Eleanor (51 page)

He stood before her—a superb, commanding presence. In his emotion all unshapeliness of limb or movement seemed to have disappeared. Transfigured by the unconsciousness of passion, he was all energy and all grace.

‘Eleanor
Has our old friendship deserved this? Why have you done this thing to me?—And, my God!’—he began to pace up and down again, his hands in his pockets—‘how well—how effectually you have gone to work! You have had—Lucy—in your hands for six weeks. It is plain enough what has been going on. This morning—on that hill—suddenly,’—he raised his hand to his brow, as though the surprise, the ecstacy of the moment returned upon him—‘there among the trees—was her face! What I said I shall never remember. But when a man feels as I do he has no need to take thought what he shall say. And she? Impatience, coldness, aversion!—not a word permitted of my long pilgrimage—not a syllable of explanation for this slight, this unbearable slight that had been put upon me as her host, her guardian, for the time being! You and she fly me as though I were no longer fit to be your companion. Even the servants talked. Aunt Pattie and I had to set ourselves at once to devise the most elaborate falsehoods, or Heaven knows where the talk would have spread. How had I deserved such a humiliation?—Yet, when I meet Miss Foster again, she behaves as though she owed me not a word of excuse. All her talk of you and your health! I must go away at once—because it would startle and disturb you to see me. She had already found out by chance that I was here—she had begged Father Benecke to use his influence with me not to insist on seeing you—not to come to the convent. It was the most amazing, the most inexplicable thing! What in the name of fortune does it mean? Are we all mad? Is the world and everyone on it rushing together to Bedlam?’

Still she did not speak. Was it that his mere voice, the familiar torrent of words, was delightful to her?—that she cared very little what he said, so long as he was there, living, breathing, pleading before her?—that, like Sidney, she could have cried to him: ‘Say on, and all well said, still say the same’?

But he meant to be answered. He came close to her.

‘We have been comrades, Eleanor—fellow-workers—friends. You have come to know me as perhaps no other woman has known me. I have shown you a thousand faults. You know all my weaknesses. You have a right to despise me as an unstable, egotistical, selfish fool; who must needs waste other people’s good time and good brains for his own futile purposes. You have a right to think me ungrateful for the kindest help that ever man got. You have a right as Miss Foster’s friend—and perhaps, guessing as you do at some of my past history,—to expect of me probation and guarantees. You have a right to warn her how she gives away anything so precious as herself. But you have not a right to inflict on me such suffering—such agony of mind—as you have imposed on me the last six weeks! I deny it, Eleanor—I deny it altogether! The punishment, the test goes beyond—far beyond—your right and my offences!’

He calmed—he curbed himself.

‘The reckoning has come, Eleanor. I ask you to pay it.’

She drew a long breath.

‘But I can’t go at that pace. You must give me time.’

He turned away in a miserable impatience.

She closed her eyes and thought a little, ‘Now’—she said to herself—‘now is the time for lying. It must be done. Quick! no scruples!’

And aloud:

‘You understand,’ she said slowly, ‘that Miss Foster and I had become much attached to each other?’

‘I understand.’

‘That she had felt great sympathy for me in the failure of the book, and was inclined—well, you have proof of it!—to pity me, of course a great deal too much, for being a weakling. She is the most tender—the most loving creature that exists.’

‘How does that explain why you should have fled from me like the plague?’ he said doggedly.

‘No—no—but—Anyway, you see Lucy was likely to do anything she could to please me. That’s plain, isn’t it?—so far?’

Her head dropped a little to one side, interrogatively.

He made no reply. He still stood in front of her, his eyes bent upon her, his hands in his pockets.

‘Meanwhile’—the colour rushed over her face—‘I had been, most innocently, an eavesdropper.’

‘Ah!’ he said, with a movement, ‘that night? I imagined it.’

‘You were not as cautious as you might have been—considering all the people about—and I heard.’

