Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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This was part of his explanation. As to the rest, it was inevitable that
both his vanity and passion should speak soft things. A girl does not take
such a wild step, or acquiesce in it--till she has felt a man's power.
Self-assertion on Eleanor's part--a sweet alarm on Lucy's--these had been
his keys to the matter, so far. They had brought him anger, but also hope;
the most delicious, the most confident hope.

Now remorse shot through him, fierce and stinging--remorse and terror! Then
on their heels followed an angry denial of responsibility, mingled with
alarm and revolt. Was he to be robbed of Lucy because Eleanor had misread
him? No doubt she had imprinted what she pleased on Lucy's mind. Was he
indeed undone?--for good and all?

Then shame, pity, rushed upon him headlong. He dared not look at the face
beside him with its record of pain. He tried to put out of his mind what it
meant. Of course he must accept her lead. He was only too eager to accept
it; to play the game as she pleased. She was mistress! That he realised.

He took up the camp-stool on which he had been sitting when she arrived and
placed himself beside her.

'Well--that explains something'--he said more gently. 'I can't complain
that I don't seem to you or anyone a miracle of discretion; I can't
wonder--perhaps--that you should wish to protect Miss Foster, if--if you
thought she needed protecting. But I must think--I can't help thinking,
that you set about it with very unnecessary violence. And for yourself
too--what madness! Eleanor! what have you been doing to yourself?'

He looked at her reproachfully with that sudden and intimate penetration
which was one of his chief spells with women. Eleanor shrank.

'Oh! I am ill,' she said hastily; 'too ill in fact to make a fuss about. It
would only be a waste of time.'

'Of course you have found this place too rough for you. Have you any
comforts at all in that ruin? Eleanor, what a rash,--what a wild thing to
do!'

He came closer to her, and Eleanor trembled under the strong expostulating
tenderness of his face and voice. It was so like him--to be always somehow
in the right! Would he succeed, now as always, in doing with her exactly as
he would? And was it not this, this first and foremost that she had fled
from?

'No'--she said,--'no. I have been as well here as I should have been
anywhere else. Don't let us talk of it.'

'But I must talk of it. You have hurt yourself--and Heaven knows you have
hurt me--desperately. Eleanor--when I came back from that function the
day you left the Villa, I came back with the intention of telling you
everything. I knew you were Miss Foster's friend. I thought you were mine
too. In spite of all my stupidity about the book, Eleanor, you would have
listened to me?--you would have advised me?'

'When did you begin to think of Lucy?'

Her thin fingers, crossed over her brow, as she rested her arm on the back
of the chair, hid from him the eagerness, the passion, of her curiosity.

But he scented danger. He prepared himself to walk warily.

'It was after Nemi--quite suddenly. I can't explain it. How can one ever
explain those things?'

'What makes you want to marry her? What possible congruity is there between
her and you?'

He laughed uneasily.

'What's the good of asking those things? One's feeling itself is the
answer.'

'But I'm the spectator--the friend.'--The word came out slowly, with a
strange emphasis. 'I want to know what Lucy's chances are.'

'Chances of what?'

'Chances of happiness.'

'Good God!'--he said, with an impatient groan.--'You talk as though she
were going to give herself any opportunity to find out.'

'Well, let us talk so, for argument. You're not exactly a novice, you
know, in these things. How is one to be sure that you're not playing with
Lucy--as you played with the book--till you can go back to the play you
really like best?'

'What do you mean?' he cried, starting with indignation--'the play of
politics?'

'Politics--ambition--what you will. Suppose Lucy finds herself taken up and
thrown down--like the book?--when the interest's done?'

She uncovered her eyes, and looked at him steadily, coldly. It was an
Eleanor he did not know.

He sprang up in his anger and discomfort, and began to pace again in front
of her.

'Oh well--if you think as badly of me as that'--he said fiercely,--'I don't
see what good can come of this conversation.'

There was a pause. At the end of it, Eleanor said in another voice:

'Did you ever give her any indication of what you felt--before to-day?'

'I came near--in the Borghese gardens,' he said reluctantly. 'If she had
held out the tip of her little finger--But she didn't. And I should have
been a fool. It was too soon--too hasty. Anyway, she would not give me
the smallest opening. And afterwards--' He paused. His mind passed to his
night-wandering in the garden, to the strange breaking of the terra-cotta.
Furtively his gaze examined Eleanor's face. But what he saw of it told
him nothing, and again his instinct warned him to let sleeping dogs lie.
'Afterwards I thought things over, naturally. And I determined, that night,
as I have already said, to come to you and take counsel with you. I saw you
were out of charity with me. And, goodness knows, there was not much to
be said for me! But at any rate I thought that we, who had been such old
friends, had better understand each other; that you'd help me if I asked
you. You'd never yet refused, anyway.'

