Eleanor (44 page)

How quiet she was! Yet never was there an attitude more eloquent. She held in her hands, which lay upon her knee, one of the little terra-cottas. Eleanor could see it perfectly. It was the head of a statuette, not unlike her own which she had destroyed,—a smaller and ruder Artemis with the Cybele crown. There flashed into her mind the memory of Manisty explaining it to the girl, sitting on the bench behind the strawberry hut; his black brows bent in the eagerness of his talk; her sweet eyes, her pure pleasure.

And now Lucy had no companion—but thought. Her face was raised, the eyes were shut, the beautiful mouth quivered in the effort to be still. She was mistress of herself, yet not for the moment wholly mistress of longing and of sorrow. A quick struggle passed over the face. There was another slight sob. Then Eleanor saw her raise the terra-cotta, bow her face upon it, press it long and lingeringly to her lips. It was like a gesture of eternal farewell; the gesture of a child expressing the heart of a woman.

Eleanor tottered back. She sat on the edge of her bed, motionless in the darkness, till the sounds of Cecco bringing up the
pranzo
in the corridor outside warned her that her time of solitude was over.

In the evening Eleanor was sitting in the Sassetto. Lucy with her young need of exercise had set off to walk down through the wood to the first bridge over the Paglia. Eleanor had been very weary all day, and for the first time irritable. It was almost with a secret relief that Lucy started, and Eleanor saw her depart.

Mrs. Burgoyne was left stretched on her long canvas chair, in the green shade of the Sassetto. All about her was a chaos of moss-grown rocks crowned with trees young and old; a gap in the branches showed her a distant peachy sky suffused with gold above the ethereal heights of the Amiata range; a little wind crept through the trees; the birds were silent, but the large green lizards slipped in and out, and made a friendly life in the cool shadowed place.

The Contessa was to have joined Eleanor here at six o’clock. But a note had arrived excusing her. The visit of some relations detained her.

Nevertheless a little after six a step was heard approaching along the winding path which while it was still distant Eleanor knew to be Father Benecke. For his sake, she was glad that the Contessa was not with her.

As for Donna Teresa, when she met the priest in the village or on the road she shrank out of his path as though his mere shadow brought malediction.

Her pinched face, her thin figure seemed to contract still further under an impulse of fear and repulsion. Eleanor had seen it, and wondered.

But even the Contessa would have nothing to say to him.

‘
Non, Madame; c’est plus fort que moi!
‘ she had said to Eleanor one day that she had come across Mrs. Burgoyne and Father Benecke together in the Sassetto—in after-excuse for her behaviour to him. ‘For you and me—_bien entendu!_—we think what we please. Heaven knows I am not bigoted. Teresa makes herself unhappy about me.’ The stout, imperious woman stifled a sigh that betrayed much. ‘I take what I want from our religion—and I don’t trouble about the rest. Emilio was the same. But a priest that disobeys—that deserts—! No! that is another matter. I can’t argue; it seizes me by the throat.’ She made an expressive movement. ‘It is an instinct—an inheritance—call it what you like. But I feel like Teresa; I could run at the sight of him.’

Certainly Father Benecke gave her no occasion to run. Since his recovery from the first shock and agitation of his suspension he had moved about the roads and tracks of Torre Amiata with the ‘recollected’ dignity of the pale and meditative recluse. He asked nothing; he spoke to no one, except to the ladies at the convent, and to the old woman who served him unwillingly in the little tumble-down house by the river’s edge to which he had now transferred himself and his books, for greater solitude. Eleanor understood that he shrank from facing his German life and friends again till he had completed the revision of his book, and the evolution of his thought; and she had some reason to believe that he regarded his isolation and the enmity of this Italian neighbourhood as a necessary trial and testing, to be borne without a murmur.

As his step came nearer, she sat up and threw off her languor. It might have been divined, even, that she heard it with a secret excitement.

When he appeared he greeted her with the manner at once reticent and cordial that was natural to him. He had brought her an article in a German newspaper of the ‘Centre’ on himself and his case, the violence of which had provoked him to a reply, whereof the manuscript was also in his pocket.

