The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon

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"I will keep silence, papa."

"Be sure you do so," Mr. Lovel said sternly; and then, with a sudden
passion and inconsistency that startled his daughter, he went on: "Yes, I
have sold Arden--every acre. Not a rood of the land that has belonged to my
race from generation to generation since Edward IV. was king, is left to
me. And I have planted myself here--here at the very gates of my lost
home--so that I may drain the bitter cup of humiliation to the dregs. The
fools who call themselves my friends think, that because I can endure to
live here, I am indifferent to all I have lost; that I am an eccentric
bookworm--an easy-going philosophical recluse, content to dawdle away the
remnant of my days amongst old books. It pleases me to let them think
so. Why, there is never a day that yonder trader's carriage, passing my
windows, does not seem to drive over my body; not a sound of a woodman's
axe or a carpenter's hammer in the place that was mine, that does not go
straight home to my heart!"

"O, papa, papa!"

"Hush, girl! I can accept pity from no one--from you least of all."

"Not from me, papa--your own child?"

"Not from you; because your mother's reckless extravagance was the
beginning of my ruin. I might have been a different man but for her. My
marriage was fatal, and in the end, as you see, has wrecked me."

"But even if my mother was to blame, papa--as she may have been--I cannot
pretend to deny the truth of what you say, being so completely ignorant of
our past history--you cannot be so cruel as to hold _me_ guilty?"

"You are too like her, Clarissa," Mr. Lovel answered, in a strange tone.
"But I do not want to speak of these things. It is your fault; you had no
right to talk of Arden. _That_ subject always raises a devil in me."

He paced the room backwards and forwards for a few minutes in an agitated
way, as if trying to stifle some passion raging inwardly.

He was a man of about fifty, tall and slim, with a distinguished air, and
a face that must once have been very handsome, but perhaps, at its best, a
little effeminate. The face was careworn now, and the delicate features
had a pinched and drawn look, the thin lips a half-cynical, half-peevish
expression. It was not a pleasant countenance, in spite of its look of high
birth; nor was there any likeness between Marmaduke Lovel and his daughter.
His eyes were light blue, large and bright, but with a cold look in them--a
coldness which, on very slight provocation, intensified into cruelty; his
hair pale auburn, crisp and curling closely round a high but somewhat
narrow forehead.

He came back to the breakfast-table presently, and seated himself in his
easy-chair. He sipped a cup of coffee, and trifled listlessly with a morsel
of dried salmon.

"I have no appetite this morning," he said at last, pushing his plate away
with an impatient gesture; "nor is that kind of talk calculated to improve
the flavour of a man's breakfast. How tall you have grown, Clarissa, a
perfect woman; remarkably handsome too! Of course you know that, and there
is no fear of your being made vain by anything I may say to you. All young
women learn their value soon enough. You ought to make a good match, a
brilliant match--if there were any chance for a girl in such a hole as
this. Marriage is your only hope, remember, Clarissa. Your future lies
between that and the drudgery of a governess's life. You have received an
expensive education--an education that will serve you in either case; and
that is all the fortune I can give you."

"I hope I may marry well, papa, for your sake; but--"

"Never mind me. You have only yourself to think about."

"But I never could marry any one I did not esteem, if the match were ever
such a brilliant one."

"Of course not. All schoolgirls talk like that; and in due course discover
how very little esteem has to do with matrimony. If you mean that you would
like to marry some penniless wretch of a curate, or some insolvent ensign,
for love, I can only say that the day of your marriage will witness our
final parting. I should not make any outrageous fuss or useless opposition,
rely upon it. I should only wish you good-bye."

Clarissa smiled faintly at this speech. She expected so little from her
father, that his hardest words did not wound her very deeply, nor did they
extinguish that latent hope, "He will love me some day."

"I trust I may never be so imprudent as to lose you for ever, like that,
papa.. I must shut my heart resolutely against curates."

"If bad reading is an abomination to you, you have only to open your ears.
I have some confidence in you, Clary," Mr. Lovel went on, with a smile
that was almost affectionate. "You look like a sensible girl; a little
impulsive, I daresay; but knowledge of the world--which is an uncommonly
hard world for you and me--will tone that down in good time. You are
accomplished, I hope. Madame Marot wrote me a most flourishing account
of your attainments; but one never knows how much to believe of a
schoolmistress's analysis."

