Lucy approached her impetuously.
Oh! how white and stricken an aspect—through what a dark eclipse of pain the eyes looked out!
'Ought we not to be going?' Lucy whispered in her ear. 'I am sure you are tired.'
Eleanor rose. She took the girl's hand in a clinging grasp, while she turned smiling to her neighbour the Dane:
'We must be moving to the Villa Borghese—some friends will be meeting us there. Our train does not go for a long, long while.'
'Does any Roman train ever go?' said Doctor Jensen, stroking his straw-coloured beard. 'But why leave us, Madame? Is not one garden as good as another? What spell can we invent to chain you here?'
He bowed low, smiling fatuously, with his hand on his heart. He was one of the most learned men in the world. But about that he cared nothing. The one reputation he desired was that of a 'sad dog'—a terrible man with the ladies. That was the paradox of his existence.
Eleanor laughed mechanically; then she turned to Lucy.
'Come!' she said in the girl's ear, and as they walked away she half closed her eyes against the sun, and Lucy thought she heard a gasp of fatigue. But she spoke lightly.
'Dear, foolish, old man! he was telling me how he had gone back to the Hermitage Library at St. Petersburg the other day to read, after thirty years. And there in a book that had not been taken down since he had used it last he found a leaf of paper and some pencil words scribbled on it by him when he was a youth—"my own darling." "And if I only knew nowvichdarling!" he said, looking at me and slapping his knee. "Vich darling"!' Eleanor repeated, laughing extravagantly. Then suddenly she wavered. Lucy instinctively caught her by the arm, and Eleanor lent heavily upon her.
'Dear Mrs. Burgoyne—you are not well,' cried the girl, terrified. 'Let us go to a hotel where you can rest till the train goes—or to some friend.'
Eleanor's face set in the effort to control herself—she drew her hand across her eyes. 'No, no, I am well,' she said, hurriedly. 'It is the sun—and I could not eat at luncheon. The Ambassador's new cook did not tempt me. And besides'—she suddenly threw a look at Lucy before which Lucy shrank—'I am out of love with myself. There is one hour yesterday which I wish to cancel—to take back. I give up everything—everything.'
They were advancing across a wide lawn. The Ambassador and Mrs. Swetenham were coming to meet them. The Ambassador, weary of his companion, was looking with pleasure at the two approaching figures, at the sweep of Eleanor's white dress upon the grass, and the frame made by her black lace parasol for the delicacy of her head and neck.
Meanwhile Eleanor and Lucy saw only each other. The girl coloured proudly.She drew herself erect.
'You cannot give up—what would not be taken—what is not desired,' she said fiercely. Then, in another voice: 'But please, please let me take care of you! Don't let us go to the Villa Borghese!'
She felt her hand pressed passionately, then dropped.
'I am all right,' said Eleanor, almost in her usual voice. 'Eccellenza! we must bid you good-bye—have you seen our gentleman?'
'Ecco,' said the Ambassador, pointing to Manisty, who, in company with the American Monsignore, was now approaching them. 'Let him take you out of the sun at once—you look as though it were too much for you.'
Manisty, however, came up slowly, in talk with his companion. The frowning impatience of his aspect attracted the attention of the group round the Ambassador. As he reached them, he said to the priest beside him—
'You know that he has withdrawn his recantation?'
'Ah! yes'—said the Monsignore, raising his eyebrows, 'poor fellow!'—
The mingled indifference and compassion of the tone made the words bite.Manisty flushed.
'I hear he was promised consideration,' he said quickly.
'Then he got it,' was the priest's smiling reply.
'He was told that his letter was not for publication. Next morning it appeared in theOsservatore Romano.'
'Oh no!—impossible! Your facts are incorrect.'
The Monsignore laughed, in unperturbed good humour. But after the laugh, the face reappeared, hard and a little menacing, like a rock that has been masked by a wave. He watched Manisty for a moment silently.
'Where is he?' said Manisty abruptly.
'Are you talking of Father Benecke'?' said the Ambassador. 'I heard of him yesterday. He has gone into the country, but he gave me no address. He wished to be undisturbed.'
'A wise resolve'—said the Monsignore, holding out his hand. 'Your Excellency must excuse me. I have an audience of his Holiness at three o'clock.'
He made his farewells to the ladies with Irish effusion, and departed. TheAmbassador looked curiously at Manisty. Then he fell back with Lucy.
'It will be a column to-night,' he said with depression. 'Why didn't you stand by me? I showed Mrs. Swetenham my pictures—my beauties—my ewe-lambs—that I have been gathering for twenty years—that the National Gallery shall have, when I'm gone, if it behaves itself. And she asked me if they were originals, and took my Luini for a Raphael! Yes! it will be a column,' said the Ambassador pensively. Then, with a brisk change, he looked up and took the hand that Lucy offered him.
'Good-bye—good-bye! You won't forget my prescription?—nor me?' said the old man, smiling and patting her hand kindly. 'And remember!'—he bent towards her, dropping his voice with an air in which authority and sweetness mingled—'send Mr. Manisty home!'
He felt the sudden start in the girl's hand before he dropped it. Then he turned to Manisty himself.
'Ah! Manisty, here you are. Your ladies want to leave us.'
Manisty made his farewells, and carried Lucy off. But as they walked towards the house he said not a word, and Lucy, venturing a look at him, saw the storm on his brow, the stiffness of the lips.
'We are going to the Villa Borghese, are we not?' she said timidly—'ifMrs. Burgoyne ought to go?'
'We must go somewhere, I suppose,' he said, stalking on before her. 'We can't sit in the street.'
The party returning to Marinata had two hours to spend in the gallery and garden of the Villa Borghese. Of the pictures and statues of the palace, of the green undulations, the stone pines, thetempiettiof the garden, Lucy afterwards had no recollection. All that she remembered was flight on her part, pursuit on Manisty's, and finally a man triumphant and a girl brought to bay.
It was in a shady corner of the vast garden, where hedges of some fragrant yellow shrub shut in the basin of a fountain, surrounded by a ring of languid nymphs, that Lucy at last found herself face to face with Manisty, and knew that she must submit.
'I do not understand how I have missed Mrs. Burgoyne,' she said hastily, looking round for her companion Mrs. Elliot, who had just left her to overtake her brother and go home; while Lucy was to meet Eleanor and Mr. Neal at this rendezvous.
Manisty looked at her with his most sparkling, most determined air.
