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

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'Carabinieri!' cried Lucy in delight.

She had made friends with several members of this fine corps on the closely guarded roads about the Alban lake, and to see them here gave her a sense of protection.

Bending over the side of the carriage, she nodded to the two handsome brown-skinned fellows, who smiled back at her.

'How far,' she said, 'to Santa Trinita?'

'_Un miglio grasso_ (a good mile), Signorina. _E tutto_. But you are late. They expected you half an hour ago.'

The driver took this for reproach, and with a shrill burst of defence pointed to his smoking horses. The Carabinieri laughed, and diving into the field, one on either side, they kept up with the carriage as it neared the village.

'Why, it is like coming home!' said Lucy, wondering. And indeed they were now surrounded by the whole village population, just returned from the fields--pointing, chattering, laughing, shouting friendly directions to the driver. 'Santa Trinita!' 'Ecco!--Santa Trinita!' sounded on all sides, amid a forest of gesticulating hands.

'How could they know?' said Eleanor, looking at the small crowd with startled eyes. Lucy spoke a word to the young man on the box.

'They knew, he says, as soon as the carriage was ordered yesterday. Look! there are the telegraph wires! The whole countryside knows! They are greatly excited by the coming of _forestieri_--especially at this time of year.'

'Oh! we can't stay!' said Eleanor with a little moan, wringing her hands.

'It's only the country people,' said Lucy tenderly, taking one of the hands in hers. 'Did you see the Contessa when you were here before?'

And she glanced up at the great yellow mass of the _palazzo_ towering above the little town, the sunset light flaming on its long western face.

'No. She was away. And the _fattore_ who took us in left in January. There is a new man.'

'Then it's quite safe!' said Lucy in French. And her kind deep eyes looked steadily into Eleanor's, as though mutely cheering and supporting her.

Eleanor unconsciously pressed her hand upon her breast. She was looking round her in a sudden anguish of memory. For, now they were through the village, they were descending--they were in the woods. Ah! the white walls of the convent--the vacant windows in its ruined end--and at the gate of the rough farmyard that surrounded it the stalwart _capoccia_, the grinning, harsh-featured wife that she remembered.

She stepped feebly down upon the dusty road. When her feet last pressed it, Manisty was beside her, and the renewing force of love and joy was filling all the sources of her being.


CHAPTER XVI

'Can you bear it? Can you be comfortable?' said Lucy, in some dismay.

They were in one of the four or five bare rooms that had been given up to them. A bed with a straw palliasse, one or two broken chairs, and bits of worm-eaten furniture filled what had formerly been one of a row of cells running along an upper corridor. The floor was of brick and very dirty. Against the wall a tattered canvas, a daub of St. Laurence and his gridiron, still recalled the former uses of the room.

They had given orders for a few comforts to be sent out from Orvieto, but the cart conveying them had not yet arrived. Meanwhile Marie was crying in the next room, and the _contadina_ was looking on astonished and a little sulky. The people who came from Orvieto never complained. What was wrong with the ladies?

Eleanor looked round her with a faint smile.

'It doesn't matter,' she said under her breath. Then she looked at Lucy.

'What care we take of you! How well we look after you!'

And she dropped her head on her hands in a fit of hysterical laughter--very near to sobs.

'I!' cried Lucy. 'As if I couldn't sleep anywhere, and eat anything! But you--that's another business. When the cart comes, we can fix you up a little better--but to-night!'

She looked, frowning, round the empty room.

'There is nothing to do anything with--or I'd set to work right away.'

'Ecco, Signora!' said the farmer's wife. She carried triumphantly in her hands a shaky carpet-chair, the only article of luxury apparently that the convent provided.

Eleanor thanked her, and the woman stood with her hands on her hips, surveying them. She frowned, but only because she was thinking hard how she could somehow propitiate these strange beings, so well provided, as it seemed, with superfluous _lire_.

'Ah!' she cried suddenly; 'but the ladies have not seen our _bella vista_!--our _loggia_! Santa Madonna! but I have lost my senses! Signorina! _venga--venga lei_.'

And beckoning to Lucy she pulled open a door that had remained unnoticed in the corner of the room.

Lucy and Eleanor followed.

Even Eleanor joined her cry of delight to Lucy's.

'Ecco!' said the _massaja_ proudly, as though the whole landscape were her chattel,--'Monte Amiata! Selvapendente--the Paglia--does the Signora see the bridge down there?--_veda lei_, under Selvapendente? Those forests on the mountain there--they belong all to the Casa Guerrini--_tutto, tutto_! as far as the Signorina can see! And that little house there, on the hill--that _casa di caccia_--that was poor Don Emilio's, that was killed in the war.'

