They stopped at the Hôtel du Palais, still acting on the major’s theory, that the most expensive hotels are the cheapest—in the end. They dined occasionally at the table-d’hôte, with two or three hundred companions, and wasted a good deal of time in the great saloons, playing at bagatelle, peering into stereoscopes, turning over the daily papers, reading stray paragraphs here and there, or pouring over a chapter of a romance in the feuilleton, until brought to a standstill by a disheartening abundance of difficult words.
After breakfast, the major left his wife and her companion, either to loll in the reading-room, to stroll about the great stone quadrangle, smoking cigars, and drinking occasional brandy and soda, or to read the English papers at Galignani’s, or to wait for the post, or to meet a British acquaintance at Hill’s café, or to stare at the raw young soldiers exercising in the courtyards of the Louvre, or the copper-faced Zouaves who had done such wonderful work in the Crimea; or perhaps to stumble across some hoary-headed veteran who had fought under Napoleon the First, to make friendly speeches to him in bad French, with every verb in a bewilderingly impossible tense, and to treat him to little glasses of pale cognac.
Then Mrs. Lennard brought out her frame and her colour-box, and her velvets and brushes, and all the rest of her implements, and plunged at once into the delightful pursuit of painting upon velvet—an accomplishment which this lady had only newly acquired in six lessons for a guinea, during her last brief sojourn in London.
“The young person who taught me called herself Madame Ascanio de Brindisi—but, oh! Miss Villars, if ever there was a Cockney in this world, I think she was one—and she said in her advertisement, that anybody could earn five pounds a week easily at this elegant and delightful occupation; but I am sure I don’t know how I should ever earn five pounds a week, Miss Villars, for I’ve been nearly a month at this one sofa cushion, and it has cost five-and-thirty shillings already, and isn’t finished yet, and the major doesn’t like to see me work, and I’m obliged to do it while he’s out; just as if it was a crime to paint upon velvet. If you would mend those gloves, dear, that are split across the thumb—and really Piver’s gloves at four francs, five-and-twenty what’s its names? oughtn’t to do so, though the major says it’s my own fault, because I will buy six-and-a-quarters—I should be so much obliged,” Mrs. Lennard added, entreatingly, as she seated herself at her work in one of the long windows. “I shall get on splendidly,” she exclaimed, “if the Emperor doesn’t go for a drive; but if he does, I must leave off my work and look at him—he’s such a dear!”
Eleanor was very willing to make herself what the advertisements call “generally useful,” to the lady who had engaged her. She was a very high-spirited girl, we know, quick to resent any insult, sensitive and proud; but she had no false pride. She felt no shame in doing what she had undertaken to do; and if, for her own convenience, she had taken the situation of a kitchen-maid, she would have performed the duties of that situation to the best of her ability. So she mended Mrs. Lennard’s gloves, and darned that lady’s delicate lace collars, and tried to infuse something like order into her toilette, and removed the damp ends of cigars, which it was the major’s habit to leave about upon every available piece of furniture, and made herself altogether so useful that Mrs. Lennard declared that she would henceforward be unable to live without her.
“But I know how it will be, you nasty provoking thing!” the major’s wife exclaimed; “you’ll go on in this way, and you’ll make us fond of you, and just as we begin to doat upon you, you’ll go and get married and leave us, and then I shall have to get another old frump like Miss Pallister, who lived with me before you, and who never would do anything for me scarcely, but was always talking about belonging to a good family, and not being used to a life of dependence. I’m sure I used to wish she had belonged to a bad family. But I know it’ll be so; just as we’re most comfortable with you, you’ll go and marry some horrid creature.”
Eleanor blushed crimson as she shook her head.
“I don’t think that’s very likely,” she said.
“Ah! you say that,” Mrs. Lennard answered, doubtfully, “but you can’t convince me quite so easily. I know you’ll go and marry; but you don’t know the troubles you may bring upon yourself if you marry young—as I did,” added the lady, dropping her brush upon her work, and breathing a profound sigh.
“Troubles, my dear Mrs. Lennard!” cried Eleanor. “Why, it seems to me as if you never could have had any sorrow in your life.”