"I shall offer an armed and honorable peace. The Duchess of Chudleigh
may intrigue and tell lies, if she pleases. I am not giving her a
hundred a year."
There was a pause.
"Why, if I may ask," said Sir Wilfrid, at the end of it, "did you
quarrel with Jacob? I understand there was a separate cause:"
Lady Henry hesitated.
"He paid me a debt," she said, at last, and a sudden flush rose in her
old, blanched cheek.
"And that annoyed you? You have the oddest code!"
Lady Henry bit her lip.
"One does not like one's money thrown in one's face."
"Most unreasonable of women!"
"Never mind, Wilfrid. We all have our feelings."
"Precisely. Well, no doubt Jacob will make peace. As for--Ah, here comes
Montresor!"
A visible tremor passed through Lady Henry. The door was thrown open,
and the footman announced the Minister for War.
"Her grace, sir, is not yet returned."
Montresor stumbled into the room, and even with his eye-glasses
carefully adjusted, did not at once perceive who was in it.
Sir Wilfrid went towards him.
"Ah, Bury! Convalescent, I hope?"
"Quite. The Duchess has gone to meet Mrs. Delafield."
"Mrs.--?" Montresor's mouth opened. "But, of course, you know?"
"Oh yes, I know. But one's tongue has to get oiled. You see Lady Henry?"
Montresor started.
"I am glad to see Lady Henry," he replied, stiffly.
Lady Henry slowly rose and advanced two steps. She quietly held out her
hand to him, and, smiling, looked him in the face.
"Take it. There is no longer any cause of quarrel between us. I raise
the embargo."
The Minister took the hand, and shook his head.
"Ah, but you had no right to impose it," he said, with energy.
"Oh, for goodness sake, meet me half-way," cried Lady Henry, "or I shall
never hold out!"
Sir Wilfrid, whose half-embarrassed gaze was bent on the ground, looked
up and was certain that he saw a gleam of moisture in those
wrinkled eyes.
"Why have you held out so long? What does it matter to me whether Miss
Julie be a duchess or no? That doesn't make up to me for all the months
you've shut your door on me. And I was always given to understand,
by-the-way, that it wouldn't matter to you."
"I've had three months at Torquay," said Lady Henry, raising her
shoulders.
"I hope it was dull to distraction."
"It was. And my doctor tells me the more I fret the more gout I may
expect."
"So all this is not generosity, but health?"
"Kiss my hand, sir, and have done with it! You are all avenged. At
Torquay I had four companions in seven weeks."
"More power to them!" said Montresor. "Meredith, come here. Shall we
accept the pleas?"
Meredith came slowly from the window, his hands behind his back.
"Lady Henry commands and we obey," he said, slowly. "But to-day begins a
new world--founded in ruin, like the rest of them."
He raised his fine eyes, in which there was no laughter, rather a dreamy
intensity. Lady Henry shrank.
"If you're thinking of Chudleigh," she said, uncertainly, "be glad for
him. It was release. As for Henry Warkworth--"
"Ah, poor fellow!" said Montresor, perfunctorily. "Poor fellow!"
He had dropped Lady Henry's hand, but he now recaptured it, enclosing
the thin, jewelled fingers in his own.
"Well, well, then it's peace, with all my heart." He stooped and lightly
kissed the fingers. "And now, when do you expect our friend?"
"At any moment," said Lady Henry.
She seated herself, and Montresor beside her.
"I am told," said Montresor, "that this horror will not only affect
Delafield personally, but that he will regard the dukedom as a
calamity."
"Hm!--and you believe it?" said Lady Henry.
"I try to," was the Minister's laughing reply. "Ah, surely, here they
are!"
Meredith turned from the window, to which he had gone back.
"The carriage has just arrived," he announced, and he stood fidgeting,
standing first on one foot, then on the other, and running his hand
through his mane of gray hair. His large features were pale, and any
close observer would have detected the quiver of emotion.
A sound of voices from the anteroom, the Duchess's light tones floating
to the top. At the same time a door on the other side of the
drawing-room opened and the Duke of Crowborough appeared.
"I think I hear my wife," he said, as he greeted Montresor and hurriedly
crossed the room.
