The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon

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Perhaps those wintry days that began the new year were the purest, happiest
of Daniel Granger's life. He forgot that his wife did not love him. She
seemed so much more his wife, seated opposite to him beside that quiet
hearth, with her baby in her arms. She made such a lovely picture, bending
over the child in her unconscious beauty. To sit and watch the two was an
all-sufficient delight for him--sometimes withdrawing his mind from the
present, to weave the web of his boy's future.

"I shall send him to Westminster, Clary," he said--it was a long time, by
the way, since he had called his wife Clary, though she herself was hardly
aware of the fact. "I shall certainly send him to Westminster. A provincial
public school is all very well--my father sent me to one--but it's not
_quite_ up to the mark. I should like him to be a good classical scholar,
which I never was, though I was a decent mathematician. I used to do my
Virgil with a crib--a translation, you know--and I never could get on with
Greek. I managed to struggle through the New Testament, but stuck in the
first book of Thucydides. What dreary work it was! I was glad when it was
all over, and my father let me come into his office. But with this fellow
it will be different. He will have no occasion to soil his hands with
trade. He will be a country gentleman, and may distinguish himself in the
House of Commons. Yes, Clary, there may be the material for a great man in
him," Mr. Granger concluded, with an almost triumphant air, as he touched
the soft little cheek, and peered curiously into the bright blue eyes. They
were something like his own eyes, he thought; Clarissa's were hazel.

The mother drew the soft mass of muslin a little nearer to her heart. She
did not care to think of her baby as a man, addressing a noisy constituency
in Holborough market-place, nor even, as a Westminster boy, intent upon
Virgil and cricket, Euclid and football. She liked to think of him as he
was now, and as he would be for the next few years--something soft and warm
and loving, that she could hold in her arms; beside whose bed she could
watch and pray at night. Her future was bounded by the years of her son's
childhood. She thought already, with a vague pang, of the time when he
should go out into the world, and she be no longer necessary to him.

The day came when she looked back to that interval of perfect quiet--the
dimly-lighted rooms, the low wood fire, and her husband's figure seated by
the hearth--with a bitter sense of regret. Daniel Granger was so good to
her in those days--so entirely devoted, in a quiet unobtrusive way--and she
was so selfishly absorbed by the baby as to be almost unconscious of his
goodness at the time. She was inclined to forget that the child belonged to
any one but herself; indeed, had the question been brought home to her, she
would have hardly liked to admit his father's claim upon him. He was her
own--her treasure beyond all price--given to her by heaven for her comfort
and consolation.

Not the least among the tranquil pleasures of that period of
retirement--which Clarissa spun out until the spring flowers were blooming
in the meadows about Arden--was a comparative immunity from the society of
Miss Granger. That young lady made a dutiful call upon her stepmother
every morning, and offered a chilling forefinger--rather a strong-minded
forefinger, with a considerable development of bone--to the infant. On the
child not receiving this advance with rapture, Miss Granger was wont to
observe that he was not so forward in taking notice as some of her model
children; at which the young mother flamed up in defence of her darling,
declaring that he did take notice, and that it was a shame to compare him
to "nasty village children."

"The 'nasty village children' have immortal souls," Sophia replied
severely.

"So they may; but they don't take notice sooner than my baby. I would never
believe that. He knows me, the precious darling;" and the little soft warm
thing in voluminous muslin was kissed and squeezed about to extinction.

Miss Granger was great upon the management of infancy, and was never tired
of expounding her ideas to Clarissa. They were of a Spartan character, not
calculated to make the period of babyhood a pleasant time to experience or
to look back upon. Cold water and nauseous medicines formed a conspicuous
part of the system, and where an ordinary nurse would have approached
infancy with a sponge, Miss Granger suggested a flesh-brush. The hardest,
most impracticable biscuits, the huskiest rusks, constituted Miss Granger's
notion of infant food. She would have excluded milk, as bilious, and would
have forbidden sugar, as a creator of acidity; and then, when the little
victim was about one and a half, she would have seated it before the most
dry-as-dust edition of the alphabet, and driven it triumphantly upon the
first stage on the high-road to Kings and Chronicles.

