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

her with a troubled face at the glaring road, at the dusty patch of vines beyond it, at the burnt grass below the garden wall. 'Mr. Manisty!--you will make Eleanor go next Friday?--you won't let her put it off--for anything?'

She turned to him, in entreaty, the colour dyeing her pure cheek and throat.

'I will do what I can. I understand your anxiety,' he said stiffly.

She opened the old door of the courtyard and passed in before him. As he rejoined her, she asked him in a low voice--

'Have you any more news?'

'Yes. I found a letter at Selvapendente last night. The state of things is better. There will be no need I hope to alarm Eleanor--for the present.'

'I am so glad!'--The voice hurried and then paused. 'And of course, for you too,' she added, with difficulty.

He said nothing, and they walked up to the inner door in silence. Then as they paused on the threshold, he said suddenly, with a bitter accent--

'You are very devoted!'

She looked at him in surprise. Her young figure drew itself erect. 'That isn't wonderful--is it?--with her?'

Her tone pierced him.

'Oh! nothing's wonderful in women. You set the standard so high--the men can't follow.'

He stared at her, pale and frowning. She laughed artificially, but he could see the breath hurrying under the blue cotton dress.

'Not at all! When it comes to the serious difficulties we must, it seems, apply to you. Eleanor is thankful that you will take her home.

'Oh! I can be a decent courier--when I put my mind into it,' he said angrily. 'That, I dare say, you'll admit.'

'Of course I shall,' she said, with a lip that smiled unsteadily. 'I know it'll be invaluable. Please, Mr. Manisty, let me pass. I must get Eleanor her breakfast.'

But he still stood there, barring the way.

'Then, Miss Foster, admit something else!--that I am not the mere intruder--the mere burden--that you took me for.'

The man's soreness expressed itself in every word, every movement.

Lucy grew white.

'For Eleanor's sake, I am glad you came,' she said struggling for composure. But the dignity, the pride behind the agitation were so evident that he dared not go a step further. He bowed, and let her pass.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the Contessa was useful. After a very little observation, based on the suggestions of her letter from Home, she divined the situation exactly. Her affection and pity for Mrs. Burgoyne grew apace. Lucy she both admired and acquitted; while she half liked, half hated Manisty. He provoked her perpetually to judgment, intellectual and moral; and they fell into many a sparring which passed the time and made a shelter for the others. Her daughter had just left her; and the more she smarted, the more she bustled in and out of the village, the more she drove about the country, attending to the claims, the sicknesses, and the animals of distant _contadini_, the more she read her newspapers, and the more nimbly did her mind move.

Like the Marchesa Fazzoleni, she would have no pessimism about Italy, though she saw things in a less poetic, more practical way.

'I dare say the taxes are heavy--and that our officials and bankers and _impiegali_ are not on as good terms as they might be with the Eighth Commandment. Well! was ever a nation made in a night before? When your Queen came to the throne, were you English so immaculate? You talk about our Socialists--have we any disturbances, pray, worse than your disturbances in the twenties and thirties? The _parroco_ says to me day after day: "The African campaign has been the ruin of Italy!" That's only because he wants it to be so. The machine marches, and the people pay their taxes, and the farming improves every year, all the same. A month or two ago, the newspapers were full of the mobbing of trains starting with soldiers for Erythrea. Yet all that time, if you went down into the Campo de' Fiori you could find poems sold for a _soldo_, that only the people wrote and the people read, that were as patriotic as the poor King himself.'

'Ah! I know,' said Manisty. 'I have seen some of them. The oddest, naivest things!--the metre of Tasso, the thoughts of a child--and every now and then the cry a poet.'

And he repeated a stanza or two from these broad-sheets of the war, in a rolling and musical Italian.

The Contessa looked at him with cool admiration; and then aside, at Lucy. Certainly, when this Englishman was taking pains, his good-looks deserved all that could be said of them. That he was one of the temperaments to which other lives minister without large return--that she had divined at once. But, like Lucy, she was not damped by that. The Contessa had known few illusions, and only one romance; her love for her dead son. Otherwise she took the world as it came, and quarrelled with very few of its marked and persistent phenomena.

They were sitting on a terrace beneath the north-western front of the Palazzo. The terrace was laid out in a formal garden. Fountains played; statues stood in rows; and at the edge cypresses, black against the evening blue and rose, threw back the delicate dimness of the mountains, made their farness more far, and the gay foreground--oleanders, geraniums, nasturtiums--more gay.

Eleanor was lying on a deck-chair, smiling often, and at ease. Lucy sat a little apart, busy with her embroidery. She very seldom talked, but Eleanor could not make a movement or feel a want without her being aware of it.

'But, Madame, I cannot allow you to make an enemy out of me!'--said Manisty to the Contessa, resuming the conversation. 'When you talk to me of this Country and its future, _vous prechez un converti_.'

