'Miss Foster is not getting up? How is she?'
'I believe Aunt Pattie only persuaded her to rest till after breakfast, and
that was hard work. Aunt Pattie thought her rather shaken still.'
The speakers were Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor was sitting in the
deep shade of the avenue that ran along the outer edge of the garden.
Through the gnarled trunks to her right shone the blazing stretches of the
Campagna, melting into the hot shimmer of the Mediterranean. A new volume
of French memoirs, whereof not a page had yet been cut, was lying upon her
knee.
Manisty, who had come out to consult with her, leant against the tree
beside her. Presently he broke out impetuously:
'Eleanor! we must protect that girl. You know what I mean? You'll help me?'
'What are you afraid of?'
'Good heavens!--I hardly know. But we must keep Alice away from Miss
Foster. She mustn't walk with her, or sit with her, or be allowed to worry
her in any way. I should be beside myself with alarm if Alice were to take
a fancy to her.'
Eleanor hesitated a moment. The slightest flush rose to her cheek,
unnoticed in the shadow of her hat.
'You know--if you are in any real anxiety--Miss Foster could go to
Florence. She told me yesterday that the Porters have friends there whom
she could join.'
Manisty fidgeted.
'Well, I hardly think that's necessary. It's a great pity she should miss
Vallombrosa. I hoped I might settle her and Aunt Pattie there by about the
middle of June.'
Eleanor made so sudden a movement that her book fell to the ground.
'You are going to Vallombrosa? I thought you were due at home, the
beginning of June?'
'That was when I thought the book was coming out before the end of the
month. But now--
'Now that it isn't coming out at all, you feel there's no hurry?'
Manisty looked annoyed.
'I don't think that's a fair shot. Of course the book's coming out! But if
it isn't June, it must be October. So there's no hurry.'
The little cold laugh with which Eleanor had spoken her last words
subsided. But she gave him no sign of assent. He pulled a stalk of grass,
and nibbled at it uncomfortably.
'You think I'm a person easily discouraged?' he said presently.
'You take advice so oddly,' she said, smiling; 'sometimes so ill--sometimes
so desperately well.'
'I can't help it. I am made like that. When a man begins to criticise my
work, I first hate him--then I'm all of his opinion--only more so.'
'I know,' said Eleanor impatiently. 'It's this dreadful modern
humility--the abominable power we all have of seeing the other side. But an
author is no good till he has thrown his critics out of window.'
'Poor Neal!' said Manisty, with his broad sudden smile, 'he would fall
hard. However, to return to Miss Foster. There's no need to drive her away
if we look after her. You'll help us, won't you, Eleanor?'
He sat down on a stone bench beside her. The momentary cloud had cleared
away. He was his most charming, most handsome self. A shiver ran through
Eleanor. Her thought flew to yesterday--compared the kind radiance of the
face beside her, its look of brotherly confidence and appeal, with the
look of yesterday, the hard evasiveness with which he had met all her
poor woman's attempts to renew the old intimacy, reknit the old bond. She
thought of the solitary, sleepless misery of the night she had just passed
through. And here they were, sitting in cousinly talk, as though nothing
else were between them but this polite anxiety for Miss Foster's peace of
mind! What was behind that apparently frank brow--those sparkling grey-blue
eyes? Manisty could always be a mystery when he chose, even to those who
knew him best.
She drew a long inward breath, feeling the old inexorable compulsion that
lies upon the decent woman, who can only play the game as the man chooses
to set it.
'I don't know what I can do--' she said slowly. 'You think Alice is no
better?'
Manisty shook his head. He looked at her sharply and doubtfully, as though
measuring her--and then said, lowering his voice:
'I believe--I know I can trust you with this--I have some reason to suppose
that there was an attempt at suicide at Venice. Her maid prevented it, and
gave me the hint. I am in communication with the maid--though Alice has no
idea of it.
'Ought she to come here at all?' said Eleanor after a pause.
'I have thought of that--of meeting all the trains and turning her back.
But you know her obstinacy. As long as she is in Rome and we here, we can't
protect ourselves and the villa. There are a thousand ways of invading us.
Better let her come--find out what she wants--pacify her if possible--and
send her away. I am not afraid for ourselves, you included, Eleanor! She
would do us no harm. A short annoyance--and it would be over. But Miss
Foster is the weak point.'
