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On the way back to the salon the ladies passed once more through the large book-room or library which lay between it and the dining-room. Lucy Foster looked round it, a little piteously, as though she were seeking for something to undo the impression—the disappointment—she had just received.

'Oh! my dear, you never saw such a place as it was when we arrived in March'—said Miss Manisty. 'It was the billiard-room—a ridiculous table—and ridiculous balls—and a tiled floor without a scrap of carpet—and the cold! In the whole apartment there were just two bedrooms with fireplaces. Eleanor went to bed in one; I went to bed in the other. No carpets—no stoves—no proper beds even. Edward of course said it was all charming, and the climate balmy. Ah, well!—now we are really quite comfortable—except in that odious dining-room, which Edward will have left in its sins.'

Miss Manisty surveyed her work with a mild satisfaction. The table indeed had been carried away. The floor was covered with soft carpets. The rough uneven walls painted everywhere with the interlaced M's of the Malestrini were almost hidden by well-filled bookcases; and, in addition, a profusion of new books, mostly French and Italian, was heaped on all the tables. On the mantelpiece a large recent photograph stood propped against a marble head. It represented a soldier in a striking dress; and Lucy stopped to look at it.

'One of the Swiss Guards—at the Vatican'—said Mrs. Burgoyne kindly. 'You know the famous uniform—it was designed by Michael Angelo.'

'No—I didn't know'—said the girl, flushing again.—'And this head?'

'Ah, that is a treasure! Mr. Manisty bought it a few months ago from a Roman noble who has come to grief. He sold this and a few bits of furniture first of all. Then he tried to sell his pictures. But the Government came down upon him—you know your pictures are not your own in Italy. So the poor man must keep his pictures and go bankrupt. But isn't she beautiful? She is far finer than most of the things in the Vatican—real primitive Greek—not a copy. Do you know'—Mrs. Burgoyne stepped back, looked first at the bust, then at Miss Poster—'do you know you are really very like her—curiously like her!'

'Oh!'—cried Miss Foster in confusion—'I wish—'

'But it is quite true. Except for the hair. And that's only arrangement. Do you think—would you let me?—would you forgive me?—It's just this band of hair here, yours waves precisely in the same way. Would you really allow me—I won't make you untidy?'

And before Miss Poster could resist, Mrs. Burgoyne had put up her deft hands, and in a moment, with a pull here, and the alteration of a hairpin there, she had loosened the girl's black and silky hair, till it showed the beautiful waves above the ear in which it did indeed resemble the marble head with a curious closeness.

'I can put it back in a moment. But oh—that is so charming! Aunt Pattie!'

Miss Manisty looked up from a newspaper which had just arrived.

'My dear!—that was bold of you I But indeed it is charming! I think I would forgive you if I were Miss Foster.

The girl felt herself gently turned towards the mirror that rose behind the Greek head. With pink cheeks she too looked at herself for a moment. Then in a shyness beyond speech, she lifted her hands.

'Must you'—said Mrs. Burgoyne appealingly. 'I know one doesn't like to be untidy. But it isn't really the least untidy—It is only delightful—perfectly delightful!'

Her voice, her manner charmed the girl's annoyance.

'If you like it'—she said, hesitating—'But it will come down!'

'I like it terribly—and it will not think of coming down! Let me show you

Mr. Manisty's latest purchase.'

And, slipping her arm inside Miss Foster's, Mrs. Burgoyne dexterously turned her away from the glass, and brought her to the large central table, where a vivid charcoal sketch, supported on a small easel, rose among the litter of books.

It represented an old old man carried in a chair on the shoulders of a crowd of attendants and guards. Soldiers in curved helmets, courtiers in short velvet cloaks and ruffs, priests in floating vestments pressed about him—a dim vast multitude stretched into the distance. The old man wore a high cap with three lines about it; his thin and shrunken form was enveloped in a gorgeous robe. The face, infinitely old, was concentrated in the sharply smiling eyes, the long, straight, secret mouth. His arm, supporting with difficulty the weight of the robe, was raised—the hand blessed. On either side of him rose great fans of white ostrich feathers, and the old man among them was whiter than they, spectrally white from head to foot, save for the triple cap, and the devices on his robe. But into his emaciation, his weakness, the artist had thrown a triumph, a force that thrilled the spectator. The small figure, hovering above the crowd, seemed in truth to have nothing to do with it, to be alone with the huge spaces—arch on arch—dome on dome—of the vast church through which it was being borne.—

'Do you know who it is?' asked Mrs. Burgoyne, smiling.

