Lady Rose's Daughter Part 20

"And I must rush," said Captain Warkworth, looking at his watch. "I told a man to come to my rooms at twelve. Heavens!"

He shook hands with Miss Le Breton and hurried away.

Sir Wilfrid and Julie moved on together. That he had disturbed a most intimate and critical conversation was somehow borne in upon Sir Wilfrid. But kind and even romantic as was the old man's inmost nature, his feelings were not friendly.

"How does the biography get on?" he asked his companion, with a smile.

A bright flush appeared in Mademoiselle Le Breton's cheek.

"I think Lady Henry has dropped it."

"Ah, well, I don't imagine she will regret it;" he said, dryly.

She made no reply. He mentally accused himself for a brute, and then shook off the charge. Surely a few pin-p.r.i.c.ks were her desert! That she should defend her own secrets was, as Delafield had said, legitimate enough. But when a man offers you his services, you should not befool him beyond a certain point.

She must be aware of what he was thinking. He glanced at her curiously; at the stately dress gleaming with jet, which no longer affected anything of the girl; at the fine but old-fas.h.i.+oned necklace of pearls and diamonds--no doubt her mother's--which clasped her singularly slender throat. At any rate, she showed nothing. She began to talk again of the Delafield miniatures, using her fan the while with graceful deliberation; and presently they found the d.u.c.h.ess.

"Is she an adventuress, or is she not?" thought Bury, as his hansom carried him away from Rutland Gate. "If she marries Jacob, it will be a queer business."

VIII

Meanwhile the d.u.c.h.ess had dropped Julie Le Breton at Lady Henry's door.

Julie groped her way up-stairs through the sleeping house. She found her room in darkness, and she turned on no light. There was still a last glimmer of fire, and she sank down by it, her long arms clasped round her knees, her head thrown back as though she listened still to words in her ears.

"Oh, such a child! Such a dear, simple-minded child! Report engaged her to at least ten different people at Simla. She had a crowd of cavaliers there--I was one of them. The whole place adored her. She is a very rare little creature, but well looked after, I can tell you--a long array of guardians in the background."

How was it possible not to trust that aspect and that smile? Her mind travelled back to the autumn days when she had seen them first; reviewed the steps, so little noticed at first, so rapid lately and full of fate, by which she had come into this bondage wherein she stood. She saw the first appearance of the young soldier in Lady Henry's drawing-room; her first conversation with him; and all the subtle development of that singular relation between them, into which so many elements had entered.

The flattering sense of social power implied both in the homage of this young and successful man, and in the very services that she, on her side, was able to render him; impulsive grat.i.tude for that homage, at a time when her very soul was smarting under Lady Henry's contemptuous hostility; and then the sweet advances of a "friends.h.i.+p" that was to unite them in a bond, secret and unique, a bond that took no account of the commonplaces of love and marriage, the link of equal and kindred souls in a common struggle with hard and sordid circ.u.mstance.

"I have neither family nor powerful friends," he had written to her a few weeks after their first meeting; "all that I have won, I have won for myself. n.o.body ever made 'interest' for me but you. You, too, are alone in the world. You, too, have to struggle for yourself. Let us unite our forces--cheer each other, care for each other--and keep our friends.h.i.+p a sacred secret from the world that would misunderstand it. I will not fail you, I will give you all my confidence; and I will try and understand that n.o.ble, wounded heart of yours, with its memories, and all those singular prides and isolations that have been imposed on it by circ.u.mstance. I will not say, let me be your brother; there is something _ba.n.a.l_ in that; 'friend' is good enough for us both; and there is between us a community of intellectual and spiritual interest which will enable us to add new meaning even to that sacred word. I will write to you every day; you shall know all that happens to me; and whatever grateful devotion can do to make your life smoother shall be done."

Five months ago was it, that that letter was written?

Its remembered phrases already rang bitterly in an aching heart. Since it reached her, she had put out all her powers as a woman, all her influence as an intelligence, in the service of the writer.

And now, here she sat in the dark, tortured by a pa.s.sion of which she was ashamed, before which she was beginning to stand helpless in a kind of terror. The situation was developing, and she found herself wondering how much longer she would be able to control herself or it. Very miserably conscious, too, was she all the time that she was now playing for a reward that was secretly, tacitly, humiliatingly denied her. How could a poor man, with Harry Warkworth's ambitions, think for a moment of marriage with a woman in her ambiguous and dependent position? Her common-sense told her that the very notion was absurd. And yet, since the d.u.c.h.ess's gossip had given point and body to a hundred vague suspicions, she was no longer able to calm, to master herself.

Suddenly a thought of another kind occurred to her. It added to her smart that Sir Wilfrid, in their meeting at Lady Hubert's, had spoken to her and looked at her with that slight touch of laughing contempt. There had been no insincerity in that emotion with which she had first appealed to him as her mother's friend; she did truly value the old man's good opinion. And yet she had told him lies.

"I can't help it," she said to herself, with a little s.h.i.+ver. The story about the biography had been the invention of a moment. It had made things easy, and it had a small foundation in the fact that Lady Henry had talked vaguely of using the letters lent her by Captain Warkworth for the elucidation--perhaps in a _Nineteenth Century_ article--of certain pa.s.sages in her husband's Indian career.

