Eleanor Part 39

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 Emba.s.sy 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 ma.s.s 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 ca 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 att.i.tude, 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, n.o.ble, and powerful personality.

'Look well at her,' the Amba.s.sador 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.u.m 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 att.i.tude was all careless good-humour; yet one might have felt a touch of southern pa.s.sion 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 Ma.s.s 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 _a peu pres_. 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!