But when Lucy returned, in one way or another Eleanor managed to inform herself as to the destination of all the letters. And then she scourged and humbled herself for her doubts, and became for the rest of the morning the most winning and tender of companions.
As a rule they never spoke of Manisty. What Lucy's attitude implied was that she had in some unwitting and unwilling way brought trouble on Eleanor; that she was at Torre Amiata to repair it; and that in general she was at Eleanor's orders.
Of herself she would not allow a word. Beyond and beneath her sweetness Eleanor divined a just and indomitable pride. And beyond that Mrs. Burgoyne could not penetrate.
Meanwhile Eleanor found some distraction in Father Benecke.
The poor priest was gradually recovering a certain measure of serenity. The two ladies were undoubtedly of great assistance to him. They became popular in the village, where they and their wants set flowing a stream oflire, more abundant by far than had hitherto attended the summer guests, even the Sindaco of Selvapendente. They were the innocent causes, indeed, of some evil. Eleanor had been ordered goats' milk by the Orvieto doctor, and the gentleman who had secured the order from themassajawent in fear of his life at the hands of two other gentlemen who had not been equally happy. But in general they brought prosperity, and the popular smile was granted them.
So that when it was discovered that they were already acquainted with the mysterious foreign priest, and stoutly disposed to befriend him, the village showed the paralysing effect of a conflict of interests. At the moment and for various reasons the clericals were masters. And the clericals denounced Father Benecke as a traitor and a heretic. At the same time the village could not openly assail the ladies' friend without running the risk of driving the ladies themselves from Torre Amiata. And this clearly would have been a mere wanton slight to a kind Providence. Even the children understood the situation, and Father Benecke now took his walks unmolested by anything sharper than sour looks and averted faces.
Meanwhile he was busy in revising a new edition of his book. This review of his own position calmed him. Contact with all the mass of honest and laborious knowledge of which it was a summary gave him back his dignity, raised him from the pit of humiliation into which he seemed to have fallen, and strengthened him to resist. The spiritual privations that his state brought him could be sometimes forgotten. There were moments indeed when the iron entered into his soul. When the bell of the little church rang at half-past five in the morning, he was always there in his corner by the door. The peasants brushed past him suspiciously as they went in and out. He did not see them. He was absorbed in the function, or else in a bitter envy of the officiating priest, and at such moments he suffered all that any 'Vaticanist' could have wished him to suffer.
But when he was once more among his books, large gusts of a new and strange freedom began, as it were, to blow about him. In writing the philosophical book which had now brought him into conflict with the Church, he had written in constraint and timidity. A perpetual dread, not only of ecclesiastical censure but of the opinion of old and valued friends; a perpetual uncertainty as to the limits of Catholic liberty; these things had held him in bondage. What ought he say? What must he leave unsaid? He understood perfectly that hypothesis must not be stated as truth. But the vast accumulation of biological fact on the one hand, and of historical criticism on the other, that has become the common property of the scientific mind, how was it to be recapitulated—within Catholic limits? He wrote in fear, like one walking on the burning ploughshares of the ordeal. Religion was his life; but he had at once the keen intelligence and the mystical temperament of the Suabian. He dreaded the collision which ultimately came. Yet the mental process could not be stayed.
Now, with the final act of defiance, obscurely carried out, conditioned he knew not how, there had arrived for him a marvellous liberation of soul. Even at sixty-five he felt himself tragically new-born—naked and feeble indeed, but still with unknown possibilities of growth and new life before him.
His book, instead of being revised, must be re-written. No need now to tremble for a phrase! Let the truth be told. He plunged into his old studies again, and the world of thought met him with a friendlier and franker welcome. On all sides there was a rush and sparkle of new light. How far he must follow and submit, his trembling soul did not yet know. But for the moment there was an extraordinary though painful exhilaration—the excitement of leading-strings withdrawn and walls thrown down.
This enfranchisement brought him, however, into strange conflict with his own character. His temperament was that of the ascetic and visionary religious. His intelligence had much the same acuteness and pliancy as that of another and more pronounced doubter—a South German also, like Father Benecke,—the author of the 'Leben Jesu.' But hischaracterwas the joint product of his temperament and his habits, and was often difficult to reconcile with the quick play of his intelligence.
For instance, he was, in daily habit, an austere and most devout priest, living alone with his old sister, as silent and yet fervent as himself, and knowing almost nothing of other women, except through the Confessional. To his own astonishment he was in great request as a director. But socially he knew very little of his penitents; they were to him only 'souls,' spiritual cases which he studied with the ardour of a doctor. Otherwise the small benefice which he held in a South German town, his university class, and the travail of his own research absorbed him wholly.
Hence a great innocence and unworldliness; but also an underlying sternness towards himself and others. His wants were small, and for many years the desires of the senses had been dead within him. Towards women he felt, if the truth were known, with that strange unconscious arrogance which is a most real and very primitive element in Catholicism, notwithstanding the worship of Mary and the glories of St. Teresa and St. Catharine. The Church does not allow any woman, even a 'religious,' to wash the corporal and other linen which has been used in the Mass. There is a strain of thought implied in that prohibition which goes deep and far—back to the dim dawn of human things. It influences the priest in a hundred ways; it affected even the tender and spiritual mind of Father Benecke. As a director of women he showed them all that impersonal sweetness which is of the essence of Catholic tradition; but they often shrank nevertheless from what they felt to be a fundamental inflexibility mingled with pity.
Thus when he found himself brought into forced contact with the two ladies who had invaded his retreat, when Lucy in a hundred pretty ways began to show him a young and filial homage, when Eleanor would ask him to coffee with them, and talk to him about his book and the subjects it discussed, the old priest was both amazed and embarrassed.
How in the world did she know anything about such things? He understood that she had been of assistance to Mr. Manisty: but that it had been the assistance of a comrade and an equal—that had never entered his head.
So that at first Mrs. Burgoyne's talk silenced and repelled him. He was conscious of the male revolt of St. Paul!—'I suffer not a woman to teach'; and for a time he hung back.
On his visit to the villa, and on her first meeting with him at Torre Amiata, he had been under the influence of a shock which had crushed the child in him and broken down his reserve. Yet that reserve was naturally strong, together with certain despotic instincts which Eleanor perceived with surprise beneath his exquisite gentleness. She sometimes despaired of taming him.
Nevertheless when Eleanor presently advised him to publish a statement of his case in a German periodical; when the few quick things she said showed a knowledge of the German situation and German current literature that filled him with astonishment; when with a few smiles, hints, demurs, she made plain to him that she perfectly understood where he had weakened his book—which lay beside her—out of deference to authority, and where it must be amended, if it was to produce any real influence upon European cultivated opinion, the old priest was at first awkward or speechless. Then slowly he rose to the bait. He began to talk; he became by degrees combative, critical, argumentative. His intelligence took the field; his character receded. Eleanor had won the day.
