The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon (page 4)

of things too much for her endurance. For the last ten years of her life, ever since she was a precocious damsel of twelve, brought to a premature state of cultivation by an expensive forcing apparatus of governesses and masters, she had been in the habit of assuring herself and her confidantes that her father would never marry again. She had a very keen sense of the importance of wealth, and from that tender age, of twelve or so upwards, she had been fully aware of the diminution her own position would undergo in the event of a second marriage, and the advent of a son to the house of Granger. Governesses and maidservants had perhaps impressed this upon her at some still earlier stage of her existence; but from this time upwards she had needed nothing to remind her of the fact, and she had watched her father with an unwearying vigilance.

More than once, strong-minded and practical as he was, she had seen him in danger. Attractive widows and dashing spinsters had marked him for their prey, and he had seemed not quite adamant; but the hour of peril had passed, and the widow or the spinster had gone her way, with all her munitions of war expended, and Daniel Granger still unscathed. This time it was very different. Mr. Granger showed an interest in Clarissa which he had never before exhibited in any member of her sex since he wooed and won the first Mrs. Granger; and as his marriage had been by no means a romantic affair, but rather a prudential arrangement made and entered upon by Daniel Granger the elder, cloth manufacturer of Leeds and Bradford, on the one part, and Thomas Talloway, cotton-spinner of Manchester, on the other part, it is doubtful whether Miss Sophy Talloway had ever in her ante-nuptial days engrossed so much of his attention.

Having no one else at Hale to whom she could venture to unbosom herself, Miss Granger was fain to make a confidante of her maid, although she did not, as a general rule, affect familiarity with servants. This maid, who was a mature damsel of five-and-thirty or upwards, and a most estimable Church-of-England person, had been with Miss Granger for a great many years; had curled her hair for her when she wore it in a crop, and even remembered her in her last edition of pinafores. Some degree of familiarity therefore might be excused, and the formal Sophia would now and then expand a little in her intercourse with Warman.

One night, a very little while before Lady Geraldine’s wedding-day, the cautious Warman, while brushing Miss Granger’s hair, ventured to suggest that her mistress looked out of spirits. Had she said that Sophia looked excessively cross, she would scarcely have been beside the mark.

“Well, Warman,” Miss Granger replied, in rather a shrewish tone, “I _am_ out of spirits. I have been very much annoyed this evening by papa’s attentions to–by the designing conduct of a young lady here.”

“I think I can guess who the young lady is, miss,” Warman answered shrewdly.

“O, I suppose so,” cried Sophia, giving her head an angry jerk which almost sent the brush out of her abigail’s hand; “servants know everything.”

“Well, you see, miss, servants have eyes and ears, and they can’t very well help using them. People think we’re inquisitive and prying if we venture to see things going on under our very noses; and so hypocrisy gets be almost part of a servant’s education, and what people call a good servant is a smooth-faced creature that pretends to see nothing and to understand nothing. But my principles won’t allow of my stooping to that sort of thing, Miss Granger, and what I think I say. I know my duty as a servant, and I know the value of my own immortal soul as a human being.”

“How you do preach, Warman! Who wants you to be a hypocrite?” exclaimed Sophia impatiently. “It’s always provoking to hear that one’s affairs have been talked over by a herd of servants, but I suppose it’s inevitable. And pray, what have they been saying about papa?”

“Well, miss, I’ve heard a good deal of talk of one kind and another. You see, your papa is looked upon as a great gentleman in the county, and people will talk about him. There’s Norris, Lady Laura’s own footman, who’s a good deal in the drawing-room–really a very intelligent-well-brought-up young man, and, I am happy to say, _not_ a dissenter. Norris takes a good deal of notice of what’s going on, and he has made a good many remarks upon your par’s attention to Miss Lovel. Looking at the position of the parties, you see, miss, it would be such a curious thing if it was to be brought round for that young lady to be mistress of Arden Court.”

“Good gracious me, Warman!” cried Sophia aghast, “you don’t suppose that papa would marry again?”

“Well, I can’t really say, miss. But when a gentleman of your par’s age pays so much attention to a lady young enough to be his daughter, it generally do end that way.”

There was evidently no consolation to be obtained from Warman, nor was that astute handmaiden to be betrayed into any expression of opinion against Miss Lovel. It seemed to her more than probable that Clarissa Lovel might come before long to reign over the household at Arden, and this all-powerful Sophia sink to a minor position. Strong language of any kind was therefore likely to be dangerous. Hannah Warman valued her place, which was a good one, and would perhaps be still better under a more impulsive and generous mistress. The safest thing therefore was to close the conversation with one of those pious platitudes which Warman had always at her command.

“Whatever may happen, miss, we are in the hands of Providence,” she said solemnly; “and let us trust that things will be so regulated as to work for the good of our immortal souls. No one can go through life without trials, miss, and perhaps yours may be coming upon you now; but we know that such chastisements are intended for our benefit.”

Sophia Granger had encouraged this kind of talk from the lips of Warman, and other humble disciples, too often too be able to object to it just now; but her temper was by no means improved by this conversation, and she dismissed her maid presently with a very cool good-night.

