Lucy said nothing. Her heart swelled a little. It seemed to her that under all this sweetness she was being treated with a certain violence. She went to the balcony, where the breakfast had just been laid, that she might bring Eleanor's coffee.
'It is just a little crude,' Eleanor thought, uneasily. 'Dear bird!—the net is sadly visible. But what can one do?—with so little time—so few chances! Once part them, and the game is up!'
So she used her weakness once more as a tyranny, this time for different ends.
The situation that she dictated was certainly difficult enough. Manisty appeared, by her summons, in the afternoon, and found them on the loggia. Lucy greeted him with a cold self-possession. Of all that had happened on the previous day, naturally, not a word. So far indeed as allusions to the past were concerned, the three might just have travelled together from Marinata. Eleanor very flushed, and dressed in her elegant white dress and French hat, talked fast and well, of the country folk, the padre parroco, the Contessa. Lucy looked at her with alarm, dreading the after fatigue. But Eleanor would not be managed; would have her way.
Manisty, however, was no longer deceived. Lucy was aware of some of the glances that he threw his cousin. The trouble which they betrayed gave the girl a bitter satisfaction.
Presently she left them alone. After her disappearance Eleanor turned to
Manisty with a smile.
'On your peril—not another word to her!—till I give you leave. That would finish it.'
He lifted hands and shoulders in a despairing gesture; but said nothing. In Lucy's absence, however, then and later, he did not attempt to control his depression, and Eleanor was soon distracting and comforting him in the familiar ways of the past. Before forty-eight hours had elapsed the relations between them indeed had resumed, to all appearance, the old and close intimacy. On his arm she crept down the road, to the Sassetto, while Lucy drove with the Contessa. Or Manisty read aloud to her on the loggia, while Lucy in the courtyard below sat chatting fast to a swarm of village children who would always henceforward associate her white dress and the pure oval of her face with their dreams of the Madonna.
In their tête-à-têtes, the talk of Manisty and Eleanor was always either of Lucy or of Manisty's own future. He had been at first embarrassed or reluctant. But she had insisted, and he had at length revealed himself as in truth he had never revealed himself in the days of their early friendship. With him at least, Eleanor through all anguish had remained mistress of herself, and she had her reward. No irreparable word had passed between them. In silence the old life ceased to be, and a new bond arose. The stifled reproaches, the secret impatiences, the ennuis, the hidden anguish of those last weeks at Marinata were gone. Manisty, freed from the pressure of an unspoken claim which his conscience half acknowledged and his will repulsed, was for his cousin a new creature. He began to treat her as he had treated his friend Neal, with the same affectionate consideration, the same easy sweetness; even through all the torments that Lucy made him suffer. 'His restlessness as a lover,—his excellence as a friend,'—so a man who knew him well had written of him in earlier days. As for the lover, discipline and penance had overtaken him. But now that Eleanor's claim of another kind was dead, the friend in him had scope. Eleanor possessed him as the lover of Lucy more truly than she had ever yet done in the days when she ruled alone.
One evening finding her more feeble than usual, he implored her to let him summon a doctor from Rome before she risked the fatigue of the Mont Cenis journey.