And from these risky heights she looked down sometimes on Manisty—wondering where was emotion, sympathy. Not a trace of them! Of all their party he alone was obviously and hideously bored by the long wait. He leant back in his chair, with folded arms, staring at the ceiling—yawning—fidgetting. At last he took out a small Greek book from his pocket, and hung over it in a moody absorption. Once only, when a procession of the inferior clergy went by, he looked at it closely, turning afterwards to Mrs. Burgoyne with the emphatic remark: 'Bad faces!—aren't they?—almost all of them?'
Yet Lucy could see that even here in this vast crowd, amid the hubbub and bustle, he still counted, was still remembered. Officials came to lean and chat across the rope; diplomats stopped to greet him on the way to the august seats beyond the Confession. His manner in return showed no particular cordiality; Lucy thought it languid, even cold. She was struck with the difference between his mood of the day, and that brilliant and eager homage he had lavished on the old Cardinal in the villa garden. What a man of change and fantasy! Here it was he qui tendait la joue. Cold, distant, dreamy—one would have thought him either indifferent or hostile to the whole great pageant and its meanings.
Only once did Lucy see him bestir himself—show a gleam of animation. A white-haired priest, all tremulous dignity and delicacy, stood for a moment beside the rope-barrier, waiting for a friend. Manisty bent over and touched him on the arm. The old man turned. The face was parchment, the cheeks cavernous. But in the blue eyes there was an exquisite innocence and youth.
Manisty smiled at him. His manner showed a peculiar almost a boyish deference. 'You join us afterwards—at lunch?'
'Yes, yes.' The old priest beamed and nodded; then his friend came up and he was carried on.
* * * * *
'A quarter to eleven,' said Manisty with a yawn, looking at his watch.
'Ah!—listen!'
He sprang to his feet. In an instant half the occupants of Tribune D were on their chairs, Lucy and Eleanor among them. A roar came up the church—passionate—indescribable. Lucy held her breath.
There—there he is,—the old man! Caught in a great shaft of sunlight striking from south to north, across the church, and just touching the chapel of the Holy Sacrament—the Pope emerges. The white figure, high above the crowd, sways from side to side; the hand upraised gives the benediction. Fragile, spiritual as is the apparition, the sunbeam refines, subtilises, spiritualises it still more. It hovers like a dream above the vast multitudes—surely no living man!—but thought, history, faith, taking shape; the passion of many hearts revealed. Up rushes the roar towards the Tribunes. 'Did you hear?' said Manisty to Mrs. Burgoyne, lifting a smiling brow, as a few Papalino cries—'Viva il Papa Re'—make themselves heard among the rest. Eleanor's thin face turns to him with responsive excitement. But she has seen these things before. Instinctively her eyes wander perpetually to Manisty's, taking their colour, their meaning from his. It is not the spectacle itself that matters to her—poor Eleanor! One heart-beat, one smile of the man beside her outweighs it all. And he, roused at last from his nonchalance, watching hawk-like every movement of the figure and the crowd, is going mentally through a certain page of his book, repeating certain phrases—correcting here—strengthening there.
Lucy alone—the alien and Puritan Lucy—Lucy surrenders herself completely. She betrays nothing, save by the slightly parted lips, and the flutter of the black veil fastened on her breast; but it is as though her whole inner being were dissolving, melting away, in the flame of the moment. It is her first contact with decisive central things, her first taste of the great world-play, as Europe has known it and taken part in it, at least since Charles the Great.