The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon

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The dinner in Clarges-street was a very quiet affair. George Fairfax was
the only visitor, and the Grangers were "due" at an evening party. He
learned with considerable annoyance that they were to leave London at
the end of that week, whereby he could have little opportunity of seeing
Clarissa. He might have followed her down to Yorkshire, certainly; but such
a course would have been open to remark, nor would it be good taste for
him to show himself in the neighbourhood of Hale Castle while Geraldine
Challoner was there. He had an opportunity of talking confidentially to
Clarissa once after dinner, when Mr. Granger, who had not fairly finished
his nap in the railway-carriage, had retired to a dusky corner of the
drawing-room and sunk anew into slumber, and when Miss Granger seemed
closely occupied in the manufacture of an embroidered pincushion for a
fancy fair. Absorbing as the manipulation of chenille and beads might be,
however, her work did not prevent her keeping a tolerably sharp watch upon
those two figures by the open piano: Clarissa with one hand wandering idly
over the keys, playing some random passage, _pianissimo_, now and then;
George Fairfax standing by the angle of the piano, bending down to talk to
her with an extreme earnestness.

He had his opportunity, and he knew how to improve it. He was talking of
her brother. That subject made a link between them that nothing else could
have made. She forgot her distrust of George Fairfax when he spoke with
friendly interest of Austin.

"Is the wife _very_ vulgar?" Clarissa asked, when they had been talking
some time.

"Not so especially vulgar. That sort of thing would be naturally toned down
by her association with your brother. But she has an unmistakable air of
Bohemianism; looks like a third-rate actress, or dancer, in short; or
perhaps an artist's model. I should not wonder if that were her position,
by the way, when your brother fell in love with her. She is handsome still,
though a little faded and worn by her troubles, poor soul and seems fond of
him."

"I am glad of that. How I should like to see him, and the poor wife, and
the children--my brother's children! I have never had any children fond of
me."

She thought of Austin in his natural position, as the heir of Arden Court,
with his children playing in the old rooms--not as they were now, in
the restored splendour of the Middle Ages, but as they had been in her
childhood, sombre and faded, with here and there a remnant of former
grandeur.

Mr. Granger woke presently, and George Fairfax wished him good-night.

"I hope we shall see you at the Court some day," Clarissa's husband said,
with a kind of stately cordiality. "We cannot offer you the numerous
attractions of Hale Castle, but we have good shooting, and we generally
have a houseful in September and October."

"I shall be most happy to make one of the houseful," Mr. Fairfax said, with
a smile--that winning smile which had helped him to make so many friends,
and which meant so little. He went away in a thoughtful spirit.

"Is she happy?" he asked himself. "She does not seem unhappy; but then
women have such a marvellous power of repression, or dissimulation, one can
never be sure of anything about them. At Hale I could have sworn that she
loved me. Could a girl of that age be absolutely mercenary, and be caught
at once by the prospect of bringing down such big game as Daniel Granger?
Has she sold herself for a fine house and a great fortune, and is she
satisfied with the price? Surely no. She is not the sort of woman to be
made happy by splendid furniture and fine dresses; no, nor by the common
round of fashionable pleasures. There was sadness in her face when I came
upon her unawares to-day. Yes, I am sure of that. But she has schooled
herself to hide her feelings."

"I wonder you asked Mr. Fairfax to Arden, papa," said Miss Granger, when
the visitor had departed.

"Why, my dear? He is a very pleasant young man; and I know he likes our
part of the country. Besides, I suppose he will be a good deal at Hale this
year, and that his marriage will come off before long. Lord Calderwood must
have been dead year."

"Lord Calderwood has been dead nearly two years," replied Miss Granger. "I
fancy that engagement between Mr. Fairfax and Lady Geraldine must have been
broken off. If it were not so, they would surely have been married before
now. And I observed that Mr. Fairfax was not with Lady Laura to-day. I do
not know how long he may have been in the gardens," Miss Granger added,
with a suspicious glance at her stepmother, "but he certainly was not with
Lady Laura during any part of the time."

Clarissa blushed when Lady Geraldine's engagement was spoken of. She felt
as if she had been in some manner guilty in not having communicated the
intelligence Lady Laura had given her. It seemed awkward to have to speak
of it now.

