Eleanor Part 15

Lucy followed and caught her hand.

'Oh no! no!'--she said--'it is only so brave and good of you--to be able still--to take an interest--'

'Do I take it?' said Eleanor, scornfully, raising her other hand and letting it fall.

Lucy was silenced. After a moment Eleanor looked round, calmly took the photograph of the child from the table, and held it towards Lucy.

'He was just two--his birthday was four days before this was taken.

It's the picture I love best, because I last saw him like that--in his night-gown. I was very ill that night--they wouldn't let me stay with my husband--but after I left him, I came and rocked the baby and tucked him up--and leant my face against his. He was so warm and sweet always in his sleep. The touch of him--and the scent of him--his dear breath--and his curls--and the moist little hands--sometimes they used to intoxicate me--to give me life--like wine. They did me such good--that night.'

Her voice did not tremble. Tears softly found their way down Lucy's face.

And suddenly she stooped, and put her lips, tenderly, clingingly, to Mrs.

Burgoyne's hand.

Eleanor smiled. Then she herself bent forward and lightly kissed the girl's cheek.

'Oh! I am not worthy either to have had him--or lost him--' she said bitterly. There was a little pause, which Eleanor broke. 'Now really we must go to Aunt Pattie--mustn't we?'

CHAPTER VI

'Ah! here you are! Don't kill yourselves. Plenty of time--for us!

Listen--there's the bell--eight o'clock--now they open the doors.

Goodness!--Look at the rush--and those little Italian chaps tackling those strapping priests. Go it, ye cripples!'

Lucy tamed her run to a quick walk, and Mr. Reggie took care of her, while Manisty disappeared ahead with Mrs. Burgoyne, and Aunt Pattie fell to the share of a certain Mr. Vanbrugh Neal, an elderly man tall and slim, and of a singular elegance of bearing, who had joined them at the Piazza, and seemed to be an old friend of Mr. Manisty's.

Lucy looked round her in bewilderment. Before the first stroke of the bell the Piazza of St. Peter's had been thickly covered with freely moving groups, all advancing in order upon the steps of the church. But as the bell began to speak, there was a sudden charge mostly of young priests and seminarists--black skirts flying, black legs leaping--across the open s.p.a.ce and up the steps.

'Reminds me of nothing so much'--said Reggie laughing back over his shoulder at a friend behind--'as the charge of the Harrow boys at Lord's last year--when they stormed the pavilion--did you see it?--and that little Harrow chap saved the draw? I say!--they've broken the line!--and there'll be a bad squash somewhere.'

And indeed the attacking priests had for a moment borne down the Italian soldiers who were good-naturedly guarding and guiding the Pope's guests from the entrance of the Piazza to the very door of the church. But the little men--as they seemed to Lucy's eyes--recovered themselves in a twinkling, threw themselves stoutly on the black gentry, like sheep dogs on the sheep, worried them back into line, collared a few bold spirits here, formed a new cordon there, till all was once more in tolerable order, and a dangerous pressure on the central door was averted.

Meanwhile Lucy was hurried forward with the privileged crowd going to the tribunes, towards the sacristy door on the south.

'Let's catch up Mrs. Burgoyne'--said the young man, looking ahead with some anxiety--'Manisty's no use. He'll begin to moon and forget all about her. I say!--Look at the building--and the sky behind it! Isn't it stunning?'

And they threw up a hasty glance as they sped along at the superb walls and apses and cornices of the southern side--golden ivory or wax against the blue.--The pigeons flew in white eddies above their heads; the April wind flushed Lucy's cheek, and played with her black mantilla. All qualms were gone. After her days of seclusion in the villa garden, she was pa.s.sionately conscious of this great Rome and its magic; and under her demure and rather stately air, her young spirits danced and throbbed with pleasure.

'How that black lace stuff does become all you women!'--said Reggie Brooklyn, throwing a lordly and approving glance at her and his cousin Eleanor, as they all met and paused amid the crowd that was concentrating itself on the sacristy door; and Lucy, instead of laughing at the lad's airs, only reddened a little more brightly and found it somehow sweet--April sweet--that a young man on this spring morning should admire her; though after all, she was hardly more inclined to fall in love with Reggie Brooklyn than with Manisty's dear collie puppy, that had been left behind, wailing, at the villa.

At the actual door the young man quietly possessed himself of Mrs.

Burgoyne, while Manisty with an unconscious look of relief fell behind.

'And you, Miss Foster,--keep closer--my coat's all at your service--it'll stand a pull. Don't you be swept away--and I'll answer for Mrs. Burgoyne.'

