Eleanor (22 page)

Figure after figure, story after story, did he draw from her,—warm from the hidden fire of her own strenuous, loving life. Once or twice she spoke of her mother—like one drawing a veil for an instant from a holy of holies. He felt and saw the burning of a sacred fire; then the veil dropped, nor would it lift again for any word of his. And every now and then, a phrase that startled him by its quality,—its suggestions. Presently he was staring at her with his dark absent eyes.

‘Heavens!’—he was thinking—‘what a woman there is in her!—what a nature!’

The artist—the poet—the lover of things significant and moving,—all these were stirred in him as he listened to her, as he watched her young and noble beauty.

But, in the end, he would not grant her much, argumentatively.

‘You make me see strange things—magnificent things, if you like! But your old New England saints and dreamers are not your last word in America. They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,—science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there—there—I’ll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care! I have seen you a Catholic once, for three minutes!’

‘When?’

‘In St. Peter’s.’

His look, smiling, provocative, drove home his shaft.

‘I saw you overthrown. The great tradition swept upon you. You bowed to it,—you felt!’

She made no reply. Far within she was conscious of a kind of tremor. The personality beside her seemed to be laying an intimate, encroaching hand upon her own, and her maidenliness shrank before it.

She threw herself hastily upon other subjects. Presently, he found to his surprise that she was speaking to him of his book.

‘It would be so sad if it were not finished,’ she said timidly. ‘Mrs. Burgoyne would feel it so.’

His expression changed.

‘You think Mrs. Burgoyne cares about it so much?’

‘But she worked so hard for it!’—cried Lucy, indignant with something in his manner, though she could not have defined what. Her mind, indeed, was full of vague and generous misgivings on the subject of Mrs. Burgoyne. First she had been angry with Mr. Manisty for what had seemed to her neglect and ingratitude. Now she was somehow dissatisfied with herself too.

‘She worked too hard,’ said Manisty gravely. ‘It is a good thing the pressure has been taken off. Have you found out yet, Miss Foster, what a remarkable woman my cousin is?’

He turned to her with a sharp look of inquiry.

‘I admire her all day long,’ cried Lucy, warmly.

‘That’s right,’ said Manisty slowly—‘that’s right. Do you know her history?’

‘Mr. Brooklyn told me—

‘He doesn’t know very much,—shall I tell it you?’

‘If you ought—if Mrs. Burgoyne would like it,’ said Lucy, hesitating. There was a chivalrous feeling in the girl’s mind that she was too new an acquaintance, that she had no right to the secrets of this friendship, and Manisty no right to speak of them.

But Manisty took no notice. With half-shut eyes, like a man looking into the past, he began to describe his cousin; first as a girl in her father’s home; then in her married life, silent, unhappy, gentle; afterwards in the dumb years of her irreparable grief; and finally in this last phase of intellectual and spiritual energy, which had been such an amazement to himself, which had first revealed to him indeed the true Eleanor.

He spoke slowly, with a singular and scrupulous choice of words; building up the image of Mrs. Burgoyne’s life and mind with an insight and a delicacy which presently held his listener spell-bound. Several times Lucy felt herself flooded with hot colour.

‘Does he guess so much about—about us all?’ she asked herself with a secret excitement.

Suddenly Manisty said, with an entire change of tone, springing to his feet as he did so:

‘In short, Miss Foster—my cousin Eleanor is one of the ablest and dearest of women—and she and I have been completely wasting each other’s time this winter!’

Lucy stared at him in astonishment.

‘Shall I tell you why? We have been too kind to each other!’

He waited, studying his companion’s face with a hard, whimsical look.

‘Eleanor gave my book too much sympathy. It wanted brutality. I have worn her out—and my book is in a mess. The best thing I could do for us both—was to cut it short.’

Lucy was uncomfortably silent.

‘There’s no use in talking about it,’ Manisty went on, impatiently, with a shake of his great shoulders; ‘I am not meant to work in partnership. A word of blame depresses me; and I am made a fool by praise. It was all a mistake. If only Eleanor could understand—that it’s my own fault—and I know it’s my own fault—and not think me unjust and unkind. Miss Foster—’

Lucy looked up. In the glance she encountered, the vigorous and wilful personality beside her seemed to bring all its force to bear upon herself—

‘—if Eleanor talks to you—

‘She never does!’ cried Lucy.

