“No, no! How could I? I thought of someone so different—I had never seen her—”
She paused, her wide—seeking gaze fixed upon him through tears, as though she pleaded with him to find explanations—palliatives.
But he gently shook his head.
Suddenly, shaken with weeping, she bowed her face upon the hands that held her own. It was like one who relinquishes all pleading, all defence, and throws herself on the mercy of the judge.
He tenderly asked her pardon if he had wounded her. But he shrank from offering any caress. The outward signs of life’s most poignant and most beautiful moments are generally very simple and austere.
XXIV
“You have had a disquieting letter?”
The voice was Julie’s. Delafield was standing, apparently in thought, at the farther corner of the little, raised terrace of the hotel. She approached him with an affectionate anxiety, of which he was instantly conscious.
“I am afraid I may have to leave you tonight,” he said, turning towards her, and holding out the letter in his hand.
It contained a few agitated lines from the Duke of Chudleigh.
“They tell me my lad can’t get over this. He’s made a gallant fight, but this beats us. A week or two—no more. Ask Mrs. Delafield to let you come. She will, I know. She wrote to me very kindly. Mervyn keeps talking of you. You’d come, if you heard him. It’s ghastly—the cruelty of it all. Whether I can live without him, that’s the point.”
“You’ll go, of course?” said Julie, returning it.
“Tonight, if you allow it.”
“Of course. You ought.”
“I hate leaving you alone, with this trouble on your hands,” said Jacob, in some agitation. “What are your plans?”
“I could follow you next week. Aileen comes down today. And I should like to wait here for the mail.”
“In five days, about, it should be here,” said Delafield.
There was a silence. She dropped into a chair beside the balustrade of the terrace, which was wreathed in wistaria, and looked out upon the vast landscape of the lake. His thought was, “How can the mail matter to her? She cannot suppose that he had written—”
Aloud he said, in some embarrassment, “You expect letters yourself?”
“I expect nothing,” she said, after a pause. “But Aileen is living on the chance of letters.”
“There may be nothing for her—except, indeed, her letters to him—poor child!”
“She knows that. But the hope keeps her alive.”
“And you?” thought Delafield, with an inward groan, as he looked down upon her pale profile. He had a moment’s hateful vision of himself as the elder brother in the parable. Was Julie’s mind to be the home of an eternal antithesis between the living husband and the dead lover—in which the latter had forever the beau role?
Then, impatiently, Jacob wrenched himself from mean thoughts. It was as though he bared his head remorsefully before the dead man.
“I will go to the Foreign Office,” he said, in her ear, “as I pass through town. They will have letters. All the information I can get you shall have at once.”
“Thank you, mon ami,” she said, almost inaudibly.
Then she looked up, and he was startled by her eyes. Where he had expected grief, he saw a shrinking animation.
“Write to me often,” she said, imperiously.
“Of course. But don’t trouble to answer much. Your hands are so full here.”
She frowned.
“Trouble! Why do you spoil me so? Demand—insist—that I should write!”
“Very well,” he said, smiling, “I demand—I insist!”
She drew a long breath, and went slowly away from him into the house. Certainly the antagonism of her secret thoughts, though it persisted, was no longer merely cold or critical. For it concerned one who was not only the master of his own life, but threatened unexpectedly to become the master of hers.
She had begun, indeed, to please her imagination with the idea of a relation between them, which, while it ignored the ordinary relations of marriage, should yet include many of the intimacies and refinements of love. More and more did the surprises of his character arrest and occupy her mind. She found, indeed, no “plaster saint.” Her cool intelligence soon detected the traces of a peevish or stubborn temper, and of a natural inertia, perpetually combated, however, by the spiritual energy of a new and other self exfoliating from the old; a self whose acts and ways she watched, sometimes with the held breath of fascination, sometimes with a return of shrinking or fear. That a man should not only appear but be so good was still in her eyes a little absurd. Perhaps her feeling was at bottom the common feeling of the sceptical nature. “We should listen to the higher voices; but in such a way that if another hypothesis were true, we should not have been too completely duped.”
She was ready, also, to convict him of certain prejudices and superstitions which roused in her an intellectual impatience. But when all was said, Delafield, unconsciously, was drawing her towards him, as the fowler draws a fluttering bird. It was the exquisite refinement of those spiritual insights and powers he possessed which constantly appealed, not only to her heart, but—a very important matter in Julie’s case—to her taste, to her own carefully tempered instinct for the rare and beautiful.
He was the master, then, she admitted, of a certain vein of spiritual genius. Well, here should he lead—and even, if he pleased, command her. She would sit at his feet, and he should open to her ranges of feeling, delights, and subtleties of moral sensation hitherto unknown to her.
Thus the feeling of ennui and reaction which had marked the first weeks of her married life had now wholly disappeared. Delafield was no longer dull or pedantic in her eyes. She passed alternately from moments of intolerable smart and pity for the dead to moments of agitation and expectancy connected with her husband. She thought over their meeting of the night before; she looked forward to similar hours to come.
Meanwhile
