was much too good-natured to discourage it; so the painting upon velvet was abandoned, for that morning at least, and the Major’s wife gave a brief synopsis of her history for the benefit of Mrs. Monckton.
“You must know, my dear,” Mrs. Lennard began, “my poor Pa was a country gentleman; and he had once been very rich; or at least his family—and he belonged to a very old family, though not as aristocratic as the Major’s—had once been very rich; but somehow or other through the extravagance of one and another, poor Pa was dreadfully poor, and his estate, which was in Berkshire, was heavily—what’s its name?—mortgaged.”
Eleanor gave a slight start at the word “Berkshire,” which did not escape Mrs. Lennard.
“You know Berkshire?” she said.
“Yes, some part of it.”
“Well, my dear, as I said before, poor Papa’s estate was very heavily mortgaged, and he’d scarcely anything that he could call his own, except the rambling old country-house in which I was born; and beyond that he was awfully in debt, and in constant dread of his creditors sending him to prison, where he might have finished his days, for there wasn’t the least possibility of his ever paying his debts by anything short of a miracle. Now of course all this was very sad. However I was too young to know much about it, and Papa sent me to a fashionable school at Bath where his sisters had gone when they were young, and where he knew he could get credit for my education to be finished.”
Eleanor, hard at work at the split gloves, listened rather indifferently to this story, at first; but little by little she began to be interested in it, until at last she let her hands drop into her lap, and left off working, in order the better to attend to Mrs. Lennard’s discourse.
“Well, Miss Villars, it was at that school that I met the ruling star of my fate—that is to say, the Major, who was then dreadfully young, without even the least pretence of whiskers, and always sitting in a pastrycook’s-shop in the fashionable street eating strawberry ices. He had only just got his commission, and he was quartered at Bath with his regiment, and his sister Louisa was my schoolfellow at Miss Florathorne’s, and he called one morning to see her, and I happened that very morning to be practising in the drawing-room, the consequence of which was that we met, and from that hour our destinies were sealed.
“I won’t dwell upon our meetings, which Louisa managed for us, and which were generally dreadfully inconvenient, for Fred used to clamber up the garden wall by the toes of his boots—and he has told me since that the brickwork used to scratch off all the varnish, which of course made it dreadfully expensive—but what will not love endure?—and hook himself on as it were; and it was in that position, with nothing of him visible below his chin, that he made me a most solemn offer of his hand and heart. I was young and foolish, Miss Villars, and I accepted him, without one thought of my poor Papa, who was the most indulgent of parents, and who had always let me do everything I liked, and indeed owed upwards of fifty pounds, at a toy-shop in Windsor, for dolls and things that he’d bought me before I was grown up.
“Well, from that hour, Frederick and I were engaged, and he dropped a turquoise ring in among the bushes at the bottom of the garden the next morning, and Louisa and I had upwards of an hour’s work to find it. We were engaged! But we were not long allowed to bask in the sunshine of requited affection, for a fortnight after this Frederick’s regiment was ordered out to Malta, and I was wretched. I will pass over my wretchedness, which might not be interesting to you, Miss Villars, and I will only say that, night after night, my pillow was wet with tears, and that, but for Louisa’s sympathy, I should have broken my heart. Frederick and I corresponded regularly under cover of Louisa, and that was my only comfort.
“By-and-by, however, the time for my leaving school came—partly because I was seventeen years of age, and partly because Papa couldn’t settle Miss Florathorne’s bills—and I went home to the old rambling house in Berkshire. Here I found everything at sixes and sevens, and poor Papa in dreadfully low spirits. His creditors were all getting horribly impatient, he had all sorts of writs, and attachments, and judgments, and contempt of courts, and horrors of that kind, out against him; and if they could have put him into two prisons at once, I think they would have done it, for some of them wanted him in Whitecross Street, and others wanted him in the Queen’s Bench, and it was altogether dreadful.
“Well, Papa’s only friend of late years had been a very learned gentleman, belonging to a grand legal firm in the city, who had managed all his business matters for him. Now this gentleman had lately died, and his only son, who had succeeded to a very large fortune upon his father’s death, was staying with my poor Papa when I came home from school.
“I hope you won’t think me conceited, Miss Villars, but in order to make my story intelligible, I’m obliged to say that at that time I was considered a very pretty girl. I had been the belle of the school at Miss Florathorne’s, and when I went back to Berkshire and mixed in society, people made a tremendous fuss about me. Of course you know, my dear, troubles about money matters, and a wandering life, and French dinners, which are too much for a weak digestion, have made a very great difference in me, and I’m not a bit like what I was then. Well, the young lawyer who was staying with Papa—I shall not tell you his name, because I consider it very dishonourable to tell the name of a person you’ve jilted, even to a stranger—was very attentive. However, I took no notice of that—though he was very handsome and elegant-looking, and awfully clever—for my heart was true to Frederick, from whom I received the most heartrending letters under cover to Louisa, declaring that, what with the mosquitoes and what with the separation from me, and owing debts of honour to his brother officers, and not clearly seeing his way to pay them, he was often on the verge of committing suicide.
