The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon

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This was George Fairfax.

Clarissa threw herself upon her knees beside the prostrate figure.

"George! George!" she cried piteously.

It was the first time she had ever uttered his Christian name, except in
her dreams; and yet it came to her lips as naturally in that moment of
supreme agony as if it had been their every-day utterance.

"George! George!" she cried again, bending down to gaze at the white
blank face dimly visible in the firelight; and then, with a still sharper
anguish, "He is dead!"

The sight of that kneeling figure, the sound of that piteous imploring
voice, was well-nigh maddening to Daniel Granger. He caught his wife by the
arm, and dragged her up from her knees with no tender hand.

"You have killed him," she said.

"I hope I have."

Whatever latent passion there was in this man's nature was at white heat
now. An awful fury possessed him. He seemed transformed by the intensity of
his anger. His bulky figure rose taller; his full gray eyes shone with a
pitiless light under the straight stern brows.

"Yes," he said, "I hope I have killed your lover."

"My lover!"

"Your lover--the man with whom you were to have left Paris to-night. Your
lover--the man you have met in this convenient rendezvous, day after day
for the last two months. Your lover--the man you loved before you did me
the honour to accept the use of my fortune, and whom you have loved ever
since."

"Yes," cried Clarissa, with a wild hysterical laugh, "my lover! You are
right. I am the most miserable woman upon earth, for I love him."

"I am glad you do not deny it. Stand out of the way, if you please, and let
me see if I have killed him."

There were a pair of half-burned wax candles on the mantelpiece. Mr.
Granger lighted one of them, and then knelt down beside the prostrate
figure with the candle in his hand. George Fairfax had given no sign of
life as yet. There had not been so much as a groan.

He opened his enemy's waistcoat, and laid his hand above the region of the
heart. Yes, there was life still--a dull beating. The wretch was not dead.

While he knelt thus, with his hand upon George Fairfax's heart, a massive
chain, loosened from its moorings, fell across his wrist. Attached to the
chain there was a locket--a large gold locket with a diamond cross--one of
the ornaments that Daniel Granger had given to his wife.

He remembered it well. It was a very trifle among the gifts be had showered
upon her; but he remembered it well. If this had been the one solitary gem
he had given to his wife, he could not have been quicker to recognise it,
or more certain of its identity.

He took it in the palm of his hand and touched the spring, holding the
candle still in the other hand. The locket flew open, and he saw the ring
of silky brown hair and the inscription, "From Clarissa."

He looked up at his wife with a smile--such a smile! "You might have
afforded your lover something better than a secondhand _souvenir_," he
said.

Clarissa's eyes wandered from the still white face, with its awful closed
eyes, only to rest for a moment on the unlucky locket.

"I gave that to my sister-in-law," she said indifferently. "Heaven only
knows how he came by it." And then, in a different tone, she asked, "Why
don't you do something for him? Why don't you fetch some one? Do you want
him to die?"

"Yes. Do you think anything less than his death would satisfy me? Don't
alarm yourself; I am not going to kill him. I was quite ready to do it just
now in hot blood. But he is safe enough now. What good would there be in
making an end of him? There are two of you in it."

"You can kill me, if you like," said Clarissa "Except for my child's sake,
I have little wish to live."

"For your child's sake!" echoed her husband scornfully. "Do you think there
is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night."

He dropped the locket on George Fairfax's breast with a contemptuous
gesture, as if he had been throwing away a handful of dirt. _That_ folly
had cost dearly enough.

"I'll go and fetch some one," he said. "Don't let your distraction make you
forget that the man wants all the air he can get. You had better stand away
from him."

Clarissa obeyed mechanically. She stood a little way off, staring at that
lifeless figure, while Daniel Granger went to fetch the porter. The house
was large, and at this time in the evening for the most part untenanted,
and Austin's painting-room was over the arched carriage-way. Thus it
happened that no one had heard that fall of George Fairfax's.

Mr. Granger explained briefly that the gentleman had had a fall, and was
stunned--would the porter fetch the nearest doctor? The man looked a him
rather suspiciously. The lovely lady's arrival in the gloaming; a locked
door; this middle-aged Englishman's eagerness to get into the rooms; and
now a fall and the young Englishman is disabled. The leaf out of a romance
began to assume a darker aspect. There had been murder done, perhaps, up
yonder. The porter's comprehensive vision surveyed the things that might
be--the house fallen into evil repute by reason of this crime, and bereft
of lodgers. The porter was an elderly man, and did not care to shift his
household gods.

