Lady Rose's Daughter

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"He never saw me as I am," she thought to herself, looking fretfully back to their past acquaintance. "I am neither as weak as he thinks me--nor as clever. And how strange it is--this tension in which he lives!"

And as she sat there idly plucking at the wet grass, her mind was overrun with a motley host of memories--some absurd, some sweet, some of an austerity that chilled her to the core. She thought of the difficulty she had in persuading Delafield to allow himself even necessary comforts and conveniences; a laugh, involuntary, and not without tenderness, crossed her face as she recalled a tale he had told her at Camaldoli, of the contempt excited in a young footman of a smart house by the mediocrity and exiguity of his garments and personal appointments generally. "I felt I possessed nothing that he would have taken as a gift," said Delafield, with a grin. "It was chastening."

Yet though he laughed, he held to it; and Julie was already so much of the wife as to be planning how to coax him presently out of a portmanteau and a top-hat that were in truth a disgrace to their species.

And all the time she must have the best of everything--a maid, luxurious travelling, dainty food. They had had one or two wrestles on the subject already. "Why are you to have all the high thinking and plain living to yourself?" she had asked him, angrily, only to be met by the plea, "Dear, get strong first--then you shall do what you like."

But it was at La Verna, the mountain height overshadowed by the memories of St. Francis, that she seemed to have come nearest to the ascetic and mystical tendency in Delafield. 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. How remarkably it had developed!--whither would it carry them both in the future? When thinking about it, she was apt to find herself seized with a sudden craving for Mayfair, "little dinners," and good talk.

"What a pity you weren't born a Catholic!--you might have been a religious," she said to him one night at La Verna, when he had been reading her some of the Fioretti with occasional comments of his own.

But he had shaken his head with a smile.

"You see, I have no creed--or next to none."

The answer startled her. And in the depths of his blue eyes there seemed to her to be hovering a swarm of thoughts that would not let themselves loose in her presence, but were none the less the true companions of his mind. She saw herself a moment as Elsa, and her husband as a modern Lohengrin, coming spiritually she knew not whence, bound on some quest mysterious and unthinkable.

"What will you do," she said, suddenly, "when the dukedom comes to you?"