"I worked very hard, papa; all the harder because I was so anxious to
come home; and I fancied I might shorten my exile a little by being very
industrious."

"Humph! You give yourself a good character. You sing and play, I suppose?"

"Yes, papa. But I am fonder of art than of music."

"Ah, art is very well as a profession; but amateur art--French plum-box
art--is worse than worthless. However, I am glad you can amuse yourself
somehow; and I daresay, if you have to turn governess by-and-by, that sort
of thing will be useful. You have the usual smattering of languages, of
course?"

"Yes, papa. We read German and Italian on alternate days at Madame
Marot's."

"I _promessi Sposi_, and so on, no doubt. There is a noble Tasso in the
bookcase yonder, and a fine old Petrarch, with which you may keep up your
Italian. You might read a little to me of an evening sometimes. I should
not mind it much."

"And I should like it very much, papa," Clarissa answered eagerly.

She was anxious for anything that could bring her father and herself
together--that might lessen the gulf between them, if by ever so little.

And in this manner Miss Lovel's life began in her new home. No warmth of
welcome, no word of fatherly affection, attended this meeting between a
father and daughter who had not met for six years. Mr. Lovel went back
to his books as calmly as if there had been no ardent impetuous girl of
eighteen under his roof, leaving Clarissa to find occupation and amusement
as best she might. He was not a profound student; a literary trifler
rather, caring for only a limited number of books, and reading those again
and again. Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Southey's _Doctor_. Montaigne,
and Swift, he read continually. He was a collector of rare editions of
the Classics, and would dawdle over a Greek play, edited by some learned
German, for a week at a time, losing himself in the profundity of elaborate
foot-notes. He was an ardent admirer of the lighter Roman poets, and
believed the Horatian philosophy the only true creed by which a man should
shape his existence. But it must not be supposed that books brought repose
to the mind and heart of Marmaduke Lovel. He was a disappointed man, a
discontented man, a man given to brooding over the failure of his life,
inclined to cherish vengeful feelings against his fellow-men on account of
that failure. Books to him were very much what they might have been to
some fiery-tempered ambitious soldier of fortune buried alive in a prison,
without hope of release,--some slight alleviation of his anguish, some
occasional respite from his dull perpetual pain; nothing more.

Clarissa's first day at Mill Cottage was a very fair sample of the rest of
her life. She found that she must manage to spend existence almost entirely
by herself--that she must expect the smallest amount of companionship from
her father.

"This is the room in which I generally sit," her father said to her that
first morning after breakfast; "my books are here, you see, and the aspect
suits me. The drawing-room will be almost entirely at your disposal. We
have occasional callers, of course; I have not been able to make these
impervious country people comprehend that I don't want society. They
sometimes pester me with invitations to dinner, which no doubt they
consider an amazing kindness to a man in my position; invitations which I
make a point of declining. It will be different with you, of course; and
if any eligible people--Lady Laura Armstrong or Mrs. Renthorpe for
instance--should like to take you up, I shall not object to your seeing a
little society. You will never find a rich husband at Mill Cottage."

"Please do not speak of husbands, papa. I don't want to be married, and I
shouldn't care to go into society without you."

"Nonsense, child; you will have to do what is best for your future welfare.
Remember that my death will leave you utterly unprovided for--absolutely
penniless."

"I hope you may live till I am almost an old woman, papa."

"Not much chance of that; and even if I did, I should not care to have you
on my hands all that time. A good marriage is the natural prospect of a
good-looking young woman, and I shall be much disappointed if you do not
marry well, Clarissa."

The pale cold blue eyes looked at her with so severe a glance, as Mr. Lovel
said this, that the girl felt she must expect little mercy from her father
if her career in life did not realise his hopes.

"In short," he continued, "I look to you to redeem our fallen fortunes. I
don't want the name of Lovel to die out in poverty and obscurity. I look to
you to prevent that, Clarissa."

"Papa," said Clarissa, almost trembling as she spoke, "it is not to me you
should look for that. What can a girl do to restore a name that has fallen
into obscurity? Even if I were to marry a rich man, as you say, it would be
only to take another name, and lose my own identity in that of my husband.
It is only a son who can redeem his father's name. There is some one else
to whom you must look----"

"What!" cried her father vehemently, "have you not been forbidden to
mention that name in my hearing? Unlucky girl, you seem to have been born
on purpose to outrage and pain me."

