Eleanor (56 page)

Eleanor heard him very calmly.

‘You dear, dear boy!’ she said, when he paused for lack of breath. ‘You remind me of that pretty story—don’t you remember?—only it was the other way about—of Lord Giffard and Lady Dufferin. He was dying—and she married him—that she might be with him to the end. That’s right—for the woman. It’s her natural part to be the nurse. Do you think I’m going to let
you
ruin your career to come and nurse me? Oh! you foolish Reggie!’

But he implored her; and after a while she grew restless.

‘There’s only one thing in the world you can do for me!—’ she said at last, pushing him away from her in her agitation.

Then reaching out from her sofa, she opened a drawer in a little table beside her, and took out a double photograph-case, folded together. She opened it and held it out to him.

‘There!—help me bring those two together, Reggie—and I’ll give you even more of my heart than I do now!’

He stared, open-mouthed and silent, at the portraits, at the delicate, illumined face.

‘Come here’—she said, drawing him back towards her. ‘Come and let us talk.’

Meanwhile Manisty and Father Benecke were climbing the long hill, on the return from their walk. There had been no full confidence between these two. Manisty’s pride would not allow it. There was too sharp humiliation at present in the thought of that assurance with which he had spoken to Benecke by the river-side.

He chose, therefore, when they were alone, rather to talk to the priest of his own affairs, of his probable acceptance of the Old Catholic offers which had been made him. Benecke did not resent the perfunctory manner of his talk, the half-mind that he gave to it. The priest’s shrewd humility made no claims. He understood perfectly that the catastrophe of his own life could have no vital interest for a man absorbed as Manisty was then absorbed. He submitted to its being made a topic, a
passe-temps
.

Moreover, he forgave, he had always forgiven Manisty’s dominant attitude towards the forces which had trampled on himself. Often he had felt himself the shipwrecked sailor sinking in the waves, while Manisty as the cool spectator was hobnobbing with the wreckers on the shore. But nothing of this affected his love for the man. He loved him as Vanbrugh Neal had loved him; because of a certain charm, a certain indestructible youth and irresponsibility at the very heart of him, which redeemed half his errors.

‘Ah! my dear friend,’ Manisty was saying as they neared the top of the hill—with his largest and easiest gesture; ‘of course you must go to Bonn; you must do what they want you to do. The Old Catholics will make a great deal of you. It might have been much worse.’

‘They are very kind. But one transplants badly at sixty-six,’ said the priest mildly, thinking perhaps of his little home in the street of his Bavarian town, of the pupils he should see no more, of the old sister who had deserted him.

‘
Your
book has been the success,’ said Manisty, impatiently. ‘For you said what you meant to say—you hit your mark. As for me—well, never mind! I came out in too hot a temper; the men I saw first were too plausible; the facts have been too many for me. No matter. It was an adventure like any other. I don’t regret it! In itself, it gave one some exciting moments, and,—if I mistook the battle here—I shall still fight the English battle all the better for the experience!
Allons donc
!—“To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new!”’

The priest looked at his handsome reckless air, with a mixture of indulgence and repulsion. Manisty was ‘an honourable man,’ of many gifts. If certain incalculable elements in his character could be controlled, place and fame were probably before him. Compared with him, the priest realised profoundly his own meaner, obscurer destiny. The humble servant of a heavenly
patria
, of an unfathomable truth, is no match for these intellectual soldiers of fortune. He does not judge them; he often feels towards them a strange forbearance. But he would sooner die than change parts!

As the convent came in sight, Manisty paused.

‘You are going in to see her?’

The priest assented.

‘Then I will come up later.’

They parted, and Father Benecke entered the convent alone.

Five days more! Would anything happen—or nothing? Manisty’s wounded vanity held him at arm’s length; Miss Foster could not forgive him. But the priest knew Eleanor’s heart; and what else he did not know he divined. All rested with the American girl, with the wounded tenderness, the upright independence of a nature, which, as the priest frankly confessed to himself, he did not understand.

