“Richard was right,” she thought, as she dismissed this idea with a humiliating sense of her own baseness in having even for one brief moment entertained it. “He was right. What shame and degradation I must wade through before I can keep my promise!”
And to keep her promise she must go back to Hazlewood. This was the point to which she always returned. But was it possible for her to regain her old position in Mrs. Darrell’s house? Would not Mrs. Darrell take care to keep her away, having once succeeded in banishing her from Launcelot’s society?
Miss Vane was not a good schemer. Transparent, ingenuous, and impulsive, she had the will and the courage which would have prompted her to denounce Launcelot Darrell as a traitor and a cheat; but she did not possess one of the attributes which are necessary for the watcher who hopes to trace a shameful secret through all the dark intricacies of the hidden pathway that leads to it.
It was long after daylight when the young lady fell asleep, worn out, harassed, and baffled. The night had brought no counsel. Eleanor Vane dropped off into a fitful slumber, with a passionate prayer upon her lips,—a prayer that Providence would set her in the way of bringing vengeance upon her father’s destroyer.
She flung herself upon Providence—after the manner of a great many persons—when she found her own intellect powerless to conduct her to the end she wanted to gain.
Throughout the next day Miss Vane sat alone on the chintz-covered sofa by the window, looking down at the children playing hop-scotch, and gambling for marbles upon the rugged flags below; “weary of the rolling hours,” and unable to bring herself to the frame of mind necessary for the ordinary purposes of life. Upon any other occasion she would have tried to do something whereby she might lighten the Signora’s burden, being quite competent to take the pupils off her friend’s hands; but to-day she had suffered Eliza Picirillo to trudge out under the broiling August sky, through the stifling London streets, and had made no attempt to lessen her labours. She seemed even incapable of performing the little domestic offices which she had been in the habit of doing. She let the London dust accumulate upon the piano; she left the breakfast-table scattered with the débris of the morning’s meal; she made no effort to collect the stray sheets of music, the open books, the scraps of needlework that littered the room; but with her elbow on the smoky sill of the window, and her head resting on her hand, she sat, looking wearily out, with eyes that saw nothing but vacancy.
Richard had gone out early, and neither he nor his aunt was expected to return till dusk.
“I can have everything ready for them when they come back,” she thought, looking listlessly at the unwashed tea-things, which seemed to stare at her in mute reproachfulness; and then her eyes wandered back to the sunny window, and her mind returned with a cruel constancy to the one idea that occupied it.
Had she been really looking at the objects on which her eyes seemed to be fixed, she must have been surprised by the advent of a tall and rather distinguished-looking stranger, who made his way along the straw-littered promenade, between the Colonnade and the stables, erasing the chalk diagrams of the hop-scotch players with the soles of his boots, and rendering himself otherwise objectionable to the juvenile population.
This stranger came straight to the shop of the shoemaker with whom Signora Picirillo lodged, and inquired for Miss Vincent.