Eleanor looked at him inquiringly.
'It is one of the strongest signs of her unsound state,' said Manisty,
frowning--'her wild fancies that she takes for girls much younger than
herself. There have been all sorts of difficulties in hotels. She will be
absolutely silent with older people--or with you and me, for instance--but
if she can captivate any quite young creature, she will pour herself out to
her, follow her, write to her, tease her.--Poor, poor Alice!'
Manisty's voice had become almost a groan. His look betrayed a true and
manly feeling.
'One must always remember,' he resumed, 'that she has still the power to
attract a stranger. Her mind is in ruins--but they are the ruins of what
was once fine and noble. But it is all so wild, and strange, and desperate.
A girl is first fascinated--and then terrified. She begins by listening,
and pitying--then Alice pursues her, swears her to secrecy, talks to her
of enemies and persecutors, of persons who wish her death, who open her
letters, and dog her footsteps--till the girl can't sleep at nights, and
her own nerve begins to fail her. There was a case of this at Florence last
year. Dalgetty, that's the maid, had to carry Alice off by main force. The
parents of the girl threatened to set the doctors in motion--to get Alice
sent to an asylum.'
'But surely, surely,' cried Mrs. Burgoyne, 'that would be the right
course!'
Manisty shook his head.
'Impossible!' he said with energy. 'Don't imagine that my lawyers and I
haven't looked into everything. Unless the disease has made much progress
since I last saw her, Alice will always baffle any attempts to put her in
restraint. She is queer--eccentric--melancholy; she envelopes the people
she victimises with a kind of moral poison; but you can't _prove_--so far,
at least--that she is dangerous to herself or others. The evidence always
falls short.' He paused; then added with cautious emphasis: 'I don't speak
without book. It has been tried.'
'But the attempt at Venice?'
'No good. The maid's letter convinced me of two things--first, that she had
attempted her life, and next, that there is no proof of it.'
Eleanor bent forward.
'And the suitor--the man?'
'Dalgetty tells me there have been two interviews. The first at
Venice--probably connected with the attempt we know of. The second some
weeks ago at Padua. I believe the man to be a reputable person, though no
doubt not insensible to the fact that Alice has some money. You know who he
is?--a French artist she came across in Venice. He is melancholy and lonely
like herself. I believe he is genuinely attached to her. But after the last
scene at Padua she told Dalgetty that she would never make him miserable by
marrying him.'
'What do you suppose she is coming here for?'
'Very likely to get me to do something for this man. She won't be his wife,
but she likes to be his Providence: I shall promise anything, in return for
her going quickly back to Venice--or Switzerland--where she often spends
the summer. So long as she and Miss Foster are under one roof, I shall not
have a moment free from anxiety.'
Eleanor sank back in her chair. She was silent; but her eye betrayed the
bitter animation of the thoughts passing behind them, thoughts evoked not
so much by what Manisty had said, as by what he had _not_ said. All alarm,
all consideration to be concentrated on one point?--nothing, and no one
else, to matter?
But again she fought down the rising agony, refused to be mastered by it,
or to believe her own terrors. Another wave of feeling rose. It was so
natural to her to love and help him!
'Well, of course I shall do what you tell me! I generally do--don't I? What
are your commands?'
He brought his head nearer to hers, his brilliant eyes bent upon her
intently:
'Never let her be alone with Miss Foster! Watch her. If you see any sign of
persecution--if you can't check it--let me know at once. I shall keep Alice
in play of course. One day we can send Miss Foster into Rome--perhaps two.
Ah! hush!--here she comes!'
Eleanor looked round. Lucy had just appeared in the cool darkness of the
avenue. She walked slowly and with a languid grace, trailing her white
skirts. The shy rusticity, the frank robustness of her earlier aspect were
now either gone, or temporarily merged in something more exquisite and
more appealing. Her youth too had never been so apparent. She had been too
strong too self-reliant. The touch of physical delicacy seemed to have
brought back the child.
Then, turning back to her companion, Eleanor saw the sudden softness in
Manisty's face--the alert expectancy of his attitude.
'What a wonderful oval of the head and cheek!' he said under his breath,
half to himself, half to her. 'Do you know, Eleanor, what she reminds me
of?'
