WAITING.
Miss Vane walked very slowly homeward through the hot, breathless
summer night. She was too sorrowful, too much depressed by the sudden
disappointment which had fallen like a dark shadow upon the close
of the day that had begun so brightly, to be embarrassed by any
uncomfortable sense of her loneliness in the crowded thoroughfare.
No one molested or assailed her—she walked serene in her youth and
innocence; though the full radiance of the lamplight rarely fell upon
her face without some passing glance of admiration resting there also.
She never once thought that her father had done wrong in leaving her to
walk alone through that crowded Parisian street. In the unselfishness
of her loving nature she scarcely remembered her disappointment about
the theatre: not even when she passed the brilliantly lighted edifice,
and looked, a little wistfully perhaps, at the crowd upon the threshold.
She was uneasy and unhappy about her father, because in all her Chelsea
experiences she remembered evil to have resulted from his going out
late at night; vague and mysterious trouble, the nature of which he
had never revealed to her, but whose effects had haunted him and
depressed him for many dreary days. He had been sometimes—indeed, very
often—poorer after a late absence from his shabby Chelsea lodging; he
had been now and then richer; but he had always been alike remorseful
and miserable after those occasional nights of dissipation.
His daughter was sorrowful therefore at parting with him. She knew
that, in spite of his declaration that he would be home at eleven,
it would be between one and two in the morning when he returned;
not tipsy—no, thank Heaven, he was no drunkard—but with a nervous,
wretched, half-demented manner, which was perhaps more sad to see than
any ordinary intoxication.
“I was in hopes papa would always stay at home with me now that I am
grown up,” the young lady thought, very sadly. “When I was little, of
course it was different; I couldn’t amuse him. Though we were very
happy sometimes then; and I could play _écarté_, or cribbage, or whist
with two dummies. If I can get on very well with my education at Madame
Marly’s, and then get a situation as morning governess for a large
salary—morning governesses do get high salaries sometimes—how happy
papa and I might be!”
Her spirits revived under the influence of cheering thoughts each
as these. I have said before that it was scarcely possible for her
to be long unhappy. Her step grew lighter and faster as she walked
homeward. The glory of the gaslights brightened with the brightening
of her hopes. She began to linger now and then before some of the most
attractive of the shops, with almost the same intense rapture and
delight that she had felt in the morning.
She was standing before a book-stall, or rather an open shop, reading
the titles of the paper-covered romances, with the full glare of the
shadeless gaslights on her face, when she was startled by a loud,
hearty English voice, which exclaimed without one murmur of warning or
preparation,—
“Don’t tell me that this tall young woman with the golden curls is Miss
Eleanor Vandeleur Vane, of Regent’s Gardens, King’s Road, Chelsea,
London, Middlesex. Please don’t tell me anything of the kind, for I
can’t possibly believe anybody but Jack-and-the-beanstalk could have
grown at such a rate.”
Eleanor Vane turned round to greet this noisy gentleman.
“Oh, Dick,” she cried, putting both her hands into the broad palm held
out before her, “is it really you? Who would have thought of seeing you
in Paris?”
“Or you, Miss Vane? We heard you were at school at Brixton.”
“Yes, Dick,” the young lady answered, “but I have come home now. Papa
lives here, you know, and I am going to a finishing school in the Bois
de Boulogne, and then I am going to be a morning governess, and live
with papa always.”
“You are a great deal too pretty for a governess,” said the young man,
looking admiringly at the bright face lifted up to him; “your mistress
would snub you. Miss Vane, you’d better——”
“What, Dick?”
“Try our shop.”
“What, be a scene-painter, Dick?” cried Eleanor, laughing, “It would be
funny for a woman to be a scene-painter.”
“Of course, Miss Vane. But nobody talked of scene-painting. You don’t
suppose I’d ask you to stand on the top of a ladder to put in skies and
backgrounds, do you? There are other occupations at the Royal Waterloo
Phœnix besides scene-painting. But I don’t want to talk to you about
that: I know how savage your poor old dad used to be when we talked of
the Phœnix. What do you think I am over here for?”
“What, Richard?”
“Why, they’re doing a great drama in eight acts and thirty-two tableaux
at the Porte St. Martin; Raoul l’Empoisonneur it’s called, Ralph the
Poisoner; and I’m over here to pick up the music, sketch the scenery
and effects, and translate the play. Something like versatility there,
I think, for five-and-thirty shillings a week.”