On the third day before the wedding, George Fairfax’s mother arrived at the Castle, in order to assist in this important event in her son’s life. Clarissa contemplated this lady with a peculiar interest, and was not a little wounded by the strange coldness with which Mrs. Fairfax greeted her upon her being introduced by Lady Laura to the new arrival. This coldness was all the more striking on account of the perfect urbanity of Mrs. Fairfax’s manners in a general way, and a certain winning gentleness which distinguished her on most occasions. It seemed to Clarissa as if she recoiled with something like aversion at the sound of her name.

“Miss Lovel of Arden Court, I believe?” she said, looking at Lady Laura.

“Yes; my dear Clarissa is the only daughter of the gentleman who till lately was owner of Arden Court. It has passed into other hands now.”

“I beg your pardon. I did not know there had been any change.”

And then Mrs. Fairfax continued her previous conversation with Lady Laura, as if anxious to have done with the subject of Miss Lovel.

Nor in the three days before the wedding did she take any farther notice of Clarissa; a neglect the girl felt keenly; all the more so because she was interested in spite of herself in this pale faded lady of fifty, who still bore the traces of great beauty and who carried herself with the grace of a queen. She had that air _du faubourg_ which we hear of in the great ladies of a departed era in Parisian society,–a serene and tranquil elegance which never tries to be elegant, a perfect self-possession which never degenerates into insolence.

In a party so large as that now assembled at Hale, this tacit avoidance of one person could scarcely be called a rudeness. It might so easily be accidental. Clarissa felt it nevertheless, and felt somehow that it was not accidental. Though she could never be anything to George Fairfax, though all possibility even of friendship was at an end between them, she would have liked to gain his mother’s regard. It was an idle wish perhaps, but scarcely an unnatural one.

She watched Mrs. Fairfax and Lady Geraldine together. The affection between those two was very evident. Never did the younger lady appear to greater advantage than in her intercourse with her future mother-in-law. All pride and coldness vanished in that society, and Geraldine Challoner became genial and womanly.

“She has played her cards well,” Barbara Fermor said maliciously. “It is the mother who has brought about this marriage.”

If Mrs. Fairfax showed herself coldly disposed towards Clarissa, there was plenty of warmth on the parts of Ladies Emily and Louisa Challoner, who arrived at the Castle about the same time, and at once took a fancy to their sister’s _protegee._

“Laura has told us so much about you, Miss Lovel,” said Lady Louisa, “and we mean to be very fond of you, if you will allow us; and, O, please may we call you Clarissa? It is such a _sweet_ name!”

Both these ladies had passed that fearful turning-point in woman’s life, her thirtieth birthday, and had become only more gushing and enthusiastic with increasing years. They were very much like Lady Laura, had all her easy good-nature and liveliness, and were more or less afraid of the stately Geraldine.

“Do you know, we are quite glad she is going to be married at last,” Lady Emily said in a confidential tone to Clarissa; “for she has kept up a kind of frigid atmosphere at home that I really believe has helped to frighten away all our admirers. Men of the present day don’t like that sort of thing. It went out of fashion in England with King Charles I., I think, and in France with Louis XIV. You know how badly the royal household behaved coming home from his funeral, laughing and talking and all that: I believe it arose from their relief at thinking that the king of forms and ceremonies was dead. We always have our nicest little parties–kettle-drums, and suppers after the opera, and that sort of thing–when Geraldine is away; for we can do anything with papa.”

The great day came, and the heavens were propitious. A fine clear September day, with a cool wind and a warm sun; a day upon which the diaphanous costumes of the bridesmaids might be a shade too airy; but not a stern or cruel day, to tinge their young noses with a frosty hue, or blow the crinkles out of their luxuriant hair.

The bridesmaids were the Ladies Emily and Louisa Challoner, the two Miss Fermors, Miss Granger, and Clarissa–six in all; a moderation which Lady Laura was inclined to boast of as a kind of Spartan simplicity. They were all to be dressed alike, in white, with bonnets that seemed composed of waxen looking white heather and tremulous harebells, and with blue sashes to match the harebells. The dresses were Lady Laura’s inspiration: they had come to her almost in her sleep, she declared, when she had well-nigh despaired of realising her vague desires; and Clarissa’s costume was, like the ball-dress, a present from her benefactress.

The nine-o’clock breakfast–a meal that begun at nine and rarely ended till eleven–was hurried over in the most uncomfortable and desultory manner on this eventful morning. The principals in the great drama did not appear at all, and Clarissa and Miss Granger were the only two bridesmaids who could spare half an hour from the cares of the toilet. The rest breakfasted in the seclusion of their several apartments, with their hair in crimping-pins. Miss Granger was too perfect a being to crinkle her hair, or to waste three hours on dressing, even for a wedding. Lady Laura showed herself among her guests, for a quarter of an hour or so, in a semi-hysterical flutter; so anxious that everything should go off well, so fearful that something might happen, she knew not what, to throw the machinery of her arrangements out of gear.

“I suppose it’s only a natural feeling on such an occasion as this,” she said, “but I really do feel as if something were going to happen. Things have gone on so smoothly up to this morning–no disappointments from milliners, no stupid mistakes on the part of those railway people–everything has gone upon velvet; and now it is coming to the crisis I am quite nervous.”

