They were all going down to the midday train for Rome.
At last the Ambassador--who had been passing through a series of political
and domestic difficulties, culminating in the mutiny of his Neapolitan
cook--had been able to carry out his whim. A luncheon had been arranged for
the young American girl who had taken his fancy. At the head of his house
for the time being was his married daughter, Lady Mary, who had come from
India for the winter to look after her babies and her father. When she
was told to write the notes for this luncheon, she lifted her eyebrows in
good-humoured astonishment.
'My dear,' said the Ambassador, 'we have been doing our duty for six
months--and I find it pall!'
He had been entertaining Royalties and Cabinet Ministers in heavy
succession, and his daughter understood. There was an element of
insubordination in her father, which she knew better than to provoke.
So the notes were sent.
'Find her some types, my dear,' said the Ambassador;--'and little of
everything.'
Lady Mary did her best. She invited an Italian Marchesa whom she had heard
her father describe as 'the ablest woman in Rome,' while she herself knew
her as one of the most graceful and popular; a young Lombard landowner
formerly in the Navy, now much connected with the Court, whose blue eyes
moreover were among the famous things of the day; a Danish professor and
savant who was also a rich man, collector of flints and torques, and other
matters of importance to primitive man; an artist or two; an American
Monsignore blessed with some Irish wit and much influence; Reggie Brooklyn,
of course, and his sister; Madame Variani, who would prevent Mr. Manisty
from talking too much nonsense; and a dull English Admiral and his wife,
official guests, whom the Ambassador admitted at the last moment with a
groan, as still representing the cold tyranny of duty invading his snatch
of pleasure.
'And Mr. Bellasis, papa?' said Lady Mary, pausing, pen in hand, like
Fortitude prepared for all extremities.
'Heavens, no!' said the Ambassador, hastily. 'I have put him off twice.
This time I should have to read him.'
* * * * *
Manisty accordingly was smoking on the balcony of the villa while he waited
for the ladies to appear. Miss Manisty, who was already suffering from the
heat, was not going. The fact did not improve Manisty's temper. Three is no
company--that we all know.
If Lady Mary, indeed, had only planned this luncheon because she must,
Manisty was going to it under a far more impatient sense of compulsion. It
would be a sickening waste of time. Nothing now had any attraction for him,
nothing seemed to him desirable or important, but that conversation with
Lucy Foster which he was bent on securing, and she apparently was bent on
refusing him.
His mind was full of the sense of injury. During all the day before, while
he had been making the arrangements for his unhappy sister--during the
journeys backward and forward to Rome--a delicious image had filled all
the background of his thoughts, the image of the white Lucy, helpless and
lovely, lying unconscious in his chair.
In the evening he could hardly command his eagerness sufficiently to help
his tired little aunt up the steps of the station, and put her safely in
her cab, before hurrying himself up the steep short-cut to the villa.
Should he find her perhaps on the balcony, conscious of his step on the
path below, weak and shaken, yet ready to lift those pure, tender eyes of
hers to his in a shy gratitude?
He had found no one on the balcony, and the evening of that trying day had
been one of baffling disappointment. Eleanor was in her room, apparently
tired out by the adventures of the night before; and although Miss Foster
appeared at dinner she had withdrawn immediately afterwards, and there had
been no chance for anything but the most perfunctory conversation.
She had said of course all the proper things, so far as they could be said.
'I trust you have been able to make the arrangements you wished. Mrs.
Burgoyne and I have been so sorry! Poor Miss Manisty must have had a very
tiring day--'
Bah!--he could not have believed that a girl could speak so formally, so
trivially to a man who within twenty-four hours had saved her from the
attack of a madwoman. For that was what it came to--plainly. Did she
know what had happened? Had her swoon blotted it all out? If so, was he
justified in revealing it. There was an uneasy feeling that it would be
more chivalrous towards her, and kinder towards his sister, if he left the
veil drawn, seeing that she seemed to wish it so--if he said no more about
her fright, her danger, her faint. But Manisty was not accustomed to let
himself be governed by the scruples of men more precise or more timid. He
wished passionately to force a conversation with her more intimate, more
personal than any one had yet allowed him; to break down at a stroke most
if not all of the barriers that separate acquaintance from--
From what? He stood, cigarette in hand, staring blindly at the garden, lost
in an intense questioning of himself.
Suddenly he found himself back again, as it were, among the feelings and
sensations of Lucy Foster's first Sunday at the villa; his repugnance
towards any notion of marriage; his wonder that anybody should suppose that
he had any immediate purpose of marrying Eleanor Burgoyne; the mood, half
lazy, half scornful, in which he had watched Lucy, in her prim Sunday
dress, walking along the avenue.