So on they hurried, borne along with the human current through pa.s.sages and corridors, part of a laughing, pus.h.i.+ng, chatting crowd, containing all the types that throng the Roman streets--English and American tourists, Irish or German or English priests, monks white and brown, tall girls who wore their black veils with an evident delight in the new setting thus given to their fair hair and brilliant skins, beside older women to whom, on the contrary, the dress had given a kind of unwonted repose and quietness of look, as though for once they dared to be themselves in it, and gave up the struggle with the years.

Reggie Brooklyn maintained a lively chatter all the time, mostly at Manisty's expense. Eleanor Burgoyne first laughed at his sallies, then gently turned her head in a pause of the general advance and searched the crowd pressing at their heels. Lucy's eyes followed hers, and there far behind, carried forward pa.s.sively in a brown study, losing ground slightly whenever it was possible, was Manisty. The fine significant face was turned a little upward; the eyes were full of thoughts; he was at once the slave of the crowd, and its master.

And across Eleanor's expression--unseen--there pa.s.sed the slightest, subtlest flash of tenderness and pride. She knew and understood him--she alone!

At last the doors are pa.s.sed. They are in the vast barricaded and part.i.tioned s.p.a.ce, already humming with the talk and tread of thousands,--the 'Tu es Petrus' overhead. Reggie Brooklyn would have hurried them on in the general rush for the tribunes. But Mrs. Burgoyne laid a restraining hand upon him. 'No--we mustn't separate,' she said, gently peremptory. And for a few minutes Mr. Reggie in an anguish must needs see the crowd flow past him, and the first seats of Tribune D filled. Then Manisty appeared, lifting his eyebrows in a frowning wonder at the young man's impatience;--and on they flew.

At last!--They are in the third row of Tribune D, close to the line by which the Pope must pa.s.s, and to the platform from which he will deliver the Apostolic Benediction. Reggie the unsatisfied, the idealist, grumbles that they ought to have been in the very front. But Eleanor and Aunt Pattie are well satisfied. They find their acquaintance all around them. It is a general flutter of fans, and murmur of talk. Already people are standing on their seats looking down on the rapidly filling church. In press the less favoured thousands from the Piazza, through the Atrium and the Eastern door--great sea of human life spreading over the illimitable nave behind the two lines of Swiss and Papal Guards, in quick never-ending waves that bewilder and dazzle the eye.

Lucy found the three hours' wait but a moment. The pa.s.sing and re-pa.s.sing of the splendid officials in their Tudor or Valois dress; the great names, 'Colonna,' 'Barberini,' 'Savelli,' 'Borghese' that sound about her, as Mrs.

Burgoyne who knows everybody, at least by sight, laughs and points and chats with her neighbour, Mr. Neal; the constant welling up of processions from behind,--the Canons and Monsignori in their fur and lace tippets, the red Cardinals with their suites; the entry of the Guardia n.o.bile, splendid, incredible, in their winged Achillean helmets above their Empire uniforms--half Greek, half French, half G.o.ds, half dandies, the costliest foolishest plaything that any court can show; and finally as the time draws on, the sudden thrills and murmurs that run through the church, announcing the great moment which still, after all, delays: these things chase the minutes, blot out, the sense of time.

Meanwhile, again and again, Lucy, the sedate, the self-controlled, cannot prevent herself from obeying a common impulse with those about her--from leaping on her chair--straining her white throat--her eyes. Then a handsome chamberlain would come by, lifting a hand in gentle protest, motioning to the ladies--'De grace, mesdames--mesdames, de _grace_!--' Or angry murmurs would rise from those few who had not the courage or the agility to mount--'_Giu! giu!_--Descendez, mesdames!--qu'est-ce que c'est done que ces manieres?'--and Lucy, crimson and abashed, would descend in haste, only to find a kind Irish priest behind smiling at her,--prompting her,--'Never mind them!--take no notice!--who is it you're harmin'?'--And her excitement would take him at his word--for who should know if not a priest?

And from these risky heights she looked down sometimes on Manisty--wondering where was emotion, sympathy. Not a trace of them! Of all their party he alone was obviously and hideously bored by the long wait. He leant back in his chair, with folded arms, staring at the ceiling--yawning--fidgetting. At last he took out a small Greek book from his pocket, and hung over it in a moody absorption. Once only, when a procession of the inferior clergy went by, he looked at it closely, turning afterwards to Mrs. Burgoyne with the emphatic remark: 'Bad faces!--aren't they?--almost all of them?'

Yet Lucy could see that even here in this vast crowd, amid the hubbub and bustle, he still counted, was still remembered. Officials came to lean and chat across the rope; diplomats stopped to greet him on the way to the august seats beyond the Confession. His manner in return showed no particular cordiality; Lucy thought it languid, even cold. She was struck with the difference between his mood of the day, and that brilliant and eager homage he had lavished on the old Cardinal in the villa garden. What a man of change and fantasy! Here it was he _qui tendait la joue_. Cold, distant, dreamy--one would have thought him either indifferent or hostile to the whole great pageant and its meanings.

