The party grouped themselves round the tea-tables. Mrs. Burgoyne laid
a kind hand on Lucy Foster's arm, and introduced one or two of the
new-comers.
Then, while Miss Manisty, a little apart, lent her ear to the soft chat
of the ambassador, who sat beside her, supporting a pair of old and very
white hands upon a gold-headed stick, Mrs. Burgoyne busied herself with Mr.
Bellasis and his tea. For he was anxious to catch a train, and had but a
short time to spare.
He was a tall stiffly built man, with a heavy white face, and a shock of
black hair combed into a high and bird-like crest. As to Mrs. Burgoyne's
attentions, he received them with a somewhat pinched but still smiling
dignity. Manisty, meanwhile, a few feet away, was fidgetting on his chair,
in one of his most unmanageable moods. Around him were two or three young
men bearing the great names of Rome. They all belonged to the Guardia
Nobile, and were all dressed by English tailors. Two of them, moreover,
were the sons of English mothers. They were laughing and joking together,
and every now and then they addressed their host. But he scarcely replied.
He gathered stalk after stalk of grass from the ground beside him, nibbled
it and threw it away--a constant habit of his when he was annoyed or out of
spirits.
"So you have read my book?" said Mr. Bellasis pleasantly, addressing Mrs.
Burgoyne, as she handed him a cup of tea. The book in question was long;
it revived the narrative verse of our grandfathers; and in spite of the
efforts of a 'set' the world was not disposed to take much notice of it.
'Yes, indeed! We liked it so much.--But I think when I wrote to you I told
you what we thought about it?'
And she glanced towards Manisty for support. He, however, did not
apparently hear what she said. Mr. Bellasis also looked round in his
direction; but in vain. The poet's face clouded.
'May I ask what reading you are at?' he said, returning to his tea.
'What reading?'--Mrs. Burgoyne looked puzzled.
'Have you read it more than once?'
She coloured.
'No--I'm afraid--'
'Ah!--my friends tell me in Rome that the book cannot be really appreciated
except at a second or third reading--'
Mrs. Burgoyne looked up in dismay, as a shower of gravel descended on the
tea-table. Manisty has just beckoned in haste to his great Newfoundland who
was lying stretched on the gravel path, and the dog bounding towards him,
seemed to have brought the path with him.
Mr. Bellasis impatiently shook some fragments of gravel from his coat, and
resumed:--
'I have just got a batch of the first reviews. Really criticism has become
an absurdity! Did you look at the "Sentinel"?'
Mrs. Burgoyne hesitated.
'Yes--I saw there was something about the style--'
'The style!'--Mr. Bellasis threw himself back in his chair and laughed
loud--'Why the style is done with a magnifying-glass!--There's not a
phrase,--not a word that I don't stand by.'
'Mr. Bellasis'--said the courteous voice of the ambassador--'are you going
by this train?'
The great man held out his watch.
'Yes indeed--and I must catch it!' cried the man of letters. He started to
his feet, and bending over Mrs. Burgoyne, he said in an aside perfectly
audible to all the world--'I read my new play to-night--just finished--at
Madame Salvi's!'
Eleanor smiled and congratulated him. He took his leave, and Manisty in an
embarrassed silence accompanied him half way down the avenue.
Then returning, he threw himself into a chair near Lucy Foster and young
Brooklyn, with a sigh of relief.
'Intolerable ass!'--he said under his breath, as though quite unconscious
of any bystander.
The young man looked at Lucy with eyes that danced.
* * * * *
'Who is your young lady?' said the ambassador.
Miss Manisty explained.
'An American? Really? I was quite off the scent. But now--I see--I see! Let
me guess. She is a New Englander--not from Boston, but from the country. I
remember the type exactly. The year I was at Washington I spent some weeks
in the summer convalescing at a village up in the hills of Maine.--The
women there seemed to me the salt of the earth. May I go and talk to her?'
Miss Manisty led him across the circle to Lucy, and introduced him.
'Will you take me to the terrace and show me St. Peter's? I know one can
see it from here,' said the suave polished voice.
Lucy rose in a shy pleasure that became her. The thought flashed happily
through her, as she walked beside the old man, that Uncle Ben would like
to hear of it! She had that 'respect of persons' which comes not from
snobbishness, but from imagination and sympathy. The man's office thrilled
her, not his title.