What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so
unacquainted with his world?
There was her beauty of course. But he had passed the period when mere
beauty is enough. He was extremely captious and difficult to please where
the ordinary pretty woman was concerned. Her arts left him now quite
unmoved. Of self-conscious vanity and love of effect he had himself enough
and to spare. He could not mend himself; but he was often weary of his own
weaknesses, and detested them in other people. If Lucy Foster had been
merely a beauty, aware of her own value, and bent upon making him aware of
it also, he would probably have been as careless of her now in the eighth
week of their acquaintance as he had been in the first.
But it was a beauty so innocent, so interfused with suggestion, with an
enchanting thrill of prophecy! It was not only what she said and looked,
but what a man might divine in her--the 'white fire' of a nature most pure,
most passionate, that somehow flashed through her maiden life and aspect,
fighting with the restraints imposed upon it, and constantly transforming
what might otherwise have been a cold seemliness into a soft and delicate
majesty.
In short, there was a mystery in Lucy, for all her simplicity;--a mystery
of feeling, which piqued and held the fastidious taste of Manisty. It was
this which made her loveliness tell. Her sincerity was so rich and full,
that it became dramatic,--a thing to watch, for the mere joy of the fresh,
unfolding spectacle. She was quite unconscious of this significance of
hers. Rather she was clearly and always conscious of weakness, ignorance,
inexperience. And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the
rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from
the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely
attractive to Manisty.
In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently.
Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a
time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things
inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment. Manisty
disliked and had thrown aside the rôle of country gentleman; because, in
truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set
himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the
probable boredoms of it worth while.
But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he
began to think with a new tolerance of the English _cadre_ and the English
life. He remembered all those illustrious or comely husbands and wives,
his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house.
For the first time it thrilled him to imagine a new mistress of the
house--young, graceful, noble--moving about below them. And even--for the
first time--there gleamed from out the future the dim features of a son,
and he did not recoil. He caressed the whole dream with a new and strange
complacency. What if after all the beaten roads are best?
To the old paths, my soul!
Then he paused, in a sudden chill of realisation. His thoughts might rove
as they please. But Lucy Foster had given them little warrant. To all her
growing spell upon him, there was added indeed the charm of difficulty
foreseen, and delighted in. He was perfectly aware that he puzzled and
attracted her. And he was perfectly aware also of his own power with women,
often cynically aware of it. But he could not flatter himself that so far
he had any hold over the senses or the heart of Lucy Foster. He thought
of her eager praise of his Palestine letters--of the Nemi tale. She was
franker, more enthusiastic than an English girl would have been--and at the
same time more remote, infinitely more incalculable!
His mind filled with a delicious mingling of desire and doubt. He foresaw
the sweet approach of new emotions,--of spells to make 'the colours freshen
on this threadbare world.' All his life he had been an epicurean, in search
of pleasures beyond the ken of the crowd. It was pleasure of this kind that
beckoned to him now,--in the wooing, the conquering, the developing of
Lucy.
A voice struck on his ear. It was Eleanor calling to Lucy from the salon.
Ah!--Eleanor? A rush of feeling--half generous, half audacious--came upon
him. He knew that he had given her pain at Nemi. He had been a brute, an
ungrateful brute! Women like Eleanor have very exalted and sensitive ideals
of friendship. He understood that he had pulled down Eleanor's ideal, that
he had wounded her sorely. What did she expect of him? Not any of the
things which the ignorant or vulgar bystander expected of him--that he
was certain. But still her claim had wearied him; and he had brushed it
aside. His sulkiness about the book had been odious, indefensible. And
yet--perhaps from another point of view--it had not been a bad thing for
either of them. It had broken through habits which had become, surely, an
embarrassment to both.
But now, let him make amends; select fresh ground; and from it rebuild
their friendship. His mind ran forward hazily to some bold confidence or
other, some dramatic appeal to Eleanor for sympathy and help.
The affection between her and Miss Foster seemed to be growing closer. He
thought of it uncomfortably, and with vague plannings of counter-strokes.
It did not suit him--nay, it presented itself somehow as an obstacle in his
path. For he had a half remorseful, half humorous feeling that Eleanor knew
him too well.
* * * * *
'Ah! my dear lady,' said the Ambassador--'how few things in this world one
does to please oneself! This is one of them.'
Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador's
left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers, with a
charming and paternal freedom.
'Have you enjoyed yourself?--Have you lost your heart to Italy?' said her
host, stooping to her. He was amused to see the transformation in her, the
pretty dress, the developed beauty.
