The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon

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"I hope I did not alarm you very much," he said, "by the suddenness of
my appearance. I thought I heard your voice just now, speaking to some
one"--he had not the heart to mention her baby--"and came down here to look
for you. What a charming spot it is!"

She had recovered her self-possession by this time, and was able to answer
him quite calmly. "Yes, it is very pretty. It was a favourite spot of
Austin's. I have at least a dozen sketches of it done by him. But I did not
know you were in Yorkshire, Mr. Fairfax."

She wondered whether he was staying at Hale; and then it flashed upon her
that there had been a reconciliation between him and Lady Geraldine.

"I have not been long in Yorkshire. I am merely here _en passant_, in
short. My only excuse for approaching you lies in the fact that I have come
to talk to you about your brother."

"About Austin!" exclaimed Clarissa, with a look of alarm. "There is nothing
wrong--he is well, I hope?"

"Pray don't alarm yourself. Yes, he is tolerably well, I believe; and there
is nothing wrong--nothing that need cause you any immediate concern at
least. I am going to Paris, and I thought you might be glad to send some
message."

"You are very kind to think of that; yes, I shall be glad to send to him.
He is not a good correspondent, and I get very anxious about him sometimes.
What you said just now seemed to imply that there was something wrong. Pray
be candid with me, Mr. Fairfax."

He did not answer her immediately; in fact, for the moment he scarcely was
conscious of her words. He was looking at the beautiful face--looking at it
with a repressed passion that was deeper and more real than any he had ever
felt in his life. His thoughts wandered away from Austin Level. He was
thinking what he would have given, what peril he would have dared, to call
this woman his own. All this lower world seemed nothing to him when weighed
against her; and in such a moment a man of his stamp rarely remembers any
other world.

"There is something wrong," repeated Clarissa with increasing anxiety. "I
entreat you to tell me the truth!"

"Yes, there is something wrong," he answered vaguely; and then, wrenching
his mind away from those wild speculations as to what he would or would not
do to win Daniel Granger's wife, he went on in another tone: "The truth is,
my dear Mrs. Granger, I was in Paris last winter, and saw something of your
brother's mode of life; and I cannot say that I consider it a satisfactory
one. You have sent him a good deal of money since I saw you last, I
daresay? Pray understand that there is nothing intrusive or impertinent in
my question. I only wish to be some use to you, if I can."

"I am sure of that. Yes; I have sent him what I could--about four hundred
pounds--since last June; and he has been very grateful, poor fellow! He
ought to know that he is welcome to every shilling I have. I could send him
much more, of course, if I cared to ask my husband for money."

"It is wiser to trust to your own resources. And I doubt if the command of
much money would be a positive benefit to your brother. You have asked me
to be candid; and I shall obey you, even at the hazard of giving you pain.
There is a kind of constitutional weakness in your brother's nature. He
is a man open to every influence, and not always governed by the best
influences. I saw a good deal of him when I was last in Paris, and I saw
him most in the fastest society, amongst people who petted him for the
sake of his genius and vivacity, but who would turn their backs upon him
to-morrow if he were no longer able to amuse them; the set into which an
artist is so apt to fall when his home influences are not strong enough to
keep him steady, and when he has that lurking disposition to Bohemianism
which has been the bane of your brother's life. I speak entirely without
reserve, you see."

"I am grateful to you for doing so. Poor Austin! if he had only chosen more
wisely! But his wife is fond of him, you say?"

"Too fond of him, perhaps; for she is very much given to torment him
with jealous outbreaks; and he is not a man to take that sort of thing
pleasantly. She does not go into society with him: indeed, I doubt if
half-a-dozen out of the people whom he lives amongst know that he has a
wife. I found his social position considerably improved; thanks to your
remittances, no doubt. He was still in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard--as, of
course, you know--but had moved a stage lower down, and had furnished a
painting-room in the stereotyped style--Flemish carved buffets, dingy
tapestry from a passage behind the Rue Richelieu, and a sprinkling of
bric-a-brac from the Quai Voltaire. The poor little woman and her children
were banished; and he had a room full of visitors chattering round him
while he painted. You know his wonderful facility. The atmosphere was
cloudy with tobacco-smoke; and the men were drinking that abominable
concoction of worm-wood with which young France cultivates madness and
early doom."

"It is not a pleasant picture," said Clarissa with a profound sigh.