There was a rustle of quick steps, and the little Duchess entered.
"Freddie, here is Julie!"
Behind appeared a tall figure in black. Everybody in the room advanced,
including Lady Henry, who, however, after a few steps stood still behind
the others, leaning on her stick.
Julie looked round the little circle, then at the Duke of Crowborough,
who had gravely given her his hand. The suppressed excitement already in
the room clearly communicated itself to her. She did not lose her
self-command for an instant, but her face pleaded.
"Is it really true? Perhaps there is some mistake?"
"I fear there can be none," said the Duke, sadly. "Poor Chudleigh had
been long dead when they found him."
"Freddie," said the Duchess, interrupting, "I have told Greswell we
shall want the carriage at half-past nine for Euston. Will that do?"
"Perfectly."
Greswell, the handsome groom of the chambers, approached Julie.
"Your grace's maid wishes to know whether it is your grace's wish that
she should go round to Heribert Street before taking the luggage
to Euston?"
Julie looked at the man, bewildered. Then a stormy color rushed into her
cheeks.
"Does he mean my maid?" she said to the Duke, piteously.
"Certainly. Will you give your orders?"
She gave them, and then, turning again to the Duke, she covered her eyes
with her hands a moment.
"What does it all mean?" she said, faltering. "It seems as though we
were all mad."
"You understand, of course, that Jacob succeeds?" said the Duke, not
without coldness; and he stood still an instant, gazing at this woman,
who must now, he supposed, feel herself at the very summit of her
ambitions.
Julie drew a long breath. Then she perceived Lady Henry. Instantly,
impetuously, she crossed the room. But as she reached that composed and
formidable figure, the old timidity, the old fear, seized her. She
paused abruptly, but she held out her hand.
Lady Henry took it. The two women stood regarding each other, while the
other persons in the room instinctively turned away from their meeting.
Lady Henry's first look was one of curiosity. Then, before the
indefinable, ennobling change in Julie's face, now full of the pale
agitation of memory, the eyes of the older woman wavered and dropped.
But she soon recovered herself.
"We meet again under very strange circumstances," she said, quietly;
"though I have long foreseen them. As for our former experience, we were
in a false relation, and it made fools of us both. You and Jacob are now
the heads of the family. And if you like to make friends with me on this
new footing, I am ready. As to my behavior, I think it was natural; but
if it rankles in your mind, I apologize."
The personal pride of the owner, curbed in its turn by the pride of
tradition and family, spoke strangely from these words. Julie stood
trembling, her chest heaving.
"I, too, regret--and apologize," she said, in a low voice.
"Then we begin again. But now you must let Evelyn take you to rest for
an hour or two. I am sorry you have this hurried journey to-night."
Julie pressed her hands to her breast with one of those dramatic
movements that were natural to her.
"Oh, I must see Jacob!" she said, under her breath--"I must see Jacob!"
And she turned away, looking vaguely round her. Meredith approached.
"Comfort yourself," he said, very gently, pressing her hand in both of
his. "It has been a great shock, but when you get there he'll be
all right."
"Jacob?"
Her expression, the piteous note in her voice, awoke in him an answering
sense of pain. He wondered how it might be between the husband and wife.
Yet it was borne in upon him, as upon Lady Henry, that her marriage,
however interpreted, had brought with it profound and intimate
transformation. A different woman stood before him. And when, after a
few more words, the Duchess swept down upon them, insisting that Julie
must rest awhile, Meredith stood looking after the retreating figures,
filled with the old, bitter sense of human separateness, and the
fragmentariness of all human affections. Then he made his farewells to
the Duke and Lady Henry, and slipped away. He had turned a page in the
book of life; and as he walked through Grosvenor Square he applied his
mind resolutely to one of the political "causes" with which, as a
powerful and fighting journalist, he was at that moment occupied.
Lady Henry, too, watched Julie's exit from the room.
"So now she supposes herself in love with Jacob?" she thought, with
amusement, as she resumed her seat.
"What if Delafield refuses to be made a duke?" said Sir Wilfrid, in her
ear.