"Yes," she said, with a very poor attempt at carelessness, "the engagement
is broken off. Lady Laura told me so some time ago."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Sophia. "How odd that you should not mention it!"

Daniel Granger looked first at his daughter, and then at his wife. There
was something in this talk, a sort of semi-significance, that displeased
him. What was George Fairfax, that either his wife or his daughter should
be interested in him?

"Clarissa may not have thought the fact worth mentioning, my dear," he said
stiffly. "It is quite unimportant to us."

He waived the subject away, as he might have done if it had been some small
operation in commerce altogether unworthy of his notice; but in his secret
heart he kept the memory of his wife's embarrassed manner. He had not
forgotten the portfolio of drawings among which the likeness of George
Fairfax figured go prominently. It had seemed a small thing at the
time--the merest accident; one head was as good to draw as another, and so
on--he had told himself; but he knew now that his wife did not love him,
and he wanted to know if she had ever loved any one else.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXX.

THE HEIR OF ARDEN.

Clarissa wrote to her brother--a long letter full of warmth and tenderness,
with loving messages for his children, and even for the wife who was so
much beneath him. She enclosed three ten-pound notes, all that remained
to her of a quarter's pin-money; and O, how bitterly she regretted the
frivolous extravagances that had reduced her exchequer to so low a
condition! Toward the close of her letter she came to a standstill. She had
begged Austin to write to her, to tell her all he could about himself,
his hopes, his plans for the future; but when it came to the question of
receiving a letter from him she was puzzled. From the first day of her
married life she had made a point of showing all her letters to her
husband, as a duty, just as she had shown them to her father; who had very
rarely taken the trouble to read them, by the way. But Daniel Granger did
read his wife's letters, and expected that they should be submitted to him.
It would be impossible to reserve from him any correspondence that came to
her in the common way. So Clarissa, though not given to secrecy, was on
this occasion fain to be secret. After considerable deliberation, she told
her brother to write to her under cover to her maid, Jane Target, at Arden
Court. The girl seemed a good honest girl, and Mrs. Granger believed that
she could trust her.

They went back to Arden a day or two afterwards; and Miss Granger returned
with rapture to her duties as commander-in-chief of the model villagers. No
martinet ever struck more terror into the breasts of rank and file than
did this young lady cause in the simple minds of her prize cottagers,
conscience-stricken by the knowledge that stray cobwebs had flourished
and dust-bins run to seed during her absence. There was not much room for
complaint, however, when she did arrive. The note of warning had been
sounded by the servants of the Court, and there had been a general
scrubbing and cleansing in the habitations of New Arden--that particular
Arden which Mr. Granger had built for himself, and the very bricks whereof
ought to have been stamped with his name and titles, as in the case of
Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon. For a week before
Miss Granger's coming there had been heard the splashing of innumerable
pails of water, and the scrubbing of perpetual scrubbing-brushes; windows
had been polished to the highest degree of transparency; tin tea-kettles
had been sandpapered until they became as silver; there had been quite a
run upon the village chandler for mottled soap and hearthstone.

So, after a rigorous inspection, Miss Granger was obliged to express her
approval--not an unqualified approval, by any means. Too much praise would
have demoralized the Ardenites, and lowered the standard of perfection.

"I like to be able to say that my papa's village is the cleanest village in
England," she said; "not one of the cleanest, but _the_ cleanest. Why have
you turned the back of that tea-kettle to the wall, Mrs. Binks? I'm afraid
it's smoky. Now there never need be a smoky kettle. Your place looks very
nice, Mrs. Binks; but from the strong smell of soap, I fancy it must have
been cleaned _very lately_. I hope you have not been neglecting things
while I've been away. That sort of thing would militate against your
obtaining my prize for domestic cleanliness next Christmas."

Mrs. Binks did not know what "militate" meant, unless it might be something
in connection with the church militant, of which she had heard a great
deal; but she was not a mild-tempered woman, and she grew very red in the
face at this reproof."

"Well, miss, if to toil and scrub early and late, with a husband and five
children to do for, and to keep the place pretty much as you see it now,
though I don't say as it ain't a little extry perhaps, in honour of your
coming back--if that ain't hard work and cleanliness, and don't deserve
a prize of two pound at the year's end, I don't know what do. It's
hard-earned money, Miss Granger, when all's said and done."

Sophia turned the eyes of reproof upon Mrs. Binks.

