Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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Eleanor shook her head.

'Better not. He wouldn't come. We shall have to tame him like a bird.'

The hours passed on. At last the western sun began to creep round into
the _loggia_. The empty cells on the eastern side were now cool, but
they looked upon the inner cloistered court which was alive with playing
children, and all the farm life. Eleanor shrank both from noise and
spectators. Yet she grew visibly more tired and restless, and Lucy went out
to reconnoitre. She came back recommending a descent into the forest.

So they braved a few yards of sun-scorched road and plunged into a little
right-hand track, which led downward through a thick undergrowth of heath
and arbutus towards what seemed the cool heart of the woods.

Presently they came to a small gate, and beyond appeared a broad, well-kept
path, winding in zig-zags along the forest-covered side of the hill.

'This must be private,' said Eleanor, looking at the gate in some doubt.
'And there you see is the Palazzo Guerrini.'

She pointed. Above them through a gap in the trees showed the great yellow
pile on the edge of the plateau, the forest stretching steeply up to it and
enveloping it from below.

'There is nothing to stop us,' said Lucy. 'They won't turn us out, if it is
theirs. I can't have you go through that sun again.'

And she pressed on, looking for shade and rest.

But soon she stopped, with a little cry, and they both stood looking in
astonishment at the strange and lovely thing upon which they had stumbled
unawares.

'I know!' cried Lucy. 'The woman at the convent tried to tell me--and I
couldn't understand. She said we must see the "Sassetto"--that it was a
wonder--and all the strangers thought so. And it _is_ a wonder! And so
cool!'

Down from the very brow of the hill, in an age before man was born, the
giant force of some primeval convulsion had flung a lava torrent of
molten rock to the bed of the Paglia. And there still was the torrent--a
rock-stream composed of huge blocks of basalt--flowing in one vast steep
fall, a couple of hundred yards wide, through the forest from top to bottom
of the hill.

And very grim and stern would that rock-river have been but for Italy, and
the powers of the Italian soil. But the forest and its lovely undergrowths,
its heaths and creepers, its ferns and periwinkles, its lichen and mosses
had thrown themselves on the frozen lava, had decked and softened its wild
shapes, had reared oaks and pines amid the clefts of basalt, and planted
all the crannies below with lighter, featherier green, till in the dim
forest light all that had once been terror had softened into grace, and
Nature herself had turned her freak to poetry.

And throughout the 'Sassetto' there reigned a peculiar and delicious
coolness--the blended breath of mountain and forest. The smooth path that
Eleanor and Lucy had been following wound in and out among the strange
rock-masses, bearing the signs of having been made at great cost and
difficulty. Soon, also, benches of grey stone began to mark the course of
it at frequent intervals.

'We must live here!' cried Lucy in enchantment. 'Let me spread the shawl
for you--there!--just in front of that glimpse of the river.'

They had turned a corner of the path. Lucy, whose gaze was fixed upon the
blue distance towards Orvieto, heard a hurried word from Eleanor, looked
round, and saw Father Benecke just rising from a seat in front.

A shock ran through her. The priest stood hesitating and miserable before
them, a hot colour suffusing his hollow cheeks. Lucy saw that he was no
longer in clerical dress. He wore a grey alpaca suit, and a hat of fine
Leghorn straw with a broad black ribbon. Both ladies almost feared to speak
to him.

Then Lucy ran forward, her cheeks too a bright red, her eyes wet and
sparkling. 'How do you do, Father Benecke? You won't remember me, but I was
just introduced to you that day at luncheon--don't you remember--on the
Aventine?'

The priest took her offered hand, and looked at her in astonishment.

'Yes--I remember--you were with Miss Manisty.'

'I wish you had asked me to come with you this morning,' cried the girl
suddenly. 'I'd have helped you carry that parcel up the hill. It was too
much for you in the heat.'

Her face expressed the sweetest, most passionate sympathy, the indignant
homage of youth to old age unjustly wounded and forsaken. Eleanor was no
less surprised than Father Benecke. Was this the stiff, the reticent Lucy?

The priest struggled for composure, and smiled as he withdrew his hand.

'You would have found it a long way, Signorina. I tried to get a boy at
Selvapendente, but no one would serve me.'

He paused a moment, then resumed speaking with a sort of passionate
reluctance, his eyes upon the ground.

