The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon

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To-day she was out of spirits, and came to the library for some relief from
those vaguely painful thoughts that had oppressed her lately. The room was
so little affected by my lady's butterfly guests that she made sure of
having it all to herself this afternoon, when the voices and laughter of
the croquet-players, floating in at the open windows, told her that the
sport was still at its height.

She went into the room, and stopped suddenly a few paces from the doorway.
A gentleman was standing before the wide empty fireplace, where there was
a great dog-stove of ironwork and brass which consumed about half a ton of
coal a day in winter; a tall, ponderous-looking man, with his hands behind
him, glancing downward with cold gray eyes, but not in the least degree
inclining his stately head to listen to Lady Laura Armstrong, who was
seated on a sofa near him, fanning herself and prattling gaily after her
usual vivacious manner.

Clarissa started and drew back at sight of this tall stranger.

"Mr. Granger," she thought, and tried to make her escape without being
seen.

The attempt was a failure. Lady Laura called to her.

"Who is that in a white dress? Miss Lovel, I am sure.--Come here,
Clary--what are you running away for? I want to introduce my friend Mr.
Granger to you.--Mr. Granger, this is Miss Lovel, the Miss Lovel whose
birthplace fortune has given to you."

Mr. Granger bowed rather stiffly, and with the air of a man to whom a bow
was a matter of business.

"I regret," he said, "to have robbed Miss Lovel of a home to which she was
attached. I regret still more that she will not avail herself of my desire
to consider the park and grounds entirely at her disposal on all occasions.
Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see her use the place as if
it were her own."

"And nothing could be kinder than such a wish on your part." exclaimed my
lady approvingly.

Clarissa lifted her eyes rather shyly to the rich man's face. He was not
a connoisseur in feminine loveliness, but they struck him at once as very
fine eyes. He was a connoisseur in pictures, and no mean judge of them,
and those brilliant hazel eyes of Clarissa's reminded him of a portrait by
Velasquez, of which he was particularly proud.

"You are very kind," she murmured; "but--but there are some associations
too painful to bear. The park would remind me so bitterly of all I have
lost since I was a child."

She was thinking of her brother, and his disgrace--or misfortune; she did
not even know which of these two it was that had robbed her of him. Mr.
Granger looked at her wonderingly. Her words and manner seemed to betray
a deeper feeling than he could have supposed involved in the loss of an
estate. He was not a man of sentiment himself, and had gone through life
affected only by its sternest realities. There was something rather too
Rosa-Matildaish for his taste in this faltered speech of Clarissa's; but
he thought her a very pretty girl nevertheless, and was inclined to look
somewhat indulgently upon a weakness he would have condemned without
compunction in his daughter. Mr. Granger was a man who prided himself upon
his strength of mind, and he had a very poor idea of the exclusive recluse
whose early extravagances had made him master of Arden Court. He had not
seen Mr. Lovel half-a-dozen times in his life, for all business between
those two that could be transacted by their respective lawyers had been so
transacted; but what he had seen of that pale careworn face, that fragile
figure, and somewhat irritable manner, had led the ponderous, strong-minded
Daniel Granger to consider Marmaduke Lovel a very poor creature.

He was interested in this predecessor of his nevertheless. A man must be
harder than iron who can usurp another man's home, and sit by another man's
hearthstone, without giving some thought to the exile he has ousted. Daniel
Granger was not so hard as that, and he did profoundly pity the ruined
gentleman he had deposed. Perhaps he was still more inclined to pity the
ruined gentleman's only daughter, who must needs suffer for the sins and
errors of others.

"Now, pray don't run away, Clary," cried Lady Laura, seeing Clarissa moving
towards the door, as if still anxious to escape. "You came to look for some
books, I know.--Miss Lovel is a very clever young lady, I assure you, Mr.
Granger, and has read immensely.--Sit down, Clary; you shall take away an
armful of books by-and-by, if you like."

Clarissa seated herself near my lady's sofa with a gracious submissive air,
which the owner of Arden Court thought a rather pretty kind of thing, in
its way. He had a habit of classifying all young women in a general way
with his own daughter, as if in possessing that one specimen of the female
race he had a key to the whole species. His daughter was obedient--it was
one of her chief virtues; but somehow there was not quite such a graceful
air in her small concessions as he perceived in this little submission of
Miss Lovel's.