The ambassador's shrewd eyes ran over her face and bearing, taking note of
all the signs of character. Then he began to talk, exerting himself as he
had not exerted himself that morning for a princess who had lunched at his
table. And as he was one of the enchanters of his day, known for such in
half a dozen courts, and two hemispheres, Lucy Foster's walk was a walk
of delight. There was only one drawback. She had heard some member of the
party say 'Your Excellency'--and somehow her lips would not pronounce it!
Yet so kind and kingly was the old man, there was no sign of homage she
would not have gladly paid him, if she had known how.
They emerged at last upon the stone terrace at the edge of the garden
looking out upon the Campagna.
'Ah! there it is!'--said the ambassador, and, walking to the corner of the
terrace, he pointed northwards.
And there--just caught between two stone pines--in the dim blue distance
rose the great dome.
'Doesn't it give you an emotion?' he said, smiling down upon her.--'When
I first stayed on these hills I wrote a poem about it--a very bad poem.
There's a kind of miracle in it, you know. Go where you will, that dome
follows you. Again and again, storm and mist may blot out the rest--that
remains. The peasants on these hills have a superstition about it. They
look for that dome as they look for the sun. When they can't see it, they
are unhappy--they expect some calamity.--It's a symbol, isn't it, an
idea?--and those are the things that touch us. I have a notion'--he turned
to her smiling, 'that it will come into Mr. Manisty's book?'
Their eyes met in a smiling assent.
"Well, there are symbols--and symbols. That dome makes my old heart beat
because it speaks of so much--half the history of our race. But looking
back--I remember another symbol--I was at Harvard in '69; and I remember
the first time I ever saw those tablets--you recollect--in the Memorial
Hall--to the Harvard men that fell in the war?"
The colour leapt into her cheek. Her eyes filled.
"Oh yes! yes!"--she said, half eager, half timid--"My father lost two
brothers--both their names are there."
The ambassador looked at her kindly.--"Well--be proud of it!--be proud of
it! That wall, those names, that youth, and death--they remain with me,
as the symbol of the other great majesty in the world! There's one,"--he
pointed to the dome,--"that's Religion. And the other's Country. It's
country that Mr. Manisty forgets--isn't it?"
The old man shook his head, and fell silent, looking out over the
cloud-flecked Campagna.
"Ah, well"--he said, rousing himself--"I must go. Will you come and see me?
My daughter shall write to you."
And five minutes later the ambassador was driving swiftly towards Rome, in
a good humour with himself and the day. He had that morning sent off what
he knew to be a masterly despatch, and in the afternoon, as he was also
quite conscious, he had made a young thing happy.
* * * * *
Manisty could not attend the ambassador to his carriage. He was absorbed by
another guest. Mrs. Burgoyne, young Brooklyn, and Lucy, paid the necessary
civilities.
When they returned, they found a fresh group gathered on the terrace. Two
persons made the centre of it--a grey-haired cardinal--and Manisty.
Lucy looked at her host in amazement. What a transformation! The man who
had been lounging and listless all the afternoon--barely civil to his
guests--making no effort indeed for anyone, was now another being. An hour
before he had been in middle age; now he was young, handsome, courteous,
animating, and guiding the conversation around him with the practised ease
of one who knew himself a master.
Where was the spell? The Cardinal?
The Cardinal sat to Manisty's right, one wrinkled hand resting on the neck
of the Newfoundland. It was a typical Italian face, large-cheeked and
large-jawed, with good eyes,--a little sleepy, but not unspiritual. His
red-edged cassock allowed a glimpse of red stockings to be seen, and his
finely worked cross and chain, his red sash, and the bright ribbon that lit
up his broad-brimmed hat, made spots of cheerful colour in the shadow of
the trees.
He was a Cardinal of the Curia, belonging indeed to the Congregation of the
Index. The vulgar believed that he was staying on the hills for his health.
The initiated, however, knew that he had come to these heights, bringing
with him the works of a certain German Catholic professor threatened with
the thunders of the Church. It was a matter that demanded leisure and a
quiet mind.