He waited, all ear. But she ceased to speak. She bent a little farther over the back of the chair, as though she were making a mental enumeration of the leaves of a tiny myrtle bush that grew near his heel.

‘I thought that bit of truth would have stiffened the lies,’ she thought to herself; ‘but somehow—they don’t work.’

‘Well: then, you see’—she threw back her head again and looked at him—‘I had to consider. As you say, I knew you better than most people. It was all remarkably rapid—you will hardly deny that? For a fortnight you took no notice of Lucy Foster. Then the attraction began—and suddenly—Well, we needn’t go into that any more; but with your character it was plain that you would push matters on—that you would give her no time—that you would speak,
coute qua coute
—that you would fling caution and delay to the winds—and that all in a moment Lucy Foster would find herself confronted by a great decision that she was not at all prepared to make. It was not fair that she should even be asked to make it. I had become her friend, specially. You will see there was a responsibility. Delay for both of you—wasn’t that to be desired? And no use whatever to go and leave you the address!—you’ll admit that?’ she said hurriedly, with the accent of a child trying to entrap the judgment of an angry elder who was bringing it to book.

He stood there lost in wrath, bewilderment, mystification. Was there ever a more lame, more ridiculous tale?

Then he turned quickly upon her, searching her face for some clue. A sudden perception—a perception of horror—swept upon him. Eleanor’s first flush was gone; in its place was the pallor of effort and excitement. What a ghost, what a spectre she had become! Manisty looked at her aghast,—at her unsteady yet defiant eyes, at the uncontrollable trembling of the mouth she did her best to keep at its hard task of smiling.

In a flash, he understood. A wave of red invaded the man’s face and neck. He saw himself back in the winter days, working, talking, thinking; always with Eleanor; Eleanor his tool, his stimulus; her delicate mind and heart the block on which he sharpened his own powers and perceptions. He recalled his constant impatience of the barriers that hamper cold and cautious people. He must have intimacy, feeling, and the moods that border on and play with passion. Only so could his own gift of phrase, his own artistic divinations develop to a fine suhtlety and clearness, like flowers in a kind air.

An experience,—for him. And for her? He remembered how, in a leisurely and lordly way, he had once thought it possible he might some day reward his cousin; at the end of things, when all other adventures were done.

Then came that tragi-comedy of the book; his disillusion with it; his impatient sense that the winter’s work upon it was somehow bound up in Eleanor’s mind with a claim on him that had begun to fret and tease; and those rebuffs, tacit or spoken, which his egotism had not shrunk from inflicting on her sweetness.

How could he have helped inflicting them? Lucy had come!—to stir in him the deepest waters of the soul. Besides, he had never taken Eleanor seriously. On the one hand he had thought of her as intellect, and therefore hardly woman; on the other he had conceived her as too gentle, too sweet, too sensitive to push anything to extremes. No doubt the flight of the two friends and Eleanor’s letter had been a rude awakening. He had then understood that he had offended Eleanor, offended her both as a friend, and as a clever woman. She had noticed the dawn of his love for Lucy Foster, and had determined that he should still recognise her power and influence upon his life.

This was part of his explanation. As to the rest, it was inevitable that both his vanity and passion should speak soft things. A girl does not take such a wild step, or acquiesce in it—till she has felt a man’s power. Self-assertion on Eleanor’s part—a sweet alarm on Lucy’s—these had been his keys to the matter, so far. They had brought him anger, but also hope; the most delicious, the most confident hope.

Now remorse shot through him, fierce and stinging—remorse and terror! Then on their heels followed an angry denial of responsibility, mingled with alarm and revolt. Was he to be robbed of Lucy because Eleanor had misread him? No doubt she had imprinted what she pleased on Lucy’s mind. Was he indeed undone?—for good and all?

Then shame, pity, rushed upon him headlong. He dared not look at the face beside him with its record of pain. He tried to put out of his mind what it meant. Of course he must accept her lead. He was only too eager to accept it; to play the game as she pleased. She was mistress! That he realised.

