Eleanor (41 page)

Now, with the final act of defiance, obscurely carried out, conditioned he knew not how, there had arrived for him a marvellous liberation of soul. Even at sixty-five he felt himself tragically new-born—naked and feeble indeed, but still with unknown possibilities of growth and new life before him.

His book, instead of being revised, must be re-written. No need now to tremble for a phrase! Let the truth be told. He plunged into his old studies again, and the world of thought met him with a friendlier and franker welcome. On all sides there was a rush and sparkle of new light. How far he must follow and submit, his trembling soul did not yet know. But for the moment there was an extraordinary though painful exhilaration—the excitement of leading-strings withdrawn and walls thrown down.

This enfranchisement brought him, however, into strange conflict with his own character. His temperament was that of the ascetic and visionary religious. His intelligence had much the same acuteness and pliancy as that of another and more pronounced doubter—a South German also, like Father Benecke,—the author of the ‘Leben Jesu.’ But his
character
was the joint product of his temperament and his habits, and was often difficult to reconcile with the quick play of his intelligence.

For instance, he was, in daily habit, an austere and most devout priest, living alone with his old sister, as silent and yet fervent as himself, and knowing almost nothing of other women, except through the Confessional. To his own astonishment he was in great request as a director. But socially he knew very little of his penitents; they were to him only ‘souls,’ spiritual cases which he studied with the ardour of a doctor. Otherwise the small benefice which he held in a South German town, his university class, and the travail of his own research absorbed him wholly.

Hence a great innocence and unworldliness; but also an underlying sternness towards himself and others. His wants were small, and for many years the desires of the senses had been dead within him. Towards women he felt, if the truth were known, with that strange unconscious arrogance which is a most real and very primitive element in Catholicism, notwithstanding the worship of Mary and the glories of St. Teresa and St. Catharine. The Church does not allow any woman, even a ‘religious,’ to wash the corporal and other linen which has been used in the Mass. There is a strain of thought implied in that prohibition which goes deep and far—back to the dim dawn of human things. It influences the priest in a hundred ways; it affected even the tender and spiritual mind of Father Benecke. As a director of women he showed them all that impersonal sweetness which is of the essence of Catholic tradition; but they often shrank nevertheless from what they felt to be a fundamental inflexibility mingled with pity.

Thus when he found himself brought into forced contact with the two ladies who had invaded his retreat, when Lucy in a hundred pretty ways began to show him a young and filial homage, when Eleanor would ask him to coffee with them, and talk to him about his book and the subjects it discussed, the old priest was both amazed and embarrassed.

How in the world did she know anything about such things? He understood that she had been of assistance to Mr. Manisty: but that it had been the assistance of a comrade and an equal—that had never entered his head.

So that at first Mrs. Burgoyne’s talk silenced and repelled him. He was conscious of the male revolt of St. Paul!—‘I suffer not a woman to teach’; and for a time he hung back.

On his visit to the villa, and on her first meeting with him at Torre Amiata, he had been under the influence of a shock which had crushed the child in him and broken down his reserve. Yet that reserve was naturally strong, together with certain despotic instincts which Eleanor perceived with surprise beneath his exquisite gentleness. She sometimes despaired of taming him.

Nevertheless when Eleanor presently advised him to publish a statement of his case in a German periodical; when the few quick things she said showed a knowledge of the German situation and German current literature that filled him with astonishment; when with a few smiles, hints, demurs, she made plain to him that she perfectly understood where he had weakened his book—which lay beside her—out of deference to authority, and where it must be amended, if it was to produce any real influence upon European cultivated opinion, the old priest was at first awkward or speechless. Then slowly he rose to the bait. He began to talk; he became by degrees combative, critical, argumentative. His intelligence took the field; his character receded. Eleanor had won the day.