'I have been in fairy-land,' said Lucy, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon
him. 'Nothing can ever be like it again.'
'No--because one can never be twenty again,' said the old man, sighing.
'Twenty years hence you will wonder where the magic came from. Never
mind--just now, anyway, the world's your oyster.'
Then he looked at her a little more closely. And it seemed to him that,
though she was handsomer, she was not so happy. He missed some of that
quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before, and there were
some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met
the man--the appointed one?
He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and
stately.
'We must all have our ups and downs,' he said to her presently. 'Let me
just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them.
Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old.'
He stopped and surveyed her. His kind humorous eyes blinked through their
blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling
expectancy.
'_Learn Persian!_' said the old man in an urgent whisper--'and get the
dictionary by heart!'
Lucy still looked--wondering.
'I finished it this morning,' said the Ambassador, in her ear. 'To-morrow I
shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I
over-tire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should
take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary, I should
have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the
evening--or when they worry me from home--I take a column. But generally
half a column's enough--good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of
course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But
that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something
to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy
Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy who's at Oxford, said he
wouldn't be responsible for them--so I had to desist. And I suppose the
mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one
must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden. Now
Mr. Manisty--how is he provided in that way?'
His sudden question took Lucy by surprise, and the quick rise of colour in
the clear cheeks did not escape him.
'Well--I suppose he has his book?' she said, smiling.
'Oh! no use at all! He can do what he likes with his book. But you can't
do what you like with the dictionary. You must take it or leave it. That's
what makes it so reposeful. Now if I were asked, I could soon find some
Persian roots for Mr. Manisty--to be taken every day!'
Lucy glanced across the table. Her eyes fell, and she said in the low full
voice that delighted the old man's ears:
'I suppose you would send him home?'
The Ambassador nodded.
'Tenants, turnips, and Petty Sessions! Persian's pleasanter--but those
would serve.'
He paused a moment, then said seriously, under the cover of a loud buzz of
talk, 'He's wasting his time, dear lady--there's no doubt of that.'
Lucy still looked down, but her attitude changed imperceptibly. 'The
subject interests her!' thought the old man. 'It's a thousand pities,' he
resumed, with the caution, masked by the ease, of the diplomat, 'he came
out here in a fit of pique. He saw false--and as far as I can hear, the
book's a mistake. Yet it was not a bad subject. Italy _is_ just now an
object lesson and a warning. But our friend there could not have taken
it more perversely. He has chosen to attack not the violence of the
Church--but the weakness of the State. And meanwhile--if I may be allowed
to say so--his own position is something of an offence. Religion is too big
a pawn for any man's personal game. Don't you agree? Often I feel inclined
to apply to him the saying about Benjamin Constant and liberty--"Grand
homme devant la religion--_s'il y croyait!_" I compare with him a poor old
persecuted priest I know--Manisty knows too.--Ah! well, I hear the book is
very brilliant--and venomous to a degree. It will be read of course. He has
the power to be read. But it is a blunder--if not a crime. And meanwhile
he is throwing away all his chances. I knew his father. I don't like to
see him beating the air. If you have any influence with him'--the old man
smiled--'send him home! Or Mrs. Burgoyne there. He used to listen to her.'
A great pang gripped Lucy's heart.
'I should think he always took his own way,' she said, with difficulty.
'Mr. Neal sometimes advises him.'
The Ambassador's shrewd glance rested upon her for a moment. Then without
another word he turned away. 'Reggie!' he said, addressing young Brooklyn,
'you seem to be ill-treating Madame Variani. Must I interpose?'
Reggie and his companion, who were in a full tide of 'chaff' and laughter,
turned towards him.
'Sir,' said Brooklyn, 'Madame Variani is attacking my best friend.'
'Many of us find that agreeable,' said the Ambassador.
'Ah! but she makes it so personal,' said Reggie, dallying with his banana.
'She abuses him because he's not married--and calls him a selfish fop.
Now _I'm_ not married--and I object to these wholesale classifications.
Besides, my friend has the most conclusive answer.'
'I wait for it,' said Madame Variani.
Reggie delicately unsheathed his banana.
'Well, some of us once enquired what he meant by it, and he said: "My dear
fellow, I've asked all the beautiful women I know to marry me, and they
won't! Now!--I'd be content with cleanliness and conduct."'
There was a general laugh, in the midst of which Reggie remarked:
'I thought it the most touching situation. But Madame Variani has the heart
of a stone.'
Madame Variani looked down upon him unmoved. She and the charming lad were
fast friends.
'I will wager you he never asked,' she said quietly.
Reggie protested.
