Eleanor Part 37

He had been entertaining Royalties and Cabinet Ministers in heavy succession, and his daughter understood. There was an element of insubordination in her father, which she knew better than to provoke.

So the notes were sent.

'Find her some types, my dear,' said the Amba.s.sador;--'and little of everything.'

Lady Mary did her best. She invited an Italian Marchesa whom she had heard her father describe as 'the ablest woman in Rome,' while she herself knew her as one of the most graceful and popular; a young Lombard landowner formerly in the Navy, now much connected with the Court, whose blue eyes moreover were among the famous things of the day; a Danish professor and savant who was also a rich man, collector of flints and torques, and other matters of importance to primitive man; an artist or two; an American Monsignore blessed with some Irish wit and much influence; Reggie Brooklyn, of course, and his sister; Madame Variani, who would prevent Mr. Manisty from talking too much nonsense; and a dull English Admiral and his wife, official guests, whom the Amba.s.sador admitted at the last moment with a groan, as still representing the cold tyranny of duty invading his s.n.a.t.c.h of pleasure.

'And Mr. Bellasis, papa?' said Lady Mary, pausing, pen in hand, like Fort.i.tude prepared for all extremities.

'Heavens, no!' said the Amba.s.sador, hastily. 'I have put him off twice.

This time I should have to read him.'

Manisty accordingly was smoking on the balcony of the villa while he waited for the ladies to appear. Miss Manisty, who was already suffering from the heat, was not going. The fact did not improve Manisty's temper. Three is no company--that we all know.

If Lady Mary, indeed, had only planned this luncheon because she must, Manisty was going to it under a far more impatient sense of compulsion. It would be a sickening waste of time. Nothing now had any attraction for him, nothing seemed to him desirable or important, but that conversation with Lucy Foster which he was bent on securing, and she apparently was bent on refusing him.

His mind was full of the sense of injury. During all the day before, while he had been making the arrangements for his unhappy sister--during the journeys backward and forward to Rome--a delicious image had filled all the background of his thoughts, the image of the white Lucy, helpless and lovely, lying unconscious in his chair.

In the evening he could hardly command his eagerness sufficiently to help his tired little aunt up the steps of the station, and put her safely in her cab, before hurrying himself up the steep short-cut to the villa.

Should he find her perhaps on the balcony, conscious of his step on the path below, weak and shaken, yet ready to lift those pure, tender eyes of hers to his in a shy grat.i.tude?

He had found no one on the balcony, and the evening of that trying day had been one of baffling disappointment. Eleanor was in her room, apparently tired out by the adventures of the night before; and although Miss Foster appeared at dinner she had withdrawn immediately afterwards, and there had been no chance for anything but the most perfunctory conversation.

She had said of course all the proper things, so far as they could be said.

'I trust you have been able to make the arrangements you wished. Mrs.

Burgoyne and I have been so sorry! Poor Miss Manisty must have had a very tiring day--'

Bah!--he could not have believed that a girl could speak so formally, so trivially to a man who within twenty-four hours had saved her from the attack of a madwoman. For that was what it came to--plainly. Did she know what had happened? Had her swoon blotted it all out? If so, was he justified in revealing it. There was an uneasy feeling that it would be more chivalrous towards her, and kinder towards his sister, if he left the veil drawn, seeing that she seemed to wish it so--if he said no more about her fright, her danger, her faint. But Manisty was not accustomed to let himself be governed by the scruples of men more precise or more timid. He wished pa.s.sionately to force a conversation with her more intimate, more personal than any one had yet allowed him; to break down at a stroke most if not all of the barriers that separate acquaintance from--

From what? He stood, cigarette in hand, staring blindly at the garden, lost in an intense questioning of himself.

Suddenly he found himself back again, as it were, among the feelings and sensations of Lucy Foster's first Sunday at the villa; his repugnance towards any notion of marriage; his wonder that anybody should suppose that he had any immediate purpose of marrying Eleanor Burgoyne; the mood, half lazy, half scornful, in which he had watched Lucy, in her prim Sunday dress, walking along the avenue.

What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so unacquainted with his world?

There was her beauty of course. But he had pa.s.sed the period when mere beauty is enough. He was extremely captious and difficult to please where the ordinary pretty woman was concerned. Her arts left him now quite unmoved. Of self-conscious vanity and love of effect he had himself enough and to spare. He could not mend himself; but he was often weary of his own weaknesses, and detested them in other people. If Lucy Foster had been merely a beauty, aware of her own value, and bent upon making him aware of it also, he would probably have been as careless of her now in the eighth week of their acquaintance as he had been in the first.

But it was a beauty so innocent, so interfused with suggestion, with an enchanting thrill of prophecy! It was not only what she said and looked, but what a man might divine in her--the 'white fire' of a nature most pure, most pa.s.sionate, that somehow flashed through her maiden life and aspect, fighting with the restraints imposed upon it, and constantly transforming what might otherwise have been a cold seemliness into a soft and delicate majesty.

