M. E. Braddon

“ We are so fond of each other; you know, Richard, we are all the world to each other; and my poor darling looks so hopefully forward to the day in which he will have Mr. de Crespigny’s fortune. I don’t hope for that quite so much as papa does, Dick; for Mr. de Crespigny may live to be a very, very old man, and it seems so wicked to wish for any one’s death. The day I look forward to is the day when I shall have finished my education, and be able to work for papa. That must be almost better than being rich, I should think, Dick. I can’t imagine any happier fate than to work for those we love. ”

“ But my youth is passed, and I can scarcely expect to be loved for myself alone. Think how dreary and undefended your life must be, if you refuse my love and protection. Think of that, Eleanor. Ah! if you knew what a woman is when thrown upon the world without the shelter of a husband’s love, you would think seriously. I want you to be more than my wife, Eleanor. I want you to be the guardian and protectress of that poor frivolous girl whose future has been trusted to my care. I want you to come and live at Tolldale, my darling, so as to be near that poor child at Hazlewood. ”

“ We none of us calculate the consequences of our sins, my dear. If this man cheated, he cheated because he wanted money. For Heaven’s sake, Nelly, leave him and his sin in the hands of Providence! The future is not a blank sheet of paper, for us to write any story we please upon, but a wonderful chart, mapped out by a Divine and unerring Hand. Launcelot Darrell will not go unpunished, my dear. ‘My faith is strong in Time,’ as the poet says. Leave the young man to time—and to Providence.”
Eleanor Vane shook her head, smiling bitterly at her friend’s philosophy. ”

“ Darrell and the man you saw upon the boulevard. Any dark pale-faced man lounging moodily on a kerbstone would have reminded you of the figure which is so interwoven with the memories of that mournful time in Paris. Forget it, Nelly, my dear—forget that dark chapter in the history of your girlhood. Your father’s rest will be none the sweeter because the brightness of your youth is blighted by these bitter memories. Do your duty, Eleanor, in the state to which you are called. You are not called upon to sacrifice the fairest years of your life to a Quixotic scheme of vengeance. ”

“ I knew George Vane. He would have forgiven his worst enemy. He was the last person to be vindictive or revengeful when his first anger was passed. What good end will be gained by my son’s disgrace? You shall not refuse to hear me. You are a wife, Eleanor Monckton: you may one day be a mother. If you are pitiless to me now, God will be pitiless to you then. You will think of me then. In every throb of pain your child may suffer; in every childish ailment that makes your heart grow sick with unutterable fear, you will recognize God’s vengeance upon you for this night’s work. ”

“ You hate Launcelot Darrell?”
Eleanor hesitated. There is something terrible in that word “hate.” People entertain the deadly sentiment; but they shrink from its plain expression. The naked word is too appalling. It is the half-sister of murder.
“I have good reason to dislike him——” she began.
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders as he interrupted her.
“Yes, you hate him!” he said; “you do not like to say so, because the word is not nice. You are—what is it you call it?—you are shocked by the word. But it is so, nevertheless; you hate him, and you have cause to hate him. ”

“ Could they, Eleanor? When an artist paints the same face again and again, and again and again, he must be in love with the original; mustn’t he now?”
Nobody answered the young lady’s eager questions. Launcelot Darrell smiled and twisted his dark moustache between his slender womanish fingers. Laura’s unrestrained admiration of him was very agreeable; and he was beginning to be in love with her, after his own fashion, which was a very easy one.
Eleanor looked at her husband’s ward with a strange expression in her face—a stern unpitying gaze, that promised little good to the young heiress. ”

“ To investigate the nature of the wrongs they had done him would have been to take their side in the quarrel. Reason and Love could not go hand-in-hand in Eleanor’s creed; for the questions which Reason might ask would be so many treacheries against Love.
It is not to be wondered, then, that she held the few broken sentences written by her father on the threshold of a shameful death, as a solemn and sacred trust, not to be violated or lost sight of, though her future life should be sacrificed to the fulfilment of one purpose. ”

“ This man will never be found. What hope have we? what chance of finding him? We might hear his name to-morrow, and we should not know it. If either of us met him in the street, we should pass him by. We might live in the same house with him, and be ignorant of his presence.”
“No, Richard,” cried Eleanor Vane. “I think if I met that man some instinct of hate and horror would reveal his identity to me.”
“My poor romantic Nelly, you talk as if life was a melodrama. No, my dear, I say again, this man will never be found; the story of your father’s death is unhappily a common one. ”

“ Laura linked her hand through his arm, and raising herself on tiptoe, so as to bring her rosy lips within easier reach of his ear, whispered archly,
“Does she really love you? Was it really a love match?”
Gilbert Monckton started as violently as if that infantine whisper had been the envenomed hiss of a snake.
“What do you mean, child?” he said, turning sharply upon his ward; “of course Eleanor and I married because we loved each other? Why else should we have married?”
“No, to be sure. Girls marry for money sometimes. ”

