Eleanor
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Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor
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Figure after figure, story after story, did he draw from her,--warm from
the hidden fire of her own strenuous, loving life. Once or twice she
spoke of her mother--like one drawing a veil for an instant from a holy
of holies. He felt and saw the burning of a sacred fire; then the veil
dropped, nor would it lift again for any word of his. And every now
and then, a phrase that startled him by its quality,--its suggestions.
Presently he was staring at her with his dark absent eyes.
'Heavens!'--he was thinking--'what a woman there is in her!--what a
nature!'
The artist--the poet--the lover of things significant and moving,--all
these were stirred in him as he listened to her, as he watched her young
and noble beauty.
* * * * *
But, in the end, he would not grant her much, argumentatively.
'You make me see strange things--magnificent things, if you like! But your
old New England saints and dreamers are not your last word in America. They
tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches
are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among
you,--science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there--there--I'll not
prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care!
I have seen you a Catholic once, for three minutes!'
'When?'
'In St. Peter's.'
His look, smiling, provocative, drove home his shaft.
'I saw you overthrown. The great tradition swept upon you. You bowed to
it,--you felt!'
She made no reply. Far within she was conscious of a kind of tremor. The
personality beside her seemed to be laying an intimate, encroaching hand
upon her own, and her maidenliness shrank before it.
She threw herself hastily upon other subjects. Presently, he found to his
surprise that she was speaking to him of his book.
'It would be so sad if it were not finished,' she said timidly. 'Mrs.
Burgoyne would feel it so.'
His expression changed.
'You think Mrs. Burgoyne cares about it so much?'
'But she worked so hard for it!'--cried Lucy, indignant with something in
his manner, though she could not have defined what. Her mind, indeed, was
full of vague and generous misgivings on the subject of Mrs. Burgoyne.
First she had been angry with Mr. Manisty for what had seemed to her
neglect and ingratitude. Now she was somehow dissatisfied with herself too.
'She worked too hard,' said Manisty gravely. 'It is a good thing the
pressure has been taken off. Have you found out yet, Miss Foster, what a
remarkable woman my cousin is?'
He turned to her with a sharp look of inquiry.
'I admire her all day long,' cried Lucy, warmly.
'That's right,' said Manisty slowly--'that's right. Do you know her
history?'
'Mr. Brooklyn told me--
'He doesn't know very much,--shall I tell it you?'
'If you ought--if Mrs. Burgoyne would like it,' said Lucy, hesitating.
There was a chivalrous feeling in the girl's mind that she was too new an
acquaintance, that she had no right to the secrets of this friendship, and
Manisty no right to speak of them.
But Manisty took no notice. With half-shut eyes, like a man looking into
the past, he began to describe his cousin; first as a girl in her father's
home; then in her married life, silent, unhappy, gentle; afterwards in
the dumb years of her irreparable grief; and finally in this last phase
of intellectual and spiritual energy, which had been such an amazement to
himself, which had first revealed to him indeed the true Eleanor.
He spoke slowly, with a singular and scrupulous choice of words; building
up the image of Mrs. Burgoyne's life and mind with an insight and a
delicacy which presently held his listener spell-bound. Several times Lucy
felt herself flooded with hot colour.
'Does he guess so much about--about us all?' she asked herself with a
secret excitement.
Suddenly Manisty said, with an entire change of tone, springing to his feet
as he did so:
'In short, Miss Foster--my cousin Eleanor is one of the ablest and dearest
of women--and she and I have been completely wasting each other's time this
winter!'
Lucy stared at him in astonishment.
'Shall I tell you why? We have been too kind to each other!'
He waited, studying his companion's face with a hard, whimsical look.
'Eleanor gave my book too much sympathy. It wanted brutality. I have
worn her out--and my book is in a mess. The best thing I could do for us
both--was to cut it short.'
Lucy was uncomfortably silent.
'There's no use in talking about it,' Manisty went on, impatiently, with
a shake of his great shoulders; 'I am not meant to work in partnership. A
word of blame depresses me; and I am made a fool by praise. It was all a
mistake. If only Eleanor could understand--that it's my own fault--and I
know it's my own fault--and not think me unjust and unkind. Miss Foster--'
Lucy looked up. In the glance she encountered, the vigorous and wilful
personality beside her seemed to bring all its force to bear upon herself--
'--if Eleanor talks to you--
'She never does!' cried Lucy.
