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

in that I have gone out; that she is not to trouble about me, as I shall soon return; and tell her also that I felt unusually well and strong.'

Then she turned and beckoned to Father Benecke.

'This way, Father, please!'

And she led him down the little stair that had taken Lucy to the garden the night before. At the foot of the stairs she paused. The wall of the garden divided them from the courtyard, and on the other side of it they could hear Lucy speaking to the _massaja_.

'Now!' said Eleanor, 'quick I--before she discovers us!'

And opening the garden door with the priest's help she passed into the field, and took a wide circuit to the right so as to be out of view of the _loggia_.

'Dear madame, where are you going?' said the priest in some alarm. 'This is too fatiguing for you.'

Eleanor took no notice. She, who for days had scarcely dragged one languid foot after another, sped through the heat and over the broken ground like one of the goldfinches in the convent garden. The old priest followed her with difficulty. Nor did she pause till they were in the middle of the Sassetto.

'Explain what we are doing!' he implored her, as she allowed him to press his old limbs for a moment on his stick, and take breath.

She, too, leant against a tree panting.

'You said, Father, that Mr. Manisty was to leave you at midday.'

'And you wish to see him?' he cried.

'I am determined to see him,' she said in a low voice, biting her lip.

And again she was off, a gleam of whiteness gliding down, down, through the cool green heart of the Sassetto, towards the Paglia.

They emerged upon the fringe of the wood, where amid scrub and sapling trees stood the little sun-baked house.

From the distance came a sound of wheels--a carriage from Selvapendente crossing the bridge over the Paglia?

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at the house for a moment in silence. Then, sheltered under her large white parasol, she passed round to the side that fronted the river.

There, in the shade, sat Manisty, his arms upon his knees, his head buried in his hands.

He did not at first hear Mrs. Burgoyne's step, and she paused a little way off. She was alone. The priest had not followed her.

At last, as she moved, either the sound of her dress or the noise of the approaching wheels roused him. He looked up--started--sprang to his feet.

'Eleanor!--'

They met. Their eyes crossed. She shivered, for there were tears in his. But through that dimness there shone the fierce unspoken question that had leapt to them at the sight of his cousin--

'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?'


CHAPTER XXIII

Eleanor was the first to break the silence.

'You have had a long pilgrimage to find us,' she said quietly. 'Yet perhaps Torre Amiata might have occurred to you. It was you that praised it--that proposed to find quarters at the convent.'

He stared at her in amazement.

'Eleanor--in God's name!' he broke out violently, 'tell me what this all means! What has been the meaning of this mad--this extraordinary behaviour?'

She tottered a little and leant against the wall of the house.

'Find me a chair, please, before we begin to talk. And--is that your fly? Send it away--to wait under the trees. It can take me up the hill, when we have finished.'

He controlled himself with difficulty and went round the house.

She pressed her hands upon her eyes to shut out the memory of his face.

'She has refused him!' she said to herself; 'and--what is more--she has made him believe it!'

Very soon his step was heard returning. The woman he had left in the shade listened for it, as though in all this landscape of rushing river and murmuring wood it the one audible, significant sound. But when he came back to her again, he saw nothing but a composed, expectant Eleanor; dressed, in these wilds, with a dainty care which would have done honour to London or Paris, with a bright colour in her cheeks, and the quiver of a smile on her lips. Ill! He thought he had seldom seen her look so well. Had she not always been of a thistle-down lightness? 'Exaggeration!--absurdity!' he said to himself fiercely, carrying his mind back to certain sayings in a girl's voice that were still ringing in his ears.

He, however, was in no mood to smile. Eleanor had thrown herself sideways on the chair he had brought her; her arms resting on the back of it, her delicate hands hanging down. It was a graceful and characteristic attitude, and it seemed to him affectation--a piece of her fine-ladyism.

She instantly perceived that he was in a state of such profound and passionate excitement that it was difficult for him to speak.

So she began, with a calmness which exasperated him:

'You asked me, Edward, to explain our escapade?'

He raised his burning eyes.

'What can you explain?--how can you explain?' he said roughly. 'Are you going to tell me why my cousin and comrade hates me and plots against me?--why she has inflicted this slight and outrage upon me--why, finally, she has poisoned against me the heart of the woman I love?'

He saw her shrink. Did a cruel and secret instinct in him rejoice? He was mad with rage and misery, and he was incapable of concealing it.

She knew it. As he dropped his head again in an angry stare at the grass between them, she was conscious of a sudden childish instinct to put out her hand and stroke the black curls and the great broad shoulders. He was not for her; but, in the old days, who had known so well as she how to soothe, manage, control him?