'I am a suspended priest--and the Bishop of Orvieto has notified the fact
to his clergy. The news was soon known through the whole district. And now
it seems the people hate me. They will do nothing for me. Nay, if they
could, they would willingly do me an injury.'

The flush had died out of the old cheeks. He stood bareheaded before them,
the tonsure showing plainly amid his still thick white locks--the delicate
face and hair, like a study in ivory and silver, thrown out against the
deep shadows of the Sassetto.

'Father, won't you sit down and tell me about it all?' said Eleanor gently.
'You didn't send me away, you know--the other day--at the villa.'

The priest sighed and hesitated. 'I don't know, Madame, why I should
trouble you with my poor story.

'It would not trouble me. Besides, I know so much of it already.'

She pointed to the bench he had just left.

'And I,' said Lucy, 'will go and fetch a book I left in the _loggia_.
Father Benecke, Mrs. Burgoyne is not strong. She has walked more than
enough. Will you kindly make her rest while I am gone?'

She fixed upon him her kind beseeching eyes. The sympathy, the homage of
the two women enveloped the old man. His brow cleared a little.

She sped down the winding path, aglow with anger and pity. The priest's
crushed strength and humiliated age--what a testimony to the power of that
tradition for which Mr. Manisty was working--its unmerciful and tyrannous
power!

Why such a penalty for a 'mildly Liberal' book?--'a fraction of the truth'?
She could hear Manisty's ironic voice on that bygone drive to Nemi. If he
saw his friend now, would he still excuse--defend?--

Her thoughts wrestled with him hotly--then withdrew themselves in haste,
and fled the field.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Father Benecke's reserve had gradually yielded. He gave Eleanor a
long troubled look, and said at last, very simply--

'Madame, you see a man broken hearted--'

He stopped, staring desolately at the ground. Eleanor threw in a few gentle
words and phrases, and presently he again mustered courage to speak:

'You remember, Madame, that my letter was sent to the _Osservatore
Romano_ after a pledge had been given to me that only the bare fact of my
submission, the mere formula that attends the withdrawal of any book that
has been placed upon the Index, should be given to the public. Then my
letter appeared. And suddenly it all became clear to me. I cannot explain
it. It was with me as it was with St. Paul: "Placuit Domino ut revelaret
filium suum in me!" My heart rose up and said: "Thou hast betrayed the
truth"--"_Tradidisti Sanctum et Justum!_" After I left you that day I wrote
withdrawing my letter and my submission. And I sent a copy to one of the
Liberal papers. Then my heart smote me. One of the Cardinals of the Holy
Office had treated me with much kindness. I wrote to him--I tried to
explain what I had done. I wrote to several other persons at the Vatican,
complaining of the manner in which I had been dealt with. No answer--not
one. All were silent--as though I were already a dead man. Then I tried to
see one or two of my old friends. But no one would receive me; one and all
turned me from their doors. So then I left Rome. But I could not make up
my mind to go home till I knew the worst. You understand, Madame, that I
have been a Professor of Theology; that my Faculty can remove me--that my
Faculty obeys the Bishops, and the Bishops obey the Holy See. I remembered
this place--I left my address in Rome--and I came down here to wait. Ah! it
was not long!'

He drew himself up, smiling bitterly.

'Two days after I arrived here I received two letters simultaneously--one
from my Bishop, the other from the Council of my Faculty--suspending
me both from my priestly and my academical functions. By the next post
arrived a communication from the Bishop of this diocese, forbidding me the
Sacraments.'

He paused. The mere recital of his case had brought him again into the
bewilderment of that mental anguish he had gone through. Eleanor made a
murmur of sympathy. He faced her with a sudden ardour.

'I had expected it, Madame; but when it came I was stunned--I was bowed to
the earth. A few days later, I received an anonymous letter--from Orvieto,
I think--reminding me that a priest suspended _a divinis_ has no right
to the soutane. "Let the traitor," it said, "give up the uniform he has
disgraced--let him at least have the decency to do that." In my trouble I
had not thought of it. So I wrote to a friend in Rome to send me clothes.'

Eleanor's eyes filled with tears. She thought of the old man staggering
alone up the dusty hill under his unwelcome burden.

He himself was looking down at his new clothes in a kind of confusion.
Suddenly he said under his breath, 'And for what?--because I said what
every educated man in Europe knows to be true?'

'Father,' said Eleanor, longing to express some poor word of comfort and
respect, 'you have suffered greatly--you will suffer--but it is not for
yourself.'

