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

* *

Surely this hot evening and their shabby carriage and the dusty unfamiliar road were all dream-stuff--an illusion from which she was to wake directly and find herself once more in her room at Marinata, looking out on Monte Cavo?

Yet as this passed across Lucy's mind, she felt again upon her face the cool morning wind, as she and Eleanor fled down the Marinata hill in the early sunlight, between six and seven o'clock,--through the streets of Albano, already full and busy,--along the edge of that strange green crater of Aricia, looking up to Pio Nono's great viaduct, and so to Cecchina, the railway station in the plain.

An escape!--nothing else; planned the night before when Lucy's strong commonsense had told her that the only chance for her own peace and Eleanor's was to go at once, to stop any further development of the situation, and avoid any fresh scene with Mr. Manisty.

She thought of the details--the message left for Aunt Pattie that they had gone into Rome to shop before the heat; then the telegram 'Urgente,' despatched to the villa after they were sure that Mr. Manisty must have safely left it for that important field day of his clerical and Ultramontane friends in Rome, in which he was pledged to take part; then the arrival of the startled and bewildered Aunt Pattie at the small hotel where they were in hiding--her conferences--first with Eleanor, then with Lucy.

Strange little lady, Aunt Pattie! How much had she guessed? What had passed between her and Mrs. Burgoyne? When at last she and Lucy stood together hand in hand, the girl's sensitive spirit had divined in her a certain stiffening, a certain diminution of that constant kindness which she had always shown her guest. Did Aunt Pattie blame her? Had she cherished her own views and secret hopes for her nephew and Mrs. Burgoyne? Did she feel that Lucy had in some way unwarrantably and ambitiously interfered with them?

At any rate, Lucy had divined the unspoken inference 'You must have given him encouragement!' and behind it--perhaps?--the secret ineradicable pride of family and position that held her no fitting match for Edward Manisty. Lucy's inmost mind was still sore and shrinking from this half-hour's encounter with Aunt Pattie.

But she had not shown it. And at the end of it Aunt Pattie had kissed her ruefully with tears--'It's _very_ good of you! You'll take care of Eleanor!'

Lucy could hear her own answer--'Indeed, indeed, I will!'--and Aunt Pattie's puzzled cry, 'If only someone would tell me what I'm to do with _him_!'

And then she recalled her own pause of wonder as Aunt Pattie left her--beside the hotel window, looking into the narrow side street. Why was it 'very good of her'?--and why, nevertheless, was this dislocation of all their plans felt to be somehow her fault and responsibility?--even by herself? There was a sudden helpless inclination to laugh over the topsy-turviness of it all.

And then her heart had fluttered in her breast, stabbed by the memory of Eleanor's cry the night before. 'It is of no use to say that you know nothing--that he has said nothing. _I_ know. If you stay, he will give you no peace--his will is indomitable. But if you go, he will guess my part in it. I shall not have the physical strength to conceal it--and he can be a hard man when he is resisted! What am I to do? I would go home at once--but--I might die on the way. Why not?'

And then--in painful gasps--the physical situation had been revealed to her--the return of old symptoms and the reappearance of arrested disease. The fear of the physical organism alternating with the despair of the lonely and abandoned soul,--never could Lucy forget the horror of that hour's talk, outwardly so quiet, as she sat holding Eleanor's hands in hers, and the floodgates of personality and of grief were opened before her.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the patient, sweating horses climbed and climbed. Soon they were at the brow of the hill, and looking back for their last sight of Orvieto. And now they were on a broad tableland, a bare, sun-baked region where huge flocks of sheep, of white, black, and brown goats wandered with ragged shepherds over acres of burnt and thirsty pasture. Here and there were patches of arable land and groups of tilling peasants in the wide untidy expanse; once or twice too an _osteria_, with its bush or its wine-stained tables under the shadow of its northern wall. But scarcely a farmhouse. Once indeed a great building like a factory or a workhouse, in the midst of wide sun-beaten fields. 'Ecco! la fattoria,' said the driver, pointing to it. And once a strange group of underground dwellings, their chimneys level with the surrounding land, whence wild swarms of troglodyte children rushed up from the bowels of the earth to see the carriage pass and shriek for _soldi_.

But the beauty of the sun-scorched upland was its broom! Sometimes they were in deep tufa lanes; like English lanes, save for their walls and canopies of gold; sometimes they journeyed through wide barren stretches, where only broom held the soil against all comers, spreading in sheets of gold beneath the dazzling sky. Large hawks circled overhead; in the rare woods the nightingales were loud and merry; and goldfinches were everywhere. A hot, lonely, thirsty land--the heart of Italy--where the rocks are honeycombed with the tombs of that mysterious Etruscan race, the Melchisedek of the nations, coming no one knows whence, 'without father and without mother'--a land which has to the west of it the fever-stricken Maremma and the heights of the Amiata range, and to the south the forest country of Viterbo.

