Lucy started. Then she put her arms on the table and dropped her face into her arms. Her voice became a low and thrilling murmur that just reached Eleanor's ears.

'I wish--oh! how I wish--that I had never come here!'

Eleanor wavered a moment, then she said with gentleness, even with sweetness:

'You have nothing to blame yourself for. Nor has anyone. That picture accuses no one. It draws the future--which no one can stop or change--but you.'

'In the first place,' said Lucy, still hiding her eyes and the bitter tears that dimmed them--'what does it mean? Why am I the slayer?--and--and--you the slain? What have I done? How have I deserved such a thing?'

Her voice failed her. Eleanor drew a little nearer.

'It is not you--but fate. You have taken from me--or you are about to take from me--the last thing left to me on this earth! I have had one chance of happiness, and only one, in all my life, till now. My boy is dead--he has been dead eight years. And at last I had found another chance--and after seven weeks, you--you--are dashing it from me!'

Lucy drew back from the table, like one that shrinks from an enemy.

'Mrs. Burgoyne!'

'You don't know it!' said Eleanor calmly. 'Oh! I understand that. You are too good--too loyal. That's why I am talking like this. One could only dare it with some one whose heart one knew. Oh! I have had such gusts of feeling towards you--such mean, poor feeling. And then, as I sat playing there, I said to myself, "I'll tell her! She will find that drawing, and--I'll tell her! She has a great, true nature--she'll understand. Why shouldn't one try to save oneself? It's the natural law. There's only the one life."'

She covered her eyes with her hand an instant, choking down the sob which interrupted her. Then she moved a little nearer to Lucy.

'You see,' she said, appealing,--'you were very sweet and tender to me one day. It's very easy to pretend to mourn with other people--because one thinks one ought--or because it makes one liked. I am always pretending in that way--I can't help it. But you--no: you don't say what you don't feel, and you've the gift to feel. It's so rare--and you'll suffer from it.

You'll find other people doing what I'm doing now--throwing themselves upon you--taking advantage--trusting to you. You pitied me because I had lost my boy. But you didn't know--you couldn't guess how bare my life has been always--but for him. And then--this winter--' her voice changed and broke--'the sun rose again for me. I have been hungry and starving for years, and it seemed as though I--even I!--might still feast and be satisfied.

'It would not have taken much to satisfy me. I am not young, like you--I don't ask much. Just to be his friend, his secretary, his companion--in time--perhaps--his wife--when he began to feel the need of home, and peace--and to realise that no one else was so dear or so familiar to him as I. I understood him--he me--our minds touched. There was no need for "falling in love." One had only to go on from day to day--entering into each other's lives--I ministering to him and he growing accustomed to the atmosphere I could surround him with, and the sympathy I could give him--till the habit had grown so deep into heart and flesh that it could not be wrenched away. His hand would have dropped into mine, almost without his willing or knowing it.... And I should have made him happy. I could have lessened his faults--stimulated his powers. That was my dream all these later months--and every week it seemed to grow more reasonable, more possible. Then you came--'

She dropped into a chair beside Lucy, resting her delicate hands on the back of it. In the mingled abandonment and energy of her att.i.tude, there was the power that belongs to all elemental human emotion, made frankly visible and active. All her plaintive clinging charm had disappeared. It was the fierceness of the dove--the egotism of the weak. Every line and nerve of the fragile form betrayed the exasperation of suffering and a tension of the will, unnatural and irresistible. Lucy bowed to the storm.

She lay with her eyes hidden, conscious only of this accusing voice close to her,--and of the song of two nightingales without, rivalling each other among the chestnut trees above the lower road. Eleanor resumed after a momentary pause--a momentary closing of the tired eyes, as though in search of calm and recollection.

'You came. He took no notice of you. He was rude and careless--he complained that our work would be interrupted. It teased him that you should be here--and that you represented something so different from his thoughts and theories. That is like him. He has no real tolerance. He wants to fight, to overbear, to crush, directly he feels opposition. Among women especially, he is accustomed to be the centre--to be the master always.

And you resisted--silently. That provoked and attracted him. Then came the difficulties with the book--and Mr. Neal's visit. He has the strangest superst.i.tions. It was ill-luck, and I was mixed up with it. He began to cool to me--to avoid me. You were here; you didn't remind him of failure.

He found relief in talking to you. His ill-humour would all have pa.s.sed away like a child's sulkiness, but that--Ah! well!--'

She raised her hand with a long, painful sigh, and let it drop.

'Don't imagine I blame anyone. You were so fresh and young--it was all so natural. Yet somehow I never really feared--after the first evening I felt quite at ease. I found myself drawn to like--to love--you. And what could you and he have in common? Then on the Nemi day I dared to reproach him--to appeal to the old times--to show him the depth of my own wound--to make him explain himself. Oh! but all those words are far, far too strong for what I did? Who could ever suppose it to their advantage to make a scene with him--to weary or disgust him? It was only a word--a phrase or two here and there. But he understood,--and he gave me my answer. Oh! what humiliations we women can suffer from a sentence--a smile--and show nothing--nothing!'

Her face had begun to burn. She lifted her handkerchief to brush away two slow tears that had forced their way. Lucy's eyes had been drawn to her from their hiding-place. The girl's brow was furrowed, her lips parted; there was a touch of fear--unconscious, yet visible--in her silence.

