“Julie, it is strange how this appointment affects me. Last night I saw several people at the Embassy—good fellows—who seemed anxious to do all they could for me. Such men never took so much notice of me before. It is plain to me that this task will make or mar me. I may fail. I may die. But if I succeed England will owe me something, and these men at the top of the tree—
“Good God! how can I go on writing this to you? It’s because I came back to the hotel and tossed about half the night brooding over the difference between what these men—these honorable, distinguished fellows—were prepared to think of me, and the blackguard I knew myself to be. What, take everything from a woman’s hand, and then turn and try and drag her in the mire—propose to her what one would shoot a man for proposing to one’s sister! Thief and cur.
“Julie—kind, beloved Julie—forget it all! For God’s sake, let’s cast it all behind us! As long as I live, your name, your memory will live in my heart. We shall not meet, probably, for many years. You’ll marry and be happy yet. Just now I know you’re suffering. I seem to see you in the train—on the steamer—your pale face that has lighted up life for me—your dear, slender hands that folded so easily into one of mine. You are in pain, my darling. Your nature is wrenched from its natural supports. And you gave me all your fine, clear mind, and all your heart. I ought to be damned to the deepest hell!
“Then, again, I say to myself, if only she were here! If only I had her here, with her arms round my neck, surely I might have found the courage and the mere manliness to extricate both herself and me from these entanglements. Aileen might have released and forgiven one.
“No, no! It’s all over! I’ll go and do my task. You set it me. You shan’t be ashamed of me there.
“Goodbye, Julie, my love—goodbye—forever!”
These were portions of that strange document composed through the intervals of a long night, which showed in Warkworth’s mind the survival of a moral code, inherited from generations of scrupulous and God-fearing ancestors, overlaid by selfish living, and now revived under the stress, the purification partly of deepening passion, partly of a high responsibility. The letter was incoherent, illogical; it showed now the meaner, now the nobler elements of character; but it was human; it came from the warm depths of life, and it had exerted in the end a composing and appeasing force upon the woman to whom it was addressed. He had loved her—if only at the moment of parting—he had loved her! At the last there had been feeling, sincerity, anguish, and to these all things may be forgiven.
And, indeed, what in her eyes there was to forgive, Julie had long forgiven. Was it his fault if, when they met first, he was already pledged—for social and practical reasons which her mind perfectly recognized and understood—to Aileen Moffatt? Was it his fault if the relations between herself and him had ripened into a friendship which in its turn could only maintain itself by passing into love? No! It was she, whose hidden, insistent passion—nourished, indeed, upon a tragic ignorance—had transformed what originally he had a perfect right to offer and to feel.
So she defended him; for in so doing she justified herself. And as to the Paris proposal, he had a right to treat her as a woman capable of deciding for herself how far love should carry her; he had a right to assume that her antecedents, her training, and her circumstances were not those of the ordinary sheltered girl, and that for her love might naturally wear a bolder and wilder aspect than for others. He blamed himself too severely, too passionately; but for this very blame her heart remembered him the more tenderly. For it meant that his mind was torn and in travail for her, that his thoughts clung to her in a passionate remorse; and again she felt herself loved, and forgave with all her heart.
All the same, he was gone out of her life, and through the strain and the unconscious progress to other planes and phases of being, wrought by sickness and convalescence, her own passion for him even was now a changed and blunted thing.
Was she ashamed of the wild impulse which had carried her to Paris? It is difficult to say. She was often seized with the shuddering consciousness of an abyss escaped, with wonder that she was still in the normal, accepted world, that Evelyn might still be her companion, that Thérèse still adored her more fervently than any saint in the calendar. Perhaps, if the truth were known, she was more abased in her own eyes by the self-abandonment which had preceded the assignation with Warkworth. She had much intellectual arrogance, and before her acquaintance with Warkworth she had been accustomed to say and to feel that love was but one passion among many, and to despise those who gave it too great a place. And here she had flung herself into it, like any dull or foolish girl for whom a love affair represents the only stirring in the pool of life that she is ever likely to know.
Well, she must recapture herself and remake her life. As she sat there in the still Italian evening she thought of