Presently, indeed, he began to haunt them. He brought to Eleanor each article and letter as it arrived, consulting her on every phase of a controversy, concerning him and his book, which was now sweeping through certain Catholic circles and newspapers. He was eager, forgetful, exacting even. Lucy began to dread the fatigue that he sometimes produced. While for Lucy he was still the courteous and paternal priest, for Eleanor he gradually became—like Manisty—the intellectual comrade, crossing swords often in an equal contest, where he sometimes forgot the consideration due to the woman in the provocation shown him by the critic.
And when she had tamed him, it was to Eleanor all ashes and emptiness!
'Thisis the kind of thing I can always do,' she said to herself one day, throwing out her hands in self-scorn, as he left her on theloggia, where he had been taking coffee with herself and Lucy.
And meanwhile what attracted her was not in the least the controversialist and the man of letters—it was the priest, the Christian, the ascetic.
Torn with passion and dread as she was, she divined in him the director; she felt towards him as the woman so often feels towards that sexless mystery, the priest. Other men are the potential lovers of herself or other women; she knows herself their match. But in this man set apart, she recognises the embodied conscience, the moral judge, who is indifferent to her as a woman, observant of her as a soul. Round this attraction she flutters, and has always fluttered since the beginning of things. It is partly a yearning for guidance and submission; partly also a secret pride that she who for other men is mere woman, is, for the priest, spirit, and immortal. She prostrates herself; but at the same time she seems to herself to enter through her submission upon a region of spiritual independence where she is the slave, not of man but of God.
What she felt also, tortured as she was by jealousy and angry will, was the sheer longing for human help that must always be felt by the lonely and the weak. Confession, judgment, direction—it was on these tremendous things that her inner mind was brooding all the time that she sat talking to Father Benecke of the Jewish influence in Bavaria, or the last number of the 'Civiltà Cattolica.'
* * * * *
One evening at the beginning of July Eleanor and Lucy were caught in the woods by a thunder-shower. The temperature dropped suddenly, and as they mounted the hill towards the convent Eleanor in her thin white dress met a blast of cold wind that followed the rain.
The result was chill and fever. Lucy and Marie tended her as best they could, but her strength appeared to fail her with great rapidity, and there came an evening when Lucy fell into a panic of anxiety.
Should she summon the local doctor—a man who was paid 80_l._ a year by theMunicipio of Selvapendente, and tended the Commune of Torre Amiata?
She had discovered, however, that he was not liked by the peasants. His appearance was not attractive, and she doubted whether she could persuade Eleanor to see him.
An idea struck her. Without consulting Mrs. Burgoyne, she took her hat and boldly walked up to the Palazzo on the hill. Here she inquired for the Contessa Guerrini. The Contessa, however, was out; Lucy left a little note in French asking for advice. Could they get a good doctor at Selvapendente, or must she send to Orvieto?
She had hardly reached home before an answer followed her from the Contessa, who regretted extremely that Mademoiselle Foster should not have found her at home. There was a good doctor at Selvapendente, and the Contessa would have great pleasure in sending a mounted messenger to fetch him. She regretted the illness of Madame. There was a fairfarmaciain the village. Otherwise she was afraid that in illness the ladies would not find themselves very well placed at Torre Amiata. Would Mademoiselle kindly have her directions for the doctor ready, and the messenger would call immediately?
Lucy was sincerely grateful and perhaps a little astonished. She was obliged to tell Eleanor, and Eleanor showed some restlessness, but was too unwell to protest. The doctor came and proved to be competent. The fever was subdued, and Eleanor was soon convalescent. Meanwhile flowers, fruit, and delicacies were sent daily from the Palazzo, and twice did the Contessa descend from her little victoria at the door of the convent courtyard, to inquire for the patient.
On each occasion Lucy saw her, and received the impression of a dignified, kind, and masterful woman, bowed by recent grief, but nevertheless sensitively alive in a sort of old-fashioned stately way to the claims of strangers on the protection of the local grandee. It seemed to attract her that Lucy was American, and that Eleanor was English.
'I have twice visited England,' she said, in an English that was correct, but a little rusty. 'My husband learnt many things from England—for the estate. But I wonder, Mademoiselle, that you come to us at this time of year?'
Lucy laughed and coloured. She said it was pleasant to see Italy without theforestieri; that it was like surprising a bird on its nest. But she stumbled a little, and the Contessa noticed both the blush and the stumbling.
When Eleanor was able to go out, the little carriage was sent for her, and neither she nor Lucy knew how to refuse it. They drove up and down the miles of zig-zag road that Don Emilio had made through the forest on either side of the river, connecting the Palazzo Guerrini with thecasa di cacciaon the mountain opposite. The roads were deserted; grass was beginning to grow on them. The peasants scarcely ever used them. They clung to the old steep paths and tracts that had been theirs for generations. But the small smart horses, in their jingling harness, trotted briskly along; and Eleanor beside her companion, more frail and languid than ever, looked listlessly out upon a world of beauty that spoke to her no more.
And at last a note from the Contessa arrived, asking if the ladies would honour her and her daughter by taking tea with them at the Palazzo. 'We are in deep mourning and receiving no society,' said the note; 'but if Madame and her friend will visit us in this quiet way it will give us pleasure, and they will perhaps enjoy the high view from here over our beautiful country.'
Eleanor winced and accepted.
* * * * *
The Palazzo, as they climbed up through the village towards it, showed itself to be an imposing pile of the later seventeenth century, with heavily-barred lower windows, and, above, a series of gracefulloggieon its northern and western fronts which gave it a delicate and habitable air. On the north-eastern side the woods, broken by the stone-fall of the Sassetto, sank sharply to the river; on the other the village and the vineyards pressed upon its very doors. The great entrance gateway opened on a squalid village street, alive with crawling babies and chatting mothers.
At this gateway, however—through which appeared a courtyard aglow with oleanders and murmurous with running water—they were received with some state. An old majordomo met them, accompanied by two footmen and a carrying-chair. Eleanor was borne up a high flight of stone stairs, and through a vast and bare 'apartment' of enormous rooms with tiled or brick floors and wide stonecheminées, furnished with a few old chests and cabinets, a collection of French engravings of the last century, and some indifferent pictures. A few of the rooms were frescoed with scenes of hunting or social life in a facile eighteenth-century style. Here and there was a piece of old tapestry or a Persian carpet. But as a whole, the Palazzo, in spite of its vastness, made very much the impression of an old English manor house which has belonged to people of some taste and no great wealth, and has grown threadbare and even ugly with age. Yet tradition and the family remain. So here. A frugal and antique dignity, sure of itself and needing no display, breathed in the great cool spaces.
