Eleanor (36 page)

They had turned into a wide open space crossed by a few wire fences at vast intervals. The land was mostly rough pasture, or mere sandy rock and scrub. In the glowing west, towards which they journeyed, rose far purple peaks peering over the edge of the great tableland. To the east and south vast woods closed in the horizon.

The carriage left the main road and entered an ill-defined track leading apparently through private property.

‘Ah! I remember!’ cried Eleanor, starting up. ‘There is the
palazzo
—and the village.’

In front of them, indeed, rose an old villa of the Renaissance, with its long flat roofs, its fine
loggia
, and terraced vineyards. A rude village of grey stone, part, it seemed, of the tufa rocks from which it sprang, pressed round the villa, invaded its olive-gardens, crept up to its very walls. Meanwhile the earth grew kinder and more fertile. The vines and figs stood thick again among the green corn and flowering lucerne. Peasants streaming home from work, the men on donkeys, the women carrying their babies, met the carriage and stopped to stare after it, and talk.

Suddenly from the ditches of the roadside sprang up two martial figures.

‘Carabinieri!’ cried Lucy in delight.

She had made friends with several members of this fine corps on the closely guarded roads about the Alban lake, and to see them here gave her a sense of protection.

Bending over the side of the carriage, she nodded to the two handsome brown-skinned fellows, who smiled back at her.

‘How far,’ she said, ‘to Santa Trinita?’

‘
Un miglio grasso
(a good mile), Signorina.
E tutto
. But you are late. They expected you half an hour ago.’

The driver took this for reproach, and with a shrill burst of defence pointed to his smoking horses. The Carabinieri laughed, and diving into the field, one on either side, they kept up with the carriage as it neared the village.

‘Why, it is like coming home!’ said Lucy, wondering. And indeed they were now surrounded by the whole village population, just returned from the fields—pointing, chattering, laughing, shouting friendly directions to the driver. ‘Santa Trinita!’ ‘Ecco!—Santa Trinita!’ sounded on all sides, amid a forest of gesticulating hands.

‘How could they know?’ said Eleanor, looking at the small crowd with startled eyes. Lucy spoke a word to the young man on the box.

‘They knew, he says, as soon as the carriage was ordered yesterday. Look! there are the telegraph wires! The whole countryside knows! They are greatly excited by the coming of
forestieri
—especially at this time of year.’

‘Oh! we can’t stay!’ said Eleanor with a little moan, wringing her hands.

‘It’s only the country people,’ said Lucy tenderly, taking one of the hands in hers. ‘Did you see the Contessa when you were here before?’

And she glanced up at the great yellow mass of the
palazzo
towering above the little town, the sunset light flaming on its long western face.

‘No. She was away. And the
fattore
who took us in left in January. There is a new man.’

‘Then it’s quite safe!’ said Lucy in French. And her kind deep eyes looked steadily into Eleanor’s, as though mutely cheering and supporting her.

Eleanor unconsciously pressed her hand upon her breast. She was looking round her in a sudden anguish of memory. For, now they were through the village, they were descending—they were in the woods. Ah! the white walls of the convent—the vacant windows in its ruined end—and at the gate of the rough farmyard that surrounded it the stalwart
capoccia
, the grinning, harsh-featured wife that she remembered.

She stepped feebly down upon the dusty road. When her feet last pressed it, Manisty was beside her, and the renewing force of love and joy was filling all the sources of her being.

CHAPTER
XVI

‘Can you bear it? Can you be comfortable?’ said Lucy, in some dismay.

They were in one of the four or five bare rooms that had been given up to them. A bed with a straw palliasse, one or two broken chairs, and bits of worm-eaten furniture filled what had formerly been one of a row of cells running along an upper corridor. The floor was of brick and very dirty. Against the wall a tattered canvas, a daub of St. Laurence and his gridiron, still recalled the former uses of the room.

They had given orders for a few comforts to be sent out from Orvieto, but the cart conveying them had not yet arrived. Meanwhile Marie was crying in the next room, and the
contadina
was looking on astonished and a little sulky. The people who came from Orvieto never complained. What was wrong with the ladies?

Eleanor looked round her with a faint smile.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said under her breath. Then she looked at Lucy.

‘What care we take of you! How well we look after you!’