"What have they come to do up there?" he asked. "I think I had better fetch
the _sergent de ville_."

"You are quite at liberty to do that, provided you bring a doctor along
with him," replied Daniel Granger coolly, and then turned on his heel and
walked upstairs again.

He roamed through the empty rooms with a candle in his hand until he found
a bottle of water, some portion of which he dashed into his enemy's face,
kneeling by his side to do it, but with a cool off-hand air, as if he were
reviving a dog, and that a dog upon, which he set no value.

George Fairfax opened his eyes, very slowly, and groaned aloud.

"O God, my head!" he said. "What a blow!"

He had a sensation of lying at the bottom of a steep hill--on a sharp
inclined plane, as it were, with his feet uppermost--a sense of
suffocation, too, as if his throat had been full of blood. There seemed to
him to be blood in his eyes also; and he could only see things in a dim
cloudy way--a room--what room he could not remember--one candle flaring on
the mantelpiece, and the light of an expiring fire.

Of the things that had happened to him immediately before that struggle and
that fall, he had, for the time being, no memory. But by slow degrees it
dawned upon him that this was Austin Lovel's painting-room.

"Where the devil are you, Austin?" he asked impatiently.

"Can't you pick a fellow up?"

A grasp stronger than ever Austin Lovel's had been, dragged him to his
feet, and half led, half pushed him into the nearest chair. He sat there,
staring blankly before him. Clarissa had moved away from him, and stood
amid the deep shadows at the other end of the studio, waiting for her doom.
It seemed to her to matter very little what that doom should be. Perfect
ruin had come upon her. The porter came in presently with a doctor--a
little old grey-headed man, who wore spectacles, and had an ancient
doddering manner not calculated to inspire beholders with any great belief
in his capacity.

He bowed to Mr. Granger in on old-fashioned ceremonious way, and went over
to the patient.

"A fall, I believe you say, monsieur!" he said.

"Yes, a fall. He struck his head against the angle of that doorway."

Mr. Granger omitted to state that it was a blow between the eyes from his
clenched fist which had felled George Fairfax--a blow sent straight out
from the powerful shoulder.

"There was no seizure--no fit of any kind, I hope?"

"No."

The patient had recovered himself considerably by this time, and twitched
his wrist rather impatiently from the little doctor's timid grasp.

"I am well enough now," he said in a thick voice. "There was no occasion to
send for a medical man. I stumbled at the doorway yonder, and knocked my
head in falling--that's all."

The Frenchman was manipulating Mr. Fairfax's cranium with cautious fingers.

"There is a considerable swelling at the back of the skull," he said.
"But there appears to have been another blow on the forehead. There is a
puffiness, and a slight abrasion of the skin."

Mr. Fairfax extricated his head from this investigation by standing up
suddenly out of reach of the small doctor. He staggered a little as he rose
to his feet, but recovered himself after a moment or so, and stood firmly
enough, with his hand resting on the back of the chair.

"If you will be good enough to accept this by way of fee," he said,
slipping a napoleon into the doctor's hand, "I need give you no farther
trouble."

The old man looked rather suspiciously from Mr. Fairfax to Mr. Granger and
then back again. There was something queer in the business evidently, but a
napoleon was a napoleon, and his fees were neither large nor numerous. He
coughed feebly behind his hand, hesitated a little, and then with a sliding
bow slipped from the room.

The porter lingered, determined to see the end of the romance, at any rate.

It was not long.

"Are you ready to come away?" Daniel Granger asked his wife, in a cold
stern voice. And then, turning to George Fairfax, he said, "You know where
to find me, sir, when you wish to settle the score between us."

"I shall call upon you to-morrow morning, Mr. Granger."

Clarissa looked at George Fairfax piteously for a moment, wondering if he
had been much hurt--if there were any danger to be feared from the effects
or that crushing fall. Never for an instant of her life had she meant to
be false to her husband; but she loved this man; and her secret being
discovered now, she deemed that the bond between her and Daniel Granger was
broken. She looked at George Fairfax with that brief yearning look, just
long enough to see that he was deadly pale; and then left the room with her
husband, obeying him mechanically They went down the darksome staircase,
which had grown so familiar to Clarissa, out into the empty street. There
was a hackney carriage waiting near the archway--the carriage that had
brought Mr. Granger. He put his wife into it without a word, and took his
seat opposite to her; and so they drove home in profound silence.

