Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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Was it likely that he would remember?--that he would track them? Hardly. He
would surely think that in this heat they would go northward. He would not
dream of looking for them in Italy.

She too was thinking of nothing--nothing!--but the last scenes at the villa
and in Rome, as the carriage moved along. The phrases of her letter to
Manisty ran through her mind. Had they made him her lasting enemy? The
thought was like a wound draining blood and strength. But in her present
state of jealous passion it was more tolerable than that other thought
which was its alternative--the thought of Lucy surrendered, Lucy in her
place.

'Lucy Foster is with me,' she had written. 'We wish to be together for a
while before she goes back to America. And that we may be quite alone, we
prefer to give no address for a few weeks. I have written to Papa to say
that I am going away for a time with a friend, to rest and recruit. You and
Aunt Pattie could easily arrange that there should be no talk and no gossip
about the matter. I hope and think you will. Of course if we are in any
strait or difficulty we shall communicate at once with our friends.'

How had he received it? Sometimes she thought of his anger and
disappointment with terror, sometimes with a vindictive excitement that
poisoned all her being. Gentleness turned to hate and violence,--was it of
that in truth, and not of that heart mischief to which doctors gave long
names, that Eleanor Burgoyne was dying?

* * * * *

They had turned into a wide open space crossed by a few wire fences at vast
intervals. The land was mostly rough pasture, or mere sandy rock and scrub.
In the glowing west, towards which they journeyed, rose far purple peaks
peering over the edge of the great tableland. To the east and south vast
woods closed in the horizon.

The carriage left the main road and entered an ill-defined track leading
apparently through private property.

'Ah! I remember!' cried Eleanor, starting up. 'There is the _palazzo_--and
the village.'

In front of them, indeed, rose an old villa of the Renaissance, with its
long flat roofs, its fine _loggia_, and terraced vineyards. A rude village
of grey stone, part, it seemed, of the tufa rocks from which it sprang,
pressed round the villa, invaded its olive-gardens, crept up to its very
walls. Meanwhile the earth grew kinder and more fertile. The vines and figs
stood thick again among the green corn and flowering lucerne. Peasants
streaming home from work, the men on donkeys, the women carrying their
babies, met the carriage and stopped to stare after it, and talk.

Suddenly from the ditches of the roadside sprang up two martial figures.

'Carabinieri!' cried Lucy in delight.

She had made friends with several members of this fine corps on the closely
guarded roads about the Alban lake, and to see them here gave her a sense
of protection.

Bending over the side of the carriage, she nodded to the two handsome
brown-skinned fellows, who smiled back at her.

'How far,' she said, 'to Santa Trinita?'

'_Un miglio grasso_ (a good mile), Signorina. _E tutto_. But you are late.
They expected you half an hour ago.'

The driver took this for reproach, and with a shrill burst of defence
pointed to his smoking horses. The Carabinieri laughed, and diving into the
field, one on either side, they kept up with the carriage as it neared the
village.

'Why, it is like coming home!' said Lucy, wondering. And indeed they were
now surrounded by the whole village population, just returned from the
fields--pointing, chattering, laughing, shouting friendly directions to the
driver. 'Santa Trinita!' 'Ecco!--Santa Trinita!' sounded on all sides, amid
a forest of gesticulating hands.

'How could they know?' said Eleanor, looking at the small crowd with
startled eyes. Lucy spoke a word to the young man on the box.

'They knew, he says, as soon as the carriage was ordered yesterday. Look!
there are the telegraph wires! The whole countryside knows! They are
greatly excited by the coming of _forestieri_--especially at this time of
year.'

'Oh! we can't stay!' said Eleanor with a little moan, wringing her hands.

'It's only the country people,' said Lucy tenderly, taking one of the hands
in hers. 'Did you see the Contessa when you were here before?'

And she glanced up at the great yellow mass of the _palazzo_ towering above
the little town, the sunset light flaming on its long western face.

'No. She was away. And the _fattore_ who took us in left in January. There
is a new man.'

'Then it's quite safe!' said Lucy in French. And her kind deep eyes looked
steadily into Eleanor's, as though mutely cheering and supporting her.

Eleanor unconsciously pressed her hand upon her breast. She was looking
round her in a sudden anguish of memory. For, now they were through the
village, they were descending--they were in the woods. Ah! the white walls
of the convent--the vacant windows in its ruined end--and at the gate
of the rough farmyard that surrounded it the stalwart _capoccia_, the
grinning, harsh-featured wife that she remembered.

