‘It was that day, while you and he were walking about the ruins, that a flash of light came to me. I suppose I had seen it before. I know I had been unhappy long before! But as long as one can hide things from oneself—it seems to make them not true,—as though one’s own will still controlled them. But that day—after our walk—when we came back and found you on the hill-side! How was it your fault? Yet I could almost have believed that you had invented the boys and the stone! Certainly he spared me nothing. He had eyes and ears only for you. After he brought you home all his thoughts were for you. Nobody else’s fatigues and discomforts mattered anything. And it was the same with Alice. His only terrors were for you. When he heard that she was coming, he had no alarms for Aunt Pattie or for me. But you must be shielded—you must be saved from everything repulsive or shocking. He sat up last night to protect you—and even in his sleep—he heard you.’
Her voice dropped. Eleanor sat staring before her into the golden shadows of the room, afraid of what she had said, instinctively waiting for its effect on Lucy.
And Lucy crouched no longer. She had drawn herself erect.
‘Mrs. Burgoyne, is it kind—is it
bearable
—that you should say these things to me? I have not deserved them! No! no!—I have
not
. What right have you? I can’t protect myself—I can’t escape you—but—’
Her voice shook. There was in it a passion of anger, pain, loneliness, and yet something else—the note of something new-born and transforming.
‘What right?’ repeated Eleanor, in low tones—tones almost of astonishment. She turned to her companion. ‘The right of hunger—the right of poverty—the right of one pleading for a last possession!—a last hope!’
Lucy was silenced. The passion of the older woman bore her down, made the protest of her young modesty seem a mere trifling and impertinence. Eleanor had slid to her knees. Her face had grown tremulous and sweet. A strange dignity quivered in the smile that transformed her mouth as she caught the girl’s reluctant hands and drew them against her breast.
‘Is it forbidden to cry out when grief—and loss—go beyond a certain point? No!—I think not. I couldn’t struggle with you—or plot against you—or hate you. Those things are not in my power. I was not made so. But what forbids mo to come to you and say?—“I have suffered terribly. I had a dreary home. I married, ignorantly, a man who made me miserable. But when my boy came, that made up for all. I never grumbled. I never envied other people after that. It seemed to me I had all I deserved—and so much, much more than many! Afterwards, when I woke up without him that day in Switzerland, there was only one thing that made it endurable. I overheard the Swiss doctor say to my maid—he was a kind old man and very sorry for me—that my own health was so fragile that I shouldn’t live long to pine for the child. But oh!—what we can bear and not die! I came back to my father, and for eight years I never slept without crying—without the ghost of the boy’s head against my breast. Again and again I used to wake up in an ecstasy, feeling it there—feeling the curls across my mouth.”’ A deep sob choked her. Lucy, in a madness of pity, struggled to release herself that she might throw her arms round the kneeling figure. But Eleanor’s grasp only tightened. She hurried on.
‘But last year, I began to hope. Everybody thought badly of me; the doctors spoke very strongly; and even Papa made no objection when Aunt Pattie asked me to come to Rome. I came to Rome in a strange state—as one looks at things and loves them, for the last time, before a journey. And then—well, then it all began!—new life for me, new health. The only happiness—except for the child—that had ever come my way. I know—oh! I don’t deceive myself—I know it was not the same to Edward as to me. But I don’t ask much. I knew he had given the best of his heart to other women—long ago—long before this. But the old loves were all dead, and I could almost be thankful for them. They had kept him for me, I thought,—tamed and exhausted him, so that I—so colourless and weak compared to those others!—might just slip into his heart and find the way open—that he might just take me in, and be glad, for sheer weariness.’
She dropped Lucy’s hands, and rising, she locked her own, and began to walk to and fro in the great room; her head thrown back, her senses turned as it were inward upon the sights and sounds of memory.
Lucy gazed upon her in bewilderment. Then she too rose and approached Mrs. Burgoyne.
