'Eleanor—where are you off to?'

'Just to my house of Simmon,' said that lady, smiling. She was standing on the eastern balcony, buttoning a dainty grey glove, while Manisty a few paces from her was lounging in a deck-chair, with the English newspapers.

'What?—to mass? I protest. Look at the lake—look at the sky—look at that patch of broom on the lake side. Come and walk there before dÉjeuner—and make a round home by Aricia.'

Mrs. Burgoyne shook her head.

'No—I like my little idolatries,' she said, with decision. It was Sunday morning. The bells in Marinata were ringing merrily. Women and girls with black lace scarves upon their heads, handsome young men in short coats and soft peaked hats, were passing along the road between the villa and the lake, on their way to mass. It was a warm April day. The clouds of yellow banksia, hanging over the statued wall that girdled the fountain-basin, were breaking into bloom; and the nightingales were singing with a prodigality that was hardly worthy of their rank and dignity. Nature in truth is too lavish of nightingales on the Alban Hills in spring! She forgets, as it were, her own sweet arts, and all that rareness adds to beauty. One may hear a nightingale and not mark him; which is a lÈse majestÉ.

Mrs. Burgoyne's toilette matched the morning. The grey dress, so fresh and elegant, the broad black hat above the fair hair, the violets dewy from the garden that were fastened at her slender waist, and again at her throat beneath the pallor of the face,—these things were of a perfection quite evident to the critical sense of Edward Manisty. It was the perfection that was characteristic. So too was the faded fairness of hair and skin, the frail distinguished look. So, above all, was the contrast between the minute care for personal adornment implied in the finish of the dress, and the melancholy shrinking of the dark-rimmed eyes.

He watched her, through the smoke wreaths of his cigarette,—pleasantly and lazily conscious both of her charm and her inconsistencies.

'Are you going to take Miss Foster?' he asked her.

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'I made the suggestion. She looked at me with amazement, coloured crimson, and went away. I have lost all my chances with her.'

'Then she must be an ungrateful minx'—said Manisty, lowering his voice and looking round him towards the villa, 'considering the pains you take.'

'Some of us must take pains,' said Mrs. Burgoyne, significantly.

'Some of us do'—he said, laughing. 'The others profit.—One goes on praying for the primitive,—but when it comes—No!—it is not permitted to be as typical as Miss Foster.'

'Typical of what?'

'The dissidence of Dissent, apparently—and the Protestantism of the
Protestant religion. Confess:—it was an odd caprice on the part of high
Jove to send her here?'

'I am sure she has a noble character—and an excellent intelligence!'

Manisty shrugged his shoulders.

'—Her grandfather'—continued the lady—'was a divinity professor and wrote a book on the Inquisition!'—

Manisty repeated his gesture.

'—And as I told you last night, she is almost as handsome as your Greek head—and very like her.'

'My dear lady—you have the wildest notions!'

Mrs. Burgoyne picked up her parasol.

'Quite true.—Your aunt tells me she was so disappointed, poor child, that there was no church of her own sort for her to go to this morning.'

'What!'—cried Manisty—'Did she expect a conventicle in the Pope's own town!'

For Marinata owned a Papal villa and had once been a favourite summer residence of the Popes.

'No—but she thought she might have gone into Rome, and she missed the trains. I found her wandering about the salon looking quite starved and restless.'

'Those are hungers that pass!—My heart is hard.—There—your bell is stopping. Eleanor!—I wonder why you go to these functions?'

He turned to look at her, his fine eye sharp and a little mocking.

'Because I like it.'

'You like the thought of it. But when you get there, the reality won't please you at all. There will be the dirty floor, and the bad music,—and the little priest intoning through his nose—and the scuffling boys,—and the abominable pictures—and the tawdry altars. Much better stay at home—and help me praise the Holy Roman Church from a safe distance!'

'What a hypocrite people would think you, if they could hear you talk like that!' she said, flushing.

'Then they would think it unjustly.—I don't mean to be my own dupe, that's all.'

'The dupes are the happiest,' she said in a low voice. 'There is something between them, and—Ah! well, never mind!'—

She stood still a moment, looking across the lake, her hands resting lightly on the stone balustrade of the terrace. Manisty watched her in silence, occasionally puffing at his cigarette.

