Lady Rose's Daughter Part 59

"Dear Julie, why won't you?"

"If you were to ask him," she cried, in despair, "he would tell you as I do."

And across her miserable thoughts there flashed two mingled images--Warkworth waiting, waiting for her at the Sceaux Station, and that look of agonized reproach in Delafield's haggard face as he had parted from her in the dawn of this strange, this incredible day.

And here beside her, with the tyranny of the dying, this dear babbler wandered on in broken words, with painful breath, pleading, scolding, counselling. She felt that he was exhausting himself. She begged him to let her recall nurse and doctor. He shook his head, and when he could no longer speak, he clung to her hand, his gaze solemnly, insistently, fixed upon her.

Her spirit writhed and rebelled. But she was helpless in the presence of this mortal weakness, this affection, half earthly, half beautiful, on its knees before her.

A thought struck her. Why not content him? Whatever pledges she gave would die with him. What did it matter? It was cruelty to deny him the words--the mere empty words--he asked of her.

"I--I would do anything to please you!" she said, with a sudden burst of uncontrollable tears, as she laid her head down beside him on the pillow. "If he _were_ to ask me again, of course, for your sake, I would consider it once more. Dear, dear friend, won't that satisfy you?"

Lord Lackington was silent a few moments, then he smiled.

"That's a promise?"

She raised herself and looked at him, conscious of a sick movement of terror. What was there in his mind, still so quick, fertile, ingenious, under the very shadow of death?

He waited for her answer, feebly pressing her hand.

"Yes," she said, faintly, and once more hid her face beside him.

Then, for some little time, the dying man neither stirred nor spoke. At last Julie heard:

"I used to be afraid of death--that was in middle life. Every night it was a torment. But now, for many years, I have not been afraid at all.... Byron--Lord Byron--said to me, once, he would not change anything in his life; but he would have preferred not to have lived at all. I could not say that. I have enjoyed it all--being an Englishman, and an English peer--pictures, politics, society--everything. Perhaps it wasn't fair. There are so many poor devils."

Julie pressed his hand to her lips. But in her thoughts there rose the sudden, sharp memory of her mother's death--of that bitter stoicism and abandonment in which the younger life had closed, in comparison with this peace, this complacency.

Yet it was a complacency rich in sweetness. His next words were to a.s.sure her tenderly that he had made provision for her. "Uredale and Bill--will see to it. They're good fellows. Often--they've thought me--a pretty fool. But they've been kind to me--always."

Then, after another interval, he lifted himself in bed, with more strength than she had supposed he could exert, looked at her earnestly, and asked her, in the same painful whisper, whether she believed in another life.

"Yes," said Julie. But her shrinking, perfunctory manner evidently distressed him. He resumed, with a furrowed brow:

"You ought. It is good for us to believe it."

"I must hope, at any rate, that I shall see you again--and mamma," she said, smiling on him through her tears.

"I wonder what it will be like," he replied, after a pause. His tone and look implied a freakish, a whimsical curiosity, yet full of charm.

Then, motioning to her to come nearer, and speaking into her ear:

"Your poor mother, Julie, was never happy--never! There must be laws, you see--and churches--and religious customs. It's because--we're made of such wretched stuff. My wife, when she died--made me promise to continue going to church--and praying. And--without it--I should have been a bad man. Though I've had plenty of sceptical thoughts--plenty.

Your poor parents rebelled--against all that. They suffered--they suffered. But you'll make up--you're a n.o.ble woman--you'll make up."

He laid his hand on her head. She offered no reply; but through the inner mind there rushed the incidents, pa.s.sions, revolts of the preceding days.

But for that strange chance of Delafield's appearance in her path--a chance no more intelligible to her now, after the pondering of several feverish hours, than it had been at the moment of her first suspicion--where and what would she be now? A dishonored woman, perhaps, with a life-secret to keep; cut off, as her mother had been, from the straight-living, law-abiding world.

The touch of the old man's hand upon her hair roused in her a first recoil, a first shattering doubt of the impulse which had carried her to Paris. Since Delafield left her in the early dawn she had been pouring out a broken, pa.s.sionate heart in a letter to Warkworth. No misgivings while she was writing it as to the all-sufficing legitimacy of love!

But here, in this cold neighborhood of the grave--brought back to gaze in spirit; on her mother's tragedy--she shrank, she trembled. Her proud intelligence denied the stain, and bade her hate and despise her rescuer. And, meanwhile, things also inherited and inborn, the fruit of a remoter ancestry, rising from the dimmest and deepest caverns of personality, silenced the clamor of the naturalist mind. One moment she felt herself seized with terror lest anything should break down the veil between her real self and this unsuspecting tenderness of the dying man; the next she rose in revolt against her own fear. Was she to find herself, after all, a mere weak penitent--meanly grateful to Jacob Delafield? Her heart cried out to Warkworth in a protesting anguish.

So absorbed in thought was she that she did not notice how long the silence had lasted.

"He seems to be sleeping," said a low voice beside her.

She looked up to see the doctor, with Lord Uredale. Gently releasing herself, she kissed Lord Lackington's forehead, and rose to her feet.

Suddenly the patient opened his eyes, and as he seemed to become aware of the figures beside him, he again lifted himself in bed, and a gleam most animated, most vivacious, pa.s.sed over his features.

"Brougham's not asked," he said, with a little chuckle of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Isn't it a joke?"

The two men beside him looked at each other. Lord Uredale approached the bed.

"Not asked to what, father?" he said, gently.

"Why, to the Queen's fancy ball, of course," said Lord Lackington, still smiling. "Such a to-do! All the elderly sticks practising minuets for their lives!"

A voluble flow of talk followed--hardly intelligible. The words "Melbourne" and "Lady Holland" emerged--the fragment, apparently, of a dispute with the latter, in which "Allen" intervened--the names of "Palmerston" and "that dear chap, Villiers."

Lord Uredale sighed. The young doctor looked at him interrogatively.

"He is thinking of his old friends," said the son. "That was the Queen's ball, I imagine, of '42. I have often heard him describe my mother's dress."

But while he was speaking the fitful energy died away. The old man ceased to talk; his eyelids fell. But the smile still lingered about his mouth, and as he settled himself on his pillows, like one who rests, the spectators were struck by the urbane and distinguished beauty of his aspect. The purple flush had died again into mortal pallor. Illness had masked or refined the weakness of mouth and chin; the beautiful head and countenance, with their characteristic notes of youth, impetuosity, a kind of gay detachment, had never been more beautiful.

The young doctor looked stealthily from the rec.u.mbent figure to the tall and slender woman standing absorbed and grief-stricken beside the bed.

The likeness was as evident to him as it had been, in the winter, to Sir Wilfrid Bury.

As he was escorting her down-stairs, Lord Uredale said to his companion, "Foster thinks he may still live twenty-four hours."

"If he asks for me again," said Julie, now shrouded once more behind a thick, black veil, "you will send?"

He gravely a.s.sented.

"It is a great pity," he said, with a certain stiffness--did it unconsciously mark the difference between her and his legitimate kindred?--"that my sister Lady Blanche and her daughter cannot be with us."

"They are in Italy?"

"At Florence. My niece has had an attack of diphtheria. She could neither travel nor could her mother leave her."

Then pausing in the hall, he added in a low voice, and with some embarra.s.sment:

"My father has told you, I believe, of the addition he has made to his will?"