The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon

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Clarissa remembered Mrs. Fairfax's cold manner, and understood the reason
of that tacit avoidance which had wounded her so deeply. She too, no doubt,
was hateful; as hateful to the injured wife of Colonel Fairfax as his son
could be to her father.

"And now, Clarissa," said Mr. Lovel, "remember that any acquaintance
between you and George Fairfax is most repugnant to me. I have told you
this story in order that there may be no possibility of any mistake between
us. God only knows what it costs a man to open old wounds as I have opened
mine to-night. Only this afternoon you affected a considerable regard for
me, which I promised to return to the best of my power. All that is a dead
letter if you hold any communion with this man. Choose him for your friend,
and renounce me for your father. You cannot have both."

"He is not my friend, papa; he is nothing to me. Even it there were no
such thing as this prejudice on your part, I am not so dishonourably as to
forget that Mr. Fairfax is engaged to Lady Geraldine."

"And you promise that there shall be no more meetings, no repetition of the
kind of thing I saw to-night?"

"I promise, papa, that of my own free will I will never see him again. Our
meeting to-night was entirely accidental."

"On your part, perhaps; but was it so on his?"

"I cannot tell that, papa."

Mr. Lovel felt himself obliged to be satisfied with this answer. It seemed
to him a hard thing that the son of his enemy should arise thus to torment
him--an accident that might have tempted a superstitious man to think that
an evil fate brooded over his house; and Marmaduke Lovel's mind, being
by no means strongly influenced by belief, was more or less tainted with
superstition. Looked at from any point of view, it was too provoking that
this man should cross Clarissa's pathway at the very moment when it was
all-important to her destiny that her heart should be untouched, her fancy
unfettered.

"If nothing comes of this Granger business I shall take her abroad," Mr.
Lovel said to himself; "anything to get her out of the way of a Fairfax."

He drank his tea in silence, meditating upon that little scene in the
moonlight, and stealing a look at his daughter every now and then, as she
sat opposite to him pretending to read. He could see that the open book was
the merest pretence, and that Clarissa was profoundly agitated. Was it her
mother's story that had moved her so deeply, or that other newer story
which George Fairfax might have been whispering to her just now in the
lonely moonlit road? Mr. Lovel was disturbed by this question, but did not
care to seek any farther explanation from his daughter. There are some
subjects that will not bear discussion.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIX.

MR. GRANGER IS PRECIPITATE.

Clarissa had little sleep that night. The image of George Fairfax, and
of that dead soldier whom she pictured darkly like him, haunted her all
through the slow silent hours. Her mother's story had touched her to the
heart; but her sympathies were with her father. Here was a new reason why
she should shut her heart against Lady Geraldine's lover, if any reason
were wanted to strengthen that sense of honour which reigns supreme in a
girl's unsullied soul. In her conviction as to what was right she never
wavered. She felt herself very weak where this man was concerned--weak
enough to love him in spite of reason and honour; but she did not doubt
her power to keep that guilty secret, and to hide her weakness from George
Fairfax.

She had almost forgotten her engagement at Arden Court when her father came
down to his late breakfast, and found her sketching at a little table near
the window, with the affectionate Ponto nestling close at her side.

"I thought you would be dressing for your visit by this time, Clary," he
said very graciously.

"My visit, papa? O, yes, to the Court," she replied, with a faint sigh of
resignation. "I had very nearly forgotten all about it. I was to be there
between twelve and one, I think. I shall have plenty of time to give you
your breakfast. It's not eleven yet."

"Be sure you dress yourself becomingly. I don't want you to appear at a
disadvantage compared with the heiress."

"I'll put on my prettiest dress, if you like, papa; but I can't wear such
silks and laces as Miss Granger wears."

"You will have such things some day, I daresay, and set them off better
than Miss Granger. She is not a bad-looking young woman--good complexion,
fine figure, and so on--but as stiff as a poker."

"I think she is mentally stiff, papa; she is a sort of person I could never
get on with. How I wish you were coming with me this morning!"

"I couldn't manage it, Clarissa. The schools and the model villagers would
be more than I could stand. But at your age you ought to be interested in
that sort of thing; and you really ought to get on with Miss Granger."

It was half-past twelve when Miss Lovel opened the gate leading into Arden
Park--the first time that she had ever opened it; though she had stood
so often leaning on that rustic boundary, and gazing into the well-known
woodland, with fond sad looks. There was an actual pain at her heart as she
entered that unforgotten domain; and she felt angry with Daniel Granger for
having forced this visit upon her.

