Eleanor Part 74

An instant--and she added hastily in a voice that wavered,' I am so very, very sorry--'

'Thank you. She often asks about you.'

He spoke with a formal courtesy, in his 'grand manner.' Her gleam of feeling had made him sensible, of advantage, given him back self-confidence.

The soft flutter of her dress disappeared, and he was left to pace up and down the _loggia_ in alternations of hope and despair. He, too, felt with Eleanor that these days were fatal. If he lost her now, he lost her for ever. She was of those natures in which a scruple only deepens with time.

She would not take what should have been Eleanor's. There was the case in a nutsh.e.l.l. And how insist in these circ.u.mstances, as he would have done vehemently in any other, that Eleanor had no lawful grievance?

He felt himself bound and p.r.i.c.ked by a thousand delicate lilliputian bonds.

The 'regiment of women' was complete. He could do nothing. Only Eleanor could help.

The following day, just outside the convent gate, he met Lucy, returning from the village, whither she had been in quest of some fresh figs for Eleanor's breakfast. It was barely eight o'clock, but the sun was already fierce. After their formal greeting, Lucy lingered a moment.

'It's going to be frightfully hot to-day,' she said, looking round her with a troubled face at the glaring road, at the dusty patch of vines beyond it, at the burnt gra.s.s below the garden wall. 'Mr. Manisty!--you will make Eleanor go next Friday?--you won't let her put it off--for anything?'

She turned to him, in entreaty, the colour dyeing her pure cheek and throat.

'I will do what I can. I understand your anxiety,' he said stiffly.

She opened the old door of the courtyard and pa.s.sed in before him. As he rejoined her, she asked him in a low voice--

'Have you any more news?'

'Yes. I found a letter at Selvapendente last night. The state of things is better. There will be no need I hope to alarm Eleanor--for the present.'

'I am so glad!'--The voice hurried and then paused. 'And of course, for you too,' she added, with difficulty.

He said nothing, and they walked up to the inner door in silence. Then as they paused on the threshold, he said suddenly, with a bitter accent--

'You are very devoted!'

She looked at him in surprise. Her young figure drew itself erect. 'That isn't wonderful--is it?--with her?'

Her tone pierced him.

'Oh! nothing's wonderful in women. You set the standard so high--the men can't follow.'

He stared at her, pale and frowning. She laughed artificially, but he could see the breath hurrying under the blue cotton dress.

'Not at all! When it comes to the serious difficulties we must, it seems, apply to you. Eleanor is thankful that you will take her home.

'Oh! I can be a decent courier--when I put my mind into it,' he said angrily. 'That, I dare say, you'll admit.'

'Of course I shall,' she said, with a lip that smiled unsteadily. 'I know it'll be invaluable. Please, Mr. Manisty, let me pa.s.s. I must get Eleanor her breakfast.'

But he still stood there, barring the way.

'Then, Miss Foster, admit something else!--that I am not the mere intruder--the mere burden--that you took me for.'

The man's soreness expressed itself in every word, every movement.

Lucy grew white.

'For Eleanor's sake, I am glad you came,' she said struggling for composure. But the dignity, the pride behind the agitation were so evident that he dared not go a step further. He bowed, and let her pa.s.s.

Meanwhile the Contessa was useful. After a very little observation, based on the suggestions of her letter from Home, she divined the situation exactly. Her affection and pity for Mrs. Burgoyne grew apace. Lucy she both admired and acquitted; while she half liked, half hated Manisty. He provoked her perpetually to judgment, intellectual and moral; and they fell into many a sparring which pa.s.sed the time and made a shelter for the others. Her daughter had just left her; and the more she smarted, the more she bustled in and out of the village, the more she drove about the country, attending to the claims, the sicknesses, and the animals of distant _contadini_, the more she read her newspapers, and the more nimbly did her mind move.

Like the Marchesa Fazzoleni, she would have no pessimism about Italy, though she saw things in a less poetic, more practical way.

'I dare say the taxes are heavy--and that our officials and bankers and _impiegali_ are not on as good terms as they might be with the Eighth Commandment. Well! was ever a nation made in a night before? When your Queen came to the throne, were you English so immaculate? You talk about our Socialists--have we any disturbances, pray, worse than your disturbances in the twenties and thirties? The _parroco_ says to me day after day: "The African campaign has been the ruin of Italy!" That's only because he wants it to be so. The machine marches, and the people pay their taxes, and the farming improves every year, all the same. A month or two ago, the newspapers were full of the mobbing of trains starting with soldiers for Erythrea. Yet all that time, if you went down into the Campo de' Fiori you could find poems sold for a _soldo_, that only the people wrote and the people read, that were as patriotic as the poor King himself.'

'Ah! I know,' said Manisty. 'I have seen some of them. The oddest, navest things!--the metre of Ta.s.so, the thoughts of a child--and every now and then the cry a poet.'

And he repeated a stanza or two from these broad-sheets of the war, in a rolling and musical Italian.

The Contessa looked at him with cool admiration; and then aside, at Lucy.

Certainly, when this Englishman was taking pains, his good-looks deserved all that could be said of them. That he was one of the temperaments to which other lives minister without large return--that she had divined at once. But, like Lucy, she was not damped by that. The Contessa had known few illusions, and only one romance; her love for her dead son. Otherwise she took the world as it came, and quarrelled with very few of its marked and persistent phenomena.

They were sitting on a terrace beneath the north-western front of the Palazzo. The terrace was laid out in a formal garden. Fountains played; statues stood in rows; and at the edge cypresses, black against the evening blue and rose, threw back the delicate dimness of the mountains, made their farness more far, and the gay foreground--oleanders, geraniums, nasturtiums--more gay.

Eleanor was lying on a deck-chair, smiling often, and at ease. Lucy sat a little apart, busy with her embroidery. She very seldom talked, but Eleanor could not make a movement or feel a want without her being aware of it.

'But, Madame, I cannot allow you to make an enemy out of me!'--said Manisty to the Contessa, resuming the conversation. 'When you talk to me of this Country and its future, _vous prechez un converti_.'

'I thought you were the Jonah of our day,' she said, with her abrupt and rather disdainful smile.

Manisty laughed.

'A Jonah who needn't complain anyway that his Nineveh is too ready to hear him.'

'Where is the preaching?' she asked.

'In the waste-paper basket,' said Manisty, throwing away his cigarette.

'Nowadays, apparently it is the prophets who repent.'

Involuntarily his eye wandered, sought for Lucy withdrew. She was hidden behind her work.

'Oh! preach away,' cried the Contessa. 'Take up your book again. Publish it. We can bear it.'

Manisty searched with both hands for his matches; his new cigarette between his lips.

'My book, Madame'--he said coolly--' outlived the pleasure its author took in writing it. My cousin was its good angel; but not even she could bring a blunder to port. Eleanor!--_n'est-ce pas?_'