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

Mrs. Burgoyne inwardly--'I wonder whether the Lewinsons treated her nicely at Florence?'

Indeed as Lucy Foster leant over the balcony, the olive-gardens and vineyards faded before her. She saw in their stead, the snow-covered farms and fields of a New England valley--the elms in along village street, bare and wintry--a rambling wooden house--a glowing fire, in a simple parlour--an old man sitting beside it.--

It _is_ chilly'--said Mrs. Burgoyne--'Let us go in. But we will keep the window open. Don't take that off.'

She laid a restraining hand on the girl's arm. Miss Foster sat down absently not far from the window. The mingled lights of lamp and moon fell upon her, upon the noble rounding of the face, which was grave, a little austere even, but still sensitive and delicate. Her black hair, thanks to Mrs. Burgoyne's devices, rippled against the brow and cheek, almost hiding the small ear. The graceful cloak, with its touches of sable on a main fabric of soft white, hid the ugly dress; its ample folds heightened the natural dignity of the young form and long limbs, lent them a stately and muse-like charm. Mrs. Burgoyne and Miss Manisty looked at each other, then at Miss Foster. Both of them had the same curious feeling, as though a veil were being drawn away from something they were just beginning to see.

'You must be very tired, my dear'--said Miss Manisty at last, when she and Mrs. Burgoyne had chatted a good deal, and the new-comer still sat silent--'I wonder what you are thinking about so intently?'

Miss Foster woke up at once.

'Oh, I'm not a bit tired--not a bit! I was thinking--I was thinking of that photograph in the next room--and a line of poetry.'

She spoke with the _naivete_ of one who had not known how to avoid the confession. 'What line?' said Mrs. Burgoyne.

'It's Milton. I learnt it at school. You will know it, of course,' she said timidly. 'It's the line about "the triple tyrant" and "the Babylonian woe"'--

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'Their martyred blood and ashes sow O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway The triple tyrant--

Was that what you were thinking of?'

Miss Foster had coloured deeply.

'It was the cap--the tiara, isn't it?--that reminded me,' she said faintly; and then she looked away, as though not wishing to continue the subject.

'She wonders whether I am a Catholic,' thought Mrs. Burgoyne, amused, 'and whether she has hurt my feelings.'--Aloud, she said--'Are you very, very Puritan still in your part of America? Excuse me, but I am dreadfully ignorant about America.'

'We are Methodists in our little town mostly'--said Miss Foster. 'There is a Presbyterian church--and the best families go there. But my father's people were always Methodists. My mother was a Universalist.'

Mrs. Burgoyne frowned with perplexity. 'I'm afraid I don't know what that is?' she said.

'They think everybody will be saved,' said Miss Foster in her shy deep voice. 'They don't despair of anybody.'

And suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne saw a very soft and tender expression pass across the girl's grave features, like the rising of an inward light.

'A mystic--and a beauty both?' she thought to herself, a little scornfully this time. In all her politeness to the new-comer so far, she had been like a person stealthily searching for something foreseen and desired. If she had found it, it would have been quite easy to go on being kind to Miss Foster. But she had not found it.

At that moment the door between the library and the salon was thrown open, and Manisty appeared, cigarette in hand.

'Aunt Pattie--Eleanor--how many tickets do you want for this function next Sunday?'

'Four tribune tickets--we three'--Miss Manisty pointed to the other two ladies--'and yourself. If we can't get so many, leave me at home.'

'Of course we shall have tribune tickets--as many as we want,' said Manisty a little impatiently.--'Have you explained to Miss Foster?'

'No, but I will. Miss Foster, next Sunday fortnight the Pope celebrates his 'Capella Papale'--the eighteenth anniversary of his coronation--in St. Peter's. Rome is very full, and there will be a great demonstration--fifty thousand people or more. Would you like to come?'

Miss Foster looked up, hesitating. Manisty, who had turned to go back to his room, paused, struck by the momentary silence. He listened with curiosity for the girl's reply.

'One just goes to see it like a spectacle?' she said at last, slowly. 'One needn't do anything oneself?'

Miss Manisty stared--and then laughed. 'Nobody will see what you do in such a crowd--I should think,' she said. 'But you know one can't be rude--to an old old man. If others kneel, I suppose we must kneel. Does it do anyone harm to be blessed by an old man?'

'Oh no!--no!' cried Miss Foster, flushing deeply. Then, after a moment, she added decidedly--'Please--I should like to go very much.'

Manisty grinned unseen, and closed the door behind him.

Then Miss Foster, after an instant's restlessness, moved nearer to her hostess.

'I am afraid--you thought I was rude just now? It's so lovely of you to plan things for me. But--I can't ever be sure whether it's right to go into other people's churches and look at their services--like a show. I should just hate it myself--and I felt it once or twice at Florence. And so--you understand--don't you?'--she said imploringly.