'Well, I shall be back very soon,' she said, gathering up her prayer-book and her parasol. 'Will it then be our duty to take Miss Foster for a walk?'

'Why not leave her to my aunt?'

She passed him with a little nod of farewell. Presently, through the openings of the balustrade, Manisty could watch her climbing the village street with her dress held high above her daintily shod feet, a crowd of children asking for a halfpenny following at her heels. Presently he saw her stop irresolutely, open a little velvet bag that hung from her waist and throw a shower of soldi among the children. They swooped upon it, fighting and shrieking.

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at them half smiling, half repentant, shook her head and walked on.

'Eleanor—you coward!' said Manisty, throwing himself back in his chair with a silent laugh.

Under his protection, or his aunt's, as he knew well, Mrs. Burgoyne could walk past those little pests of children, even the poor armless and legless horrors on the way to Albano, and give a firm adhesion to Miss Manisty's Scotch doctrines on the subject of begging. But by herself, she could not refuse—she could not bear to be scowled on—even for a moment. She must yield—must give herself the luxury of being liked. It was all of a piece with her weakness towards servants and porters and cabmen—her absurdities in the way of tips and gifts—the kindnesses she had been showing during the last three days to the American girl. Too kind! Insipidity lay that way.

Manisty returned to his newspapers. When he had finished them he got up and began to pace the stone terrace, his great head bent forward as usual, as though the weight of it were too much for the shoulders. The newspapers had made him restless again, had dissipated the good humour of the morning, born perhaps of the mere April warmth and bien Être.

'Idling in a villa—with two women'—he said to himself, bitterly—'while all these things are happening.'

For the papers were full of news—of battles lost and won, on questions with which he had been at one time intimately concerned. Once or twice in the course of these many columns he had found his own name, his own opinion quoted, but only as belonging to a man who had left the field—a man of the past—politically dead.

As he stood there with his hands upon his sides, looking out over the Alban Lake, and its broom-clad sides, a great hunger for London swept suddenly upon him, for the hot scent of its streets, for its English crowd, for the look of its shops and clubs and parks. He had a vision of the club writing-room—of well-known men coming in and going out—discussing the news of the morning, the gossip of the House—he saw himself accosted as one of the inner circle,—he was sensible again of those short-lived pleasures of power and office. Not that he had cared half as much for these pleasures, when he had them, as other men. To affirm with him meant to be already half way on the road to doubt; contradiction was his character. Nevertheless, now that he was out of it, alone and forgotten—now that the game was well beyond his reach—it had a way of appearing to him at moments intolerably attractive!

Nothing before him now, in these long days at the villa, but the hours of work with Eleanor, the walks with Eleanor, the meals with his aunt and Eleanor—and now, for a stimulating change, Miss Foster! The male in him was restless. He had been eager to come to the villa, and the quiet of the hills, so as to push this long delaying book to its final end. And, behold, day by day, in the absence of the talk and distractions of Rome, a thousand discontents and misgivings were creeping upon him. In Rome he was still a power. In spite of his strange detached position, it was known that he was the defender of the Roman system, the panegyrist of Leo XIII., the apologist of the Papal position in Italy. And this had been more than enough to open to him all but the very inmost heart of Catholic life. Their apartments in Rome, to the scandal of Miss Manisty's Scotch instincts, had been haunted by ecclesiastics of every rank and kind. Cardinals, Italian and foreign, had taken their afternoon tea from Mrs. Burgoyne's hands; the black and white of the Dominicans, the brown of the Franciscans, the black of the Jesuits,—the staircase in the Via Sistina had been well acquainted with them all. Information not usually available had been placed lavishly at Manisty's disposal; he had felt the stir and thrill of the great Catholic organisation as all its nerve-threads gather to its brain and centre in the Vatican. Nay, on two occasions, he had conversed freely with Leo XIII. himself.