The Contessa and her daughter were in a small and more modernsalonelooking on the river and the woods. Eleanor was placed in a low chair near the open window, and her hostess could not forbear a few curious and pitying glances at the sharp, high-bred face of the Englishwoman, the feverish lips, and the very evident emaciation, which the elegance of the loose black dress tried in vain to hide.
'I understand, Madame,' she said, after Eleanor had expressed her thanks with the pretty effusion that was natural to her, 'that you were at Torre Amiata last autumn?'
Eleanor started. Themassaja, she supposed, had been gossiping. It was disagreeable, but good-breeding bade her be frank.
'Yes, I was here with some friends, and your agent gave us hospitality for the night.'
The Contessa looked astonished.
'Ah!' she said, 'you were here with the D——'s?'
Eleanor assented.
'And you spent the winter in Rome?'
'Part of it. Madame, you have the most glorious view in the world!' And she turned towards the great prospect at her feet.
The Contessa understood.
'How ill she is!' she thought; 'and how distinguished!'
And presently Eleanor on her side, while she was talking nervously and fast on a good many disconnected subjects, found herself observing her hostess. The Contessa's strong square face had been pale and grief-stricken when she saw it first. But she noticed now that the eyelids were swollen and red, as though from constant tears; and the little sallow daughter looked sadder and shyer than ever. Eleanor presently gathered that they were living in the strictest seclusion and saw no visitors. 'Then why'—she asked herself, wondering—'did she speak to us in the Sassetto?—and why are we admitted now? Ah! that is his portrait!'
For at the Contessa's elbow, on a table specially given up to it, she perceived a large framed photograph draped in black. It represented a tall young man in an Artillery uniform. The face was handsome, eager, and yet melancholy. It seemed to express a character at once impatient and despondent, but held in check by a strong will. With a shiver Eleanor again recalled the ghastly incidents of the war; and the story they had heard from themassajaof the young man's wound and despair.
Her heart, in its natural lovingness, went out to his mother. She found her tongue, and she and the Contessa talked till the twilight fell of the country and the peasants, of the improvements in Italian farming, of the old convent and its history.
Not a word of the war; and not a word, Eleanor noticed, of their fellow-lodger, Father Benecke. From various indications she gathered that the sallow daughter wasdévoteand a 'black.' The mother, however, seemed to be of a different stamp. She was at any rate a person of cultivation. That, the books lying about were enough to prove. But she had also the shrewdness and sobriety, the large pleasant homeliness, of a good man of business. It was evident that she, rather than herfattore, managed her property, and that she perfectly understood what she was doing.
In truth, a secret and strong sympathy had arisen between the two women.During the days that followed they met often.
The Contessa asked no further questions as to the past history or future plans of the visitors. But indirectly, and without betraying her new friends, she made inquiries in Rome. One of the D—— family wrote to her:
'The English people we brought with us last year to your delicious Torre Amiata were three—a gentleman and two ladies. The gentleman was a Mr. Manisty, a former member of the English Parliament, and very conspicuous in Rome last winter for a kind of Brunetière alliance with the Vatican and hostility to the Italianrégime. People mostly regarded it as a pose; and as he and his aunt were rich and of old family, and Mr. Manisty was—when he chose—a most brilliant talker, they were welcome everywhere, and Rome certainly fêted them a good deal. The lady staying with them was a Mrs. Burgoyne, a very graceful and charming woman whom everybody liked. It was quite plain that there was some close relation between her and Mr. Manisty. By which I mean nothing scandalous! Heavens! nobody ever thought of such a thing. But I believe that many people who knew them well felt that it would be a very natural and right thing that he should marry her. She was evidently touchingly devoted to him—acting as his secretary, and hanging on his talk. In the spring they went out to the hills, and a young American girl—quite a beauty, they say, though rather raw—went to stay with them. I heard so much of her beauty from Madame Variani that I was anxious to see her. Miss Manisty promised to bring her here before they left in June. But apparently the party broke up suddenly, and we saw no more of them.
'Now I think I have told you the chief facts about them. I wonder what makes you ask? I often think of poor Mrs. Burgoyne, and hope she may be happy some day. I can't say, however, that Mr. Manisty ever seemed to me a very desirable husband! And yet I was very sorry you were not at home in the autumn. You might have disliked him heartily, but you would have found himpiquantand stimulating. And of all the glorious heads on man's shoulders he possesses the most glorious—the head of a god attached to a rather awkward and clumsy body.'
Happy! Well, whatever else might have happened, the English lady was not yet happy. Of that the Contessa Guerrini was tolerably certain after a first conversation with her. Amid the gnawing pressure of her own grief there was a certain distraction in the observance of this sad and delicate creature, and in the very natural speculations she aroused. Clearly Miss Foster was the young American girl. Why were they here together, in this heat, away from all their friends?
* * * * *
One day Eleanor was sitting with the Contessa on aloggiain the Palazzo, looking north-west towards Radicofani. It was a cool and rather cloudy evening, after a day of gasping heat. The majordomo suddenly announced; 'His reverence, Don Teodoro.'
The youngpadre parrocoappeared—a slim, engaging figure, as he stood for an instant amid the curtains of the doorway, glancing at the two ladies with an expression at once shy and confiding.
He received the Contessa's greeting with effusion, bowing low over her hand. When she introduced him to the English lady, he bowed again ceremoniously. But his blue eyes lost their smile. The gesture was formal, the look constrained. Eleanor, remembering Father Benecke, understood.
In conversation with the Contessa however he recovered a boyish charm and spontaneity that seemed to be characteristic. Eleanor watched him with admiration, noticing also the subtle discernment of the Italian, which showed through all his simplicity of manner. It was impossible to mistake, for instance, that he felt himself in a house of mourning. The movements of body and voice were all at first subdued and sympathetic. Yet the mourning had passed into a second stage, and ordinary topics might now be introduced. He glided into them with the most perfect tact.
He had come for two reasons. First, to announce his appointment as Select Preacher for the coming Advent at a well-known church in Rome; secondly, to bring to the Contessa's notice a local poet—gifted, but needy—an Orvieto man, whose Muse the clergy had their own reasons for cultivating.
The Contessa congratulated him, and he bowed profoundly in a silent pleasure.
Then he took up the poet, repeating stanza after stanza with a perfectnaïveté, in his rich young voice, without a trace of display; ending at last with a little sigh, and a sudden dropping of the eyes, like a child craving pardon.
Eleanor was delighted with him, and the Contessa, who seemed more difficult to please, also smiled upon him. Teresa, the pious daughter, was with Lucy in the Sassetto. No doubt she was the little priest's particular friend. He had observed at once that she was not there, and had inquired for her.
'One or two of those lines remind me of Carducci, and that reminds me that I saw Carducci for the first time this spring,' said the Contessa, turning to Eleanor. 'It was at a meeting of the Accademia in Rome. A great affair—the King and Queen—and a paper on Science and Religion, by Mazzoli. Perhaps you don't remember his name? He was our Minister of the Interior a few years ago.'