'The—the Pope?' said Miss Foster, wondering.

'Isn't it clever? It is by one of your compatriots, an American artist in Rome. Isn't it wonderful too, the way in which it shows you, not the Pope—but the Papacy—not the man but the Church?'

Miss Foster said nothing. Her puzzled eyes travelled from the drawing to Mrs. Burgoyne's face. Then she caught sight of another photograph on the table.

'And that also?'—she said—For again it was the face of Leo XIII.—feminine, priestly, indomitable—that looked out upon her from among the books.

'Oh, my dear, come away,' said Miss Manisty impatiently. 'In my days the Scarlet Lady was the Scarlet Lady, and we didn't flirt with her as all the world does now. Shrewd old gentleman! I should have thought one picture of him was enough.'

* * * * *

As they entered the old painted salon, Mrs. Burgoyne went to one of the tall windows opening to the floor and set it wide. Instantly the Campagna was in the room—the great moonlit plain, a thousand feet below, with the sea at its further edge, and the boundless sweep of starry sky above it. From the little balcony, one might, it seemed, have walked straight into Orion. The note of a nightingale bubbled up from the olives; and the scent of a bean-field in flower flooded the salon.

Miss Foster sprang to her feet and followed Mrs. Burgoyne. She hung over the balcony while her companion pointed here and there, to the line of the Appian Way—to those faint streaks in the darkness that marked the distant city—to the dim blue of the Etrurian mountains.—

Presently, however, she drew herself erect, and Mrs. Burgoyne fancied that she shivered.

'Ah! this is a hill-air,' she said, and she took from her arm a light evening cloak, and threw it round Miss Foster.

'Oh, I am not cold!—It wasn't that!'

'What was it?' said Mrs. Burgoyne pleasantly. 'That you feel Italy too much for you? Ah! you must get used to that.'

Lucy Foster drew a long breath—a breath of emotion. She was grateful for being understood. But she could not express herself.

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at her curiously.

'Did you read a good deal about it before you came?'

'Well, I read some—we have a good town library—and Uncle Ben gave me two or three books—but of course it wasn't like Boston. Ours is a little place.'

'And you were pleased to come?'

The girl hesitated.

'Yes'—she said simply. 'I wanted to come.—But I didn't want to leave my uncle. He is getting quite an old man.'

'And you have lived with him a long time?'

'Since I was a little thing. Mother and I came to live with him after

Father died. Then Mother died, five years ago.'

'And you have been alone—and very good friends?'

Mrs. Burgoyne smiled kindly. She had a manner of questioning that seemed to Miss Foster the height of courtesy. But the girl did not find it easy to answer.

'I have no one else—' she said at last, and then stopped abruptly.

'She is home-sick'—said Mrs. Burgoyne inwardly—'I wonder whether the

Lewinsons treated her nicely at Florence?'

Indeed as Lucy Foster leant over the balcony, the olive-gardens and vineyards faded before her. She saw in their stead, the snow-covered farms and fields of a New England valley—the elms in along village street, bare and wintry—a rambling wooden house—a glowing fire, in a simple parlour—an old man sitting beside it.—

It is chilly'—said Mrs. Burgoyne—'Let us go in. But we will keep the window open. Don't take that off.'

She laid a restraining hand on the girl's arm. Miss Foster sat down absently not far from the window. The mingled lights of lamp and moon fell upon her, upon the noble rounding of the face, which was grave, a little austere even, but still sensitive and delicate. Her black hair, thanks to Mrs. Burgoyne's devices, rippled against the brow and cheek, almost hiding the small ear. The graceful cloak, with its touches of sable on a main fabric of soft white, hid the ugly dress; its ample folds heightened the natural dignity of the young form and long limbs, lent them a stately and muse-like charm. Mrs. Burgoyne and Miss Manisty looked at each other, then at Miss Foster. Both of them had the same curious feeling, as though a veil were being drawn away from something they were just beginning to see.

'You must be very tired, my dear'—said Miss Manisty at last, when she and Mrs. Burgoyne had chatted a good deal, and the new-comer still sat silent—'I wonder what you are thinking about so intently?'

Miss Foster woke up at once.

'Oh, I'm not a bit tired—not a bit! I was thinking—I was thinking of that photograph in the next room—and a line of poetry.'

