“The first night we met,” she said, passionately, “I found a carnation you had worn in your buttonhole. I put it under my pillow, and felt for it in the dark like a talisman. You had stood between me and Lady Henry twice. You had smiled at me and pressed my hand—not as others did, but as though you understood me, myself—as though, at least, you wished to understand. Then came the joy of joys, that I could help you—that I could do something for you. Ah, how it altered life for me! I never turned the corner of a street that I did not count on the chance of seeing you beyond—suddenly—on my path. I never heard your voice that it did not thrill me from head to foot. I never made a new friend or acquaintance that I did not ask myself first how I could thereby serve you. I never saw you come into the room that my heart did not leap. I never slept but you were in my dreams. I loathed London when you were out of it. It was paradise when you were there.”
Straining back from him as he still held her hands, her whole face and form shook with the energy of her confession. Her wonderful hair, loosened from the thin gold bands in which it had been confined during the evening, fell in a glossy confusion about her brow and slender neck; its black masses, the melting brilliance of the eyes, the tragic freedom of the attitude gave both to form and face a wild and poignant beauty.
Warkworth, beside her, was conscious first of amazement, then of a kind of repulsion—a kind of fear—till all else was lost in a hurry of joy and gratitude.
The tears stood on his cheek. “Julie, you shame me—you trample me into the earth!”
He tried to gather her in his arms, but she resisted. Caresses were not what those eyes demanded—eyes feverishly bright with the memory of her own past dreams. Presently, indeed, she withdrew herself from him. She rose and closed the window; she put the lamp in another place; she brought her rebellious hair into order.
“We must not be so mad,” she said, with a quivering smile, as she again seated herself, but at some distance from him. “You see, for me the great question is”—her voice became low and rapid—“What am I going to do with the future? For you it is all plain. We part tonight. You have your career, your marriage. I withdraw from your life—absolutely. But for me—”
She paused. It was the manner of one trying to see her way in the dark.
“Your social gifts,” said Warkworth, in agitation, “your friends, Julie—these will occupy your mind. Then, of course, you will, you must marry! Oh, you’ll soon forget me, Julie! I pray you may!”
“My social gifts?” she repeated, disregarding the rest of his speech. “I have told you already they have broken down. Society sides with Lady Henry. I am to be made to know my place—I do know it!”
“The Duchess will fight for you.”
She laughed.
“The Duke won’t let her—nor shall I.”
“You’ll marry,” he repeated, with emotion. “You’ll find someone worthy of you—someone who will give you the great position for which you were born.”
“I could have it at any moment,” she said, looking him quietly in the eyes.
Warkworth drew back, conscious of a disagreeable shock. He had been talking in generalities, giving away the future with that fluent prodigality, that easy prophecy which costs so little. What did she mean?
“Delafield?” he cried.
And he waited for her reply—which lingered—in a tense and growing eagerness. The notion had crossed his mind once or twice during the winter, only to be dismissed as ridiculous. Then, on the occasion of their first quarrel, when Julie had snubbed him in Delafield’s presence and to Delafield’s advantage, he had been conscious of a momentary alarm. But Julie, who on that one and only occasion had paraded her intimacy with Delafield, thenceforward said not a word of him, and Warkworth’s jealousy had died for lack of fuel. In relation to Julie, Delafield had been surely the mere shadow and agent of his little cousin the Duchess—a friendly, knight-errant sort of person, with a liking for the distressed. What! the heir-presumptive of Chudleigh Abbey, and one of the most famous of English dukedoms, when even he, the struggling, penurious officer, would never have dreamed of such a match?
Julie, meanwhile, heard only jealousy in his exclamation, and it caressed her ear, her heart. She was tempted once more, womanlike, to dwell upon the other lover, and again something compelling and delicate in her feeling towards Delafield forbade.
“No, you mustn’t make me tell you any more,” she said, putting the name aside with a proud gesture. “It would be poor and mean. But it’s true. I have only to put out my hand for what you call ‘a great position,’ I have refused to put it out. Sometimes, of course, it has dazzled me. Tonight it seems to me—dust and ashes. No; when we two have said goodbye, I shall begin life again. And this time I shall live it in my own way, for my own ends. I’m very tired. Henceforth ‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading—it vexes me to choose another guide.’ ”
And as she spoke the words of one of the chainless souls of history, in a voice passionately full and rich, she sprang to her feet, and, drawing her slender form to its full height, she locked her hands behind her, and began to pace the room with a wild, free step.
Every nerve in Warkworth’s frame was tingling. He was carried out of himself, first by the