Eleanor did not hear. Her attention was diverted by the sudden change in the aspect of thepadre parroco. It was the dove turned hawk. The fresh face seemed to have lost its youth in a moment, to have grown old, sharp, rancorous.
'Mazzoli!'—he said, as the Contessa paused—'Eccellenza, è un Ebreo!'
The Contessa frowned. Yes, Mazzoli was a Jew, but an honest man; and his address had been of great interest, as bearing witness to the revival of religious ideas in circles that had once been wholly outside religion. Theparroco'slips quivered with scorn. He remembered the affair—a scandalous business! The King and Queen present, and aJewdaring before them, to plead the need of 'a new religion'—in Italy, where Catholicism, Apostolic and Roman, was guaranteed as the national religion—by the first article of theStatuto. The Contessa replied with some dryness that Mazzoli spoke as a philosopher. Whereupon theparrocoinsisted with heat that there could be no true philosophy outside the Church. The Contessa laughed and turned upon the young man a flashing and formidable eye.
'Let the Church add a little patriotism to her philosophy, Father,—she will find it better appreciated.'
Don Teodoro straightened to the blow. 'I am a Roman,Eccellenza—you also—Scusi!'
'I am an Italian, Father—you also. But you hate your country.'
Both speakers had grown a little pale.
'I have nothing to do with the Italy of Venti Settembre,' said the priest, twisting and untwisting his long fingers in a nervous passion. 'That Italy has three marks of distinction before Europe—by which you may know her.'
'And those—?' said the Contessa, calm and challenging.
'Debt,Eccellenza—hunger!—crimes of blood!Sono il suo primato—l'unico!'
He threw at her a look sparkling and venomous. All the grace of his youth had vanished. As he sat there, Eleanor in a flash saw in him the conspirator and the firebrand that a few more years would make of him.
'Ah!' said the Contessa, flushing. 'There were none of these things in the old Papal States?—under the Bourbons?—the Austrians? Well—we understand perfectly that you would destroy us if you could!'
'Eccellenza, Jesus Christ and his Vicar come before the House of Savoy!'
'Ruin us, and see what you will gain!'
'Eccellenza, the Lord rules.
'Well—well. Break the eggs—that's easy. But whether the omelet will be as the Jesuits please—that's another affair.'
Each combatant smiled, and drew a long breath.
'These are our old battles,' said the Contessa, shaking her head. 'Scusi!I must go and give an order.'
And to Eleanor's alarm, she rose and left the room.
The young priest showed a momentary embarrassment at being left alone with the strange lady. But it soon passed. He sat a moment, quieting down, with his eyes dropped, his finger-tips lightly joined upon his knee. Then he said sweetly:
'You are perhaps not acquainted with the pictures in the Palazzo, Madame. May I offer you my services? I believe that I know the names of the portraits.'
Eleanor was grateful to him, and they wandered through the bare rooms, looking at the very doubtful works of art that they contained.
Presently, as they returned to thesalonefrom which they had started,Eleanor caught sight of a fine old copy of the Raphael St. Cecilia atBologna. The original has been much injured, and the excellence of the copystruck her. She was seized, too, with a stabbing memory of a day in theBologna Gallery with Manisty!
She hurried across the room to look at the picture. The priest followed her.
'Ah! that, Madame,' he said with enthusiasm—that is acapolavoro. It is by Michael Angelo.'
Eleanor looked at him in astonishment. 'This one? It is a copy, Padre, ofRaphael's St. Cecilia at Bologna—a very interesting and early copy.'
Don Teodoro frowned. He went up to look at it doubtfully, pushing out his lower lip.
'Oh! no, Madame,' he said, returning to her, and speaking with a soft yet obstinate complacency. 'Pardon me—but you are mistaken. That is an original work of the great Michael Angelo.'
Eleanor said no more.
When the Contessa returned, Eleanor took up a volume of French translations from the Greek Anthology that the Contessa had lent her the day before. She restored the dainty little book to its mistress, pointing to some of her favourites.
Theparroco'sface fell as he listened.
'Ah!—these are from the Greek!' he said, looking down modestly, as the Contessa handed him the book. 'I spent five years,Eccellenza, in learning Greek, but—!' He shrugged his shoulders gently.
Then glancing from one lady to the other, he said with a deprecating smile:
'I could tell you some things. I could explain what some of the Greek words in Italian come from—"mathematics," for instance.'
He gave the Greek word with a proud humility, emphasising each syllable.
'"Economy"—"theocracy"—"aristocracy."'
The Greek came out like a child's lesson. He was not always sure; he corrected himself once or twice; and at the end he threw back his head with a little natural pride.
But the ladies avoided looking either at him or each other.
Eleanor thought of Father Benecke; of the weight of learning on that silver head. Yet Benecke was an outcast, and this youth was already on the ladder of promotion.
When he departed the Contessa threw up her hands.
'And that man is just appointed Advent Preacher at one of the greatest churches in Rome!'
Then she checked herself.
'At the same time, Madame,' she said, looking a little stiffly at Eleanor, 'we have learned priests—many of them.'
Eleanor hastened to assent. With what heat had Manisty schooled her during the winter to the recognition of Catholic learning, within its own self-chosen limits!
'It is this deplorable Seminary education!' sighed the Contessa. 'How is one half of the nation ever to understand the other? They speak a different language. Imagine all our scientific education on the one side, and this—this dangerous innocent on the other! And yet we all want religion—we all want some hope beyond this life.'
Her strong voice broke. She turned away, and Eleanor could only see the massive outline of head and bust, and the coils of grey hair.
Mrs. Burgoyne drew her chair nearer to the Contessa. Silently and timidly she laid a hand upon her knee.
'I can't understand,' she said in a low voice, 'how you have had the patience to be kind to us, these last weeks!'
'Do you know why?' said the Contessa, turning round upon her, and no longer attempting to conceal the tears upon her fine old face.
'No—tell me!'
'It was because Emilio loved the English. He once spent a very happy summer in England. I—I don't know whether he was in love with anyone. But, at any rate, he looked back to it with deep feeling. He always did everything that he could for any English person—and especially in these wilds. I have known him often take trouble that seemed to me extravagant or quixotic. But he always would. And when I saw you in theSassettothat day, I knew exactly what he would have done. You looked so delicate—and I remembered how rough the convent was. I had hardly spoken to anybody but Teresa since the news came, but I could not help speaking to you.'
Eleanor pressed her hand. After a pause she said gently:
'He was with General Da Bormida?'
