CHAPTER XIV.

THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN.

The course of Eleanor’s life at Hazlewood was peaceful and monotonous. She had been engaged simply as a “companion” for Laura Mason. That common epithet, which is so often twisted into the signification of a household drudge—an upperservant, who works harder than any of her fellows—in this case meant purely and simply what it was originally intended to mean. Eleanor’s only duties were to teach Laura Mason music, and to be the companion and associate of all her girlish pleasures and industries.

Not that Miss Mason was very industrious. She had a habit of beginning great undertakings in the way of fancy work, and the more gigantic the design the more ardent was her desire to attempt it—but she rarely got beyond the initiative part of her labour. There was always some “Dweller on the Threshold” in the shape of a stitch that couldn’t be learnt, or a skein of silk that couldn’t be matched, or a pattern that _wouldn’t_ come right; and one after another of the gigantic undertakings was flung aside to decay in dusty oblivion, or to be finished by Eleanor or Mrs. Darrell.

Laura Mason was not made for the active service of life. She was one of the holiday soldiers in the great army, fit for nothing but to wear gilded epaulettes and gorgeous uniforms, and to turn out upon gala days to the sound of trumpet and drum.

She was a loving, generous-hearted, confiding creature; but, like some rudderless boat drifting hither and thither before a stormy ocean, this frivolous, purposeless girl flung herself, helpless and dependent, upon the mercy of other people.

The rich City solicitor, Mr. Monckton, the head of a celebrated legal firm familiar in the Bankruptcy Court, took the trouble to say very little about his pretty, flaxen-haired, and blue-eyed ward.

He spoke of her, indeed, with an almost pointed indifference. She was the daughter of some people he had known in his early youth, he said, and her fortune had been entrusted to his care. She would be rich, but he was none the less anxious about her future. A woman was not generally any the safer in this world for being an heiress. This was all Gilbert Monckton had ever said to Mrs. Darrell upon the subject of his ward’s past history. Laura herself had talked freely enough of her first two homes. There was little to tell, but, upon the other hand, there seemed nothing to conceal.

Upon one subject Mr. Monckton was very strict, and that was the seclusion of the home he had chosen for his ward.

“When Miss Mason is of age she will of course choose for herself,” he said; “but until that time comes, I must beg, Mrs. Darrell, that you will keep her out of all society.”

Under these circumstances it was especially necessary that Laura Mason should have a companion of her own age. Hazlewood was a hermitage, never approached by any visitors except some half-dozen elderly ladies, who were intimate with Mrs. Darrell, and Mr. Monckton, who came about once a fortnight to dine and spend the evening.

He used to devote himself very much to Laura and her companion during these visits. Eleanor could see how earnestly he watched the flaxen-haired girl, whose childish simplicity no doubt made her very bewitching to the grave man of business. He watched her and listened to her; sometimes with a pleased smile, sometimes with an anxious expression on his face; but his attention vary rarely wandered from her.

“He must love her very dearly,” Eleanor thought, remembering how earnestly he had spoken in the railway carriage.

She wondered what was the nature of the affection which the solicitor felt for his ward. He was old enough to be her father, it was true, but he was still in the prime of life; he had not that beauty of feature and complexion which a school-girl calls handsome, but he had a face which leaves its impress upon the minds of those who look at it.

He was very clever, or at least he seemed so to Eleanor; for there was no subject ever mentioned, no topic ever discussed, with which he did not appear thoroughly familiar, and upon which his opinions were not original and forcible. Eleanor’s intellect expanded under the influence of this superior masculine intelligence. Her plastic mind, so ready to take any impression, was newly moulded by its contact with this stronger brain. Her education, very imperfect before, seemed to complete itself now by this occasional association with a clever man.

Of course all this came about by slow degrees. She did not very rapidly become familiar with Gilbert Monckton, for his grave manner was rather calculated to inspire diffidence in a very young woman; but little by little, as she grew accustomed to his society, accustomed to sit quietly in the shade, only speaking now and then, while Laura Mason talked familiarly to her guardian, she began to discover how much she had gained from her association with the lawyer. It was not without some bitterness of spirit that Eleanor Vane thought of this. She felt as if she had been an interloper in that quiet Hazlewood household. What right had she to come between Laura and her guardian, and steal the advantages Mr. Monckton intended for his ward? It was for Laura’s sake he had been earnest or eloquent; it was for Laura’s benefit he had described this, or explained that. What right, then, had she, Eleanor, to remember what Laura had forgotten, or to avail herself of the advantages Laura was too frivolous to value?

