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

among the children. They swooped upon it, fighting and shrieking.

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at them half smiling, half repentant, shook her head and walked on.

'Eleanor--you coward!' said Manisty, throwing himself back in his chair with a silent laugh.

Under his protection, or his aunt's, as he knew well, Mrs. Burgoyne could walk past those little pests of children, even the poor armless and legless horrors on the way to Albano, and give a firm adhesion to Miss Manisty's Scotch doctrines on the subject of begging. But by herself, she could not refuse--she could not bear to be scowled on--even for a moment. She must yield--must give herself the luxury of being liked. It was all of a piece with her weakness towards servants and porters and cabmen--her absurdities in the way of tips and gifts--the kindnesses she had been showing during the last three days to the American girl. Too kind! Insipidity lay that way.

Manisty returned to his newspapers. When he had finished them he got up and began to pace the stone terrace, his great head bent forward as usual, as though the weight of it were too much for the shoulders. The newspapers had made him restless again, had dissipated the good humour of the morning, born perhaps of the mere April warmth and _bien etre_.

'Idling in a villa--with two women'--he said to himself, bitterly--'while all these things are happening.'

For the papers were full of news--of battles lost and won, on questions with which he had been at one time intimately concerned. Once or twice in the course of these many columns he had found his own name, his own opinion quoted, but only as belonging to a man who had left the field--a man of the past--politically dead.

As he stood there with his hands upon his sides, looking out over the Alban Lake, and its broom-clad sides, a great hunger for London swept suddenly upon him, for the hot scent of its streets, for its English crowd, for the look of its shops and clubs and parks. He had a vision of the club writing-room--of well-known men coming in and going out--discussing the news of the morning, the gossip of the House--he saw himself accosted as one of the inner circle,--he was sensible again of those short-lived pleasures of power and office. Not that he had cared half as much for these pleasures, when he had them, as other men. To affirm with him meant to be already half way on the road to doubt; contradiction was his character. Nevertheless, now that he was out of it, alone and forgotten--now that the game was well beyond his reach--it had a way of appearing to him at moments intolerably attractive!

Nothing before him now, in these long days at the villa, but the hours of work with Eleanor, the walks With Eleanor, the meals with his aunt and Eleanor--and now, for a stimulating change, Miss Foster! The male in him was restless. He had been eager to come to the villa, and the quiet of the hills, so as to push this long delaying book to its final end. And, behold, day by day, in the absence of the talk and distractions of Rome, a thousand discontents and misgivings were creeping upon him. In Rome he was still a power. In spite of his strange detached position, it was known that he was the defender of the Roman system, the panegyrist of Leo XIII., the apologist of the Papal position in Italy. And this had been more than enough to open to him all but the very inmost heart of Catholic life. Their apartments in Rome, to the scandal of Miss Manisty's Scotch instincts, had been haunted by ecclesiastics of every rank and kind. Cardinals, Italian and foreign, had taken their afternoon tea from Mrs. Burgoyne's hands; the black and white of the Dominicans, the brown of the Franciscans, the black of the Jesuits,--the staircase in the Via Sistina had been well acquainted with them all. Information not usually available had been placed lavishly at Manisty's disposal; he had felt the stir and thrill of the great Catholic organisation as all its nerve-threads gather to its brain and centre in the Vatican. Nay, on two occasions, he had conversed freely with Leo XIII. himself.

All this he had put aside, impatiently, that he might hurry on his book, and accomplish his _coup_. And in the tranquillity of the hills, was he beginning to lose faith in the book, and the compensation it was to bring him? Unless this book, with its scathing analysis of the dangers and difficulties of the secularist State, were not only a book, but _an event_, of what use would it be to him? He was capable both of extravagant conceit, and of the most boundless temporary disgust with his own doings and ideas. Such a disgust seemed to be mounting now through all his veins, taking all the savour out of life and work. No doubt it would be the same to the end,--the politician in him just strong enough to ruin the man of letters--the man of letters always ready to distract and paralyse the politician. And as for the book, there also he had been the victim of a double mind. He had endeavoured to make it popular, as Chateaubriand made the great argument of the _Genie du Christianisme_ popular, by the introduction of an element of poetry and romance. For the moment he was totally out of love with the result. What was the plain man to make of it? And nowadays the plain man settles everything.

