George Mowbray Vane set the candlestick upon the rusty velvet cover of the low mantel-piece, and drew his daughter towards him. She had thrown off her bonnet and loose grey cloak, and stood before her father in her scanty muslin frock, with all her auburn hair hanging about her face and shoulders, and glittering in the dim light of that one scrap of wax candle.
“My pet, how beautiful you have grown, how beautiful!” the old man said, with an accent of fond tenderness. “We’ll teach Mrs. Bannister a lesson some of these days, Eleanor. Yes, our turn will come, my love; I know that I shall die a rich man.”
Miss Vane was accustomed to hear this remark from her father. She inherited something of his sanguine nature, and she loved him very dearly, so she may be forgiven if she believed in his vague visions of future grandeur. She had never seen anything in her life but chaotic wrecks of departed splendour, confusion, debt, and difficulty. She had not been called upon to face poverty in the fair hand-to-hand struggle which ennobles and elevates the sturdy wrestler in the battle of life. No, she had rather been compelled to play at hide-and-seek with the grim enemy. She had never gone out into the open, and looked her foe full in the eyes, hardy, resolute, patient, and steadfast. She was familiar with all those debasing tricks and pitiful subterfuges whereby the weak and faint-hearted seek to circumvent the enemy; but she had never been taught the use of those measures by which he may be honestly beaten.
The Mrs. Bannister of whom George Vane had spoken, was one of his elder daughters, who had been very, very ungrateful to him, he declared; and who now in his old age doled him out the meagre allowance which enabled him to occupy an entresol over a butcher’s shop, and dine daily at one of the cheap restaurants in the Palais Royal.
Mr. Vane was wont to lament his daughter’s cruel lack of affection in very bitter language, freely interspersed with quotations from “King Lear;” indeed I believe he considered his case entirely parallel with that of the injured British monarch and father; ignoring the one rather important fact that, whereas Lear’s folly had been the too generous division of his own fortune between his recreant daughters, his weakness had been the reckless waste and expenditure of the portions which his children had inherited from their mother.
Mrs. Bannister, instigated thereto by her husband, had protested some years before against the several acts of folly and extravagance by which the fortune which ought to have been hers had been fooled away. She declined to allow her father more than the pittance alluded to above; although, as she was now a rich widow, and of course entirely her own mistress, she might have done much more.
“Yes, my darling,” Mr. Vane said, as he proudly contemplated his youngest child’s beauty, “we will turn the tables upon Mrs. Bannister and the rest of them, yet, please God. My Benjamin; my youngest, brightest darling; we’ll teach them a lesson. They may poke their old father away in a foreign lodging, and stint him of money for any little innocent pleasure; but the day will come, my love, the day will come!”
The old man nodded his head two or three times with solemn significance. The sanguine, impulsive nature, dwarfed and fettered by the cruel bonds of poverty, was too elastic to be entirely repressed even by those galling chains; and having hoped all his life, and having enjoyed such successes and good fortune as fall to the lot of very few men, he went on hoping in his old age, blindly confident that some sudden revolution in the wheel of life would lift him out of his obscurity and set him again on the pinnacle he had once occupied so proudly.
He had had a host of friends and many children, and he had squandered more than one fortune, not being any more careful of other people’s money than of his own; and now, in his poverty and desolation, the child of his old age was the only one who clung to him, and loved him, and believed in him; the only one whom he loved, perhaps, truly and unreservedly, though he wept frequently over the ingratitude of the others. It may be that Eleanor was the only one whom he could love with any comfort to himself, because the only one he had never injured.
“But, papa, dear,” this youngest and best loved of the old man’s children pleaded gently, “Mrs. Bannister, Hortensia, has been very good—has she not?—in sending the money for my education at Madame Marly’s, where she was finished herself. That was very generous of her, wasn’t it, papa?”