Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/388

380 are you going, Miss Vane? because, wherever it is, I’d better see you there. If we stand before this book-stall any longer, the proprietor may think we’re going to buy something, and as the Parisians don’t seem a buying people, the delusion might be too much for his nerves. Where shall I take you, Miss Vane?”

“To the Rue l’Archevêque, if you please, behind the Madeleine. Do you know it?”

“Better than I know myself. Miss V. The Signora lived in that direction when I was a boy. But how is it that you are all alone in the streets at this time of night?”

“Papa had an appointment with two gentlemen, and he—”

“And he left you to walk home alone. Then he still—”

“Still what, Richard?”

The young man had stopped hesitatingly, and looking furtively at Eleanor.

“He still stays out late at night sometimes: a bad habit. Miss Vane. I was in hopes he would have been cured of it by this time; especially as there are no dens in the Palais Royal, now-a-days.”

“No dens in the Palais Royal,” cried Eleanor. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing, my dear Miss Nelly, except that Paris used to be a very wild and wicked place.”

“But it isn’t now?”

“Oh dear, no. Our modern Lutetia is a very paradise of innocent delights, whose citizens enjoy themselves virtuously under the sheltering dictatorialism of a paternal government. You don’t understand me—well, never mind, you are still the bright-faced child you were in the King’s Road, Chelsea, only taller and prettier—that’s all.”

Miss Vane had taken her companion’s arm, and they were walking away towards the Madeleine by this time; the young lady clinging to her new friend almost as confidingly as she had done to her father.

I don’t think the confidence was misplaced. This young man, with the loud voice and the somewhat reckless manner, was only assistant scene-painter and second violin player at a transpontine theatre. He was bound by no tie of relationship to the beautiful girl hanging upon his arm. Indeed, his acquaintance with Mr. Vane and his daughter had been of that accidental and desultory kind out of which the friendships of poor people generally arise.

The young man had lodged with his aunt in the same house that for nearly six years had sheltered the proud old spendthrift and his motherless child, and some of Eleanor’s earliest memories were of Signora Piccirillo and her nephew Richard Thornton. She had received her first lessons upon, the pianoforte from the kind Signora, whose Neapolitan husband had died years and years before, leaving her nothing but an Italian name, which looked very imposing at the top of the circulars which the music-mistress was wont to distribute amongst her pupils.

Richard Thornton, at eight-and-twenty, seemed a very elderly person in the eyes of the school-girl of fifteen. She could remember him years, and years, and years ago, as it seemed to her, sitting in his shirt sleeves through the long summer afternoons, under the shadow of the scarlet runners in the little garden at Chelsea, smoking dirty clay pipes and practising popular melodies upon his fiddle. Her father had thought him a nuisance, and had been lofty and reserved in his patronage of the young man; but to Eleanor, Dick had been the most delightful of playfellows, the wisest of counsellors, the most learned of instructors. Whatever Richard did. Miss Vane insisted upon also doing, humbly following the genius she admired, with little toddling steps, along the brilliant pathway his talents adorned.

I am afraid she had learned to play “God save the Queen,” and “Rory O’More,” upon Richard’s violin, before she had mastered Haydn’s “Surprise,” or “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman?” upon the Signora’s shabby old grand piano. She smeared her pinafores with poor Dick’s water-colours, and insisted upon producing replicas of the young scene-painter’s sketches, with all the houses lopsided, and the trunks of all the trees gouty. If Dick kept rabbits or silkworms, there was no greater happiness for Miss Vane than to accompany him to Covent Garden market in quest of cabbage or mulberry leaves. I do not mean that she ever deserted her father for the society of her friend; but there were times when Mr. Vane absented himself from his little girl; long days, in which the old man strolled about the streets of the West-end, on the look-out for the men he had known in his prosperity, with the hope of borrowing a pound or two, or a handful of loose silver, for the love of Auld Lang Syne; and longer nights, in which the old man disappeared from the Chelsea lodging for many dreary hours.

Then it was that Eleanor Vane was thrown into the companionship of the Signora and her nephew. Then it was that she read Richard’s books and periodicals, that she revelled in “Jack Sheppard,” and gloated over “Wagner, the Wehr Wolf.” Then it was that she played upon the young man’s violin, and copied his pictures, and destroyed his water-colours, and gorged his rabbits and silkworms, and loved and tormented, and admired him, after the manner of some beautiful younger sister, who had dropped from the clouds to be his companion.

This is how these two stood towards each other. They had not met for three years until to-night, and in the interim Miss Eleanor Vane had grown from a hoyden of twelve into a tall, slender young damsel of fifteen.

“You were so altered, Miss Vane,” Richard said, as they walked along the boulevard, “that I can’t help wondering how it was I knew you.”

“And you’re not altered a bit, Dick,” answered the young lady, “but don’t call me Miss Vane—it sounds as if you were laughing at me. Call me Nell, as you used to do, at Chelsea. Do you know, Dick, I contrived to go to Chelsea once last summer. It was against papa’s wish, you know, that I should let them find out where I came from at Brixton; because, you see, Chelsea, or at least the King’s Road, sounds vulgar, papa thought. Indeed, I believe he said he lived in Cadogan Place, when the Miss Bennetts asked