Mr. Granger was rather a silent man; but my lady rattled on gaily in her
accustomed style, and while that perennial stream of small talk flowed on,
Clarissa had leisure to observe the usurper.

He was a tall man, six feet high perhaps, with a powerful and somewhat
bulky frame, broad shoulders, a head erect and firmly planted as an
obelisk, and altogether an appearance which gave a general idea of
strength. He was not a bad-looking man by any means. His features were
large and well cut, the mouth firm as iron, and unshadowed by beard or
moustache; the eyes gray and clear, but very cold. Such a man could surely
be cruel, Clarissa thought, with an inward shudder. He was a man who would
have looked grand in a judge's wig; a man whose eyes and eyebrows, lowered
upon some trembling delinquent, might have been almost as awful as Lord
Thurlow's. Even his own light-brown hair, faintly streaked with grey, which
he wore rather long, had something of a leonine air.

He listened to Lady Laura's trivial discourse with a manner which was no
doubt meant to be gracious, but with no great show of interest. Once he
went so far as to remark that the Castle gardens were looking very fine for
so advanced a season, and attended politely to my lady's rather diffuse
account of her triumphs in the orchid line.

"I don't pretend to understand much about those things," he said, in his
stately far-off way, as if he lived in some world quite remote from Lady
Laura's, and of a superior rank in the catalogue of worlds. "They are
pretty and curious, no doubt. My daughter interests herself considerably in
that sort of thing. We have a good deal of glass at Arden--more than I care
about. My head man tells me that I must have grapes and pines all the year
round: and since he insists upon it, I submit. But I imagine that a good
many more of his pines and grapes find their way to Covent Garden than to
my table."

Clarissa remembered the old kitchen-gardens at the Court in her father's
time, when the whole extent of "glass" was comprised by a couple of
dilapidated cucumber-frames, and a queer little greenhouse in a corner,
where she and her brother had made some primitive experiments in
horticulture, and where there was a particular race of spiders, the biggest
specimens of the spidery species it had ever been her horror to encounter.

"I wonder whether the little greenhouse is there still?" she thought. "O,
no, no; battered down to the ground, of course, by this pompous man's
order. I don't suppose I should know the dear old place, if I were to see
it now."

"You are fond of botany, I suppose, Miss Lovel?" Mr. Granger asked
presently, with a palpable effort. He was not an adept in small talk, and
though in the course of years of dinner-eating and dinner-giving he had
been frequently called upon to address his conversation to young ladies, he
never opened his lips to one of the class without a sense of constraint
and an obvious difficulty. He had all his life been most at home in men's
society, where the talk was of grave things, and was no bad talker when
the question in hand was either commercial or political. But as a rich
man cannot go through life without being cultivated more or less by the
frivolous herd, Mr. Granger had been compelled to conform himself somehow
to the requirements of civilised society, and to talk in his stiff bald way
of things which he neither understood nor cared for.

"I am fond of flowers," Clarissa answered, "but I really know nothing of
botany. I would always rather paint them than anatomise them."

"Indeed! Painting is a delightful occupation for a young lady. My daughter
sketches a little, but I cannot say that she has any remarkable talent that
way. She has been well taught, of course."

"You will find Miss Lovel quite a first-rate artist," said Lady Laura,
pleased to praise her favourite. "I really know no one of her age with such
a marked genius for art. Everybody observes it." And then, half afraid
that this praise might seem to depreciate Miss Granger, the good-natured
_chatelaine_ went on, "Your daughter illuminates, I daresay?"

"Well, yes, I suppose so, Lady Laura. I know that Sophia does some massy
kind of work involving the use of gums and colours. I have seen her engaged
in it sometimes. And there are scriptural texts on the walls of our
poor-schools which I conclude are her work. A young woman cannot have too
many pursuits. I like to see my daughter occupied."

"Miss Granger reads a good deal, I suppose, like Clarissa,' Lady Laura
hazarded.

"No, I cannot say that she does. My daughter's habits are active and
energetic rather than studious. Nor should I encourage her in giving
much time to literature, unless the works she read were of a very solid
character. I have never found anything great achieved by reading men of my
own acquaintance; and directly I hear that, a man is never so happy as in
his library, I put him down as a man whose life will be a failure."

