Eleanor by Mrs. Humphry Ward (short novels to read txt) 📖

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At last the doors are passed. They are in the vast barricaded and partitioned space, already humming with the talk and tread of thousands,--the 'Tu es Petrus' overhead. Reggie Brooklyn would have hurried them on in the general rush for the tribunes. But Mrs. Burgoyne laid a restraining hand upon him. 'No--we mustn't separate,' she said, gently peremptory. And for a few minutes Mr. Reggie in an anguish must needs see the crowd flow past him, and the first seats of Tribune D filled. Then Manisty appeared, lifting his eyebrows in a frowning wonder at the young man's impatience;--and on they flew.

At last!--They are in the third row of Tribune D, close to the line by which the Pope must pass, and to the platform from which he will deliver the Apostolic Benediction. Reggie the unsatisfied, the idealist, grumbles that they ought to have been in the very front. But Eleanor and Aunt Pattie are well satisfied. They find their acquaintance all around them. It is a general flutter of fans, and murmur of talk. Already people are standing on their seats looking down on the rapidly filling church. In press the less favoured thousands from the Piazza, through the Atrium and the Eastern door--great sea of human life spreading over the illimitable nave behind the two lines of Swiss and Papal Guards, in quick never-ending waves that bewilder and dazzle the eye.

Lucy found the three hours' wait but a moment. The passing and re-passing of the splendid officials in their Tudor or Valois dress; the great names, 'Colonna,' 'Barberini,' 'Savelli,' 'Borghese' that sound about her, as Mrs. Burgoyne who knows everybody, at least by sight, laughs and points and chats with her neighbour, Mr. Neal; the constant welling up of processions from behind,--the Canons and Monsignori in their fur and lace tippets, the red Cardinals with their suites; the entry of the Guardia Nobile, splendid, incredible, in their winged Achillean helmets above their Empire uniforms--half Greek, half French, half gods, half dandies, the costliest foolishest plaything that any court can show; and finally as the time draws on, the sudden thrills and murmurs that run through the church, announcing the great moment which still, after all, delays: these things chase the minutes, blot out, the sense of time.

Meanwhile, again and again, Lucy, the sedate, the self-controlled, cannot prevent herself from obeying a common impulse with those about her--from leaping on her chair--straining her white throat--her eyes. Then a handsome chamberlain would come by, lifting a hand in gentle protest, motioning to the ladies--'De grace, mesdames--mesdames, de _grace_!--' Or angry murmurs would rise from those few who had not the courage or the agility to mount--'_Giu! giu!_--Descendez, mesdames!--qu'est-ce que c'est done que ces manieres?'--and Lucy, crimson and abashed, would descend in haste, only to find a kind Irish priest behind smiling at her,--prompting her,--'Never mind them!--take no notice!--who is it you're harmin'?'--And her excitement would take him at his word--for who should know if not a priest?

And from these risky heights she looked down sometimes on Manisty--wondering where was emotion, sympathy. Not a trace of them! Of all their party he alone was obviously and hideously bored by the long wait. He leant back in his chair, with folded arms, staring at the ceiling--yawning--fidgetting. At last he took out a small Greek book from his pocket, and hung over it in a moody absorption. Once only, when a procession of the inferior clergy went by, he looked at it closely, turning afterwards to Mrs. Burgoyne with the emphatic remark: 'Bad faces!--aren't they?--almost all of them?'

Yet Lucy could see that even here in this vast crowd, amid the hubbub and bustle, he still counted, was still remembered. Officials came to lean and chat across the rope; diplomats stopped to greet him on the way to the august seats beyond the Confession. His manner in return showed no particular cordiality; Lucy thought it languid, even cold. She was struck with the difference between his mood of the day, and that brilliant and eager homage he had lavished on the old Cardinal in the villa garden. What a man of change and fantasy! Here it was he _qui tendait la joue_. Cold, distant, dreamy--one would have thought him either indifferent or hostile to the whole great pageant and its meanings.

Only once did Lucy see him bestir himself--show a gleam of animation. A white-haired priest, all tremulous dignity and delicacy, stood for a moment beside the rope-barrier, waiting for a friend. Manisty bent over and touched him on the arm. The old man turned. The face was parchment, the cheeks cavernous. But in the blue eyes there was an exquisite innocence and youth.

Manisty smiled at him. His manner showed a peculiar almost a boyish deference. 'You join us afterwards--at lunch?'

'Yes, yes.' The old priest beamed and nodded; then his friend came up and he was carried on.

* * * * *

'A quarter to eleven,' said Manisty with a yawn, looking at his watch. 'Ah!--listen!'

He sprang to his feet. In an instant half the occupants of Tribune D were on their chairs, Lucy and Eleanor among them. A roar came up the church--passionate--indescribable. Lucy held her breath.

