Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33

For Manisty--as she sat there, high above him, yet leaning a little
towards him--there was something in the general freshness and purity of
her presence, both physical and moral, that began most singularly to steal
upon his emotions. Certain barriers seemed to be falling, certain secret
sympathies emerging, drawn from regions far below their differences of age
and race, of national and intellectual habit. How was it she had liked his
Palestine book so much? He almost felt as though in some mysterious way
he had been talking to her, and she listening, for years,--since first,
perhaps, her sweet crude youth began.

Then even his egotism felt the prick of humour. Five weeks had she been
with them at the villa?--and in a fortnight their party was to break
up. How profitably indeed he had used his time with her! How civil--how
kind--how discerning he had shown himself!

Yet soreness of this kind was soon lost in the surge of this new and
unexpected impulse, which brought his youth exultantly back upon him.
A beautiful woman rode beside him, through the Italian evening. With
impatience, with an inward and passionate repudiation of all other bonds
and claims, he threw himself into that mingled process--at once exploring
and revealing--which makes the thrill of all the higher relations between
men and women, and ends invariably either in love--or tragedy.

* * * * *

They found a carriage waiting for them near the Sforza-Cesarini gate, and
in it Mrs. Elliott, Reggie Brooklyn's kind sister. Lucy was taken to a
doctor, and the hurt was dressed. By nine o'clock she was once more under
the villa-roof. Miss Manisty received her with lamentations and enquiries,
that the tottering Lucy was too weary even to hear aright. Amid what seemed
to her a babel of tongues and lights and kind concern, she was taken to bed
and sleep.

Mrs. Burgoyne did not attend her. She waited in Manisty's library, and when
Manisty entered the room she came forward--

'Edward, I have some disagreeable news'--

He stopped abruptly.

'Your sister Alice will be here to-morrow.'

'My sister--Alice?'--he repeated incredulously.

'She telegraphed this morning that she must see you. Aunt Pattie consulted
me. The telegram gave no address--merely said that she would come to-morrow
for two or three nights.'

Manisty first stared in dismay, then, thrusting his hands into his pockets,
began to walk hurriedly to and fro.

'When did this news arrive?'

'This morning, before we started.'

'Eleanor!--_Why_ was I not told?'

'I wanted to save the day,'--the words were spoken in Eleanor's most
charming, most musical voice. 'There was no address. You could not have
stopped her.'

'I would have managed somehow,'--said Manisty striking his hand on the
table beside him in his annoyance and impatience.

Eleanor did not defend herself. She tried to soothe him, to promise him as
usual that the dreaded visit should be made easy to him. But he paid little
heed. He sat moodily brooding in his chair; and when Eleanor's persuasions
ceased, he broke out--

'That poor child!--After to-day's experiences,--to have Alice let loose
upon her!--I would have given anything--anything!--that it should not have
happened.'

'Miss Foster?' said Eleanor lightly--'oh! she will bear up.'

'There it is!'--said Manisty, in a sudden fury. 'We have all been
misjudging her in the most extraordinary way! She is the most sensitive,
tender-natured creature--I would not put an ounce more strain upon her for
the world.'

His aunt called him, and he went stormily away. Eleanor's smile as she
stood looking after him--how pale and strange it was!

CHAPTER IX

'Miss Foster is not getting up? How is she?'

'I believe Aunt Pattie only persuaded her to rest till after breakfast, and
that was hard work. Aunt Pattie thought her rather shaken still.'

The speakers were Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor was sitting in the
deep shade of the avenue that ran along the outer edge of the garden.
Through the gnarled trunks to her right shone the blazing stretches of the
Campagna, melting into the hot shimmer of the Mediterranean. A new volume
of French memoirs, whereof not a page had yet been cut, was lying upon her
knee.

Manisty, who had come out to consult with her, leant against the tree
beside her. Presently he broke out impetuously:

'Eleanor! we must protect that girl. You know what I mean? You'll help me?'

'What are you afraid of?'

'Good heavens!--I hardly know. But we must keep Alice away from Miss
Foster. She mustn't walk with her, or sit with her, or be allowed to worry
her in any way. I should be beside myself with alarm if Alice were to take
a fancy to her.'

Eleanor hesitated a moment. The slightest flush rose to her cheek,
unnoticed in the shadow of her hat.

'You know--if you are in any real anxiety--Miss Foster could go to
Florence. She told me yesterday that the Porters have friends there whom
she could join.'

Manisty fidgeted.