His voice changed. She said nothing for a little, and her hands still made
a penthouse for her face.

At last she threw him a question.

'Just now--what happened?'

'Good Heavens, as if I knew!' he said, with a cry of distress. 'I tried
to tell her how I had gone up and down Italy, seeking for her, hungering
for any shred of news of you. And she?--she treated me like a troublesome
intruder, like a dog that follows you unasked and has to be beaten back
with your stick!'

Eleanor smiled a little. His heart and his vanity had been stabbed alike.
Certainly he had something to complain of.

She dropped her hands, and drew herself erect.

'Well, yes,' she said in a meditative voice, 'we must think--we must see.'

As she sat there, rapt in a sudden intensity of reflection, the fatal
transformation in her was still more plainly visible; Manisty could hardly
keep his eyes from her. Was it his fault? His poor, kind Eleanor! He felt
the ghastly tribute of it, felt it with impatience, and repulsion. Must a
man always measure his words and actions by a foot-rule--lest a woman take
him too seriously? He repented; and in the same breath told himself that
his penalty was more than his due.

At last Eleanor spoke.

'I must return a moment to what we said before. Lucy Foster's ways,
habits, antecedents are wholly different from yours. Suppose there were a
chance for you. You would take her to London--expect her to play her part
there--in your world. Suppose she failed. How would you get on?'

'Eleanor--really!--am a "three-tailed bashaw"?'

'No. But you are absorbing--despotic--fastidious. You might break that
girl's heart in a thousand ways--before you knew you'd done it. You don't
give; you take.'

'And you--hit hard!' he said, under his breath, resuming his walk.

She sat white and motionless, her eyes sparkling. Presently he stood still
before her, his features working with emotion.

'If I am incapable of love--and unworthy of hers,' he said in a stifled
voice,--'if that's your verdict--if that's what you tell her--I'd better
go. I know your power--don't dispute your right to form a judgment--I'll
go. The carriage is there. Good-bye.'

She lifted her face to his with a quick gesture.

'She loves you!'--she said, simply.

Manisty fell back, with a cry.

There was a silence. Eleanor's being was flooded with the strangest, most
ecstatic sense of deliverance. She had been her own executioner; and this
was not death--but life!

She rose. And speaking in her natural voice, with her old smile, she
said--'I must go back to her--she will have missed me. Now then--what shall
we do next?'

He walked beside her bewildered.

'You have taken my breath away--lifted me from Hell to Purgatory anyway,'
he said, at last, trying for composure. 'I have no plans for myself--no
particular hope--you didn't see and hear her just now! But I leave it all
in your hands. What else can I do?'

'No,' she said calmly. 'There is nothing else for you to do.'

He felt a tremor of revolt, so quick and strange was her assumption of
power over both his destiny and Lucy's. But he suppressed it; made no
reply.

They turned the corner of the house. 'Your carriage can take ms up the
hill,' said Eleanor. 'You must ask Father Benecke's hospitality a little
longer; and you shall hear from me to-night.'

They walked towards the carriage, which was waiting a hundred yards
away. On the way Manisty suddenly said, plunging back into some of the
perplexities which had assailed him before Eleanor's appearance:

'What on earth does Father Benecke know about it all? Why did he never
mention that you were here; and then ask me to pay him a visit? Why did he
send me up the hill this morning? I had forgotten all about the convent. He
made me go.'

Eleanor started; coloured; and pondered a moment.

'We pledged him to secrecy as to his letters. But all priests are
Jesuits, aren't they?--even the good ones. I suppose he thought we had
quarrelled, and he would force us for our good to make it up. He is very
kind--and--rather romantic.'

Manisty said no more. Here, too, he divined mysteries that were best
avoided.

They stood beside the carriage. The coachman was on the ground remedying
something wrong with the harness.

Suddenly Manisty put out his hand and seized his companion's.

'Eleanor!'--he said imploringly--'Eleanor!'

His lips could not form a word more. But his eyes spoke for him. They
breathed compunction, entreaty; they hinted what neither could ever say;
they asked pardon for offences that could never be put into words.