'You have missed her—because I have misled her.' Then, as Lucy drew back, he hurried on,—'I cannot understand, Miss Foster, why it is that you have constantly refused all yesterday evening—all to-day—to give me the opportunity I desired! But I, too, have a will,—and it has been roused!
'I don't understand,' said Lucy, growing white.
'Let me explain, then,' said Manisty, coolly. 'Miss Foster, two nights ago you were attacked,—in danger—under my roof, in my care. As your host, you owe it to me, to let me account and apologise for such things—if I can. But you avoid me. You give me no chance of telling you what I had done to protect you—of expressing my infinite sorrow and regret. I can only imagine that you resent our negligence too deeply even to speak of it—that you cannot forgive us!'
'Forgive!' cried Lucy, fairly taken aback. 'What could I have to forgive,Mr. Manisty?—what can you mean?'
'Explain to me then,' said he, unflinching, 'why you have never had a kindword for me, or a kind look, since this happened. Please sit down, MissFoster'—he pointed to a marble bench close beside her—'I will stand here.The others are far away. Ten minutes you owe me—ten minutes I claim.'
Lucy sat down, struggling to maintain her dignity and presence of mind.
'I am afraid I have given you very wrong ideas of me,' she said, throwing him a timid smile. 'I of course have nothing to forgive anybody—far, far the contrary. I know that you took all possible pains that no harm should happen to me. And through you—no harm did happen to me.'
She turned away her head, speaking with difficulty. To both that moment of frenzied struggle at the dining-room door was almost too horrible for remembrance. And through both minds there swept once more the thrill of her call to him—of his rush to her aid.
'You knew'—he said eagerly, coming closer.
'I knew—I was in danger—that but for you—perhaps—your poor sister—'
'Oh! don't speak of it,' he said, shuddering.
And leaning over the edge of one of the nymphs' pedestals, beside her, he stared silently into the cool green water.
'There,' said Lucy tremulously, 'you don't want to speak of it. And that was my feeling. Why should we speak of it any more? It must be such a horrible grief to you. And I can't do anything to help you and Miss Manisty. It would be so different if I could.'
'You can,—you must—let me tell you what I had done for your safety that night,' he said firmly, interrupting her. 'I had made such arrangements with Dalgetty—who is a strong woman physically—I had so imprisoned my poor sister, that I could not imagine any harm coming to you or any other of our party. When my aunt said to me that night before she went to bed that she was afraid your door was unsafe, I laughed—"That doesn't matter!" I said to her. I felt quite confident. I sat up all night,—but I was not anxious,—and I suppose it was that which at last betrayed me into sleep. Of course, the fatal thing was that we none of us knew of the chloroform she had hidden away.'
Lucy fidgetted in distress.
'Please—please—don't talk as though anyone were to blame—as though there were anything to make excuses for—'.
'How should there not be? You were disturbed—attacked—frightened. You might—'
He drew in his breath. Then he bent over her.
'Tell me,' he said in a low voice, 'did she attack you in your room?'
Lucy hesitated. 'Why will you talk about it?' she said despairingly.
'I have a right to know.'
His urgent imperious look left her no choice. She felt his will, and yielded. In very simple words, faltering yet restrained, she told the whole story. Manisty followed every word with breathless attention.
'My God!' he said, when she paused, 'my God!' And he hid his eyes with his hand a moment. Then—
'You knew she had a weapon?' he said.
'I supposed so,' she said quietly. 'All the time she was in my room, she kept her poor hand closed on something.'
'Her poor hand!'—the little phrase seemed to Manisty extraordinarily touching. There was a moment's pause—then he broke out:
'Upon my word, this has been a fine ending to the whole business. Miss Foster, when you came out to stay with us, you imagined, I suppose, that you were coming to stay with friends? You didn't know much of us; but after the kindness my aunt and I had experienced from your friends and kinsfolk in Boston—to put it in the crudest way—you might have expected at least that we should welcome you warmly—do all we could for you—take you everywhere—show you everything?'
Lucy coloured—then laughed.
'I don't know in the least what you mean, Mr. Manisty! I knew you would be kind to me; and of course—of course—you have been!'
She looked in distress first at the little path leading from the fountain, by which he barred her exit, and then at him. She seemed to implore, either that he would let her go, or that he would talk of something else.
'Not I,' he said with decision. 'I admit that since Alice appeared on the scene you have been my chief anxiety. But before that, I treated you, Miss Foster, with a discourtesy, a forgetfulness, that you can't, that you oughtn't to forget; I made no plans for your amusement; I gave you none of my time. On your first visit to Rome, I let you mope away day after day in that stifling garden, without taking a single thought for you. I even grudged it when Mrs. Burgoyne looked after you. To be quite, quite frank, I grudged your coming to us at all. Yet I was your host—you were in my care—I had invited you. If there ever was an ungentlemanly boor, it was I. There! Miss Foster, there is my confession. Can you forgive it? Will you give me another chance?'
He stood over her, his broad chest heaving with an agitation that, do what she would, communicated itself to her. She could not help it. She put out her hand, with a sweet look, half smiling, half appealing—and he took it. Then, as she hurriedly withdrew it, she repeated:
'There is nothing—nothing—to forgive. You haveallbeen good to me. And as for Mrs. Burgoyne and Aunt Pattie, they have been just angels!'
Manisty laughed.
'I don't grudge them their wings. But I should like to grow a pair of my own. You have a fortnight more with us—isn't it so?' Lucy started and looked down. 'Well, in a fortnight, Miss Foster, I could yet redeem myself; I could make your visit really worth while. It is hot, but we could get round the heat. I have many opportunities here—friends who have the keys of things not generally seen. Trust yourself to me. Take me for a guide, a professor, a courier! At last I will give you a good time!'
He smiled upon her eagerly, impetuously. It was like him, this plan for mending all past errors in a moment, for a summary and energetic repentance. She could hardly help laughing; yet far within her heart made a leap towards him—beaten back at once by its own sad knowledge.
She turned away from him—away from his handsome face, and that touch in him of the 'imperishable child,' which moved and pleased her so. Playing with some flowers on her lap, she said shyly—
'Shall I tell you what you ought to do with this fortnight?'
'Tell me,' said Manisty, stooping towards her. It was well for her that she could not see his expression, as he took in with covetous delight her maidenly simpleness and sweetness.
'Oughtn't you—to finish the book? You could—couldn't you? And Mrs.Burgoyne has been so disappointed. It makes one sad to see her.'
Her words gave her courage. She looked at him again with a grave, friendly air.