"It would be a situation new to the Constitution," said Lady Henry,
composedly. "I advise you, however, to wait till it occurs."
* * * * *
The northern express rushed onward through the night. Rugby, Stafford,
Crewe had been left behind. The Yorkshire valleys and moors began to
show themselves in pale ridges and folds under the moon. Julie, wakeful
in her corner opposite the little, sleeping Duchess, was conscious of an
interminable rush of images through a brain that longed for a few
unconscious and forgetful moments. She thought of the deferential
station-master at Euston; of the fuss attending their arrival on the
platform; of the arrangements made for stopping the express at the
Yorkshire Station, where they were to alight.
Faircourt? Was it the great Early-Georgian house of which she had heard
Jacob speak--the vast pile, half barrack, half palace, in which,
according to him, no human being could be either happy or at home?
And this was now his--and hers? Again the whirl of thoughts swept and
danced round her.
A wild, hill country. In the valleys, the blackness of thick trees, the
gleam of rivers, the huge, lifeless factories; and beyond, the high,
silver edges, the sharp shadows of the moors.... The train slackened,
and the little Duchess woke at once.
"Ten minutes to three. Oh, Julie, here we are!"
The dawn was just coldly showing as they alighted. Carriages and
servants were waiting, and various persons whose identity and function
it was not easy to grasp. One of them, however, at once approached Julie
with a privileged air, and she perceived that he was a doctor.
"I am very glad that your grace has come," he said, as he raised his
hat. "The trouble with the Duke is shock, and want of sleep."
Julie looked at him, still bewildered.
"How long has my husband been ill?"
He walked on beside her, describing in as few words as possible the
harrowing days preceding the death of the boy, Delafield's attempts to
soothe and control the father, the stratagem by which the poor Duke had
outwitted them all, and the weary hours of search through the night,
under a drizzling rain, which had resulted, about dawn, in the discovery
of the Duke's body in one of the deeper holes of the river.
"When the procession returned to the house, your husband"--the speaker
framed the words uncertainly--"had a long fainting-fit. It was probably
caused by the exhaustion of the search--many hours without food--and
many sleepless nights. We kept him in his room all day. But towards
evening he insisted on getting up. The restlessness he shows is itself a
sign of shock. I trust, now you are here, you may be able to persuade
him to spare himself. Otherwise the consequences might be grave."
The drive to the house lay mainly through a vast park, dotted with stiff
and melancholy woods. The morning was cloudy; even the wild roses in the
hedges and the daisies in the grass had neither gayety nor color. Soon
the house appeared--an immense pile of stone, with a pillared centre,
and wings to east and west, built in a hollow, gray and sunless. The
mournful blinds drawn closely down made of it rather a mausoleum for the
dead than a home for the living.
At the approach of the carriage, however, doors were thrown open,
servants appeared, and on the steps, trembling and heavy-eyed, stood
Susan Delafield.
She looked timidly at Julie, and then, as they passed into the great
central hall, the two kissed each other with tears.
"He is in his room, waiting for you. The doctors persuaded him not to
come down. But he is dressed, and reading and writing. We don't believe
he has slept at all for a week."
* * * * *
"Through there," said Susan Delafield, stepping back. "That is the
door."
[Illustration: "SHE FOUND HERSELF KNEELING BESIDE HIM"]
Julie softly opened it, and closed it behind her. Delafield had heard
her approach, and was standing by the table, supporting himself upon it.
His aspect filled Julie with horror. She ran to him and threw her
arms round him. He sank back into his chair, and she found herself
kneeling beside him, murmuring to him, while his head rested upon
her shoulder.
"Jacob, I am here! Oh, I ought to have been here all through! It's
terrible--terrible! But, Jacob, you won't suffer so--now I'm here--now
we're together--now I love you, Jacob?"
Her voice broke in tears. She put back the hair from his brow, kissing
him with a tenderness in which there was a yearning and lovely humility.
Then she drew a little away, waiting for him to speak, in an agony.
But for a time he seemed unable to speak. He feebly released himself, as
though he could not bear the emotion she offered him, and his
eyes closed.
"Jacob, come and lie down!" she said, in terror. "Let me call the
doctors."
