Eleanor (9 page)

‘Yes, indeed! We liked it so much.—But I think when I wrote to you I told you what we thought about it?’

And she glanced towards Manisty for support. He, however, did not apparently hear what she said. Mr. Bellasis also looked round in his direction; but in vain. The poet’s face clouded.

‘May I ask what reading you are at?’ he said, returning to his tea.

‘What reading?’—Mrs. Burgoyne looked puzzled.

‘Have you read it more than once?’

She coloured.

‘No—I’m afraid—’

‘Ah!—my friends tell me in Rome that the book cannot be really appreciated except at a second or third reading—’

Mrs. Burgoyne looked up in dismay, as a shower of gravel descended on the tea-table. Manisty has just beckoned in haste to his great Newfoundland who was lying stretched on the gravel path, and the dog bounding towards him, seemed to have brought the path with him.

Mr. Bellasis impatiently shook some fragments of gravel from his coat, and resumed:—

‘I have just got a batch of the first reviews. Really criticism has become an absurdity! Did you look at the “Sentinel”?’

Mrs. Burgoyne hesitated.

‘Yes—I saw there was something about the style—’

‘The style!’—Mr. Bellasis threw himself back in his chair and laughed loud—‘Why the style is done with a magnifying-glass!—There’s not a phrase,—not a word that I don’t stand by.’

‘Mr. Bellasis’—said the courteous voice of the ambassador—‘are you going by this train?’

The great man held out his watch.

‘Yes indeed—and I must catch it!’ cried the man of letters. He started to his feet, and bending over Mrs. Burgoyne, he said in an aside perfectly audible to all the world—‘I read my new play to-night—just finished—at Madame Salvi’s!’

Eleanor smiled and congratulated him. He took his leave, and Manisty in an embarrassed silence accompanied him half way down the avenue.

Then returning, he threw himself into a chair near Lucy Foster and young Brooklyn, with a sigh of relief.

‘Intolerable ass!’—he said under his breath, as though quite unconscious of any bystander.

The young man looked at Lucy with eyes that danced.

‘Who is your young lady?’ said the ambassador.

Miss Manisty explained.

‘An American? Really? I was quite off the scent, But now—I see—I see! Let me guess. She is a New Englander—not from Boston, but from the country. I remember the type exactly. The year I was at Washington I spent some weeks in the summer convalescing at a village up in the hills of Maine.—The women there seemed to me the salt of the earth. May I go and talk to her?’

Miss Manisty led him across the circle to Lucy, and introduced him.

‘Will you take me to the terrace and show me St. Peter’s? I know one can see it from here,’ said the suave polished voice.

Lucy rose in a shy pleasure that became her. The thought flashed happily through her, as she walked beside the old man, that Uncle Ben would like to hear of it! She had that ‘respect of persons’ which comes not from snobbishness, but from imagination and sympathy. The man’s office thrilled her, not his title.

The ambassador’s shrewd eyes ran over her face and bearing, taking note of all the signs of character. Then he began to talk, exerting himself as he had not exerted himself that morning for a princess who had lunched at his table. And as he was one of the enchanters of his day, known for such in half a dozen courts, and two hemispheres, Lucy Foster’s walk was a walk of delight. There was only one drawback. She had heard some member of the party say ‘Your Excellency’—and somehow her lips would not pronounce it! Yet so kind and kingly was the old man, there was no sign of homage she would not have gladly paid him, if she had known how.

They emerged at last upon the stone terrace at the edge of the garden looking out upon the Campagna.

‘Ah! there it is!’—said the ambassador, and, walking to the corner of the terrace, he pointed northwards.

And there—just caught between two stone pines—in the dim blue distance rose the great dome.

‘Doesn’t it give you an emotion?’ he said, smiling down upon her.—‘When I first stayed on these hills I wrote a poem about it—a very bad poem. There’s a kind of miracle in it, you know. Go where you will, that dome follows you. Again and again, storm and mist may blot out the rest—that remains. The peasants on these hills have a superstition about it. They look for that dome as they look for the sun. When they can’t see it, they are unhappy—they expect some calamity.—It’s a symbol, isn’t it, an idea?—and those are the things that touch us. I have a notion’—he turned to her smiling, ‘that it will come into Mr. Manisty’s book?’

Their eyes met in a smiling assent.

