Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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

'At the same time, Madame,' she said, looking a little stiffly at Eleanor,
'we have learned priests--many of them.'

Eleanor hastened to assent. With what heat had Manisty schooled her
during the winter to the recognition of Catholic learning, within its own
self-chosen limits!

'It is this deplorable Seminary education!' sighed the Contessa. 'How
is one half of the nation ever to understand the other? They speak a
different language. Imagine all our scientific education on the one side,
and this--this dangerous innocent on the other! And yet we all want
religion--we all want some hope beyond this life.'

Her strong voice broke. She turned away, and Eleanor could only see the
massive outline of head and bust, and the coils of grey hair.

Mrs. Burgoyne drew her chair nearer to the Contessa. Silently and timidly
she laid a hand upon her knee.

'I can't understand,' she said in a low voice, 'how you have had the
patience to be kind to us, these last weeks!'

'Do you know why?' said the Contessa, turning round upon her, and no longer
attempting to conceal the tears upon her fine old face.

'No--tell me!'

'It was because Emilio loved the English. He once spent a very happy summer
in England. I--I don't know whether he was in love with anyone. But, at
any rate, he looked back to it with deep feeling. He always did everything
that he could for any English person--and especially in these wilds. I have
known him often take trouble that seemed to me extravagant or quixotic.
But he always would. And when I saw you in the _Sassetto_ that day, I knew
exactly what he would have done. You looked so delicate--and I remembered
how rough the convent was. I had hardly spoken to anybody but Teresa since
the news came, but I could not help speaking to you.'

Eleanor pressed her hand. After a pause she said gently:

'He was with General Da Bormida?'

'Yes--he was with Da Bormida. There were three columns, you remember.
He was with the column that seemed for a time to be successful. I only
got the full account last week from a brother-officer, who was a prisoner
till the end of June. Emilio, like all the rest, thought the position was
carried--that it was a victory. He raised his helmet and shouted, _Viva il
Re! Viva l'Italia!_ And then all in a moment the Scioans were on them like
a flood. They were all carried away. Emilio rallied his men again and again
under a hail of bullets. Several heard him say: "Courage, lads--courage!
Your Captain dies with you! _Avanti! avanti! Viva l'Italia!_" Then at
last he was frightfully wounded, and perhaps you may have heard in
the village'--again the mother turned her face away--' that he said
to a _caporale_ beside him, who came from this district, whom he knew
at home--"Federigo, take your gun and finish it." He was afraid--my
beloved!--of falling into the hands of the enemy. Already they had passed
some wounded, horribly mutilated. The _caporale_ refused. "I can't do that,
_Eccellenza_," he said; "but we will transport you or die with you!" Then
again there was a gleam of victory. He thought the enemy were repulsed. A
brother-officer saw him being carried along by two soldiers, and Emilio
beckoned to him. "You must be my Confessor!" he said, smiling. And he gave
him some messages for me and Teresa--some directions about his affairs.
Then he asked: "It is victory--isn't it? We have won, after all?" And the
other--who knew--couldn't bear to tell him the truth. He said, "Yes." And
Emilio said, "You swear it?" "I swear." And the boy made the sign of the
cross--said again, _Viva l'Italia!_--and died.... They buried him that
night under a little thicket. My God! I thank Thee that he did not lie on
that accursed plain!'

She raised her handkerchief to hide her trembling lips. Eleanor said
nothing. Her face was bowed upon her hands, which lay on the Contessa's
knee.

'His was not a very happy temperament,' said the poor mother presently.' He
was always anxious and scrupulous. I sometimes thought he had been too much
influenced by Leopardi; he was always quoting him. That is the way with
many of our young men. Yet Emilio was a Christian--a sincere believer. It
would have been better if he had married. But he gave all his affection
to me and Teresa--and to this place and the people. I was to carry on his
work--but I am an old woman--and very tired. Why should the young go before
their time?... Yet I have no bitterness about the war. It was a ghastly
mistake--and it has humiliated us as a nation. But nations are made by
their blunderings as much as by their successes. Emilio would not have
grudged his life. He always thought that Italy had been "made too quick,"
as they say--that our day of trial and weakness was not done.... But, _Gesu
mio!_--if he had not left me so much of life.'

Eleanor raised her head.

'I, too,' she said, almost in a whisper--'I, too, have lost a son. But he
was a little fellow.'

The Contessa looked at her in astonishment and burst into tears.

