Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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'Father,' she said, bending towards him, 'you are a priest--and a
confessor?'

His face changed. He waited an instant before replying.

'Yes, Madame--I am!' he said at last, with a firm and passionate dignity.

'Yet now you cannot act as a priest. And I am not a Catholic. Still, I am
a human being--with a soul, I suppose--if there are such things!--and you
are old enough to be my father, and have had great experience. I am in
trouble--and probably dying. Will you hear my case--as though it were a
confession--under the same seal?'

She fixed her eyes upon him. Insensibly the priest's expression had
changed; the priestly caution, the priestly instinct had returned. He
looked at her steadily and compassionately.

'Is there no one, Madame, to whom you might more profitably make this
confession--no one who has more claim to it than I?'

'No one.'

'I cannot refuse,' he said, uneasily. 'I cannot refuse to hear anyone in
trouble and--if I can--to help them. But let me remind you that this could
not be in any sense a true confession. It could only be a conversation
between friends.'

She drew her hand across her eyes.

'I must treat it as a confession, or I cannot speak. I shall not ask you
to absolve me. That--that would do me no good,' she said, with a little
wild laugh, 'What I want is direction--from some one accustomed to look at
people as they are--and--and to speak the truth to them. Say "yes," Padre.
You--you may have the fate of three lives in your hands.'

Her entreating eyes hung upon him. His consideration took a few moments
longer. Then he dropped his own look upon the ground, and clasped his
hands.

'Say, my daughter, all that you wish to say.'

The priestly phrase gave her courage.

She drew a long breath, and paused a little to collect her thoughts. When
she began, it was in a low, dragging voice full of effort.

'What I want to know, Father, is--how far one may fight--how far one
_should_ fight--for oneself. The facts are these. I will not mention any
names. Last winter, Father, I had reason to think that life had changed for
me--after many years of unhappiness. I gave my whole, whole heart away.'
The words came out in a gasp, as though a large part of the physical power
of the speaker escaped with them. 'I thought that--in return--I was held
in high value, in true affection--that--that my friend cared for me more
than for anyone else--that in time he would be mine altogether. It was a
great hope, you understand--I don't put it at more. But I had done much
to deserve his kindness--he owed me a great deal. Not, I mean, for the
miserable work I had done for him; but for all the love, the thought by day
and night that I had given him.'

She bowed her head on her hands for a moment. The priest sat motionless and
she resumed, torn and excited by her strange task.

'I was not alone in thinking and hoping--as I did. Other people thought it.
It was not merely presumptuous or foolish on my part. But--ah! it is an old
story, Padre. I don't know why I inflict it on you!'

She stopped, wringing her hands.

The priest did not raise his eyes, but sat quietly--in an attitude a little
cold and stern, which seemed to rebuke her agitation. She composed herself,
and resumed:

'There was of course some one else, Father--you understood that from the
beginning--some one younger, and far more attractive than I. It took five
weeks--hardly so much. There was no affinity of nature and mind to go
upon--or I thought so. It seemed to me all done in a moment by a beautiful
face. I could not be expected to bear it--to resign myself at once to the
loss of everything that made life worth living--could I, Father?' she said
passionately.

The priest still did not look up.

'You resisted?' he said.

'I resisted--successfully,' she said with fluttering breath. 'I separated
them. The girl who supplanted me was most tender, dear, and good. She
pitied me, and I worked upon her pity. I took her away from--from my
friend. And why should I not? Why are we called upon perpetually to give
up--give up? It seemed to me such a cruel, cold, un-human creed. I knew my
own life was broken--beyond mending; but I couldn't bear the unkindness--I
couldn't forgive the injury--I couldn't--couldn't! I took her away; and my
power is still great enough, and will be always great enough, if I choose,
to part these two from each other!'

Her hands were on her breast, as though she were trying to still the heart
that threatened to silence her. When she spoke of giving up, her voice had
taken a note of scorn, almost of hatred, that brought a momentary furrow to
the priest's brow.

For a little while after she had ceased to speak he sat bowed, and
apparently deep in thought. When he looked up she braced herself, as though
she already felt the shock of judgment. But he only asked a question.

'Your girl-friend, Madame--her happiness was not involved?'

Eleanor shrank and turned away.

'I thought not--at first.' It was a mere murmur.

'But now?'

