Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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He bent forward, looking not at her, but at the brick floor of the
_loggia_. Eleanor offered a few words of sympathy; but felt there was more
to come.

'I have also heard from my sister. She refuses to keep my house any
longer. Her resentment at what I have done is very bitter--apparently
insurmountable. She wishes to retire to a country place in Bavaria where we
have some relations. She has a small _rente_, and will not be in any need.'

'And you?' said Eleanor quickly.

'I must find work, madame. My book will bring me in a little, they say.
That will give me time--and some liberty of decision. Otherwise of course I
am destitute. I have lost everything. But my education will always bring me
enough for bread. And I ask no more.'

Her compassion was in her eyes.

'You too--old and alone--like the Contessa!' she said under her breath.

He did not hear. He was pursuing his own train of thought, and presently
he raised himself. Never had the apostolic dignity of his white head, his
broad brow been more commanding. But what Eleanor saw, what perplexed her,
was the subtle tremor of the lip, the doubt in the eyes.

'So you see, madame, our pleasant hours are almost over. In a few days I
must be gone. I will not attempt to express what I owe to your most kind,
most indulgent sympathy. It seems to me that in the "dark wood" of my life
it was your conversation--when my heart was so sorely cast down--which
revived my intelligence--and so held me up, till--till I could see my way,
and choose my path again. It has given me a great many new ideas--this
companionship you have permitted me. I humbly confess that I shall always
henceforward think differently of women, and of the relations that men and
women may hold to one another. But then, madame--'

He paused. Eleanor could see his hand trembling on his knee.

She raised herself on her elbow.

'Father Benecke! you have something to say to me!'

He hurried on.

'The other day you allowed us to change the _roles_. You had been my
support. You threw yourself on mine. Ah! Madame, have I been of any
assistance to you--then, and in the interviews you have since permitted me?
Have I strengthened your heart at all as you strengthened mine?'

His ardent, spiritual look compelled--and reassured her.

She sank back. A tear glittered on her brown lashes. She raised a hand to
dash it away.

'I don't know, Father--I don't know. But to-day--for some mysterious
reason--I seem almost to be happy again. I woke up with the feeling of one
who had been buried under mountains of rocks and found them rolled away;
of one who had been passing through a delirium which was gone. I seem to
care for nothing--to grieve for nothing. Sometimes you know that happens to
people who are very ill. A numbness comes upon them.--But I am not numb. I
feel everything. Perhaps, Father'--and she turned to him with her old sweet
instinct--of one who loved to be loved--'perhaps you have been praying for
me?'

She smiled at him half shyly. But he did not see it. His head bent lower
and lower.

'Thank God!' he said, with the humblest emphasis. 'Then,
madame--perhaps--you will find the force--to forgive me!'

The words were low--the voice steady.

Eleanor sprang up.

'Father Benecke!--what have you been doing? Is--is Mr. Manisty here?'

She clung to the _loggia_ parapet for support. The priest looked at her
pallor with alarm, with remorse, and spoke at once.

'He came to me last night.'

Their eyes met, as though in battle--expressed a hundred questions--a
hundred answers. Then she broke the silence.

'Where is he?' she said imperiously.' Ah!--I see--I see!'

She sat down, fronting him, and panting a little.

'Miss Foster is not with me. Mr. Manisty is not with you. The inference
is easy.--And you planned it! You took--you _dared_ to take--as much as
this--into your own hands!'

He made no reply. He bent like a reed in the storm.

'There is no boldness like a saint's'--she said bitterly,--'no
hardness--like an angel's! What I would not have ventured to do with my
closest friend, my nearest and dearest--you--a stranger--have done--with a
light heart. Oh! it is monstrous!--monstrous!'

She moved her neck from side to side as though she was
suffocating--throwing back the light ruffle that encircled it.

'A stranger?'--he said slowly. His intense yet gentle gaze confronted hers.

'You refer, I suppose, to that most sacred, most intimate confidence I
made to you?--which no man of honour or of heart could have possibly
betrayed,'--she said passionately. 'Ah! you did well to warn me that it
was no true confession--under no true seal! You should have warned me
further--more effectually.'

Her paleness was all gone. Her cheeks flamed. The priest felt that she was
beside herself, and, traversed as his own mind was with the most poignant
doubts and misgivings, he must needs wrestle with her, defend himself.

