Eleanor (30 page)

Then he paused, in a sudden chill of realisation. His thoughts might rove as they please. But Lucy Foster had given them little warrant. To all her growing spell upon him, there was added indeed the charm of difficulty foreseen, and delighted in. He was perfectly aware that he puzzled and attracted her. And he was perfectly aware also of his own power with women, often cynically aware of it. But he could not flatter himself that so far he had any hold over the senses or the heart of Lucy Foster. He thought of her eager praise of his Palestine letters—of the Nemi tale. She was franker, more enthusiastic than an English girl would have been—and at the same time more remote, infinitely more incalculable!

His mind filled with a delicious mingling of desire and doubt. He foresaw the sweet approach of new emotions,—of spells to make ‘the colours freshen on this threadbare world.’ All his life he had been an epicurean, in search of pleasures beyond the ken of the crowd. It was pleasure of this kind that beckoned to him now,—in the wooing, the conquering, the developing of Lucy.

A voice struck on his ear. It was Eleanor calling to Lucy from the salon.

Ah!—Eleanor? A rush of feeling—half generous, half audacious—came upon him. He knew that he had given her pain at Nemi. He had been a brute, an ungrateful brute! Women like Eleanor have very exalted and sensitive ideals of friendship. He understood that he had pulled down Eleanor’s ideal, that he had wounded her sorely. What did she expect of him? Not any of the things which the ignorant or vulgar bystander expected of him—that he was certain. But still her claim had wearied him; and he had brushed it aside. His sulkiness about the book had been odious, indefensible. And yet—perhaps from another point of view—it had not been a bad thing for either of them. It had broken through habits which had become, surely, an embarrassment to both.

But now, let him make amends; select fresh ground; and from it rebuild their friendship. His mind ran forward hazily to some bold confidence or other, some dramatic appeal to Eleanor for sympathy and help.

The affection between her and Miss Foster seemed to be growing closer. He thought of it uncomfortably, and with vague plannings of counter-strokes. It did not suit him—nay, it presented itself somehow as an obstacle in his path. For he had a half remorseful, half humorous feeling that Eleanor knew him too well.

‘Ah! my dear lady,’ said the Ambassador—‘how few things in this world one does to please oneself! This is one of them.’

Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador’s left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers, with a charming and paternal freedom.

‘Have you enjoyed yourself?—Have you lost your heart to Italy?’ said her host, stooping to her. He was amused to see the transformation in her, the pretty dress, the developed beauty.

‘I have been in fairy-land,’ said Lucy, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon him. ‘Nothing can ever be like it again.’

‘No—because one can never be twenty again,’ said the old man, sighing. ‘Twenty years hence you will wonder where the magic came from. Never mind—just now, anyway, the world’s your oyster.’

Then he looked at her a little more closely. And it seemed to him that, though she was handsomer, she was not so happy. He missed some of that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before, and there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met the man—the appointed one?

He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and stately.

‘We must all have our ups and downs,’ he said to her presently. ‘Let me just give you a word of advice. It’ll carry you through most of them. Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old.’

He stopped and surveyed her. His kind humorous eyes blinked through their blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling expectancy.

‘
Learn Persian!
‘ said the old man in an urgent whisper—‘and get the dictionary by heart!’

Lucy still looked—wondering.

‘I finished it this morning,’ said the Ambassador, in her ear. ‘To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I over-tire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it weren’t for my dictionary, I should have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the evening—or when they worry me from home—I take a column. But generally half a column’s enough—good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But that’s the whipped cream. That don’t count. What one wants is something to set one’s teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy who’s at Oxford, said he wouldn’t be responsible for them—so I had to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one’s dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one’s garden. Now Mr. Manisty—how is he provided in that way?’

His sudden question took Lucy by surprise, and the quick rise of colour in the clear cheeks did not escape him.

‘Well—I suppose he has his book?’ she said, smiling.

‘Oh! no use at all! He can do what he likes with his book. But you can’t do what you like with the dictionary. You must take it or leave it. That’s what makes it so reposeful. Now if I were asked, I could soon find some Persian roots for Mr. Manisty—to be taken every day!’