He shook his head.

'Madame, you see a man dying of hunger and thirst! He cannot cheat himself
with fine words. He starves!'

She stared at him, startled--partly understanding.

'For forty-two years,' he said, in a low, pathetic voice, 'have I received
my Lord--day after day--without a break. And now "they have taken Him
away--and I know not where they have laid Him!"'

Nothing could be more desolate than tone and look. Eleanor understood. She
had seen this hunger before. She remembered a convent in Rome where on Good
Fridays some of the nuns were often ill with restlessness and longing,
because for twenty-four hours the Sacrament was not upon the altar.

Under the protection of her reverent and pitying silence he gradually
recovered himself. With great delicacy, with fine and chosen words, she
began to try and comfort him, dwelling on his comradeship with all the
martyrs of the world, on the help and support that would certainly gather
round him, on the new friends that would replace the old. And as she talked
there grew up in her mind an envy of him so passionate, so intense, that
she could have thrown herself at his feet there and then and opened her own
wretched heart to him.

He, tortured by the martyrdom of thought, by the loss of Christian
fellowship!--She, scorched and consumed by a passion that was perfectly
ready to feed itself on the pain and injury of the beloved, or the
innocent, as soon as its own selfish satisfaction was denied it! There was
a moment when she felt herself unworthy to breathe the same air with him.

She stared at him, frowning and pale, her hand clasping her breast, lest he
should hear the beating of her heart.

* * * * *

Then the hand dropped. The inner tumult passed. And at the same moment the
sound of steps was heard approaching.

Round the further corner of the path came two ladies, descending towards
them. They were both dressed in deep mourning. The first was an old woman,
powerfully and substantially built. Her grey hair, raised in a sort of
toupe under her plain black bonnet, framed a broad and noticeable brow,
black eyes, and other features that were both benevolent and strong. She
was very pale, and her face expressed a haunting and prevailing sorrow.
Eleanor noticed that she was walking alone, some distance ahead of her
companion, and that she had gathered up her black skirts in an ungloved
hand, with an absent disregard of appearances. Behind her came a younger
lady, a sallow and pinched woman of about thirty, very slight and tall.

As they passed Eleanor and her companion, the elder woman threw a lingering
glance at the strangers. The scrutiny of it was perhaps somewhat imperious.
The younger lady walked past stiffly with her eyes on the ground.

Eleanor and Father Benecke were naturally silent as they passed. Eleanor
had just begun to speak again when she heard herself suddenly addressed in
French.

She looked up in astonishment and saw that the old lady had returned and
was standing before her.

'Madame--you allow me to address you?'

Eleanor bowed.

'You are staying at Santa Trinita, I believe!'

'_Oui, Madame_. We arrived yesterday.'

The Contessa's examining eye, whereof the keenness was but just duly
chastened by courtesy, took note of that delicate and frail refinement
which belonged both to Eleanor's person and dress.

'I fear, Madame, you are but roughly housed at the Trinita. They are not
accustomed to English ladies. If my daughter and I, who are residents here,
can be of any service to you, I beg that you will command us.'

Eleanor felt nothing but an angry impatience. Could even this remote place
give them no privacy? She answered however with her usual grace.

'You are very good, Madame. I suppose that I am speaking to the Contessa
Guerrini?'

The other lady made a sign of assent.

'We brought a few things from Orvieto--my friend and I,' Eleanor continued.
'We shall only stay a few weeks. I think we have all that is necessary. But
I am very grateful to you for your courtesy.'

Her manner, however, expressed no effusion, hardly even adequate response.
The Contessa understood. She talked for a few moments, gave a few
directions as to paths and points of view, pointed out a drive beyond
Selvapendente on the mountain side, bowed and departed.

Her bow did not include the priest. But he was not conscious of it. While
the ladies talked, he had stood apart, holding the hat that seemed to burn
him, in his finger-tips, his eyes, with their vague and troubled intensity,
expressing only that inward vision which is at once the paradise and the
torment of the prophet.

* * * * *

Three weeks passed away. Eleanor had said no more of further travelling.
For some days she lived in terror, startled by the least sound upon the
road. Then, as it seemed to Lucy, she resigned herself to trust in Father
Benecke's discretion, influenced also no doubt by the sense of her own
physical weakness, and piteous need of rest.

