Her two companions were silent. That terrible something which was at yet unrevealed must be told sooner or later; but who was to tell it to this girl, with her excitable nature, her highly-wrought nervous temperament?
The Signora shrugged her shoulders despondingly as she looked at her nephew. Mr. Thornton had been painting all the afternoon in the little sitting-room. He had tried to interest Eleanor Vane in the great set scenes he was preparing for Raoul. He had explained to her the nature of a vampire trap in the wainscot of the poisoner’s chamber, and had made his pasteboard model limp in his repeated exhibition of its machinery. The vampire trap was a subtle contrivance which might have beguiled any one from their grief, Dick thought; but the wan smile with which Eleanor watched his work only made the scene-painter’s heart ache. Richard sighed as he returned his aunt’s look. It seemed quite a hopeless case as yet. This poor lonely child of fifteen might go melancholy mad, perhaps, in her grief for a spendthrift father.
Eleanor Vane turned upon them suddenly while they sat silent and embarrassed, wondering what they should say to her next.
“My father committed suicide!” she said, in a strangely quiet voice.
The Signora started and rose suddenly, as if she would have gone to Eleanor. Richard grew very pale, but sat looking down at the litter upon the table, with one hand trifling nervously amongst the scraps of cardboard and wet paint-brushes.
“Yes,” cried Eleanor Vane, “you have deceived me from first to last. You told me first that he was not dead; but when you could no longer keep my misery a secret from me, you only told me half the truth—you only told me half the cruel truth. And even now, when I have suffered so much that it seems as if no further suffering could touch me, you still deceive me, you still try to keep the truth from me. My father parted from me in health and spirits. Don’t trifle with me, Signora; I am not a child any longer; I am not a foolish school-girl, whom you can deceive as you like. I am a woman, and will know the worst. My father killed himself!”
She had risen in her excitement, but clung with one hand to the back of her chair, as if too weak to stand without that support.
The Signora went to her, and wound her arms about the slight trembling figure; but Eleanor seemed almost unconscious of that motherly caress.
“Tell me the truth,” she cried, vehemently; “did my father kill himself?”
“It is feared that he did, Eleanor.”