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Vandaleur was a family connection, and not a chance visitor from the neighbourhood, Mrs. O'Connor apologized for her remarks, and tried to extract the Duchess's history from Aunt Theresa then and there. But Mrs. Buller would only promise to tell it "another time." "I'm dying with curiosity," said Mrs. O'Connor, as she took leave, "I shall run in to-morrow afternoon on purpose to hear all about it.
"Oh, me lady, God bless ye! but I'm past the helping now! I loved him, I would have died to save him from a minute's sorrow, and he threatened the police on me!" "Come with me; I will take care of you, and you shall tell me all." Miss Vandaleur hailed a passing hansom and jumped in, followed by Eily, white, shivering, and limp.
"Mrs. Vandaleur," said Major Buller, "can afford to be independent of appearances to an extent that would not perhaps be safe for most of us." "You're right there, Buller," said the Surgeon. "Wonderfully queenly she is! That fur cloak looks like an ermine robe on her." "I don't think you'd like to see me in it!" tittered his wife. "I don't say I should," returned the Surgeon, rather smartly.
He had the de Vandaleur quality of pleasing, with the weakness of being utterly ruled by the woman he loved. At twenty he married an heiress. His parents had themselves married too early to have reasonable ground for complaint at this; but when he left his own Church for that of his wife, there came a terrible breach between them and their only son.
Major Buller had taken her hand in both his, and replied very cordially, "Of course, my dear madam, of course. Whenever it is convenient to yourself and to Mr. de Vandaleur."
She had, like most Scotch matrons of her type, too good a gift for telling family stories, and too high a respect for ancestral traditions, to have quite kept herself from amusing her daughter's childhood with tales of the de Vandaleur greatness.
"'Pon my soul, she is like her!" said one of the "middle ones" one day, examining me through his eyeglass, "Th' same expressive eyes, you know, and just that graceful gracious little manner poor Mrs. Vandaleur had. By Jove, it was a shocking thing! She was an uncommonly pretty woman." "You never saw her mother, my good fellow," said one of the "old ones" who was present.
I suppose I have some Vandaleur features, from an eerie little incident which befell me on the threshold of The Vine an appropriate beginning to a life that always felt like a weird, shadowy dream. Thither I ran so hastily, that a straggling sweetbriar caught my hat and my net, and dragged them off, sending my hair over my shoulders.
But, in spite of common-sense and experience, Monsieur de Vandaleur did die of grief, or something very like it, within twenty-four hours of the death of his wife, and the birth of their only son. For some years the faithful Jeanette supported this child by her own industry. She was an exquisite laundress, and she throve where the Duke and Duchess would have starved.
"Very sorry, sir, no mistake, sir; Miss Vandaleur is not at 'ome!" and the door closed in the face of the astonished artist. It was June in Connemara. Where else is the month of roses half as lovely? where does the sky show bluer, or the grass greener? and where is the air so clear and cool and fragrant, or the lakes half as still and azure as in that blessed country?
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