On the following morning when Lucy entered Eleanor's room she found her giving some directions to Marie.
'Tell Mamma Doni that we give up the rooms next week—Friday in next week.Make her understand.'
'Parfaitement, Madame.' And Marie left the room. Lucy advanced with a face of dismay.
'Ten days more!—Eleanor.
Eleanor tapped her lightly on the cheek, then kissed her, laughing.
'Are you too hot?'
'Dear!—don't talk about me! But you promised me to be gone before August.'
She knelt down by Eleanor's bedside, holding her hands, imploring her with her deep blue eyes.
'Well, it's only a few days more,' said Eleanor, guiltily. 'Do let's take it leisurely! It's so horrid to be hurried in one's packing. Look at all these things!'
She waved her hand desperately round the little room, choked up with miscellaneous boxes; then laid both hands on Lucy's shoulders, coaxing and smiling at her like a child.
Lucy soon convinced herself that it was of no use to argue. She must just submit, unless she were prepared to go to lengths of self-assertion which might excite Eleanor and bring on a heart attack.
So, setting her teeth, she yielded.
'Friday week, then—for the last, last day!—And Mr. Manisty?'
She had risen from her knees and stood looking down at Eleanor. Her cheek had reddened, but Eleanor admired her stateliness.
'Oh, we must keep Edward. We want him for courier. I gave you trouble enough, on the journey here.'
Lucy said nothing. Her heart swelled a little. It seemed to her that under all this sweetness she was being treated with a certain violence. She went to the balcony, where the breakfast had just been laid, that she might bring Eleanor's coffee.
'Itisjust a little crude,' Eleanor thought, uneasily. 'Dear bird!—the net is sadly visible. But what can one do?—with so little time—so few chances! Once part them, and the game is up!'
So she used her weakness once more as a tyranny, this time for different ends.
The situation that she dictated was certainly difficult enough. Manisty appeared, by her summons, in the afternoon, and found them on theloggia. Lucy greeted him with a cold self-possession. Of all that had happened on the previous day, naturally, not a word. So far indeed as allusions to the past were concerned, the three might just have travelled together from Marinata. Eleanor very flushed, and dressed in her elegant white dress and French hat, talked fast and well, of the country folk, thepadre parroco, the Contessa. Lucy looked at her with alarm, dreading the after fatigue. But Eleanor would not be managed; would have her way.
Manisty, however, was no longer deceived. Lucy was aware of some of the glances that he threw his cousin. The trouble which they betrayed gave the girl a bitter satisfaction.
Presently she left them alone. After her disappearance Eleanor turned toManisty with a smile.
'On your peril—not another word to her!—till I give you leave. That would finish it.'
He lifted hands and shoulders in a despairing gesture; but said nothing. In Lucy's absence, however, then and later, he did not attempt to control his depression, and Eleanor was soon distracting and comforting him in the familiar ways of the past. Before forty-eight hours had elapsed the relations between them indeed had resumed, to all appearance, the old and close intimacy. On his arm she crept down the road, to the Sassetto, while Lucy drove with the Contessa. Or Manisty read aloud to her on theloggia, while Lucy in the courtyard below sat chatting fast to a swarm of village children who would always henceforward associate her white dress and the pure oval of her face with their dreams of the Madonna.
In theirtête-à-têtes, the talk of Manisty and Eleanor was always either of Lucy or of Manisty's own future. He had been at first embarrassed or reluctant. But she had insisted, and he had at length revealed himself as in truth he had never revealed himself in the days of their early friendship. With him at least, Eleanor through all anguish had remained mistress of herself, and she had her reward. No irreparable word had passed between them. In silence the old life ceased to be, and a new bond arose. The stifled reproaches, the secret impatiences, theennuis, the hidden anguish of those last weeks at Marinata were gone. Manisty, freed from the pressure of an unspoken claim which his conscience half acknowledged and his will repulsed, was for his cousin a new creature. He began to treat her as he had treated his friend Neal, with the same affectionate consideration, the same easy sweetness; even through all the torments that Lucy made him suffer. 'His restlessness as a lover,—his excellence as a friend,'—so a man who knew him well had written of him in earlier days. As for the lover, discipline and penance had overtaken him. But now that Eleanor's claim of another kind was dead, the friend in him had scope. Eleanor possessed him as the lover of Lucy more truly than she had ever yet done in the days when she ruled alone.
One evening finding her more feeble than usual, he implored her to let him summon a doctor from Rome before she risked the fatigue of the Mont Cenis journey.
But she refused. 'If necessary,' she said, 'I will go to Orvieto. There is a good man there. But there is some one else you shall write to, if you like:—Reggie! Didn't you see him last week?'
'Certainly. Reggie and the first secretary left in charge, sitting in their shirt-sleeves, with no tempers to speak of, and the thermometer at 96. But Reggie was to get his holiday directly.'
'Write and catch him.'
'Tell him to come not later than Tuesday, please,' said Lucy, quietly, who was standing by.
'Despot!' said Eleanor, looking up. 'Are we really tied and bound toFriday?'
Lucy smiled and nodded. When she went away Manisty sat in a black silence, staring at the ground. Eleanor bit her lip, grew a little restless, and at last said:
'She gives you no openings?'
Manisty laughed.
'Except for rebuffs!' he said, bitterly.
'Don't provoke them!'
'How can I behave as though that—that scene had never passed between us? In ordinary circumstances my staying on here would be an offence, of which she might justly complain. I told her last night I would have gone—but for your health.'
'When did you tell her?'
'I found her alone here for a moment before dinner.'
'Well?'
Manisty moved impatiently.
'Oh! she was very calm. Nothing I say puts her out. She thought I might be useful!—And she hopes Aunt Pattie will meet us in London, that she may be free to start for New York by the 10th, if her friends go then. She has written to them.'
Eleanor was silent.
'I must have it out with her!' said Manisty presently under his breath. In his unrest he rose, that he might move about. His face had grown pale.
'No—wait till I give you leave,' said Eleanor again, imploring. 'I never forget—for a moment. Leave it to me.'
He came and stood beside her. She put out her hand, which he took.
'Do you still believe—what you said?' he asked her, huskily.
Eleanor looked up smiling.
'A thousand times more!' she said, under her breath. 'A thousand times more.'
But here the conversation reached animpasse. Manisty could not say—'Then why?—in Heaven's name!'—for he knew why. Only it was not awhythat he and Eleanor could discuss. Every hour he realised more plainly with what completeness Eleanor held him in her hands. The situation was galling. But her sweetness and his own remorse disarmed him. To be helpless—and to be kind!—nothing else apparently remained to him. The only gracious look Lucy had vouchsafed him these two days had been in reward for some new arrangement of Eleanor's sofa which had given the invalid greater ease.
