Eleanor (21 page)

‘What do you suppose she is coming here for?’

‘Very likely to get me to do something for this man. She won’t be his wife, but she likes to be his Providence: I shall promise anything, in return for her going quickly back to Venice—or Switzerland—where she often spends the summer. So long as she and Miss Foster are under one roof, I shall not have a moment free from anxiety.’

Eleanor sank back in her chair. She was silent; but her eye betrayed the bitter animation of the thoughts passing behind them, thoughts evoked not so much by what Manisty had said, as by what he had
not
said. All alarm, all consideration to be concentrated on one point?—nothing, and no one else, to matter?

But again she fought down the rising agony, refused to be mastered by it, or to believe her own terrors. Another wave of feeling rose. It was so natural to her to love and help him!

‘Well, of course I shall do what you tell me! I generally do—don’t I? What are your commands?’

He brought his head nearer to hers, his brilliant eyes bent upon her intently:

‘Never let her be alone with Miss Foster! Watch her. If you see any sign of persecution—if you can’t check it—let me know at once. I shall keep Alice in play of course. One day we can send Miss Foster into Rome—perhaps two. Ah! hush!—here she comes!’

Eleanor looked round. Lucy had just appeared in the cool darkness of the avenue. She walked slowly and with a languid grace, trailing her white skirts. The shy rusticity, the frank robustness of her earlier aspect were now either gone, or temporarily merged in something more exquisite and more appealing. Her youth too had never been so apparent. She had been too strong too self-reliant. The touch of physical delicacy seemed to have brought back the child.

Then, turning back to her companion, Eleanor saw the sudden softness in Manisty’s face—the alert expectancy of his attitude.

‘What a wonderful oval of the head and cheek!’ he said under his breath, half to himself, half to her. ‘Do you know, Eleanor, what she reminds me of?’

Eleanor shook her head.

‘Of that little head—little face rather—that I gave you at Nemi. Don’t you see it?’

‘I always said she was like your Greek bust,’ said Eleanor slowly.

‘Ah, that was in her first archaic stage. But now that she’s more at ease with us—you see?—there’s the purity of line just the same—but subtilised—humanised—somehow! It’s the change from marble to terra-cotta, isn’t it?’

His fancy pleased him, and his smile turned to hers for sympathy. Then, springing up, he went to meet Lucy.

‘Oh, there can be nothing in his mind! He could not speak—look—smile—like that to
me
,’ thought Eleanor with passionate relief.

Then as they approached, she rose, and with kind solicitude forced Lucy to take her chair, on the plea that she herself was going back to the villa.

Lucy touched her hand with timid gratitude. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to me,’ she said, half wistful, half smiling; ‘I never stayed in bed to breakfast in my life before. At Greyridge, they’d think I had gone out of my mind.’

Eleanor inquired if it was an invariable sign of lunacy in America to take your breakfast in bed. Lucy couldn’t say. All she knew was that nobody ever took it so in Greyridge, Vermont, unless they were on the point of death.

‘I should never be any good, any more,’ she said, with an energy that brought the red back to her cheeks,—‘if they were to spoil me at home, as you spoil me here.’

Eleanor waved her hand, smiled, and went her way.

As she moved further and further away from them down the long avenue, she saw them all the time, though she never once looked back—saw the eager inquiries of the man, the modest responsiveness of the girl. She was leaving them to themselves—at the bidding of her own pride—and they had the May morning before them. According to a telegram just received, Alice Manisty was not expected till after lunch.

Meanwhile Manisty was talking of his sister to Lucy, With coolness, and as much frankness as he thought necessary.

‘She is very odd—and very depressing. She is now very little with us. There is no company she likes as well as her own. But in early days, she and I were great friends. We were brought up in an old Yorkshire house together, and a queer pair we were. I was never sent to school, and I got the better of most of my tutors. Alice was unmanageable too, and we spent most of our time rambling and reading as we pleased. Both of us dreamed awake half our time. I had shooting and fishing to take me out of myself; but Alice, after my mother’s death, lived with her own fancies and got less like other people every day. There was a sort of garden house in the park,—a lonely, overgrown kind of place. We put our books there, and used practically to live there for weeks together. That was just after I came into the place, before I went abroad. Alice was sixteen. I can see her now sitting in the doorway of the little house, hour after hour, staring into the woods like a somnambulist, one arm behind her head. One day I said to her: “Alice, what are you thinking of?” “Myself!” she said. So then I laughed at her, and teased her. And she answered quite quietly, “I know it is a pity—but I can’t help it.”

