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

that if you don't write to me every week, my generosity, as you call it, will break down--and I shall be for sending out a search party right away.... Do you want money? I must say that I hope July will see the end of your adventure.'

Would it? Lucy found her mind full of anxious thoughts as Eleanor read aloud to her.

Presently she discovered that a skein of silk she wanted for her work was not in her basket. She turned to look also in her old inlaid workbox, which stood on a small table beside her. But it was not there.

'Please wait a moment,' she said to her companion. 'I am afraid I must get my silk.'

She stood up hastily, and her movement upset the rickety cane table. With a crash her workbox fell to the ground, and its contents rolled all over the _loggia_. She gave a cry of dismay.

'Oh! my terra-cottas!--my poor terra-cottas!'

Eleanor started, and rose too, involuntarily, to her feet. There on the ground lay all the little Nemi fragments which Manisty had given to Lucy, and which had been stowed away, each carefully wrapped in tissue paper, in the well of her old workbox.

Eleanor assisted to pick them up, rather silently. The note of keen distress in Lucy's voice rang in her ears.

'They are not much hurt, luckily,' she said.

And indeed, thanks to the tissue paper, there were only a few small chips and bruises to bemoan when Lucy at last had gathered them all safely into her lap. Still, chips and bruises in the case of delicate Graeco-Roman terra-cottas are more than enough to make their owner smart, and Lucy bent over them with a very flushed and rueful face, examining and wrapping them up again.

'Cotton-wool would be better,' she said anxiously. 'How have you put your two away?'

Directly the words were out of her mouth she felt that they had been better unspoken.

A deep flush stained Eleanor's thin face.

'I am afraid I haven't taken much care of them,' she said hurriedly.

They were both silent for a little. But while Lucy still had her lap full of her treasures, Eleanor again stood up.

'I will go in and rest for an hour before _dejeuner_. I _think_ I might go to sleep.'

She had passed a very broken night, and Lucy looked at her with tender concern. She quickly but carefully laid aside her terra-cottas, that she might go in with Eleanor and 'settle her' comfortably.

But when she was left to rest in her carefully darkened room, and Lucy had gone back to the _loggia_, Eleanor got no wink of sleep. She lay in an anguish of memory, living over again that last night at the villa--thinking of Manisty in the dark garden and her own ungovernable impulse.

Presently a slight sound reached her from the _loggia_. She turned her head quickly. A sob?--from Lucy?

Her heart stood still. Noiselessly she slipped to her feet. The door between her and the _loggia_ had been left ajar for air. It was partially glazed, with shutters of plain green wood outside, and inside a muslin blind. Eleanor approached it.

Through the chink of the door she saw Lucy plainly. The girl had been sitting almost with her back to the door, but she had turned so that her profile and hands were visible.

How quiet she was! Yet never was there an attitude more eloquent. She held in her hands, which lay upon her knee, one of the little terra-cottas. Eleanor could see it perfectly. It was the head of a statuette, not unlike her own which she had destroyed,--a smaller and ruder Artemis with the Cybele crown. There flashed into her mind the memory of Manisty explaining it to the girl, sitting on the bench behind the strawberry hut; his black brows bent in the eagerness of his talk; her sweet eyes, her pure pleasure.

And now Lucy had no companion--but thought. Her face was raised, the eyes were shut, the beautiful mouth quivered in the effort to be still. She was mistress of herself, yet not for the moment wholly mistress of longing and of sorrow. A quick struggle passed over the face. There was another slight sob. Then Eleanor saw her raise the terra-cotta, bow her face upon it, press it long and lingeringly to her lips. It was like a gesture of eternal farewell; the gesture of a child expressing the heart of a woman.

Eleanor tottered back. She sat on the edge of her bed, motionless in the darkness, till the sounds of Cecco bringing up the _pranzo_ in the corridor outside warned her that her time of solitude was over.

* * * * *

In the evening Eleanor was sitting in the Sassetto. Lucy with her young need of exercise had set off to walk down through the wood to the first bridge over the Paglia. Eleanor had been very weary all day, and for the first time irritable. It was almost with a secret relief that Lucy started, and Eleanor saw her depart.

Mrs. Burgoyne was left stretched on her long canvas chair, in the green shade of the Sassetto. All about her was a chaos of moss-grown rocks crowned with trees young and old; a gap in the branches showed her a distant peachy sky suffused with gold above the ethereal heights of the Amiata range; a little wind crept through the trees; the birds were silent, but the large green lizards slipped in and out, and made a friendly life in the cool shadowed place.