“Dear Richard, you were always so clever.”
“To be sure; it runs in the family.”
“And the Signora, she is well, I hope?”
“Pretty well; the teaching goes on _tant bon que mauvais_, as our
friends over here say. The Clementi is a little thinner in tone than
when you heard it last, and a little farther off concert pitch; but as
most of my aunt’s pupils sing flat, that’s rather an advantage than
otherwise. But where are you going, Miss Vane? because wherever it
is, I’d better see you there. If we stand before this book-stall any
longer, the proprietor may think we’re going to buy something, and as
the Parisians don’t seem a buying people, the delusion might be too
much for his nerves. Where shall I take you, Miss Vane?”
“To the Rue de l’Archevêque, if you please, behind the Madeleine. Do
you know it?”
“Better than I know myself, Miss V. The Signora lived in that direction
when I was a boy. But how is it that you are all alone in the streets
at this time of night?”
“Papa had an appointment with two gentlemen, and he——”
“And he left you to walk home alone. Then he still——”
“Still what, Richard?”
The young man had stopped hesitatingly, and looked furtively at Eleanor.
“He still stays out late at night sometimes: a bad habit, Miss Vane. I
was in hopes he would have been cured of it by this time; especially
as there are no dens in the Palais Royal now-a-days; to the honour and
glory of Napoleon the Third be it spoken.”
“No dens in the Palais Royal,” cried Eleanor. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, my dear Miss Nelly, except that Paris used to be a very wild
and wicked place.”
“But it isn’t now?”
“Oh dear, no. Our modern Lutetia is a very paradise of innocent
delights, whose citizens enjoy themselves virtuously under the
sheltering dictatorialism of a paternal government. You don’t
understand me—well, never mind, you are still the bright-faced child
you were in the King’s Road, Chelsea, only taller and prettier—that’s
all.”
Miss Vane had taken her companion’s arm, and they were walking away
towards the Madeleine by this time; the young lady clinging to her new
friend almost as confidingly as she had done to her father.
I don’t think the confidence was misplaced. This young man, with
the loud voice and the somewhat reckless manner, was only assistant
scene-painter and second violin-player at a transpontine theatre. He
was bound by no tie of relationship to the beautiful girl hanging
upon his arm. Indeed, his acquaintance with Mr. Vane and his daughter
had been of that accidental and desultory kind out of which the
friendships of poor people generally arise.
The young man had lodged with his aunt in the same house that for
nearly six years had sheltered the proud old spendthrift and his
motherless child, and some of Eleanor’s earliest memories were of
Signora Picirillo and her nephew Richard Thornton. She had received
her first lessons upon the pianoforte from the kind Signora, whose
Neapolitan husband had died years and years before, leaving her nothing
but an Italian name, which looked very imposing at the top of the
circulars which the music-mistress was wont to distribute amongst her
pupils.
Richard Thornton, at eight-and-twenty, seemed a very elderly person in
the eyes of the school-girl of fifteen. She could remember him years,
and years, and years ago, as it seemed to her, sitting in his shirt
sleeves through the long summer afternoons, under the shadow of the
scarlet-runners in the little garden at Chelsea, smoking dirty clay
pipes and practising popular melodies upon his fiddle. Her father
had thought him a nuisance, and had been lofty and reserved in his
patronage of the young man; but to Eleanor, Dick had been the most
delightful of playfellows, the wisest of counsellors, the most learned
of instructors. Whatever Richard did, Miss Vane insisted upon also
doing, humbly following the genius she admired, with little toddling
steps, along the brilliant pathway his talents adorned.
I am afraid she had learned to play “God save the Queen,” and “Rory
O’More,” upon Richard’s violin before she had mastered Haydn’s
“Surprise,” or “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman?” upon the Signora’s
shabby old grand piano. She smeared her pinafores with poor Dick’s
water-colours, and insisted upon producing replicas of the young
scene-painter’s sketches, with all the houses lop-sided, and the trunks
of all the trees gouty. If Dick kept rabbits or silkworms, there was no
greater happiness for Miss Vane than to accompany him to Covent Garden
Market in quest of cabbage or mulberry leaves. I do not mean that she
ever deserted her father for the society of her friend; but there were
times when Mr. Vane absented himself from his little girl; long days,
in which the old man strolled about the streets of the West-End, on the
look-out for the men he had known in his prosperity, with the hope of
borrowing a pound or two, or a handful of loose silver, for the love
of Auld Lang Syne; and longer nights, in which he disappeared from the
Chelsea lodging for many dreary hours.