"I did not think it was the money you cared for," she said; "I thought it
was the honour you valued most."

She pointed to a card framed and glazed over the mantelpiece--a card upon
which, with many nourishes and fat initial letters in red ink, the model
schoolmaster had recorded the fact, that Mrs. Binks, at the preceding
Christmas distributions, had obtained Miss Granger's annual reward for
domestic cleanliness.

"Well, of course, miss, I set store by the card. It's nice to see one's
name wrote out like that, and any strangers as chance to come in the summer
time, they takes notice; but to a hard-working man's wife two pound is a
consideration. I'm sure I beg your parding humbly, miss, if I spoke a bit
short just now; but it is trying, when one has worked hard, to have one's
work found fault with."

"I am not aware that I found fault with your work, Mrs. Sinks," Sophia
replied with supreme dignity; "I merely remarked that it appeared to have
been done hastily. I don't approve of spasmodic industry."

And with this last crushing remark, Miss Granger sailed out of the cottage,
leaving the luckless Mrs. Binks to repent her presumption at leisure, and
to feel that she had hazarded her hopes of Christmas bounties, and enhanced
the chances of her detested rival of three doors off, Mrs. Trotter, a
sanctimonious widow, with three superhuman children, who never had so much
as a spot on their pinafores, and were far in advance of the young Binkses
in Kings and Chronicles; indeed the youngest Trotter had been familiar with
all the works of Hezekiah before the eldest Binks had grasped the abstract
idea of Saul.

For Clarissa the change to Arden Court was a pleasant one. That incessant
succession of London gaieties had wearied her beyond measure. Here, for a
little time before her visitors began to arrive, she lived her own life,
dreaming away a morning over a sketch-book, or reading some newly-published
volume in a favourite thicket in the park. There was a good deal of time,
of course, that she was obliged to devote to her husband, walking or
driving or riding with him, in rather a ceremonial manner, almost as she
might have done had she belonged to that charmed circle whose smallest walk
or drive is recorded by obsequious chroniclers in every journal in the
united kingdom. Then came six brilliant weeks in August and September,
when Arden Court was filled with visitors, and Clarissa began to feel how
onerous are the duties of a chatelaine. She had not Lady Laura Armstrong's
delight in managing a great house. She was sincerely anxious that her
guests might be pleased, but somewhat over-burdened by the responsibility
of pleasing them. It was only after some experience that she found there
was very little to be done, after all. With a skilful combination of
elements, the result was sure to be agreeable. Morning after morning the
cheerful faces gathered round the breakfast-table; and morning after
morning vast supplies of dried salmon, fresh trout, grilled fowl, and
raised pie--to say nothing of lighter provender, in the way of omelets,
new-laid eggs, hot buttered cakes of various descriptions, huge wedges of
honeycomb, and jars of that Scotch marmalade, so dear to the hearts of
boating-men--vanished like smoke before a whirlwind. Whatever troubles
these nomads may have had were hidden in their hearts for the time being.
A wise custom prevailed in Mr. Granger's establishment with regard to the
morning letters, which were dealt out to each guest with his or her early
cup of tea, and not kept back for public distribution, to the confusion of
some luckless recipient, who feels it difficult to maintain an agreeable
smirk upon his countenance while he reads, that unless such or such an
account is settled immediately, proceedings will be taken without delay.

Lady Laura came, as she had promised, and gave her dearest Clarissa lessons
in the art of presiding over a large establishment, and did her utmost
to oust Miss Granger from her position of authority in the giving out of
stores and the ordering of grocery. This, however, was impossible. Sophia
clung to her grocer's book as some unpopular monarch tottering on his
insecure throne might cling to his sceptre. If she could not sit in the
post of honour at her father's dinner-table, as she had sat so long, it
was something to reign supreme in the store-room; if she found herself a
secondary person in the drawing-room, and that unpunctilious callers were
apt to forget the particular card due to her, she could at least hold on
by the keys of those closets in which the superfine china services for Mr.
Granger's great dinners were stored away, with chamois leather between all
the plates and dishes. She had still the whip-hand of the housekeeper, and
could ordain how many French plums and how many muscatel raisins were to
be consumed in a given period. She could bring her powers of arithmetic to
bear upon wax-candles, and torment the souls of hapless underlings by the
precision of her calculations. She had an eye to the preserves; and if
awakened suddenly in the dead of the night could have told, to a jar, how
many pots of strawberry, and raspberry, and currant, and greengage were
ranged on the capacious shelves of that stronghold of her power, the
store-room.

