Eleanor - Mrs. Humphry Ward (some good books to read TXT) 📗

at the same time she seems to herself to enter through her submission upon a region of spiritual independence where she is the slave, not of man but of God.

What she felt also, tortured as she was by jealousy and angry will, was the sheer longing for human help that must always be felt by the lonely and the weak. Confession, judgment, direction--it was on these tremendous things that her inner mind was brooding all the time that she sat talking to Father Benecke of the Jewish influence in Bavaria, or the last number of the 'Civilta Cattolica.'

* * * * *

One evening at the beginning of July Eleanor and Lucy were caught in the woods by a thunder-shower. The temperature dropped suddenly, and as they mounted the hill towards the convent Eleanor in her thin white dress met a blast of cold wind that followed the rain.

The result was chill and fever. Lucy and Marie tended her as best they could, but her strength appeared to fail her with great rapidity, and there came an evening when Lucy fell into a panic of anxiety.

Should she summon the local doctor--a man who was paid 80_l._ a year by the Municipio of Selvapendente, and tended the Commune of Torre Amiata?

She had discovered, however, that he was not liked by the peasants. His appearance was not attractive, and she doubted whether she could persuade Eleanor to see him.

An idea struck her. Without consulting Mrs. Burgoyne, she took her hat and boldly walked up to the Palazzo on the hill. Here she inquired for the Contessa Guerrini. The Contessa, however, was out; Lucy left a little note in French asking for advice. Could they get a good doctor at Selvapendente, or must she send to Orvieto?

She had hardly reached home before an answer followed her from the Contessa, who regretted extremely that Mademoiselle Foster should not have found her at home. There was a good doctor at Selvapendente, and the Contessa would have great pleasure in sending a mounted messenger to fetch him. She regretted the illness of Madame. There was a fair _farmacia_ in the village. Otherwise she was afraid that in illness the ladies would not find themselves very well placed at Torre Amiata. Would Mademoiselle kindly have her directions for the doctor ready, and the messenger would call immediately?

Lucy was sincerely grateful and perhaps a little astonished. She was obliged to tell Eleanor, and Eleanor showed some restlessness, but was too unwell to protest. The doctor came and proved to be competent. The fever was subdued, and Eleanor was soon convalescent. Meanwhile flowers, fruit, and delicacies were sent daily from the Palazzo, and twice did the Contessa descend from her little victoria at the door of the convent courtyard, to inquire for the patient.

On each occasion Lucy saw her, and received the impression of a dignified, kind, and masterful woman, bowed by recent grief, but nevertheless sensitively alive in a sort of old-fashioned stately way to the claims of strangers on the protection of the local grandee. It seemed to attract her that Lucy was American, and that Eleanor was English.

'I have twice visited England,' she said, in an English that was correct, but a little rusty. 'My husband learnt many things from England--for the estate. But I wonder, Mademoiselle, that you come to us at this time of year?'

Lucy laughed and coloured. She said it was pleasant to see Italy without the _forestieri_; that it was like surprising a bird on its nest. But she stumbled a little, and the Contessa noticed both the blush and the stumbling.

When Eleanor was able to go out, the little carriage was sent for her, and neither she nor Lucy knew how to refuse it. They drove up and down the miles of zig-zag road that Don Emilio had made through the forest on either side of the river, connecting the Palazzo Guerrini with the _casa di caccia_ on the mountain opposite. The roads were deserted; grass was beginning to grow on them. The peasants scarcely ever used them. They clung to the old steep paths and tracts that had been theirs for generations. But the small smart horses, in their jingling harness, trotted briskly along; and Eleanor beside her companion, more frail and languid than ever, looked listlessly out upon a world of beauty that spoke to her no more.

And at last a note from the Contessa arrived, asking if the ladies would honour her and her daughter by taking tea with them at the Palazzo. 'We are in deep mourning and receiving no society,' said the note; 'but if Madame and her friend will visit us in this quiet way it will give us pleasure, and they will perhaps enjoy the high view from here over our beautiful country.'

Eleanor winced and accepted.

* * * * *

The Palazzo, as they climbed up through the village towards it, showed itself to be an imposing pile of the later seventeenth century, with heavily-barred lower windows, and, above, a series of graceful _loggie_ on its northern and western fronts which gave it a delicate and habitable air. On the north-eastern side the woods, broken by the stone-fall of the Sassetto, sank sharply to the river; on the other the village and the vineyards pressed upon its very doors. The great entrance gateway opened on a squalid village street, alive with crawling babies and chatting mothers.

