Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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She raised her hand with a long, painful sigh, and let it drop.

'Don't imagine I blame anyone. You were so fresh and young--it was all so
natural. Yet somehow I never really feared--after the first evening I felt
quite at ease. I found myself drawn to like--to love--you. And what could
you and he have in common? Then on the Nemi day I dared to reproach him--to
appeal to the old times--to show him the depth of my own wound--to make him
explain himself. Oh! but all those words are far, far too strong for what
I did? Who could ever suppose it to their advantage to make a scene with
him--to weary or disgust him? It was only a word--a phrase or two here and
there. But he understood,--and he gave me my answer. Oh! what humiliations
we women can suffer from a sentence--a smile--and show nothing--nothing!'

Her face had begun to burn. She lifted her handkerchief to brush away two
slow tears that had forced their way. Lucy's eyes had been drawn to her
from their hiding-place. The girl's brow was furrowed, her lips parted;
there was a touch of fear--unconscious, yet visible--in her silence.

'It was that day, while you and he were walking about the ruins, that
a flash of light came to me. I suppose I had seen it before. I know I
had been unhappy long before! But as long as one can hide things from
oneself--it seems to make them not true,--as though one's own will still
controlled them. But that day--after our walk--when we came back and found
you on the hill-side! How was it your fault? Yet I could almost have
believed that you had invented the boys and the stone! Certainly he spared
me nothing. He had eyes and ears only for you. After he brought you home
all his thoughts were for you. Nobody else's fatigues and discomforts
mattered anything. And it was the same with Alice. His only terrors
were for you. When he heard that she was coming, he had no alarms for
Aunt Pattie or for me. But you must be shielded--you must be saved from
everything repulsive or shocking. He sat up last night to protect you--and
even in his sleep--he heard you.'

Her voice dropped. Eleanor sat staring before her into the golden shadows
of the room, afraid of what she had said, instinctively waiting for its
effect on Lucy.

And Lucy crouched no longer. She had drawn herself erect.

'Mrs. Burgoyne, is it kind--is it _bearable_--that you should say these
things to me? I have not deserved them! No! no!--I have _not_. What right
have you? I can't protect myself--I can't escape you--but--'

Her voice shook. There was in it a passion of anger, pain, loneliness, and
yet something else--the note of something new-born and transforming.

'What right?' repeated Eleanor, in low tones--tones almost of astonishment.
She turned to her companion. 'The right of hunger--the right of
poverty--the right of one pleading for a last possession!--a last hope!'

Lucy was silenced. The passion of the older woman bore her down, made the
protest of her young modesty seem a mere trifling and impertinence. Eleanor
had slid to her knees. Her face had grown tremulous and sweet. A strange
dignity quivered in the smile that transformed her mouth as she caught the
girl's reluctant hands and drew them against her breast.

'Is it forbidden to cry out when grief--and loss--go beyond a certain
point? No!--I think not. I couldn't struggle with you--or plot against
you--or hate you. Those things are not in my power. I was not made so. But
what forbids mo to come to you and say?--"I have suffered terribly. I had a
dreary home. I married, ignorantly, a man who made me miserable. But when
my boy came, that made up for all. I never grumbled. I never envied other
people after that. It seemed to me I had all I deserved--and so much,
much more than many! Afterwards, when I woke up without him that day in
Switzerland, there was only one thing that made it endurable. I overheard
the Swiss doctor say to my maid--he was a kind old man and very sorry for
me--that my own health was so fragile that I shouldn't live long to pine
for the child. But oh!--what we can bear and not die! I came back to my
father, and for eight years I never slept without crying--without the ghost
of the boy's head against my breast. Again and again I used to wake up in
an ecstasy, feeling it there--feeling the curls across my mouth."' A deep
sob choked her. Lucy, in a madness of pity, struggled to release herself
that she might throw her arms round the kneeling figure. But Eleanor's
grasp only tightened. She hurried on.

