Eleanor (34 page)

‘When I got home, and to my room, I opened my windows wide. Our apartment is at the end of the Via Sistina, and has a marvellous view over Rome. It was a gorgeous moon—St. Peter’s, the hills, every dome and tower radiantly clear. And at last it seemed to me that I was not a rebel and an outlaw—that beauty and I were reconciled.

‘Such peace in the night! It opened and took me in. Oh! my little, little son!—I have had such strange visions of you all these last days. That horror of the whirling river—and the tiny body—tossed and torn. Oh! my God! my God!—has it not filled all my days and nights for eight years? And now I see him so no more. I see him always carried in the arms of dim majestic forms—wrapped close and warm. Sometimes the face that bends over him is that of some great Giotto angel—sometimes, so dim and faint! the pure Mother herself—sometimes the Hands that fold him in are marred. Is it the associations of Rome—the images with which this work with Edward fills my mind? Perhaps.

‘But at least I am strangely comforted—some kind hand seems to be drawing the smart from the deep deep wound. Little golden-head! you lie soft and safe, but often you seem to me to turn your dear eyes—the baby-eyes that still know all—to look out over the bar of heaven—to search for me—to bid me be at peace,
at last
.

‘February 20. How delicious is the first breath of the spring! The almond trees are pink in the Campagna. The snow on the Sabine peaks is going. The Piazza di Spagna is heaped with flowers—anemones and narcissus and roses. And for the first time in my life I too feel the “Sehnsucht”—the longing of the spring! At twenty-nine!’

‘March 24, Easter week. I went to a wedding at the English church to-day. Some barrier seems to have fallen between me and life. The bride—a dear girl who has often been my little companion this winter—kissed me as she was going up to take off her dress. And I threw my arms round her with such a rush of joy. Other women have felt all these things ten years earlier perhaps than I. But they are not less heavenly when they come late—into a heart seared with grief.

‘March 26. It is my birthday. From the window looking on the Piazza, I have just seen Edward bargaining with the flower woman. Those lilacs and pinks are for me—I know it! Already he has given me the little engraved emerald I wear at my watch-chain. A little genius with a torch is cut upon it. He said I was to take it as the genius of our friendship.

‘I changed the orders for my dress to-day. I have discovered that black is positively disagreeable to him. So Mathilda will have to devise something else.

‘April 5. He is away at Florence, and I am working at some difficult points for him—about some suppressed monasteries. I have asked Count B—, who knows all about such things, to help me, and am working very hard. He comes back in four days.

‘April 9. He came back to-day. Such a gay and happy evening. When he saw what I had done, he took both my hands, and kissed them impetuously. “Eleanor, my queen of cousins!” And now we shall be at the villa directly. And there will be no interruption. There is one visitor coming. But Aunt Pattie will look after her. I think the book should be out in June. Of course there are some doubtful things. But it must, it will have a great effect.—How wonderfully well I have been lately! The doctor last week looked at me in astonishment. He thought that the Shadow and I were to be soon acquainted, when he saw me first!

‘I hope that Edward will get as much inspiration from the hills as from Rome. Every little change makes me anxious. Why should we change? Dear beloved, golden Rome!—even to be going fourteen miles away from you somehow tears my heart.’

Yes, there they were, those entries,—mocking, ineffaceable, for ever.

As she had read them, driving through all the memories they suggested, like a keen and bitter wind that kills and blights the spring bloom, there had pressed upon her the last memory of all,—the memory of this forlorn, this intolerable day. Had Manisty ever yet forgotten her so completely—abandoned her so utterly? She had simply dropped out of his thoughts. She had become as much of a stranger to him again, as on her first arrival at Rome. Nay, more! For when two people are first brought into a true contact, there is the secret delightful sense on either side of possibilities, of the unexplored. But when the possibilities are all known, and all exhausted?

What had happened between him and Lucy Foster? Of course she understood that he had deliberately contrived their interview. But as Lucy and she came home together they had said almost nothing to each other. She had a vision of their two silent figures in the railway-carriage side by side,—her hand in Lucy’s. And Lucy—so sad and white herself!—with the furrowed brow that betrayed the inner stress of thought.