At this gateway, however--through which appeared a courtyard aglow with oleanders and murmurous with running water--they were received with some state. An old majordomo met them, accompanied by two footmen and a carrying-chair. Eleanor was borne up a high flight of stone stairs, and through a vast and bare 'apartment' of enormous rooms with tiled or brick floors and wide stone _cheminees_, furnished with a few old chests and cabinets, a collection of French engravings of the last century, and some indifferent pictures. A few of the rooms were frescoed with scenes of hunting or social life in a facile eighteenth-century style. Here and there was a piece of old tapestry or a Persian carpet. But as a whole, the Palazzo, in spite of its vastness, made very much the impression of an old English manor house which has belonged to people of some taste and no great wealth, and has grown threadbare and even ugly with age. Yet tradition and the family remain. So here. A frugal and antique dignity, sure of itself and needing no display, breathed in the great cool spaces.

The Contessa and her daughter were in a small and more modern _salone_ looking on the river and the woods. Eleanor was placed in a low chair near the open window, and her hostess could not forbear a few curious and pitying glances at the sharp, high-bred face of the Englishwoman, the feverish lips, and the very evident emaciation, which the elegance of the loose black dress tried in vain to hide.

'I understand, Madame,' she said, after Eleanor had expressed her thanks with the pretty effusion that was natural to her, 'that you were at Torre Amiata last autumn?'

Eleanor started. The _massaja_, she supposed, had been gossiping. It was disagreeable, but good-breeding bade her be frank.

'Yes, I was here with some friends, and your agent gave us hospitality for the night.'

The Contessa looked astonished.

'Ah!' she said, 'you were here with the D----'s?'

Eleanor assented.

'And you spent the winter in Rome?'

'Part of it. Madame, you have the most glorious view in the world!' And she turned towards the great prospect at her feet.

The Contessa understood.

'How ill she is!' she thought; 'and how distinguished!'

And presently Eleanor on her side, while she was talking nervously and fast on a good many disconnected subjects, found herself observing her hostess. The Contessa's strong square face had been pale and grief-stricken when she saw it first. But she noticed now that the eyelids were swollen and red, as though from constant tears; and the little sallow daughter looked sadder and shyer than ever. Eleanor presently gathered that they were living in the strictest seclusion and saw no visitors. 'Then why'--she asked herself, wondering--'did she speak to us in the Sassetto?--and why are we admitted now? Ah! that is his portrait!'

For at the Contessa's elbow, on a table specially given up to it, she perceived a large framed photograph draped in black. It represented a tall young man in an Artillery uniform. The face was handsome, eager, and yet melancholy. It seemed to express a character at once impatient and despondent, but held in check by a strong will. With a shiver Eleanor again recalled the ghastly incidents of the war; and the story they had heard from the _massaja_ of the young man's wound and despair.

Her heart, in its natural lovingness, went out to his mother. She found her tongue, and she and the Contessa talked till the twilight fell of the country and the peasants, of the improvements in Italian farming, of the old convent and its history.

Not a word of the war; and not a word, Eleanor noticed, of their fellow-lodger, Father Benecke. From various indications she gathered that the sallow daughter was _devote_ and a 'black.' The mother, however, seemed to be of a different stamp. She was at any rate a person of cultivation. That, the books lying about were enough to prove. But she had also the shrewdness and sobriety, the large pleasant homeliness, of a good man of business. It was evident that she, rather than her _fattore_, managed her property, and that she perfectly understood what she was doing.

In truth, a secret and strong sympathy had arisen between the two women. During the days that followed they met often.

The Contessa asked no further questions as to the past history or future plans of the visitors. But indirectly, and without betraying her new friends, she made inquiries in Rome. One of the D---- family wrote to her:

'The English people we brought with us last year to your delicious Torre Amiata were three--a gentleman and two ladies. The gentleman was a Mr. Manisty, a former member of the English Parliament, and very conspicuous in Rome last winter for a kind of Brunetiere alliance with the Vatican and hostility to the Italian _regime_. People mostly regarded it as a pose; and as he and his aunt were rich and of old family, and Mr. Manisty was--when he chose--a most brilliant talker, they were welcome everywhere, and Rome certainly feted them a good deal. The lady staying with them was a Mrs. Burgoyne, a very graceful and charming woman whom everybody liked. It was quite plain that there was some close relation between her and Mr. Manisty. By which I mean nothing scandalous! Heavens! nobody ever thought of such a thing. But I believe that many people who knew them well felt that it would be a very natural and right thing that he should marry her. She was evidently touchingly devoted to him--acting as his secretary, and hanging on his talk. In the spring they went out to the hills, and a young American girl--quite a beauty, they say, though rather raw--went to stay with them. I heard so much of her beauty from Madame Variani that