‘She might,’ said Manisty, coolly. ‘She might. If she does, persuade her of my admiration, my gratitude! Tell her that I know very well that I am not worth her help. Her inspiration would have led any other man to success. It only failed because I was I. I hate to seem to discourage and disavow what I once accepted so eagerly.—But a man must find out his own mistakes—and thrash his own blunders. She was too kind to thrash them—so I have appointed Neal to the office. Do you understand?’

She rose, full of wavering approvals and disapprovals, seized by him,—and feeling with Mrs. Burgoyne.

‘I understand only a very little,’ she said, lifting her clear eyes to his; ‘except that I never saw anyone
I—I
cared for so much, in so short a time—as Mrs. Burgoyne.’

‘Ah! care for her!’ he said, in another voice, with another aspect. ‘Go on caring for her! She needs it.’

They walked on together towards the villa, for Alfredo was on the balcony signalling to them that the twelve o’clock breakfast was ready.

On the way Manisty turned upon her.

‘Now, you are to be obedient! You are not to pay any attention to my sister. She is not a happy person—but you are not to be sorry for her. You can’t understand her; and I beg you will not try. You are, please, to leave her alone. Can I trust you?’

‘Hadn’t you better send me into Rome?’ said Lucy, laughing and embarrassed.

‘I always intended to do so,’ said Manisty shortly.

Towards five o’clock, Alice Manisty arrived, accompanied by an elderly maid. Lucy, before she escaped into the garden, was aware of a very tall woman, possessing a harshly handsome face, black eyes, and a thin long-limbed frame. These black eyes, uneasily bright, searched the salon, as she entered it, only to fasten, with a kind of grip, in which there was no joy, upon her brother. Lucy saw her kiss him with a cold perfunctoriness, bowed herself, as her name was nervously pronounced by Miss Manisty, and then withdrew. Mrs. Burgoyne was in Rome for the afternoon.

But at dinner they all met, and Lucy could satisfy some of the curiosity that burnt in her very feminine mind. Alice Manisty was dressed in black lace and satin, and carried herself with stateliness. Her hair, black like her brother’s, though with a fine line of grey here and there, was of enormous abundance, and she wore it heavily coiled round her head in a mode which gave particular relief to the fire and restlessness of the eyes which flashed beneath it. Beside her, Eleanor Burgoyne, though she too was rather tall than short, suffered a curious eclipse. The plaintive distinction that made the charm of Eleanor’s expression and movements seemed for the moment to mean and say nothing, beside the tragic splendour of Alice Manisty.

The dinner was not agreeable. Manisty was clearly ill at ease, and seething with inward annoyance; Miss Manisty had the air of a frightened mouse; Alice Manisty talked not at all, and ate nothing except some poached eggs that she had apparently ordered for herself before dinner; and Eleanor—chattering of her afternoon in Rome—had to carry through the business as best she could, with occasional help from Lucy.

From the first it was unpleasantly evident to Manisty that his sister took notice of Miss Foster. Almost her only words at table were addressed to the girl sitting opposite to her; and her roving eyes returned again and again to Lucy’s fresh young face and quiet brow.

After dinner Manisty followed the ladies into the salon, and asked his aunt’s leave to smoke his cigarette with them.

Lucy wondered what had passed between him and his sister before dinner. He was polite to her; and yet she fancied that their relations were already strained.

Presently, as Lucy was busy with some embroidery on one of the settees against the wall of the salon, she was conscious of Alice Manisty’s approach. The new-comer sat down beside her, bent over her work, asked her a few low, deep-voiced questions. Those strange eyes fastened upon her,—stared at her indeed.

But instantly Manisty was there, cigarette in hand, standing between them. He distracted his sister’s attention, and at the same moment Eleanor called to Lucy from the piano.

‘Won’t you turn over for me? I can’t play them by heart.’

Lucy wondered at the scantiness of Mrs. Burgoyne’s musical memory that night. She, who could play by the hour without note, on most occasions, showed herself, on this, tied and bound to the printed page; and that page must be turned for her by Lucy, and Lucy only.