Manisty drew himself suddenly erect. After a pause, he said in another voice: 'I thought I had explained to you before that the book and I had reached acul de sac—that I no longer saw my way with it.'
Lucy thought of the criticisms upon it she had heard at the Embassy, and was uncomfortably silent.
'Miss Foster!' said Manisty suddenly, with determination.
Lucy's heart stood still.
'I believe I see the thought in your mind. Dismiss it! There have been rumours in Rome—in which even perhaps my aunt has believed. They are unjust—both to Eleanor and to me. She would be the first to tell you so.'
'Of course,' said Lucy hurriedly, 'of course,'—and then did not know what to say, torn as she was between her Puritan dread of falsehood, her natural woman's terror of betraying Eleanor, and her burning consciousness of the man and the personality beside her.
'No!—you still doubt. You have heard some gossip and you believe it.'
He threw away the cigarette with which he had been playing, and came to sit down on the curving marble bench beside her.
'I think you must listen to me,' he said, with a quiet and manly force that became him. 'The friendship between my cousin and me has been unusual, I know. It has been of a kind that French people, rather than English, understand; because for French people literature and conversation are serious matters, not trifles that don't count, as they are with us. She has been all sweetness and kindness to me, and I suppose that she, like a good many other people, has found me an unsatisfactory and disappointing person to work with!'
'She is so ill and tired,' said Lucy, in a low voice.
'Is she?' said Manisty, concerned. 'But she never can stand heat. She will pick up when she gets to England.—But now suppose we grant all my enormities. Then please tell me what I am to do? How am I to appease Eleanor?—and either transform the book, to satisfy Neal,—or else bury it decently? Beastly thing!—as if it were worth one tithe of the trouble it has cost her and me. Yet there are some uncommon good things in it too!' he said, with a change of tone.
'Well, if you did bury it,' said Lucy, half laughing, yet trying to pluck up courage to obey the Ambassador,—'what would you do? Go back to England?—and—and to your property?'
'What! has that dear old man been talking to you?' he said with amusement.'I thought as much. He has snubbed my views and me two or three timeslately. I don't mind. He is one of the privileged. So the Ambassador thinksI should go home?'
He threw one arm over the back of the seat, and threw her a brilliant hectoring look which led her on.
'Don't people in England think so too?'
'Yes—some of them,' he said considering. 'I have been bombarded with letters lately as to politics, and the situation, and a possible new constituency. A candid friend says to me this morning, "Hang the Italians!—what do you know about them,—and what do they matter? English people can only be frightened by their own bogies. Come home, for God's sake! There's a glorious fight coming, and if you're not in it, you'll be a precious fool."'
'I daren't be as candid as that!' said Lucy, her face quivering with suppressed fun.
Their eyes met in a common flash of laughter. Then Manisty fell heavily back against the seat.
'What have I got to go home for?' he said abruptly, his countenance darkening.
Lucy's aspect changed too, instantly. She waited.
Manisty's lower jaw dropped a little. A sombre bitterness veiled the eyes fixed upon the distant vistas of the garden.
'I hate my old house,' he said slowly. 'Its memories are intolerable. My father was a very eminent person, and had many friends. His children saw nothing of him, and had not much reason to love him. My mother died there—of an illness it is appalling to think of. No, no—not Alice's illness!—not that. And now, Alice,—I should see her ghost at every corner!'
Lucy watched him with fascination. Every note of the singular voice, every movement of the picturesque ungainly form, already spoke to her, poor child, with a significance that bit these passing moments into memory, as an etcher's acid bites upon his plate.
'Oh! she will recover!' she said, softly, leaning towards him unconsciously.
'No!—she will never recover,—never! And if she did, she and I have long ceased to be companions and friends. No, Miss Foster, there is nothing to call me home,—except politics. I may set up a lodging in London, of course. But as for playing the country squire—' He laughed, and shrugged his shoulders. 'No,—I shall let the place as soon as I can. Anyway, I shall never return to it—alone!'
He turned upon her suddenly. The tone in which the last word was spoken, the steady ardent look with which it was accompanied, thrilled the hot May air.
A sickening sense of peril, of swift intolerable remorse, rushed upon Lucy.It gave her strength.
She changed her position, and spoke with perfect self-possession, gathering up her parasol and gloves.
'We really must find the others, Mr. Manisty. They will wonder what has become of us.'
She rose as she spoke. Manisty drew a long breath as he still sat observing her. Her light, cool dignity showed him that he was either not understood—or too well understood. In either case he was checked. He took back his move; not without a secret pleasure that she was not too yielding—too much of theingénue!
'We shall soon discover them,' he said carelessly, relighting his cigarette. 'By the way, I saw what company you were in after lunch! You didn't hear any good of the book or me—there!'
'I liked them all,' she said with spirit. 'They love their country, and they believe in her. Where, Mr. Manisty, did you leave Mr. Neal and Mrs. Burgoyne?'
'I will show you,' he said, unwillingly. 'They are in a part of the garden you don't know.'
Her eye was bright, a little hostile. She moved resolutely forward, and Manisty followed her. Both were conscious of a hidden amazement. But a minute, since he had spoken that word, looked that look? How strange a thing is human life! He would not let himself think,—talked of he hardly knew what.
'They love their country, you say? Well, I grant you that particular group has pure hands, and isn't plundering their country's vitals like the rest—as far as I know. A set of amiable dreamers, however, they appear to me; fiddling at small reforms, while the foundations are sinking from under them. However, you liked them,—that's enough. Now then, when and how shall we begin our campaign? Where will you go?—what will you see? The crypt of St. Peter's?—that wants a Cardinal's order. The Villa Albani?—closed to the public since the Government laid hands on the Borghese pictures,—but it shall open to you. The great function at the Austrian Embassy next week with all the Cardinals? Give me your orders,—it will be hard if I can't compass them!'
But she was silent, and he saw that she still hurried, that her look sought the distance, that her cheek was flushed. Why? What new thing had he said to press—to disturb her? A spark of emotion passed through him. He approached her gently, persuasively, as one might approach a sweet, resisting child—
You'll come? You'll let me make amends?'
'I thought,' said Lucy, uncertainly, 'that you were going home directly—at the beginning of June. Oh! please, Mr. Manisty, will you look? Is that Mrs. Burgoyne?'
Manisty frowned.
'They are not in that direction.—As to my going home, Miss Foster, I have no engagements that I cannot break.'
The wounded feeling in the voice was unmistakable. It hurt her ear.