Eleanor shook her head.
'Of that little head--little face rather--that I gave you at Nemi. Don't
you see it?'
'I always said she was like your Greek bust,' said Eleanor slowly.
'Ah, that was in her first archaic stage. But now that she's more at
ease with us--you see?--there's the purity of line just the same--but
subtilised--humanised--somehow! It's the change from marble to terra-cotta,
isn't it?'
His fancy pleased him, and his smile turned to hers for sympathy. Then,
springing up, he went to meet Lucy.
'Oh, there can be nothing in his mind! He could not
speak--look--smile--like that to _me_,' thought Eleanor with passionate
relief.
Then as they approached, she rose, and with kind solicitude forced Lucy to
take her chair, on the plea that she herself was going back to the villa.
Lucy touched her hand with timid gratitude. 'I don't know what's happened
to me,' she said, half wistful, half smiling; 'I never stayed in bed to
breakfast in my life before. At Greyridge, they'd think I had gone out of
my mind.'
Eleanor inquired if it was an invariable sign of lunacy in America to take
your breakfast in bed. Lucy couldn't say. All she knew was that nobody ever
took it so in Greyridge, Vermont, unless they were on the point of death.
'I should never be any good, any more,' she said, with an energy that
brought the red back to her cheeks,--'if they were to spoil me at home, as
you spoil me here.'
Eleanor waved her hand, smiled, and went her way.
As she moved further and further away from them down the long avenue, she
saw them all the time, though she never once looked back--saw the eager
inquiries of the man, the modest responsiveness of the girl. She was
leaving them to themselves--at the bidding of her own pride--and they had
the May morning before them. According to a telegram just received, Alice
Manisty was not expected till after lunch.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Manisty was talking of his sister to Lucy, With coolness, and as
much frankness as he thought necessary.
'She is very odd--and very depressing. She is now very little with us.
There is no company she likes as well as her own. But in early days, she
and I were great friends. We were brought up in an old Yorkshire house
together, and a queer pair we were. I was never sent to school, and I got
the better of most of my tutors. Alice was unmanageable too, and we spent
most of our time rambling and reading as we pleased. Both of us dreamed
awake half our time. I had shooting and fishing to take me out of myself;
but Alice, after my mother's death, lived with her own fancies and got
less like other people every day. There was a sort of garden house in the
park,--a lonely, overgrown kind of place. We put our books there, and used
practically to live there for weeks together. That was just after I came
into the place, before I went abroad. Alice was sixteen. I can see her now
sitting in the doorway of the little house, hour after hour, staring into
the woods like a somnambulist, one arm behind her head. One day I said
to her: "Alice, what are you thinking of?" "Myself!" she said. So then I
laughed at her, and teased her. And she answered quite quietly, "I know it
is a pity--but I can't help it."
Lucy's eyes were wide with wonder. 'But you ought to have given her
something to do--or to learn: couldn't she have gone to school, or found
some friends?'
'Oh! I dare say I ought to have done a thousand things,' said Manisty
impatiently. 'I was never a model brother, or a model anything! I grew
up for myself and by myself, and I supposed Alice would do the same. You
disapprove?'
He turned his sharp, compelling eyes upon her, so that Lucy flinched a
little. 'I shouldn't dare,' she said laughing. 'I don't know enough about
it. But it's plain, isn't it, that girls of sixteen shouldn't sit on
doorsteps and think about themselves?'
'What did you think about at sixteen?'
Her look changed.
'I had mother then,'--she said simply.
'Ah! then--I'm afraid you've no right to sit in judgment upon us. Alice
and I had no mother--no one but ourselves. Of course all our relations and
friends disapproved of us. But that somehow has never made much difference
to either of us. Does it make much difference to you? Do you mind if people
praise or blame you? What does it matter what anybody thinks? Who can know
anything about you but yourself?--Eh?'
He poured out his questions in a hurry, one tumbling over the other. And he
had already begun to bite the inevitable stalk of grass. Lucy as usual was
conscious both of intimidation and attraction--she felt him at once absurd
and magnetic.
'I'm sure we're meant to care what people think,' she said, with spirit.
'It helps us. It keeps us straight.'
His eyes flashed.
