Mrs. Humphry Ward

“ Idleness? No! That way lies the end. To slacken the rush of life, for men of his sort, is to call on death--death, the secret pursuer, who is not far from each one of us. No, no! Fight on! It was only the long drudgery behind, under alien suns, together with the iron certainty of fresh drudgery ahead, that gave value, after all, to this rainy, this enchanting Piccadilly--that kept the string of feeling taut and all its notes clear.
"Going to bed, Sir Wilfrid?" said a voice behind him, as he turned down St. James's Street.
"Delafield!" The old man faced round with alacrity. ”

“ Oh, how I loathe some people! Well, there she is in bed, Madame Bornier away, and everybody. I simply can't go to Scotland. But Freddie is just mad. Do, Jacob, there's a dear, go and dine with him to-night and cheer him up. He vows he won't go north without me. Perhaps I'll come to-morrow. I could no more leave Julie to-night than fly.
"She'll be ill for weeks. What I ought to do is to take her abroad. She's very dear and good; but, oh, Jacob, as she lies there I feel her heart's broken. And it's not Lord Lackington. Oh no! though I'm sure she loved him. Do go to Freddie, there's a dear." ”

“ It was an effect as of something over-living, over-brilliant--an animation, an intensity, so strong that, at first beholding, a by-stander could scarcely tell whether it pleased him or no.
"Mademoiselle Le Breton--Sir Wilfrid Bury," said Jacob Delafield, introducing them.
"Is she French?" thought the old diplomat, puzzled. "And--have I ever seen her before?"
"Lady Henry will be so glad!" said a low, agreeable voice. "You are one of the old friends, aren't you? I have often heard her talk of you."
"You are very good. Certainly, I am an old friend--a connection also." ”

“ But this intelligent, full-blooded woman, who could understand at a word, or a half word, who had a knowledge of affairs which many a high-placed man might envy, with whom one never had a dull moment--this courted, distinguished Julie Le Breton--his mind swelled with half-guilty pride at the thought that for six months he had absorbed all her energies, that a word from him could make her smile or sigh, that he could force her to look at him with eyes so melting and so troubled as those with which she had given him her hands--her slim, beautiful hands--that night in Grosvenor Square. ”

“ Julie would have her hours of bitterness and humiliation; and she would conquer by boldness, if she conquered at all--by originality, by determining to live her own life. That would preserve for her the small circle, if it lost her the large world. And the small circle was what she lived for, what she ought, at any rate, to live for.
It was not likely she would marry. Why should she desire it? From any blundering tragedy a woman of so acute a brain would, of course, know how to protect herself. But within the limits of her life, why should she refuse herself happiness, intimacy, love? ”

“ Warkworth would marry Aileen Moffatt, and use her money for an ambitious career. After these weeks now lying before them--weeks of dangerous intimacy, dangerous emotion--she and he would become as strangers to each other. He would be absorbed by his profession and his rich marriage. She would be left alone to live her life.
A sudden terror of her own weakness overcame her. No, she could not be alone. She must place a barrier between herself and this--this strange threatening of illimitable ruin that sometimes rose upon her from the dark. "I have no prejudices," she had said to Sir Wilfrid. ”

“ Lord Lackington frowned.
"That won't do," he said, almost vehemently. "You have great talents, but you are weak--you are a woman--you must marry."
Julie stared at him, whiter even than when she had entered his room--helpless to avert what she began to foresee.
"Jacob Delafield is devoted to you. You should marry him, dear--you should marry him."
The room seemed to swim around her. But his face was still plain--the purpled lips and cheeks, the urgency in the eyes, as of one pursued by an overtaking force, the magnificent brow, the crown of white hair. ”

“ Delafield hung over the surging water in a strange exaltation, half physical, half moral. The wild salt strength and savor of the sea breathed something akin to that passionate force of will which had impelled him to the enterprise in which he stood. No mere man of the world could have dared it; most men of the world, as he was well aware, would have condemned or ridiculed it. But for one who saw life and conduct sub specie æternitatis it had seemed natural enough.
The wind blew fierce and cold. He made his way back to Julie's side. ”

“ But who that knew him well could avoid applying it to Delafield? A man of "recollection" living in the eye of the Eternal; keeping a guard over himself in the smallest matters of thought and action; mystically possessed by the passion of a spiritual ideal; in love with charity, purity, simplicity of life.
She bowed her head upon her hands in dreariness of spirit. Ultimately, what could such a man want with her? What had she to give him? In what way could she ever be necessary to him? And a woman, even in friendship, must feel herself that to be happy. ”

