The air cooled her brow, and from the deep, enveloping night her torn heart drew balm, and a first soothing of the pulse of pain. Every now and then, as she sat down to rest, a waking dream overshadowed her. She seemed to be supporting Warkworth in her arms; his dying head lay upon her breast, and she murmured courage and love into his ear. But not as Julie Le Breton. Through all the anguish of what was almost an illusion of the senses, she still felt herself Delafield’s wife. And in that flood of silent speech she poured out on Warkworth, it was as though she offered him also Jacob’s compassion, Jacob’s homage, mingled with her own.
Once she found herself sitting at the edge of a meadow, environed by the heavy scents of flowers. Some apple-trees with whitened trunks rose between her and the lake a thousand feet below. The walls of Chillon, the houses of Montreux, caught the light; opposite, the deep forests of Bouveret and St. Gingolphe lay black upon the lake; above them rode the moon. And to the east the high Alps, their pure lines a little effaced and withdrawn, as when a light veil hangs over a sanctuary.
Julie looked out upon a vast freedom of space, and by a natural connection she seemed to be also surveying her own world of life and feeling, her past and her future. She thought of her childhood and her parents, of her harsh, combative youth, of the years with Lady Henry, of Warkworth, of her husband, and the life into which his strong hand had so suddenly and rashly drawn her. Her thoughts took none of the religious paths so familiar to his. And yet her reverie was so far religious that her mind seemed to herself to be quivering under the onset of affections, emotions, awes, till now unknown, and that, looking back, she was conscious of a groping sense of significance, of purpose, in all that had befallen her. Yet to this sense she could put no words. Only, in the end, through the constant action of her visualizing imagination, it connected itself with Delafield’s face, and with the memory of many of his recent acts and sayings.
It was one of those hours which determine the history of a man or woman. And the august Alpine beauty entered in, so that Julie, in this sad and thrilling act of self-probing, felt herself in the presence of powers and dominations divine.
Her face, stained with tears, took gradually some of the calm, the loftiness of the night. Yet the close-shut, brooding mouth would slip sometimes into a smile exquisitely soft and gentle, as though the heart remembered something which seemed to the intelligence at once folly and sweetness.
What was going on within her was, to her own consciousness, a strange thing. It appeared to her as a kind of simplification, a return to childhood; or, rather, was it the emergence in the grown mind, tired with the clamor of its own egotistical or passionate life, of some instincts, natural to the child, which she, nevertheless, as a child had never known; instincts of trust, of self-abandonment, steeped, perhaps, in those tears which are themselves only another happiness? …
But hush! What are our poor words in the presence of these nobler secrets of the wrestling and mounting spirit!
On the way down she saw another figure emerge from the dark.
“Lady Blanche!”
Lady Blanche stood still.
“The hotel was stifling,” she said, in a voice that vainly tried for steadiness.
Julie perceived that she had been weeping.
“Aileen is asleep?”
“Perhaps. They have given her something to make her sleep.”
They walked on towards the hotel.
Julie hesitated.
“She was not disappointed?” she said, at last, in a low voice.
“No!” said the mother, sharply. “But one knew, of course, there must be letters for her. Thank God, she can feel that his very last thought was for her! The letters which have reached her are dated the day before the fatal attack began—giving a complete account of his march—most interesting—showing how he trusted her already—though she is such a child. It will tranquillize her to feel how completely she possessed his heart—poor fellow!”
Julie said nothing, and Lady Blanche, with bitter satisfaction, felt rather than saw what seemed to her the just humiliation expressed in the drooping and black-veiled figure beside her.
Next day there was once more a tinge of color on Aileen’s cheeks. Her beautiful hair fell round her once more in a soft life and confusion, and the roses which her mother had placed beside her on the bed were not in too pitiful contrast with her frail loveliness.
“Read it, please,” she said, as soon as she found herself alone with Julie, pushing her letter tenderly towards her. “He tells me everything—everything! All he was doing and hoping—consults me in everything. Isn’t it an honor—when I’m so ignorant and childish? I’ll try to be brave—try to be worthy—”
And while her whole frame was shaken with deep, silent sobs, she greedily watched Julie read the letter.
“Oughtn’t I to try and live,” she said, dashing away her tears, as Julie returned it, “when he loved me so?”
Julie kissed her with a passionate and guilty pity. The letter might have been written to any friend, to any charming child for whom a much older man had a kindness. It gave a businesslike account of their march, dilated on one or two points of policy, drew some humorous sketches of his companions, and concluded with a few affectionate and playful sentences.
But when the wrestle with death began, Warkworth wrote but one last letter, uttered but one cry of the heart, and it lay now in Julie’s bosom.
A few