As he sat sipping Miss Manisty's tea, however, nothing could be divined of
those scathing Latin sheets on which he had left his secretary employed. He
had the air of one at peace with all the world--hardly stirred indeed by
the brilliance of his host.
'Italy again!'--said Reggie Brooklyn in Lucy's ear--poor old Italy!--one
might be sure of that, when one sees one of these black gentlemen about.'
The Cardinal indeed had given Manisty his text. He had brought an account
of some fresh vandalism of the Government--the buildings of an old Umbrian
convent turned to Government uses--the disappearance of some famous
pictures in the process, supposed to have passed into the bands of a Paris
dealer by the connivance of a corrupt official.
The story had roused Manisty to a white heat. This maltreatment of
religious buildings and the wasting of their treasures was a subject on
which he was inexhaustible. Encouraged by the slow smile of the Cardinal,
the laughter and applause of the young men, he took the history of a
monastery in the mountains of Spoleto, which had long been intimately known
to him, and told it,--with a variety, a passion, an irony, that only he
could achieve--that at last revealed indeed to Lucy Foster, as she sat
quivering with antagonism beside Miss Manisty, all the secret of the man's
fame and power in the world.
For gradually--from the story of this monastery, and its suppression at
the hands of a few Italian officials--he built up a figure, typical,
representative, according to him, of the New Italy, small, insolent,
venal,--insulting and despoiling the Old Italy, venerable, beautiful and
defenceless. And then a natural turn of thought, or a suggestion from one
of the group surrounding him, brought him to the scandals connected with
the Abyssinian campaign--to the charges of incompetence and corruption
which every Radical paper was now hurling against the Crispi government.
He gave the latest gossip, handling it lightly, inexorably, as one more
symptom of an inveterate disease, linking the men of the past with the men
of the present, spattering all with the same mud, till Italian Liberalism,
from Cavour to Crispi, sat shivering and ugly--stripped of all those pleas
and glories wherewith she had once stepped forth adorned upon the page of
history.
Finally--with the art of the accomplished talker--a transition! Back to the
mountains, and the lonely convent on the heights--to the handful of monks
left in the old sanctuary, handing on the past, waiting for the future,
heirs of a society which would destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had
destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,--offering the daily sacrifice amid the
murmur and solitude of the woods,--confident, peaceful, unstained; while
the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated,
in the mire of a profitless and purposeless corruption.
And all this in no set harangue--but in vivid broken sentences; in snatches
of paradox and mockery; of emotion touched and left; interrupted, moreover,
by the lively give and take of conversation with the young Italians, by
the quiet comments of the Cardinal. None the less, the whole final image
emerged, as Manisty meant it to emerge; till the fascinated hearers felt,
as it were, a breath of hot bitterness and hate pass between them and the
spring day, enveloping the grim phantom of a ruined and a doomed State.
The Cardinal said little. Every now and then he put in a fact of his own
knowledge--a stroke of character--a phrase of compassion that bit more
sharply even than Manisty's scorns--a smile--a shake of the head. And
sometimes, as Manisty talked with the young men, the sharp wrinkled eyes
rested upon the Englishman with a scrutiny, instantly withdrawn. All the
caution of the Roman ecclesiastic,--the inheritance of centuries--spoke in
the glance.
It was perceived by no one, however, but a certain dark elderly lady, who
was sitting restlessly silent beside Miss Manisty. Lucy Foster had noticed
her as a new-comer, and believed that her name was Madame Variani.
As for Eleanor Burgoyne, she sat on Manisty's left while he talked--it was
curious to notice how a place was always made for her beside him!--her head
raised a little towards him, her eyes bright and fixed. The force that
breathed from him passed through her frail being, quickening every pulse of
life. She neither criticised nor accepted what he said. It was the man's
splendid vitality that subdued and mastered her.
Yet she alone knew what no one else suspected. At the beginning of the
conversation Manisty had placed himself behind an old stone table of oblong
shape and thick base, of which there were several in the garden. Round it
grew up grasses and tall vetches which had sown themselves among the gaping
stones of the terrace. Nothing, therefore, could be seen of the talker as
he leant carelessly across the table but the magnificent head, and the
shoulders on which it was so freely and proudly carried.
Anybody noticing the effect--for it was an effect--would have thought it
a mere happy accident. Eleanor Burgoyne alone knew that it was conscious.