Of course every one declared this was perfectly natural, and recommended his or her favourite specific–a few drops of sal-volatile–a liqueur-glass of dry curacoa–red lavender–chlorodyne–and so on; and then Lady Laura laughed and called herself absurd, and hurried away to array herself in a pearl-coloured silk, half smothered by puffings of pale pink areophane and Brussels-lace flounces; a dress that was all pearly gray and rose and white, like the sky at early morning.

Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Granger, with some military men and country squires, took their breakfast as calmly as if a wedding were part of the daily business of life. Miss Granger exhibited a polite indifference about the great event; Miss Level was pale and nervous, not able to give much attention to Daniel Granger, who had contrived to sit next her that morning, and talked to her a good deal, with an apparent unconsciousness of the severe gaze of his daughter, seated exactly opposite to him.

Clarissa was glad to make her toilet an excuse for leaving Mr. Granger; but once in the sanctuary of her own room, she sat down in an absent manner, and made no attempt to begin dressing. Fosset, the maid, found her there at a quarter past ten o’clock–the ceremony was to take place at eleven–and gave a cry of horror at seeing the toilet uncommenced.

“Good gracious me, miss! what have you been thinking of? Your hair not begun nor nothing! I’ve been almost torn to bits with one and another–Miss Fermor’s maid bothering for long hair-pins and narrow black ribbon; and Jane Roberts–Lady Emily Challoner’s maid–who really never has anything handy, wanting half the things out of my work-box–or I should have been with you ever so long ago. My Lady would be in a fine way if you were late.”

“I think my hair will do very well as it is, Fosset,” Clarissa said listlessly.

“Lor, no, miss; not in that dowdy style. It don’t half show it off.”

Clarissa seated herself before the dressing-table with an air of resignation rather than interest, and the expeditious Fosset began her work. It was done very speedily–that wealth of hair was so easy to dress; there was no artful manipulation of long hair-pins and black ribbon needed to unite borrowed tresses with real ones. The dress was put on, and Clarissa was invited to look at herself in the cheval-glass.

“I do wish you had a bit more colour in your cheeks to-day, miss,” Fosset said, with rather a vexed air. “Not that I’d recommend you any of their vinegar rouges, or ineffaceable blooms, or anything of that kind. But I don’t think I ever saw you look so pale. One would think _you_ were going to be married, instead of Lady Geraldine. _She’s_ as cool as a cucumber this morning, Sarah Thompson told me just now. You can’t put _her_ out easily.”

The carriages were driving up to the great door by this time. It was about twenty minutes to eleven, and in ten minutes more the procession would be starting. Hale Church was within five minutes’ drive of the Castle.

Clarissa went fluttering down to the drawing-room, where she supposed people would assemble. There was no one there but Mr. Granger, who was stalking up and down the spacious room, dressed in the newest and stiffest of coats and waistcoats, and looking as if he were going to assist at a private hanging. Miss Lovel felt almost inclined to ran away at sight of him. The man seemed to pursue her somehow; and since that night when George Fairfax had offered her his mocking congratulations, Mr. Granger’s attentions had been particularly repugnant to her.

She could not draw back, however, without positive rudeness, and it was only a question of five minutes; so she went in and entered upon an interesting little conversation about the weather. It was still fine; there was no appearance of rain; a most auspicious day, really; and so on,–from Mr. Granger; to which novel remarks Clarissa assented meekly.

“There are people who attach a good deal of significance to that kind of thing,” he said presently. “For my own part, _if_ I were going to be married to the woman I loved, I should care little how black the sky above us might be. That sounds rather romantic for me, doesn’t it? A man of fifty has no right to feel like that.”

This he said with a half-bitter laugh. Clarissa was spared the trouble of answering by the entrance of more bridesmaids–Lady Louisa Challoner and Miss Granger–with three of the military men, who wore hothouse flowers in their buttonholes, and were altogether arrayed like the lilies of the field, but who had rather the air of considering this marriage business a tiresome interruption to partridge-shooting.

“I suppose we are going to start directly,” cried Lady Louisa, who was a fluttering creature of three-and-thirty, always eager to flit from one scene to another. “If we don’t, I really think we shall be late–and there is some dreadful law, isn’t there, to prevent people being married after eleven o’clock?”

“After twelve,” Mr. Granger answered in his matter of fact way. “Lady Geraldine has ample margin for delay.”

“But why not after twelve?” asked Lady Louisa with a childish air; “why not in the afternoon or evening, if one liked? What can be the use of such a ridiculous law? One might as well live in Russia.”

She fluttered to one of the windows and looked out.

“There are all the carriages. How well the men look! Laura must have spent a fortune in white ribbon and gloves for them–and the horses, dear things!”–a woman of Lady Louisa’s stamp is generally enthusiastic about horses, it is such a safe thing–“they look as if they knew it was a wedding. O, good gracious!”

“What is the matter. Lady Louisa?”

“A man from the railway–with a telegram–yes, I am sure it’s a telegram! Do you know, I have such a horror of telegrams! I always fancy they mean illness–or death–or something dreadful. Very absurd of me, isn’t it? And I daresay this is only a message about some delayed parcel, or some one who was to be here and can’t come, or something of that kind.”

