Eleanor (24 page)

Her nerves were not in their normal state; and as she sat there in the cool, dark, vague, paralysing fears swept across her, of which she was ashamed, One minute she longed to go back to them, and help them. The next, she recognised that the best help she could give was to stay where she was. She saw very well that she was a responsibility and a care to them.

‘If it lasts, I must go away’—she said to herself firmly. ‘Certainly I must go.’

But at the thought of going, the tears came into her eyes. At most, there was little more than a fortnight before the party broke up, and she went with Aunt Pattie to Vallombrosa.

She took up the book upon her knee. It was a fine poem in Roman dialect, on the immortal retreat of Garibaldi after ‘49. But after a few lines, she let it drop again, listlessly. One of the motives which had entered into her reading of these things—a constant heat of antagonism and of protest—seemed to have gone out of her.

Meanwhile Aunt Pattie, Eleanor and Manisty held conclave in Aunt Pattie’s sitting-room, which was a little room at the south-western corner of the apartment. It opened out of the salon, and overlooked the Campagna.

On the north-eastern side, Dalgetty, Alice Manisty’s maid, sat sewing in a passage-room, which commanded the entrance to the glass passage—her own door—the door of the ante-room that Manisty had spoken of to Eleanor, and close beside her a third door—which was half open—communicating with Manisty’s library. The glass passage, or conservatory, led directly to the staircase and the garden, past the French windows of the library.

Dalgetty was a person of middle age, a strongly made Scotchwoman with a high forehead and fashionable rolls of sandy hair. Her face was thin and freckled, and one might have questioned whether its expression was shrewd, or self-important. She was clearly thinking of other matters than needlework. Her eyes travelled constantly to one or other of the doors in sight; and her lips had the pinched tension that shows preoccupation.

Her mind indeed harboured a good many disagreeable thoughts. In the first place she was pondering the qualities of a certain drug lately recommended as a sedative to her mistress. It seemed to Dalgetty that its effect had not been good, but evil; or rather that it acted capriciously, exciting as often as it soothed. Yet Miss Alice would take it. On coming to her room after her interview with her brother, she had fallen first into a long fit of weeping, and then, after much restless pacing to and fro, she had put her hands to her head in a kind of despair, and had bidden Dalgetty give her the new medicine. ‘I must lie down and sleep—_sleep!_’—she had said, ‘or—’

And then she had paused, looking at Dalgetty with an aspect so piteous and wild that the maid’s heart had quaked within her. Nevertheless she had tried to keep the new medicine away from her mistress. But Miss Alice had shown such uncontrollable anger on being crossed, that there was nothing for it but to yield. And as all was quiet in her room, Dalgetty hoped that this time the medicine would prove to be a friend, and not a foe, and that the poor lady would wake up calmer and less distraught.

She was certainly worse—much worse. The maid guessed at Mr. Manisty’s opinion; she divined the approach of some important step. Very likely she would soon be separated from her mistress; and the thought depressed her. Not only because she had an affection for her poor charge; but also because she was a rather lazy and self-indulgent woman. Miss Alice had been very trying certainly; but she was not exacting in the way of late hours and needlework; she had plenty of money, and she liked moving about. All these qualities suited the tastes of the maid, who knew that she would not easily obtain another post so much to her mind.

The electric bell on the outer landing rang. Alfredo admitted the caller, and Dalgetty presently perceived a tall priest standing in the library. He was an old man with beautiful blue eyes, and he seemed to Dalgetty to have a nervous timid air.

Alfredo had gone to ask Mr. Manisty whether he could receive this gentleman—and meanwhile the stranger stood there twisting his long bony hands, and glancing about him with the shyness of a bird.

Presently Alfredo came back, and conducted the priest to the salon.

He had not been gone five minutes before Mr. Manisty appeared. He came through the library, and stood in the doorway of the passage room where she sat.

‘All right, Dalgetty?’ he said, stooping to her, and speaking in a whisper.

‘I think and hope she’s asleep, sir,’ said the maid, in his ear—‘I have heard nothing this half-hour.’