"Forgive me, papa; it shall be the last time. But O, is there no hope that
you will ever pardon----"

"Pardon," echoed Mr. Lovel, with a bitter laugh; "it is no question of
pardon. I have erased that person's image from my mind. So far as I am
concerned, there is no such man in the world. Pardon! You must induce me to
reinstate him in my memory again, before you ask me to pardon."

"And that can never be, papa?"

"Never!"

The tone of that one word annihilated hope in Clarissa's mind. She had
pushed the question to its utmost limit, at all hazards of offending her
father. What was it that her brother Austin had done to bring upon himself
this bitter sentence of condemnation? She remembered him in his early
manhood, handsome, accomplished, brilliant; the delight and admiration
of every one who knew him, except her father. Recalling those days, she
remembered that between her father and Austin there had never been any show
of affection. The talents and brilliant attributes that had won admiration
from others seemed to have no charm in the father's eye. Clarissa could
remember many a sneering speech of Mr. Lovel's, in which he had made light
of his son's cleverness, denouncing his varied accomplishments as trivial
and effeminate, and asking if any Englishman ever attained an honourable
distinction by playing the piano, or modelling in clay.

"I would rather have my son the dullest plodder that ever toiled at the
bar, or droned bald platitudes from a pulpit, than the most brilliant
drawing-room idler, whose amateur art and amateur music ever made him the
fashion of a single season, to leave him forgotten in the next. I utterly
despise an accomplished man."

Austin Lovel had let such speeches as this go by him with a languid
indifference, that testified at once to his easy temper and his comfortable
disregard of his father's opinion. He was fond of his little sister Clary,
in rather a careless way, and would suffer her companionship, juvenile as
she was at that time, with perfect good nature, allowing her to spoil his
drawing paper with her untutored efforts, and even to explore the sacred
mysteries of his colour-box. In return for this indulgence, the girl loved
him with intense devotion, and believed in Him as the most brilliant of
mankind.

Clarissa Lovel recalled those departed days now with painful tenderness.
How kind and gracious Austin had been to her! How happy they had been
together! sometimes wandering for a whole day in the park and woods of
Arden, he with his sketching apparatus, she with a volume of Sir Walter
Scott, to read aloud to him while he sketched, or to read him to sleep with
very often. And then what delight it had been to sit by his side while he
lay at full length upon the mossy turf, or half-buried in fern--to sit by
him supremely happy, reading or drawing, and looking up from her occupation
every now and then to glance at the sleeper's handsome face in loving
admiration.

Those days had been the happiest of her life. When Austin left Arden, he
seemed always to carry away the brightness of her existence with him; for
without him her life was very lonely--a singularly joyless life for one
so young. Then, in an evil hour, as she thought, there came their final
parting. How well she remembered her brother loitering on the broad terrace
in front of Arden Court, in the dewy summer morning, waiting to bid her
good-bye! How passionately she had clung to him in that farewell embrace,
unable to tear herself away, until her father's stern voice summoned her to
the carriage that was to take her on the first stage of her journey!

"Won't you come to the station with us, Austin?" she pleaded.

"No, Clary," her brother answered, with a glance at her father. "_He_ does
not want me."

And so they had parted; never to meet any more upon this earth perhaps,
Clarissa said to herself, in her dismal reveries to-day. "That stranger in
the railway-carriage spoke of his having emigrated. He will live and die
far away, perhaps on the other side of the earth, and I shall never see his
bright face again. O, Austin, Austin, is this the end of all our summer
days in Arden woods long ago!"

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV.

CLARISSA IS "TAKEN UP."

For some time there was neither change nor stir in Clarissa Lovel's new
life. It was not altogether an unpleasant kind of existence, perhaps, and
Miss Lovel was inclined to make the best of it. She was very much her own
mistress, free to spend the long hours of her monotonous days according to
her own pleasure. Her father exacted very little from her, and received
her dutiful attentions with an air of endurance which was not particularly
encouraging. But Clarissa was not easily disheartened. She wanted to
win her father's affection; and again and again, after every new
discouragement, she told herself that there was no reason why she should
not ultimately succeed in making herself as dear to him as an only daughter
should be. It was only a question of time and patience. There was no reason
that he should not love her, no possible ground for his coldness. It was
his nature to be cold, perhaps; but those cold natures have often proved
capable of a single strong attachment. What happiness it would be to win
this victory of love!

