“‘Seems, Hamlet!’” exclaimed Mrs. Lennard, casting up her eyes tragically; “‘nay, it is; I know not seems,’ as the Queen says to Hamlet—or perhaps it’s Hamlet says so to the Queen, but that doesn’t matter. Oh, Miss Villars! my life might have been very happy, perhaps, but for the blighting influence of my own crime; a crime that I can never atone for—nev-arr!”
Eleanor would have been quite alarmed by this speech, but for the tone of enjoyment with which Mrs. Lennard gave utterance to it. She had pushed aside her frame and huddled her brushes together upon the buhl table—there was nothing but buhl and ormolu, and velvet-pile and ebony, at the Hôtel du Palais, and an honest mahogany chair, a scrap of Kidderminster carpet, or a dimity curtain, would have been a relief to the overstrained intellect—and she sat with her hands clasped upon the edge of the table, and her light blue eyes fixed in a tragic rapture.
“Crime, Mrs. Lennard!” Eleanor repeated, in that tone of horrified surprise which was less prompted by actual terror, than by the feeling that some exclamation of the kind was demanded of her.
“Yes, my dear, ker-rime! ker-rime! is not too harsh a word for the conduct of a woman who jilts the man that loves her on the very eve of the day appointed for the wedding, after a most elaborate trousseau has been prepared at his expense, to say nothing of heaps of gorgeous presents, and diamonds as plentiful as dirt—and elopes with another man. Nothing could be more dreadful than that, could it, Miss Villars?”
Eleanor felt that she was called upon to say that nothing could be more dreadful, and said so accordingly.
“Oh, don’t despise me, then, or hate me, please, Miss Villars,” cried Mrs. Lennard; “I know you’ll feel inclined to do so; but don’t. I did it!—I did it, Miss Villars. But I’m not altogether such a wretch as I may seem to you. It was chiefly for my poor pa’s sake; it was, indeed.”
Eleanor was quite at a loss to know how Mrs. Leonard’s bad conduct to her affianced husband could have benefited that lady’s father, and she said something to that effect.
“Why, you see, my dear, in order to explain that, I must go back to the very beginning, which was when I was at school.”
As Mrs. Lennard evidently derived very great enjoyment from this kind of conversation, Eleanor was much too good-natured to discourage it; so the painting upon velvet was abandoned, for that morning at least, and the major’s wife gave a brief synopsis of her history for the benefit of Mrs. Monckton.
“You must know, my dear,” Mrs. Lennard began, “my poor pa was a country gentleman; and he had once been very rich; or at least his family—and he belonged to a very old family, though not as aristocratic as the major’s—had once been very rich; but somehow or other, through the extravagance of one and another, poor pa was dreadfully poor, and his estate, which was in Berkshire, was heavily—what’s its name?—mortgaged.”