He was not, indeed, without pricks of conscience with regard to her. Supposing that she ultimately yielded? It was he who would have precipitated the solution; he who would in truth have given her to Manisty. Might he not, in so doing, have succoured the one life only to risk the other? Were Manisty’s the hands in which to place a personality so noble and so trusting as that of the young girl?

But these qualms did not last long. As we have seen he had an invincible tenderness for Manisty. And in his priestly view women were the adjuncts and helpers of men. Woman is born to trouble; and the risks that she must take grow with her. Why fret about the less or more? His own spiritual courage would not have shrunk from any burden that love might lay upon it. In his Christian stoicism—the man of the world might have called it a Christian insensibility—he answered for Lucy.

Why suppose that she would shrink, or ought to shrink? Eve’s burden is anyway enormous; and the generous heart scorns a grudging foresight.

As to Mrs. Burgoyne—ah! there at least he might be sure that he had not dared in vain. While Lucy was steel to him, Eleanor not only forgave him, but was grateful to him with a frankness that only natures so pliant and so sweet have the gift to show. In a few hours, as it seemed to him, she had passed from fevered anguish into a state which held him often spellbound before her, so consonant was it to the mystical instincts of his own life. He thought of her with the tenderest reverence, the most sacred rejoicing. Through his intercourse with her, moreover, while he guided and sustained her, he had been fighting his own way back to the sure ground of spiritual hope and confidence. God had not withdrawn from him the divine message! He was about to step forth into the wilderness; but this light went with him.

On the stairs leading to Mrs. Burgoyne’s rooms he met Reggie Brooklyn coming down. The young man’s face was pale and strained. The priest asked him a question, but he ran past without an answer.

Eleanor was alone on the
loggia
. It was past eight o’clock, and the trees in the courtyard and along the road were alive with fire-flies. Overhead was the clear incomparable sky, faintly pricked with the first stars. Someone was singing ‘Santa Lucia’ in the distance; and there was the twanging of a guitar.

‘Shall I go away?’ he said, standing beside her. ‘You wished me to come. But you are fatigued.’

She gave him her hand languidly.

‘Don’t go, Father. But let me rest a little.’

‘Pay me no attention,’ he said. ‘I have my office.’

He took out his breviary, and there was silence.

After a while, when he could no longer see even the red letters of his little book and was trusting entirely to memory, Eleanor said, with a sudden clearness of voice,—

A strange thing happened to me to-day, Father. I thought I would tell you. For many many years I have been haunted by a kind of recurrent vision. I think it must have come, to begin with, from the influence of a clergyman—a very stern, imaginative, exacting man—who prepared me for confirmation. Suddenly I see the procession of the Cross; the Lord in front, with the Crown of Thorns dripping with blood; the thieves following; the crowd, the daughters of Jerusalem. Nothing but that—but always very vivid, the colours as bright as the colours of a Van Eyck—and bringing with it an extraordinary sense of misery and anguish—of everything that one wants to forget and refuse in life. The man to whom I trace it was a saint, but a forbidding one. He made me afraid of him; afraid of Christianity. I believed, but I never loved. And when his influence was withdrawn, I threw it all behind me, in a great hurry. But this impression remained—like a nightmare. I remember the day I was presented; there, in the midst of all the feathers and veils and coronets, was the vision,—and the tumult of ghastly and crushing thoughts that spread from it. I remember hating Christianity that day; and its influence in the world.

‘Last night, just before the dawn, I looked out; and there was the vision again, sweeping over the forests, and up into the clouds that hung over Monte Amiata. And I hated it no more. There was no accompanying horror. It seemed to me as natural as the woods; as the just-kindling light. And my own soul seemed to be rapt into the procession—the dim and endless procession of all times and nations—and to pass away with it,—I knew not where….

Her voice fell softly, to a note of dream.

‘That was an omen,’ he said, after a pause, ‘an omen of peace.’

