'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 etre.

'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 Genie 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 Graeco-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 archaeologists. 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.



CHAPTER IV

The party grouped themselves round the tea-tables. Mrs. Burgoyne laid a kind hand on Lucy Foster's arm, and introduced one or two of the new-comers.

Then, while Miss Manisty, a little apart, lent her ear to the soft chat of the ambassador, who sat beside her, supporting a pair of old and very white hands upon a gold-headed stick, Mrs. Burgoyne busied herself with Mr. Bellasis and his tea. For he was anxious to catch a train, and had but a short time to spare.

He was a tall stiffly built man, with a heavy white face, and a shock of black hair combed into a high and bird-like crest. As to Mrs. Burgoyne's attentions, he received them with a somewhat pinched but still smiling dignity. Manisty, meanwhile, a few feet away, was fidgetting on his chair, in one of his most unmanageable moods. Around him were two or three young men bearing the great names of Rome. They all belonged to the Guardia Nobile, and were all dressed by English tailors. Two of them, moreover, were the sons of English mothers. They were laughing and joking together, and every now and then they addressed their host. But he scarcely replied. He gathered stalk after stalk of grass from the ground beside him, nibbled it and threw it away—a constant habit of his when he was annoyed or out of spirits.

"So you have read my book?" said Mr. Bellasis pleasantly, addressing Mrs. Burgoyne, as she handed him a cup of tea. The book in question was long; it revived the narrative verse of our grandfathers; and in spite of the efforts of a 'set' the world was not disposed to take much notice of it.

'Yes, indeed! We liked it so much.—But I think when I wrote to you I told you what we thought about it?'

And she glanced towards Manisty for support. He, however, did not apparently hear what she said. Mr. Bellasis also looked round in his direction; but in vain. The poet's face clouded.

'May I ask what reading you are at?' he said, returning to his tea.

'What reading?'—Mrs. Burgoyne looked puzzled.

'Have you read it more than once?'

She coloured.

'No—I'm afraid—'

'Ah!—my friends tell me in Rome that the book cannot be really appreciated except at a second or third reading—'

Mrs. Burgoyne looked up in dismay, as a shower of gravel descended on the tea-table. Manisty has just beckoned in haste to his great Newfoundland who was lying stretched on the gravel path, and the dog bounding towards him, seemed to have brought the path with him.

Mr. Bellasis impatiently shook some fragments of gravel from his coat, and resumed:—

'I have just got a batch of the first reviews. Really criticism has become an absurdity! Did you look at the "Sentinel"?'

Mrs. Burgoyne hesitated.

'Yes—I saw there was something about the style—'

'The style!'—Mr. Bellasis threw himself back in his chair and laughed loud—'Why the style is done with a magnifying-glass!—There's not a phrase,—not a word that I don't stand by.'

'Mr. Bellasis'—said the courteous voice of the ambassador—'are you going by this train?'

The great man held out his watch.

'Yes indeed—and I must catch it!' cried the man of letters. He started to his feet, and bending over Mrs. Burgoyne, he said in an aside perfectly audible to all the world—'I read my new play to-night—just finished—at Madame Salvi's!'

Eleanor smiled and congratulated him. He took his leave, and Manisty in an embarrassed silence accompanied him half way down the avenue.

Then returning, he threw himself into a chair near Lucy Foster and young Brooklyn, with a sigh of relief.

'Intolerable ass!'—he said under his breath, as though quite unconscious of any bystander.

The young man looked at Lucy with eyes that danced.

* * * * *

'Who is your young lady?' said the ambassador.

Miss Manisty explained.

'An American? Really? I was quite off the scent, But now—I see—I see! Let me guess. She is a New Englander—not from Boston, but from the country. I remember the type exactly. The year I was at Washington I spent some weeks in the summer convalescing at a village up in the hills of Maine.—The women there seemed to me the salt of the earth. May I go and talk to her?'

Miss Manisty led him across the circle to Lucy, and introduced him.

'Will you take me to the terrace and show me St. Peter's? I know one can see it from here,' said the suave polished voice.

Lucy rose in a shy pleasure that became her. The thought flashed happily through her, as she walked beside the old man, that Uncle Ben would like to hear of it! She had that 'respect of persons' which comes not from snobbishness, but from imagination and sympathy. The man's office thrilled her, not his title.

The ambassador's shrewd eyes ran over her face and bearing, taking note of all the signs of character. Then he began to talk, exerting himself as he had not exerted himself that morning for a princess who had lunched at his table. And as he was one of the enchanters of his day, known for such in half a dozen courts, and two hemispheres, Lucy Foster's walk was a walk of delight. There was only one drawback. She had heard some member of the party say 'Your Excellency'—and somehow her lips would not pronounce it! Yet so kind and kingly was the old man, there was no sign of homage she would not have gladly paid him, if she had known how.

They emerged at last upon the stone terrace at the edge of the garden looking out upon the Campagna.

'Ah! there it is!'—said the ambassador, and, walking to the corner of the terrace, he pointed northwards.

And there—just caught between two stone pines—in the dim blue distance rose the great dome.

'Doesn't it give you an emotion?' he said, smiling down upon her.—'When I first stayed on these hills I wrote a poem about it—a very bad poem. There's a kind of miracle in it, you know. Go where you will, that dome follows you. Again and again, storm and mist may blot out the rest—that remains. The peasants on these hills have a superstition about it. They look for that dome as they look for the sun. When they can't see it, they are unhappy—they expect some calamity.—It's a symbol, isn't it, an idea?—and those are the things that touch us. I have a notion'—he turned to her smiling, 'that it will come into Mr. Manisty's book?'

Their eyes met in a smiling assent.

"Well, there are symbols—and symbols. That dome makes my old heart beat because it speaks of so much—half the history of our race. But looking back—I remember another symbol—I was at Harvard in '69; and I remember the first time I ever saw those tablets—you recollect—in the Memorial Hall—to the Harvard men that fell in the war?"

The colour leapt into her cheek. Her eyes filled.

"Oh yes! yes!"—she said, half eager, half timid—"My father lost two brothers—both their names are there."

The ambassador looked at her kindly.—"Well—be proud of it!—be proud of it! That wall, those names, that youth, and death—they remain with me, as the symbol of the other great majesty in the world! There's one,"—he pointed to the dome,—"that's Religion. And the other's Country. It's country that Mr. Manisty forgets—isn't it?"

The old man shook his head, and fell silent, looking out over the cloud-flecked Campagna.

"Ah, well"—he said, rousing himself—"I must go. Will you come and see me? My daughter shall write to you."