He returned to his seat, smiling queerly.
'Well, I am not the only person in disgrace. Do you notice how Benecke is treated?'
'She avoids him?'
'She never speaks to him if she can help it. I know that he feels it.'
'He risked his penalty,' said Eleanor laughing. 'I think he must bear it.'Then in another tone, and very softly, she added—
'Poor child!'
Manisty thought the words particularly inappropriate. In all his experience of women he never remembered a more queenly and less childish composure than Lucy had been able to show him since their scene on the hill. It had enlarged all his conceptions of her. His passion for her was thereby stimulated and tormented, yet at the same time glorified in his own eyes. He saw in her already thegrande dameof the future—that his labour, his ambitions, and his gifts should make of her.
If only Eleanor spoke the truth!
* * * * *
The following day Manisty, returning from a late walk with Father Benecke, parted from the priest on the hill, and mounted the garden stairway to theloggia.
Lucy was sitting there alone, her embroidery in her hands.
She had not heard him in the garden; and when he suddenly appeared she was not able to hide a certain agitation. She got up and began vaguely to put away her silks and thimble.
'I won't disturb you,' he said formally. 'Has Eleanor not come back?'
For Eleanor had been driving with the Contessa.
'Yes. But she has been resting since.'
'Don't let me interrupt you,' he said again.
Then he looked at her fingers and their uncertain movements among the silks; at the face bent over the workbasket.
'I want if I can to keep some bad news from my cousin,' he said abruptly.
Lucy started and looked up. He had her face full now, and the lovely entreating eyes.
'My sister is very ill. There has been another crisis. I might be summoned at any time.'
'Oh!'—she said, faltering. Unconsciously she moved a step nearer to him.In a moment she was all enquiry, and deep, shy sympathy—the old docileLucy. 'Have you had a letter?' she asked.
'Yes, this morning. I saw her the other day when I passed through Rome. She knew me, but she is a wreck. The whole constitution is affected. Sometimes there are intervals, but they get rarer. And each acute attack weakens her seriously.'
'It is terrible—terrible!'
As she stood there before him in her white dress under the twilight, he had a vision of her lying with shut eyes in his chair at Marinata; he remembered the first wild impulse that had bade him gather her, unconscious and helpless, in his arms.
He moved away from her. For something to do, or say, he stooped down to look into her open workbasket.
'Isn't that one of the Nemi terra-cottas!'
He blundered into the question from sheer nervousness, wishing it unspoken the instant it was out.
Lucy started. She had forgotten. How could she have forgotten! There in a soft bed of many-coloured silks, wrapped tenderly about, yet so as to show the face and crown, was the little Artemis. The others were beneath the tray of the box. But this for greater safety lay by itself, a thin fold of cotton-wool across its face. In that moment of confusion when he had appeared on theloggiashe had somehow displaced the cotton-wool without knowing it, and uncovered the head.
'Yes, it is the Artemis,' she said, trying to keep herself from trembling.
Manisty bent without speaking, and took the little thing into his hand. He thought of that other lovelier head—her likeness?—whereof the fragments were at that moment in a corner of his dressing-case, after journeying with him through the mountains.
As for Lucy it was to her as though the little head nestling in his hand must somehow carry there the warmth of her kisses upon it, must somehow betray her. He seemed to hold a fragment of her heart.
'Please let me put it away,' she said hurriedly. 'I must go to Eleanor. It is nearly time for dinner.'
He gave it up silently. She replaced it, smoothed down her silks and her work, and shut the box. His presence, his sombre look, and watching eye, affected her all the time electrically. She had never yet been so near the loss of self-command.
The thought of Eleanor calmed her. As she finished her little task, she paused and spoke again.
'You won't alarm her about poor Miss Manisty, without—without consulting with me?' she said timidly.
He bowed.
'Would you rather I did not tell her at all? But if I have to go?'
'Yes then—then you must.'
An instant—and she added hastily in a voice that wavered,' I am so very, very sorry—'
'Thank you. She often asks about you.'
He spoke with a formal courtesy, in his 'grand manner.' Her gleam of feeling had made him sensible, of advantage, given him back self-confidence.
The soft flutter of her dress disappeared, and he was left to pace up and down theloggiain alternations of hope and despair. He, too, felt with Eleanor that these days were fatal. If he lost her now, he lost her for ever. She was of those natures in which a scruple only deepens with time.
She would not take what should have been Eleanor's. There was the case in a nutshell. And how insist in these circumstances, as he would have done vehemently in any other, that Eleanor had no lawful grievance?
He felt himself bound and pricked by a thousand delicate lilliputian bonds. The 'regiment of women' was complete. He could do nothing. Only Eleanor could help.
* * * * *
The following day, just outside the convent gate, he met Lucy, returning from the village, whither she had been in quest of some fresh figs for Eleanor's breakfast. It was barely eight o'clock, but the sun was already fierce. After their formal greeting, Lucy lingered a moment.
'It's going to be frightfully hot to-day,' she said, looking round her with a troubled face at the glaring road, at the dusty patch of vines beyond it, at the burnt grass below the garden wall. 'Mr. Manisty!—you will make Eleanor go next Friday?—you won't let her put it off—for anything?'
She turned to him, in entreaty, the colour dyeing her pure cheek and throat.
'I will do what I can. I understand your anxiety,' he said stiffly.
She opened the old door of the courtyard and passed in before him. As he rejoined her, she asked him in a low voice—
'Have you any more news?'
'Yes. I found a letter at Selvapendente last night. The state of things is better. There will be no need I hope to alarm Eleanor—for the present.'
'I am so glad!'—The voice hurried and then paused. 'And of course, for you too,' she added, with difficulty.
He said nothing, and they walked up to the inner door in silence. Then as they paused on the threshold, he said suddenly, with a bitter accent—
'You are very devoted!'
She looked at him in surprise. Her young figure drew itself erect. 'That isn't wonderful—is it?—with her?'
Her tone pierced him.
'Oh! nothing's wonderful in women. You set the standard so high—the men can't follow.'
He stared at her, pale and frowning. She laughed artificially, but he could see the breath hurrying under the blue cotton dress.
'Not at all! When it comes to the serious difficulties we must, it seems, apply to you. Eleanor is thankful that you will take her home.
'Oh! I can be a decent courier—when I put my mind into it,' he said angrily. 'That, I dare say, you'll admit.'