“Well, there are symbols—and symbols. That dome makes my old heart beat because it speaks of so much—half the history of our race. But looking back—I remember another symbol—I was at Harvard in ‘69; and I remember the first time I ever saw those tablets—you recollect—in the Memorial Hall—to the Harvard men that fell in the war?”

The colour leapt into her cheek. Her eyes filled.

“Oh yes! yes!”—she said, half eager, half timid—“My father lost two brothers—both their names are there.”

The ambassador looked at her kindly.—“Well—be proud of it!—be proud of it! That wall, those names, that youth, and death—they remain with me, as the symbol of the other great majesty in the world! There’s one,”—he pointed to the dome,—“that’s Religion. And the other’s Country. It’s country that Mr. Manisty forgets—isn’t it?”

The old man shook his head, and fell silent, looking out over the cloud-flecked Campagna.

“Ah, well”—he said, rousing himself—“I must go. Will you come and see me? My daughter shall write to you.”

And five minutes later the ambassador was driving swiftly towards Rome, in a good humour with himself and the day. He had that morning sent off what he knew to be a masterly despatch, and in the afternoon, as he was also quite conscious, he had made a young thing happy.

Manisty could not attend the ambassador to his carriage. He was absorbed by another guest. Mrs. Burgoyne, young Brooklyn, and Lucy, paid the necessary civilities.

When they returned, they found a fresh group gathered on the terrace. Two persons made the centre of it—a grey-haired cardinal—and Manisty.

Lucy looked at her host in amazement. What a transformation! The man who had been lounging and listless all the afternoon—barely civil to his guests—making no effort indeed for anyone, was now another being. An hour before he had been in middle age; now he was young, handsome, courteous, animating, and guiding the conversation around him with the practised ease of one who knew himself a master.

Where was the spell? The Cardinal?

The Cardinal sat to Manisty’s right, one wrinkled hand resting on the neck of the Newfoundland. It was a typical Italian face, large-cheeked and large-jawed, with good eyes,—a little sleepy, but not unspiritual. His red-edged cassock allowed a glimpse of red stockings to be seen, and his finely worked cross and chain, his red sash, and the bright ribbon that lit up his broad-brimmed hat, made spots of cheerful colour in the shadow of the trees.

He was a Cardinal of the Curia, belonging indeed to the Congregation of the Index. The vulgar believed that he was staying on the hills for his health.

The initiated, however, knew that he had come to these heights, bringing with him the works of a certain German Catholic professor threatened with the thunders of the Church. It was a matter that demanded leisure and a quiet mind.

As he sat sipping Miss Manisty’s tea, however, nothing could be divined of those scathing Latin sheets on which he had left his secretary employed. He had the air of one at peace with all the world—hardly stirred indeed by the brilliance of his host.

‘Italy again!’—said Reggie Brooklyn in Lucy’s ear—poor old Italy!—one might be sure of that, when one sees one of these black gentlemen about.’

The Cardinal indeed had given Manisty his text. He had brought an account of some fresh vandalism of the Government—the buildings of an old Umbrian convent turned to Government uses—the disappearance of some famous pictures in the process, supposed to have passed into the bands of a Paris dealer by the connivance of a corrupt official.

The story had roused Manisty to a white heat. This maltreatment of religious buildings and the wasting of their treasures was a subject on which he was inexhaustible. Encouraged by the slow smile of the Cardinal, the laughter and applause of the young men, he took the history of a monastery in the mountains of Spoleto, which had long been intimately known to him, and told it,—with a variety, a passion, an irony, that only he could achieve—that at last revealed indeed to Lucy Foster, as she sat quivering with antagonism beside Miss Manisty, all the secret of the man’s fame and power in the world.

For gradually—from the story of this monastery, and its suppression at the hands of a few Italian officials—he built up a figure, typical, representative, according to him, of the New Italy, small, insolent, venal,—insulting and despoiling the Old Italy, venerable, beautiful and defenceless. And then a natural turn of thought, or a suggestion from one of the group surrounding him, brought him to the scandals connected with the Abyssinian campaign—to the charges of incompetence and corruption which every Radical paper was now hurling against the Crispi government. He gave the latest gossip, handling it lightly, inexorably, as one more symptom of an inveterate disease, linking the men of the past with the men of the present, spattering all with the same mud, till Italian Liberalism, from Cavour to Crispi, sat shivering and ugly—stripped of all those pleas and glories wherewith she had once stepped forth adorned upon the page of history.