'I don't know--I suspect,' she said miserably. 'But, Father, if it were so
she is young; she has all her powers and chances before her. What would
kill me would only--anticipate--for her--a day that must come. She is born
to be loved.'

Again she let him see her face, convulsed by the effort for composure, the
eyes shining with large tears. It was like the pleading of a wilful child.

A veil descended also on the pure intense gaze of the priest, yet he bent
it steadily upon her.

'Madame--God has done you a great honour.'

The words were just breathed, but they did not falter. Mutely, with parted
lips, she seemed to search for his meaning.

'There are very few of whom God condescends to ask, as plainly, as
generously, as He now asks of you. What does it matter, Madame, whether God
speaks to us amid the thorns or the flowers? But I do not remember that
He ever spoke among the flowers, but often--often, amongst deserts and
wildernesses. And when He speaks--Madame! the condescension, the gift is
that He should speak at all; that He, our Maker and Lord, should plead
with, should as it were humble Himself to, our souls. Oh! how we should
hasten to answer, how we should hurry to throw ourselves and all that we
have into His hands!'

Eleanor turned away. Unconsciously she began to strip the moss from a tree
beside her. The tears dropped upon her lap.

But the appeal was to religious emotion, not to the moral judgment, and she
rallied her forces.

'You speak, Father, as a priest--as a Christian. I understand of course
that that is the Christian language, the Christian point of view.'

'My daughter,' he said simply, 'I can speak no other language.'

There was a pause. Then he resumed: 'But consider it for a moment from
another point of view. You say that for yourself you have renounced the
expectation of happiness. What, then, do you desire? Merely the pain,
the humiliation of others? But is that an end that any man or woman may
lawfully pursue--Pagan or Christian? It was not a Christian who said, "Men
exist for the sake of one another." Yet when two other human beings--your
friends--have innocently--unwittingly--done you a wrong--'

She shook her head silently.

The priest observed her.

'One at least, you said, was kind and good--showed you a compassionate
spirit--and intended you no harm. Yet you will punish her--for the sake of
your own pride. And she is young. You who are older, and better able to
control passion, ought you not to feel towards her as a tender elder
sister--a mother--rather than a rival?'

He spoke with a calm and even power, the protesting force of his own soul
mounting all the time like a tide.

Eleanor rose again in revolt.

'It is no use,' she said despairingly. 'Do you understand, Father, what
I said to you at first?--that I have probably not many months--a year
perhaps--to live? And that to give these two to each other would embitter
all my last days and hours--would make it impossible for me to believe, to
hope, anything?'

'No, no, poor soul!' he said, deeply moved. 'It would be with you as with
St. John: "Now we know that we have passed from death unto life, because we
love the brethren."'

She shrugged her shoulders.

'I have no faith--and no hope.'

His look kindled, took a new aspect almost of command.

'You do yourself wrong. Could you have brought yourself to ask this counsel
of me, if God had not been already at work in your soul--if your sin were
not already half conquered?'

She recoiled as though from a blow. Her cheek burnt.

'Sin!' she repeated bitterly, with a kind of scorn, not able to bear the
word.

But he did not quail.

'All selfish desire is sin--desire that defies God and wills the hurt of
man. But you will cast it out. The travail is already begun in you that
will form the Christ.'

'Father, creeds and dogmas mean nothing to me!'

'Perhaps,' he said calmly. 'Does religion also mean nothing to you?'

'Oh! I am a weak woman,' she said with a quivering lip. 'I throw myself on
all that promises consolation. When I see the nuns from down below pass up
and down this road, I often think that theirs is the only way out; that
the Catholic Church and a convent are perhaps the solution to which I must
come--for the little while that remains.'

'In other words,' he said after a pause, 'God offers you one discipline,
and you would choose another. Well, the Lord gave the choice to David of
what rod he would be scourged with; but it always has seemed to me that the
choice was an added punishment. I would not have chosen. I would have left
all to His Divine Majesty! This cross is not of your own making; it comes
to you from God. Is it not the most signal proof of His love? He asks of
you what only the strongest can bear; gives you just time to serve Him with
the best. As I said before, is it not His way of honouring His creature?'

Eleanor sat without speaking, her delicate head drooping.

