Lady Rose's Daughter

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

And still she had no tears. Only, existence seemed to have ended in a gulf of horror, where youth and courage, repentance and high resolve, love and pleasure were all buried and annihilated together.

That poor girl up-stairs! It had not been possible to take her home. She was there with nurse and doctor, her mother hanging upon every difficult breath. The attack of diphtheria had left a weakened heart and nervous system; the shock had been cruel, and the doctor could promise nothing for the future.

"Mother--mother!... Dead!"

The cry echoed in Julie's ears. It seemed to fill the old, low-ceiled room in which she lay. Her fancy, preternaturally alive, heard it thrown back from the mountains outside--returned to her in wailing from the infinite depths of the lake. She was conscious of the vast forms and abysses of nature, there in the darkness, beyond the walls of her room, as something hostile, implacable....

And while he lay there dead, under the tropical sand, she was still living and breathing here, in this old Swiss inn--Jacob Delafield's wife, at least in name.

There was a knock at her door. At first she did not answer it. It seemed to be only one of the many dream sounds which tormented her nerves. Then it was repeated. Mechanically she said "Come in."

The door opened, and Delafield, carrying a light, which he shaded with his hand, stood on the threshold.

"May I come and talk to you?" he said, in a low voice. "I know you are not sleeping."

It was the first time he had entered his wife's room. Through all her misery, Julie felt a strange thrill as her husband's face was thus revealed to her, brightly illumined, in the loneliness of the night. Then the thrill passed into pain--the pain of a new and sharp perception.

Delafield, in truth, was some two or three years younger than Warkworth. But the sudden impression on Julie's mind, as she saw him thus, was of a man worn and prematurely aged--markedly older and graver, even, since their marriage, since that memorable evening by the side of Como when, by that moral power of which he seemed often to be the mere channel and organ, he had overcome her own will and linked her life with his.