George Vane’s sanguine and romantic visions of wealth and grandeur, of retaliation upon those who had neglected and forgotten him, had not been without effect upon the mind of his youngest daughter. That plastic mind had been entirely in the old man’s hands, to mould in what form he pleased. Himself entirely the slave of impulse, it was not to be supposed that he could teach his daughter those sound principles without which man, like a rudderless vessel, floats hither and thither before every current in the sea of life. He suffered Eleanor’s impulsive nature to have full sway; he put no curb upon the sanguine temperament which took everything in the extreme. As blindly as the girl loved her father, so blindly she was ready to hate those whom he called his enemies. To investigate the nature of the wrongs they had done him would have been to take their side in the quarrel. Reason and Love could not go hand-in-hand in Eleanor’s creed; for the questions which Reason might ask would be so many treacheries against Love.
It is not to be wondered, then, that she held the few broken sentences written by her father, on the threshold of a shameful death, as a solemn and sacred trust not to be violated or lost sight of, though her future life should be sacrificed to the fulfilment of one purpose.
Such thoughts as these, indistinct, ignorant, and childish, perhaps, but not the less absorbing, filled her mind. It may be that this new purpose of revenge, enabled her the better to endure her loss. She had something to live for, at least. There was a light far away athwart the long gloomy pathway through an unknown world, and, however lurid that guiding star might be, it was better than total darkness.
CHAPTER X. HORTENSIA BANNISTER HOLDS OUT A HELPING HAND.
Signora Picirillo was very well contented with her morning’s work. She had obtained Eleanor’s consent to a speedy departure from Paris; that was the grand point. Once away from the scene of the terrible catastrophe of George Vane’s death, the young girl’s sunshiny nature would reassert itself, and little by little the great grief would be forgotten.
In all this dreary period of sickness and misery the good music-mistress had grown to love Mr. Vane’s daughter even more than she had loved her long ago, when Eleanor’s childish fingers had first stumbled slowly over the keys of the pianoforte, in a feeble endeavour to master the grand difficulties of Haydn’s “Surprise.”
The widow’s life had been a very sorrowful one. Perhaps its most tranquil period had come within the last ten years. It was ten years since, her Italian husband and her children having one by one died, she had found herself alone in the world, with a gaunt, long-legged hobadahoy of eighteen, her dead sister’s orphan son, for her sole protector.
This long-legged hobadahoy was Richard Thornton, the only child of the Signora’s pretty younger sister and a dashing cavalry officer, who had married a penniless and obscure girl for the love of her pretty face, and had died within a couple of years of his marriage, leaving his widow to drag out the remnant of a fretful, helpless life in dependence upon her sister. The Signora had been used to carrying other people’s burthens from a very early age. She was the eldest child of a clever violinist, who had been for twenty years leader of the orchestra in one of the principal London theatres; and from babyhood had been a brave-hearted, self-reliant creature. When her sister died, therefore, and with the last words upon her pale, tremulous lips prayed the Signora to protect the helpless boy, Richard Thornton, Eliza Picirillo freely accepted the charge, and promised to perform it faithfully. The poor faded beauty died with a smile upon her face, and when Signor Picirillo—who was a teacher of languages at a few suburban schools, and a lazy, good-tempered nonenity—came home that evening, he found that there was to be another member of his domestic circle, and another mouth to be fed henceforth.
The Signora’s cruse of oil held out bravely, in spite of the demands upon it; and by-and-by, when the honest-hearted music-mistress would otherwise have been terribly desolate, there was Richard, a tall lad, ready to stand by her sturdily in the battle of life, and as devoted to her as the most affectionate of sons. The boy had shown considerable talent at a very early age, but it was a versatile kind of talent which did not promise ever to burst forth into the grander gift of genius. His aunt taught him music, and he taught himself painting, intending to be something in the way of Maclise or Turner by-and-by, and scraping together some of the shillings he earned with his violin in order to attend a dingy academy somewhere in Bloomsbury.
But the great historical subjects after Maclise—“The Death of the Bloody Boar at Bosworth,” a grand battle scene, with a lurid sunset in the background, and Richmond’s face and armour all ablaze with crimson lake and gamboge, from the flaming reflection of the skies, was the magnum opus which poor Dick fondly hoped to see in the Royal Academy—were not very saleable; and the Turneresque landscapes, nymphs and ruins, dryads and satyrs, dimly visible through yellow mist and rose-coloured fog, cost a great deal of time and money to produce, and were not easily convertible into ready cash. So, when Richard had gone the usual weary round amongst the picture-dealers, and had endured the usual heart-burnings and agonies which wait upon ambitious youth, he was glad to accept the brush flung aside by a scene-painter at the Phœnix, where Dick received a scanty salary as second violinist; a salary which was doubled when the young man practised the double duty of second violin and assistant scene-painter.
These simple people were the only friends of Eleanor Vane’s childhood. They were ready to accept the responsibility of her future welfare now, when her rich sister would have sent her into the world, lonely and helpless, to sink to the abject drudgery which well-to-do people speak so complacently of, when they recommend their poor relations to get an honest living and trouble them no longer.