Well!--if the book came to grief, it was not only he that would suffer.--Poor Eleanor!--poor, kind, devoted Eleanor!

Yet as the thought of her passed through his meditations, a certain annoyance mingled with it. What if she had been helping to keep him, all this time, in a fool's paradise--hiding the truth from him by this soft enveloping sympathy of hers?

His mind started these questions freely. Yet only to brush them away with a sense of shame. Beneath his outer controlling egotism there were large and generous elements in his mixed nature. And nothing could stand finally against the memory of that sweet all-sacrificing devotion which had been lavished upon himself and his work all the winter!

What right had he to accept it? What did it mean? Where was it leading?

He guessed pretty shrewdly what had been the speculations of the friends and acquaintances who had seen them together in Rome. Eleanor Burgoyne was but just thirty, very attractive, and his distant kinswoman. As for himself, he knew very well that according to the general opinion of the world, beginning with his aunt, it was his duty to marry and marry soon. He was in the prime of life; he had a property that cried out for an heir; and a rambling Georgian house that would be the better for a mistress. He was tolerably sure that Aunt Pattie had already had glimpses of Eleanor Burgoyne in that position.

Well--if so, Aunt Pattie was less shrewd than usual. Marriage! The notion of its fetters and burdens was no less odious to him now than it had been at twenty. What did he want with a wife--still more, with a son? The thought of his own life continued in another's filled him with a shock of repulsion. Where was the sense of infusing into another being the black drop of discontent that poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps--with the eyes of his mad sister Alice? Or a son--with the contradictions and weaknesses, without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging the future. But that particular way called paternity had never in his most optimistic moments appealed to Manisty.

And of course Eleanor understood him! He had not been ungrateful. No!--he knew well enough that he had the power to make a woman's hours pass pleasantly. Eleanor's winter had been a happy one; her health and spirits had alike revived. Friendship, as they had known it, was a very rare and exquisite thing. No doubt when the book was done with, their relations must change somewhat. He confessed that he might have been imprudent; that he might have been appropriating the energies and sympathies of a delightful woman, as a man is hardly justified in doing, unless--. But, after all, a few weeks more would see the end of it; and friends, dear, close friends, they must always be.

For now there was plenty of room and leisure in his life for these subtler bonds. The day of great passions was gone by. There were one or two incidents in his earlier manhood on which he could look back with the half-triumphant consciousness that no man had dived deeper to the heart of feeling, had drunk more wildly, more inventively, of passion than he, in more than one country of Europe, in the East as in the West. These events had occurred in those wander-years between twenty and thirty, which he had spent in travelling, hunting and writing, in the pursuit, alternately eager and fastidious, of as wide an experience as possible. But all that was over. These things concerned another man, in another world. Politics and ambition had possessed him since, and women now appealed to other instincts in him--instincts rather of the diplomatist and intriguer than of the lover. Of late years they had been his friends and instruments. And by no unworthy arts. They were delightful to him; and his power with them was based on natural sympathies and divinations that were perhaps his birthright. His father had had the same gift. Why deny that both his father and he had owed much to women? What was there to be ashamed of? His father had been one of the ablest and most respected men of his day and so far as English society was concerned, the son had no scandal, nor the shadow of one, upon his conscience.

How far did Eleanor divine him? He raised his shoulder with a smile. Probably she knew him better than he knew himself. Besides, she was no mere girl, brimful of illusions and dreaming of love-affairs. What a history!--Good heavens! Why had he not known and seen something of her in the days when she was still under the tyranny of that intolerable husband? He might have eased the weight a little--protected her--as a kinsman may. Ah well--better not! They were both younger then.--

As for the present,--let him only extricate himself from this coil in which he stood, find his way back to activity and his rightful place, and many things might look differently. Perhaps--who could say?--in the future, when youth was still further forgotten by both of them, he and Eleanor might after all take each other by the hand--sit down on either side of the same hearth--their present friendship pass into one of another kind? It was quite possible, only--

The sudden crash of a glass door made him look round. It was Miss Foster who was hastening along the enclosed passage leading to the outer stair. She had miscalculated the strength of the wind on the north side of the house, and the glass door communicating with the library had slipped from her hand. She passed Manisty with a rather scared penitent look, quickly opened the outer door, and ran downstairs.

Manisty watched her as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness itself--middle-class, sabbatical neatness.

Manisty recalled his thoughts of