Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/501

25, 1863.] you know, though he is only a professional man, and he lives at a beautiful place four miles from here, called Tolldale Priory. I used to ask him questions about papa and mamma, but he would never tell me anything. So now I never speak to him about them.”

She sighed as she finished speaking, and was silent for some few minutes; but she very quickly recovered her spirits and conducted Eleanor to a pretty rustic chamber with a lattice window looking on to the lawn.

“Mrs. Darrell’s man is gone to fetch your luggage,” Miss Mason said, “so you must have my brushes and combs, please, for your hair, and then we’ll go down to tea.”

She led Eleanor into the adjoining apartment, where the dressing-table was littered with all manner of womanly frivolities, and here Miss Vane re-arranged her luxuriant golden brown hair, which no longer was allowed to fall about her shoulders in rippling curls, but was drawn simply away from her forehead, and rolled in a knot at the back of her head. She was a woman now, and had begun the battle of life.

A pony-carriage drove up to the gate while Eleanor was standing at the glass by the open window, and Mrs. Darrell got out and walked across the lawn towards the house.

She was a tall woman, unusually tall for a woman, and she was dressed in black silk, which hung about her angular limbs in heavy, lustreless folds. Eleanor could see that her face was pale, and her eyes black and flashing.

The two girls went down stairs hand-in-hand. Tea was prepared in the dining-room, a long wainscoted apartment older than the rest of the house, and rather gloomy-looking. Three narrow windows upon one side of this room looked towards the shrubbery and grove at the back of the house, and the trunks of the trees looked gaunt and black in the spring twilight. A fire was burning upon the low hearth, and a maid-servant was lighting a lamp in the centre of the table as the two girls went in.

Mrs. Darrell welcomed her dependant very politely; but there was a harshness and a stiffness in her politeness which reminded Eleanor of her half-sister, Mrs. Bannister. The two women seemed to belong to the same school, Miss Vane thought.

The lamplight shone full upon Mrs. Darrell’s face, and Eleanor could see now that the face was a handsome one, though faded and careworn. The widow’s hair was gray, but her eyes retained the flashing brightness of youth. They were very dark and lustrous, but their expression was scarcely pleasant. There was too much of the hawk or eagle in their penetrating glance.

But Laura Mason did not seem at all afraid of her protectress.

“Miss Vincent and I are good friends already, Mrs. Darrell,” she said, gaily, “and we shall be as happy together as the day is long, I hope.”

“And I hope Miss Vincent will teach you industrious habits, Laura,” Mrs. Darrell answered, gravely.

Miss Mason made a grimace with her pretty red under lip.

Eleanor took the seat indicated to her, a seat at the end of the dining-table, and exactly opposite to Mrs. Darrell, who sat with her back to the fire-place.

Sitting here, Eleanor could scarcely fail to observe an oil painting—the only picture in the room—which hung over the mantelpiece. It was the portrait of a young man, with dark hair clustering about a handsome forehead, regular features, a pale complexion, and black eyes. The face was very handsome, very aristocratic, but there was a want of youthfulness, of the fresh, eager spirit of boyhood, in its expression. A look of listlessness and hauteur hung like a cloud over the almost faultless features.

Mrs. Darrell watched Eleanor’s eyes as the girl looked at this picture.

“You are looking at my son, Miss Vincent,” she said; “but perhaps it is scarcely necessary to tell you so. People say there is a strong likeness between us.”

There was indeed a very striking resemblance between the faded face below and the pictured face above. But it seemed to Eleanor Vane as if the mother’s face, faded and careworn though it was, was almost the younger of the two. The listless indifference, the utter lack of energy in the lad’s countenance, was so much the more striking when contrasted with the youthfulness of the features.

“Yes,” exclaimed Laura Mason, “that is Mrs. Darrell’s only son, Launcelot Darrell. Isn’t that a romantic name, Miss Vincent?”

Eleanor started. This Launcelot Darrell was the heir presumptive to the De Crespigny estate. How often she had heard the young man’s name! It was he, then, who would have stood between her father and fortune, had that dear father lived, or whose claim of kindred would, perhaps, have had to make way for the more sacred right of friendship.

And this young man’s portrait was hanging in the room where she sat. He lived in the house, perhaps. Where should he live except in his mother’s house?

But Eleanor’s mind was soon relieved upon this point, for Laura Mason, in the pauses of the business of the tea-table, talked a good deal about the original of the portrait.

“Don’t you think him handsome, Miss Vincent?” she asked, without waiting for an answer. “But of course you do; everybody thinks him handsome; and then Mrs. Darrell says he’s so elegant, so tall, so aristocratic. He is to have Woodlands by-and-by, and all Mr. de Crespigny’s money. But of course you don’t know Woodlands or Mr. de Crespigny. How should you, when you’ve never been in Berkshire before? And he—not Mr. Crespigny, he’s a nasty, fidgety, hypochon—what’s it’sits [sic] name—old man?—but Launcelot Darrell is so accomplished. He’s an artist, you know, and all the water-coloured sketches in the drawing-room and the breakfast-parlour are his; and he plays and sings, and he dances exquisitely, and he rides and plays cricket, and he’s a—what you may call it—a crack shot; and, in short, he’s an Admirable Crichton. You musn’tmustn’t [sic] fancy I’m in love with him, you know, Miss Vincent,” the