Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/390

382 friend’s random talk, as she wished him good night. All the light-heartedness of her careless childhood seemed to return to her in Richard Thornton’s society. Her childhood had not been an unhappy one, remember; for in all her father’s troubles, he had so contrived as to keep his head above water, somehow or other, and the influence of his over-sanguine spirit had kept Eleanor bright and hopeful under every temporary cloud in the domestic sky.

But the sense of her loneliness came back as she pushed open the door and entered the dark passage at the side of the shop. The butcher’s wife came out at the sound of her footstep, and gave her the key, with some kindly word of greeting which Eleanor scarcely understood.

She could only say, “Bon soir, madame,” in her school-girl French, as she dragged herself slowly up the little winding stair, thoroughly worn out, physically and mentally, by this time.

The little entresol seemed terribly close and stifling. She drew back the curtains, and looked out through the open window, but even the street itself seemed oppressively hot in the moonless, airless August night.

Eleanor found half a wax candle in a flat china candlestick, and a box of matches, set ready for her. She lighted this candle, and then flung off her bonnet and mantle, before she sat down near the window.

“I shall have a very short time to wait, if papa comes home at eleven o’clock,” she thought.

Alas! she remembered in her old childish experiences, that he had never come home at the promised hour. How often, ah, how often, she had waited, counting the weary hours upon the church clocks,—there was one which chimed the quarters; and trembling sometimes at those strange sounds which break the night silence of every house. How often she had “hoped against hope,” that he might, for this once, return at the time he had promised.

She took the candle in her hand and looked about for a book. She wanted to wile away the dreary interval which she knew must elapse before her father’s return. She found a novel of Paul Féval’s, in a dirty and tattered cover, on the little marble-topped writing-table. The leaves were crumpled, and smeared with stains and splotches of grease, for it was Mr. Vane’s habit to amuse himself with a work of fiction while he took his matutinal roll and coffee. He had taken to novel reading in his frivolous old age, and was as fond of a sentimental story as any school-girl,—as his daughter herself.

Miss Vane drew the lumbering little table to the open window, and sat down before it, with her candle close to her elbow, and the tattered book spread out before her. No breath of air flickered the flame of her candle, or ruffled the golden hair swept back from her brow.

The passers-by upon the opposite side of the street—they were few and far between by this time—looked up at the lighted window, and saw a pretty picture by the dim glimmer of that solitary candle. The picture of a girl, serene in her youth and innocence, bending over her book: her pale muslin dress and yellow hair faintly visible in the subdued light.

The rattle of wheels and the cries of coachmen sounded far off upon the Boulevard, and in the Rue de Rivoli, and only made the silence more palpable in the Rue de l’Archevêque. Now and then a carriage came into that quiet corner, and Eleanor Vane looked up from her book, breathless, eager, expectant, fondly hoping that her father might have come back to her in some hired vehicle; but the solitary carriage always rolled away, until the sound of its wheels mixed with the rattle of the distant wheels upon the Boulevards.

There were clocks in the distance that struck the quarters. How long those quarters seemed! Paul Féval was very interesting no doubt. There was an awful mystery in those greasy tattered pages; a ghastly mystery about two drowned young women, treacherously made away with, as it seemed, upon the shore of a dreary river overshadowed by willows. There were villains and rascals paramount throughout this delightful romance; and there was mystery and murder enough for half a dozen novels. But Eleanor’s thoughts wandered away from the page. The dreary river-bank, and the ghostly pollard-willows, the drowned young women, and the ubiquitous villain, all mingled themselves with her anxious thoughts about her father; and the trouble in the book seemed to become a part of the trouble in her own mind, adding its dismal weight to her anxieties.

There were splotchy engravings scattered here and there through the pages of Monsieur Féval’s romance, and Eleanor fancied by-and-by that the villain in these pictures was like the sulky stranger who had followed her father and the Frenchman away towards the Barrière Saint Antoine.

She fancied this, although she had scarcely seen that silent stranger’s face. He had kept it, as it seemed, purposely averted, and she had only caught one glimpse of the restless black eyes under the shadow of his hat, and the thick moustache that shrouded his mouth. There is always something mysterious and unpleasant in the idea of anything that has been hidden from us, however trivial and insignificant that thing may be. Eleanor Vane, growing more and more nervous as the slow hours crept away, began to worry herself with the vivid recollection of that one brief glimpse in which she had seen the silent stranger’s face.

“He cannot have a good countenance,” she thought, “or the recollection of it would not make me so uncomfortable. How rude he was, too! I did not much like the Frenchman, but at least he was polite. The other man was very disagreeable. I hope he is not a friend of papa’s.” And then she returned to the drowned young women, and the water-side, and the willows; trying in vain to bury herself in the romance, and not to listen so eagerly for the striking of the quarters. Sometimes she thought, “Before I turn over to the next page, papa will be home,” or, “Before I can finish this chapter I shall hear his step upon the stairs.”

Breathless though the night was, there were many sounds that disturbed and mocked this