'She might,' said Manisty, coolly. 'She might. If she does, persuade her of
my admiration, my gratitude! Tell her that I know very well that I am not
worth her help. Her inspiration would have led any other man to success. It
only failed because I was I. I hate to seem to discourage and disavow what
I once accepted so eagerly.--But a man must find out his own mistakes--and
thrash his own blunders. She was too kind to thrash them--so I have
appointed Neal to the office. Do you understand?'
She rose, full of wavering approvals and disapprovals, seized by him,--and
feeling with Mrs. Burgoyne.
'I understand only a very little,' she said, lifting her clear eyes to
his; 'except that I never saw anyone I--I cared for so much, in so short a
time--as Mrs. Burgoyne.'
'Ah! care for her!' he said, in another voice, with another aspect. 'Go on
caring for her! She needs it.'
They walked on together towards the villa, for Alfredo was on the balcony
signalling to them that the twelve o'clock breakfast was ready.
On the way Manisty turned upon her.
'Now, you are to be obedient! You are not to pay any attention to my
sister. She is not a happy person--but you are not to be sorry for her. You
can't understand her; and I beg you will not try. You are, please, to leave
her alone. Can I trust you?'
'Hadn't you better send me into Rome?' said Lucy, laughing and embarrassed.
'I always intended to do so,' said Manisty shortly.
* * * * *
Towards five o'clock, Alice Manisty arrived, accompanied by an elderly
maid. Lucy, before she escaped into the garden, was aware of a very
tall woman, possessing a harshly handsome face, black eyes, and a thin
long-limbed frame. These black eyes, uneasily bright, searched the salon,
as she entered it, only to fasten, with a kind of grip, in which there
was no joy, upon her brother. Lucy saw her kiss him with a cold
perfunctoriness, bowed herself, as her name was nervously pronounced
by Miss Manisty, and then withdrew. Mrs. Burgoyne was in Rome for the
afternoon.
But at dinner they all met, and Lucy could satisfy some of the curiosity
that burnt in her very feminine mind. Alice Manisty was dressed in black
lace and satin, and carried herself with stateliness. Her hair, black like
her brother's, though with a fine line of grey here and there, was of
enormous abundance, and she wore it heavily coiled round her head in a mode
which gave particular relief to the fire and restlessness of the eyes which
flashed beneath it. Beside her, Eleanor Burgoyne, though she too was rather
tall than short, suffered a curious eclipse. The plaintive distinction that
made the charm of Eleanor's expression and movements seemed for the moment
to mean and say nothing, beside the tragic splendour of Alice Manisty.
The dinner was not agreeable. Manisty was clearly ill at ease, and seething
with inward annoyance; Miss Manisty had the air of a frightened mouse;
Alice Manisty talked not at all, and ate nothing except some poached
eggs that she had apparently ordered for herself before dinner; and
Eleanor--chattering of her afternoon in Rome--had to carry through the
business as best she could, with occasional help from Lucy.
From the first it was unpleasantly evident to Manisty that his sister took
notice of Miss Foster. Almost her only words at table were addressed to the
girl sitting opposite to her; and her roving eyes returned again and again
to Lucy's fresh young face and quiet brow.
After dinner Manisty followed the ladies into the salon, and asked his
aunt's leave to smoke his cigarette with them.
Lucy wondered what had passed between him and his sister before dinner. He
was polite to her; and yet she fancied that their relations were already
strained.
Presently, as Lucy was busy with some embroidery on one of the settees
against the wall of the salon, she was conscious of Alice Manisty's
approach. The new-comer sat down beside her, bent over her work, asked
her a few low, deep-voiced questions. Those strange eyes fastened upon
her,--stared at her indeed.
But instantly Manisty was there, cigarette in hand, standing between them.
He distracted his sister's attention, and at the same moment Eleanor called
to Lucy from the piano.
'Won't you turn over for me? I can't play them by heart.'
Lucy wondered at the scantiness of Mrs. Burgoyne's musical memory that
night. She, who could play by the hour without note, on most occasions,
showed herself, on this, tied and bound to the printed page; and that page
must be turned for her by Lucy, and Lucy only.
Meanwhile Manisty sat beside his sister smoking, throwing first the left
leg over the right, then the right leg over the left, and making attempts
at conversation with her, that Eleanor positively must not see, lest music
and decorum both break down in a wreck of nervous laughter.