'Yes—he was with Da Bormida. There were three columns, you remember. He was with the column that seemed for a time to be successful. I only got the full account last week from a brother-officer, who was a prisoner till the end of June. Emilio, like all the rest, thought the position was carried—that it was a victory. He raised his helmet and shouted,Viva il Re! Viva l'Italia!And then all in a moment the Scioans were on them like a flood. They were all carried away. Emilio rallied his men again and again under a hail of bullets. Several heard him say: "Courage, lads—courage! Your Captain dies with you!Avanti! avanti! Viva l'Italia!" Then at last he was frightfully wounded, and perhaps you may have heard in the village'—again the mother turned her face away—' that he said to acaporalebeside him, who came from this district, whom he knew at home—"Federigo, take your gun and finish it." He was afraid—my beloved!—of falling into the hands of the enemy. Already they had passed some wounded, horribly mutilated. Thecaporalerefused. "I can't do that,Eccellenza," he said; "but we will transport you or die with you!" Then again there was a gleam of victory. He thought the enemy were repulsed. A brother-officer saw him being carried along by two soldiers, and Emilio beckoned to him. "You must be my Confessor!" he said, smiling. And he gave him some messages for me and Teresa—some directions about his affairs. Then he asked: "It is victory—isn't it? We have won, after all?" And the other—who knew—couldn't bear to tell him the truth. He said, "Yes." And Emilio said, "You swear it?" "I swear." And the boy made the sign of the cross—said again,Viva l'Italia!—and died…. They buried him that night under a little thicket. My God! I thank Thee that he did not lie on that accursed plain!'
She raised her handkerchief to hide her trembling lips. Eleanor said nothing. Her face was bowed upon her hands, which lay on the Contessa's knee.
'His was not a very happy temperament,' said the poor mother presently.' He was always anxious and scrupulous. I sometimes thought he had been too much influenced by Leopardi; he was always quoting him. That is the way with many of our young men. Yet Emilio was a Christian—a sincere believer. It would have been better if he had married. But he gave all his affection to me and Teresa—and to this place and the people. I was to carry on his work—but I am an old woman—and very tired. Why should the young go before their time?… Yet I have no bitterness about the war. It was a ghastly mistake—and it has humiliated us as a nation. But nations are made by their blunderings as much as by their successes. Emilio would not have grudged his life. He always thought that Italy had been "made too quick," as they say—that our day of trial and weakness was not done…. But,Gesù mio!—if he had not left me so much of life.'
Eleanor raised her head.
'I, too,' she said, almost in a whisper—'I, too, have lost a son. But he was a little fellow.'
The Contessa looked at her in astonishment and burst into tears.
'Then we are two miserable women!' she said, wildly.
Eleanor clung to her—but with a sharp sense of unfitness and unworthiness. She felt herself a hypocrite. In thought and imagination her boy now was but a hovering shadow compared to Manisty. It was not this sacred mother-love that was destroying her own life.
* * * * *
As they drove home through the evening freshness, Eleanor's mind pursued its endless and solitary struggle.
Lucy sat beside her. Every now and then Eleanor's furtive guilty look sought the girl's face. Sometimes a flying terror would grip her by the heart. Was Lucy graver—paler? Were there some new lines round the sweet eyes? That serene and virgin beauty—had it suffered the first withering touch since Eleanor had known it first? And if so, whose hand? whose fault?
Once or twice her heart failed within her; foreseeing a remorse that was no sooner imagined than it was denied, scouted, hurried out of sight.
That brave, large-brained woman with whom she had just been talking; there was something in the atmosphere which the Contessa's personality shed round it, that made Eleanor doubly conscious of the fever in her own blood. As in Father Benecke's case, so here; she could only feel herself humiliated and dumb before these highest griefs—the griefs that ennoble and enthrone.
That night she woke from a troubled sleep with a stifled cry of horror. In her dreams she had been wrestling with Manisty, trying to thrust him back with all the frenzied force of her weak hands. But he had wrenched himself from her hold. She saw him striding past her—aglow, triumphant. And that dim white form awaiting him—and the young arms outstretched!
'No, no! False! She doesn't—doesn't love him!' her heart cried, throwing all its fiercest life into the cry. She sat up in bed trembling and haggard. Then she stole into the next room. Lucy lay deeply, peacefully asleep. Eleanor sank down beside her, hungrily watching her. 'How could she sleep like that—if—if she cared?' asked her wild thoughts, and she comforted herself, smiling at her own remorse. Once she touched the girl's hand with her lips, feeling towards her a rush of tenderness that came like dew on the heat of the soul. Then she crept back to bed, and cried, and cried—through the golden mounting of the dawn.
The days passed on. Between Eleanor and Lucy there had grown up a close, intense, and yet most painful affection. Neither gave the other her full confidence, and on Eleanor's side the consciousness both of the futility and the enormity of what she had done only increased with time, embittering the resistance of a will which was still fierce and unbroken.
Meanwhile she often observed her companion with a quick and torturing curiosity. What was it that Manisty had found so irresistible, when all her own subtler arts had failed?
Lucy was in some ways very simple, primitive even, as Manisty had called her. Eleanor knew that her type was no longer common in a modern America that sends all its girls to college, and ransacks the world for an experience. But at the same time the depth and force of her nature promised rich developments in the future. She was still a daughter of New England, with many traits now fast disappearing; but for her, too, there was beginning that cosmopolitan transformation to which the women of her race lend themselves so readily.
And it was Manisty's influence that was at work! Eleanor's miserable eyesdiscerned it in a hundred ways. Half the interests and questions on whichManisty's mind had been fixed for so long were becoming familiar to Lucy.They got books regularly from Rome, and Eleanor had been often puzzled byLucy's selections—till one day the key to them flashed across her.
The girl indeed was making her way, fast and silently, into quite new regions of thought and feeling. She read, and she thought. She observed the people of the village; she even frequented their humble church, though she would never go with Eleanor to Sunday Mass. There some deep, unconquerable instinct held her back.
All through, indeed, her personal beliefs and habits—Evangelical, unselfish, strong, and a little stern—seemed to be quite unchanged. But they were differently tinged, and would be in time differently presented. Nor would they ever, of themselves, divide her from Manisty. Eleanor saw that clearly enough. Lucy could hold opinion passionately, unreasonably even; but she was not of the sort that makes life depend upon opinion. Her true nature was large, tolerant, patient. The deepest forces in it were forces of feeling, and no intellectual difference would ever be able to deny them their natural outlet.
Meanwhile Lucy seemed to herself the most hopelessly backward and ignorant person, particularly in Eleanor's company.
'Oh! I am just a dunce,' she said one day to Eleanor, with a smile and sigh, after some questions as to her childhood and bringing up. 'They ought to have sent me to college. All the girls I knew went. But then Uncle Ben would have been quite alone. So I just had to get along.'
'But you know what many girls don't know.'
Lucy gave a shrug.
'I know some Latin and Greek, and other things that Uncle Ben could teach me. But oh! what a simpleton I used to feel in Boston!'
'You were behind the age?
