She smiled at him half shyly. But he did not see it. His head bent lower and lower.
‘Thank God!’ he said, with the humblest emphasis. ‘Then, madame—perhaps—you will find the force—to forgive me!’
The words were low—the voice steady.
Eleanor sprang up.
‘Father Benecke!—what have you been doing? Is—is Mr. Manisty here?’
She clung to the
loggia
parapet for support. The priest looked at her pallor with alarm, with remorse, and spoke at once.
‘He came to me last night.’
Their eyes met, as though in battle—expressed a hundred questions—a hundred answers. Then she broke the silence.
‘Where is he?’ she said imperiously.’ Ah!—I see—I see!’
She sat down, fronting him, and panting a little.
‘Miss Foster is not with me. Mr. Manisty is not with you. The inference is easy.—And you planned it! You took—you
dared
to take—as much as this—into your own hands!’
He made no reply. He bent like a reed in the storm.
‘There is no boldness like a saint’s’—she said bitterly,—‘no hardness—like an angel’s! What I would not have ventured to do with my closest friend, my nearest and dearest—you—a stranger—have done—with a light heart. Oh! it is monstrous!—monstrous!’
She moved her neck from side to side as though she was suffocating—throwing back the light ruffle that encircled it.
‘A stranger?’—he said slowly. His intense yet gentle gaze confronted hers.
‘You refer, I suppose, to that most sacred, most intimate confidence I made to you?—which no man of honour or of heart could have possibly betrayed,’—she said passionately. ‘Ah! you did well to warn me that it was no true confession—under no true seal! You should have warned me further—more effectually.’
Her paleness was all gone. Her cheeks flamed. The priest felt that she was beside herself, and, traversed as his own mind was with the most poignant doubts and misgivings, he must needs wrestle with her, defend himself.
‘Madame!—you do me some wrong,’ he said hurriedly. ‘At least in words I have told nothing—betrayed nothing. When I left him an hour ago Mr. Manisty had no conception that you were here. After my first letter to him, he tells me that he relinquished the idea of coming to Torre Amiata, since if you had been staying here, I must have mentioned it.’
Eleanor paused. ‘Subterfuge!’ she cried, under her breath. Then, aloud—‘You asked him to come.’
‘That, madame, is my crime,’ he admitted, with a mild and painful humility. ‘Your anger hits me hard. But—do you remember?—you placed three lives in my hands. I found you helpless; you asked for help. I saw you day by day, more troubled, yet, as it seemed to me, more full of instincts towards generosity, towards peace. I felt—oh! madame, I felt with all my heart, that there lay just one step between you and a happiness that would compensate you a thousand times for all you had gone through. You say that I prayed for you. I did—often—and earnestly. And it seemed to me that—in our later conversations—I saw such signs of grace in you—such exquisite dispositions of the heart—that were the chance of action once more given to you—you would find the strength to seize the blessing that God offered you. And one evening in particular, I found you in an anguish that seemed to be destroying you. And you had opened your heart to me; you had asked my help as a Christian priest. And so, madame, as you say—I dared. I said, in writing to Mr. Manisty, who had told me he was coming northward—“if Torre Amiata is not far out of your road—look in upon me.” Neither your name nor Miss Foster’s passed my lips. But since—I confess—I have lived in much disturbance of mind!’
Eleanor laughed.
‘Are all priests as good casuists as you, Father?’
His eyes wavered a little as though her words stung. But he did not reply.
There was a pause. Eleanor turned towards the parapet and looked outward towards the road and the forest. Her face and eyes were full of an incredible animation; her lips were lightly parted to let the quick breath pass.
Then of a sudden she withdrew. Her eyes moved back to Father Benecke; she bent forward and held out both her hands.
‘Father—I forgive you! Let us make peace.’
He took the small fingers into his large palms with a gratitude that was at once awkward and beautiful.
‘I don’t know yet’—he said, in a deep perplexity—‘whether I absolve myself.’
‘You will soon know,’ she said almost with gaiety. ‘Oh! it is quite possible’—she threw up one hand in a wild childish gesture—‘it is quite possible that to-morrow I may be at your feet, asking you to give me penance for my rough words. On the other hand—Anyway, Father, you have not found me a very dutiful penitent?’
