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

But at least our dreams are true--to _us_.'... 'We make the heaven we hope indeed our home! All to the good if we wake up in it after all! If not, the dream will have had its own use here. Why should we fight so with our ignorance? The point is, as to the _quality_ of our dreams! The quality of mine was once all dark--all misery. Now, there is a change,--like the change from London drizzle and rain to the clearness of this sky, which gives beauty to everything beneath it. But, for me, it is not the first time--no, not the first--'

The words were no longer audible, her hands pressed against each other, and he traced that sudden rigidity in her dim face which meant that she was defending herself against emotion.

'It is all true, my friend,' he said, bending over her,--'the gospel of Christ. You would be happier if you could accept it simply.'

She opened her eyes, smiling, but she did not reply. She was always eager that he should read and talk to her, and she rarely argued. But he never felt that intellectually he had much hold upon her. Her mind seemed to him to be moving elusively in a sphere remote and characteristic, where he could seldom follow. _Anima naturaliter Christiana_; yet with a most stoic readiness to face the great uncertainties, the least flattering possibilities of existence: so she often appeared to him.

Presently she dragged herself higher in her chair to look at the moon rising above the eastern mass of the convent.

'It all gives me such extraordinary pleasure!' she said, as though in wonder--'The moon--the fire-flies--those beautiful woods--your kindness--Lucy in her white dress, when I see her there at the door. I know how short it must be; and a few weeks ago I enjoyed nothing. What mystery are we part of?--that moves and changes without our will. I was much touched, Father, by all you said to me that great, great day; but I was not conscious of yielding to you; nor afterwards. Then, one night, I went to sleep in one mind; I woke up in another. The "grace of God," you think?--or the natural welling back of the river, little by little, to its natural bed? After all I never wilfully hurt or defied anybody before--that I can remember. But what are "grace" and "nature" more than words? There is a Life,--which our life perpetually touches and guesses at--like a child fingering a closed room in the dark. What else do we know?'

'We know a great deal more,' he said firmly. 'But I don't want to weary you by talking.'

'You don't weary me. Ah!'--her voice leapt--'what _is_ true--is the "dying to live" of Christianity. One moment, you have the weight of the world upon you; the next, as it were, you dispose of the world and all in it. Just an act of the will!--and the thing verifies itself like any chemical experiment. Let me go on--go on!' she said, with mystical intensity. 'If the clue is anywhere it is there,--so far my mind goes with you. Other races perceive it through other forms. But Christ offered it to us.'

'My dear friend,' said the priest tenderly--'He offers us _Himself_.'

She smiled, most brightly.

'Don't quarrel with me--with my poor words. He is there--_there!_'--she said under her breath.

And he saw the motion of her white fingers towards her breast.

Afterwards he sat beside her for some time in silence, thinking of the great world of Rome, and of his long conflict there.

Form after form appeared to him of those men, stupid or acute, holy or worldly, learned or ignorant, who at the heart of Catholicism are engaged in that amazing struggle with knowledge which perhaps represents the only condition under which knowledge--the awful and irresistible--can in the long run safely incorporate itself with the dense mass of human life. He thought of scholar after scholar crushed by the most incompetent of judges; this man silenced by a great post, that man by exile, one through the best of his nature, another through the worst. He saw himself sitting side by side with one of the most-eminent theologians of the Roman Church; he recalled the little man, black-haired, lively, corpulent, a trifle underhung, with a pleasant lisp and a merry eye; he remembered the incredible conversation, the sense of difficulty and shame under which he had argued some of the common-places of biology and primitive history, as educated Europe understands them; the half patronising, half impatient glibness of the other.--

'Oh! you know better, my son, than I how to argue these things; you are more learned, of course. But it is only a matter for the Catechism after all. Obey, my friend, obey!--there is no more to be said.'

And his own voice--tremulous:

'I would obey if I could. But unhappy as I am, to betray truths that are as evident to me as the sun in heaven would make me still unhappier. The fate that threatens me is frightful. _Aber ich kann nicht anders_. The truth holds me in a vice.'--

'Let me give you a piece of counsel. You sit too close to your books. You read and read,--you spin yourself into your own views like a cocoon. Travel--hear what others say--above all, go into retreat! No one need know. It would do you much good.'

'Eminence, I don't only study; I pray and meditate; I take pains to hear all that my opponents say. But my heart stands firm.'

'My son, the tribunal of the Pope is the tribunal of Christ. You are judged; submit! If not, I am sorry--regret deeply--but the consequence is certain.'

