He raised his hand and touched her hair tenderly.
“He died serving his country,” he said, commanding his voice with difficulty. “And you grieve for him like this! I can’t pity him so much.”
“You thought ill of him—I know you did.” She spoke between deep, sobbing breaths. “But he wasn’t—he wasn’t a bad man.”
She fell back on her pillow and the tears rained down her cheeks.
Delafield kissed her hand in silence.
“Some day—I’ll tell you,” she said, brokenly.
“Yes, you shall tell me. It would help us both.”
“I’ll prove to you he wasn’t vile. When—when he proposed that to me he was distracted. So was I. How could he break off his engagement? Now you see how she loved him. But we couldn’t part—we couldn’t say goodbye. It had all come on us unawares. We wanted to belong to each other—just for two days—and then part forever. Oh, I’ll tell you—”
“You shall tell me all—here!” he said, firmly, crushing her delicate hands in his own against his breast, so that she felt the beating of his heart.
“Give me my hand. I’ll show you his letter—his last letter to me.” And, trembling, she drew from under her pillow that last scrawled letter, written from the squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux.
No sooner, however, had she placed it in Delafield’s hands than she was conscious of new forces of feeling in herself which robbed the act of its simplicity. She had meant to plead her lover’s cause and her own with the friend who was nominally her husband. Her action had been a cry for sympathy, as from one soul to another.
But as Delafield took the letter and began to read, her pulses began to flutter strangely. She recalled the phrases of passion which the letter contained. She became conscious of new fears, new compunctions.
For Delafield, too, the moment was one of almost intolerable complexity. This tender intimacy of night—the natural intimacy of husband and wife; this sense, which would not be denied, however sternly he might hold it in check, of her dear form beside him; the little refinements and self-revelations of a woman’s room; his half-rights towards her, appealing at once to love, and to the memory of that solemn pledge by which he had won her—what man who deserved the name but must be conscious, tempestuously conscious, of such thoughts and facts?
And then, wrestling with these smarts, these impulses, belonging to the natural, physical life, the powers of the moral being—compassion, self-mastery, generosity; while strengthening and directing all, the man of faith was poignantly aware of the austere and tender voices of religion.
Amid this play of influences he read the letter, still kneeling beside her and holding her fingers clasped in his. She had closed her eyes and lay still, save for the occasional tremulous movement of her free hand, which dried the tears on her cheek.
“Thank you,” he said, at last, with a voice that wavered, as he put the letter down. “Thank you. It was good of you to let me see it. It changes all my thoughts of him henceforward. If he had lived—”
“But he’s dead! He’s dead!” cried Julie, in a sudden agony, wrenching her hand from his and burying her face in the pillow. “Just when he wanted to live. Oh, my God—my God! No, there’s no God—nothing that cares—that takes any notice!”
She was shaken by deep, convulsive weeping. Delafield soothed her as best he could. And presently she stretched out her hand with a quick, piteous gesture, and touched his face.
“You, too! What have I done to you? How you looked, just now! I bring a curse. Why did you want to marry me? I can’t tear this out of my heart—I can’t!”
And again she hid herself from him. Delafield bent over her.
“Do you imagine that I should be poor-souled enough to ask you?”
Suddenly a wild feeling of revolt ran through Julie’s mind. The loftiness of his mood chilled her. An attitude more weakly, passionately human, a more selfish pity for himself would, in truth, have served him better. Had the pain of the living man escaped his control, avenging itself on the supremacy that death had now given to the lover, Delafield might have found another Julie in his arms. As it was, her husband seemed to her perhaps less than man, in being more; she admired unwillingly, and her stormy heart withdrew itself.
And when at last she controlled her weeping, and it became evident to him that she wished once more to be alone, his sensitiveness perfectly divined the secret reaction in her. He rose from his place beside her with a deep, involuntary sigh. She heard it, but only to shrink away.
“You will sleep a little?” he said, looking down upon her.
“I will try, mon ami.”
“If you don’t sleep, and would like me to read to you, call me. I am in the next room.”
She thanked him faintly, and he went away. At the door he paused and came back again.
“Tonight”—he hesitated—“while the doctors were here, I ran down to Montreux by the short path and telegraphed. The consul at Zanzibar is an old friend of mine. I asked him for more particulars at once, by wire. But the letters can’t be here for a fortnight.”
“I know. You’re very, very good.”
Hour after hour Delafield sat motionless in his room, till “high in the Valais depths profound” he “saw the morning break.”
There was a little balcony at his command, and as he noiselessly stepped out upon it, between three and four o’clock, he felt himself the solitary comrade of the mist-veiled lake, of those high, rosy mountains on the eastern verge, the first throne and harbor of the light—of the lower forest-covered hills that “took the morning,” one by one, in a glorious and golden succession. All was fresh, austere, and vast—the spaces of the lake, the distant hollows of high glaciers filled with purple shadow, the precipices of
