Eleanor (33 page)

She turned away from him—away from his handsome face, and that touch in him of the ‘imperishable child,’ which moved and pleased her so. Playing with some flowers on her lap, she said shyly—

‘Shall I tell you what you ought to do with this fortnight?’

‘Tell me,’ said Manisty, stooping towards her. It was well for her that she could not see his expression, as he took in with covetous delight her maidenly simpleness and sweetness.

‘Oughtn’t you—to finish the book? You could—couldn’t you? And Mrs. Burgoyne has been so disappointed. It makes one sad to see her.’

Her words gave her courage. She looked at him again with a grave, friendly air.

Manisty drew himself suddenly erect. After a pause, he said in another voice: ‘I thought I had explained to you before that the book and I had reached a
cul de sac
—that I no longer saw my way with it.’

Lucy thought of the criticisms upon it she had heard at the Embassy, and was uncomfortably silent.

‘Miss Foster!’ said Manisty suddenly, with determination.

Lucy’s heart stood still.

‘I believe I see the thought in your mind. Dismiss it! There have been rumours in Rome—in which even perhaps my aunt has believed. They are unjust—both to Eleanor and to me. She would be the first to tell you so.’

‘Of course,’ said Lucy hurriedly, ‘of course,’—and then did not know what to say, torn as she was between her Puritan dread of falsehood, her natural woman’s terror of betraying Eleanor, and her burning consciousness of the man and the personality beside her.

‘No!—you still doubt. You have heard some gossip and you believe it.’

He threw away the cigarette with which he had been playing, and came to sit down on the curving marble bench beside her.

‘I think you must listen to me,’ he said, with a quiet and manly force that became him. ‘The friendship between my cousin and me has been unusual, I know. It has been of a kind that French people, rather than English, understand; because for French people literature and conversation are serious matters, not trifles that don’t count, as they are with us. She has been all sweetness and kindness to me, and I suppose that she, like a good many other people, has found me an unsatisfactory and disappointing person to work with!’

‘She is so ill and tired,’ said Lucy, in a low voice.

‘Is she?’ said Manisty, concerned. ‘But she never can stand heat. She will pick up when she gets to England.—But now suppose we grant all my enormities. Then please tell me what I am to do? How am I to appease Eleanor?—and either transform the book, to satisfy Neal,—or else bury it decently? Beastly thing!—as if it were worth one tithe of the trouble it has cost her and me. Yet there are some uncommon good things in it too!’ he said, with a change of tone.

‘Well, if you did bury it,’ said Lucy, half laughing, yet trying to pluck up courage to obey the Ambassador,—‘what would you do? Go back to England?—and—and to your property?’

‘What! has that dear old man been talking to you?’ he said with amusement. ‘I thought as much. He has snubbed my views and me two or three times lately. I don’t mind. He is one of the privileged. So the Ambassador thinks I should go home?’

He threw one arm over the back of the seat, and threw her a brilliant hectoring look which led her on.

‘Don’t people in England think so too?’

‘Yes—some of them,’ he said considering. ‘I have been bombarded with letters lately as to politics, and the situation, and a possible new constituency. A candid friend says to me this morning, “Hang the Italians!—what do you know about them,—and what do they matter? English people can only be frightened by their own bogies. Come home, for God’s sake! There’s a glorious fight coming, and if you’re not in it, you’ll be a precious fool.”’

‘I daren’t be as candid as that!’ said Lucy, her face quivering with suppressed fun.

Their eyes met in a common flash of laughter. Then Manisty fell heavily back against the seat.

‘What have I got to go home for?’ he said abruptly, his countenance darkening.

Lucy’s aspect changed too, instantly. She waited.

Manisty’s lower jaw dropped a little. A sombre bitterness veiled the eyes fixed upon the distant vistas of the garden.

‘I hate my old house,’ he said slowly. ‘Its memories are intolerable. My father was a very eminent person, and had many friends. His children saw nothing of him, and had not much reason to love him. My mother died there—of an illness it is appalling to think of. No, no—not Alice’s illness!—not that. And now, Alice,—I should see her ghost at every corner!’

