Eleanor (6 page)

‘From the temple enclosure, from the further trees, from the hill around, a crowd comes running; men and white-robed priestesses, women, children even—gathering in haste. But they pause afar off. Not a living soul approaches the place of combat; not a hand gives aid. The boy can see the faces of the virgins who serve the temple. They are pale, but very still. Not a sound of pity escapes their white lips; their ambiguous eyes watch calmly for the issue of the strife.

‘And on the further side, at the edge of the grove stand country folk, men in goatskin tunics and leathern hats like the boy’s father. And the little goatherd, not knowing what he does, calls to them for help in his shrill voice. But no one heeds; and the priest himself calls no one, entreats no one.

‘Ah! The priest wavers—he falls—his white robes are in the dust. The bright steel rises—descends:—the last groan speeds to heaven.

‘The victor raised himself from the dead, all stained with the blood and soil of the battle. Quintus gazed upon him astonished. For here was no rude soldier, nor swollen boxer, but a youth merely—a youth, slender and beautiful, fair-haired, and of a fair complexion. His loins were girt with a slave’s tunic. Pallid were his young features; his limbs wasted with hunger and toil; his eyes blood-streaked as those of the deer when the dogs close upon its tender life.

‘And looking down upon the huddled priest, fallen in his blood upon the dust, he peered long into the dead face, as though he beheld it for the first time. Shudders ran through him; Quintus listened to hear him weep or moan. But at the last, he lifted his head, fiercely straightening his limbs like one who reminds himself of black fate, and things not to be undone. And turning to the multitude, he made a sign. With shouting and wild cries they came upon him; they snatched the purple-striped robe from the murdered priest, and with it they clothed his murderer. They put on him the priest’s fillet, and the priest’s cap; they hung garlands upon his neck; and with rejoicing and obeisance they led him to the sacred temple….

‘And for many hours more the boy remained hidden in the tree, held there by the spell of his terror. He saw the temple ministers take up the body of the dead, and carelessly drag it from the grove. All day long was there crowd and festival within the sacred precinct. But when the shadows began to fall from the ridge of Aricia across the lake; when the new-made priest had offered on Trivia’s altar a white steer, nourished on the Alban grass; when he had fed the fire of Vesta; and poured offerings to Virbius the immortal, whom in ancient days great Diana had snatched from the gods’ wrath, and hidden here, safe within the Arician wood,—when these were done, the crowd departed and the Grove-King came forth alone from the temple.

‘The boy watched what he would do. In his hand he carried the sword, which at the sunrise he had taken from the dead. And he came to the sacred tree that was in the middle of the grove, and he too began to pace about it, glancing from side to side, as that other had done before him. And once when he was near the place where the caked blood still lay upon the ground, the sword fell clashing from his hand, and he flung his two arms to heaven with a hoarse and piercing cry—the cry of him who accuses and arraigns the gods.

‘And the boy, shivering, slipped from the tree, with that cry in his ear, and hastily sought for his goats. And when he had found them he drove them home, not staying even to quench his thirst from their swollen udders. And in the shepherd’s hut he found his father Caeculus; and sinking down beside him with tears and sobs he told his tale.

‘And Caeculus pondered long. And without chiding, he laid his hand upon the boy’s head and bade him be comforted. “For,” said he, as though he spake with himself—“such is the will of the goddess. And from the furthest times it has happened thus, before the Roman fathers journeyed from the Alban Mount and made them dwellings on the seven hills—before Romulus gave laws,—or any white-robed priest had climbed the Capitol. From blood springs up the sacred office; and to blood it goes! No natural death must waste the priest of Trivia’s tree. The earth is hungry for the blood in its strength—nor shall it be withheld! Thus only do the trees bear, and the fields bring forth.”

‘Astonished, the boy looked at his father, and saw upon his face, as he turned it upon the ploughed lands and the vineyards, a secret and a savage joy. And the little goatherd’s mind was filled with terror—nor would his father tell him further what the mystery meant. But when he went to his bed of dried leaves at night, and the moon rose upon the lake, and the great woods murmured in the hollow far beneath him, he tossed restlessly from side to side, thinking of the new priest who kept watch there—of his young limbs and miserable eyes—of that voice which he had flung to heaven. And the child tried to believe that he might yet escape.—But already in his dreams he saw the grove part once more and the slayer leap forth. He saw the watching crowd—and their fierce, steady eyes, waiting thirstily for the spilt blood. And it was as though a mighty hand crushed the boy’s heart, and for the first time he shrank from the gods, and from his father,—so that the joy of his youth was darkened within him.’

As he read the last word, Manisty flung the sheets down upon the table beside him, and rising, he began to pace the room with his hands upon his sides, frowning and downcast. When he came to Mrs. Burgoyne’s chair he paused beside her—

‘I don’t see what it has to do with the book. It is time lost’—he said to her abruptly, almost angrily.

‘I think not,’ she said, smiling at him. But her tone wavered a little, and his look grew still more irritable.

‘I shall destroy it!’—he said, with energy—‘nothing more intolerable than ornament out of place!’

