Eleanor (10 page)

The Marchese Vitellucci—a charming boy of two and twenty, tall, thin-faced and pensive,—laughed and bowed.

‘The Pope, Madame, should establish some
dames d’honneur
. Then he would have all the ladies too on his side.

‘
O, mon Dieu!
—he has enough of them,’ cried Madame Variani. ‘But here comes Mr. Manisty, I must drink my tea and hold my tongue. I am going out to dinner to-night, and if one gets hot and cross, that is not good for the complexion.’

Manisty advanced at his usual quick pace, his head sunk once more between his shoulders.

Young Vitellucci approached him. ‘Ah! Carlo!’ he said, looking up affectionately—‘dear fellow!—Come for a stroll with me.’

And linking his arm in the young man’s, he carried him off. Their peals of laughter could be heard coming back from the distance of the ilex-walk.

Madame Variani tilted back her chair to look after them.

‘Ah! your nephew can be agreeable too, when he likes,’ she said to Miss Manisty. ‘I do not say no. But when he talks of these poor Italians, he is
mechant—mechant
!’

As for Lucy Foster, as Manisty passed out of sight, she felt her pulses still tingling with a wholly new sense of passionate hostility—dislike even. But none the less did the stage seem empty and meaningless when he had left it.

Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were closeted in the library for some time before dinner. Lucy in the salon could hear him pacing up and down, and the deep voice dictating.

Then Mrs. Burgoyne came into the salon, and not noticing the girl who was hidden behind a great pot of broom threw herself on the sofa with a long sigh of fatigue. Lucy could just see the pale face against the pillow and the closed eyes. Thus abandoned and at rest, there was something strangely pitiful in the whole figure, for all its grace.

A wave of feeling rose in the girl’s breast. She slipped softly from her hiding-place, took a silk wrap that was lying on a chair, and approached Mrs. Burgoyne.

‘Let me put this over you. Won’t you sleep before dinner? And I will shut the window. It is getting cold.’

Mrs. Burgoyne opened her eyes in astonishment, and murmured a few words of thanks.

Lucy covered her up, closed the window, and was stealing away, when Mrs. Burgoyne put out a hand and touched her.

‘It is very sweet of you to think of me.’

She drew the girl to her, enclosed the hand she had taken in both hers, pressed it and released it. Lucy went quietly out of the room.

Then till dinner she sat reading her New Testament, and trying rather piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her, as she recalled the service; the great words of ‘sin,’ ‘salvation,’ ‘righteousness,’ as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled through her heart.

Then, as she rose to dress, there burst upon her through the open window the sunset blaze of the Campagna with the purple dome in its midst. And with that came the memory of the afternoon,—of the Cardinal—and Manisty.

Very often, in these first days, it was as though her mind ached, under the stress of new thinking, like something stretched and sore. In the New England house where she had grown up, a corner of the old-fashioned study was given up to the books of her grandfather, the divinity professor. They were a small collection, all gathered with one object,—the confuting and confronting of Rome. Like many another Protestant zealot, the old professor had brooded on the crimes and cruelties of persecuting Rome, till they became a madness in the blood. How well Lucy remembered his books—with their backs of faded grey or brown cloths, and their grim titles. Most of them she had never yet been allowed to read. When she looked for a book, she was wont to pass this shelf by in a vague horror. What Rome habitually did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in the past, could not—it seemed—be known by a pure woman! And she would glance from the books to the engraving of her grandfather above them,—to the stern and yet delicate face of the old Calvinist, with its high-peaked brow, and white neckcloth supporting the sharp chin; lifting her heart to him in a passionate endorsement, a common fierce hatred of wrong and tyranny.

She had grown older since then, and her country with her. New England Puritanism was no longer what it had been; and the Catholic Church had spread in the land. But in Uncle Ben’s quiet household, and in her own feeling, the changes had been but slight and subtle. Pity, perhaps, had insensibly taken the place of hatred. But those old words ‘priest’ and ‘mass’ still rung in her ears as symbols of all that man had devised to corrupt and deface the purity of Christ.