"But the great men of our day have generally been men of wide reading, have
they not?"

"I think not, Lady Laura. They have been men who have made a little
learning go a long way. Of course there are numerous exceptions amongst the
highest class of all--statesmen, and so on. But for success in active life,
I take it, a man cannot have his brain too clear of waste rubbish in the
way of book-learning. He wants all his intellectual coin in his current
account, you see, ready for immediate use, not invested in out-of-the-way
corners, where he can't get at it."

While Mr. Granger and my lady were arguing this question, Clarissa went to
the bookshelves and amused herself hunting for some attractive volumes.
Daniel Granger followed the slender girlish figure with curious eyes.
Nothing could have been more unexpected than this meeting with Marmaduke
Lovel's daughter. He had done his best, in the first year or so of his
residence at the Court, to cultivate friendly relations with Mr. Lovel,
and had most completely failed in that well-meant attempt. Some men in Mr.
Granger's position might have been piqued by this coldness. But Daniel
Granger was not such a one; he was not given to undervalue the advantage
of his friendship or patronage. A career of unbroken prosperity, and a
character by nature self-contained and strong-willed, combined to sustain
his belief in himself. He could not for a moment conceive that Mr. Lovel
declined his acquaintance as a thing not worth having. He therefore
concluded that the banished lord of Arden felt his loss too keenly
to endure to look upon his successor's happiness, and he pitied him
accordingly. It would have been the one last drop of bitterness in
Marmaduke Lovel's cup to know that this man did pity him. Having thus
failed in cultivating anything approaching intimacy with the father, Mr.
Granger was so much the more disposed to feel an interest--half curious,
half compassionate--in the daughter. From the characterless ranks of
young-ladyhood this particular damsel stood out with unwonted distinctness.
He found his mind wandering a little as he tried to talk with Lady Laura.
He could not help watching the graceful figure yonder, the slim white-robed
figure standing out so sharply against the dark background of carved oaken
bookshelves.

Clarissa selected a couple of volumes to carry away with her presently, and
then came back to her seat by Lady Laura's sofa. She did not want to appear
rude to Mr. Granger, or to disoblige her kind friend, who for some reason
or other was evidently anxious she should remain, or she would have been
only too glad to run away to her own room.

The talk went on. My lady was confidential after her manner communicating
her family affairs to Daniel Granger as freely as she might have done if
he had been an uncle or an executor. She told him about her sister's
approaching marriage and George Fairfax's expectations.

"They will have to begin life upon an income that I daresay _you_ would
think barely sufficient for bread and cheese," she said.

Mr. Granger shook his head, and murmured that his own personal requirements
could be satisfied for thirty shillings a week.

"I daresay. It is generally the case with millionaires. They give four
hundred a year to a cook, and dine upon a mutton-chop or a boiled chicken.
But really Mr. Fairfax and Geraldine will be almost poor at first; only my
sister has fortunately no taste for display, and George must have sown all
his wild oats by this time. I expect them to be a model couple, they are so
thoroughly attached to each other."

Clarissa opened one of her volumes and bent over it at this juncture. Was
this really true? Did Lady Laura believe what she said? Was that problem
which she had been perpetually trying to solve lately so very simple, after
all, and only a perplexity to her own weak powers of reason? Lady Laura
must be the best judge, of course, and she was surely too warm-hearted
a woman to take a conventional view of things, or to rejoice in a mere
marriage of convenience. No, it must be true. They really did love each
other, these two, and that utter absence of all those small signs and
tokens of attachment which Clarissa had expected to see was only a
characteristic of good taste. What she had taken for coldness was merely a
natural reserve, which at once proved their superior breeding and rebuked
her own vulgar curiosity.

From the question of the coming marriage, Lady Laura flew to the lighter
subject of the ball.

"I hope Miss Granger has brought a ball-dress; I told her all about our
ball in my last note."

"I believe she has provided herself for the occasion," replied Mr. Granger.
"I know there was an extra trunk, to which I objected when my people were
packing the luggage. Sophia is not usually extravagant in the matter of
dress. She has a fair allowance, of course, and liberty to exceed it on
occasion; but I believe she spends more upon her school-children and
pensioners in the village than on her toilet."

