The drive to the house lay mainly through a vast park, dotted with stiff and melancholy woods. The morning was cloudy; even the wild roses in the hedges and the daisies in the grass had neither gayety nor color. Soon the house appeared—an immense pile of stone, with a pillared centre, and wings to east and west, built in a hollow, gray and sunless. The mournful blinds drawn closely down made of it rather a mausoleum for the dead than a home for the living.
At the approach of the carriage, however, doors were thrown open, servants appeared, and on the steps, trembling and heavy-eyed, stood Susan Delafield.
She looked timidly at Julie, and then, as they passed into the great central hall, the two kissed each other with tears.
“He is in his room, waiting for you. The doctors persuaded him not to come down. But he is dressed, and reading and writing. We don’t believe he has slept at all for a week.”
“Through there,” said Susan Delafield, stepping back. “That is the door.”
Julie softly opened it, and closed it behind her. Delafield had heard her approach, and was standing by the table, supporting himself upon it. His aspect filled Julie with horror. She ran to him and threw her arms round him. He sank back into his chair, and she found herself kneeling beside him, murmuring to him, while his head rested upon her shoulder.
“Jacob, I am here! Oh, I ought to have been here all through! It’s terrible—terrible! But, Jacob, you won’t suffer so—now I’m here—now we’re together—now I love you, Jacob?”
Her voice broke in tears. She put back the hair from his brow, kissing him with a tenderness in which there was a yearning and lovely humility. Then she drew a little away, waiting for him to speak, in an agony.
But for a time he seemed unable to speak. He feebly released himself, as though he could not bear the emotion she offered him, and his eyes closed.
“Jacob, come and lie down!” she said, in terror. “Let me call the doctors.”
He shook his head, and a faint pressure from his hand bade her sit beside him.
“I shall be better soon. Give me time. I’ll tell you—”
Then silence again. She sat holding his hand, her eyes fixed upon him. Time passed, she knew not how. Susan came into the room—a small sitting-room in the east wing—to tell her that the neighboring bedroom had been prepared for herself. Julie only looked up for an instant with a dumb sign of refusal. A doctor came in, and Delafield made a painful effort to take the few spoonfuls of food and stimulant pressed upon him. Then he buried his face in the side of the armchair.
“Please let us be alone,” he said, with a touch of his old peremptoriness, and both Susan and the doctor obeyed.
But it was long before he could collect energy enough to talk. When he did, he made an effort to tell her the story of the boy’s death, and the father’s self-destruction. He told it leaning forward in his chair, his eyes on the ground, his hands loosely joined, his voice broken and labored. Julie listened, gathering from his report an impression of horror, tragic and irremediable, similar to that which had shaken the balance of his own mind. And when he suddenly looked up with the words, “And now I am expected to take their place—to profit by their deaths! What rightful law of God or man binds me to accept a life and a responsibility that I loathe?” Julie drew back as though he had struck her. His face, his tone were not his own—there was a violence, a threat in them, addressed, as it were, specially to her. “If it were not for you,” his eyes seemed to say, “I could refuse this thing, which will destroy me, soul and body.”
She was silent, her pulses fluttering, and he resumed, speaking like one groping his way:
“I could have done the work, of course—I have done it for five years. I could have looked after the estate and the people. But the money, the paraphernalia, the hordes of servants, the mummery of the life! Why, Julie, should we be forced into it? What happiness—I ask you—what happiness can it bring to either of us?”
And again he looked up, and again it seemed to Julie that his expression was one of animated hostility and antagonism—antagonism to her, as embodying for the moment all the arguments—of advantage, custom, law—he was, in his own mind, fighting and denying. With a failing heart she felt herself very far from him. Was there not also something in his attitude, unconsciously, of that old primal antagonism of the man to the woman, of the stronger to the weaker, the more spiritual to the more earthy?
“You think, no doubt,” he said, after a pause, “that it is my duty to take this thing, even if I could lay it down?”
“I don’t know what I think,” she said, hurriedly. “It is very strange, of course, what you say. We ought to discuss it thoroughly. Let me have a little time.”
He gave an impatient sigh, then suddenly rose.
“Will you come and look at them?”
She, too, rose and put her hand in his.
“Take me where you will.”
“It is not horrible,” he said, shading his eyes a moment. “They are at peace.”
With a feeble step, leaning on her arm, he guided her through the great, darkened house. Julie was dimly aware of wide staircases, of galleries and high halls, of the pictures of past Delafields looking down upon them. The morning was now