'And, Madame,' the priest continued with a changed voice, 'you say that
creeds and dogmas mean nothing to you. How can I, who am now cast out
from the Visible Church, uphold them to you--attempt to bind them on your
conscience? But one thing I can do, whether as man or priest; I can bid you
ask yourself whether in truth _Christ_ means nothing to you--and Calvary
nothing?'

He paused, staring at her with his bright and yet unseeing eyes, the wave
of feeling rising within him to a force and power born of recent storm, of
the personal wrestling with a personal anguish.

'Why is it'--he resumed, each word low and pleading,--'that this divine
figure is enshrined, if not in all our affections--at least in all our
imaginations? Why is it that at the heart of this modern world, with all
its love of gold, its thirst for knowledge, its desire for pleasure, there
still lives and burns '--

--He held out his two strong clenched hands, quivering, as though he held
in them the vibrating heart of man--

--'this strange madness of sacrifice, this foolishness of the Cross? Why
is it that in these polite and civilised races which lead the world, while
creeds and Churches divide us, what still touches us most deeply, what
still binds us together most surely, is this story of a hideous death,
which the spectators said was voluntary--which the innocent Victim embraced
with joy as the ransom of His brethren--from which those who saw it
received in very truth the communication of a new life--a life, a Divine
Mystery, renewed amongst us now, day after day, in thousands of human
beings? What does it mean, Madame? Ask yourself! How has our world of lust
and iron produced such a thing? How, except as the clue to the world's
secret, is man to explain it to himself? Ah! my daughter, think what you
will of the nature and dignity of the Crucified--but turn your eyes to the
Cross! Trouble yourself with no creeds--I speak this to your weakness--but
sink yourself in the story of the Passion and its work upon the world!
Then bring it to bear upon your own case. There is in you a root of evil
mind--an angry desire--a _cupido_ which keeps you from God. Lay it down
before the Crucified, and rejoice--rejoice!--that you have something to
give to your God--before He gives you Himself!'

The old man's voice sank and trembled.

Eleanor made no reply. Her capacity for emotion was suddenly exhausted.
Nerve and brain were tired out.

After a minute or two she rose to her feet and held out her hand.

'I thank you with all my heart. Your words touch me very much, but they
seem to me somehow remote--impossible. Let me think of them. I am not
strong enough to talk more now.'

She bade him good-night, and left him. With her feeble step she slowly
mounted the Sassetto path, and it was some little time before her slender
form and white dress disappeared among the trees.

Father Benecke remained alone--a prey to many conflicting currents of
thought.

* * * * *

For him too the hour had been strangely troubling and revolutionary. On the
recognised lines of Catholic confession and direction, all that had been
asked of him would have been easy to give. As it was, he had been obliged
to deal with the moral emergency as he best could; by methods which, now
that the crisis was over, filled him with a sudden load of scrupulous
anguish.

The support of a great system had been withdrawn from him. He still felt
himself neither man nor priest--wavering in the dark.

This poor woman! He was conscious that her statement of her case had roused
in him a kind of anger; so passionate and unblushing had been the egotism
of her manner. Even after his long experience he felt in it something
monstrous. Had he been tender, patient enough?

What troubled him was this consciousness of the _woman_, as apart from
the penitent, which had overtaken him; the woman with her frail physical
health, possibly her terror of death, her broken heart. New perplexities
and compunctions, not to be felt within the strong dykes of Catholic
practice, rushed upon him as he sat thinking under the falling night. The
human fate became more bewildering, more torturing. The clear landscape
of Catholic thought upon which he had once looked out was wrapping itself
in clouds, falling into new aspects and relations. How marvellous are the
chances of human history! The outward ministry had been withdrawn; in its
stead this purely spiritual ministry had been offered to him. '_Domine, in
caelo misericordia tua--judicia tua abyssus multa!_'

* * * * *

Recalling what he knew of Mrs. Burgoyne's history and of Manisty's, his
mind trained in the subtleties of moral divination soon reconstructed the
whole story. Clearly the American lady now staying with Mrs. Burgoyne--who
had showed towards himself such a young and graceful pity--was the other
woman.