Lucy watched him with fascination. Every note of the singular voice, every movement of the picturesque ungainly form, already spoke to her, poor child, with a significance that bit these passing moments into memory, as an etcher’s acid bites upon his plate.

‘Oh! she will recover!’ she said, softly, leaning towards him unconsciously.

‘No!—she will never recover,—never! And if she did, she and I have long ceased to be companions and friends. No, Miss Foster, there is nothing to call me home,—except politics. I may set up a lodging in London, of course. But as for playing the country squire—’ He laughed, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘No,—I shall let the place as soon as I can. Anyway, I shall never return to it—alone!’

He turned upon her suddenly. The tone in which the last word was spoken, the steady ardent look with which it was accompanied, thrilled the hot May air.

A sickening sense of peril, of swift intolerable remorse, rushed upon Lucy. It gave her strength.

She changed her position, and spoke with perfect self-possession, gathering up her parasol and gloves.

‘We really must find the others, Mr. Manisty. They will wonder what has become of us.’

She rose as she spoke. Manisty drew a long breath as he still sat observing her. Her light, cool dignity showed him that he was either not understood—or too well understood. In either case he was checked. He took back his move; not without a secret pleasure that she was not too yielding—too much of the
ingenue
!

‘We shall soon discover them,’ he said carelessly, relighting his cigarette. ‘By the way, I saw what company you were in after lunch! You didn’t hear any good of the book or me—there!’

‘I liked them all,’ she said with spirit. ‘They love their country, and they believe in her. Where, Mr. Manisty, did you leave Mr. Neal and Mrs. Burgoyne?’

‘I will show you,’ he said, unwillingly. ‘They are in a part of the garden you don’t know.’

Her eye was bright, a little hostile. She moved resolutely forward, and Manisty followed her. Both were conscious of a hidden amazement. But a minute, since he had spoken that word, looked that look? How strange a thing is human life! He would not let himself think,—talked of he hardly knew what.

‘They love their country, you say? Well, I grant you that particular group has pure hands, and isn’t plundering their country’s vitals like the rest—as far as I know. A set of amiable dreamers, however, they appear to me; fiddling at small reforms, while the foundations are sinking from under them. However, you liked them,—that’s enough. Now then, when and how shall we begin our campaign? Where will you go?—what will you see? The crypt of St. Peter’s?—that wants a Cardinal’s order. The Villa Albani?—closed to the public since the Government laid hands on the Borghese pictures,—but it shall open to you. The great function at the Austrian Embassy next week with all the Cardinals? Give me your orders,—it will be hard if I can’t compass them!’

But she was silent, and he saw that she still hurried, that her look sought the distance, that her cheek was flushed. Why? What new thing had he said to press—to disturb her? A spark of emotion passed through him. He approached her gently, persuasively, as one might approach a sweet, resisting child—

You’ll come? You’ll let me make amends?’

‘I thought,’ said Lucy, uncertainly, ‘that you were going home directly—at the beginning of June. Oh! please, Mr. Manisty, will you look? Is that Mrs. Burgoyne?’

Manisty frowned.

‘They are not in that direction.—As to my going home, Miss Foster, I have no engagements that I cannot break.’

The wounded feeling in the voice was unmistakable. It hurt her ear.

‘I should love to see all those things,’ she said vaguely, still trying, as it seemed to him, to outstrip him, to search the figures in the distance; ‘but—but—plans are so difficult. Oh! that is—that is Mr. Neal!’

She began to run towards the approaching figure, and presently Manisty could hear her asking breathlessly for Mrs. Burgoyne.

Manisty stood still. Then as they approached him, he said—

‘Neal!—well met! Will you take these ladies to the station, or, at any rate, put them in their cab? It is time for their train. I dine in Rome.’

He raised his hat formally to Lucy, turned, and went his way.

It was night at the villa.

Eleanor was in her room, the western room overlooking the olive-ground and the Campagna, which Lucy had occupied for a short time on her first arrival.

It was about half an hour since Eleanor had heard Manisty’s cab arrive, and his voice in the library giving his orders to Alfredo. She and Lucy Foster and Aunt Pattie had already dispersed to their rooms. It was strange that he should have dined in town. It had been expressly arranged on their way to Rome that he should bring them back.