Jacob Delafield, too. There also it was no less clear to her than to Sir Wilfrid that she had "overdone it." It was true, then, what Lady Henry said of her--that she had an overmastering tendency to intrigue--to a perpetual tampering with the plain fact?

"Well, it is the way in which such people as I defend themselves," she said, obstinately, repeating to herself what she had said to Sir Wilfrid Bury.

And then she set against it, proudly, that disinterestedness of which, as she vowed to herself, no one but she knew the facts. It was true, what she had said to the d.u.c.h.ess and to Sir Wilfrid. Plenty of people would give her money, would make her life comfortable, without the need for any daily slavery. She would not take it. Jacob Delafield would marry her, if she lifted her finger; and she would not lift it. Dr.

Meredith would marry her, and she had said him nay. She hugged the thought of her own unknown and unapplauded integrity. It comforted her pride. It drew a veil over that wounding laughter which had gleamed for a moment through those long lashes of Sir Wilfrid Bury.

Last of all, as she sank into her restless sleep, came the remembrance that she was still under Lady Henry's roof. In the silence of the night the difficulties of her situation pressed upon and tormented her. What was she to do? Whom was she to trust?

"Dixon, how is Lady Henry?"

"Much too ill to come down-stairs, miss. She's very much put out; in fact, miss (the maid lowered her voice), you hardly dare go near her.

But she says herself it would be absurd to attempt it."

"Has Hatton had any orders?"

"Yes, miss. I've just told him what her ladys.h.i.+p wishes. He's to tell everybody that Lady Henry's very sorry, and hoped up to the last moment to be able to come down as usual."

"Has Lady Henry all she wants, Dixon? Have you taken her the evening papers?"

"Oh yes, miss. But if you go in to her much her ladys.h.i.+p says you're disturbing her; and if you don't go, why, of course, everybody's neglecting her."

"Do you think I may go and say good-night to her, Dixon?"

The maid hesitated.

"I'll ask her, miss--I'll certainly ask her."

The door closed, and Julie was left alone in the great drawing-room of the Bruton Street house. It had been prepared as usual for the Wednesday--evening party. The flowers were fresh; the chairs had been arranged as Lady Henry liked to have them; the parquet floors shone under the electric light; the Gainsboroughs seemed to look down from the walls with a gay and friendly expectancy.

For herself, Julie had just finished her solitary dinner, still buoyed up while she was eating it by the hope that Lady Henry would be able to come down. The bitter winds of the two previous days, however, had much aggravated her chronic rheumatism. She was certainly ill and suffering; but Julie had known her make such heroic efforts before this to keep her Wednesdays going that not till Dixon appeared with her verdict did she give up hope.

So everybody would be turned away. Julie paced the drawing-room a solitary figure amid its lights and flowers--solitary and dejected. In a couple of hours' time all her particular friends would come to the door, and it would be shut against them. "Of course, expect me to-night," had been the concluding words of her letter of the morning. Several people also had announced themselves for this evening whom it was extremely desirable she should see. A certain eminent colonel, professor at the Staff College, was being freely named in the papers for the Mokembe mission. Never was it more necessary for her to keep all the threads of her influence in good working order. And these Wednesday evenings offered her the occasions when she was most successful, most at her ease--especially whenever Lady Henry was not well enough to leave the comparatively limited sphere of the back drawing-room.

Moreover, the gatherings themselves ministered to a veritable craving in Julie Le Breton--the craving for society and conversation. She shared it with Lady Henry, but in her it was even more deeply rooted. Lady Henry had ten talents in the Scriptural sense--money, rank, all sorts of inherited bonds and a.s.sociations. Julie Le Breton had but this one.

Society was with her both an instinct and an art. With the subtlest and most intelligent ambition she had trained and improved her natural gift for it during the last few years. And now, to the excitement of society was added the excitement of a new and tyrannous feeling, for which society was henceforth a mere weapon to be used.

She fumed and fretted for a while in silence. Every now and then she would pause in front of one of the great mirrors of the room, and look at the reflection of her tall thinness and the trailing satin of her gown.

"The girl--so pretty, in a gossamer sort of way," The words echoed in her mind, and vaguely, beside her own image in the gla.s.s, there rose a vision of girlhood--pale, gold hair, pink cheeks, white frock--and she turned away, miserable, from that conscious, that intellectual distinction with which, in general, she could persuade herself to be very fairly satisfied.

Hutton, the butler, came in to look at the fire.

"Will you be sitting here to-night, miss?"

"Oh no, Hutton. I shall go back to the library. I think the fire in my own room is out."

"I had better put out these lights, anyway," said the man, looking round the brilliant room.

"Oh, certainly," said Julie, and she began to a.s.sist him to do so.

Suddenly a thought occurred to her.

"Hutton!" She went up to him and spoke in a lower tone. "If the d.u.c.h.ess of Crowborough comes to-night, I should very much like to see her, and I know she wants to see me. Do you think it could possibly disturb Lady Henry if you were to show her into the library for twenty minutes?"