'Madame!--you do me some wrong,' he said hurriedly. 'At least in words
I have told nothing--betrayed nothing. When I left him an hour ago Mr.
Manisty had no conception that you were here. After my first letter to him,
he tells me that he relinquished the idea of coming to Torre Amiata, since
if you had been staying here, I must have mentioned it.'

Eleanor paused. 'Subterfuge!' she cried, under her breath. Then,
aloud--'You asked him to come.'

'That, madame, is my crime,' he admitted, with a mild and painful humility.
'Your anger hits me hard. But--do you remember?--you placed three lives in
my hands. I found you helpless; you asked for help. I saw you day by day,
more troubled, yet, as it seemed to me, more full of instincts towards
generosity, towards peace. I felt--oh! madame, I felt with all my heart,
that there lay just one step between you and a happiness that would
compensate you a thousand times for all you had gone through. You say that
I prayed for you. I did--often--and earnestly. And it seemed to me that--in
our later conversations--I saw such signs of grace in you--such exquisite
dispositions of the heart--that were the chance of action once more given
to you--you would find the strength to seize the blessing that God offered
you. And one evening in particular, I found you in an anguish that seemed
to be destroying you. And you had opened your heart to me; you had asked my
help as a Christian priest. And so, madame, as you say--I dared. I said, in
writing to Mr. Manisty, who had told me he was coming northward--"if Torre
Amiata is not far out of your road--look in upon me." Neither your name nor
Miss Foster's passed my lips. But since--I confess--I have lived in much
disturbance of mind!'

Eleanor laughed.

'Are all priests as good casuists as you, Father?'

His eyes wavered a little as though her words stung. But he did not reply.

There was a pause. Eleanor turned towards the parapet and looked outward
towards the road and the forest. Her face and eyes were full of an
incredible animation; her lips were lightly parted to let the quick breath
pass.

Then of a sudden she withdrew. Her eyes moved back to Father Benecke; she
bent forward and held out both her hands.

'Father--I forgive you! Let us make peace.'

He took the small fingers into his large palms with a gratitude that was at
once awkward and beautiful.

'I don't know yet'--he said, in a deep perplexity--'whether I absolve
myself.'

'You will soon know,' she said almost with gaiety. 'Oh! it is quite
possible'--she threw up one hand in a wild childish gesture--'it is quite
possible that to-morrow I may be at your feet, asking you to give me
penance for my rough words. On the other hand--Anyway, Father, you have not
found me a very dutiful penitent?'

'I expected castigation,' he said meekly. 'If the castigation is done, I
have come off better than I could have hoped.'

She raised herself, and took up her gloves that were lying on the little
table beside her sofa.

'You see'--she said, talking very fast--'I am an Englishwoman, and my race
is not a docile one. Here, in this village, I have noticed a good deal,
and the _massaja_ gossips to me. There was a fight in the street the other
night. The men were knifing each other. The _parroco_ sent them word that
they should come at once to his house--_per pacificarli_. They went. There
is a girl, living with her sister, whose husband has a bad reputation. The
_parroco_ ordered her to leave--found another home for her. She left. There
is a lad who made some blasphemous remarks in the street on the day of the
Madonna's procession. The _parroco_ ordered him to do penance. He did it.
But those things are not English. Perhaps they are Bavarian?'

He winced, but he had recovered his composure.

'Yes, madame, they are Bavarian also. But it seems that even an
Englishwoman can sometimes feel the need of another judgment than her own?'

She smiled. All the time that she had made her little speech about the
village, she had been casting quick glances along the road. It was evident
that her mind was only half employed with what she was saying. The
rose-flush in her cheeks, the dainty dress, the halo of fair hair gave her
back youth and beauty; and the priest gazed at her in astonishment.

'Ah!'--she said, with a vivacity that was almost violence--'here she is.
Father--please--!' And with a peremptory gesture, she signed to him to draw
back, as she had done, into the shadow, out of sight of the road.

But the advancing figure was plain to both of them.

Lucy mounted the hill with a slow and tired step. Her eyes were on the
ground. The whole young form drooped under the heat, and under a weight of
thought still more oppressive. As it came nearer a wave of sadness seemed
to come with it, dimming the sunshine and the green splendour of the woods.

As she passed momentarily out of sight behind some trees that sheltered the
gate of the courtyard, Mrs. Burgoyne crossed the _loggia_, and called to
her maid.

'Marie--be so good as to tell Miss Foster when she comes in that I have
gone out; that she is not to trouble about me, as I shall soon return; and
tell her also that I felt unusually well and strong.'