"I suppose he is determined that we shall pay homage to his wealth, and
admire his taste, and drink the bitter cup of humiliation to the very
dregs. If he had any real delicacy of feeling, he would understand our
reluctance to any intimacy with him."

While she was thinking of Mr. Granger in this unfriendly spirit, a step
sounded on the winding path before her, and looking up, she perceived the
subject of her thoughts coming quickly towards her. Was there ever such an
intrusive man? She blushed rosy red with vexation.

He came to her, with his hat in his hand, looking very big and stiff and
counting-house like among the flickering shadows of forest trees; not
an Arcadian figure by any means, but with a certain formal
business-like-dignity about him, for all that; not a man to be ridiculed or
despised.

"I am glad you have not forgotten your promise to come early, Miss Lovel,"
he said, in his strong sonorous voice. "I was just walking over to the
cottage to remind you. Sophia is quite ready to do the honours of her
schools. But I shall not let her carry you off till after luncheon; I want
to show you my improvements. I had set my heart on your seeing the Court
for the first time--since its restoration--under my guidance."

"Pompous, insufferable _parvenu_," thought Clarissa, to whom this desire on
Mr. Granger's part seemed only an odious eagerness to exhibit his wealth.
She little knew how much sentiment there was involved in this wish of
Daniel Granger's.

They came into the open part of the park presently, and she was fain to
confess, that whatever changes had been made--and the alterations here were
not many--had been made with a perfect appreciation of the picturesque.
Even the supreme neatness with which the grounds were now kept did not
mar their beauty. Fairy-like young plantations of rare specimens of the
coniferous tribe had arisen at every available point of the landscape,
wherever there had been barrenness before. Here and there the old timber
had been thinned a little, always judiciously. No cockney freaks of fancy
disfigured the scene. There were no sham ruins, no artificial waterfalls
poorly supplied with water, no Chinese pagodas, or Swiss cottages, or
gothic hermitages. At one point of the shrubbery where the gloom of cypress
and fir was deepest, they came suddenly on a Grecian temple, whose slender
marble columns might have gleamed amidst the sacred groves of Diana; and
this was the only indulgence Mr. Granger had allowed to an architect's
fancy, Presently, at the end of a wide avenue, a broad alley of turf
between double lines of unrivalled beeches, the first glimpse of the Court
burst upon Clarissa's sight--unchanged and beautiful. A man must have been
a Goth, indeed, who had altered the outward aspect of the place by a hair's
breadth.

The house was surrounded by a moat, and there was a massive stone gateway,
of older date than the Court itself--though that was old--dividing a small
prim garden from the park; this gatehouse was a noble piece of masonry, of
the purest gothic, rich with the mellow tint of age, and almost as perfect
as in the days when some wandering companionship of masons gave the last
stroke of their chisels to the delicate tracery of window and parapet.

The Court formed three sides of a quadrangle. A dear old place, lovable
rather than magnificent, yet with all the grandeur of the middle ages; a
place that might have stood a siege perhaps, but had evidently been built
for a home. The garden originally belonging to the house was simplicity
itself, and covered scarcely an acre. All round the inner border of the
moat there ran a broad terrace-walk, divided by a low stone balustrade from
a grassy bank that sloped down to the water. The square plot of ground
before the house was laid out in quaint old flower-beds, where the roses
seemed, to Clarissa at least, to flourish as they flourished nowhere else.
The rest of the garden consisted of lawn and flower-beds, with more roses.
There were no trees near the house, and the stables and out-offices, which
made a massive pile of building, formed a background to the grave old
gothic mansion.

Without, at least, Mr. Granger had respected the past. Clarissa felt
relieved by this moderation, and was inclined to think him a little less
hateful. So far he had said nothing which could seem to betray a boastful
spirit. He had watched her face and listened to her few remarks with a kind
of deferential eagerness, as if it had been a matter of vital importance
to him that she should approve what he had done. A steward, who had been
entrusted with the conduct of alterations and renovations during the
absence of his master, could scarcely have appeared more anxious as to the
result of his operations.

The great iron gates under the gothic archway stood wide open just as they
had been wont to do in Mr. Lovel's time, and Clarissa and her companion
passed into the quiet garden. How well she remembered the neglected air of
the place when last she had seen it--the mossgrown walks, the duckweed in
the moat, the straggling rose-bushes, everything out of order, from the
broken weathercock on one of the gateway towers, to the scraper by the
half-glass door in one corner of the quadrangle, which had been, used
instead of the chief entrance! It seems natural to a man of decayed fortune
to shut up his hall-door and sneak in and out of his habitation by some
obscure portal.