'You think so? Then we disagree entirely--absolutely--and _in toto_! I
don't want to be approved--outside my literary work any way--I want to be
happy. It never enters my head to judge other people--why should they judge
me?'
'But--but'--Then she laughed out, remembering his book, and his political
escapade, 'Aren't you _always_ judging other people?'
'Fighting them--yes! That's another matter. But I don't give myself
superior airs. I don't judge--I just love--and hate.'
Her attention followed the bronzed expressive face, so bold in outline, so
delicate in detail, with a growing fascination.
'It seems to me you hate more than you love.'
He considered it.
'Quite possible. It isn't an engaging world. But I don't hate readily--I
hate slowly and by degrees. If anybody offends me, for instance, at first I
hardly feel it,--it doesn't seem to matter at all. Then it grows in my mind
gradually, it becomes a weight--a burning fire--and drives everything else
out. I hate the men, for instance, that I hated last year in England, much
worse now than I did then!'
She bit her lip, but could not help the broadening smile, to which his own
responded.
'Do you take any interest, Miss Foster, in what happened to me last year?'
'I often wonder whether you regret it,' she said, rather shyly. 'Wasn't
it--a great pity?'
'Not at all,' he said peremptorily; 'I shall recover all I let slip.'
She did not reply. But the smile still trembled on her lips, while she
copied his favourite trick in stripping the leaves from a spray of box.
'You don't believe that?'
'Does one ever recover all one lets slip--especially in politics?'
'Goodness--you are a pessimist! Why should one not recover it?'
Her charming mouth curved still more gaily.
'I have often heard my uncle say that the man who "resigns" is lost.'
'Ah!--never regret--never resign--never apologise? We know that creed. Your
uncle must be a man of trenchant opinions. Do you agree with him?'
She tried to be serious.
'I suppose one should count the cost before--'
'Before one joins a ministry? Yes, that's a fair stroke. I wish to heaven
I had never joined it. But when I began to think that this particular
Ministry was taking English society to perdition, it was as well--wasn't
it?--that I should leave it?'
Her face suddenly calmed itself to a sweet gravity.
'Oh yes--yes!--if it was as bad as that.'
'I'm not likely to confess, anyway, that it wasn't as bad as that!--But I
will confess that I generally incline to hate my own side,--and to love my
adversaries. English Liberals moreover hold the ridiculous opinion that the
world is to be governed by intelligence. I couldn't have believed it of
any sane men. When I discovered it, I left them. My foreign experience had
given the lie to all that. And when I left them, the temptation to throw a
paradox in their faces was irresistible.'
She said nothing, but her expression spoke for her.
'You think me mad?'
She turned aside--dumb--plucking at a root of cyclamen beside her.
'Insincere?'
'No. But you like to startle people--to make them talk about you!'
Her eyes were visible again; and he perceived at once her courage and her
diffidence.
'Perhaps! English political life runs so smooth, that to throw in a stone
and make a splash was amusing.'
'But was it fair?' she said, flushing.
'What do you mean?'
'Other people were in earnest; and you--'
'Were not? Charge home. I am prepared,' he said, smiling.
'You talk now--as though you were a Catholic--and you are not, you don't
believe,' she said suddenly, in a deep, low voice.
He looked at her for a moment in a smiling silence. His lips were ready
to launch a reckless sentence or two; but they refrained. Her attitude
meanwhile betrayed an unconscious dread--like a child that fears a blow.
'You charming saint!'--he thought; surprised at his own feeling of
pleasure. Pleasure in what?--in the fact that however she might judge his
opinions, she was clearly interested in the holder of them?
'What does one's own point of view matter?' he said gently. 'I believe what
I can,--and as long as I can--sometimes for a whole twenty-four hours! Then
a big doubt comes along, and sends me floundering. But that has nothing
to do with it. The case is quite simple. The world can't get on without
morals; and Catholicism, Anglicanism too--the religions of authority in
short--are the great guardians of morals. They are the binding forces--the
forces making for solidarity and continuity. Your cocksure, peering
Protestant is the dissolvent--the force making for ruin. What's his
private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he'll make
everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me--it is perfectly
open to you to say'--he looked away from her, half-forgetting her,
addressing with animation and pugnacity an imaginary opponent--'what
do morals matter?--how do you know that the present moral judgments
of the world represent any ultimate truth? Ah! well'--he shrugged his
shoulders--'I can't follow you there. Black may be really white--and white
black; but I'm not going to admit it. It would make me too much of a dupe.