Then she turned and beckoned to Father Benecke.

'This way, Father, please!'

And she led him down the little stair that had taken Lucy to the garden the
night before. At the foot of the stairs she paused. The wall of the garden
divided them from the courtyard, and on the other side of it they could
hear Lucy speaking to the _massaja_.

'Now!' said Eleanor, 'quick I--before she discovers us!'

And opening the garden door with the priest's help she passed into the
field, and took a wide circuit to the right so as to be out of view of the
_loggia_.

'Dear madame, where are you going?' said the priest in some alarm. 'This is
too fatiguing for you.'

Eleanor took no notice. She, who for days had scarcely dragged one languid
foot after another, sped through the heat and over the broken ground like
one of the goldfinches in the convent garden. The old priest followed her
with difficulty. Nor did she pause till they were in the middle of the
Sassetto.

'Explain what we are doing!' he implored her, as she allowed him to press
his old limbs for a moment on his stick, and take breath.

She, too, leant against a tree panting.

'You said, Father, that Mr. Manisty was to leave you at midday.'

'And you wish to see him?' he cried.

'I am determined to see him,' she said in a low voice, biting her lip.

And again she was off, a gleam of whiteness gliding down, down, through the
cool green heart of the Sassetto, towards the Paglia.

They emerged upon the fringe of the wood, where amid scrub and sapling
trees stood the little sun-baked house.

From the distance came a sound of wheels--a carriage from Selvapendente
crossing the bridge over the Paglia?

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at the house for a moment in silence. Then, sheltered
under her large white parasol, she passed round to the side that fronted
the river.

There, in the shade, sat Manisty, his arms upon his knees, his head buried
in his hands.

He did not at first hear Mrs. Burgoyne's step, and she paused a little way
off. She was alone. The priest had not followed her.

At last, as she moved, either the sound of her dress or the noise of the
approaching wheels roused him. He looked up--started--sprang to his feet.

'Eleanor!--'

They met. Their eyes crossed. She shivered, for there were tears in his.
But through that dimness there shone the fierce unspoken question that had
leapt to them at the sight of his cousin--

'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?'

CHAPTER XXIII

Eleanor was the first to break the silence.

'You have had a long pilgrimage to find us,' she said quietly. 'Yet perhaps
Torre Amiata might have occurred to you. It was you that praised it--that
proposed to find quarters at the convent.'

He stared at her in amazement.

'Eleanor--in God's name!' he broke out violently, 'tell me what this
all means! What has been the meaning of this mad--this extraordinary
behaviour?'

She tottered a little and leant against the wall of the house.

'Find me a chair, please, before we begin to talk. And--is that your fly?
Send it away--to wait under the trees. It can take me up the hill, when we
have finished.'

He controlled himself with difficulty and went round the house.

She pressed her hands upon her eyes to shut out the memory of his face.

'She has refused him!' she said to herself; 'and--what is more--she has
made him believe it!'

Very soon his step was heard returning. The woman he had left in the shade
listened for it, as though in all this landscape of rushing river and
murmuring wood it the one audible, significant sound. But when he came back
to her again, he saw nothing but a composed, expectant Eleanor; dressed,
in these wilds, with a dainty care which would have done honour to London
or Paris, with a bright colour in her cheeks, and the quiver of a smile on
her lips. Ill! He thought he had seldom seen her look so well. Had she not
always been of a thistle-down lightness? 'Exaggeration!--absurdity!' he
said to himself fiercely, carrying his mind back to certain sayings in a
girl's voice that were still ringing in his ears.

He, however, was in no mood to smile. Eleanor had thrown herself sideways
on the chair he had brought her; her arms resting on the back of it, her
delicate hands hanging down. It was a graceful and characteristic attitude,
and it seemed to him affectation--a piece of her fine-ladyism.

She instantly perceived that he was in a state of such profound and
passionate excitement that it was difficult for him to speak.

So she began, with a calmness which exasperated him:

'You asked me, Edward, to explain our escapade?'

He raised his burning eyes.

'What can you explain?--how can you explain?' he said roughly. 'Are you
going to tell me why my cousin and comrade hates me and plots against
me?--why she has inflicted this slight and outrage upon me--why, finally,
she has poisoned against me the heart of the woman I love?'

He saw her shrink. Did a cruel and secret instinct in him rejoice? He was
mad with rage and misery, and he was incapable of concealing it.