'But last year, I began to hope. Everybody thought badly of me; the doctors
spoke very strongly; and even Papa made no objection when Aunt Pattie asked
me to come to Rome. I came to Rome in a strange state--as one looks at
things and loves them, for the last time, before a journey. And then--well,
then it all began!--new life for me, new health. The only happiness--except
for the child--that had ever come my way. I know--oh! I don't deceive
myself--I know it was not the same to Edward as to me. But I don't ask
much. I knew he had given the best of his heart to other women--long
ago--long before this. But the old loves were all dead, and I could
almost be thankful for them. They had kept him for me, I thought,--tamed
and exhausted him, so that I--so colourless and weak compared to those
others!--might just slip into his heart and find the way open--that he
might just take me in, and be glad, for sheer weariness.'

She dropped Lucy's hands, and rising, she locked her own, and began to walk
to and fro in the great room; her head thrown back, her senses turned as it
were inward upon the sights and sounds of memory.

Lucy gazed upon her in bewilderment. Then she too rose and approached Mrs.
Burgoyne.

'When shall I go?' she said simply. 'You must help me to arrange it with
Miss Manisty. It might be to-morrow--it would be easy to find some excuse.'

Eleanor looked at her with a convulsed face.

'That would help nothing,' she said--'nothing! He would guess what I had
done.'

Lucy was silent a moment. Then she broke out piteously.

'What can I do?'

'What claim have I that you should do anything?' said Eleanor despairingly.
'I don't know what I wanted, when I began this scene.'

She moved on, her eyes bent upon the ground--Lucy beside her.

The girl had drawn Mrs. Burgoyne's arm through her own. The tears were on
her check, but she was thinking, and quite calm.

'I believe,' she said at last, in a voice that was almost steady--'that
all your fears are quite, quite vain. Mr. Manisty feels for me nothing
but a little kindness--he could feel nothing else. It will all come
back to you--and it was not I that took it away. But--whatever you tell
me--whatever you ask, I will do.'

With a catching breath Eleanor turned and threw her arm round the girl's
neck.

'Stay,' she breathed--'stay for a few days. Let there be no shock--nothing
to challenge him. Then slip away--don't let him know where--and there is
one woman in the world who will hold you in her inmost heart, who will pray
for you with her secretest, sacredest prayers, as long as you live!'

The two fell into each other's embrace. Lucy, with the maternal tenderness
that should have been Eleanor's, pressed her lips on the hot brow that
lay upon her breast, murmuring words of promise, of consolation, of
self-reproach, feeling her whole being passing out to Eleanor's in a great
tide of passionate will and pity.

CHAPTER XIII

They were all going down to the midday train for Rome.

At last the Ambassador--who had been passing through a series of political
and domestic difficulties, culminating in the mutiny of his Neapolitan
cook--had been able to carry out his whim. A luncheon had been arranged for
the young American girl who had taken his fancy. At the head of his house
for the time being was his married daughter, Lady Mary, who had come from
India for the winter to look after her babies and her father. When she
was told to write the notes for this luncheon, she lifted her eyebrows in
good-humoured astonishment.

'My dear,' said the Ambassador, 'we have been doing our duty for six
months--and I find it pall!'

He had been entertaining Royalties and Cabinet Ministers in heavy
succession, and his daughter understood. There was an element of
insubordination in her father, which she knew better than to provoke.

So the notes were sent.

'Find her some types, my dear,' said the Ambassador;--'and little of
everything.'

Lady Mary did her best. She invited an Italian Marchesa whom she had heard
her father describe as 'the ablest woman in Rome,' while she herself knew
her as one of the most graceful and popular; a young Lombard landowner
formerly in the Navy, now much connected with the Court, whose blue eyes
moreover were among the famous things of the day; a Danish professor and
savant who was also a rich man, collector of flints and torques, and other
matters of importance to primitive man; an artist or two; an American
Monsignore blessed with some Irish wit and much influence; Reggie Brooklyn,
of course, and his sister; Madame Variani, who would prevent Mr. Manisty
from talking too much nonsense; and a dull English Admiral and his wife,
official guests, whom the Ambassador admitted at the last moment with a
groan, as still representing the cold tyranny of duty invading his snatch
of pleasure.

'And Mr. Bellasis, papa?' said Lady Mary, pausing, pen in hand, like
Fortitude prepared for all extremities.