‘When shall I go?’ she said simply. ‘You must help me to arrange it with Miss Manisty. It might be to-morrow—it would be easy to find some excuse.’
Eleanor looked at her with a convulsed face.
‘That would help nothing,’ she said—‘nothing! He would guess what I had done.’
Lucy was silent a moment. Then she broke out piteously.
‘What can I do?’
‘What claim have I that you should do anything?’ said Eleanor despairingly. ‘I don’t know what I wanted, when I began this scene.’
She moved on, her eyes bent upon the ground—Lucy beside her.
The girl had drawn Mrs. Burgoyne’s arm through her own. The tears were on her check, but she was thinking, and quite calm.
‘I believe,’ she said at last, in a voice that was almost steady—‘that all your fears are quite, quite vain. Mr. Manisty feels for me nothing but a little kindness—he could feel nothing else. It will all come back to you—and it was not I that took it away. But—whatever you tell me—whatever you ask, I will do.’
With a catching breath Eleanor turned and threw her arm round the girl’s neck.
‘Stay,’ she breathed—‘stay for a few days. Let there be no shock—nothing to challenge him. Then slip away—don’t let him know where—and there is one woman in the world who will hold you in her inmost heart, who will pray for you with her secretest, sacredest prayers, as long as you live!’
The two fell into each other’s embrace. Lucy, with the maternal tenderness that should have been Eleanor’s, pressed her lips on the hot brow that lay upon her breast, murmuring words of promise, of consolation, of self-reproach, feeling her whole being passing out to Eleanor’s in a great tide of passionate will and pity.
CHAPTER
XIII
They were all going down to the midday train for Rome.
At last the Ambassador—who had been passing through a series of political and domestic difficulties, culminating in the mutiny of his Neapolitan cook—had been able to carry out his whim. A luncheon had been arranged for the young American girl who had taken his fancy. At the head of his house for the time being was his married daughter, Lady Mary, who had come from India for the winter to look after her babies and her father. When she was told to write the notes for this luncheon, she lifted her eyebrows in good-humoured astonishment.
‘My dear,’ said the Ambassador, ‘we have been doing our duty for six months—and I find it pall!’
He had been entertaining Royalties and Cabinet Ministers in heavy succession, and his daughter understood. There was an element of insubordination in her father, which she knew better than to provoke.
So the notes were sent.
‘Find her some types, my dear,’ said the Ambassador;—‘and little of everything.’
Lady Mary did her best. She invited an Italian Marchesa whom she had heard her father describe as ‘the ablest woman in Rome,’ while she herself knew her as one of the most graceful and popular; a young Lombard landowner formerly in the Navy, now much connected with the Court, whose blue eyes moreover were among the famous things of the day; a Danish professor and savant who was also a rich man, collector of flints and torques, and other matters of importance to primitive man; an artist or two; an American Monsignore blessed with some Irish wit and much influence; Reggie Brooklyn, of course, and his sister; Madame Variani, who would prevent Mr. Manisty from talking too much nonsense; and a dull English Admiral and his wife, official guests, whom the Ambassador admitted at the last moment with a groan, as still representing the cold tyranny of duty invading his snatch of pleasure.
‘And Mr. Bellasis, papa?’ said Lady Mary, pausing, pen in hand, like Fortitude prepared for all extremities.
‘Heavens, no!’ said the Ambassador, hastily. ‘I have put him off twice. This time I should have to read him.’
Manisty accordingly was smoking on the balcony of the villa while he waited for the ladies to appear. Miss Manisty, who was already suffering from the heat, was not going. The fact did not improve Manisty’s temper. Three is no company—that we all know.
If Lady Mary, indeed, had only planned this luncheon because she must, Manisty was going to it under a far more impatient sense of compulsion. It would be a sickening waste of time. Nothing now had any attraction for him, nothing seemed to him desirable or important, but that conversation with Lucy Foster which he was bent on securing, and she apparently was bent on refusing him.