'Then we are two miserable women!' she said, wildly.

Eleanor clung to her--but with a sharp sense of unfitness and unworthiness.
She felt herself a hypocrite. In thought and imagination her boy now
was but a hovering shadow compared to Manisty. It was not this sacred
mother-love that was destroying her own life.

* * * * *

As they drove home through the evening freshness, Eleanor's mind pursued
its endless and solitary struggle.

Lucy sat beside her. Every now and then Eleanor's furtive guilty look
sought the girl's face. Sometimes a flying terror would grip her by the
heart. Was Lucy graver--paler? Were there some new lines round the sweet
eyes? That serene and virgin beauty--had it suffered the first withering
touch since Eleanor had known it first? And if so, whose hand? whose fault?

Once or twice her heart failed within her; foreseeing a remorse that was no
sooner imagined than it was denied, scouted, hurried out of sight.

That brave, large-brained woman with whom she had just been talking; there
was something in the atmosphere which the Contessa's personality shed round
it, that made Eleanor doubly conscious of the fever in her own blood. As in
Father Benecke's case, so here; she could only feel herself humiliated and
dumb before these highest griefs--the griefs that ennoble and enthrone.

That night she woke from a troubled sleep with a stifled cry of horror. In
her dreams she had been wrestling with Manisty, trying to thrust him back
with all the frenzied force of her weak hands. But he had wrenched himself
from her hold. She saw him striding past her--aglow, triumphant. And that
dim white form awaiting him--and the young arms outstretched!

'No, no! False! She doesn't--doesn't love him!' her heart cried, throwing
all its fiercest life into the cry. She sat up in bed trembling and
haggard. Then she stole into the next room. Lucy lay deeply, peacefully
asleep. Eleanor sank down beside her, hungrily watching her. 'How could
she sleep like that--if--if she cared?' asked her wild thoughts, and she
comforted herself, smiling at her own remorse. Once she touched the girl's
hand with her lips, feeling towards her a rush of tenderness that came like
dew on the heat of the soul. Then she crept back to bed, and cried, and
cried--through the golden mounting of the dawn.

CHAPTER XIX

The days passed on. Between Eleanor and Lucy there had grown up a close,
intense, and yet most painful affection. Neither gave the other her full
confidence, and on Eleanor's side the consciousness both of the futility
and the enormity of what she had done only increased with time, embittering
the resistance of a will which was still fierce and unbroken.

Meanwhile she often observed her companion with a quick and torturing
curiosity. What was it that Manisty had found so irresistible, when all her
own subtler arts had failed?

Lucy was in some ways very simple, primitive even, as Manisty had called
her. Eleanor knew that her type was no longer common in a modern America
that sends all its girls to college, and ransacks the world for an
experience. But at the same time the depth and force of her nature promised
rich developments in the future. She was still a daughter of New England,
with many traits now fast disappearing; but for her, too, there was
beginning that cosmopolitan transformation to which the women of her race
lend themselves so readily.

And it was Manisty's influence that was at work! Eleanor's miserable eyes
discerned it in a hundred ways. Half the interests and questions on which
Manisty's mind had been fixed for so long were becoming familiar to Lucy.
They got books regularly from Rome, and Eleanor had been often puzzled by
Lucy's selections--till one day the key to them flashed across her.

The girl indeed was making her way, fast and silently, into quite new
regions of thought and feeling. She read, and she thought. She observed the
people of the village; she even frequented their humble church, though she
would never go with Eleanor to Sunday Mass. There some deep, unconquerable
instinct held her back.

All through, indeed, her personal beliefs and habits--Evangelical,
unselfish, strong, and a little stern--seemed to be quite unchanged. But
they were differently tinged, and would be in time differently presented.
Nor would they ever, of themselves, divide her from Manisty. Eleanor saw
that clearly enough. Lucy could hold opinion passionately, unreasonably
even; but she was not of the sort that makes life depend upon opinion. Her
true nature was large, tolerant, patient. The deepest forces in it were
forces of feeling, and no intellectual difference would ever be able to
deny them their natural outlet.

Meanwhile Lucy seemed to herself the most hopelessly backward and ignorant
person, particularly in Eleanor's company.

'Oh! I am just a dunce,' she said one day to Eleanor, with a smile and
sigh, after some questions as to her childhood and bringing up. 'They ought
to have sent me to college. All the girls I knew went. But then Uncle Ben
would have been quite alone. So I just had to get along.'