'No--he never asked. Englishmen don't ask ladies to marry them any more.'
'Let Madame Variani prove her point,' said the Ambassador, raising one
white hand above the hubbub, while he hollowed the other round his deaf
ear. 'This is a most interesting discussion.'
'But it is known to all that Englishmen don't get married any more!' cried
Madame Variani. 'I read in an English novel the other day that it is
spoiling your English society, that the charming girls wait and wait--and
nobody marries them.'
'Well, there are no English young ladies present,' said the Ambassador,
looking round the table; 'so we may proceed. How do you account for this
phenomenon, Madame?'
'Oh! you have now too many French cooks in England!' said Madame Variani,
shrugging her plump shoulders.
'What in the world has that got to do with it?' cried the Ambassador.
'Your young men are too comfortable,' said the lady, with a calm wave
of the hand towards Reggie Brooklyn. 'That's what I am told. I ask an
English lady, who knows both France and England--and she tells me--your
young men get now such good cooking at their clubs, and at the messes of
their regiments--and their sports amuse them so well, and cost so much
money--they don't want any wives!--they are not interested any more in the
girls. That is the difference between them and the Frenchman. The Frenchman
is still interested in the ladies. After dinner the Frenchman wants to go
and sit with the ladies--the Englishman, no! That is why the French are
still agreeable.'
The small black eyes of the speaker sparkled, but otherwise she looked
round with challenging serenity on the English and Americans around her.
Madame Variani--stout, clever, middle-aged, and disinterested--had a
position of her own in Rome. She was the correspondent of a leading French
paper; she had many English friends; and she and the Marchesa Fazzoleni, at
the Ambassador's right hand, had just been doing wonders for the relief of
the Italian sick and wounded after the miserable campaign of Adowa.
'Oh! I hide my diminished head!' said the old Ambassador, taking his white
locks in both hands. 'All I know is, I have sent twenty wedding presents
already this year--and that the state of my banking account is wholly
inconsistent with these theories.'
'Ah! you are exceptional,' said the lady. 'Only this morning I get an
account of an English gentleman of my acquaintance. He is nearly forty--he
possesses a large estate--his mother and sisters are on their knees to
him to marry--it will all go to a cousin, and the cousin has forged--or
something. And he--not he! He don't care what happens to the estate. He has
only got the one life, he says--and he won't spoil it. And of course it
does your women harm! Women are always dull when the men don't court them!'
The table laughed. Lucy, looking down it, caught first the face of Eleanor
Burgoyne, and in the distance Manisty's black head and absent smile. The
girl's young mind was captured by a sudden ghastly sense of the human
realities underlying the gay aspects and talk of the luncheon-table. It
seemed to her she still heard that heart-rending voice of Mrs. Burgoyne:
'Oh! I never dreamed it could be the same for him as for me. I didn't ask
much.'
She dreaded to let herself think. It seemed to her that Mrs. Burgoyne's
suffering must reveal itself to all the world, and the girl had moments of
hot shame, as though for herself. To her eyes, the change in aspect and
expression, visible through all the elegance and care of dress, was already
terrible.
Oh! why had she come to Rome? What had changed the world so? Some wounded
writhing thing seemed to be struggling in her own breast--while she was
holding it down, trying to thrust it out of sight and hearing.
She had written to Uncle Ben, and to the Porters. To-morrow she must break
it to Aunt Pattie that she could not go to Vallombrosa, and must hurry back
to England. The girl's pure conscience was tortured already by the thought
of the excuses she would have to invent. And not a word, till Mr. Manisty
was safely started on his way to that function at the Vatican which he was
already grumbling over, which he would certainly shirk if he could. But,
thank Heaven, it was not possible for him to shirk it.
Again her eyes crossed those of Manisty. He was now discussing the strength
of parties in the recent Roman municipal elections with the American
Monsignore, talking with all his usual vehemence. Nevertheless, through it
all, it seemed to her, that she was watched, that in some continuous and
subtle way he held her in sight.
How cold and ungrateful he must have thought her the night before! To-day,
at breakfast, and in the train, he had hardly spoken to her.
Yet--mysteriously--Lucy felt herself threatened, hard pressed. Alice
Manisty's talk in that wild night haunted her ear. Her hand, cold and
tremulous, shook on her knee. Even the voice of the Ambassador startled
her.
After luncheon the Ambassador's guests fell into groups on the large shady
lawn of the Embassy garden.
The Ambassador introduced Lucy to the blue-eyed Lombard, Fioravanti, while
he, pricked with a rueful sense of duty, devoted himself for a time to the
wife of the English Admiral who had been Lady Mary's neighbour at luncheon.
