‘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 man sang the little song carelessly, commonly, without a thought of the words, interrupting himself every now and then to sharpen his scythe, and then beginning again. To Eleanor it seemed the natural voice of the morning; one more, echo of the cry of universal parting, now for a day, now for a season, now for ever—which fills the world.
She was too restless to enjoy the
loggia
and the view, too restless to go back to bed. She pushed back the door between her and Lucy, only to see that Lucy was still fast asleep. But there were voices and stops downstairs. The farm-people had been abroad for hours.
She made a preliminary toilette, took her hat, and stole downstairs. As she opened the outer door the children caught sight of her and came crowding round, large-eyed, their fingers in their mouths. She turned towards the chapel and the little cloister that she remembered. The children gave a shout and swooped back into the convent. And when she reached the chapel door, there they were on her skirts again, a big boy brandishing the key.
Eleanor took it and parleyed with them. They were to go away and leave her alone—quite alone. Then when she came back they should have
soldi
. The children nodded shrewdly, withdrew in a swarm to the corner of the cloister, and watched events.
Eleanor entered. From some high lunette windows the cool early sunlight came creeping and playing into the little whitewashed place. On either hand two cinque-cento frescoes had been rescued from the whitewash. They shone like delicate flowers on the rough, yellowish-white of the walls; on one side a martyrdom of St. Catharine, on the other a Crucifixion. Their pale blues and lilacs, their sharp pure greens and thin crimsons, made subtle harmony with the general lightness and cleanness of the abandoned chapel. A poor little altar with a few tawdry furnishings at the further end, a confessional box falling to pieces with age, and a few chairs—these were all that it contained besides.
Eleanor sank kneeling beside one of the chairs. As she looked round her, physical weakness and the concentration of all thought on one subject and one person made her for the moment the victim of an illusion so strong that it was almost an ‘apparition of the living.’
Manisty stood before her, in the rough tweed suit he had worn in November, one hand, holding his hat, upon his hip, his curly head thrown back, his eyes just turning from the picture to meet hers; eyes always eagerly confident, whether their owner pronounced on the affinities of a picture or the fate of a country.
‘School of Pinturicchio certainly!—but local work. Same hand—don’t you think so?—as in that smaller chapel in the cathedral. Eleanor! you remember?’
She gave a gasp, and hid her face, shaking. Was this haunting of eye and ear to pursue her now henceforward? Was the passage of Manisty’s being through the world to be—for her—ineffaceable?—so that earth and air retained the impress of his form and voice, and only her tortured heart and sense were needed to make the phantom live and walk and speak again?
She began to pray—brokenly and desperately, as she had often prayed during the last few weeks. It was a passionate throwing of the will against a fate, cruel, unjust, intolerable; a means not to self-renunciation, but to a self-assertion which was in her like madness, so foreign was it to all the habits of the soul.
‘That he should make use of me to the last moment, then fling me to the winds—that I should just make room, and help him to his goal—and then die meekly—out of the way—No! He too shall suffer!—and he shall know that it is Eleanor who exacts it!—Eleanor who bars the way!’
And in the very depths of consciousness there emerged the strange and bitter recognition that from the beginning she had allowed him to hold her cheaply; that she had been content, far, far too content, with what he chose to give; that if she had claimed more, been less delicate, less exquisite in loving, he might have feared and regarded her more.
She heard the chapel door open. But at the same moment she became aware that her face was bathed in tears, and she did not dare to look round. She drew down her veil, and composed herself as she best could.
The person behind, apparently, also knelt down. The tread and movements were those of a heavy man—some countryman, she supposed.
But his neighbourhood was unwelcome, and the chapel ceased to be a place of refuge where feeling might have its way. In a few minutes she rose and turned towards the door.
She gave a little cry. The man kneeling at the back of the chapel rose in astonishment and came towards her.
‘Madame!’
‘Father Benecke!
you
here,’ said Eleanor, leaning against the wall for support—so weak was she, and so startling was this sudden apparition of the man whom she had last seen on the threshold of the glass passage at Marinata, barely a fortnight before.
‘I fear, Madame, that I intrude upon you,’ said the old priest, staring at her with embarrassment. ‘I will retire.’
‘No, no,’ said Eleanor, putting out her hand, with some recovery of her normal voice and smile. ‘It was only so—surprising; so—unexpected. Who could have thought of finding you here, Father?’
The priest did not reply. They left the chapel together. The knot of waiting children in the cloister, as soon as they saw Eleanor, raised a shout of glee, and began to run towards her. But the moment they perceived her companion, they stopped dead.
Their little faces darkened, stiffened, their black eyes shone with malice. Then suddenly the boys swooped on the pebbles of the courtyard, and with cries of ‘
Bestia!—bestia!
‘ they flung them at the priest over their shoulders, as they all fled helter-skelter, the brothers dragging off the sisters, the big ones the little ones, out of sight.
‘Horrid little imps!’ cried Eleanor in indignation. ‘What is the matter with them? I promised them some
soldi
. Did they hit you, Father?’
She paused, arrested by the priest’s face.
‘They?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Did you mean the children? Oh! no, they did no harm?’
What had happened to him since they met last at the villa? No doubt he had been in conflict with his superiors and his Church. Was he already suspended?—excommunicate? But he still wore the soutane?
Then panic for herself swept in upon and silenced all else. All was over with their plans. Father Benecke either was, or might at any moment be, in communication with Manisty. Alas, alas!—what ill-luck!
They walked together to the road—Eleanor first imagining, then rejecting one sentence after another. At last she said, a little piteously:
‘It is so strange, Father—that you should be here!’
The priest did not answer immediately. He walked with a curiously uncertain gait. Eleanor noticed that his soutane was dusty and torn, and that he was unshaven. The peculiar and touching charm that had once arisen from the contrast between the large-limbed strength which he inherited from a race of Suabian peasants, and an extraordinary delicacy of feature and skin, a childish brightness and sweetness in the eyes, had suffered eclipse. He was dulled and broken. One might have said almost that he had become a mere ungainly, ill-kept old man, red-eyed for lack of sleep, and disorganised by some bitter distress.
‘You remember—what I told you and Mr. Manisty, at Marinata?’ he said at last, with difficulty.
‘Perfectly. You withdrew your letter?’
‘I withdrew it. Then I came down here. I have an old friend—a Canon of Orvieto. He told me once of this place.’
Eleanor looked at him with a sudden return of all her natural kindness and compassion.
‘I am afraid you have gone through a great deal, Father,’ she said, gravely.
The priest stood still. His hand shook upon his stick.
‘I must not detain you, Madame,’ he said suddenly, with a kind of tremulous formality. ‘You will be wishing to return to your apartment I heard that two English ladies were expected—but I never thought—’
‘How could you?’ said Eleanor hurriedly. ‘I am not in any hurry. It is very early still. Will you not tell me more of what has happened to you? You would’—she turned away her head—‘you would have told Mr. Manisty?’