Lucy laughed.
'I didn't seem to have anything to do with the age, or the age with me. You see, I was slow, and everybody else was quick. But an American that isn't quick's got no right to exist. You're bound to have heard the last thing, and read the last book, or people just want to know why you're there!'
'Why should people call you slow?' said Eleanor, in that voice which Lucy often found so difficult to understand, because of the strange note of hostility which, for no reason at all, would sometimes penetrate through the sweetness. 'It's absurd. How quickly you've picked up Italian—and frocks!—and a hundred things.'
She smiled, and stroked the brown head beside her.
Lucy coloured, bent over her work, and did not reply.
Generally they passed their mornings in theloggiareading and working. Lucy was a dexterous needle-woman, and a fine piece of embroidery had made much progress since their arrival at Torre Amiata. Secretly she wondered whether she was to finish it there. Eleanor now shrank from the least mention of change; and Lucy, having opened her generous arms to this burden, did not know when she would be allowed to put it down. She carried it, indeed, very tenderly—with a love that was half eager remorse. Still, before long Uncle Ben must remonstrate in earnest. And the Porters, whom she had treated so strangely? They were certainly going back to America in September, if not before. And must she not go with them?
And would the heat at Torre Amiata be bearable for the sensitive Northerner after July? Already they spent many hours of the day in their shuttered and closed rooms, and Eleanor was whiter than the convolvulus which covered the new-mown hayfields.
What a darling—what a kind and chivalrous darling was Uncle Ben! She had asked him to trust her, and he had done it nobly, though it was evident from his letters that he was anxious and disturbed. 'I cannot tell you everything,' she had written, 'or I should be betraying a confidence; but I am doing what I feel to be right—what I am sure you would consent to my doing if you knew. Mrs. Burgoyne isveryfrail—and she clings to me. I can't explain to you how or why—but so it is. For the present I must look after her. This place is beautiful; the heat not yet too great; and you shall hear every week. Only, please, tell other people that I wish you to forward letters, and cannot long be certain of my address.'
And he:
'Dear child, this is very mysterious. I don't like it. It would be absurd to pretend that I did. But I haven't trusted my Lucy for fourteen years in order to begin to persecute her now because she can't tell me a secret. Only I give you warning that if you don't write to me every week, my generosity, as you call it, will break down—and I shall be for sending out a search party right away…. Do you want money? I must say that I hope July will see the end of your adventure.'
Would it? Lucy found her mind full of anxious thoughts as Eleanor read aloud to her.
Presently she discovered that a skein of silk she wanted for her work was not in her basket. She turned to look also in her old inlaid workbox, which stood on a small table beside her. But it was not there.
'Please wait a moment,' she said to her companion. 'I am afraid I must get my silk.'
She stood up hastily, and her movement upset the rickety cane table. With a crash her workbox fell to the ground, and its contents rolled all over theloggia. She gave a cry of dismay.
'Oh! my terra-cottas!—my poor terra-cottas!'
Eleanor started, and rose too, involuntarily, to her feet. There on the ground lay all the little Nemi fragments which Manisty had given to Lucy, and which had been stowed away, each carefully wrapped in tissue paper, in the well of her old workbox.
Eleanor assisted to pick them up, rather silently. The note of keen distress in Lucy's voice rang in her ears.
'They are not much hurt, luckily,' she said.
And indeed, thanks to the tissue paper, there were only a few small chips and bruises to bemoan when Lucy at last had gathered them all safely into her lap. Still, chips and bruises in the case of delicate Græco-Roman terra-cottas are more than enough to make their owner smart, and Lucy bent over them with a very flushed and rueful face, examining and wrapping them up again.
'Cotton-wool would be better,' she said anxiously. 'How have you put your two away?'
Directly the words were out of her mouth she felt that they had been better unspoken.
A deep flush stained Eleanor's thin face.
'I am afraid I haven't taken much care of them,' she said hurriedly.
They were both silent for a little. But while Lucy still had her lap full of her treasures, Eleanor again stood up.
'I will go in and rest for an hour beforedéjeuner. IthinkI might go to sleep.'
She had passed a very broken night, and Lucy looked at her with tender concern. She quickly but carefully laid aside her terra-cottas, that she might go in with Eleanor and 'settle her' comfortably.
But when she was left to rest in her carefully darkened room, and Lucy had gone back to theloggia, Eleanor got no wink of sleep. She lay in an anguish of memory, living over again that last night at the villa—thinking of Manisty in the dark garden and her own ungovernable impulse.
Presently a slight sound reached her from theloggia. She turned her head quickly. A sob?—from Lucy?
Her heart stood still. Noiselessly she slipped to her feet. The door between her and theloggiahad been left ajar for air. It was partially glazed, with shutters of plain green wood outside, and inside a muslin blind. Eleanor approached it.
Through the chink of the door she saw Lucy plainly. The girl had been sitting almost with her back to the door, but she had turned so that her profile and hands were visible.
How quiet she was! Yet never was there an attitude more eloquent. She held in her hands, which lay upon her knee, one of the little terra-cottas. Eleanor could see it perfectly. It was the head of a statuette, not unlike her own which she had destroyed,—a smaller and ruder Artemis with the Cybele crown. There flashed into her mind the memory of Manisty explaining it to the girl, sitting on the bench behind the strawberry hut; his black brows bent in the eagerness of his talk; her sweet eyes, her pure pleasure.
And now Lucy had no companion—but thought. Her face was raised, the eyes were shut, the beautiful mouth quivered in the effort to be still. She was mistress of herself, yet not for the moment wholly mistress of longing and of sorrow. A quick struggle passed over the face. There was another slight sob. Then Eleanor saw her raise the terra-cotta, bow her face upon it, press it long and lingeringly to her lips. It was like a gesture of eternal farewell; the gesture of a child expressing the heart of a woman.
Eleanor tottered back. She sat on the edge of her bed, motionless in the darkness, till the sounds of Cecco bringing up thepranzoin the corridor outside warned her that her time of solitude was over.
* * * * *
In the evening Eleanor was sitting in the Sassetto. Lucy with her young need of exercise had set off to walk down through the wood to the first bridge over the Paglia. Eleanor had been very weary all day, and for the first time irritable. It was almost with a secret relief that Lucy started, and Eleanor saw her depart.
Mrs. Burgoyne was left stretched on her long canvas chair, in the green shade of the Sassetto. All about her was a chaos of moss-grown rocks crowned with trees young and old; a gap in the branches showed her a distant peachy sky suffused with gold above the ethereal heights of the Amiata range; a little wind crept through the trees; the birds were silent, but the large green lizards slipped in and out, and made a friendly life in the cool shadowed place.
The Contessa was to have joined Eleanor here at six o'clock. But a note had arrived excusing her. The visit of some relations detained her.
