Not a boat on the wide reaches of the lake; not a voice or other sound of human toil, either from the vineyards below or the meadows above. Meanwhile some instinct, perhaps also some faint movements in her room, told him that Julie was no less wakeful than himself. And was not that a low voice in the room above him—the trained voice and footsteps of a nurse? Ah, poor little heiress, she, too, watched with sorrow!
A curious feeling of shame, of self-depreciation crept into his heart. Surely he himself of late had been lying down with fear and rising up with bitterness? Never a day had passed since they had reached Switzerland but he, a man of strong natural passions, had bade himself face the probable truth that, by a kind of violence, he had married a woman who would never love him—had taken irrevocably a false step, only too likely to be fatal to himself, intolerable to her.
Nevertheless, steeped as he had been in sadness, in foreboding, and, during this bygone night, in passionate envy of the dead yet beloved Warkworth, he had never been altogether unhappy. That mysterious It—that other divine self of the mystic—God—the enwrapping, sheltering force—had been with him always. It was with him now—it spoke from the mysterious color and light of the dawn.
How, then, could he ever equal Julie in experience, in the true and poignant feeling of any grief whatever? His mind was in a strange, double state. It was like one who feels himself unfairly protected by a magic armor; he would almost throw it aside in a remorseful eagerness to be with his brethren, and as his brethren, in the sore weakness and darkness of the human combat; and then he thinks of the hand that gave the shield, and his heart melts in awe.
“Friend of my soul and of the world, make me thy tool—thy instrument! Thou art Love! Speak through me! Draw her heart to mine.”
At last, knowing that there was no sleep in him, and realizing that he had brooded enough, he made his way out of the hotel and up through the fresh and dew-drenched meadows, where the haymakers were just appearing, to the Les Avants stream. A plunge into one of its cool basins retempered the whole man. He walked back through the scented field-paths, resolutely restraining his mind from the thoughts of the night, hammering out, indeed, in his head a scheme for the establishment of small holdings on certain derelict land in Wiltshire belonging to his cousin.
As he was descending on Charnex, he met the postman and took his letters. One among them, from the Duke of Chudleigh, contained a most lamentable account of Lord Elmira. The father and son had returned to England, and an angry, inclement May had brought a touch of pneumonia to add to all the lad’s other woes. In itself it was not much—was, indeed, passing away. “But it has used up most of his strength,” said the Duke, “and you know whether he had any to waste. Don’t forget him. He constantly thinks and talks of you.”
Delafield restlessly wondered when he could get home. But he realized that Julie would now feel herself tragically linked to the Moffatts, and how could he leave her? He piteously told himself that here, and now, was his chance with her. As he bore himself now towards her, in this hour of her grief for Warkworth, so, perhaps, would their future be.
Yet the claims of kindred were strong. He suffered much inward distress as he thought of the father and son, and their old touching dependence upon him. Chudleigh, as Jacob knew well, was himself incurably ill. Could he long survive his poor boy?
And so that other thought, which Jacob spent so much ingenuity in avoiding, rushed upon him unawares. The near, inevitable expectation of the famous dukedom, which, in the case of almost any other man in England, must at least have quickened the blood with a natural excitement, produced in Delafield’s mind a mere dull sense of approaching torment. Perhaps there was something non-sane in his repulsion, something that linked itself with his father’s “queerness,” or the bigotry and fanaticism of his grandmother, the Evangelical Duchess, with her “swarm of parsons,” as Sir Wilfrid remembered her. The oddity, which had been violent or brutal in earlier generations, showed itself in him, one might have said, in a radical transposition of values, a singularity of criterion, which the ordinary robust Englishman might very well dismiss with impatience as folly or cant.
Yet it was neither; and the feeling had, in truth, its own logic and history. He had lived from his youth up among the pageants of rank and possession. They had no glamour for him; he realized their burdens, their ineffectiveness for all the more precious kinds of happiness—how could he not, with these two forlorn figures of Chudleigh and his boy always before him? As for imagination and poetry, Delafield, with a mind that was either positive or mystical—the mind, one might say, of the land-agent or the saint—failed to see where they came in. Family tradition, no doubt, carries a thrill. But what thrill is there in the mere possession of a vast number of acres of land, of more houses, new and old, than any human being can possibly live in, of more money than any reasonable man can ever spend, and more responsibilities than he can ever meet? Such things often seemed to Delafield pure calamity—mere burdens upon life and breath. That he could and must be forced, some time, by law and custom, to take them up, was nothing but a social barbarity.
Mingled with all which, of course, was