'Heavens, no!' said the Ambassador, hastily. 'I have put him off twice.
This time I should have to read him.'

* * * * *

Manisty accordingly was smoking on the balcony of the villa while he waited
for the ladies to appear. Miss Manisty, who was already suffering from the
heat, was not going. The fact did not improve Manisty's temper. Three is no
company--that we all know.

If Lady Mary, indeed, had only planned this luncheon because she must,
Manisty was going to it under a far more impatient sense of compulsion. It
would be a sickening waste of time. Nothing now had any attraction for him,
nothing seemed to him desirable or important, but that conversation with
Lucy Foster which he was bent on securing, and she apparently was bent on
refusing him.

His mind was full of the sense of injury. During all the day before, while
he had been making the arrangements for his unhappy sister--during the
journeys backward and forward to Rome--a delicious image had filled all
the background of his thoughts, the image of the white Lucy, helpless and
lovely, lying unconscious in his chair.

In the evening he could hardly command his eagerness sufficiently to help
his tired little aunt up the steps of the station, and put her safely in
her cab, before hurrying himself up the steep short-cut to the villa.
Should he find her perhaps on the balcony, conscious of his step on the
path below, weak and shaken, yet ready to lift those pure, tender eyes of
hers to his in a shy gratitude?

He had found no one on the balcony, and the evening of that trying day had
been one of baffling disappointment. Eleanor was in her room, apparently
tired out by the adventures of the night before; and although Miss Foster
appeared at dinner she had withdrawn immediately afterwards, and there had
been no chance for anything but the most perfunctory conversation.

She had said of course all the proper things, so far as they could be said.
'I trust you have been able to make the arrangements you wished. Mrs.
Burgoyne and I have been so sorry! Poor Miss Manisty must have had a very
tiring day--'

Bah!--he could not have believed that a girl could speak so formally, so
trivially to a man who within twenty-four hours had saved her from the
attack of a madwoman. For that was what it came to--plainly. Did she
know what had happened? Had her swoon blotted it all out? If so, was he
justified in revealing it. There was an uneasy feeling that it would be
more chivalrous towards her, and kinder towards his sister, if he left the
veil drawn, seeing that she seemed to wish it so--if he said no more about
her fright, her danger, her faint. But Manisty was not accustomed to let
himself be governed by the scruples of men more precise or more timid. He
wished passionately to force a conversation with her more intimate, more
personal than any one had yet allowed him; to break down at a stroke most
if not all of the barriers that separate acquaintance from--

From what? He stood, cigarette in hand, staring blindly at the garden, lost
in an intense questioning of himself.

Suddenly he found himself back again, as it were, among the feelings and
sensations of Lucy Foster's first Sunday at the villa; his repugnance
towards any notion of marriage; his wonder that anybody should suppose that
he had any immediate purpose of marrying Eleanor Burgoyne; the mood, half
lazy, half scornful, in which he had watched Lucy, in her prim Sunday
dress, walking along the avenue.

What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so
unacquainted with his world?

There was her beauty of course. But he had passed the period when mere
beauty is enough. He was extremely captious and difficult to please where
the ordinary pretty woman was concerned. Her arts left him now quite
unmoved. Of self-conscious vanity and love of effect he had himself enough
and to spare. He could not mend himself; but he was often weary of his own
weaknesses, and detested them in other people. If Lucy Foster had been
merely a beauty, aware of her own value, and bent upon making him aware of
it also, he would probably have been as careless of her now in the eighth
week of their acquaintance as he had been in the first.

But it was a beauty so innocent, so interfused with suggestion, with an
enchanting thrill of prophecy! It was not only what she said and looked,
but what a man might divine in her--the 'white fire' of a nature most pure,
most passionate, that somehow flashed through her maiden life and aspect,
fighting with the restraints imposed upon it, and constantly transforming
what might otherwise have been a cold seemliness into a soft and delicate
majesty.

