Delafield opened the closed door.
The father and son lay together, side by side, the boy’s face in a very winning repose, which at first sight concealed the traces of his long suffering; the father’s also—closed eyes and sternly shut mouth—suggesting, not the despair which had driven him to his death, but, rather, as in sombre triumph, the all-forgetting, all-effacing sleep which he had won from death.
They stood a moment, till Delafield fell on his knees. Julie knelt beside him. She prayed for a while; then she wearied, being, indeed, worn out with her journey. But Delafield was motionless, and it seemed to Julie that he hardly breathed.
She rose to her feet, and found her eyes for the first time flooded with tears. Never for many weeks had she felt so lonely, or so utterly unhappy. She would have given anything to forget herself in comforting Jacob. But he seemed to have no need of her, no thought of her.
As she vaguely looked round her, she saw that beside the dead man was a table holding some violets—the only flowers in the room—some photographs, and a few well—worn books. Softly she took up one. It was a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, much noted and underlined. It would have seemed to her sacrilege to look too close; but she presently perceived a letter between its pages, and in the morning light, which now came strongly into the room through a window looking on the garden, she saw plainly that it was written on thin, foreign paper, that it was closed, and addressed to her husband.
“Jacob!”
She touched him softly on the shoulder, alarmed by his long immobility.
He looked up, and it appeared to Julie as though he were shaking off with difficulty some abnormal and trancelike state. But he rose, looking at her strangely.
“Jacob, this is yours.”
He took the book abruptly, almost as if she had no right to be holding it. Then, as he saw the letter, the color rushed into his face. He took it, and after a moment’s hesitation walked to the window and opened it.
She saw him waver, and ran to his support. But he put out a hand which checked her.
“It was the last thing he wrote,” he said; and then, uncertainly, and without reading any but the first words of the letter, he put it into his pocket.
Julie drew back, humiliated. His gesture said that to a secret so intimate and sacred he did not propose to admit his wife.
They went back silently to the room from which they had come. Sentence after sentence came to Julie’s lips, but it seemed useless to say them, and once more, but in a totally new way, she was “afraid” of the man beside her.
She left him shortly after, by his own wish.
“I will lie down, and you must rest,” he said, with decision.
So she bathed and dressed, and presently she allowed the kind, fair-haired Susan to give her food, and pour out her own history of the death-week which she and Jacob had passed through. But in all that was said, Julie noticed that Susan spoke of her brother very little, and of his inheritance and present position not at all. And once or twice she noticed a wondering or meditative expression in the girl’s charming eyes as they rested on herself, and realized that the sense of mystery, of hushed expectancy, was not confined to her own mind.
When Susan left her at nine o’clock, it was to give a number of necessary orders in the house. The inquest was to be held in the morning, and the whole day would be filled with arrangements for the double funeral. The house would be thronged with officials of all sorts. “Poor Jacob!” said the sister, sighing, as she went away.
But the tragic tumult had not yet begun. The house was still quiet, and Julie was for the first time alone.
She drew up the blinds, and stood gazing out upon the park, now flooded with light; at the famous Italian garden beneath the windows, with its fountains and statues; at the wide lake which filled the middle distance; and the hills beyond it, with the plantations and avenues which showed the extension of the park as far as the eye could see.
Julie knew very well what it all implied. Her years with Lady Henry, in connection with her own hidden sense of birth and family, had shown her with sufficient plainness the conditions under which the English noble lives. She was actually, at that moment, Duchess of Chudleigh; her strong intelligence faced and appreciated the fact; the social scope and power implied in those three words were all the more vivid to her imagination because of her history and upbringing. She had not grown to maturity inside, like Delafield, but as an exile from a life which was yet naturally hers—an exile, full, sometimes, of envy, and the passions of envy.
It had no terrors for her—quite the contrary—this high social state. Rather, there were moments when her whole nature reached out to it, in a proud and confident ambition. Nor had she any mystical demurrer to make. The originality which in some ways she richly possessed was not concerned in the least with the upsetting of class distinctions, and as a Catholic she had been taught loyally to accept them.
The minutes passed away. Julie sank deeper and deeper into reverie, her head leaning against the side of the window, her hands clasped before her on her black dress. Once or twice she found the tears dropping from her eyes, and once or twice she smiled.
She was not thinking of the tragic circumstances amid which she stood. From that short trance of feeling even the