“ He had something of George Vane’s nature, perhaps; that fatally hopeful temperament common to men who are for ever going to do great things, and for ever failing to achieve even the smallest. He was one of those men who are perpetually deluding other people by the force of their power of self-delusion.
Self-deluded and mistaken now, it was scarcely strange if he deceived Eleanor Vane, who was carried away by the impetuous torrent of words in which he told her that he loved her, and that the future happiness of his life depended upon the fiat which must issue from her lips. ”

“ My dear Eleanor, if I regret the vehemence of your feeling upon this subject, I do not defend the man whose treachery hurried your father to his unhappy death; I only wish to convince you of the folly you commit in cherishing these ideas of vengeance and retribution. Life is not a three-volume novel or a five-act play, you know, Nelly. The sudden meetings and strange coincidences common in novels are not very general in our everyday existence. It is not at all likely that in the whole course of your life you will ever again encounter this man. ”

“ You must know, you must have long known, my dear, that heavy sorrows come to us all, sooner or later. It is the common lot, my love, and we must all bow before the Divine hand that afflicts us. If there were no sorrow [Pg 71] in this world, Eleanor, we should grow too much in love with our own happiness; we should be frightened at the approach of grey hairs and old age; we should tremble at the thought of death. If there were no better and higher life than this, Eleanor, sorrow and death would indeed be terrible. You know how very much affliction has fallen to my share, dear. ”

“ She went on with the letter:—
“From the hour of our return to Tolldale, Eleanor,” wrote Gilbert Monckton, “I knew the truth—the hard and cruel truth—very difficult for a man to believe, when he has built up his life and mapped out a happy future under the influence of a delusion which leaves him desolate when it melts away. I knew the worst. I watched you as a man only watches the woman upon whose truth his every hope depends, and I saw that you still loved Launcelot Darrell. By a hundred evidences, small in themselves, but damning when massed together, you betrayed your secret. ”

“ Eleanor Vane yielded herself up to the brief holiday-time which generally comes once in almost every woman’s life, however desolate and joyless the rest of that life may be. The holiday comes,—a fleeting summer of gladness and rejoicing. The earth lights up under a new sun and moon; the flowers bloom into new colours and scatter new perfumes on the sublimated atmosphere; the waters of the commonest rivers change to melted sapphires, and blaze with the splendour of a million jewels in the sunshine. The dull universe changes to fairyland ”

“ Who says it is pleasant to go out of the straight line? Not I, faith of a gentleman, Monsieur Lance! Believe me, it is more pleasant, as well as more proper, to be virtuous than to be wicked. Give me an annuity of a few thousand francs, and I will be the most honourable of men. You are afraid of the work that lies before you, because it is difficult, because it is dangerous; but not because it is dishonourable. Let us speak frankly, and call things by their right names. You want to inherit this old man’s fortune?”
“Yes,” answered Launcelot Darrell. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ Is he to have a noble fortune and an amiable wife? and am I to stand by and permit him to be happy; remembering what happened upon that dreadful night in Paris—remembering that my father lies in his unconsecrated grave, and that his blood is upon this man’s head? Help me, Richard. Come to me; help me to find proof positive of Launcelot Darrell’s guilt. You can help me, if you please. Your brain is clearer, your perception quicker, than mine. I am carried away by my own passion—blinded by my indignation. ”

“ But to the ears of Eleanor Monckton, the old man’s speech had another signification; the blood mounted to her face, and her heart beat violently. “He is thinking of Launcelot Darrell,” she thought; “he will leave his fortune to Launcelot Darrell. He will die before he learns the secret of my father’s wrongs. His will is already made, no doubt, and he will die before I can dare to say to him, ‘Your niece’s son is a trickster and a villain!’”
This was the only occasion upon which Maurice de Crespigny ever spoke of his intentions with regard to the fortune that he must leave behind him. ”

“ I was deceived, Miss Vincent, and for twenty years I have profited by that bitter lesson. Heaven help me if I feel inclined to forget it now. I am forty years of age, but I do not think that the brightness of my life has quite gone yet. Twenty years ago I was in love, and in the ardour and freshness of my youth, I dare say I talked a great deal of nonsense. I am in love once more, Eleanor. Will you forgive me if all my faculty for sentimental talk is lost? Will you let me tell you, in very few and simple words, that I love you ”

“ You have heard me speak of the children I loved; all taken from me, Nelly, all taken away. If it were not for my dear nephew, Richard, I should stand quite alone in the world, a desolate old woman, with no hope on this side of the grave. But when my sons were taken from me, God raised me up another son in him. Do you think that God ever abandons us, Eleanor, even when He afflicts us most heavily? I have lived a long life, my dear, and I tell you NO!”
The Signora waited in vain for some change in the rigid attitude, the stony face. Eleanor Vane still stared blankly at the dead wall before her. ”

“ Laura added, hastily, half ashamed of having spoken unkindly of the friend who had been so patient with her during the last few days. “I love her very dearly; but if she hadn’t cared for Launcelot Darrell, why did she go against my marrying him?”
Gilbert Monckton groaned aloud. Yes, it must be so. Eleanor had loved Launcelot, and her sudden anger, her violent emotion, had arisen out of her jealousy. She was not a devoted daughter, nursing a dream of vengeance against her dead father’s foe; but a jealous and vindictive woman, bent upon avenging an infidelity against herself. ”