"No, my dear Mrs. Granger; but it is a faithful one. Mr. Lovel had won a
certain reputation for his airy style of art, and was beginning to get
better prices for his pictures; but I fancy he has a capacity for spending
money, and an inability to save it, which would bring him always to the
same level of comparative insolvency. I have known so many men like that;
and a man who begins in that way so rarely ends in any other way."

"What am I to do!" exclaimed Clarissa piteously; "what can I do to help
him?"

"I am almost at a loss to suggest anything. Perhaps if you were on the
spot, your influence might do something. I know he loves you, and is more
moved by the mention of your name than by any sermon one could preach to
him. But I suppose there is no chance of your being in Paris."

"I don't know. Mr. Granger talked some time ago of spending the autumn
abroad, and asked me if I should like to see a New-Year's day in Paris. I
think, if I were to express a wish about it, he would take me there; and it
would be such happiness to me to see Austin!" And then Mrs. Granger
thought of her baby, and wondered whether the atmosphere of Paris would be
favourable to that rare and beauteous blossom; whether the tops-and-bottoms
of the French capital would agree with his tender digestive machinery,
and if the cowkeepers of the Faubourg St. Honore were an honest and
unadulterating race. The very notion of taking the treasure away from his
own nurseries, his own cow, his own goat-chaise, was enough to make her
shudder.

"It would be the best chance for his redemption. A little womanly kindness
and counsel from you to the wife might bring about a happier state of
things in his home; and a man who can be happy at home is in a measure
saved. It is hardly possible for your brother to mix much with the people
amongst whom I saw him without injury to himself. They are people to whom
dissipation is the very salt of life; people who breakfast at the Moulin
Rouge at three o'clock in the afternoon, and eat ices at midnight to the
music of the cascade in the Bois; people to be seen at every race-meeting;
men who borrow money at seventy-five per cent to pay for opera-boxes and
dinners at the Cafe Riche, and who manage the rest of their existence on
credit."

"But what could my influence do against such friends as these?" asked
Clarissa in a hopeless tone.

"Who can say? It might do wonders. I know your brother has a heart, and
that you have power to touch it. Take my advice, Mrs. Granger, and try to
be in Paris as soon as you can."

"I will," she answered fervently. "I would do anything to save him." She
looked at her watch, and rose from the seat under the hawthorn. "It is
nearly two o'clock," she said, "and I must go back to the house. You will
come to luncheon, of course?"

"Thanks--no. I have an engagement that will take me back to the town
immediately."

"But Mr. Granger will be surprised to hear that you have been here without
calling upon him."

"Need Mr. Granger hear of my coming?" George Fairfax asked in a low tone.

Clarissa flushed scarlet.

"I have no secrets from my husband, Mr. Fairfax," she said, "even about
trifles."

"Ten thousand pardons! I scarcely want to make my presence here a secret;
but, in short, I came solely to speak to you about a subject in which I
knew you were deeply interested, and I had not contemplated calling upon
Mr. Granger."

They were walking slowly up the grassy slope as they talked; and after this
there came a silence, during which Clarissa quickened her pace a little,
George Fairfax keeping still by her side. Her heart beat faster than its
wont; and she had a vague sense of danger in this man's presence--a sense
of a net being woven round her, a lurking suspicion that this apparent
interest in her brother veiled some deeper feeling.

They came out of the hollow, side by side, into a short arcade of flowering
limes, at the end of which there was a broad sweep of open grass. A man
on a deep-chested strong-limbed gray horse was riding slowly towards them
across the grass--Daniel Granger.

That picture of his wife walking in the little avenue of limes, with George
Fairfax by her side, haunted Mr. Granger with a strange distinctness in
days to come,--the slight white-robed figure against the background of
sunlit greenery; the young man's handsome head, uncovered, and stooping a
little as he spoke to his companion.

The master of Arden Court dismounted, and led his horse by the bridle as
he came forward to meet Mr. Fairfax. The two men shook hands; but not very
warmly. The encounter mystified Daniel Granger a little. It was strange to
find a man he had supposed to be at the other end of England strolling in
the park with his wife, and that man the one about whom he had had many
a dreary half-hour of brooding. He waited for an explanation, however,
without any outward show of surprise. The business was simple and natural
enough, no doubt, he told himself.

"Have you been to the house?" he asked; "I have been out all the morning."