I take my stand on morals. And if you give me morals, you must give me
the only force that can guarantee them,--Catholicism, more or less:--and
dogma,--and ritual,--and superstition,--and all the foolish ineffable
things that bind mankind together, and send them to "face the music" in
this world and the next!'
She sat silent, with twitching lips, excited, yet passionately scornful
and antagonistic. Thoughts of her home, of that Puritan piety amid which
she had been brought up, flashed thick and fast through her mind. Suddenly
she covered her face with her hands, to hide a fit of laughter that had
overtaken her.
'All that amuses you?'--said Manisty, breathing a little faster.
'No--oh! no. But--I was thinking of my uncle--of the people in our village
at home. What you said of Protestants seemed to me, all at once, so odd--so
ridiculous!'
'Did it? Tell me then about the people in your valley at home.'
And turning on his elbows beside her, he put her through a catechism as to
her village, her uncle, her friends. She resisted a little, for the brusque
assurance of his tone still sounded oddly in her American ear. But he was
not easy to resist; and when she had yielded she soon discovered that to
talk to him was a no less breathless and absorbing business than to listen
to him. He pounced on the new, the characteristic, the local; he drew out
of her what he wanted to know; he made her see her own trees and fields,
the figures of her home, with new sharpness, so quick, so dramatic, so
voracious, one might almost say, were his own perceptions.
Especially did he make her tell him of the New England winter; of the long
pauses of its snow-bound life; its whirling winds and drifts; its snapping,
crackling frosts; the lonely farms, and the deep sleigh-tracks amid the
white wilderness, that still in the winter silence bind these homesteads to
each other and the nation; the strange gleams of moonrise and sunset on the
cold hills; the strong dark armies of the pines; the grace of the stripped
birches. Above all, must she talk to him of the people in these farms,
the frugal, or silent, or brooding people of the hills; honourable, hard,
knotted, prejudiced, believing folk, whose lives and fates, whose spiritual
visions and madnesses, were entwined with her own young memories and
deepest affections.
Figure after figure, story after story, did he draw from her,--warm from
the hidden fire of her own strenuous, loving life. Once or twice she
spoke of her mother--like one drawing a veil for an instant from a holy
of holies. He felt and saw the burning of a sacred fire; then the veil
dropped, nor would it lift again for any word of his. And every now
and then, a phrase that startled him by its quality,--its suggestions.
Presently he was staring at her with his dark absent eyes.
'Heavens!'--he was thinking--'what a woman there is in her!--what a
nature!'
The artist--the poet--the lover of things significant and moving,--all
these were stirred in him as he listened to her, as he watched her young
and noble beauty.
* * * * *
But, in the end, he would not grant her much, argumentatively.
'You make me see strange things--magnificent things, if you like! But your
old New England saints and dreamers are not your last word in America. They
tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches
are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among
you,--science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there--there--I'll not
prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care!
I have seen you a Catholic once, for three minutes!'
'When?'
'In St. Peter's.'
His look, smiling, provocative, drove home his shaft.
'I saw you overthrown. The great tradition swept upon you. You bowed to
it,--you felt!'
She made no reply. Far within she was conscious of a kind of tremor. The
personality beside her seemed to be laying an intimate, encroaching hand
upon her own, and her maidenliness shrank before it.
She threw herself hastily upon other subjects. Presently, he found to his
surprise that she was speaking to him of his book.
'It would be so sad if it were not finished,' she said timidly. 'Mrs.
Burgoyne would feel it so.'
His expression changed.
'You think Mrs. Burgoyne cares about it so much?'
'But she worked so hard for it!'--cried Lucy, indignant with something in
his manner, though she could not have defined what. Her mind, indeed, was
full of vague and generous misgivings on the subject of Mrs. Burgoyne.
First she had been angry with Mr. Manisty for what had seemed to her
neglect and ingratitude. Now she was somehow dissatisfied with herself too.
'She worked too hard,' said Manisty gravely. 'It is a good thing the
pressure has been taken off. Have you found out yet, Miss Foster, what a
remarkable woman my cousin is?'