Lucy’s eyes were wide with wonder. ‘But you ought to have given her something to do—or to learn: couldn’t she have gone to school, or found some friends?’

‘Oh! I dare say I ought to have done a thousand things,’ said Manisty impatiently. ‘I was never a model brother, or a model anything! I grew up for myself and by myself, and I supposed Alice would do the same. You disapprove?’

He turned his sharp, compelling eyes upon her, so that Lucy flinched a little. ‘I shouldn’t dare,’ she said laughing. ‘I don’t know enough about it. But it’s plain, isn’t it, that girls of sixteen shouldn’t sit on doorsteps and think about themselves?’

‘What did you think about at sixteen?’

Her look changed.

‘I had mother then,’—she said simply.

‘Ah! then—I’m afraid you’ve no right to sit in judgment upon us. Alice and I had no mother—no one but ourselves. Of course all our relations and friends disapproved of us. But that somehow has never made much difference to either of us. Does it make much difference to you? Do you mind if people praise or blame you? What does it matter what anybody thinks? Who can know anything about you but yourself?—Eh?’

He poured out his questions in a hurry, one tumbling over the other. And he had already begun to bite the inevitable stalk of grass. Lucy as usual was conscious both of intimidation and attraction—she felt him at once absurd and magnetic.

‘I’m sure we’re meant to care what people think,’ she said, with spirit. ‘It helps us. It keeps us straight.’

His eyes flashed.

‘You think so? Then we disagree entirely—absolutely—and
in toto
! I don’t want to be approved—outside my literary work any way—I want to be happy. It never enters my head to judge other people—why should they judge me?’

‘But—but’—Then she laughed out, remembering his book, and his political escapade, ‘Aren’t you
always
judging other people?’

‘Fighting them—yes! That’s another matter. But I don’t give myself superior airs. I don’t judge—I just love—and hate.’

Her attention followed the bronzed expressive face, so bold in outline, so delicate in detail, with a growing fascination.

‘It seems to me you hate more than you love.’

He considered it.

‘Quite possible. It isn’t an engaging world. But I don’t hate readily—I hate slowly and by degrees. If anybody offends me, for instance, at first I hardly feel it,—it doesn’t seem to matter at all. Then it grows in my mind gradually, it becomes a weight—a burning fire—and drives everything else out. I hate the men, for instance, that I hated last year in England, much worse now than I did then!’

She bit her lip, but could not help the broadening smile, to which his own responded.

‘Do you take any interest, Miss Foster, in what happened to me last year?’

‘I often wonder whether you regret it,’ she said, rather shyly. ‘Wasn’t it—a great pity?’

‘Not at all,’ he said peremptorily; ‘I shall recover all I let slip.’

She did not reply. But the smile still trembled on her lips, while she copied his favourite trick in stripping the leaves from a spray of box.

‘You don’t believe that?’

‘Does one ever recover all one lets slip—especially in politics?’

‘Goodness—you are a pessimist! Why should one not recover it?’

Her charming mouth curved still more gaily.

‘I have often heard my uncle say that the man who “resigns” is lost.’

‘Ah!—never regret—never resign—never apologise? We know that creed. Your uncle must be a man of trenchant opinions. Do you agree with him?’

She tried to be serious.

‘I suppose one should count the cost before—’

‘Before one joins a ministry? Yes, that’s a fair stroke. I wish to heaven I had never joined it. But when I began to think that this particular Ministry was taking English society to perdition, it was as well—wasn’t it?—that I should leave it?’

Her face suddenly calmed itself to a sweet gravity.

‘Oh yes—yes!—if it was as bad as that.’