'I should love to see all those things,' she said vaguely, still trying, as it seemed to him, to outstrip him, to search the figures in the distance; 'but—but—plans are so difficult. Oh! that is—that is Mr. Neal!'
She began to run towards the approaching figure, and presently Manisty could hear her asking breathlessly for Mrs. Burgoyne.
Manisty stood still. Then as they approached him, he said—
'Neal!—well met! Will you take these ladies to the station, or, at any rate, put them in their cab? It is time for their train. I dine in Rome.'
He raised his hat formally to Lucy, turned, and went his way.
* * * * *
It was night at the villa.
Eleanor was in her room, the western room overlooking the olive-ground and the Campagna, which Lucy had occupied for a short time on her first arrival.
It was about half an hour since Eleanor had heard Manisty's cab arrive, and his voice in the library giving his orders to Alfredo. She and Lucy Foster and Aunt Pattie had already dispersed to their rooms. It was strange that he should have dined in town. It had been expressly arranged on their way to Rome that he should bring them back.
Eleanor was sitting in a low chair beside a table that carried a paraffin lamp. At her back was the window, which was open save for the sun-shutter outside, and the curtains, both of which had been drawn close. A manuscript diary lay on Eleanor's lap, and she was listlessly turning it over, with eyes that saw nothing, and hands that hardly knew what they touched. Her head, with its aureole of loosened hair, was thrown back against the chair, and the crude lamplight revealed each sharpened feature with a merciless plainness. She was a woman no longer young—ill—and alone.
By the help of the entries before her she had been living the winter over again.
How near and vivid it was,—how incredibly, tangibly near!—and yet as dead as the Cæsars on the Palatine.
For instance:—
'November 22. To-day we worked well. Three hours this morning—nearly three this afternoon. The survey of the financial history since 1870 is nearly finished. I could not have held out so long, but for his eagerness, for my head ached, and last night it seemed to me that Rome was all bells, and that the clocks never ceased striking.
'But how his eagerness carries one through, and his frank and generous recognition of all that one does for him! Sometimes I copy and arrange; sometimes he dictates; sometimes I just let him talk till he has got a page or section into shape. Even in this handling of finance, you feel the flame that makes life with him so exciting. It is absurd to say, as his enemies do, that he has no steadiness of purpose. I have seen him go through the most tremendous drudgery the last few weeks,—and then throw it all into shape with the most astonishing ease and rapidity. And he is delightful to work with. He weighs all I say. But no false politeness! If he doesn't like it, he frowns and bites his lip, and tears me to pieces. But very often I prevail, and no one can yield with a better grace. People here talk of his vanity. I don't deny it—perhaps I think it part of his charm.
'He thinks too much of me, far, far too much.
'December 16. A luncheon at the Marchesa's. The Fioravantis were there, and some Liberal Catholics. Manisty was attacked on all sides. At first he was silent and rather sulky—it is not always easy to draw him. Then he fired up,—and it was wonderful how he met them all in an Italian almost as quick as their own. I think they were amazed: certainly I was.
'Of course I sometimes wish that it were conviction with him and not policy. My heart aches, hungers sometimes—for another note. If instead of this praise from outside, this cool praise of religion as the great policeman of the world, if only his voice, his dear voice, spoke for one moment the language of faith!—all barren tension and grief and doubt would be gone then for me, at a breath. But it never, never does. And I remind myself—painfully—that his argument holds whether the arguer believe or no. "Somehow or other you must get conduct out of the masses or society goes to pieces. But you can only do this through religion. What folly, then, for nations like Italy and France to quarrel with the only organisation which can ever get conduct out of the ignorant!—in the way they understand!"—It is all so true. I know it by heart—there is no answering it. But if instead he once said to me—"Eleanor, there is a God!—and it is He that has brought us together in this life and work,—He that will comfort you, and open new ways for me"—Ah then—then!—
* * * * *
'Christmas Day. We went last night to the midnight mass at Santa Maria Maggiore. Edward is always incalculable at these functions; sometimes bored to death, sometimes all enthusiasm and sympathy. Last night the crowd jarred him, and I wished we had not come. But as we walked home through the moonlit streets, full of people hurrying in and out of the churches, of the pifferari with their cloaks and pipes—black and white nuns—brown monks—lines of scarlet seminarists, and the like, he suddenly broke out with the prayer of the First Christmas Mass—I must give it in English, for I have forgotten the Latin:
'"O God, who didst cause this most holy Night to be illumined by the rising of the true Light, we beseech Thee that we who know on earth the secret shining of His splendour may win in Heaven His eternal joys."
'We were passing through Monte Cavallo, beside the Two Divine Horsemen who saved Rome of old. The light shone on the fountains—it seemed as if the two godlike figures were just about to leap, in fierce young strength, upon their horses.
'Edward stopped to look at them.
'"And we say that the world lives by Science! Fools! when has it lived by anything else than Dreams—at Athens, at Rome, or Jerusalem?"
'We stayed by the fountains talking. And as we moved away, I said: "How strange at my age to be enjoying Christmas for the first time!" And he looked at me as though I had given him pleasure, and said with his most delightful smile—"Who else should enjoy life if not you—kind, kind Eleanor?"
'When I got home, and to my room, I opened my windows wide. Our apartment is at the end of the Via Sistina, and has a marvellous view over Rome. It was a gorgeous moon—St. Peter's, the hills, every dome and tower radiantly clear. And at last it seemed to me that I was not a rebel and an outlaw—that beauty and I were reconciled.
'Such peace in the night! It opened and took me in. Oh! my little, little son!—I have had such strange visions of you all these last days. That horror of the whirling river—and the tiny body—tossed and torn. Oh! my God! my God!—has it not filled all my days and nights for eight years? And now I see him so no more. I see him always carried in the arms of dim majestic forms—wrapped close and warm. Sometimes the face that bends over him is that of some great Giotto angel—sometimes, so dim and faint! the pure Mother herself—sometimes the Hands that fold him in are marred. Is it the associations of Rome—the images with which this work with Edward fills my mind? Perhaps.
'But at least I am strangely comforted—some kind hand seems to be drawing the smart from the deep deep wound. Little golden-head! you lie soft and safe, but often you seem to me to turn your dear eyes—the baby-eyes that still know all—to look out over the bar of heaven—to search for me—to bid me be at peace,at last.
'February 20. How delicious is the first breath of the spring! The almond trees are pink in the Campagna. The snow on the Sabine peaks is going. The Piazza di Spagna is heaped with flowers—anemones and narcissus and roses. And for the first time in my life I too feel the "Sehnsucht"—the longing of the spring! At twenty-nine!'