'But you know what many girls don't know.'

Lucy gave a shrug.

'I know some Latin and Greek, and other things that Uncle Ben could teach
me. But oh! what a simpleton I used to feel in Boston!'

'You were behind the age?

Lucy laughed.

'I didn't seem to have anything to do with the age, or the age with me. You
see, I was slow, and everybody else was quick. But an American that isn't
quick's got no right to exist. You're bound to have heard the last thing,
and read the last book, or people just want to know why you're there!'

'Why should people call you slow?' said Eleanor, in that voice which Lucy
often found so difficult to understand, because of the strange note of
hostility which, for no reason at all, would sometimes penetrate through
the sweetness. 'It's absurd. How quickly you've picked up Italian--and
frocks!--and a hundred things.'

She smiled, and stroked the brown head beside her.

Lucy coloured, bent over her work, and did not reply.

Generally they passed their mornings in the _loggia_ reading and working.
Lucy was a dexterous needle-woman, and a fine piece of embroidery had made
much progress since their arrival at Torre Amiata. Secretly she wondered
whether she was to finish it there. Eleanor now shrank from the least
mention of change; and Lucy, having opened her generous arms to this
burden, did not know when she would be allowed to put it down. She carried
it, indeed, very tenderly--with a love that was half eager remorse. Still,
before long Uncle Ben must remonstrate in earnest. And the Porters, whom
she had treated so strangely? They were certainly going back to America in
September, if not before. And must she not go with them?

And would the heat at Torre Amiata be bearable for the sensitive Northerner
after July? Already they spent many hours of the day in their shuttered and
closed rooms, and Eleanor was whiter than the convolvulus which covered the
new-mown hayfields.

What a darling--what a kind and chivalrous darling was Uncle Ben! She had
asked him to trust her, and he had done it nobly, though it was evident
from his letters that he was anxious and disturbed. 'I cannot tell you
everything,' she had written, 'or I should be betraying a confidence; but
I am doing what I feel to be right--what I am sure you would consent to my
doing if you knew. Mrs. Burgoyne is _very_ frail--and she clings to me. I
can't explain to you how or why--but so it is. For the present I must look
after her. This place is beautiful; the heat not yet too great; and you
shall hear every week. Only, please, tell other people that I wish you to
forward letters, and cannot long be certain of my address.'

And he:

'Dear child, this is very mysterious. I don't like it. It would be absurd
to pretend that I did. But I haven't trusted my Lucy for fourteen years in
order to begin to persecute her now because she can't tell me a secret.
Only I give you warning that if you don't write to me every week, my
generosity, as you call it, will break down--and I shall be for sending out
a search party right away.... Do you want money? I must say that I hope
July will see the end of your adventure.'

Would it? Lucy found her mind full of anxious thoughts as Eleanor read
aloud to her.

Presently she discovered that a skein of silk she wanted for her work was
not in her basket. She turned to look also in her old inlaid workbox, which
stood on a small table beside her. But it was not there.

'Please wait a moment,' she said to her companion. 'I am afraid I must get
my silk.'

She stood up hastily, and her movement upset the rickety cane table. With a
crash her workbox fell to the ground, and its contents rolled all over the
_loggia_. She gave a cry of dismay.

'Oh! my terra-cottas!--my poor terra-cottas!'

Eleanor started, and rose too, involuntarily, to her feet. There on the
ground lay all the little Nemi fragments which Manisty had given to Lucy,
and which had been stowed away, each carefully wrapped in tissue paper, in
the well of her old workbox.

Eleanor assisted to pick them up, rather silently. The note of keen
distress in Lucy's voice rang in her ears.

'They are not much hurt, luckily,' she said.

And indeed, thanks to the tissue paper, there were only a few small chips
and bruises to bemoan when Lucy at last had gathered them all safely into
her lap. Still, chips and bruises in the case of delicate Graeco-Roman
terra-cottas are more than enough to make their owner smart, and Lucy bent
over them with a very flushed and rueful face, examining and wrapping them
up again.

'Cotton-wool would be better,' she said anxiously. 'How have you put your
two away?'

Directly the words were out of her mouth she felt that they had been better
unspoken.

A deep flush stained Eleanor's thin face.

'I am afraid I haven't taken much care of them,' she said hurriedly.

They were both silent for a little. But while Lucy still had her lap full
of her treasures, Eleanor again stood up.

