By a gesture, dreadful to see in its undisguised loathing she indicated her husband.
“The social code demands that I shall make his existence happy,” she continued. “I will obey, I will be his servant, my devotion to him shall be boundless; but from to-day I am a widow. I will neither be a prostitute in my own eyes nor in those of the world. If I do not belong to M. d’Aiglemont, I will never belong to another. You shall have nothing, nothing save this which you have wrung from me. This is the doom which I have passed upon myself,” she said, looking proudly at him. “And now, know this—if you give way to a single criminal thought, M. d’Aiglemont’s widow will enter a convent in Spain or Italy. By an evil chance we have spoken of our love; perhaps that confession was bound to come; but our hearts must never vibrate again like this. To-morrow you will receive a letter from England, and we shall part, and never see each other again.”
The effort had exhausted all Julie’s strength. She felt her knees trembling, and a feeling of deathly cold came over her. Obeying a woman’s instinct, she sat down, lest she should sink into Arthur’s arms.
“Julie!” cried Lord Grenville.
The sharp cry rang through the air like a crack of thunder. Till then he could not speak; now, all the words which the dumb lover could not utter gathered themselves in that heartrending appeal.
“Well, what is wrong with her?” asked the General, who had hurried up at that cry, and now suddenly confronted the two.
“Nothing serious,” said Julie, with that wonderful self-possession which a woman’s quick-wittedness usually brings to her aid when it is most called for. “The chill, damp air under the walnut tree made me feel quite faint just now, and that must have alarmed this doctor of mine. Does he not look on me as a very nearly finished work of art? He was startled, I suppose, by the idea of seeing it destroyed.” With ostentatious coolness she took Lord Grenville’s arm, smiled at her husband, took a last look at the landscape, and went down the pathway, drawing her traveling companion with her.
“This certainly is the grandest view that we have seen,” she said; “I shall never forget it. Just look, Victor, what distance, what an expanse of country, and what variety in it! I have fallen in love with this landscape.”
Her laughter was almost hysterical, but to her husband it sounded natural. She sprang gaily down into the hollow pathway and vanished.
“What?” she cried, when they had left M. d’Aiglemont far behind. “So soon? Is it so soon? Another moment, and we can neither of us be ourselves; we shall never be ourselves again, our life is over, in short—”