And of what that purity might be, she had such tender, such positive traditions! Her mother had been a Christian mystic—a ‘sweet woman,’ meek as a dove in household life, yet capable of the fiercest ardours as a preacher and missionary, gathering rough labourers into barns and by the wayside, and dying before her time, worn out by the imperious energies of religion. Lucy had always before her the eyes that seemed to be shining through a mist, the large tremulous mouth, the gently furrowed brow. Those strange forces—‘grace’—and ‘the spirit’—had been the realities, the deciding powers of her childhood, whether in what concerned the great emotions of faith, or the most trivial incidents of ordinary life—writing a letter—inviting a guest—taking a journey. The soul bare before God, depending on no fleshly aid, distracted by no outward rite; sternly defending its own freedom as a divine trust:—she had been reared on these main thoughts of Puritanism, and they were still through all insensible transformation, the guiding forces of her own being.

Already, in this Catholic country, she had been jarred and repelled on all sides. Yet she found herself living with two people for whom Catholicism was not indeed a personal faith—she could not think of that side of it without indignation—but a thing to be passionately admired and praised, like art, or music, or scenery. You might believe nothing, and yet write pages and pages in glorification of the Pope and the Mass, and in contempt of everything else!—in excuse too of every kind of tyranny so long as it served the Papacy and ‘the Church.’

She leaned out to the sunset, remembering sentence after sentence from the talk on the terrace—hating or combating them all.

Yet all the time a new excitement invaded her. For the man who had spoken thus was, in a sense, not a mere stranger to her. Somewhere in his being must be the capacity for those thoughts and feelings that had touched her so deeply in his book—for that magical insight and sweetness—

Ah!—perhaps she had not understood his book—no more than she understood him now. The sense of her own ignorance oppressed her—and of all that
might
be said, with regard apparently to anything whatever. Was there nothing quite true—quite certain—in the world?

So the girl’s intense and simple nature entered like all its fellows, upon the old inevitable struggle. As she stood there, with locked hands and flushed cheeks, conscious through every vein of the inrush and shock of new perceptions, new comparisons, she was like a ship that leaves the harbour for the open, and feels for the first time on all her timbers the strain of the unplumbed sea.

And of this invasion, this excitement, the mind, in haunting debate and antagonism, made for itself one image, one symbol—the face of Edward Manisty.

CHAPTER
V

While he was thus—unknowing—the cause of so many new attractions and repulsions in his guest’s mind, Manisty, after the first shock of annoyance produced by her arrival was over, hardly remembered her existence. He was incessantly occupied by the completion of his book, working late and early, sometimes in high and even extravagant spirits, but, on the whole, more commonly depressed and discontented.

Eleanor Burgoyne worked with him or for him many hours in each day. Her thin pallor became more pronounced. She ate little, and Miss Manisty believed that she slept less. The elder lady indeed began to fidget and protest, to remonstrate now and then with Manisty himself, even to threaten a letter to ‘the General.’ Eleanor’s smiling obstinacy, however, carried all before it. And Manisty, in spite of a few startled looks and perfunctory dissuasions, whenever his aunt attacked him, soon slipped back into his normal ways of depending on his cousin, and not being able to work without her. Lucy Foster thought him selfish and inconsiderate. It gave her one more cause of quarrel with him.

For she and Mrs. Burgoyne were slowly but surely making friends. The clearer it became that Manisty took no notice of Miss Foster, and refused to be held in any way responsible for her entertainment, the more anxious, it seemed, did Eleanor show herself to make life pleasant for the American girl. Her manner, which had always been kind, became more natural and gay. It was as though she had settled some question with herself, and settled it entirely to Lucy Foster’s advantage.

