"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 antithesis between the living husband and the dead lover--in
which the latter had forever the _beau rôle_?
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 pass
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.
Then she looked up, and he was startled by her eyes. Where he had
expected grief, he saw a shrinking animation.
"Write to me often," she said, imperiously.
"Of course. But don't trouble to answer much. Your hands are so full
here."
She frowned.
"Trouble! Why do you spoil me so? Demand--insist--that I should write!"
"Very well," he said, smiling, "I demand--I insist!"
She drew a long breath, and went slowly away from him into the house.
Certainly the antagonism of her secret thoughts, though it persisted,
was no longer merely cold or critical. For it concerned one who was not
only the master of his own life, but threatened unexpectedly to become
the master of hers.
She had begun, indeed, to please her imagination with the idea of a
relation between them, which, while it ignored the ordinary relations of
marriage, should yet include many of the intimacies and refinements of
love. More and more did the surprises of his character arrest and occupy
her mind. She found, indeed, no "plaster saint." Her cool intelligence
soon detected the traces of a peevish or stubborn temper, and of a
natural inertia, perpetually combated, however, by the spiritual energy
of a new and other self exfoliating from the old; a self whose acts and
ways she watched, sometimes with the held breath of fascination,
sometimes with a return of shrinking or fear. That a man should not only
appear but be so good was still in her eyes a little absurd. Perhaps her
feeling was at bottom the common feeling of the sceptical nature. "We
should listen to the higher voices; but in such a way that if another
hypothesis were true, we should not have been too completely duped."
She was ready, also, to convict him of certain prejudices and
superstitions which roused in her an intellectual impatience. But when
all was said, Delafield, unconsciously, was drawing her towards him, as
the fowler draws a fluttering bird. It was the exquisite refinement of
those spiritual insights and powers he possessed which constantly
appealed, not only to her heart, but--a very important matter in Julie's
case--to her taste, to her own carefully tempered instinct for the rare
and beautiful.
He was the master, then, she admitted, of a certain vein of spiritual
genius. Well, here should he lead--and even, if he pleased, command her.
She would sit at his feet, and he should open to her ranges of feeling,
delights, and subtleties of moral sensation hitherto unknown to her.
Thus the feeling of ennui and reaction which had marked the first weeks
of her married life had now wholly disappeared. Delafield was no longer
dull or pedantic in her eyes. She passed alternately from moments of
intolerable smart and pity for the dead to moments of agitation and
expectancy connected with her husband. She thought over their meeting of
the night before; she looked forward to similar hours to come.
Meanwhile his relation towards her in many matters was still naïvely
ignorant and humble--determined by the simplicity of a man of some real
greatness, who never dreamed of claiming tastes or knowledge he did not
possess, whether in small things or large. This phase, however, only
gave the more value to one which frequently succeeded it. For suddenly
the conversation would enter regions where he felt himself peculiarly at
home, and, with the same unconsciousness on his part, she would be made
to feel the dignity and authority which surrounded his ethical and
spiritual life. And these contrasts--this weakness and this
strength--combined with the man-and-woman element which is always
present in any situation of the kind, gave rise to a very varied and
gradually intensifying play of feeling between them. Feeling only
possible, no doubt, for the _raffinés_ of this world; but for them full
of strange charm, and even of excitement.
* * * * *
Delafield left the little inn for Montreux, Lausanne, and London that
afternoon. He bent to kiss his wife at the moment of his departure, in
the bare sitting-room that had been improvised for them on the ground
floor of the hotel, and as she let her face linger ever so little
against his she felt strong arms flung round her, and was crushed
against his breast in a hungry embrace. When he released her with a
flush and a murmured word of apology she shook her head, smiling sadly
but saying nothing. The door closed on him, and at the sound she made a
hasty step forward.
"Jacob! Take me with you!"
But her voice died in the rattle and bustle of the diligence outside,
and she was left trembling from head to foot, under a conflict of
emotions that seemed now to exalt, now to degrade her.
Half an hour after Delafield's departure there appeared on the terrace
of the hotel a tottering, emaciated form--Aileen Moffatt, in a black
dress and hat, clinging to her mother's arm. But she refused the
deck--chair, which they had spread with cushions and shawls.
"No; let me sit up." And she took an ordinary chair, looking round upon
the lake and the little flowery terrace with a slow, absorbed look, like
one trying to remember. Suddenly she bowed her head on her hands.
"Aileen!" cried Lady Blanche, in an agony.