'Of course I shall,' she said, with a lip that smiled unsteadily. 'I know it'll be invaluable. Please, Mr. Manisty, let me pass. I must get Eleanor her breakfast.'
But he still stood there, barring the way.
'Then, Miss Foster, admit something else!—that I am not the mere intruder—the mere burden—that you took me for.'
The man's soreness expressed itself in every word, every movement.
Lucy grew white.
'For Eleanor's sake, I am glad you came,' she said struggling for composure. But the dignity, the pride behind the agitation were so evident that he dared not go a step further. He bowed, and let her pass.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the Contessa was useful. After a very little observation, based on the suggestions of her letter from Home, she divined the situation exactly. Her affection and pity for Mrs. Burgoyne grew apace. Lucy she both admired and acquitted; while she half liked, half hated Manisty. He provoked her perpetually to judgment, intellectual and moral; and they fell into many a sparring which passed the time and made a shelter for the others. Her daughter had just left her; and the more she smarted, the more she bustled in and out of the village, the more she drove about the country, attending to the claims, the sicknesses, and the animals of distantcontadini, the more she read her newspapers, and the more nimbly did her mind move.
Like the Marchesa Fazzoleni, she would have no pessimism about Italy, though she saw things in a less poetic, more practical way.
'I dare say the taxes are heavy—and that our officials and bankers andimpiegaliare not on as good terms as they might be with the Eighth Commandment. Well! was ever a nation made in a night before? When your Queen came to the throne, were you English so immaculate? You talk about our Socialists—have we any disturbances, pray, worse than your disturbances in the twenties and thirties? Theparrocosays to me day after day: "The African campaign has been the ruin of Italy!" That's only because he wants it to be so. The machine marches, and the people pay their taxes, and the farming improves every year, all the same. A month or two ago, the newspapers were full of the mobbing of trains starting with soldiers for Erythrea. Yet all that time, if you went down into the Campo de' Fiori you could find poems sold for asoldo, that only the people wrote and the people read, that were as patriotic as the poor King himself.'
'Ah! I know,' said Manisty. 'I have seen some of them. The oddest, naïvest things!—the metre of Tasso, the thoughts of a child—and every now and then the cry a poet.'
And he repeated a stanza or two from these broad-sheets of the war, in a rolling and musical Italian.
The Contessa looked at him with cool admiration; and then aside, at Lucy. Certainly, when this Englishman was taking pains, his good-looks deserved all that could be said of them. That he was one of the temperaments to which other lives minister without large return—that she had divined at once. But, like Lucy, she was not damped by that. The Contessa had known few illusions, and only one romance; her love for her dead son. Otherwise she took the world as it came, and quarrelled with very few of its marked and persistent phenomena.
They were sitting on a terrace beneath the north-western front of the Palazzo. The terrace was laid out in a formal garden. Fountains played; statues stood in rows; and at the edge cypresses, black against the evening blue and rose, threw back the delicate dimness of the mountains, made their farness more far, and the gay foreground—oleanders, geraniums, nasturtiums—more gay.
Eleanor was lying on a deck-chair, smiling often, and at ease. Lucy sat a little apart, busy with her embroidery. She very seldom talked, but Eleanor could not make a movement or feel a want without her being aware of it.
'But, Madame, I cannot allow you to make an enemy out of me!'—said Manisty to the Contessa, resuming the conversation. 'When you talk to me of this Country and its future,vous prêchez un converti.'
'I thought you were the Jonah of our day,' she said, with her abrupt and rather disdainful smile.
Manisty laughed.
'A Jonah who needn't complain anyway that his Nineveh is too ready to hear him.'
'Where is the preaching?' she asked.
'In the waste-paper basket,' said Manisty, throwing away his cigarette.'Nowadays, apparently it is the prophets who repent.'
Involuntarily his eye wandered, sought for Lucy withdrew. She was hidden behind her work.
'Oh! preach away,' cried the Contessa. 'Take up your book again. Publish it. We can bear it.'
Manisty searched with both hands for his matches; his new cigarette between his lips.
'My book, Madame'—he said coolly—' outlived the pleasure its author took in writing it. My cousin was its good angel; but not even she could bring a blunder to port. Eleanor!—n'est-ce pas?'
He gathered a spray of oleander that grew near him, and laid it on her hand, like a caress. Eleanor's emaciated fingers closed upon it gently. She looked up, smiling. The Contessa abruptly turned away.
'And besides—' said Manisty.
He puffed away steadily, with his gaze on the mountains.
'I wait,' said the Contessa.
'Your Italy is a witch,' he said, with a sudden lifting of eyes and voice, 'and there are too many people that love her!'
Lucy bent a little lower over her work.
Presently the Contessa went away.
Eleanor lay with eyes closed and hands crossed, very white and still. They thought her asleep, for it was common with her now to fall into short sleeps of pure exhaustion. When they occurred, those near her kept tender and generally silent watch, joining hands of protection, as it were, round her growing feebleness.
After a few minutes, however, Manisty bent across towards Lucy.
'You urged me once to finish the book. But it was she who told me the other day she was thankful it had been dropped.'
He looked at her with the half irritable, half sensitive expression that she knew so well.
'Of course,' said Lucy, hurriedly. 'It was much best.'
She rose and stooped over Eleanor.
'Dear!—It is getting late. I think I ought to call the carriage.'
'Let me,' said Manisty, biting his lip.
'Thank you,' said Lucy, formally. 'The coachman understood we should want him at seven.'
When he came back, Lucy went into the house to fetch some wraps.
Eleanor opened her eyes, which were singularly animated and smiling.
'Listen!'
He stooped.
'Be angry!' she said, laying a light grasp on his arm. 'Be quite angry.Now—you may! It will do no harm.'
He sat beside her, his head bent; gloomily listening, till Lucy reappeared.
But he took the hint, calling to his aid all his pride, and all his singular power of playing any rôle in his own drama that he might desire to play. He played it with energy, with desperation, counting meanwhile each hour as it passed, having in view always that approaching moment in London when Lucy would disappear within the doors of the Porters' house, leaving the butler to meet the demands of unwelcome visitors with such equivalents of 'Not at home' as her Puritan scruples might allow; till the newspapers should announce the safe sailing of her steamer for New York.
