But she had not shown it. And at the end of it Aunt Pattie had kissed her ruefully with tears—'It's very good of you! You'll take care of Eleanor!'
Lucy could hear her own answer—'Indeed, indeed, I will!'—and Aunt Pattie's puzzled cry, 'If only someone would tell me what I'm to do with him!'
And then she recalled her own pause of wonder as Aunt Pattie left her—beside the hotel window, looking into the narrow side street. Why was it 'very good of her'?—and why, nevertheless, was this dislocation of all their plans felt to be somehow her fault and responsibility?—even by herself? There was a sudden helpless inclination to laugh over the topsy-turviness of it all.
And then her heart had fluttered in her breast, stabbed by the memory of Eleanor's cry the night before. 'It is of no use to say that you know nothing—that he has said nothing. I know. If you stay, he will give you no peace—his will is indomitable. But if you go, he will guess my part in it. I shall not have the physical strength to conceal it—and he can be a hard man when he is resisted! What am I to do? I would go home at once—but—I might die on the way. Why not?'
And then—in painful gasps—the physical situation had been revealed to her—the return of old symptoms and the reappearance of arrested disease. The fear of the physical organism alternating with the despair of the lonely and abandoned soul,—never could Lucy forget the horror of that hour's talk, outwardly so quiet, as she sat holding Eleanor's hands in hers, and the floodgates of personality and of grief were opened before her.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the patient, sweating horses climbed and climbed. Soon they were at the brow of the hill, and looking back for their last sight of Orvieto. And now they were on a broad tableland, a bare, sun-baked region where huge flocks of sheep, of white, black, and brown goats wandered with ragged shepherds over acres of burnt and thirsty pasture. Here and there were patches of arable land and groups of tilling peasants in the wide untidy expanse; once or twice too an osteria, with its bush or its wine-stained tables under the shadow of its northern wall. But scarcely a farmhouse. Once indeed a great building like a factory or a workhouse, in the midst of wide sun-beaten fields. 'Ecco! la fattoria,' said the driver, pointing to it. And once a strange group of underground dwellings, their chimneys level with the surrounding land, whence wild swarms of troglodyte children rushed up from the bowels of the earth to see the carriage pass and shriek for soldi.
But the beauty of the sun-scorched upland was its broom! Sometimes they were in deep tufa lanes; like English lanes, save for their walls and canopies of gold; sometimes they journeyed through wide barren stretches, where only broom held the soil against all comers, spreading in sheets of gold beneath the dazzling sky. Large hawks circled overhead; in the rare woods the nightingales were loud and merry; and goldfinches were everywhere. A hot, lonely, thirsty land—the heart of Italy—where the rocks are honeycombed with the tombs of that mysterious Etruscan race, the Melchisedek of the nations, coming no one knows whence, 'without father and without mother'—a land which has to the west of it the fever-stricken Maremma and the heights of the Amiata range, and to the south the forest country of Viterbo.
Eleanor looked out upon the road and the fields with eyes that faintly remembered, and a heart held now, as always, in the grip of that tempo felice which was dead.
It was she who had proposed this journey. Once in late November she and Aunt Pattie and Manisty had spent two or three days at Orvieto with some Italian friends. They had made the journey back to Rome, partly by vetturino, driving from Orvieto to Bolsena and Viterbo, and spending a night on the way at a place of remote and enchanting beauty which had left a deep mark on Eleanor's imagination. They owed the experience to their Italian friends, acquaintances of the great proprietor whose agent gave the whole party hospitality for the night; and as they jogged on through this June heat she recalled with bitter longing the bright November day, the changing leaves, the upland air, and Manisty's delight in the strange unfamiliar country, in the vast oak woods above the Paglia, and the marvellous church at Monte Fiascone.