He shook his head, and a faint pressure from his hand bade her sit
beside him.
"I shall be better soon. Give me time. I'll tell you--"
Then silence again. She sat holding his hand, her eyes fixed upon him.
Time passed, she knew not how. Susan came into the room--a small
sitting-room in the east wing--to tell her that the neighboring bedroom
had been prepared for herself. Julie only looked up for an instant with
a dumb sign of refusal. A doctor came in, and Delafield made a painful
effort to take the few spoonfuls of food and stimulant pressed upon him.
Then he buried his face in the side of the arm-chair.
"Please let us be alone," he said, with a touch of his old
peremptoriness, and both Susan and the doctor obeyed.
But it was long before he could collect energy enough to talk. When he
did, he made an effort to tell her the story of the boy's death, and the
father's self-destruction. He told it leaning forward in his chair, his
eyes on the ground, his hands loosely joined, his voice broken and
labored. Julie listened, gathering from his report an impression of
horror, tragic and irremediable, similar to that which had shaken the
balance of his own mind. And when he suddenly looked up with the words,
"And now _I_ am expected to take their place--to profit by their deaths!
What rightful law of God or man binds me to accept a life and a
responsibility that I loathe?" Julie drew back as though he had struck
her. His face, his tone were not his own--there was a violence, a threat
in them, addressed, as it were, specially to _her_. "If it were not for
you," his eyes seemed to say, "I could refuse this thing, which will
destroy me, soul and body."
She was silent, her pulses fluttering, and he resumed, speaking like one
groping his way:
"I could have done the work, of course--I have done it for five years. I
could have looked after the estate and the people. But the money, the
paraphernalia, the hordes of servants, the mummery of the life! Why,
Julie, should we be forced into it? What happiness--I ask you--what
happiness can it bring to either of us?"
And again he looked up, and again it seemed to Julie that his expression
was one of animated hostility and antagonism--antagonism to her, as
embodying for the moment all the arguments--of advantage, custom,
law--he was, in his own mind, fighting and denying. With a failing heart
she felt herself very far from him. Was there not also something in his
attitude, unconsciously, of that old primal antagonism of the man to
the woman, of the stronger to the weaker, the more spiritual to the
more earthy?
"You think, no doubt," he said, after a pause, "that it is my duty to
take this thing, even if I _could_ lay it down?"
"I don't know what I think," she said, hurriedly. "It is very strange,
of course, what you say. We ought to discuss it thoroughly. Let me have
a little time."
He gave an impatient sigh, then suddenly rose.
"Will you come and look at them?"
She, too, rose and put her hand in his.
"Take me where you will."
"It is not horrible," he said, shading his eyes a moment. "They are at
peace."
With a feeble step, leaning on her arm, he guided her through the great,
darkened house. Julie was dimly aware of wide staircases, of galleries
and high halls, of the pictures of past Delafields looking down upon
them. The morning was now far advanced. Many persons were at work in the
house, but Julie was conscious of them only as distant figures that
vanished at their approach. They walked alone, guarded from all
intrusion by the awe and sympathy of the unseen human beings
around them.
Delafield opened the closed door.
The father and son lay together, side by side, the boy's face in a very
winning repose, which at first sight concealed the traces of his long
suffering; the father's also--closed eyes and sternly shut
mouth--suggesting, not the despair which had driven him to his death,
but, rather, as in sombre triumph, the all-forgetting, all-effacing
sleep which he had won from death.
They stood a moment, till Delafield fell on his knees. Julie knelt
beside him. She prayed for a while; then she wearied, being, indeed,
worn out with her journey. But Delafield was motionless, and it seemed
to Julie that he hardly breathed.
She rose to her feet, and found her eyes for the first time flooded with
tears. Never for many weeks had she felt so lonely, or so utterly
unhappy. She would have given anything to forget herself in comforting
Jacob. But he seemed to have no need of her, no thought of her.