He ceased to propitiate her; he dropped embarrassment. He ignored her. He became the man of the world and of affairs, whose European interests and relations are not within the ken of raw young ladies from Vermont. He had never been more brilliant, more interesting, more agreeable, for Eleanor, for the Contessa, for Benecke; for all the world, save one. He described his wanderings among the Calabrian highlands. He drew the peasants, the priests, the great landowners of the south still surrounded with their semi-feudal state; he made Eleanor laugh or shudder with his tales of the brigandage of the sixties; he talked as the artist and the scholar may of the Greek memories and remains of the Tarentine coast. Then he turned to English politics, to his own chances, and the humours of his correspondence. The Contessa ceased to quarrel with him. The handsome Englishman with the colour of a Titian, and the features of an antique, with his eloquence, his petulance, his conceit, his charm, filled the stage, quickened the dull hours whenever he appeared. Eleanor's tragedy explained itself. The elder woman understood and pitied. As for Lucy Foster, the Contessa's shrewd eyes watched her with a new respect. At what stage, in truth, was the play, and how would it end?
Meanwhile for Lucy Foster alone, Manisty was not agreeable. He rose formally when she appeared; he placed her chair; he paid her all necessary courtesies. But his conversation never included her. Her coming generally coincided—after she was ceremoniously provided for—with an outbreak of talk between him and Eleanor, or between him and Benecke, more eager, animated and interesting than before. But Lucy had no part in it. It was not the early neglect and incivility of the villa; it was something infinitely colder and more wounding; the frigidity of disillusion and resentment, of kindness rebuffed and withdrawn.
Lucy said nothing. She went about her day's work as usual, making all arrangements for their departure, devoting herself to Eleanor. Every now and then she was forced to consult with Manisty as to arrangements for the journey. They spoke as mere acquaintances and no more than was necessary; while she, when she was alone, would spend much time in a silent abstraction, thinking of her uncle, of the duties to which she was returning, and the lines of her future life. Perhaps in the winter she might do some teaching. Several people in Greyridge had said they would employ her.
And, all the time, during the night hours when she was thus wrestling down her heart, Manisty was often pacing the forest paths, in an orgie of smoke and misery, cursing the incidents of the day, raging, doubting, suffering—as no woman had yet made him suffer. The more truly he despaired, the more he desired her. The strength of the moral life in her was a revelation, a challenge to all the forces of his own being. He was not accustomed to have to consider such things in women. It added to her a wealth, a rarity, which made the conquest of her the only object worth pursuing in a life swept bare for the moment of all other passions and zests. She loved him! Eleanor knew it; Eleanor declared it. Yet in ten days' time she would say,—'Good bye, Mr. Manisty'—with that calm brow which he already foresaw as an outrage and offence to love. Ah! for some means to cloud those dear eyes—to make her weep, and let him see the tears!
'Hullo, Manisty!—is that you? Is this the place?'
The speaker was Reggie Brooklyn, who was dismounting from his bicycle at the door of the convent, followed by a clattering mob of village children, who had pursued him down the hill.
'I say, what a weird place!' said Reggie, looking about him,—'and at the other end of nowhere. What on earth made Eleanor come here?'
Ho looked at Manisty in perplexity, wiping the perspiration from his brow, which frowned beneath his fair curls.
'We were here last year,' said Manisty, 'on that little tour we made with the D.'s. Eleanor liked it then. She came here when the heat began, she thought it would be cool.'
'You didn't know where she was ten days ago,' said the boy, looking at him queerly. 'And General Muir didn't know, for I heard from some one who had seen him last week.'
Manisty laughed.
'All the same, she is here now,' he said drily.
'And Miss Foster is here too?'
Manisty nodded.
'And you say that Eleanor is ill?'
The young man had still the same hostile, suspicious air.
Manisty, who had been poking at the ground with his stick, looked up.Brooklyn made a step backward.
'Veryill,' he said, with a face of consternation. 'And nobody knew?'
'She would not let us know,' said Manisty slowly. Then he added, with the authority of the older man, the man in charge—'now we are doing all we can. We start on Friday and pick up a nurse at Genoa. When we get home, of course she will have the best advice. Very often she is wonderfully bright and like herself. Oh! we shall pull her round. But you mustn't tire her. Don't stay too long.'
They walked into the convent together, Brooklyn all impatience, Manisty moody and ill at ease.
'Reggie!—well met!' It was Eleanor's gayest voice, from the vine-leafed shadows of theloggia. Brooklyn sat down beside her, gazing at her with his troubled blue eyes. Manisty descended to the walled garden, and walked up and down there smoking, a prey to disagreeable thoughts.
After half an hour or so Reggie came down to the convent gate to look out for the ricketty diligence which had undertaken to bring his bag from Orvieto.
Here he was overtaken by Lucy Foster, who seemed to have hurried after him.
'How do you do, Mr. Brooklyn?' He turned sharply, and let her see a countenance singularly discomposed.
They looked at each other a moment in silence. He noted with amazement her growth in beauty, in expression. But the sadness of the mouth and eyes tortured him afresh.
'What is the matter with her?' he said abruptly, dropping her timidly offered hand.
'An old illness—mostly the heart,' she said, with difficulty. 'But I think the lungs are wrong too.'
'Why did she come here—why did you let her?'
The roughness of his tone, the burning of his eyes made her draw back.
'It seemed the best thing to do,' she said, after a pause. 'Of course, it was only done because she wished it.'
'Her people disapproved strongly!'
'She would not consider that.'
'And here in this rough place—in this heat—how have you been able to look after her?' said the young man passionately.
'We have done what we could,' said the girl humbly. 'The Contessa Guerrini has been very kind. We constantly tried to persuade her to let us take her home; but she couldn't bring herself to move.'
'It was madness,' he said, between his teeth. 'And now—she looks as though she were going to die!'
He gave a groan of angry grief. Lucy turned aside, leaning her arm against the convent gateway, and her face upon it. The attitude was very touching; but Brooklyn only stared at her in a blind wrath. 'What did you ever come for?'—was his thought—'making mischief!—and robbing Eleanor of her due!—It was a bad bargain she wanted,—but she might have been allowed to have him in peace. What did you come meddling for?'
At that moment the door of the walled garden opened. Manisty came out into the courtyard. Brooklyn looked from him to Lucy with a tight lip, a fierce and flashing eye.
He watched them meet. He saw Lucy's quick change of attitude, the return of hardness and composure. Manisty approached her. They discussed some arrangement for the journey, in the cold tones of mere acquaintance. Not a sign of intimacy in manner or words; beyond the forced intimacy of those who have for the moment a common task.