And five minutes later the ambassador was driving swiftly towards Rome, in a good humour with himself and the day. He had that morning sent off what he knew to be a masterly despatch, and in the afternoon, as he was also quite conscious, he had made a young thing happy.

* * * * *

Manisty could not attend the ambassador to his carriage. He was absorbed by another guest. Mrs. Burgoyne, young Brooklyn, and Lucy, paid the necessary civilities.

When they returned, they found a fresh group gathered on the terrace. Two persons made the centre of it—a grey-haired cardinal—and Manisty.

Lucy looked at her host in amazement. What a transformation! The man who had been lounging and listless all the afternoon—barely civil to his guests—making no effort indeed for anyone, was now another being. An hour before he had been in middle age; now he was young, handsome, courteous, animating, and guiding the conversation around him with the practised ease of one who knew himself a master.

Where was the spell? The Cardinal?

The Cardinal sat to Manisty's right, one wrinkled hand resting on the neck of the Newfoundland. It was a typical Italian face, large-cheeked and large-jawed, with good eyes,—a little sleepy, but not unspiritual. His red-edged cassock allowed a glimpse of red stockings to be seen, and his finely worked cross and chain, his red sash, and the bright ribbon that lit up his broad-brimmed hat, made spots of cheerful colour in the shadow of the trees.

He was a Cardinal of the Curia, belonging indeed to the Congregation of the Index. The vulgar believed that he was staying on the hills for his health.

The initiated, however, knew that he had come to these heights, bringing with him the works of a certain German Catholic professor threatened with the thunders of the Church. It was a matter that demanded leisure and a quiet mind.

As he sat sipping Miss Manisty's tea, however, nothing could be divined of those scathing Latin sheets on which he had left his secretary employed. He had the air of one at peace with all the world—hardly stirred indeed by the brilliance of his host.

'Italy again!'—said Reggie Brooklyn in Lucy's ear—poor old Italy!—one might be sure of that, when one sees one of these black gentlemen about.'

The Cardinal indeed had given Manisty his text. He had brought an account of some fresh vandalism of the Government—the buildings of an old Umbrian convent turned to Government uses—the disappearance of some famous pictures in the process, supposed to have passed into the bands of a Paris dealer by the connivance of a corrupt official.

The story had roused Manisty to a white heat. This maltreatment of religious buildings and the wasting of their treasures was a subject on which he was inexhaustible. Encouraged by the slow smile of the Cardinal, the laughter and applause of the young men, he took the history of a monastery in the mountains of Spoleto, which had long been intimately known to him, and told it,—with a variety, a passion, an irony, that only he could achieve—that at last revealed indeed to Lucy Foster, as she sat quivering with antagonism beside Miss Manisty, all the secret of the man's fame and power in the world.

For gradually—from the story of this monastery, and its suppression at the hands of a few Italian officials—he built up a figure, typical, representative, according to him, of the New Italy, small, insolent, venal,—insulting and despoiling the Old Italy, venerable, beautiful and defenceless. And then a natural turn of thought, or a suggestion from one of the group surrounding him, brought him to the scandals connected with the Abyssinian campaign—to the charges of incompetence and corruption which every Radical paper was now hurling against the Crispi government. He gave the latest gossip, handling it lightly, inexorably, as one more symptom of an inveterate disease, linking the men of the past with the men of the present, spattering all with the same mud, till Italian Liberalism, from Cavour to Crispi, sat shivering and ugly—stripped of all those pleas and glories wherewith she had once stepped forth adorned upon the page of history.

Finally—with the art of the accomplished talker—a transition! Back to the mountains, and the lonely convent on the heights—to the handful of monks left in the old sanctuary, handing on the past, waiting for the future, heirs of a society which would destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,—offering the daily sacrifice amid the murmur and solitude of the woods,—confident, peaceful, unstained; while the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated, in the mire of a profitless and purposeless corruption.

And all this in no set harangue—but in vivid broken sentences; in snatches of paradox and mockery; of emotion touched and left; interrupted, moreover, by the lively give and take of conversation with the young Italians, by the quiet comments of the Cardinal. None the less, the whole final image emerged, as Manisty meant it to emerge; till the fascinated hearers felt, as it were, a breath of hot bitterness and hate pass between them and the spring day, enveloping the grim phantom of a ruined and a doomed State.

The Cardinal said little. Every now and then he put in a fact of his own knowledge—a stroke of character—a phrase of compassion that bit more sharply even than Manisty's scorns—a smile—a shake of the head. And sometimes, as Manisty talked with the young men, the sharp wrinkled eyes rested upon the Englishman with a scrutiny, instantly withdrawn. All the caution of the Roman ecclesiastic,—the inheritance of centuries—spoke in the glance.

It was perceived by no one, however, but a certain dark elderly lady, who was sitting restlessly silent beside Miss Manisty. Lucy Foster had noticed her as a new-comer, and believed that her name was Madame Variani.

As for Eleanor Burgoyne, she sat on Manisty's left while he talked—it was curious to notice how a place was always made for her beside him!—her head raised a little towards him, her eyes bright and fixed. The force that breathed from him passed through her frail being, quickening every pulse of life. She neither criticised nor accepted what he said. It was the man's splendid vitality that subdued and mastered her.

Yet she alone knew what no one else suspected. At the beginning of the conversation Manisty had placed himself behind an old stone table of oblong shape and thick base, of which there were several in the garden. Round it grew up grasses and tall vetches which had sown themselves among the gaping stones of the terrace. Nothing, therefore, could be seen of the talker as he leant carelessly across the table but the magnificent head, and the shoulders on which it was so freely and proudly carried.

Anybody noticing the effect—for it was an effect—would have thought it a mere happy accident. Eleanor Burgoyne alone knew that it was conscious. She had seen the same pose, the same concealment practised too often to be mistaken. But it made no difference whatever to the spell that held her. The small vanities and miseries of Manisty's nature were all known to her—and alas! she would not have altered one of them!

* * * * *

When the Cardinal rose to go, two Italian girls, who had come with their brother, the Count Casaleschi, ran forward, and curtseying kissed the Cardinal's ring. And as he walked away, escorted by Manisty, a gardener crossed the avenue, who also at sight of the tall red-sashed figure fell on his knees and did the same. The Cardinal gave him an absent nod and smile, and passed on.

'Ah! j'etouffe!'—cried Madame Variani, throwing herself down by Miss Manisty. 'Give me another cup, chere Madame. Your nephew is too bad. Let him show us another nation born in forty years—that has had to make itself in a generation—let him show it us! Ah! you English—with all your advantages—and your proud hearts.—Perhaps we too could pick some holes in you!'

