Julie looked at the man, bewildered. Then a stormy color rushed into her cheeks.
“Does he mean my maid?” she said to the Duke, piteously.
“Certainly. Will you give your orders?”
She gave them, and then, turning again to the Duke, she covered her eyes with her hands a moment.
“What does it all mean?” she said, faltering. “It seems as though we were all mad.”
“You understand, of course, that Jacob succeeds?” said the Duke, not without coldness; and he stood still an instant, gazing at this woman, who must now, he supposed, feel herself at the very summit of her ambitions.
Julie drew a long breath. Then she perceived Lady Henry. Instantly, impetuously, she crossed the room. But as she reached that composed and formidable figure, the old timidity, the old fear, seized her. She paused abruptly, but she held out her hand.
Lady Henry took it. The two women stood regarding each other, while the other persons in the room instinctively turned away from their meeting. Lady Henry’s first look was one of curiosity. Then, before the indefinable, ennobling change in Julie’s face, now full of the pale agitation of memory, the eyes of the older woman wavered and dropped. But she soon recovered herself.
“We meet again under very strange circumstances,” she said, quietly; “though I have long foreseen them. As for our former experience, we were in a false relation, and it made fools of us both. You and Jacob are now the heads of the family. And if you like to make friends with me on this new footing, I am ready. As to my behavior, I think it was natural; but if it rankles in your mind, I apologize.”
The personal pride of the owner, curbed in its turn by the pride of tradition and family, spoke strangely from these words. Julie stood trembling, her chest heaving.
“I, too, regret—and apologize,” she said, in a low voice.
“Then we begin again. But now you must let Evelyn take you to rest for an hour or two. I am sorry you have this hurried journey tonight.”
Julie pressed her hands to her breast with one of those dramatic movements that were natural to her.
“Oh, I must see Jacob!” she said, under her breath—“I must see Jacob!”
And she turned away, looking vaguely round her. Meredith approached.
“Comfort yourself,” he said, very gently, pressing her hand in both of his. “It has been a great shock, but when you get there he’ll be all right.”
“Jacob?”
Her expression, the piteous note in her voice, awoke in him an answering sense of pain. He wondered how it might be between the husband and wife. Yet it was borne in upon him, as upon Lady Henry, that her marriage, however interpreted, had brought with it profound and intimate transformation. A different woman stood before him. And when, after a few more words, the Duchess swept down upon them, insisting that Julie must rest awhile, Meredith stood looking after the retreating figures, filled with the old, bitter sense of human separateness, and the fragmentariness of all human affections. Then he made his farewells to the Duke and Lady Henry, and slipped away. He had turned a page in the book of life; and as he walked through Grosvenor Square he applied his mind resolutely to one of the political “causes” with which, as a powerful and fighting journalist, he was at that moment occupied.
Lady Henry, too, watched Julie’s exit from the room.
“So now she supposes herself in love with Jacob?” she thought, with amusement, as she resumed her seat.
“What if Delafield refuses to be made a duke?” said Sir Wilfrid, in her ear.
“It would be a situation new to the Constitution,” said Lady Henry, composedly. “I advise you, however, to wait till it occurs.”
The northern express rushed onward through the night. Rugby, Stafford, Crewe had been left behind. The Yorkshire valleys and moors began to show themselves in pale ridges and folds under the moon. Julie, wakeful in her corner opposite the little, sleeping Duchess, was conscious of an interminable rush of images through a brain that longed for a few unconscious and forgetful moments. She thought of the deferential stationmaster at Euston; of the fuss attending their arrival on the platform; of the arrangements made for stopping the express at the Yorkshire Station, where they were to alight.
Faircourt? Was it the great Early-Georgian house of which she had heard Jacob speak—the vast pile, half barrack, half palace, in which, according to him, no human being could be either happy or at home?
And this was now his—and hers? Again the whirl of thoughts swept and danced round her.
A wild, hill country. In the valleys, the blackness of thick trees, the gleam of rivers, the huge, lifeless factories; and beyond, the high, silver edges, the sharp shadows of the moors. … The train slackened, and the little Duchess woke at once.
“Ten minutes to three. Oh, Julie, here we are!”
The dawn was just coldly showing as they alighted. Carriages and servants were waiting, and various persons whose identity and function it was not easy to grasp. One of them, however, at once approached Julie with a privileged air, and she perceived that he was a doctor.
“I am very glad that your grace has come,” he said, as he raised his hat. “The trouble with the Duke is shock, and want of sleep.”
Julie looked at him, still bewildered.
“How long has my husband been ill?”
He walked on beside her, describing in as few words as possible the harrowing days preceding the death of the boy, Delafield’s attempts to soothe and control the father, the stratagem by which the poor Duke had outwitted them all, and the weary hours of search through the night, under a drizzling rain, which had resulted, about dawn, in the discovery of the Duke’s body in one of the deeper holes of the river.
“When the procession returned to the house, your husband”—the speaker framed the words uncertainly—“had a