All this he had put aside, impatiently, that he might hurry on his book, and accomplish his coup. And in the tranquillity of the hills, was he beginning to lose faith in the book, and the compensation it was to bring him? Unless this book, with its scathing analysis of the dangers and difficulties of the secularist State, were not only a book, but an event, of what use would it be to him? He was capable both of extravagant conceit, and of the most boundless temporary disgust with his own doings and ideas. Such a disgust seemed to be mounting now through all his veins, taking all the savour out of life and work. No doubt it would be the same to the end,—the politician in him just strong enough to ruin the man of letters—the man of letters always ready to distract and paralyse the politician. And as for the book, there also he had been the victim of a double mind. He had endeavoured to make it popular, as Chateaubriand made the great argument of the GÉnie du Christianisme popular, by the introduction of an element of poetry and romance. For the moment he was totally out of love with the result. What was the plain man to make of it? And nowadays the plain man settles everything.

Well!—if the book came to grief, it was not only he that would suffer.—Poor Eleanor!—poor, kind, devoted Eleanor!

Yet as the thought of her passed through his meditations, a certain annoyance mingled with it. What if she had been helping to keep him, all this time, in a fool's paradise—hiding the truth from him by this soft enveloping sympathy of hers?

His mind started these questions freely. Yet only to brush them away with a sense of shame. Beneath his outer controlling egotism there were large and generous elements in his mixed nature. And nothing could stand finally against the memory of that sweet all-sacrificing devotion which had been lavished upon himself and his work all the winter!

What right had he to accept it? What did it mean? Where was it leading?

He guessed pretty shrewdly what had been the speculations of the friends and acquaintances who had seen them together in Rome. Eleanor Burgoyne was but just thirty, very attractive, and his distant kinswoman. As for himself, he knew very well that according to the general opinion of the world, beginning with his aunt, it was his duty to marry and marry soon. He was in the prime of life; he had a property that cried out for an heir; and a rambling Georgian house that would be the better for a mistress. He was tolerably sure that Aunt Pattie had already had glimpses of Eleanor Burgoyne in that position.

Well—if so, Aunt Pattie was less shrewd than usual. Marriage! The notion of its fetters and burdens was no less odious to him now than it had been at twenty. What did he want with a wife—still more, with a son? The thought of his own life continued in another's filled him with a shock of repulsion. Where was the sense of infusing into another being the black drop of discontent that poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps—with the eyes of his mad sister Alice? Or a son—with the contradictions and weaknesses, without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging the future. But that particular way called paternity had never in his most optimistic moments appealed to Manisty.

And of course Eleanor understood him! He had not been ungrateful. No!—he knew well enough that he had the power to make a woman's hours pass pleasantly. Eleanor's winter had been a happy one; her health and spirits had alike revived. Friendship, as they had known it, was a very rare and exquisite thing. No doubt when the book was done with, their relations must change somewhat. He confessed that he might have been imprudent; that he might have been appropriating the energies and sympathies of a delightful woman, as a man is hardly justified in doing, unless—. But, after all, a few weeks more would see the end of it; and friends, dear, close friends, they must always be.

For now there was plenty of room and leisure in his life for these subtler bonds. The day of great passions was gone by. There were one or two incidents in his earlier manhood on which he could look back with the half-triumphant consciousness that no man had dived deeper to the heart of feeling, had drunk more wildly, more inventively, of passion than he, in more than one country of Europe, in the East as in the West. These events had occurred in those wander-years between twenty and thirty, which he had spent in travelling, hunting and writing, in the pursuit, alternately eager and fastidious, of as wide an experience as possible. But all that was over. These things concerned another man, in another world. Politics and ambition had possessed him since, and women now appealed to other instincts in him—instincts rather of the diplomatist and intriguer than of the lover. Of late years they had been his friends and instruments. And by no unworthy arts. They were delightful to him; and his power with them was based on natural sympathies and divinations that were perhaps his birthright. His father had had the same gift. Why deny that both his father and he had owed much to women? What was there to be ashamed of? His father had been one of the ablest and most respected men of his day and so far as English society was concerned, the son had no scandal, nor the shadow of one, upon his conscience.

