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

Eleanor's mind.--She gave an inward cry--a cry of misery. The lake seemed to swim before her.


CHAPTER VIII

They made their tea under the shadow of the farm-building, which consisted of a loft above, and a large dark room on the ground floor, which was filled with the flat strawberry-baskets, full and ready for market.

Lucy found the little festa delightful, though all that the ladies had to do was to make an audience for Aristodemo and Manisty. The handsome dare-devil lad began to talk, drawn out by the Englishman, and lo! instead of a mere peasant they had got hold of an artist and a connoisseur! Did he know anything of the excavations and the ruins? Why, he knew everything! He chattered to them, with astonishing knowledge and shrewdness, for half an hour. Complete composure, complete good-humour, complete good manners--he possessed them all. Easy to see that he was the son of an old race, moulded by long centuries of urbane and civilised living!

A little boastful, perhaps. He too had found the head of a statue, digging in his father's orchard. Man or woman?--asked Mrs. Burgoyne. A woman. And handsome? The handsomest lady ever seen. And perfect? Quite perfect. Had she a nose, for instance? He shook his young head in scorn. Naturally she had a nose! Did the ladies suppose he would have picked up a creature without one?

Then he rose and beckoned smiling to Eleanor and Lucy. They followed him through the cool lower room, where the strawberries gleamed red through the dark, up the creaking stairs to the loft. And there on the ground was an old box and in the box, a few score of heads and other fragments--little terracottas, such as the peasants turn up every winter as they plough or dig among the olives.. Delicate little hooded women, heads of Artemis with the crown of Cybele, winged heads, or heads covered with the Phrygian cap, portrait-heads of girls or children, with their sharp profiles still perfect, and the last dab of the clay under the thumb of the artist, as clear and clean as when it was laid there some twenty-two centuries ago.

Lucy bent over them in a passion of pleasure, turning over the little things quite silently, but with sparkling looks.

'Would you like them?' said Manisty, who had followed them, and stood over her, cigarette in hand.

'Oh no!' said Lucy, rising in confusion. 'Don't get them for me.'

'Come away,' said Eleanor, laughing. 'Never interfere between a man and a bargain.'

The _padrone_ indeed appeared at the moment. Manisty sent the ladies downstairs, and the bargaining began.

When he came downstairs ten minutes later a small basket was in his hand. He offered it to Lucy, while he held out his other hand to Eleanor. The hand contained two fragments only, but of exquisite quality, one a fine Artemis head with the Cybele crown, the other merely the mask or shell of a face, from brow to chin,--a gem of the purest and loveliest Greek work.

Eleanor took them with a critical delight. Her comments were the comments of taste and knowledge. They were lightly given, without the smallest pedantry, but Manisty hardly answered them. He walked eagerly to Lucy Foster, whose shy intense gratitude, covering an inward fear that he had spent far, far too much money upon her, and that she had indecorously provoked his bounty, was evidently attractive to him. He told her that he had got them for a mere nothing, and they sat down on the bench behind the house together, turning them over, he holding forth, and now and then discovering through her modest or eager replies, that she had been somehow remarkably well educated by that old Calvinist uncle of hers. The tincture of Greek and Latin, which had looked so repellent from a distance, presented itself differently now that it enabled him to give his talk rein, and was partly the source in her of these responsive grateful looks which became her so well. After all perhaps her Puritan stiffness was only on the surface. How much it had yielded already to Eleanor's lessons! He really felt inclined to continue them on his own account; to test for himself this far famed pliancy of the American woman.

Meanwhile Eleanor moved away, watching the path from Genzano which wound downwards from the Sforza Cesarini villa to the 'Giardino,' and was now visible, now hidden by the folds of the shore.

Presently Manisty and Lucy heard her exclamation.

'At last!--What has Reggie been about?'

'Coming?' said Manisty.

'Yes--thank goodness! Evidently they missed that first train. But now there are four people coming down the hill--two men and two ladies. I'm sure one's Reggie.'

'Well, for the practical man he hasn't distinguished himself,' said Manisty, taking out another cigarette.

'I can't see them now--they're hidden behind that bend. They'll be ten minutes more, I should think, before they arrive. Edward!'

'Yes?--Don't be energetic!'

'There's just time to explore that ravine--while they're having tea. Then we shall have seen it all--done the last, last thing! Who knows--dear Nemi!--if we shall ever see it again?'

Her tone was quite gay, yet, involuntarily, there was a touching note in it. Lucy looked down guiltily, wishing herself away. But Manisty resisted.

'You'll be very tired, Eleanor--it's much further than you think--and it's very hot.'

'Oh no, it's not far--and the sun's going down fast. You wouldn't be afraid? They'll be here directly,' she said, turning to Lucy. 'I'm sure it was they.'