In short, there was a mystery in Lucy, for all her simplicity;--a mystery of feeling, which piqued and held the fastidious taste of Manisty. It was this which made her loveliness tell. Her sincerity was so rich and full, that it became dramatic,--a thing to watch, for the mere joy of the fresh, unfolding spectacle. She was quite unconscious of this significance of hers. Rather she was clearly and always conscious of weakness, ignorance, inexperience. And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely attractive to Manisty.

In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently.

Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment. Manisty disliked and had thrown aside the role of country gentleman; because, in truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the probable boredoms of it worth while.

But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he began to think with a new tolerance of the English _cadre_ and the English life. He remembered all those ill.u.s.trious or comely husbands and wives, his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house.

For the first time it thrilled him to imagine a new mistress of the house--young, graceful, n.o.ble--moving about below them. And even--for the first time--there gleamed from out the future the dim features of a son, and he did not recoil. He caressed the whole dream with a new and strange complacency. What if after all the beaten roads are best?

To the old paths, my soul!

Then he paused, in a sudden chill of realisation. His thoughts might rove as they please. But Lucy Foster had given them little warrant. To all her growing spell upon him, there was added indeed the charm of difficulty foreseen, and delighted in. He was perfectly aware that he puzzled and attracted her. And he was perfectly aware also of his own power with women, often cynically aware of it. But he could not flatter himself that so far he had any hold over the senses or the heart of Lucy Foster. He thought of her eager praise of his Palestine letters--of the Nemi tale. She was franker, more enthusiastic than an English girl would have been--and at the same time more remote, infinitely more incalculable!

His mind filled with a delicious mingling of desire and doubt. He foresaw the sweet approach of new emotions,--of spells to make 'the colours freshen on this threadbare world.' All his life he had been an epicurean, in search of pleasures beyond the ken of the crowd. It was pleasure of this kind that beckoned to him now,--in the wooing, the conquering, the developing of Lucy.

A voice struck on his ear. It was Eleanor calling to Lucy from the salon.

Ah!--Eleanor? A rush of feeling--half generous, half audacious--came upon him. He knew that he had given her pain at Nemi. He had been a brute, an ungrateful brute! Women like Eleanor have very exalted and sensitive ideals of friendship. He understood that he had pulled down Eleanor's ideal, that he had wounded her sorely. What did she expect of him? Not any of the things which the ignorant or vulgar bystander expected of him--that he was certain. But still her claim had wearied him; and he had brushed it aside. His sulkiness about the book had been odious, indefensible. And yet--perhaps from another point of view--it had not been a bad thing for either of them. It had broken through habits which had become, surely, an embarra.s.sment to both.

But now, let him make amends; select fresh ground; and from it rebuild their friendship. His mind ran forward hazily to some bold confidence or other, some dramatic appeal to Eleanor for sympathy and help.

The affection between her and Miss Foster seemed to be growing closer. He thought of it uncomfortably, and with vague plannings of counter-strokes.

It did not suit him--nay, it presented itself somehow as an obstacle in his path. For he had a half remorseful, half humorous feeling that Eleanor knew him too well.

'Ah! my dear lady,' said the Amba.s.sador--'how few things in this world one does to please oneself! This is one of them.'

Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Amba.s.sador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers, with a charming and paternal freedom.

'Have you enjoyed yourself?--Have you lost your heart to Italy?' said her host, stooping to her. He was amused to see the transformation in her, the pretty dress, the developed beauty.

'I have been in fairy-land,' said Lucy, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon him. 'Nothing can ever be like it again.'

'No--because one can never be twenty again,' said the old man, sighing.

'Twenty years hence you will wonder where the magic came from. Never mind--just now, anyway, the world's your oyster.'

Then he looked at her a little more closely. And it seemed to him that, though she was handsomer, she was not so happy. He missed some of that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before, and there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met the man--the appointed one?

He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and stately.

'We must all have our ups and downs,' he said to her presently. 'Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them.

Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old.'

He stopped and surveyed her. His kind humorous eyes blinked through their blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling expectancy.

'_Learn Persian!_' said the old man in an urgent whisper--'and get the dictionary by heart!'

Lucy still looked--wondering.

'I finished it this morning,' said the Amba.s.sador, in her ear. 'To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I over-tire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary, I should have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the evening--or when they worry me from home--I take a column. But generally half a column's enough--good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them--so I had to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden. Now Mr. Manisty--how is he provided in that way?'

His sudden question took Lucy by surprise, and the quick rise of colour in the clear cheeks did not escape him.

'Well--I suppose he has his book?' she said, smiling.

'Oh! no use at all! He can do what he likes with his book. But you can't do what you like with the dictionary. You must take it or leave it. That's what makes it so reposeful. Now if I were asked, I could soon find some Persian roots for Mr. Manisty--to be taken every day!'