Eleanor by Mrs. Humphry Ward (snow like ashes TXT) 📕

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.

The head, or rather the face, which he had given Eleanor at Nemi! The parting of the hair above the brow was intact--so was the beautiful curve of the cheek.

He knew it--and the likeness to Lucy. He remembered his words to Eleanor in the garden. Holding the pieces in his hand, he went slowly back towards the terrace.

Thrown out?--flung out into the night--by Eleanor? But why? He thought--and thought. A black sense of entanglement and fate grew upon him in the darkness, as he thought of the two women together, in the midnight silence, while he was pacing thus, alone. He met it with the defiance of newborn passion--with the resolute planning of a man who feels himself obscurely threatened, and realises that his chief menace lies, not in the power of any outside enemy, but in the very goodness of the woman he loves.


PART II.

'_Alas! there is no instinct like the heart--

The heart--which may be broken: happy they! Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould, The precious porcelain of human clay, Break with the first fall: they can ne'er behold The long year linked with heavy clay on day, And all which must be borne, and never told._'


CHAPTER XV

'Can you stand this heat?' said Lucy, anxiously.

'Oh, it will soon be cooler,' was Eleanor's languid reply.

She and Lucy sat side by side in a large and ancient landau; Mrs. Burgoyne's maid, Marie Vefour, was placed opposite to them, a little sulky and silent. On the box, beside the driver of the lean brown horses, was a bright-eyed, neatly-dressed youth who was going with the ladies to Torre Amiata.

They had just left the hill-town of Orvieto, had descended rapidly into the valley lying to the south-west of its crested heights, and were now mounting again on the further side. As they climbed higher and higher Lucy, whose attention had been for a time entirely absorbed by the weariness of the frail woman beside her, began to realise that they were passing through a scene of extraordinary beauty. Her eyes, which had been drawn and anxious, relaxed. She looked round her with a natural and rising joy.

To their left, as the road turned in zig-zag to the east, was the marvellous town which the traveller who has seen Palestine likens to Jerusalem, so steep and high and straight is the crest of warm brown and orange precipice on which it stands, so deep the valleys round it, so strange and complete the fusion between the city and the rock, so conspicuous the place of the great cathedral, which is Orvieto, as the Temple was Zion.

It was the sixth of June, and the day had been very hot. The road was deep in thick white dust. The fig-trees and vines above the growing crops were almost at a full leafiness; scarlet poppies grew thick among the corn; and at the dusty edges of the road, wild roses of a colour singularly vivid and deep, the blue flowers of love-in-a-mist, and some spikes of wine-coloured gladiolus struck strangely on a northern eye.

Then as the road turned back again--behold! a great valley, opening out westward, beyond Orvieto,--the valley of the Paglia; a valley with wooded hills on either side, of a bluish-green colour, chequered with hill-towns and slim campaniles and winding roads; and binding it all in one, the loops and reaches of a full brown river. Heat everywhere!--on the blinding walls of the buildings, on the young green of the vineyards, on the yellowing corn, on the beautiful ragged children running barefoot and bareheaded beside the carriage, on the peasants working among the vines, on the drooping heads of the horses, on the brick-red face of the driver.

'If Madame had only stayed at Orvieto!' murmured Marie the maid, looking back at the city and then at her mistress.

Eleanor smiled faintly and tapped the girl's hand.

'_Rassure-toi_, Marie! Remember how soon we made ourselves comfortable at the villa.'

Marie shook her much be-curled head. Because it had taken them three months to make the Marinata villa decently habitable, was that any reason for tempting the wilderness again?

Lucy, too, had her misgivings. Nominally she was travelling, she supposed, under Eleanor Burgoyne's chaperonage. Really she was the guardian of the whole party, and she was conscious of a tender and anxious responsibility. Already they had been delayed a whole week in Orvieto by Eleanor's prostrate state. She had not been dangerously ill; but it had been clearly impossible to leave doctor and chemist behind and plunge into the wilds. So they had hidden themselves in a little Italian inn in a back street, and the days had passed somehow.

* * *