Eleanor took the article and turned it over. But some inward voice told her that her
role
, of counsellor and critic was—again—played out. Suddenly Father Benecke said:

‘I have submitted my reply to Mr. Manisty. I would like to show you what he says.’

Eleanor fell back in her chair. ‘You know where he is?’ she cried.

Her surprise was so great that she could not at once disguise her emotion. Father Benecke was also taken aback. He lifted his eyes from the papers he held.

‘I wrote to him through his bankers the other day, Madame. I have always found that letters so addressed to him are forwarded.’

Then he stopped in distress and perturbation. Mrs. Burgoyne was still apparently struggling for breath and composure. His absent, seer’s eyes at last took note of her as a human being. He understood, all at once, that he had before him a woman very ill, apparently very unhappy, and that what he had just said had thrown her into an anguish with which her physical weakness was hardly able to cope.

The colour rose in his own cheeks.

‘Madame! let me hasten to say that I have done your bidding precisely. You were so good as to tell me that you wished no information to be given to anyone as to your stay here. I have not breathed a word of it to Mr. Manisty or to any other of my correspondents. Let me show you his letter.’

He held it out to her. Eleanor took it with uncertain fingers.

‘Your mention of him took me by surprise,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Miss Foster and I—have been—so long—without hearing of our friends.’

Then she stooped over the letter. It seemed to her the ink was hardly dry on it—that it was still warm from Manisty’s hand. The date of it was only three days old. And the place from which it came? Cosenza?—Cosenza in Calabria? Then he was still in Italy?

She put the letter back into Father Benecke’s hands.

‘Would you read it for me? I have rather a headache to-day.’

He read it with a somewhat embarrassed voice. She lay listening, with her eyes closed under her large hat, each hand trying to prevent the trembling of the other.

A strange pride swelled in her. It was a kind and manly letter, expressing far more personal sympathy with Benecke than Manisty had ever yet allowed himself—a letter wholly creditable indeed to the writer, and marked with a free and flowing beauty of phrase that brought home to Eleanor at every turn his voice, his movements, the ideas and sympathies of the writer.

Towards the end came the familiar Manisty-ism:

‘All the same, their answer to you is still as good as ever. The system must either break up or go on. They naturally prefer that it should go on. But if it is worked by men like you, it cannot go on. Their instinct never wavers; and it is a true one.’

Then:

‘I don’t know how I have managed to write this letter—poor stuff as it is. My mind at this moment is busy neither with speculation nor politics. I am perched for the night on the side of a mountain thickly covered with beech woods, in a remote Calabrian hamlet, where however last year some pushing person built a small ‘health resort,’ to which a few visitors come from Naples and even from Rome. The woods are vast, the people savage. The brigands are gone, or going; of electric light there is plenty. I came this morning, and shall be gone to-morrow. I am a pilgrim on the face of Italy. For six weeks I have wandered like this, from the Northern Abruzzi downwards. Wherever holiday folk go to escape from the heat of the plains, I go. But my object is not theirs…. Nor is it yours, Padre. There are many quests in the world. Mine is one of the oldest that man knows. My heart pursues it, untired. And in the end I shall win to my goal.’

The old priest read the last paragraph in a hurried, unsteady voice. At every sentence he became aware of some electrical effect upon the delicate frame and face beside him; but he read on—not knowing how to save himself—lest she should think that he had omitted anything.

When he dropped the letter his hands, too, shook. There was a silence.

Slowly Eleanor dragged herself higher in her chair; she pushed her hat back from her forehead; she turned her white drawn face upon the priest.

‘Father,’ she said, bending towards him, ‘you are a priest—and a confessor?’

His face changed. He waited an instant before replying.

‘Yes, Madame—I am!’ he said at last, with a firm and passionate dignity.

‘Yet now you cannot act as a priest. And I am not a Catholic. Still, I am a human being—with a soul, I suppose—if there are such things!—and you are old enough to be my father, and have had great experience. I am in trouble—and probably dying. Will you hear my case—as though it were a confession—under the same seal?’

