Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/472

464 pride to the worthy citizens of the Pilasters. Could all Bloomsbury, from Dudley Street to the Squares, produce sunnier golden hair or brighter gray eyes than were to be seen under the shadow of the dilapidated colonnade when Eleanor Vane went by?

In this atmosphere of love and admiration, the girl had been very happy. She had one of those natures in which there lies a wondrous power of assimilation with the manners and habits of others. She was never out of place; she was never in the way. She was not ambitious. Her sunny temperament was the centre of perpetual peace and happiness, only to be disturbed by very terrible thunder-claps of grief and trouble. She had been very happy with the Signora; and to-day, when she looked round the little sitting-room, her eyes resting sadly now on the old piano, now on a shelf of tattered books, romances dear to Richard and herself, and not too well treated by either; now on the young man’s flaming magnum opus, the picture she had loved to criticise and abuse in mischievous enjoyment of the painter’s anguish; now as she looked at these things, and remembered how soon she must go away from them, the slow tears trickled down her cheeks, and she stood hopeless, despondent on the gloomy threshold of her new life.

She had found the familiar rooms empty upon her return from Bayswater, for the Signora was away teaching beyond the regions of the New Road, and Richard was hard at work at the Phœnix, where there were always new pieces to be produced and new scenes to be painted. Eleanor had the little sitting-room all to herself; she took off her bonnet and sat down upon the old-fashioned chintz-covered sofa. She buried her head in the cushions and tried to think.

The prospect of a new existence, which would have been delightful to most girls of her age, was utterly distasteful to her. Her nature was adhesive; she would have gone to the furthest end of the world with her father if he had lived, or with Richard and the Signora, whom she loved only less than she had loved him. But to sever every tie, and go out alone into the world with nothing between her and desolation, was unspeakably terrible to this affectionate, impulsive girl.

If it had been simply a question of her own advantage, if by the sacrifice of her own advancement, her every prospect in life, she might have stayed with the friends she loved, she would not have hesitated for a moment. But it was not so. Mrs. Bannister had clearly told her that she was a burden upon these generous people who had sheltered and succoured her in her hour of misery. The cruel word pauperism had been flung in her teeth, and with a racking brain this poor girl set herself to calculate how much her maintenance cost her friends, and how much she was able to contribute out of her own pitiful earnings.

Alas! the balance told against her when the sum was done. Her earnings were very, very small as yet; not because her talent was unappreciated, but because her pupils were poor, and a music-mistress, whose address was Bloomsbury Pilasters, could scarcely demand high payment for her services, or hope to obtain a very aristocratic connection.

No, Mrs. Bannister—stern, uncompromising, and disagreeable as the truth itself—had no doubt been right. Her duty lay before her, plainly indicated by that unpleasant monitor. She was bound to leave these dear friends, and to go out into the world to fight a lonely battle for herself.

“I may be able to do something for them,” she thought; and this thought was the only gleam of light which illumined the darkness of her sorrow. “I may be able to save money enough to buy the Signora a black silk dress, and Richard a meerschaum. I should so like to buy Dick a meerschaum; I know the one he’d like—a bull-dog’s head, with a silver collar round the neck. We looked at it one night at a shop in Holborn.”

She rose from the sofa at last with an aching heart and troubled brain, when the early shadows of the spring twilight were gathering in the room. She made up the fire and swept the hearth, and arranged the tea-things on the comfortable round table, and then sat down on a low stool by the fender to toast great rounds of bread which would be as nothing in comparison to Richard’s all-devouring capacity after a hard day’s work in the scene-room at the Phœnix. How pleasant it was to perform all these little familiar offices of love and duty. How sorrowfully she looked back to her simple, free-and-easy life, now that she was to go amongst strangers who would exact all manner of ceremonious observances from her. The Bohemianism of her existence had been its greatest charm, and this poor benighted girl trembled at the prospect of a life in which she would have to go through all those terrible performances which she had read of, fearfully and wonderingly, in certain erudite essays upon Etiquette, but which had never yet come within the range of her experiences.

“It is my duty to go away from them,” she kept saying to herself; “it is my duty to go away.”

She had schooled herself in this difficult duty by the time her friends came home, and she told them very quietly that she had seen Mrs. Bannister, and had agreed to accept her patronage and services.

“I am going to be a sort of companion or musical governess—I scarcely know which—to a young lady at a country house called Hazlewood,” she said. “Don’t think I am not sorry to leave you, dear Signora, but Hortensia says it is better that I should do so.”

“And don’t think that I am not sorry to lose you, Nelly, when I tell you that I think your sister is right,” the Signora answered gently, as she kissed her protégée.

Perhaps Eleanor was a little disappointed at this reply. She little dreamed how often Eliza Picirillo had struggled against the selfishness of her affection, before she had grown thus resigned to this parting.

Mr. Richard Thornton groaned aloud.

“I shall go out and pull down a couple of the Pilasters, and bury myself under them, à la Sampson,” he said piteously. “What is to become of us without you, Eleanora? Who will come over