His mind was full of the sense of injury. During all the day before, while he had been making the arrangements for his unhappy sister—during the journeys backward and forward to Rome—a delicious image had filled all the background of his thoughts, the image of the white Lucy, helpless and lovely, lying unconscious in his chair.
In the evening he could hardly command his eagerness sufficiently to help his tired little aunt up the steps of the station, and put her safely in her cab, before hurrying himself up the steep short-cut to the villa. Should he find her perhaps on the balcony, conscious of his step on the path below, weak and shaken, yet ready to lift those pure, tender eyes of hers to his in a shy gratitude?
He had found no one on the balcony, and the evening of that trying day had been one of baffling disappointment. Eleanor was in her room, apparently tired out by the adventures of the night before; and although Miss Foster appeared at dinner she had withdrawn immediately afterwards, and there had been no chance for anything but the most perfunctory conversation.
She had said of course all the proper things, so far as they could be said. ‘I trust you have been able to make the arrangements you wished. Mrs. Burgoyne and I have been so sorry! Poor Miss Manisty must have had a very tiring day—’
Bah!—he could not have believed that a girl could speak so formally, so trivially to a man who within twenty-four hours had saved her from the attack of a madwoman. For that was what it came to—plainly. Did she know what had happened? Had her swoon blotted it all out? If so, was he justified in revealing it. There was an uneasy feeling that it would be more chivalrous towards her, and kinder towards his sister, if he left the veil drawn, seeing that she seemed to wish it so—if he said no more about her fright, her danger, her faint. But Manisty was not accustomed to let himself be governed by the scruples of men more precise or more timid. He wished passionately to force a conversation with her more intimate, more personal than any one had yet allowed him; to break down at a stroke most if not all of the barriers that separate acquaintance from—
From what? He stood, cigarette in hand, staring blindly at the garden, lost in an intense questioning of himself.
Suddenly he found himself back again, as it were, among the feelings and sensations of Lucy Foster’s first Sunday at the villa; his repugnance towards any notion of marriage; his wonder that anybody should suppose that he had any immediate purpose of marrying Eleanor Burgoyne; the mood, half lazy, half scornful, in which he had watched Lucy, in her prim Sunday dress, walking along the avenue.
What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so unacquainted with his world?
There was her beauty of course. But he had passed the period when mere beauty is enough. He was extremely captious and difficult to please where the ordinary pretty woman was concerned. Her arts left him now quite unmoved. Of self-conscious vanity and love of effect he had himself enough and to spare. He could not mend himself; but he was often weary of his own weaknesses, and detested them in other people. If Lucy Foster had been merely a beauty, aware of her own value, and bent upon making him aware of it also, he would probably have been as careless of her now in the eighth week of their acquaintance as he had been in the first.
But it was a beauty so innocent, so interfused with suggestion, with an enchanting thrill of prophecy! It was not only what she said and looked, but what a man might divine in her—the ‘white fire’ of a nature most pure, most passionate, that somehow flashed through her maiden life and aspect, fighting with the restraints imposed upon it, and constantly transforming what might otherwise have been a cold seemliness into a soft and delicate majesty.
In short, there was a mystery in Lucy, for all her simplicity;—a mystery of feeling, which piqued and held the fastidious taste of Manisty. It was this which made her loveliness tell. Her sincerity was so rich and full, that it became dramatic,—a thing to watch, for the mere joy of the fresh, unfolding spectacle. She was quite unconscious of this significance of hers. Rather she was clearly and always conscious of weakness, ignorance, inexperience. And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely attractive to Manisty.
In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently. Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment. Manisty disliked and had thrown aside the role of country gentleman; because, in truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the probable boredoms of it worth while.
But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he began to think with a new tolerance of the English
cadre
and the English life. He remembered all those illustrious or comely husbands and wives, his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house. For the first time it thrilled him to imagine a new mistress of the house—young, graceful, noble—moving about below them. And even—for the first time—there gleamed from out the future the dim features of a son, and he did not recoil. He caressed the whole dream with a new and strange complacency. What if after all the beaten roads are best?