Eleanor Part 5

Then Miss Foster, after an instant's restlessness, moved nearer to her hostess.

'I am afraid--you thought I was rude just now? It's so lovely of you to plan things for me. But--I can't ever be sure whether it's right to go into other people's churches and look at their services--like a show. I should just hate it myself--and I felt it once or twice at Florence. And so--you understand--don't you?'--she said imploringly.

Miss Manisty's small eyes examined her with anxiety. 'What an extraordinary girl!' she thought. 'Is she going to be a great bore?'

At the same time the girl's look--so open, sweet and modest--disarmed and attracted her. She shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

'Well, my dear--I don't know. All I can say is, the Catholics don't mind!

They walk in and out of their own churches all the time ma.s.s is going on--the children run about--the sacristans take you round. You certainly needn't feel it on their account.'

'But then, too, if I am not a Catholic--how far ought one to be taking part--in--in what--'

'In what one disapproves?' said Mrs. Burgoyne, smiling. 'You would make the world a little difficult, wouldn't you, if you were to arrange it on that principle?'

She spoke in a dry, rather sharp voice, unlike that in which she had hitherto addressed the new-comer. Lucy Foster looked at her with a shrinking perplexity.

'It's best if we're all straightforward, isn't it?'--she said in a low voice, and then, drawing towards her an ill.u.s.trated magazine that lay on the table near her she hurriedly buried herself in its pages.

Silence had fallen on the three ladies. Eleanor Burgoyne sat lost in reverie, her fair head thrown back against her low chair.

She was thinking of her conversation with Edward Manisty on the balcony--and of his book. That book indeed had for her a deep personal significance. To think of it at all, was to be carried to the past, to feel for the hundredth time the thrill of change and new birth.

When she joined them in Rome, in mid-winter, she had found Manisty struggling with the first drafts of it,--full of yeasty ideas, full also of doubts, confusions and discouragements. He had not been at all glad to see his half-forgotten cousin--quite the contrary. As she had reminded him, she had suffered much the same things at his hands that Miss Foster was likely to suffer now. It made her laugh to think of his languid reception of her, the moods, the silences, the weeks of just civil acquaintanceship; and then gradually, the s.n.a.t.c.hes of talk--and those great black brows of his lifted in a surprise which a tardy politeness would try to mask:--and at last, the good, long, brain-filling, heart-filling talks, the break-down of reserves--the man's whole mind, its remorses, ambitions, misgivings, poured at her feet--ending in the growth of that sweet daily habit of common work--side by side, head close to head--hand close to hand.--

Eleanor Burgoyne lay still and motionless in the soft dusk of the old room, her white lids shut--Lucy Foster thought her asleep.--

He had said to her once, quoting some Frenchman, that she was 'good to consult about ideas.' Ah well!--at a great price had she won that praise.

And with an unconscious stiffening of the frail hands lying on the arms of the chair, she thought of those bygone hours in which she had asked herself--'what remains?' Religious faith?--No!--Life was too horrible!

Could such things have happened to her in a world ruled by a G.o.d?--that was her question, day and night for years. But books, facts, ideas--all the riddle of this various nature--_that_ one might still amuse oneself with a little, till one's own light went out in the same darkness that had already engulfed mother--husband--child.

So that 'cleverness,' of which father and husband had taken so little account, which had been of so little profit to her so far in her course through circ.u.mstance, had come to her aid. The names and lists of the books that had pa.s.sed through her hands, during those silent years of her widowhood, lived beside her stern old father, would astonish even Manisty were she to try and give some account of them. And first she had read merely to fill the hours, to dull memory. But gradually there had sprung up in her that inner sweetness, that gentle restoring flame that comes from the life of ideas, the life of knowledge, even as a poor untrained woman may approach it. She had shared it with no one, revealed it to no one. Her nature dreaded rebuffs; and her father had no words sharp enough for any feminine ambition beyond the household and the nursery.

So she had kept it all to herself, till Miss Manisty, shocked as many other people had begun to be by her fragile looks, had bearded the General, and carried her off to Rome for the winter. And there she had been forced, as it were, into this daily contact with Edward Manisty, at what might well turn out to be the most critical moment of his life; when he was divided between fierce regrets for the immediate past, and fierce resolves to recover and a.s.sert himself in other ways; when he was taking up again his earlier function of man of letters in order to vindicate himself as a politician and a man of action. Strange and challenging personality!--did she yet know it fully?