‘I don’t know,—but it soothed! As to what may be
true
, Father,—you can’t be certain any more than I! But at least our dreams are true—to
us
.’... ‘We make the heaven we hope indeed our home! All to the good if we wake up in it after all! If not, the dream will have had its own use here. Why should we fight so with our ignorance? The point is, as to the
quality
of our dreams! The quality of mine was once all dark—all misery. Now, there is a change,—like the change from London drizzle and rain to the clearness of this sky, which gives beauty to everything beneath it. But, for me, it is not the first time—no, not the first—’

The words were no longer audible, her hands pressed against each other, and he traced that sudden rigidity in her dim face which meant that she was defending herself against emotion.

‘It is all true, my friend,’ he said, bending over her,—‘the gospel of Christ. You would be happier if you could accept it simply.’

She opened her eyes, smiling, but she did not reply. She was always eager that he should read and talk to her, and she rarely argued. But he never felt that intellectually he had much hold upon her. Her mind seemed to him to be moving elusively in a sphere remote and characteristic, where he could seldom follow.
Anima naturaliter Christiana
; yet with a most stoic readiness to face the great uncertainties, the least flattering possibilities of existence: so she often appeared to him.

Presently she dragged herself higher in her chair to look at the moon rising above the eastern mass of the convent.

‘It all gives me such extraordinary pleasure!’ she said, as though in wonder—‘The moon—the fire-flies—those beautiful woods—your kindness—Lucy in her white dress, when I see her there at the door. I know how short it must be; and a few weeks ago I enjoyed nothing. What mystery are we part of?—that moves and changes without our will. I was much touched, Father, by all you said to me that great, great day; but I was not conscious of yielding to you; nor afterwards. Then, one night, I went to sleep in one mind; I woke up in another. The “grace of God,” you think?—or the natural welling back of the river, little by little, to its natural bed? After all I never wilfully hurt or defied anybody before—that I can remember. But what are “grace” and “nature” more than words? There is a Life,—which our life perpetually touches and guesses at—like a child fingering a closed room in the dark. What else do we know?’

‘We know a great deal more,’ he said firmly. ‘But I don’t want to weary you by talking.’

‘You don’t weary me. Ah!’—her voice leapt—‘what
is
true—is the “dying to live” of Christianity. One moment, you have the weight of the world upon you; the next, as it were, you dispose of the world and all in it. Just an act of the will!—and the thing verifies itself like any chemical experiment. Let me go on—go on!’ she said, with mystical intensity. ‘If the clue is anywhere it is there,—so far my mind goes with you. Other races perceive it through other forms. But Christ offered it to us.’

‘My dear friend,’ said the priest tenderly—‘He offers us
Himself
.’

She smiled, most brightly.

‘Don’t quarrel with me—with my poor words. He is there—_there!_’—she said under her breath.

And he saw the motion of her white fingers towards her breast.

Afterwards he sat beside her for some time in silence, thinking of the great world of Rome, and of his long conflict there.

Form after form appeared to him of those men, stupid or acute, holy or worldly, learned or ignorant, who at the heart of Catholicism are engaged in that amazing struggle with knowledge which perhaps represents the only condition under which knowledge—the awful and irresistible—can in the long run safely incorporate itself with the dense mass of human life. He thought of scholar after scholar crushed by the most incompetent of judges; this man silenced by a great post, that man by exile, one through the best of his nature, another through the worst. He saw himself sitting side by side with one of the most-eminent theologians of the Roman Church; he recalled the little man, black-haired, lively, corpulent, a trifle underhung, with a pleasant lisp and a merry eye; he remembered the incredible conversation, the sense of difficulty and shame under which he had argued some of the common-places of biology and primitive history, as educated Europe understands them; the half patronising, half impatient glibness of the other.—

‘Oh! you know better, my son, than I how to argue these things; you are more learned, of course. But it is only a matter for the Catechism after all. Obey, my friend, obey!—there is no more to be said.’

And his own voice—tremulous:

‘I would obey if I could. But unhappy as I am, to betray truths that are as evident to me as the sun in heaven would make me still unhappier. The fate that threatens me is frightful.
Aber ich kann nicht anders
. The truth holds me in a vice.’—

‘Let me give you a piece of counsel. You sit too close to your books. You read and read,—you spin yourself into your own views like a cocoon. Travel—hear what others say—above all, go into retreat! No one need know. It would do you much good.’