Eleanor smiled. Perhaps for the first time in her life the young lady was guilty of a spice of that feminine sin called coquetry. Her boxes had arrived from Hazlewood upon the previous evening. She was armed, therefore, with all those munitions of war without which a woman can scarcely commence a siege upon the fortress of man’s indifference.
She rose early the next morning—for she was too much absorbed in the one great purpose of her life to be able to sleep very long or very soundly—and arrayed herself for a visit to the shipbroker.
She put on a bonnet of pale blue crape, which was to be the chief instrument in the siege—a feminine battering-ram or Armstrong gun before which the stoutest wall must have crumbled—and smoothed her silken locks, her soft amber-dropping tresses, under this framework of diaphanous azure. Then she went into the little sitting-room where Mr. Richard Thornton was loitering over his breakfast, to try the effect of this piece of milliner’s artillery upon the unhappy young man.
“Will the clerks snub me, Dick?” she asked, archly.
The scene-painter replied with his mouth full of egg and bread-and-butter, and was more enthusiastic than intelligible.
A four-wheel cab jolted Miss Vane and her companion to Cornhill, and the young lady contrived to make her way into the sanctum-sanctorum of the shipbroker himself, in a manner which took Richard Thornton’s breath away from him, in the fervour of his admiration. Every barrier gave way before the blue bonnet and glistening auburn hair, the bright grey eyes and friendly smile. Poor Dick had approached the officials with that air of suppressed enmity and lurking hate with which the Englishman generally addresses his brother Englishman; but Eleanor’s friendliness and familiarity disarmed the stoniest of the clerks, and she was conducted to the shipbroker’s private room by an usher who bowed before her as if she had been a queen.
The young lady told her story very simply, She wished to ascertain if a gentleman called Launcelot Darrell had sailed in the Princess Alice on the 4th of October, ’52.
This was all she said. Richard Thornton stood by, fingering difficult passages in his last overture on the brim of his hat, out of sheer perturbation of spirit, while he wondered at and admired Miss Vane’s placid assurance.
“I shall be extremely obliged if you can give me this information,” she said in conclusion, “for a great deal depends upon my being able to ascertain the truth in this matter.”
The shipbroker looked through his spectacles at the earnest face turned so trustingly towards his own. He was an old man, with granddaughters as tall as Eleanor, but was nevertheless not utterly dead to the influence of a beautiful face. The auburn hair and diaphanous bonnet made a bright spot of colour in the dinginess of his dusty office.