Such a cry! It rent and desolated the evening peace. It seemed to Lucy the voice of an old woman, crossed by other voices—rough, chiding voices of men. Oh, were they ill-treating her? The girl said hurriedly to the man beside her that she would dismount.
'No, no, signorina,' said the man, placidly, raising his hand. 'The signor will be here directly. It happens often, often.'
And almost at the same moment Manisty was beside her again, and the gruesome sounds above were dying away.
'Were you frightened?' he said, with anxiety. 'There was no need. How strange that it should have happened just now! It's a score that your Italy must settle—mine washes her hands of it!' and he explained that what she had heard were the cries of a poor hysterical woman, a small farmer's wife, who had lost both her sons in the Abyssinian war, in the frightful retreat of Adowa, and had never been in her right mind since the news arrived. With the smallest lapse in the vigilance of those about her, she would rush down to the road, and throw herself upon any passer-by, imploring them to intercede for her with the Government—that they should give her back her sons—Nino, at least!—Nino, her youngest, and darling. It was impossible that they should both be dead—impossible! The Holy Virgin would never have suffered it.
'Poor soul!—she tried to cling round my knees—wailing out the candles and prayers she had offered—shrieking something about the "Governo." I helped the sons to carry her in. They were quite gentle to her.'
Lucy turned away her head; and they resumed their march. She governed herself with all her power; but her normal self-control was weakened, and that cry of anguish still haunted her. Some quiet tears fell—she hoped, she believed that they were unseen.
But Manisty perceived them. He gave not the smallest direct sign; he began at once to talk of other things in a quite other vein. But underlying his characteristic whims and sallies she was presently conscious of a new and exquisite gentleness. It seemed to address itself both to her physical fatigue, and to the painful impression of the incident which had just passed. Her sudden tears—the tears of a tired child—and his delicate feeling—there arose out of them, as out of their whole journey, a relation, a bond, of which both were conscious, to which she yielded herself in a kind of vague and timid pleasure.
For Manisty—as she sat there, high above him, yet leaning a little towards him—there was something in the general freshness and purity of her presence, both physical and moral, that began most singularly to steal upon his emotions. Certain barriers seemed to be falling, certain secret sympathies emerging, drawn from regions far below their differences of age and race, of national and intellectual habit. How was it she had liked his Palestine book so much? He almost felt as though in some mysterious way he had been talking to her, and she listening, for years,—since first, perhaps, her sweet crude youth began.
Then even his egotism felt the prick of humour. Five weeks had she been with them at the villa?—and in a fortnight their party was to break up. How profitably indeed he had used his time with her! How civil—how kind—how discerning he had shown himself!
Yet soreness of this kind was soon lost in the surge of this new and unexpected impulse, which brought his youth exultantly back upon him. A beautiful woman rode beside him, through the Italian evening. With impatience, with an inward and passionate repudiation of all other bonds and claims, he threw himself into that mingled process—at once exploring and revealing—which makes the thrill of all the higher relations between men and women, and ends invariably either in love—or tragedy.