She stepped feebly down upon the dusty road. When her feet last pressed it,
Manisty was beside her, and the renewing force of love and joy was filling
all the sources of her being.

CHAPTER XVI

'Can you bear it? Can you be comfortable?' said Lucy, in some dismay.

They were in one of the four or five bare rooms that had been given up to
them. A bed with a straw palliasse, one or two broken chairs, and bits of
worm-eaten furniture filled what had formerly been one of a row of cells
running along an upper corridor. The floor was of brick and very dirty.
Against the wall a tattered canvas, a daub of St. Laurence and his
gridiron, still recalled the former uses of the room.

They had given orders for a few comforts to be sent out from Orvieto, but
the cart conveying them had not yet arrived. Meanwhile Marie was crying in
the next room, and the _contadina_ was looking on astonished and a little
sulky. The people who came from Orvieto never complained. What was wrong
with the ladies?

Eleanor looked round her with a faint smile.

'It doesn't matter,' she said under her breath. Then she looked at Lucy.

'What care we take of you! How well we look after you!'

And she dropped her head on her hands in a fit of hysterical laughter--very
near to sobs.

'I!' cried Lucy. 'As if I couldn't sleep anywhere, and eat anything! But
you--that's another business. When the cart comes, we can fix you up a
little better--but to-night!'

She looked, frowning, round the empty room.

'There is nothing to do anything with--or I'd set to work right away.'

'Ecco, Signora!' said the farmer's wife. She carried triumphantly in her
hands a shaky carpet-chair, the only article of luxury apparently that the
convent provided.

Eleanor thanked her, and the woman stood with her hands on her hips,
surveying them. She frowned, but only because she was thinking hard how
she could somehow propitiate these strange beings, so well provided, as it
seemed, with superfluous _lire_.

'Ah!' she cried suddenly; 'but the ladies have not seen our _bella
vista_!--our _loggia_! Santa Madonna! but I have lost my senses! Signorina!
_venga--venga lei_.'

And beckoning to Lucy she pulled open a door that had remained unnoticed in
the corner of the room.

Lucy and Eleanor followed.

Even Eleanor joined her cry of delight to Lucy's.

'Ecco!' said the _massaja_ proudly, as though the whole landscape were her
chattel,--'Monte Amiata! Selvapendente--the Paglia--does the Signora see
the bridge down there?--_veda lei_, under Selvapendente? Those forests on
the mountain there--they belong all to the Casa Guerrini--_tutto, tutto_!
as far as the Signorina can see! And that little house there, on the
hill--that _casa di caccia_--that was poor Don Emilio's, that was killed in
the war.'

And she chattered on, in a _patois_ not always intelligible, even to
Eleanor's trained ear, about the widowed Contessa, her daughter, and her
son; about the new roads that Don Emilio had made through the woods; of the
repairs and rebuilding at the Villa Guerrini--all stopped since his death;
of the Sindaco of Selvapendente, who often came up to Torre Amiata for the
summer; of the nuns in the new convent just built there under the hill, and
their _fattore_,--whose son was with Don Emilio after he was wounded, when
the poor young man implored his own men to shoot him and put him out of his
pain--who had stayed with him till he died, and had brought his watch and
pocket-book back to the Contessa--

'Is the Contessa here?' said Eleanor, looking at the woman with the
strained and startled air that was becoming habitual to her, as though each
morsel of passing news only served somehow to make life's burden heavier.

But certainly the Contessa was here! She and Donna Teresa were always at
the Villa. Once they used to go to Rome and Florence part of the year, but
now--no more!

A sudden uproar arose from below--of crying children and barking dogs. The
woman threw up her hands. 'What are they doing to me with the baby?' she
cried, and disappeared.

Lucy went back to fetch the carpet-chair. She caught up also a couple of
Florentine silk blankets that were among their wraps. She laid them on
the bricks of the _loggia_, found a rickety table in Eleanor's room, her
travelling-bag, and a shawl.

'Don't take such trouble about me!' said Eleanor, almost piteously, as Lucy
established her comfortably in the chair, with a shawl over her knees and a
book or two beside her.

Lucy with a soft little laugh stooped and kissed her.