She had seen the same pose, the same concealment practised too often to be
mistaken. But it made no difference whatever to the spell that held her.
The small vanities and miseries of Manisty's nature were all known to
her--and alas! she would not have altered one of them!
* * * * *
When the Cardinal rose to go, two Italian girls, who had come with their
brother, the Count Casaleschi, ran forward, and curtseying kissed the
Cardinal's ring. And as he walked away, escorted by Manisty, a gardener
crossed the avenue, who also at sight of the tall red-sashed figure fell on
his knees and did the same. The Cardinal gave him an absent nod and smile,
and passed on.
'Ah! _j'étouffe_!'--cried Madame Variani, throwing herself down by Miss
Manisty. 'Give me another cup, _chère Madame_. Your nephew is too bad.
Let him show us another nation born in forty years--that has had to make
itself in a generation--let him show it us! Ah! you English--with all your
advantages--and your proud hearts.--Perhaps we too could pick some holes in
you!'
She fanned herself with angry vigour. The young men came to stand round
her arguing and laughing. She was a favourite in Rome, and as a French
woman, and the widow of a Florentine man of letters, occupied a somewhat
independent position, and was the friend of many different groups.
'And you--young lady, what do you think?'--she said suddenly, laying a
large hand on Lucy Foster's knee.
Lucy, startled, looked into the sparkling black eyes brought thus close to
her own.
'But I just _long_'--she said, catching her breath--'to hear the other
side.'
'Ah, and you shall hear it, my dear--you shall!' cried Madame Variani.
'_N'est-ce pas, Madame?_' she said, addressing Miss Manisty--'We will get
rid of all those priests--and then we will speak our mind? Oh, and you
too,'--she waved her hand with a motherly roughness towards the young
men,--'What do you know about it, Signor Marchese? If there were no Guardia
Nobile, you would not wear those fine uniforms.--That is why you like the
Pope.'
The Marchese Vitellucci--a charming boy of two and twenty, tall, thin-faced
and pensive,--laughed and bowed.
'The Pope, Madame, should establish some _dames d'honneur_. Then he would
have all the ladies too on his side.
'_O, mon Dieu!_--he has enough of them,' cried Madame Variani. 'But here
comes Mr. Manisty, I must drink my tea and hold my tongue. I am going out
to dinner to-night, and if one gets hot and cross, that is not good for the
complexion.'
Manisty advanced at his usual quick pace, his head sunk once more between
his shoulders.
Young Vitellucci approached him. 'Ah! Carlo!' he said, looking up
affectionately--'dear fellow!--Come for a stroll with me.'
And linking his arm in the young man's, he carried him off. Their peals of
laughter could be heard coming back from the distance of the ilex-walk.
Madame Variani tilted back her chair to look after them.
'Ah! your nephew can be agreeable too, when he likes,' she said to Miss
Manisty. 'I do not say no. But when he talks of these poor Italians, he is
_méchant--méchant_!'
As for Lucy Foster, as Manisty passed out of sight, she felt her pulses
still tingling with a wholly new sense of passionate hostility--dislike
even. But none the less did the stage seem empty and meaningless when he
had left it.
* * * * *
Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were closeted in the library for some time before
dinner. Lucy in the salon could hear him pacing up and down, and the deep
voice dictating.
Then Mrs. Burgoyne came into the salon, and not noticing the girl who was
hidden behind a great pot of broom threw herself on the sofa with a long
sigh of fatigue. Lucy could just see the pale face against the pillow and
the closed eyes. Thus abandoned and at rest, there was something strangely
pitiful in the whole figure, for all its grace.
A wave of feeling rose in the girl's breast. She slipped softly from her
hiding-place, took a silk wrap that was lying on a chair, and approached
Mrs. Burgoyne.
'Let me put this over you. Won't you sleep before dinner? And I will shut
the window. It is getting cold.'
Mrs. Burgoyne opened her eyes in astonishment, and murmured a few words of
thanks.
Lucy covered her up, closed the window, and was stealing away, when Mrs.
Burgoyne put out a hand and touched her.
'It is very sweet of you to think of me.'
She drew the girl to her, enclosed the hand she had taken in both hers,
pressed it and released it. Lucy went quietly out of the room.