Among the model villagers Miss Granger had ample opportunity of offering
advice of this kind, and fondly believed that her counsel was acted upon.
Obsequious matrons, with an eye to Christmas benefactions, pretended to
profit by her wisdom; but it is doubtful whether the model infants were
allowed to suffer from a practical exposition of her Spartan theories.

Clarissa had her own ideas about the heir of the Grangers. Not a crumpled
rose-leaf--had rose-leaves been flying about just then--must roughen her
darling's bed. The softest lawn, the downiest, most delicate woollens, were
hardly good enough to wrap her treasure. She had solemn interviews with a
regiment of nurses before she could discover a woman who seemed worthy to
be guardian of this infant demigod. And Mr. Granger showed himself scarcely
less weak. It almost seemed as if this boy was his first child. He had
been a busy man when Sophia was born--too entirely occupied by the grave
considerations of commerce to enter into the details of the nursery--and
the sex of the child had been something of a disappointment to him. He
was rich enough even then to desire an heir to his wealth. During the few
remaining years of his first wife's life, he had hoped for the coming of a
son; but no son had been given to him. It was now, in his sober middle age,
that the thing he had longed for was granted to him, and it seemed all the
more precious because of the delay. So Daniel Granger was wont to sit and
stare at the infant as if it had been something above the common clay of
which infancy is made. He would gaze at it for an hour together, in a dumb
rapture, fully believing it to be the most perfect object in creation; and
about this child there sprung up between his wife and himself a sympathy
that had never been before. Only deep in Clarissa's heart there was a vague
jealousy. She would have liked her baby to be hers alone. The thought of
his father's claim frightened her. In the time to come her child might grow
to love his father better than her.

Finding her counsel rejected, Miss Granger would ask in a meek voice if she
might be permitted to kiss the baby, and having chilled his young blood by
the cool and healthy condition of her complexion, would depart with an air
of long-suffering; and this morning visit being over, Clarissa was free of
her for the rest of the day. Miss Granger had her "duties." She devoted her
mornings to the regulation of the household, her afternoons to the drilling
of the model villagers. In the evening she presided at her father's dinner,
which seemed rather a chilling repast to Mr. Granger, in the absence of
that one beloved face. He would have liked to dine off a boiled fowl in
his wife's room, or to have gone dinnerless and shared Clarissa's
tea-and-toast, and heard the latest wonders performed by the baby, but he
was ashamed to betray so much weakness.

So he dined in state with Sophia, and found it hard work to keep up a
little commonplace conversation with her during the solemn meal--his heart
being elsewhere all the time.

That phase of gloom and despondency, through which, his mind had passed
during the summer that was gone, had given place to brighter thoughts. A
new dawn of hope had come for him with the birth of his child.

He told himself again, as he had so often told himself in the past, that
his wife would grow to love him--that time would bring him the fruition
of his desires. In the meanwhile he was almost entirely happy in the
possession of this new blessing. All his life was coloured by the existence
of this infant. He had a new zest in the driest details of his position
as the master of a great estate. He had bought some two thousand acres of
neighbouring land at different times since his purchase of Arden Court; and
the estate, swollen by these large additions, was fast becoming one of the
finest in the county.

There was not a tree he planted in the beginning of this new year which
he did not consider with reference to his boy; and he made extensive
plantations on purpose that he might be able to point to them by-and-by
and say, "These trees were planted the year my son was born." When he went
round his stables, he made a special survey of one particularly commodious
loose-box, which would do for his boy's pony. He fancied the little fellow
trotting by his side across farms and moorlands, or deep into the woods to
see the newly-felled timber, or to plan a fresh clearing.

It was a pleasant day dream.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE NEAREST WAY TO CARLSRUHE.

A great event befell George Fairfax in the spring of the new year. He
received a summons to Lyvedon, and arrived there only in time to attend
his uncle's death bed. The old man died, and was buried in the tomb of his
forefathers--a spacious vaulted chamber beneath Lyvedon church--and George
Fairfax reigned in his stead. Since his brother's death he had known that
this was to be, and had accepted the fact as a matter of course. His
succession caused him very little elation. He was glad to have unlimited
ready-money, but, in the altered aspect of his life, Le did not care much
for the estate. With Geraldine Challoner for his wife, the possession of
such a place as Lyvedon would have been very agreeable to him. He could
have almost resigned himself to the ordinary country gentleman's life: to
be a magnate in the county; to attend at petty sessions, and keep himself
well posted in parochial questions; to make himself a terror to the soul of
poachers, and to feel that his youth was over. But now it was different. He
had no wife, nor any prospect of a wife. He had no definite plans for his
future. For a long time he had been going altogether the wrong way; leading
a roving, desultory kind of existence; living amongst men whose habits and
principles were worse than his own.

