And now?—Why were they going? Eleanor hardly knew. She had tried to stop it. But Reggie Brooklyn had been asked, and the Ambassador's daughter. And Vanbrugh Neal had a fancy to see Nemi. Manisty, who had forgotten all that the day was once to signify, had resigned himself to the expedition—he who hated expeditions!—' because Neal wanted it.' There had not been a word said about it during the last few days that had not brought gall and wound to Eleanor. She, who thought she knew all that male selfishness was capable of, was yet surprised and pricked anew, hour after hour, by Manisty's casual sayings and assumptions.
It was like some gourd-growth in the night—the rise of this entangling barrier between herself and him. She knew that some of it came from those secret superstitions and fancies about himself and his work which she had often detected in him. If a companion or a place, even a particular table or pen had brought him luck, he would recur to them and repeat them with eagerness. But once prove to him the contrary, and she had seen him drop friend and pen with equal decision.
And as far as she could gather—as far as he would discuss the matter at all—it was precisely with regard to those portions of the book where her influence upon it had been strongest, that the difficulties put forward by Mr. Neal had arisen.
Her lip quivered. She had little or no personal conceit. Very likely Mr. Neal's criticisms were altogether just, and she had counselled wrongly. When she thought of the old days of happy consultation, of that vibrating sympathy of thought which had arisen between them, glorifying the winter days in Rome, of the thousand signs in him of a deep, personal gratitude and affection—
Vanished!—vanished! The soreness of heart she carried about with her, proudly concealed, had the gnawing constancy of physical pain. While he!—Nothing seemed to her more amazing than the lapses in mere gentlemanliness that Manisty could allow himself. He was capable on occasion of all that was most refined and tender in feeling. But once jar that central egotism of his, and he could behave incredibly! Through the small actions and omissions of every day, he could express, if he chose, a hardness of soul before which the woman shuddered.
Did he in truth mean her to understand, not only that she had been an intruder, and an unlucky one, upon his work and his intellectual life, but that any dearer hopes she might have based upon their comradeship were to be once for all abandoned? She stood there, lost in a sudden tumult of passionate pride and misery, which was crossed every now and then by a strange and bitter wonder.
Each of us carries about with him a certain mental image of himself—typical, characteristic—as we suppose; draped at any rate to our fancy; round which we group the incidents of life. Eleanor saw herself always as the proud woman; it is a guise in which we are none of us loth to masquerade. Haughtily dumb and patient during her married years; proud morally, socially, intellectually; finding in this stiffening of the self her only defence against the ugly realities of daily life. Proud too in her loneliness and grief—proud of her very grief, of her very capacity for suffering, of all the delicate shades of thought and sorrow which furnished the matter of her secret life, lived without a sign beside the old father whose coarser and commoner pride took such small account of hers!
And now—she seemed to herself to be already drinking humiliation, and foreseeing ever deeper draughts of it to come. She, who had never begged for anything, was in the mood to see her whole existence as a refused petition, a rejected gift. She had offered Edward Manisty her all of sympathy and intelligence, and he was throwing it back lightly, inexorably upon her hands. Her thin cheek burnt; but it was the truth. She annoyed and wearied him; and he had shaken her off; her, Eleanor Burgoyne! She did not know herself. Her inmost sense of identity was shaken.
She leant her head an instant against the frame of the open window, closing her tired eyes upon the great Campagna below her. A surge of rebellious will passed through her. Always submission, patience, silence,—till now! But there are moments when a woman must rouse herself, and fight—must not accept, but make, her fate.
Jealous! Was that last heat and ignominy of the soul to be hers too? She was to find it a threat and offence that he should spend some of the evenings that now went so heavily, talking with this girl,—this nice simple girl, whom she had herself bade him cultivate, whom she had herself brought into notice, rubbing off her angles,—drilling her into beauty? The very notion was madness and absurdity. It degraded her in her own eyes. It was the measure of her own self-ignorance. She—resign him at the first threat of another claim! The passionate life of her own heart amazed and stunned her.