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

fault? His poor, kind Eleanor! He felt the ghastly tribute of it, felt it with impatience, and repulsion. Must a man always measure his words and actions by a foot-rule--lest a woman take him too seriously? He repented; and in the same breath told himself that his penalty was more than his due.

At last Eleanor spoke.

'I must return a moment to what we said before. Lucy Foster's ways, habits, antecedents are wholly different from yours. Suppose there were a chance for you. You would take her to London--expect her to play her part there--in your world. Suppose she failed. How would you get on?'

'Eleanor--really!--am a "three-tailed bashaw"?'

'No. But you are absorbing--despotic--fastidious. You might break that girl's heart in a thousand ways--before you knew you'd done it. You don't give; you take.'

'And you--hit hard!' he said, under his breath, resuming his walk.

She sat white and motionless, her eyes sparkling. Presently he stood still before her, his features working with emotion.

'If I am incapable of love--and unworthy of hers,' he said in a stifled voice,--'if that's your verdict--if that's what you tell her--I'd better go. I know your power--don't dispute your right to form a judgment--I'll go. The carriage is there. Good-bye.'

She lifted her face to his with a quick gesture.

'She loves you!'--she said, simply.

Manisty fell back, with a cry.

There was a silence. Eleanor's being was flooded with the strangest, most ecstatic sense of deliverance. She had been her own executioner; and this was not death--but life!

She rose. And speaking in her natural voice, with her old smile, she said--'I must go back to her--she will have missed me. Now then--what shall we do next?'

He walked beside her bewildered.

'You have taken my breath away--lifted me from Hell to Purgatory anyway,' he said, at last, trying for composure. 'I have no plans for myself--no particular hope--you didn't see and hear her just now! But I leave it all in your hands. What else can I do?'

'No,' she said calmly. 'There is nothing else for you to do.'

He felt a tremor of revolt, so quick and strange was her assumption of power over both his destiny and Lucy's. But he suppressed it; made no reply.

They turned the corner of the house. 'Your carriage can take ms up the hill,' said Eleanor. 'You must ask Father Benecke's hospitality a little longer; and you shall hear from me to-night.'

They walked towards the carriage, which was waiting a hundred yards away. On the way Manisty suddenly said, plunging back into some of the perplexities which had assailed him before Eleanor's appearance:

'What on earth does Father Benecke know about it all? Why did he never mention that you were here; and then ask me to pay him a visit? Why did he send me up the hill this morning? I had forgotten all about the convent. He made me go.'

Eleanor started; coloured; and pondered a moment.

'We pledged him to secrecy as to his letters. But all priests are Jesuits, aren't they?--even the good ones. I suppose he thought we had quarrelled, and he would force us for our good to make it up. He is very kind--and--rather romantic.'

Manisty said no more. Here, too, he divined mysteries that were best avoided.

They stood beside the carriage. The coachman was on the ground remedying something wrong with the harness.

Suddenly Manisty put out his hand and seized his companion's.

'Eleanor!'--he said imploringly--'Eleanor!'

His lips could not form a word more. But his eyes spoke for him. They breathed compunction, entreaty; they hinted what neither could ever say; they asked pardon for offences that could never be put into words.

Eleanor did not shrink. Her look met his in the first truly intimate gaze that they had ever exchanged; hers infinitely sad, full of a dignity recovered, and never to be lost again, the gaze, indeed, of a soul that was already withdrawing itself gently, imperceptibly from the things of earth and sense; his agitated and passionate. It seemed to him that he saw the clear brown of those beautiful eyes just cloud with tears. Then they dropped, and the moment was over, the curtain fallen, for ever.

They sighed, and moved apart. The coachman climbed upon the box.

'To-night!'--she said, smiling--waving her hand--'Till to-night.'

'_Avanti!_' cried the coachman, and the horses began to toil sleepily up the hill.

* * * * *

'Sapphira was nothing to me!' thought Eleanor as she threw herself back in the old shabby landau with a weariness of body that made little impression however on the tension of her mind.

Absently she looked out at the trees above and around her; at the innumerable turns of the road. So the great meeting was over! Manisty's reproaches had come and gone! With his full knowledge--at his humble demand--she held his fate in her hands.

Again that extraordinary sense of happiness and lightness! She shrank from it in a kind of terror.

Once, as the horses turned corner after corner, the sentence of a meditative Frenchman crossed her mind; words which said that the only satisfaction for man lies in being _dans l'ordre_; in unity, that is, with the great world-machine in which he finds himself; fighting with it, not against it.

Her mind played about this thought; then returned to Manisty and Lucy.

A new and humbled Manisty!--shaken with a supreme longing and fear which seemed to have driven out for the moment all the other elements in his character--those baser, vainer, weaker elements that she knew so well. The change in him was a measure of the smallness of her own past influence upon him; of the infinitude of her own self-deception. Her sharp intelligence drew the inference at once, and bade her pride accept it.