Clarissa went straight to her room--the dressing-room in which Daniel
Granger had talked to her the night before ha went to England. How well she
remembered his words, and her own inclination to tell him everything! If
she had only obeyed that impulse--if she had only confessed the truth--the
shame and ignominy of to-night would have been avoided. There would have
been no chance of that fatal meeting with George Fairfax; her husband would
have sheltered her from danger and temptation--would have saved her from
herself.

Vain regrets. The horror of that scene was still present with her--must
remain so present with her till the end of her life, she thought. Those two
men grappling each other, and then the fall--the tall figure crashing
down with the force of a descending giant, as it had seemed to that
terror-stricken spectator. For a long time she sat thinking of that awful
moment--thinking of it with a concentration which left no capacity for
any other thought in her mind. Her maid had come to her, and removed her
out-of-door garments, and stirred the fire, and had set out a dainty little
tea-tray on a table close at hand, hovering about her mistress with a
sympathetic air, conscious that there was something amiss. But Clarissa had
been hardly aware of the girl's presence. She was living over again the
agony of that moment in which she thought George Fairfax was dead.

This could not last for ever. She awoke by and by to the thought of her
child, with her husband's bitter words ringing in her ears,--

"Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after
to-night?"

"Perhaps they will shut me out of my nursery," she thought.

The rooms sacred to Lovel Granger were on the same floor as her own--she
had stipulated that it should be so. She went out into the corridor from
which all the rooms opened. All was silent. The boy had gone to bed, of
course, by this time; very seldom had she been absent at the hour of his
retirement. It had been her habit to spend a stolen half-hour in the
nursery just before dressing for dinner, or to have her boy brought to her
dressing-room--one of the happiest half-hours in her day. No one barred
her entrance to the nursery. Mrs. Brobson was sitting by the fire,
making-believe to be busy at needlework, with the under-nurse in
attendance--a buxom damsel, whose elbows rested on the table as she
conversed with her superior. Both looked up in some slight confusion at
Clarissa's entrance. They had been talking about her, she thought, but with
a supreme indifference. No petty household slander could trouble her in her
great sorrow. She went on towards the inner room, where her darling slept,
the head-nurse following obsequiously with a candle. In the night-nursery
there was only the subdued light of a shaded lamp.

"Thank you, Mrs. Brobson, but I don't want any more light," Clarissa said
quietly. "I am going to sit with baby for a little while. Take the candle
away, please; it may wake him."

It was the first time she had spoken since she had left the Rue du
Chevalier Bayard. Her own voice sounded strange to her; and yet its tone
could scarcely have betrayed less agitation.

"The second dinner-bell has rung, ma'am," Mrs. Brobson said, with a
timorously-suggestive air; "I don't know whether you are aware."

"Yes, I know, but I am not going down to dinner; I have a wretched
headache. You can tell Target to say so, if they send for me."

"Yes, ma'am; but you'll have something sent up, won't you?"

"Not yet; by and by, perhaps, I'll take a cup of tea in my dressing-room.
Go and tell Target, please, Mrs. Brobson; Mr. Granger may be waiting
dinner."

She was so anxious to get rid of the woman, to be alone with her baby. She
sat down by the cot. O, inestimable treasure! had she held him so lightly
as to give any other a place in her heart? To harbour any guilty thought
was to have sinned against this white-souled innocent. If those clear eyes,
which looked up from her breast sometimes with such angelic tenderness,
could have read the secrets of her sinful heart, how could she have dared
to meet their steadfast gaze? To-night that sleeping baby seemed something
more to her than her child; he was her judge.

"O, my love, my love, I am not good enough to have you for my son!" she
murmured, sobbing, as she knelt by his side, resting her tired head upon
his pillow, thinking idly how sweet it would be to die thus, and make an
end of all this evil.

She stayed with her child for more than an hour undisturbed, wondering
whether there would be any attempt to take him away from her--whether there
was any serious meaning in those pitiless words of Daniel Granger's. Could
he think for a moment that she would surrender him? Could he suppose that
she would lose this very life of her life, and live?