Alice Manisty scarcely responded; she sat motionless, her wild black head
bent like that of a Maenad at watch, her gaze fixed, her long thin hands
grasping the arm of her chair with unconscious force.
'What is she thinking of?' thought Lucy once, with a momentary shiver.
'Herself?'
When bedtime came, Manisty gave the ladies their candles. As he bade
good-night to Lucy, he said in her ear: 'You said you wished to see the
Lateran Museum. My aunt will send Benson with you to-morrow.'
His tone did not ask whether she wished for the arrangement, but simply
imposed it.
Then, as Eleanor approached him, he raised his shoulders with a gesture
that only she saw, and led her a few steps apart in the dimly lighted
ante-room, where the candles were placed.
'She wants the most impossible things, my dear lady,' he said in low-voiced
despair--'things I can no more do than fly over the moon!'
'Edward!'--said his sister from the open door of the salon--'I should like
some further conversation with you before I go to bed.'
Manisty with the worst grace in the world saw his aunt and Eleanor to their
rooms, and then went back to surrender himself to Alice. He was a man who
took family relations hardly, impatient of the slightest bond that was not
of his own choosing. Yet it was Eleanor's judgment that, considering his
temperament, he had not been a bad brother to this wild sister. He had
spent both heart and thought upon her case; and at the root of his relation
to her, a deep and painful pity was easily to be divined.
Vast as the villa-apartment was, the rooms were all on one floor, and the
doors fitted badly. Lucy's sleep was haunted for long by a distant sound of
voices, generally low and restrained, but at moments rising and sharpening
as though their owners forgot the hour and the night. In the morning it
seemed to her that she had been last conscious of a burst of weeping, far
distant--then of a sudden silence ...
* * * * *
The following day, Lucy in Benson's charge paid her duty to the Sophocles
of the Lateran Museum, and, armed with certain books lent her by Manisty,
went wandering among the art and inscriptions of Christian Rome. She came
home, inexplicably tired, through a glorious Campagna, splashed with
poppies, embroidered with marigold and vetch; she climbed the Alban slopes
from the heat below, and rejoiced in the keener air of the hills, and the
freshness of the _ponente_, as she drove from the station to the villa.
Mrs. Burgoyne was leaning over the balcony looking out for her. Lucy ran
up to her, astonished at her own eagerness of foot, at the breath of home
which seemed to issue from the great sun-beaten house.
Eleanor looked pale and tired, but she took the girl's hand kindly.
'Oh! you must keep all your gossip for dinner!' said Eleanor, as they
greeted. 'It will help us through. It has been rather a hard day.'
Lucy's face showed her sympathy, and the question she did not like to put
into words.
'Oh, it has been a wrestle all day,' said Eleanor wearily. 'She wants Mr.
Manisty to do certain things with her property, that as her trustee he
_cannot_ do. She has the maddest ideas--she _is_ mad. And when she is
crossed, she is terrible.'
At dinner Lucy did her best to lighten the atmosphere, being indeed most
truly sorry for her poor friends and their dilemma. But her pleasant
girlish talk seemed to float above an abyss of trouble and discomfort,
which threatened constantly to swallow it up.
Alice Manisty indeed responded. She threw off her silence, and talked
of Rome, exclusively to Lucy and with Lucy, showing in her talk a great
deal of knowledge and a great deal of fine taste, mingled with occasional
violence and extravagance. Her eyes indeed were wilder than ever. They
shone with a miserable intensity, that became a positive glare once or
twice, when Manisty addressed her. Her whole aspect breathed a tragic
determination, crossed with an anger she was hardly able to restrain. Lucy
noticed that she never spoke to or answered her brother if she could help
it.
After dinner Lucy found herself the object of various embarrassing
overtures on the part of the new-comer. But on each occasion Manisty
interposed at first adroitly, then roughly. On the last occasion Alice
Manisty sprang to her feet, went to the side table where the candles
were placed, disappeared and did not return. Manisty, his aunt, and Mrs.
Burgoyne, drew together in a corner of the salon discussing the events of
the day in low anxious voices. Lucy thought herself in the way, and went to
bed.
* * * * *
After some hours of sleep, Lucy awoke, conscious of movement somewhere near
her. With the advent of the hot weather she had been moved to a room on the
eastern side of the villa, in one of two small wings jutting out from the
facade. She had locked her door, but the side window of her room, which
overlooked the balcony towards the lake, was open, and slight sounds came
from the balcony. Springing up she crept softly towards the window. The
wooden shutters had been drawn forward, but both they and the casements
were ajar.