‘I expected castigation,’ he said meekly. ‘If the castigation is done, I have come off better than I could have hoped.’
She raised herself, and took up her gloves that were lying on the little table beside her sofa.
‘You see’—she said, talking very fast—‘I am an Englishwoman, and my race is not a docile one. Here, in this village, I have noticed a good deal, and the
massaja
gossips to me. There was a fight in the street the other night. The men were knifing each other. The
parroco
sent them word that they should come at once to his house—_per pacificarli_. They went. There is a girl, living with her sister, whose husband has a bad reputation. The
parroco
ordered her to leave—found another home for her. She left. There is a lad who made some blasphemous remarks in the street on the day of the Madonna’s procession. The
parroco
ordered him to do penance. He did it. But those things are not English. Perhaps they are Bavarian?’
He winced, but he had recovered his composure.
‘Yes, madame, they are Bavarian also. But it seems that even an Englishwoman can sometimes feel the need of another judgment than her own?’
She smiled. All the time that she had made her little speech about the village, she had been casting quick glances along the road. It was evident that her mind was only half employed with what she was saying. The rose-flush in her cheeks, the dainty dress, the halo of fair hair gave her back youth and beauty; and the priest gazed at her in astonishment.
‘Ah!’—she said, with a vivacity that was almost violence—‘here she is. Father—please—!’ And with a peremptory gesture, she signed to him to draw back, as she had done, into the shadow, out of sight of the road.
But the advancing figure was plain to both of them.
Lucy mounted the hill with a slow and tired step. Her eyes were on the ground. The whole young form drooped under the heat, and under a weight of thought still more oppressive. As it came nearer a wave of sadness seemed to come with it, dimming the sunshine and the green splendour of the woods.
As she passed momentarily out of sight behind some trees that sheltered the gate of the courtyard, Mrs. Burgoyne crossed the
loggia
, and called to her maid.
‘Marie—be so good as to tell Miss Foster when she comes in that I have gone out; that she is not to trouble about me, as I shall soon return; and tell her also that I felt unusually well and strong.’
Then she turned and beckoned to Father Benecke.
‘This way, Father, please!’
And she led him down the little stair that had taken Lucy to the garden the night before. At the foot of the stairs she paused. The wall of the garden divided them from the courtyard, and on the other side of it they could hear Lucy speaking to the
massaja
.
‘Now!’ said Eleanor, ‘quick I—before she discovers us!’
And opening the garden door with the priest’s help she passed into the field, and took a wide circuit to the right so as to be out of view of the
loggia
.
‘Dear madame, where are you going?’ said the priest in some alarm. ‘This is too fatiguing for you.’
Eleanor took no notice. She, who for days had scarcely dragged one languid foot after another, sped through the heat and over the broken ground like one of the goldfinches in the convent garden. The old priest followed her with difficulty. Nor did she pause till they were in the middle of the Sassetto.
‘Explain what we are doing!’ he implored her, as she allowed him to press his old limbs for a moment on his stick, and take breath.
She, too, leant against a tree panting.
‘You said, Father, that Mr. Manisty was to leave you at midday.’
‘And you wish to see him?’ he cried.
‘I am determined to see him,’ she said in a low voice, biting her lip.
And again she was off, a gleam of whiteness gliding down, down, through the cool green heart of the Sassetto, towards the Paglia.
They emerged upon the fringe of the wood, where amid scrub and sapling trees stood the little sun-baked house.
From the distance came a sound of wheels—a carriage from Selvapendente crossing the bridge over the Paglia?
Mrs. Burgoyne looked at the house for a moment in silence. Then, sheltered under her large white parasol, she passed round to the side that fronted the river.
There, in the shade, sat Manisty, his arms upon his knees, his head buried in his hands.
He did not at first hear Mrs. Burgoyne’s step, and she paused a little way off. She was alone. The priest had not followed her.
At last, as she moved, either the sound of her dress or the noise of the approaching wheels roused him. He looked up—started—sprang to his feet.