Had the crisis arrived?—and had she refused him? Eleanor had not dared to ask.

Suddenly she rose from her chair. She clasped her hands above her head, and began to walk tempestuously up and down the bare floor of her room. In this creature so soft, so loving, so compact of feeling and of tears, there had gradually arisen an intensity of personal claim, a hardness, almost a ferocity of determination, which was stiffening and transforming the whole soul. She could waver still—as she had wavered in that despairing, anguished moment with Lucy in the Embassy garden. But the wavering would soon be over. A jealousy so overpowering that nothing could make itself heard against it was closing upon her like a demoniacal possession. Was it the last effort of self-preservation?—the last protest of the living thing against its own annihilation?

He was not to be hers—but this treachery, this wrong should be prevented.

She thought of Lucy in Manisty’s arms—of that fresh young life against his breast—and the thought maddened her. She was conscious of a certain terror of herself—of this fury in the veins, so strange, so alien, so debasing. But it did not affect her will.

Was Lucy’s own heart touched? Over that question Eleanor had been racking herself for days past. But if so it could be only a passing fancy. It made it only the more a duty to protect her from Manisty. Manisty—the soul of caprice and wilfulness—could never make a woman like Lucy happy. He would tire of her and neglect her. And what would be left for Lucy—Lucy the upright, simple, profound—but heartbreak?

Eleanor paused absently in front of the glass, and then looked at herself with a start of horror. That face—to fight with Lucy’s!

On the dressing-table there were still lying the two terra-cotta heads from Nemi, the Artemis, and the Greek fragment with the clear brow and nobly parted hair, in which Manisty had seen and pointed out the likeness to Lucy. Eleanor recalled his words in the garden—his smiling, absorbed look as the girl approached.

Yes!—it was like her. There was the same sweetness in strength, the same adorable roundness and youth.

And that was the beauty that Eleanor had herself developed and made doubly visible—as a man may free a diamond from the clay.

A mad impulse swept through her—that touch of kinship with the criminal and the murderer that may reveal itself in the kindest and the noblest.

She took up the little mask, and, reaching to the window, she tore back the curtains and pushed open the sun-shutters outside.

The night burst in upon her, the starry night hanging above the immensity of the Campagna, and the sea. There was still a faint glow in the western heaven. On the plain were a few scattered lights, fires lit, perhaps, by wandering herdsmen against malaria. On the far edge of the land to the south-west, a revolving light flashed its message to the Mediterranean and the passing ships. Otherwise, not a sign of life. Below, a vast abyss of shadow swallowed up the olive-garden, the road, and the lower slopes of the hills.

Eleanor felt herself leaning out above the world, alone with her agony and the balmy peace which mocked it. She lifted her arm, and, stretching forward, she flung the little face violently into the gulf beneath. The villa rose high above the olive-ground, and the olive-ground itself sank rapidly towards the road. The fragment had far to fall. It seemed to Eleanor that in the deep stillness she heard a sound like the striking of a stone among thick branches. Her mind followed with a wild triumph the breaking of the terra-cotta,—the shivering of the delicate features—their burial in the stony earth.

With a long breath she tottered from the window and sank into her chair. A horrible feeling of illness overtook her, and she found herself gasping for breath. ‘If I could only reach that medicine on my table!’ she thought. But she could not reach it. She lay helpless.

The door opened.

Was it a dream? She seemed to struggle through rushing waters back to land.

There was a low cry. A light step hurried across the room. Lucy Foster sank on her knees beside her and threw her arms about her.

‘Give me—those drops—on the table,’ said Eleanor, with difficulty.

Lucy said not a word. Quietly, with steady hands, she brought and measured the medicine. It was a strong heart-stimulant, and it did its work. But while her strength came back, Lucy saw that she was shivering with cold, and closed the window.

Then, silently, Lucy looked down upon the figure in the chair. She was almost as white as Eleanor. Her eyes showed traces of tears. Her forehead was still drawn with thought as it had been in the train.

Presently she sank again beside Eleanor.