Through the chink she saw a strange sight. On the step leading from the
house to the terrace of the balcony sat Alice Manisty. Her head was
thrown back against the wall of the villa, and her hands were clasped upon
her knee. Her marvellous hair fell round her shoulders, and a strange
illumination, in which a first gleam of dawn mingled with the moonlight,
struck upon the white face and white hands emerging from the darkness of
her hair and of her loose black dress.
Was she asleep? Lucy, holding back so as not to be seen, peered with held
breath. No!--the large eyes were wide open, though it seemed to Lucy that
they saw nothing. Minute after minute passed. The figure on the terrace
sat motionless. There were two statues on either side of her, a pair of
battered round-limbed nymphs, glorified by the moonlight into a grace and
poetry not theirs by day. They seemed to be looking down upon the woman at
their feet in a soft bewilderment--wondering at a creature so little like
themselves; while from the terrace came up the scent of the garden, heavy
with roses and bedrenched with dew.
Suddenly it seemed to Lucy as though that white face, those intolerable
eyes, awoke--turned towards herself, penetrated her room, pursued her. The
figure moved, and there was a low sound of words. Her window was in truth
inaccessible from the terrace; but in a panic fear, Lucy threw herself
on the casement and the shutters, closed them and drew the bolts; as
noiselessly as: she could, still not without some noise. Then hurrying to
her bed, she threw herself upon it, panting--in a terror she could neither
explain nor compose.
CHAPTER X
'My dear lady--there's nothing to be done with her whatever. She will not
yield one inch--and I cannot. But one thing at last is clear to me. The
mischief has made progress--I fear, great progress.'
Manisty had drawn his cousin into the garden, and they were pacing the
avenue. With his last words he turned upon her a grave significant look.
The cause of Alice Manisty's visit, indeed, had turned out to be precisely
what Manisty supposed. The sister had come to Marinata in order to persuade
her brother, as one of the trustees of her property, to co-operate with
her in bestowing some of her money on the French artist, Monsieur Octave
Vacherot, to whom, as she calmly avowed, her affections were indissolubly
attached, though she did not ever intend to marry him, nor indeed to
see much of him in the future. 'I shall never do him the disservice of
becoming his wife'--she announced, with her melancholy eyes full upon her
brother--'But money is of no use to me. He is young and can employ it.'
Manisty inquired whether the gentleman in question was aware of what she
proposed. Alice replied that if money were finally settled upon him he
would accept it; whereas his pride did not allow him to receive perpetual
small sums at her hands. 'But if I settle a definite sum upon him, he will
take it as an endowment of his genius. It would be giving to the public,
not to him. His great ideas would get their chance.'
Manisty, in his way as excitable as she, had evidently found it difficult
to restrain himself when M. Octave Vacherot's views as to his own value
were thus explained to him. Nevertheless he seemed to have shown on the
whole a creditable patience, to have argued with his sister, to have even
offered her money of his own, for the temporary supply of M. Vacherot's
necessities. But all to no avail; and in the end it had come of course
to his flatly refusing any help of his to such a scheme, and without it
the scheme fell. For their father had been perfectly well aware of his
daughter's eccentricities, and had placed her portion, by his will, in the
hands of two trustees, of whom her brother was one, without whose consent
she could not touch the capital.
'It always seemed to her a monstrous arrangement,' said Manisty, 'and I can
see now it galls her to the quick to have to apply to me, in this way. I
don't wonder--but I can't help it. The duty's there--worse luck!--and I've
got to face it, for my father's sake. Besides, if I were to consent, the
other fellow--an old cousin of ours--would never dream of doing it. So
what's the good? All the same, it makes me desperately anxious, to see the
effect that this opposition of mine produces upon her.'
'I saw yesterday that she must have been crying in the night'--said
Eleanor.
Her words evoked some emotion in Manisty.
'She cried in my presence, and I believe she cried most of the night
afterwards,'--he said in hasty pain. 'That beast Vacherot!'
'Why doesn't she marry him?'
'For the noblest of reasons!--She knows that her brain is clouded, and she
won't let him run the risk.'