Then it was that Eleanor Vane was thrown into the companionship of
the Signora and her nephew. Then it was that she read Richard’s books
and periodicals, that she revelled in “Jack Sheppard,” and gloated
over “Wagner, the Wehr Wolf.” Then it was that she played upon the
young man’s violin, and copied his pictures, and destroyed his
water-colours, and gorged his rabbits and silkworms, and loved, and
tormented, and admired him, after the manner of some beautiful younger
sister, who had dropped from the clouds to be his companion.
This is how these two stood towards each other. They had not met for
three years until to-night; and in the interim Miss Eleanor Vane had
grown from a hoyden of twelve into a tall, slender damsel of fifteen.
“You are so altered, Miss Vane,” Richard said, as they walked along the
boulevard, “that I can’t help wondering how it was I knew you.”
“And you’re not altered a bit, Dick,” answered the young lady; “but
don’t call me Miss Vane—it sounds as if you were laughing at me. Call
me Nell, as you used to do, at Chelsea. Do you know, Dick, I contrived
to go to Chelsea once last summer. It was against papa’s wish, you
know, that I should let them find out where I came from at Brixton;
because, you see, Chelsea, or at least the King’s Road, sounds vulgar,
papa thought. Indeed, I believe he said he lived in Cadogan Place,
when the Miss Bennetts asked him the question. He explained it to me
afterwards, you know, poor dear; and it wasn’t exactly a story, for he
had lodged there for a fortnight once, just after his marriage with
mamma, and when he was beginning to get poor. So I was obliged to
manage so cleverly to get to Regent’s Gardens, Dick; and when I did get
there you were gone, and the Signora’s rooms were to let, and there was
a nasty cross old woman in our lodgings, and the scarlet-runners in the
garden were so neglected, and I saw your rabbit-hutches, all broken and
forgotten in the corner by the dust-hole, but the rabbits were gone.
The dear old place seemed so changed, Dick, though Mr. and Mrs. Migson
were very kind, and very pleased to see me, but they couldn’t tell me
where you and the Signora were living.”
“No, we moved two or three times after leaving Regent’s Gardens.
You see we’re obliged to study the pupils, Nell, rather than our
own convenience. Chelsea was a long way from the Waterloo Phœnix,
in spite of the short cuts; but wherever the Signora’s pupils are
thickest, we’re obliged to pitch our tents. They’re thickest about
Tottenham-court Road and Euston Square way now; so we’re living in the
Pilasters, Dudley Street.”
“The Pilasters! That sounds quite grand, Dick.”
“Yes, doesn’t it? _Magnifique et pas cher._ We’ve a chimney-sweep next
door but one, and no end of mangles. The Pilasters would be very nice,
if we’d two sides of the way, but unfortunately we haven’t; the other
side’s stables. It isn’t my prejudices make me object to that; but the
grooms make such an abominable noise cleaning down their horses, and I
wake every morning out of a dream in which it’s Boxing-night, and my
transformation scene is getting the goose.”
The young man laughed cheerily, and guided his companion across the
road to the other side of the boulevard. It was past ten o’clock when
they reached the corner of the Rue de l’Archevêque, and the butcher’s
shop was closed.
Eleanor knew that she had only to push open the little side door, and
that she would find the key of her father’s rooms in the custody of
the butcher’s wife. She was very tired, almost ready to drop, poor
girl, for she had walked a long way since alighting at the Palais Royal
with her father; but she was almost sorry that she had reached her
destination. The sense of her loneliness returned, now that she was to
part with her old friend.
“Thank you very much for seeing me home, Dick,” she said, shaking hands
with the young scene-painter. “It was very selfish of me to bring you
so far out of your way.”
“Selfish of you! Why, you don’t suppose I’d let you prowl about the
streets by yourself, Nell?”
Eleanor’s face flushed as her friend said this: there was a reproach to
her father implied in the speech.
“It was my own fault that I was so late,” she said. “It was only just
nine when papa left me; but I loitered a little, looking at the shops.
I shall see you again, Dick, I hope. But of course I shall, for you’ll
come and see papa, won’t you? How long do you stay in Paris?”
“About a week, I suppose. I’ve a week’s leave of absence, and double
salary, besides my expenses. They know the value of a clever man at the
Phœnix, Miss Vane.”