There--there he is,--the old man! Caught in a great shaft of sunlight striking from south to north, across the church, and just touching the chapel of the Holy Sacrament--the Pope emerges. The white figure, high above the crowd, sways from side to side; the hand upraised gives the benediction. Fragile, spiritual as is the apparition, the sunbeam refines, subtilises, spiritualises it still more. It hovers like a dream above the vast multitudes--surely no living man!--but thought, history, faith, taking shape; the passion of many hearts revealed. Up rushes the roar towards the Tribunes. 'Did you hear?' said Manisty to Mrs. Burgoyne, lifting a smiling brow, as a few Papalino cries--'Viva il Papa Re'--make themselves heard among the rest. Eleanor's thin face turns to him with responsive excitement. But she has seen these things before. Instinctively her eyes wander perpetually to Manisty's, taking their colour, their meaning from his. It is not the spectacle itself that matters to her--poor Eleanor! One heart-beat, one smile of the man beside her outweighs it all. And he, roused at last from his nonchalance, watching hawk-like every movement of the figure and the crowd, is going mentally through a certain page of his book, repeating certain phrases--correcting here--strengthening there.

Lucy alone--the alien and Puritan Lucy--Lucy surrenders herself completely. She betrays nothing, save by the slightly parted lips, and the flutter of the black veil fastened on her breast; but it is as though her whole inner being were dissolving, melting away, in the flame of the moment. It is her first contact with decisive central things, her first taste of the great world-play, as Europe has known it and taken part in it, at least since Charles the Great.

Yet, as she looks, within the visible scene, there opens another: the porch of a plain, shingled house, her uncle sitting within it, his pipe and his newspaper on his knee, sunning himself in the April morning. She passes behind him, looks into the stiff leaf-scented parlour--at the framed Declaration of Independence on the walls, the fresh boughs in the fire-place, the Bible on its table, the rag-carpet before the hearth. She breathes the atmosphere of the house; its stern independence and simplicities; the scorns and the denials, the sturdy freedoms both of body and soul that it implies--conscience the only master--vice-master for God, in this His house of the World. And beyond--as her lids sink for an instant on the pageant before her--she hears, as it were, the voices of her country, so young and raw and strong!--she feels within her the throb of its struggling self-assertive life; she is conscious too of the uglinesses and meannesses that belong to birth and newness, to growth and fermentation. Then, in a proud timidity--as one who feels herself an alien and on sufferance--she hangs again upon the incomparable scene. This is St. Peter's; there is the dome of Michael Angelo; and here, advancing towards her amid the red of the cardinals, the clatter of the guards, the tossing of the flabellae, as though looking at her alone--the two waxen fingers raised for her alone--is the white-robed triple-crowned Pope.

She threw herself upon the sight with passion, trying to penetrate and possess it; and it baffled her, passed her by. Some force of resistance within her cried out to it that she was not its subject--rather its enemy! And august, unheeding, the great pageant swept on. Close, close to her now! Down sink the crowd upon the chairs; the heads fall like corn before the wind. Lucy is bending too. The Papal chair borne on the shoulders of the guards is now but a few feet distant; vaguely she wonders that the old man keeps his balance, as he clings with one frail hand to the arm of the chair, rises incessantly--and blesses with the other. She catches the very look and meaning of the eyes--the sharp long line of the closed and toothless jaw. Spirit and spectre;--embodying the Past, bearing the clue to the Future.

'_Yeux de police!_'--laughed Reggie Brooklyn to Mrs. Burgoyne as the procession passed--'don't you know?--that's what they say.'

Manisty bent forward. The flush of excitement was still on his cheek, but he threw a little nod to Brooklyn, whose gibe amused him.

Lucy drew a long breath--and the spell was broken.

* * * * *

Nor was it again renewed, in the same way. The Pope and his cortege disappeared behind the Confession, behind the High Altar, and presently, Lucy, craning her neck to the right, could see dimly in the furthest distance, against the apse, and under the chair of St. Peter, the chair of Leo XIII. and the white shadow, motionless, erect, within it, amid a court of cardinals and diplomats. As for the mass that followed, it had its moments of beauty for the girl's wondering or shrinking curiosity, but also its moments of weariness and disillusion. From the latticed choir-gallery, placed against one of the great piers of the dome, came unaccompanied music--fine, pliant, expressive--like a single voice moving freely in the vast space; and at the High Altar, Cardinals and Bishops crossed and recrossed, knelt and rose, offered and put off the mitre; amid wreaths of incense, long silences, a few chanted words; sustained, enfolded all the while by the swelling tide of _Gloria_, or _Sanctus_.

At last--the elevation!--and at the bell the whole long double line of soldiers, from the Pope's chair at the western end to the eastern door, with a rattle of arms that ran from end to end of the church, dropped on one knee--saluted. Then, crac!--and as they had dropped, they rose, the stiff white breeches and towering helmets of the Guardia Nobile, the red and yellow of the Swiss, the red and blue of the Papal guards--all motionless as before. It was like the movement of some gigantic toy. And who or what else took any notice? Lucy looked round amazed. Even the Irish priest behind her had scarcely bowed his head. Nobody knelt. Most people were talking. Eleanor Burgoyne indeed had covered her face with her long delicate