Finally—with the art of the accomplished talker—a transition! Back to the mountains, and the lonely convent on the heights—to the handful of monks left in the old sanctuary, handing on the past, waiting for the future, heirs of a society which would destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,—offering the daily sacrifice amid the murmur and solitude of the woods,—confident, peaceful, unstained; while the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated, in the mire of a profitless and purposeless corruption.

And all this in no set harangue—but in vivid broken sentences; in snatches of paradox and mockery; of emotion touched and left; interrupted, moreover, by the lively give and take of conversation with the young Italians, by the quiet comments of the Cardinal. None the less, the whole final image emerged, as Manisty meant it to emerge; till the fascinated hearers felt, as it were, a breath of hot bitterness and hate pass between them and the spring day, enveloping the grim phantom of a ruined and a doomed State.

The Cardinal said little. Every now and then he put in a fact of his own knowledge—a stroke of character—a phrase of compassion that bit more sharply even than Manisty’s scorns—a smile—a shake of the head. And sometimes, as Manisty talked with the young men, the sharp wrinkled eyes rested upon the Englishman with a scrutiny, instantly withdrawn. All the caution of the Roman ecclesiastic,—the inheritance of centuries—spoke in the glance.

It was perceived by no one, however, but a certain dark elderly lady, who was sitting restlessly silent beside Miss Manisty. Lucy Foster had noticed her as a new-comer, and believed that her name was Madame Variani.

As for Eleanor Burgoyne, she sat on Manisty’s left while he talked—it was curious to notice how a place was always made for her beside him!—her head raised a little towards him, her eyes bright and fixed. The force that breathed from him passed through her frail being, quickening every pulse of life. She neither criticised nor accepted what he said. It was the man’s splendid vitality that subdued and mastered her.

Yet she alone knew what no one else suspected. At the beginning of the conversation Manisty had placed himself behind an old stone table of oblong shape and thick base, of which there were several in the garden. Round it grew up grasses and tall vetches which had sown themselves among the gaping stones of the terrace. Nothing, therefore, could be seen of the talker as he leant carelessly across the table but the magnificent head, and the shoulders on which it was so freely and proudly carried.

Anybody noticing the effect—for it was an effect—would have thought it a mere happy accident. Eleanor Burgoyne alone knew that it was conscious. She had seen the same pose, the same concealment practised too often to be mistaken. But it made no difference whatever to the spell that held her. The small vanities and miseries of Manisty’s nature were all known to her—and alas! she would not have altered one of them!

When the Cardinal rose to go, two Italian girls, who had come with their brother, the Count Casaleschi, ran forward, and curtseying kissed the Cardinal’s ring. And as he walked away, escorted by Manisty, a gardener crossed the avenue, who also at sight of the tall red-sashed figure fell on his knees and did the same. The Cardinal gave him an absent nod and smile, and passed on.

‘Ah!
j’etouffe
!’—cried Madame Variani, throwing herself down by Miss Manisty. ‘Give me another cup,
chere Madame
. Your nephew is too bad. Let him show us another nation born in forty years—that has had to make itself in a generation—let him show it us! Ah! you English—with all your advantages—and your proud hearts.—Perhaps we too could pick some holes in you!’

She fanned herself with angry vigour. The young men came to stand round her arguing and laughing. She was a favourite in Rome, and as a French woman, and the widow of a Florentine man of letters, occupied a somewhat independent position, and was the friend of many different groups.

‘And you—young lady, what do you think?’—she said suddenly, laying a large hand on Lucy Foster’s knee.

Lucy, startled, looked into the sparkling black eyes brought thus close to her own.

‘But I just
long
‘—she said, catching her breath—‘to hear the other side.’

‘Ah, and you shall hear it, my dear—you shall!’ cried Madame Variani. ‘
N’est-ce pas, Madame?
‘ she said, addressing Miss Manisty—‘We will get rid of all those priests—and then we will speak our mind? Oh, and you too,’—she waved her hand with a motherly roughness towards the young men,—‘What do you know about it, Signor Marchese? If there were no Guardia Nobile, you would not wear those fine uniforms.—That is why you like the Pope.’