'Well, I hardly think that's necessary. It's a great pity she should miss
Vallombrosa. I hoped I might settle her and Aunt Pattie there by about the
middle of June.'

Eleanor made so sudden a movement that her book fell to the ground.

'You are going to Vallombrosa? I thought you were due at home, the
beginning of June?'

'That was when I thought the book was coming out before the end of the
month. But now--

'Now that it isn't coming out at all, you feel there's no hurry?'

Manisty looked annoyed.

'I don't think that's a fair shot. Of course the book's coming out! But if
it isn't June, it must be October. So there's no hurry.'

The little cold laugh with which Eleanor had spoken her last words
subsided. But she gave him no sign of assent. He pulled a stalk of grass,
and nibbled at it uncomfortably.

'You think I'm a person easily discouraged?' he said presently.

'You take advice so oddly,' she said, smiling; 'sometimes so ill--sometimes
so desperately well.'

'I can't help it. I am made like that. When a man begins to criticise my
work, I first hate him--then I'm all of his opinion--only more so.'

'I know,' said Eleanor impatiently. 'It's this dreadful modern
humility--the abominable power we all have of seeing the other side. But an
author is no good till he has thrown his critics out of window.'

'Poor Neal!' said Manisty, with his broad sudden smile, 'he would fall
hard. However, to return to Miss Foster. There's no need to drive her away
if we look after her. You'll help us, won't you, Eleanor?'

He sat down on a stone bench beside her. The momentary cloud had cleared
away. He was his most charming, most handsome self. A shiver ran through
Eleanor. Her thought flew to yesterday--compared the kind radiance of the
face beside her, its look of brotherly confidence and appeal, with the
look of yesterday, the hard evasiveness with which he had met all her
poor woman's attempts to renew the old intimacy, reknit the old bond. She
thought of the solitary, sleepless misery of the night she had just passed
through. And here they were, sitting in cousinly talk, as though nothing
else were between them but this polite anxiety for Miss Foster's peace of
mind! What was behind that apparently frank brow--those sparkling grey-blue
eyes? Manisty could always be a mystery when he chose, even to those who
knew him best.

She drew a long inward breath, feeling the old inexorable compulsion that
lies upon the decent woman, who can only play the game as the man chooses
to set it.

'I don't know what I can do--' she said slowly. 'You think Alice is no
better?'

Manisty shook his head. He looked at her sharply and doubtfully, as though
measuring her--and then said, lowering his voice:

'I believe--I know I can trust you with this--I have some reason to suppose
that there was an attempt at suicide at Venice. Her maid prevented it, and
gave me the hint. I am in communication with the maid--though Alice has no
idea of it.

'Ought she to come here at all?' said Eleanor after a pause.

'I have thought of that--of meeting all the trains and turning her back.
But you know her obstinacy. As long as she is in Rome and we here, we can't
protect ourselves and the villa. There are a thousand ways of invading us.
Better let her come--find out what she wants--pacify her if possible--and
send her away. I am not afraid for ourselves, you included, Eleanor! She
would do us no harm. A short annoyance--and it would be over. But Miss
Foster is the weak point.'

Eleanor looked at him inquiringly.

'It is one of the strongest signs of her unsound state,' said Manisty,
frowning--'her wild fancies that she takes for girls much younger than
herself. There have been all sorts of difficulties in hotels. She will be
absolutely silent with older people--or with you and me, for instance--but
if she can captivate any quite young creature, she will pour herself out to
her, follow her, write to her, tease her.--Poor, poor Alice!'

Manisty's voice had become almost a groan. His look betrayed a true and
manly feeling.

'One must always remember,' he resumed, 'that she has still the power to
attract a stranger. Her mind is in ruins--but they are the ruins of what
was once fine and noble. But it is all so wild, and strange, and desperate.
A girl is first fascinated--and then terrified. She begins by listening,
and pitying--then Alice pursues her, swears her to secrecy, talks to her
of enemies and persecutors, of persons who wish her death, who open her
letters, and dog her footsteps--till the girl can't sleep at nights, and
her own nerve begins to fail her. There was a case of this at Florence last
year. Dalgetty, that's the maid, had to carry Alice off by main force. The
parents of the girl threatened to set the doctors in motion--to get Alice
sent to an asylum.'

'But surely, surely,' cried Mrs. Burgoyne, 'that would be the right
course!'

Manisty shook his head.

