Eleanor by Mrs Humphry Ward

Eleanor by Mrs Humphry Ward

Author:Mrs Humphry Ward [Ward, Humphry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Military, History
ISBN: 9781846377594
Publisher: Echo Library
Published: 2005-01-30T01:45:30+00:00


‘A wise resolve’—said the Monsignore, holding out his hand. ‘Your Excellency must excuse me. I have an audience of his Holiness at three o’clock.’

He made his farewells to the ladies with Irish effusion, and departed. The Ambassador looked curiously at Manisty. Then he fell back with Lucy.

‘It will be a column to-night,’ he said with depression. ‘Why didn’t you stand by me? I showed Mrs. Swetenham my pictures—my beauties—my ewe-lambs—that I have been gathering for twenty years—that the National Gallery shall have, when I’m gone, if it behaves itself. And she asked me if they were originals, and took my Luini for a Raphael! Yes! it will be a column,’ said the Ambassador pensively. Then, with a brisk change, he looked up and took the hand that Lucy offered him.

‘Good-bye—good-bye! You won’t forget my prescription?—nor me?’ said the old man, smiling and patting her hand kindly. ‘And remember!’—he bent towards her, dropping his voice with an air in which authority and sweetness mingled—‘send Mr. Manisty home!’

He felt the sudden start in the girl’s hand before he dropped it. Then he turned to Manisty himself.

‘Ah! Manisty, here you are. Your ladies want to leave us.’

Manisty made his farewells, and carried Lucy off. But as they walked towards the house he said not a word, and Lucy, venturing a look at him, saw the storm on his brow, the stiffness of the lips.

‘We are going to the Villa Borghese, are we not?’ she said timidly—‘if Mrs. Burgoyne ought to go?’

‘We must go somewhere, I suppose,’ he said, stalking on before her. ‘We can’t sit in the street.’

CHAPTER XIV

The party returning to Marinata had two hours to spend in the gallery and garden of the Villa Borghese. Of the pictures and statues of the palace, of the green undulations, the stone pines, the tempietti of the garden, Lucy afterwards had no recollection. All that she remembered was flight on her part, pursuit on Manisty’s, and finally a man triumphant and a girl brought to bay.

It was in a shady corner of the vast garden, where hedges of some fragrant yellow shrub shut in the basin of a fountain, surrounded by a ring of languid nymphs, that Lucy at last found herself face to face with Manisty, and knew that she must submit.

‘I do not understand how I have missed Mrs. Burgoyne,’ she said hastily, looking round for her companion Mrs. Elliot, who had just left her to overtake her brother and go home; while Lucy was to meet Eleanor and Mr. Neal at this rendezvous.

Manisty looked at her with his most sparkling, most determined air.

‘You have missed her—because I have misled her.’ Then, as Lucy drew back, he hurried on,—‘I cannot understand, Miss Foster, why it is that you have constantly refused all yesterday evening—all to-day—to give me the opportunity I desired! But I, too, have a will,—and it has been roused!

‘I don’t understand,’ said Lucy, growing white.

‘Let me explain, then,’ said Manisty, coolly. ‘Miss Foster, two nights ago you were attacked,—in danger—under my roof, in my care.



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