After some hours of sleep, Lucy awoke, conscious of movement somewhere near her. With the advent of the hot weather she had been moved to a room on the eastern side of the villa, in one of two small wings jutting out from the façade. She had locked her door, but the side window of her room, which overlooked the balcony towards the lake, was open, and slight sounds came from the balcony. Springing up she crept softly towards the window. The wooden shutters had been drawn forward, but both they and the casements were ajar.
Through the chink she saw a strange sight. On the step leading from the house to the terrace of the balcony sat Alice Manisty. Her head was thrown back against the wall of the villa, and her hands were clasped upon her knee. Her marvellous hair fell round her shoulders, and a strange illumination, in which a first gleam of dawn mingled with the moonlight, struck upon the white face and white hands emerging from the darkness of her hair and of her loose black dress.
Was she asleep? Lucy, holding back so as not to be seen, peered with held breath. No!—the large eyes were wide open, though it seemed to Lucy that they saw nothing. Minute after minute passed. The figure on the terrace sat motionless. There were two statues on either side of her, a pair of battered round-limbed nymphs, glorified by the moonlight into a grace and poetry not theirs by day. They seemed to be looking down upon the woman at their feet in a soft bewilderment—wondering at a creature so little like themselves; while from the terrace came up the scent of the garden, heavy with roses and bedrenched with dew.
Suddenly it seemed to Lucy as though that white face, those intolerable eyes, awoke—turned towards herself, penetrated her room, pursued her. The figure moved, and there was a low sound of words. Her window was in truth inaccessible from the terrace; but in a panic fear, Lucy threw herself on the casement and the shutters, closed them and drew the bolts; as noiselessly as: she could, still not without some noise. Then hurrying to her bed, she threw herself upon it, panting—in a terror she could neither explain nor compose.
CHAPTER X
'My dear lady—there's nothing to be done with her whatever. She will not yield one inch—and I cannot. But one thing at last is clear to me. The mischief has made progress—I fear, great progress.'
Manisty had drawn his cousin into the garden, and they were pacing the avenue. With his last words he turned upon her a grave significant look.
The cause of Alice Manisty's visit, indeed, had turned out to be precisely what Manisty supposed. The sister had come to Marinata in order to persuade her brother, as one of the trustees of her property, to co-operate with her in bestowing some of her money on the French artist, Monsieur Octave Vacherot, to whom, as she calmly avowed, her affections were indissolubly attached, though she did not ever intend to marry him, nor indeed to see much of him in the future. 'I shall never do him the disservice of becoming his wife'—she announced, with her melancholy eyes full upon her brother—'But money is of no use to me. He is young and can employ it.' Manisty inquired whether the gentleman in question was aware of what she proposed. Alice replied that if money were finally settled upon him he would accept it; whereas his pride did not allow him to receive perpetual small sums at her hands. 'But if I settle a definite sum upon him, he will take it as an endowment of his genius. It would be giving to the public, not to him. His great ideas would get their chance.'
Manisty, in his way as excitable as she, had evidently found it difficult to restrain himself when M. Octave Vacherot's views as to his own value were thus explained to him. Nevertheless he seemed to have shown on the whole a creditable patience, to have argued with his sister, to have even offered her money of his own, for the temporary supply of M. Vacherot's necessities. But all to no avail; and in the end it had come of course to his flatly refusing any help of his to such a scheme, and without it the scheme fell. For their father had been perfectly well aware of his daughter's eccentricities, and had placed her portion, by his will, in the hands of two trustees, of whom her brother was one, without whose consent she could not touch the capital.
'It always seemed to her a monstrous arrangement,' said Manisty, 'and I can see now it galls her to the quick to have to apply to me, in this way. I don't wonder—but I can't help it. The duty's there—worse luck!—and I've got to face it, for my father's sake. Besides, if I were to consent, the other fellow—an old cousin of ours—would never dream of doing it. So what's the good? All the same, it makes me desperately anxious, to see the effect that this opposition of mine produces upon her.'