The room was full of idle people by this time. Every one went to the open window and stared down at the man who had brought the telegram. He had given his message, and was standing on the broad flight of steps before the Castle door, waiting for the return of the official who had taken it. Whether the electric wires had brought the tidings of some great calamity, or a milliner’s apology for a delayed bonnet, was impossible to guess. The messenger stood there stolid and impenetrable, and there was nothing to be divined from his aspect.

But presently, while a vague anxiety possessed almost every one present, there came from the staircase without a sudden cry of woe–a woman’s shriek, long and shrill, ominous as the wail of the banshee. There was a rush to the door, and the women crowded, out in a distracted way. Lady Laura was fainting in her husband’s arms, and George Fairfax was standing near her reading a telegram.

People had not long to wait for the evil news. Lord Calderwood had been seized with a paralytic stroke–his third attack–at ten o’clock the previous night, and had expired at half-past eight that morning. There could be no wedding that day–nor for many days and weeks to come.

“O, Geraldine, my poor Geraldine, let me go to her!” cried Lady Laura, disengaging herself from her husband’s arms and rushing upstairs. Mr. Armstrong hurried after her.

“Laura, my sweet girl, don’t agitate yourself; consider yourself,” he cried, and followed, with Lady Louisa sobbing and wailing behind him. Geraldine had not left her room yet. The ill news was to find her on the threshold, calm and lovely in the splendour of her bridal dress.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVII.

“‘TIS DEEPEST WINTER IN LORD TIMOR’S PURSE.”

Before nightfall–before the evening which was to have been enlivened by a dinner-party and a carpet-dance, and while bride and bridegroom should have been speeding southwards to that noble Kentish mansion which his uncle had lent George Fairfax–before the rooks flew homeward across the woods beyond Hale–there had been a general flight from the Castle. People were anxious to leave the mourners alone with their grief, and even the most intimate felt more or less in the way, though Mr. Armstrong entreated that there might be no hurry, no inconvenience for any one.

“Poor Laura won’t be fit to be seen for a day or two,” he said, “and of course I shall have to go up to town for the funeral; but that need make no difference. Hale is large enough for every one, and it will be a comfort to her by-and-by to find her friends round her.”

Through all that dreary day Lady Laura wandered about her morning-room, alternately sobbing and talking of her father to those chosen friends with whom she held little interviews.

Her sisters Louisa and Emily were with her for the greater part of the time, echoing her lamentations like a feeble chorus. Geraldine kept her room, and would see no one–not even him who was to have been her bridegroom, and who might have supposed that he had the chiefest right to console her in this sudden affliction.

Clarissa spent more than an hour with Lady Laura, listening with a tender interest to her praises of the departed. It seemed as if no elderly nobleman–more or less impecunious for the last twenty years of his life–had ever supported such a load of virtues as Lord Calderwood had carried with him to the grave. To praise him inordinately was the only consolation his three daughters could find in the first fervour of their grief. Time was when they had been apt to confess to one another that papa was occasionally rather “trying,” a vague expression which scarcely involved a lapse of filial duty on the part of the grumbler. But to hear them to-day one would have supposed that they had never been tried; that life with Lord Calderwood in a small house in Chapel-street, Mayfair, had been altogether a halcyon existence.

Clarissa listened reverently, believing implicitly in the merits of the newly lost, and did her best to console her kind friend during the hour Mr. Armstrong allowed her to spend with Lady Laura. At the end of that time he came and solemnly fetched her away, after a pathetic farewell.

“You must come to me again, Clary, and very, very soon,” said my lady, embracing her. “I only wish Fred would let you stay with me now. You would be a great comfort.”

“My dearest Lady Laura, it is better not. You have your sisters.”

“Yes, they are very good; but I wanted you to stay, Clary. I had such plans for you. O, by the bye, the Grangers will be going back to-day, I suppose. Why should they not take you with them in their great travelling carriage?–Frederick, will you arrange for the Grangers to take Clarissa home?” cried Lady Laura to her husband, who was hovering near the door. In the midst of her grief my lady brightened a little; with the idea of managing something, even so small a matter as this.

“Of course, my dear,” replied the affectionate Fred. “Granger shall take Miss Lovel home. And now I must positively hurry her away; all this talk and excitement is so bad for you.”

“I must see the Fermors before they go. You’ll let me see the Fermors, Fred?”

“Well, well, I’ll bring them just to say good-bye–that’s all–Come along, Miss Lovel.”

Clarissa followed him through the corridor.

“O, if you please, Mr. Armstrong,” she said, “I did not like to worry Lady Laura, but I would so much rather go home alone in a fly.”

“Nonsense! the Grangers can take you. You could have Laura’s brougham, of course; but if she wants you to go with the Grangers, you must go. Her word is law; and she’s sure to ask me about it by-and-by. She’s a wonderful woman; thinks of everything.”

They met Mr. and Miss Granger presently, dressed for the journey.

“O, if you please, Granger, I want you to take Miss Lovel home in your carriage. You’ve plenty of ‘room, I know.”

Sophia looked as if she would have liked to say that there was no room, but her father’s face quite flushed with pleasure.

“I shall be only too happy,” he said, “if Miss Lovel will trust herself to our care.”

“And perhaps you’ll explain toiler father what has happened, and how sorry we are to lose her, and so on.”