In short, there was a mystery in Lucy, for all her simplicity;--a mystery
of feeling, which piqued and held the fastidious taste of Manisty. It was
this which made her loveliness tell. Her sincerity was so rich and full,
that it became dramatic,--a thing to watch, for the mere joy of the fresh,
unfolding spectacle. She was quite unconscious of this significance of
hers. Rather she was clearly and always conscious of weakness, ignorance,
inexperience. And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the
rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from
the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely
attractive to Manisty.

In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently.
Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a
time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things
inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment. Manisty
disliked and had thrown aside the role of country gentleman; because, in
truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set
himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the
probable boredoms of it worth while.

But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he
began to think with a new tolerance of the English _cadre_ and the English
life. He remembered all those illustrious or comely husbands and wives,
his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house.
For the first time it thrilled him to imagine a new mistress of the
house--young, graceful, noble--moving about below them. And even--for the
first time--there gleamed from out the future the dim features of a son,
and he did not recoil. He caressed the whole dream with a new and strange
complacency. What if after all the beaten roads are best?

To the old paths, my soul!

Then he paused, in a sudden chill of realisation. His thoughts might rove
as they please. But Lucy Foster had given them little warrant. To all her
growing spell upon him, there was added indeed the charm of difficulty
foreseen, and delighted in. He was perfectly aware that he puzzled and
attracted her. And he was perfectly aware also of his own power with women,
often cynically aware of it. But he could not flatter himself that so far
he had any hold over the senses or the heart of Lucy Foster. He thought
of her eager praise of his Palestine letters--of the Nemi tale. She was
franker, more enthusiastic than an English girl would have been--and at the
same time more remote, infinitely more incalculable!

His mind filled with a delicious mingling of desire and doubt. He foresaw
the sweet approach of new emotions,--of spells to make 'the colours freshen
on this threadbare world.' All his life he had been an epicurean, in search
of pleasures beyond the ken of the crowd. It was pleasure of this kind that
beckoned to him now,--in the wooing, the conquering, the developing of
Lucy.

A voice struck on his ear. It was Eleanor calling to Lucy from the salon.

Ah!--Eleanor? A rush of feeling--half generous, half audacious--came upon
him. He knew that he had given her pain at Nemi. He had been a brute, an
ungrateful brute! Women like Eleanor have very exalted and sensitive ideals
of friendship. He understood that he had pulled down Eleanor's ideal, that
he had wounded her sorely. What did she expect of him? Not any of the
things which the ignorant or vulgar bystander expected of him--that he
was certain. But still her claim had wearied him; and he had brushed it
aside. His sulkiness about the book had been odious, indefensible. And
yet--perhaps from another point of view--it had not been a bad thing for
either of them. It had broken through habits which had become, surely, an
embarrassment to both.

But now, let him make amends; select fresh ground; and from it rebuild
their friendship. His mind ran forward hazily to some bold confidence or
other, some dramatic appeal to Eleanor for sympathy and help.

The affection between her and Miss Foster seemed to be growing closer. He
thought of it uncomfortably, and with vague plannings of counter-strokes.
It did not suit him--nay, it presented itself somehow as an obstacle in his
path. For he had a half remorseful, half humorous feeling that Eleanor knew
him too well.

* * * * *

'Ah! my dear lady,' said the Ambassador--'how few things in this world one
does to please oneself! This is one of them.'

Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador's
left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers, with a
charming and paternal freedom.

'Have you enjoyed yourself?--Have you lost your heart to Italy?' said her
host, stooping to her. He was amused to see the transformation in her, the
pretty dress, the developed beauty.

'I have been in fairy-land,' said Lucy, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon
him. 'Nothing can ever be like it again.'

'No--because one can never be twenty again,' said the old man, sighing.
'Twenty years hence you will wonder where the magic came from. Never
mind--just now, anyway, the world's your oyster.'

Then he looked at her a little more closely. And it seemed to him that,
though she was handsomer, she was not so happy. He missed some of that
quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before, and there were
some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met
the man--the appointed one?

He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and
stately.

'We must all have our ups and downs,' he said to her presently. 'Let me
just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them.
Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old.'

He stopped and surveyed her. His kind humorous eyes blinked through their
blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling
expectancy.

'_Learn Persian!_' said the old man in an urgent whisper--'and get the
dictionary by heart!'