Nevertheless a little after six a step was heard approaching along the winding path which while it was still distant Eleanor knew to be Father Benecke. For his sake, she was glad that the Contessa was not with her.
As for Donna Teresa, when she met the priest in the village or on the road she shrank out of his path as though his mere shadow brought malediction.
Her pinched face, her thin figure seemed to contract still further under an impulse of fear and repulsion. Eleanor had seen it, and wondered.
But even the Contessa would have nothing to say to him.
'Non, Madame; c'est plus fort que moi!' she had said to Eleanor one day that she had come across Mrs. Burgoyne and Father Benecke together in the Sassetto—in after-excuse for her behaviour to him. 'For you and me—bien entendu!—we think what we please. Heaven knows I am not bigoted. Teresa makes herself unhappy about me.' The stout, imperious woman stifled a sigh that betrayed much. 'I take what I want from our religion—and I don't trouble about the rest. Emilio was the same. But a priest that disobeys—that deserts—! No! that is another matter. I can't argue; it seizes me by the throat.' She made an expressive movement. 'It is an instinct—an inheritance—call it what you like. But I feel like Teresa; I could run at the sight of him.'
Certainly Father Benecke gave her no occasion to run. Since his recovery from the first shock and agitation of his suspension he had moved about the roads and tracks of Torre Amiata with the 'recollected' dignity of the pale and meditative recluse. He asked nothing; he spoke to no one, except to the ladies at the convent, and to the old woman who served him unwillingly in the little tumble-down house by the river's edge to which he had now transferred himself and his books, for greater solitude. Eleanor understood that he shrank from facing his German life and friends again till he had completed the revision of his book, and the evolution of his thought; and she had some reason to believe that he regarded his isolation and the enmity of this Italian neighbourhood as a necessary trial and testing, to be borne without a murmur.
As his step came nearer, she sat up and threw off her languor. It might have been divined, even, that she heard it with a secret excitement.
When he appeared he greeted her with the manner at once reticent and cordial that was natural to him. He had brought her an article in a German newspaper of the 'Centre' on himself and his case, the violence of which had provoked him to a reply, whereof the manuscript was also in his pocket.
Eleanor took the article and turned it over. But some inward voice told her that herrôle, of counsellor and critic was—again—played out. Suddenly Father Benecke said:
'I have submitted my reply to Mr. Manisty. I would like to show you what he says.'
Eleanor fell back in her chair. 'You know where he is?' she cried.
Her surprise was so great that she could not at once disguise her emotion. Father Benecke was also taken aback. He lifted his eyes from the papers he held.
'I wrote to him through his bankers the other day, Madame. I have always found that letters so addressed to him are forwarded.'
Then he stopped in distress and perturbation. Mrs. Burgoyne was still apparently struggling for breath and composure. His absent, seer's eyes at last took note of her as a human being. He understood, all at once, that he had before him a woman very ill, apparently very unhappy, and that what he had just said had thrown her into an anguish with which her physical weakness was hardly able to cope.
The colour rose in his own cheeks.
'Madame! let me hasten to say that I have done your bidding precisely.You were so good as to tell me that you wished no information to be givento anyone as to your stay here. I have not breathed a word of it to Mr.Manisty or to any other of my correspondents. Let me show you his letter.'
He held it out to her. Eleanor took it with uncertain fingers.
'Your mention of him took me by surprise,' she said, after a moment. 'MissFoster and I—have been—so long—without hearing of our friends.'
Then she stooped over the letter. It seemed to her the ink was hardly dry on it—that it was still warm from Manisty's hand. The date of it was only three days old. And the place from which it came? Cosenza?—Cosenza in Calabria? Then he was still in Italy?
She put the letter back into Father Benecke's hands.
'Would you read it for me? I have rather a headache to-day.'
He read it with a somewhat embarrassed voice. She lay listening, with her eyes closed under her large hat, each hand trying to prevent the trembling of the other.
A strange pride swelled in her. It was a kind and manly letter, expressing far more personal sympathy with Benecke than Manisty had ever yet allowed himself—a letter wholly creditable indeed to the writer, and marked with a free and flowing beauty of phrase that brought home to Eleanor at every turn his voice, his movements, the ideas and sympathies of the writer.
Towards the end came the familiar Manisty-ism:
'All the same, their answer to you is still as good as ever. The system must either break up or go on. They naturally prefer that it should go on. But if it is worked by men like you, it cannot go on. Their instinct never wavers; and it is a true one.'
Then:
'I don't know how I have managed to write this letter—poor stuff as it is. My mind at this moment is busy neither with speculation nor politics. I am perched for the night on the side of a mountain thickly covered with beech woods, in a remote Calabrian hamlet, where however last year some pushing person built a small 'health resort,' to which a few visitors come from Naples and even from Rome. The woods are vast, the people savage. The brigands are gone, or going; of electric light there is plenty. I came this morning, and shall be gone to-morrow. I am a pilgrim on the face of Italy. For six weeks I have wandered like this, from the Northern Abruzzi downwards. Wherever holiday folk go to escape from the heat of the plains, I go. But my object is not theirs…. Nor is it yours, Padre. There are many quests in the world. Mine is one of the oldest that man knows. My heart pursues it, untired. And in the end I shall win to my goal.'
The old priest read the last paragraph in a hurried, unsteady voice. At every sentence he became aware of some electrical effect upon the delicate frame and face beside him; but he read on—not knowing how to save himself—lest she should think that he had omitted anything.
When he dropped the letter his hands, too, shook. There was a silence.
Slowly Eleanor dragged herself higher in her chair; she pushed her hat back from her forehead; she turned her white drawn face upon the priest.
'Father,' she said, bending towards him, 'you are a priest—and a confessor?'
His face changed. He waited an instant before replying.
'Yes, Madame—I am!' he said at last, with a firm and passionate dignity.
'Yet now you cannot act as a priest. And I am not a Catholic. Still, I am a human being—with a soul, I suppose—if there are such things!—and you are old enough to be my father, and have had great experience. I am in trouble—and probably dying. Will you hear my case—as though it were a confession—under the same seal?'
She fixed her eyes upon him. Insensibly the priest's expression had changed; the priestly caution, the priestly instinct had returned. He looked at her steadily and compassionately.
'Is there no one, Madame, to whom you might more profitably make this confession—no one who has more claim to it than I?'
'No one.'
'I cannot refuse,' he said, uneasily. 'I cannot refuse to hear anyone in trouble and—if I can—to help them. But let me remind you that this could not be in any sense a true confession. It could only be a conversation between friends.'
She drew her hand across her eyes.
'I must treat it as a confession, or I cannot speak. I shall not ask you to absolve me. That—that would do me no good,' she said, with a little wild laugh, 'What I want is direction—from some one accustomed to look at people as they are—and—and to speak the truth to them. Say "yes," Padre. You—you may have the fate of three lives in your hands.'