'It was that day, while you and he were walking about the ruins, that a flash of light came to me. I suppose I had seen it before. I know I had been unhappy long before! But as long as one can hide things from oneself--it seems to make them not true,--as though one's own will still controlled them. But that day--after our walk--when we came back and found you on the hill-side! How was it your fault? Yet I could almost have believed that you had invented the boys and the stone! Certainly he spared me nothing. He had eyes and ears only for you. After he brought you home all his thoughts were for you. n.o.body else's fatigues and discomforts mattered anything. And it was the same with Alice. His only terrors were for you. When he heard that she was coming, he had no alarms for Aunt Pattie or for me. But you must be shielded--you must be saved from everything repulsive or shocking. He sat up last night to protect you--and even in his sleep--he heard you.'

Her voice dropped. Eleanor sat staring before her into the golden shadows of the room, afraid of what she had said, instinctively waiting for its effect on Lucy.

And Lucy crouched no longer. She had drawn herself erect.

'Mrs. Burgoyne, is it kind--is it _bearable_--that you should say these things to me? I have not deserved them! No! no!--I have _not_. What right have you? I can't protect myself--I can't escape you--but--'

Her voice shook. There was in it a pa.s.sion of anger, pain, loneliness, and yet something else--the note of something new-born and transforming.

'What right?' repeated Eleanor, in low tones--tones almost of astonishment.

She turned to her companion. 'The right of hunger--the right of poverty--the right of one pleading for a last possession!--a last hope!'

Lucy was silenced. The pa.s.sion of the older woman bore her down, made the protest of her young modesty seem a mere trifling and impertinence. Eleanor had slid to her knees. Her face had grown tremulous and sweet. A strange dignity quivered in the smile that transformed her mouth as she caught the girl's reluctant hands and drew them against her breast.

'Is it forbidden to cry out when grief--and loss--go beyond a certain point? No!--I think not. I couldn't struggle with you--or plot against you--or hate you. Those things are not in my power. I was not made so. But what forbids me to come to you and say?--"I have suffered terribly. I had a dreary home. I married, ignorantly, a man who made me miserable. But when my boy came, that made up for all. I never grumbled. I never envied other people after that. It seemed to me I had all I deserved--and so much, much more than many! Afterwards, when I woke up without him that day in Switzerland, there was only one thing that made it endurable. I overheard the Swiss doctor say to my maid--he was a kind old man and very sorry for me--that my own health was so fragile that I shouldn't live long to pine for the child. But oh!--what we can bear and not die! I came back to my father, and for eight years I never slept without crying--without the ghost of the boy's head against my breast. Again and again I used to wake up in an ecstasy, feeling it there--feeling the curls across my mouth."' A deep sob choked her. Lucy, in a madness of pity, struggled to release herself that she might throw her arms round the kneeling figure. But Eleanor's grasp only tightened. She hurried on.

'But last year, I began to hope. Everybody thought badly of me; the doctors spoke very strongly; and even Papa made no objection when Aunt Pattie asked me to come to Rome. I came to Rome in a strange state--as one looks at things and loves them, for the last time, before a journey. And then--well, then it all began!--new life for me, new health. The only happiness--except for the child--that had ever come my way. I know--oh! I don't deceive myself--I know it was not the same to Edward as to me. But I don't ask much. I knew he had given the best of his heart to other women--long ago--long before this. But the old loves were all dead, and I could almost be thankful for them. They had kept him for me, I thought,--tamed and exhausted him, so that I--so colourless and weak compared to those others!--might just slip into his heart and find the way open--that he might just take me in, and be glad, for sheer weariness.'

She dropped Lucy's hands, and rising, she locked her own, and began to walk to and fro in the great room; her head thrown back, her senses turned as it were inward upon the sights and sounds of memory.

Lucy gazed upon her in bewilderment. Then she too rose and approached Mrs.

Burgoyne.

'When shall I go?' she said simply. 'You must help me to arrange it with Miss Manisty. It might be to-morrow--it would be easy to find some excuse.'

Eleanor looked at her with a convulsed face.

'That would help nothing,' she said--'nothing! He would guess what I had done.'

Lucy was silent a moment. Then she broke out piteously.

'What can I do?'

'What claim have I that you should do anything?' said Eleanor despairingly.

'I don't know what I wanted, when I began this scene.'

She moved on, her eyes bent upon the ground--Lucy beside her.

The girl had drawn Mrs. Burgoyne's arm through her own. The tears were on her cheek, but she was thinking, and quite calm.

'I believe,' she said at last, in a voice that was almost steady--'that all your fears are quite, quite vain. Mr. Manisty feels for me nothing but a little kindness--he could feel nothing else. It will all come back to you--and it was not I that took it away. But--whatever you tell me--whatever you ask, I will do.'

With a catching breath Eleanor turned and threw her arm round the girl's neck.

'Stay,' she breathed--'stay for a few days. Let there be no shock--nothing to challenge him. Then slip away--don't let him know where--and there is one woman in the world who will hold you in her inmost heart, who will pray for you with her secretest, sacredest prayers, as long as you live!'

The two fell into each other's embrace. Lucy, with the maternal tenderness that should have been Eleanor's, pressed her lips on the hot brow that lay upon her breast, murmuring words of promise, of consolation, of self-reproach, feeling her whole being pa.s.sing out to Eleanor's in a great tide of pa.s.sionate will and pity.

CHAPTER XIII

They were all going down to the midday train for Rome.

At last the Amba.s.sador--who had been pa.s.sing through a series of political and domestic difficulties, culminating in the mutiny of his Neapolitan cook--had been able to carry out his whim. A luncheon had been arranged for the young American girl who had taken his fancy. At the head of his house for the time being was his married daughter, Lady Mary, who had come from India for the winter to look after her babies and her father. When she was told to write the notes for this luncheon, she lifted her eyebrows in good-humoured astonishment.

'My dear,' said the Amba.s.sador, 'we have been doing our duty for six months--and I find it pall!'