She fanned herself with angry vigour. The young men came to stand round her arguing and laughing. She was a favourite in Rome, and as a French woman, and the widow of a Florentine man of letters, occupied a somewhat independent position, and was the friend of many different groups.

'And you—young lady, what do you think?'—she said suddenly, laying a large hand on Lucy Foster's knee.

Lucy, startled, looked into the sparkling black eyes brought thus close to her own.

'But I just long'—she said, catching her breath—'to hear the other side.'

'Ah, and you shall hear it, my dear—you shall!' cried Madame Variani. 'N'est-ce pas, Madame?' she said, addressing Miss Manisty—'We will get rid of all those priests—and then we will speak our mind? Oh, and you too,'—she waved her hand with a motherly roughness towards the young men,—'What do you know about it, Signor Marchese? If there were no Guardia Nobile, you would not wear those fine uniforms.—That is why you like the Pope.'

The Marchese Vitellucci—a charming boy of two and twenty, tall, thin-faced and pensive,—laughed and bowed.

'The Pope, Madame, should establish some dames d'honneur. Then he would have all the ladies too on his side.

'O, mon Dieu!—he has enough of them,' cried Madame Variani. 'But here comes Mr. Manisty, I must drink my tea and hold my tongue. I am going out to dinner to-night, and if one gets hot and cross, that is not good for the complexion.'

Manisty advanced at his usual quick pace, his head sunk once more between his shoulders.

Young Vitellucci approached him. 'Ah! Carlo!' he said, looking up affectionately—'dear fellow!—Come for a stroll with me.'

And linking his arm in the young man's, he carried him off. Their peals of laughter could be heard coming back from the distance of the ilex-walk.

Madame Variani tilted back her chair to look after them.

'Ah! your nephew can be agreeable too, when he likes,' she said to Miss Manisty. 'I do not say no. But when he talks of these poor Italians, he is mechant—mechant!'

As for Lucy Foster, as Manisty passed out of sight, she felt her pulses still tingling with a wholly new sense of passionate hostility—dislike even. But none the less did the stage seem empty and meaningless when he had left it.

* * * * *

Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were closeted in the library for some time before dinner. Lucy in the salon could hear him pacing up and down, and the deep voice dictating.

Then Mrs. Burgoyne came into the salon, and not noticing the girl who was hidden behind a great pot of broom threw herself on the sofa with a long sigh of fatigue. Lucy could just see the pale face against the pillow and the closed eyes. Thus abandoned and at rest, there was something strangely pitiful in the whole figure, for all its grace.

A wave of feeling rose in the girl's breast. She slipped softly from her hiding-place, took a silk wrap that was lying on a chair, and approached Mrs. Burgoyne.

'Let me put this over you. Won't you sleep before dinner? And I will shut the window. It is getting cold.'

Mrs. Burgoyne opened her eyes in astonishment, and murmured a few words of thanks.

Lucy covered her up, closed the window, and was stealing away, when Mrs. Burgoyne put out a hand and touched her.

'It is very sweet of you to think of me.'

She drew the girl to her, enclosed the hand she had taken in both hers, pressed it and released it. Lucy went quietly out of the room.

Then till dinner she sat reading her New Testament, and trying rather piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her, as she recalled the service; the great words of 'sin,' 'salvation,' 'righteousness,' as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled through her heart.

Then, as she rose to dress, there burst upon her through the open window the sunset blaze of the Campagna with the purple dome in its midst. And with that came the memory of the afternoon,—of the Cardinal—and Manisty.

Very often, in these first days, it was as though her mind ached, under the stress of new thinking, like something stretched and sore. In the New England house where she had grown up, a corner of the old-fashioned study was given up to the books of her grandfather, the divinity professor. They were a small collection, all gathered with one object,—the confuting and confronting of Rome. Like many another Protestant zealot, the old professor had brooded on the crimes and cruelties of persecuting Rome, till they became a madness in the blood. How well Lucy remembered his books—with their backs of faded grey or brown cloths, and their grim titles. Most of them she had never yet been allowed to read. When she looked for a book, she was wont to pass this shelf by in a vague horror. What Rome habitually did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in the past, could not—it seemed—be known by a pure woman! And she would glance from the books to the engraving of her grandfather above them,—to the stern and yet delicate face of the old Calvinist, with its high-peaked brow, and white neckcloth supporting the sharp chin; lifting her heart to him in a passionate endorsement, a common fierce hatred of wrong and tyranny.

She had grown older since then, and her country with her. New England Puritanism was no longer what it had been; and the Catholic Church had spread in the land. But in Uncle Ben's quiet household, and in her own feeling, the changes had been but slight and subtle. Pity, perhaps, had insensibly taken the place of hatred. But those old words 'priest' and 'mass' still rung in her ears as symbols of all that man had devised to corrupt and deface the purity of Christ.

And of what that purity might be, she had such tender, such positive traditions! Her mother had been a Christian mystic—a 'sweet woman,' meek as a dove in household life, yet capable of the fiercest ardours as a preacher and missionary, gathering rough labourers into barns and by the wayside, and dying before her time, worn out by the imperious energies of religion. Lucy had always before her the eyes that seemed to be shining through a mist, the large tremulous mouth, the gently furrowed brow. Those strange forces—'grace'—and 'the spirit'—had been the realities, the deciding powers of her childhood, whether in what concerned the great emotions of faith, or the most trivial incidents of ordinary life—writing a letter—inviting a guest—taking a journey. The soul bare before God, depending on no fleshly aid, distracted by no outward rite; sternly defending its own freedom as a divine trust:—she had been reared on these main thoughts of Puritanism, and they were still through all insensible transformation, the guiding forces of her own being.

Already, in this Catholic country, she had been jarred and repelled on all sides. Yet she found herself living with two people for whom Catholicism was not indeed a personal faith—she could not think of that side of it without indignation—but a thing to be passionately admired and praised, like art, or music, or scenery. You might believe nothing, and yet write pages and pages in glorification of the Pope and the Mass, and in contempt of everything else!—in excuse too of every kind of tyranny so long as it served the Papacy and 'the Church.'

She leaned out to the sunset, remembering sentence after sentence from the talk on the terrace—hating or combating them all.

Yet all the time a new excitement invaded her. For the man who had spoken thus was, in a sense, not a mere stranger to her. Somewhere in his being must be the capacity for those thoughts and feelings that had touched her so deeply in his book—for that magical insight and sweetness—

Ah!—perhaps she had not understood his book—no more than she understood him now. The sense of her own ignorance oppressed her—and of all that might be said, with regard apparently to anything whatever. Was there nothing quite true—quite certain—in the world?

