Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor

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But to laugh and live with a people, merely that you might gibbet it before
Europe, that you might show it as the Helot among nations--there was a kind
of treachery in it! Lucy Foster remembered some of the talk and feeling in
America after the Manistys' visit there had borne fruit in certain hostile
lectures and addresses on the English side of the water. She had shared the
feeling. She was angry still. And her young ignorance and sympathy were up
in arms so far on behalf of Italy. Who and what was this critic that he
should blame so freely, praise so little?

Not that Mr. Manisty had so far confided any of his views to her! It seemed
to her that she had hardly spoken with him since that first evening of her
arrival. But she had heard further portions of his book read aloud; taken
from the main fabric this time and not from the embroideries. The whole
villa indeed was occupied, and pre-occupied by the book. Mrs. Burgoyne was
looking pale and worn with the stress of it.

Mrs. Burgoyne! The girl fell into a wondering reverie. She was Mr.
Manisty's second cousin--she had lost her husband and child in some
frightful accident--she was not going to marry Mr. Manisty--at least nobody
said so--and though she went to mass, she was not a Catholic, but on the
contrary a Scotch Presbyterian, by birth, being the daughter of a Scotch
laird of old family--one General Delafield Muir--?

'She is very kind to me,' thought Lucy Foster in a rush of gratitude mixed
with some perplexity.--'I don't know why she takes so much trouble about
me. She is so different--so--so fashionable--so experienced. She can't care
a bit about me. Yet she is very sweet to me--to everybody, indeed. But--'

And again she lost herself in ponderings on the relation of Mr. Manisty to
his cousin. She had never seen anything like it. The mere neighbourhood
of it thrilled her, she could not have told why. Was it the intimacy that
it implied--the intimacy of mind and thought? It was like marriage--but
married people were more reserved, more secret. Yet of course it was only
friendship. Miss Manisty had said that her nephew and Mrs. Burgoyne were
'very great friends.' Well--One read of such things--one did not often see
them.

* * * * *

The sound of steps approaching made her lift her eyes.

It was not Alfredo, but a young man, a young Englishman apparently, who
was coming towards her. He was fair-haired and smiling; he carried his hat
under his arm; and he wore a light suit and a rose in his button-hole--this
was all she had time to see before he was at her side.

'May I introduce myself? I must!--Miss Manisty told me to come and find
you. I'm Reggie Brooklyn--Mrs. Burgoyne's friend. Haven't you heard of me?
I look after her when Manisty ought to, and doesn't; I'm going to take you
all to St. Peter's next week.'

Lucy looked up to see a charming face, lit by the bluest of blue eyes,
adorned moreover by a fair moustache, and an expression at once confident
and appealing.

Was this the 'delightful boy' from the Embassy Mrs. Burgoyne had announced
to her? No doubt. The colour rose softly in her cheek. She was not
accustomed to young gentlemen with such a manner and such a _savoir faire_.

'Won't you sit down?' She moved sedately to one side of the bench.

He settled himself at once, fanning himself with his hat, and looking at
her discreetly.

'You're American, aren't you? You don't mind my asking you?'

'Not in the least. Yes; it's my first time in Europe.'

'Well, Italy's not bad; is it? Nice place, Rome, anyway. Aren't you rather
knocked over by it? I was when I first came.'

'I've only been here four days.

'And of course nobody here has time to take you about. I can guess that!
How's the book getting on?'

'I don't know,' she said, opening her eyes wide in a smile that would not
be repressed, a smile that broke like light in her grave face.

Her companion looked at her with approval.

'My word! she's dowdy'--he thought--'like a Sunday-school teacher. But
she's handsome.'

The real point was, however, that Mrs. Burgoyne had told him to go out and
make himself agreeable, and he was accustomed to obey orders from that
quarter.

'Doesn't he read it to you all day and all night?' he asked. 'That's his
way.'

'I have heard some of it. It's very interesting.'

The young man shrugged his shoulders.

'It's a queer business that book. My chief here is awfully sick about it.
So are a good many other English. Why should an Englishman come out here
and write a book to run down Italy?--And an Englishman that's been in the
Government, too--so of course what he says'll have authority. Why, we're
friends with Italy--we've always stuck up for Italy! When I think what he's
writing--and what a row it'll make--I declare I'm ashamed to look one's
Italian friends in the face!--And just now, too, when they're so down on
their luck.'

For it was the year of the Abyssinian disasters; and the carnage of Adowa
was not yet two months old.

Lucy's expression showed her sympathy.