"Your ideas on the subject of costume are not quite so wide as Mr.
Brummel's, I suppose," said my lady. "Do you remember his reply, when an
anxious mother asked him what she ought to allow her son for dress?"

Mr. Granger did not spoil my lady's delight in telling an anecdote by
remembering; and he was a man who would have conscientiously declared his
familiarity with the story, had he known it.

"'It might be done on eight hundred a year, madam,' replied Brummel, 'with
the strictest economy.'"

Mr. Granger gave a single-knock kind of laugh.

"Curious fellow, that Brummel," he said. "I remember seeing him at Caen,
when I was travelling as a young man."

And so the conversation meandered on, my lady persistently lively in her
pleasant commonplace way, Mr. Granger still more commonplace, and not
at all lively. Clarissa thought that hour and a half in the library the
longest she had ever spent in her life. How different from that afternoon
in the same room when George Fairfax had looked at his watch and declared
the Castle bell must be wrong!

That infallible bell rang at last--a welcome sound to Clarissa, and perhaps
not altogether unwelcome to Lady Laura and Mr. Granger, who had more than
once sympathised in a smothered yawn.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII.

MR. GRANGER IS INTERESTED.

When Clarissa went to the great drawing-room dressed for dinner, she found
Lizzie Fermor talking to a young lady whom she at once guessed to be Miss
Granger. Nor was she allowed to remain in any doubt of the fact; for the
lively Lizzie beckoned her to the window by which they were seated, and
introduced the two young ladies to each other.

"Miss Granger and I are quite old friends," she said, "and I mean you to
like each other very much."

Miss Granger bowed stiffly, but pledged herself to nothing. She was a tall
young woman of about two-and-twenty, with very little of the tender grace
of girlhood about her; a young woman who, by right of a stately carriage
and a pair of handsome shoulders, might have been called fine-looking.
Her features were not unlike her father's; and those eyes and eyebrows of
Daniel Granger's, which would have looked so well under a judicial wig,
were reproduced in a modified degree in the countenance of his daughter.
She had what would be generally called a fine complexion, fair and florid;
and her hair, of which she had an abundant quantity, was of an insipid
light brown, and the straightest Clarissa had ever seen. Altogether, she
was a young lady who, invested with all the extraneous charms of her
father's wealth, would no doubt be described as attractive, and even
handsome. She was dressed well, with a costly simplicity, in a dark-blue
corded silk, relieved by a berthe of old point lace, and the whiteness of
her full firm throat was agreeably set off by a broad band of black velvet,
from which there hung a Maltese cross of large rubies.

The two young ladies went on with their talk, which was chiefly of gaieties
they had each assisted at since their last meeting, and people they had
met.

Clarissa, being quite unable to assist in this conversation, looked on
meekly, a little interested in Miss Granger, who was, like herself, an
only daughter, and about whose relations with her father she had begun to
wonder. Was he very fond of this only child, and in this, as in all else,
unlike her own father? He had spoken of her that afternoon several times,
and had even praised her, but somewhat coldly, and with a practical
matter-of-course air, almost as Mr. Lovel might have spoken of his daughter
if constrained to talk of her in society.

Miss Granger said a good deal about the great people she had met that year.
They seemed all to be more or less the elect of the earth: but she pulled
herself up once or twice to protest that she cared very little for society;
she was happier when employed with her schools and poor people--_that_ was
her real element.

"One feels all the other thing to be so purposeless and hollow," she said
sententiously. "After a round of dinners and dances and operas and concerts
in London, I always have a kind of guilty feeling. So much time wasted, and
nothing to show for it. And really my poor are improving so wonderfully.
If you could see my cottages, Miss Fermor!" (she did not say, "their
cottages.") "I give a prize for the cleanest floors and windows, an
illuminated ticket for the neatest garden-beds. I don't suppose you could
get a sprig of groundsel for love or money in Arden village. I have
actually to cultivate it in a corner of the kitchen-garden for my canaries.
I give another prize at Christmas for the most economical household
management, accorded to the family which has dined oftenest without meat
in the course of the year; and I give a premium of one per cent upon all
investments in the Holborough savings-bank--one and a half in the case of
widows; a complete suit of clothes to every woman who has attended morning
and evening service without missing one Sunday in the year, the consequence
of which has been to put a total stop to cooking on the day of rest. I
don't believe you could come across so much as a hot potato on a Sunday in
one of my cottages."