Presently, indeed, he began to haunt them. He brought to Eleanor each article and letter as it arrived, consulting her on every phase of a controversy, concerning him and his book, which was now sweeping through certain Catholic circles and newspapers. He was eager, forgetful, exacting even. Lucy began to dread the fatigue that he sometimes produced. While for Lucy he was still the courteous and paternal priest, for Eleanor he gradually became—like Manisty—the intellectual comrade, crossing swords often in an equal contest, where he sometimes forgot the consideration due to the woman in the provocation shown him by the critic.

And when she had tamed him, it was to Eleanor all ashes and emptiness!

‘
This
is the kind of thing I can always do,’ she said to herself one day, throwing out her hands in self-scorn, as he left her on the
loggia
, where he had been taking coffee with herself and Lucy.

And meanwhile what attracted her was not in the least the controversialist and the man of letters—it was the priest, the Christian, the ascetic.

Torn with passion and dread as she was, she divined in him the director; she felt towards him as the woman so often feels towards that sexless mystery, the priest. Other men are the potential lovers of herself or other women; she knows herself their match. But in this man set apart, she recognises the embodied conscience, the moral judge, who is indifferent to her as a woman, observant of her as a soul. Round this attraction she flutters, and has always fluttered since the beginning of things. It is partly a yearning for guidance and submission; partly also a secret pride that she who for other men is mere woman, is, for the priest, spirit, and immortal. She prostrates herself; but at the same time she seems to herself to enter through her submission upon a region of spiritual independence where she is the slave, not of man but of God.

What she felt also, tortured as she was by jealousy and angry will, was the sheer longing for human help that must always be felt by the lonely and the weak. Confession, judgment, direction—it was on these tremendous things that her inner mind was brooding all the time that she sat talking to Father Benecke of the Jewish influence in Bavaria, or the last number of the ‘Civilta Cattolica.’

One evening at the beginning of July Eleanor and Lucy were caught in the woods by a thunder-shower. The temperature dropped suddenly, and as they mounted the hill towards the convent Eleanor in her thin white dress met a blast of cold wind that followed the rain.

The result was chill and fever. Lucy and Marie tended her as best they could, but her strength appeared to fail her with great rapidity, and there came an evening when Lucy fell into a panic of anxiety.

Should she summon the local doctor—a man who was paid 80_l._ a year by the Municipio of Selvapendente, and tended the Commune of Torre Amiata?

She had discovered, however, that he was not liked by the peasants. His appearance was not attractive, and she doubted whether she could persuade Eleanor to see him.

An idea struck her. Without consulting Mrs. Burgoyne, she took her hat and boldly walked up to the Palazzo on the hill. Here she inquired for the Contessa Guerrini. The Contessa, however, was out; Lucy left a little note in French asking for advice. Could they get a good doctor at Selvapendente, or must she send to Orvieto?

She had hardly reached home before an answer followed her from the Contessa, who regretted extremely that Mademoiselle Foster should not have found her at home. There was a good doctor at Selvapendente, and the Contessa would have great pleasure in sending a mounted messenger to fetch him. She regretted the illness of Madame. There was a fair
farmacia
in the village. Otherwise she was afraid that in illness the ladies would not find themselves very well placed at Torre Amiata. Would Mademoiselle kindly have her directions for the doctor ready, and the messenger would call immediately?

Lucy was sincerely grateful and perhaps a little astonished. She was obliged to tell Eleanor, and Eleanor showed some restlessness, but was too unwell to protest. The doctor came and proved to be competent. The fever was subdued, and Eleanor was soon convalescent. Meanwhile flowers, fruit, and delicacies were sent daily from the Palazzo, and twice did the Contessa descend from her little victoria at the door of the convent courtyard, to inquire for the patient.

On each occasion Lucy saw her, and received the impression of a dignified, kind, and masterful woman, bowed by recent grief, but nevertheless sensitively alive in a sort of old-fashioned stately way to the claims of strangers on the protection of the local grandee. It seemed to attract her that Lucy was American, and that Eleanor was English.

‘I have twice visited England,’ she said, in an English that was correct, but a little rusty. ‘My husband learnt many things from England—for the estate. But I wonder, Mademoiselle, that you come to us at this time of year?’