Even Lady Laura's diplomacy failed here. The genius of a Talleyrand would
not have dislodged Miss Granger.

"I like to feel that I am of _some_ use to papa," she remarked very often,
with the air of a household Antigone. "He has new outlets for his money
now, and it is more than ever my duty as a daughter to protect him from the
wastefulness of servants. With all my care, there are some things in Mrs.
Plumptree's management which I do not understand. I'm sure what becomes of
all the preserved-ginger and crystallized apricots that I give out, is a
mystery that no one could fathom. Who ever eats preserved-ginger? I have
taken particular notice, and could never see any one doing it. The things
are not eaten; _they disappear_."

Lady Laura suggested that, with such a fortune as Mr. Granger's, a little
waste more or less was hardly worth thinking of.

"I cannot admit that," Miss Granger replied solemnly. "It is the abstract
sinfulness of waste which I think of. An under-butler who begins by wasting
preserved-ginger may end by stealing his master's plate."

The summer went by. Picnics and boating parties, archery meetings and
flower-shows, and all the familiar round of country pleasures repeated
themselves just as they had done at Hale Castle two years ago; and Clarissa
wondered at the difference in her own mind which made these things so
different. It was not that all capacity for enjoyment was dead in her.
Youth is too bright a thing to be killed so easily. She could still delight
in a lovely landscape, in exquisite flowers, in that art which she had
loved from her childhood--she could still enjoy good music and pleasant
society; but that keen sense of happiness which she had felt at Hale, that
ardent appreciation of small pleasures, that eager looking forward to the
future--these were gone. She lived in the present. To look back to the past
was to recall the image of George Fairfax, who seemed somehow interwoven
with her girlhood; to look forward to the future was to set her face
towards a land hidden in clouds and darkness. She had positively nothing to
hope for.

Mr. Granger took life very calmly. He knew that his wife did not love him;
and he was too proud a man to lay himself out to win her love, even if he
had known how to set about a task so incongruous with the experience of his
life. He was angry with himself for having ever been weak enough to think
that this girlish creature--between whom and himself there stretched a gulf
of thirty years--could by any possibility be beguiled into loving him. Of
course, she had married him for his money. There was not one among his
guests who would not have thought him a fool for supposing that it could be
otherwise, or for expecting more from her than a graceful fulfilment of the
duties of her position.

He had little ground for complaint. She was gentle and obedient,
deferential in her manner to him before society, amiable always; he only
knew that she did not love him--that was all. But Daniel Granger was a
proud man, and this knowledge was a bitter thing to him. There were hours
in his life when he sat alone in his own room--that plainly-furnished
chamber which was half study, half dressing-room--withdrawing himself from
his guests under pretence of having business-letters to write to his people
at Bradford and Leeds; sat with his open desk before him, and made no
attempt to write; sat brooding over thoughts of his young wife, and
regretting the folly of his marriage.

Was it true that she had never cared for any one else? He had her father's
word for that; but he know that Marmaduke Lovel was a selfish man, who
would be likely enough to say anything that would conduce to his own
advantage. Had her heart been really true and pure when he won her for his
wife? He remembered those sketches of George Fairfax in the portfolio, and
one day when he was waiting for Clarissa in her morning-room he took the
trouble to look over her drawings. There were many that he recollected
having seen that day at Mill Cottage, but the portraits of Mr. Fairfax were
all gone. He looked through the portfolio very carefully, but found none of
those careless yet life-like sketches which had attracted the attention of
Sophia Granger.

"She has destroyed them, I suppose," he said to himself; and the notion of
her having done so annoyed him a little. He did not care to question her
about them. There would have been an absurdity in that, he thought: as
if it could matter to him whose face she chose for her unstudied
sketches--mere vagabondage of the pencil.

Upon rare occasions Marmaduke Lovel consented to take a languid share in
the festivities at Arden. But although he was very well pleased that his
daughter should be mistress of the house that he had lost, he did not
relish a secondary position in the halls of his forefathers; nor had the
gaieties of the place any charm for him. He was glad to slip away quietly
at the beginning of September, and to go back to Spa, where the waters
agreed with his rheumatism--that convenient rheumatism which was an excuse
for anything he might choose to do.

