He sat down beside her, and Julie felt a fresh pang of remorse, perhaps of alarm. Why had she called him to her? What had they to do with each other? But he soon reassured her. He began to talk of Meredith, and the work before her—the important and glorious work, as he naively termed it, of the writer.
And presently he turned upon her with sudden feeling.
“You accused me, just now, of judging what I have no business to judge. If you think that I regret the severance of your relation with Lady Henry, you are quite, quite mistaken. It has been the dream of my life this last year to see you free—mistress of your own life. It—it made me mad that you should be ordered about like a child—dependent upon another person’s will.”
She looked at him curiously.
“I know. That revolts you always—any form of command? Evelyn tells me that you carry it to curious lengths with your servants and laborers.”
He drew back, evidently disconcerted.
“Oh, I try some experiments. They generally break down.”
“You try to do without servants, Evelyn says, as much as possible.”
“Well, if I do try, I don’t succeed,” he said, laughing. “But”—his eyes kindled—“isn’t it worth while, during a bit of one’s life, to escape, if one can, from some of the paraphernalia in which we are all smothered? Look there! What right have I to turn my fellow-creatures into bedizened automata like that?”
And he threw out an accusing hand towards the two powdered footmen, who were removing the coffee-cups and making up the fire in the next room, while the magnificent groom of the chambers stood like a statue, receiving some orders from the Duchess.
Julie, however, showed no sympathy.
“They are only automata in the drawing-room. Downstairs they are as much alive as you or I.”
“Well, let us put it that I prefer other kinds of luxury,” said Delafield. “However, as I appear to have none of the qualities necessary to carry out my notions, they don’t get very far.”
“You would like to shake hands with the butler?” said Julie, musing. “I knew a case of that kind. But the butler gave warning.”
Delafield laughed.
“Perhaps the simpler thing would be to do without the butler.”
“I am curious,” she said, smiling—“very curious. Sir Wilfrid, for instance, talks of going down to stay with you?”
“Why not? He’d come off extremely well. There’s an ex-butler, and an ex-cook of Chudleigh’s settled in the village. When I have a visitor, they come in and take possession. We live like fighting-cocks.”
“So nobody knows that, in general, you live like a workman?”
Delafield looked impatient.
“Somebody seems to have been cramming Evelyn with ridiculous tales, and she’s been spreading them. I must have it out with her.”
“I expect there is a good deal in them,” said Julie. Then, unexpectedly, she raised her eyes and gave him a long and rather strange look. “Why do you dislike having servants and being waited upon so much, I wonder? Is it—you won’t be angry?—that you have such a strong will, and you do these things to tame it?”
Delafield made a sudden movement, and Julie had no sooner spoken the words than she regretted them.
“So you think I should have made a jolly tyrannical slave-owner?” said Delafield, after a moment’s pause.
Julie bent towards him with a charming look of appeal—almost of penitence. “On the contrary, I think you would have been as good to your slaves as you are to your friends.”
His eyes met hers quietly.
“Thank you. That was kind of you. And as to giving orders, and getting one’s way, don’t suppose I let Chudleigh’s estate go to ruin! It’s only”—he hesitated—“the small personal tyrannies of every day that I’d like to minimize. They brutalize half the fellows I know.”
“You’ll come to them,” said Julie, absently. Then she colored, suddenly remembering the possible dukedom that awaited him.
His brow contracted a little, as though he understood. He made no reply. Julie, with her craving to be approved—to say what pleased—could not leave it there.
“I wish I understood,” she said, softly, after a moment, “what, or who it was that gave you these opinions.”
Getting still no answer, she must perforce meet the gray eyes bent upon her, more expressively, perhaps, than their owner knew. “That you shall understand,” he said, after a minute, in a voice which was singularly deep and full, “whenever you choose to ask.”
Julie shrank and drew back.
“Very well,” she said, trying to speak lightly. “I’ll hold you to that. Alack! I had forgotten a letter I must write.”
And she pretended to write it, while Delafield buried himself in the newspapers.
XIII
Julie’s curiosity—passing and perfunctory as it was—concerning the persons and influences that had worked upon Jacob Delafield since his college days, was felt in good earnest by not a few of Delafield’s friends. For he was a person rich in friends, reserved as he generally was, and crotchety as most of them thought him. The mixture of self-evident strength and manliness in his physiognomy with something delicate and evasive, some hindering element of reflection or doubt, was repeated in his character. On the one side he was a robust, healthy Etonian, who could ride, shoot, and golf like the rest of his kind, who used the terse, slangy ways of speech of the ordinary Englishman, who loved the land and its creatures, and had a natural hatred for a poacher; and on another he was a man haunted by dreams and spiritual voices, a man for whom, as he paced his tired horse homeward after a day’s run, there would rise on the grays and purples of the winter dusk far-shining “cities of God” and visions of a better life for man. He read much poetry, and the New Testament spoke to him imperatively, though in no orthodox or accustomed way. Ruskin, and the earlier work of Tolstoy, then just beginning to take hold of the English mind, had affected his