And then his own voice, in its last wrestle--

'The penalty that approaches me appears to me more terrible the nearer it comes. Like the Preacher--"I have judged him happiest who is not yet born, nor doth he see the ills that are done under the sun." Eminence, give me yet a little time.'

'A fortnight--gladly. But that is the utmost limit. My son, make the "sacrificium intellectus!"--and make it willingly.'

Ah!--and then the yielding, and the treachery, and the last blind stroke for truth!--

What was it which had undone him--which was now strangling the mental and moral life of half Christendom!

Was it the _certainty_ of the Roman Church; that conception of life which stakes the all of life upon the carnal and outward; upon a date, an authorship, a miracle, an event?

Perhaps his own certainty, at bottom, had not been so very different.

But here, beneath his eyes, in this dying woman, was another certainty; erect amid all confusion; a certainty of the spirit.

And looking along the future, he saw the battle of the certainties, traditional, scientific, moral, ever more defined; and believed, like all the rest of us, in that particular victory, for which he hoped!

* * * * *

Late that night, when all their visitors were gone, Eleanor showed unusual animation. She left her sofa; she walked up and down their little sitting-room, giving directions to Marie about the journey home; and at last she informed them with a gaiety that made mock of their opposition that she had made all arrangements to start very early the following morning to visit the doctor in Orvieto who had attended her in June. Lucy protested and implored, but soon found that everything was settled, and Eleanor was determined. She was to go alone with Marie, in the Contessa's carriage, starting almost with the dawn so as to avoid the heat: to spend the hot noon under shelter at Orvieto; and to return in the evening. Lucy pressed at least to go with her. So it appeared had the Contessa. But Eleanor would have neither. 'I drive most days, and it does me no harm,' she said, almost with temper. 'Do let me alone!'

When she returned, Manisty was lounging under the trees of the courtyard waiting for her. He had spent a dull and purposeless day, which for a man of his character and in his predicament had been hard to bear. His patience was ebbing; his disappointment and despair were fast getting beyond control. All this Eleanor saw in his face as she dismounted.

Lucy, who had been watching for her all the afternoon, was at the moment for some reason or other with Reggie in the village.

Eleanor, with her hand on Marie's arm, tottered across the courtyard. At the convent door her strength failed her. She turned to Manisty.

'I can't walk up these stairs. Do you think you could carry me? I am very light.'

Struck with sudden emotion he threw his arms round her. She yielded like a tired child. He, who had instinctively prepared himself for a certain weight, was aghast at the ease with which he lifted her. Her head, in its pretty black hat, fell against his breast. Her eyes closed. He wondered if she had fainted.

He carried her to her room, and laid her on the sofa there. Then he saw that she had not fainted, and that her eyes followed him. As he was about to leave her to Marie, who was moving about in Lucy's room next door, she touched him on the arm.

'You may speak again--to-morrow,' she said, nodding at him with a friendly smile.

His face in its sudden flash of animation reflected the permission. He pressed her hand tenderly.

'Was your doctor useful to you?'

'Oh yes; it is hard to think as much of a prescription in Italian as in English--but that's one's insular way.'

'He thought you no worse?'

'Why should one believe him if he did?' she said evasively. 'No one knows as much as oneself. Ah! there is Lucy. I think you must bid us good-night. I am too tired for talking.'

As he left the room Eleanor settled down happily on her pillow.

'The first and only time!' she thought. 'My heart on his--my arms round his neck. There must be impressions that outlast all others. I shall manage to put them all away at the end--but that.'

When Lucy came in, she declared she was not very much exhausted. As to the doctor she was silent.

But that night, when Lucy had been for some time in bed, and was still sleepless with anxiety and sorrow, the door opened and Eleanor appeared. She was in her usual white wrapper, and her fair hair, now much touched with grey, was loose on her shoulders.

'Oh! can I do anything?' cried Lucy, starting up.

Eleanor came up to her, laid a hand on her shoulder, bade her 'be still,' and brought a chair for herself. She had put down her candle on a table which stood near, and Lucy could see the sombre agitation of her face.

'How long?' she said, bending over the girl--'how long are you going to break my heart and his?'

The words were spoken with a violence which convulsed her whole frail form. Lucy sprang up, and tried to throw her arms round her. But Eleanor shook her off.

'No--no! Let us have it out. Do you see?' She let the wrapper slip from her shoulders. She showed the dark hollows under the wasted collar-bones, the knife-like shoulders, the absolute disappearance of all that had once made the difference between grace and emaciation. She held up her hands