When the short dialogue was over, Manisty mumbled something to Brooklyn to the effect that Father Benecke had some dinner for him at the house at the foot of the hill. But he did not wait for the young man's company. He hurried off with the slouching and yet swinging gait characteristic of him, his shoulders bent as it were under the weight of his great head. The young man and the girl looked after him. Then Reggie turned impulsively.
'I suppose it was that beastly book—partly—that knocked her up. What's he done with it?'
'He has given it up, I believe. I heard him say so to Eleanor.'
'And now I suppose he will condescend to go back to politics?'
'I know nothing of Mr. Manisty's affairs.'
The young man threw her a glance first of distrust—then of something milder and more friendly. They turned back to the convent together, Lucy answering his questions as to the place, the people, the Contessa, and so forth.
A step, quick and gentle, overtook them.
It was Father Benecke who stopped and greeted them; a venerable figure, as he bared his white head, and stood for a moment talking to Brooklyn under the great sycamore of the courtyard. He had now resumed his clerical dress; not, indeed, the soutane; but the common round collar, and long black coat of the non-Catholic countries. The little fact, perhaps, was typical of a general steadying and settling of his fortunes after the anguish of his great catastrophe.
Lucy hardly spoke to him. His manner was soft and deprecating. And Miss Foster stood apart as though she liked neither it nor him. When he left them, to enter, the Convent, Reggie broke out:—
And how doeshecome to be here? I declare it's the most extraordinary tangle! What's he doing in there?'
He nodded towards the building, which seemed to be still holding the sunlight of the day, so golden-white it shone under the evening sky, and against the engirdling forest.
'Every night—almost—he comes to read with Eleanor.'
The young man stared.
'I say—is she—is she going to become a Catholic?'
Lucy smiled.
'You forget—don't you? They've excommunicated Father Benecke.'
'My word!—Yes!—I forgot. My chief was awfully excited about it. Well, I'm sure he's well quit of them!'—said the young man fervently. 'They're doing their level best to pull this country about everybody's ears. And they'll be the first to suffer—thank heaven!—if they do upset the coach. And so it was Benecke that brought Manisty here?'
Lucy's movement rebuked him; made him feel himself an impertinent.
'I believe so,' she said coldly. 'Good-night, Mr. Brooklyn. I must go in.There!—that's the stage coming down hill.'
He went to tell the driver to set down his bag at the house by the bridge, and then he walked down the hill after the little rumbling carriage, his hands thrust into the pockets of his blue flannel coat.
'She's not going to marry him!—I'll bet anything she's not! She's a girl of the right sort—she's a brick, she is!'—he said to himself in a miserable, a savage exultation, kicking the stones of the road furiously down hill, after the disappearing diligence. 'So that's how a woman looks when her heart's broken!—Oh! my God—Eleanor!—my poor, poor Eleanor!'
And before he knew what had happened to him, the young fellow found himself sitting in the darkness by the roadside, grappling with honest tears, that astonished and scandalised himself.
* * * * *
Next day he was still more bewildered by the position of affairs. Eleanor was apparently so much better that he was disposed to throw scorn on his own burst of grief under the starlight. That was the first impression. Then she was apparently in Manisty's charge. Manisty sat with her, strolled with her, read to her from morning till night. Never had their relations been more intimate, more affectionate. That was the second impression.
Nevertheless, that some great change had taken place—above all in Eleanor—became abundantly evident to the young man's quickened perception, before another twenty-four hours had passed away. And with this new sense returned the sense of irreparable tragedy. Eleanor stood alone—aloof from them all. The more unremitting, the more delicate was Manisty's care, the more tender was Lucy's devotion, the more plainly was Brooklyn aware of a pathetic, a mysterious isolation which seemed already to bring the chill of death into their little company.
The boy's pain flowed back upon him, ten-fold augmented. For seven or eight years he had seen in Eleanor Burgoyne the woman of ideal distinction by whom he judged all other women. The notion of falling in love with her would have seemed to him ridiculous. But his wife, whenever he could indulge himself in such a luxury, must be like her. Meanwhile he was most naïvely, most boyishly devoted to her.
The sight of her now, environed as it were by the new and awful possibilities which her state suggested, was a touch upon the young man's nature, which seemed to throw all its energies into a fiery fusion,—concentrating them upon a changed and poignant affection, which rapidly absorbed his whole being. His pity for her was almost intolerable, his bitterness towards Manisty almost beyond his control. All very well for him now to be the guardian of her decline! Whatever might be the truth about the American girl, it was plain enough that while she could still reckon on the hopes and chances of the living, Eleanor had wasted her heart and powers on an egotist, only to reap ingratitude, and the deadly fruit of 'benefits forgot.'
What chafed him most was that he had so little time with her; that Manisty was always there. At last, two days after his arrival, he got an hour to himself while Manisty and Father Benecke were walking, and Lucy was with the Contessa.
He began to question her eagerly as to the future. With whom was she to pass the remainder of the year—and where?
'With my father and Aunt Pattie of course,' said Eleanor, smiling. 'It will be Scotland I suppose till November—then London.'
He was silent for a few moments, the colour flooding his smooth fair face. Then he took her hand firmly, and with words and gestures that became him well, he solemnly asked her to marry him. He was not fit to tie her shoes; but he could take care of her; he could be her courier, her travelling companion, her nurse, her slave. He implored her to listen to him. What was her father to her—he asked her plainly—when had he ever considered her, as she should be considered? Let her only trust herself to him. Never, never should she repent that she had done him such an inconceivable honour. Hang the diplomatic service! He had some money; with her own it would be enough. He would take her to Egypt or the Cape. That would revive her.
Eleanor heard him very calmly.
'You dear, dear boy!' she said, when he paused for lack of breath. 'You remind me of that pretty story—don't you remember?—only it was the other way about—of Lord Giffard and Lady Dufferin. He was dying—and she married him—that she might be with him to the end. That's right—for the woman. It's her natural part to be the nurse. Do you think I'm going to letyouruin your career to come and nurse me? Oh! you foolish Reggie!'
But he implored her; and after a while she grew restless.
'There's only one thing in the world you can do for me!—' she said at last, pushing him away from her in her agitation.
Then reaching out from her sofa, she opened a drawer in a little table beside her, and took out a double photograph-case, folded together. She opened it and held it out to him.
'There!—help me bring those two together, Reggie—and I'll give you even more of my heart than I do now!'
He stared, open-mouthed and silent, at the portraits, at the delicate, illumined face.
'Come here'—she said, drawing him back towards her. 'Come and let us talk.'
* * * * *
Meanwhile Manisty and Father Benecke were climbing the long hill, on the return from their walk. There had been no full confidence between these two. Manisty's pride would not allow it. There was too sharp humiliation at present in the thought of that assurance with which he had spoken to Benecke by the river-side.