He felt instinctively that Mrs. Burgoyne would approach him again, coldly
as she had parted from him. She had betrayed to him all the sick confusion
of soul that existed beneath her intellectual competence and vigour. The
situation between them, indeed, had radically changed. He laid aside
deference and humility; he took up the natural mastery of the priest as the
moral expert. She had no faith; and faith would save her. She was wandering
in darkness, making shipwreck of herself and others. And she had appealed
to him. With an extraordinary eagerness the old man threw himself into
the task she had so strangely set him. He longed to conquer and heal her;
to bring her to faith, to sacrifice, to God. The mingled innocence and
despotism of his nature were both concerned. And was there something
else?--the eagerness of the soldier who retrieves disobedience by some
special and arduous service? To be allowed to attempt it is a grace; to
succeed in it is pardon.

Was she dying--poor lady!--or was it a delusion on her part, one of the
devices of self-pity? Yet he recalled the emaciated face and form, the
cough, the trailing step, Miss Foster's anxiety, some comments overheard in
the village.--

And if she died unreconciled, unhappy? Could nothing be done to help her,
from outside,--to brace her to action--and in time?

He pondered the matter with all the keenness of the casuist, all the
_naivete_ of the recluse. In the tragical uprooting of established habit
through which he was passing, even those ways of thinking and acting which
become the second nature of the priest were somewhat shaken. Had Eleanor's
confidence been given him in Catholic confession he might not even by word
or look have ever reminded herself of what had passed between them; still
less have acted upon it in any way. Nor under the weight of tradition
which binds the Catholic priest, would he ever have been conscious of the
remotest temptation to what his Church regards as one of the deadliest of
sins.

And further. If as his penitent, yet outside confession,--in a letter or
conversation--Eleanor had told him her story, his passionately scrupulous
sense of the priestly function would have bound him precisely in the same
way. Here, all Catholic opinion would not have agreed with him; but his own
conviction would have been clear.

But now in the general shifting of his life from the standpoint of
authority, to the standpoint of conscience, new aspects of the case
appeared to him. He recalled certain questions of moral theology,
with which as a student he was familiar. The modern discipline of the
confessional 'seal' is generally more stringent than that of the middle
ages. Benecke remembered that in the view of St. Thomas, it is sometimes
lawful for a confessor to take account of what he hears in confession so
far as to endeavour afterwards to remove some obstacle to the spiritual
progress of his penitent, which has been revealed to him under the seal.
The modern theologian denies altogether the legitimacy of such an act,
which for him is a violation of the Sacrament.

But for Benecke, at this moment, the tender argument of St. Thomas suddenly
attained a new beauty and compulsion.

He considered it long. He thought of Manisty, his friend, to whom his
affectionate heart owed a debt of gratitude, wandering about Italy, in a
blind quest of the girl who had been snatched away from him. He thought of
the girl herself, and the love that not all Mrs. Burgoyne's jealous anguish
had been able to deny. And then his mind returned to Mrs. Burgoyne, and the
arid misery of her struggle.--

The darkness was falling. As he reached the last of the many windings of
the road, he saw his tiny house by the riverside, with a light in the
window.

He leant upon his stick, conscious of inward excitement, feeling suddenly
on his old shoulders the burden of those three lives of which Mrs. Burgoyne
had spoken.

'My God, give them to me!'--he cried, with a sudden leap of the heart that
was at once humble and audacious. Not a word to Mr. Manisty, or to any
other human being, clearly, as to Mrs. Burgoyne's presence at Torre Amiata.
To that he was bound.

But--

'May I not entertain a wayfarer, a guest?'--he thought, trembling, 'like
any other solitary?'

CHAPTER XX

The hot evening was passing into night. Eleanor and Lucy were on the
_loggia_ together.

Through the opening in the parapet wall made by the stairway to what had
once been the enclosed monastery garden, Eleanor could see the fire-flies
flashing against the distant trees; further, above the darkness of the
forest, ethereal terraces of dimmest azure lost in the starlight; and where
the mountains dropped to the south-west a heaven still fiery and streaked
with threats of storm. Had she raised herself a little she could have
traced far away, beyond the forest slopes, the course of those white mists
that rise at night out of the wide bosom of Bolsena.

