the weather, which were more courteous than original. He asked Eleanor if she was hungry, if she would have luncheon, or wait for a six o’clock dinner, and if she was a good sailor. Then, coming suddenly to a stand still, he demanded soda-water and brandy.
It was the habit of this amiable man to require this beverage on every possible occasion. He was by no means a drunkard, though he was one of those good-natured noisy creatures who can never be convivial without getting tipsy; but his existence was one perpetual absorption of soda-water and brandy. Why he drank this mixture, which the uninitiated are apt to consider insipid, was a mystery only to be explained by himself. He could not have been perpetually thirsty; and I am inclined to think that this soda-water and brandy was the desperate resource of a feeble intellect craving some employment, rather than a physical want.
The major and his wife retired to the bedroom and began their packing. When matters grew very desperate Eleanor was summoned as a forlorn hope, and did her best to reduce the chaos into something like order. This process occupied the time until six o’clock, when the major put on his coat and sat down to dinner.
But even during dinner the packing business was not altogether suspended, for every now and then, when there was a little pause in the banquet, Mrs. Lennard jumped up from the table, and ran into the next room with her workbox, or her desk, or something from the mantelpiece or one of the sofa-tables—sometimes a book, sometimes a paper-knife, a thimble, a pair of scissors, a pen-wiper, or a packet of envelopes—and then scampered back to her place before the waiter re-entered the room, and tried to look as if she hadn’t left her seat. The major meanwhile worked steadily on with his knife and fork, only looking up from his plate to attend to the wants of Eleanor and his wife.
At last everything was ready. The addresses were fastened to the boxes and portmanteaus. A bewildering canary bird—which rejoiced in every kind of noise and confusion, and had been excruciatingly loud and shrill all the afternoon—was inducted into the new brass cage which Mrs. Lennard had bought for it. A sharp little black-and-tan terrier, the property of the major, was invested in the new collar, and securely padlocked; Eleanor and Mrs. Lennard put on their shawls and bonnets; the major made himself gigantic by the addition to his normal bulk of a rough great-coat, a Scotch plaid, and half a dozen yards of woollen comforter; the bill was paid at the very last moment, while the luggage was being piled upon the top of an extra cab; and Major Lennard and his companions departed at a rattling pace for the London Bridge terminus. There was just time enough for the major to get the tickets and choose a comfortable carriage, before the train started. Away they flew through the darkness of the bleak March night, and Eleanor felt that every throb of the shrieking engine made the step that she had taken more irrevocable.
“There was not a word in Gilbert’s letter that expressed sorrow at parting from me,” she thought. “I had worn out his love, I suppose.”
It was eleven o’clock when they got to Dover. Major Lennard slept all the way, with the lappets of his travelling cap, which was a sort of woollen caricature of a Knight Templar’s helmet, drawn closely over his ears. Mrs. Lennard, who was very wide awake all the time, sat opposite to her husband, with the canary bird on her lap. He had grown quiet at last, and had retired from the world under a tent of green-baize. The bird’s mistress made up for his silence by talking incessantly throughout the journey; but it only seemed to Eleanor as if she had a second Laura for her companion, and the succession of her own sad thoughts was scarcely broken by Mrs. Lennard’s conversation.
They arrived in Paris the next morning in time for breakfast at the great Hôtel du Palais, a monstrous building, newly erected, and rich in the glitter of gilding and the glow of colour. Here the major took up his abode, after deliberately expounding to his wife and Eleanor the theory that the best and most expensive hotels are always the cheapest—in the end. This moral had been the rule of the major’s life, and had very often brought him alarmingly near the awful abysses of insolvency.
The gorgeous apartments in which Eleanor found herself were very unlike the low-ceilinged little sitting-room in the Rue de l’Archevêque; but her mind went back to that sad time, nevertheless. She spent the morning in the agreeable employment of unpacking Mrs. Lennard’s wardrobe, while the major and his wife sailed out of the great hotel to sun themselves in the Rue Rivoli and on the Boulevards, and to wind up with a drive in the Bois, and a little dinner at Véfours’. When she had completed this most wearisome task, and had arranged all the scraps of lace and ribbons, the gloves and collars, and feminine furbelows, in a buhl chest of drawers and a gorgeous ebony and gold wardrobe, Mrs. Monckton put on her bonnet and shawl, and went out into the busy street.
The tears rushed up to her eyes as she looked at the bright vista before her, and heard the roll of the drum, and the tramp of soldiers’ feet in the courts of the Louvre. Yes, there was the street along which she had walked by her father’s side on the last day of his blighted life. Her hands clenched themselves involuntarily as she remembered that day; and that other bitter day of anguish in which she had knelt upon the ground and sworn to be revenged upon George Vane’s enemy.
How had she kept her oath? She smiled bitterly as she thought of the four years that had passed since then, and the strange chance that had flung Launcelot Darrell in her way.
“I went away from this place while he was here,” she thought. “I come back to it now that he is in England. Is it my destiny, I wonder, always to fail in everything I attempt?”
She went to the Rue de l’Archevêque. Nothing was changed. The same butcher was busy in the shop; the same faded curtains of flowered damask hung behind the windows.