"We stand almost alone in the world," she said to herself. "We had need be
very dear to each other."

So, though the time went by, and she made no perceptible progress towards
this happy result, Clarissa did not despair. Her father tolerated her, and
even this was something; it seemed a great deal when she remembered her
childhood at Arden, in which she had never known what it was to be in her
father's society for an hour at a time, and when, but for chance meetings
in corridors and on staircases, she would very often have lived for weeks
under the same roof with him without seeing his face or hearing his voice.

Now it was all different; she was a woman now, and Mill Cottage was
scarcely large enough to accommodate two separate existences, even had Mr.
Lovel been minded to keep himself aloof from his daughter. This being so,
he tolerated her, treating her with a kind of cold politeness, which might
have been tolerably natural in some guardian burdened with the charge of
a ward he did not care for. They rarely met until dinner-time, Clarissa
taking her breakfast about three hours before her father left his room. But
at seven they dined together, and spent the long winter evenings in each
other's company, Clarissa being sometimes permitted to read aloud in German
or Italian, while her father lay back in his easy-chair, smoking his
meerschaum, and taking the amber mouthpiece from his lips now and then to
correct an accent or murmur a criticism on the text. Sometimes, too, Mr.
Lovel would graciously expound a page or two of a Greek play, or dilate on
the subtilty of some learned foot-note, for his daughter's benefit, but
rather with the air of one gentleman at his club inviting the sympathy of
another gentleman than with the tone of a father instructing his child.

Sometimes, but very rarely, they had company. Mr. Oliver and his wife would
dine with them occasionally, or the Vicar of Arden, a grave bachelor of
five-and-thirty, would drop in to spend an hour or two of an evening. But
besides these they saw scarcely any one. The small professional men of
Holborough Mr. Lovel held in supreme contempt, a contempt of which those
gentlemen themselves were thoroughly aware; the country people whom he had
been accustomed to receive at Arden Court he shrank from with a secret
sense of shame, in these days of his fallen fortunes. He had therefore made
for himself a kind of hermit life at Mill Cottage; and his acquaintance
had come, little by little, to accept this as his established manner of
existence. They still called upon the recluse occasionally, and sent him
cards for their state dinners, averse from any neglect of a man who
had once occupied a great position among them; but they were no longer
surprised when Mr. Lovel pleaded his feeble health as a reason for
declining their hospitality. A very dull life for a girl, perhaps; but for
Clarissa it was not altogether an unhappy life. She was at an age when a
girl can make an existence for herself out of bright young fancies and
vague deep thoughts. There was that in her life just now which fades and
perishes with the passing of years; a subtle indescribable charm, a sense
of things beyond the common things of daily life. If there had been a
closer bond of union between her father and herself, if there had not
been that dark cloud upon her brother's life, she might have made herself
entirely happy; she might almost have forgotten that Arden was sold, and
a vulgar mercantile stranger lord of those green slopes and broad ancient
terraces she loved so well.

As it was, the loneliness of her existence troubled her very little. She
had none of that eager longing for "society" or "fashion" wherewith young
ladies who live in towns are apt to inoculate one another. She had no
desire to shine, no consciousness of her own beauty; for the French girls
at Madame Marot's had been careful not to tell her that her pale patrician
face was beautiful. She wished for nothing but to win her father's love,
and to bring about some kind of reconciliation between him and Austin.
So the autumn deepened into winter, and the winter brightened into early
spring, without bringing any change to her life. She had her colour-box and
her easel, her books and piano, for her best companions; and if she did
not make any obvious progress towards gaining her father's affection,
she contrived, at any rate, to avoid rendering her presence in any way
obnoxious to him.

Two or three times in the course of the winter Mrs. Oliver gave a little
musical party, at which Clarissa met the small gentry of Holborough, who
pronounced her a very lovely girl, and pitied her because of her father's
ruined fortunes. To her inexperience these modest assemblies seemed the
perfection of gaiety; and she would fain have accepted the invitations that
followed them, from the wives of Holborough bankers and lawyers and medical
men to whom she had been introduced. Against this degradation, however, Mr.
Lovel resolutely opposed himself.

