Eleanor, Mrs. Humphry Ward [best books to read now .txt] 📗

to come to Rome. I came to Rome in a strange state--as one looks at things and loves them, for the last time, before a journey. And then--well, then it all began!--new life for me, new health. The only happiness--except for the child--that had ever come my way. I know--oh! I don't deceive myself--I know it was not the same to Edward as to me. But I don't ask much. I knew he had given the best of his heart to other women--long ago--long before this. But the old loves were all dead, and I could almost be thankful for them. They had kept him for me, I thought,--tamed and exhausted him, so that I--so colourless and weak compared to those others!--might just slip into his heart and find the way open--that he might just take me in, and be glad, for sheer weariness.'

She dropped Lucy's hands, and rising, she locked her own, and began to walk to and fro in the great room; her head thrown back, her senses turned as it were inward upon the sights and sounds of memory.

Lucy gazed upon her in bewilderment. Then she too rose and approached Mrs. Burgoyne.

'When shall I go?' she said simply. 'You must help me to arrange it with Miss Manisty. It might be to-morrow--it would be easy to find some excuse.'

Eleanor looked at her with a convulsed face.

'That would help nothing,' she said--'nothing! He would guess what I had done.'

Lucy was silent a moment. Then she broke out piteously.

'What can I do?'

'What claim have I that you should do anything?' said Eleanor despairingly. 'I don't know what I wanted, when I began this scene.'

She moved on, her eyes bent upon the ground--Lucy beside her.

The girl had drawn Mrs. Burgoyne's arm through her own. The tears were on her check, but she was thinking, and quite calm.

'I believe,' she said at last, in a voice that was almost steady--'that all your fears are quite, quite vain. Mr. Manisty feels for me nothing but a little kindness--he could feel nothing else. It will all come back to you--and it was not I that took it away. But--whatever you tell me--whatever you ask, I will do.'

With a catching breath Eleanor turned and threw her arm round the girl's neck.

'Stay,' she breathed--'stay for a few days. Let there be no shock--nothing to challenge him. Then slip away--don't let him know where--and there is one woman in the world who will hold you in her inmost heart, who will pray for you with her secretest, sacredest prayers, as long as you live!'

The two fell into each other's embrace. Lucy, with the maternal tenderness that should have been Eleanor's, pressed her lips on the hot brow that lay upon her breast, murmuring words of promise, of consolation, of self-reproach, feeling her whole being passing out to Eleanor's in a great tide of passionate will and pity.


CHAPTER XIII

They were all going down to the midday train for Rome.

At last the Ambassador--who had been passing through a series of political and domestic difficulties, culminating in the mutiny of his Neapolitan cook--had been able to carry out his whim. A luncheon had been arranged for the young American girl who had taken his fancy. At the head of his house for the time being was his married daughter, Lady Mary, who had come from India for the winter to look after her babies and her father. When she was told to write the notes for this luncheon, she lifted her eyebrows in good-humoured astonishment.

'My dear,' said the Ambassador, 'we have been doing our duty for six months--and I find it pall!'

He had been entertaining Royalties and Cabinet Ministers in heavy succession, and his daughter understood. There was an element of insubordination in her father, which she knew better than to provoke.

So the notes were sent.

'Find her some types, my dear,' said the Ambassador;--'and little of everything.'

Lady Mary did her best. She invited an Italian Marchesa whom she had heard her father describe as 'the ablest woman in Rome,' while she herself knew her as one of the most graceful and popular; a young Lombard landowner formerly in the Navy, now much connected with the Court, whose blue eyes moreover were among the famous things of the day; a Danish professor and savant who was also a rich man, collector of flints and torques, and other matters of importance to primitive man; an artist or two; an American Monsignore blessed with some Irish wit and much influence; Reggie Brooklyn, of course, and his sister; Madame Variani, who would prevent Mr. Manisty from talking too much nonsense; and a dull English Admiral and his wife, official guests, whom the Ambassador admitted at the last moment with a groan, as still representing the cold tyranny of duty invading his snatch of pleasure.

'And Mr. Bellasis, papa?' said Lady Mary, pausing, pen in hand, like Fortitude prepared for all extremities.

'Heavens, no!' said the Ambassador, hastily. 'I have put him off twice. This time I should have to read him.'