Only once did Lucy see him bestir himself--show a gleam of animation.

A white-haired priest, all tremulous dignity and delicacy, stood for a moment beside the rope-barrier, waiting for a friend. Manisty bent over and touched him on the arm. The old man turned. The face was parchment, the cheeks cavernous. But in the blue eyes there was an exquisite innocence and youth.

Manisty smiled at him. His manner showed a peculiar almost a boyish deference. 'You join us afterwards--at lunch?'

'Yes, yes.' The old priest beamed and nodded; then his friend came up and he was carried on.

'A quarter to eleven,' said Manisty with a yawn, looking at his watch.

'Ah!--listen!'

He sprang to his feet. In an instant half the occupants of Tribune D were on their chairs, Lucy and Eleanor among them. A roar came up the church--pa.s.sionate--indescribable. Lucy held her breath.

There--there he is,--the old man! Caught in a great shaft of sunlight striking from south to north, across the church, and just touching the chapel of the Holy Sacrament--the Pope emerges. The white figure, high above the crowd, sways from side to side; the hand upraised gives the benediction. Fragile, spiritual as is the apparition, the sunbeam refines, subtilises, spiritualises it still more. It hovers like a dream above the vast mult.i.tudes--surely no living man!--but thought, history, faith, taking shape; the pa.s.sion of many hearts revealed. Up rushes the roar towards the Tribunes. 'Did you hear?' said Manisty to Mrs. Burgoyne, lifting a smiling brow, as a few Papalino cries--'Viva il Papa Re'--make themselves heard among the rest. Eleanor's thin face turns to him with responsive excitement. But she has seen these things before. Instinctively her eyes wander perpetually to Manisty's, taking their colour, their meaning from his. It is not the spectacle itself that matters to her--poor Eleanor!

One heart-beat, one smile of the man beside her outweighs it all. And he, roused at last from his nonchalance, watching hawk-like every movement of the figure and the crowd, is going mentally through a certain page of his book, repeating certain phrases--correcting here--strengthening there.

Lucy alone--the alien and Puritan Lucy--Lucy surrenders herself completely.

She betrays nothing, save by the slightly parted lips, and the flutter of the black veil fastened on her breast; but it is as though her whole inner being were dissolving, melting away, in the flame of the moment. It is her first contact with decisive central things, her first taste of the great world-play, as Europe has known it and taken part in it, at least since Charles the Great.

Yet, as she looks, within the visible scene, there opens another: the porch of a plain, s.h.i.+ngled house, her uncle sitting within it, his pipe and his newspaper on his knee, sunning himself in the April morning. She pa.s.ses behind him, looks into the stiff leaf-scented parlour--at the framed Declaration of Independence on the walls, the fresh boughs in the fire-place, the Bible on its table, the rag-carpet before the hearth.

She breathes the atmosphere of the house; its stern independence and simplicities; the scorns and the denials, the st.u.r.dy freedoms both of body and soul that it implies--conscience the only master--vice-master for G.o.d, in this His house of the World. And beyond--as her lids sink for an instant on the pageant before her--she hears, as it were, the voices of her country, so young and raw and strong!--she feels within her the throb of its struggling self-a.s.sertive life; she is conscious too of the uglinesses and meannesses that belong to birth and newness, to growth and fermentation. Then, in a proud timidity--as one who feels herself an alien and on sufferance--she hangs again upon the incomparable scene. This is St.

Peter's; there is the dome of Michael Angelo; and here, advancing towards her amid the red of the cardinals, the clatter of the guards, the tossing of the flabellae, as though looking at her alone--the two waxen fingers raised for her alone--is the white-robed triple-crowned Pope.

She threw herself upon the sight with pa.s.sion, trying to penetrate and possess it; and it baffled her, pa.s.sed her by. Some force of resistance within her cried out to it that she was not its subject--rather its enemy!

And august, unheeding, the great pageant swept on. Close, close to her now!

Down sink the crowd upon the chairs; the heads fall like corn before the wind. Lucy is bending too. The Papal chair borne on the shoulders of the guards is now but a few feet distant; vaguely she wonders that the old man keeps his balance, as he clings with one frail hand to the arm of the chair, rises incessantly--and blesses with the other. She catches the very look and meaning of the eyes--the sharp long line of the closed and toothless jaw. Spirit and spectre;--embodying the Past, bearing the clue to the Future.

'_Yeux de police!_'--laughed Reggie Brooklyn to Mrs. Burgoyne as the procession pa.s.sed--'don't you know?--that's what they say.'