He turned to her with a sharp look of inquiry.
'I admire her all day long,' cried Lucy, warmly.
'That's right,' said Manisty slowly--'that's right. Do you know her
history?'
'Mr. Brooklyn told me--
'He doesn't know very much,--shall I tell it you?'
'If you ought--if Mrs. Burgoyne would like it,' said Lucy, hesitating.
There was a chivalrous feeling in the girl's mind that she was too new an
acquaintance, that she had no right to the secrets of this friendship, and
Manisty no right to speak of them.
But Manisty took no notice. With half-shut eyes, like a man looking into
the past, he began to describe his cousin; first as a girl in her father's
home; then in her married life, silent, unhappy, gentle; afterwards in
the dumb years of her irreparable grief; and finally in this last phase
of intellectual and spiritual energy, which had been such an amazement to
himself, which had first revealed to him indeed the true Eleanor.
He spoke slowly, with a singular and scrupulous choice of words; building
up the image of Mrs. Burgoyne's life and mind with an insight and a
delicacy which presently held his listener spell-bound. Several times Lucy
felt herself flooded with hot colour.
'Does he guess so much about--about us all?' she asked herself with a
secret excitement.
Suddenly Manisty said, with an entire change of tone, springing to his feet
as he did so:
'In short, Miss Foster--my cousin Eleanor is one of the ablest and dearest
of women--and she and I have been completely wasting each other's time this
winter!'
Lucy stared at him in astonishment.
'Shall I tell you why? We have been too kind to each other!'
He waited, studying his companion's face with a hard, whimsical look.
'Eleanor gave my book too much sympathy. It wanted brutality. I have
worn her out--and my book is in a mess. The best thing I could do for us
both--was to cut it short.'
Lucy was uncomfortably silent.
'There's no use in talking about it,' Manisty went on, impatiently, with
a shake of his great shoulders; 'I am not meant to work in partnership. A
word of blame depresses me; and I am made a fool by praise. It was all a
mistake. If only Eleanor could understand--that it's my own fault--and I
know it's my own fault--and not think me unjust and unkind. Miss Foster--'
Lucy looked up. In the glance she encountered, the vigorous and wilful
personality beside her seemed to bring all its force to bear upon herself--
'--if Eleanor talks to you--
'She never does!' cried Lucy.
'She might,' said Manisty, coolly. 'She might. If she does, persuade her of
my admiration, my gratitude! Tell her that I know very well that I am not
worth her help. Her inspiration would have led any other man to success. It
only failed because I was I. I hate to seem to discourage and disavow what
I once accepted so eagerly.--But a man must find out his own mistakes--and
thrash his own blunders. She was too kind to thrash them--so I have
appointed Neal to the office. Do you understand?'
She rose, full of wavering approvals and disapprovals, seized by him,--and
feeling with Mrs. Burgoyne.
'I understand only a very little,' she said, lifting her clear eyes to
his; 'except that I never saw anyone I--I cared for so much, in so short a
time--as Mrs. Burgoyne.'
'Ah! care for her!' he said, in another voice, with another aspect. 'Go on
caring for her! She needs it.'
They walked on together towards the villa, for Alfredo was on the balcony
signalling to them that the twelve o'clock breakfast was ready.
On the way Manisty turned upon her.
'Now, you are to be obedient! You are not to pay any attention to my
sister. She is not a happy person--but you are not to be sorry for her. You
can't understand her; and I beg you will not try. You are, please, to leave
her alone. Can I trust you?'
'Hadn't you better send me into Rome?' said Lucy, laughing and embarrassed.
'I always intended to do so,' said Manisty shortly.
* * * * *
Towards five o'clock, Alice Manisty arrived, accompanied by an elderly
maid. Lucy, before she escaped into the garden, was aware of a very
tall woman, possessing a harshly handsome face, black eyes, and a thin
long-limbed frame. These black eyes, uneasily bright, searched the salon,
as she entered it, only to fasten, with a kind of grip, in which there
was no joy, upon her brother. Lucy saw her kiss him with a cold
perfunctoriness, bowed herself, as her name was nervously pronounced
by Miss Manisty, and then withdrew. Mrs. Burgoyne was in Rome for the
afternoon.