How far did Eleanor divine him? He raised his shoulder with a smile. Probably she knew him better than he knew himself. Besides, she was no mere girl, brimful of illusions and dreaming of love-affairs. What a history!—Good heavens! Why had he not known and seen something of her in the days when she was still under the tyranny of that intolerable husband? He might have eased the weight a little—protected her—as a kinsman may. Ah well—better not! They were both younger then.—

As for the present,—let him only extricate himself from this coil in which he stood, find his way back to activity and his rightful place, and many things might look differently. Perhaps—who could say?—in the future, when youth was still further forgotten by both of them, he and Eleanor might after all take each other by the hand—sit down on either side of the same hearth—their present friendship pass into one of another kind? It was quite possible, only—

The sudden crash of a glass door made him look round. It was Miss Foster who was hastening along the enclosed passage leading to the outer stair. She had miscalculated the strength of the wind on the north side of the house, and the glass door communicating with the library had slipped from her hand. She passed Manisty with a rather scared penitent look, quickly opened the outer door, and ran downstairs.

Manisty watched her as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness itself—middle-class, sabbatical neatness.

Manisty recalled his thoughts of the last half-hour with a touch of amusement. He had been meditating on 'women'—the delightfulness of 'women,' his own natural inclination to their society. But how narrow is everybody's world!

His collective noun of course had referred merely to that small, high-bred, cosmopolitan class which presents types like Eleanor Burgoyne. And here came this girl, walking through his dream, to remind him of what 'woman,' average virtuous woman of the New or the Old World, is really like.

All the same, she walked well,—carried her head remarkably well. There was a free and springing youth in all her movements that he could not but follow with eyes that noticed all such things as she passed through the old trees, and the fragments of GrÆco-Roman sculpture placed among them.

* * * * *

That afternoon Lucy Foster was sitting by herself in the garden of the villa. She had a volume of sermons by a famous Boston preacher in her hand, and was alternately reading—and looking. Miss Manisty had told her that some visitors from Rome would probably arrive between four and five o'clock, and close to her indeed the little butler, running hither and thither with an anxiety, an effusion that no English servant would have deigned to show, was placing chairs and tea-tables and putting out tea-things.

Presently indeed Alfredo approached the silent lady sitting under the trees, on tip-toe.

Would the signorina be so very kind as to come and look at the tables? The signora—so all the household called Miss Manisty—had given directions—but he, Alfredo, was not sure—and it would be so sad if when she came out she were not satisfied!

Lucy rose and went to look. She discovered some sugar-tongs missing. Alfredo started like the wind in search of them, running down the avenue with short, scudding steps, his coat-tails streaming behind him.

What a child-like eagerness to please! Yet he had been five years in the cavalry; he was admirably educated; he wrote a better hand than Manisty's own, and when his engagement at the villa came to an end he was already, thanks to a very fair scientific knowledge, engaged as manager in a firework factory in Rome.

Lucy's look pursued the short flying figure of the butler with a smiling kindness. What was wrong with this clever and loveable people that Mr. Manisty should never have a good word for their institutions, or their history, or their public men? Unjust! Nor was he even consistent with his own creed. He, so moody and silent with Mrs. Burgoyne and Miss Manisty, could always find a smile and a phrase for the natives. The servants adored him, and all the long street of Marinata welcomed him with friendly eyes. His Italian was fluency itself; and his handsome looks perhaps, his keen commanding air gave him a natural kingship among a susceptible race.

But to laugh and live with a people, merely that you might gibbet it before Europe, that you might show it as the Helot among nations—there was a kind of treachery in it! Lucy Foster remembered some of the talk and feeling in America after the Manistys' visit there had borne fruit in certain hostile lectures and addresses on the English side of the water. She had shared the feeling. She was angry still. And her young ignorance and sympathy were up in arms so far on behalf of Italy. Who and what was this critic that he should blame so freely, praise so little?

Not that Mr. Manisty had so far confided any of his views to her! It seemed to her that she had hardly spoken with him since that first evening of her arrival. But she had heard further portions of his book read aloud; taken from the main fabric this time and not from the embroideries. The whole villa indeed was occupied, and pre-occupied by the book. Mrs. Burgoyne was looking pale and worn with the stress of it.

Mrs. Burgoyne! The girl fell into a wondering reverie. She was Mr. Manisty's second cousin—she had lost her husband and child in some frightful accident—she was not going to marry Mr. Manisty—at least nobody said so—and though she went to mass, she was not a Catholic, but on the contrary a Scotch Presbyterian, by birth, being the daughter of a Scotch laird of old family—one General Delafield Muir—?

