But the tragic tumult had not yet begun. The house was still quiet, and Julie was for the first time alone.
She drew up the blinds, and stood gazing out upon the park, now flooded with light; at the famous Italian garden beneath the windows, with its fountains and statues; at the wide lake which filled the middle distance; and the hills beyond it, with the plantations and avenues which showed the extension of the park as far as the eye could see.
Julie knew very well what it all implied. Her years with Lady Henry, in connection with her own hidden sense of birth and family, had shown her with sufficient plainness the conditions under which the English noble lives. She was actually, at that moment, Duchess of Chudleigh; her strong intelligence faced and appreciated the fact; the social scope and power implied in those three words were all the more vivid to her imagination because of her history and up-bringing. She had not grown to maturity inside, like Delafield, but as an exile from a life which was yet naturally hers--an exile, full, sometimes, of envy, and the passions of envy.
It had no terrors for her--quite the contrary--this high social state. Rather, there were moments when her whole nature reached out to it, in a proud and confident ambition. Nor had she any mystical demurrer to make. The originality which in some ways she richly possessed was not concerned in the least with the upsetting of class distinctions, and as a Catholic she had been taught loyally to accept them.
The minutes passed away. Julie sank deeper and deeper into reverie, her head leaning against the side of the window, her hands clasped before her on her black dress. Once or twice she found the tears dropping from her eyes, and once or twice she smiled.
She was not thinking of the tragic circumstances amid which she stood. From that short trance of feeling even the piteous figures of the dead father and son faded away. Warkworth entered into it, but already invested with the passionless and sexless beauty of a world where--whether it be to us poetry or reality--"they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Her warm and living thoughts spent themselves on one theme only--the redressing of a spiritual balance. She was no longer a beggar to her husband; she had the wherewithal to give. She had been the mere recipient, burdened with debts beyond her paying; now--
And then it was that her smiles came--tremluous, fugitive, exultant.
A bell rang in the long corridor, and the slight sound recalled her to life and action. She walked towards the door which separated her from the sitting-room where she had left her husband, and opened it without knocking.
Delafield was sitting at a writing-table in the window. He had apparently been writing; but she found him in a moment of pause, playing absently with the pen he still held.