‘Eleanor!—’
They met. Their eyes crossed. She shivered, for there were tears in his. But through that dimness there shone the fierce unspoken question that had leapt to them at the sight of his cousin—
‘Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?’
CHAPTER
XXIII
Eleanor was the first to break the silence.
‘You have had a long pilgrimage to find us,’ she said quietly. ‘Yet perhaps Torre Amiata might have occurred to you. It was you that praised it—that proposed to find quarters at the convent.’
He stared at her in amazement.
‘Eleanor—in God’s name!’ he broke out violently, ‘tell me what this all means! What has been the meaning of this mad—this extraordinary behaviour?’
She tottered a little and leant against the wall of the house.
‘Find me a chair, please, before we begin to talk. And—is that your fly? Send it away—to wait under the trees. It can take me up the hill, when we have finished.’
He controlled himself with difficulty and went round the house.
She pressed her hands upon her eyes to shut out the memory of his face.
‘She has refused him!’ she said to herself; ‘and—what is more—she has made him believe it!’
Very soon his step was heard returning. The woman he had left in the shade listened for it, as though in all this landscape of rushing river and murmuring wood it the one audible, significant sound. But when he came back to her again, he saw nothing but a composed, expectant Eleanor; dressed, in these wilds, with a dainty care which would have done honour to London or Paris, with a bright colour in her cheeks, and the quiver of a smile on her lips. Ill! He thought he had seldom seen her look so well. Had she not always been of a thistle-down lightness? ‘Exaggeration!—absurdity!’ he said to himself fiercely, carrying his mind back to certain sayings in a girl’s voice that were still ringing in his ears.
He, however, was in no mood to smile. Eleanor had thrown herself sideways on the chair he had brought her; her arms resting on the back of it, her delicate hands hanging down. It was a graceful and characteristic attitude, and it seemed to him affectation—a piece of her fine-ladyism.
She instantly perceived that he was in a state of such profound and passionate excitement that it was difficult for him to speak.
So she began, with a calmness which exasperated him:
‘You asked me, Edward, to explain our escapade?’
He raised his burning eyes.
‘What can you explain?—how can you explain?’ he said roughly. ‘Are you going to tell me why my cousin and comrade hates me and plots against me?—why she has inflicted this slight and outrage upon me—why, finally, she has poisoned against me the heart of the woman I love?’
He saw her shrink. Did a cruel and secret instinct in him rejoice? He was mad with rage and misery, and he was incapable of concealing it.
She knew it. As he dropped his head again in an angry stare at the grass between them, she was conscious of a sudden childish instinct to put out her hand and stroke the black curls and the great broad shoulders. He was not for her; but, in the old days, who had known so well as she how to soothe, manage, control him?
‘I can’t tell you those things—certainly,’ she said, after a pause. ‘I can’t describe what doesn’t exist.’
And to herself she cried: ‘Oh! I shall lie—lie—lie—like a fiend, if I must!’
‘What doesn’t exist’?’ he repeated scornfully. ‘Will you listen to my version of what has happened—the barest, unadorned tale? I was your host and Miss Foster’s. I had begun to show the attraction that Miss Foster had for me, to offer her the most trifling, the most ordinary attention. From the moment I was first conscious of my own feeling, I knew that you were against me—that you were influencing—Lucy’—the name dropped from his lips in a mingled anguish and adoration—‘against me. And just as I was beginning to understand my own heart—to look forward to two or three last precious weeks in which to make, if I could, a better impression upon her, after my abominable rudeness at the beginning—_you_ interfered—you, my best friend! Without a word our party is broken up; my chance is snatched from me; Miss Foster is spirited away. You and she disappear, and you leave me to bear my affront—the outrage done me—as best I may. You alarm, you distress all your friends. Your father takes things calmly, I admit. But even he has been anxious. Aunt Pattie has been miserable. As for me—’
He rose, and began to pace up and down before her; struggling with his own wrath.
‘And at last’—he resumed, pausing in front of her—‘after wandering up and down Italy, I find you—in this remote place—by the merest chance. Father Benecke said not a word. But what part he has played in it I don’t yet understand. In another half-hour I should have been off; and again you would have made the veriest fool of me that over walked this earth. Why, Eleanor?—why? What have I done to you?’