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.”