So the girl's intense and simple nature entered like all its fellows, upon the old inevitable struggle. As she stood there, with locked hands and flushed cheeks, conscious through every vein of the inrush and shock of new perceptions, new comparisons, she was like a ship that leaves the harbour for the open, and feels for the first time on all her timbers the strain of the unplumbed sea.

And of this invasion, this excitement, the mind, in haunting debate and antagonism, made for itself one image, one symbol—the face of Edward Manisty.



CHAPTER V

While he was thus—unknowing—the cause of so many new attractions and repulsions in his guest's mind, Manisty, after the first shock of annoyance produced by her arrival was over, hardly remembered her existence. He was incessantly occupied by the completion of his book, working late and early, sometimes in high and even extravagant spirits, but, on the whole, more commonly depressed and discontented.

Eleanor Burgoyne worked with him or for him many hours in each day. Her thin pallor became more pronounced. She ate little, and Miss Manisty believed that she slept less. The elder lady indeed began to fidget and protest, to remonstrate now and then with Manisty himself, even to threaten a letter to 'the General.' Eleanor's smiling obstinacy, however, carried all before it. And Manisty, in spite of a few startled looks and perfunctory dissuasions, whenever his aunt attacked him, soon slipped back into his normal ways of depending on his cousin, and not being able to work without her. Lucy Foster thought him selfish and inconsiderate. It gave her one more cause of quarrel with him.

For she and Mrs. Burgoyne were slowly but surely making friends. The clearer it became that Manisty took no notice of Miss Foster, and refused to be held in any way responsible for her entertainment, the more anxious, it seemed, did Eleanor show herself to make life pleasant for the American girl. Her manner, which had always been kind, became more natural and gay. It was as though she had settled some question with herself, and settled it entirely to Lucy Foster's advantage.

Not much indeed could be done for the stranger while the stress of Manisty's work lasted. Aunt Pattie braced herself once or twice, got out the guide-books and took her visitor into Rome to see the sights. But the little lady was so frankly worn out by these expeditions, that Lucy, full of compunctions, could only beg to be left to herself in future. Were not the garden and the lake, the wood-paths to Rocca di Papa, and the roads to Albano good enough?

So presently it came to her spending many hours alone in the terraced garden on the hill-side, with all the golden Campagna at her feet. Her young fancy, however, soon learnt to look upon that garden as the very concentration and symbol of Italy. All the Italian elements, the Italian magics were there. Along its topmost edge ran a vast broken wall, built into the hill; and hanging from the brink of the wall like a long roof, great ilexes shut out the day from the path below. Within the thickness of the wall—in days when, in that dim Rome upon the plain, many still lived who could remember the voice and the face of Paul of Tarsus—Domitian had made niches and fountains; and he had thrown over the terrace, now darkened by the great ilex boughs, a long portico roof supported on capitals and shafts of gleaming marble. Then in the niches round the clear fountains, he had ranged the fine statues of a still admirable art; everywhere he had lavished marbles, rose and yellow and white, and under foot he had spread a mosaic floor, glistening beneath the shadow-play of leaf and water, in the rich reflected light from the garden and the Campagna outside; while at intervals, he had driven through the very crest of the hill long tunnelled passages, down which one might look from the garden and see the blue lake shining at their further end.

And still the niches and the recesses were there,—the huge wall too along the face of the hill; all broken and gashed and ruinous, showing the fine reticulated brickwork that had been once faced with marble; alternately supported and torn by the pushing roots of the ilex-trees. The tunnelled passages too were there, choked and fallen in; no flash of the lake now beyond their cool darkness! And into the crumbling surface of the wall, rude hands had built fragments of the goddesses and the Caesars that had once reigned there, barbarously mingled with warm white morsels from the great cornice of the portico, acanthus blocks from the long buried capitals, or dolphins orphaned of Aphrodite.

The wreck was beautiful, like all wrecks in Italy where Nature has had her way. For it was masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and shone golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length, ran a low marble conduit that held still the sweetest liveliest water. Lilies of the valley grew beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air; while on the outer or garden side of the path, the grass was purple with long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a little further, from the same grass, there shot up in a happy neglect, tall camellia-trees ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath them. And above the camellias again, the famous stone-pines of the villa climbed into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte.

So old it was!—and yet so fresh with spring! In the mornings at least the spring was uppermost. It silenced the plaint of outraged beauty which the place seemed to be always making, under a flutter of growth and song. Water and flowers and nightingales, the shadow, the sunlight, and the heat, were all alike strong and living,—Italy untamed. It was only in the evenings that Lucy shunned the path. For then, from the soil below and the wall above, there crept out the old imprisoned forces of sadness, or of poison, and her heart flagged or her spirits sank as she sat or walked there. Marinata has no malaria; but on old soils, and as night approaches, there is always something in the shade of Italy that fights with human life. The poor ghosts rise from the earth—jealous of those that are still walking the warm ways of the world.

But in the evenings, when the Fountain Walk drove her forth, the central hot zone of the garden was divine, with its roses and lilacs, its birds, its exquisite grass alive with shining lizards, jewelled with every flower, breathing every scent; and at its edge the old terrace with its balustrade, set above the Campagna, commanding the plain and the sea, the sky and the sunsets.

Evening after evening Lucy might have been found perched on the stone coping of the balustrade, sometimes trying, through the warm silent hours, by the help of this book or that, to call up again the old Roman life; sometimes dreaming of what there might still be—what the archaeologists indeed said must be—buried beneath her feet; of the marble limbs and faces pressed into the earth, and all the other ruined things, small and great, mean or lovely, that lay deep in a common grave below the rustling olives, and the still leafless vineyards; and sometimes the mere passive companion of the breeze and the sun, conscious only of the chirping of the crickets, or the loudness of the nightingales, or the flight of a hoopoe, like some strange bright bird of fairy-tale, flashing from one deep garden-shadow to another.

Yet the garden was not always given up to her and the birds. Peasant folk coming from Albano or the olive-grounds between it and the villa would take a short cut through the garden to Marinata; dark-faced gardeners, in blue linen suits, would doff their peaked hats to the strange lady; or a score or two of young black-frocked priestlings from a neighbouring seminary would suddenly throng its paths, playing mild girlish games, with infinite clamour and chatter, running races as far and fast as their black petticoats would allow, twisting their long overcoats and red sashes meanwhile round a battered old noseless bust that stood for Domitian at the end of a long ilex-avenue, and was the butt for all the slings and arrows of the day,—poor helpless State, blinded and buffeted by the Church!

Lucy would hide herself among the lilacs and the arbutus when the seminary invaded her; watching through the leaves the strapping Italian boys in their hindering womanish dress; scorning them for their state of supervision and dependence; pitying them for their destiny!