Ah! that winter--what a healing in it all!--what a great human experience!

Yet now, as always, when her thoughts turned to the past, she did not allow them to dwell upon it long. That past lay for her in a golden haze. To explore it too deeply, or too long,--that she shrank from. All that she prayed was to press no questions, force no issues. But at least she had found in it a new reason for living; she meant to live; whereas last year she had wished to die, and all the world--dear, kind Aunt Pattie first and foremost--had thought her on the road for death.

But the book?--she bent her brows over it, wrestling with various doubts and difficulties. Though it was supposed to represent the thoughts and fancies of an Englishman wandering through modern Italy, it was really Manisty's Apologia--Manisty's defence of certain acts which had made him for a time the scandal and offence of the English political party to which ancestrally he belonged, in whose interests he had entered Parliament and taken office. He had broken with his party on the ground that it had become a party of revolution, especially in matters connected with Religion and Education; and having come abroad to escape for a time from the personal frictions and agitations which his conduct had brought upon him, he had thrown himself into a pa.s.sionate and most hostile study of Italy--Italy, the new country, made by revolution, fashioned, so far as laws and government can do it, by the lay modern spirit--as an object-lesson to England and the world. The book was in reality a party pamphlet, written by a man whose history and antecedents, independently of his literary ability, made his work certain of readers and of vogue.

That, however, was not what Mrs. Burgoyne was thinking of.--She was anxiously debating with herself certain points of detail, points of form.

These fragments of poetical prose which Manisty had interspersed amid a serious political argument--were they really an adornment of the book, or a blur upon it? He had a natural tendency towards colour and exuberance in writing; he loved to be leisurely, and a little sonorous; there was something old-fashioned and Byronic in his style and taste. His sentences, perhaps, were short; but his manner was not brief. The elliptical fashion of the day was not his. He liked to wander through his subject, dreaming, poetising, discussing at his will. It was like a return to _vetturino_ after the summary haste of the railway. And so far the public had welcomed this manner of his. His earlier book (the 'Letters from Palestine'), with its warm, over-laden pages, had found many readers and much fame.

But here--in a strenuous political study, furnished with all the facts and figures that the student and the debater require--representing, too, another side of the man, just as vigorous and as real, were these intrusions of poetry wise or desirable? Were they in place? Was the note of them quite right? Was it not a little turbid--uncertain?

That prose poem of 'The Priest of Nemi,' for example?

Ah! Nemi!--the mere thought of it sent a thrill of pleasure through her.

That blue lake in its green cup on the edge of the Campagna, with its ruins and its legends--what golden hours had she and Manisty spent there! It had caught their fancy from the beginning--the site of the great temple, the wild strawberry fields, the great cliffs of Nemi and Genzano, the bright-faced dark-eyed peasants with their cla.s.sical names--Aristodemo, Oreste, Evandro.

And that strange legend of the murdered priest--

'The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain'--

--what modern could not find something in that--some stimulus to fancy--some hint for dreaming?

Yes--it had been very natural--very tempting. But!--

... So she pondered,--a number of acute, critical instincts coming into play. And presently her thoughts spread and became a vague reverie, covering a mult.i.tude of ideas and images that she and Manisty now had in common. How strange that she and he should be engaged in this work together!--this impa.s.sioned defence of tradition, of Catholicism and the Papacy, as the imperishable, indestructible things--'chastened and not killed--dying, and behold they live'--let the puny sons of modern Italy rage and struggle as they may. He--one of the most thorough sceptics of his day, as she had good reason to know--she, a woman who had at one time ceased to believe because of an intolerable anguish, and was now only creeping slowly back to faith, to hope, because--because--

Ah!--with a little shiver, she recalled her thought, as a falconer might his bird, before it struck. Oh! this old, old Europe, with its complexities, its manifold currents and impulses, every human being an embodied contradiction--no simplicity, no wholeness anywhere--none possible!

She opened her eyes languidly, and they rested on Lucy Foster's head and profile bent over her book. Mrs. Burgoyne's mind filled with a sudden amused pity for the girl's rawness and ignorance. She seemed the fitting type of a young crude race with all its lessons to learn; that saw nothing absurd in its Methodists and Universalists and the rest--confident, as a child is, in its cries and whims and prejudices. The American girl, fresh from her wilds, and doubtful whether she would go to see the Pope in St.

