Mrs. Burgoyne turned at last from the great spectacle to her companion.
‘One has really no adjectives left,’ she said. ‘But I had used mine up within a week.’
‘It still gives you so much pleasure?’ he said, looking at her a little askance.
Her face changed at once.
‘And you?—you are beginning to be tired of it?’
‘One gets a sort of indigestion.—Oh! I shall be all right to-morrow.’
Both were silent for a moment. Then he resumed.—
‘I met General Fenton in the Borgia rooms this morning.’
She turned, with a quick look of curiosity.
‘Well?’
‘I hadn’t seen him since I met him at Simla three years ago. I always found him particularly agreeable then. We used to ride together and talk together,—and he put me in the way of seeing a good many things. This morning he received me with a change of manner—can’t exactly describe it; but it was not flattering! So I presently left him to his own devices and went on into another room. Then he followed me, and seemed to wish to talk. Perhaps he perceived that he had been unfriendly, and thought he would make amends. But I was rather short with him. We had been real friends; we hadn’t met for three years; and I thought he might have behaved differently. He asked me a number of questions, however, about last year, about my resignation, and so forth; and I answered as little as I could. So presently he looked at me and laughed—“You remind me,” he said, “of what somebody said of Peel—that he was bad to go up to in the stable!—But what on earth are you in the stable for?—and not in the running?”’
Mrs. Burgoyne smiled.
‘He was evidently bored with the pictures!’ she said, dryly.
Manisty gave a shrug. ‘Oh! I let him off. I wouldn’t be drawn. I told him I had expressed myself so much in public there was nothing more to say. “H’m,” he said, “they tell me at the Embassy you’re writing a book!” You should have seen the little old fellow’s wizened face—and the scorn of it! So I inquired whether there was any objection to the writing of books. “Yes!”—he said—“when a man can do a d----d sight better for himself—as you could! Everyone tells me that last year you had the ball at your feet.” “Well,”—I said—“and I kicked it—and am still kicking it—in my own way. It mayn’t be yours—or anybody else’s—but wait and see.” He shook his head. “A man with what
were
your prospects can’t afford escapades. It’s all very well for a Frenchman; it don’t pay in England.” So then I maintained that half the political reputations of the present day were based on escapades. “Whom do you mean?”—he said—“Randolph Churchill?—But Randolph’s escapades were always just what the man in the street understood. As for your escapade, the man in the street can’t make head or tail of it. That’s just the, difference.”’
Mrs. Burgoyne laughed—but rather impatiently.
‘I should like to know when General Fenton ever considered the man in the street!’
‘Not at Simla certainly. There you may despise him.—But the old man is right enough as to the part he plays in England.—I gathered that all my old Indian friends thought I had done for myself. There was no sympathy for me anywhere. Oh!—as to the cause I upheld—yes. But none as to the mode of doing it.’
‘Well—there is plenty of sympathy elsewhere! What does it matter what dried-up officials like General Fenton choose to think about it?’
‘Nothing—so long as there are no doubts inside to open the gates to the General Fentons outside!’
He looked at her oddly—half smiling, half frowning.
‘The doubts are traitors. Send them to execution!’ He shook his head.
‘Do you remember that sentence we came across yesterday in Chateaubriand’s letters “As to my career—I have gone from shipwreck to shipwreck.” What if I am merely bound on the same charming voyage?’
‘I accept the comparison,’ she said with vivacity. ‘End as he did in re-creating a church, and regenerating a literature—and see who will count the shipwrecks!’
Her hand’s disdainful gesture completed the sally.
Manisty’s face dismissed its shadow.