'What makes him--'

'Take such a twisted sort of a line? O goodness! what makes Manisty do
anything? Of course, I oughtn't to talk. I'm just an understrapper--and
he's a man of genius,--more or less--we all know that. But what made him
do what he did last year? I say it was because his chief--he was in the
Education Office you know--was a Dissenter, and a jam manufacturer, and had
mutton-chop whisker. Manisty just couldn't do what he was told by a man
like that. He's as proud as Lucifer. I once heard him tell a friend of mine
that he didn't know how to obey anybody--he'd never learnt. That's because
they didn't send him to a public school--worse luck; that was his mother's
doing, I believe. She thought him so clever--he must be treated differently
to other people. Don't you think that's a great mistake?'

'What?'

'Why--to prefer the cross-cuts, when you might stick to the high road?'

The American girl considered. Then she flashed into a smile.--

'I think I'm for the cross-cuts!'

'Ah--that's because you're American. I might have known you'd say that. All
your people want to go one better than anybody else. But I can tell you it
doesn't do for Englishmen. They want their noses kept to the grindstone.
That's my experience! Of course it was a great pity Manisty ever went into
Parliament at all. He'd been abroad for seven or eight years, living with
all the big-wigs and reactionaries everywhere. The last thing in the world
he knew anything about was English politics.--But then his father had been
a Liberal, and a Minister for ever so long. And when Manisty came home, and
the member for his father's division died, I don't deny it was very natural
they should put him in. And he's such a queer mixture, I dare say he didn't
know himself where he was.--But I'll tell you one thing--'

He shook his head slowly,--with all the airs of the budding statesman.

'When you've joined a party,--you must _dine_ with 'em:--It don't sound
much--but I declare it's the root of everything. Now Manisty was always
dining with the other side. All the great Tory ladies,--and the charming
High Churchwomen, and the delightful High Churchmen--and they _are_ nice
fellows, I can tell you!--got hold of him. And then it came to some
question about these beastly schools--don't you wish they were all at
the bottom of the sea?--and I suppose his chief was more annoying than
usual--(oh, but he had a number of other coolnesses on his hands by that
time--he wasn't meant to be a Liberal!) and his friends talked to him--and
so--Ah! there they are!

And lifting his hat, the young man waved it towards Mrs. Burgoyne who with
Manisty and three or four other companions had just become visible at the
further end of the ilex-avenue which stretched from their stone bench to
the villa.

'Why, that's my chief,'--he cried--'I didn't think he was to be here this
afternoon. I say, do you know my chief?'

And he turned to her with the brightest, most confiding manner, as though
he had been the friend of her cradle.

'Who?'--said Lucy, bewildered--'the tall gentleman with the white hair?'

'Yes,--that's the ambassador. Oh! I'm glad you'll see him. He's a charmer,
is our chief! And that's his married daughter, who's keeping house for
him just now.--I'll tell you something, if you'll keep a secret'--he bent
towards her,--'He likes Mrs. Burgoyne of course,--everybody does--but
he don't take Manisty at his own valuation. I've heard him say some
awfully good things to Manisty--you'd hardly think a man would get over
them.--Who's that on the other side?'

He put his hand over his eyes for a moment, then burst into a laugh.--

'Why, it's the other man of letters!--Bellasis. I should think you've read
some of his poems--or plays? Rome has hardly been able to hold the two
of them this winter. It's worse than the archaeologists. Mrs. Burgoyne is
always trying to be civil to him, so that he mayn't make uncivil remarks
about Manisty. I say--don't you think she's delightful?'

He lowered his voice as he looked round upon his companion, but his blue
eyes shone.

'Mrs. Burgoyne?'--said Lucy--'Yes, indeed!--She's so--so very kind.'

'Oh! she's a darling, is Eleanor Burgoyne. And I may call her that, you
know, for I'm her cousin, just as Manisty is--only on the other side. I
have been trying to look after her a bit this winter in Rome; she never
looks after herself. And she's not a bit strong.--You know her history of
course?'

He lowered his voice with young importance, speaking almost in a whisper,
though the advancing party were still far away. Lucy shook her head.

