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

that she recognised through the gathering darkness. It was an evening spectacle of which she never tired. Her feeling clung to these labouring people, whom she idealised with the optimism of her clean youth. Secretly her young strength envied them their primal, necessary toils. She would not have shrunk from their hardships; their fare would have been no grievance to her. Sickness, old age, sin, cruelty, violence, death,--that these dark things entered into their lives, she knew vaguely. Her heart shrank from what her mind sometimes divined; all the more perhaps that there was in her the promise of a wide and rare human sympathy, which must some day find its appointed tasks and suffer much in the finding. Now, when she stumbled on the horrors of the world, she would cry to herself, 'God knows!'--with a catching breath, and the feeling of a child that runs from darkness to protecting arms; and so escape her pain.

Presently she came to sit by Eleanor again, trying to amuse her by the account of a talk on the roadside, with an old _spaccapietre_, or stone-breaker, who had fought at Mentana.

Eleanor listened vaguely, hardly replying. But she watched the girl in her simple white dress, her fine head, her grave and graceful movements; she noticed the voice, so expressive of an inner self-mastery through all its gaiety. And suddenly the thought flamed through her--

'If I told her!--if she knew that I had seen a letter from him this afternoon?--that he is in Italy?--that he is looking for _her_, day and night! If I just blurted it out--what would she say?--how would she take it?'

But not a word passed her lips. She began again to try and unravel the meaning of his letter. Why had he gone in search of them to the Abruzzi of all places?

Then, suddenly, she remembered.

One day at the villa, some Italian friends--a deputy and his wife--had described to them a summer spent in a wild nook of the Abruzzi. The young husband had possessed a fine gift of phrase. The mingled savagery and innocence of the people; the vast untrodden woods of chestnut and beech; the slowly advancing civilisation; the new railway line that seemed to the peasants a living and hostile thing, a kind of greedy fire-monster, carrying away their potatoes to market and their sons to the army; the contrasts of the old and new Italy; the joys of summer on the heights, of an unbroken Italian sunshine steeping a fresh and almost northern air: he had drawn it all, with the facility of the Italian, the broken, impressionist strokes of the modern. Why must Italians nowadays always rush north, to the lakes, or Switzerland or the Tyrol? Here in their own land, in the Abruzzi, and further south, in the Volscian and Calabrian mountains, were cool heights waiting to be explored, the savour of a primitive life, the traces of old cities, old strongholds, old faiths, a peasant world moreover, unknown to most Italians of the west and north, to be observed, to be made friends with.

They had all listened in fascination. Lucy especially. The thought of scenes so rarely seen, so little visited, existing so near to them, in this old old Italy, seemed to touch the girl's imagination--to mingle as it were a breath from her own New World with the land of the Caesars.

'One can ride everywhere?' she had asked, looking up at the traveller.

'Everywhere, mademoiselle.'

'I shall come,' she had said, drawing pencil circles on a bit of paper before her, with pleased intent eyes, like one planning.

And the Italian, amused by her enthusiasm, had given her a list of places where accommodation could be got, where hotels of a simple sort were beginning to develop, whence this new land that was so old could be explored by the stranger.

And Manisty had stood by, smoking and looking down at the girl's graceful head, and the charming hand that was writing down the names.

Another pang of the past recalled,--a fresh one added!

For Torre Amiata had been forgotten, while Lucy's momentary whim had furnished the clue which had sent him on his vain quest through the mountains.

* * * * *

'I do think '--said Lucy, presently, taking Eleanor's hand,--'you haven't coughed so much to-day?'

Her tone was full of anxiety, of tenderness.

Eleanor smiled. 'I am very well,' she said, dryly. But Lucy's frown did not relax. This cough was a new trouble. Eleanor made light of it. But Marie sometimes spoke of it to Lucy with expressions which terrified one who had never known illness except in her mother.

Meanwhile Eleanor was thinking--'Something will bring him here. He is writing to Father Benecke--Father Benecke to him. Some accident will happen--any day, any hour. Well--let him come!'

Her hands stiffened under her shawl that Lucy had thrown round her. A fierce consciousness of power thrilled through her weak frame. Lucy was hers! The pitiful spectacle of these six weeks had done its work. Let him come.

His letter was not unhappy!--far from it. She felt herself flooded with bitterness as she remembered the ardour that it breathed; the ardour of a lover to whom effort and pursuit are joys only second to the joys of possession.