As she vaguely looked round her, she saw that beside the dead man was a
table holding some violets--the only flowers in the room--some
photographs, and a few well--worn books. Softly she took up one. It was
a copy of the _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, much noted and
underlined. It would have seemed to her sacrilege to look too close; but
she presently perceived a letter between its pages, and in the morning
light, which now came strongly into the room through a window looking on
the garden, she saw plainly that it was written on thin, foreign paper,
that it was closed, and addressed to her husband.
"Jacob!"
She touched him softly on the shoulder, alarmed by his long immobility.
He looked up, and it appeared to Julie as though he were shaking off
with difficulty some abnormal and trancelike state. But he rose, looking
at her strangely.
"Jacob, this is yours."
He took the book abruptly, almost as if she had no right to be holding
it. Then, as he saw the letter, the color rushed into his face. He took
it, and after a moment's hesitation walked to the window and opened it.
She saw him waver, and ran to his support. But he put out a hand which
checked her.
"It was the last thing he wrote," he said; and then, uncertainly, and
without reading any but the first words of the letter, he put it into
his pocket.
Julie drew back, humiliated. His gesture said that to a secret so
intimate and sacred he did not propose to admit his wife.
They went back silently to the room from which they had come. Sentence
after sentence came to Julie's lips, but it seemed useless to say them,
and once more, but in a totally new way, she was "afraid" of the man
beside her.
* * * * *
She left him shortly after, by his own wish.
"I will lie down, and you must rest," he said, with decision.
So she bathed and dressed, and presently she allowed the kind,
fair-haired Susan to give her food, and pour out her own history of the
death-week which she and Jacob had passed through. But in all that was
said, Julie noticed that Susan spoke of her brother very little, and of
his inheritance and present position not at all. And once or twice she
noticed a wondering or meditative expression in the girl's charming eyes
as they rested on herself, and realized that the sense of mystery, of
hushed expectancy, was not confined to her own mind.
When Susan left her at nine o'clock, it was to give a number of
necessary orders in the house. The inquest was to be held in the
morning, and the whole day would be filled with arrangements for the
double funeral. The house would be thronged with officials of all sorts.
"Poor Jacob!" said the sister, sighing, as she went away.
But the tragic tumult had not yet begun. The house was still quiet, and
Julie was for the first time alone.
She drew up the blinds, and stood gazing out upon the park, now flooded
with light; at the famous Italian garden beneath the windows, with its
fountains and statues; at the wide lake which filled the middle
distance; and the hills beyond it, with the plantations and avenues
which showed the extension of the park as far as the eye could see.
Julie knew very well what it all implied. Her years with Lady Henry, in
connection with her own hidden sense of birth and family, had shown her
with sufficient plainness the conditions under which the English noble
lives. She _was_ actually, at that moment, Duchess of Chudleigh; her
strong intelligence faced and appreciated the fact; the social scope and
power implied in those three words were all the more vivid to her
imagination because of her history and up-bringing. She had not grown to
maturity _inside_, like Delafield, but as an exile from a life which was
yet naturally hers--an exile, full, sometimes, of envy, and the
passions of envy.
It had no terrors for her--quite the contrary--this high social state.
Rather, there were moments when her whole nature reached out to it, in a
proud and confident ambition. Nor had she any mystical demurrer to make.
The originality which in some ways she richly possessed was not
concerned in the least with the upsetting of class distinctions, and as
a Catholic she had been taught loyally to accept them.
The minutes passed away. Julie sank deeper and deeper into reverie, her
head leaning against the side of the window, her hands clasped before
her on her black dress. Once or twice she found the tears dropping from
her eyes, and once or twice she smiled.
She was not thinking of the tragic circumstances amid which she stood.
From that short trance of feeling even the piteous figures of the dead
father and son faded away. Warkworth entered into it, but already
invested with the passionless and sexless beauty of a world
where--whether it be to us poetry or reality--"they neither marry nor
are given in marriage." Her warm and living thoughts spent themselves on
one theme only--the redressing of a spiritual balance. She was no longer
a beggar to her husband; she had the wherewithal to give. She had been
the mere recipient, burdened with debts beyond her paying; now--
And then it was that her smiles came--tremluous, fugitive, exultant.
* * * * *
A bell rang in the long corridor, and the slight sound recalled her to
life and action. She walked towards the door which separated her from
the sitting-room where she had left her husband, and opened it
without knocking.