Miss Manisty's small eyes examined her with anxiety. 'What an extraordinary girl!' she thought. 'Is she going to be a great bore?'

At the same time the girl's look--so open, sweet and modest--disarmed and attracted her. She shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

'Well, my dear--I don't know. All I can say is, the Catholics don't mind! They walk in and out of their own churches all the time mass is going on--the children run about--the sacristans take you round. You certainly needn't feel it on their account.'

'But then, too, if I am not a Catholic--how far ought one to be taking part--in--in what--'

'In what one disapproves?' said Mrs. Burgoyne, smiling. 'You would make the world a little difficult, wouldn't you, if you were to arrange it on that principle?'

She spoke in a dry, rather sharp voice, unlike that in which she had hitherto addressed the new-comer. Lucy Foster looked at her with a shrinking perplexity.

'It's best if we're all straightforward, isn't it?'--she said in a low voice, and then, drawing towards her an illustrated magazine that lay on the table near her she hurriedly buried herself in its pages.

* * * * *

Silence had fallen on the three ladies. Eleanor Burgoyne sat lost in reverie, her fair head thrown back against her low chair.

She was thinking of her conversation with Edward Manisty on the balcony--and of his book. That book indeed had for her a deep personal significance. To think of it at all, was to be carried to the past, to feel for the hundredth time the thrill of change and new birth.

When she joined them in Rome, in mid-winter, she had found Manisty struggling with the first drafts of it,--full of yeasty ideas, full also of doubts, confusions and discouragements. He had not been at all glad to see his half-forgotten cousin--quite the contrary. As she had reminded him, she had suffered much the same things at his hands that Miss Foster was likely to suffer now. It made her laugh to think of his languid reception of her, the moods, the silences, the weeks of just civil acquaintanceship; and then gradually, the snatches of talk--and those great black brows of his lifted in a surprise which a tardy politeness would try to mask:--and at last, the good, long, brain-filling, heart-filling talks, the break-down of reserves--the man's whole mind, its remorses, ambitions, misgivings, poured at her feet--ending in the growth of that sweet daily habit of common work--side by side, head close to head--hand close to hand.--

Eleanor Burgoyne lay still and motionless in the soft dusk of the old room, her white lids shut--Lucy Foster thought her asleep.--

He had said to her once, quoting some Frenchman, that she was 'good to consult about ideas.' Ah well!--at a great price had she won that praise. And with an unconscious stiffening of the frail hands lying on the arms of the chair, she thought of those bygone hours in which she had asked herself--'what remains?' Religious faith?--No!--Life was too horrible! Could such things have happened to her in a world ruled by a God?--that was her question, day and night for years. But books, facts, ideas--all the riddle of this various nature--_that_ one might still amuse oneself with a little, till one's own light went out in the same darkness that had already engulfed mother--husband--child. So that 'cleverness,' of which father and husband had taken so little account, which had been of so little profit to her so far in her course through circumstance, had come to her aid. The names and lists of the books that had passed through her hands, during those silent years of her widowhood, lived beside her stern old father, would astonish even Manisty were she to try and give some account of them. And first she had read merely to fill the hours, to dull memory. But gradually there had sprung up in her that inner sweetness, that gentle restoring flame that comes from the life of ideas, the life of knowledge, even as a poor untrained woman may approach it. She had shared it with no one, revealed it to no one. Her nature dreaded rebuffs; and her father had no words sharp enough for any feminine ambition beyond the household and the nursery.

So she had kept it all to herself, till Miss Manisty, shocked as many other people had begun to be by her fragile looks, had bearded the General, and carried her off to Rome for the winter. And there she had been forced, as it were, into this daily contact with Edward Manisty, at what might well turn out to be the most critical moment of his life; when he was divided between fierce regrets for the immediate past, and fierce resolves to recover and assert himself in other ways; when he was taking up again his earlier function of man of letters in order to vindicate himself as a politician and a man of action. Strange and challenging personality!--did she yet know it fully?

Ah! that winter--what a healing in it all!--what a great human experience! Yet now, as always, when her thoughts turned to the past, she did not allow them to dwell upon it long. That past lay for her in a golden haze. To explore it too deeply, or too long,--that she shrank from. All that she prayed was to press no questions, force no issues. But at least she had found in it a new reason for living; she meant to live; whereas last year she had wished to die, and all the world--dear, kind Aunt Pattie first and foremost--had thought her on the road for death.

But the book?--she bent her brows over it, wrestling with various doubts and difficulties. Though it was supposed to represent the thoughts and fancies of an Englishman wandering through modern Italy, it was really Manisty's Apologia--Manisty's defence of certain acts which had made him for a time the scandal and offence