There was a gulf between the two girls that could not be passed, even by affection. Eleanor Vane’s mental superiority placed her so high above Laura Mason that perfect confidence could not exist between them. Eleanor’s love for the light-hearted, heedless girl, had something almost motherly in its nature.

“I know we shall never quite understand each other, Laura,” she said; “but I think I could give up my life for your sake, my dear.”

“Or I for you, Nelly.”

“No, no, Laura. I know you are unselfish as an angel, and you’d wish to do so; but yours is not the giving-up nature, my darling. You’d die under a great sorrow.”

“I think I should, Nelly,” the girl answered, drawing closer to her friend, and trembling at the very thought of calamity; “but how you speak, dear. Had you ever a great sorrow?”

“Yes, a very great one.”

“And yet you are happy with us, and can sing and play, and ramble about in the woods with me, Nell, as if you had nothing on your mind.”

“Yes, Laura, but I can remember my sorrow all the time. It is hidden so deep in my heart that the sunshine never reaches it, however happy I may seem.”

Laura Mason sighed. The spoiled child of fortune could not help wondering how she would act under the influence of a great misery. She would sit down upon the ground in some darkened room, she thought, and cry until her heart broke and she died.

The summer faded into autumn, and autumn into winter, and the early spring flowers bloomed again in the shrubberies and on the lawn at Hazlewood. The primroses were pale upon the tender grass of the sloping banks in the broad lane near the gates, and still no event had happened to break the tranquil monotony of that secluded household. Eleanor had grown familiar with every nook in the rambling old cottage; even with Launcelot Darrell’s apartments, a suite of rooms on the bedroom floor, looking out into the grove at the back of the house. Those rooms had been shut up for years, ever since Launcelot had sailed for India, and they had a desolate look, though fires had been lighted in them periodically, and every scrap of furniture was kept carefully dusted.

“The rooms must always be ready,” Mrs. Darrell said. “Mr. de Crespigny may die, and my son may be called home suddenly.”

So the three rooms, a bedroom, dressing-room, and sitting-room, were kept in perfect order, and Laura and Eleanor wandered into them sometimes, in the idleness of a wet afternoon, and looked at the pictures upon the walls, the unfinished sketches piled one upon the top of another on the easel, or tried the little cottage piano, upon which Mr. Darrell had been wont to accompany himself when he sang. His mother always insisted upon this piano being tuned when the tuner came from Windsor to attend to Laura Mason’s modern grand. The two girls used to talk a good deal of the widow’s handsome son. They had heard him spoken of by his mother, by the servants, and by the few humble neighbours in scattered cottages near Hazlewood. They talked of his uncertain fortunes, his accomplishments, his handsome, haughty face, which Laura declared was faultless.

Miss Vane had by this time been a twelvemonth at Hazlewood. Her eighteenth birthday was past, and the girlishness of her appearance had matured into the serene beauty of early womanhood. The golden tints of her hair had deepened into rich auburn, her grey eyes looked darker under the shadow of her dark brows. When she went to spend a brief Christmas holiday with her old friends, the Signora and Richard Thornton declared that she had altered very much since she had left them, and were surprised at her matured beauty. She bought the silk gown for Eliza Picirillo, and the meerschaum pipe for poor Dick, who needed no memorial of his adopted sister; for her image haunted him only too perpetually, to the destruction of all other images which might else have found a place in the scene-painter’s heart.

Eleanor Vane felt a pang of remorse as she remembered how very easily she had borne her separation from these faithful friends. It was not that she loved them less, or forgot their goodness to her. She had no such ingratitude as that wherewith to reproach herself; but she felt as if she had committed a sin against them in being happy in the calm serenity of Hazlewood.

She said this to Richard Thornton during the brief Christmas visit. They had walked out once more in the quiet streets and squares in the early winter twilight.

“I feel as if I had grown selfish and indifferent,” she said. “The months pass one after another. It is two years and a half since my father died, and I am not one step nearer to the discovery of the man who caused his death. Not one step. I am buried alive at Hazlewood. I am bound hand and foot. What can I do, Richard; what can I do? I could go mad, almost, when I remember that I am a poor helpless girl, and that I may never be able to keep the oath I swore when I first read my dead father’s letter. And you, Richard, in all this time you have done nothing to help me.”