Lucy glanced across the table. Her eyes fell, and she said in the low full voice that delighted the old man’s ears:

‘I suppose you would send him home?’

The Ambassador nodded.

‘Tenants, turnips, and Petty Sessions! Persian’s pleasanter—but those would serve.’

He paused a moment, then said seriously, under the cover of a loud buzz of talk, ‘He’s wasting his time, dear lady—there’s no doubt of that.’

Lucy still looked down, but her attitude changed imperceptibly. ‘The subject interests her!’ thought the old man. ‘It’s a thousand pities,’ he resumed, with the caution, masked by the ease, of the diplomat, ‘he came out here in a fit of pique. He saw false—and as far as I can hear, the book’s a mistake. Yet it was not a bad subject. Italy
is
just now an object lesson and a warning. But our friend there could not have taken it more perversely. He has chosen to attack not the violence of the Church—but the weakness of the State. And meanwhile—if I may be allowed to say so—his own position is something of an offence. Religion is too big a pawn for any man’s personal game. Don’t you agree? Often I feel inclined to apply to him the saying about Benjamin Constant and liberty—“Grand homme devant la religion—_s’il y croyait!_” I compare with him a poor old persecuted priest I know—Manisty knows too.—Ah! well, I hear the book is very brilliant—and venomous to a degree. It will be read of course. He has the power to be read. But it is a blunder—if not a crime. And meanwhile he is throwing away all his chances. I knew his father. I don’t like to see him beating the air. If you have any influence with him’—the old man smiled—‘send him home! Or Mrs. Burgoyne there. He used to listen to her.’

A great pang gripped Lucy’s heart.

‘I should think he always took his own way,’ she said, with difficulty. ‘Mr. Neal sometimes advises him.’

The Ambassador’s shrewd glance rested upon her for a moment. Then without another word he turned away. ‘Reggie!’ he said, addressing young Brooklyn, ‘you seem to be ill-treating Madame Variani. Must I interpose?’

Reggie and his companion, who were in a full tide of ‘chaff’ and laughter, turned towards him.

‘Sir,’ said Brooklyn, ‘Madame Variani is attacking my best friend.’

‘Many of us find that agreeable,’ said the Ambassador.

‘Ah! but she makes it so personal,’ said Reggie, dallying with his banana. ‘She abuses him because he’s not married—and calls him a selfish fop. Now
I’m
not married—and I object to these wholesale classifications. Besides, my friend has the most conclusive answer.’

‘I wait for it,’ said Madame Variani.

Reggie delicately unsheathed his banana.

‘Well, some of us once enquired what he meant by it, and he said: “My dear fellow, I’ve asked all the beautiful women I know to marry me, and they won’t! Now!—I’d be content with cleanliness and conduct.”’

There was a general laugh, in the midst of which Reggie remarked:

‘I thought it the most touching situation. But Madame Variani has the heart of a stone.’

Madame Variani looked down upon him unmoved. She and the charming lad were fast friends.

‘I will wager you he never asked,’ she said quietly.

Reggie protested.

‘No—he never asked. Englishmen don’t ask ladies to marry them any more.’

‘Let Madame Variani prove her point,’ said the Ambassador, raising one white hand above the hubbub, while he hollowed the other round his deaf ear. ‘This is a most interesting discussion.’

‘But it is known to all that Englishmen don’t get married any more!’ cried Madame Variani. ‘I read in an English novel the other day that it is spoiling your English society, that the charming girls wait and wait—and nobody marries them.’

‘Well, there are no English young ladies present,’ said the Ambassador, looking round the table; ‘so we may proceed. How do you account for this phenomenon, Madame?’

‘Oh! you have now too many French cooks in England!’ said Madame Variani, shrugging her plump shoulders.

‘What in the world has that got to do with it?’ cried the Ambassador.

