But the cold bise was still blowing, and Julie, shivering, drew her wrap closer round her. Her heart pined for Como and the south; perhaps for the little Duchess, who spoiled and petted her in the common, womanish ways.
The spring—a second spring—was all about her; but in this chilly northern form it spoke to her with none of the ravishment of Italy. In the steep fields above her the narcissuses were bent and bowed with rain; the red-browns of the walnuts glistened in the wet gleams of sun; the fading apple-blossom beside her wore a melancholy beauty; only in the rich, pushing grass, with its wealth of flowers and its branching cow-parsley, was there the stubborn life and prophecy of summer.
Suddenly Julie caught up the book that lay beside her and opened it with a hasty hand. It was one of that set of Saint-Simon which had belonged to her mother, and had already played a part in her own destiny.
She turned to the famous “character” of the Dauphin, of that model prince, in whose death Saint-Simon, and Fénelon, and France herself, saw the eclipse of all great hopes.
“A prince, affable, gentle, humane, patient, modest, full of compunctions, and, as much as his position allowed—sometimes beyond it—humble, and severe towards himself.”
Was it not to the life? “Affable, doux, humain—patient, modeste—humble et austère pour soi”—beyond what was expected, beyond, almost, what was becoming?
She read on to the mention of the Dauphine, terrified, in her human weakness, of so perfect a husband, and trying to beguile or tempt him from the heights; to the picture of Louis Quatorze, the grandfather, shamed in his worldly old age by the presence beside him of this saintly and high-minded youth; of the Court, looking forward with dismay to the time when it should find itself under the rule of a man who despised and condemned both its follies and its passions, until she reached that final rapture, where, in a mingled anguish and adoration, Saint-Simon bids eternal farewell to a character and a heart of which France was not worthy.
The lines passed before her, and she was conscious, guiltily conscious, of reading them with a double mind.
Then she closed the book, held by the thought of her husband—in a somewhat melancholy reverie.
There is a Catholic word with which in her convent youth she had been very familiar—the word recueilli—“recollected.” At no time had it sounded kindly in her ears; for it implied fetters and self—suppressions—of the voluntary and spiritual sort—wholly unwelcome to and unvalued by her own temperament. But who that knew him well could avoid applying it to Delafield? A man of “recollection” living in the eye of the Eternal; keeping a guard over himself in the smallest matters of thought and action; mystically possessed by the passion of a spiritual ideal; in love with charity, purity, simplicity of life.
She bowed her head upon her hands in dreariness of spirit. Ultimately, what could such a man want with her? What had she to give him? In what way could she ever be necessary to him? And a woman, even in friendship, must feel herself that to be happy.
Already this daily state in which she found herself—of owing everything and giving nothing—produced in her a secret irritation and repulsion; how would it be in the years to come?
“He never saw me as I am,” she thought to herself, looking fretfully back to their past acquaintance. “I am neither as weak as he thinks me—nor as clever. And how strange it is—this tension in which he lives!”
And as she sat there idly plucking at the wet grass, her mind was overrun with a motley host of memories—some absurd, some sweet, some of an austerity that chilled her to the core. She thought of the difficulty she had in persuading Delafield to allow himself even necessary comforts and conveniences; a laugh, involuntary, and not without tenderness, crossed her face as she recalled a tale he had told her at Camaldoli, of the contempt excited in a young footman of a smart house by the mediocrity and exiguity of his garments and personal appointments generally. “I felt I possessed nothing that he would have taken as a gift,” said Delafield, with a grin. “It was chastening.”
Yet though he laughed, he held to it; and Julie was already so much of the wife as to be planning how to coax him presently out of a portmanteau and a top-hat that were in truth a disgrace to their species.
And all the time she must have the best of everything—a maid, luxurious travelling, dainty food. They had had one or two wrestles on the subject already. “Why are you to have all the high thinking and plain living to yourself?” she had asked him, angrily, only to be met by the plea, “Dear, get strong first—then you shall do what you like.”
But it was at La Verna, the mountain height overshadowed by the memories of St. Francis, that she seemed to have come nearest to the ascetic and mystical tendency in Delafield. He went about the mountain-paths a transformed being, like one long spiritually athirst who has found the springs and sources of life. Julie felt a secret terror. Her impression was much the same as Meredith’s—as of “something wearing through” to the light of day. Looking back she saw that this temperament, now so plain to view, had been always there; but in the young and capable agent of the Chudleigh property, in the Duchess’s cousin, or Lady Henry’s nephew, it had passed for the most part unsuspected. How remarkably it had developed!—whither would it carry