'Don't mind me, please!' said Lucy. 'I shall be perfectly right. I'll boil the kettle again, and be ready for them. Aristodemo will look after me.'

Eleanor turned to Manisty.

'Come!' she said.

This time she rather commanded than entreated. There was a delicate stateliness in her attitude, her half-mourning dress of grey and black, her shadowy hat, the gesture of her hand, that spoke a hundred subtle things--all those points of age and breeding, of social distinction and experience, that marked her out from Lucy--from the girl's charming immaturity.

Manisty rose ungraciously. As he followed his cousin along the narrow path among the strawberry beds his expression was not agreeable. Eleanor's heart--if she had looked back--might have failed her. But she hurried on.

* * * * *

Lucy, left to herself, set the stove under the kettle alight and prepared some fresh tea, while Aristodemo and the other boy leant against the wall in the shade chattering to each other.

The voices of Eleanor and Manisty had vanished out of hearing in the wood behind the Giardino. But the voices from Genzano began to come nearer. A quarter to six.--There would be only a short time for them to rest and have their tea in, before they must all start home for the villa, where Miss Manisty was expecting the whole party for dinner at eight. Was that Mr. Brooklyn's voice? She could not see them, but she could hear them talking in the narrow overgrown lane leading from the lake to the ruins.

How _very_ strange! The four persons approaching entered the Giardino still noisily laughing and talking--and Lucy knew none of them! The two men, of whom one certainly resembled Mr. Brooklyn in height and build, were quite strangers to her; and she felt certain that the two ladies, who were stout and elderly, had nothing to do either with Mrs. Elliott, Mr. Reggie's married sister, or with the Ambassador's daughter.

She watched them with astonishment. They were English, tourists apparently from Frascati, to judge from their conversation. And they were in a great hurry. The walk had taken them longer than they expected, and they had only a short time to stay. They looked carelessly at the niched wall, and the shed with the strawberry baskets, remarking that there was 'precious little to see, now you'd done it.' Then they walked past Lucy, throwing many curious glances at the solitary English girl with the tea-things before her, the gentlemen raising their hats. And finally they hurried away, and all sounds of them were soon lost in the quiet of the May evening.

Lucy was left, feeling a little forlorn and disconcerted. Presently she noticed that all the women working on the Giardino land were going home. Aristodemo and his companion ran after some of the girls, and their discordant shouts and laughs could be heard in the distance, mingled with the 'Ave Maria' sung by groups of woman and girls who were mounting the zigzag path towards Nemi, their arms linked together.

The evening stillness came flooding into the great hollow like a soft resistless wave. Every now and then the voices of peasants going home rippled up from unseen paths, then sank again into the earth. On the high windows of Nemi the sunset light from the Campagna struck and flamed, '_Ave Maria--gratia plena._' How softened now, how thinly, delicately far! The singers must be nearing their homes in the little hill town.

Lucy looked around her. No one on the Giardino, no one in the fields near, no one on the Genzano road. She seemed to be absolutely alone. Her two companions indeed could not be far away, and the boys no doubt would come back for the baskets. But meanwhile she could see and hear no one.

The sun disappeared behind the Genzano ridge, and it grew cold all in a moment. She felt the chill, together with a sudden consciousness of fatigue. Was there fever in this hollow of the lake? Certainly the dwellings were all placed on the heights, save for the fisherman's cottage half-way to Genzano. She got up and began to move about, wishing for her cloak. But Mr. Manisty had carried it off, absently, on his arm.

Then she packed up the tea-things. What had happened to the party from Rome?

Surely more than an hour had passed. Had it taken them longer to climb to the spring's source than they supposed? How fast the light was failing, the rich Italian light, impatient to be gone, claiming all or nothing!

The girl began to be a little shaken with vague discomforts and terrors. She had been accustomed to wander about the lake of Albano by herself, and to make friends with the peasants. But after all the roads would not be so closely patrolled by _carabinieri_ if all was quite as safe as in Vermont or Middlesex; and there were plenty of disquieting stories current among the English visitors, even among the people themselves. Was it not only a month since a carriage containing some German royalties had been stopped and robbed by masked peasants on the Rocca di Papa road? Had not an old resident in Rome told her, only the day before, that when he walked about these lake paths he always filled his pockets with cigars and divested them of money, in order that the charcoal-burners might love him without robbing him? Had not friends of theirs going to Cori and Ninfa been followed by mounted police all the way?

These things weighed little with her as she wandered in broad daylight about the roads near the villa. But now she was quite alone, the night was coming, and the place seemed very desolate.

But of course they would be back directly! Why not walk to meet them? It was the heat and slackness of the day which had unnerved her. Perhaps, too, unknown to herself!--the stir of new emotions and