‘Your young men are too comfortable,’ said the lady, with a calm wave of the hand towards Reggie Brooklyn. ‘That’s what I am told. I ask an English lady, who knows both France and England—and she tells me—your young men get now such good cooking at their clubs, and at the messes of their regiments—and their sports amuse them so well, and cost so much money—they don’t want any wives!—they are not interested any more in the girls. That is the difference between them and the Frenchman. The Frenchman is still interested in the ladies. After dinner the Frenchman wants to go and sit with the ladies—the Englishman, no! That is why the French are still agreeable.’

The small black eyes of the speaker sparkled, but otherwise she looked round with challenging serenity on the English and Americans around her. Madame Variani—stout, clever, middle-aged, and disinterested—had a position of her own in Rome. She was the correspondent of a leading French paper; she had many English friends; and she and the Marchesa Fazzoleni, at the Ambassador’s right hand, had just been doing wonders for the relief of the Italian sick and wounded after the miserable campaign of Adowa.

‘Oh! I hide my diminished head!’ said the old Ambassador, taking his white locks in both hands. ‘All I know is, I have sent twenty wedding presents already this year—and that the state of my banking account is wholly inconsistent with these theories.’

‘Ah! you are exceptional,’ said the lady. ‘Only this morning I get an account of an English gentleman of my acquaintance. He is nearly forty—he possesses a large estate—his mother and sisters are on their knees to him to marry—it will all go to a cousin, and the cousin has forged—or something. And he—not he! He don’t care what happens to the estate. He has only got the one life, he says—and he won’t spoil it. And of course it does your women harm! Women are always dull when the men don’t court them!’

The table laughed. Lucy, looking down it, caught first the face of Eleanor Burgoyne, and in the distance Manisty’s black head and absent smile. The girl’s young mind was captured by a sudden ghastly sense of the human realities underlying the gay aspects and talk of the luncheon-table. It seemed to her she still heard that heart-rending voice of Mrs. Burgoyne: ‘Oh! I never dreamed it could be the same for him as for me. I didn’t ask much.’

She dreaded to let herself think. It seemed to her that Mrs. Burgoyne’s suffering must reveal itself to all the world, and the girl had moments of hot shame, as though for herself. To her eyes, the change in aspect and expression, visible through all the elegance and care of dress, was already terrible.

Oh! why had she come to Rome? What had changed the world so? Some wounded writhing thing seemed to be struggling in her own breast—while she was holding it down, trying to thrust it out of sight and hearing.

She had written to Uncle Ben, and to the Porters. To-morrow she must break it to Aunt Pattie that she could not go to Vallombrosa, and must hurry back to England. The girl’s pure conscience was tortured already by the thought of the excuses she would have to invent. And not a word, till Mr. Manisty was safely started on his way to that function at the Vatican which he was already grumbling over, which he would certainly shirk if he could. But, thank Heaven, it was not possible for him to shirk it.

Again her eyes crossed those of Manisty. He was now discussing the strength of parties in the recent Roman municipal elections with the American Monsignore, talking with all his usual vehemence. Nevertheless, through it all, it seemed to her, that she was watched, that in some continuous and subtle way he held her in sight.

How cold and ungrateful he must have thought her the night before! To-day, at breakfast, and in the train, he had hardly spoken to her.

Yet—mysteriously—Lucy felt herself threatened, hard pressed. Alice Manisty’s talk in that wild night haunted her ear. Her hand, cold and tremulous, shook on her knee. Even the voice of the Ambassador startled her.

After luncheon the Ambassador’s guests fell into groups on the large shady lawn of the Embassy garden.

The Ambassador introduced Lucy to the blue-eyed Lombard, Fioravanti, while he, pricked with a rueful sense of duty, devoted himself for a time to the wife of the English Admiral who had been Lady Mary’s neighbour at luncheon. The Ambassador examined her through his half-closed eyes, as he meekly offered to escort her indoors to see his pictures. She was an elegant and fashionable woman with very white and regular false teeth. Her looks were conventional and mild. In reality the Ambassador knew her to be a Tartar. He walked languidly beside her; his hands were lightly crossed before him; his white head drooped under the old wideawake that he was accustomed to wear in the garden.