She spoke with the naïveté of one who had not known how to avoid the confession. 'What line?' said Mrs. Burgoyne.

'It's Milton. I learnt it at school. You will know it, of course,' she said timidly. 'It's the line about "the triple tyrant" and "the Babylonian woe"'—

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'Their martyred blood and ashes sow

O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway

The triple tyrant—

Was that what you were thinking of?'

Miss Foster had coloured deeply.

'It was the cap—the tiara, isn't it?—that reminded me,' she said faintly; and then she looked away, as though not wishing to continue the subject.

'She wonders whether I am a Catholic,' thought Mrs. Burgoyne, amused, 'and whether she has hurt my feelings.'—Aloud, she said—'Are you very, very Puritan still in your part of America? Excuse me, but I am dreadfully ignorant about America.'

'We are Methodists in our little town mostly'—said Miss Foster. 'There is a Presbyterian church—and the best families go there. But my father's people were always Methodists. My mother was a Universalist.'

Mrs. Burgoyne frowned with perplexity. 'I'm afraid I don't know what that is?' she said.

'They think everybody will be saved,' said Miss Foster in her shy deep voice. 'They don't despair of anybody.'

And suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne saw a very soft and tender expression pass across the girl's grave features, like the rising of an inward light.

'A mystic—and a beauty both?' she thought to herself, a little scornfully this time. In all her politeness to the new-comer so far, she had been like a person stealthily searching for something foreseen and desired. If she had found it, it would have been quite easy to go on being kind to Miss Foster. But she had not found it.

At that moment the door between the library and the salon was thrown open, and Manisty appeared, cigarette in hand.

'Aunt Pattie—Eleanor—how many tickets do you want for this function next

Sunday?'

'Four tribune tickets—we three'—Miss Manisty pointed to the other two ladies—'and yourself. If we can't get so many, leave me at home.'

'Of course we shall have tribune tickets—as many as we want,' said Manisty a little impatiently.—'Have you explained to Miss Foster?'

'No, but I will. Miss Foster, next Sunday fortnight the Pope celebrates his 'Capella Papale'—the eighteenth anniversary of his coronation—in St. Peter's. Rome is very full, and there will be a great demonstration—fifty thousand people or more. Would you like to come?'

Miss Foster looked up, hesitating. Manisty, who had turned to go back to his room, paused, struck by the momentary silence. He listened with curiosity for the girl's reply.

'One just goes to see it like a spectacle?' she said at last, slowly. 'One needn't do anything oneself?'

Miss Manisty stared—and then laughed. 'Nobody will see what you do in such a crowd—I should think,' she said. 'But you know one can't be rude—to an old old man. If others kneel, I suppose we must kneel. Does it do anyone harm to be blessed by an old man?'

'Oh no!—no!' cried Miss Foster, flushing deeply. Then, after a moment, she added decidedly—'Please—I should like to go very much.'

Manisty grinned unseen, and closed the door behind him.

Then Miss Foster, after an instant's restlessness, moved nearer to her hostess.

'I am afraid—you thought I was rude just now? It's so lovely of you to plan things for me. But—I can't ever be sure whether it's right to go into other people's churches and look at their services—like a show. I should just hate it myself—and I felt it once or twice at Florence. And so—you understand—don't you?'—she said imploringly.

Miss Manisty's small eyes examined her with anxiety. 'What an extraordinary girl!' she thought. 'Is she going to be a great bore?'

At the same time the girl's look—so open, sweet and modest—disarmed and attracted her. She shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

'Well, my dear—I don't know. All I can say is, the Catholics don't mind! They walk in and out of their own churches all the time mass is going on—the children run about—the sacristans take you round. You certainly needn't feel it on their account.'

'But then, too, if I am not a Catholic—how far ought one to be taking part—in—in what—'

'In what one disapproves?' said Mrs. Burgoyne, smiling. 'You would make the world a little difficult, wouldn't you, if you were to arrange it on that principle?'

She spoke in a dry, rather sharp voice, unlike that in which she had hitherto addressed the new-comer. Lucy Foster looked at her with a shrinking perplexity.

'It's best if we're all straightforward, isn't it?'—she said in a low voice, and then, drawing towards her an illustrated magazine that lay on the table near her she hurriedly buried herself in its pages.

