Eleanor Part 32

CHAPTER XI

After Manisty had carried off his sister, Eleanor and Lucy sat together in the garden, talking sometimes, but more often silent, till the sun began to drop towards Ostia and the Mediterranean.

'You must come in,' said Eleanor, laying her hand on the girl's. 'The chill is beginning.'

Lucy rose, conscious again of the slight giddiness of fever, and they walked towards the house. Half way, Lucy said with sudden, shy energy--

'I do _wish_ I were quite myself! It is I who ought to be helping you through this--and I am just nothing but a worry!'

Eleanor smiled.

'You distract our thoughts,' she said. 'Nothing could have made this visit of Alice's other than a trial.'

She spoke kindly, but with that subtle lack of response to Lucy's sympathy which had seemed to spring first into existence on the day of Nemi. Lucy had never felt at ease with her since then, and her heart, in truth, was a little sore. She only knew that something intangible and dividing had arisen between them; and that she felt herself once more the awkward, ignorant girl beside this delicate and high-bred woman, on whose confidence and friendship she had of course no claim whatever. Already she was conscious of a certain touch of shame when she thought of her new dresses and of Mrs. Burgoyne's share in them. Had she been after all the mere troublesome intruder? Her swimming head and languid spirits left her the prey of these misgivings.

Aunt Pattie met them at the head of the long flight of stone stairs which led from the garden to the first floor. Her finger was on her lip.

'Will you come through my room?' she said under her breath. 'Edward and Alice are in the library.'

So they made a round--every room almost in the apartment communicating with every other--and thus reached Aunt Pattie's sitting-room and the salon.

Lucy sat shivering beside the wood-fire in Aunt Pattie's room, which Miss Manisty had lit as soon as she set eyes upon her; while the two other ladies murmured to each other in the salon.

The rich wild light from the Campagna flooded the room; the day sank rapidly and a strange hush crept through the apartment. The women working among the olives below had gone home; there were no sounds from the Marinata road; and the crackling of the fire alone broke upon the stillness--except for a sound which emerged steadily as the silence grew.

It seemed to be a man's voice reading. Once it was interrupted by a laugh out of all scale--an ugly, miserable laugh--and Lucy shuddered afresh.

Meanwhile Aunt Pattie was whispering to Eleanor.

'He was wonderful--quite wonderful! I did not think he could--'

'He can do anything he pleases. He seems to be reading aloud?'

'He is reading some poems, my dear, that she wrote at Venice. She gave them to him to look at the day she came. I daresay they're quite mad, but he's reading and discussing them as though they were the most important things, and it pleases her,--poor, poor Alice! First, you know, he quieted her very much about the money. I listened at the door sometimes, before you came in.

She seems quite reconciled to him.'

'All the same, I wish this night were over and the doctor here!' said Eleanor, and Miss Manisty, lifting her hands, a.s.sented with all the energy her small person could throw into the gesture.

Lucy, in the course of dressing for dinner, decided that to sit through a meal was beyond her powers, and that she would be least in the way if she went to bed. So she sent a message to Miss Manisty, and was soon lying at ease, with the window opposite her bed opened wide to Monte Cavo and the moonlit lake. The window on her left hand, which looked on the balcony, she herself had closed and fastened with all possible care. And she had satisfied herself that her key was in her door. As soon as Miss Manisty and Eleanor had paid her their good-night visit, she meant to secure herself.

And presently Aunt Pattie came in, to see that she had her soup and had taken her quinine. The little old lady did not talk to Lucy of her niece, nor of the adventure of the afternoon, though she had heard all from Eleanor. Her family pride, as secret as it was intense, could hardly endure this revelation of the family trouble and difficulty to a comparative stranger, much as she liked the stranger. Nevertheless her compunctions on the subject showed visibly. No cares and attentions could be too much for the girl in her charge, who had suffered annoyance at the hands of a Manisty, while her own natural protectors were far away.

'Benson, my dear, will come and look after you the last thing,' said the old lady, not without a certain stateliness. 'You will lock your door--and I hope you will have a very good night.'