"No; I was on my way there, when I came upon Mrs. Granger in the most
romantic spot yonder. I felt that I was rather early for a morning-call
even in the depths of the country, and had strolled out of the beaten path
to get rid of an hour or so."

"I did not know you were in Yorkshire," said Mr. Granger, not in the most
cordial tone. "You are staying at Hale, I suppose?"

"No; Lady Laura is away, you know."

"Ah--to be sure; I had forgotten."

"I am spending a few days with a bachelor friend in Holborough. I am off to
Germany before the week is out."

Mr. Granger was not sorry to hear this. He was not jealous of George
Fairfax. If anybody had suggested the possibility of his entertaining such
a sentiment, that person would have experienced the full force of Daniel
Granger's resentment; but this was just the one man whom he fancied his
wife might have cared for a little before her marriage. He was not a man
given to petty jealousies; and of late, since the birth of his son,
there had been growing up in his mind a sense of security in his wife's
fidelity--her affection even. The union between them had seemed very
perfect after the advent of the child; and the master of Arden Court felt
almost as if there were nothing upon this earth left for him to desire. But
he was a little puzzled by the presence of George Fairfax, nevertheless.

Holborough was a small place; and he began to speculate immediately upon
the identity of this bachelor friend of Mr. Fairfax's. It was not a
garrison town. The young men of the place were for the most part small
professional men--half-a-dozen lawyers and doctors, two or three curates, a
couple of bankers' sons, an auctioneer or two, ranking vaguely between the
trading and professional classes, and the sons of tradesmen. Among them all
Mr. Granger could remember no one likely to be a friend of George Fairfax.
It might possibly be one of the curates; but it seemed scarcely probable
that Mr. Fairfax would come two hundred and fifty miles to abide three days
with a curate. Nor was it the season of partridges. There was no shooting
to attract Mr. Fairfax to the neighbourhood of Holborough. There was trout,
certainly, to be found in abundance in brooks, and a river within a walk of
the town; and Mr. Fairfax might be passionately fond of fly-fishing.

"You will come in and have some luncheon, of course," Mr. Granger said,
when they came to the gateway, where George Fairfax pulled up, and began to
wish them good-bye. Not to ask the man to eat and drink would have seemed
to him the most unnatural thing in the world.

"Thanks. I think I had better deny myself that pleasure," Mr. Fairfax said
doubtfully. "The day is getting on, and--and I have an engagement for the
afternoon." ("Trout, no doubt," thought Mr. Granger.) "I have seen you,
that is the grand point. I could not leave Yorkshire without paying my
respects to you and Mrs. Granger."

"Do you leave so soon?"

"To-morrow, I think."

"A hurried journey for trout," thought Mr. Granger.

He insisted upon the visitor coming in to luncheon. George Fairfax was not
very obdurate. It was so sweet to be near the woman he loved, and he had
not the habit of refusing himself the things that were sweet to him. They
went into the small dining-room. The luncheon bell had rung a quarter of
an hour ago, and Miss Granger was waiting for her parents, with an air of
placid self-abnegation, by an open window.

There was a good deal of talk during luncheon, but the chief talker was
George Fairfax. Clarissa was grave and somewhat absent. She was thinking of
her brother Austin, and the gloomy account of him which she had just heard.
It was hardly a surprise to her. His letters had been few and far between,
and they had not been hopeful, or, at the best, brightened by only a flash
of hopefulness, which was more like bravado, now and then. His necessity
for money, too, had seemed without limit. She was planning her campaign.
Come what might, she must contrive some means of being in Paris before
long. Mr. Fairfax was going on to Carlsruhe, that was an advantage; for
something in his manner to-day had told her that he must always be more or
less than her friend. She had a vague sense that his eagerness to establish
a confidence between her and himself was a menace of danger to her.

"If I can only go to Austin myself," she thought, "there need be no
intermediary."

Luncheon was over, and still Mr. Fairfax lingered--strangely indifferent
to the waning of an afternoon which seemed peculiarly advantageous for
fly-fishing, Mr. Granger thought. They went into the drawing-room, and Mr.
Fairfax dawdled an hour away talking of Lyvedon, and giving a serio-comic
description of himself in the novel character of a country gentleman.
It was not till Mr. Granger had looked at his watch once or twice in a
surreptitious manner, thinking of an engagement to meet his architect for
the inspection of some dilapidated cottages on the newest part of his
estate, that the visitor rose to depart. Daniel Granger had quite warmed to
him by this time. His manner was so natural in its pleasant airiness: it
was not easy to think there could be any lurking evil beneath such a show
of candour.