At a little after nine o'clock, she heard the door of the outer nursery
open, and a masculine step in the room--her husband's. The door between the
two nurseries was half open. She could hear every word that was spoken; she
could see Daniel Granger's figure, straight and tall and ponderous, as he
stood by the table talking to Mrs. Brobson.

"I am going back to Arden the day after to-morrow, Brobson," he said; "you
will have everything ready, if you please."

"O, certainly, sir; we can be ready. And I'm sure I shall rejoice to see
our own house again, after all the ill-conveniences of this place." And
Mrs. Brobson looked round the handsomely-furnished apartment as if it had
been a hovel. "Frenchified ways don't suit me," she remarked. "If, when
they was furnishing their houses, they laid out more money upon water-jugs
and wash-hand basins, and less upon clocks and candelabras, it would do
them more credit; and if there was a chair to be had not covered with red
velvet, it would be a comfort. Luxury is luxury; but you may overdo it."

This complaint, murmured in a confidential tone, passed unnoticed by Daniel
Granger.

"Thursday morning, then, Mrs. Brobson, remember; the train leaves at seven.
You'll have to be very early."

"It can't be too early for me."

"I'm glad to hear that; I'll go in and take a look at the child--asleep, I
suppose?"

"Yes, sir; fast asleep."

He went into the dimly-lighted chamber, not expecting to see that kneeling
figure by the cot. He gave a little start at seeing it, and stood aloof, as
if there had been infection that way. Whatever he might feel or think, he
could scarcely order his wife away from her son's bedside. Her son! Yes,
there was the sting. However he might put her away from himself, he could
not utterly sever _that_ bond. He would do his best; but in the days to
come his boy might revolt against him, and elect to follow that guilty
mother.

He had loved her so fondly, he had trusted her so completely; and his anger
against her was so much the stronger because of this. He could not forgive
her for having made him so weak a dupe. Her own ignominy--and he deemed her
the most shameful of women--was not so deep as his disgrace.

He stood aloof, looking at his sleeping boy, looking across the kneeling
figure as if not seeing it, but with a smouldering anger in his eyes that
betrayed his consciousness of his wife's presence. She raised her haggard
eyes to his face. The time would come when she would have to tell him her
story--to make some attempt to justify herself--to plead for his pardon;
but not yet. There was time enough for that. She felt that the severance
between them was utter. He might believe, he might forgive her; but he
would never give her his heart again. She felt that this was so, and
submitted to the justice of the forfeiture. Nor had she loved him well
enough to feel this loss acutely. Her one absorbing agony was the fear of
losing her child.

Daniel Granger stood for a little while watching his son's placid slumber,
and then left the room without a word. What could he say to his wife? His
anger was much too great for words; but there was something more than
anger: there was a revulsion of feeling, that made the woman he had loved
seem hateful to him--hateful in her fatal beauty, as a snake is hateful
in its lithe grace and silvery sheen. She had deceived him so completely;
there was something to his mind beyond measure dastardly in her stolen
meetings with George Fairfax; and he set down all her visits to the Rue du
Chevalier Bayard to that account. She had smiled in his face, and had gone
every other day to meet her lover.

Clarissa stayed with her child all that night. The servants would wonder
and speculate, no doubt. She knew that; but she could not bring herself
to leave him. She had all manner of fantastic fears about him. They would
steal him from her in the night, perhaps. That order of Daniel Granger's
about Thursday morning might be only a ruse. She laid herself down upon a
sofa near the cot, and pretended to sleep, until the nurse had gone to bed,
after endless fussings and rustlings and movings to and fro, that were
torture to Mrs. Granger's nerves; and then listened and watched all the
night through.

No one came. The wintry morning dawned, and found her child still
slumbering sweetly, the rosy lips ever so slightly parted, golden-tinted
lashes lying on the round pink cheeks. She smiled at her own folly, as she
sat watching him in that welcome daylight. What had she expected? Daniel
Granger was not an ogre. He could not take her child from her.

_Her_ child! The thought that the boy was _his_ child very rarely presented
itself to her. Yet it had been suggested rather forcibly by those bitter
words of her husband's: "Do you think there is anything in common between
my son and you, after to-night?"