'She is very kind to me,' thought Lucy Foster in a rush of gratitude mixed with some perplexity.—'I don't know why she takes so much trouble about me. She is so different—so—so fashionable—so experienced. She can't care a bit about me. Yet she is very sweet to me—to everybody, indeed. But—'

And again she lost herself in ponderings on the relation of Mr. Manisty to his cousin. She had never seen anything like it. The mere neighbourhood of it thrilled her, she could not have told why. Was it the intimacy that it implied—the intimacy of mind and thought? It was like marriage—but married people were more reserved, more secret. Yet of course it was only friendship. Miss Manisty had said that her nephew and Mrs. Burgoyne were 'very great friends.' Well—One read of such things—one did not often see them.

* * * * *

The sound of steps approaching made her lift her eyes.

It was not Alfredo, but a young man, a young Englishman apparently, who was coming towards her. He was fair-haired and smiling; he carried his hat under his arm; and he wore a light suit and a rose in his button-hole—this was all she had time to see before he was at her side.

'May I introduce myself? I must!—Miss Manisty told me to come and find you. I'm Reggie Brooklyn—Mrs. Burgoyne's friend. Haven't you heard of me? I look after her when Manisty ought to, and doesn't; I'm going to take you all to St. Peter's next week.'

Lucy looked up to see a charming face, lit by the bluest of blue eyes, adorned moreover by a fair moustache, and an expression at once confident and appealing.

Was this the 'delightful boy' from the Embassy Mrs. Burgoyne had announced to her? No doubt. The colour rose softly in her cheek. She was not accustomed to young gentlemen with such a manner and such a savoir faire.

'Won't you sit down?' She moved sedately to one side of the bench.

He settled himself at once, fanning himself with his hat, and looking at her discreetly.

'You're American, aren't you? You don't mind my asking you?'

'Not in the least. Yes; it's my first time in Europe.'

'Well, Italy's not bad; is it? Nice place, Rome, anyway. Aren't you rather knocked over by it? I was when I first came.'

'I've only been here four days.

'And of course nobody here has time to take you about. I can guess that!
How's the book getting on?'

'I don't know,' she said, opening her eyes wide in a smile that would not be repressed, a smile that broke like light in her grave face.

Her companion looked at her with approval.

'My word! she's dowdy'—he thought—'like a Sunday-school teacher. But she's handsome.'

The real point was, however, that Mrs. Burgoyne had told him to go out and make himself agreeable, and he was accustomed to obey orders from that quarter.

'Doesn't he read it to you all day and all night?' he asked. 'That's his way.'

'I have heard some of it. It's very interesting.'

The young man shrugged his shoulders.

'It's a queer business that book. My chief here is awfully sick about it. So are a good many other English. Why should an Englishman come out here and write a book to run down Italy?—And an Englishman that's been in the Government, too—so of course what he says'll have authority. Why, we're friends with Italy—we've always stuck up for Italy! When I think what he's writing—and what a row it'll make—I declare I'm ashamed to look one's Italian friends in the face!—And just now, too, when they're so down on their luck.'

For it was the year of the Abyssinian disasters; and the carnage of Adowa was not yet two months old.

Lucy's expression showed her sympathy.

'What makes him—'

'Take such a twisted sort of a line? O goodness! what makes Manisty do anything? Of course, I oughtn't to talk. I'm just an understrapper—and he's a man of genius,—more or less—we all know that. But what made him do what he did last year? I say it was because his chief—he was in the Education Office you know—was a Dissenter, and a jam manufacturer, and had mutton-chop whisker. Manisty just couldn't do what he was told by a man like that. He's as proud as Lucifer. I once heard him tell a friend of mine that he didn't know how to obey anybody—he'd never learnt. That's because they didn't send him to a public school—worse luck; that was his mother's doing, I believe. She thought him so clever—he must be treated differently to other people. Don't you think that's a great mistake?'

'What?'

'Why—to prefer the cross-cuts, when you might stick to the high road?'

The American girl considered. Then she flashed into a smile.—

'I think I'm for the cross-cuts!'