And she dropped her head on her hands in a fit of hysterical laughter—very near to sobs.

‘I!’ cried Lucy. ‘As if I couldn’t sleep anywhere, and eat anything! But you—that’s another business. When the cart comes, we can fix you up a little better—but to-night!’

She looked, frowning, round the empty room.

‘There is nothing to do anything with—or I’d set to work right away.’

‘Ecco, Signora!’ said the farmer’s wife. She carried triumphantly in her hands a shaky carpet-chair, the only article of luxury apparently that the convent provided.

Eleanor thanked her, and the woman stood with her hands on her hips, surveying them. She frowned, but only because she was thinking hard how she could somehow propitiate these strange beings, so well provided, as it seemed, with superfluous
lire
.

‘Ah!’ she cried suddenly; ‘but the ladies have not seen our
bella vista
!—our
loggia
! Santa Madonna! but I have lost my senses! Signorina!
venga—venga lei
.’

And beckoning to Lucy she pulled open a door that had remained unnoticed in the corner of the room.

Lucy and Eleanor followed.

Even Eleanor joined her cry of delight to Lucy’s.

‘Ecco!’ said the
massaja
proudly, as though the whole landscape were her chattel,—‘Monte Amiata! Selvapendente—the Paglia—does the Signora see the bridge down there?—_veda lei_, under Selvapendente? Those forests on the mountain there—they belong all to the Casa Guerrini—_tutto, tutto_! as far as the Signorina can see! And that little house there, on the hill—that
casa di caccia
—that was poor Don Emilio’s, that was killed in the war.’

And she chattered on, in a
patois
not always intelligible, even to Eleanor’s trained ear, about the widowed Contessa, her daughter, and her son; about the new roads that Don Emilio had made through the woods; of the repairs and rebuilding at the Villa Guerrini—all stopped since his death; of the Sindaco of Selvapendente, who often came up to Torre Amiata for the summer; of the nuns in the new convent just built there under the hill, and their
fattore
,—whose son was with Don Emilio after he was wounded, when the poor young man implored his own men to shoot him and put him out of his pain—who had stayed with him till he died, and had brought his watch and pocket-book back to the Contessa—

‘Is the Contessa here?’ said Eleanor, looking at the woman with the strained and startled air that was becoming habitual to her, as though each morsel of passing news only served somehow to make life’s burden heavier.

But certainly the Contessa was here! She and Donna Teresa were always at the Villa. Once they used to go to Rome and Florence part of the year, but now—no more!

A sudden uproar arose from below—of crying children and barking dogs. The woman threw up her hands. ‘What are they doing to me with the baby?’ she cried, and disappeared.

Lucy went back to fetch the carpet-chair. She caught up also a couple of Florentine silk blankets that were among their wraps. She laid them on the bricks of the
loggia
, found a rickety table in Eleanor’s room, her travelling-bag, and a shawl.

‘Don’t take such trouble about me!’ said Eleanor, almost piteously, as Lucy established her comfortably in the chair, with a shawl over her knees and a book or two beside her.

Lucy with a soft little laugh stooped and kissed her.

‘Now I must go and dry Marie’s tears. Then I shall dive downstairs and discover the kitchen. They say they’ve got a cook, and the dinner’ll soon be ready. Isn’t that lovely? And I’m sure the cart’ll be here directly. It’s the most beautiful place I ever saw in my life!’ said Lucy, clasping her hands a moment in a gesture familiar to her, and turning towards the great prospect of mountain, wood, and river. ‘And it’s so strange—so strange! It’s like another Italy! Why, these woods—they might be just in a part of Maine I know. You can’t see a vineyard—not one. And the air—isn’t it fresh? Isn’t it lovely? Wouldn’t you guess you were three thousand feet up? I just know this—we’re going to make you comfortable. I’m going right down now to send that cart back to Orvieto for a lot of things. And you’re going to get ever, ever so much better, aren’t you? Say you will!’

The girl fell on her knees beside Eleanor, and took the other’s thin hands into her own. Her face, thrown back, had lost its gaiety; her mouth quivered.

Eleanor met the girl’s tender movement dry-eyed. For the hundredth time that day she asked herself the feverish, torturing question—‘Does she love him?’

