“Misled you?” said Evelyn.
Her innocence was really a little hard to bear, and not even the beauty of her blue eyes, now happily restored to him, could appease the mentor at her side.
“You led me plainly to believe,” he repeated, with emphasis, “that if I helped her through the crisis of leaving Lady Henry she would relinquish her designs on Delafield.”
“Did I?” said the Duchess. And putting her hands over her face she laughed rather hysterically. “But that wasn’t why you lent her the house, Freddie.”
“You coaxed me into it, of course,” said the Duke.
“No, it was Julie herself got the better of you,” said Evelyn, triumphantly. “You felt her spell, just as we all do, and wanted to do something for her.”
“Nothing of the sort,” said the Duke, determined to admit no recollection to his disadvantage. “It was your doing entirely.”
The Duchess thought it discreet to let him at least have the triumph of her silence, smiling, and a little sarcastic though it were.
“And of all the undeserved good fortune!” he resumed, feeling in his irritable disapproval that the moral order of the universe had been somehow trifled with. “In the first place, she is the daughter of people who flagrantly misconducted themselves—that apparently does her no harm. Then she enters the service of Lady Henry in a confidential position, and uses it to work havoc in Lady Henry’s social relations. That, I am glad to say, has done her a little harm, although not nearly as much as she deserves. And finally she has a most discreditable flirtation with a man already engaged—to her own cousin, please observe!—and pulls wires for him all over the place in the most objectionable and unwomanly manner.”
“As if everybody didn’t do that!” cried the Duchess. “You know, Freddie, that your own mother always used to boast that she had made six bishops and saved the Establishment.”
The Duke took no notice.
“And yet there she is! Lord Lackington has left her a fortune—a competence, anyway. She marries Jacob Delafield—rather a fool, I consider, but all the same one of the best fellows in the world. And at any time, to judge from what one hears of the health both of Chudleigh and his boy, she may find herself Duchess of Chudleigh.”
The Duke threw himself back in the carriage with the air of one who waits for Providence to reply.
“Oh, well, you see, you can’t make the world into a moral tale to please you,” said the Duchess, absently.
Then, after a pause, she asked, “Are you still going to let them have the house, Freddie?”
“I imagine that if Jacob Delafield applies to me to let it to him, that I shall not refuse him,” said the Duke, stiffly.
The Duchess smiled behind her fan. Yet her tender heart was not in reality very happy about her Julie. She knew well enough that it was a strange marriage of which they had just been witnesses—a marriage containing the seeds of many untoward things only too likely to develop unless fate were kinder than rash mortals have any right to expect.
“I wish to goodness Delafield weren’t so religious,” murmured the Duchess, fervently, pursuing her own thoughts.
“Evelyn!”
“Well, you see, Julie isn’t, at all,” she added, hastily.
“You need not have troubled yourself to tell me that,” was the Duke’s indignant reply.
After a fortnight at Camaldoli and Vallombrosa the Delafields turned towards Switzerland. Julie, who was a lover of Rousseau and Obermann, had been also busy with the letters of Byron. She wished to see with her own eyes St. Gingolphe and Chillon, Bevay and Glion.
So one day at the end of May they found themselves at Montreux. But Montreux was already hot and crowded, and Julie’s eyes turned in longing to the heights. They found an old inn at Charnex, whereof the garden commanded the whole head of the lake, and there they settled themselves for a fortnight, till business, in fact, should recall Delafield to England. The Duke of Chudleigh had shown all possible kindness and cordiality with regard to the marriage, and the letter in which he welcomed his cousin’s new wife had both touched Julie’s feelings and satisfied her pride. “You are marrying one of the best of men,” wrote this melancholy father of a dying son. “My boy and I owe him more than can be written. I can only tell you that for those he loves he grudges nothing—no labor, no sacrifice of himself. There are no half-measures in his affections. He has spent himself too long on sick and sorry creatures like ourselves. It is time he had a little happiness on his own account. You will give it him, and Mervyn and I will be most grateful to you. If joy and health can never be ours, I am not yet so vile as to grudge them to others. God bless you! Jacob will tell you that my house is not a gay one; but if you and he will sometimes visit it, you will do something to lighten its gloom.”
Julie wondered, as she wrote her very graceful reply, how much the Duke might know about herself. Jacob had told his cousin, as she knew, the story of her parentage and of Lord Lackington’s recognition of his granddaughter. But as soon as the marriage was announced it was not likely that Lady Henry had been able to hold her tongue.
A good many interesting tales of his cousin’s bride had, indeed, reached the melancholy Duke. Lady Henry had done all that she conceived it her duty to do, filling many pages of notepaper with what the Duke regarded as most unnecessary information.
At any rate, he had brushed it all aside with the impatience of one for whom nothing on earth had now any savor or value beyond one or two indispensable affections. “What’s good enough for Jacob is good for me,” he wrote to Lady Henry, “and if I may offer you some advice, it is that you should not quarrel with