Delafield was sitting at a writing-table in the window. He had
apparently been writing; but she found him in a moment of pause, playing
absently with the pen he still held.
As she entered he looked up, and it seemed to her that his aspect and
his mood had changed. Her sudden and indefinable sense of this made it
easier for her to hasten to him, and to hold out her hands to him.
"Jacob, you asked me a question just now, and I begged you to give me
time. But I am here to answer it. If it would be to your happiness to
refuse the dukedom, refuse it. I will not stand in your way, and I will
never reproach you. I suppose"--she made herself smile upon him--"there
are ways of doing such a strange thing. You will be much criticised,
perhaps much blamed. But if it seems to you right, do it. I'll just
stand by you and help you. Whatever makes you happy shall make me happy,
if only--"
Delafield had risen impetuously and held her by both hands. His breast
heaved, and the hurrying of her own breath would now hardly let
her speak.
"If only what?" he said, hoarsely.
She raised her eyes.
"If only, _mon ami_"--she disengaged one hand and laid it gently on his
shoulder--"you will give me your trust, and"--her voice
dropped--"your love!"
They gazed at each other. Between them, around them hovered thoughts of
the past--of Warkworth, of the gray Channel waves, of the spiritual
relation which had grown up between them in Switzerland, mingled with
the consciousness of this new, incalculable present, and of the growth
and change in themselves.
"You'd give it all up?" said Delafield, gently, still holding her at
arm's-length.
"Yes," she nodded to him, with a smile.
"For me? For my sake?"
She smiled again. He drew a long breath, and turning to the table
behind him, took up a letter which was lying there.
"I want you to read that," he said, holding it out to her.
She drew back, with a little, involuntary frown.
He understood.
"Dearest," he cried, pressing her hand passionately, "I have been in the
grip of all the powers of death! Read it--be good to me!"
Standing beside him, with his arm round her, she read the melancholy
Duke's last words:
"My Dear Jacob,--I leave you a heavy task, which I know well
is, in your eyes, a mere burden. But, for my sake, accept it.
The man who runs away has small right to counsel courage. But
you know what my struggle has been. You'll judge me
mercifully, if no one else does. There is in you, too, the
little, bitter drop that spoils us all; but you won't be
alone. You have your wife, and you love her. Take my place
here, care for our people, speak of us sometimes to your
children, and pray for us. I bless you, dear fellow. The only
moments of comfort I have ever known this last year have come
from you. I would live on if I could, but I must--_must_ have
sleep."
Julie dropped the paper. She turned to look at her husband.
"Since I read that," he said, in a low voice, "I have been sitting here
alone--or, rather, it is my belief that I have not been alone. But"--he
hesitated--"it is very difficult for me to speak of that--even to you.
At any rate, I have felt the touch of discipline, of command. My poor
cousin deserted. I, it seems"--he drew a long and painful breath--"must
keep to the ranks."
"Let us discuss it," said Julie; and sitting down, hand in hand, they
talked quietly and gravely.
Suddenly, Delafield turned to her with renewed emotion.
"I feel already the energy, the honorable ambition you will bring to it.
But still, you'd have given it up, Julie? You'd have given it up?"
Julie chose her words.
"Yes. But now that we are to keep it, will you hate me if, some
day--when we are less sad--I get pleasure from it? I sha'n't be able to
help it. When we were at La Verna, I felt that you ought to have been
born in the thirteenth century, that you were really meant to wed
poverty and follow St. Francis. But now you have got to be horribly,
hopelessly rich. And I, all the time, am a worldling, and a modern. What
you'll suffer from, I shall perhaps--enjoy."
The word fell harshly on the darkened room. Delafield shivered, as
though he felt the overshadowing dead. Julie impetuously took his hand.
"It will be my part to be a worldling--for your sake," she said, her
breath wavering. Their eyes met. From her face shone a revelation, a
beauty that enwrapped them both. Delafield fell on his knees beside her,
and laid his head upon her breast. The exquisite gesture with which she
folded her arms about him told her inmost thought. At last he needed
her, and the dear knowledge filled and tamed her heart.