The Contessa was to have joined Eleanor here at six o'clock. But a note had arrived excusing her. The visit of some relations detained her.

Nevertheless a little after six a step was heard approaching along the winding path which while it was still distant Eleanor knew to be Father Benecke. For his sake, she was glad that the Contessa was not with her.

As for Donna Teresa, when she met the priest in the village or on the road she shrank out of his path as though his mere shadow brought malediction.

Her pinched face, her thin figure seemed to contract still further under an impulse of fear and repulsion. Eleanor had seen it, and wondered.

But even the Contessa would have nothing to say to him.

'_Non, Madame; c'est plus fort que moi!_' she had said to Eleanor one day that she had come across Mrs. Burgoyne and Father Benecke together in the Sassetto--in after-excuse for her behaviour to him. 'For you and me--_bien entendu!_--we think what we please. Heaven knows I am not bigoted. Teresa makes herself unhappy about me.' The stout, imperious woman stifled a sigh that betrayed much. 'I take what I want from our religion--and I don't trouble about the rest. Emilio was the same. But a priest that disobeys--that deserts--! No! that is another matter. I can't argue; it seizes me by the throat.' She made an expressive movement. 'It is an instinct--an inheritance--call it what you like. But I feel like Teresa; I could run at the sight of him.'

Certainly Father Benecke gave her no occasion to run. Since his recovery from the first shock and agitation of his suspension he had moved about the roads and tracks of Torre Amiata with the 'recollected' dignity of the pale and meditative recluse. He asked nothing; he spoke to no one, except to the ladies at the convent, and to the old woman who served him unwillingly in the little tumble-down house by the river's edge to which he had now transferred himself and his books, for greater solitude. Eleanor understood that he shrank from facing his German life and friends again till he had completed the revision of his book, and the evolution of his thought; and she had some reason to believe that he regarded his isolation and the enmity of this Italian neighbourhood as a necessary trial and testing, to be borne without a murmur.

As his step came nearer, she sat up and threw off her languor. It might have been divined, even, that she heard it with a secret excitement.

When he appeared he greeted her with the manner at once reticent and cordial that was natural to him. He had brought her an article in a German newspaper of the 'Centre' on himself and his case, the violence of which had provoked him to a reply, whereof the manuscript was also in his pocket.

Eleanor took the article and turned it over. But some inward voice told her that her _role_, of counsellor and critic was--again--played out. Suddenly Father Benecke said:

'I have submitted my reply to Mr. Manisty. I would like to show you what he says.'

Eleanor fell back in her chair. 'You know where he is?' she cried.

Her surprise was so great that she could not at once disguise her emotion. Father Benecke was also taken aback. He lifted his eyes from the papers he held.

'I wrote to him through his bankers the other day, Madame. I have always found that letters so addressed to him are forwarded.'

Then he stopped in distress and perturbation. Mrs. Burgoyne was still apparently struggling for breath and composure. His absent, seer's eyes at last took note of her as a human being. He understood, all at once, that he had before him a woman very ill, apparently very unhappy, and that what he had just said had thrown her into an anguish with which her physical weakness was hardly able to cope.

The colour rose in his own cheeks.

'Madame! let me hasten to say that I have done your bidding precisely. You were so good as to tell me that you wished no information to be given to anyone as to your stay here. I have not breathed a word of it to Mr. Manisty or to any other of my correspondents. Let me show you his letter.'

He held it out to her. Eleanor took it with uncertain fingers.

'Your mention of him took me by surprise,' she said, after a moment. 'Miss Foster and I--have been--so long--without hearing of our friends.'

Then she stooped over the letter. It seemed to her the ink was hardly dry on it--that it was still warm from Manisty's hand. The date of it was only three days old. And the place from which it came? Cosenza?--Cosenza in Calabria? Then he was still in Italy?

She put the letter back into Father Benecke's hands.

'Would you read it for me? I have rather a headache to-day.'

He read it with a somewhat embarrassed voice. She lay listening, with her eyes closed under her large hat, each hand trying to prevent the trembling of the other.

A strange pride swelled in her. It was a kind and manly letter, expressing far more personal sympathy with Benecke than Manisty had ever yet allowed himself--a letter wholly creditable indeed to the writer, and marked with a free and flowing beauty of phrase that brought home to Eleanor at every turn his voice, his movements, the ideas and sympathies of the writer.

Towards the end came the familiar Manisty-ism:

'All the same, their answer to you is still as good as ever. The system must either break up or go on. They naturally prefer that it should go on. But if it is worked by