'Impossible!' he said with energy. 'Don't imagine that my lawyers and I
haven't looked into everything. Unless the disease has made much progress
since I last saw her, Alice will always baffle any attempts to put her in
restraint. She is queer--eccentric--melancholy; she envelopes the people
she victimises with a kind of moral poison; but you can't _prove_--so far,
at least--that she is dangerous to herself or others. The evidence always
falls short.' He paused; then added with cautious emphasis: 'I don't speak
without book. It has been tried.'

'But the attempt at Venice?'

'No good. The maid's letter convinced me of two things--first, that she had
attempted her life, and next, that there is no proof of it.'

Eleanor bent forward.

'And the suitor--the man?'

'Dalgetty tells me there have been two interviews. The first at
Venice--probably connected with the attempt we know of. The second some
weeks ago at Padua. I believe the man to be a reputable person, though no
doubt not insensible to the fact that Alice has some money. You know who he
is?--a French artist she came across in Venice. He is melancholy and lonely
like herself. I believe he is genuinely attached to her. But after the last
scene at Padua she told Dalgetty that she would never make him miserable by
marrying him.'

'What do you suppose she is coming here for?'

'Very likely to get me to do something for this man. She won't be his wife,
but she likes to be his Providence: I shall promise anything, in return for
her going quickly back to Venice--or Switzerland--where she often spends
the summer. So long as she and Miss Foster are under one roof, I shall not
have a moment free from anxiety.'

Eleanor sank back in her chair. She was silent; but her eye betrayed the
bitter animation of the thoughts passing behind them, thoughts evoked not
so much by what Manisty had said, as by what he had _not_ said. All alarm,
all consideration to be concentrated on one point?--nothing, and no one
else, to matter?

But again she fought down the rising agony, refused to be mastered by it,
or to believe her own terrors. Another wave of feeling rose. It was so
natural to her to love and help him!

'Well, of course I shall do what you tell me! I generally do--don't I? What
are your commands?'

He brought his head nearer to hers, his brilliant eyes bent upon her
intently:

'Never let her be alone with Miss Foster! Watch her. If you see any sign of
persecution--if you can't check it--let me know at once. I shall keep Alice
in play of course. One day we can send Miss Foster into Rome--perhaps two.
Ah! hush!--here she comes!'

Eleanor looked round. Lucy had just appeared in the cool darkness of the
avenue. She walked slowly and with a languid grace, trailing her white
skirts. The shy rusticity, the frank robustness of her earlier aspect were
now either gone, or temporarily merged in something more exquisite and
more appealing. Her youth too had never been so apparent. She had been too
strong too self-reliant. The touch of physical delicacy seemed to have
brought back the child.

Then, turning back to her companion, Eleanor saw the sudden softness in
Manisty's face--the alert expectancy of his attitude.

'What a wonderful oval of the head and cheek!' he said under his breath,
half to himself, half to her. 'Do you know, Eleanor, what she reminds me
of?'

Eleanor shook her head.

'Of that little head--little face rather--that I gave you at Nemi. Don't
you see it?'

'I always said she was like your Greek bust,' said Eleanor slowly.

'Ah, that was in her first archaic stage. But now that she's more at
ease with us--you see?--there's the purity of line just the same--but
subtilised--humanised--somehow! It's the change from marble to terra-cotta,
isn't it?'

His fancy pleased him, and his smile turned to hers for sympathy. Then,
springing up, he went to meet Lucy.

'Oh, there can be nothing in his mind! He could not
speak--look--smile--like that to _me_,' thought Eleanor with passionate
relief.

Then as they approached, she rose, and with kind solicitude forced Lucy to
take her chair, on the plea that she herself was going back to the villa.

Lucy touched her hand with timid gratitude. 'I don't know what's happened
to me,' she said, half wistful, half smiling; 'I never stayed in bed to
breakfast in my life before. At Greyridge, they'd think I had gone out of
my mind.'

Eleanor inquired if it was an invariable sign of lunacy in America to take
your breakfast in bed. Lucy couldn't say. All she knew was that nobody ever
took it so in Greyridge, Vermont, unless they were on the point of death.

'I should never be any good, any more,' she said, with an energy that
brought the red back to her cheeks,--'if they were to spoil me at home, as
you spoil me here.'

Eleanor waved her hand, smiled, and went her way.

As she moved further and further away from them down the long avenue, she
saw them all the time, though she never once looked back--saw the eager
inquiries of the man, the modest responsiveness of the girl. She was
leaving them to themselves--at the bidding of her own pride--and they had
the May morning before them. According to a telegram just received, Alice
Manisty was not expected till after lunch.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Manisty was talking of his sister to Lucy, With coolness, and as
much frankness as he thought necessary.