Lucy still looked--wondering.

'I finished it this morning,' said the Ambassador, in her ear. 'To-morrow I
shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I
over-tire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should
take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary, I should
have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the
evening--or when they worry me from home--I take a column. But generally
half a column's enough--good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of
course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But
that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something
to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy
Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy who's at Oxford, said he
wouldn't be responsible for them--so I had to desist. And I suppose the
mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one
must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden. Now
Mr. Manisty--how is he provided in that way?'

His sudden question took Lucy by surprise, and the quick rise of colour in
the clear cheeks did not escape him.

'Well--I suppose he has his book?' she said, smiling.

'Oh! no use at all! He can do what he likes with his book. But you can't
do what you like with the dictionary. You must take it or leave it. That's
what makes it so reposeful. Now if I were asked, I could soon find some
Persian roots for Mr. Manisty--to be taken every day!'

Lucy glanced across the table. Her eyes fell, and she said in the low full
voice that delighted the old man's ears:

'I suppose you would send him home?'

The Ambassador nodded.

'Tenants, turnips, and Petty Sessions! Persian's pleasanter--but those
would serve.'

He paused a moment, then said seriously, under the cover of a loud buzz of
talk, 'He's wasting his time, dear lady--there's no doubt of that.'

Lucy still looked down, but her attitude changed imperceptibly. 'The
subject interests her!' thought the old man. 'It's a thousand pities,' he
resumed, with the caution, masked by the ease, of the diplomat, 'he came
out here in a fit of pique. He saw false--and as far as I can hear, the
book's a mistake. Yet it was not a bad subject. Italy _is_ just now an
object lesson and a warning. But our friend there could not have taken
it more perversely. He has chosen to attack not the violence of the
Church--but the weakness of the State. And meanwhile--if I may be allowed
to say so--his own position is something of an offence. Religion is too big
a pawn for any man's personal game. Don't you agree? Often I feel inclined
to apply to him the saying about Benjamin Constant and liberty--"Grand
homme devant la religion--_s'il y croyait!_" I compare with him a poor old
persecuted priest I know--Manisty knows too.--Ah! well, I hear the book is
very brilliant--and venomous to a degree. It will be read of course. He has
the power to be read. But it is a blunder--if not a crime. And meanwhile
he is throwing away all his chances. I knew his father. I don't like to
see him beating the air. If you have any influence with him'--the old man
smiled--'send him home! Or Mrs. Burgoyne there. He used to listen to her.'

A great pang gripped Lucy's heart.

'I should think he always took his own way,' she said, with difficulty.
'Mr. Neal sometimes advises him.'

The Ambassador's shrewd glance rested upon her for a moment. Then without
another word he turned away. 'Reggie!' he said, addressing young Brooklyn,
'you seem to be ill-treating Madame Variani. Must I interpose?'

Reggie and his companion, who were in a full tide of 'chaff' and laughter,
turned towards him.

'Sir,' said Brooklyn, 'Madame Variani is attacking my best friend.'

'Many of us find that agreeable,' said the Ambassador.

'Ah! but she makes it so personal,' said Reggie, dallying with his banana.
'She abuses him because he's not married--and calls him a selfish fop.
Now _I'm_ not married--and I object to these wholesale classifications.
Besides, my friend has the most conclusive answer.'

'I wait for it,' said Madame Variani.

Reggie delicately unsheathed his banana.

'Well, some of us once enquired what he meant by it, and he said: "My dear
fellow, I've asked all the beautiful women I know to marry me, and they
won't! Now!--I'd be content with cleanliness and conduct."'

There was a general laugh, in the midst of which Reggie remarked:

'I thought it the most touching situation. But Madame Variani has the heart
of a stone.'

Madame Variani looked down upon him unmoved. She and the charming lad were
fast friends.

'I will wager you he never asked,' she said quietly.

Reggie protested.

'No--he never asked. Englishmen don't ask ladies to marry them any more.'

'Let Madame Variani prove her point,' said the Ambassador, raising one
white hand above the hubbub, while he hollowed the other round his deaf
ear. 'This is a most interesting discussion.'

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