The scene-painter shook his head sadly enough.

“What can I do, my dear Eleanor? What I told you nearly a year ago, I tell you again now. This man will never be found. What hope have we? what chance of finding him? We might hear his name to-morrow, and we should not know it. If either of us met him in the street, we should pass him by. We might live in the same house with him, and be ignorant of his presence.”

“No, Richard,” cried Eleanor Vane. “I think if I met that man some instinct of hate and horror would reveal his identity to me.”

“My poor romantic Nelly, you talk as if life was a melodrama. No, my dear, I say again, this man will never be found; the story of your father’s death is unhappily a common one. Let that sad story rest, Nell, with all the other mournful records of the past. Believe me that you cannot do better than be happy at Hazlewood; happy in your innocent life, and utterly forgetful of the foolish vow you made when you were little better than a child. If all the improbabilities that you have ever dreamt of were to come to pass, and vengeance were in your grasp, I hope and believe, Nell, that a better spirit would arise within you, and prompt you to let it go.”

Richard Thornton spoke very seriously. He had never been able to speak of Eleanor’s scheme of retribution without grief and regret. He recognized the taint of her father’s influence in this vision of vengeance and destruction. All George Vane’s notions of justice and honour had been rather the meretricious and flimsy ideas of a stage play, than the common-sense views of real life. He had talked incessantly to his daughter about days of retribution; gigantic vengeances which were looming somewhere in the far-away distance, for the ultimate annihilation of the old man’s enemies. This foolish ruined spendthrift, who cried out against the world because his money was spent, and his place in that world usurped by wiser men, had been Eleanor’s teacher during her most impressionable years. It was scarcely to be wondered at, then, that there were some flaws in the character of this motherless girl, and that she was ready to mistake a pagan scheme of retribution for the Christian duty of filial love.

Midsummer had come and gone, when an event occurred to break the tranquillity of that simple household.

The two girls had lingered late in the garden one evening early in July. Mrs. Darrell sat writing in the breakfast-parlour. The lamplight glimmered under the shadow of the verandah, and the widow’s tall figure seated at her desk was visible through the open bay window.

Laura and her companion had been talking for a long time, but Eleanor had lapsed into silence at last, and stood against the low white gate with her elbow resting upon the upper bar, looking thoughtfully out into the lane. Miss Mason was never the first to be tired of talking. A silvery torrent of innocent babble was for ever gushing from her red babyish lips; so, when at last Eleanor grew silent and absent-minded, the heiress was fain to talk to her dogs; her darling silky Skye, whose great brown eyes looked out from a ball of floss silk that represented the animal’s head; and her Italian greyhound, a slim shivering brute, who wore a coloured flannel paletot, and exhibited a fretful and whimpering disposition, far from agreeable to any one but his mistress.

There was no moon upon this balmy July night, and the hulking hobbledehoy-of-all-work came out to light the lamp while the two girls were standing at the gate. This lamp gave a pleasant aspect to the cottage upon dark nights, and threw a bright line of light into the obscurity of the lane.

The boy had scarcely retired with his short ladder and flaming lantern, when the two pet dogs began to bark violently, and a man came out of the darkness into the line of lamplight.

Laura Mason gave a startled scream; but Eleanor caught her by the arm, to check her foolish outcry.

There was nothing very alarming in the aspect of the man. He was only a tramp: not a common beggar, but a shabby-genteel-looking tramp, whose threadbare coat was of a fashionable make, and who, in spite of his ragged slovenliness, had something the look of a gentleman.

“Mrs. Darrell still lives here, does she not?” he asked, rather eagerly.

“Yes.”

It was Eleanor who answered. The dogs were still barking, and Laura was still looking very suspiciously at the stranger.

“Will you tell her, please, that she is wanted out here by some one who has something important to communicate to her,” the man said.

Eleanor was going towards the house to deliver this message, when she saw Mrs. Darrell coming across the lawn. She had been disturbed at her writing by the barking of the dogs.

“What is the matter, Miss Vincent?” she asked, sharply. “Who are you and Laura talking to, out here?”

She walked from the two girls to the man, who stood back a little way outside the gate, with the lamplight shining full upon his face.

The widow looked sternly at this man who had dared to come to the gate at nightfall, and to address the two girls under her charge.

But her face changed as she looked at him, and a wild cry broke from her lips.

“Launcelot, Launcelot, my son!”