The Ambassador examined her through his half-closed eyes, as he meekly
offered to escort her indoors to see his pictures. She was an elegant and
fashionable woman with very white and regular false teeth. Her looks were
conventional and mild. In reality the Ambassador knew her to be a Tartar.
He walked languidly beside her; his hands were lightly crossed before him;
his white head drooped under the old wideawake that he was accustomed to
wear in the garden.
Meanwhile the gallant and be-whiskered Admiral would have liked to secure
Manisty's attention. To get hold of a politician, or something near a
politician, and explain to them a new method of fusing metals in which he
believed, represented for him the main object of all social functions.
But Manisty peremptorily shook him off. Eleanor, the American Monsignore,
and Reggie Brooklyn were strolling near. He retreated upon them. Eleanor
addressed some question to him, but he scarcely answered her. He seemed to
be in a brown study, and walked on beside her in silence.
Reggie fell back a few paces, and watched them.
'What a bear he can be when he chooses!' the boy said to himself
indignantly. 'And how depressed Eleanor looks! Some fresh worry I
suppose--and all his fault. Now look at that!'
For another group--Lucy, her new acquaintance the Count, and Madame
Variani--had crossed the path of the first. And Manisty had left Eleanor's
side to approach Miss Foster. All trace of abstraction was gone. He looked
ill at ease, and yet excited; his eyes were fixed upon the girl. He stooped
towards her, speaking in a low voice.
'There's something up'--thought Brooklyn. 'And if that girl's any hand in
it she ought to be cut! I thought she was a nice girl.'
His blue eyes stared fiercely at the little scene. Since the day at Nemi,
the boy had understood half at least of the situation. He had perceived
then that Eleanor was miserably unhappy. No doubt Manisty was disappointing
and tormenting her. What else could she expect?
But really--that she should be forsaken and neglected for this chit of a
girl--this interloping American--it was too much! Reggie's wrath glowed
within him.
Meanwhile Manisty addressed Lucy.
'I have something I very much wish to say to you. There is a seat by the
fountain, quite in shade. Will you try it?'
She glanced hurriedly at her companions.
'Thank you--I think we were going to look at the rose-walk.'
Manisty gave an angry laugh, said something inaudible, and walked
impetuously away; only to be captured however by the Danish Professor,
Doctor Jensen, who took no account of bad manners in an Englishman, holding
them as natural as daylight. The flaxen-haired savant therefore was soon
happily engaged in pouring out upon his impatient companion the whole of
the latest _Boletino_ of the Accademia.
Meanwhile Lucy, seeing nothing, it is to be feared, of the beauty of the
Embassy garden, followed her two companions and soon found herself sitting
with them on a stone seat beneath a spreading ilex. In front was a tangled
mass of roses; beyond, an old bit of wall with Roman foundations; and in
the hot blue sky above the wall, between two black cypresses, a slender
brown Campanile--furthest of all a glimpse of Sabine mountains. The air was
heavy with the scent of the roses, with the heat that announced the coming
June, with that indefinable meaning and magic, which is Rome.
Lucy drooped and was silent. The young Count Fioravanti however was not the
person either to divine oppression in another or to feel it for himself.
He sat with his hat on the back of his head, smoking and twisting his
cane, displaying to the fullest advantage those china-blue eyes, under
the blackest of curls, which made him so popular in Rome. His irregular
and most animated face was full of talent and wilfulness. He liked Madame
Variani, and thought the American girl handsome. But it mattered very
little to him with whom he talked; he could have chattered to a tree-stump.
He was over-flowing with the mere interest and jollity of life.
'Have you known Mr. Manisty long?' he asked of Lucy, while his gay look
followed the Professor and his captive.
'I have been staying with them for six weeks at Marinata.'
'What--to finish the book?' he said, laughing.
'Mr. Manisty hoped to finish it.'
The Count laughed again, more loudly and good-humouredly, and shook his
head.
'Oh! he won't finish it. It's a folly! And I know, for I made him read some
of it to me and my sister. No; it is a strange case--is Manisty's. Most
Englishmen have two sides to their brain--while we Latins have only one.
But Manisty is like a Latin--he has only one. He takes a whim, and then
he must cut and carve the world to it. But the world is tough--_et ça ne
marche pas_! We can't go to ruin to please him. Italy is not falling to
pieces--not at all. This war has been a horror--but we shall get through.
And there will be no revolution. The people in the streets won't cheer the
King and Queen for a little bit--but next year, you will see, the House
of Savoy will be there all the same. And he thinks that our priests will
destroy us. Nothing of the sort. We can manage our priests!'
