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

of place!'

'Oh don't!--don't alter it at all!' said a quick imploring voice.

Manisty turned in astonishment.

Lucy Foster was looking at him steadily. A glow of pleasure was on her cheek, her beautiful eyes were warm and eager. Manisty for the first time observed her, took note also of the loosened hair and Eleanor's cloak.

'You liked it?' he said with some embarrassment. He had entirely forgotten that she was in the room.

She drew a long breath.

'Yes!'--she said softly, looking down.

He thought that she was too shy to express herself. In reality her feeling was divided between her old enthusiasm and her new disillusion. She would have liked to tell him that his reading had reminded her of the book she loved. But the man, standing beside her, chilled her. She wished she had not spoken. It began to seem to her a piece of forwardness.

'Well, you're very kind'--he said, rather formally--'But I'm afraid it won't do. That lady there won't pass it.'

'What have I said?'--cried Mrs. Burgoyne, protesting.

Manisty laughed. 'Nothing. But you'll agree with me.' Then he gathered up his papers under his arm in a ruthless confusion, and walked away into his study, leaving discomfort behind him.

Mrs. Burgoyne sat silent, a little tired and pale. She too would have liked to praise and to give pleasure. It was not wonderful indeed that the child's fancy had been touched. That thrilling, passionate voice--her own difficulty always was to resist it--to try and see straight in spite of it.

* * * * *

Later that evening, when Miss Foster had withdrawn, Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were lingering and talking on a stone balcony that ran along the eastern front of the villa. The Campagna and the sea were behind them. Here, beyond a stretch of formal garden, rose a curved front of wall with statues and plashing water showing dimly in the moonlight; and beyond the wall there was a space of blue and silver lake; and girdling the lake the forest-covered Monte Cavo rose towering into the moonlit sky, just showing on its topmost peak that white speck which once was the temple of the Latian Jupiter, and is now, alas! only the monument of an Englishman's crime against history, art, and Rome. The air was soft, and perfumed with scent from the roses in the side-alleys below. A monotonous bird-note came from the ilex darkness, like the note of a thin passing bell. It was the cry of a small owl, which, in its plaintiveness and changelessness, had often seemed to Manisty and Eleanor the very voice of the Roman night.

Suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne said--'I have a different version of your Nemi story running in my head!--more tragic than yours. My priest is no murderer. He found his predecessor dead under the tree; the place was empty; he took it. He won't escape his own doom, of course, but he has not deserved it. There is no blood on his hand--his heart is pure. There!--I imagine it so.'

There was a curious tremor in her voice, which Manisty, lost in his own thoughts, did not detect. He smiled.

'Well!--you'll compete with Renan. He made a satire out of it. His priest is a moral gentleman who won't kill anybody. But the populace soon settle that. They knock him on the head, as a disturber of religion.'

'I had forgotten--' said Mrs. Burgoyne absently.

'But you didn't like it, Eleanor--my little piece!' said Manisty, after a pause. 'So don't pretend!'

She roused herself at once, and began to talk with her usual eagerness and sympathy. It was a repetition of the scene before dinner. Only this time her effect was not so great. Manisty's depression did not yield.

Presently, however, he looked down upon her. In the kind, concealing moonlight she was all grace and charm. The man's easy tenderness awoke.

'Eleanor--this air is too keen for that thin dress.'

And stooping over her he took her cloak from her arm, and wrapped it about her.

'You lent it to Miss Foster'--he said, surveying her. 'It became her--but it knows its mistress!'

The colour mounted an instant in her cheek. Then she moved further away from him.

'Have you discovered yet'--she said--'that that girl is extraordinarily handsome?'

'Oh yes'--he said carelessly--'with a handsomeness that doesn't matter.'

She laughed.

'Wait till Aunt Pattie and I have dressed her and put her to rights.'

'Well, you can do most things no doubt--both with bad books, and raw girls,'--he said, with a shrug and a sigh.

They bade each other good-night, and Mrs. Burgoyne disappeared through the glass door behind them.

* * * * *

The moon was sailing gloriously above the stone-pines of the garden. Mrs. Burgoyne, half-undressed, sat dreaming in a corner room, with a high painted ceiling, and both its windows open to the night.

She had entered her room in a glow of something which had been half torment, half happiness. Now, after an hour's dreaming, she suddenly bent forward and, parting the cloud of fair hair that fell about her, she looked in the glass before her, at the worn, delicate face haloed within it--thinking all the time with a vague misery of Lucy Foster's untouched bloom.

Then her eyes fell upon two photographs that stood upon her table. One represented a man in yeomanry uniform; the other a tottering child of two.

'Oh! my boy--my darling!'--she cried in a stifled agony, and snatching up the picture, she bowed her head upon it, kissing it. The touch of it calmed her. But she could not part from it. She put it in her breast, and when she slept, it was still there.


