ELEANOR’S VICTORY.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “AURORA FLOYD,” “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” &c.
CHAPTER LIII. MARGARET LENNARD’S DELINQUENCIES.
Mrs. Major Lennard was very kind to Eleanor, and if kindness and friendliness on the part of her employers could have made Mrs. Monckton comfortable, she might have been entirely so in her new position.
But comfort was a noun substantive whose very meaning must, I think, have been utterly incomprehensible to Major and Mrs. Lennard. They had married very young, had started in life all wrong, and had remained in a perpetual state of muddle, both mental and physical, ever since. They were like two children who had played at being grown-up people for twenty years or so; and who were as entirely childish in their play now as they had been at the very beginning. To live with them was to exist in an atmosphere of bewilderment and confusion; to have any dealings whatever with them was to plunge at once into a chaos of disorder, out of which the clearest intellect could scarcely emerge without having suffered complete disorganisation. The greatest misfortune of these two people was the likeness they bore to each other. Had Major Lennard been a man of vigorous intellect and strong will, or had he been merely possessed of the average allowance of common sense, he might have ruled his wife, and introduced some element of order into his existence. On the other hand, if Mrs. Lennard had been a sensible woman she would no doubt have henpecked her husband, and would have rescued the good-natured soldier from a hundred follies, by a well-timed frown, or a sharp matronly nudge, as the occasion might demand.
But they were both alike. They were two overgrown children of forty years of age; and they looked upon the world as a great play-room, whose inhabitants had no better occupation than to find amusement, and shirk the schoolmaster. They were generous and kind hearted to a degree that, in the opinion of their wiser acquaintance, bordered upon foolishness. They were imposed upon on every side, and had been imposed upon during twenty years, without acquiring any moral wealth in the way of wisdom, from their very costly experience. The Major had within the last twelve months left the army on half-pay, on the death of a maiden aunt, who had left him eight hundred a-year. Up to the date of receiving this welcome legacy, the soldier and his wife had been compelled to exist upon Major Lennard’s pay, eked out by the help of stray benefactions which he received from time to time from his rich relatives. The family to which the ponderous officer belonged was very numerous and aristocratic, owning as its chief a marquis, who was uncle to the major.
So the two big children had decided upon enjoying themselves very much for the rest of their days, and as a commencement of this new life of idleness and enjoyment, Major Lennard had brought his wife to Paris, whence they were to go to Baden-Baden, to meet some of the major’s aristocratic cousins.
“He might come in for the title himself, my dear,” Mrs. Lennard told Eleanor, “if seventeen of his first cousins, and first cousins once removed, would die. But, as I told poor papa, when he grumbled at my marrying so badly, you can’t expect seventeen cousins to go off all in a minute, just to oblige us by making Freddy a marquis.”
Perhaps nothing could have been happier for Eleanor than this life of confusion, this scrambling and unsettled existence, in which the mind was kept in a tumult by trifling cares and agitations; for in this perpetual disorganisation of her intellect, the lonely girl had no time to think of her own troubles, or of the isolated position which she had chosen for herself. It was only at night, when she went to bed, in a small apartment very high up in the Hotel du Palais, and about a quarter of an hour’s walk from the chamber of the Major and his wife, that she had time to think of Launcelot Darrell’s triumph and her husband’s unjust suspicions; and even then she could rarely brood very long upon her troubles, for she was generally exhausted alike in mind and body by the confusion and excitement of the day, and more likely to fall asleep and dream of her sorrows than to lie awake and think of them.
Those dreams were more troublesome to her than all the bewilderment of the day, for in them she was perpetually renewing the old struggle with Launcelot Darrell, perpetually upon the eve of victory, but never quite victorious.
The Major lingered in Paris much longer than he had intended, for the big children found the city of boulevards a most delightful play-ground, and frittered away a great deal of money upon expensive dinners at renowned restaurants, ices, opera tickets, new bonnets, Piver’s gloves, Lubin’s perfumes, and coach hire.
They stopped at the Hotel du Palais, still acting on the Major’s theory, that the most expensive hotels are the cheapest—in the end. They dined occasionally at the table d’hôte, with two or three hundred companions, and wasted a good deal of time in the great saloons, playing at bagatelle, peering into stereoscopes, turning over the daily papers, reading stray paragraphs here and there, or poring over a chapter of a romance in the feuilleton, until brought to a standstill by a disheartening abundance of difficult words.
After breakfast, the Major left his wife and her companion, either to loll in the reading-room, to stroll about the great stone quadrangle smoking cigars, and drinking occasional brandy and soda, or to read the English papers at Galignani’s, or to wait for the post, or to meet a British acquaintance at Hill’s café, or to stare at the raw young soldiers exercising in the court-yards of the