Mrs. Bannister wrote a stiffly-worded letter in reply to that in which Richard Thornton told her of her father’s death, enclosing an order on Messrs. Blount for the sum she considered sufficient to pay for the old man’s funeral, and to support Eleanor for a few weeks.
“I should advise her early return to England,” the stockbroker’s widow wrote, “and I will endeavour to find her some decent situation—as nursery governess or milliner’s apprentice, perhaps—but she must remember that I expect her to support herself, and that she must not look to me for any further assistance. I have performed my duty to my father at a considerable loss to myself, but with his death all claim upon me ceases.”
George Vane had been buried during the early days of his youngest daughter’s illness. They placed him amongst a cluster of neglected graves, in a patch of ground upon the outskirts of Père la Chaise, a burial place for heretics and suicides, and Richard Thornton ordered a roughly-hewn cross from one of the stonemasons near the cemetery. So, far away from the lofty monuments of the Russian princes and the marshals of the First Empire; far away from Abelard and Heloise, and all the marble chapels in which devoted survivors pray for the souls of the beloved dead; in a desolate and unhallowed patch of weedy turf, where the bones of the departed were only suffered to rest peaceably for a given number of years, and were stirred up out of their coffins periodically to make room for new-comers, George Vane slept the last sleep. He might have been buried as a nameless suicide, but for the chance which had taken Richard Thornton to the Morgue, where he recognized Eleanor’s father in the unknown man who had been last brought to that gloomy shelter; for he had had no papers which could give any clue to his identity about him at the time of his death.
Upon the morning after that quiet September afternoon on which Eleanor Vane had learned the true story of her father’s death, Signora Picirillo for the first time spoke seriously of the future. In the intensity of her first great grief, Eleanor Vane had never once thought of the desolation of her position, nor yet of the sacrifices which the Signora and Richard were making for her sake. She never remembered that they were both lingering in Paris solely on her account: she only knew that they were there, and that she saw them daily, and that the sight of them, good and kind as they were, was pain and weariness to her, like the sight of everything else in the world. She had been singularly quiet since the revelation made to her. After the first burst of passionate vehemence which had succeeded her perusal of her dead father’s letter, her manner had grown almost unnaturally calm. She had sat all the evening apart near the window, and Richard had tried in vain to beguile her attention even for a moment. She kept silence, brooding upon the scrap of paper which lay in her bosom.
This morning she sat in a listless attitude, with her head resting on her hand. She took no heed of the Signora’s busy movements from room to room. She made no effort to give her old friend any assistance in all the little household arrangements which took so long to complete, and when at last the music-mistress brought her needlework to the window, and sat down opposite the invalid, Eleanor looked up at her with a dull gaze that struck despair to the good creature’s heart.
“Nelly, my dear,” the Signora said, briskly, “I want to have a little serious conversation with you.”
“About what, dear Signora?”
“About the future, my love.”
“The future!” Eleanor Vane uttered the word almost as if it had been meaningless to her.
“Yes, my dear. You see even I can talk hopefully of the future, though I am an old woman; but you, who are only fifteen, have a long life before you, and it is time you began to look forward to it.”