Half an hour later came Mrs. Burgoyne. Lucy's candle was out. A wick floating on oil gave a faint light in one corner of the room. Across the open window a muslin curtain had been drawn, to keep out bats and moths.

But the moonlight streamed through, and lay in patches on the brick floor.

And in this uncertain illumination Lucy could just see the dark pits of Eleanor's eyes, the sharp slightness of her form, the dim wreath of hair.

'You may be quite happy,' said Eleanor bending over her, and speaking almost in a whisper. 'She is much quieter. They have given her a stronger sleeping draught and locked all the doors--except the door into Dalgetty's room. And that is safe, for Dalgetty has drawn her bed right across it.

If Alice tries to come through, she must wake her, and Dalgetty is quite strong enough to control her. Besides, Manisty would be there in a moment.

So you may be quite, quite at ease.'

Lucy thanked her.

'And you?' she said wistfully, feeling for Eleanor's hand.

Eleanor yielded it for an instant, then withdrew it, and herself.--'Oh, thank you--I shall sleep excellently. Alice takes no interest, alas! in me! You are sure there is nothing else we can do for you?' She spoke in a light, guarded voice, that seemed to Lucy to come from a person miles away.

'Thank you--I have everything.'

'Benson will bring you milk and lemonade. I shall send Marie the first thing for news of you. You know she sleeps just beyond you, and you have only to cross the dining room to find me. Good-night. Sleep well.'

As Eleanor closed the door behind her, Lucy was conscious of a peculiar sinking of heart. Mrs. Burgoyne had once made all the advances in their friendship. Lucy thought of two or three kisses that formerly had greeted her cheek, to which she had been too shy and startled to respond. Now it seemed to her difficult to imagine that Mrs. Burgoyne had ever caressed her, had ever shown herself so sweet and gay and friendly as in those first weeks when all Lucy's pleasure at the villa depended upon her. What was wrong?--what had she done?

She lay drooping, her hot face pressed upon her hands, pondering the last few weeks, thoughts and images pa.s.sing through her brain with a rapidity and an occasional incoherence that was the result of her feverish state.

How much she had seen and learnt in these flying days!--it often seemed to her as though her old self had been put off along with her old clothes.

She was carried back to the early time when she had just patiently adapted herself to Mr. Manisty's indifference and neglect, as she might have adapted herself to any other condition of life at the villa. She had made no efforts. It had seemed to her mere good manners to a.s.sume that he did not want the trouble of her acquaintance, and be done with it. To her natural American feeling indeed, as the girl of the party, it was strange and disconcerting that her host should not make much of her. But she had soon reconciled herself. After all, what was he to her or she to him?

Then, of a sudden, a whole swarm of incidents and impressions rushed upon memory. The semi-darkness of her room was broken by images, brilliant or tormenting--Mr. Manisty's mocking look in the Piazza of St. Peter's--his unkindness to his cousin--his sweetness to his friend--the aspect, now petulant, even childish, and now gracious and commanding beyond any other she had ever known, which he had worn at Nemi. His face, upturned beside her, as she and her horse climbed the steep path; the extraordinary significance, fulness, warmth of the nature behind it; the gradual unveiling of the man's personality, most human, faulty, self-willed, yet perpetually interesting and challenging, whether to the love or hate of the bystander:--these feelings or judgments about her host pulsed through the girl's mind with an energy that she was powerless to arrest. They did not make her happy, but they seemed to quicken and intensify all the acts of thinking and living.

At last, however, she succeeded in recapturing herself, in beating back the thoughts which, like troops over-rash on a doubtful field, appeared to be carrying her into the ambushes and strongholds of an enemy. She was impatient and scornful of them. For, crossing all these memories of things, new or exciting, there was a constant sense of something untoward, something infinitely tragic, accompanying them, developing beside them. In this feverish silence it became a nightmare presence filling the room.

What was the truth about Mr. Manisty and his cousin? Lucy searched her own innocent mind and all its new awakening perceptions in vain. The intimacy of the friendship, as she had first seen it; the tone used by Mr. Manisty that afternoon in speaking of Mrs. Burgoyne; the hundred small signs of a deep distress in her, of a new detachment in him--Lucy wandered in darkness as she thought of them, and yet with vague pangs and jarring vibrations of the heart.