Now all was changed; a kind of antique primness, which had no taint of
cockney stiffness, pervaded the scene. One might have expected to see Sir
Thomas More or Lord Bacon emerge from the massive gothic porch, and stroll
with slow step and meditative aspect towards the stone sun-dial that stood
in the centre of that square rose-garden. The whole place had an air of
doublet and hose. It seemed older to Clarissa than when she had seen
it last--older and yet newer, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty,
restored, after a century of decay, to all its original grandeur.

The door under the porch stood open; but there were a couple of men in a
sober livery waiting in the hall--footmen who had never been reared
in those Yorkshire wilds--men with powdered hair, and the stamp of
Grosvenor-square upon them. Those flew to open inner doors, and Clarissa
began with wonder to behold the new glories of the mansion. She followed
Mr. Granger in silence through dining and billiard-rooms, saloon and
picture-gallery, boudoir and music-room, in all of which the Elizabethan
air, the solemn grace of a departed age, had been maintained with a
marvellous art. Money can do so much; above all, where a man has no
bigoted belief in his own taste or capacity, and will put his trust in the
intelligence of professional artists. Daniel Granger had done this. He had
said to an accomplished architect, "I give you the house of my choice; make
it what it was in its best days. Improve wherever you can, but alter as
little as possible; and, above all, no modernising."

Empowered by this _carte blanche_, the architect had given his soul to
dreams of mediaeval splendour and had produced a place which, in its way,
was faultless. No matter that some of the carved-oak furniture was fresh
from the chisel of the carver, while other things were the spoil of old
Belgian churches; that the tapestry in one saloon was as old as the days of
its designer, Boucher, and that in the adjoining chamber made on purpose
for Arden Court at the Gobelins manufactory of his Imperial Majesty
Napoleon III. No matter that the gilt-leather hangings in one room had hung
there in the reign of Charles I., while those in another were supplied by a
West-end upholsterer. Perfect taste had harmonised every detail; there was
not so much as a footstool or a curtain that could have been called an
anachronism. Clarissa looked at all these things with a strange sense of
wandering somewhere in a dream. It was, and yet was not her old home. There
was nothing incongruous. The place scarcely seemed new to her, though
everything was altered. It was only as it ought to have been always.

She remembered the bare rooms, the scanty shabby furniture of the Georgian
era, the patches and glimpses of faded splendour here and there, the
Bond-street prettinesses and fripperies in her mother's boudoir, which,
even in her early girlhood, had grown tawdry and _rococo_, the old pictures
rotting in their tarnished frames; everything with that sordid air of
poverty and decay upon it."

"Well, Miss Lovel," Daniel Granger said at last, when they had gone through
all the chief rooms almost in silence, "do you approve of what has been
done?"

"It is beautiful," Clarissa answered, "most beautiful; but--but it breaks
my heart to see it."

The words were wrung from her somehow. In the next moment she was ashamed
of them--it seemed like the basest envy.

"O, pray, pray do not think me mean or contemptible, Mr. Granger," she
said; "it is not that I envy you your house, only it was my home so long,
and I always felt its neglect so keenly; and to see it now so beautiful, as
I could have only pictured it in my dreams--and even in them I could not
fancy it so perfect."

"It may be your home again, Clarissa, if you care to make it so," said Mr.
Granger, coming very close to her, and with a sudden passion in his voice.
"I little thought when I planned this place that it would one day seem
worthless to me without one lovely mistress. It is all yours, Clarissa, if
you will have it--and the heart of its master, who never thought that it
was in his nature to feel what he feels for you."

He tried to take her hand; but she shrank away from him, trembling a
little, and with a frightened look in her face.

"Mr. Granger, O, pray, pray don't----"

"For God's sake don't tell me that this seems preposterous or hateful to
you--that you cannot value the love of a man old enough to be your father.
You do not know what it is for a man of my age and my character to love for
the first time. I had gone through life heart-whole, Clarissa, till I saw
you. Between my wife and me there was never more than liking. She was a
good woman, and I respected her, and we got on very well together. That was
all. Clarissa, tell me that there is some hope. I ought not to have spoken
so soon; I never meant to be such a fool--but the words came in spite of
me. O, my dearest, don't crush me with a point-blank refusal. I know that
all this must seem strange to you. Let it pass. Think no more of anything I
have said till you know me better--till you find my love is worth having.
I believe I fell in love with you that first afternoon in the library
at Hale. From that time forth your face haunted me--like some beautiful
picture--the loveliest thing I had ever seen, Clarissa."