Not much indeed could be done for the stranger while the stress of Manisty’s work lasted. Aunt Pattie braced herself once or twice, got out the guide-books and took her visitor into Rome to see the sights. But the little lady was so frankly worn out by these expeditions, that Lucy, full of compunctions, could only beg to be left to herself in future. Were not the garden and the lake, the wood-paths to Rocca di Papa, and the roads to Albano good enough?

So presently it came to her spending many hours alone in the terraced garden on the hill-side, with all the golden Campagna at her feet. Her young fancy, however, soon learnt to look upon that garden as the very concentration and symbol of Italy. All the Italian elements, the Italian magics were there. Along its topmost edge ran a vast broken wall, built into the hill; and hanging from the brink of the wall like a long roof, great ilexes shut out the day from the path below. Within the thickness of the wall—in days when, in that dim Rome upon the plain, many still lived who could remember the voice and the face of Paul of Tarsus—Domitian had made niches and fountains; and he had thrown over the terrace, now darkened by the great ilex boughs, a long portico roof supported on capitals and shafts of gleaming marble. Then in the niches round the clear fountains, he had ranged the fine statues of a still admirable art; everywhere he had lavished marbles, rose and yellow and white, and under foot he had spread a mosaic floor, glistening beneath the shadow-play of leaf and water, in the rich reflected light from the garden and the Campagna outside; while at intervals, he had driven through the very crest of the hill long tunnelled passages, down which one might look from the garden and see the blue lake shining at their further end.

And still the niches and the recesses were there,—the huge wall too along the face of the hill; all broken and gashed and ruinous, showing the fine reticulated brickwork that had been once faced with marble; alternately supported and torn by the pushing roots of the ilex-trees. The tunnelled passages too were there, choked and fallen in; no flash of the lake now beyond their cool darkness! And into the crumbling surface of the wall, rude hands had built fragments of the goddesses and the Caesars that had once reigned there, barbarously mingled with warm white morsels from the great cornice of the portico, acanthus blocks from the long buried capitals, or dolphins orphaned of Aphrodite.

The wreck was beautiful, like all wrecks in Italy where Nature has had her way. For it was masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and shone golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length, ran a low marble conduit that held still the sweetest liveliest water. Lilies of the valley grew beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air; while on the outer or garden side of the path, the grass was purple with long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a little further, from the same grass, there shot up in a happy neglect, tall camellia-trees ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath them. And above the camellias again, the famous stone-pines of the villa climbed into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte.

So old it was!—and yet so fresh with spring! In the mornings at least the spring was uppermost. It silenced the plaint of outraged beauty which the place seemed to be always making, under a flutter of growth and song. Water and flowers and nightingales, the shadow, the sunlight, and the heat, were all alike strong and living,—Italy untamed. It was only in the evenings that Lucy shunned the path. For then, from the soil below and the wall above, there crept out the old imprisoned forces of sadness, or of poison, and her heart flagged or her spirits sank as she sat or walked there. Marinata has no malaria; but on old soils, and as night approaches, there is always something in the shade of Italy that fights with human life. The poor ghosts rise from the earth—jealous of those that are still walking the warm ways of the world.

But in the evenings, when the Fountain Walk drove her forth, the central hot zone of the garden was divine, with its roses and lilacs, its birds, its exquisite grass alive with shining lizards, jewelled with every flower, breathing every scent; and at its edge the old terrace with its balustrade, set above the Campagna, commanding the plain and the sea, the sky and the sunsets.

Evening after evening Lucy might have been found perched on the stone coping of the balustrade, sometimes trying, through the warm silent hours, by the help of this book or that, to call up again the old Roman life; sometimes dreaming of what there might still be—what the archaeologists indeed said must be—buried beneath her feet; of the marble limbs and faces pressed into the earth, and all the other ruined things, small and great, mean or lovely, that lay deep in a common grave below the rustling olives, and the still leafless vineyards; and sometimes the mere passive companion of the breeze and the sun, conscious only of the chirping of the crickets, or the loudness of the nightingales, or the flight of a hoopoe, like some strange bright bird of fairy-tale, flashing from one deep garden-shadow to another.