'Well, it's a ghastly tale, and I've only a minute.--Her husband, you see,
had pneumonia--they were in Switzerland together, and he'd taken a chill
after a walk--and one night he was raving mad, mad you understand with
delirium and fever--and poor Eleanor was so ill, they had taken her away
from her husband, and put her to bed on the other side of the hotel.--And
there was a drunken nurse--it's almost too horrible, isn't it?--and while
she was asleep Mr. Burgoyne got up, quite mad--and he went into the next
room, where the baby was, without waking anybody, and he took the child out
asleep in his arms, back to his own room where the windows were open, and
there he threw himself and the boy out together--headlong! The hotel was
high up,--built, one side of it, above a rock wall, with a stream below
it.--There had been a great deal of rain, and the river was swollen. The
bodies were not found for days.--When poor Eleanor woke up, she had lost
everything.--Oh! I dare say, when the first shock was over, the husband
didn't so much matter--he hadn't made her at all happy.--But the child!'--

He stopped, Mrs. Burgoyne's gay voice could be heard as she approached.
All the elegance of the dress was visible, the gleam of a diamond at the
throat, the flowers at the waist. Lucy Foster's eyes, dim with sudden
tears, fastened themselves upon the slender, advancing form.

CHAPTER IV

The party grouped themselves round the tea-tables. Mrs. Burgoyne laid
a kind hand on Lucy Foster's arm, and introduced one or two of the
new-comers.

Then, while Miss Manisty, a little apart, lent her ear to the soft chat
of the ambassador, who sat beside her, supporting a pair of old and very
white hands upon a gold-headed stick, Mrs. Burgoyne busied herself with Mr.
Bellasis and his tea. For he was anxious to catch a train, and had but a
short time to spare.

He was a tall stiffly built man, with a heavy white face, and a shock of
black hair combed into a high and bird-like crest. As to Mrs. Burgoyne's
attentions, he received them with a somewhat pinched but still smiling
dignity. Manisty, meanwhile, a few feet away, was fidgetting on his chair,
in one of his most unmanageable moods. Around him were two or three young
men bearing the great names of Rome. They all belonged to the Guardia
Nobile, and were all dressed by English tailors. Two of them, moreover,
were the sons of English mothers. They were laughing and joking together,
and every now and then they addressed their host. But he scarcely replied.
He gathered stalk after stalk of grass from the ground beside him, nibbled
it and threw it away--a constant habit of his when he was annoyed or out of
spirits.

"So you have read my book?" said Mr. Bellasis pleasantly, addressing Mrs.
Burgoyne, as she handed him a cup of tea. The book in question was long;
it revived the narrative verse of our grandfathers; and in spite of the
efforts of a 'set' the world was not disposed to take much notice of it.

'Yes, indeed! We liked it so much.--But I think when I wrote to you I told
you what we thought about it?'

And she glanced towards Manisty for support. He, however, did not
apparently hear what she said. Mr. Bellasis also looked round in his
direction; but in vain. The poet's face clouded.

'May I ask what reading you are at?' he said, returning to his tea.

'What reading?'--Mrs. Burgoyne looked puzzled.

'Have you read it more than once?'

She coloured.

'No--I'm afraid--'

'Ah!--my friends tell me in Rome that the book cannot be really appreciated
except at a second or third reading--'

Mrs. Burgoyne looked up in dismay, as a shower of gravel descended on the
tea-table. Manisty has just beckoned in haste to his great Newfoundland who
was lying stretched on the gravel path, and the dog bounding towards him,
seemed to have brought the path with him.

Mr. Bellasis impatiently shook some fragments of gravel from his coat, and
resumed:--

'I have just got a batch of the first reviews. Really criticism has become
an absurdity! Did you look at the "Sentinel"?'

Mrs. Burgoyne hesitated.

'Yes--I saw there was something about the style--'

'The style!'--Mr. Bellasis threw himself back in his chair and laughed
loud--'Why the style is done with a magnifying-glass!--There's not a
phrase,--not a word that I don't stand by.'

'Mr. Bellasis'--said the courteous voice of the ambassador--'are you going
by this train?'

The great man held out his watch.

'Yes indeed--and I must catch it!' cried the man of letters. He started to
his feet, and bending over Mrs. Burgoyne, he said in an aside perfectly
audible to all the world--'I read my new play to-night--just finished--at
Madame Salvi's!'

Eleanor smiled and congratulated him. He took his leave, and Manisty in an
embarrassed silence accompanied him half way down the avenue.

Then returning, he threw himself into a chair near Lucy Foster and young
Brooklyn, with a sigh of relief.

'Intolerable ass!'--he said under his breath, as though quite unconscious
of any bystander.

The young man looked at Lucy with eyes that danced.

* * * * *

'Who is your young lady?' said the ambassador.

Miss Manisty explained.