“ Nevertheless, as the rose of evening burned on the craggy mountain face beyond Bellaggio, retreating upward, step by step, till the last glorious summit had died into the cool and already starlit blues of night, Julie, held, as it were, by a reluctant and half-jealous fascination, sat dreaming on the hill-side, not now of Warkworth, not of the ambitions of the mind, or society, but simply of the goings and comings, the aspects and sayings of a man in whose eyes she had once read the deepest and sternest things of the soul--a condemnation and an anguish above and beyond himself. ”

“ 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 Bièvre, 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 Duchess even--of Madame Bornier--how she scowls at me sometimes! ”

“ It was she who ought to pay such acts of homage, not Julie.
"Father, Miss Le Breton is here."
"Let her come in, Jack--and the Duchess, too."
Lord Uredale went back to the door. Two figures came noiselessly into the room, the Duchess in front, with Julie's hand in hers.
Lord Lackington was propped up in bed, and breathing fast. But he smiled as they approached him.
"This is good-bye, dear Duchess," he said, in a whisper, as she bent over him. Then, with a spark of his old gayety in the eyes, "I should be a cur to grumble. Life has been very agreeable. Ah, Julie!" ”

“ I am afraid of Lady Henry, mortally afraid! When she speaks to me I feel like a child who puts up its hands to ward off a blow. My instinct is not merely to submit, but to grovel. When you have had the youth that I had, when you have existed, learned, amused yourself on sufferance, when you have had somehow to maintain yourself among girls who had family, friends, money, name, while you--"
Her voice stopped, resolutely silenced before it broke. Sir Wilfrid uncomfortably felt that he had no sympathy to produce worthy of the claim that her whole personality seemed to make upon it. ”

“ Lady Blanche seldom came to town, and, for the most part, he lived alone in the fine house in St. James's Square, of which she had heard her mother talk.
He liked her--had liked her from the first. How natural that she should tend and brighten his old age--how natural, and how impossible! He was not the man to brave the difficulties and discomforts inseparable from the sudden appearance of an illegitimate granddaughter in his household, and if he had been, Julie, in her fierce, new-born independence, would have shrunk from such a step. ”

“ Don't let your dear head be troubled about my affairs. They are never serious, and nothing counts--except," she added, recklessly, "that I get a little amusement by the way."
"Julie," cried the Duchess, "as if Jacob--"
Julie frowned and released herself; then she laughed.
"Nothing that one ever says about ordinary mortals applies to Mr. Delafield. He is, of course, hors concours."
"Julie!"
"It is you, Evelyn, who make me méchante. I could be grateful--and excellent friends with that young man--in my own way." ”

“ Jacob Delafield? No! Her being contracted and shivered at the thought of him. A will tardily developed, if all accounts of his school and college days were true, but now, as she believed, invincible; a mystic; an ascetic; a man under whose modest or careless or self-mocking ways she, with her eye for character, divined the most critical instincts, and a veracity, iron, scarcely human--a man before whom one must be always posing at one's best--that was a personal risk too great to take for a Julie Le Breton. ”

“ Well, now, Evelyn, you understand about the bazaar? I wish I could, but I can't."
"Yes, I understand. Julie!" The Duchess rose impulsively, and threw herself into a chair beside the table where she could watch the face and movements of Mademoiselle Le Breton. "Julie, I want so much to talk to you--about business. You're not to be offended. Julie, if you leave Lady Henry, how will you manage?"
"How shall I live, you mean?" ”

“ He went about the mountain-paths a transformed being, like one long spiritually athirst who has found the springs and sources of life. Julie felt a secret terror. Her impression was much the same as Meredith's--as of "something wearing through" to the light of day. Looking back she saw that this temperament, now so plain to view, had been always there; but in the young and capable agent of the Chudleigh property, in the Duchess's cousin, or Lady Henry's nephew, it had passed for the most part unsuspected. ”

“ Sir Wilfrid shook his head.
"She overdid it," he repeated. "However, what do you think of the man yourself, Jacob?"
"Well, I don't take to him," said the other, unwillingly. "He isn't my sort of man."
"And Mademoiselle Julie--you think nothing but well of her? I don't like discussing a lady; but, you see, with Lady Henry to manage, one must feel the ground as one can."
Sir Wilfrid looked at his companion, and then stretched his legs a little farther towards the fire. The lamp-light shone full on his silky eyelashes and beard, on his neatly parted hair, and the diamond on his fine left hand. ”

“ The tragic yearning, the agonized tenderness and pity which consumed her, must be crushed out of sight as far as possible. They would have been an offence to Lady Blanche, a bewilderment to Aileen. And it was on her relation to her new-found cousin that, as Delafield perceived, her moral life for the moment turned. This frail girl was on the brink of perishing because death had taken Warkworth from her. And Julie knew well that Warkworth had neither loved her nor deserved her--that he had gone to Africa and to death with another image in his heart. ”