Then till dinner she sat reading her New Testament, and trying rather
piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England
village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting
her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear
the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her,
as she recalled the service; the great words of 'sin,' 'salvation,'
'righteousness,' as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled through her
heart.
Then, as she rose to dress, there burst upon her through the open window
the sunset blaze of the Campagna with the purple dome in its midst. And
with that came the memory of the afternoon,--of the Cardinal--and Manisty.
Very often, in these first days, it was as though her mind ached, under
the stress of new thinking, like something stretched and sore. In the New
England house where she had grown up, a corner of the old-fashioned study
was given up to the books of her grandfather, the divinity professor. They
were a small collection, all gathered with one object,--the confuting and
confronting of Rome. Like many another Protestant zealot, the old professor
had brooded on the crimes and cruelties of persecuting Rome, till they
became a madness in the blood. How well Lucy remembered his books--with
their backs of faded grey or brown cloths, and their grim titles. Most of
them she had never yet been allowed to read. When she looked for a book,
she was wont to pass this shelf by in a vague horror. What Rome habitually
did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in
the past, could not--it seemed--be known by a pure woman! And she would
glance from the books to the engraving of her grandfather above them,--to
the stern and yet delicate face of the old Calvinist, with its high-peaked
brow, and white neckcloth supporting the sharp chin; lifting her heart
to him in a passionate endorsement, a common fierce hatred of wrong and
tyranny.
She had grown older since then, and her country with her. New England
Puritanism was no longer what it had been; and the Catholic Church had
spread in the land. But in Uncle Ben's quiet household, and in her own
feeling, the changes had been but slight and subtle. Pity, perhaps, had
insensibly taken the place of hatred. But those old words 'priest' and
'mass' still rung in her ears as symbols of all that man had devised to
corrupt and deface the purity of Christ.
And of what that purity might be, she had such tender, such positive
traditions! Her mother had been a Christian mystic--a 'sweet woman,' meek
as a dove in household life, yet capable of the fiercest ardours as a
preacher and missionary, gathering rough labourers into barns and by the
wayside, and dying before her time, worn out by the imperious energies of
religion. Lucy had always before her the eyes that seemed to be shining
through a mist, the large tremulous mouth, the gently furrowed brow. Those
strange forces--'grace'--and 'the spirit'--had been the realities, the
deciding powers of her childhood, whether in what concerned the great
emotions of faith, or the most trivial incidents of ordinary life--writing
a letter--inviting a guest--taking a journey. The soul bare before God,
depending on no fleshly aid, distracted by no outward rite; sternly
defending its own freedom as a divine trust:--she had been reared on these
main thoughts of Puritanism, and they were still through all insensible
transformation, the guiding forces of her own being.
Already, in this Catholic country, she had been jarred and repelled on all
sides. Yet she found herself living with two people for whom Catholicism
was not indeed a personal faith--she could not think of that side of it
without indignation--but a thing to be passionately admired and praised,
like art, or music, or scenery. You might believe nothing, and yet write
pages and pages in glorification of the Pope and the Mass, and in contempt
of everything else!--in excuse too of every kind of tyranny so long as it
served the Papacy and 'the Church.'
She leaned out to the sunset, remembering sentence after sentence from the
talk on the terrace--hating or combating them all.
Yet all the time a new excitement invaded her. For the man who had spoken
thus was, in a sense, not a mere stranger to her. Somewhere in his being
must be the capacity for those thoughts and feelings that had touched her
so deeply in his book--for that magical insight and sweetness--
Ah!--perhaps she had not understood his book--no more than she understood
him now. The sense of her own ignorance oppressed her--and of all that
_might_ be said, with regard apparently to anything whatever. Was there
nothing quite true--quite certain--in the world?
So the girl's intense and simple nature entered like all its fellows, upon
the old inevitable struggle. As she stood there, with locked hands and
flushed cheeks, conscious through every vein of the inrush and shock of new
perceptions, new comparisons, she was like a ship that leaves the harbour
for the open, and feels for the first time on all her timbers the strain of
the unplumbed sea.
And of this invasion, this excitement, the mind, in haunting debate and
antagonism, made for itself one image, one symbol--the face of Edward
Manisty.