'Now I must go and dry Marie's tears. Then I shall dive downstairs and
discover the kitchen. They say they've got a cook, and the dinner'll soon
be ready. Isn't that lovely? And I'm sure the cart'll be here directly.
It's the most beautiful place I ever saw in my life!' said Lucy, clasping
her hands a moment in a gesture familiar to her, and turning towards the
great prospect of mountain, wood, and river. 'And it's so strange--so
strange! It's like another Italy! Why, these woods--they might be just in a
part of Maine I know. You can't see a vineyard--not one. And the air--isn't
it fresh? Isn't it lovely? Wouldn't you guess you were three thousand feet
up? I just know this--we're going to make you comfortable. I'm going right
down now to send that cart back to Orvieto for a lot of things. And you're
going to get ever, ever so much better, aren't you? Say you will!'

The girl fell on her knees beside Eleanor, and took the other's thin
hands into her own. Her face, thrown back, had lost its gaiety; her mouth
quivered.

Eleanor met the girl's tender movement dry-eyed. For the hundredth time
that day she asked herself the feverish, torturing question--'Does she love
him?'

'Of course I shall get better,' she said lightly, stroking the girl's hair;
'or if not--what matter?'

Lucy shook her head.

'You must get better,' she said in a low, determined voice. 'And it must
all come right.'

Eleanor was silent. In her own heart she knew more finally, more
irrevocably every hour that for her it would never come right. But how say
to Lucy that her whole being hung now--not on any hope for herself, but on
the fierce resolve that there should be none for Manisty?

Lucy gave a long sigh, rose to her feet, and went off to household duties.

Eleanor was left alone. Her eyes, bright with fever, fixed themselves,
unseeing, on the sunset sky, and the blue, unfamiliar peaks beneath it.

Cheerful sounds of rioting children and loud-voiced housewives came from
below. Presently there was a distant sound of wheels, and the _carro_ from
Orvieto appeared, escorted by the whole village, who watched its unpacking
with copious comment on each article, and a perpetual scuffling for places
in the front line of observation. Even the _padre parroco_ and the doctor
paused as they passed along the road, and Lucy as she flitted about caught
sight of the smiling young priest, in his flat broad-brimmed hat and caped
soutane, side by side with the meditative and gloomy countenance of the
doctor, who stood with his legs apart, smoking like a chimney.

But Lucy had no time to watch the crowd. She was directing the men with
the _carro_ where to place the cooking-stove that had been brought from
Orvieto, in the dark and half-ruinous kitchen on the lower floor of the
convent; marvelling the while at the _risotto_ and the _pollo_ that the
local artist, their new cook, the sister of the farmer's wife, was engaged
in producing, out of apparently nothing in the way either of fire or tools.
She was conferring with Cecco the little manservant, who, with less polish
than Alfredo, but with a like good-will, was running hither and thither,
intent only on pleasing his ladies, and on somehow finding enough spoons
and forks to lay a dinner-table with; or she was alternately comforting and
laughing at Marie, who was for the moment convinced that Italy was pure and
simple Hades, and Torre Amiata the lowest gulf thereof.

Thus--under the soft, fresh evening--the whole forlorn and ruinous building
was once more alive with noise and gaiety, with the tread of men carrying
packages, with the fun of skirmishing children, with the cries of the cook
and Cecco, with Lucy's stumbling yet sweet Italian.

Eleanor only was alone--but how terribly alone!

She sat where Lucy had left her--motionless--her hands hanging listlessly.
She had been always thin, but in the last few weeks she had become a
shadow. Her dress had lost its old perfection, though its carelessness was
still the carelessness of instinctive grace, of a woman who could not throw
on a shawl or a garden-hat without a natural trick of hand, that held even
through despair and grief. The delicacy and emaciation of the face had now
gone far beyond the bounds of beauty. It spoke of disease, and drew the
pity of the passer-by.

Her loneliness grew upon her--penetrated and pursued her. She could not
resign herself to it. She was always struggling with it, beating it away,
as a frightened child might struggle with the wave that overwhelms it on
the beach. A few weeks ago she had been so happy, so rich in friends--the
world had been so warm and kind!

And now it seemed to her that she had no friends; no one to whom she could
turn; no one she wished to see, except this girl--this girl she had known
barely a couple of months--by whom she had been made desolate!