“Certainly, my dear Armstrong. I shall make a point of seeing Mr. Lovel in order to do so.”

So Clarissa had a seat in Mr. Granger’s luxurious carriage, the proprietor whereof sat opposite to her, admiring the pale patrician face, and wondering a little what that charm was which made it seem to him more beautiful than any other countenance he had ever looked upon. They did not talk much, Mr. Granger only making a few stereotyped remarks about the uncertainties of this life, or occasionally pointing out some feature of the landscape to Clarissa. The horses went at a splendid pace Their owner would have preferred a slower transit.

“Remember, Miss Lovel,” he said, as they approached the village of Arden, “you have promised to come and see us.”

“You are very good; but I go out so little, and papa is always averse to my visiting.”

“But he can’t be that any more after allowing you to stay at the Castle, or he will offend commoner folks, like Sophy and me, by his exclusiveness. Besides, he told me he wished Sophy and you to be good friends. I am sure he will let you come to us. When shall it be? Shall we say to-morrow, before luncheon–at twelve or one, say? I will show you what I’ve done for the house in the morning, and Sophy can take you over her schools and cottages in the afternoon.”

Sophia Granger made no attempt to second this proposition; but her father was so eager and decisive, that it seemed quite impossible for Clarissa to say no.

“If papa will let me come,” she said doubtfully.

“O, I’m quite sure he will not refuse, after what he was good enough to say to me,” replied Mr. Granger; “and if he does not feel equal to going about with us in the morning, I hope we shall be able to persuade him to come to dinner.”

They were at the little rustic gate before Mill Cottage by this time. How small the place looked after Hale Castle! but not without a prettiness of its own. The virginia creeper was reddening on the wall; the casement windows open to the air and sunshine. Ponto ran out directly the gate was opened–first to bark at the carriage, and then to leap joyously about Clarissa, overpowering her with a fond canine welcome.

“You’ll come in with us, Sophia?” asked Mr. Granger, when he had alighted, and handed Clarissa out of the carriage.

“I think not, papa. You can’t want me; and this dreadful morning has given me a wretched headache.”

“I thought there was something amiss. It would be more respectful to Mr. Lovel for you to come in. I daresay he’ll excuse you, however, when he hears you are ill.”

Clarissa held out her hand, which Miss Granger took with an almost obvious reluctance, and the two young ladies said “Good-bye” to each other, without a word from Sophia about the engagement for the next day.

They found Mr. Lovel in his favourite sitting-room; not dreaming over a Greek play or a volume of Bentley, as it was his custom to do, but seriously engaged with a number of open letters and papers scattered on the writing-table before him–papers that looked alarmingly like tradesmens’ bills. He was taken by surprise on the entrance of Clarissa and her companion, and swept the papers into an open drawer with rather a nervous hand.

“My dear Clarissa, this is quite unexpected!–How do you do, Mr. Granger? How very good of you to bring my little girl over to see me! Will you take that chair by the window? I was deep in a file of accounts when you came in. A man must examine his affairs sometimes, however small his household may be.–Well, Clary, what news of our kind friends at the Castle? Why, bless my soul, this is the wedding-day, isn’t it? I had quite forgotten the date. Has anything happened?”

“Yes, papa; there has been a great misfortune, and the wedding is put off.”

Between them, Mr. Granger and Clarissa explained the state of affairs at the Castle. Mr. Lovel seemed really shocked by the intelligence of the Earl’s death.

“Poor Calderwood! He and I were great friends thirty years ago. I suppose it’s nearly twenty since I last saw him. He was one of the handsomest men I ever knew–Lady Geraldine takes after him–and when he was in the diplomatic service had really a very brilliant career before him; but he missed it somehow. Had always rather a frivolous mind, I fancy, and a want of perseverance. Poor Calderwood! And so he is gone! How old could he have been? Not much over sixty, I believe. I’ll look into Debrett presently.”

As soon as he could decently do so after this, Mr. Granger urged his invitation for the next day.

“O, certainly, by all means. Clary shall come to you as early as you like. It will be a great relief for her from the dulness of this place. And–well–yes, if you insist upon it, I’ll join you at dinner. But you see what a perfect recluse I am. There will be no one else, I suppose?”

“You have only to say that you wish it, and there shall be no one else,” Mr. Granger replied courteously.

Never had he been so anxious to propitiate any one. People had courted him more or less all his life; and here he was almost suing for the acquaintance of this broken-down spendthrift–a man whom he had secretly despised until now.

On this assurance Mr. Lovel consented to dine with his neighbour for the first time; and Mr. Granger, having no excuse for farther lingering, took his departure, remembering all at once that he had such a thing as a daughter waiting for him in the carriage outside.

He went, and Clarissa took up the thread of her old life just where she had dropped it. Her father was by no means so gracious or agreeable to-day as he had been during his brief visit to Hale Castle. He took out his tradesmen’s letters and bills when Mr. Granger was gone, and went on with his examination of them, groaning aloud now and then, or sometimes stopping to rest his head on his hands with a dreary long-drawn sigh. Clarissa would have been very glad to offer her sympathy, to utter some word of comfort; but there was something in her father’s aspect which forbade any injudicious approach. She sat by the open window with a book in her hand, but not reading, waiting patiently in the hope that he would share his troubles with her by-and-by.