Outside, the country-folk were streaming home from their work; the men
riding their donkeys or mules, the women walking, often with burdens on
their heads, and children dragging at their hands; dim purplish figures, in
the evening blue, charged with the eternal grace of the old Virgilian life
of Italy, the life of corn and vine, of chestnut and olive. Lucy hung over
the balcony, looking at the cavalcades, sometimes waving her hand to a
child or a mother that she recognised through the gathering darkness. It
was an evening spectacle of which she never tired. Her feeling clung to
these labouring people, whom she idealised with the optimism of her clean
youth. Secretly her young strength envied them their primal, necessary
toils. She would not have shrunk from their hardships; their fare would
have been no grievance to her. Sickness, old age, sin, cruelty, violence,
death,--that these dark things entered into their lives, she knew vaguely.
Her heart shrank from what her mind sometimes divined; all the more perhaps
that there was in her the promise of a wide and rare human sympathy, which
must some day find its appointed tasks and suffer much in the finding. Now,
when she stumbled on the horrors of the world, she would cry to herself,
'God knows!'--with a catching breath, and the feeling of a child that runs
from darkness to protecting arms; and so escape her pain.

Presently she came to sit by Eleanor again, trying to amuse her by
the account of a talk on the roadside, with an old _spaccapietre_, or
stone-breaker, who had fought at Mentana.

Eleanor listened vaguely, hardly replying. But she watched the girl in her
simple white dress, her fine head, her grave and graceful movements; she
noticed the voice, so expressive of an inner self-mastery through all its
gaiety. And suddenly the thought flamed through her--

'If I told her!--if she knew that I had seen a letter from him this
afternoon?--that he is in Italy?--that he is looking for _her_, day and
night! If I just blurted it out--what would she say?--how would she take
it?'

But not a word passed her lips. She began again to try and unravel the
meaning of his letter. Why had he gone in search of them to the Abruzzi of
all places?

Then, suddenly, she remembered.

One day at the villa, some Italian friends--a deputy and his wife--had
described to them a summer spent in a wild nook of the Abruzzi. The young
husband had possessed a fine gift of phrase. The mingled savagery and
innocence of the people; the vast untrodden woods of chestnut and beech;
the slowly advancing civilisation; the new railway line that seemed to
the peasants a living and hostile thing, a kind of greedy fire-monster,
carrying away their potatoes to market and their sons to the army; the
contrasts of the old and new Italy; the joys of summer on the heights,
of an unbroken Italian sunshine steeping a fresh and almost northern
air: he had drawn it all, with the facility of the Italian, the broken,
impressionist strokes of the modern. Why must Italians nowadays always rush
north, to the lakes, or Switzerland or the Tyrol? Here in their own land,
in the Abruzzi, and further south, in the Volscian and Calabrian mountains,
were cool heights waiting to be explored, the savour of a primitive life,
the traces of old cities, old strongholds, old faiths, a peasant world
moreover, unknown to most Italians of the west and north, to be observed,
to be made friends with.

They had all listened in fascination. Lucy especially. The thought of
scenes so rarely seen, so little visited, existing so near to them, in this
old old Italy, seemed to touch the girl's imagination--to mingle as it were
a breath from her own New World with the land of the Caesars.

'One can ride everywhere?' she had asked, looking up at the traveller.

'Everywhere, mademoiselle.'

'I shall come,' she had said, drawing pencil circles on a bit of paper
before her, with pleased intent eyes, like one planning.

And the Italian, amused by her enthusiasm, had given her a list of places
where accommodation could be got, where hotels of a simple sort were
beginning to develop, whence this new land that was so old could be
explored by the stranger.

And Manisty had stood by, smoking and looking down at the girl's graceful
head, and the charming hand that was writing down the names.

Another pang of the past recalled,--a fresh one added!

For Torre Amiata had been forgotten, while Lucy's momentary whim had
furnished the clue which had sent him on his vain quest through the
mountains.

* * * * *

'I do think '--said Lucy, presently, taking Eleanor's hand,--'you haven't
coughed so much to-day?'

Her tone was full of anxiety, of tenderness.

Eleanor smiled. 'I am very well,' she said, dryly. But Lucy's frown did not
relax. This cough was a new trouble. Eleanor made light of it. But Marie
sometimes spoke of it to Lucy with expressions which terrified one who had
never known illness except in her mother.

Meanwhile Eleanor was thinking--'Something will bring him here. He is
writing to Father Benecke--Father Benecke to him. Some accident will
happen--any day, any hour. Well--let him come!'

Her hands stiffened under her shawl that Lucy had thrown round her. A
fierce consciousness of power thrilled through her weak frame. Lucy was
hers! The pitiful spectacle of these six weeks had done its work. Let him
come.

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