"I cannot answer you, Mr. Granger," she said in a broken voice; "you have
shocked and surprised me so much, I----"

"Shocked and surprised you! That seems hard."

In that very moment it flashed upon her that this was what her father and
Lady Laura Armstrong had wished to bring about. She was to win back the
lost heritage of Arden Court--win it by the sacrifice of every natural
feeling of her heart, by the barter of her very self.

How much more Mr. Granger might have said there is no knowing--for,
once having spoken, a man is loth to leave such a subject as this
unexhausted--but there came to Clarissa's relief the rustling sound of a
stiff silk dress, announcing the advent of Miss Granger, who sailed towards
them through a vista of splendid rooms, with a stately uncompromising air
that did not argue the warmest possible welcome for her guest.

"I have been hunting for you everywhere, papa," she said in an aggrieved
tone. "Where have you been hiding Miss Lovel?"

And then she held out her hand and shook hands with Clarissa in the coldest
manner in which it was possible for a human being to perform that ceremony.
She looked at her father with watchful suspicious eyes as he walked away to
one of the windows, not caring that his daughter should see his face just
at that moment. There was something, evidently, Sophia thought,--something
which it concerned her to discover.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XX.

MODEL VILLAGERS.

They went to luncheon in a secondary dining room--a comfortable apartment,
which served pleasantly for all small gatherings, and had that social air
so impossible in a stately banqueting-chamber--a perfect gem of a room,
hung with gilt leather, relieved here and there by a choice picture in a
frame of gold and ebony. Here the draperies were of a dark crimson cut
velvet, which the sunshine brightened into ruby. The only ornaments in this
room were a pair of matchless Venetian girandoles on the mantelpiece, and
a monster Palissy dish, almost as elaborate in design as the shield of
Achilles, on the oaken buffet.

The luncheon was not a very genial repast; Miss Granger maintained a polite
sulkiness; Clarissa had not yet recovered from the agitation which Mr.
Granger's most unexpected avowal had occasioned; and even the strong man
himself felt his nerves shaken, and knew that he was at a disadvantage,
between the daughter who suspected him and the woman who had all but
refused his hand. He did his utmost to seem at his ease, and to beguile
his daughter into a more cordial bearing; but there was a gloom upon that
little party of three which was palpably oppressive. It seemed in vain to
struggle against the dismal influence. Mr. Granger felt relieved when, just
at the close of the meal, his butler announced that Mr. Tillott was in the
drawing-room. Mr. Tillott was a mild inoffensive young man of High-church
tendencies, the curate of Arden.

"I asked Tillott to go round the schools with us this afternoon," Mr.
Granger said to his daughter in an explanatory tone. "I know what an
interest he takes in the thing, and I thought it would be pleasanter."

"You are very kind, papa," Miss Granger replied, with implacable stiffness;
"but I really don't see what we want with Mr. Tillott, or with you either.
There's not the least reason that we should take you away from your usual
occupations; and you are generally so busy of an afternoon. Miss Lovel and
I can see everything there is to be seen, without any escort; and I have
always heard you complain that my schools bored you."

"Well, perhaps I may have had rather an overdose of the philanthropic
business occasionally, my dear," answered Mr. Granger, with a good-humoured
laugh. "However, I have set my heart upon seeing how all your improvements
affect Miss Lovel. She has such a peculiar interest in the place, you see,
and is so identified with the people. I thought you'd be pleased to have
Tillott. He's really a good fellow, and you and he always seem to have so
much to talk about."

On this they all repaired to the drawing-room, where Mr. Tillott the curate
was sitting at a table, turning over the leaves of an illuminated psalter,
and looking altogether as if he had just posed himself for a photograph.

To this mild young man Miss Granger was in a manner compelled to relax the
austerity of her demeanour. She even smiled in a frosty way as she shook
hands with him; but she had no less a sense of the fact that her father had
out-manoeuvred her, and that this invitation to Mr. Tillott was a crafty
design whereby he intended to have Clarissa all to himself during that
afternoon.

"I am sorry you could not come to luncheon with us, Tillott," said Mr.
Granger in his hearty way. "Or are you sure, by the bye, that you have
taken luncheon? We can go back to the dining-room and hear the last news of
the parish while you wash down some game-pie with a glass or two of the old
madeira."