Eleanor did not shrink. Her look met his in the first truly intimate gaze
that they had ever exchanged; hers infinitely sad, full of a dignity
recovered, and never to be lost again, the gaze, indeed, of a soul that
was already withdrawing itself gently, imperceptibly from the things of
earth and sense; his agitated and passionate. It seemed to him that he saw
the clear brown of those beautiful eyes just cloud with tears. Then they
dropped, and the moment was over, the curtain fallen, for ever.

They sighed, and moved apart. The coachman climbed upon the box.

'To-night!'--she said, smiling--waving her hand--'Till to-night.'

'_Avanti!_' cried the coachman, and the horses began to toil sleepily up
the hill.

* * * * *

'Sapphira was nothing to me!' thought Eleanor as she threw herself back in
the old shabby landau with a weariness of body that made little impression
however on the tension of her mind.

Absently she looked out at the trees above and around her; at the
innumerable turns of the road. So the great meeting was over! Manisty's
reproaches had come and gone! With his full knowledge--at his humble
demand--she held his fate in her hands.

Again that extraordinary sense of happiness and lightness! She shrank from
it in a kind of terror.

Once, as the horses turned corner after corner, the sentence of a
meditative Frenchman crossed her mind; words which said that the only
satisfaction for man lies in being _dans l'ordre_; in unity, that is, with
the great world-machine in which he finds himself; fighting with it, not
against it.

Her mind played about this thought; then returned to Manisty and Lucy.

A new and humbled Manisty!--shaken with a supreme longing and fear which
seemed to have driven out for the moment all the other elements in his
character--those baser, vainer, weaker elements that she knew so well. The
change in him was a measure of the smallness of her own past influence upon
him; of the infinitude of her own self-deception. Her sharp intelligence
drew the inference at once, and bade her pride accept it.

They had reached the last stretch of hill before the convent. Where was
Lucy? She looked out eagerly.

The girl stood at the edge of the road, waiting. As Eleanor bent forward
with a nervous 'Dear, I am not tired--wasn't it lovely to find this
carriage?' Lucy made no reply. Her face was stern; her eyes red. She helped
Eleanor to alight without a word.

But when they had reached Eleanor's cool and shaded room, and Eleanor was
lying on her bed physically at rest, Lucy stood beside her with a quivering
face.

'Did you tell him to go at once? Of course you have seen him?'

'Yes, I have seen him. Father Benecke gave me notice.'

'Father Benecke!' said the girl with a tightening of the lip.

There was a pause; then Eleanor said:

'Dear, get that low chair and sit beside me.'

'You oughtn't to speak a word,' said Lucy impetuously; 'you ought to rest
there for hours. Why we should be disturbed in this unwarrantable, this
unpardonable way, I can't imagine.'

She looked taller than Eleanor had ever seen her; and more queenly. Her
whole frame seemed to be stiff with indignation and will.

'Come!' said Eleanor, holding out her hand.

Unwillingly Lucy obeyed.

Eleanor turned towards her. Their faces were close together; the ghastly
pallor of the one beside the stormy, troubled beauty of the other.

'Darling, listen to me. For two months I have been like a person in a
delirium--under suggestion, as the hypnotists say. I have not been myself.
It has been a possession. And this morning--before I saw Edward at all--I
felt the demon--go! And the result is very simple. Put your ear down to
me.'

Lucy bent.

'The one thing in the world that I desire now--before I die--(Ah! dear,
don't start!--you know!)--the only, only thing--is that you and Edward
should be happy--and forgive me.'

Her voice was lost in a sob. Lucy kissed her quickly, passionately. Then
she rose.

'I shall never marry Mr. Manisty, Eleanor, if that is what you mean. It is
well to make that clear at once.'

'And why?' Eleanor caught her--kept her prisoner.

'Why?--why?' said Lucy impatiently--'because I have no desire to marry
him--because--I would sooner cut off my right hand than marry him.'

Eleanor held her fast, looked at her with a brilliant eye--accusing,
significant.

'A fortnight ago you were on the _loggia_--alone. I saw you from my room.
Lucy!--I saw you kiss the terra-cotta he gave you. Do you mean to tell me
that meant nothing--_nothing_--from you, of all people? Oh! you dear, dear
child!--I knew it from the beginning--I knew it--but I was mad.'

Lucy had grown very white, but she stood rigid.

'I can't be responsible for what you thought, or--for anything--but what I
do. And I will never marry Mr. Manisty.'

Eleanor still held her.