'An American? Really? I was quite off the scent, But now--I see--I see! Let
me guess. She is a New Englander--not from Boston, but from the country. I
remember the type exactly. The year I was at Washington I spent some weeks
in the summer convalescing at a village up in the hills of Maine.--The
women there seemed to me the salt of the earth. May I go and talk to her?'

Miss Manisty led him across the circle to Lucy, and introduced him.

'Will you take me to the terrace and show me St. Peter's? I know one can
see it from here,' said the suave polished voice.

Lucy rose in a shy pleasure that became her. The thought flashed happily
through her, as she walked beside the old man, that Uncle Ben would like
to hear of it! She had that 'respect of persons' which comes not from
snobbishness, but from imagination and sympathy. The man's office thrilled
her, not his title.

The ambassador's shrewd eyes ran over her face and bearing, taking note of
all the signs of character. Then he began to talk, exerting himself as he
had not exerted himself that morning for a princess who had lunched at his
table. And as he was one of the enchanters of his day, known for such in
half a dozen courts, and two hemispheres, Lucy Foster's walk was a walk
of delight. There was only one drawback. She had heard some member of the
party say 'Your Excellency'--and somehow her lips would not pronounce it!
Yet so kind and kingly was the old man, there was no sign of homage she
would not have gladly paid him, if she had known how.

They emerged at last upon the stone terrace at the edge of the garden
looking out upon the Campagna.

'Ah! there it is!'--said the ambassador, and, walking to the corner of the
terrace, he pointed northwards.

And there--just caught between two stone pines--in the dim blue distance
rose the great dome.

'Doesn't it give you an emotion?' he said, smiling down upon her.--'When
I first stayed on these hills I wrote a poem about it--a very bad poem.
There's a kind of miracle in it, you know. Go where you will, that dome
follows you. Again and again, storm and mist may blot out the rest--that
remains. The peasants on these hills have a superstition about it. They
look for that dome as they look for the sun. When they can't see it, they
are unhappy--they expect some calamity.--It's a symbol, isn't it, an
idea?--and those are the things that touch us. I have a notion'--he turned
to her smiling, 'that it will come into Mr. Manisty's book?'

Their eyes met in a smiling assent.

"Well, there are symbols--and symbols. That dome makes my old heart beat
because it speaks of so much--half the history of our race. But looking
back--I remember another symbol--I was at Harvard in '69; and I remember
the first time I ever saw those tablets--you recollect--in the Memorial
Hall--to the Harvard men that fell in the war?"

The colour leapt into her cheek. Her eyes filled.

"Oh yes! yes!"--she said, half eager, half timid--"My father lost two
brothers--both their names are there."

The ambassador looked at her kindly.--"Well--be proud of it!--be proud of
it! That wall, those names, that youth, and death--they remain with me,
as the symbol of the other great majesty in the world! There's one,"--he
pointed to the dome,--"that's Religion. And the other's Country. It's
country that Mr. Manisty forgets--isn't it?"

The old man shook his head, and fell silent, looking out over the
cloud-flecked Campagna.

"Ah, well"--he said, rousing himself--"I must go. Will you come and see me?
My daughter shall write to you."

And five minutes later the ambassador was driving swiftly towards Rome, in
a good humour with himself and the day. He had that morning sent off what
he knew to be a masterly despatch, and in the afternoon, as he was also
quite conscious, he had made a young thing happy.

* * * * *

Manisty could not attend the ambassador to his carriage. He was absorbed by
another guest. Mrs. Burgoyne, young Brooklyn, and Lucy, paid the necessary
civilities.

When they returned, they found a fresh group gathered on the terrace. Two
persons made the centre of it--a grey-haired cardinal--and Manisty.

Lucy looked at her host in amazement. What a transformation! The man who
had been lounging and listless all the afternoon--barely civil to his
guests--making no effort indeed for anyone, was now another being. An hour
before he had been in middle age; now he was young, handsome, courteous,
animating, and guiding the conversation around him with the practised ease
of one who knew himself a master.

Where was the spell? The Cardinal?

The Cardinal sat to Manisty's right, one wrinkled hand resting on the neck
of the Newfoundland. It was a typical Italian face, large-cheeked and
large-jawed, with good eyes,--a little sleepy, but not unspiritual. His
red-edged cassock allowed a glimpse of red stockings to be seen, and his
finely worked cross and chain, his red sash, and the bright ribbon that lit
up his broad-brimmed hat, made spots of cheerful colour in the shadow of
the trees.