“ Laura Mason was accustomed to obey her guardian, and Eleanor was very well pleased to pay all possible respect to Gilbert Monckton. She looked up to him as something removed from the commonplace sphere in which she felt so fettered and helpless. She fancied sometimes that if she could have told him the story of her father’s death, he might have helped her to find the old man’s destroyer. She had that implicit confidence in his power which a young and inexperienced woman almost always feels for a man of superior intellect who is twenty years her senior. ”

“ I know it seems very cruel to speak against the man you love, but it would be fifty times more cruel to let you marry him, and leave you to discover afterwards, when your life was linked to his, and never, never could be a happy life again if parted from him, that he was unworthy of your love. If it is terrible to be told this now, Laura, it would be a thousand times more terrible to hear it then. Come with me to your room, dear; I will stay with you all to-night. I will tell you all I know about Launcelot Darrell. ”

“ Richard said: “Mr. Launcelot Darrell has no sympathy with nature. He might be a clever figure painter if he had as much perseverance as he has talent. His pictures are like himself; shallow, artificial, and meretricious; but they are clever.”
The scene-painter said this with a purpose. He knew that Eleanor stood behind him, erect and statuesque, with her hand grasping the back of his chair, a pale Nemesis bent on revenge and destruction. He wanted, if possible, to let her down to commonplace feeling, by his commonplace talk, before Launcelot Darrell saw her face. ”

“ The genuine will is burn, he think. He defies himself of his dear friend, this poor Bourdon, and he will not even tell him who would have benefit by that genuine will. It is burn! Did he not see it scorch and blaze with his own eyes? There is nothing to fear; and for this poor comrade, who has helped my gentleman to a great fortune he is less than that!”
Monsieur Bourdon snapped his fingers derisively, and stared fiercely at Eleanor. Then he relapsed into a sardonic smile, and went on.
“At first things go on charmingly. Monsieur Launcelot is more sweet than the honey. ”

“ Then the despair seizes itself of you. Launcelot mocks himself of you; he laughs at your nose. You find yourself unhappy; they do not believe you; they look coldly at you; they are harsh to you, and you fly from them. It is like that; is it not?”
“Yes,” Eleanor answered.
Her breath came and went quickly; she never removed her eyes from the man’s face. She began to think that her justification was perhaps only to be obtained by the agency of this disreputable Frenchman.
“What, then, of the lost will? It was not swallowed up by the earth. It could not fly itself away into the space! ”

“ She tried to disengage herself from Ellen Darrell’s arms, but the widow still clung about her, with her head flung back, and her white face convulsed with anguish.
“Forgive him for my sake,” she cried; “give him to me—give him to me! He will suffer enough from the ruin of his hopes. He will suffer enough from the consciousness of having done wrong. He has suffered. Yes. I have watched him, and I know. Take everything from him. Leave him a penniless dependant upon the pittance my uncle left to me, but save him from disgrace. ”

“ You are not different to the rest of the world. If other women are mercenary, you too are mercenary. You are not content with having sacrificed your inclination for the sake of making what the world calls an advantageous marriage. You are not satisfied with having won a wealthy husband, and you seek to inherit Maurice de Crespigny’s fortune.”
Eleanor Monckton passed both her hands across her forehead, pushing back the loose masses of her hair, as if she would by that movement have cleared away some of the clouds that overshadowed her brain. ”

“ Darrell’s friendship when her own end is gained,” Gilbert Monckton said, thoughtfully. “Ellen Darrell is only capable of loving one person, and that person is, according to the fashion of the world, the one who has used her worst. She loves her son, Launcelot, and would sacrifice a hecatomb of her fellow-creatures for his advantage. If she can get you a new home, I dare say she will do so. If she cannot, she has succeeded in removing you from her son’s pathway, and will trouble herself very little about your future.”
Eleanor Vane lifted her head with a sudden gesture of pride. ”

“ His professional career had given him the faculty of putting together the evidences of smiles and frowns, involuntary contractions of the eyebrows, scarcely perceptible compressions of the lips, every tone and semi-tone in the facial diapason. He looked at Eleanor Vane’s face, and said to himself:
“This girl cannot be mercenary. She is as pure as an angel; as unselfish as Jephtha’s daughter; as brave as Judith, or Joan of Arc. She cannot be anything but a good wife. The man who wins her has reason to thank God for his bounty.” ”

“ All George Vane’s notions of justice and honour had been rather the meretricious and flimsy ideas of a stage play, than the common-sense views of real life. He had talked incessantly to his daughter about days of retribution; gigantic vengeances which were looming somewhere in the far-away distance, for the ultimate annihilation of the old man’s enemies. This foolish ruined spendthrift, who cried out against the world because his money was spent, and his place in that world usurped by wiser men, had been Eleanor’s teacher during her most impressionable years. ”