poetic, with which Dalrymple had shown
him the treasures of the gallery, in the manner of one whose learning
was merely the food of fancy, the stuff on which imagination and reverie
grew rich.