Her entreating eyes hung upon him. His consideration took a few moments longer. Then he dropped his own look upon the ground, and clasped his hands.
'Say, my daughter, all that you wish to say.'
The priestly phrase gave her courage.
She drew a long breath, and paused a little to collect her thoughts. When she began, it was in a low, dragging voice full of effort.
'What I want to know, Father, is—how far one may fight—how far oneshouldfight—for oneself. The facts are these. I will not mention any names. Last winter, Father, I had reason to think that life had changed for me—after many years of unhappiness. I gave my whole, whole heart away.' The words came out in a gasp, as though a large part of the physical power of the speaker escaped with them. 'I thought that—in return—I was held in high value, in true affection—that—that my friend cared for me more than for anyone else—that in time he would be mine altogether. It was a great hope, you understand—I don't put it at more. But I had done much to deserve his kindness—he owed me a great deal. Not, I mean, for the miserable work I had done for him; but for all the love, the thought by day and night that I had given him.'
She bowed her head on her hands for a moment. The priest sat motionless and she resumed, torn and excited by her strange task.
'I was not alone in thinking and hoping—as I did. Other people thought it. It was not merely presumptuous or foolish on my part. But—ah! it is an old story, Padre. I don't know why I inflict it on you!'
She stopped, wringing her hands.
The priest did not raise his eyes, but sat quietly—in an attitude a little cold and stern, which seemed to rebuke her agitation. She composed herself, and resumed:
'There was of course some one else, Father—you understood that from the beginning—some one younger, and far more attractive than I. It took five weeks—hardly so much. There was no affinity of nature and mind to go upon—or I thought so. It seemed to me all done in a moment by a beautiful face. I could not be expected to bear it—to resign myself at once to the loss of everything that made life worth living—could I, Father?' she said passionately.
The priest still did not look up.
'You resisted?' he said.
'I resisted—successfully,' she said with fluttering breath. 'I separated them. The girl who supplanted me was most tender, dear, and good. She pitied me, and I worked upon her pity. I took her away from—from my friend. And why should I not? Why are we called upon perpetually to give up—give up? It seemed to me such a cruel, cold, un-human creed. I knew my own life was broken—beyond mending; but I couldn't bear the unkindness—I couldn't forgive the injury—I couldn't—couldn't! I took her away; and my power is still great enough, and will be always great enough, if I choose, to part these two from each other!'
Her hands were on her breast, as though she were trying to still the heart that threatened to silence her. When she spoke of giving up, her voice had taken a note of scorn, almost of hatred, that brought a momentary furrow to the priest's brow.
For a little while after she had ceased to speak he sat bowed, and apparently deep in thought. When he looked up she braced herself, as though she already felt the shock of judgment. But he only asked a question.
'Your girl-friend, Madame—her happiness was not involved?'
Eleanor shrank and turned away.
'I thought not—at first.' It was a mere murmur.
'But now?'
'I don't know—I suspect,' she said miserably. 'But, Father, if it were so she is young; she has all her powers and chances before her. What would kill me would only—anticipate—for her—a day that must come. She is born to be loved.'
Again she let him see her face, convulsed by the effort for composure, the eyes shining with large tears. It was like the pleading of a wilful child.
A veil descended also on the pure intense gaze of the priest, yet he bent it steadily upon her.
'Madame—God has done you a great honour.'
The words were just breathed, but they did not falter. Mutely, with parted lips, she seemed to search for his meaning.
'There are very few of whom God condescends to ask, as plainly, as generously, as He now asks of you. What does it matter, Madame, whether God speaks to us amid the thorns or the flowers? But I do not remember that He ever spoke among the flowers, but often—often, amongst deserts and wildernesses. And when He speaks—Madame! the condescension, the gift is that He should speak at all; that He, our Maker and Lord, should plead with, should as it were humble Himself to, our souls. Oh! how we should hasten to answer, how we should hurry to throw ourselves and all that we have into His hands!'
Eleanor turned away. Unconsciously she began to strip the moss from a tree beside her. The tears dropped upon her lap.
But the appeal was to religious emotion, not to the moral judgment, and she rallied her forces.
'You speak, Father, as a priest—as a Christian. I understand of course that that is the Christian language, the Christian point of view.'
'My daughter,' he said simply, 'I can speak no other language.'
There was a pause. Then he resumed: 'But consider it for a moment from another point of view. You say that for yourself you have renounced the expectation of happiness. What, then, do you desire? Merely the pain, the humiliation of others? But is that an end that any man or woman may lawfully pursue—Pagan or Christian? It was not a Christian who said, "Men exist for the sake of one another." Yet when two other human beings—your friends—have innocently—unwittingly—done you a wrong—'
She shook her head silently.
The priest observed her.
'One at least, you said, was kind and good—showed you a compassionate spirit—and intended you no harm. Yet you will punish her—for the sake of your own pride. And she is young. You who are older, and better able to control passion, ought you not to feel towards her as a tender elder sister—a mother—rather than a rival?'
He spoke with a calm and even power, the protesting force of his own soul mounting all the time like a tide.
Eleanor rose again in revolt.
'It is no use,' she said despairingly. 'Do you understand, Father, what I said to you at first?—that I have probably not many months—a year perhaps—to live? And that to give these two to each other would embitter all my last days and hours—would make it impossible for me to believe, to hope, anything?'
'No, no, poor soul!' he said, deeply moved. 'It would be with you as with St. John: "Now we know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren."'
She shrugged her shoulders.
'I have no faith—and no hope.'
His look kindled, took a new aspect almost of command.
'You do yourself wrong. Could you have brought yourself to ask this counsel of me, if God had not been already at work in your soul—if your sin were not already half conquered?'
She recoiled as though from a blow. Her cheek burnt.
'Sin!' she repeated bitterly, with a kind of scorn, not able to bear the word.
But he did not quail.
'All selfish desire is sin—desire that defies God and wills the hurt of man. But you will cast it out. The travail is already begun in you that will form the Christ.'
'Father, creeds and dogmas mean nothing to me!'
'Perhaps,' he said calmly. 'Does religion also mean nothing to you?'
'Oh! I am a weak woman,' she said with a quivering lip. 'I throw myself on all that promises consolation. When I see the nuns from down below pass up and down this road, I often think that theirs is the only way out; that the Catholic Church and a convent are perhaps the solution to which I must come—for the little while that remains.'
'In other words,' he said after a pause, 'God offers you one discipline, and you would choose another. Well, the Lord gave the choice to David of what rod he would be scourged with; but it always has seemed to me that the choice was an added punishment. I would not have chosen. I would have left all to His Divine Majesty! This cross is not of your own making; it comes to you from God. Is it not the most signal proof of His love? He asks of you what only the strongest can bear; gives you just time to serve Him with the best. As I said before, is it not His way of honouring His creature?'