Manisty looked relieved, repeated his injunctions to be watchful, and went back to the salon. Dalgetty presently heard his voice in the distance, mingling with those of the priest and Mrs. Burgoyne.

Now she had nothing left to amuse her but the view through the glass passage to the balcony and the lake. It was hot, and she was tired of her sewing. The balcony however was in deep shade, and a breath of cool air came up from the lake. Dalgetty could not resist it. She glanced at her mistress’s door and listened a moment. All silence.

She put down her work and slipped through the glass passage on to the broad stone balcony.

There her ears were suddenly greeted with a sound of riotous shouting and singing on the road, and Alfredo ran out from the dining-room to join her.

‘
Festa!
‘—he said, nodding to her in a kindly patronage, and speaking as he might have spoken to a child—’
Festa!
’

And Dalgetty began to see a number of carts adorned with green boughs and filled with singing people, coming along the road. Each cart had a band of girls dressed alike—red, white, orange, blue, and so forth.

Alfredo endeavoured to explain that these were Romans who after visiting the church of the ‘Madonna del Divino Amore’ in the plain were now bound to an evening of merriment at Albano. According to him it was not so much a case of ‘divino amore’ as of ‘amore di vino,’ and he was very anxious that the English maid should understand his pun. She laughed—pretended—showed off her few words of Italian. She thought Alfredo a funny, handsome little man, a sort of toy wound up, of which she could not understand the works. But after all he was a man; and the time slipped by.

After ten minutes, she remembered her duties with a start, and hastily crossing the glass passage, she returned to her post. All was just as she had left it. She listened at Miss Alice’s door. Not a sound was to be heard; and she resumed her sewing.

Meanwhile Manisty and Eleanor were busy with Father Benecke. The poor priest had come full of a painful emotion, which broke its bounds as soon as he had Manisty’s hand in his.

‘You got my letter?’ he said. ‘That told you my hopes were dead—that the sands for me were running out?—Ah! my kind friend—there is worse to tell you!’

He stood clinging unconsciously to Manisty’s hand, his eyes fixed upon the Englishman’s face.

‘I had submitted. The pressure upon me broke me down. I had given way. They brought me a message from the Holy Father which wrung my heart. Next week they were to publish the official withdrawal—”
librum reprobavit, et se laudabiliter subjecit
“—you know the formula? But meanwhile they asked more of me. His Eminence entreated of me a private letter that he might send it to the Holy Father. So I made a condition. I would write,—but they must promise, on their part, that nothing should be published beyond the formal submission,—that my letter should be for his eyes alone, and for the Pope. They promised,—oh! not in writing—I have nothing written!—so I wrote. I placed myself, like a son, in the hands of the Holy Father.—Now, this morning there is my letter—the whole of it—in the
Osservatore Romano
! To-morrow!—I came to tell you—I withdraw it. I withdraw my submission!’

He drew himself up, his blue eyes shining. Yet they were swollen with fatigue and sleeplessness, and over the whole man a blighting breath of age and pain had passed since the day in St. Peter’s.

Manisty looked at him in silence a moment. Then he said—

‘I’m sorry—heartily, heartily sorry!’

At this Eleanor, thinking that the two men would prefer to be alone, turned to leave the room. The priest perceived it.

‘Don’t leave us, madame, on my account. I have no secrets, and I know that you are acquainted with some at least of my poor history. But perhaps I am intruding; I am in your way?’

He looked round him in bewilderment. It was evident to Eleanor that he had come to Manisty in a condition almost as unconscious of outward surroundings as that of the sleep-walker. And she and Manisty, on their side, as they stood looking at him, lost the impression of the bodily man in the overwhelming impression of a wounded spirit, struggling with mortal hurt.

‘Come and sit down,’ she said to him gently, and she led him to a chair. Then she went into the next room, poured out and brought him a cup of coffee. He took it with an unsteady hand and put it down beside him untouched. Then he looked at Manisty and began in detail the story of all that had happened to him since the letter in which he had communicated to his English friend the certainty of his condemnation.