"Can't you stay and dine with us?" asked Mr. Granger; "or will you go back
to Holborough and fetch your friend? We shall be very glad to know him, if
we don't know him already."

If a blush had been possible to George Fairfax, this friendly speech would
have raised it; but the capacity had departed from him before he left Eton.
He did feel ashamed of himself, nevertheless.

"You are more than good," he said, "but my friend seldom goes anywhere.
Good-bye."

He made his adieux with an agreeable abruptness, not caring to prolong the
dinner question. Such men as he tell lies without stint upon occasion; but
the men are few to whom it is actually congenial to lie. He was glad to get
away even from the woman he loved, and the sense of shame was strong upon
him as he departed.

If his mother, who was anxiously awaiting a letter from Paris or Carlsruhe,
could have known of his presence here in this place, to which his father
had come years ago to betray her! If she who loved him so fondly, and was
so full of prayers and hopes for his future, could have seen him so utterly
on the wrong road, what bitter shame and lamenting there would have been in
the halls of Lyvedon that day--those deserted halls in which the lady sat
alone among the sombre old-world grandeurs of oak and tapestry, and sighed
for her absent son!

* * * * *

Instead of going straight back to the Holborough high-road, Mr. Fairfax
struck across the woods by that path which led to the mill-stream and the
orchard, where he had parted from Clarissa on that cheerless October night
nearly three years ago. He knew that Mr. Lovel was away, and the cottage
only tenanted by servants, and he had a fancy for looking at the place
where he had been so angry and so miserable--the scene of that one
rejection which had stung him to the very quick, the single humiliation of
his successful career. It was only the morbid fancy of an idle man, who had
an afternoon to dispose of somehow.

Half-way between the Court and the cottage, he heard the jingling of
bells, and presently, flashing and gleaming among the trees, he saw a
gaily-painted carriage drawn by a pair of goats, with plated harness that
shone in the sun. Mixed with the joyous jingle of the bells, there came
the sound of an infant's laughter. It was the baby taking his after-dinner
airing, attended by a couple of nurses. A turn in the path brought George
Fairfax and the heir of Arden face to face.

A sudden impulse seized him--a sudden impulse of tenderness for _her_
child. He took the little bundle of rosy babyhood and lace and muslin in
his arms, and kissed the soft little face as gently as a woman, and looked
into the innocent blue eyes, dilated to an almost impossible extent in a
wondering stare, with unspeakable love and melancholy in his own. Great
Heaven! if Clarissa had been his wife, this child his son, what a happy
man he might have been, what a new charm there would have been in the
possession of a fine estate, what a new zest in life, the savour of which
seemed to have departed altogether of late!

He put the little one back into his cushioned seat in the goat-chaise with
supreme care and gentleness, not ruffling so much as a plume in his dainty
white satin hat.

"A fine boy, Mrs. Nurse," he said, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for
bacsheesh; to which proposition the portly head-nurse, who had stared
at him, aghast with horror, while had handled the infant, assented with
enthusiasm.

"I never nursed a finer, sir; and I was head-nurse to Lady Fitz-Lubin,
which my lady had five boys, and not a girl between them; and Mrs. Granger
does dote on him so. I never see a ma that rapt up in her child."

Mr. Fairfax gave her half-a-sovereign, stooped down to kiss the baby
again--it is doubtful if he had ever kissed a baby before--and then walked
on, wondering at the new sensation. Such a little soft thing, that opened
its mouth to be kissed, like a petted bird! And yet he could contemplate a
future in which he should come between Clarissa and this child; he could
dream of a possibility which should make its mother's name a shame to this
little one.

* * * * *

Mr. Granger kept his appointment with the architect, and came to the
natural conclusion of a rich roan upon the subject of dilapidated
buildings. After inspecting the lop-sided old cottages, with their deep
roomy chimneys, in which the farm labourer loved to sit of a night,
roasting his ponderous boots, and smoking the pipe of meditation, and their
impossible staircases, which seemed to have been designed with a deliberate
view to the breaking of legs and endangerment of spines, Mr. Granger made a
wry face, and ordered that rubbish to be swept away.

"You can build me half-a-dozen upon the new Arden design," he said; "red
brick, with stone dressings; and be sure you put a tablet with the date in
front of each."