Their eyes met in a quick sympathy. She saw that his poetic susceptibility,
the romantic and dramatic elements in him were all alive to his sister's
case. How critically, sharply perceptive he was--or could be--with regard
apparently to everybody in the world--save one! Often--as they talked--her
heart stirred in this way, far out of sight, like a fluttering and wounded
thing.
'It is the strangest madness'--said Manisty presently--'Many people would
say it was only extravagance of imagination unless they knew--what I know.
She told me last night, that she was not one person but two--and the other
self was a brother!--not the least like me--who constantly told her what to
do, and what not to do. She calls him quite calmly "my brother John"--"my
heavenly brother." She says that he often does strange things, things that
she does not understand; but that he tells her the most wonderful secrets;
and that he is a greater poet than any now living. She says that the first
time she perceived him as separate from herself was one day in Venice, when
a friend came for her to the hotel. She went out with the friend, or seemed
to go out with her--and then suddenly she perceived that she was lying
on her bed, and that the other Alice--had been John! He looks just like
herself--but for the eyes. The weirdness of her look as she tells these
things! But she expresses herself often with an extraordinary poetry. I
envy her the words, and the phrases!--It seemed to me once or twice, that
she had all sorts of things I wished to have. If one could only be a little
mad--one might write good books!'
He turned upon his companion, with a wild brilliance in his own blue eyes,
that, taken together with the subject of their conversation and his many
points of physical likeness to his sister, sent an uncomfortable thrill
through Eleanor. Nevertheless, as she knew well, at the very bottom of
Manisty's being, there lay a remarkable fund of ordinary capacity, an
invincible sanity in short, which had always so far rescued him in the long
run from that element which was extravagance in him, and madness in his
sister.
And certainly nothing could have been more reasonable, strong and kind,
than his further talk about his sister. He confided to his cousin that his
whole opinion of Alice's state had changed; that certain symptoms for which
he had been warned to be on the watch had in his judgment appeared; that he
had accordingly written to a specialist in Rome, asking him to come and see
Alice, without warning, on the following day; and that he hoped to be able
to persuade her without too much conflict to accept medical watching and
treatment for a time.
'I feel that it is plotting against her,' he said, not without feeling,
'but it has gone too far--she is not safe for herself or others. One of the
most anxious things is this night-wandering, which has taken possession of
her. Did you hear her last night?'
'Last night?'--said Eleanor, startled.
'I had been warned by Dalgetty,' said Manisty. 'And between three and four
I thought I heard sounds somewhere in the direction of the Albano balcony.
So I crept out through the salon into the library. And there, sitting on
the step of the glass passage--was Alice--looking as though she were turned
to marble--and staring at Miss Foster's room! To my infinite relief I saw
that Miss Foster's shutters and windows were fast closed. But I felt I
could not leave Alice there. I made a little noise in the library to warn
her, and then I came out upon her. She showed no surprise--nor did I. I
asked her to come and look at the sunrise striking over the Campagna.
She made no objection, and I took her through my room and the salon to
the salon balcony. The sight was marvellous; and first, it gave her
pleasure--she said a few things about it with her old grace and power.
Then--in a minute--a veil seemed to fall over her eyes. The possessed,
miserable look came back. She remembered that she hated me--that I had
thwarted her. Yet I was able to persuade her to go back to her room. I
promised that we would have more talk to-day. And when she had safely shut
her own door--you know that tiled ante-room, that leads to her room?--I
found the key of it, and locked it safely from outside. That's one access
to her. The other is through the room in which Dalgetty was sleeping. I'd
have given a good deal to warn Dalgetty, but I dared not risk it. She had
not heard Alice go out by the ante-room, but she told me the other day the
smallest sound in her own room woke her. So I felt tolerably safe, and I
went to bed.--Eleanor! do you think that child saw or knew anything of it?'
'Lucy Foster? I noticed nothing.'
The name, even on her own lips, struck Eleanor's aching sense like a
sound of fate. It seemed now as if through every conversation she foresaw
it--that all talk led up to it.
'She looks unlike herself still, this morning--don't you think?' said
Manisty, in disquiet.
'Very possibly she got some chill at Nemi--some slight poison--which will
pass off.'
'Well, now'--he said, after a pause--'how shall we get through the day? I
shall have another scene with Alice, I suppose. I don't see how it is to
be avoided. Meanwhile--will you keep Miss Foster here?'--he pointed to the
garden--'out of the way?'
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