Eleanor Part 80

He seated himself beside her, he took her hands by force.

'Lucy, I know what you mean. I won't pretend that I don't know. You think that I ought to have married my cousin--that if you had not been there, I should have married her. I might,--not yet, but after some time,--it is quite true that it might have happened. Would it have made Eleanor happy? You saw me at the villa--as I am. You know well, that even as a friend, I constantly disappointed her. There seemed to be a fate upon us which made me torment and wound her when I least intended it. I don't defend myself,--and Heaven knows I don't blame Eleanor! I have always believed that these things are mysterious, predestined--matters of temperament deeper than our will. I was deeply, sincerely attached to Eleanor--yet!--when you came--after those first few weeks--the falsity of the whole position flashed upon me. And there was the book. It seemed to me sometimes that the only way of extricating us all was to destroy the book, and--and--all that it implied--or might have been thought to imply,--'

he added hurriedly. 'Oh! you needn't tell me that I was a blundering and selfish fool! We have all got into a horrible coil--and I can't pose before you if I would. But it isn't Eleanor that would hold you back from me, Lucy--it isn't Eleanor!--answer me!--you know that?'

He held her almost roughly, scanning her face in an agony that served him well.

Her lips moved piteously, in words that he could not hear. But her hands lay pa.s.sive in his grasp; and he hastened on.

'Ever since that Nemi evening, Lucy, I have been a new creature. I will tell you no lies. I won't say that I never loved any woman before you. I will have no secrets from you--you shall know all, if you want to know. But I do say that every pa.s.sion I ever knew in my first youth seems to me now a mere apprenticeship to loving you! You have become my life--my very heart.

If anything is to be made of a fellow like me--it's you that'll give me a chance, Lucy. Oh! my dear--don't turn from me! It's Eleanor's voice speaks in mine--listen to us both!'

Her colour came and went. She swayed towards him, fascinated by his voice, conquered by the mere exhaustion of her long struggle, held in the grasp of that compulsion which Eleanor had laid upon her.

Manisty perceived her weakness; his eyes flamed; his arm closed round her.

'I had an instinct--a vision,' he said, almost in her ear, 'when I set out. The day dawned on me like a day of consecration. The sun was another sun--the earth reborn. I took up my pilgrimage again--looking for Lucy--as I have looked for her the last six weeks. And everything led me right--the breeze and the woods and the birds. They were all in league with me. They pitied me--they told me where Lucy was--'

The low, rushing words ceased a moment. Manisty looked at her, took both her hands again.

'But they couldn't tell me'--he murmured--'how to please her--how to make her kind to me--make her listen to me. Lucy, whom shall I go to for that?'

She turned away her face; her hands released themselves. Manisty hardly breathed till she said, with a trembling mouth, and a little sob now and then between the words--

'It is all so strange to me--so strange and so--so doubtful! If there were only someone here from my own people,--someone who could advise me! Is it wise for you--for us both? You know I'm so different from you--and you'll find it out perhaps, more and more. And if you did--and were discontented with me--I can't be sure that I could always fit myself to you. I was brought up so that--that--I can't always be as easy and pleasant as other girls. My mother--she stood by herself often--and I with her. She was a grand nature--but I'm sure you would have thought her extravagant--and perhaps hard. And often I feel as though I didn't know myself,--what there might be in me. I know I'm often very stubborn. Suppose--in a few years--'

Her eyes came back to him; searching and interrogating that bent look of his, in which her whole being seemed held.

What was it Manisty saw in her troubled face that she could no longer conceal? He made no attempt to answer her words; there was another language between them. He gave a cry. He put forth a tender violence; and Lucy yielded. She found herself in his arms; and all was said.

Yet when she withdrew herself, she was in tears. She took his hand and kissed it wildly, hardly knowing what she was doing. But her heart turned to Eleanor; and it was Eleanor's voice in her ears that alone commanded and absolved her.

As they strolled home, Manisty's mood was of the wildest and gayest. He would hear of no despair about his cousin.