And sometimes Manisty, disturbed by the noise, would come out—pale and frowning. But at the sight of the seminarists and of the old priest in command of them, his irritable look would soften. He would stand indeed with his hands on his sides, laughing and chatting with the boys, his head uncovered, his black curls blown backward from the great furrowed brow; and in the end Lucy peering from her nook would see him pacing up and down the ilex-walk with the priest,—haranguing and gesticulating—the old man in a pleased wonder looking at the Englishman through his spectacles, and throwing in from time to time ejaculations of assent, now half puzzled, and now fanatically eager. "He is talking the book!"—Lucy would think to herself—and her mind would rise in revolt.

One day after parting with the lads he came unexpectedly past her hiding-place, and paused at sight of her. "Do the boys disturb you?" he said, glancing at her book, and speaking with the awkward abruptness which with him could in a moment take the place of ease and mirth.

"Oh no—not at all."

He fidgeted, stripping leaves from the arbutus tree under which she sat.

"That old priest who comes with them is a charming fellow!"

Her shyness gave way.

"Is he?—He looks after them like an old nurse. And they are such babies—those great boys!"

His eye kindled.

"So you would like them to be more independent—more brutal. You prefer a Harvard and Yale football match—with the dead and wounded left on the ground?"

She laughed, daring for the first time to assert herself.

"No. I don't want blood! But there is something between. However—"

She hesitated. He looked down upon her half irritable, half smiling.

"Please go on."

"It would do them no good, would it—to be independent?"

"Considering how soon they must be slaves for life? Is that what you mean?"

Her frank blue eyes raised themselves to his. He was instantly conscious of something cool and critical in her attitude towards him. Very possibly he had been conscious of it for some time, which accounted for his instinctive avoidance of her. In the crisis of thought and production through which he was passing he shrank from any touch of opposition or distrust. He distrusted himself enough. It was as though he carried about with him wounds that only Eleanor's soft touch could be allowed to approach. And from the first evening he had very naturally divined in this Yankee girl, with her mingled reserve and transparency, her sturdy Protestantisms of all sorts, elements antagonistic to himself.

She answered his question, however, by another—still referring to the seminarists.

'Isn't that the reason why they take and train them so young—that they may have no will left?'

'Well, is that the worst condition in the world—to give up your own will to an idea—a cause?'

She laughed shyly—a low musical sound that suddenly gave him, as it seemed, a new impression of her.

'You call the old priest an "idea"?'

Both had the same vision of the most portly and substantial of figures. Manisty smiled unwillingly.

'The old priest is merely the symbol.'

She shook her head obstinately.

'He is all they know anything about. He gives orders, and they obey. Soon it will be some one else's turn to give them the orders—'

'Till the time comes for them to give orders themselves?—Well, what is there to object to in that?' He scanned her severely. 'What does it mean but that they are parts of a great system, properly organised, to a great end? Show me anything better?'

She coloured.

'It is better, isn't it, that—sometimes—one should give oneself orders?' she said in a low voice.

Manisty laughed.

'Liberty to make a fool of oneself—in short. No doubt,—that's the great modern panacea.' He paused, staring at her without being conscious of it, with his absent brilliant eyes. Then he broke out—'Well! so you despise my little priests! Did you ever think of inquiring, however, which wears best—their notion of human life, which after all has weathered 1900 years, and is as strong and prevailing as it ever was—or the sort of notion that their enemies here go to work upon? Look into the history of this Abyssinian war—everybody free to make fools of themselves, in Rome or Africa—and doing it magnificently! Private judgment—private aims everywhere—from Crispi to the smallest lieutenant. Result—universal wreck and muddle—thousands of lives thrown away—a nation brought to shame. Then look about you at what's going on—here—this week—on these hills. It's Holy Week. They're all fasting—they're a11 going to mass—the people working in the fields, our servants, the bright little priests. To-morrow's Holy Thursday. From now till Sunday, nobody here will eat anything but a little bread and a few olives. The bells will cease to-morrow. If a single church-bell rang in Rome—over this plain, and these mountains—through the whole of Italy—from mass to-morrow till mass on Saturday—a whole nation would feel pain and outrage. Then on Saturday—marvellous symbol!—listen for the bells. You will hear them all loosed together, as soon as the Sanctus begins—all over Italy. And on Sunday—watch the churches. If it isn't Matthew Arnold's "One common wave of thought and joy—Lifting mankind amain,"—what is it? To me, it's what keeps the human machine running. Make the comparison!—it will repay you. My little muffs of priests with their silly obedience won't come so badly out of it.'

Unconsciously he had taken a seat beside her, and was looking at her with a sharp imperious air. She dimly understood that he was not talking to her but to a much larger audience, that he was still in fact in the grip of "the book." But that he should have anyway addressed so many consecutive sentences to her excited her after these many days of absolute neglect and indifference on his part; she felt a certain tremor of pulse. Instead, however, of diminishing self-command, it bestowed it.

'Well, if that's the only way of running the machine—the Catholic way I mean,'—her words came out a little hurried and breathless—'I don't see how we exist.'

'You? America?'

She nodded.

'Do you exist?—in any sense that matters?'

He laughed as he spoke; but his tone provoked her. She threw up her head a little, suddenly grave.

'Of course we know that you dislike us.'

He showed a certain embarrassment.

'How do you know?'

'Oh!—we read what you said of us.'

'I was badly reported,' he said, smiling.

'No,'—she insisted. 'But you were mistaken in a great many things—very, very much mistaken. You judged much too quickly.'

He rose, a covert amusement playing round his lips. It was the indulgence of the politician and man of affairs towards the little backwoods girl who was setting him to rights.

'We must have it out,' he said, 'I see I shall have to defend myself. But now I fear Mrs. Burgoyne will be waiting for me.'

And lifting his hat with the somewhat stately and excessive manner, which he could always substitute at the shortest notice for brusquerie or inattention, he went his way.

Lucy Foster was left with a red cheek. She watched him till he had passed into the shadow of the avenue leading to the house; then with an impetuous movement she took up a book which had been lying beside her on the bench, and began to read it with a peculiar ardour—almost passion. It was the life of one of the heroes of the Garibaldian expedition of 1860-61.

For of late she had been surrounding herself—by the help of a library in Rome to which the Manistys had access—with the books of the Italian Risorgimento, that great movement, that heroic making of a nation, in which our fathers felt so passionate an interest, which has grown so dim and far away now, not only in the mind of a younger England, but even in that of a younger Italy.