As she stood beside him, in the rosy light—so proudly confident—Eleanor Burgoyne was very delightful to see and hear. Manisty, one of the subtlest and most fastidious of observers, was abundantly conscious of it. Yet she was not beautiful, except in the judgment of a few exceptional people, to whom a certain kind of grace—very rare, and very complex in origin—is of more importance than other things. The eyes were, indeed, beautiful; so was the forehead, and the hair of a soft ashy brown folded and piled round it in a most skilful simplicity. But the rest of the face was too long; and its pallor, the singularly dark circles round the eyes, the great thinness of the temples and cheeks, together with the emaciation of the whole delicate frame, made a rather painful impression on a stranger. It was a face of experience, a face of grief; timid, yet with many strange capacities and suggestions both of vehemence and pride. It could still tremble into youth and delight. But in general it held the world aloof. Mrs. Burgoyne was not very far from thirty, and either physical weakness, or the presence of some enemy within more destructive still, had emphasised the loss of youth. At the same time she had still a voice, a hand, a carriage that lovelier women had often envied, discerning in them those subtleties of race and personality which are not to be rivalled for the asking.
To-night she brought all her charm to bear upon her companion’s despondency, and succeeded as she had often succeeded before. She divined that he needed flattery, and she gave it; that he must be supported and endorsed, and she had soon pushed General Fenton out of sight behind a cloud of witness of another sort.
Manisty’s mood yielded; and in a short time he was again no less ready to admire the sunset than she was.
‘Heavens!’ she said at last, holding out her watch.—‘Just look at the time—and Miss Foster!’
Manisty struck his hand against the railing.
‘How is one to be civil about this visit! Nothing could be more unfortunate. These last critical weeks—and each of us so dependent on the other—Really it is the most monstrous folly on all our parts that we should have brought this girl upon us.’
‘Poor Miss Foster!’ said Mrs. Burgoyne, raising her eyebrows. ‘But of course you won’t be civil!—Aunt Pattie and I know that. When I think of what I went through that first fortnight—’
‘Eleanor!’
‘You are the only man I ever knew that could sit silent through a whole meal. By to-morrow Miss Foster will have added that experience to her collection. Well—I shall be prepared with my consolations—there’s the carriage—and the bell!’
They fled indoors, escaping through the side entrances of the salon, before the visitor could be shown in.
‘Must I change my dress?’
The voice that asked the question trembled with agitation and fatigue. But the girl who owned the voice stood up stiffly, looking at Miss Manisty with a frowning, almost a threatening shyness.
‘Well, my dear,’ said Miss Manisty, hesitating. ‘Are you not rather dusty? We can easily keep dinner a quarter of an hour.’
She looked at the grey alpaca dress before her, in some perplexity.
‘Oh, very well’—said the girl hurriedly.—‘Of course I’ll change. Only’—and the voice fluttered again evidently against her will—‘I’m afraid I haven’t anything very nice. I must get something in Rome. Mrs. Lewinson advised me. This is my afternoon dress,—I’ve been wearing it in Florence. But of course—I’ll put on my other.—Oh! please don’t send for a maid. I’d rather unpack for myself—so much rather!’
The speaker flushed crimson, as she saw Miss Manisty’s maid enter the room in answer to her mistress’s ring. She stood up indeed with her hand grasping her trunk, as though defending it from an assailant.
The maid looked at her mistress. ‘Miss Foster will ring, Benson, if she wants you’—said Miss Manisty; and the black-robed elderly maid, breathing decorous fashion and the ways of ‘the best people,’ turned, gave a swift look at Miss Foster, and left the room.
‘Are you sure, my dear? You know she would make you tidy in no time. She arranges hair beautifully.’
‘Oh quite—quite sure!—thank you,’ said the girl with the same eagerness. ‘I will be ready,—right away.’
Then, left to herself, Miss Foster hastily opened her box and took out some of its contents. She unfolded one dress after another,—and looked at them unhappily.
‘Perhaps I ought to have let cousin Izza give me those things in Boston,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps I was too proud. And that money of Uncle Ben’s—it might have been kinder—after all he wanted me to look nice’—
She sat ruefully on the ground beside her trunk, turning the things over, in a misery of annoyance and mortification; half inclined to laugh too as she remembered the seamstress in the small New England country town, who had helped her own hands to manufacture them. ‘Well, Miss Lucy, your uncle’s done real handsome by you. I guess he’s set you up, and no mistake. There’s no meanness about him!’
And she saw the dress on the stand—the little blonde withered head of the dressmaker—the spectacled eyes dwelling proudly on the masterpiece before them.—
Alack! There rose up the memory of little Mrs. Lewinson at Florence—of her gently pursed lips—of the looks that were meant to be kind, and were in reality so critical.
