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

remorse, without any unnerving of the will. How far, far she was from Uncle Ben, and that shingled house in Vermont! It was near midsummer, and all the English and Americans had fled from this Southern Italy. Italy was at home, and at ease in her own house, living her own rich immemorial life, knowing and thinking nothing of the foreigner. Nor indeed on those uplands and in those woods had she ever thought of him; though below in the valley ran the old coach road from Florence to Rome, on which Goethe and Winckelmann had journeyed to the Eternal City. Lucy felt as though, but yesterday a tourist and stranger, she had now crept like a child into the family circle. Nay, she had raised a corner of Italy's mantle, and drawn close to the warm breast of one of the great mother-lands of the world.

Ah! but feeling sweeps fast and far, do what we will. Soon she was struggling out of her depth. These weeks of rushing experience had been loosening soul and tongue. To-night how she could have talked of these things to one now parted from her, perhaps for ever! How he would have listened to her--impatiently often! How he would have mocked and rent her! But then the quick softening--and the beautiful kindling eye--the dogmatism at once imperative and sweet--the tyranny that a woman might both fight and love!

Yet how painful was the thought of Manisty! She was ashamed--humiliated. Their flight assumed as a certainty what after all, let Eleanor say what she would, he had never, never said to her--what she had no clear authority to believe. Where was he? What was he thinking? For a moment, her heart fluttered towards him like a homing bird.

Then in a sharp and stern reaction she rebuked, she chastened herself. Standing there in the night, above the forests, looking over to the dim white cliffs on the side of Monte Amiata, she felt herself, in this strange and beautiful land, brought face to face with calls of the spirit, with deep voices of admonition and pity that rose from her own inmost being.

With a long sigh, like one that lifts a weight she raised her young arms above her head, and then brought her hands down slowly upon her eyes, shutting out sight and sense. There was a murmur--

'Mother!--darling mother!--if you were just here--for one hour--'

She gathered up the forces of the soul.

'So help me God!' she said. And then she started, perceiving into what formula she had slipped, unwittingly.

* * * * *

She moved on a few paces down the road, meaning just to peep into the woods and their scented loneliness. The night was so lovely she was loth to leave it.

Suddenly she became aware of a point of light in front, and the smell of tobacco.

A man rose from the wayside. Lucy stayed her foot, and was about to retreat swiftly when she heard a cheerful--

'Buona sera, Signorina!' She recognised a voice of the afternoon. It was the handsome carabiniere. Lucy advanced with alacrity.

'I came out because it was so fine,' she said. 'Are you on duty still? Where is your companion?'

He smiled, and pointed to the wood. 'We have a hut there. First Ruggieri sleeps--then I sleep. We don't often come this way; but when there are _forestieri_, then we must look out.'

'But there are no brigands here?'

He showed his white teeth. 'I shot two once with this gun,' he said, producing it.

'But not here?' she said, startled.

'No--but beyond the mountains--over there--in Maremma.' He waved his hand vaguely towards the west. Then he shook his head. 'Bad country--bad people--in Maremma.'

'Oh yes, I know,' said Lucy, laughing. 'If there is anything bad here, you say it comes from Maremma. When our harness broke this afternoon our driver said, "_Che vuole?_ It was made in Maremma!"--Tell me--who lives in that part of the convent--over there?'

And, turning back, she pointed to the distant window and the light.

The man spat upon the road without replying. After replenishing his pipe he said slowly: 'That, Signorina, is a _forestiere_, too.'

'A priest--isn't it?'

'A priest--and not a priest,' said the man after another pause.

Then he laughed, with the sudden _insouciance_ of the Italian.

'A priest that doesn't say his Mass!--that's a queer sort of priest--isn't it?'

'I don't understand,' said Lucy.

'_Per Dio!_ what does it matter?' said the man, laughing. 'The people here wouldn't trouble their heads, only--But you understand, Signorina'--he dropped his voice a little--'the priests have much power--_molto, molto_! Don Teodoro, the _parroco_ there,--it was he founded the _cassa rurale_. If a _contadino_ wants some money for his seed-corn--or to marry his daughter--or to buy himself a new team of oxen--he must go to the _parroco_. Since these new banks began, it is the priests that have the money--_capisce?_ If you want it you must ask them! So you understand, Signorina, it doesn't profit to fall out with them. You must love their friends, and--' His grin and gesture finished the sentence.

'But what's the matter?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Has he committed any crime?' And she looked curiously at the figure in the convent window.

'_E un prete spretato, Signorina._'

'_Spretato_?' (unpriested--unfrocked). The word was unfamiliar to her. She frowned over it.

'_Scomunicato!_' said the _carabiniere_, with a laugh.