He chose, therefore, when they were alone, rather to talk to the priest of his own affairs, of his probable acceptance of the Old Catholic offers which had been made him. Benecke did not resent the perfunctory manner of his talk, the half-mind that he gave to it. The priest's shrewd humility made no claims. He understood perfectly that the catastrophe of his own life could have no vital interest for a man absorbed as Manisty was then absorbed. He submitted to its being made a topic, apasse-temps.
Moreover, he forgave, he had always forgiven Manisty's dominant attitude towards the forces which had trampled on himself. Often he had felt himself the shipwrecked sailor sinking in the waves, while Manisty as the cool spectator was hobnobbing with the wreckers on the shore. But nothing of this affected his love for the man. He loved him as Vanbrugh Neal had loved him; because of a certain charm, a certain indestructible youth and irresponsibility at the very heart of him, which redeemed half his errors.
'Ah! my dear friend,' Manisty was saying as they neared the top of the hill—with his largest and easiest gesture; 'of course you must go to Bonn; you must do what they want you to do. The Old Catholics will make a great deal of you. It might have been much worse.'
'They are very kind. But one transplants badly at sixty-six,' said the priest mildly, thinking perhaps of his little home in the street of his Bavarian town, of the pupils he should see no more, of the old sister who had deserted him.
'Yourbook has been the success,' said Manisty, impatiently. 'For you said what you meant to say—you hit your mark. As for me—well, never mind! I came out in too hot a temper; the men I saw first were too plausible; the facts have been too many for me. No matter. It was an adventure like any other. I don't regret it! In itself, it gave one some exciting moments, and,—if I mistook the battle here—I shall still fight the English battle all the better for the experience!Allons donc!—"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new!"'
The priest looked at his handsome reckless air, with a mixture of indulgence and repulsion. Manisty was 'an honourable man,' of many gifts. If certain incalculable elements in his character could be controlled, place and fame were probably before him. Compared with him, the priest realised profoundly his own meaner, obscurer destiny. The humble servant of a heavenlypatria, of an unfathomable truth, is no match for these intellectual soldiers of fortune. He does not judge them; he often feels towards them a strange forbearance. But he would sooner die than change parts!
* * * * *
As the convent came in sight, Manisty paused.
'You are going in to see her?'
The priest assented.
'Then I will come up later.'
They parted, and Father Benecke entered the convent alone.
Five days more! Would anything happen—or nothing? Manisty's wounded vanity held him at arm's length; Miss Foster could not forgive him. But the priest knew Eleanor's heart; and what else he did not know he divined. All rested with the American girl, with the wounded tenderness, the upright independence of a nature, which, as the priest frankly confessed to himself, he did not understand.
He was not, indeed, without pricks of conscience with regard to her. Supposing that she ultimately yielded? It was he who would have precipitated the solution; he who would in truth have given her to Manisty. Might he not, in so doing, have succoured the one life only to risk the other? Were Manisty's the hands in which to place a personality so noble and so trusting as that of the young girl?
But these qualms did not last long. As we have seen he had an invincible tenderness for Manisty. And in his priestly view women were the adjuncts and helpers of men. Woman is born to trouble; and the risks that she must take grow with her. Why fret about the less or more? His own spiritual courage would not have shrunk from any burden that love might lay upon it. In his Christian stoicism—the man of the world might have called it a Christian insensibility—he answered for Lucy.
Why suppose that she would shrink, or ought to shrink? Eve's burden is anyway enormous; and the generous heart scorns a grudging foresight.
As to Mrs. Burgoyne—ah! there at least he might be sure that he had not dared in vain. While Lucy was steel to him, Eleanor not only forgave him, but was grateful to him with a frankness that only natures so pliant and so sweet have the gift to show. In a few hours, as it seemed to him, she had passed from fevered anguish into a state which held him often spellbound before her, so consonant was it to the mystical instincts of his own life. He thought of her with the tenderest reverence, the most sacred rejoicing. Through his intercourse with her, moreover, while he guided and sustained her, he had been fighting his own way back to the sure ground of spiritual hope and confidence. God had not withdrawn from him the divine message! He was about to step forth into the wilderness; but this light went with him.
On the stairs leading to Mrs. Burgoyne's rooms he met Reggie Brooklyn coming down. The young man's face was pale and strained. The priest asked him a question, but he ran past without an answer.
Eleanor was alone on theloggia. It was past eight o'clock, and the trees in the courtyard and along the road were alive with fire-flies. Overhead was the clear incomparable sky, faintly pricked with the first stars. Someone was singing 'Santa Lucia' in the distance; and there was the twanging of a guitar.
'Shall I go away?' he said, standing beside her. 'You wished me to come.But you are fatigued.'
She gave him her hand languidly.
'Don't go, Father. But let me rest a little.'
'Pay me no attention,' he said. 'I have my office.'
He took out his breviary, and there was silence.
After a while, when he could no longer see even the red letters of his little book and was trusting entirely to memory, Eleanor said, with a sudden clearness of voice,—
A strange thing happened to me to-day, Father. I thought I would tell you. For many many years I have been haunted by a kind of recurrent vision. I think it must have come, to begin with, from the influence of a clergyman—a very stern, imaginative, exacting man—who prepared me for confirmation. Suddenly I see the procession of the Cross; the Lord in front, with the Crown of Thorns dripping with blood; the thieves following; the crowd, the daughters of Jerusalem. Nothing but that—but always very vivid, the colours as bright as the colours of a Van Eyck—and bringing with it an extraordinary sense of misery and anguish—of everything that one wants to forget and refuse in life. The man to whom I trace it was a saint, but a forbidding one. He made me afraid of him; afraid of Christianity. I believed, but I never loved. And when his influence was withdrawn, I threw it all behind me, in a great hurry. But this impression remained—like a nightmare. I remember the day I was presented; there, in the midst of all the feathers and veils and coronets, was the vision,—and the tumult of ghastly and crushing thoughts that spread from it. I remember hating Christianity that day; and its influence in the world.
'Last night, just before the dawn, I looked out; and there was the vision again, sweeping over the forests, and up into the clouds that hung over Monte Amiata. And I hated it no more. There was no accompanying horror. It seemed to me as natural as the woods; as the just-kindling light. And my own soul seemed to be rapt into the procession—the dim and endless procession of all times and nations—and to pass away with it,—I knew not where….
Her voice fell softly, to a note of dream.
'That was an omen,' he said, after a pause, 'an omen of peace.'