But at dinner they all met, and Lucy could satisfy some of the curiosity
that burnt in her very feminine mind. Alice Manisty was dressed in black
lace and satin, and carried herself with stateliness. Her hair, black like
her brother's, though with a fine line of grey here and there, was of
enormous abundance, and she wore it heavily coiled round her head in a mode
which gave particular relief to the fire and restlessness of the eyes which
flashed beneath it. Beside her, Eleanor Burgoyne, though she too was rather
tall than short, suffered a curious eclipse. The plaintive distinction that
made the charm of Eleanor's expression and movements seemed for the moment
to mean and say nothing, beside the tragic splendour of Alice Manisty.
The dinner was not agreeable. Manisty was clearly ill at ease, and seething
with inward annoyance; Miss Manisty had the air of a frightened mouse;
Alice Manisty talked not at all, and ate nothing except some poached
eggs that she had apparently ordered for herself before dinner; and
Eleanor--chattering of her afternoon in Rome--had to carry through the
business as best she could, with occasional help from Lucy.
From the first it was unpleasantly evident to Manisty that his sister took
notice of Miss Foster. Almost her only words at table were addressed to the
girl sitting opposite to her; and her roving eyes returned again and again
to Lucy's fresh young face and quiet brow.
After dinner Manisty followed the ladies into the salon, and asked his
aunt's leave to smoke his cigarette with them.
Lucy wondered what had passed between him and his sister before dinner. He
was polite to her; and yet she fancied that their relations were already
strained.
Presently, as Lucy was busy with some embroidery on one of the settees
against the wall of the salon, she was conscious of Alice Manisty's
approach. The new-comer sat down beside her, bent over her work, asked
her a few low, deep-voiced questions. Those strange eyes fastened upon
her,--stared at her indeed.
But instantly Manisty was there, cigarette in hand, standing between them.
He distracted his sister's attention, and at the same moment Eleanor called
to Lucy from the piano.
'Won't you turn over for me? I can't play them by heart.'
Lucy wondered at the scantiness of Mrs. Burgoyne's musical memory that
night. She, who could play by the hour without note, on most occasions,
showed herself, on this, tied and bound to the printed page; and that page
must be turned for her by Lucy, and Lucy only.
Meanwhile Manisty sat beside his sister smoking, throwing first the left
leg over the right, then the right leg over the left, and making attempts
at conversation with her, that Eleanor positively must not see, lest music
and decorum both break down in a wreck of nervous laughter.
Alice Manisty scarcely responded; she sat motionless, her wild black head
bent like that of a Mænad at watch, her gaze fixed, her long thin hands
grasping the arm of her chair with unconscious force.
'What is she thinking of?' thought Lucy once, with a momentary shiver.
'Herself?'
When bedtime came, Manisty gave the ladies their candles. As he bade
good-night to Lucy, he said in her ear: 'You said you wished to see the
Lateran Museum. My aunt will send Benson with you to-morrow.'
His tone did not ask whether she wished for the arrangement, but simply
imposed it.
Then, as Eleanor approached him, he raised his shoulders with a gesture
that only she saw, and led her a few steps apart in the dimly lighted
ante-room, where the candles were placed.
'She wants the most impossible things, my dear lady,' he said in low-voiced
despair--'things I can no more do than fly over the moon!'
'Edward!'--said his sister from the open door of the salon--'I should like
some further conversation with you before I go to bed.'
Manisty with the worst grace in the world saw his aunt and Eleanor to their
rooms, and then went back to surrender himself to Alice. He was a man who
took family relations hardly, impatient of the slightest bond that was not
of his own choosing. Yet it was Eleanor's judgment that, considering his
temperament, he had not been a bad brother to this wild sister. He had
spent both heart and thought upon her case; and at the root of his relation
to her, a deep and painful pity was easily to be divined.
Vast as the villa-apartment was, the rooms were all on one floor, and the
doors fitted badly. Lucy's sleep was haunted for long by a distant sound of
voices, generally low and restrained, but at moments rising and sharpening
as though their owners forgot the hour and the night. In the morning it
seemed to her that she had been last conscious of a burst of weeping, far
distant--then of a sudden silence ...