* * * * *

Manisty accordingly was smoking on the balcony of the villa while he waited for the ladies to appear. Miss Manisty, who was already suffering from the heat, was not going. The fact did not improve Manisty's temper. Three is no company--that we all know.

If Lady Mary, indeed, had only planned this luncheon because she must, Manisty was going to it under a far more impatient sense of compulsion. It would be a sickening waste of time. Nothing now had any attraction for him, nothing seemed to him desirable or important, but that conversation with Lucy Foster which he was bent on securing, and she apparently was bent on refusing him.

His mind was full of the sense of injury. During all the day before, while he had been making the arrangements for his unhappy sister--during the journeys backward and forward to Rome--a delicious image had filled all the background of his thoughts, the image of the white Lucy, helpless and lovely, lying unconscious in his chair.

In the evening he could hardly command his eagerness sufficiently to help his tired little aunt up the steps of the station, and put her safely in her cab, before hurrying himself up the steep short-cut to the villa. Should he find her perhaps on the balcony, conscious of his step on the path below, weak and shaken, yet ready to lift those pure, tender eyes of hers to his in a shy gratitude?

He had found no one on the balcony, and the evening of that trying day had been one of baffling disappointment. Eleanor was in her room, apparently tired out by the adventures of the night before; and although Miss Foster appeared at dinner she had withdrawn immediately afterwards, and there had been no chance for anything but the most perfunctory conversation.

She had said of course all the proper things, so far as they could be said. 'I trust you have been able to make the arrangements you wished. Mrs. Burgoyne and I have been so sorry! Poor Miss Manisty must have had a very tiring day--'

Bah!--he could not have believed that a girl could speak so formally, so trivially to a man who within twenty-four hours had saved her from the attack of a madwoman. For that was what it came to--plainly. Did she know what had happened? Had her swoon blotted it all out? If so, was he justified in revealing it. There was an uneasy feeling that it would be more chivalrous towards her, and kinder towards his sister, if he left the veil drawn, seeing that she seemed to wish it so--if he said no more about her fright, her danger, her faint. But Manisty was not accustomed to let himself be governed by the scruples of men more precise or more timid. He wished passionately to force a conversation with her more intimate, more personal than any one had yet allowed him; to break down at a stroke most if not all of the barriers that separate acquaintance from--

From what? He stood, cigarette in hand, staring blindly at the garden, lost in an intense questioning of himself.

Suddenly he found himself back again, as it were, among the feelings and sensations of Lucy Foster's first Sunday at the villa; his repugnance towards any notion of marriage; his wonder that anybody should suppose that he had any immediate purpose of marrying Eleanor Burgoyne; the mood, half lazy, half scornful, in which he had watched Lucy, in her prim Sunday dress, walking along the avenue.

What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so unacquainted with his world?

There was her beauty of course. But he had passed the period when mere beauty is enough. He was extremely captious and difficult to please where the ordinary pretty woman was concerned. Her arts left him now quite unmoved. Of self-conscious vanity and love of effect he had himself enough and to spare. He could not mend himself; but he was often weary of his own weaknesses, and detested them in other people. If Lucy Foster had been merely a beauty, aware of her own value, and bent upon making him aware of it also, he would probably have been as careless of her now in the eighth week of their acquaintance as he had been in the first.

But it was a beauty so innocent, so interfused with suggestion, with an enchanting thrill of prophecy! It was not only what she said and looked, but what a man might divine in her--the 'white fire' of a nature most pure, most passionate, that somehow flashed through her maiden life and aspect, fighting with the restraints imposed upon it, and constantly transforming what might otherwise have been a cold seemliness into a soft and delicate majesty.

In short, there was a mystery in Lucy, for all her simplicity;--a mystery of feeling, which piqued and held the fastidious taste of Manisty. It was this which made her loveliness tell. Her sincerity was so rich and full, that it became dramatic,--a thing to watch, for the mere joy of the fresh, unfolding spectacle. She was quite unconscious of this significance of hers. Rather she was clearly and always conscious of weakness, ignorance, inexperience. And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely attractive to Manisty.

In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently. Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment. Manisty disliked and had thrown aside the role of country gentleman; because, in truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the probable boredoms of it worth while.

But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he began to think with a new tolerance of the English _cadre_ and the English life. He remembered all those illustrious or comely husbands and wives, his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house. For the first time