Madame Variani made a gesture of dissent. Her heavy, handsome face was
turned upon him rather sleepily, as though the heat oppressed her. But her
slight frown betrayed, to anyone who knew her, alert attention.
'We can, I say!' cried the Count, striking his knee. 'Besides, the battle
is not ranged as Manisty sees it. There are priests, and priests. Up in
my part of the world the older priests are all right. We landowners who
go with the monarchy can get on with them perfectly. Our old Bishop is a
dear: but it is the young priests, fresh from the seminaries--I grant you,
they're a nuisance! They swarm over us like locusts, ready for any bit of
mischief against the Government. But the Government will win!--Italy will
win! Manisty first of all takes the thing too tragically. He doesn't see
the farce in it. We do. We Italians understand each other. Why, the Vatican
raves and scolds--and all the while, as the Prefect of Police told me only
the other day, there is a whole code of signals ready between the police
headquarters and a certain window of the Vatican; so that directly they
want help against the populace they can call us in. And after that function
the other day--where I saw you, Mademoiselle'--he bowed to Lucy--'one of
the first things the Vatican did was to send their thanks to the Government
for having protected and policed them so well. No; Manisty is in the
clouds.' He laughed good-humouredly. 'We are half acting all the time. The
Clericals must have their politics, like other people--only they call it
religion.'
'But your poor starved peasants--and your corruption--and your war?' said
Lucy.
She spoke with energy, frowning a little as though something had nettled
her. 'She is like a beautiful nun,' thought the young man, looking with
admiration at the austere yet charming face.
'Oh! we shall pull through,' he said, coolly. 'The war was an
abomination--a misery. But we shall learn from it. It will no more ruin us
than a winter storm can ruin the seed in the ground. Manisty is like all
the other clever foreigners who write dirges about us--they don't feel the
life-blood pulsing through the veins as we landowners do.' He flung out his
clasped hand in a dramatic gesture. 'Come and live with us for a summer on
one of our big farms near Mantua--and you shall see. My land brings me just
double what it brought my father!--and our contadini are twice as well off.
There! that's in our starving Italy--in the north of course, mind you!'
He threw himself back, smoking furiously.
'Optimist!' said a woman's voice.
They looked round to see the Marchesa Fazzoleni upon them. She stood
smiling, cigarette in hand, a tall woman, still young--though she was the
mother of five robust children. Her closely-fitting black dress somehow
resembled a riding-habit; her grey gauntletted gloves drawn to the elbow,
her Amazon's hat with its plume, the alertness and grace of the whole
attitude, the brilliancy of her clear black eye--all these carried with
them the same suggestions of open-air life, of health of body and mind--of
a joyous, noble, and powerful personality.
'Look well at her,' the Ambassador had said to Lucy as they stepped into
the garden after luncheon. 'She is one of the mothers of the new Italy.
She is doing things here--things for the future--that in England it would
take twenty women to do. She has all the practical sense of the north; and
all the subtlety of the south. She is one of the people who make me feel
that Italy and England have somehow mysterious affinities that will work
themselves out in history. It seems to me that I could understand all her
thoughts--and she mine--if it were worth her while. She is a modern of the
moderns; and yet there is in her some of the oldest stuff in the world. She
belongs, it is true, to a nation in the making--but that nation, in its
earlier forms, has already carried the whole weight of European history!'
And Lucy, looking up to the warm, kind face, felt vaguely comforted and
calmed by its mere presence. She made room for the Marchesa beside her.
But the Marchesa declared that she must go home and drag one of her
boys, who was studying for an examination, out for exercise. 'Oh! these
examinations--they are _horrors_!' she said, throwing up her hands.
'No--these poor boys!--and they have no games like the English boys. But
you were speaking about the war--about our poor Italy?'
She paused. She laid her hand on Lucy's shoulder and looked down into the
girl's face. Her eyes became for a moment veiled and misty, as though
ghosts passed before them--the grisly calamities and slaughters of the war.
Then they cleared and sparkled.
'I tell you, Mademoiselle,' she said slowly, in her difficult picturesque
English, 'that what Italy has done in forty years is colossal!--not to be
believed! You have taken a hundred years--you!--to make a nation, and you
have had a big civil war. Forty years--not quite!--since Cavour died. And
all that time Italy has been like that cauldron--you remember?--into which
they threw the members of that old man who was to become young. There has
been a bubbling, and a fermenting! And the scum has come up--and up. And it
comes up still--and the brewing goes on. But in the end the young strong
nation will step forth. Now Mr. Manisty--oh! I like Mr. Manisty very
well!--but he sees only the ugly gases and the tumult of the cauldron. He
has no idea--'
'Oh! Manisty,' said the young Count, flinging away his cigarette; 'he is a
_poseur_ of course. His Italian friends don't mind. He has his English fish
to fry. _Sans cela_--!'
