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

said a woman's voice.

They looked round to see the Marchesa Fazzoleni upon them. She stood smiling, cigarette in hand, a tall woman, still young--though she was the mother of five robust children. Her closely-fitting black dress somehow resembled a riding-habit; her grey gauntletted gloves drawn to the elbow, her Amazon's hat with its plume, the alertness and grace of the whole attitude, the brilliancy of her clear black eye--all these carried with them the same suggestions of open-air life, of health of body and mind--of a joyous, noble, and powerful personality.

'Look well at her,' the Ambassador had said to Lucy as they stepped into the garden after luncheon. 'She is one of the mothers of the new Italy. She is doing things here--things for the future--that in England it would take twenty women to do. She has all the practical sense of the north; and all the subtlety of the south. She is one of the people who make me feel that Italy and England have somehow mysterious affinities that will work themselves out in history. It seems to me that I could understand all her thoughts--and she mine--if it were worth her while. She is a modern of the moderns; and yet there is in her some of the oldest stuff in the world. She belongs, it is true, to a nation in the making--but that nation, in its earlier forms, has already carried the whole weight of European history!'

And Lucy, looking up to the warm, kind face, felt vaguely comforted and calmed by its mere presence. She made room for the Marchesa beside her.

But the Marchesa declared that she must go home and drag one of her boys, who was studying for an examination, out for exercise. 'Oh! these examinations--they are _horrors_!' she said, throwing up her hands. 'No--these poor boys!--and they have no games like the English boys. But you were speaking about the war--about our poor Italy?'

She paused. She laid her hand on Lucy's shoulder and looked down into the girl's face. Her eyes became for a moment veiled and misty, as though ghosts passed before them--the grisly calamities and slaughters of the war. Then they cleared and sparkled.

'I tell you, Mademoiselle,' she said slowly, in her difficult picturesque English, 'that what Italy has done in forty years is colossal!--not to be believed! You have taken a hundred years--you!--to make a nation, and you have had a big civil war. Forty years--not quite!--since Cavour died. And all that time Italy has been like that cauldron--you remember?--into which they threw the members of that old man who was to become young. There has been a bubbling, and a fermenting! And the scum has come up--and up. And it comes up still--and the brewing goes on. But in the end the young strong nation will step forth. Now Mr. Manisty--oh! I like Mr. Manisty very well!--but he sees only the ugly gases and the tumult of the cauldron. He has no idea--'

'Oh! Manisty,' said the young Count, flinging away his cigarette; 'he is a _poseur_ of course. His Italian friends don't mind. He has his English fish to fry. _Sans cela_--!'

He bent forward, staring at Lucy in a boyish absent-mindedness which was no discourtesy, while his hat slipped further down the back of his curly head. His attitude was all careless good-humour; yet one might have felt a touch of southern passion not far off.

'No; his Italian friends don't mind,' said Madame Variani. 'But his English friends should look after him. Everybody should be angry wid som-thin--it is good for the character; but Mr. Manisty is angry wid too many things. That is stupid--that is a waste of time.'

'His book is a blunder,' said Fioravanti with decision. 'By the time it is out, it will look absurd. He says we have become atheists, because we don't let the priests have it all their own way. Bah! we understand these gentry better than he does. Why! my father was all for the advance on Rome--he was a member of the first Government after 1870--he wouldn't give way to the Clericals an inch in what he thought was for the good of the country. But he was the most religious man I ever knew. He never missed any of the old observances in which he had been brought up. He taught us the same. Every Sunday after Mass he read the Gospel for the day to us in Italian, and explained it. And when he was dying he sent for his old parish priest--who used to denounce him from the pulpit and loved him all the same! "And don't make any secret of it!" he said to me. "Bring him in openly--let all the world see. _Non crubesco evangelium!_"'

The young man stopped--reddened and a little abashed by his own eloquence.

But Madame Variani murmured--still with the same aspect of a shrewd and sleepy cat basking in the sun--

'It is the same with all you Anglo-Saxons. The North will never understand the South--never! You can't understand our _a peu pres_. You think Catholicism is a tyranny--and we must either let the priests oppress us, or throw everything overboard. But it is nothing of the kind. We take what we want of it, and leave the rest. But you!--if you come over to us, that is another matter! You have to swallow it all. You must begin even with Adam and Eve!'

'Ah! but what I can't understand,' said Fioravanti, 'is how Mrs. Burgoyne allowed it. She ought to have given the book another direction--and she could. She is an extremely clever woman! She knows that caricature is not argument.'

'But what has happened to Mrs. Burgoyne?' said the Marchesa to Lucy, throwing up her hands, 'Such a change! I was so distressed--' 'You think she looks ill?' said Lucy quickly.