He sent for his mother, and installed her as mistress of Lyvedon. The place
and the position suited her to admiration. He spent a month in dawdling
about the neighbourhood, taking stock of his new possessions, now and then
suggesting some alteration or improvement, but always too lazy to carry
it out; strolling in the park with a couple of dogs and a cigar, or going
fly-fishing along the bank of a little winding river; driving in an open
carriage with his mother; yawning over a book or a newspaper all the
evening, and then sitting up till late into the night, writing letters
which might just as easily have been written in the day. His manner made
his mother anxious. Once, with a sigh, she ventured to say how much she
regretted the breaking-off his engagement to Lady Geraldine.

"You were so admirably adapted for each other," she said.

"Yes, mother, admirably adapted, no doubt; but you see we did not love each
other." He felt a little pang of remorse as he said this, for it misgave
him that Geraldine _had_ loved him. "It would have been like those chestnut
ponies you drive; they go very well together, and look superb, but they are
always snapping at each other's heads. I don't mean to say that Geraldine
and I would have quarrelled--one might as well try to quarrel with a
rock--but we shouldn't have got on. In short, I have a prejudice in favour
of marrying a woman I could love."

"And yet I thought you were so much attached to her."

"I was--in the way of friendship. Her society had become a kind of habit
with me. I do really like her, and shall always consider her one of the
handsomest and cleverest women I know; but it was a mistake to ask her to
marry me, and might have been a fatal one. You will say, of course, that a
man ought not to make that kind of mistake. I quite agree with you there;
but I made it, and I think it infinitely better to pull up even at an
awkward point than to make two lives miserable."

Mrs. Fairfax sighed, and shook her head doubtfully.

"O, George, George, I'm afraid there was some newer fancy--some secret
reason for your conduct to poor Geraldine," she said in a reproachful tone.

"My dear mother, I have a dozen fancies in a month, and rarely know my
own mind for a week at a stretch; but I do know that I never really loved
Geraldine Challoner, and that it is better for me to be free from an
ill-advised engagement."

Mrs. Fairfax did not venture to press the question any farther. She had her
suspicions, and her suspicions pointed to Clarissa. But Clarissa now being
married and fairly out of the way, she had some faint hope that her son
would return to his old allegiance, and that she might even yet have
Geraldine Challoner for her daughter. In the meantime she was fain to be
patient, and to refrain from any irritating persistence upon a subject that
was very near to her heart.

So far as her own interests were concerned, it would have been a pleasant
thing for Mrs. Fairfax that her son should remain a bachelor. The
sovereignty of Lyvedon was a pure and perfect delight to her. The place was
the home of her childhood; and there was not a thicket in the park, or a
flower-bed in the garden, that was not familiar and dear to her. Every
corner of the sombre old rooms--in which the furniture had been unchanged
for a century--had its tender associations. All the hopes and dreams of her
long-vanished youth came back to her, faint and pale, like faded flowers
shut in the leaves of a book. And in the event of her son's marriage, she
must of course resign all this--must make a new home for herself outside
the walls of Lyvedon; for she was not a woman to accept a secondary place
in any household. Considering the question merely from a selfish point
of view, she had every reason to be satisfied with the existing state of
things; but it was not of herself she thought. She saw her son restless and
unsettled, and had a secret conviction that he was unhappy. There had been
much in the history of his past life that had troubled her; and for his
future her chief hope had been in the security of a judicious marriage. She
was a woman of strong religious feeling, and had shed many bitter tears and
prayed many prayers on account of this beloved son.