And she chattered on, in a _patois_ not always intelligible, even to Eleanor's trained ear, about the widowed Contessa, her daughter, and her son; about the new roads that Don Emilio had made through the woods; of the repairs and rebuilding at the Villa Guerrini--all stopped since his death; of the Sindaco of Selvapendente, who often came up to Torre Amiata for the summer; of the nuns in the new convent just built there under the hill, and their _fattore_,--whose son was with Don Emilio after he was wounded, when the poor young man implored his own men to shoot him and put him out of his pain--who had stayed with him till he died, and had brought his watch and pocket-book back to the Contessa--

'Is the Contessa here?' said Eleanor, looking at the woman with the strained and startled air that was becoming habitual to her, as though each morsel of passing news only served somehow to make life's burden heavier.

But certainly the Contessa was here! She and Donna Teresa were always at the Villa. Once they used to go to Rome and Florence part of the year, but now--no more!

A sudden uproar arose from below--of crying children and barking dogs. The woman threw up her hands. 'What are they doing to me with the baby?' she cried, and disappeared.

Lucy went back to fetch the carpet-chair. She caught up also a couple of Florentine silk blankets that were among their wraps. She laid them on the bricks of the _loggia_, found a rickety table in Eleanor's room, her travelling-bag, and a shawl.

'Don't take such trouble about me!' said Eleanor, almost piteously, as Lucy established her comfortably in the chair, with a shawl over her knees and a book or two beside her.

Lucy with a soft little laugh stooped and kissed her.

'Now I must go and dry Marie's tears. Then I shall dive downstairs and discover the kitchen. They say they've got a cook, and the dinner'll soon be ready. Isn't that lovely? And I'm sure the cart'll be here directly. It's the most beautiful place I ever saw in my life!' said Lucy, clasping her hands a moment in a gesture familiar to her, and turning towards the great prospect of mountain, wood, and river. 'And it's so strange--so strange! It's like another Italy! Why, these woods--they might be just in a part of Maine I know. You can't see a vineyard--not one. And the air--isn't it fresh? Isn't it lovely? Wouldn't you guess you were three thousand feet up? I just know this--we're going to make you comfortable. I'm going right down now to send that cart back to Orvieto for a lot of things. And you're going to get ever, ever so much better, aren't you? Say you will!'

The girl fell on her knees beside Eleanor, and took the other's thin hands into her own. Her face, thrown back, had lost its gaiety; her mouth quivered.

Eleanor met the girl's tender movement dry-eyed. For the hundredth time that day she asked herself the feverish, torturing question--'Does she love him?'

'Of course I shall get better,' she said lightly, stroking the girl's hair; 'or if not--what matter?'

Lucy shook her head.

'You must get better,' she said in a low, determined voice. 'And it must all come right.'

Eleanor was silent. In her own heart she knew more finally, more irrevocably every hour that for her it would never come right. But how say to Lucy that her whole being hung now--not on any hope for herself, but on the fierce resolve that there should be none for Manisty?

Lucy gave a long sigh, rose to her feet, and went off to household duties.

Eleanor was left alone. Her eyes, bright with fever, fixed themselves, unseeing, on the sunset sky, and the blue, unfamiliar peaks beneath it.

Cheerful sounds of rioting children and loud-voiced housewives came from below. Presently there was a distant sound of wheels, and the _carro_ from Orvieto appeared, escorted by the whole village, who watched its unpacking with copious comment on each article, and a perpetual scuffling for places in the front line of observation. Even the _padre parroco_ and the doctor paused as they passed along the road, and Lucy as she flitted about caught sight of the smiling young priest, in his flat broad-brimmed hat and caped soutane, side by side with the meditative and gloomy countenance of the doctor, who stood with his legs apart, smoking like a chimney.

But Lucy had no time to watch the crowd. She was directing the men with the _carro_ where to place the cooking-stove that had been brought from Orvieto, in the dark and half-ruinous kitchen on the lower floor of the convent; marvelling the while at the _risotto_ and the _pollo_ that the local artist, their new cook, the sister of the farmer's wife, was engaged in producing, out of apparently nothing in the way either of fire or tools. She was conferring with Cecco the little manservant, who, with less polish than Alfredo, but with a like good-will, was running hither and thither, intent only on pleasing his ladies, and on somehow finding enough spoons and forks to lay a dinner-table with; or she was alternately comforting and laughing at Marie, who was for the moment convinced that Italy was pure and simple Hades, and Torre Amiata the lowest gulf thereof.

Thus--under the soft, fresh evening--the whole forlorn and ruinous building was once more alive with noise and gaiety, with the tread of men carrying packages, with the fun of skirmishing children, with the cries of the cook and Cecco, with Lucy's stumbling yet sweet Italian.

Eleanor only was alone--but how terribly alone!

She sat where Lucy had left her--motionless--her hands hanging listlessly. She had been always thin, but in the last few weeks she had become a shadow. Her dress had lost its old perfection, though its carelessness was still the carelessness of instinctive grace, of a woman who could not throw on a shawl or a garden-hat without a natural trick of hand, that held even through despair and grief. The delicacy and emaciation of the face had now gone far beyond the bounds of beauty. It spoke of disease, and drew the pity of the passer-by.

Her loneliness grew upon her--penetrated and