Her troubled dream was suddenly broken by a sound. She sprang up trembling.

Was it an angry, distant voice? Did it come from the room across the balcony? No!--it was the loud talking of a group of men on the road outside. She shook all over, unable to restrain herself. 'What would Uncle Ben think of me?' she said to herself in despair. For Uncle Ben loved calm and self-control in women, and had often praised her for not being flighty and foolish, as he in his bachelor solitude conceived most other young women to be.

She looked down at her bandaged wrist. The wound still ached and burned from the pressure of that wild grip which she had not been able to ward off from it. Lucy herself had the strength of healthy youth, but she had felt her strength as nothing in Alice Manisty's hands. And the tyranny of those black eyes!--so like her brother's, without the human placable spark--and the horror of those fierce possessing miseries that lived in them!

Perhaps after all Uncle Ben would not have thought her so cowardly! As she sat up in bed, her hands round her knees, a pitiful home-sickness invaded her. A May scent of roses coming from the wall below the open window recalled to her the spring scents at home--not these strong Italian scents, but thin northern perfumes of lilac and lavender, of pine-needles and fresh gra.s.s. It seemed to her that she was on the slope behind Uncle Ben's house, with the scattered farms below--and the maple green in the hollow--and the gra.s.sy hillsides folded one upon another--and the gleam of a lake among them--and on the furthest verge of the kind familiar scene, the blue and shrouded heads of mountain peaks. She dropped her head on her knees, and could hear the lowing of cattle and the clucking of hens; she saw the meeting-house roof among the trees, and groups scattered through the lanes on the way to the prayer meeting, the older women in their stuff dresses and straw bonnets, the lean, bronzed men.

Benson's knock dispelled the mirage. The maid brought lemonade and milk, brushed Lucy's long hair and made all straight and comfortable.

When her tendance was over she looked at the door and then at Lucy. 'Miss Manisty said, Miss, I was to see you had your key handy. It's there all right--but it is the door that's wrong. Never saw such flimsy things as the doors in all this place.'

And Benson examined the two flaps of the door, filled with that frank contempt for the foreigner's powers and intelligence which makes the English race so beloved of Europe.

'Why, the floor-bolts'll scarcely hold, neither of them; and the lock's that loose, it's a disgrace. But I shouldn't think the people that own this place had spent a shilling on it since I was born. When you go to lay hold on things they're just tumbling to bits.'

'Oh! never mind, Benson,' said Lucy--shrinking. 'I'm sure it'll be all right. Thank you--and good-night.'

She and Benson avoided looking at each other; and the maid was far too highly trained to betray any knowledge she was not asked for. But when she had taken her departure Lucy slipped out of bed, turned the key, and tightened the bolts herself. It was true that their sockets in the brick floor were almost worn away; and the lock-case seemed scarcely to hold upon the rotten wood. The wood-work, indeed, throughout the whole villa was not only old and worm-eaten, but it had been originally of the rudest description, meant for summer uses, and a villeggiatura existence in which privacy was of small account. The Malestrini who had reared the villa above the Campagna in the late seventeenth century had no money to waste on the superfluities of doors that fitted and windows that shut; he had spent all he had, and more, on the sprawling _putti_ and fruit wreaths of the ceilings, and the arabesques of the walls. And now doors, windows, and shutters alike, shrunken and scorched and blistered by the heat of two hundred summers, were dropping into ruin.

The handling of this rotten lock and its rickety accompaniments suddenly brought back a panic fear on Lucy. What if Alice Manisty and the wind, which was already rising, should burst in upon her together? She looked down upon her night-gown and her bare feet. Well, at least she would not be taken quite unawares! She opened her cupboard and brought from it a white wrapper of a thin woollen stuff which she put on. She thrust her feet into her slippers, and so stood a moment listening, her long hair dropping about her. Nothing! She lay down, and drew a shawl over her. 'I won't--won't--sleep,' she said to herself.

And the last sound she was conscious of was the cry of the little downy owl--so near that it seemed to be almost at her window.