But to Lucy—reading the story with the plain of Rome, and St. Peter's in sight, her wits quickened by the perpetual challenge of Manisty's talk with Mrs. Burgoyne, or any chance visitor,—Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini; all the striking figures and all the main stages in the great epic; the blind, mad, hopeless outbreaks of '48; the hangings and shootings and bottomless despairs of '49; the sullen calm of those waiting years from '49 to '58; the ecstasy of Magenta and Solferino, and the fierce disappointment of Villafranca; the wild golden days of Sicily in 1860; the plucking of Venice like a ripe fruit in '66; of Rome, in 1870; all the deliriums of freedom, vengeance, union—these immortal names and passions and actions, were thrilling through the girl's fresh poetic sense, and capturing all her sympathies. Had Italy indeed been 'made too quick'? Was all the vast struggle, and these martyred lives for nothing—all to end like a choked river in death and corruption? Well, if so, whose fault was it, but the priests'?—of that black, intriguing, traitorous Italy, headed by the Papacy, which except for one brief moment in the forties, had upheld every tyranny, and drenched every liberty in blood, had been the supporter of the Austrian and the Bourbon, and was now again tearing to pieces the Italy that so many brave men had died to make?

The priests!—the Church!—Why!—she wondered, as she read the story of Charles Albert, and Metternich and the Naples Bourbons, that Italy still dared to let the ignorant, persecuting brood live and thrive in her midst at all! Especially was it a marvel to her that any Jesuit might still walk Italian streets, that a nation could ever forgive or forget such crimes against her inmost life as had been the crimes of the Jesuits. She would stand at the end of the terrace, her hands behind her clasping her book, her eyes fixed on the distant dome amid the stone-pines. Her book opened with the experiences of a Neapolitan boy at school in Naples during the priest-ridden years of the twenties, when Austrian bayonets, after the rising of '21, had replaced Bourbons and Jesuits in power, and crushed the life out of the young striving liberty of '21, as a cruel boy may crush and strangle a fledgling bird. 'What did we learn,' cried the author of the memoir—'from that monkish education which dwarfed both our mind and body? How many have I seen in later life groaning over their own ignorance, and pouring maledictions on the seminary or the college, where they had wasted so many years and had learnt nothing!'

'That monkish education which dwarfed both our mind and body'—

Lucy would repeat the words to herself—throwing them out as a challenge to that great dome hovering amid the sunny haze. That old man there, among his Cardinals—she thought of him with a young horror and revolt; yet not without a certain tremor of the imagination. Well!—in a few days—Sunday week—she was to see him, and judge for herself.

* * * * *

Meanwhile visitors were almost shut out. The villa sank into a convent-like quiet; for in a week, ten days, the book was perhaps to be finished. Miss Manisty, as the crisis approached, kept a vigilant eye on Mrs. Burgoyne. She was in constant dread of a delicate woman's collapse; and after the sittings in the library had lasted a certain time she had now the courage to break in upon them, and drive Manisty's Egeria out of her cave to rest and to the garden.

So Lucy, as the shadows lengthened in the garden, would hear the sound of a light though languid step, and would look up to see a delicate white face smiling down upon her.

'Oh! how tired you must be!' she would say, springing up. 'Let me make a place for you here under the trees.'

'No, no. Let us move about. I am tired of sitting.'

And they would pace up and down the terrace and the olive-garden beyond, while Mrs. Burgoyne leant upon Lucy's arm, chatting and laughing with an evident relief from tension which only betrayed the mental and physical fatigue behind.

Lucy wondered to see how exquisite, how dainty, she would emerge from these wrestles with hard work. Her fresh white or pale dresses, the few jewels half-hidden at her wrists or throat, the curled or piled masses of the fair hair, were never less than perfection, it seemed to Lucy; she was never more the woman of fashion and the great world than when she came out from a morning's toil that would have left its disturbing mark on a strong man, her eyes shining under the stress and ardour of those 'ideas,' as to which it was good to talk with her.

But how eagerly she would throw off that stress, and turn to wooing and winning Lucy Foster! All hanging back in the matter was gone. Certain vague thoughts and terrors were laid to sleep, and she must needs allow herself the luxury of charming the quiet girl, like all the rest—the dogs, the servants or the village children. There was a perpetual hunger for love in Eleanor's nature which expressed itself in a thousand small and piteous ways. She could never help throwing out tendrils, and it was rarely that she ventured them in vain.

In the case of Lucy Foster, however, her fine tact soon discovered that caresses were best left alone. They were natural to herself, and once or twice as the April days went by, she ventured to kiss the girl's fresh cheek, or to slip an arm round her waist. But Lucy took it awkwardly. When she was kissed she flushed, and stood passive; and all her personal ways were a little stiff and austere. After one of these demonstrations indeed Mrs. Burgoyne generally found herself repaid in some other form, by some small thoughtfulness on Lucy's part—the placing of a stool, the fetching of a cloak—or merely perhaps by a new softness in the girl's open look. And Eleanor never once thought of resenting her lack of response. There was even a kind of charm in it. The prevailing American type in Rome that winter had been a demonstrative type.

Lucy's manner in comparison was like a cool and bracing air. 'And when she does kiss!' Eleanor would say to herself—'it will be with all her heart. One can see that.'

Meanwhile Mrs. Burgoyne took occasional note of the Mazzinian literature that lay about. She would turn the books over and read their titles, her eyes sparkling with a little gentle mischief, as she divined the girl's disapproval of her host and his views. But she never argued with Lucy. She was too tired of the subject, too eager to seek relief in talking of the birds and the view, of people and chiffons.

Too happy perhaps—also. She walked on air in these days before Easter. The book was prospering; Manisty was more content; and as agreeable in all daily ways and offices as only the hope of good fortune can make a man. 'The Priest of Nemi'—indeed, with several other prose poems of the same kind, had been cast out of the text; which now presented one firm and vigorous whole of social and political discussion. But the Nemi piece was to be specially bound for Eleanor, together with some drawings that she had made of the lake and the temple site earlier in the spring. And on the day the book was finished—somewhere within the next fortnight—there was to be a festal journey to Nemi—divine and blessed place!

So she felt no fatigue, and was always ready to chatter to Lucy of the most womanish things. Especially, as the girl's beauty grew upon her, was she anxious to carry out those plans of transforming her dress and hair,—her gowns and hats and shoes—the primness of her brown braids, which she and Miss Manisty had confided to each other.

But Lucy was shy—would not be drawn that way. There were fewer visitors at the villa than she had expected. For this quiet life in the garden, and on the country roads, it seemed to her that her dresses did very well. The sense of discomfort excited by the elegance of her Florentine acquaintance died away. And she would have thought it wrong and extravagant to spend unnecessary money.

So she had quietly ceased to think about her dress; and the blue and white check, to Eleanor's torment, had frequently to be borne with.

