That night she woke from a troubled sleep with a stifled cry of horror. In her dreams she had been wrestling with Manisty, trying to thrust him back with all the frenzied force of her weak hands. But he had wrenched himself from her hold. She saw him striding past her—aglow, triumphant. And that dim white form awaiting him—and the young arms outstretched!
'No, no! False! She doesn't—doesn't love him!' her heart cried, throwing all its fiercest life into the cry. She sat up in bed trembling and haggard. Then she stole into the next room. Lucy lay deeply, peacefully asleep. Eleanor sank down beside her, hungrily watching her. 'How could she sleep like that—if—if she cared?' asked her wild thoughts, and she comforted herself, smiling at her own remorse. Once she touched the girl's hand with her lips, feeling towards her a rush of tenderness that came like dew on the heat of the soul. Then she crept back to bed, and cried, and cried—through the golden mounting of the dawn.
CHAPTER XIX
The days passed on. Between Eleanor and Lucy there had grown up a close, intense, and yet most painful affection. Neither gave the other her full confidence, and on Eleanor's side the consciousness both of the futility and the enormity of what she had done only increased with time, embittering the resistance of a will which was still fierce and unbroken.
Meanwhile she often observed her companion with a quick and torturing curiosity. What was it that Manisty had found so irresistible, when all her own subtler arts had failed?
Lucy was in some ways very simple, primitive even, as Manisty had called her. Eleanor knew that her type was no longer common in a modern America that sends all its girls to college, and ransacks the world for an experience. But at the same time the depth and force of her nature promised rich developments in the future. She was still a daughter of New England, with many traits now fast disappearing; but for her, too, there was beginning that cosmopolitan transformation to which the women of her race lend themselves so readily.
And it was Manisty's influence that was at work! Eleanor's miserable eyes
discerned it in a hundred ways. Half the interests and questions on which
Manisty's mind had been fixed for so long were becoming familiar to Lucy.
They got books regularly from Rome, and Eleanor had been often puzzled by
Lucy's selections—till one day the key to them flashed across her.
The girl indeed was making her way, fast and silently, into quite new regions of thought and feeling. She read, and she thought. She observed the people of the village; she even frequented their humble church, though she would never go with Eleanor to Sunday Mass. There some deep, unconquerable instinct held her back.
All through, indeed, her personal beliefs and habits—Evangelical, unselfish, strong, and a little stern—seemed to be quite unchanged. But they were differently tinged, and would be in time differently presented. Nor would they ever, of themselves, divide her from Manisty. Eleanor saw that clearly enough. Lucy could hold opinion passionately, unreasonably even; but she was not of the sort that makes life depend upon opinion. Her true nature was large, tolerant, patient. The deepest forces in it were forces of feeling, and no intellectual difference would ever be able to deny them their natural outlet.
Meanwhile Lucy seemed to herself the most hopelessly backward and ignorant person, particularly in Eleanor's company.