“Yes, the good music-mistress and her son. I have your address, Miss Vincent, and you may rely on hearing from me in a few days. I shall take care that you suffer no inconvenience from this sudden change in all our plans. Good-bye; and God bless you, my dear!”
Eleanor had taken her seat in the carriage by this time, and the train was about to move. Mrs. Darrell held out her hand; but the girl drew away from her with a sudden movement of terror. “Oh, please do not shake hands with me!” she cried. “I am very, very unhappy!”
The train moved away before the widow could reply to this strange speech; and the last thing that Eleanor saw was the pale face of Launcelot Darrell’s mother turned towards her with a look of surprise.
“Poor child!” thought Mrs. Darrell, as she walked slowly back to the station door, before which her pony-carriage waited. “She feels this very much, but she has acted nobly.”
The widow sighed as she remembered that the worst part of the struggle was yet to come. She would have her son’s indignation to encounter and to endure—not the stormy passion of a strong man unfairly separated from the woman he loves, but the fretful irritation of a spoiled child who has been robbed of a favourite toy.
It was nearly dark when Eleanor Vane reached the Pilasters. She paid and dismissed the cab in Dudley Street, and made her way on foot under the familiar archway and into the Colonnade, where the same children seemed to be playing the same games in the dusky light, the same horses peering from the stable-doors, the same cabmen drinking at the old-fashioned public-house at the corner.
The Signora was giving a singing-lesson to a stolid young person, with a fat face and freckles, who was being prepared for the lyric drama, and wished to appear at one of the opera-houses as Norma, after a dozen lessons or so. Eliza Picirillo was trying her hardest to simplify a difficult passage for this embryo Grisi’s comprehension, when Eleanor Vane opened the door of the little sitting-room and appeared upon the threshold.
It would have been natural to the girl to have rushed to the piano and flung herself into the arms of the Signora at the risk of upsetting the stolid pupil; and there was something so very unnatural in her manner as she paused in the open doorway,—something so wan and ghostlike in her appearance, that Eliza Picirillo rose from her music-stool in alarm, and stared aghast at this unexpected visitor.
“Eleanor!” she exclaimed, “Eleanor!”