She knew it. As he dropped his head again in an angry stare at the grass
between them, she was conscious of a sudden childish instinct to put out
her hand and stroke the black curls and the great broad shoulders. He was
not for her; but, in the old days, who had known so well as she how to
soothe, manage, control him?

'I can't tell you those things--certainly,' she said, after a pause. 'I
can't describe what doesn't exist.'

And to herself she cried: 'Oh! I shall lie--lie--lie--like a fiend, if I
must!'

'What doesn't exist'?' he repeated scornfully. 'Will you listen to my
version of what has happened--the barest, unadorned tale? I was your host
and Miss Foster's. I had begun to show the attraction that Miss Foster had
for me, to offer her the most trifling, the most ordinary attention. From
the moment I was first conscious of my own feeling, I knew that you were
against me--that you were influencing--Lucy'--the name dropped from his
lips in a mingled anguish and adoration--'against me. And just as I was
beginning to understand my own heart--to look forward to two or three last
precious weeks in which to make, if I could, a better impression upon her,
after my abominable rudeness at the beginning--_you_ interfered--you, my
best friend! Without a word our party is broken up; my chance is snatched
from me; Miss Foster is spirited away. You and she disappear, and you leave
me to bear my affront--the outrage done me--as best I may. You alarm, you
distress all your friends. Your father takes things calmly, I admit. But
even he has been anxious. Aunt Pattie has been miserable. As for me--'

He rose, and began to pace up and down before her; struggling with his own
wrath.

'And at last'--he resumed, pausing in front of her--'after wandering up and
down Italy, I find you--in this remote place--by the merest chance. Father
Benecke said not a word. But what part he has played in it I don't yet
understand. In another half-hour I should have been off; and again you
would have made the veriest fool of me that over walked this earth. Why,
Eleanor?--why? What have I done to you?'

He stood before her--a superb, commanding presence. In his emotion all
unshapeliness of limb or movement seemed to have disappeared. Transfigured
by the unconsciousness of passion, he was all energy and all grace.

'Eleanor!--explain! Has our old friendship deserved this? Why have you done
this thing to me?--And, my God!'--he began to pace up and down again, his
hands in his pockets--'how well--how effectually you have gone to work! You
have had--Lucy--in your hands for six weeks. It is plain enough what has
been going on. This morning--on that hill--suddenly,'--he raised his hand
to his brow, as though the surprise, the ecstacy of the moment returned
upon him--'there among the trees--was her face! What I said I shall never
remember. But when a man feels as I do he has no need to take thought
what he shall say. And she? Impatience, coldness, aversion!--not a word
permitted of my long pilgrimage--not a syllable of explanation for this
slight, this unbearable slight that had been put upon me as her host,
her guardian, for the time being! You and she fly me as though I were no
longer fit to be your companion. Even the servants talked. Aunt Pattie and
I had to set ourselves at once to devise the most elaborate falsehoods, or
Heaven knows where the talk would have spread. How had I deserved such a
humiliation?--Yet, when I meet Miss Foster again, she behaves as though she
owed me not a word of excuse. All her talk of you and your health! I must
go away at once--because it would startle and disturb you to see me. She
had already found out by chance that I was here--she had begged Father
Benecke to use his influence with me not to insist on seeing you--not to
come to the convent. It was the most amazing, the most inexplicable thing!
What in the name of fortune does it mean? Are we all mad? Is the world and
everyone on it rushing together to Bedlam?'

Still she did not speak. Was it that his mere voice, the familiar torrent
of words, was delightful to her?--that she cared very little what he said,
so long as he was there, living, breathing, pleading before her?--that,
like Sidney, she could have cried to him: 'Say on, and all well said, still
say the same'?

But he meant to be answered. He came close to her.

'We have been comrades, Eleanor--fellow-workers--friends. You have come to
know me as perhaps no other woman has known me. I have shown you a thousand
faults. You know all my weaknesses. You have a right to despise me as an
unstable, egotistical, selfish fool; who must needs waste other people's
good time and good brains for his own futile purposes. You have a right
to think me ungrateful for the kindest help that ever man got. You have
a right as Miss Foster's friend--and perhaps, guessing as you do at some
of my past history,--to expect of me probation and guarantees. You have
a right to warn her how she gives away anything so precious as herself.
But you have not a right to inflict on me such suffering--such agony of
mind--as you have imposed on me the last six weeks! I deny it, Eleanor--I
deny it altogether! The punishment, the test goes beyond--far beyond--your
right and my offences!'