Even the promised invitation to the Embassy had not arrived. It was said that the Ambassador's daughter had gone to Florence. Only Lucy wished she had not written that letter to Uncle Ben from Florence:—that rather troubled and penitent letter on the subject of dress. He might misunderstand—might do something foolish.

* * * * *

And apparently Uncle Ben did do something foolish. For a certain letter arrived from Boston on the day after the seminarists' invasion of the garden. Lucy after an hour's qualms and hesitations, must needs reluctantly confide the contents of it to Miss Manisty. And that lady with smiles and evident pleasure called Mrs. Burgoyne—and Eleanor called her maid,—and the ball began to roll.

* * * * *

On Saturday morning early, Mrs. Burgoyne's room indeed was in a bustle—delightful to all but Lucy. Manisty was in Rome for the day, and Eleanor had holiday. She had never looked more frail—a rose-leaf pink in her cheek—nor more at ease. For she was at least as good to consult about a skirt as an idea.

'Marie!'—she said, giving her own maid a little peremptory push—'just run and fetch Benson—there's an angel. We must have all the brains possible. If we don't get the bodice right, it won't suit Miss Foster a bit.'

Marie went in all haste. Meanwhile in front of a large glass stood a rather red and troubled Lucy arrayed in a Paris gown belonging to Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor had played her with much tact, and now had her in her power.

'It is the crisis, my dear,' Miss Manisty had said in Eleanor's ear, as they rose from breakfast, with a twinkle of her small eyes. 'The question is; can we, or can we not, turn her into a beauty? You can!'

Eleanor at any rate was doing her best. She had brought out her newest gowns and Lucy was submissively putting them on one after the other. Eleanor was in pursuit first of all of some general conceptions. What was the girl's true style?—what were the possibilities?

'When I have got my lines and main ideas in my head,' she said pensively, 'then we will call in the maids. Of course you might have the things made in Rome. But as we have the models—and these two maids have nothing to do—why not give ourselves the pleasure of looking after it?'

Pleasure! Lucy Foster opened her eyes.

Still, here was this absurd, this most extravagant cheque from Uncle Ben, and these peremptory commands to get herself everything—everything—that other girls had. Why, it was demanded of her, had she been economical and scrupulous before starting? Folly and disobedience! He had been told of her silly hesitations, her detestable frugalities—he had ferretted it all out. And now she was at a disadvantage—was she? Let her provide herself at once, or old as he was, he would take train and steamer and come and see to it!

She was not submissive in general—far from it. But the reading of Uncle Ben's letter had left her very meek in spirit and rather inclined to cry.

Had Uncle Ben really considered whether it was right to spend so much money on oneself, to think so much about it? Their life together had been so simple, the question had hardly emerged. Of course it was right to be neat and fresh, and to please his taste in what she wore. But—

The net result of all this internal debate, however, was to give a peculiar charm, like the charm of rippled and sensitive water, to features that were generally too still and grave. She stood silently before the long glass while Mrs. Burgoyne and the maids talked and pinned. She walked to the end of the room and back, as she was bid; she tried to express a preference, when she was asked for one; and as she was arrayed in one delicious gown after another, she became more and more alive to the beauty of the soft stuffs, the invention and caprice with which they were combined, the daintiness of their pinks and blues, their greys and creams, their lilacs and ivories. At last Mrs. Burgoyne happened upon a dress of white crape, opening upon a vest of pale green, with thin edges of black here and there, disposed with the tact, the feeling of the artist; and when Lucy's tall form had been draped in this garment, her three attendants fell back with one simultaneous cry:

'Oh my dear!' said Mrs. Burgoyne drawing a long breath.—'Now you see, Marie—I told you!—that's the cut. And just look how simple that is, and how it falls! That's the green. Yes, when Mathilde is as good as that she's divine.—Now all you've got to do is just to copy that. And the materials are just nothing—you'll get them in the Corso in half-an-hour.'

'May I take it off?' said Lucy.

'Well yes, you may'—said Mrs. Burgoyne, reluctantly—'but it's a great pity. Well now, for the coat and skirt,'—she checked them off on her slim fingers—'for the afternoon gown, and one evening dress, I think I see my way—'

'Enough for one morning isn't it?' said Lucy half laughing, half imploring.

'Yes,'—said Mrs. Burgoyne absently, her mind already full of further developments.

The gowns were carried away, and Aunt Pattie's maid departed. Then as Lucy in her white cotton wrapper was retiring to her own room, Mrs. Burgoyne caught her by the arm.

'You remember,'—she said appealingly,—'how rude I was that evening you came—how I just altered your hair? You don't know how I long to do it properly! You know I shall have a little trouble with these dresses—trouble I like—but still I shall pretend it's trouble, that you may pay me for it. Pay me by letting me experiment! I just long to take all your hair down, and do it as it ought to be done. And you don't know how clever I am. Let me!'

And already, before the shamefaced girl could reply, she was gently pushed into the chair before Mrs. Burgoyne's dressing-table, and a pair of skilled hands went to work.

'I can't say you look as though you enjoyed it,' said Mrs. Burgoyne by the time she had covered the girl's shoulders with the long silky veil which she had released from the stiff plaits confining it. 'Do you think it's wrong to do your hair prettily?' Lucy laughed uneasily.

'I was never brought up to think much about it. My mother had very strict views.'

'Ah!'—said Eleanor, with a discreet intonation. 'But you see, at Rome it is really so much better for the character to do as Rome does. To be out of the way makes one self-conscious. Your mother didn't foresee that.'

Silence,—while the swift white fingers plaited and tied and laid foundations.

'It waves charmingly already'—murmured the artist—'but it must be just a little more ondule in the right places—just a touch—here and there. Quick, Marie!—bring me the stove—and the tongs—and two or three of those finest hairpins.'

The maid flew, infected by the ardour of her mistress, and between them they worked to such purpose that when at last they released their victim, they had turned the dark head into that of a stately and fashionable beauty. The splendid hair was raised high in small silky ripples above the white brow. The little love-locks on the temples had been delicately arranged so as to complete the fine oval of the face, and at the back the black masses drawn lightly upwards from the neck, and held in place there by a pearl comb of Mrs. Burgoyne's, had been piled and twisted into a crown that would have made Artemis herself more queenly.

'Am I really to keep it like this?' cried Lucy, looking at herself in the glass.

'But of course you are!' and Mrs. Burgoyne instinctively held the girl's arms, lest any violence should be offered to her handiwork—'And you must put on your old white frock—not the check—the nice soft one that's been washed, with the pink sash—Goodness, how the time goes! Marie, run and tell Miss Manisty not to wait for me—I'll follow her to the village.'