* * * * *
The following day, Lucy in Benson's charge paid her duty to the Sophocles
of the Lateran Museum, and, armed with certain books lent her by Manisty,
went wandering among the art and inscriptions of Christian Rome. She came
home, inexplicably tired, through a glorious Campagna, splashed with
poppies, embroidered with marigold and vetch; she climbed the Alban slopes
from the heat below, and rejoiced in the keener air of the hills, and the
freshness of the _ponente_, as she drove from the station to the villa.
Mrs. Burgoyne was leaning over the balcony looking out for her. Lucy ran
up to her, astonished at her own eagerness of foot, at the breath of home
which seemed to issue from the great sun-beaten house.
Eleanor looked pale and tired, but she took the girl's hand kindly.
'Oh! you must keep all your gossip for dinner!' said Eleanor, as they
greeted. 'It will help us through. It has been rather a hard day.'
Lucy's face showed her sympathy, and the question she did not like to put
into words.
'Oh, it has been a wrestle all day,' said Eleanor wearily. 'She wants Mr.
Manisty to do certain things with her property, that as her trustee he
_cannot_ do. She has the maddest ideas--she _is_ mad. And when she is
crossed, she is terrible.'
At dinner Lucy did her best to lighten the atmosphere, being indeed most
truly sorry for her poor friends and their dilemma. But her pleasant
girlish talk seemed to float above an abyss of trouble and discomfort,
which threatened constantly to swallow it up.
Alice Manisty indeed responded. She threw off her silence, and talked
of Rome, exclusively to Lucy and with Lucy, showing in her talk a great
deal of knowledge and a great deal of fine taste, mingled with occasional
violence and extravagance. Her eyes indeed were wilder than ever. They
shone with a miserable intensity, that became a positive glare once or
twice, when Manisty addressed her. Her whole aspect breathed a tragic
determination, crossed with an anger she was hardly able to restrain. Lucy
noticed that she never spoke to or answered her brother if she could help
it.
After dinner Lucy found herself the object of various embarrassing
overtures on the part of the new-comer. But on each occasion Manisty
interposed at first adroitly, then roughly. On the last occasion Alice
Manisty sprang to her feet, went to the side table where the candles
were placed, disappeared and did not return. Manisty, his aunt, and Mrs.
Burgoyne, drew together in a corner of the salon discussing the events of
the day in low anxious voices. Lucy thought herself in the way, and went to
bed.
* * * * *
After some hours of sleep, Lucy awoke, conscious of movement somewhere near
her. With the advent of the hot weather she had been moved to a room on the
eastern side of the villa, in one of two small wings jutting out from the
façade. She had locked her door, but the side window of her room, which
overlooked the balcony towards the lake, was open, and slight sounds came
from the balcony. Springing up she crept softly towards the window. The
wooden shutters had been drawn forward, but both they and the casements
were ajar.
Through the chink she saw a strange sight. On the step leading from the
house to the terrace of the balcony sat Alice Manisty. Her head was
thrown back against the wall of the villa, and her hands were clasped upon
her knee. Her marvellous hair fell round her shoulders, and a strange
illumination, in which a first gleam of dawn mingled with the moonlight,
struck upon the white face and white hands emerging from the darkness of
her hair and of her loose black dress.
Was she asleep? Lucy, holding back so as not to be seen, peered with held
breath. No!--the large eyes were wide open, though it seemed to Lucy that
they saw nothing. Minute after minute passed. The figure on the terrace
sat motionless. There were two statues on either side of her, a pair of
battered round-limbed nymphs, glorified by the moonlight into a grace and
poetry not theirs by day. They seemed to be looking down upon the woman at
their feet in a soft bewilderment--wondering at a creature so little like
themselves; while from the terrace came up the scent of the garden, heavy
with roses and bedrenched with dew.
Suddenly it seemed to Lucy as though that white face, those intolerable
eyes, awoke--turned towards herself, penetrated her room, pursued her. The
figure moved, and there was a low sound of words. Her window was in truth
inaccessible from the terrace; but in a panic fear, Lucy threw herself
on the casement and the shutters, closed them and drew the bolts; as
noiselessly as: she could, still not without some noise. Then hurrying to
her bed, she threw herself upon it, panting--in a terror she could neither
explain nor compose.