Nothing could have been more touching than his absorption in his own case; his entire unconsciousness of anything in Manisty’s mind that could conflict with it. Eleanor turning from his tragic simplicity to Manisty’s ill-concealed worry and impatience, pitied both. That poor Father Benecke should have brought his grief to Manisty, on this afternoon of all afternoons!

It had been impossible to refuse to see him. He had come a pilgrimage from Rome and could not be turned away. But she knew well that Manisty’s ear was listening all the time for every sound in the direction of his sister’s room; his anxieties indeed betrayed themselves in every restless movement as he sat with averted head—listening.

Presently he got up, and with a hurried ‘Excuse me an instant’—he left the room.

Father Benecke ceased to speak, his lips trembling. To find himself alone with Mrs. Burgoyne embarrassed him. He sat, folding his soutane upon his knee, answering in monosyllables to the questions that she put him. But her sympathy perhaps did more to help him unpack his heart than he knew; for when Manisty returned, he began to talk rapidly and well, a natural eloquence returning to him. He was a South German, but he spoke a fine literary English, of which the very stumbles and occasional naivetes had a peculiar charm; like the faults which reveal a pure spirit even more plainly than its virtues.

He reached his climax, in a flash of emotion—

‘My submission, you see—the bare fact of it—left my cause intact. It was the soldier falling by the wall. But my letter must necessarily be misunderstood—my letter betrays the cause. And for that I have no right. You understand? I thought of the Pope—the old man. They told me he was distressed—that the Holy Father had suffered—had lost sleep—through me! So I wrote out of my heart—like a son. And the paper this morning!—See—I have brought it you—the
Osservatore Romano
. It is insolent—brutal—but not to me! No, it is all honey to me! But to the truth—to our ideas.—No!—I cannot suffer it. I take it back!—I bear the consequences.’

And with trembling fingers, he took a draft letter from his pocket, and handed it, with the newspaper, to Manisty.

Manisty read the letter, and returned it, frowning.

‘Yes—you have been abominably treated—no doubt of that. But have you counted the cost? You know my point of view! It’s one episode, for me, in a world-wide struggle. Intellectually I am all with you—strategically, all with them. They can’t give way! The smallest breach lets in the flood. And then, chaos!’

‘But the flood is truth!’ said the old man, gazing at Manisty. There was a spot of red on each wasted cheek.

Manisty shrugged his shoulders, then dropped his eyes upon the ground, and sat pondering awhile in a moody silence. Eleanor looked at him in some astonishment. It was as though for the first time his habitual paradox hurt him in the wielding—or rather as though he shrank from using what was a conception of the intellect upon the flesh and blood before him. She had never yet seen him visited by a like compunction.

It was curious indeed to see that Father Benecke himself was not affected by Manisty’s attitude. From the beginning he had always instinctively appealed from the pamphleteer to the man. Manisty had been frank, brutal even. But notwithstanding, the sensitive yet strong intelligence of the priest had gone straight for some core of thought in the Englishman that it seemed only he divined. And it was clear that his own utter selflessness—his poetic and passionate detachment from all the objects of sense and ambition—made him a marvel to Manisty’s more turbid and ambiguous nature. There had been a mystical attraction between them from the first; so that Manisty, even when he was most pugnacious, had yet a filial air and way towards the old man.

Eleanor too had often felt the spell. Yet to-day there were both in herself and Manisty hidden forces of fever and unrest which made the pure idealism, the intellectual tragedy of the priest almost unbearable. Neither—for different and hidden reasons—could respond; and it was an infinite relief to both when the old man at last rose to take his leave.

They accompanied him through the library to the glass passage.

‘Keep me informed,’ said Manisty, wringing him by the hand; ‘and tell me if there is anything I can do.’

Eleanor said some parting words of sympathy. The priest bowed to her with a grave courtesy in reply.

‘It will be as God wills,’ he said gently; and then went his way in a sad abstraction.

Eleanor was left a moment alone. She put her hands over her heart, and pressed them there. ‘He suffers from such high things!’—she said to herself in a sudden passion of misery—‘and I?’

Manisty came hurrying back from the staircase, and crossed the library to the passage-room beyond. When he saw Dalgetty there, still peacefully sewing, his look of anxiety cleared again.

‘All right?’ he said to her.