Eleanor was sitting in a low chair beside a table that carried a paraffin lamp. At her back was the window, which was open save for the sun-shutter outside, and the curtains, both of which had been drawn close. A manuscript diary lay on Eleanor’s lap, and she was listlessly turning it over, with eyes that saw nothing, and hands that hardly knew what they touched. Her head, with its aureole of loosened hair, was thrown back against the chair, and the crude lamplight revealed each sharpened feature with a merciless plainness. She was a woman no longer young—ill—and alone.

By the help of the entries before her she had been living the winter over again.

How near and vivid it was,—how incredibly, tangibly near!—and yet as dead as the Caesars on the Palatine.

For instance:—

‘November 22. To-day we worked well. Three hours this morning—nearly three this afternoon. The survey of the financial history since 1870 is nearly finished. I could not have held out so long, but for his eagerness, for my head ached, and last night it seemed to me that Rome was all bells, and that the clocks never ceased striking.

‘But how his eagerness carries one through, and his frank and generous recognition of all that one does for him! Sometimes I copy and arrange; sometimes he dictates; sometimes I just let him talk till he has got a page or section into shape. Even in this handling of finance, you feel the flame that makes life with him so exciting. It is absurd to say, as his enemies do, that he has no steadiness of purpose. I have seen him go through the most tremendous drudgery the last few weeks,—and then throw it all into shape with the most astonishing ease and rapidity. And he is delightful to work with. He weighs all I say. But no false politeness! If he doesn’t like it, he frowns and bites his lip, and tears me to pieces. But very often I prevail, and no one can yield with a better grace. People here talk of his vanity. I don’t deny it—perhaps I think it part of his charm.

‘He thinks too much of me, far, far too much.

‘December 16. A luncheon at the Marchesa’s. The Fioravantis were there, and some Liberal Catholics. Manisty was attacked on all sides. At first he was silent and rather sulky—it is not always easy to draw him. Then he fired up,—and it was wonderful how he met them all in an Italian almost as quick as their own. I think they were amazed: certainly I was.

‘Of course I sometimes wish that it were conviction with him and not policy. My heart aches, hungers sometimes—for another note. If instead of this praise from outside, this cool praise of religion as the great policeman of the world, if only his voice, his dear voice, spoke for one moment the language of faith!—all barren tension and grief and doubt would be gone then for me, at a breath. But it never, never does. And I remind myself—painfully—that his argument holds whether the arguer believe or no. “Somehow or other you must get conduct out of the masses or society goes to pieces. But you can only do this through religion. What folly, then, for nations like Italy and France to quarrel with the only organisation which can ever get conduct out of the ignorant!—in the way they understand!”—It is all so true. I know it by heart—there is no answering it. But if instead he once said to me—“Eleanor, there is a God!—and it is He that has brought us together in this life and work,—He that will comfort you, and open new ways for me”—Ah then—then!—

‘Christmas Day. We went last night to the midnight mass at Santa Maria Maggiore. Edward is always incalculable at these functions; sometimes bored to death, sometimes all enthusiasm and sympathy. Last night the crowd jarred him, and I wished we had not come. But as we walked home through the moonlit streets, full of people hurrying in and out of the churches, of the pifferari with their cloaks and pipes—black and white nuns—brown monks—lines of scarlet seminarists, and the like, he suddenly broke out with the prayer of the First Christmas Mass—I must give it in English, for I have forgotten the Latin:

’”
O God, who didst cause this most holy Night to be illumined by the rising of the true Light, we beseech Thee that we who know on earth the secret shining of His splendour may win in Heaven His eternal joys
.”

‘We were passing through Monte Cavallo, beside the Two Divine Horsemen who saved Rome of old. The light shone on the fountains—it seemed as if the two godlike figures were just about to leap, in fierce young strength, upon their horses.

‘Edward stopped to look at them.

‘“And we say that the world lives by Science! Fools! when has it lived by anything else than Dreams—at Athens, at Rome, or Jerusalem?”

‘We stayed by the fountains talking. And as we moved away, I said: “How strange at my age to be enjoying Christmas for the first time!” And he looked at me as though I had given him pleasure, and said with his most delightful smile—“Who else should enjoy life if not you—kind, kind Eleanor?”