'March 24, Easter week. I went to a wedding at the English church to-day. Some barrier seems to have fallen between me and life. The bride—a dear girl who has often been my little companion this winter—kissed me as she was going up to take off her dress. And I threw my arms round her with such a rush of joy. Other women have felt all these things ten years earlier perhaps than I. But they are not less heavenly when they come late—into a heart seared with grief.
'March 26. It is my birthday. From the window looking on the Piazza, I have just seen Edward bargaining with the flower woman. Those lilacs and pinks are for me—I know it! Already he has given me the little engraved emerald I wear at my watch-chain. A little genius with a torch is cut upon it. He said I was to take it as the genius of our friendship.
'I changed the orders for my dress to-day. I have discovered that black is positively disagreeable to him. So Mathilda will have to devise something else.
'April 5. He is away at Florence, and I am working at some difficult points for him—about some suppressed monasteries. I have asked Count B—, who knows all about such things, to help me, and am working very hard. He comes back in four days.
'April 9. He came back to-day. Such a gay and happy evening. When he saw what I had done, he took both my hands, and kissed them impetuously. "Eleanor, my queen of cousins!" And now we shall be at the villa directly. And there will be no interruption. There is one visitor coming. But Aunt Pattie will look after her. I think the book should be out in June. Of course there are some doubtful things. But it must, it will have a great effect.—How wonderfully well I have been lately! The doctor last week looked at me in astonishment. He thought that the Shadow and I were to be soon acquainted, when he saw me first!
'I hope that Edward will get as much inspiration from the hills as from Rome. Every little change makes me anxious. Why should we change? Dear beloved, golden Rome!—even to be going fourteen miles away from you somehow tears my heart.'
* * * * *
Yes, there they were, those entries,—mocking, ineffaceable, for ever.
As she had read them, driving through all the memories they suggested, like a keen and bitter wind that kills and blights the spring bloom, there had pressed upon her the last memory of all,—the memory of this forlorn, this intolerable day. Had Manisty ever yet forgotten her so completely—abandoned her so utterly? She had simply dropped out of his thoughts. She had become as much of a stranger to him again, as on her first arrival at Rome. Nay, more! For when two people are first brought into a true contact, there is the secret delightful sense on either side of possibilities, of the unexplored. But when the possibilities are all known, and all exhausted?
What had happened between him and Lucy Foster? Of course she understood that he had deliberately contrived their interview. But as Lucy and she came home together they had said almost nothing to each other. She had a vision of their two silent figures in the railway-carriage side by side,—her hand in Lucy's. And Lucy—so sad and white herself!—with the furrowed brow that betrayed the inner stress of thought.
Had the crisis arrived?—and had she refused him? Eleanor had not dared to ask.
Suddenly she rose from her chair. She clasped her hands above her head, and began to walk tempestuously up and down the bare floor of her room. In this creature so soft, so loving, so compact of feeling and of tears, there had gradually arisen an intensity of personal claim, a hardness, almost a ferocity of determination, which was stiffening and transforming the whole soul. She could waver still—as she had wavered in that despairing, anguished moment with Lucy in the Embassy garden. But the wavering would soon be over. A jealousy so overpowering that nothing could make itself heard against it was closing upon her like a demoniacal possession. Was it the last effort of self-preservation?—the last protest of the living thing against its own annihilation?
He was not to be hers—but this treachery, this wrong should be prevented.
She thought of Lucy in Manisty's arms—of that fresh young life against his breast—and the thought maddened her. She was conscious of a certain terror of herself—of this fury in the veins, so strange, so alien, so debasing. But it did not affect her will.
Was Lucy's own heart touched? Over that question Eleanor had been racking herself for days past. But if so it could be only a passing fancy. It made it only the more a duty to protect her from Manisty. Manisty—the soul of caprice and wilfulness—could never make a woman like Lucy happy. He would tire of her and neglect her. And what would be left for Lucy—Lucy the upright, simple, profound—but heartbreak?
Eleanor paused absently in front of the glass, and then looked at herself with a start of horror. That face—to fight with Lucy's!
On the dressing-table there were still lying the two terra-cotta heads from Nemi, the Artemis, and the Greek fragment with the clear brow and nobly parted hair, in which Manisty had seen and pointed out the likeness to Lucy. Eleanor recalled his words in the garden—his smiling, absorbed look as the girl approached.
Yes!—it was like her. There was the same sweetness in strength, the same adorable roundness and youth.
And that was the beauty that Eleanor had herself developed and made doubly visible—as a man may free a diamond from the clay.
A mad impulse swept through her—that touch of kinship with the criminal and the murderer that may reveal itself in the kindest and the noblest.
She took up the little mask, and, reaching to the window, she tore back the curtains and pushed open the sun-shutters outside.
The night burst in upon her, the starry night hanging above the immensity of the Campagna, and the sea. There was still a faint glow in the western heaven. On the plain were a few scattered lights, fires lit, perhaps, by wandering herdsmen against malaria. On the far edge of the land to the south-west, a revolving light flashed its message to the Mediterranean and the passing ships. Otherwise, not a sign of life. Below, a vast abyss of shadow swallowed up the olive-garden, the road, and the lower slopes of the hills.
Eleanor felt herself leaning out above the world, alone with her agony and the balmy peace which mocked it. She lifted her arm, and, stretching forward, she flung the little face violently into the gulf beneath. The villa rose high above the olive-ground, and the olive-ground itself sank rapidly towards the road. The fragment had far to fall. It seemed to Eleanor that in the deep stillness she heard a sound like the striking of a stone among thick branches. Her mind followed with a wild triumph the breaking of the terra-cotta,—the shivering of the delicate features—their burial in the stony earth.
With a long breath she tottered from the window and sank into her chair. A horrible feeling of illness overtook her, and she found herself gasping for breath. 'If I could only reach that medicine on my table!' she thought. But she could not reach it. She lay helpless.
The door opened.
Was it a dream? She seemed to struggle through rushing waters back to land.
There was a low cry. A light step hurried across the room. Lucy Foster sank on her knees beside her and threw her arms about her.
'Give me—those drops—on the table,' said Eleanor, with difficulty.
Lucy said not a word. Quietly, with steady hands, she brought and measured the medicine. It was a strong heart-stimulant, and it did its work. But while her strength came back, Lucy saw that she was shivering with cold, and closed the window.
Then, silently, Lucy looked down upon the figure in the chair. She was almost as white as Eleanor. Her eyes showed traces of tears. Her forehead was still drawn with thought as it had been in the train.
