Julie fell on her knees beside her swooning cousin. Lady Blanche, meanwhile, was loosening her daughter’s dress, chafing her icy hands, or moaning over her in a delirium of terror.
“My darling—my darling! Oh, my God! Why did I allow it? Why did I ever let him come near her? It was my fault—my fault! And it’s killed her!”
And clinging to her child’s irresponsive hands, she looked down upon her in a convulsion of grief, which included not a shadow of regret, not a gleam of pity for anything or anyone else in the world but this bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, which lay stricken there.
But Julie’s mind had ceased to be conscious of the tragedy beside her. It had passed for the second time into the grasp of an illusion which possessed itself of the whole being and all its perceptive powers. Before her wide, terror-stricken gaze there rose once more the same piteous vision which had tortured her in the crisis of her love for Warkworth. Against the eternal snows which close in the lake the phantom hovered in a ghastly relief—emaciated, with matted hair, and purpled cheeks, and eyes—not to be borne!—expressing the dumb anger of a man, still young, who parts unwillingly from life in a last lonely spasm of uncomforted pain.
XXIII
It was midnight in the little inn at Charnex. The rain which for so many nights in this miserable June had been beating down upon the village had at last passed away. The night was clear and still—a night when the voice of mountain torrents, far distant, might reach the ear suddenly—sharply pure—from the very depths of silence.
Julie was in bed. She had been scarcely aware of her maid’s help in undressing. The ordinary life was, as it were, suspended. Two scenes floated alternately before her—one the creation of memory, the other of imagination; and the second was, if possible, the more vivid, the more real of the two. Now she saw herself in Lady Henry’s drawing-room; Sir Wilfrid Bury and a white-haired general were beside her. The door opened and Warkworth entered—young, handsome, soldierly, with that boyish, conquering air which some admired and others disliked. His eyes met hers, and a glow of happiness passed through her.
Then, at a stroke, the London drawing-room melted away. She was in a low bell-tent. The sun burned through its sides; the air was stifling. She stood with two other men and the doctor beside the low camp-bed; her heart was wrung by every movement, every sound; she heard the clicking of the fan in the doctor’s hands, she saw the flies on the poor, damp brow.
And still she had no tears. Only, existence seemed to have ended in a gulf of horror, where youth and courage, repentance and high resolve, love and pleasure were all buried and annihilated together.
That poor girl upstairs! It had not been possible to take her home. She was there with nurse and doctor, her mother hanging upon every difficult breath. The attack of diphtheria had left a weakened heart and nervous system; the shock had been cruel, and the doctor could promise nothing for the future.
“Mother—mother! … Dead!”
The cry echoed in Julie’s ears. It seemed to fill the old, low-ceiled room in which she lay. Her fancy, preternaturally alive, heard it thrown back from the mountains outside—returned to her in wailing from the infinite depths of the lake. She was conscious of the vast forms and abysses of nature, there in the darkness, beyond the walls of her room, as something hostile, implacable. …
And while he lay there dead, under the tropical sand, she was still living and breathing here, in this old Swiss inn—Jacob Delafield’s wife, at least in name.
There was a knock at her door. At first she did not answer it. It seemed to be only one of the many dream sounds which tormented her nerves. Then it was repeated. Mechanically she said “Come in.”
The door opened, and Delafield, carrying a light, which he shaded with his hand, stood on the threshold.
“May I come and talk to you?” he said, in a low voice. “I know you are not sleeping.”
It was the first time he had entered his wife’s room. Through all her misery, Julie felt a strange thrill as her husband’s face was thus revealed to her, brightly illumined, in the loneliness of the night. Then the thrill passed into pain—the pain of a new and sharp perception.
Delafield, in truth, was some two or three years younger than Warkworth. But the sudden impression on Julie’s mind, as she saw him thus, was of a man worn and prematurely aged—markedly older and graver, even, since their marriage, since that memorable evening by the side of Como when, by that moral power of which he seemed often to be the mere channel and organ, he had overcome her own will and linked her life with his.
She looked at him in a kind of terror. Why was he so pale—an embodied grief? Warkworth’s death was not a mortal stroke for him.
He came closer, and still Julie’s eyes held him. Was it her fault, this—this shadowed countenance, these suggestions of a dumb strain and conflict, which not even his strong youth could bear without betrayal? Her heart cried out, first in a tragic impatience; then it melted within her strangely, she knew not how.
She sat up in bed and held out her hands. He thought of that evening in Heribert Street, after Warkworth had left her, when she had been so sad and yet so docile. The same yearning, the same piteous agitation was in her attitude now.
He knelt down beside the bed and put his arms round her. She clasped her hands about his neck and hid her face on his shoulder. There ran through her the first long shudder of weeping.
“He