Her troubled eyes sought those kind ones looking down upon her almost in appeal. Instinctively the younger woman, far from home and conscious of a hidden agony of feeling, threw herself upon the exquisite maternity that breathed from the elder. 'Oh! if I could tell you!--if you could advise me!' was the girl's unspoken cry.

'She looks terribly ill--to me,' said the Marchesa, gravely. 'And the winter had done her so much good. We all loved her here. It is deplorable. Perhaps the hill climate has been too cold for her, Mademoiselle?'

* * * * *

Lucy walked hurriedly back to the lawn to rejoin her companions. The flood of misery within made movement the only relief. Some instinct of her own came to the aid of the Marchesa's words, helped them to sting all the more deeply. She felt herself a kind of murderer.

Suddenly as she issued blindly from the tangle of the rose-garden she came upon Eleanor Burgoyne talking gaily, surrounded by a little knot of people, mostly older men, who had found her to-day, as always, one of the most charming and distinguished of companions.

Lucy approached her impetuously.

Oh! how white and stricken an aspect--through what a dark eclipse of pain the eyes looked out!

'Ought we not to be going?' Lucy whispered in her ear. 'I am sure you are tired.'

Eleanor rose. She took the girl's hand in a clinging grasp, while she turned smiling to her neighbour the Dane:

'We must be moving to the Villa Borghese--some friends will be meeting us there. Our train does not go for a long, long while.'

'Does any Roman train ever go?' said Doctor Jensen, stroking his straw-coloured beard. 'But why leave us, Madame? Is not one garden as good as another? What spell can we invent to chain you here?'

He bowed low, smiling fatuously, with his hand on his heart. He was one of the most learned men in the world. But about that he cared nothing. The one reputation he desired was that of a 'sad dog'--a terrible man with the ladies. That was the paradox of his existence.

Eleanor laughed mechanically; then she turned to Lucy.

'Come!' she said in the girl's ear, and as they walked away she half closed her eyes against the sun, and Lucy thought she heard a gasp of fatigue. But she spoke lightly.

'Dear, foolish, old man! he was telling me how he had gone back to the Hermitage Library at St. Petersburg the other day to read, after thirty years. And there in a book that had not been taken down since he had used it last he found a leaf of paper and some pencil words scribbled on it by him when he was a youth--"my own darling." "And if I only knew now _vich_ darling!" he said, looking at me and slapping his knee. "Vich darling"!' Eleanor repeated, laughing extravagantly. Then suddenly she wavered. Lucy instinctively caught her by the arm, and Eleanor lent heavily upon her.

'Dear Mrs. Burgoyne--you are not well,' cried the girl, terrified. 'Let us go to a hotel where you can rest till the train goes--or to some friend.'

Eleanor's face set in the effort to control herself--she drew her hand across her eyes. 'No, no, I am well,' she said, hurriedly. 'It is the sun--and I could not eat at luncheon. The Ambassador's new cook did not tempt me. And besides'--she suddenly threw a look at Lucy before which Lucy shrank--'I am out of love with myself. There is one hour yesterday which I wish to cancel--to take back. I give up everything--everything.'

They were advancing across a wide lawn. The Ambassador and Mrs. Swetenham were coming to meet them. The Ambassador, weary of his companion, was looking with pleasure at the two approaching figures, at the sweep of Eleanor's white dress upon the grass, and the frame made by her black lace parasol for the delicacy of her head and neck.

Meanwhile Eleanor and Lucy saw only each other. The girl coloured proudly. She drew herself erect.

'You cannot give up--what would not be taken--what is not desired,' she said fiercely. Then, in another voice: 'But please, please let me take care of you! Don't let us go to the Villa Borghese!'

She felt her hand pressed passionately, then dropped.

'I am all right,' said Eleanor, almost in her usual voice. '_Eccellenza_! we must bid you good-bye--have you seen our gentleman?'

'_Ecco_,' said the Ambassador, pointing to Manisty, who, in company with the American Monsignore, was now approaching them. 'Let him take you out of the sun at once--you look as though it were too much for you.'

Manisty, however, came up slowly, in talk with his companion. The frowning impatience of his aspect attracted the attention of the group round the Ambassador. As he reached them, he said to the priest beside him--

'You know that he has withdrawn his recantation?'

'Ah! yes'--said the Monsignore, raising his eyebrows, 'poor fellow!'--

The mingled indifference and compassion of the tone made the words bite. Manisty flushed.

'I hear he was promised consideration,' he said quickly.

'Then he got it,' was the priest's smiling reply.

'He was told that his letter was not for publication. Next morning it appeared in the _Osservatore Romano_.'

'Oh no!--impossible! Your facts are incorrect.'

The Monsignore laughed, in unperturbed good humour. But after the laugh, the face reappeared, hard and a little menacing, like a rock that has been masked by a wave. He watched Manisty for a moment silently.

'Where is he?' said Manisty abruptly.

'Are you talking