Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/418

410 “No. How could I eat when I was so wretched about papa?”

Richard shook his head reproachfully.

“My darling Nell!” he said, “you promised me just now that you’d be a good girl, and trust in Providence. I shall take you somewhere and give you some supper, and then you must promise me to go home and get a good night’s rest.”

“I will do whatever you tell me, Richard,” Eleanor answered, submissively, “but let me go home first, please, and see if papa has come back.”

The scene-painter did not for a few moments reply to this request, but he answered presently in an abstracted tone.

“You shall do what you like, Nell.”

He told the coachman to drive to the Rue de l’Archevêque, but he would not let Eleanor alight from the vehicle when they reached the corner of the street and the little butcher’s shop, eager as she was to spring out and run into the house.

“Stay where you are, Nell,” he said, authoritatively. “I will make all inquiries.”

Eleanor obeyed him. She was enfeebled and exhausted by a weary night of watching, a long day of agitation and anxiety, and she was too weak to oppose her old friend. She looked hopelessly up at the open windows on the entresol. They were exactly as she had left them four or five hours ago. No glimmer of light gave friendly token that the rooms were occupied.

Richard Thornton talked to the butcher’s wife for a long time, as it seemed to Eleanor, but he had very little to tell her when he came back to the carriage. Mr. Vane had not returned: that was all he said.

He took his companion to a café near the Madeleine, where he insisted upon her taking a large cup of coffee and a roll. It was all he could persuade her to take, and she begged to be allowed to sit at one of the tables outside the café.

She might see her father go by, she said, on his way to the Rue de l’Archevêque.

The two friends sat at a little iron table rather apart from the groups of animated loungers sitting at other tables drinking coffee and lemonade. But George Mowbray Vandeleur Vane did not pass that way throughout the half hour during which Eleanor lingered over her cup of coffee.

It was past ten o’clock when Richard Thornton bade her good night at the threshold of the little door beside the butcher’s shop.

“You must promise me not to sit up to-night, Nelly,” he said, as he shook hands with her.

“Yes, Richard.”

“And mind you keep your promise this time. I will come and see you early to-morrow. God bless you my dear, and good night.”

He pressed her hand tenderly. When she had closed the door behind her, he crossed the narrow street, and waited upon the other side of the way until he saw a light in one of the entresol windows. He watched while Eleanor came to this window and drew a dark curtain across it, and then he walked slowly away.

“God bless her, poor child,” he murmured, in a low, compassionate voice, “poor lonely child!”

The grave thoughtfulness of his expression never changed as he walked homewards to the Hôtel des Deux Mondes. Late as it was when he reached his chamber on the fifth storey, he seated himself at the table, and pushing aside his clay pipe and tobacco-pouch, his water-colours and brushes, his broken palettes and scraps of Bristol board, and all the litter of his day’s work, he took a few sheets of foreign letter paper and a tiny bottle of ink from a shabby leather desk, and began to write.

He wrote two letters, both rather long, and folded, sealed, and addressed them.

One was directed to Mrs. Bannister, Hyde Park Gardens, Bayswater; the other to Signora Picirillo, the Pilasters, Dudley Street, Northumberland Square.

Richard Thornton put both these letters in his pocket and went out to post them.

“I think I have acted for the best,” he muttered, as he went back to the hotel near the market-place; “I can do nothing more until to-morrow.”

did not come home. Eleanor kept the promise made to her faithful friend, and tried to sleep. She flung herself, dressed as she was, upon the little bed near the curtained alcove. She would thus be ready to run to her father, whenever he came in, she thought, to welcome and minister to him. She was thoroughly worn out, and she slept; a wretched slumber, broken by nightmares and horrible dreams, in which she saw her father assailed by all kinds of dangers, a prey to every manner of misfortune and vicissitude. Once she saw him standing on a horrible rock, menaced by a swiftly advancing tide, while she was in a boat only a few paces from him, as it seemed, doing battle with the black waves, and striving with all her might to reach and rescue him, but never able to do so.

In another dream he was wandering upon the crumbling verge of a precipice—he seemed a white haired, feeble, tottering old man in this vision—and again she was near him, but unable to give him warning of his danger, though a word would have done so. The agony of her endeavour to utter the one cry which would have called that idolised father from his death, awoke her.

But she had other dreams, dreams of quite a different character, in which her father was restored to her, rich and prosperous, and he and she were laughing merrily at all the foolish tortures she had inflicted upon herself; and other dreams again, which seemed so real that she fancied she must be awake; dreams in which she heard the welcome footsteps upon the stair, the opening of the door, and her father’s voice in the next room calling to her.

These dreams were the worst of all. It was terrible to awake after many such delusions and find she had been again deluded. It was cruel to awake to the full sense of her loneliness, while the sound of the voice she had heard in her dream still lingered in her ears.

The dark hours of the short summer night seemed interminable to her in this wretched, bewildered, half-sleeping, half-waking state; far longer than they had appeared when she sat up