He went on with his work for about an hour, and then tied the papers in a bundle with an impatient air.

“Arithmetic is no use in such a case as mine,” he said; “no man can make fifty pounds pay a hundred. I suppose it must end in the bankruptcy court. It will be only our last humiliation, the culminating disgrace.”

“The bankruptcy court! O, papa!” cried Clarissa piteously. She had a very vague idea as to what bankruptcy meant, but felt that it was something unutterably shameful–the next thing to a criminal offence.

“Better men than I have gone through it,” Mr. Lovel went on with a sigh, and without the faintest notice of his daughter’s dismay; “but I couldn’t stand Arden and Holborough after that degradation. I must go abroad, to some dull old town in the south of France, where I could have my books and decent wine, and where, as regards everything else, I should be in a living grave.

“But they would never make you bankrupt surely, papa;” Clarissa exclaimed in the same piteous tone.

“_They_ would never make me bankrupt!” echoed her father fretfully. “What do you mean by _they_? You talk like a baby, Clarissa. Do you suppose that tradesmen and bankers and bill-discounters would have more mercy upon me than upon other people? They may give me more time than they would give another man, perhaps, because they know I have some pride of race, and would coin my heart’s blood rather than adopt expedients that other men make light of; but when they know there is no more to be got out of me, they will do their worst. It is only a question of time.”

“Are you very much in debt, papa?” Clarissa asked timidly, anticipating a rebuff.

“No; that is the most confounded part of the business. My liabilities only amount to a few pitiful hundreds. When I sold Arden–and I did not do that till I was obliged, you may believe–the bulk of the purchase-money went to the mortgagees. With the residue–a paltry sum–I bought myself an annuity; a transaction which I was able to conclude upon better terms than most men of my age, on account of my precarious health, and to which I was most strongly urged by my legal advisers. On this I have existed, or tried to exist, ever since: but the income has not been sufficient even for the maintenance of this narrow household; if I lived in a garret, I must live like a gentleman, and should be always at the mercy of my servants. These are honest enough, I daresay, but I have no power of checking my expenditure. And then I had your schooling to pay for–no small amount, I assure you.”

“Thank heaven that is over, papa! And now, if you would only let me go out as a governess, I might be some help to you instead of a burden.”

“There’s time enough to think of that. You are not much of a burden to me at present. I don’t suppose you add many pounds a year to the expenses of this house. And if I have to face the inevitable, and see my name in the _Gazette_, we must begin life again upon a smaller scale, and in a cheaper place–some out-of-the-way corner of France or Belgium. The governess notion will keep till I am dead. You can always be of some use to me as a companion, if you choose.”

This was quite a concession. Clarissa came over to her father’s chair, and laid her hand caressingly upon his shoulder.

“My dear father,” she said in a low sweet voice, “you make me almost happy, in spite of our troubles. I wish for nothing better than to stay with you always. And by-and-by, if we have to live abroad, where you need not be so particular about our name, I may be able to help you a little–by means of art or music–without leaving home. I think I could be happy anywhere with you, papa, if you would only love me a little.”

That appeal touched a heart not easily moved. Marmaduke Lovel put his hand–such a slender feminine hand–into his daughter’s with an affectionate pressure.

“Poor child!” he said sadly. “It would be hard if I couldn’t love you a little. But you were born under an evil star, Clarissa; and hitherto perhaps I have tried to shut my heart against you. I won’t do that any more. Whatever affection is in me to give shall be yours. God knows I have no reason to withhold it, nor any other creature on this earth on whom to bestow it. God knows it is a new thing for me to have my love sued for.”

There was a melancholy in his tone which touched his daughter deeply. He seemed to have struck the key-note of his life in those few words; a disappointed unsuccessful life; a youth in which there had been some hidden cause for the ungenial temper of his middle age.

It was nearly six o’clock by this time, and Clarissa strolled into the garden with her father while the table was being laid for dinner. There were faint glimpses of russet here and there among the woods around Arden Court, but it still seemed summer time. The late roses were in full bloom in Mr. Lovel’s fertile garden, the rosy apples were brightening in the orchard, the plums purpling on a crumbling old red-brick wall that bounded the narrow patch of kitchen-garden. Yes, even after Hale Castle the place seemed pretty; and a pang went through Clarissa’s heart, as she thought that this too they might have to leave; even this humble home was not secure to them.

Father and daughter dined together very pleasantly. Clarissa had been almost happy by her father’s unwonted tenderness, and Mr. Lovel was in tolerable spirits, in spite of that dreary afternoon’s labour, that hopeless task of trying to find out some elastic quality in pounds, shillings, and pence.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVIII.

SOMETHING FATAL.

AT seven o’clock Mr. Level composed himself for his after-dinner nap, and Clarissa, being free to dispose of herself as she pleased till about nine, at which hour the tea-tray was wont to be brought into the parlour, put on her hat and went out into the village. It would be daylight till nearly eight, and moonlight after that; for the moon rose early, as Miss Lovel remembered. She had a fancy to look at the familiar old plane again–the quiet village street, with its three or four primitive shops, and single inn lying back a little from the road, and with a flock of pigeons and other feathered creatures always on the patch of grass before it; the low white-walled cottages, in which there were only friendly faces for her. That suggestion of a foreign home had made her native village newly dear to her.