Presently she sank again beside Eleanor.
'I came to see you, because I could not sleep, and I wanted to suggest a plan to you. I had no idea you were ill. You should have called me before.'
Eleanor put out a feeble hand. Lucy took it tenderly, and laid it against her cheek. She could not understand why Eleanor looked, at her with this horror and wildness,—how it was that she came to be up, by this open window, in this state of illness and collapse. But the discovery only served an antecedent process—a struggle from darkness to light—which had brought her to Eleanor's room.
She bent forward and said some words in Eleanor's ear.
Gradually Eleanor understood and responded. She raised herself piteously in her chair. The two women sat together, hand locked in hand, their faces near to each other, the murmur of their voices flowing on brokenly, for nearly an hour.
Once Lucy rose to get a guide book that lay on Eleanor's table. And on another occasion, she opened a drawer by Eleanor's direction, took out a leather pocket-book and counted some Italian notes that it contained. Finally she insisted on Eleanor's going to bed, and on helping her to undress.
Eleanor had just sunk into her pillows, when a noise from the library startled them. Eleanor looked up with strained eyes.
'It must be Mr. Manisty,' said Lucy hurriedly. 'He was out when I came through the glass passage. The doors were all open, and his lamp burning.' I am nearly sure that I heard him unbar the front door. I must wait now till he is gone.'
They waited—Eleanor staring into the darkness of the room—till there had been much opening and shutting of doors, and all was quiet again.
Then the two women clung to each other in a strange and pitiful embrace—offered with passion on Lucy's side, accepted with a miserable shame on Eleanor's—and Lucy slipped away.
'He was out?—in the garden?' said Eleanor to herself bewildered. And with those questions on her lips, and a mingled remorse and fever in her blood, she lay sleepless waiting for the morning.
* * * * *
Manisty indeed had also been under the night, bathing passion and doubt in its cool purity.
Again and again had he wandered up and down the terrace in the starlight, proving and examining his own heart, raised by the growth of love to a more manly and more noble temper than had been his for years.
What was in his way? His conduct towards his cousin? He divined what seemed to him the scruple in the girl's sensitive and tender mind. He could only meet it by truth and generosity—by throwing himself on Eleanor's mercy.Sheknew what their relations had been—she would not refuse him this boon of life and death—the explanation of them to Lucy.
Unless! There came a moment when his restless walk was tormented with the prickly rise of a whole new swarm of fears. He recalled that moment in the library after the struggle with Alice, when Lucy was just awakening from unconsciousness—when Eleanor came in upon them. Had she heard? He remembered that the possibility of it had crossed his mind. Was she in truth working against him—avenging his neglect—establishing a fatal influence over Lucy?
His soul cried out in fierce and cruel protest. Here at last was the great passion of his life. Come what would, Eleanor should not be allowed to strangle it.
Absently he wandered down a little path leading from the terrace to thepoderebelow, and soon found himself pacing the dim grass walks among the olives. The old villa rose above him, dark and fortress-like. That was no longer her room—that western corner? No—he had good cause to remember that she had been moved, to the eastern side, beyond his library, beyond the glass passage! Those were now Eleanor's windows, he believed.
Ah!—what was that sudden light? He threw his head back in astonishment. One of the windows at which he had been looking was flung open, and in the bright lamplight a figure appeared. It stooped forward. Eleanor! Something fell close beside him. He heard the breaking of a branch from one of the olives.
In his astonishment, he stood motionless, watching the window. It remained open for a while. Then again some one appeared—not the same figure as at first. A thrill of delight and trouble ran through him. He sent his salutation, his homage through the night.
But the window shut—the light went out. All was once more still and dark.
Then he struck a match and groped under the tree close by him. Yes, there was the fallen branch. But what had broken it? He lit match after match, holding the light with his left hand while he turned over the dry ground with his knife. Presently he brought up a handful of stones and earth, and laid them on a bit of ruined wall close by. Stooping over them with his dim, sputtering lights, he presently discovered some terra-cotta fragments. His eye, practised in such things, detected them at once. They were the fragments of a head, which had measured about three inches from brow to chin.
The head, or rather the face, which he had given Eleanor at Nemi! The parting of the hair above the brow was intact—so was the beautiful curve of the cheek.
He knew it—and the likeness to Lucy. He remembered his words to Eleanor in the garden. Holding the pieces in his hand, he went slowly back towards the terrace.
Thrown out?—flung out into the night—by Eleanor? But why? He thought—and thought. A black sense of entanglement and fate grew upon him in the darkness, as he thought of the two women together, in the midnight silence, while he was pacing thus, alone. He met it with the defiance of newborn passion—with the resolute planning of a man who feels himself obscurely threatened, and realises that his chief menace lies, not in the power of any outside enemy, but in the very goodness of the woman he loves.
'_Alas! there is no instinct like the heart—
The heart—which may be broken: happy they!Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould,The precious porcelain of human clay,Break with the first fall: they can ne'er beholdThe long year linked with heavy day on day,And all which must be borne, and never told._'
'Can you stand this heat?' said Lucy, anxiously.
'Oh, it will soon be cooler,' was Eleanor's languid reply.
She and Lucy sat side by side in a large and ancient landau; Mrs. Burgoyne's maid, Marie Véfour, was placed opposite to them, a little sulky and silent. On the box, beside the driver of the lean brown horses, was a bright-eyed, neatly-dressed youth who was going with the ladies to Torre Amiata.
They had just left the hill-town of Orvieto, had descended rapidly into the valley lying to the south-west of its crested heights, and were now mounting again on the further side. As they climbed higher and higher Lucy, whose attention had been for a time entirely absorbed by the weariness of the frail woman beside her, began to realise that they were passing through a scene of extraordinary beauty. Her eyes, which had been drawn and anxious, relaxed. She looked round her with a natural and rising joy.
To their left, as the road turned in zig-zag to the east, was the marvellous town which the traveller who has seen Palestine likens to Jerusalem, so steep and high and straight is the crest of warm brown and orange precipice on which it stands, so deep the valleys round it, so strange and complete the fusion between the city and the rock, so conspicuous the place of the great cathedral, which is Orvieto, as the Temple was Zion.
It was the sixth of June, and the day had been very hot. The road was deep in thick white dust. The fig-trees and vines above the growing crops were almost at a full leafiness; scarlet poppies grew thick among the corn; and at the dusty edges of the road, wild roses of a colour singularly vivid and deep, the blue flowers of love-in-a-mist, and some spikes of wine-coloured gladiolus struck strangely on a northern eye.