She thought of those winter gatherings in Rome which she had enjoyed with
so keen a pleasure; the women she had liked, who had liked her in return,
to whom her eager wish to love and be loved had made her delightful. But
beneath her outward sweetness she carried a proud and often unsuspected
reserve. She had made a _confidante_ of no one. That her relation to
Manisty was accepted and understood in Rome; that it was regarded as
a romance, with which it was not so much ill-natured as ridiculous to
associate a breath of scandal--a romance which all kind hearts hoped might
end as most of such things should end--all this she knew. She had been
proud of her place beside him, proud of Rome's tacit recognition of her
claim upon him. But she had told her heart to nobody. Her wild scene with
Lucy stood out unique, unparalleled in the story of her life.

And now there was no one she craved to see--not one. With the instinct of
the stricken animal she turned from her kind. Her father? What had he ever
been to her? Aunt Pattie? Her very sympathy and pity made Eleanor thankful
to be parted from her. Other kith and kin? No! Happy, she could have loved
them; miserable, she cared for none of them. Her unlucky marriage had
numbed and silenced her for years. From that frost the waters of life had
been loosened, only to fail now at their very source.

Her whole nature was one wound. At the moment when, standing spell-bound in
the shadow, she had seen Manisty stooping over the unconscious Lucy, and
had heard his tender breathless words, the sword had fallen, dividing the
very roots of being.

And now--strange irony!--the only heart on which she leant, the only hand
to which she clung, were the heart and the hand of Lucy!

'Why, why are we here?' she cried to herself with a sudden change of
position and of anguish.

Was not their flight a mere absurdity?--humiliation for herself, since it
revealed what no woman should reveal--but useless, ridiculous as any check
on Manisty! Would he give up Lucy because she might succeed in hiding
her for a few weeks? Was that passionate will likely to resign itself to
the momentary defeat she had inflicted on it? Supposing she succeeded in
despatching Lucy to America without any further interview between them; are
there no steamers and trains to take impatient lovers to their goal? What
childish folly was the whole proceeding!

And would she even succeed so far? Might he not even now be on their track?
How possible that he should remember this place--its isolation--and her
pleasure in it! She started in her chair. It seemed to her that she already
heard his feet upon the road.

Then her thought rebounded in a fierce triumph, an exultation that shook
the feeble frame. She was secure! She was entrenched, so to speak, in
Lucy's heart. Never would that nature grasp its own joy at the cost of
another's agony. No! no!--she is not in love with him!--the poor hurrying
brain insisted. She has been interested, excited, touched. That, he can
always achieve with any woman, if he pleases. But time and change soon
wear down these first fancies of youth. There is no real congruity between
them--there never, never could be.

But supposing it were not so--supposing Lucy could be reached and affected
by Manisty's pursuit, still Eleanor was safe. She knew well what had been
the effect, what would now be the increasing effect of her weakness and
misery on Lucy's tender heart. By the mere living in Lucy's sight she would
gain her end. From the first she had realised the inmost quality of the
girl's strong and diffident personality. What Manisty feared she counted
on.

Sometimes, just for a moment, as one may lean over the edge of a precipice,
she imagined herself yielding, recalling Manisty, withdrawing her own
claim, and the barrier raised by her own vindictive agony. The mind sped
along the details that might follow--the girl's loyal resistance--Manisty's
ardour--Manisty's fascination--the homage and the seduction, the quarrels
and the impatience with which he would surround her--the scenes in which
Lucy's reserve mingling with her beauty would but evoke on the man's side
all the ingenuity, all the delicacy of which he was capable--and the final
softening of that sweet austerity which hid Lucy's heart of gold.--

No!--Lucy had no passion!--she would tell herself with a feverish, an angry
vehemence. How would she ever bear with Manisty, with the alternate excess
and defect of his temperament?

And suddenly, amid the shadows of the past winter Eleanor would see
herself writing, and Manisty stooping over her,--his hand taking her pen,
his shoulder touching hers. His hand was strong, nervous, restless like
himself. Her romantic imagination that was half natural, half literary,
delighted to trace in it both caprice and power. When it touched her own
slender fingers, it seemed to her they could but just restrain themselves
from nestling into his. She would draw herself back in haste, lest some
involuntary movement should betray her. But not before the lightning
thought had burnt its way through her--'What if one just fell back
against his breast--and all was said--all ventured in a moment!
Afterwards--ecstasy, or despair--what matter!'--

When would Lucy have dared even such a dream? Eleanor's wild jealousy would
secretly revenge itself on the girl's maidenly coldness, on the young
stiffness, Manisty had once mocked at. How incredible that she should have
attracted him!--how, impossible that she should continue to attract him!
All Lucy's immaturities and defects passed through Eleanor's analysing
thought.