But some day no doubt he would be unhappy--in earnest; if her will held. But it would hold.

After all, it was not much she asked. She might live till the winter; possibly a year. Not long, after all, in Lucy's life or Manisty's. Let them only wait a little.

Her hand burnt in Lucy's cool clasp. Restlessly, she asked the girl some further questions about her walk.

'I met the Sisters--the nuns--from Selvapendente, on the hill,' said Lucy. 'Such sweet faces some of them have.'

'I don't agree,' said Eleanor petulantly. 'I saw two of them yesterday. They smile at you, but they have the narrowest, stoniest eyes. Their pity would be very difficult to bear.'

A few minutes later Lucy left her for a moment, to give a message to Marie.

'These Christians are hard--_hard_!' thought Eleanor sharply, closing her tired lids.

Had Father Benecke ever truly weighed her case, her plea at all? Never! It had been the stereotyped answer of the priest and the preacher. Her secret sense resented the fact that he had been so little moved, apparently, by her physical state. It humiliated her that she should have brought so big a word as death into their debate--to no effect. Her thin cheek flushed with shame and anger.

The cracked bell which announced their meals tinkled from the sitting-room.

Eleanor dragged herself to her feet, and stood a moment by the parapet looking into the night.

'I cough less?' she thought. 'Why?--for I get worse every day. That I may make less noise in dying? Well! one would like to go without ugliness and fuss. I might as well be dead now, I am so broken--so full of suffering. How I hide it all from that child! And what is the use of it--of living a single day or hour more?'

* * * * *

She was angry with Father Benecke; but she took care to see him again.

By means of a little note about a point in the article he was just completing, she recalled him.

They met without the smallest reference to the scene which had passed between them. He asked for her literary opinion with the same simplicity, the same outward deference as before. She was once more the elegant and languid woman, no writer herself, but born to be the friend and muse of writers. She made him feel just as clearly as before the clumsiness of a phrase, the _naivete_ of a point of view.

And yet in truth all was changed between them. Their talk ranged further, sank deeper. From the controversy of science with the Vatican, from the position of the Old Catholics, or the triumph of Ultramontanism in France, it would drop of a sudden, neither knew how, and light upon some small matter of conduct or feeling, some 'flower in the crannied wall,' charged with the profoundest things--things most intimate, most searching, concerned with the eternal passion and trouble of the human will, the 'body of this death,' the 'burden' of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'

Then the priest's gentle insistent look would steal on hers; he would speak from his heart; he would reveal in a shrinking word or two the secrets of his own spiritual life, of that long inner discipline, which was now his only support in rebellion, the plank between him and the abyss.

She felt herself pursued; felt it with a mixture of fear and attraction. She had asked him to be her director; and then refused his advice. She had tried to persuade him that she was a sceptic and unbeliever. But he had not done with her. She divined the ardour of the Christian; perhaps the acuteness of the ecclesiastic. Often she was not strong enough to talk to him, and then he read to her--the books that she allowed him to choose. Through a number of indirect and gradual approaches he laid siege to her, and again and again did she feel her heart fluttering in his grasp, only to draw it back in fear, to stand once more on a bitter unspoken defence of herself that would not yield. Yet he recognised in her the approach of some crisis of feeling. She seemed herself to suspect it, and to be trying to ward it off, in a kind of blind anguish. Nothing meanwhile could be more touching than the love between her and Lucy. The old man looked on and wondered.

Day after day he hesitated. Then one evening, in Lucy's absence, he found her so pale, and racked with misery--so powerless either to ask help, or to help herself, so resolute not to speak again, so clearly tortured by her own coercing will, that his hesitation gave way.

He walked down the hill, in a trance of prayer. When he emerged from it his mind was made up.

* * * * *

In the days that followed he seemed to Eleanor often agitated and ill at ease. She was puzzled, too, by his manner towards Lucy. In truth, he watched Miss Foster with a timid anxiety, trying to penetrate her character, to divine how presently she might feel towards him. He was not afraid of Mrs. Burgoyne, but he was sometimes afraid of this girl with her clear, candid eyes. Her fresh youth, and many of her American ways and feelings were hard for him to understand. She showed him friendship in a hundred pretty ways; and he met her sometimes eagerly, sometimes with a kind of shame-facedness.

Soon he began to neglect his work of a morning that he might wander out to meet the postman beyond the bridge. And when the man passed him by with a short 'Non c' e niente,' the priest would turn homeward, glad almost that for one day more he was not called