Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/444

436 almost unnaturally calm. She had sat all the evening apart near the window, and Richard had tried in vain to beguile her attention even for a moment. She kept silence, brooding upon the scrap of paper which lay in her bosom.

This morning she sat in a listless attitude, with her head resting on her hand. She took no heed of the Signora’s busy movements from room to room. She made no effort to give her old friend any assistance in all the little household arrangements which took so long to complete, and when at last the music-mistress brought her needle-work to the window, and sat down opposite the invalid, Eleanor looked up at her with a dull weary gaze that struck despair to the good creature’s heart.

“Nelly, my dear,” the Signora said, briskly, “I want to have a little serious conversation with you.”

“About what, dear Signora?”

“About the future, my love.”

“The future!”

Eleanor Vane uttered the word almost as if it had been meaningless to her.

“Yes, my dear. You see even I can talk hopefully of the future, though I am an old woman; but you, who are only fifteen, have a long life before you, and it is time you began to look forward to it.”

“I do look forward,” Eleanor said, with a gloomy expression upon her face. “I do look forward to the future; and to meeting that man, the man who caused my father’s death. How am I to find him, Signora? Help me in that. You have been kind to me in everything else. Only help me to do that and I will love you better than ever I have loved you yet.”

The Signora shook her head. She was a light-hearted, energetic creature, who had borne very heavy burdens through a long life; but the burdens had not been able to crush her. Perhaps her unselfishness had upheld her throughout all her trials. She had thought and cared so much for other people, that she had had little time left for thinking of herself.

“My dear Eleanor,” she said, gravely, “this will never do. You must not be influenced by that fatal letter. Your poor father had no right to lay the responsibility of his own act upon another man. If he chose to stake this unfortunate money upon the hazard of a pack of cards, and lost it, he had no right to charge this man with the consequences of his own folly.”

“But the man cheated him!”

“As your father thought. People are very apt to fancy themselves cheated when they lose money.”

“Papa would never have written so positively, if he had not known that the man cheated him. Besides, Richard says they were heard at high words; that was no doubt when my poor dear father accused this wretch of being a cheat. He and his companion were wicked, scheming men, who had good reason to hide their names. They were pitiless wretches, who had no compassion upon the poor old man who trusted them and believed in their honour. Are you going to defend them, Signora Picirillo?”

“Defend them, Eleanor? no: they were bad men, I have no doubt. But, my darling child, you must not begin life with hatred and vengeance in your heart.”

“Not hate the man who caused my father’s death?” cried Eleanor Vane. “Do you think I shall ever cease to hate him, Signora? Do you think that I shall ever forget to pray that the day may come when he and I will stand face to face, and that he may be as helpless and as dependent upon my mercy as my father was on his? Heaven help him on that day! But I don’t want to talk of this, Signora: what is the use of talking? I may be an old woman, perhaps, before I meet this man, but surely, surely I shall meet him sooner or later. If I only knew his name—if I only knew his name, I think I could trace him from one end of the earth to the other. Robert Lan—Lan—what?”

Her head sank forward on her breast, and her eyes fixed themselves dreamily on the sunlit street below the open window. The French poodle, Fido, lay at her feet, and lifted up his head every now and then to lick her hand. The animal had missed his master, and had wandered about the little rooms, sniffing on the thresholds of closed doors, and moaning dismally for several days after Mr. Vane’s disappearance.

The Signora sighed as she watched Eleanor. What was she to do with this girl, who had taken a horrible vendetta upon herself at fifteen years of age, and who seemed as gloomily absorbed in her scheme of vengeance as any Corsican chieftain?

“My dear,” the music-mistress said presently, with rather a sharp accent, “do you know that Richard and I will be compelled to leave Paris to-morrow?”

“Leave Paris to-morrow, Signora!”

“Yes. The Phœnix opens early in October, and our Dick will have all the scenes to paint for the new piece. Besides, there are my pupils; you know, my love, they cannot be kept together for ever unless I go back to them.”

Eleanor Vane looked up with almost a bewildered expression, as if she had been trying to comprehend all that Signora Picirillo had said; then suddenly a light seemed to dawn upon her, and she rose from her chair and flung herself upon a carpeted hassock at the feet of her friend.

“Dear Signora,” she said, clasping the music-mistress’s hand in both her own, “how wicked and ungrateful I have been all this time! I forget everything but myself and my own trouble. You came over to Paris on my account. You told me so when I was ill, but I had forgotten, I had forgotten; and Richard has stopped in Paris because of me. Oh, what can I do to repay you both, what can I do?”

Eleanor hid her face upon the Signora’s lap, and wept silently. Those tears did her good; they beguiled her for a little while, at least, from the one absorbing thought of her father’s melancholy fate.

Signora Picirillo tenderly smoothed the soft ripples of auburn hair lying on her lap.

“My dear Eleanor, shall I tell you what you can do to make us both very happy, and to repay