'Excommunicated?' She felt a thrill of pity, mingled with a vague horror.

'Why?--what has he done?'

The _carabiniere_ laughed again. The laugh was odious, but she was already acquainted with that strange instinct of the lower-class Italian which leads him to make mock of calamity. He has passion, but no sentiment; he instinctively hates the pathetic.

'_Chi sa, Signorina?_ He seems a quiet old man. We keep a sharp eye on him; he won't do any harm. He used to give the children _confetti_, but the mothers have forbidden them to take them. Gianni there'--he pointed to the convent, and Lucy understood that he referred to the _contadino_--'Gianni went to Don Teodoro, and asked if he should turn him out. But Don Teodoro wouldn't say Yes or No. He pays well, but the village want him to go. They say he will bring them ill-luck with their harvest.'

'And the _Padre parroco_? Does he not speak to him?'

Antonio laughed.

'When Don Teodoro passes him on the road he doesn't see him--_capisce_, Signorina? And so with all the other priests. When he comes by they have no eyes. The Bishop sent the word.'

'And everybody here does what the priests tell them?'

Lucy's tone expressed that instinctive resentment which the Puritan feels against a ruling and dominant Catholicism.

Antonio laughed again, but a little stupidly. It was the laugh of a man who knows that it is not worth while even to begin to explain certain matters to a stranger.

'They understand their business--_i preti!_'--was all he would say. Then--'_Ma!_--they are rich--the priests! All these last years--so many banks--so many _casse_--so many _societa_! That holds the people better than prayers.'

* * * * *

When Lucy turned homewards she found herself watching the light in the far window with an eager attention. A priest in disgrace?--and a foreigner? What could he be hiding here for?--in this remote corner of a district which, as they had been already told at Orvieto, was Catholic, _fino al fanatismo_?

* * * * *

The morning rose, fresh and glorious, over mountain and forest.

Eleanor watched the streaks of light that penetrated through the wooden sun-shutters grow brighter and brighter on the white-washed wall. She was weary of herself, weary of the night. The old building was full of strange sounds--of murmurs and resonances, of slight creepings and patterings, that tried the nerves. Her room communicated with Lucy's, and their doors were provided with bolts, the newness of which, perhaps, testified to the fears of other summer tenants before them. Nevertheless, Eleanor had been a prey to starts and terrors, and her night had passed in a bitter mingling of moral strife and physical discomfort.

Seven o'clock striking from the village church. She slipped to her feet. Ready to her hand lay one of the soft and elegant wrappers--fresh, not long ago, from Paris--as to which Lucy had often silently wondered how anyone could think it right to spend so much money on such things.

Eleanor, of course, was not conscious of the smallest reproach in the matter. Dainty and costly dress was second nature to her; she never thought about it. But this morning as she first took up the elaborate silken thing, to which pale girls in hot Parisian workrooms had given so much labour of hand and head, and then caught sight of her own face and shoulders in the cracked glass upon the wall, she was seized with certain ghastly perceptions that held her there motionless in the semi-darkness, shivering amid the delicate lace and muslin which enwrapped her. Finished!--for her--all the small feminine joys. Was there one of her dresses that did not in some way speak to her of Manisty?--that had not been secretly planned with a view to tastes and preferences she had come to know hardly less intimately than her own?

She thought of the face of the Orvieto doctor, of certain words that she had stopped on his lips because she was afraid to hear them. A sudden terror of death,--of the desolate, desolate end swept upon her. To die, with this cry of the heart unspent, untold for ever! Unloved, unsatisfied, unrewarded--she whose whole nature gave itself--gave itself perpetually, as a wave breaks upon a barren shore. How can any God send human beings into the world for such a lot? There can be no God. But how is the riddle easier, for thinking Him away?

When at last she rose, it was to make quietly for the door opening on the _loggia_.

Still there, this radiant marvel of the world!--this pageant of rock and stream and forest, this pomp of shining cloud, this silky shimmer of the wheat, this sparkle of flowers in the grass; while human hearts break, and human lives fail, and the graveyard on the hill yonder packs closer and closer its rows of metal crosses and wreaths!

Suddenly, from a patch of hayfield on the further side of the road, she heard a voice singing. A young man, tall and well made, was mowing in a corner of the field. The swathes fell fast before him: every movement spoke of an assured rejoicing strength. He sang with the sharp stridency which is the rule in Italy--the words clear, the sounds nasal.

Gradually Eleanor made out that the song was the farewell of a maiden to her lover who is going for winter work to the Maremma.

The labourers go to Maremma-- Oh! 'tis long till the days of June, And my heart is all in a flutter Alone here, under the moon.