As for his daughter, he washed his hands of all responsibility in
connection with her. He felt as if he had provided for her in a most
meritorious manner by the diplomacy which had brought about her marriage.
Whether she was happy in her new life, was a question which he had never
asked himself; but if any one else had propounded such a question, he would
have replied unhesitatingly in the affirmative. Of course Clarissa was
happy. Had she not secured for herself all the things that women most
value? could she not run riot in the pleasures for which women will imperil
their souls? He remembered his own wife's extravagance, and he argued with
himself, that if she could have had a perennial supply of fine dresses, and
a perpetual round of amusement, she would speedily have forgotten Colonel
Fairfax. It was the dulness of her life, and the dismal atmosphere of
poverty, that had made her false.

So he went back to Spa, secure in the thought that he could make his home
at Arden whenever he pleased. Perhaps at some remote period of old age,
when his senses were growing dim, he might like to inhabit the familiar
rooms, and feel no sting in the thought that he was a guest, and not the
master. It would be rather pleasant to be carried to his grave from Arden
Court, if anything about a man's burial could be pleasant. He went back to
Spa and led his own life, and in a considerable measure forgot that he had
ever had a son and a daughter.

With September and October there came guests for the shooting, but George
Fairfax was not among them. Mr. Granger had not renewed that careless
invitation of his in Clarges-street. After supervising Clarissa's existence
for two or three weeks, Lady Laura had returned to Hale, there to reign in
all her glory. Mr. and Mrs. Granger dined at the castle twice in the course
of the autumn, and Clarissa saw Lady Geraldine for the first time since
that fatal wedding-day.

There was very little alteration in the fair placid face. Geraldine
Challoner was not a woman to wear the willow in any obvious manner. She
was still coldly brilliant, with just a shade more bitterness, perhaps, in
those little flashes of irony and cynicism which passed for wit. She talked
rather more than of old, Clarissa thought; she was dressed more elaborately
than in the days of her engagement to George Fairfax, and had altogether
the air of a woman who means to shine in society. To Mrs. Granger she was
polite, but as cold as was consistent with civility.

After a fortnight's slaughter of the pheasants, there was a lull in the
dissipations of Arden Court. Visitors departed, leaving Mr. Granger's
gamekeepers with a plethora of sovereigns and half-sovereigns in their
corduroy pockets, and serious thoughts of the Holborough Savings Bank, and
Mr. Granger's chief butler with views that soared as high as Consols.
All the twitter and cheerful confusion of many voices in the rooms and
corridors of the grand old house dwindled and died away, until Mr. Granger
was left alone with his wife and daughter. He was not sorry to see his
visitors depart, though he was a man who, after his own fashion, was fond
of society. But before the winter was over, an event was to happen at Arden
which rendered quiet indispensable.

Late in December, while the villagers were eating Mr. Granger's beef, and
warming themselves before Mr. Granger's coals, and reaping the fruit of
laborious days in the shape of Miss Granger's various premiums for humble
virtue--while the park and woodland were wrapped in snow, and the Christmas
bells were still ringing in the clear crisp air, God gave Clarissa a
son--the first thing she had ever held in her arms which she could and
might love with all her heart.

It was like some strange dream to her, this holy mystery of motherhood. She
had not looked forward to the child's coming with any supreme pleasure, or
supposed that her life would be altered by his advent. But from the moment
she held him in her arms, a helpless morsel of humanity, hardly visible to
the uninitiated amidst his voluminous draperies, she felt herself on the
threshold of a new existence. With him was born her future--it was a most
complete realization of those sweet wise words of the poet,--

"a child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts."

Mr. Granger was enraptured. For him, too, even more than for his wife, this
baby represented the future. Often and often, after some brilliant stroke
of business which swelled the figures upon the left side of his bank-book
to an abnormal amount, he had felt a dismal sense of the extinction that
must befall his glory by-and-by. There was no one but Sophia. She would
inherit a fortune thrice as large as any woman need desire, and would
in all likelihood marry, and give her wealth to fill the coffers of a
stranger, whose name should wipe out the name of Granger--or preserve it
in a half-and-half way in some inane compound, such, as Granger-Smith,
or Jones-Granger, extended afterwards into Jones-Granger-Jones, or
Granger-Smith-Granger.