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’m 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 Palllster, 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.”
“‘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 Hotel 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. Lennard’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