They had reached the last stretch of hill before the convent. Where was Lucy? She looked out eagerly.

The girl stood at the edge of the road, waiting. As Eleanor bent forward with a nervous 'Dear, I am not tired--wasn't it lovely to find this carriage?' Lucy made no reply. Her face was stern; her eyes red. She helped Eleanor to alight without a word.

But when they had reached Eleanor's cool and shaded room, and Eleanor was lying on her bed physically at rest, Lucy stood beside her with a quivering face.

'Did you tell him to go at once? Of course you have seen him?'

'Yes, I have seen him. Father Benecke gave me notice.'

'Father Benecke!' said the girl with a tightening of the lip.

There was a pause; then Eleanor said:

'Dear, get that low chair and sit beside me.'

'You oughtn't to speak a word,' said Lucy impetuously; 'you ought to rest there for hours. Why we should be disturbed in this unwarrantable, this unpardonable way, I can't imagine.'

She looked taller than Eleanor had ever seen her; and more queenly. Her whole frame seemed to be stiff with indignation and will.

'Come!' said Eleanor, holding out her hand.

Unwillingly Lucy obeyed.

Eleanor turned towards her. Their faces were close together; the ghastly pallor of the one beside the stormy, troubled beauty of the other.

'Darling, listen to me. For two months I have been like a person in a delirium--under suggestion, as the hypnotists say. I have not been myself. It has been a possession. And this morning--before I saw Edward at all--I felt the demon--go! And the result is very simple. Put your ear down to me.'

Lucy bent.

'The one thing in the world that I desire now--before I die--(Ah! dear, don't start!--you know!)--the only, only thing--is that you and Edward should be happy--and forgive me.'

Her voice was lost in a sob. Lucy kissed her quickly, passionately. Then she rose.

'I shall never marry Mr. Manisty, Eleanor, if that is what you mean. It is well to make that clear at once.'

'And why?' Eleanor caught her--kept her prisoner.

'Why?--why?' said Lucy impatiently--'because I have no desire to marry him--because--I would sooner cut off my right hand than marry him.'

Eleanor held her fast, looked at her with a brilliant eye--accusing, significant.

'A fortnight ago you were on the _loggia_--alone. I saw you from my room. Lucy!--I saw you kiss the terra-cotta he gave you. Do you mean to tell me that meant nothing--_nothing_--from you, of all people? Oh! you dear, dear child!--I knew it from the beginning--I knew it--but I was mad.'

Lucy had grown very white, but she stood rigid.

'I can't be responsible for what you thought, or--for anything--but what I do. And I will never marry Mr. Manisty.'

Eleanor still held her.

'Dear--you remember that night when Alice attacked you? I came into the library, unknown to you both. You were still in the chair--you heard nothing. He stooped over you. I heard what he said. I saw his face. Lucy! there are terrible risks--not to you--but to him--in driving a temperament like his to despair. You know how he lives by feeling, by imagination--how much of the artist, of the poet, there is in him. If he is happy--if there is someone to understand, and strengthen him, he will do great things. If not he will waste his life. And that would be so bitter, bitter to see!'

Eleanor leant her face on Lucy's hands, and the girl felt her tears. She shook from head to foot, but she did not yield.

'I can't--I can't'--she said in a low, resolute voice. 'Don't ask me. I never can.'

'And you told him so?'

'I don't know what I told him--except that he mustn't trouble you--that we wanted him to go--to go directly.'

'And he--what did he say to you?'

'That doesn't matter in the least,' cried Lucy. 'I have given him no right to say what he does. Did I encourage him to spend these weeks in looking for us? Never!'

'He didn't want encouraging,' said Eleanor. 'He is in love--perhaps for the first time in his life. If you are to give him no hope--it will go hard with him.'

Lucy's face only darkened.

'How can you say such things to me?' she said passionately. 'How can you?'

Eleanor sighed. 'I have not much right to say them, I know,' she said presently, in a low voice. 'I have poisoned the sound of them to your ears.'

Lucy was silent. She began to walk up and down the room, with her hands behind her.

'I will never, never forgive Father Benecke,' she said presently, in a low, determined voice.

'What do you think he had to do with it?'

'I know,' said Lucy. 'He brought Mr. Manisty here. He sent him up the hill this morning to see me. It was the most intolerable interference and presumption. Only a priest could have done it.'

'Oh! you bigot!--you Puritan! Come here, little wild-cat. Let me say something.'

Lucy came reluctantly, and Eleanor held her.

'Doesn't it enter into your philosophy--tell me--that one soul should be able to do anything for another?'

'I don't believe in the professional, anyway,' said Lucy stiffly--'nor in the professional claims.'

'My dear, it is a training like any other.'

'Did you--did you confide in him?' said the girl after a moment, with a visible