Lucy laughed and coloured. She said it was pleasant to see Italy without the
forestieri
; that it was like surprising a bird on its nest. But she stumbled a little, and the Contessa noticed both the blush and the stumbling.

When Eleanor was able to go out, the little carriage was sent for her, and neither she nor Lucy knew how to refuse it. They drove up and down the miles of zig-zag road that Don Emilio had made through the forest on either side of the river, connecting the Palazzo Guerrini with the
casa di caccia
on the mountain opposite. The roads were deserted; grass was beginning to grow on them. The peasants scarcely ever used them. They clung to the old steep paths and tracts that had been theirs for generations. But the small smart horses, in their jingling harness, trotted briskly along; and Eleanor beside her companion, more frail and languid than ever, looked listlessly out upon a world of beauty that spoke to her no more.

And at last a note from the Contessa arrived, asking if the ladies would honour her and her daughter by taking tea with them at the Palazzo. ‘We are in deep mourning and receiving no society,’ said the note; ‘but if Madame and her friend will visit us in this quiet way it will give us pleasure, and they will perhaps enjoy the high view from here over our beautiful country.’

Eleanor winced and accepted.

The Palazzo, as they climbed up through the village towards it, showed itself to be an imposing pile of the later seventeenth century, with heavily-barred lower windows, and, above, a series of graceful
loggie
on its northern and western fronts which gave it a delicate and habitable air. On the north-eastern side the woods, broken by the stone-fall of the Sassetto, sank sharply to the river; on the other the village and the vineyards pressed upon its very doors. The great entrance gateway opened on a squalid village street, alive with crawling babies and chatting mothers.

At this gateway, however—through which appeared a courtyard aglow with oleanders and murmurous with running water—they were received with some state. An old majordomo met them, accompanied by two footmen and a carrying-chair. Eleanor was borne up a high flight of stone stairs, and through a vast and bare ‘apartment’ of enormous rooms with tiled or brick floors and wide stone
cheminees
, furnished with a few old chests and cabinets, a collection of French engravings of the last century, and some indifferent pictures. A few of the rooms were frescoed with scenes of hunting or social life in a facile eighteenth-century style. Here and there was a piece of old tapestry or a Persian carpet. But as a whole, the Palazzo, in spite of its vastness, made very much the impression of an old English manor house which has belonged to people of some taste and no great wealth, and has grown threadbare and even ugly with age. Yet tradition and the family remain. So here. A frugal and antique dignity, sure of itself and needing no display, breathed in the great cool spaces.

The Contessa and her daughter were in a small and more modern
salone
looking on the river and the woods. Eleanor was placed in a low chair near the open window, and her hostess could not forbear a few curious and pitying glances at the sharp, high-bred face of the Englishwoman, the feverish lips, and the very evident emaciation, which the elegance of the loose black dress tried in vain to hide.

‘I understand, Madame,’ she said, after Eleanor had expressed her thanks with the pretty effusion that was natural to her, ‘that you were at Torre Amiata last autumn?’

Eleanor started. The
massaja
, she supposed, had been gossiping. It was disagreeable, but good-breeding bade her be frank.

‘Yes, I was here with some friends, and your agent gave us hospitality for the night.’

The Contessa looked astonished.

‘Ah!’ she said, ‘you were here with the D----‘s?’

Eleanor assented.

‘And you spent the winter in Rome?’

‘Part of it. Madame, you have the most glorious view in the world!’ And she turned towards the great prospect at her feet.

The Contessa understood.

‘How ill she is!’ she thought; ‘and how distinguished!’

And presently Eleanor on her side, while she was talking nervously and fast on a good many disconnected subjects, found herself observing her hostess. The Contessa’s strong square face had been pale and grief-stricken when she saw it first. But she noticed now that the eyelids were swollen and red, as though from constant tears; and the little sallow daughter looked sadder and shyer than ever. Eleanor presently gathered that they were living in the strictest seclusion and saw no visitors. ‘Then why’—she asked herself, wondering—‘did she speak to us in the Sassetto?—and why are we admitted now? Ah! that is his portrait!’