He took up the camp-stool on which he had been sitting when she arrived and placed himself beside her.

‘Well—that explains something’—he said more gently. ‘I can’t complain that I don’t seem to you or anyone a miracle of discretion; I can’t wonder—perhaps—that you should wish to protect Miss Foster, if—if you thought she needed protecting. But I must think—I can’t help thinking, that you set about it with very unnecessary violence. And for yourself too—what madness! Eleanor! what have you been doing to yourself?’

He looked at her reproachfully with that sudden and intimate penetration which was one of his chief spells with women. Eleanor shrank.

‘Oh! I am ill,’ she said hastily; ‘too ill in fact to make a fuss about. It would only be a waste of time.’

‘Of course you have found this place too rough for you. Have you any comforts at all in that ruin? Eleanor, what a rash,—what a wild thing to do!’

He came closer to her, and Eleanor trembled under the strong expostulating tenderness of his face and voice. It was so like him—to be always somehow in the right! Would he succeed, now as always, in doing with her exactly as he would? And was it not this, this first and foremost that she had fled from?

‘No’—she said,—‘no. I have been as well here as I should have been anywhere else. Don’t let us talk of it.’

‘But I must talk of it. You have hurt yourself—and Heaven knows you have hurt me—desperately. Eleanor—when I came back from that function the day you left the Villa, I came back with the intention of telling you everything. I knew you were Miss Foster’s friend. I thought you were mine too. In spite of all my stupidity about the book, Eleanor, you would have listened to me?—you would have advised me?’

‘When did you begin to think of Lucy?’

Her thin fingers, crossed over her brow, as she rested her arm on the back of the chair, hid from him the eagerness, the passion, of her curiosity.

But he scented danger. He prepared himself to walk warily.

‘It was after Nemi—quite suddenly. I can’t explain it. How can one ever explain those things?’

‘What makes you want to marry her? What possible congruity is there between her and you?’

He laughed uneasily.

‘What’s the good of asking those things? One’s feeling itself is the answer.’

‘But I’m the spectator—the friend.’—The word came out slowly, with a strange emphasis. ‘I want to know what Lucy’s chances are.’

‘Chances of what?’

‘Chances of happiness.’

‘Good God!’—he said, with an impatient groan.—‘You talk as though she were going to give herself any opportunity to find out.’

‘Well, let us talk so, for argument. You’re not exactly a novice, you know, in these things. How is one to be sure that you’re not playing with Lucy—as you played with the book—till you can go back to the play you really like best?’

‘What do you mean?’ he cried, starting with indignation—‘the play of politics?’

‘Politics—ambition—what you will. Suppose Lucy finds herself taken up and thrown down—like the book?—when the interest’s done?’

She uncovered her eyes, and looked at him steadily, coldly. It was an Eleanor he did not know.

He sprang up in his anger and discomfort, and began to pace again in front of her.

‘Oh well—if you think as badly of me as that’—he said fiercely,—‘I don’t see what good can come of this conversation.’

There was a pause. At the end of it, Eleanor said in another voice:

‘Did you ever give her any indication of what you felt—before to-day?’

‘I came near—in the Borghese gardens,’ he said reluctantly. ‘If she had held out the tip of her little finger—But she didn’t. And I should have been a fool. It was too soon—too hasty. Anyway, she would not give me the smallest opening. And afterwards—’ He paused. His mind passed to his night-wandering in the garden, to the strange breaking of the terra-cotta. Furtively his gaze examined Eleanor’s face. But what he saw of it told him nothing, and again his instinct warned him to let sleeping dogs lie. ‘Afterwards I thought things over, naturally. And I determined, that night, as I have already said, to come to you and take counsel with you. I saw you were out of charity with me. And, goodness knows, there was not much to be said for me! But at any rate I thought that we, who had been such old friends, had better understand each other; that you’d help me if I asked you. You’d never yet refused, anyway.’