'I don't know,—but it soothed! As to what may betrue, Father,—you can't be certain any more than I! But at least our dreams are true—tous.'… 'We make the heaven we hope indeed our home! All to the good if we wake up in it after all! If not, the dream will have had its own use here. Why should we fight so with our ignorance? The point is, as to thequalityof our dreams! The quality of mine was once all dark—all misery. Now, there is a change,—like the change from London drizzle and rain to the clearness of this sky, which gives beauty to everything beneath it. But, for me, it is not the first time—no, not the first—'
The words were no longer audible, her hands pressed against each other, and he traced that sudden rigidity in her dim face which meant that she was defending herself against emotion.
'It is all true, my friend,' he said, bending over her,—'the gospel ofChrist. You would be happier if you could accept it simply.'
She opened her eyes, smiling, but she did not reply. She was always eager that he should read and talk to her, and she rarely argued. But he never felt that intellectually he had much hold upon her. Her mind seemed to him to be moving elusively in a sphere remote and characteristic, where he could seldom follow.Anima naturaliter Christiana; yet with a most stoic readiness to face the great uncertainties, the least flattering possibilities of existence: so she often appeared to him.
Presently she dragged herself higher in her chair to look at the moon rising above the eastern mass of the convent.
'It all gives me such extraordinary pleasure!' she said, as though in wonder—'The moon—the fire-flies—those beautiful woods—your kindness—Lucy in her white dress, when I see her there at the door. I know how short it must be; and a few weeks ago I enjoyed nothing. What mystery are we part of?—that moves and changes without our will. I was much touched, Father, by all you said to me that great, great day; but I was not conscious of yielding to you; nor afterwards. Then, one night, I went to sleep in one mind; I woke up in another. The "grace of God," you think?—or the natural welling back of the river, little by little, to its natural bed? After all I never wilfully hurt or defied anybody before—that I can remember. But what are "grace" and "nature" more than words? There is a Life,—which our life perpetually touches and guesses at—like a child fingering a closed room in the dark. What else do we know?'
'We know a great deal more,' he said firmly. 'But I don't want to weary you by talking.'
'You don't weary me. Ah!'—her voice leapt—'whatistrue—is the "dying to live" of Christianity. One moment, you have the weight of the world upon you; the next, as it were, you dispose of the world and all in it. Just an act of the will!—and the thing verifies itself like any chemical experiment. Let me go on—go on!' she said, with mystical intensity. 'If the clue is anywhere it is there,—so far my mind goes with you. Other races perceive it through other forms. But Christ offered it to us.'
'My dear friend,' said the priest tenderly—'He offers usHimself.'
She smiled, most brightly.
'Don't quarrel with me—with my poor words. He is there—there!'—she said under her breath.
And he saw the motion of her white fingers towards her breast.
Afterwards he sat beside her for some time in silence, thinking of the great world of Rome, and of his long conflict there.
Form after form appeared to him of those men, stupid or acute, holy or worldly, learned or ignorant, who at the heart of Catholicism are engaged in that amazing struggle with knowledge which perhaps represents the only condition under which knowledge—the awful and irresistible—can in the long run safely incorporate itself with the dense mass of human life. He thought of scholar after scholar crushed by the most incompetent of judges; this man silenced by a great post, that man by exile, one through the best of his nature, another through the worst. He saw himself sitting side by side with one of the most-eminent theologians of the Roman Church; he recalled the little man, black-haired, lively, corpulent, a trifle underhung, with a pleasant lisp and a merry eye; he remembered the incredible conversation, the sense of difficulty and shame under which he had argued some of the common-places of biology and primitive history, as educated Europe understands them; the half patronising, half impatient glibness of the other.—
'Oh! you know better, my son, than I how to argue these things; you are more learned, of course. But it is only a matter for the Catechism after all. Obey, my friend, obey!—there is no more to be said.'
And his own voice—tremulous:
'I would obey if I could. But unhappy as I am, to betray truths that are as evident to me as the sun in heaven would make me still unhappier. The fate that threatens me is frightful.Aber ich kann nicht anders. The truth holds me in a vice.'—
'Let me give you a piece of counsel. You sit too close to your books.You read and read,—you spin yourself into your own views like a cocoon.Travel—hear what others say—above all, go into retreat! No one need know.It would do you much good.'
'Eminence, I don't only study; I pray and meditate; I take pains to hear all that my opponents say. But my heart stands firm.'
'My son, the tribunal of the Pope is the tribunal of Christ. You are judged; submit! If not, I am sorry—regret deeply—but the consequence is certain.'
And then his own voice, in its last wrestle—
'The penalty that approaches me appears to me more terrible the nearer it comes. Like the Preacher—"I have judged him happiest who is not yet born, nor doth he see the ills that are done under the sun." Eminence, give me yet a little time.'
'A fortnight—gladly. But that is the utmost limit. My son, make the "sacrificium intellectus!"—and make it willingly.'
Ah!—and then the yielding, and the treachery, and the last blind stroke for truth!—
What was it which had undone him—which was now strangling the mental and moral life of half Christendom!
Was it thecertaintyof the Roman Church; that conception of life which stakes the all of life upon the carnal and outward; upon a date, an authorship, a miracle, an event?
Perhaps his own certainty, at bottom, had not been so very different.
But here, beneath his eyes, in this dying woman, was another certainty; erect amid all confusion; a certainty of the spirit.
And looking along the future, he saw the battle of the certainties, traditional, scientific, moral, ever more defined; and believed, like all the rest of us, in that particular victory, for which he hoped!
* * * * *
Late that night, when all their visitors were gone, Eleanor showed unusual animation. She left her sofa; she walked up and down their little sitting-room, giving directions to Marie about the journey home; and at last she informed them with a gaiety that made mock of their opposition that she had made all arrangements to start very early the following morning to visit the doctor in Orvieto who had attended her in June. Lucy protested and implored, but soon found that everything was settled, and Eleanor was determined. She was to go alone with Marie, in the Contessa's carriage, starting almost with the dawn so as to avoid the heat: to spend the hot noon under shelter at Orvieto; and to return in the evening. Lucy pressed at least to go with her. So it appeared had the Contessa. But Eleanor would have neither. 'I drive most days, and it does me no harm,' she said, almost with temper. 'Do let me alone!'
When she returned, Manisty was lounging under the trees of the courtyard waiting for her. He had spent a dull and purposeless day, which for a man of his character and in his predicament had been hard to bear. His patience was ebbing; his disappointment and despair were fast getting beyond control. All this Eleanor saw in his face as she dismounted.