‘Of course I shall get better,’ she said lightly, stroking the girl’s hair; ‘or if not—what matter?’

Lucy shook her head.

‘You must get better,’ she said in a low, determined voice. ‘And it must all come right.’

Eleanor was silent. In her own heart she knew more finally, more irrevocably every hour that for her it would never come right. But how say to Lucy that her whole being hung now—not on any hope for herself, but on the fierce resolve that there should be none for Manisty?

Lucy gave a long sigh, rose to her feet, and went off to household duties.

Eleanor was left alone. Her eyes, bright with fever, fixed themselves, unseeing, on the sunset sky, and the blue, unfamiliar peaks beneath it.

Cheerful sounds of rioting children and loud-voiced housewives came from below. Presently there was a distant sound of wheels, and the
carro
from Orvieto appeared, escorted by the whole village, who watched its unpacking with copious comment on each article, and a perpetual scuffling for places in the front line of observation. Even the
padre parroco
and the doctor paused as they passed along the road, and Lucy as she flitted about caught sight of the smiling young priest, in his flat broad-brimmed hat and caped soutane, side by side with the meditative and gloomy countenance of the doctor, who stood with his legs apart, smoking like a chimney.

But Lucy had no time to watch the crowd. She was directing the men with the
carro
where to place the cooking-stove that had been brought from Orvieto, in the dark and half-ruinous kitchen on the lower floor of the convent; marvelling the while at the
risotto
and the
pollo
that the local artist, their new cook, the sister of the farmer’s wife, was engaged in producing, out of apparently nothing in the way either of fire or tools. She was conferring with Cecco the little manservant, who, with less polish than Alfredo, but with a like good-will, was running hither and thither, intent only on pleasing his ladies, and on somehow finding enough spoons and forks to lay a dinner-table with; or she was alternately comforting and laughing at Marie, who was for the moment convinced that Italy was pure and simple Hades, and Torre Amiata the lowest gulf thereof.

Thus—under the soft, fresh evening—the whole forlorn and ruinous building was once more alive with noise and gaiety, with the tread of men carrying packages, with the fun of skirmishing children, with the cries of the cook and Cecco, with Lucy’s stumbling yet sweet Italian.

Eleanor only was alone—but how terribly alone!

She sat where Lucy had left her—motionless—her hands hanging listlessly. She had been always thin, but in the last few weeks she had become a shadow. Her dress had lost its old perfection, though its carelessness was still the carelessness of instinctive grace, of a woman who could not throw on a shawl or a garden-hat without a natural trick of hand, that held even through despair and grief. The delicacy and emaciation of the face had now gone far beyond the bounds of beauty. It spoke of disease, and drew the pity of the passer-by.

Her loneliness grew upon her—penetrated and pursued her. She could not resign herself to it. She was always struggling with it, beating it away, as a frightened child might struggle with the wave that overwhelms it on the beach. A few weeks ago she had been so happy, so rich in friends—the world had been so warm and kind!

And now it seemed to her that she had no friends; no one to whom she could turn; no one she wished to see, except this girl—this girl she had known barely a couple of months—by whom she had been made desolate!

She thought of those winter gatherings in Rome which she had enjoyed with so keen a pleasure; the women she had liked, who had liked her in return, to whom her eager wish to love and be loved had made her delightful. But beneath her outward sweetness she carried a proud and often unsuspected reserve. She had made a
confidante
of no one. That her relation to Manisty was accepted and understood in Rome; that it was regarded as a romance, with which it was not so much ill-natured as ridiculous to associate a breath of scandal—a romance which all kind hearts hoped might end as most of such things should end—all this she knew. She had been proud of her place beside him, proud of Rome’s tacit recognition of her claim upon him. But she had told her heart to nobody. Her wild scene with Lucy stood out unique, unparalleled in the story of her life.

And now there was no one she craved to see—not one. With the instinct of the stricken animal she turned from her kind. Her father? What had he ever been to her? Aunt Pattie? Her very sympathy and pity made Eleanor thankful to be parted from her. Other kith and kin? No! Happy, she could have loved them; miserable, she cared for none of them. Her unlucky marriage had numbed and silenced her for years. From that frost the waters of life had been loosened, only to fail now at their very source.