"And do the husbands like the cold dinners?" Miss Fermor asked rather
flippantly.

"I should hope that spiritual advantage would prevail over temporal luxury,
even in their half-awakened minds," replied Miss Granger. "I have never
inquired about their feelings on the subject. I did indeed hear that the
village baker, who had driven a profitable trade every Sunday morning
before my improvements, made some most insolent comments upon what I had
done. But I trust I can rise superior to the impertinence of a village
baker. However, you must come to Arden and see my cottages, and judge for
yourself; and if you could only know the benighted state in which I found
these poor creatures----"

Lizzie Fermor glanced towards Clarissa, and then gave a little warning
look, which had the effect of stopping Miss Granger's disquisition.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Lovel," she said; "I forgot that I was talking of
your own old parish. But you were a mere child, I believe, when you
left the Court, and of course could not be capable of effecting much
improvement."

"We were too poor to do much, or to give prizes," Clarissa answered; "but
we gave what we could, and--and I think the people were fond of us."

Miss Granger looked as if this last fact were very wide from the question.

"I have never studied how to make the people fond of me," she said. "My
constant effort has been to make them improve themselves and their own
condition. All my plans are based upon that principle. 'If you want a new
gown, cloak, and bonnet at Christmas,' I tell the women, 'you must
earn them by unfailing attendance at church. If you wish to obtain the
money-gift I wish to give you, you must first show me something saved by
your own economy and self-sacrifice.' To my children I hold out similar
inducements--a prize for the largest amount of plain needlework, every
stitch of which I make it my duty to examine through a magnifying glass; a
prize for scrupulous neatness in dress; and for scripture knowledge. I
have children in my Sunday-schools who can answer any question upon the
Old-Testament history from Genesis to Chronicles."

Clarissa gave a faint sigh, almost appalled by these wonders. She
remembered the girls' Sunday-school in her early girlhood, and her own
poor little efforts at instruction, in the course of which she had seldom
carried her pupils out of the Garden of Eden, or been able to get over the
rivers that watered that paradise, as described by the juvenile inhabitants
of Arden, without little stifled bursts of laughter on her own part; while,
in the very midst of her most earnest endeavours, she was apt to find her
brother Austin standing behind her, tempting the juvenile mind by the
surreptitious offer of apples or walnuts. The attempts at teaching
generally ended in merry laughter and the distribution of nuts and apples,
with humble apologies to the professional schoolmistress for so useless an
intrusion.

Miss Granger had no time to enlarge farther upon her manifold improvements
before dinner, to which she was escorted by one of the officers from
Steepleton, the nearest garrison town, who happened to be dining there that
day, and was very glad to get an innings with the great heiress. The master
of Arden Court had the honour of escorting Lady Laura; but from his post
by the head of the long table he looked more than once to that remote spot
where Clarissa sat, not far from his daughter. My lady saw those curious
glances, and was delighted to see them. They might mean nothing, of course;
but to that sanguine spirit they seemed an augury of success for the scheme
which had been for a long time hatching in the matron's busy brain.

"What do you think of my pet, Mr. Granger?" she asked presently.

Mr. Granger glanced at the ground near my lady's chair with rather a
puzzled look, half expecting to see a Maltese spaniel or a flossy-haired
Skye terrier standing on its hind legs.

"What do you think of my pet and _protegee_, Miss Lovel?"

"Miss Lovel! Well, upon my word, Lady Laura, I am so poor a judge of the
merits of young ladies in a general way; but she really appears a very
amiable young person."

"And is she not lovely?" asked Lady Laura, contemplating the distant
Clarissa in a dreamy way through her double eye-glass. "I think it is the
sweetest face I ever saw."

"She is certainly very pretty," admitted Mr. Granger. "I was struck by her
appearance this afternoon in the library. I suppose there is something
really out of the common in her face, for I am generally the most
unobservant of men in such matters."

"Out of the common!" exclaimed Lady Laura. "My dear sir, it is such a face
as you do not see twice in a lifetime. Madame Recamier must have been
something like that, I should fancy--a woman who could attract the eyes
of all the people in the great court of the Luxembourg, and divide public
attention with Napoleon."