'Dear--you remember that night when Alice attacked you? I came into the
library, unknown to you both. You were still in the chair--you heard
nothing. He stooped over you. I heard what he said. I saw his face. Lucy!
there are terrible risks--not to you--but to him--in driving a temperament
like his to despair. You know how he lives by feeling, by imagination--how
much of the artist, of the poet, there is in him. If he is happy--if there
is someone to understand, and strengthen him, he will do great things. If
not he will waste his life. And that would be so bitter, bitter to see!'

Eleanor leant her face on Lucy's hands, and the girl felt her tears. She
shook from head to foot, but she did not yield.

'I can't--I can't'--she said in a low, resolute voice. 'Don't ask me. I
never can.'

'And you told him so?'

'I don't know what I told him--except that he mustn't trouble you--that we
wanted him to go--to go directly.'

'And he--what did he say to you?'

'That doesn't matter in the least,' cried Lucy. 'I have given him no right
to say what he does. Did I encourage him to spend these weeks in looking
for us? Never!'

'He didn't want encouraging,' said Eleanor. 'He is in love--perhaps for the
first time in his life. If you are to give him no hope--it will go hard
with him.'

Lucy's face only darkened.

'How can you say such things to me?' she said passionately. 'How can you?'

Eleanor sighed. 'I have not much right to say them, I know,' she said
presently, in a low voice. 'I have poisoned the sound of them to your
ears.'

Lucy was silent. She began to walk up and down the room, with her hands
behind her.

'I will never, never forgive Father Benecke,' she said presently, in a low,
determined voice.

'What do you think he had to do with it?'

'I know,' said Lucy. 'He brought Mr. Manisty here. He sent him up the
hill this morning to see me. It was the most intolerable interference and
presumption. Only a priest could have done it.'

'Oh! you bigot!--you Puritan! Come here, little wild-cat. Let me say
something.'

Lucy came reluctantly, and Eleanor held her.

'Doesn't it enter into your philosophy--tell me--that one soul should be
able to do anything for another?'

'I don't believe in the professional, anyway,' said Lucy stiffly--'nor in
the professional claims.'

'My dear, it is a training like any other.'

'Did you--did you confide in him?' said the girl after a moment, with a
visible effort.

Eleanor made no reply. She lay with her face hidden. When Lucy bent down to
her she said with a sudden sob:

'Don't you understand? I have been near two griefs since I came here--his
and the Contessa's. And mine didn't stand the comparison.'

'Father Benecke had no right to take matters into his own hands,' said Lucy
stubbornly.

'I think he was afraid--I should die in my sins,' said Eleanor wildly. 'He
is an apostle--he took the license of one.'

Lucy frowned, but did not speak.

'Lucy! what makes you so hard--so strange?'

'I am not hard. But I don't want to see Mr. Manisty again. I want to take
you safely back to England, and then to go home--home to Uncle Ben--to my
own people.'

Her voice showed the profoundest and most painful emotion. Eleanor felt a
movement of despair. What could he have said or done to set this tender
nature so on edge? If it had not been for that vision on the _loggia_, she
would have thought that the girl's heart was in truth untouched, and that
Manisty would sue in vain. But how was it possible to think it?

She lost herself in doubts and conjectures, while Lucy still moved up and
down.

Presently Cecco brought up their meal, and Eleanor must needs eat and drink
to soothe Lucy's anxiety. The girl watched her every movement, and Eleanor
dared neither be tired nor dainty, lest for every mouthful she refused
Manisty's chance should be the less.

After dinner she once more laid a detaining hand on her companion.

'Dear, I can't send him away, you know--at once--to please you.'

'Do _you_ want him to stay?' said Lucy, holding herself aloof.

'After all, he is my kinsman. There are many things to discuss--much to
hear.'

'Very well. It won't be necessary for me to take part.'

'Not unless you like. But, Lucy, it would make me very unhappy--if you were
unkind to him. You have made him suffer, my dear; he is not the meekest of
men. Be content.'

'I will be quite polite,' said the girl, turning away her head. 'You will
be able to travel--won't you--very soon?'

Eleanor assented vaguely, and the conversation dropped.

In the afternoon Marie took a note to the cottage by the river.

'Ask Father Benecke to let you stay a few days. Things look bad. What did
you say? If you attacked me, it has done you harm.'

* * * * *

Meanwhile Lucy, who felt herself exiled from the woods, the roads, the
village, by one threatening presence, shut herself up for a while in her
own room, in youth's most tragic mood, calling on the pangs of thought to
strengthen still more her resolve and clear her mind.