He was thinking of his son, anxious that there should be some notable
improvement, some new building every year, to mark the progress of his
boy's existence.

The farm-labourers and their wives did not look so delighted as they might
have been by this edict. These benighted souls liked the old cottages,
lop-sided as they were--liked the crooked staircase squeezed into a corner
of the living room below, the stuffy little dens above, with casement
windows which only opened on one side, letting in the smallest modicum of
air, and were not often opened at all. Cottages on the Now Arden model
meant stone floors below and open rafters above, thorough draughts
everywhere, and, worst of all, they meant weekly inspection by Miss
Granger. The free sons and daughters of Hickly-on-the-Hill--this little
cluster of houses which formed a part of Mr. Granger's new estate--had
rejoiced that they were not as the Ardenites; that they could revel in
warmth and dirt, and eat liver-and-bacon for supper on a Saturday night,
without any fear of being lectured for their extravagance by the omniscient
Sophia on the following Monday, convicted of their guilt by the evidence of
the grease in an unwashed frying-pan; that their children could sport on
the hillside in garments that were guiltless of strings; that, in short,
they were outside the circle of Miss Granger's sympathies and could live
their own lives. But that sweet liberty was all over now: with the red
brick and stone dressings would come the Draconian laws of New Arden; no
more corners for the comfortable accumulation of dirt, no more delicious
little cupboards for the stowing away of rubbish. Everything was to be
square and solid and stony. They heard Mr. Granger giving orders that the
chimney was to be flush with the wall, and so on; the stove, an "Oxford
front," warranted to hold not more than a pound and a half of coal; no
recesses in which old age could sit and croon, no cosy nook for the cradle
of infancy.

After this interview with the architect, Mr. Granger rode home through
Holborough. His way took him past that very hotel where George Fairfax was
staying--the chief inn of the town, a fine old red-brick building that
filled nearly one side of the market-place.

It happened that just as Mr. Granger rode along the High-street, where
there were some half-a-dozen stragglers visible upon a wide expanse of
pavement, and one carriage waiting at the draper's, Mr. Fairfax walked up
the broad steps of the hotel and entered--entered with the air of a man who
lived there, Daniel Granger thought. And he had said that he was staying
with a bachelor friend. Mr. Granger rode slowly past the principal part of
the hotel to an archway at the end--an archway leading to livery stables,
where the ostler was lounging. He stopped opposite this archway, and
beckoned the man over to him.

"There was a gentleman went into the hotel just now," he said; "did you see
him?"

"Yes, sir, I seed him. Mr. Fairfax; him as was to have married Lady Laura
Armstrong's sister."

"Is he staying in the house, do you know?"

"Yes, sir; came last night, down from London. Shall I take him your card,
sir?"

"No, thank you, Giles; I won't call upon him this afternoon, I only wanted
to be sure. Good-day."

He rode on. What was the meaning of this lie which George Fairfax had told
him? Had it any meaning which it behoved him to fathom? It was strange, at
the least--strange enough to make Mr. Granger very uncomfortable as he rode
slowly back to the Court.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXII.

AUSTIN.

Late in the autumn of that year, Mr. Granger and his household took up
their abode in Paris. Clarissa had expressed a wish to winter in that
brilliant city, and Daniel Granger had no greater desire than to please
her. But, in making any concession of this kind, he did it in such a quiet
unobtrusive way, that his wife was scarcely aware how entirely her wishes
had been studied. He was too proud a man to parade his affection for her;
he kept a check upon himself rather, and in a manner regulated his own
conduct by the standard of hers. There was never any show of devotion on
his part. The world might have taken them for a couple brought together by
convenience, and making the best of their loveless union.

So, with regard to the gratification of her wishes, it seemed always that
the thing which Clarissa desired, happened to suit his own humour, rather
than that he sacrificed all personal feeling for her pleasure. In this
Parisian arrangement it had been so, and his wife had no idea that it was
entirely on her account that Daniel Granger set up his tent in the Faubourg
St. Honore.

The fair Sophia had, however, a very shrewd suspicion of the fact, and
for some weeks prior to the departure from Arden, existed in a state of
suppressed indignation, which was not good for the model villagers; her
powers of observation were, if possible, sharpened in the matter of
cobwebs; her sense of smell intensified in relation to cabbage-water.
Nor did she refrain from making herself eminently disagreeable to her
stepmother.