* * * * *

Silence had fallen on the three ladies. Eleanor Burgoyne sat lost in reverie, her fair head thrown back against her low chair.

She was thinking of her conversation with Edward Manisty on the balcony—and of his book. That book indeed had for her a deep personal significance. To think of it at all, was to be carried to the past, to feel for the hundredth time the thrill of change and new birth.

When she joined them in Rome, in mid-winter, she had found Manisty struggling with the first drafts of it—full of yeasty ideas, full also of doubts, confusions and discouragements. He had not been at all glad to see his half-forgotten cousin—quite the contrary. As she had reminded him, she had suffered much the same things at his hands that Miss Foster was likely to suffer now. It made her laugh to think of his languid reception of her, the moods, the silences, the weeks of just civil acquaintanceship; and then gradually, the snatches of talk—and those great black brows of his lifted in a surprise which a tardy politeness would try to mask:—and at last, the good, long, brain-filling, heart-filling talks, the break-down of reserves—the man's whole mind, its remorses, ambitions, misgivings, poured at her feet—ending in the growth of that sweet daily habit of common work—side by side, head close to head—hand close to hand.—

Eleanor Burgoyne lay still and motionless in the soft dusk of the old room, her white lids shut—Lucy Foster thought her asleep.—

He had said to her once, quoting some Frenchman, that she was 'good to consult about ideas.' Ah well!—at a great price had she won that praise. And with an unconscious stiffening of the frail hands lying on the arms of the chair, she thought of those bygone hours in which she had asked herself—'what remains?' Religious faith?—No!—Life was too horrible! Could such things have happened to her in a world ruled by a God?—that was her question, day and night for years. But books, facts, ideas—all the riddle of this various nature—that one might still amuse oneself with a little, till one's own light went out in the same darkness that had already engulfed mother—husband—child.

So that 'cleverness,' of which father and husband had taken so little account, which had been of so little profit to her so far in her course through circumstance, had come to her aid. The names and lists of the books that had passed through her hands, during those silent years of her widowhood, lived beside her stern old father, would astonish even Manisty were she to try and give some account of them. And first she had read merely to fill the hours, to dull memory. But gradually there had sprung up in her that inner sweetness, that gentle restoring flame that comes from the life of ideas, the life of knowledge, even as a poor untrained woman may approach it. She had shared it with no one, revealed it to no one. Her nature dreaded rebuffs; and her father had no words sharp enough for any feminine ambition beyond the household and the nursery.

So she had kept it all to herself, till Miss Manisty, shocked as many other people had begun to be by her fragile looks, had bearded the General, and carried her off to Rome for the winter. And there she had been forced, as it were, into this daily contact with Edward Manisty, at what might well turn out to be the most critical moment of his life; when he was divided between fierce regrets for the immediate past, and fierce resolves to recover and assert himself in other ways; when he was taking up again his earlier function of man of letters in order to vindicate himself as a politician and a man of action. Strange and challenging personality!—did she yet know it fully?

Ah! that winter—what a healing in it all!—what a great human experience! Yet now, as always, when her thoughts turned to the past, she did not allow them to dwell upon it long. That past lay for her in a golden haze. To explore it too deeply, or too long—that she shrank from. All that she prayed was to press no questions, force no issues. But at least she had found in it a new reason for living; she meant to live; whereas last year she had wished to die, and all the world—dear, kind Aunt Pattie first and foremost—had thought her on the road for death.

But the book?—she bent her brows over it, wrestling with various doubts and difficulties. Though it was supposed to represent the thoughts and fancies of an Englishman wandering through modern Italy, it was really Manisty's Apologia—Manisty's defence of certain acts which had made him for a time the scandal and offence of the English political party to which ancestrally he belonged, in whose interests he had entered Parliament and taken office. He had broken with his party on the ground that it had become a party of revolution, especially in matters connected with Religion and Education; and having come abroad to escape for a time from the personal frictions and agitations which his conduct had brought upon him, he had thrown himself into a passionate and most hostile study of Italy—Italy, the new country, made by revolution, fashioned, so far as laws and government can do it, by the lay modern spirit—as an object-lesson to England and the world. The book was in reality a party pamphlet, written by a man whose history and antecedents, independently of his literary ability, made his work certain of readers and of vogue.

That, however, was not what Mrs. Burgoyne was thinking of.—She was anxiously debating with herself certain points of detail, points of form.