For Daniel Granger and herself there might be parting, an eternal
severance; but there could be no creature so cruel as to rob her of her
child.

She stayed with him during his morning ablutions; saw him splash and kick
in the water with the infantine exuberance that mothers love to behold,
fondly deeming that no baby ever so splashed or so kicked before; saw him
arrayed in his pretty blue-braided frock, and dainty lace-bedizened cambric
pinafore. What a wealth of finery and prettiness had been lavished upon the
little mortal, who would have been infinitely happier dressed in rags
and making mud-pies in a gutter, than in his splendid raiment and
well-furnished nursery; an uninteresting nursery, where there were no
cupboards full of broken wagons and head-less horses, flat-nosed dolls and
armless grenadiers, the cast-off playthings of a flock of brothers and
sisters--a very chaos of rapture for the fingers of infancy! Only a few
expensive toys from a fashionable purveyor--things that went by machinery,
darting forward a little way with convulsive jerks and unearthly choking
noises, and then tumbling ignominiously on one side.

Clarissa stayed with the heir of Arden until the clock in the day-nursery
struck nine, and then went to her dressing-room, looking very pale and
haggard after her sleepless night. In the corridor she met her husband. He
bent his head gravely at sight of her, as he might have saluted a stranger
whom he encountered in his own house.

"I shall be glad to speak to you for a quarter of an hour, by and by," he
said. "What time would suit you best?" "Whenever you please. I shall be in
my dressing-room," she answered quietly; and then, growing desperate in her
desire to know her fate, she exclaimed, "But O, Daniel, are we really to go
back to Arden to-morrow?"

"We are not," he said, with a repelling look. "My children are going back
to-morrow. I contemplate other arrangements for you."

"You mean to separate my baby and me?" she cried incredulously.

"This is neither the place nor the time for any discussion about that. I
will come to your dressing-room by and by."

"I will not be parted from my child!"

"That is a question which I have to settle."

"Do not make any mistake, Mr. Granger," Clarissa said firmly, facing him
with a dauntless look that surprised him a little--yet what cannot a woman
dare, if she can betray the man who has loved and trusted her? "You may do
what you please with me; but I will not submit to have my child taken from
me."

"I do not like talking in passages," said her husband; "if you insist upon
discussing this matter now, we had better go into your room."

They were close to the dressing-room door. He opened it, and they went in.
The fire was burning brightly, and the small round table neatly laid for
breakfast. Clarissa had been in the habit of using this apartment as her
morning-room. There were books and drawing-materials, a table with a
drawing-board upon it, and a half-finished sketch.

She sank down into a chair near the fire, too weak to stand. Her husband
stood opposite to her. She noticed idly that he was dressed with his usual
business-like neatness, and that there was no sign of mental anguish in
his aspect. He seemed very cold and hard and cruel as he stood before her,
strong in his position as an injured man.

"I am not going to talk about last night any more than I am positively
obliged," he said; "nothing that I or you could say would alter the facts
of the case, or my estimation of them. I have made my plans for the future.
Sophia and Lovel will go back to Yorkshire to-morrow. You will go with me
to Spa, where I shall place you under your father's protection. Your future
life will be free from the burden of my society."

"I am quite willing to go back to my father," replied Clarissa, in a voice
that trembled a little. She had expected him to be very angry, but not so
hard and cold as this--not able to deal with her wrong-doing in such a
business-like manner, to dismiss her and her sin as coolly as if he had
been parting with a servant who had offended him.

"I am ready to go to my father," she repeated, steadying her voice with an
effort; "but I will go nowhere without my child."

"We will see about that," said Mr. Granger, "and how the law will treat
your claims; if you care to advance them--which I should suppose unlikely.
I have no compunction about the justice of my decision. You will go nowhere
without your child, you say? Did you think of that last night when your
lover was persuading you to leave Paris?"

"What!" cried Clarissa aghast. "Do you imagine that I had any thought of
going with him, or that I heard him with my free will?"

"I do not speculate upon that point; but to my mind the fact of his asking
you to run away with him argues a foregone conclusion. A man rarely comes
to that until he has established a right to make the request. All I know
is, that I saw you on your knees by your lover, and that you were candid
enough to acknowledge your affection for him. This knowledge is quite
sufficient to influence my decision as to my son's future--it must not be
spent with Mr. Fairfax's mistress."