'She is very odd--and very depressing. She is now very little with us.
There is no company she likes as well as her own. But in early days, she
and I were great friends. We were brought up in an old Yorkshire house
together, and a queer pair we were. I was never sent to school, and I got
the better of most of my tutors. Alice was unmanageable too, and we spent
most of our time rambling and reading as we pleased. Both of us dreamed
awake half our time. I had shooting and fishing to take me out of myself;
but Alice, after my mother's death, lived with her own fancies and got
less like other people every day. There was a sort of garden house in the
park,--a lonely, overgrown kind of place. We put our books there, and used
practically to live there for weeks together. That was just after I came
into the place, before I went abroad. Alice was sixteen. I can see her now
sitting in the doorway of the little house, hour after hour, staring into
the woods like a somnambulist, one arm behind her head. One day I said
to her: "Alice, what are you thinking of?" "Myself!" she said. So then I
laughed at her, and teased her. And she answered quite quietly, "I know it
is a pity--but I can't help it."

Lucy's eyes were wide with wonder. 'But you ought to have given her
something to do--or to learn: couldn't she have gone to school, or found
some friends?'

'Oh! I dare say I ought to have done a thousand things,' said Manisty
impatiently. 'I was never a model brother, or a model anything! I grew
up for myself and by myself, and I supposed Alice would do the same. You
disapprove?'

He turned his sharp, compelling eyes upon her, so that Lucy flinched a
little. 'I shouldn't dare,' she said laughing. 'I don't know enough about
it. But it's plain, isn't it, that girls of sixteen shouldn't sit on
doorsteps and think about themselves?'

'What did you think about at sixteen?'

Her look changed.

'I had mother then,'--she said simply.

'Ah! then--I'm afraid you've no right to sit in judgment upon us. Alice
and I had no mother--no one but ourselves. Of course all our relations and
friends disapproved of us. But that somehow has never made much difference
to either of us. Does it make much difference to you? Do you mind if people
praise or blame you? What does it matter what anybody thinks? Who can know
anything about you but yourself?--Eh?'

He poured out his questions in a hurry, one tumbling over the other. And he
had already begun to bite the inevitable stalk of grass. Lucy as usual was
conscious both of intimidation and attraction--she felt him at once absurd
and magnetic.

'I'm sure we're meant to care what people think,' she said, with spirit.
'It helps us. It keeps us straight.'

His eyes flashed.

'You think so? Then we disagree entirely--absolutely--and _in toto_! I
don't want to be approved--outside my literary work any way--I want to be
happy. It never enters my head to judge other people--why should they judge
me?'

'But--but'--Then she laughed out, remembering his book, and his political
escapade, 'Aren't you _always_ judging other people?'

'Fighting them--yes! That's another matter. But I don't give myself
superior airs. I don't judge--I just love--and hate.'

Her attention followed the bronzed expressive face, so bold in outline, so
delicate in detail, with a growing fascination.

'It seems to me you hate more than you love.'

He considered it.

'Quite possible. It isn't an engaging world. But I don't hate readily--I
hate slowly and by degrees. If anybody offends me, for instance, at first I
hardly feel it,--it doesn't seem to matter at all. Then it grows in my mind
gradually, it becomes a weight--a burning fire--and drives everything else
out. I hate the men, for instance, that I hated last year in England, much
worse now than I did then!'

She bit her lip, but could not help the broadening smile, to which his own
responded.

'Do you take any interest, Miss Foster, in what happened to me last year?'

'I often wonder whether you regret it,' she said, rather shyly. 'Wasn't
it--a great pity?'

'Not at all,' he said peremptorily; 'I shall recover all I let slip.'

She did not reply. But the smile still trembled on her lips, while she
copied his favourite trick in stripping the leaves from a spray of box.

'You don't believe that?'

'Does one ever recover all one lets slip--especially in politics?'

'Goodness--you are a pessimist! Why should one not recover it?'

Her charming mouth curved still more gaily.

'I have often heard my uncle say that the man who "resigns" is lost.'

'Ah!--never regret--never resign--never apologise? We know that creed. Your
uncle must be a man of trenchant opinions. Do you agree with him?'

She tried to be serious.

'I suppose one should count the cost before--'

'Before one joins a ministry? Yes, that's a fair stroke. I wish to heaven
I had never joined it. But when I began to think that this particular
Ministry was taking English society to perdition, it was as well--wasn't
it?--that I should leave it?'