These fragments of poetical prose which Manisty had interspersed amid a serious political argument—were they really an adornment of the book, or a blur upon it? He had a natural tendency towards colour and exuberance in writing; he loved to be leisurely, and a little sonorous; there was something old-fashioned and Byronic in his style and taste. His sentences, perhaps, were short; but his manner was not brief. The elliptical fashion of the day was not his. He liked to wander through his subject, dreaming, poetising, discussing at his will. It was like a return to vetturino after the summary haste of the railway. And so far the public had welcomed this manner of his. His earlier book (the 'Letters from Palestine'), with its warm, over-laden pages, had found many readers and much fame.

But here—in a strenuous political study, furnished with all the facts and figures that the student and the debater require—representing, too, another side of the man, just as vigorous and as real, were these intrusions of poetry wise or desirable? Were they in place? Was the note of them quite right? Was it not a little turbid—uncertain?

That prose poem of 'The Priest of Nemi,' for example?

Ah! Nemi!—the mere thought of it sent a thrill of pleasure through her. That blue lake in its green cup on the edge of the Campagna, with its ruins and its legends—what golden hours had she and Manisty spent there! It had caught their fancy from the beginning—the site of the great temple, the wild strawberry fields, the great cliffs of Nemi and Genzano, the bright-faced dark-eyed peasants with their classical names—Aristodemo, Oreste, Evandro.

And that strange legend of the murdered priest—

'The priest who slew the slayer,

And shall himself be slain'—

—what modern could not find something in that—some stimulus to fancy—some hint for dreaming?

Yes—it had been very natural—very tempting. But!—

… So she pondered—a number of acute, critical instincts coming into play. And presently her thoughts spread and became a vague reverie, covering a multitude of ideas and images that she and Manisty now had in common. How strange that she and he should be engaged in this work together!—this impassioned defence of tradition, of Catholicism and the Papacy, as the imperishable, indestructible things—'chastened and not killed—dying, and behold they live'—let the puny sons of modern Italy rage and struggle as they may. He—one of the most thorough sceptics of his day, as she had good reason to know—she, a woman who had at one time ceased to believe because of an intolerable anguish, and was now only creeping slowly back to faith, to hope, because—because—

Ah!—with a little shiver, she recalled her thought, as a falconer might his bird, before it struck. Oh! this old, old Europe, with its complexities, its manifold currents and impulses, every human being an embodied contradiction—no simplicity, no wholeness anywhere—none possible!

She opened her eyes languidly, and they rested on Lucy Foster's head and profile bent over her book. Mrs. Burgoyne's mind filled with a sudden amused pity for the girl's rawness and ignorance. She seemed the fitting type of a young crude race with all its lessons to learn; that saw nothing absurd in its Methodists and Universalists and the rest—confident, as a child is, in its cries and whims and prejudices. The American girl, fresh from her wilds, and doubtful whether she would go to see the Pope in St. Peter's, lest she should have to bow the knee to Antichrist—the image delighted the mind of the elder woman. She played with it, finding fresh mock at every turn.

* * * * *

'Eleanor!—now I have rewritten it. Tell me how it runs.'

Lucy Poster looked up. She saw that Mr. Manisty, carrying a sheaf of papers in his hand, had thrown himself into a chair behind Mrs. Burgoyne. His look was strenuous and absorbed, his tumbling black hair had fallen forward as though in a stress of composition; he spoke in a low, imperative voice, like one accustomed to command the time and the attention of those about him.

'Read!' said Mrs. Burgoyne, turning her slender neck that she might look at him and hear. He began to read at once in a deep, tremulous voice, and as though he were quite unconscious of any other presence in the room than hers. Miss Foster, who was sitting at a little distance, supposed she ought not to listen. She was about to close her book and rise, when Miss Manisty touched her on the arm.

'It disturbs him if we move about!' said the little spinster in a smiling whisper, her finger on her lip. And suddenly the girl was conscious of a lightning flash from lifted eyes—a look threatening and peremptory. She settled herself into her chair again as quietly as possible, and sat with head bent, a smile she could not repress playing round her lips. It was all she could do indeed not to laugh, so startling and passionate had been the monition conveyed in Mr. Manisty's signal. That the great man should take little notice of his aunt's guest was natural enough. But to be frowned upon the first evening, as though she were a troublesome child!—she did not resent it at all, but it tickled her sense of humour. She thought happily of her next letter to Uncle Ben; how she would describe these rather strange people.