'We will take her home--you and I. We will get the very best advice. It isn't--it shan't be as bad as you think!'

And out of mere reaction from her weeks of anguish, she believed him, she hoped again. Then he turned to speculate on the voyage to America he must now make, on his first interviews with Greyridge and Uncle Ben.

'Shall I make a good impression? How shall I be received? I am certain you gave your uncle the worst accounts of me.'

'I guess Uncle Ben will judge for himself,' she said, reddening; thankful all the same to remember that among her uncle's reticent, old-fashioned ways none was more marked than his habit of destroying all but an infinitesimal fraction of his letters. 'He read all those speeches of yours, last year. You'll have to think--how you're going to get over it.'

'Well, you have brought me on my knees to Italy,' he said, laughing. 'Must I now go barefoot to the tomb of Washington?'

She looked at him with a little smile, that showed him once more the Lucy of the villa.

'You do seem to make mistakes, don't you?' she said gently. But then her hand nestled shyly into his; and without words, her heart vowed the true woman's vow to love him and stand by him always, for better for worse, through error and success, through fame or failure. In truth her inexperience had a.n.a.lysed the man to whom she had pledged herself far better than he imagined. Did her love for him indeed rest partly on a secret sense of vocation?--a profound, inarticulate divining of his vast, his illimitable need for such a one as she to love him?

Meanwhile Eleanor and Reggie and Father Benecke waited breakfast on the _loggia_. They were all under the spell of a common excitement, a common restlessness.

Eleanor had discarded her sofa. She moved about the _loggia_, now looking down the road, now gathering a bunch of rose-pink oleanders for her white dress. The _frou-frou_ of her soft skirts; her happy agitation; the flush on her cheek;--neither of the men who were her companions ever forgot them afterwards.

Manisty, it appeared, had taken coffee with Father Benecke at six, and had then strolled up the Sa.s.setto path with his cigarette. Lucy had been out since the first church bells. Father Benecke reported his meeting with her on the road.

Eleanor listened to him with a sort of gay self-restraint.

'Yes--I know'--she said, nodding--'I know.--Reggie, there is a glorious tuft of carnations in that pot in the cloisters. Ask Mamma Doni if we may have them. _Ecco_--take her a _lira_ for the baby. I must have them for the table.'

And soon the little white-spread breakfast-table, with it rolls and fruit, was aglow with flowers, and a little bunch lay on each plate. The _loggia_, was in _festa_; and the morning sun flickered through the vine-leaves on the bright table, and the patterns of the brick floor.

'There--there they are!--Reggie!--Father!--leave me a minute! Quick--into the garden! We will call you directly.'

And Reggie, looking back with a gulp from the garden-stairs, saw her leaning over the _loggia_, waving her handkerchief; the figure in its light dress, tossed a little by the morning breeze, the soft muslin and lace eddying round it.

They mounted. Lucy entered first.

She stood on the threshold a moment, looking at Eleanor with a sweet and piteous appeal. Then her young foot ran, her arms opened; and with the tender dignity of a mother rejoicing over her child Eleanor received her on her breast.

By easy stages Manisty and Lucy took Mrs. Burgoyne to England. At the end of August Lucy returned to the States with her friends; and in October she and Manisty were married.

Mrs. Burgoyne lived through the autumn; and in November she hungered so pitifully for the South that by a great effort she was moved to Rome.

There she took up her quarters in the house of the Contessa Guerrini, who lavished on her last days all that care and affection could bestow.

Eleanor drove out once more towards the Alban hills; she looked once more on the slopes of Marinata and the white crown of Monte Cavo; the Roman sunshine shed round her once more its rich incomparable light. In December Manisty and Lucy were expected; but a week before they came she died.

A German Old Catholic priest journeyed from a little town in Switzerland to her burial; and a few days later the two beings she had loved stood beside her grave. They had many and strong reasons to remember her; but for one reason above all others, for her wild flight to Torre Amiata, the only selfish action of her whole life, was she--at least, in Lucy's heart--through all the years that followed the more pa.s.sionately, the more tragically enthroned.

FINIS