She fixed her eyes upon him. Insensibly the priest’s expression had changed; the priestly caution, the priestly instinct had returned. He looked at her steadily and compassionately.

‘Is there no one, Madame, to whom you might more profitably make this confession—no one who has more claim to it than I?’

‘No one.’

‘I cannot refuse,’ he said, uneasily. ‘I cannot refuse to hear anyone in trouble and—if I can—to help them. But let me remind you that this could not be in any sense a true confession. It could only be a conversation between friends.’

She drew her hand across her eyes.

‘I must treat it as a confession, or I cannot speak. I shall not ask you to absolve me. That—that would do me no good,’ she said, with a little wild laugh, ‘What I want is direction—from some one accustomed to look at people as they are—and—and to speak the truth to them. Say “yes,” Padre. You—you may have the fate of three lives in your hands.’

Her entreating eyes hung upon him. His consideration took a few moments longer. Then he dropped his own look upon the ground, and clasped his hands.

‘Say, my daughter, all that you wish to say.’

The priestly phrase gave her courage.

She drew a long breath, and paused a little to collect her thoughts. When she began, it was in a low, dragging voice full of effort.

‘What I want to know, Father, is—how far one may fight—how far one
should
fight—for oneself. The facts are these. I will not mention any names. Last winter, Father, I had reason to think that life had changed for me—after many years of unhappiness. I gave my whole, whole heart away.’ The words came out in a gasp, as though a large part of the physical power of the speaker escaped with them. ‘I thought that—in return—I was held in high value, in true affection—that—that my friend cared for me more than for anyone else—that in time he would be mine altogether. It was a great hope, you understand—I don’t put it at more. But I had done much to deserve his kindness—he owed me a great deal. Not, I mean, for the miserable work I had done for him; but for all the love, the thought by day and night that I had given him.’

She bowed her head on her hands for a moment. The priest sat motionless and she resumed, torn and excited by her strange task.

‘I was not alone in thinking and hoping—as I did. Other people thought it. It was not merely presumptuous or foolish on my part. But—ah! it is an old story, Padre. I don’t know why I inflict it on you!’

She stopped, wringing her hands.

The priest did not raise his eyes, but sat quietly—in an attitude a little cold and stern, which seemed to rebuke her agitation. She composed herself, and resumed:

‘There was of course some one else, Father—you understood that from the beginning—some one younger, and far more attractive than I. It took five weeks—hardly so much. There was no affinity of nature and mind to go upon—or I thought so. It seemed to me all done in a moment by a beautiful face. I could not be expected to bear it—to resign myself at once to the loss of everything that made life worth living—could I, Father?’ she said passionately.

The priest still did not look up.

‘You resisted?’ he said.

‘I resisted—successfully,’ she said with fluttering breath. ‘I separated them. The girl who supplanted me was most tender, dear, and good. She pitied me, and I worked upon her pity. I took her away from—from my friend. And why should I not? Why are we called upon perpetually to give up—give up? It seemed to me such a cruel, cold, un-human creed. I knew my own life was broken—beyond mending; but I couldn’t bear the unkindness—I couldn’t forgive the injury—I couldn’t—couldn’t! I took her away; and my power is still great enough, and will be always great enough, if I choose, to part these two from each other!’

Her hands were on her breast, as though she were trying to still the heart that threatened to silence her. When she spoke of giving up, her voice had taken a note of scorn, almost of hatred, that brought a momentary furrow to the priest’s brow.

For a little while after she had ceased to speak he sat bowed, and apparently deep in thought. When he looked up she braced herself, as though she already felt the shock of judgment. But he only asked a question.

‘Your girl-friend, Madame—her happiness was not involved?’

Eleanor shrank and turned away.

‘I thought not—at first.’ It was a mere murmur.

‘But now?’

‘I don’t know—I suspect,’ she said miserably. ‘But, Father, if it were so she is young; she has all her powers and chances before her. What would kill me would only—anticipate—for her—a day that must come. She is born to be loved.’

Again she let him see her face, convulsed by the effort for composure, the eyes shining with large tears. It was like the pleading of a wilful child.