“I may be able to do something for them,” she thought; and this thought was the only gleam of light which illumined the darkness of her sorrow. “I may be able to save money enough to buy the Signora a black silk dress, and Richard a meerschaum. I should so like to buy Dick a meerschaum; I know the one he’d like—a bull-dog’s head, with a silver collar round the neck. We looked at it one night at a shop in Holborn.”
She rose from the sofa at last with an aching heart and troubled brain, when the early shadows of the spring twilight were gathering in the room. She made up the fire and swept the hearth, and arranged the tea-things on the comfortable round table, and then sat down on a low stool by the fender to toast great rounds of bread, which would be as nothing in comparison to Richard’s all-devouring capacity after a hard day’s work in the scene-room at the Phœnix. How pleasant it was to perform all these little familiar offices of love and duty! How sorrowfully she looked back to her simple, free-and-easy life, now that she was to go amongst strangers who would exact all manner of ceremonious observances from her! The Bohemianism of her existence had been its greatest charm; and this poor benighted girl trembled at the prospect of a life in which she would have to go through all those terrible performances which she had read of, fearfully and wonderingly, in certain erudite essays upon Etiquette, but which had never yet come within the range of her experiences.
“It is my duty to go away from them,” she kept saying to herself; “it is my duty to go away.”
She had schooled herself in this difficult duty by the time her friends came home, and she told them very quietly that she had seen Mrs. Bannister, and had agreed to accept her patronage and services.
“I am going to be a sort of companion or musical governess—I scarcely know which—to a young lady at a country house called Hazlewood,” she said. “Don’t think I am not sorry to leave you, dear Signora, but Hortensia says it is better that I should do so.”
“And don’t think that I am not sorry to lose you, Nelly, when I tell you that I think your sister is right,” the Signora answered gently, as she kissed her protégée.
Perhaps Eleanor was a little disappointed at this reply. She little dreamed how often Eliza Picirillo had struggled against the selfishness of her affection before she had grown thus resigned to this parting.
Mr. Richard Thornton groaned aloud.
“I shall go out and pull down a couple of the Pilasters, and bury myself under them, à la Samson,” he said, piteously. “What is to become of us without you, Eleanor? Who will come over to the Phœnix, and applaud my great scenes with the ferule of an umbrella? Who’ll cut up half-quartern loaves into toast when I am hungry, or have Welsh rarebits in readiness on the hob when I come home late at night? Who’ll play Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs without Words’ to me, and darn my stockings, and sew buttons—absurd institutions, invented by ignorant people, who have never known the blessing of pins—upon my shirts? Who’ll abuse me when I go unshaven, or recommend blacking as an embellishment for my boots? Who’ll career in and out of the room with a dirty white French poodle at her heels, looking like a fair-haired Esmeralda with a curly-coated goat? What are we to do without you, Eleanor?”
There was a sharp pain at poor Dick’s heart as he apostrophized his adopted sister. Were his feelings quite brotherly? Was there no twinge of the fatal torture so common to mankind mingled with this young man’s feelings as he looked at the beautiful face opposite to him, and remembered how soon it would have vanished from that shabby chamber, leaving only dismal emptiness behind?