He bent forward, staring at Lucy in a boyish absent-mindedness which was no
discourtesy, while his hat slipped further down the back of his curly head.
His attitude was all careless good-humour; yet one might have felt a touch
of southern passion not far off.
'No; his Italian friends don't mind,' said Madame Variani. 'But his English
friends should look after him. Everybody should be angry wid som-thin--it
is good for the character; but Mr. Manisty is angry wid too many things.
That is stupid--that is a waste of time.'
'His book is a blunder,' said Fioravanti with decision. 'By the time it is
out, it will look absurd. He says we have become atheists, because we don't
let the priests have it all their own way. Bah! we understand these gentry
better than he does. Why! my father was all for the advance on Rome--he was
a member of the first Government after 1870--he wouldn't give way to the
Clericals an inch in what he thought was for the good of the country. But
he was the most religious man I ever knew. He never missed any of the old
observances in which he had been brought up. He taught us the same. Every
Sunday after Mass he read the Gospel for the day to us in Italian, and
explained it. And when he was dying he sent for his old parish priest--who
used to denounce him from the pulpit and loved him all the same! "And don't
make any secret of it!" he said to me. "Bring him in openly--let all the
world see. _Non crubesco evangelium!_"'
The young man stopped--reddened and a little abashed by his own eloquence.
But Madame Variani murmured--still with the same aspect of a shrewd and
sleepy cat basking in the sun--
'It is the same with all you Anglo-Saxons. The North will never understand
the South--never! You can't understand our _à peu près_. You think
Catholicism is a tyranny--and we must either let the priests oppress us, or
throw everything overboard. But it is nothing of the kind. We take what we
want of it, and leave the rest. But you!--if you come over to us, that is
another matter! You have to swallow it all. You must begin even with Adam
and Eve!'
'Ah! but what I can't understand,' said Fioravanti, 'is how Mrs. Burgoyne
allowed it. She ought to have given the book another direction--and she
could. She is an extremely clever woman! She knows that caricature is not
argument.'
'But what has happened to Mrs. Burgoyne?' said the Marchesa to Lucy,
throwing up her hands, 'Such a change! I was so distressed--'
'You think she looks ill?' said Lucy quickly.
Her troubled eyes sought those kind ones looking down upon her almost in
appeal. Instinctively the younger woman, far from home and conscious of a
hidden agony of feeling, threw herself upon the exquisite maternity that
breathed from the elder. 'Oh! if I could tell you!--if you could advise
me!' was the girl's unspoken cry.
'She looks terribly ill--to me,' said the Marchesa, gravely. 'And the
winter had done her so much good. We all loved her here. It is deplorable.
Perhaps the hill climate has been too cold for her, Mademoiselle?'
* * * * *
Lucy walked hurriedly back to the lawn to rejoin her companions. The flood
of misery within made movement the only relief. Some instinct of her own
came to the aid of the Marchesa's words, helped them to sting all the more
deeply. She felt herself a kind of murderer.
Suddenly as she issued blindly from the tangle of the rose-garden she came
upon Eleanor Burgoyne talking gaily, surrounded by a little knot of people,
mostly older men, who had found her to-day, as always, one of the most
charming and distinguished of companions.
Lucy approached her impetuously.
Oh! how white and stricken an aspect--through what a dark eclipse of pain
the eyes looked out!
'Ought we not to be going?' Lucy whispered in her ear. 'I am sure you are
tired.'
Eleanor rose. She took the girl's hand in a clinging grasp, while she
turned smiling to her neighbour the Dane:
'We must be moving to the Villa Borghese--some friends will be meeting us
there. Our train does not go for a long, long while.'
'Does any Roman train ever go?' said Doctor Jensen, stroking his
straw-coloured beard. 'But why leave us, Madame? Is not one garden as good
as another? What spell can we invent to chain you here?'
He bowed low, smiling fatuously, with his hand on his heart. He was one of
the most learned men in the world. But about that he cared nothing. The
one reputation he desired was that of a 'sad dog'--a terrible man with the
ladies. That was the paradox of his existence.
Eleanor laughed mechanically; then she turned to Lucy.
'Come!' she said in the girl's ear, and as they walked away she half closed
her eyes against the sun, and Lucy thought she heard a gasp of fatigue. But
she spoke lightly.