Then as the road turned back again—behold! a great valley, opening out westward, beyond Orvieto,—the valley of the Paglia; a valley with wooded hills on either side, of a bluish-green colour, chequered with hill-towns and slim campaniles and winding roads; and binding it all in one, the loops and reaches of a full brown river. Heat everywhere!—on the blinding walls of the buildings, on the young green of the vineyards, on the yellowing corn, on the beautiful ragged children running barefoot and bareheaded beside the carriage, on the peasants working among the vines, on the drooping heads of the horses, on the brick-red face of the driver.
'If Madame had only stayed at Orvieto!' murmured Marie the maid, looking back at the city and then at her mistress.
Eleanor smiled faintly and tapped the girl's hand.
'Rassure-toi, Marie! Remember how soon we made ourselves comfortable at the villa.'
Marie shook her much be-curled head. Because it had taken them three months to make the Marinata villa decently habitable, was that any reason for tempting the wilderness again?
Lucy, too, had her misgivings. Nominally she was travelling, she supposed, under Eleanor Burgoyne's chaperonage. Really she was the guardian of the whole party, and she was conscious of a tender and anxious responsibility. Already they had been delayed a whole week in Orvieto by Eleanor's prostrate state. She had not been dangerously ill; but it had been clearly impossible to leave doctor and chemist behind and plunge into the wilds. So they had hidden themselves in a little Italian inn in a back street, and the days had passed somehow.
* * * * *
Surely this hot evening and their shabby carriage and the dusty unfamiliar road were all dream-stuff—an illusion from which she was to wake directly and find herself once more in her room at Marinata, looking out on Monte Cavo?
Yet as this passed across Lucy's mind, she felt again upon her face the cool morning wind, as she and Eleanor fled down the Marinata hill in the early sunlight, between six and seven o'clock,—through the streets of Albano, already full and busy,—along the edge of that strange green crater of Aricia, looking up to Pio Nono's great viaduct, and so to Cecchina, the railway station in the plain.
An escape!—nothing else; planned the night before when Lucy's strong commonsense had told her that the only chance for her own peace and Eleanor's was to go at once, to stop any further development of the situation, and avoid any fresh scene with Mr. Manisty.
She thought of the details—the message left for Aunt Pattie that they had gone into Rome to shop before the heat; then the telegram 'Urgente,' despatched to the villa after they were sure that Mr. Manisty must have safely left it for that important field day of his clerical and Ultramontane friends in Rome, in which he was pledged to take part; then the arrival of the startled and bewildered Aunt Pattie at the small hotel where they were in hiding—her conferences—first with Eleanor, then with Lucy.
Strange little lady, Aunt Pattie! How much had she guessed? What had passed between her and Mrs. Burgoyne? When at last she and Lucy stood together hand in hand, the girl's sensitive spirit had divined in her a certain stiffening, a certain diminution of that constant kindness which she had always shown her guest. Did Aunt Pattie blame her? Had she cherished her own views and secret hopes for her nephew and Mrs. Burgoyne? Did she feel that Lucy had in some way unwarrantably and ambitiously interfered with them?
At any rate, Lucy had divined the unspoken inference 'You must have given him encouragement!' and behind it—perhaps?—the secret ineradicable pride of family and position that held her no fitting match for Edward Manisty. Lucy's inmost mind was still sore and shrinking from this half-hour's encounter with Aunt Pattie.
But she had not shown it. And at the end of it Aunt Pattie had kissed her ruefully with tears—'It'sverygood of you! You'll take care of Eleanor!'
Lucy could hear her own answer—'Indeed, indeed, I will!'—and Aunt Pattie's puzzled cry, 'If only someone would tell me what I'm to do withhim!'
And then she recalled her own pause of wonder as Aunt Pattie left her—beside the hotel window, looking into the narrow side street. Why was it 'very good of her'?—and why, nevertheless, was this dislocation of all their plans felt to be somehow her fault and responsibility?—even by herself? There was a sudden helpless inclination to laugh over the topsy-turviness of it all.
And then her heart had fluttered in her breast, stabbed by the memory of Eleanor's cry the night before. 'It is of no use to say that you know nothing—that he has said nothing.Iknow. If you stay, he will give you no peace—his will is indomitable. But if you go, he will guess my part in it. I shall not have the physical strength to conceal it—and he can be a hard man when he is resisted! What am I to do? I would go home at once—but—I might die on the way. Why not?'
And then—in painful gasps—the physical situation had been revealed to her—the return of old symptoms and the reappearance of arrested disease. The fear of the physical organism alternating with the despair of the lonely and abandoned soul,—never could Lucy forget the horror of that hour's talk, outwardly so quiet, as she sat holding Eleanor's hands in hers, and the floodgates of personality and of grief were opened before her.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the patient, sweating horses climbed and climbed. Soon they were at the brow of the hill, and looking back for their last sight of Orvieto. And now they were on a broad tableland, a bare, sun-baked region where huge flocks of sheep, of white, black, and brown goats wandered with ragged shepherds over acres of burnt and thirsty pasture. Here and there were patches of arable land and groups of tilling peasants in the wide untidy expanse; once or twice too anosteria, with its bush or its wine-stained tables under the shadow of its northern wall. But scarcely a farmhouse. Once indeed a great building like a factory or a workhouse, in the midst of wide sun-beaten fields. 'Ecco! la fattoria,' said the driver, pointing to it. And once a strange group of underground dwellings, their chimneys level with the surrounding land, whence wild swarms of troglodyte children rushed up from the bowels of the earth to see the carriage pass and shriek forsoldi.
But the beauty of the sun-scorched upland was its broom! Sometimes they were in deep tufa lanes; like English lanes, save for their walls and canopies of gold; sometimes they journeyed through wide barren stretches, where only broom held the soil against all comers, spreading in sheets of gold beneath the dazzling sky. Large hawks circled overhead; in the rare woods the nightingales were loud and merry; and goldfinches were everywhere. A hot, lonely, thirsty land—the heart of Italy—where the rocks are honeycombed with the tombs of that mysterious Etruscan race, the Melchisedek of the nations, coming no one knows whence, 'without father and without mother'—a land which has to the west of it the fever-stricken Maremma and the heights of the Amiata range, and to the south the forest country of Viterbo.
Eleanor looked out upon the road and the fields with eyes that faintly remembered, and a heart held now, as always, in the grip of thattempo felicewhich was dead.
