Such a path! To the left hand, and, as it seemed, steeply beneath her feet, all earth and heaven—the wide lake, the purple mountains, the glories of a flaming sky. On the calm spaces of water lay a shimmer of crimson and gold, repeating the noble splendor of the clouds; the midgelike boats crept from shore to shore; and, midway between Bellaggio and Cadenabbia, the steamboat, a white speck, drew a silver furrow. To her right a green hillside—each blade of grass, each flower, each tuft of heath, enskied, transfigured, by the broad light that poured across it from the hidden west. And on the very hilltop a few scattered olives, peaches, and wild cherries scrawled upon the blue, their bare, leaning stems, their pearly whites, their golden pinks and feathery grays all in a glory of sunset that made of them things enchanted, aerial, fantastical, like a dance of Botticelli angels on the height.
And presently a sheltered bank in a green hollow, where Julie sat down to rest. But nature, in this tranquil spot, had still new pageants, new sorceries wherewith to play upon the nerves of wonder. Across the hollow a great crag clothed in still leafless chestnut-trees reared itself against the lake. The innumerable lines of stem and branch, warm brown or steely gray, were drawn sharp on silver air, while at the very summit of the rock one superb tree with branching limbs, touched with intense black, sprang high above the rest, the proud plume or ensign of the wood. Through the trunks the blaze of distant snow and the purples of craggy mountains; in front the glistening spray of peach or cherry blossom, breaking the still wintry beauty of that majestic grove. And in all the air, dropping from the heaven, spread on the hills, or shimmering on the lake, a diffusion of purest rose and deepest blue, lake and cloud and mountain each melting into the other, as though heaven and earth conspired merely to give value and relief to the year’s new birth, to this near sparkle of young leaf and blossom which shone like points of fire on the deep breast of the distance.
On the green ledge which ran round the hollow were children tugging at a goat. Opposite was a contadino’s house of gray stone. A waterwheel turned beside it, and a stream, brought down from the hills, ran chattering past, a white and dancing thread of water. Everything was very still and soft. The children and the river made their voices heard; and there were nightingales singing in the woods below. Otherwise all was quiet. With a tranquil and stealthy joy the spring was taking possession. Nay—the Angelus! It swung over the lake and rolled from village to village. …
The tears were in Julie’s eyes. Such beauty as this was apt now to crush and break her. All her being was still sore, and this appeal of nature was sometimes more than she could bear.
Only a few short weeks since Warkworth had gone out of her life—since Delafield at a stroke had saved her from ruin—since Lord Lackington had passed away.
One letter had reached her from Warkworth, a wild and incoherent letter, written at night in a little room of a squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux. Her telegram had reached him, and for him, as for her, all was over.
But the letter was by no means a mere cry of baffled passion. There was in it a new note of moral anguish, as fresh and startling in her ear, coming from him, as the cry of passion itself. In the language of religion, it was the utterance of a man “convicted of sin.”
“How long is it since that man gave me your telegram? I was pacing up and down the departure platform, working myself into an agony of nervousness and anxiety as the time went by, wondering what on earth had happened to you, when the chef de gare came up: ‘Monsieur attend une dépêche?’ There were some stupid formalities—at last I got it. It seemed to me I had already guessed what it contained.
“So it was Delafield who met you—Delafield who turned you back?
“I saw him outside the hotel yesterday, and we exchanged a few words. I have always disliked his long, pale face and his high and mighty ways—at any rate, towards plain fellows, who don’t belong to the classes, like me. Yesterday I was more than usually anxious to get rid of him.
“So he guessed?
“It can’t have been chance. In some way he guessed. And you have been torn from me. My God! If I could only reach him—if I could fling his contempt in his face! And yet—
“I have been walking up and down this room all night. The longing for you has been the sharpest suffering I suppose that I have ever known. For I am not one of the many people who enjoy pain. I have kept as free of it as I could. This time it caught and gripped me. Yet that isn’t all. There has been something else.
“What strange, patched creatures we are! Do you know, Julie, that by the time the dawn came I was on my knees—thanking God that we were parted—that you were on your way home—safe—out of my reach? Was I mad, or what? I can’t explain it. I only know that one moment I hated Delafield as a mortal enemy—whether he was conscious of what he had done or no—and the next I found myself blessing him!
“I understand now what people mean when they talk of conversion. It seems to me that in the hours I have just passed through things have come to light in me that I myself never suspected. I came of an Evangelical stock—I was brought up in a religious household. I suppose that one can’t, after all, get away from the blood and the life