‘Oh don’t!—don’t alter it at all!’ said a quick imploring voice.

Manisty turned in astonishment.

Lucy Foster was looking at him steadily. A glow of pleasure was on her cheek, her beautiful eyes were warm and eager. Manisty for the first time observed her, took note also of the loosened hair and Eleanor’s cloak.

‘You liked it?’ he said with some embarrassment. He had entirely forgotten that she was in the room.

She drew a long breath.

‘Yes!’—she said softly, looking down.

He thought that she was too shy to express herself. In reality her feeling was divided between her old enthusiasm and her new disillusion. She would have liked to tell him that his reading had reminded her of the book she loved. But the man, standing beside her, chilled her. She wished she had not spoken. It began to seem to her a piece of forwardness.

‘Well, you’re very kind’—he said, rather formally—‘But I’m afraid it won’t do. That lady there won’t pass it.’

‘What have I said?’—cried Mrs. Burgoyne, protesting.

Manisty laughed. ‘Nothing. But you’ll agree with me.’ Then he gathered up his papers under his arm in a ruthless confusion, and walked away into his study, leaving discomfort behind him.

Mrs. Burgoyne sat silent, a little tired and pale. She too would have liked to praise and to give pleasure. It was not wonderful indeed that the child’s fancy had been touched. That thrilling, passionate voice—her own difficulty always was to resist it—to try and see straight in spite of it.

Later that evening, when Miss Foster had withdrawn, Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were lingering and talking on a stone balcony that ran along the eastern front of the villa. The Campagna and the sea were behind them. Here, beyond a stretch of formal garden, rose a curved front of wall with statues and plashing water showing dimly in the moonlight; and beyond the wall there was a space of blue and silver lake; and girdling the lake the forest-covered Monte Cavo rose towering into the moonlit sky, just showing on its topmost peak that white speck which once was the temple of the Latian Jupiter, and is now, alas! only the monument of an Englishman’s crime against history, art, and Rome. The air was soft, and perfumed with scent from the roses in the side-alleys below. A monotonous bird-note came from the ilex darkness, like the note of a thin passing bell. It was the cry of a small owl, which, in its plaintiveness and changelessness, had often seemed to Manisty and Eleanor the very voice of the Roman night.

Suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne said—‘I have a different version of your Nemi story running in my head!—more tragic than yours. My priest is no murderer. He found his predecessor dead under the tree; the place was empty; he took it. He won’t escape his own doom, of course, but he has not deserved it. There is no blood on his hand—his heart is pure. There!—I imagine it so.’

There was a curious tremor in her voice, which Manisty, lost in his own thoughts, did not detect. He smiled.

‘Well!—you’ll compete with Renan. He made a satire out of it. His priest is a moral gentleman who won’t kill anybody. But the populace soon settle that. They knock him on the head, as a disturber of religion.’

‘I had forgotten—’ said Mrs. Burgoyne absently.

‘But you didn’t like it, Eleanor—my little piece!’ said Manisty, after a pause. ‘So don’t pretend!’

She roused herself at once, and began to talk with her usual eagerness and sympathy. It was a repetition of the scene before dinner. Only this time her effect was not so great. Manisty’s depression did not yield.

Presently, however, he looked down upon her. In the kind, concealing moonlight she was all grace and charm. The man’s easy tenderness awoke.

‘Eleanor—this air is too keen for that thin dress.’

And stooping over her he took her cloak from her arm, and wrapped it about her.

‘You lent it to Miss Foster’—he said, surveying her. ‘It became her—but it knows its mistress!’

The colour mounted an instant in her cheek. Then she moved further away from him.

‘Have you discovered yet’—she said—‘that that girl is extraordinarily handsome?’

‘Oh yes’—he said carelessly—‘with a handsomeness that doesn’t matter.’

She laughed.

‘Wait till Aunt Pattie and I have dressed her and put her to rights.’

‘Well, you can do most things no doubt—both with bad books, and raw girls,’—he said, with a shrug and a sigh.

They bade each other good-night, and Mrs. Burgoyne disappeared through the glass door behind them.

The moon was sailing gloriously above the stone-pines of the garden. Mrs. Burgoyne, half-undressed, sat dreaming in a corner room, with a high painted ceiling, and both its windows open to the night.

She had entered her room in a glow of something which had been half torment, half happiness. Now, after an hour’s dreaming, she suddenly bent forward and, parting the cloud of fair hair that fell about her, she looked in the glass before her, at the worn, delicate face haloed within it—thinking all the time with a vague misery of Lucy Foster’s untouched bloom.

Then her eyes fell upon two photographs that stood upon her table. One represented a man in yeomanry uniform; the other a tottering child of two.

‘Oh! my boy—my darling!’—she cried in a stifled agony, and snatching up the picture, she bowed her head upon it, kissing it. The touch of it calmed her. But she could not part from it. She put it in her breast, and when she slept, it was still there.

CHAPTER
III

‘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
dejeuner
—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
lese majeste
.

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?’