Lucy, who had been watching for her all the afternoon, was at the moment for some reason or other with Reggie in the village.
Eleanor, with her hand on Marie's arm, tottered across the courtyard. At the convent door her strength failed her. She turned to Manisty.
'I can't walk up these stairs. Do you think you could carry me? I am very light.'
Struck with sudden emotion he threw his arms round her. She yielded like a tired child. He, who had instinctively prepared himself for a certain weight, was aghast at the ease with which he lifted her. Her head, in its pretty black hat, fell against his breast. Her eyes closed. He wondered if she had fainted.
He carried her to her room, and laid her on the sofa there. Then he saw that she had not fainted, and that her eyes followed him. As he was about to leave her to Marie, who was moving about in Lucy's room next door, she touched him on the arm.
'You may speak again—to-morrow,' she said, nodding at him with a friendly smile.
His face in its sudden flash of animation reflected the permission. He pressed her hand tenderly.
'Was your doctor useful to you?'
'Oh yes; it is hard to think as much of a prescription in Italian as inEnglish—but that's one's insular way.'
'He thought you no worse?'
'Why should one believe him if he did?' she said evasively. 'No one knows as much as oneself. Ah! there is Lucy. I think you must bid us good-night. I am too tired for talking.'
As he left the room Eleanor settled down happily on her pillow.
'The first and only time!' she thought. 'My heart on his—my arms round his neck. There must be impressions that outlast all others. I shall manage to put them all away at the end—but that.'
When Lucy came in, she declared she was not very much exhausted. As to the doctor she was silent.
But that night, when Lucy had been for some time in bed, and was still sleepless with anxiety and sorrow, the door opened and Eleanor appeared. She was in her usual white wrapper, and her fair hair, now much touched with grey, was loose on her shoulders.
'Oh! can I do anything?' cried Lucy, starting up.
Eleanor came up to her, laid a hand on her shoulder, bade her 'be still,' and brought a chair for herself. She had put down her candle on a table which stood near, and Lucy could see the sombre agitation of her face.
'How long?' she said, bending over the girl—'how long are you going to break my heart and his?'
The words were spoken with a violence which convulsed her whole frail form. Lucy sprang up, and tried to throw her arms round her. But Eleanor shook her off.
'No—no! Let us have it out. Do you see?' She let the wrapper slip from her shoulders. She showed the dark hollows under the wasted collar-bones, the knife-like shoulders, the absolute disappearance of all that had once made the difference between grace and emaciation. She held up her hands before the girl's terrified eyes. The skin was still white and delicate, otherwise they were the hands of a skeleton.
'You can look atthat,' she said fiercely, under her breath—'and then insult me by refusing to marry the man you love, because you choose to remember that I was once in love with him! It is an outrage to associate such thoughts with me—as though one should make a rival of someone in her shroud. It hurts and tortures me every hour to know that you have such notions in your mind. It holds me back from peace—it chains me down to the flesh, and to earth.'
'Eleanor!' cried the girl in entreaty, catching at her hands. But Eleanor stood firm.
'Tell me,' she said peremptorily—'answer me truly, as one must answer people in my state—you do love him? If I had not been here—if I had not stood in your way—you would have allowed him his chance—you would have married him?
Lucy bent her head upon her knees, forcing herself to composure.
'How can I answer that? I can never think of him, except as having brought pain to you.'
'Yes, dear, you can,' cried Eleanor, throwing herself on her knees and folding the girl in her arms. 'You can! It is no fault of his that I am like this—none—none! The doctor told me this afternoon that the respite last year was only apparent. The mischief has always been there—the end quite certain. All my dreams and disappointments and foolish woman's notions have vanished from me like smoke. There isn't one of them left. What should a woman in my condition do with such things? But whatisleft is love—for you and him. Oh! not the old love,' she said impatiently—persuading, haranguing herself no less than Lucy—'not an ounce of it! But a love that suffers so—in his suffering and yours! A love that won't let me rest; that is killing me before the time!'
She began to walk wildly up and down. Lucy sprang up, threw on some clothes, and gradually persuaded her to go back to her own room. When she was in bed again, utterly exhausted, Lucy's face—bathed in tears—approached hers:
'Tell me what to do. Have I ever refused you anything?'
* * * * *
The morning broke pure and radiant over the village and the forest. The great slopes of wood were in a deep and misty shadow; the river, shrunk to a thread again, scarcely chattered with its stones. A fresh wind wandered through the trees and over the new-reaped fields.
The Angelus had been rung long ago. There was the bell beginning for Mass. Lucy slipped out into a cool world, already alive with all the primal labours. The children and the mothers and the dogs were up; the peasants among the vines; the men with their peaked hats, the women shrouded from the sun under the heavy folds of their cotton head-gear; turned and smiled as she passed by. They liked the Signorina, and they were accustomed to her early walks.
On the hill she met Father Benecke coming up to Mass. Her cheek reddened, and she stopped to speak to him.
'You are out early, Mademoiselle?'
'It is the only time to walk.'
'Ah! yes—you are right.'
At which a sudden thought made the priest start. He looked down. But this time, he at least was innocent!
'You are coming in to tea with us this afternoon, Father?'
'If Mademoiselle does me the honour to invite me.'
The girl laughed.
'We shall expect you.'
Then she gave him her hand—a shy yet kind look from her beautiful eyes, and went her way. She had forgiven him, and the priest walked on with a cheered mind.
Meanwhile Lucy pushed her way into the fastnesses of the Sassetto. In its very heart she found a green-overgrown spot where the rocks made a sort of natural chair; one great block leaning forward overhead; a flat seat, and mossy arms on either side.
Here she seated herself. The winding path ran above her head. She could be perceived from it, but at this hour what fear of passers by?
She gave herself up to the rush of memory and fear.
She had travelled far in these four months!
'Is this what it always means?—coming to Europe?' she asked herself with a laugh that was not gay, while her fingers pulled at a tuft of hart's-tongue that grew in a crevice beside her.
And then in a flash she looked on into her destiny. She thought of Manisty with a yearning, passionate heart, and yet with a kind of terror; of the rich, incalculable, undisciplined nature, with all its capricious and self-willed power, its fastidious demands, its practical weakness; the man's brilliance and his folly. She envisaged herself laden with the responsibility of being his wife; and it seemed to her beyond her strength. One moment he appeared to her so much above and beyond her that it was ridiculous he should stoop to her. The next she felt, as it were, the weight of his life upon her hands, and told herself that she could not bear it.