Meanwhile Manisty sat beside his sister smoking, throwing first the left leg over the right, then the right leg over the left, and making attempts at conversation with her, that Eleanor positively must not see, lest music and decorum both break down in a wreck of nervous laughter.

Alice Manisty scarcely responded; she sat motionless, her wild black head bent like that of a Maenad at watch, her gaze fixed, her long thin hands grasping the arm of her chair with unconscious force.

‘What is she thinking of?’ thought Lucy once, with a momentary shiver. ‘Herself?’

When bedtime came, Manisty gave the ladies their candles. As he bade good-night to Lucy, he said in her ear: ‘You said you wished to see the Lateran Museum. My aunt will send Benson with you to-morrow.’

His tone did not ask whether she wished for the arrangement, but simply imposed it.

Then, as Eleanor approached him, he raised his shoulders with a gesture that only she saw, and led her a few steps apart in the dimly lighted ante-room, where the candles were placed.

‘She wants the most impossible things, my dear lady,’ he said in low-voiced despair—‘things I can no more do than fly over the moon!’

‘Edward!’—said his sister from the open door of the salon—‘I should like some further conversation with you before I go to bed.’

Manisty with the worst grace in the world saw his aunt and Eleanor to their rooms, and then went back to surrender himself to Alice. He was a man who took family relations hardly, impatient of the slightest bond that was not of his own choosing. Yet it was Eleanor’s judgment that, considering his temperament, he had not been a bad brother to this wild sister. He had spent both heart and thought upon her case; and at the root of his relation to her, a deep and painful pity was easily to be divined.

Vast as the villa-apartment was, the rooms were all on one floor, and the doors fitted badly. Lucy’s sleep was haunted for long by a distant sound of voices, generally low and restrained, but at moments rising and sharpening as though their owners forgot the hour and the night. In the morning it seemed to her that she had been last conscious of a burst of weeping, far distant—then of a sudden silence …

The following day, Lucy in Benson’s charge paid her duty to the Sophocles of the Lateran Museum, and, armed with certain books lent her by Manisty, went wandering among the art and inscriptions of Christian Rome. She came home, inexplicably tired, through a glorious Campagna, splashed with poppies, embroidered with marigold and vetch; she climbed the Alban slopes from the heat below, and rejoiced in the keener air of the hills, and the freshness of the
ponente
, as she drove from the station to the villa.

Mrs. Burgoyne was leaning over the balcony looking out for her. Lucy ran up to her, astonished at her own eagerness of foot, at the breath of home which seemed to issue from the great sun-beaten house.

Eleanor looked pale and tired, but she took the girl’s hand kindly.

‘Oh! you must keep all your gossip for dinner!’ said Eleanor, as they greeted. ‘It will help us through. It has been rather a hard day.’

Lucy’s face showed her sympathy, and the question she did not like to put into words.

‘Oh, it has been a wrestle all day,’ said Eleanor wearily. ‘She wants Mr. Manisty to do certain things with her property, that as her trustee he
cannot
do. She has the maddest ideas—she
is
mad. And when she is crossed, she is terrible.’

At dinner Lucy did her best to lighten the atmosphere, being indeed most truly sorry for her poor friends and their dilemma. But her pleasant girlish talk seemed to float above an abyss of trouble and discomfort, which threatened constantly to swallow it up.

Alice Manisty indeed responded. She threw off her silence, and talked of Rome, exclusively to Lucy and with Lucy, showing in her talk a great deal of knowledge and a great deal of fine taste, mingled with occasional violence and extravagance. Her eyes indeed were wilder than ever. They shone with a miserable intensity, that became a positive glare once or twice, when Manisty addressed her. Her whole aspect breathed a tragic determination, crossed with an anger she was hardly able to restrain. Lucy noticed that she never spoke to or answered her brother if she could help it.

After dinner Lucy found herself the object of various embarrassing overtures on the part of the new-comer. But on each occasion Manisty interposed at first adroitly, then roughly. On the last occasion Alice Manisty sprang to her feet, went to the side table where the candles were placed, disappeared and did not return. Manisty, his aunt, and Mrs. Burgoyne, drew together in a corner of the salon discussing the events of the day in low anxious voices. Lucy thought herself in the way, and went to bed.