No matter. The choice had to be made; and she chose at last a blue and white check that seemed to have borne its travels better than the rest. It had looked so fresh and striking in the window of the shop whence she had bought it. ‘And you know, Miss Lucy, you’re so tall, you can stand them chancy things’—her little friend had said to her, when
she
had wondered whether the check might not be too large.
And yet only with a passing wonder. She could not honestly say that her dress had cost her much thought then or at any other time. She had been content to be very simple, to admire other girls’ cleverness. There had been influences upon her own childhood, however, that had somehow separated her from the girls around her, had made it difficult for her to think and plan as they did.
She rose with the dress in her hands, and as she did so, she caught the glory of the sunset through the open window.
She ran to look, all her senses flooded with the sudden beauty,—when she heard a man’s voice as it seemed close beside her. Looking to the left, she distinguished a balcony, and a dark figure that had just emerged upon it.
Mr. Manisty—no doubt! She closed her window hurriedly, and began her dressing, trying at the time to collect her thoughts on the subject of these people whom she had come to visit.
Yet neither the talk of her Boston cousins, nor the gossip of the Lewinsons at Florence had left any very clear impression. She remembered well her first and only sight of Miss Manisty at Boston. The little spinster, so much a lady, so kind, cheerful and agreeable, had left a very favourable impression in America. Mr. Manisty had left an impression too—that was certain—for people talked of him perpetually. Not many persons, however, had liked him, it seemed. She could remember, as it were, a whole track of resentments, hostilities, left behind. ‘He cares nothing about us’—an irate Boston lady had said in her hearing—but he will exploit us! He despises us,—but he’ll make plenty of speeches and articles out of us—you’ll see!’
As for Major Lewinson, the husband of Mr. Manisty’s first cousin,—she had been conscious all the time of only half believing what he said, of holding out against it. He must be so different from Mr. Manisty—the little smart, quick-tempered soldier—with his contempt for the undisciplined civilian way of doing things. She did not mean to remember his remarks. For after all, she had her own ideas of what Mr. Manisty would be like. She had secretly formed her own opinion. He had been a man of letters and a traveller before he entered politics. She remembered—nay, she would never forget—a volume of letters from Palestine, written by him, which had reached her through the free library of the little town near her home. She who read slowly, but, when she admired, with a silent and worshipping ardour, had read this book, had hidden it under her pillow, had been haunted for days by its pliant sonorous sentences, by the colour, the perfume, the melancholy of pages that seemed to her dreaming youth marvellous, inimitable. There were descriptions of a dawn at Bethlehem—a night wandering at Jerusalem—a reverie by the sea of Galilee—the very thought of which made her shiver a little, so deeply had they touched her young and pure imagination.
And then—people talked so angrily of his quarrel with the Government—and his resigning. They said he had been foolish, arrogant, unwise. Perhaps. But after all it had been to his own hurt—it must have been for principle. So far the girl’s secret instinct was all on his side.
Meanwhile, as she dressed, there floated through her mind fragments of what she had been told as to his strange personal beauty; but these she only entertained shyly and in passing. She had been brought up to think little of such matters, or rather to avoid thinking of them.
She went through her toilette as neatly and rapidly as she could, her mind all the time so full of speculation and a deep restrained excitement that she ceased to trouble herself in the least about her gown, As for her hair, she arranged it almost mechanically, caring only that its black masses should be smooth and in order. She fastened at her throat a small turquoise brooch that had been her mother’s; she clasped the two little chain bracelets that were the only ornaments of the kind she possessed, and then without a single backward look towards the reflection in the glass, she left her room—her heart beating fast with timidity and expectation.
‘Oh! poor child—poor child!—what a frock!’
Such was the inward ejaculation of Mrs. Burgoyne, as the door of the salon was thrown open by the Italian butler, and a very tall girl came abruptly through, edging to one side as though she were trying to escape the servant, and looking anxiously round the vast room.
Manisty also turned as the door opened. Miss Manisty caught his momentary expression of wonder, as she herself hurried forward to meet the new-comer.