She had not held much intercourse with these Arden people since her coming home. The sense of her inability to help them in any substantial way had kept her aloof from them. She had not the gift of preaching, or of laying down the laws of domestic economy, whereby she might have made counsel and admonition serve instead of gold or silver. Being able to give them nothing, she felt herself better out of the way; but there were two or three households upon which she had contrived to bestow some small benefits–a little packet of grocery bought with her scanty pocket-money, a jar of good soup that she had coaxed good-natured Martha to make, and so on–and in which her visits had been very welcome.

All was very quiet this evening. Clarissa went through the village without meeting any one she knew. The gate of the churchyard stood open, and Arden churchyard was a favourite spot with Clarissa. A solemn old place, shadowed by funereal yews and spreading cedars, which must have been trees of some importance before the Hanoverian succession. There was a narrow footpath between two rows of tall quaint old tombstones, with skulls and crossbones out upon the moss-grown stone; a path leading to another gate which opened upon a wide patch of heath skirted by a scanty firwood.

This was the wildest bit of landscape about Arden, and Clarissa loved it with all an artist’s love. She had sketched that belt of fir-trees under almost every condition–with the evening sun behind them, standing blackly out against the warm crimson light; or later, when the day had left no more than a faint opal glimmer in the western sky; later still, in the fair summer moonlight, or en a blusterous autumn afternoon, tossed by the pitiless wind. There was a poetry in the scene that seemed to inspire her pencil, and yet she could never quite satisfy herself. In short, she was not Turner; and that wood and sky needed the pencil of a Turner to translate them fully. This evening she had brought her pocket sketch-book with her. It was the companion of all her lonely walks.

She sat down upon the low boundary-wall of the churchyard, close by the rustic wooden gate through which she had come, facing the heath and the firwood, and took out her sketch-book. There was always something new; inexhaustible Nature had ever some fresh lesson for her. But this evening she sat idle for a long time, with her pencil in her hand; and when at last she began to draw, it was no feature of heathy ridge or dark firwood, but a man’s face, that appeared upon the page.

It was a face that she had drawn very often lately in her idle moods, half unconsciously sometimes–a bold handsome face, that offered none of those difficulties by which some countenances baffle the skill of a painter. It was the face of a man of whom she had told herself it was a sin even to think; but the face haunted her somehow, and it seemed as if her pencil reproduced it in spite of herself.

She was thinking as she drew near of Lady Geraldine’s postponed wedding. It would have been better that the marriage should have taken place; better that the story should have ended to-day and that the frail link between herself and George Fairfax should have been broken. That accident of Lord Calderwood’s death had made everything more or less uncertain. Would the marriage ever take place? Would George Fairfax, with ample leisure for deliberation, hold himself bound by his promise, and marry a woman to whom he had confessed himself indifferent?

She was brooding over this question when she heard the thud of a horse’s hoofs upon the grass, and, looking up, saw a man riding towards her. He was leaning across his horse’s head, looking down at her in the next moment–a dark figure shutting out the waving line of fir-trees and the warm light in the western sky. “What are you doing there, Miss Lovel?” asked a voice that went straight to her heart. Who shall say that it was deeper or sweeter than, common voices? but for her it had a thrilling sound.

She started and dropped her book. George Fairfax dismounted, tied his horse’s bridle to the churchyard gate, and picked up the little sketch-book.

“My portrait!” he cried, recognizing the carelessly-pencilled bead. “Then you do think of me a little, Clarissa! Do you know that I have been prowling about Arden for the last two hours, waiting and watching for you? I have ridden past your father’s cottage twenty times, I think, and was on the point of giving up all hope and galloping back to Hale, when I caught sight of a familiar figure from that road yonder.”

He had taken a knife from his pocket, and was deliberately cutting out the leaf from Miss Lovel’s sketch-book.

“I shall keep this, Clarissa,–this one blessed scrap of evidence that you do sometimes think of me.”

“I think of a good many people in the same manner,” she said, smiling, with recovered self-possession. “I have very few acquaintance whose likenesses I have not attempted in some fashion.”

“But you have attempted mine very often,” he answered, looking over the leaves of the book. “Yes, here is my profile amongst bits of foliage, and scroll-work, and all the vagabond thoughts of your artistic brain. You shall not snub me, Clarissa. You do think of me–not as I think of you, perhaps, by day and night, but enough for my encouragement, almost enough for my happiness. Good heavens, how angry I have been with you during the last few weeks!”

“What right had you to be angry with me, Mr. Fairfax?”

“The sublime right of loving you. To my mind that constitutes a kind of moral ownership. And to see you flirting with that fellow Granger, and yet have to hold my peace! But, thank God, all pretences are done with. I recognize the event of to-day as an interposition of Providence. As soon as I can decently do so, I shall tell Lady Geraldine the truth.”

“You will not break your engagement–at such a time–when she has double need of your love?” cried Clarissa indignantly.

She saw the situation from the woman’s point of view, and it was of Geraldine Challoner’s feelings she thought at this crisis. George Fairfax weighed nothing in the scale against that sorrowing daughter. And yet she loved him.