“And where are you staying, Dick?”
“At the Hôtel des Deux Mondes, near the markets. I’ve an apartment
in convenient proximity to the sky, if I want to study atmospheric
effects. And so you live here, Nell?”
“Yes, those are our windows.”
Eleanor pointed to the open sashes of the entresol: the fluffy worsted
curtains were drawn, but the windows were wide open.
“And you expect your papa home—”
“At eleven o’clock at the latest,” she said.
Richard Thornton sighed. He remembered Mr. Vane’s habits, and he
remembered that the little girl in pinafores had been wont to keep
abnormal hours in her long watches for her father’s coming. He had
often found her, on his return from the transpontine theatre at one or
two o’clock, with the door of the little sitting-room ajar, waiting
patiently for the old man’s coming.
“You won’t sit up for your papa, Nell,” he said, as he shook hands with
her.
“Oh, no, papa told me not to sit up.”
“Good night, then. You look tired, Nell. I’ll call to-morrow, and I’ll
take you to the theatre, if your papa will let you go, and you shall
see ‘Raoul l’Empoisonneur.’ Such a scene, Nell, in the seventh act. The
stage divided into eight compartments, with eight different actions
going on simultaneously, and five murders before the fall of the
curtain. It’s a great piece, and ought to make Spavin and Cromshaw’s
fortune.”
“And yours, Dick.”
“Oh, yes. Cromshaw will shake me by the hand in that delightful,
gentlemanly manner of his: and Spavin—why Spavin will give me a
five-pound note for my adaptation of ‘Raoul,’ and tell every member of
the company, in confidence, that all the great scenes have been written
in by him, and that the piece was utter rubbish till he reconstructed
it.”
“Poor Richard!”
“Yes, Nell, poorer than the gentleman who wrote the almanack, I dare
say. But never mind, Nell. I don’t think the game of life pays for
much expenditure in the way of illumination. I think the wisest people
are those who take existence easily. Spavin’s wealth can’t give him
anything better than diamond studs and a phaeton. The virtuous peasant,
Nell, who can slap his chest, and defy his enemies to pick a hole in
his green-baize jerkin, gets the best of it in the long run, I dare
say.”
“But I wish you were rich, Dick, for the Signora’s sake,” Eleanor said,
gently.
“So do I, Nelly. I wish I was the lessee of the Phœnix, and I’d bring
you out as Juliet, with new palace arches for the ballroom, and a
lime-light in the balcony scene. But, good night, my dear; I mustn’t
keep you standing here like this, though parting is such sweet sorrow,
that I really shouldn’t have the heart to go away to-night if I didn’t
mean to call to-morrow. That line’s rather longer than the original,
Nell, isn’t it?”
Eleanor Vane laughed heartily at her old 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 contrived 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 she felt very desolate and lonely 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 very 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 while 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 auburn 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 villains, 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 anxious watcher. Sometimes the door below shook—as if
by some mysterious agency, there being no wind—and Eleanor fancied that
her father’s hand was on the latch. Sometimes the stairs creaked, and
she started from her chair, eager to run and receive him, and firmly
believing that he was stealing stealthily up to his apartments, anxious
not to disturb the sleeping inmates of the house. She had known his
cautious footfall sound exactly thus in her old midnight watches.
But all these sounds were only miserable delusions. Quarter after
quarter, each quarter longer than the last, hour after hour struck
from the clocks distant and near. The rattling of the wheels upon the
boulevards had died gradually away, and at last had ceased altogether.
It was long past four, and Eleanor had pushed aside her book. It was
daylight,—grey, cold, morning, chill and dismal after the oppressive
August night, and she stood now in the window watching the empty street.
But still the quarters chimed from the distant clocks: those distant
chimes had become terribly distinct now in the early morning stillness.
But the silence was not of long duration. The rumble of waggon wheels
sounded far away in the Rue St. Honoré. The rush and clatter of a
detachment or cavalry clashed upon the asphalte of the Place de la
Concorde. The early sound of a horn called out some wretched recruits
to perform their morning exercise in the courtyards of the Louvre. The
cheerful voices of workpeople echoed in the streets; dogs were barking,
birds singing, the yellow sun mounting in a cloudless heaven.
But there were no signs of the coming of George Vane with the morning
sunlight; and as the day grew older and brighter, the anxious face of
the pale watcher at the open window only grew paler and more anxious.