"I--I don"t understand," she said, at last.
"Julie, listen! I shall be three days in Paris, but my business can be perfectly done in one. What if you met me there after to-morrow? What harm would it be? We are not babes, we two. We understand life. And who would have any right to blame or to meddle? Julie, I know a little inn in the valley of the Bievre, quite near Paris, but all wood and field.
No English tourists ever go there. Sometimes an artist or two--but this is not the time of year. Julie, why shouldn"t we spend our last two days there--together--away from all the world, before we say good-bye? You"ve been afraid here of prying people--of the d.u.c.h.ess even--of Madame Bornier--how she scowls at me sometimes! Why shouldn"t we sweep all that away--and be happy! n.o.body should ever--n.o.body _could_ ever know." His voice dropped, became still more hurried and soft. "We might go as brother and sister--that would be quite simple. You are practically French. I speak French well. Who is to have an idea, a suspicion of our ident.i.ty? The spring there is mild and warm. The Bois de Verrieres close by is full of flowers. When my father was alive, and I was a child, we went once, to economize, for a year, to a village a mile or two away.
But I knew this place quite well. A lovely, green, quiet spot! With your poetical ideas, Julie, you would delight in it. Two days--wandering in the woods--together! Then I put you into the train for Brussels, and I go my way. But to all eternity, Julie, those days will have been ours!"
At the first words, almost, Julie had disengaged herself. Pushing him from her with both hands, she listened to him in a dumb amazement. The color first deserted her face, then returned in a flood.
"So you despise me?" she said, catching her breath.
"No. I adore you."
She fell upon a chair and hid her eyes. He first knelt beside her, arguing and soothing; then he paced up and down before her, talking very fast and low, defending and developing the scheme, till it stood before them complete and tempting in all its details.
Julie did not look up, nor did she speak. At last, Warkworth, full of tears, and stifled with his own emotions, threw open the window again in a craving for air and coolness. A scent of fresh leaves and moistened earth floated up from the shrubbery beneath the window. The scent, the branching trees, the wide, mild s.p.a.ces of air brought relief. He leaned out, bathing his brow in the night. A tumult of voices seemed to be echoing through his mind, dominated by one which held the rest defiantly in check.
"Is she a mere girl, to be "led astray"? A moment of happiness--what harm?--for either of us?"
Then he returned to Julie.
"Julie!" He touched her shoulder, trembling. Had she banished him forever? It seemed to him that in these minutes he had pa.s.sed through an infinity of experience. Was he not the n.o.bler, the more truly man? Let the moralists talk.
"Julie!" he repeated, in an anguish.
She raised her head, and he saw that she had been crying. But there was in her face a light, a wildness, a yearning that rea.s.sured him. She put her arm round him and pressed her cheek to his. He divined that she, too, had lived and felt a thousand hours in one. With a glow of ecstatic joy he began to talk to her again, her head resting on his shoulder, her slender hands crushed in his.
And Julie, meanwhile, was saying to herself, "Either I go to him, as he asks, or in a few minutes I must send him away--forever."
And then as she clung to him, so warm and near, her strength failed her.
Nothing in the world mattered to her at that moment but this handsome, curly head bowed upon her own, this voice that called her all the names of love, this transformation of the man"s earlier prudence, or ambition, or duplicity, into this eager tenderness, this anguish in separation....
"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 Emba.s.sy to-morrow 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.
Leonie had shut up the house, in a grim silence, and had taken her way up-stairs 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 a.s.sociations and affections of her childhood. The _horror naturalis_ which protects the great majority of women from the wilder ways of pa.s.sion 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 ma.s.ses of her hair, it seemed to her that the form in the gla.s.s was that of another woman, treading another earth. She trampled cowardice under foot; she freed herself from--"was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine!"
Then as she stood before the oval mirror in a cla.s.sical frame, which adorned the mantel-piece 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 card-board 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, Therese!" 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.
"Therese! 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 sha"n"t be there to-morrow, 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 to-morrow morning,"