‘I’m not likely to confess, anyway, that it wasn’t as bad as that!—But I will confess that I generally incline to hate my own side,—and to love my adversaries. English Liberals moreover hold the ridiculous opinion that the world is to be governed by intelligence. I couldn’t have believed it of any sane men. When I discovered it, I left them. My foreign experience had given the lie to all that. And when I left them, the temptation to throw a paradox in their faces was irresistible.’

She said nothing, but her expression spoke for her.

‘You think me mad?’

She turned aside—dumb—plucking at a root of cyclamen beside her.

‘Insincere?’

‘No. But you like to startle people—to make them talk about you!’

Her eyes were visible again; and he perceived at once her courage and her diffidence.

‘Perhaps! English political life runs so smooth, that to throw in a stone and make a splash was amusing.’

‘But was it fair?’ she said, flushing.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Other people were in earnest; and you—’

‘Were not? Charge home. I am prepared,’ he said, smiling.

‘You talk now—as though you were a Catholic—and you are not, you don’t believe,’ she said suddenly, in a deep, low voice.

He looked at her for a moment in a smiling silence. His lips were ready to launch a reckless sentence or two; but they refrained. Her attitude meanwhile betrayed an unconscious dread—like a child that fears a blow.

‘You charming saint!’—he thought; surprised at his own feeling of pleasure. Pleasure in what?—in the fact that however she might judge his opinions, she was clearly interested in the holder of them?

‘What does one’s own point of view matter?’ he said gently. ‘I believe what I can,—and as long as I can—sometimes for a whole twenty-four hours! Then a big doubt comes along, and sends me floundering. But that has nothing to do with it. The case is quite simple. The world can’t get on without morals; and Catholicism, Anglicanism too—the religions of authority in short—are the great guardians of morals. They are the binding forces—the forces making for solidarity and continuity. Your cocksure, peering Protestant is the dissolvent—the force making for ruin. What’s his private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he’ll make everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me—it is perfectly open to you to say’—he looked away from her, half-forgetting her, addressing with animation and pugnacity an imaginary opponent—‘what do morals matter?—how do you know that the present moral judgments of the world represent any ultimate truth? Ah! well’—he shrugged his shoulders—‘I can’t follow you there. Black may be really white—and white black; but I’m not going to admit it. It would make me too much of a dupe. I take my stand on morals. And if you give me morals, you must give me the only force that can guarantee them,—Catholicism, more or less:—and dogma,—and ritual,—and superstition,—and all the foolish ineffable things that bind mankind together, and send them to “face the music” in this world and the next!’

She sat silent, with twitching lips, excited, yet passionately scornful and antagonistic. Thoughts of her home, of that Puritan piety amid which she had been brought up, flashed thick and fast through her mind. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands, to hide a fit of laughter that had overtaken her.

‘All that amuses you?’—said Manisty, breathing a little faster.

‘No—oh! no. But—I was thinking of my uncle—of the people in our village at home. What you said of Protestants seemed to me, all at once, so odd—so ridiculous!’

‘Did it? Tell me then about the people in your valley at home.’

And turning on his elbows beside her, he put her through a catechism as to her village, her uncle, her friends. She resisted a little, for the brusque assurance of his tone still sounded oddly in her American ear. But he was not easy to resist; and when she had yielded she soon discovered that to talk to him was a no less breathless and absorbing business than to listen to him. He pounced on the new, the characteristic, the local; he drew out of her what he wanted to know; he made her see her own trees and fields, the figures of her home, with new sharpness, so quick, so dramatic, so voracious, one might almost say, were his own perceptions.

Especially did he make her tell him of the New England winter; of the long pauses of its snow-bound life; its whirling winds and drifts; its snapping, crackling frosts; the lonely farms, and the deep sleigh-tracks amid the white wilderness, that still in the winter silence bind these homesteads to each other and the nation; the strange gleams of moonrise and sunset on the cold hills; the strong dark armies of the pines; the grace of the stripped birches. Above all, must she talk to him of the people in these farms, the frugal, or silent, or brooding people of the hills; honourable, hard, knotted, prejudiced, believing folk, whose lives and fates, whose spiritual visions and madnesses, were entwined with her own young memories and deepest affections.