Eleanor looked out upon the road and the fields with eyes that faintly remembered, and a heart held now, as always, in the grip of that _tempo felice_ which was dead.

It was she who had proposed this journey. Once in late November she and Aunt Pattie and Manisty had spent two or three days at Orvieto with some Italian friends. They had made the journey back to Rome, partly by _vetturino_, driving from Orvieto to Bolsena and Viterbo, and spending a night on the way at a place of remote and enchanting beauty which had left a deep mark on Eleanor's imagination. They owed the experience to their Italian friends, acquaintances of the great proprietor whose agent gave the whole party hospitality for the night; and as they jogged on through this June heat she recalled with bitter longing the bright November day, the changing leaves, the upland air, and Manisty's delight in the strange unfamiliar country, in the vast oak woods above the Paglia, and the marvellous church at Monte Fiascone.

But it was not the agent's house, the scene of their former stay, to which she was now guiding Lucy. When she and Manisty, hurrying out for an early walk before the carriage started, had explored a corner of the dense oak woods below the _palazzo_ on the hill, they had come across a deserted convent, with a contadino's family in one corner of it, and a ruinous chapel with a couple of dim frescoes attributed to Pinturicchio.

How well she remembered Manisty's rage over the spoliation of the convent and the ruin of the chapel! He had gone stalking over the deserted place, raving against 'those brigands from Savoy,' and calculating how much it would cost to buy back the place from the rascally Municipio of Orvieto, to whom it now belonged, and return it to its former Carmelite owners.

Meanwhile Eleanor had gossiped with the _massaja_, or farmer's wife, and had found out that there were a few habitable rooms in the convent still, roughly furnished, and that in summer, people of a humble sort came there sometimes from Orvieto for coolness and change--the plateau being 3,000 feet above the sea. Eleanor had inquired if English people ever came.

'_Inglesi! no!--mai Inglesi_,' said the woman in astonishment.

The family were, however, in some sort of connection with an hotel proprietor at Orvieto, through whom they got their lodgers. Eleanor had taken down the name and all particulars in a fit of enthusiasm for the beauty and loneliness of the place. 'Suppose some day we came here to write?' Manisty had said vaguely, looking round him with regret as they drove away. The mere suggestion had made the name of Torre Amiata sweet to Eleanor thenceforward.

Was it likely that he would remember?--that he would track them? Hardly. He would surely think that in this heat they would go northward. He would not dream of looking for them in Italy.

She too was thinking of nothing--nothing!--but the last scenes at the villa and in Rome, as the carriage moved along. The phrases of her letter to Manisty ran through her mind. Had they made him her lasting enemy? The thought was like a wound draining blood and strength. But in her present state of jealous passion it was more tolerable than that other thought which was its alternative--the thought of Lucy surrendered, Lucy in her place.

'Lucy Foster is with me,' she had written. 'We wish to be together for a while before she goes back to America. And that we may be quite alone, we prefer to give no address for a few weeks. I have written to Papa to say that I am going away for a time with a friend, to rest and recruit. You and Aunt Pattie could easily arrange that there should be no talk and no gossip about the matter. I hope and think you will. Of course if we are in any strait or difficulty we shall communicate at once with our friends.'

How had he received it? Sometimes she thought of his anger and disappointment with terror, sometimes with a vindictive excitement that poisoned all her being. Gentleness turned to hate and violence,--was it of that in truth, and not of that heart mischief to which doctors gave long names, that Eleanor Burgoyne was dying?

* * * * *

They had turned into a wide open space crossed by a few wire fences at vast intervals. The land was mostly rough pasture, or mere sandy rock and scrub. In the glowing west, towards which they journeyed, rose far purple peaks peering over the edge of the great tableland. To the east and south vast woods closed in the horizon.

The carriage left the main road and entered an ill-defined track leading apparently through private property.

'Ah! I remember!' cried Eleanor, starting up. 'There is the _palazzo_--and the village.'

In front of them, indeed, rose an old villa of the Renaissance, with its long flat roofs, its fine _loggia_, and terraced vineyards. A rude village of grey stone, part, it seemed, of the tufa rocks from which it sprang, pressed round the villa, invaded its olive-gardens, crept up to its very walls. Meanwhile the earth grew kinder and more fertile. The vines and figs stood thick again among the green corn and flowering lucerne. Peasants streaming home from work, the men on donkeys, the women carrying their babies, met the carriage and stopped to stare after it, and talk.

Suddenly from the ditches of the roadside sprang up two martial