“Listen, dear!” He whispered to her. “All my business can be got through the day before you come. I have two men to see. A day will be ample. I dine at the Embassy tomorrow night—that is arranged; the day after I lunch with the Military Secretary; then—a thousand regrets, but I must hurry on to meet some friends in Italy. So I turn my back on Paris, and for two days I belong to Julie—and she to me. Say yes, Julie—my Julie!”
He bent over her, his hands framing her face.
“Say yes,” he urged, “and put off for both of us that word—alone!”
His low voice sank into her heart. He waited, till his strained sense caught the murmured words which conveyed to him the madness and the astonishment of victory.
Léonie had shut up the house, in a grim silence, and had taken her way upstairs to bed.
Julie, too, was in her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, her head drooped, her hands clasped before her absently, like Hope still listening for the last sounds of the harp of life. The candle beside her showed her, in the big mirror opposite, her grace, the white confusion of her dress.
She had expected reaction, but it did not come. She was still borne on a warm tide of will and energy. All that she was about to do seemed to her still perfectly natural and right. Petty scruples, conventional hesitations, the refusal of life’s great moments—these are what are wrong, these are what disgrace!
Romance beckoned to her, and many a secret tendency towards the lawless paths of conduct, infused into her by the associations and affections of her childhood. The horror naturalis which protects the great majority of women from the wilder ways of passion was in her weakened or dormant. She was the illegitimate child of a mother who had defied law for love, and of that fact she had been conscious all her life.
A sharp contempt, indeed, arose within her for the interpretation that the common mind would be sure to place upon her action.
“What matter! I am my own mistress—responsible to no one. I choose for myself—I dare for myself!”
And when at last she rose, first loosening and then twisting the black masses of her hair, it seemed to her that the form in the glass was that of another woman, treading another earth. She trampled cowardice under foot; she freed herself from—“was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine!”
Then as she stood before the oval mirror in a classical frame, which adorned the mantelpiece of what had once been Lady Mary Leicester’s room, her eye was vaguely caught by the little family pictures and texts which hung on either side of it. Lady Mary and her sister as children, their plain faces emerging timidly from their white, high-waisted frocks; Lady Mary’s mother, an old lady in a white coif and kerchief, wearing a look austerely kind; on the other side a clergyman, perhaps the brother of the old lady, with a similar type of face, though gentler—a face nourished on the Christian Year; and above and below them two or three cardboard texts, carefully illuminated by Lady Mary Leicester herself:
“Thou, Lord, knowest my down-sitting and my uprising.”
“Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”
“Fear not, little flock. It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
Julie observed these fragments, absently at first, then with repulsion. This Anglican pietism, so well fed, so narrowly sheltered, which measured the universe with its foot-rule, seemed to her quasi-Catholic eye merely fatuous and hypocritical. It is not by such forces, she thought, that the true world of men and women is governed.
As she turned away she noticed two little Catholic pictures, such as she had been accustomed in her convent days to carry in her books of devotion, carefully propped up beneath the texts.
“Ah, Thérèse!” she said to herself, with a sudden feeling of pain. “Is the child asleep?”
She listened. A little cough sounded from the neighboring room. Julie crossed the landing.
“Thérèse! tu ne dors pas encore?”
A voice said, softly, in the darkness, “Je t’attendais, mademoiselle.”
Julie went to the child’s bed, put down her candle, and stooped to kiss her.
The child’s thin hand caressed her cheek.
“Ah, it will be good—to be in Bruges—with mademoiselle.”
Julie drew herself away.
“I shan’t be there tomorrow, dear.”
“Not there! Oh, mademoiselle!”
The child’s voice was pitiful.
“I shall join you there. But I find I must go to Paris first. I—I have some business there.”
“But maman said—”
“Yes, I have only just made up my mind. I shall tell maman tomorrow morning.”
“You go alone, mademoiselle?”
“Why not, dear goose?”
“Vous êtes fatiguée. I would like to come with you, and carry your cloak and the umbrellas.”
“You, indeed!” said Julie. “It would end, wouldn’t it, in my carrying you—besides the cloak and the umbrellas?”
Then she knelt down beside the child and took her in her arms.
“Do you love me, Thérèse?”
The child drew a long breath. With her little, twisted hands she stroked the beautiful hair so close to her.
“Do you, Thérèse?”
A kiss fell on Julie’s cheek.
“Ce soir, j’ai beaucoup prié la Sainte Vierge pour vous!” she said, in a timid and hurried whisper.
Julie made no immediate reply. She rose from her knees, her hand still clasped in that of the crippled girl.
“Did you put those pictures on my mantelpiece, Thérèse?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The child hesitated.
“It does one good to look at them—n’est-ce pas?—when one is sad?”
“Why do you suppose I am sad?”
Thérèse was silent a moment; then she flung her little skeleton arms round Julie, and Julie felt her crying.
“Well, I won’t be sad any more,” said Julie, comforting her. “When we’re all in Bruges together, you’ll see.”
And smiling at the child, she tucked her into her white
