Then, again, he would very often obtain small sums of money, loans from private friends, it may be, or fleeting treasures from a mysterious source, of which his innocent little daughter had no knowledge. So, for the first ten or eleven years of her life, Miss Vane’s existence was chequered by sudden glimpses of abnormal wealth—wonderful feast days of luxury and extravagance—which contrasted sharply with the dreary poverty of her ordinary experiences.
Thus it was no uncommon thing for this young lady to dine to-day in a tawdry and rather dirty parlour at Chelsea upon tea and red-herrings, and to-morrow to sit opposite her father in one of the sunny windows at the Crown and Sceptre, eating whitebait with the calm enjoyment of a connoisseur, and looking placidly on while Mr. Vane gave himself ducal airs to the waiters, and found fault with the icing of his sparkling hock. There was scarcely any extravagance which this little girl had not seen her father perpetrate. She had received from him a birthday present of a two-guinea wax doll, at the very time at which her schooling account, at a certain humble little seminary near Cheyne Walk, remained unpaid, and her education was brought to a dead-lock by reason of this default. She had sighed for that golden-haired waxen plaything, and her father gave it to her because he loved her as he had always loved, weakly and foolishly.
She loved him in return: repaying him a hundredfold for his affection by her innocent love and trust. To her he was all that was perfect, all that was noble and generous. The big talk, the glowing and sentimental discourse by which he was wont to impose upon himself, imposed upon her. She believed in that fancy portrait which he painted of himself, and which he himself believed in as a most faithful and unflattered likeness. She believed in that highly-coloured picture, and thought that George Mowbray Vandeleur Vane was indeed what he represented himself, and thought himself to be,—an injured old man, a sainted martyr to the forgetfulness of the world, and the ingratitude of his children.
Poor Eleanor was never weary of listening to her father’s stories about the Prince Regent, and all the lesser planets of the darkened sky in which Mr. Vane’s light had once shone. She used to walk in the park with the old man in the sunny summer evenings, proud to see him bow to great people, who returned his recognition with friendly courtesy. She liked to fancy him in the days that were gone, riding side by side with those mighty ones of the earth, whom he was now content to watch wistfully across the iron railings. She was pleased to stroll about the West End in the dusky gloaming of the soft May night, and to look up at the lights in that princely mansion in Berkeley Square which George Vane had once occupied. He showed her the windows which had belonged to this and that apartment; the drawing-room; the first Mrs. Vane’s boudoir; the little girls’ nursery and morning-room. She fancied all those fairy chambers radiant with light and splendour; and then remembering the shabby rooms at Chelsea, clung closer to her father’s arm, in her tender sorrow for his fallen state.
But she had inherited much of George Vane’s sanguine temperament, and almost as firm as her belief in the past, which had been a reality, was her confidence in the splendid future which her father hoped in. Nothing could have been more shadowy than the foundations upon which Mr. Vane had built for himself an airy castle. In his youth and middle age his most intimate friend and companion had been a certain Maurice de Crespigny, the owner of a noble estate in Berkshire, and not a friend of the Prince Regent’s. So, while George Vane’s two estates had melted away, and his three fortunes had been expended, Mr. de Crespigny, who was an invalid and a bachelor, had contrived to keep his land and his money.
There was only the difference of two or three years between the ages of the two friends. I believe that Maurice de Crespigny was the younger of the two. And it was during their early college life that the young men had entered into a romantic alliance, very chivalrous and honourable in its nature, but scarcely likely to stand the wear and tear of worldly experience.
They were to be friends through life and until death. They were to have no secrets from each other. If by any chance they should happen to fall in love with the same person—and I really think these sentimental collegians rather wished that such a contingency might arise—one of them, the most noble, the most heroic, was quietly to fall back and suffer in silence, while the weaker won the prize. If either died a bachelor, he was to leave his fortune to the other, whatever less romantic and more commonplace claimants, in the way of heirs presumptive, might press upon him.
These vows had been made at least five-and-forty years ago, but out of this folly of the past George Vane built his hope in the future. Maurice de Crespigny was now a soured and hypochondriacal old bachelor, shut in and defended on every side by greedy and sycophantic relations, and utterly unapproachable to his shabby old bosom friend; who could as easily have made his way out of one of the lowest dungeons of the Bastille as he could force an entrance into that closely-guarded citadel within which his college companion sat, lonely and dismal, a desolate old man, watched over by sharp eyes, greedily noteful of every token of his decay, ministered to by hands that would have worked eagerly at his winding-sheet, if by so doing they could have hastened the hour of his death.
If George Vane—remembering his old friend, perhaps, with some latent feeling of tenderness intermingled with his mercenary hopes—made an effort to penetrate the cruel barriers about him, he was repulsed with ignominy by the two maiden nieces who kept watch and ward at Woodlands. If he wrote to Mr. de Crespigny, his missive was returned unopened, with a satirical intimation that the dear invalid’s health was not in a state to endure the annoyance of begging letters. He had made a hundred attempts to cross the lines of the enemy, and had been mortified by a hundred failures; but his sanguine nature was not to be subdued by any humiliation, and he still believed, firmly and entirely, that whenever Maurice de Crespigny’s will came to be opened, his name, and his alone, would appear as sole heir to his old friend’s wealth. He forgot that Maurice de Crespigny was his junior by some two or three years; for he had always heard of him of late as a feeble invalid, tottering upon the verge of the grave; while he himself was erect and stalwart, broad-chested and soldierly-looking; so very soldierly in appearance that the sentinels on guard in the park were wont to salute him as he passed them, mistaking him for some military magnate.
Yes, he believed the day would come when poor De Crespigny—he always spoke of his friend with a certain pitiful tenderness—would drop quietly into his grave, and when he would reign at Woodlands with his darling Eleanor, avenging himself upon his ungrateful elder children, reopening accounts with his old creditors—in all his visions of grandeur and patronage he never thought of paying his debts——and arising from the dull ashes of his poverty, a splendid phœnix, golden-plumed and exultant.