And now--in these first days of July--their risk was no doubt much less
than it had been. Manisty had not remembered Torre Amiata--another thorn in
Eleanor's heart! He must have left Italy. As each fresh morning dawned, she
assured herself drearily that they were safe enough.

As for the heat, the sun indeed was lord and master of this central Italy.
Yet on the high tableland of Torre Amiata the temperature was seldom
oppressive. Lucy, indeed, soon found out from her friend the Carabiniere
that while malaria haunted the valley, and scourged the region of Bolsena
to the south, the characteristic disease of their upland was pneumonia,
caused by the daily ascent of the labourers from the hot slopes below to
the sharp coolness of the night.

No, the heat was not overwhelming. Yet Eleanor grew paler and feebler. Lucy
hovered round her in a constantly increasing anxiety. And presently she
began to urge retreat, and change of plan. It was madness to stay in the
south. Why not more at once to Switzerland, or the Tyrol?

Eleanor shook her head.

'But I can't have you stay here,' cried Lucy in distress.

And coming closer, she chose her favourite seat on the floor of the
_loggia_ and laid her head against Eleanor's arm.

'Oughtn't you to go home?' she said, in a low urgent voice, caressing
Eleanor's hand. 'Send me back to Uncle Ben. I can go home any time. But you
ought to be in Scotland. Let me write to Miss Manisty!'

Eleanor laid her hand on her mouth. 'You promised!' she said, with her
sweet stubborn smile.

'But it isn't right that I should let you run these risks. It--it--isn't
kind to me.'

'I don't run risks. I am as well here as anywhere. The Orvieto doctor saw
no objection to my being here--for a month, at any rate.'

'Send me home,' murmured Lucy again, softly kissing the hand she held. 'I
don't know why I ever came.'

Eleanor started. Her lips grew pinched and bitter. But she only said:

'Give me our six weeks. All I want is you--and quiet.'

She held out both her hands very piteously, and Lucy took them, conquered,
though not convinced.

'If anything went really wrong,' said Eleanor, 'I am sure you could appeal
to that old Contessa. She has the face of a mother in Israel.'

'The people here seem to be pretty much in her hand,' said Lucy, as
she rose. 'She manages most of their affairs for them. But poor, poor
thing!--did you see that account in the _Tribuna_ this morning?'

The girl's voice dropped, as though it had touched a subject almost too
horrible to be spoken of.

Eleanor looked up with a sign of shuddering assent. Her daily _Tribuna_,
which the postman brought her, had in fact contained that morning a letter
describing the burial--after three months!--of the remains of the army
slain in the carnage of Adowa on March 1. For three months had those
thousands of Italian dead lain a prey to the African sun and the African
vultures, before Italy could get leave from her victorious foe to pay the
last offices to her sons.

That fine young fellow of whom the neighbourhood talked, who seemed to have
left behind him such memories of energy and goodness, his mother's idol,
had his bones too lain bleaching on that field of horror? It did not bear
thinking of.

Lucy went downstairs to attend to some household matters. It was about
ten o'clock in the morning, and presently Eleanor heard the postman from
Selvapendente knock at the outer door. Marie brought up the letters.

There were four or five for Lucy, who had never concealed her address from
her uncle, though she had asked that it might be kept for a while from
other people. He had accordingly forwarded some home-letters, and Marie
laid them on the table. Beside them were some letters that Lucy had just
written and addressed. The postman went his round through the village; then
returned to pick them up.

Marie went away, and suddenly Eleanor sprang from the sofa. With a flush
and a wild look she went to examine Lucy's letters.

Was all quite safe? Was Lucy not tampering with her, betraying her in any
way? The letters were all for America, except one, addressed to Paris. No
doubt an order to a tradesman? But Lucy had said nothing about it--and the
letter filled Eleanor with a mad suspicion that her weakness could hardly
repress.

'Why! by now--I am not even a lady!' she said to herself at last with
set teeth, as she dragged herself from the table, and began to pace the
_loggia_.

But when Lucy returned, in one way or another Eleanor managed to inform
herself as to the destination of all the letters. And then she scourged and
humbled herself for her doubts, and became for the rest of the morning the
most winning and tender of companions.

As a rule they never spoke of Manisty. What Lucy's attitude implied was
that she had in some unwitting and unwilling way brought trouble on
Eleanor; that she was at Torre Amiata to repair it; and that in general she
was at Eleanor's orders.

