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Manisty's eccentric and unmanageable sister had been for many years the secret burden of his life and Aunt Pattie's. Eleanor had been a witness of the annoyance and depression with which he had learnt during the winter that she was in Italy. She knew something of the efforts that had been made to keep her away from the villa. He would be furiously helpless and miserable under the infliction.
But notwithstanding, the sensitive yet strong intelligence of the priest had gone straight for some core of thought in the Englishman that it seemed only he divined. And it was clear that his own utter selflessness his poetic and passionate detachment from all the objects of sense and ambition made him a marvel to Manisty's more turbid and ambiguous nature.
And this had been more than enough to open to him all but the very inmost heart of Catholic life. Their apartments in Rome, to the scandal of Miss Manisty's Scotch instincts, had been haunted by ecclesiastics of every rank and kind. Cardinals, Italian and foreign, had taken their afternoon tea from Mrs.
The peasants on these hills have a superstition about it. They look for that dome as they look for the sun. When they can't see it, they are unhappy they expect some calamity. It's a symbol, isn't it, an idea? and those are the things that touch us. I have a notion' he turned to her smiling, 'that it will come into Mr. Manisty's book? Their eyes met in a smiling assent.
'But you didn't like it, Eleanor my little piece! said Manisty, after a pause. 'So don't pretend! She roused herself at once, and began to talk with her usual eagerness and sympathy. It was a repetition of the scene before dinner. Only this time her effect was not so great. Manisty's depression did not yield. Presently, however, he looked down upon her.
The girl watched her every movement, and Eleanor dared neither be tired nor dainty, lest for every mouthful she refused Manisty's chance should be the less. After dinner she once more laid a detaining hand on her companion. 'Dear, I can't send him away, you know at once to please you. 'Do you want him to stay? said Lucy, holding herself aloof. 'After all, he is my kinsman.
Meanwhile the gallant and be-whiskered Admiral would have liked to secure Manisty's attention. To get hold of a politician, or something near a politician, and explain to them a new method of fusing metals in which he believed, represented for him the main object of all social functions. But Manisty peremptorily shook him off.
Lucy wondered what had passed between him and his sister before dinner. He was polite to her; and yet she fancied that their relations were already strained. Presently, as Lucy was busy with some embroidery on one of the settees against the wall of the salon, she was conscious of Alice Manisty's approach.
The more unremitting, the more delicate was Manisty's care, the more tender was Lucy's devotion, the more plainly was Brooklyn aware of a pathetic, a mysterious isolation which seemed already to bring the chill of death into their little company. The boy's pain flowed back upon him, ten-fold augmented.
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.
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