'I will go in and rest for an hour before _dejeuner_. I _think_ I might go
to sleep.'

She had passed a very broken night, and Lucy looked at her with tender
concern. She quickly but carefully laid aside her terra-cottas, that she
might go in with Eleanor and 'settle her' comfortably.

But when she was left to rest in her carefully darkened room, and Lucy had
gone back to the _loggia_, Eleanor got no wink of sleep. She lay in an
anguish of memory, living over again that last night at the villa--thinking
of Manisty in the dark garden and her own ungovernable impulse.

Presently a slight sound reached her from the _loggia_. She turned her head
quickly. A sob?--from Lucy?

Her heart stood still. Noiselessly she slipped to her feet. The door
between her and the _loggia_ had been left ajar for air. It was partially
glazed, with shutters of plain green wood outside, and inside a muslin
blind. Eleanor approached it.

Through the chink of the door she saw Lucy plainly. The girl had been
sitting almost with her back to the door, but she had turned so that her
profile and hands were visible.

How quiet she was! Yet never was there an attitude more eloquent. She held
in her hands, which lay upon her knee, one of the little terra-cottas.
Eleanor could see it perfectly. It was the head of a statuette, not unlike
her own which she had destroyed,--a smaller and ruder Artemis with the
Cybele crown. There flashed into her mind the memory of Manisty explaining
it to the girl, sitting on the bench behind the strawberry hut; his black
brows bent in the eagerness of his talk; her sweet eyes, her pure pleasure.

And now Lucy had no companion--but thought. Her face was raised, the eyes
were shut, the beautiful mouth quivered in the effort to be still. She was
mistress of herself, yet not for the moment wholly mistress of longing and
of sorrow. A quick struggle passed over the face. There was another slight
sob. Then Eleanor saw her raise the terra-cotta, bow her face upon it,
press it long and lingeringly to her lips. It was like a gesture of eternal
farewell; the gesture of a child expressing the heart of a woman.

Eleanor tottered back. She sat on the edge of her bed, motionless in the
darkness, till the sounds of Cecco bringing up the _pranzo_ in the corridor
outside warned her that her time of solitude was over.

* * * * *

In the evening Eleanor was sitting in the Sassetto. Lucy with her young
need of exercise had set off to walk down through the wood to the first
bridge over the Paglia. Eleanor had been very weary all day, and for the
first time irritable. It was almost with a secret relief that Lucy started,
and Eleanor saw her depart.

Mrs. Burgoyne was left stretched on her long canvas chair, in the green
shade of the Sassetto. All about her was a chaos of moss-grown rocks
crowned with trees young and old; a gap in the branches showed her a
distant peachy sky suffused with gold above the ethereal heights of the
Amiata range; a little wind crept through the trees; the birds were silent,
but the large green lizards slipped in and out, and made a friendly life in
the cool shadowed place.

The Contessa was to have joined Eleanor here at six o'clock. But a note had
arrived excusing her. The visit of some relations detained her.

Nevertheless a little after six a step was heard approaching along the
winding path which while it was still distant Eleanor knew to be Father
Benecke. For his sake, she was glad that the Contessa was not with her.

As for Donna Teresa, when she met the priest in the village or on the road
she shrank out of his path as though his mere shadow brought malediction.

Her pinched face, her thin figure seemed to contract still further under an
impulse of fear and repulsion. Eleanor had seen it, and wondered.

But even the Contessa would have nothing to say to him.

'_Non, Madame; c'est plus fort que moi!_' she had said to Eleanor one day
that she had come across Mrs. Burgoyne and Father Benecke together in the
Sassetto--in after-excuse for her behaviour to him. 'For you and me--_bien
entendu!_--we think what we please. Heaven knows I am not bigoted. Teresa
makes herself unhappy about me.' The stout, imperious woman stifled a
sigh that betrayed much. 'I take what I want from our religion--and I
don't trouble about the rest. Emilio was the same. But a priest that
disobeys--that deserts--! No! that is another matter. I can't argue; it
seizes me by the throat.' She made an expressive movement. 'It is an
instinct--an inheritance--call it what you like. But I feel like Teresa; I
could run at the sight of him.'