Of herself she would not allow a word. Beyond and beneath her sweetness
Eleanor divined a just and indomitable pride. And beyond that Mrs. Burgoyne
could not penetrate.

CHAPTER XVIII

Meanwhile Eleanor found some distraction in Father Benecke.

The poor priest was gradually recovering a certain measure of serenity. The
two ladies were undoubtedly of great assistance to him. They became popular
in the village, where they and their wants set flowing a stream of _lire_,
more abundant by far than had hitherto attended the summer guests, even the
Sindaco of Selvapendente. They were the innocent causes, indeed, of some
evil. Eleanor had been ordered goats' milk by the Orvieto doctor, and the
gentleman who had secured the order from the _massaja_ went in fear of his
life at the hands of two other gentlemen who had not been equally happy.
But in general they brought prosperity, and the popular smile was granted
them.

So that when it was discovered that they were already acquainted with
the mysterious foreign priest, and stoutly disposed to befriend him,
the village showed the paralysing effect of a conflict of interests. At
the moment and for various reasons the clericals were masters. And the
clericals denounced Father Benecke as a traitor and a heretic. At the same
time the village could not openly assail the ladies' friend without running
the risk of driving the ladies themselves from Torre Amiata. And this
clearly would have been a mere wanton slight to a kind Providence. Even the
children understood the situation, and Father Benecke now took his walks
unmolested by anything sharper than sour looks and averted faces.

Meanwhile he was busy in revising a new edition of his book. This review
of his own position calmed him. Contact with all the mass of honest and
laborious knowledge of which it was a summary gave him back his dignity,
raised him from the pit of humiliation into which he seemed to have fallen,
and strengthened him to resist. The spiritual privations that his state
brought him could be sometimes forgotten. There were moments indeed when
the iron entered into his soul. When the bell of the little church rang at
half-past five in the morning, he was always there in his corner by the
door. The peasants brushed past him suspiciously as they went in and out.
He did not see them. He was absorbed in the function, or else in a bitter
envy of the officiating priest, and at such moments he suffered all that
any 'Vaticanist' could have wished him to suffer.

But when he was once more among his books, large gusts of a new and strange
freedom began, as it were, to blow about him. In writing the philosophical
book which had now brought him into conflict with the Church, he had
written in constraint and timidity. A perpetual dread, not only of
ecclesiastical censure but of the opinion of old and valued friends; a
perpetual uncertainty as to the limits of Catholic liberty; these things
had held him in bondage. What ought he say? What must he leave unsaid? He
understood perfectly that hypothesis must not be stated as truth. But the
vast accumulation of biological fact on the one hand, and of historical
criticism on the other, that has become the common property of the
scientific mind, how was it to be recapitulated--within Catholic limits? He
wrote in fear, like one walking on the burning ploughshares of the ordeal.
Religion was his life; but he had at once the keen intelligence and the
mystical temperament of the Suabian. He dreaded the collision which
ultimately came. Yet the mental process could not be stayed.

Now, with the final act of defiance, obscurely carried out, conditioned he
knew not how, there had arrived for him a marvellous liberation of soul.
Even at sixty-five he felt himself tragically new-born--naked and feeble
indeed, but still with unknown possibilities of growth and new life before
him.

His book, instead of being revised, must be re-written. No need now to
tremble for a phrase! Let the truth be told. He plunged into his old
studies again, and the world of thought met him with a friendlier and
franker welcome. On all sides there was a rush and sparkle of new light.
How far he must follow and submit, his trembling soul did not yet know. But
for the moment there was an extraordinary though painful exhilaration--the
excitement of leading-strings withdrawn and walls thrown down.

This enfranchisement brought him, however, into strange conflict with
his own character. His temperament was that of the ascetic and visionary
religious. His intelligence had much the same acuteness and pliancy as that
of another and more pronounced doubter--a South German also, like Father
Benecke,--the author of the 'Leben Jesu.' But his _character_ was the joint
product of his temperament and his habits, and was often difficult to
reconcile with the quick play of his intelligence.

For instance, he was, in daily habit, an austere and most devout priest,
living alone with his old sister, as silent and yet fervent as himself, and
knowing almost nothing of other women, except through the Confessional. To
his own astonishment he was in great request as a director. But socially he
knew very little of his penitents; they were to him only 'souls,' spiritual
cases which he studied with the ardour of a doctor. Otherwise the small
benefice which he held in a South German town, his university class, and
the travail of his own research absorbed him wholly.

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