She was angry with Father Benecke; but she took care to see him again.
By means of a little note about a point in the article he was just completing, she recalled him.
They met without the smallest reference to the scene which had passed between them. He asked for her literary opinion with the same simplicity, the same outward deference as before. She was once more the elegant and languid woman, no writer herself, but born to be the friend and muse of writers. She made him feel just as clearly as before the clumsiness of a phrase, the naïveté of a point of view.
And yet in truth all was changed between them. Their talk ranged further, sank deeper. From the controversy of science with the Vatican, from the position of the Old Catholics, or the triumph of Ultramontanism in France, it would drop of a sudden, neither knew how, and light upon some small matter of conduct or feeling, some 'flower in the crannied wall,' charged with the profoundest things—things most intimate, most searching, concerned with the eternal passion and trouble of the human will, the 'body of this death,' the 'burden' of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'
Then the priest's gentle insistent look would steal on hers; he would speak from his heart; he would reveal in a shrinking word or two the secrets of his own spiritual life, of that long inner discipline, which was now his only support in rebellion, the plank between him and the abyss.
She felt herself pursued; felt it with a mixture of fear and attraction. She had asked him to be her director; and then refused his advice. She had tried to persuade him that she was a sceptic and unbeliever. But he had not done with her. She divined the ardour of the Christian; perhaps the acuteness of the ecclesiastic. Often she was not strong enough to talk to him, and then he read to her—the books that she allowed him to choose. Through a number of indirect and gradual approaches he laid siege to her, and again and again did she feel her heart fluttering in his grasp, only to draw it back in fear, to stand once more on a bitter unspoken defence of herself that would not yield. Yet he recognised in her the approach of some crisis of feeling. She seemed herself to suspect it, and to be trying to ward it off, in a kind of blind anguish. Nothing meanwhile could be more touching than the love between her and Lucy. The old man looked on and wondered.
Day after day he hesitated. Then one evening, in Lucy's absence, he found her so pale, and racked with misery—so powerless either to ask help, or to help herself, so resolute not to speak again, so clearly tortured by her own coercing will, that his hesitation gave way.
He walked down the hill, in a trance of prayer. When he emerged from it his mind was made up.
* * * * *
In the days that followed he seemed to Eleanor often agitated and ill at ease. She was puzzled, too, by his manner towards Lucy. In truth, he watched Miss Foster with a timid anxiety, trying to penetrate her character, to divine how presently she might feel towards him. He was not afraid of Mrs. Burgoyne, but he was sometimes afraid of this girl with her clear, candid eyes. Her fresh youth, and many of her American ways and feelings were hard for him to understand. She showed him friendship in a hundred pretty ways; and he met her sometimes eagerly, sometimes with a kind of shame-facedness.