Her face suddenly calmed itself to a sweet gravity.

'Oh yes--yes!--if it was as bad as that.'

'I'm not likely to confess, anyway, that it wasn't as bad as that!--But I
will confess that I generally incline to hate my own side,--and to love my
adversaries. English Liberals moreover hold the ridiculous opinion that the
world is to be governed by intelligence. I couldn't have believed it of
any sane men. When I discovered it, I left them. My foreign experience had
given the lie to all that. And when I left them, the temptation to throw a
paradox in their faces was irresistible.'

She said nothing, but her expression spoke for her.

'You think me mad?'

She turned aside--dumb--plucking at a root of cyclamen beside her.

'Insincere?'

'No. But you like to startle people--to make them talk about you!'

Her eyes were visible again; and he perceived at once her courage and her
diffidence.

'Perhaps! English political life runs so smooth, that to throw in a stone
and make a splash was amusing.'

'But was it fair?' she said, flushing.

'What do you mean?'

'Other people were in earnest; and you--'

'Were not? Charge home. I am prepared,' he said, smiling.

'You talk now--as though you were a Catholic--and you are not, you don't
believe,' she said suddenly, in a deep, low voice.

He looked at her for a moment in a smiling silence. His lips were ready
to launch a reckless sentence or two; but they refrained. Her attitude
meanwhile betrayed an unconscious dread--like a child that fears a blow.

'You charming saint!'--he thought; surprised at his own feeling of
pleasure. Pleasure in what?--in the fact that however she might judge his
opinions, she was clearly interested in the holder of them?

'What does one's own point of view matter?' he said gently. 'I believe what
I can,--and as long as I can--sometimes for a whole twenty-four hours! Then
a big doubt comes along, and sends me floundering. But that has nothing
to do with it. The case is quite simple. The world can't get on without
morals; and Catholicism, Anglicanism too--the religions of authority in
short--are the great guardians of morals. They are the binding forces--the
forces making for solidarity and continuity. Your cocksure, peering
Protestant is the dissolvent--the force making for ruin. What's his
private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he'll make
everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me--it is perfectly
open to you to say'--he looked away from her, half-forgetting her,
addressing with animation and pugnacity an imaginary opponent--'what
do morals matter?--how do you know that the present moral judgments
of the world represent any ultimate truth? Ah! well'--he shrugged his
shoulders--'I can't follow you there. Black may be really white--and white
black; but I'm not going to admit it. It would make me too much of a dupe.
I take my stand on morals. And if you give me morals, you must give me
the only force that can guarantee them,--Catholicism, more or less:--and
dogma,--and ritual,--and superstition,--and all the foolish ineffable
things that bind mankind together, and send them to "face the music" in
this world and the next!'

She sat silent, with twitching lips, excited, yet passionately scornful
and antagonistic. Thoughts of her home, of that Puritan piety amid which
she had been brought up, flashed thick and fast through her mind. Suddenly
she covered her face with her hands, to hide a fit of laughter that had
overtaken her.

'All that amuses you?'--said Manisty, breathing a little faster.

'No--oh! no. But--I was thinking of my uncle--of the people in our village
at home. What you said of Protestants seemed to me, all at once, so odd--so
ridiculous!'

'Did it? Tell me then about the people in your valley at home.'

And turning on his elbows beside her, he put her through a catechism as to
her village, her uncle, her friends. She resisted a little, for the brusque
assurance of his tone still sounded oddly in her American ear. But he was
not easy to resist; and when she had yielded she soon discovered that to
talk to him was a no less breathless and absorbing business than to listen
to him. He pounced on the new, the characteristic, the local; he drew out
of her what he wanted to know; he made her see her own trees and fields,
the figures of her home, with new sharpness, so quick, so dramatic, so
voracious, one might almost say, were his own perceptions.

Especially did he make her tell him of the New England winter; of the long
pauses of its snow-bound life; its whirling winds and drifts; its snapping,
crackling frosts; the lonely farms, and the deep sleigh-tracks amid the
white wilderness, that still in the winter silence bind these homesteads to
each other and the nation; the strange gleams of moonrise and sunset on the
cold hills; the strong dark armies of the pines; the grace of the stripped
birches. Above all, must she talk to him of the people in these farms,
the frugal, or silent, or brooding people of the hills; honourable, hard,
knotted, prejudiced, believing folk, whose lives and fates, whose spiritual
visions and madnesses, were entwined with her own young memories and
deepest affections.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33