CHAPTER III

'Eleanor--where are you off to?'

'Just to my house of Simmon,' said that lady, smiling. She was standing on the eastern balcony, buttoning a dainty grey glove, while Manisty a few paces from her was lounging in a deck-chair, with the English newspapers.

'What?--to mass? I protest. Look at the lake--look at the sky--look at that patch of broom on the lake side. Come and walk there before _dejeuner_--and make a round home by Aricia.'

Mrs. Burgoyne shook her head.

'No--I like my little idolatries,' she said, with decision. It was Sunday morning. The bells in Marinata were ringing merrily. Women and girls with black lace scarves upon their heads, handsome young men in short coats and soft peaked hats, were passing along the road between the villa and the lake, on their way to mass. It was a warm April day. The clouds of yellow banksia, hanging over the statued wall that girdled the fountain-basin, were breaking into bloom; and the nightingales were singing with a prodigality that was hardly worthy of their rank and dignity. Nature in truth is too lavish of nightingales on the Alban Hills in spring! She forgets, as it were, her own sweet arts, and all that rareness adds to beauty. One may hear a nightingale and not mark him; which is a _lese majeste_.

Mrs. Burgoyne's toilette matched the morning. The grey dress, so fresh and elegant, the broad black hat above the fair hair, the violets dewy from the garden that were fastened at her slender waist, and again at her throat beneath the pallor of the face,--these things were of a perfection quite evident to the critical sense of Edward Manisty. It was the perfection that was characteristic. So too was the faded fairness of hair and skin, the frail distinguished look. So, above all, was the contrast between the minute care for personal adornment implied in the finish of the dress, and the melancholy shrinking of the dark-rimmed eyes.

He watched her, through the smoke wreaths of his cigarette,--pleasantly and lazily conscious both of her charm and her inconsistencies.

'Are you going to take Miss Foster?' he asked her.

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'I made the suggestion. She looked at me with amazement, coloured crimson, and went away. I have lost all my chances with her.'

'Then she must be an ungrateful minx'--said Manisty, lowering his voice and looking round him towards the villa, 'considering the pains you take.'

'_Some_ of us must take pains,' said Mrs. Burgoyne, significantly.

'Some of us do'--he said, laughing. 'The others profit.--One goes on praying for the primitive,--but when it comes--No!--it is not permitted to be as typical as Miss Foster.'

'Typical of what?'

'The dissidence of Dissent, apparently--and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. Confess:--it was an odd caprice on the part of high Jove to send her here?'

'I am sure she has a noble character--and an excellent intelligence!'

Manisty shrugged his shoulders.

'--Her grandfather'--continued the lady--'was a divinity professor and wrote a book on the Inquisition!'--

Manisty repeated his gesture.

'--And as I told you last night, she is almost as handsome as your Greek head--and very like her.'

'My dear lady--you have the wildest notions!'

Mrs. Burgoyne picked up her parasol.

'Quite true.--Your aunt tells me she was so disappointed, poor child, that there was no church of her own sort for her to go to this morning.'

'What!'--cried Manisty--'Did she expect a conventicle in the Pope's own town!'

For Marinata owned a Papal villa and had once been a favourite summer residence of the Popes.

'No--but she thought she might have gone into Rome, and she missed the trains. I found her wandering about the salon looking quite starved and restless.'

'Those are hungers that pass!--My heart is hard.--There--your bell is stopping. Eleanor!--I wonder why you go to these functions?'

He turned to look at her, his fine eye sharp and a little mocking.

'Because I like it.'

'You like the thought of it. But when you get there, the reality won't please you at all. There will be the dirty floor, and the bad music,--and the little priest intoning through his nose--and the scuffling boys,--and the abominable pictures--and the tawdry altars. Much better stay at home--and help me praise the Holy Roman Church from a safe distance!'

'What a hypocrite people would think you, if they could hear you talk like that!' she said, flushing.

'Then they would think it unjustly.--I don't mean to be my own dupe, that's all.'

'The dupes are the happiest,' she said in a low voice. 'There is something between them, and--Ah! well, never mind!'--

She stood still a moment, looking across the lake, her hands resting lightly on the stone balustrade of the terrace. Manisty watched her in silence, occasionally puffing at his cigarette.

'Well, I shall be back very soon,' she said, gathering up her prayer-book and her parasol. 'Will it then be our duty to take Miss Foster for a walk?'

'Why not leave her to my aunt?'

She passed him with a little nod of farewell. Presently, through the openings of the balustrade, Manisty could watch her climbing the village street with her dress held high above her daintily shod feet, a crowd of children asking for a halfpenny following at her heels. Presently he saw her stop irresolutely, open a little velvet bag that hung from her waist and throw a shower of _soldi_