Certainly Father Benecke gave her no occasion to run. Since his recovery
from the first shock and agitation of his suspension he had moved about the
roads and tracks of Torre Amiata with the 'recollected' dignity of the pale
and meditative recluse. He asked nothing; he spoke to no one, except to
the ladies at the convent, and to the old woman who served him unwillingly
in the little tumble-down house by the river's edge to which he had now
transferred himself and his books, for greater solitude. Eleanor understood
that he shrank from facing his German life and friends again till he had
completed the revision of his book, and the evolution of his thought; and
she had some reason to believe that he regarded his isolation and the
enmity of this Italian neighbourhood as a necessary trial and testing, to
be borne without a murmur.

As his step came nearer, she sat up and threw off her languor. It might
have been divined, even, that she heard it with a secret excitement.

When he appeared he greeted her with the manner at once reticent and
cordial that was natural to him. He had brought her an article in a German
newspaper of the 'Centre' on himself and his case, the violence of which
had provoked him to a reply, whereof the manuscript was also in his pocket.

Eleanor took the article and turned it over. But some inward voice told her
that her _role_, of counsellor and critic was--again--played out. Suddenly
Father Benecke said:

'I have submitted my reply to Mr. Manisty. I would like to show you what he
says.'

Eleanor fell back in her chair. 'You know where he is?' she cried.

Her surprise was so great that she could not at once disguise her emotion.
Father Benecke was also taken aback. He lifted his eyes from the papers he
held.

'I wrote to him through his bankers the other day, Madame. I have always
found that letters so addressed to him are forwarded.'

Then he stopped in distress and perturbation. Mrs. Burgoyne was still
apparently struggling for breath and composure. His absent, seer's eyes at
last took note of her as a human being. He understood, all at once, that
he had before him a woman very ill, apparently very unhappy, and that what
he had just said had thrown her into an anguish with which her physical
weakness was hardly able to cope.

The colour rose in his own cheeks.

'Madame! let me hasten to say that I have done your bidding precisely.
You were so good as to tell me that you wished no information to be given
to anyone as to your stay here. I have not breathed a word of it to Mr.
Manisty or to any other of my correspondents. Let me show you his letter.'

He held it out to her. Eleanor took it with uncertain fingers.

'Your mention of him took me by surprise,' she said, after a moment. 'Miss
Foster and I--have been--so long--without hearing of our friends.'

Then she stooped over the letter. It seemed to her the ink was hardly dry
on it--that it was still warm from Manisty's hand. The date of it was only
three days old. And the place from which it came? Cosenza?--Cosenza in
Calabria? Then he was still in Italy?

She put the letter back into Father Benecke's hands.

'Would you read it for me? I have rather a headache to-day.'

He read it with a somewhat embarrassed voice. She lay listening, with her
eyes closed under her large hat, each hand trying to prevent the trembling
of the other.

A strange pride swelled in her. It was a kind and manly letter, expressing
far more personal sympathy with Benecke than Manisty had ever yet allowed
himself--a letter wholly creditable indeed to the writer, and marked with
a free and flowing beauty of phrase that brought home to Eleanor at every
turn his voice, his movements, the ideas and sympathies of the writer.

Towards the end came the familiar Manisty-ism:

'All the same, their answer to you is still as good as ever. The system
must either break up or go on. They naturally prefer that it should go on.
But if it is worked by men like you, it cannot go on. Their instinct never
wavers; and it is a true one.'

Then:

'I don't know how I have managed to write this letter--poor stuff as it is.
My mind at this moment is busy neither with speculation nor politics. I am
perched for the night on the side of a mountain thickly covered with beech
woods, in a remote Calabrian hamlet, where however last year some pushing
person built a small 'health resort,' to which a few visitors come from
Naples and even from Rome. The woods are vast, the people savage. The
brigands are gone, or going; of electric light there is plenty. I came
this morning, and shall be gone to-morrow. I am a pilgrim on the face of
Italy. For six weeks I have wandered like this, from the Northern Abruzzi
downwards. Wherever holiday folk go to escape from the heat of the plains,
I go. But my object is not theirs.... Nor is it yours, Padre. There are
many quests in the world. Mine is one of the oldest that man knows. My
heart pursues it, untired. And in the end I shall win to my goal.'

The old priest read the last paragraph in a hurried, unsteady voice. At
every sentence he became aware of some electrical effect upon the delicate
frame and face beside him; but he read on--not knowing how to save
himself--lest she should think that he had omitted anything.

When he dropped the letter his hands, too, shook. There was a silence.

Slowly Eleanor dragged herself higher in her chair; she pushed her hat back
from her forehead; she turned her white drawn face upon the priest.

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