He calmed--he curbed himself.

'The reckoning has come, Eleanor. I ask you to pay it.'

She drew a long breath.

'But I can't go at that pace. You must give me time.'

He turned away in a miserable impatience.

She closed her eyes and thought a little, 'Now'--she said to herself--'now
is the time for lying. It must be done. Quick! no scruples!'

And aloud:

'You understand,' she said slowly, 'that Miss Foster and I had become much
attached to each other?'

'I understand.'

'That she had felt great sympathy for me in the failure of the book, and
was inclined--well, you have proof of it!--to pity me, of course a great
deal too much, for being a weakling. She is the most tender--the most
loving creature that exists.'

'How does that explain why you should have fled from me like the plague?'
he said doggedly.

'No--no--but--Anyway, you see Lucy was likely to do anything she could to
please me. That's plain, isn't it?--so far?'

Her head dropped a little to one side, interrogatively.

He made no reply. He still stood in front of her, his eyes bent upon her,
his hands in his pockets.

'Meanwhile'--the colour rushed over her face--'I had been, most innocently,
an eavesdropper.'

'Ah!' he said, with a movement, 'that night? I imagined it.'

'You were not as cautious as you might have been--considering all the
people about--and I heard.'

He waited, all ear. But she ceased to speak. She bent a little farther over
the back of the chair, as though she were making a mental enumeration of
the leaves of a tiny myrtle bush that grew near his heel.

'I thought that bit of truth would have stiffened the lies,' she thought to
herself; 'but somehow--they don't work.'

'Well: then, you see'--she threw back her head again and looked at him--'I
had to consider. As you say, I knew you better than most people. It was all
remarkably rapid--you will hardly deny that? For a fortnight you took no
notice of Lucy Foster. Then the attraction began--and suddenly--Well, we
needn't go into that any more; but with your character it was plain that
you would push matters on--that you would give her no time--that you would
speak, _coute qua coute_--that you would fling caution and delay to the
winds--and that all in a moment Lucy Foster would find herself confronted
by a great decision that she was not at all prepared to make. It was not
fair that she should even be asked to make it. I had become her friend,
specially. You will see there was a responsibility. Delay for both of
you--wasn't that to be desired? And no use whatever to go and leave you
the address!--you'll admit that?' she said hurriedly, with the accent of a
child trying to entrap the judgment of an angry elder who was bringing it
to book.

He stood there lost in wrath, bewilderment, mystification. Was there ever a
more lame, more ridiculous tale?

Then he turned quickly upon her, searching her face for some clue. A sudden
perception--a perception of horror--swept upon him. Eleanor's first flush
was gone; in its place was the pallor of effort and excitement. What a
ghost, what a spectre she had become! Manisty looked at her aghast,--at her
unsteady yet defiant eyes, at the uncontrollable trembling of the mouth she
did her best to keep at its hard task of smiling.

In a flash, he understood. A wave of red invaded the man's face and neck.
He saw himself back in the winter days, working, talking, thinking; always
with Eleanor; Eleanor his tool, his stimulus; her delicate mind and heart
the block on which he sharpened his own powers and perceptions. He recalled
his constant impatience of the barriers that hamper cold and cautious
people. He must have intimacy, feeling, and the moods that border on and
play with passion. Only so could his own gift of phrase, his own artistic
divinations develop to a fine suhtlety and clearness, like flowers in a
kind air.

An experience,--for him. And for her? He remembered how, in a leisurely and
lordly way, he had once thought it possible he might some day reward his
cousin; at the end of things, when all other adventures were done.

Then came that tragi-comedy of the book; his disillusion with it; his
impatient sense that the winter's work upon it was somehow bound up in
Eleanor's mind with a claim on him that had begun to fret and tease; and
those rebuffs, tacit or spoken, which his egotism had not shrunk from
inflicting on her sweetness.

How could he have helped inflicting them? Lucy had come!--to stir in
him the deepest waters of the soul. Besides, he had never taken Eleanor
seriously. On the one hand he had thought of her as intellect, and
therefore hardly woman; on the other he had conceived her as too gentle,
too sweet, too sensitive to push anything to extremes. No doubt the flight
of the two friends and Eleanor's letter had been a rude awakening. He
had then understood that he had offended Eleanor, offended her both as a
friend, and as a clever woman. She had noticed the dawn of his love for
Lucy Foster, and had determined that he should still recognise her power
and influence upon his life.

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