'Dear, foolish, old man! he was telling me how he had gone back to the
Hermitage Library at St. Petersburg the other day to read, after thirty
years. And there in a book that had not been taken down since he had used
it last he found a leaf of paper and some pencil words scribbled on it by
him when he was a youth--"my own darling." "And if I only knew now _vich_
darling!" he said, looking at me and slapping his knee. "Vich darling"!'
Eleanor repeated, laughing extravagantly. Then suddenly she wavered. Lucy
instinctively caught her by the arm, and Eleanor lent heavily upon her.
'Dear Mrs. Burgoyne--you are not well,' cried the girl, terrified. 'Let us
go to a hotel where you can rest till the train goes--or to some friend.'
Eleanor's face set in the effort to control herself--she drew her hand
across her eyes. 'No, no, I am well,' she said, hurriedly. 'It is the
sun--and I could not eat at luncheon. The Ambassador's new cook did not
tempt me. And besides'--she suddenly threw a look at Lucy before which Lucy
shrank--'I am out of love with myself. There is one hour yesterday which I
wish to cancel--to take back. I give up everything--everything.'
They were advancing across a wide lawn. The Ambassador and Mrs. Swetenham
were coming to meet them. The Ambassador, weary of his companion, was
looking with pleasure at the two approaching figures, at the sweep of
Eleanor's white dress upon the grass, and the frame made by her black lace
parasol for the delicacy of her head and neck.
Meanwhile Eleanor and Lucy saw only each other. The girl coloured proudly.
She drew herself erect.
'You cannot give up--what would not be taken--what is not desired,' she
said fiercely. Then, in another voice: 'But please, please let me take care
of you! Don't let us go to the Villa Borghese!'
She felt her hand pressed passionately, then dropped.
'I am all right,' said Eleanor, almost in her usual voice. '_Eccellenza_!
we must bid you good-bye--have you seen our gentleman?'
'_Ecco_,' said the Ambassador, pointing to Manisty, who, in company with
the American Monsignore, was now approaching them. 'Let him take you out of
the sun at once--you look as though it were too much for you.'
Manisty, however, came up slowly, in talk with his companion. The frowning
impatience of his aspect attracted the attention of the group round the
Ambassador. As he reached them, he said to the priest beside him--
'You know that he has withdrawn his recantation?'
'Ah! yes'--said the Monsignore, raising his eyebrows, 'poor fellow!'--
The mingled indifference and compassion of the tone made the words bite.
Manisty flushed.
'I hear he was promised consideration,' he said quickly.
'Then he got it,' was the priest's smiling reply.
'He was told that his letter was not for publication. Next morning it
appeared in the _Osservatore Romano_.'
'Oh no!--impossible! Your facts are incorrect.'
The Monsignore laughed, in unperturbed good humour. But after the laugh,
the face reappeared, hard and a little menacing, like a rock that has been
masked by a wave. He watched Manisty for a moment silently.
'Where is he?' said Manisty abruptly.
'Are you talking of Father Benecke'?' said the Ambassador. 'I heard of him
yesterday. He has gone into the country, but he gave me no address. He
wished to be undisturbed.'
'A wise resolve'--said the Monsignore, holding out his hand. 'Your
Excellency must excuse me. I have an audience of his Holiness at three
o'clock.'
He made his farewells to the ladies with Irish effusion, and departed. The
Ambassador looked curiously at Manisty. Then he fell back with Lucy.
'It will be a column to-night,' he said with depression. 'Why didn't
you stand by me? I showed Mrs. Swetenham my pictures--my beauties--my
ewe-lambs--that I have been gathering for twenty years--that the National
Gallery shall have, when I'm gone, if it behaves itself. And she asked me
if they were originals, and took my Luini for a Raphael! Yes! it will be
a column,' said the Ambassador pensively. Then, with a brisk change, he
looked up and took the hand that Lucy offered him.
'Good-bye--good-bye! You won't forget my prescription?--nor me?' said the
old man, smiling and patting her hand kindly. 'And remember!'--he bent
towards her, dropping his voice with an air in which authority and
sweetness mingled--'send Mr. Manisty home!'
He felt the sudden start in the girl's hand before he dropped it. Then he
turned to Manisty himself.
'Ah! Manisty, here you are. Your ladies want to leave us.'
Manisty made his farewells, and carried Lucy off. But as they walked
towards the house he said not a word, and Lucy, venturing a look at him,
saw the storm on his brow, the stiffness of the lips.
'We are going to the Villa Borghese, are we not?' she said timidly--'if
Mrs. Burgoyne ought to go?'
'We must go somewhere, I suppose,' he said, stalking on before her. 'We
can't sit in the street.'