'Ah—that's because you're American. I might have known you'd say that. All your people want to go one better than anybody else. But I can tell you it doesn't do for Englishmen. They want their noses kept to the grindstone. That's my experience! Of course it was a great pity Manisty ever went into Parliament at all. He'd been abroad for seven or eight years, living with all the big-wigs and reactionaries everywhere. The last thing in the world he knew anything about was English politics.—But then his father had been a Liberal, and a Minister for ever so long. And when Manisty came home, and the member for his father's division died, I don't deny it was very natural they should put him in. And he's such a queer mixture, I dare say he didn't know himself where he was.—But I'll tell you one thing—'

He shook his head slowly,—with all the airs of the budding statesman.

'When you've joined a party,—you must dine with 'em:—It don't sound much—but I declare it's the root of everything. Now Manisty was always dining with the other side. All the great Tory ladies,—and the charming High Churchwomen, and the delightful High Churchmen—and they are nice fellows, I can tell you!—got hold of him. And then it came to some question about these beastly schools—don't you wish they were all at the bottom of the sea?—and I suppose his chief was more annoying than usual—(oh, but he had a number of other coolnesses on his hands by that time—he wasn't meant to be a Liberal!) and his friends talked to him—and so—Ah! there they are!

And lifting his hat, the young man waved it towards Mrs. Burgoyne who with Manisty and three or four other companions had just become visible at the further end of the ilex-avenue which stretched from their stone bench to the villa.

'Why, that's my chief,'—he cried—'I didn't think he was to be here this afternoon. I say, do you know my chief?'

And he turned to her with the brightest, most confiding manner, as though he had been the friend of her cradle.

'Who?'—said Lucy, bewildered—'the tall gentleman with the white hair?'

'Yes,—that's the ambassador. Oh! I'm glad you'll see him. He's a charmer, is our chief! And that's his married daughter, who's keeping house for him just now.—I'll tell you something, if you'll keep a secret'—he bent towards her,—'He likes Mrs. Burgoyne of course,—everybody does—but he don't take Manisty at his own valuation. I've heard him say some awfully good things to Manisty—you'd hardly think a man would get over them.—Who's that on the other side?'

He put his hand over his eyes for a moment, then burst into a laugh.—

'Why, it's the other man of letters!—Bellasis. I should think you've read some of his poems—or plays? Rome has hardly been able to hold the two of them this winter. It's worse than the archÆologists. Mrs. Burgoyne is always trying to be civil to him, so that he mayn't make uncivil remarks about Manisty. I say—don't you think she's delightful?'

He lowered his voice as he looked round upon his companion, but his blue eyes shone.

'Mrs. Burgoyne?'—said Lucy—'Yes, indeed!—She's so—so very kind.'

'Oh! she's a darling, is Eleanor Burgoyne. And I may call her that, you know, for I'm her cousin, just as Manisty is—only on the other side. I have been trying to look after her a bit this winter in Rome; she never looks after herself. And she's not a bit strong.—You know her history of course?'

He lowered his voice with young importance, speaking almost in a whisper, though the advancing party were still far away. Lucy shook her head.

'Well, it's a ghastly tale, and I've only a minute.—Her husband, you see, had pneumonia—they were in Switzerland together, and he'd taken a chill after a walk—and one night he was raving mad, mad you understand with delirium and fever—and poor Eleanor was so ill, they had taken her away from her husband, and put her to bed on the other side of the hotel.—And there was a drunken nurse—it's almost too horrible, isn't it?—and while she was asleep Mr. Burgoyne got up, quite mad—and he went into the next room, where the baby was, without waking anybody, and he took the child out asleep in his arms, back to his own room where the windows were open, and there he threw himself and the boy out together—headlong! The hotel was high up,—built, one side of it, above a rock wall, with a stream below it.—There had been a great deal of rain, and the river was swollen. The bodies were not found for days.—When poor Eleanor woke up, she had lost everything.—Oh! I dare say, when the first shock was over, the husband didn't so much matter—he hadn't made her at all happy.—But the child!'—

He stopped, Mrs. Burgoyne's gay voice could be heard as she approached. All the elegance of the dress was visible, the gleam of a diamond at the throat, the flowers at the waist. Lucy Foster's eyes, dim with sudden tears, fastened themselves upon the slender, advancing form.