She forced her fingers to an intermittent task of needlework, but there
were long pauses when her hands lay idle on her lap, when her head drooped
against the back of her chair, and all her life centred in her fast beating
heart, driven and strained by the torment of recollection.

That moment when she had stepped out upon the road from the shelter of the
wood--the thrill of it even in memory made her pale and cold. His look--his
cry--the sudden radiance of the face, which, as she had first caught sight
of it, bent in a brooding frown over the dusty road, had seemed to her the
very image of discontent.

'Miss Foster!--_Lucy!_'

The word had escaped him, in his first rush of joy, his spring towards her.
And she had felt herself tottering, in a sudden blindness.

What could she remember? The breathless contradiction of his questions--the
eager grasp of her hand--the words and phrases that were the words and
phrases of love--dictated, justified only by love--then her first mention
of Eleanor--the short stammering sentences, which as she spoke them sounded
to her own ear so inconclusive, unintelligible, insulting--and his growing
astonishment, the darkening features, the tightening lips, and finally his
step backward, the haughty bracing of the whole man.

'Why does my cousin refuse to see me? What possible reason can you or she
assign?'

And then her despairing search for the right word, that would not come! He
must please, please, go away--because Mrs. Burgoyne was ill--because the
doctors were anxious--because there must be no excitement. She was acting
as nurse, but it was only to be for a short time longer. In a week or
two, no doubt Mrs. Burgoyne would go to England, and she would return to
America with the Porters. But for the present, quiet was still absolutely
necessary.

Then--silence!--and afterwards a few sarcastic interrogations, quick,
practical, hard to answer--the mounting menace of that thunderbrow,
extravagant, and magnificent,--the trembling of her own limbs. And at
last that sharp sentence, like lightning from the cloud, as to 'whims and
follies' that no sane man could hope to unravel, which had suddenly nerved
her to be angry.

'Oh! I was odious--odious!'--she thought to herself, hiding her face in her
hands.

His answering indignation seemed to clatter through her room.

'And you really expect me to do your bidding calmly,--to play this
ridiculous part?--to leave my cousin and you in these wilds--at this time
of year--she in the state of health that you describe--to face this heat,
and the journey home, without comforts, without assistance? It is a great
responsibility, Miss Foster, that you take, with me, and with her! I refuse
to yield it to you, till I have given you at least a little further time
for consideration. I shall stay here a few hours longer. If you change your
mind, send to me--I am with Father Benecke. If not--good-bye! But I warn
you that I will be no party to further mystification. It is undesirable for
us all. I shall write at once to General Delafield-Muir, and to my aunt. I
think it will be also my duty to communicate with your friends in London or
in Boston.'

'Mr. Manisty!--let me beg of you to leave my personal affairs alone!'

She felt again the proud flush upon her cheek, the shock of their two
wills, the mingled anguish and relief as she saw him turn upon his heel,
and go.

Ah! how unready, how _gauche_ she had shown herself! From the beginning
instead of conciliating she had provoked him. But how to make a plausible
story out of their adventure at all? There was the deciding, the fatal
difficulty! Her face burnt anew as she tried to think his thoughts, to
imagine all that he might or must guess; as she remembered the glow of
swift instinctive triumph with which he had recognised her, and realised
from it some of the ideas that must have been his travelling companions all
these weeks.

No matter: let him think what he pleased! She sat there in the gathering
dark; at one moment, feeling herself caught in the grip of a moral
necessity that no rebellion could undo; and the next, childishly catching
to her heart the echoes and images of that miserable half-hour.

No wonder he had been angry!

'_Lucy!_'

Her name was sweetened to her ear for ever. He looked way-worn and tired;
yet so eager, so spiritually alert. Never had that glitter and magic he
carried about with him been more potent, more compelling.

Alack! what woman ever yet refused to love a man because he loved himself?
It depends entirely on how she estimates the force of his temptation. And
it would almost seem as though nature, for her own secret reasons, had
thrown a special charm round the egotist of all types, for the loving and
the true. Is it that she is thinking of the race--must needs balance in it
the forces of death and life? What matters the separate joy or pain!

Yes. Lucy would have given herself to Manisty, not blind to risks,
expecting thorns!--if it had been possible.

But it was not possible. She rose from her seat, and sternly dismissed her
thoughts. She was no conscious thief, no willing traitor. Not even Eleanor
should persuade her. Eleanor was dying because she, Lucy, had stolen from
her the affections of her inconstant lover. Was there any getting over
that? None! The girl shrank in horror from the very notion of such a base
and plundering happiness.

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