"No, Clarissa," he said, sternly; "you must enter society under such
auspices as I should wish, or you must be content to remain at home. I
can't have a daughter of mine hawked about in that petty Holborough set.
Lady Laura will be at Hale Castle by-and-by, I daresay. If she chooses to
take you up, she can do so. Pretty girls are always at par in a country
house, and at the Castle you would meet people worth knowing."

Clarissa sighed. Those cordial Holborough gentry had been so kind to her,
and this exclusiveness of her father's chilled her, somehow. It seemed to
add a new bitterness to their poverty--to that poverty, by the way, of
which she had scarcely felt the sharp edges yet awhile. Things went very
smoothly at Mill Cottage. Her father lived luxuriously, after his quiet
fashion. One of the best wine-merchants at the West-end of London supplied
his claret; Fortnum and Mason furnished the condiments and foreign rarities
which were essential for his breakfast-table. There seemed never any lack
of money, or only when Clarissa ventured to hint at the scantiness of her
school-wardrobe, on which occasion Mr. Lovel looked very grave, and put her
off with two or three pounds to spend at the Holborough draper's.

"I should want so many new clothes if I went to the Castle, papa," she
said, rather sadly one day, when her father was talking of Lady Laura
Armstrong; but Mr. Lovel only shrugged his shoulders.

"A young woman is always well dressed in a white muslin gown," he said,
carelessly. "I daresay a few pounds would get you all you want."

The Castle was a noble old place at Hale, a village about six miles from
Holborough. It had been the family seat of the Earl of Roxham ever since
the reign of Edward VI.; but, on the Roxham race dying out, some fifty
years before this, had become the property of a certain Mr. Armstrong, a
civilian who had made a great fortune in the East, in an age when great
fortunes were commonly made by East-Indian traders. His only son had
been captain in a crack regiment, and had sold out of the army after his
father's death, in order to marry Lady Laura Challoner, second daughter of
the Earl of Calderwood, a nobleman of ancient lineage and decayed fortunes,
and to begin life as a country gentleman under her wise governance. The
Armstrongs were said to be a very happy couple; and if the master of Hale
Castle was apt to seem something of a cipher in his own house, the house
was an eminently agreeable one, and Lady Laura popular with all classes.
Her husband adored her, and had surrendered his judgment to her guidance
with a most supreme faith in her infallibility. Happily, she exercised her
power with that subtle tact which is the finest gift of woman, and his
worst enemies could scarcely call Frederick Armstrong a henpecked husband.

The spring and early summer brought no change to Clarissa's life. She had
been at home for the greater part of a year, and in all that time one day
had resembled another almost us closely as in the scholastic monotony of
existence at Madame Marot's. And yet the girl had shaped no complaint about
the dulness of this tranquil routine, even in her inmost unspoken thoughts.
She was happy, after a quiet fashion. She had a vague sense that there was
a broader, grander kind of life possible to womanhood; a life as different
from her own as the broad river that lost itself in the sea was different
from the placid mill-stream that bounded her father's orchard. But she
had no sick fretful yearning for that wider life. To win her father's
affection, to see her brother restored to his abandoned home--these were
her girlish dreams and simple unselfish hopes.

In all the months Clarissa Lovel had spent at Mill Cottage she had never
crossed the boundary of that lost domain she loved so well. There was a
rustic bridge across the mill-stream, and a wooden gate opening into Arden
woods. Clarissa very often stood by this gate, leaning with folded arms
upon the topmost bar, and looking into the shadowy labyrinth of beech and
pine with sad dreamy eyes, but she never went beyond the barrier. Honest
Martha asked her more than once why she never walked in the wood, which
was so much pleasanter than the dusty high-road, or even Arden common, an
undulating expanse of heathy waste beyond the village, where Clarissa would
roam for hours on the fine spring days, with a sketch-book under her arm.
The friendly peasant woman could not understand that obstinate avoidance of
a beloved scene--that sentiment which made her lost home seem to Clarissa a
thing to shrink from, as she might have shrunk from beholding the face of
the beloved dead.