The beloved son in the meanwhile dawdled away life in a very unsatisfactory
manner. He found the roads and lanes about Lyvedon remarkable for nothing
but their dust. There were wild flowers, of course--possibly nightingales
and that sort of thing; but he preferred such imported bouquets, grown on
the flowery slopes of the Mediterranean, as he could procure to order at
Covent Garden; and the song of nightingales in the dusky after dinner-time
made him melancholy. The place was a fine old place and it was undoubtedly
a good thing to possess it; but George Fairfax had lived too wild a life
to find happiness in the simple pleasures of a Kentish squire. So, after
enduring the placid monotony of Lyvedon for a couple of months, he grew
insufferably weary all at once, and told his mother that he was going to
the Black Forest.

"It's too early to shoot capercailzies," he said; "but I daresay I shall
find something to do. I am nothing but a bore to you here, mother; and you
can amuse yourself, while I'm gone, in carrying out any of the improvements
we've discussed."

Mrs. Fairfax assured her son that his presence was always a delight to her,
but that, of course, there was nothing in the world she desired so much as
his happiness, and that it had been a pain to her to see him otherwise than
happy.

"I had hoped that the possession of this place would have given you so much
occupation," she said, "that you would have gone into parliament and made a
position for yourself."

"My dear mother, I never had any affection for politics; and unless a man
could be a modern Pitt, I don't see the use of that kind of thing. Every
young Englishman turns his face towards the House of Commons, as the
sunflower turns to the sun-god; and see what a charming level of mediocrity
we enjoy in consequence thereof."

"Anything that would occupy your mind, George," remonstrated Mrs. Fairfax.

"The question is, whether I have any mind to be occupied, mother," replied
the young man with a laugh. "I think the average modern intellect, when it
knows its own capacity, rarely soars above billiards. That is a science;
and what can a man be more than scientific?"

"It is so easy to laugh the subject down in that way, George," returned the
mother with a sigh. "But a man has duties to perform."

"Surely not a man with an estate like this, mother! I can never understand
that talk about the duties of a rich man, except to pay his income-tax
properly. A fellow with a wife and children, and no income to speak of, has
duties, of course--imprimis, the duty of working for his belongings;
but what are the privileges of wealth, if one may not take life as one
pleases?"

"Oh, George, George, I used to hope such great things of you!"

"The fond delusion common to maternity, my dearest mother. A brat learns
his A B C a shade quicker than other children, or construes _Qui fit
Maecenas_ with tolerable correctness; and straightway the doting mother
thinks her lad is an embryo Canning. You should never have hoped anything
of me, except that I would love you dearly all my life. You have made that
very easy to me."

Mr. Fairfax took his portmanteau and departed, leaving his servant to carry
the rest of his luggage straight to Paris, and await his master's arrival
at one of the hotels in the Rue de Rivoli. The master himself took a
somewhat circuitous route, and began his journey to the Black Forest by
going down to Holborough.

"I can take a steamer from Hull to Hamburg," he said to himself, "and push
on from there to Carlsruhe."

He wanted to see Clarissa again. He knew that she was at Arden Court, and
that Lady Laura Armstrong was not at Hale Castle. He wanted to see her; his
ulterior views were of the vaguest; but that passionate yearning to see
her, to hear the sweet winning voice, to look into the soft hazel eyes, was
strong upon him. It was a year since the day he dined in Clarges-street;
and in all that year he had done his uttermost to forget her, had hated
himself for the weakness which made her still dearer to him than any other
woman; and then, alike angry with her and with himself, had cried, with
Wilmot Earl of Rochester,--

"Such charms by nature you possess,
'Twere madness not to love you."

He went up to London early one morning, and straight from London to
Holborough, where he arrived late in the evening. He slept at the chief
inn of the place; and in the golden summer noontide set out for Arden
Court--not to make a formal visit, but rather to look about him in a
somewhat furtive way. He did not care to make his advent known to Daniel
Granger just yet; perhaps, indeed, he might find it expedient to avoid any
revelation of himself to that gentleman. He wanted to find out all he could
of Clarissa's habits, so that he might contrive an interview with her. He
had seen the announcement of the baby's birth, and oh, what a bitter pang
the commonplace paragraph had given him! Never before had the fact that
she was another man's wife come home to him so keenly. He tried to put the
subject out of his thoughts, to forget that there had been a son born to
the house of Granger; but often in the dreary spring twilight, walking
among the oaks of Lyvedon, he had said to himself, "_Her_ child ought to
have been heir to this place."

