'My God, give them to me!'—he cried, with a sudden leap of the heart that was at once humble and audacious. Not a word to Mr. Manisty, or to any other human being, clearly, as to Mrs. Burgoyne's presence at Torre Amiata. To that he was bound.
But—
'May I not entertain a wayfarer, a guest?'—he thought, trembling, 'like any other solitary?'
CHAPTER XX
The hot evening was passing into night. Eleanor and Lucy were on the loggia together.
Through the opening in the parapet wall made by the stairway to what had once been the enclosed monastery garden, Eleanor could see the fire-flies flashing against the distant trees; further, above the darkness of the forest, ethereal terraces of dimmest azure lost in the starlight; and where the mountains dropped to the south-west a heaven still fiery and streaked with threats of storm. Had she raised herself a little she could have traced far away, beyond the forest slopes, the course of those white mists that rise at night out of the wide bosom of Bolsena.
Outside, the country-folk were streaming home from their work; the men riding their donkeys or mules, the women walking, often with burdens on their heads, and children dragging at their hands; dim purplish figures, in the evening blue, charged with the eternal grace of the old Virgilian life of Italy, the life of corn and vine, of chestnut and olive. Lucy hung over the balcony, looking at the cavalcades, sometimes waving her hand to a child or a mother that she recognised through the gathering darkness. It was an evening spectacle of which she never tired. Her feeling clung to these labouring people, whom she idealised with the optimism of her clean youth. Secretly her young strength envied them their primal, necessary toils. She would not have shrunk from their hardships; their fare would have been no grievance to her. Sickness, old age, sin, cruelty, violence, death,—that these dark things entered into their lives, she knew vaguely. Her heart shrank from what her mind sometimes divined; all the more perhaps that there was in her the promise of a wide and rare human sympathy, which must some day find its appointed tasks and suffer much in the finding. Now, when she stumbled on the horrors of the world, she would cry to herself, 'God knows!'—with a catching breath, and the feeling of a child that runs from darkness to protecting arms; and so escape her pain.
Presently she came to sit by Eleanor again, trying to amuse her by the account of a talk on the roadside, with an old spaccapietre, or stone-breaker, who had fought at Mentana.
Eleanor listened vaguely, hardly replying. But she watched the girl in her simple white dress, her fine head, her grave and graceful movements; she noticed the voice, so expressive of an inner self-mastery through all its gaiety. And suddenly the thought flamed through her—
'If I told her!—if she knew that I had seen a letter from him this afternoon?—that he is in Italy?—that he is looking for her, day and night! If I just blurted it out—what would she say?—how would she take it?'