'I can't tell you those things--certainly,' she said, after a pause. 'I can't describe what doesn't exist.'

And to herself she cried: 'Oh! I shall lie--lie--lie--like a fiend, if I must!'

'What doesn't exist'?' he repeated scornfully. 'Will you listen to my version of what has happened--the barest, unadorned tale? I was your host and Miss Foster's. I had begun to show the attraction that Miss Foster had for me, to offer her the most trifling, the most ordinary attention. From the moment I was first conscious of my own feeling, I knew that you were against me--that you were influencing--Lucy'--the name dropped from his lips in a mingled anguish and adoration--'against me. And just as I was beginning to understand my own heart--to look forward to two or three last precious weeks in which to make, if I could, a better impression upon her, after my abominable rudeness at the beginning--_you_ interfered--you, my best friend! Without a word our party is broken up; my chance is snatched from me; Miss Foster is spirited away. You and she disappear, and you leave me to bear my affront--the outrage done me--as best I may. You alarm, you distress all your friends. Your father takes things calmly, I admit. But even he has been anxious. Aunt Pattie has been miserable. As for me--'

He rose, and began to pace up and down before her; struggling with his own wrath.

'And at last'--he resumed, pausing in front of her--'after wandering up and down Italy, I find you--in this remote place--by the merest chance. Father Benecke said not a word. But what part he has played in it I don't yet understand. In another half-hour I should have been off; and again you would have made the veriest fool of me that over walked this earth. Why, Eleanor?--why? What have I done to you?'

He stood before her--a superb, commanding presence. In his emotion all unshapeliness of limb or movement seemed to have disappeared. Transfigured by the unconsciousness of passion, he was all energy and all grace.

'Eleanor!--explain! Has our old friendship deserved this? Why have you done this thing to me?--And, my God!'--he began to pace up and down again, his hands in his pockets--'how well--how effectually you have gone to work! You have had--Lucy--in your hands for six weeks. It is plain enough what has been going on. This morning--on that hill--suddenly,'--he raised his hand to his brow, as though the surprise, the ecstacy of the moment returned upon him--'there among the trees--was her face! What I said I shall never remember. But when a man feels as I do he has no need to take thought what he shall say. And she? Impatience, coldness, aversion!--not a word permitted of my long pilgrimage--not a syllable of explanation for this slight, this unbearable slight that had been put upon me as her host, her guardian, for the time being! You and she fly me as though I were no longer fit to be your companion. Even the servants talked. Aunt Pattie and I had to set ourselves at once to devise the most elaborate falsehoods, or Heaven knows where the talk would have spread. How had I deserved such a humiliation?--Yet, when I meet Miss Foster again, she behaves as though she owed me not a word of excuse. All her talk of you and your health! I must go away at once--because it would startle and disturb you to see me. She had already found out by chance that I was here--she had begged Father Benecke to use his influence with me not to insist on seeing you--not to come to the convent. It was the most amazing, the most inexplicable thing! What in the name of fortune does it mean? Are we all mad? Is the world and everyone on it rushing together to Bedlam?'

Still she did not speak. Was it that his mere voice, the familiar torrent of words, was delightful to her?--that she cared very little what he said, so long as he was there, living, breathing, pleading before her?--that, like Sidney, she could have cried to him: 'Say on, and all well said, still say the same'?

But he meant to be answered. He came close to her.

'We have been comrades, Eleanor--fellow-workers--friends. You have come to know me as perhaps no other woman has known me. I have shown you a thousand faults. You know all my weaknesses. You have a right to despise me as an unstable, egotistical, selfish fool; who must needs waste other people's good time and good brains for his own futile purposes. You have a right to think me ungrateful for the kindest help that ever man got. You have a right as Miss Foster's friend--and perhaps, guessing as you do at some of my past history,--to expect of me probation and guarantees. You have a right to warn her how she gives away anything so precious as herself. But you have not a right to inflict on me such suffering--such agony of mind--as you have imposed on me the last six weeks! I deny it, Eleanor--I deny it altogether! The punishment, the test goes beyond--far beyond--your right and my offences!'

He calmed--he curbed himself.

'The reckoning has come, Eleanor. I ask you to pay it.'

She drew a long breath.

'But I can't go at that pace. You must give me time.'

He turned away in a miserable impatience.

She closed her eyes and thought a little, 'Now'--she said to herself--'now is the time for lying. It must be done. Quick! no scruples!'

And aloud:

'You understand,' she said slowly, 'that Miss Foster and I had