It was she who had proposed this journey. Once in late November she and Aunt Pattie and Manisty had spent two or three days at Orvieto with some Italian friends. They had made the journey back to Rome, partly byvetturino, driving from Orvieto to Bolsena and Viterbo, and spending a night on the way at a place of remote and enchanting beauty which had left a deep mark on Eleanor's imagination. They owed the experience to their Italian friends, acquaintances of the great proprietor whose agent gave the whole party hospitality for the night; and as they jogged on through this June heat she recalled with bitter longing the bright November day, the changing leaves, the upland air, and Manisty's delight in the strange unfamiliar country, in the vast oak woods above the Paglia, and the marvellous church at Monte Fiascone.
But it was not the agent's house, the scene of their former stay, to which she was now guiding Lucy. When she and Manisty, hurrying out for an early walk before the carriage started, had explored a corner of the dense oak woods below thepalazzoon the hill, they had come across a deserted convent, with a contadino's family in one corner of it, and a ruinous chapel with a couple of dim frescoes attributed to Pinturicchio.
How well she remembered Manisty's rage over the spoliation of the convent and the ruin of the chapel! He had gone stalking over the deserted place, raving against 'those brigands from Savoy,' and calculating how much it would cost to buy back the place from the rascally Municipio of Orvieto, to whom it now belonged, and return it to its former Carmelite owners.
Meanwhile Eleanor had gossiped with themassaja, or farmer's wife, and had found out that there were a few habitable rooms in the convent still, roughly furnished, and that in summer, people of a humble sort came there sometimes from Orvieto for coolness and change—the plateau being 3,000 feet above the sea. Eleanor had inquired if English people ever came.
'Inglesi! no!—mai Inglesi,' said the woman in astonishment.
The family were, however, in some sort of connection with an hotel proprietor at Orvieto, through whom they got their lodgers. Eleanor had taken down the name and all particulars in a fit of enthusiasm for the beauty and loneliness of the place. 'Suppose some day we came here to write?' Manisty had said vaguely, looking round him with regret as they drove away. The mere suggestion had made the name of Torre Amiata sweet to Eleanor thenceforward.
Was it likely that he would remember?—that he would track them? Hardly. He would surely think that in this heat they would go northward. He would not dream of looking for them in Italy.
She too was thinking of nothing—nothing!—but the last scenes at the villa and in Rome, as the carriage moved along. The phrases of her letter to Manisty ran through her mind. Had they made him her lasting enemy? The thought was like a wound draining blood and strength. But in her present state of jealous passion it was more tolerable than that other thought which was its alternative—the thought of Lucy surrendered, Lucy in her place.
'Lucy Foster is with me,' she had written. 'We wish to be together for a while before she goes back to America. And that we may be quite alone, we prefer to give no address for a few weeks. I have written to Papa to say that I am going away for a time with a friend, to rest and recruit. You and Aunt Pattie could easily arrange that there should be no talk and no gossip about the matter. I hope and think you will. Of course if we are in any strait or difficulty we shall communicate at once with our friends.'
How had he received it? Sometimes she thought of his anger and disappointment with terror, sometimes with a vindictive excitement that poisoned all her being. Gentleness turned to hate and violence,—was it of that in truth, and not of that heart mischief to which doctors gave long names, that Eleanor Burgoyne was dying?
* * * * *
They had turned into a wide open space crossed by a few wire fences at vast intervals. The land was mostly rough pasture, or mere sandy rock and scrub. In the glowing west, towards which they journeyed, rose far purple peaks peering over the edge of the great tableland. To the east and south vast woods closed in the horizon.
The carriage left the main road and entered an ill-defined track leading apparently through private property.
'Ah! I remember!' cried Eleanor, starting up. 'There is thepalazzo—and the village.'
In front of them, indeed, rose an old villa of the Renaissance, with its long flat roofs, its fineloggia, and terraced vineyards. A rude village of grey stone, part, it seemed, of the tufa rocks from which it sprang, pressed round the villa, invaded its olive-gardens, crept up to its very walls. Meanwhile the earth grew kinder and more fertile. The vines and figs stood thick again among the green corn and flowering lucerne. Peasants streaming home from work, the men on donkeys, the women carrying their babies, met the carriage and stopped to stare after it, and talk.
Suddenly from the ditches of the roadside sprang up two martial figures.
'Carabinieri!' cried Lucy in delight.
She had made friends with several members of this fine corps on the closely guarded roads about the Alban lake, and to see them here gave her a sense of protection.
Bending over the side of the carriage, she nodded to the two handsome brown-skinned fellows, who smiled back at her.
'How far,' she said, 'to Santa Trinità?'
'Un miglio grasso(a good mile), Signorina.È tutto. But you are late. They expected you half an hour ago.'
The driver took this for reproach, and with a shrill burst of defence pointed to his smoking horses. The Carabinieri laughed, and diving into the field, one on either side, they kept up with the carriage as it neared the village.
'Why, it is like coming home!' said Lucy, wondering. And indeed they were now surrounded by the whole village population, just returned from the fields—pointing, chattering, laughing, shouting friendly directions to the driver. 'Santa Trinità!' 'Ecco!—Santa Trinità!' sounded on all sides, amid a forest of gesticulating hands.
'How could they know?' said Eleanor, looking at the small crowd with startled eyes. Lucy spoke a word to the young man on the box.
'They knew, he says, as soon as the carriage was ordered yesterday. Look! there are the telegraph wires! The whole countryside knows! They are greatly excited by the coming offorestieri—especially at this time of year.'
'Oh! we can't stay!' said Eleanor with a little moan, wringing her hands.
'It's only the country people,' said Lucy tenderly, taking one of the hands in hers. 'Did you see the Contessa when you were here before?'
And she glanced up at the great yellow mass of thepalazzotowering above the little town, the sunset light flaming on its long western face.
'No. She was away. And thefattorewho took us in left in January. There is a new man.'
'Then it's quite safe!' said Lucy in French. And her kind deep eyes looked steadily into Eleanor's, as though mutely cheering and supporting her.
Eleanor unconsciously pressed her hand upon her breast. She was looking round her in a sudden anguish of memory. For, now they were through the village, they were descending—they were in the woods. Ah! the white walls of the convent—the vacant windows in its ruined end—and at the gate of the rough farmyard that surrounded it the stalwartcapoccia, the grinning, harsh-featured wife that she remembered.
She stepped feebly down upon the dusty road. When her feet last pressed it, Manisty was beside her, and the renewing force of love and joy was filling all the sources of her being.