For a moment she saw her coldly, odiously, as an enemy might see her.

And then!--quick revulsion--a sudden loathing of herself--a sudden terror
of these new meannesses and bitterness that were invading her, stealing
from her her very self, robbing her of the character that unconsciously
she had loved in herself, as other people loved it--knowing that in deed
and truth she was what others thought her to be, kind, and gentle, and
sweet-natured.

And last of all--poor soul!--an abject tenderness and repentance towards
Lucy, which yet brought no relief, because it never affected for an instant
the fierce tension of will beneath.

A silvery night stole upon the sunset, absorbed, transmuted all the golds
and crimsons of the west into its own dimly shining blue.

Eleanor was in bed; Lucy's clever hands had worked wonders with her room;
and now Eleanor had been giving quick remorseful directions to Marie to
concern herself a little with Miss Foster's comfort and Miss Foster's
luggage.

Lucy escaped from the rooms littered with trunks and clothes. She took
her hat and a light cape, and stole out into the broad passage, on either
side of which opened the long series of small rooms which had once been
Carmelite cells. Only the four or five rooms at the western end, the bare
'apartment' which they occupied, were still whole and water-tight. Half-way
down the passage, as Lucy had already discovered, you came to rooms where
the windows had no glass and the plaster had dropped from the walls, and
the ceilings hung down in great gaps and rags of ruin. There was a bay
window at the eastern end of the passage, which had been lately glazed
for the summer tenants' sake. The rising moon streamed through on the
desolation of the damp-stained walls and floors. And a fresh upland wind
was beginning to blow and whistle through the empty and windowless cells.
Even Lucy shivered a little. It was perhaps not wonderful that the French
maid should be in revolt.

Then she went softly down an old stone staircase to the lower floor. Here
was the same long passage with rooms on either side, but in even worse
condition. At the far end was a glow of light and a hum of voices, coming
from the corner of the building occupied by the _contadino_, and their own
kitchen. But between the heavy front door, that Lucy was about to open,
and the distant light, was an earthen floor full of holes and gaps, and
on either side--caverns of desolation--the old wine and oil stores, the
kitchens and wood cellars of the convent, now black dens avoided by the
cautious, and dark even at midday because of the rough boarding-up of the
windows. There was a stable smell in the passage, and Lucy already knew
that one of the further dens held the _contadino's_ donkey and mule.

'_Can_ we stay here?' she said to herself, half laughing, half doubtful.

Then she lifted the heavy iron bar that closed the old double door, and
stepped out into the courtyard that surrounded the convent, half of which
was below the road as it rapidly descended from the village, and half above
it.

She took a few steps to the right.

Exquisite!

There opened out before her a little cloister, with double shafts carrying
Romanesque arches; and at the back of the court, the chapel, and a tiny
bell-tower. The moon shone down on every line and moulding. Under its
light, stucco and brick turned to ivory and silver. There was an absolute
silence, an absolute purity of air; and over all the magic of beauty and of
night. Lucy thought of the ruined frescoes in the disused chapel, of the
faces of saints and angels looking out into the stillness.

Then she mounted some steps to the road, and turned downwards towards the
forest that crept up round them on all sides.

Ah! was there yet another portion of the convent?--a wing running at right
angles to the main building in which they were established, and containing
some habitable rooms? In the furthest window of all was a light, and a
figure moving across it. A tall black figure--surely a priest? Yes!--as
the form came nearer to the window, seen from the back, Lucy perceived
distinctly the tonsured head and the soutane.

How strange! She had heard nothing from the _massaja_ of any other tenant.
And this tall gaunt figure had nothing in common with the little smiling
_parroco_ she had seen in the crowd.

She moved on, wondering.

Oh, those woods! How they sank, like great resting clouds below her, to the
shining line of the river, and rose again on the further side! They were
oak woods, and spoke strangely to Lucy of the American and English north.
Yet, as she came nearer, the moon shone upon delicate undergrowth of heath
and arbutus, that chid her fancy back to the 'Saturnian land.'

And beyond all, the blue mountains, aetherially light, like dreams on the
horizon; and above all, the radiant serenity of the sky.

Ah! there spoke the nightingales, and that same melancholy note of the
little brown owl which used to haunt the olive grounds of Marinata. Lucy
held her breath. The tears rushed into her eyes--tears of memory, tears of
longing.

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