Peter's, lest she should have to bow the knee to Antichrist--the image delighted the mind of the elder woman. She played with it, finding fresh mock at every turn.

'Eleanor!--now I have rewritten it. Tell me how it runs.'

Lucy Poster looked up. She saw that Mr. Manisty, carrying a sheaf of papers in his hand, had thrown himself into a chair behind Mrs. Burgoyne. His look was strenuous and absorbed, his tumbling black hair had fallen forward as though in a stress of composition; he spoke in a low, imperative voice, like one accustomed to command the time and the attention of those about him.

'Read!' said Mrs. Burgoyne, turning her slender neck that she might look at him and hear. He began to read at once in a deep, tremulous voice, and as though he were quite unconscious of any other presence in the room than hers. Miss Foster, who was sitting at a little distance, supposed she ought not to listen. She was about to close her book and rise, when Miss Manisty touched her on the arm.

'It disturbs him if we move about!' said the little spinster in a smiling whisper, her finger on her lip. And suddenly the girl was conscious of a lightning flash from lifted eyes--a look threatening and peremptory. She settled herself into her chair again as quietly as possible, and sat with head bent, a smile she could not repress playing round her lips. It was all she could do indeed not to laugh, so startling and pa.s.sionate had been the monition conveyed in Mr. Manisty's signal. That the great man should take little notice of his aunt's guest was natural enough. But to be frowned upon the first evening, as though she were a troublesome child!--she did not resent it at all, but it tickled her sense of humour. She thought happily of her next letter to Uncle Ben; how she would describe these rather strange people.

And at first she hardly listened to what was being read. The voice displeased her. It was too emphatic--she disliked its tremolo, its deep ba.s.s vibrations. Surely one should read more simply!

Then the first impression pa.s.sed away altogether. She looked up--her eyes fastened themselves on the reader--her lips parted--the smile changed.

What the full over-rich voice was calling up before her was a little morning scene, as Virgil might have described it, pa.s.sing in the hut of a Latian peasant farmer, under Tiberius.

It opened with the waking at dawn of the herdsman Caeculus and his little son, in their round thatched cottage on the ridge of Aricia, beneath the Alban Mount. It showed the countryman stepping out of his bed into the darkness, groping for the embers on the hearth, re-lighting his lamp, and calling first to his boy asleep on his bed of leaves, then to their African servant, the negro slave-girl with her wide mouth, her tight woolly hair.

One by one the rustic facts emerged, so old, so ever new:--Caeculus grinding his corn, and singing at his work--the baking of the flat wheaten cakes on the hot embers--the gathering of herbs from the garden--the kneading them with a little cheese and oil to make a relish for the day--the harnessing of the white steers under the thonged yoke--the man going forth to his ploughing, under the mounting dawn, clad in his goatskin tunic and his leathern hat,--the boy loosening the goats from their pen beside the hut, and sleepily driving them past the furrows where his father was at work, to the misty woods beyond.

With every touch, the earlier world revived, grew plainer in the sun, till the listener found herself walking with Manisty through paths that cut the Alban Hills in the days of Rome's first imperial glory, listening to his tale of the little goatherd, and of Nemi.

'So the boy--Quintus--left the ploughed lands, and climbed a hill above the sleeping town. And when he reached the summit, he paused and turned him to the west.

'The Latian plain spreads beneath him in the climbing sun; at its edge is the sea in a light of pearl; the white fishing-boats sparkle along the sh.o.r.e. Close at his feet runs a straight road high upon the hill. He can see the country folk on their laden mules and donkeys journeying along it, journeying northwards to the city in the plain that the spurs of the mountain hide from him. His fancy goes with them, along the Appian Way, trotting with the mules. When will his father take him again to Rome to see the shops, and the Forum, and the new white temples, and Caesar's great palace on the hill?

'Then carelessly his eyes pa.s.s southward, and there beneath him in its hollow is the lake--the round blue lake that Diana loves, where are her temple and her shadowy grove. The morning mists lie wreathed above it; the just-leafing trees stand close in the great cup; only a few patches of roof and column reveal the shrine.

'On he moves. His wheaten cake is done. He takes his pipe from his girdle, touches it, and sings.