"Thanks, you are very good; but I never eat meat on Wednesdays or Fridays.
I had a hard-boiled egg and some cocoa at half-past seven this morning,
and shall take nothing more till sunset. I had duties at Swanwick which
detained me till within the last half-hour, or I should have been very
happy to have eaten a biscuit with you at your luncheon."

"Upon my word, Tillott, you are the most indefatigable of men; but I really
wish you High-church people had not such a fancy for starving yourselves.
So much expenditure of brain-power must involve a waste of the coarser
material. Now, Sophy, if you and Miss Lovel are ready, we may as well
start."

They went out into the sunny quadrangle, where the late roses were blooming
with all their old luxuriance. How well Clarissa remembered them in those
days when they had been the sole glory of the neglected place! In spite
of Sophia, who tried her hardest to prevent the arrangement, Mr. Granger
contrived that he and Clarissa should walk side by side, and that Mr.
Tillott should completely absorb his daughter. This the curate was by no
means indisposed to do; for, if the youthful saint had a weakness, it lay
in the direction of vanity. He sincerely admired the serious qualities of
Miss Granger's mind, and conceived that, blest with such a woman and with
the free use of her fortune, he might achieve a rare distinction for his
labours in tins fold, to say nothing of placing himself on the high-road to
a bishopric. Nor was he inclined to think Miss Granger indifferent to his
own merits, or that the conquest would be by any means an impossible one.
It was a question of time, he thought; the sympathy between them was too
strong not to take some higher development. He thought of St. Francis de
Sales and Madame de Chantal, and fancied himself entrusted with the full
guidance of Miss Granger's superior mind.

They walked across the park to a small gothic gateway, which had been made
since the close of Marmaduke Lovel's reign. Just outside this stood the
chapel of Mr. Granger's building, and the new schools, also gothic, and
with that bran-new aspect against which architecture can do nothing. They
would be picturesque, perhaps, ten years hence. To-day they had the odour
of the architect's drawing-board.

Beyond the schools there were some twenty cottages, of the same modern
gothic, each habitation more or less borne down and in a manner
extinguished by its porch and chimney. If the rooms had been in reasonable
proportion to the chimneys, the cottages would have been mansions; but
gothic chimneys are pleasing objects, and the general effect was good.
These twenty cottages formed the beginning of Mr. Granger's model
village--a new Arden, which was to arise on this side of the Court. They
were for the most part inhabited by gardeners and labourers more or less
dependent on Arden Court, and it had been therefore an easy matter for Miss
Granger to obtain a certain deference to her wishes from the tenants.

The inspection of the schools and cottages was rather a tedious business.
Sophia would not let her companions off with an iota less than the
whole thing. Her model pupils were trotted out and examined in the
Scriptures--always in Kings and Chronicles--and evinced a familiarity with
the ways of Jezebel and Rehoboam that made Clarissa blush at the thought
of her own ignorance. Then there came an exhibition of plain needlework,
excruciatingly suggestive of impaired eyesight; then fancy-work, which Miss
Granger contemplated with a doubtful air, as having a frivolous tendency;
and then the school mistress's parlour and kitchen were shown, and
displayed so extreme a neatness that made one wonder where she lived; and
then the garden, where the heels of one's boots seemed a profanation;
and then, the schools and schoolhouses being exhausted, there came the
cottages.

How Clarissa's heart bled for the nice clean motherly women who were put
through their paces for Miss Granger's glorification, and were fain to
confess that their housekeeping had been all a delusion and a snare till
that young lady taught them domestic economy! How she pitied them as the
severe Sophia led the way into sacred corners, and lifted the lids of
coppers and dustholes, and opened cupboard-doors, and once, with an aspect
of horror, detected an actual cobweb lurking in an angle of the whitewashed
wall! Clarissa could not admire things too much, in order to do away with
some of the bitterness of that microscopic survey. Then there was such
cross-examination about church-going, and the shortcomings of the absent
husbands were so ruthlessly dragged into the light of day. The poor wives
blushed to own that these unregenerate spirits had still a lurking desire
for an occasional social evening at the Coach and Horses, in spite of the
charms of a gothic chimney, and a porch that was massive enough for the
dungeon of a mediaeval fortress. Miss Granger and the curate played into
each other's hands, and between the two the model villagers underwent a
kind of moral dissection. It was dreary work altogether; and Daniel Granger
had been guilty of more than one yawn before it was all over, even though
he had the new delight of being near Clarissa all the time. It was finished
at last. One woman, who in her benighted state had known Miss Lovel, had
shown herself touched by the sight of her.