He was a Cardinal of the Curia, belonging indeed to the Congregation of the
Index. The vulgar believed that he was staying on the hills for his health.

The initiated, however, knew that he had come to these heights, bringing
with him the works of a certain German Catholic professor threatened with
the thunders of the Church. It was a matter that demanded leisure and a
quiet mind.

As he sat sipping Miss Manisty's tea, however, nothing could be divined of
those scathing Latin sheets on which he had left his secretary employed. He
had the air of one at peace with all the world--hardly stirred indeed by
the brilliance of his host.

'Italy again!'--said Reggie Brooklyn in Lucy's ear--poor old Italy!--one
might be sure of that, when one sees one of these black gentlemen about.'

The Cardinal indeed had given Manisty his text. He had brought an account
of some fresh vandalism of the Government--the buildings of an old Umbrian
convent turned to Government uses--the disappearance of some famous
pictures in the process, supposed to have passed into the bands of a Paris
dealer by the connivance of a corrupt official.

The story had roused Manisty to a white heat. This maltreatment of
religious buildings and the wasting of their treasures was a subject on
which he was inexhaustible. Encouraged by the slow smile of the Cardinal,
the laughter and applause of the young men, he took the history of a
monastery in the mountains of Spoleto, which had long been intimately known
to him, and told it,--with a variety, a passion, an irony, that only he
could achieve--that at last revealed indeed to Lucy Foster, as she sat
quivering with antagonism beside Miss Manisty, all the secret of the man's
fame and power in the world.

For gradually--from the story of this monastery, and its suppression at
the hands of a few Italian officials--he built up a figure, typical,
representative, according to him, of the New Italy, small, insolent,
venal,--insulting and despoiling the Old Italy, venerable, beautiful and
defenceless. And then a natural turn of thought, or a suggestion from one
of the group surrounding him, brought him to the scandals connected with
the Abyssinian campaign--to the charges of incompetence and corruption
which every Radical paper was now hurling against the Crispi government.
He gave the latest gossip, handling it lightly, inexorably, as one more
symptom of an inveterate disease, linking the men of the past with the men
of the present, spattering all with the same mud, till Italian Liberalism,
from Cavour to Crispi, sat shivering and ugly--stripped of all those pleas
and glories wherewith she had once stepped forth adorned upon the page of
history.

Finally--with the art of the accomplished talker--a transition! Back to the
mountains, and the lonely convent on the heights--to the handful of monks
left in the old sanctuary, handing on the past, waiting for the future,
heirs of a society which would destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had
destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,--offering the daily sacrifice amid the
murmur and solitude of the woods,--confident, peaceful, unstained; while
the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated,
in the mire of a profitless and purposeless corruption.

And all this in no set harangue--but in vivid broken sentences; in snatches
of paradox and mockery; of emotion touched and left; interrupted, moreover,
by the lively give and take of conversation with the young Italians, by
the quiet comments of the Cardinal. None the less, the whole final image
emerged, as Manisty meant it to emerge; till the fascinated hearers felt,
as it were, a breath of hot bitterness and hate pass between them and the
spring day, enveloping the grim phantom of a ruined and a doomed State.

The Cardinal said little. Every now and then he put in a fact of his own
knowledge--a stroke of character--a phrase of compassion that bit more
sharply even than Manisty's scorns--a smile--a shake of the head. And
sometimes, as Manisty talked with the young men, the sharp wrinkled eyes
rested upon the Englishman with a scrutiny, instantly withdrawn. All the
caution of the Roman ecclesiastic,--the inheritance of centuries--spoke in
the glance.

It was perceived by no one, however, but a certain dark elderly lady, who
was sitting restlessly silent beside Miss Manisty. Lucy Foster had noticed
her as a new-comer, and believed that her name was Madame Variani.

As for Eleanor Burgoyne, she sat on Manisty's left while he talked--it was
curious to notice how a place was always made for her beside him!--her head
raised a little towards him, her eyes bright and fixed. The force that
breathed from him passed through her frail being, quickening every pulse of
life. She neither criticised nor accepted what he said. It was the man's
splendid vitality that subdued and mastered her.

Yet she alone knew what no one else suspected. At the beginning of the
conversation Manisty had placed himself behind an old stone table of oblong
shape and thick base, of which there were several in the garden. Round it
grew up grasses and tall vetches which had sown themselves among the gaping
stones of the terrace. Nothing, therefore, could be seen of the talker as
he leant carelessly across the table but the magnificent head, and the
shoulders on which it was so freely and proudly carried.

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