Eleanor Part 27

Her eyes were visible again; and he perceived at once her courage and her diffidence.

'Perhaps! English political life runs so smooth, that to throw in a stone and make a splash was amusing.'

'But was it fair?' she said, flushing.

'What do you mean?'

'Other people were in earnest; and you--'

'Were not? Charge home. I am prepared,' he said, smiling.

'You talk now--as though you were a Catholic--and you are not, you don't believe,' she said suddenly, in a deep, low voice.

He looked at her for a moment in a smiling silence. His lips were ready to launch a reckless sentence or two; but they refrained. Her att.i.tude meanwhile betrayed an unconscious dread--like a child that fears a blow.

'You charming saint!'--he thought; surprised at his own feeling of pleasure. Pleasure in what?--in the fact that however she might judge his opinions, she was clearly interested in the holder of them?

'What does one's own point of view matter?' he said gently. 'I believe what I can,--and as long as I can--sometimes for a whole twenty-four hours! Then a big doubt comes along, and sends me floundering. But that has nothing to do with it. The case is quite simple. The world can't get on without morals; and Catholicism, Anglicanism too--the religions of authority in short--are the great guardians of morals. They are the binding forces--the forces making for solidarity and continuity. Your c.o.c.ksure, peering Protestant is the dissolvent--the force making for ruin. What's his private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he'll make everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me--it is perfectly open to you to say'--he looked away from her, half-forgetting her, addressing with animation and pugnacity an imaginary opponent--'what do morals matter?--how do you know that the present moral judgments of the world represent any ultimate truth? Ah! well'--he shrugged his shoulders--'I can't follow you there. Black may be really white--and white black; but I'm not going to admit it. It would make me too much of a dupe.

I take my stand on morals. And if you give me morals, you must give me the only force that can guarantee them,--Catholicism, more or less:--and dogma,--and ritual,--and superst.i.tion,--and all the foolish ineffable things that bind mankind together, and send them to "face the music" in this world and the next!'

She sat silent, with twitching lips, excited, yet pa.s.sionately scornful and antagonistic. Thoughts of her home, of that Puritan piety amid which she had been brought up, flashed thick and fast through her mind. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands, to hide a fit of laughter that had overtaken her.

'All that amuses you?'--said Manisty, breathing a little faster.

'No--oh! no. But--I was thinking of my uncle--of the people in our village at home. What you said of Protestants seemed to me, all at once, so odd--so ridiculous!'

'Did it? Tell me then about the people in your valley at home.'

And turning on his elbows beside her, he put her through a catechism as to her village, her uncle, her friends. She resisted a little, for the brusque a.s.surance of his tone still sounded oddly in her American ear. But he was not easy to resist; and when she had yielded she soon discovered that to talk to him was a no less breathless and absorbing business than to listen to him. He pounced on the new, the characteristic, the local; he drew out of her what he wanted to know; he made her see her own trees and fields, the figures of her home, with new sharpness, so quick, so dramatic, so voracious, one might almost say, were his own perceptions.

Especially did he make her tell him of the New England winter; of the long pauses of its snow-bound life; its whirling winds and drifts; its snapping, crackling frosts; the lonely farms, and the deep sleigh-tracks amid the white wilderness, that still in the winter silence bind these homesteads to each other and the nation; the strange gleams of moonrise and sunset on the cold hills; the strong dark armies of the pines; the grace of the stripped birches. Above all, must she talk to him of the people in these farms, the frugal, or silent, or brooding people of the hills; honourable, hard, knotted, prejudiced, believing folk, whose lives and fates, whose spiritual visions and madnesses, were entwined with her own young memories and deepest affections.

Figure after figure, story after story, did he draw from her,--warm from the hidden fire of her own strenuous, loving life. Once or twice she spoke of her mother--like one drawing a veil for an instant from a holy of holies. He felt and saw the burning of a sacred fire; then the veil dropped, nor would it lift again for any word of his. And every now and then, a phrase that startled him by its quality,--its suggestions.

Presently he was staring at her with his dark absent eyes.

'Heavens!'--he was thinking--'what a woman there is in her!--what a nature!'

The artist--the poet--the lover of things significant and moving,--all these were stirred in him as he listened to her, as he watched her young and n.o.ble beauty.

But, in the end, he would not grant her much, argumentatively.

'You make me see strange things--magnificent things, if you like! But your old New England saints and dreamers are not your last word in America. They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,--science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there--there--I'll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care!

I have seen you a Catholic once, for three minutes!'

'When?'

'In St. Peter's.'

His look, smiling, provocative, drove home his shaft.

'I saw you overthrown. The great tradition swept upon you. You bowed to it,--you felt!'

She made no reply. Far within she was conscious of a kind of tremor. The personality beside her seemed to be laying an intimate, encroaching hand upon her own, and her maidenliness shrank before it.

She threw herself hastily upon other subjects. Presently, he found to his surprise that she was speaking to him of his book.

'It would be so sad if it were not finished,' she said timidly. 'Mrs.

Burgoyne would feel it so.'

His expression changed.

'You think Mrs. Burgoyne cares about it so much?'

'But she worked so hard for it!'--cried Lucy, indignant with something in his manner, though she could not have defined what. Her mind, indeed, was full of vague and generous misgivings on the subject of Mrs. Burgoyne.

First she had been angry with Mr. Manisty for what had seemed to her neglect and ingrat.i.tude. Now she was somehow dissatisfied with herself too.

'She worked too hard,' said Manisty gravely. 'It is a good thing the pressure has been taken off. Have you found out yet, Miss Foster, what a remarkable woman my cousin is?'

He turned to her with a sharp look of inquiry.

'I admire her all day long,' cried Lucy, warmly.

'That's right,' said Manisty slowly--'that's right. Do you know her history?'

'Mr. Brooklyn told me--

'He doesn't know very much,--shall I tell it you?'

'If you ought--if Mrs. Burgoyne would like it,' said Lucy, hesitating.

There was a chivalrous feeling in the girl's mind that she was too new an acquaintance, that she had no right to the secrets of this friendship, and Manisty no right to speak of them.

But Manisty took no notice. With half-shut eyes, like a man looking into the past, he began to describe his cousin; first as a girl in her father's home; then in her married life, silent, unhappy, gentle; afterwards in the dumb years of her irreparable grief; and finally in this last phase of intellectual and spiritual energy, which had been such an amazement to himself, which had first revealed to him indeed the true Eleanor.

He spoke slowly, with a singular and scrupulous choice of words; building up the image of Mrs. Burgoyne's life and mind with an insight and a delicacy which presently held his listener spell-bound. Several times Lucy felt herself flooded with hot colour.

'Does he guess so much about--about us all?' she asked herself with a secret excitement.

Suddenly Manisty said, with an entire change of tone, springing to his feet as he did so:

'In short, Miss Foster--my cousin Eleanor is one of the ablest and dearest of women--and she and I have been completely wasting each other's time this winter!'

Lucy stared at him in astonishment.

'Shall I tell you why? We have been too kind to each other!'

He waited, studying his companion's face with a hard, whimsical look.