‘I came to see you, because I could not sleep, and I wanted to suggest a plan to you. I had no idea you were ill. You should have called me before.’

Eleanor put out a feeble hand. Lucy took it tenderly, and laid it against her cheek. She could not understand why Eleanor looked, at her with this horror and wildness,—how it was that she came to be up, by this open window, in this state of illness and collapse. But the discovery only served an antecedent process—a struggle from darkness to light—which had brought her to Eleanor’s room.

She bent forward and said some words in Eleanor’s ear.

Gradually Eleanor understood and responded. She raised herself piteously in her chair. The two women sat together, hand locked in hand, their faces near to each other, the murmur of their voices flowing on brokenly, for nearly an hour.

Once Lucy rose to get a guide book that lay on Eleanor’s table. And on another occasion, she opened a drawer by Eleanor’s direction, took out a leather pocket-book and counted some Italian notes that it contained. Finally she insisted on Eleanor’s going to bed, and on helping her to undress.

Eleanor had just sunk into her pillows, when a noise from the library startled them. Eleanor looked up with strained eyes.

‘It must be Mr. Manisty,’ said Lucy hurriedly. ‘He was out when I came through the glass passage. The doors were all open, and his lamp burning.’ I am nearly sure that I heard him unbar the front door. I must wait now till he is gone.’

They waited—Eleanor staring into the darkness of the room—till there had been much opening and shutting of doors, and all was quiet again.

Then the two women clung to each other in a strange and pitiful embrace—offered with passion on Lucy’s side, accepted with a miserable shame on Eleanor’s—and Lucy slipped away.

‘He was out?—in the garden?’ said Eleanor to herself bewildered. And with those questions on her lips, and a mingled remorse and fever in her blood, she lay sleepless waiting for the morning.

Manisty indeed had also been under the night, bathing passion and doubt in its cool purity.

Again and again had he wandered up and down the terrace in the starlight, proving and examining his own heart, raised by the growth of love to a more manly and more noble temper than had been his for years.

What was in his way? His conduct towards his cousin? He divined what seemed to him the scruple in the girl’s sensitive and tender mind. He could only meet it by truth and generosity—by throwing himself on Eleanor’s mercy.
She
knew what their relations had been—she would not refuse him this boon of life and death—the explanation of them to Lucy.

Unless! There came a moment when his restless walk was tormented with the prickly rise of a whole new swarm of fears. He recalled that moment in the library after the struggle with Alice, when Lucy was just awakening from unconsciousness—when Eleanor came in upon them. Had she heard? He remembered that the possibility of it had crossed his mind. Was she in truth working against him—avenging his neglect—establishing a fatal influence over Lucy?

His soul cried out in fierce and cruel protest. Here at last was the great passion of his life. Come what would, Eleanor should not be allowed to strangle it.

Absently he wandered down a little path leading from the terrace to the
podere
below, and soon found himself pacing the dim grass walks among the olives. The old villa rose above him, dark and fortress-like. That was no longer her room—that western corner? No—he had good cause to remember that she had been moved, to the eastern side, beyond his library, beyond the glass passage! Those were now Eleanor’s windows, he believed.

Ah!—what was that sudden light? He threw his head back in astonishment. One of the windows at which he had been looking was flung open, and in the bright lamplight a figure appeared. It stooped forward. Eleanor! Something fell close beside him. He heard the breaking of a branch from one of the olives.

In his astonishment, he stood motionless, watching the window. It remained open for a while. Then again some one appeared—not the same figure as at first. A thrill of delight and trouble ran through him. He sent his salutation, his homage through the night.

But the window shut—the light went out. All was once more still and dark.

Then he struck a match and groped under the tree close by him. Yes, there was the fallen branch. But what had broken it? He lit match after match, holding the light with his left hand while he turned over the dry ground with his knife. Presently he brought up a handful of stones and earth, and laid them on a bit of ruined wall close by. Stooping over them with his dim, sputtering lights, he presently discovered some terra-cotta fragments. His eye, practised in such things, detected them at once. They were the fragments of a head, which had measured about three inches from brow to chin.