He went in at the lodge gate, and strolled idly into the park, not being at
all clear as to how he was to bring about what he wanted. The weather was
lovely--weather in which few people, untrammelled by necessity, would have
cared to remain indoors. There was just the chance that Mrs. Granger might
be strolling in the park herself, and the still more remote contingency
that she might be alone. He was quite prepared for the possibility of
meeting her accompanied by the lynx-eyed Miss Granger; and was not a man to
be thrown off his guard, or taken at a disadvantage, come what might.

The place wore its fairest aspect: avenues of elms, that had begun to
grow when England was young; gigantic oaks dotted here and there upon
the undulating open ground, reputed a thousand years old; bright young
plantations of rare fir and pine, that had a pert crisp newness about them,
like the air of a modern dandy; everywhere the appearance of that perfect
care and culture which is the most conclusive evidence of unlimited wealth.

George Fairfax looked round him with a sigh. The scene he looked upon was
very fair. It was not difficult to understand how dear association might
have made so beautiful a spot to such a girl as Clarissa. She had told
him she would give the world to win back her lost home; and she had
given--something less than the world--only herself. "Paris is worth a
mass," said the great Henry; and Clarissa's perjury was only one more of
the many lies which men and women have told to compass their desires.

He kept away from the carriage-roads, loitering in the remoter regions of
the park, and considering what he should do. He did not want to present
himself at the Court as a formal visitor. In the first place, it would
have been rather difficult to give any adequate reason for his presence
in Holborough; and in the second, he had an unspeakable repugnance to any
social intercourse with Clarissa's husband.

How he was ever to see her in the future without that hideous hypocrisy of
friendliness towards Daniel Granger, he knew not; but he knew that it would
cost him dearly to take the hand of the man who had supplanted him.

He wandered on till he came to a dell where the ground was broken a good
deal, and where the fern seemed to grow more luxuriantly than in any other
part of the park. There was a glimpse of blue water at the bottom of the
slope--a narrow strip of a streamlet running between swampy banks, where
the forget-me-nots and pale water-plants ran riot. This verdant valley
was sheltered by some of the oldest hawthorns George Fairfax had ever
seen--very Methuselahs of trees, whose grim old trunks and crooked branches
time had twisted into the queerest shapes, and whose massive boles
and strange excrescences of limb were covered with the moss of past
generations. It was such a valley as Gustave Dore would love to draw; a
glimpse of wilderness in the midst of cultivation.

There were not wanted figures to brighten the landscape. A woman dressed
in white sat under one of the hawthorns, with a baby on her lap; and a
nursemaid, in gayer raiment, stood by, looking down at the child.

How well George Fairfax remembered the slight girlish figure, and the day
when he had come upon it unawares in Marley Wood! He stood a few paces off,
and listened to the soft sweet voice.

Clarissa was talking to her baby in the unintelligible mother-language
inspired by the occasion. A baby just able to smile at her, and coo and
crow and chuckle in that peculiarly unctious manner common to babies of
amiable character; a fair blue-eyed baby, big and bonny, with soft rings of
flaxen hair upon his pink young head, and tender little arms that seemed
meant for nothing so much as to be kissed.

After a good deal of that sweet baby-talk, there was a little discussion
between the mistress and maid; and then the child was wrapped up as
carefully as if destruction were in the breath of the softest June zephyr.
Mr. Fairfax was afraid the mother was going away with the child, and that
his chance would be lost; but it was not so. The maid tripped off with
the infant, after it had been brought back two or three times to be half
smothered with kisses--kisses which it seemed to relish in its own peculiar
way, opening its mouth to receive them, as if they had been something
edible. The baby was carried away at last, and Clarissa took up a book and
began to read.

George Fairfax waited till the maid had been gone about ten minutes, and
then came slowly down the hollow to the spot where Clarissa was seated. The
rustle of the fern startled her; she looked up, and saw him standing by her
side. It was just a year since he had surprised her in Mr. Wooster's garden
at Henley. She had thought of him very much in that time, but less since
the birth of her boy. She turned very pale at sight of him; and when she
tried to speak, the words would not come: her lips only moved tremulously.