'I thought you were the Jonah of our day,' she said, with her abrupt and rather disdainful smile.

Manisty laughed.

'A Jonah who needn't complain anyway that his Nineveh is too ready to hear him.'

'Where is the preaching?' she asked.

'In the waste-paper basket,' said Manisty, throwing away his cigarette. 'Nowadays, apparently it is the prophets who repent.'

Involuntarily his eye wandered, sought for Lucy withdrew. She was hidden behind her work.

'Oh! preach away,' cried the Contessa. 'Take up your book again. Publish it. We can bear it.'

Manisty searched with both hands for his matches; his new cigarette between his lips.

'My book, Madame'--he said coolly--' outlived the pleasure its author took in writing it. My cousin was its good angel; but not even she could bring a blunder to port. Eleanor!--_n'est-ce pas?_'

He gathered a spray of oleander that grew near him, and laid it on her hand, like a caress. Eleanor's emaciated fingers closed upon it gently. She looked up, smiling. The Contessa abruptly turned away.

'And besides--' said Manisty.

He puffed away steadily, with his gaze on the mountains.

'I wait,' said the Contessa.

'Your Italy is a witch,' he said, with a sudden lifting of eyes and voice, 'and there are too many people that love her!'

Lucy bent a little lower over her work.

Presently the Contessa went away.

Eleanor lay with eyes closed and hands crossed, very white and still. They thought her asleep, for it was common with her now to fall into short sleeps of pure exhaustion. When they occurred, those near her kept tender and generally silent watch, joining hands of protection, as it were, round her growing feebleness.

After a few minutes, however, Manisty bent across towards Lucy.

'You urged me once to finish the book. But it was she who told me the other day she was thankful it had been dropped.'

He looked at her with the half irritable, half sensitive expression that she knew so well.

'Of course,' said Lucy, hurriedly. 'It was much best.'

She rose and stooped over Eleanor.

'Dear!--It is getting late. I think I ought to call the carriage.'

'Let me,' said Manisty, biting his lip.

'Thank you,' said Lucy, formally. 'The coachman understood we should want him at seven.'

When he came back, Lucy went into the house to fetch some wraps.

Eleanor opened her eyes, which were singularly animated and smiling.

'Listen!'

He stooped.

'Be angry!' she said, laying a light grasp on his arm. 'Be quite angry. Now--you may! It will do no harm.'

He sat beside her, his head bent; gloomily listening, till Lucy reappeared.

But he took the hint, calling to his aid all his pride, and all his singular power of playing any role in his own drama that he might desire to play. He played it with energy, with desperation, counting meanwhile each hour as it passed, having in view always that approaching moment in London when Lucy would disappear within the doors of the Porters' house, leaving the butler to meet the demands of unwelcome visitors with such equivalents of 'Not at home' as her Puritan scruples might allow; till the newspapers should announce the safe sailing of her steamer for New York.

He ceased to propitiate her; he dropped embarrassment. He ignored her. He became the man of the world and of affairs, whose European interests and relations are not within the ken of raw young ladies from Vermont. He had never been more brilliant, more interesting, more agreeable, for Eleanor, for the Contessa, for Benecke; for all the world, save one. He described his wanderings among the Calabrian highlands. He drew the peasants, the priests, the great landowners of the south still surrounded with their semi-feudal state; he made Eleanor laugh or shudder with his tales of the brigandage of the sixties; he talked as the artist and the scholar may of the Greek memories and remains of the Tarentine coast. Then he turned to English politics, to his own chances, and the humours of his correspondence. The Contessa ceased to quarrel with him. The handsome Englishman with the colour of a Titian, and the features of an antique, with his eloquence, his petulance, his conceit, his charm, filled the stage, quickened the dull hours whenever he appeared. Eleanor's tragedy explained itself. The elder woman understood and pitied. As for Lucy Foster, the Contessa's shrewd eyes watched her with a new respect. At what stage, in truth, was the play, and how would it end?

Meanwhile for Lucy Foster alone, Manisty was not agreeable. He rose formally when she appeared; he placed her chair; he paid her all necessary courtesies. But his conversation never included her. Her coming generally coincided--after she was ceremoniously provided for--with an outbreak of talk between him and Eleanor, or between him and Benecke, more eager, animated and interesting than before. But Lucy had no part in it. It was not the early neglect and incivility of the villa; it was something infinitely colder and more wounding; the frigidity of disillusion and resentment, of kindness rebuffed and withdrawn.

Lucy said nothing. She went about her day's work as usual, making all arrangements for their departure, devoting herself to Eleanor. Every now and then she was forced to consult with Manisty as to arrangements for the journey. They spoke as mere acquaintances and no more than was necessary; while she, when she was alone, would spend much time in a silent abstraction, thinking