The maid went. Lucy looked down upon her tyrant—

You are very kind to me'—she said with a lip that trembled slightly. Her blue eyes under the black brows showed a feeling that she did not know how to express. The subdued responsiveness, indeed, of Lucy's face was like that of Wordsworth's Highland girl struggling with English. You felt her 'beating up against the wind,'—in the current, yet resisting it. Or to take another comparison, her nature seemed to be at once stiff and rich—like some heavy church stuff, shot with gold.

'Oh! these things are my snare,' said Eleanor, laughing—'If I have any gift, it is for chiffons.'

'Any gift!' said Lucy wondering—'when you do so much for Mr. Manisty?'

Mrs. Burgoyne shrugged her shoulders.

'Ah! well—he wanted a secretary—and I happened to get the place,' she said, in a more constrained voice.

'Miss Manisty told me how you helped him in the winter. And she and Mr. Brooklyn—have—told me—other things—' said Lucy. She paused, colouring deeply. But her eyes travelled timidly to the photographs on Mrs. Burgoyne's table.

Eleanor understood.

'Ah!—they told you that, did they?'—The speaker turned a little white. 'And you wonder—don't you?—that I can go on talking about frocks, and new ways of doing one's hair?'

She moved away from Lucy, a touch of cold defensive dignity effacing all her pliant sweetness.

Lucy followed and caught her hand.

'Oh no! no!'—she said—'it is only so brave and good of you—to be able still—to take an interest—'

'Do I take it?' said Eleanor, scornfully, raising her other hand and letting it fall.

Lucy was silenced. After a moment Eleanor looked round, calmly took the photograph of the child from the table, and held it towards Lucy.

'He was just two—his birthday was four days before this was taken. It's the picture I love best, because I last saw him like that—in his night-gown. I was very ill that night—they wouldn't let me stay with my husband—but after I left him, I came and rocked the baby and tucked him up—and leant my face against his. He was so warm and sweet always in his sleep. The touch of him—and the scent of him—his dear breath—and his curls—and the moist little hands—sometimes they used to intoxicate me—to give me life—like wine. They did me such good—that night.'

Her voice did not tremble. Tears softly found their way down Lucy's face. And suddenly she stooped, and put her lips, tenderly, clingingly, to Mrs. Burgoyne's hand.

Eleanor smiled. Then she herself bent forward and lightly kissed the girl's cheek.

'Oh! I am not worthy either to have had him—or lost him—' she said bitterly. There was a little pause, which Eleanor broke. 'Now really we must go to Aunt Pattie—mustn't we?'



CHAPTER VI

'Ah! here you are! Don't kill yourselves. Plenty of time—for us! Listen—there's the bell—eight o'clock—now they open the doors. Goodness!—Look at the rush—and those little Italian chaps tackling those strapping priests. Go it, ye cripples!'

Lucy tamed her run to a quick walk, and Mr. Reggie took care of her, while Manisty disappeared ahead with Mrs. Burgoyne, and Aunt Pattie fell to the share of a certain Mr. Vanbrugh Neal, an elderly man tall and slim, and of a singular elegance of bearing, who had joined them at the Piazza, and seemed to be an old friend of Mr. Manisty's.

Lucy looked round her in bewilderment. Before the first stroke of the bell the Piazza of St. Peter's had been thickly covered with freely moving groups, all advancing in order upon the steps of the church. But as the bell began to speak, there was a sudden charge mostly of young priests and seminarists—black skirts flying, black legs leaping—across the open space and up the steps.

'Reminds me of nothing so much'—said Reggie laughing back over his shoulder at a friend behind—'as the charge of the Harrow boys at Lord's last year—when they stormed the pavilion—did you see it?—and that little Harrow chap saved the draw? I say!—they've broken the line!—and there'll be a bad squash somewhere.'

And indeed the attacking priests had for a moment borne down the Italian soldiers who were good-naturedly guarding and guiding the Pope's guests from the entrance of the Piazza to the very door of the church. But the little men—as they seemed to Lucy's eyes—recovered themselves in a twinkling, threw themselves stoutly on the black gentry, like sheep dogs on the sheep, worried them back into line, collared a few bold spirits here, formed a new cordon there, till all was once more in tolerable order, and a dangerous pressure on the central door was averted.

Meanwhile Lucy was hurried forward with the privileged crowd going to the tribunes, towards the sacristy door on the south.

'Let's catch up Mrs. Burgoyne'—said the young man, looking ahead with some anxiety—'Manisty's no use. He'll begin to moon and forget all about her. I say!—Look at the building—and the sky behind it! Isn't it stunning?'

And they threw up a hasty glance as they sped along at the superb walls and apses and cornices of the southern side—golden ivory or wax against the blue.—The pigeons flew in white eddies above their heads; the April wind flushed Lucy's cheek, and played with her black mantilla. All qualms were gone. After her days of seclusion in the villa garden, she was passionately conscious of this great Rome and its magic; and under her demure and rather stately air, her young spirits danced and throbbed with pleasure.

'How that black lace stuff does become all you women!'—said Reggie Brooklyn, throwing a lordly and approving glance at her and his cousin Eleanor, as they all met and paused amid the crowd that was concentrating itself on the sacristy door; and Lucy, instead of laughing at the lad's airs, only reddened a little more brightly and found it somehow sweet—April sweet—that a young man on this spring morning should admire her; though after all, she was hardly more inclined to fall in love with Reggie Brooklyn than with Manisty's dear collie puppy, that had been left behind, wailing, at the villa.

At the actual door the young man quietly possessed himself of Mrs. Burgoyne, while Manisty with an unconscious look of relief fell behind.

'And you, Miss Foster,—keep closer—my coat's all at your service—it'll stand a pull. Don't you be swept away—and I'll answer for Mrs. Burgoyne.'

So on they hurried, borne along with the human current through passages and corridors, part of a laughing, pushing, chatting crowd, containing all the types that throng the Roman streets—English and American tourists, Irish or German or English priests, monks white and brown, tall girls who wore their black veils with an evident delight in the new setting thus given to their fair hair and brilliant skins, beside older women to whom, on the contrary, the dress had given a kind of unwonted repose and quietness of look, as though for once they dared to be themselves in it, and gave up the struggle with the years.

Reggie Brooklyn maintained a lively chatter all the time, mostly at Manisty's expense. Eleanor Burgoyne first laughed at his sallies, then gently turned her head in a pause of the general advance and searched the crowd pressing at their heels. Lucy's eyes followed hers, and there far behind, carried forward passively in a brown study, losing ground slightly whenever it was possible, was Manisty. The fine significant face was turned a little upward; the eyes were full of thoughts; he was at once the slave of the crowd, and its master.