“My love she never had, and never can have; nor do I believe that honour compels me to make myself miserable for life. Of course I shall not disturb her in the hour of her grief by any talk about our intended marriage; but, so soon as I can do so with kindness, I shall let her know the real state of my feelings. She is too generous to exact any sacrifice from me.”

“And you will make her miserable for life, perhaps?”

“I am not afraid of that. I tell you, Clarissa, it is not in her cold proud nature to care much for any man. We can invent some story to account for the rupture, which will save her womanly pride. The world can be told that it is she who has broken the engagement: all that will be easily settled. Poor Lord Calderwood! Don’t imagine that I am not heartily sorry for him; he was always a good friend to me; but his death has been most opportune. It has saved me, Clarissa. But for that I should have been a married man this night, a bound slave for evermore. You can never conceive the gloomy dogged spirit in which I was going to my doom. Thank God, the release came; and here, sitting by your side, a free man, I feel how bitter a bondage I have escaped.”

He put his arm round Clarissa, and tried to draw her towards him; but she released herself from him with a quick proud movement, and rose from her seat on the low wall. He rose at the same moment, and they stood facing each other in the darkening twilight.

“And what then, Mr. Fairfax?” she said, trembling a little, but looking him steadily in the face nevertheless. “When you have behaved like a traitor, and broken your engagement, what then?”

“What then? Is there any possible doubt about what must come then? You will be my wife, Clarissa!”

“You think that I would be an accomplice to such cruelty? You think that I could be so basely ungrateful to Lady Laura, my first friend? Yes, Mr. Fairfax, the first friend I ever had, except my aunt, whose friendship has always seemed a kind of duty. You think that after all her goodness to me I could have any part in breaking her sister’s heart?”

“I think there is one person whose feelings you overlook in this business.”

“And who is that?”

“Myself. You seem to forget that I love you, and that my happiness depends upon you. Are you going to stand upon punctilio, Clarissa, and break my heart because Laura Armstrong has been civil to you?”

Clarissa smiled–a very mournful smile.

“I do not believe you are so dreadfully in earnest,” she said. “If I did–“

“If you did, what then, Clarissa?”

“It might be different. I might be foolish enough, wicked enough–But I am sure that this folly of yours is no more than a passing fancy. You will go away and forget all about me. You would be very sorry by-and-by, if I were weak enough to take you at your word; just as sorry as you are now for your engagement to Lady Geraldine. Come, Mr. Fairfax, let us both be sensible, if we can, and let there be an end of this folly for evermore between us. Good-night; I must go home. It is half-past eight o’clock, and at nine papa has his tea.”

“You shall go home in time to pour out Mr. Lovel’s tea; but you shall hear me out first, Clarissa, and you shall confess to me. I will not be kept in the dark.”

And then he urged his cause, passionately, eloquently, or with that which seemed eloquence to the girl of nineteen, who heard him with pale cheeks and fast-throbbing heart, and yet tried to seem unmoved. Plead as he might, he could win no admission from her. It was only in her eyes, which could not look denial, on her tremulous lips, which could not simulate coldness, that he read her secret. There he saw enough to make him happy and triumphant.

“Say what you please, my pitiless one,” he cried at last; “in less than three months you shall be my wife!”

The church-clock chimed the three-quarters. He had no excuse for keeping her any longer.

“Come then, Clarissa,” he said, drawing her hand through his arm; “let me see you to your father’s door.”

“But your horse–you can’t leave him here?”

“Yes, I can. I don’t suppose any one will steal him in a quarter of an hour or so; and I daresay we shall meet some village urchin whom I can send to take care of him.”

“There is no occasion. I am quite accustomed to walk about Arden alone.”

“Not at this hour. I have detained you, and am bound to see you safely lodged.”

“But if papa should hear—-“

“He shall near nothing. I’ll leave you within a few yards of his gate.”

It was no use for her to protest; so they went back to within half a dozen paces of Mill Cottage arm-in-arm; not talking very much, but dangerously happy in each other’s company.

“I shall see you again very soon, Clarissa,” George Fairfax said. And then he asked her to tell him her favourite walks; but this she refused to do.

“No matter. I shall find you out in spite of your obstinacy. And remember, child, you owe nothing to Laura Armstrong except the sort of kindness she would show to any pretty girl of good family. You are as necessary to her as the orchids on her dinner-table. I don’t deny that she is a warm-hearted little woman, with a great deal that is good in her–just the sort of woman to dispense a large fortune. But I shall make matters all right in that quarter, and at once.”

They were now as near Mill Cottage as Mr. Fairfax considered it prudent to go. He stopped, released Clarissa’s hand from his arm, only to lift it to his lips and kiss it–the tremulous little ungloved hand which had been sketching his profile when he surprised her, half an hour before, on the churchyard wall.

There was not a creature on the road before them, as they Stood thus in the moonlight; but in spite of this appearance of security, they were not unobserved. A pair of angry eyes watched them from across a clipped holly hedge in front of the cottage–the eyes of Marmaduke Lovel, who had ventured out in the soft September night to smoke his after-dinner cigar.

“Good-night, Clarissa,” said George Fairfax; “I shall see you again very soon.”

“No, no; I don’t wish to see you. No good can come of our seeing each other.”

“You will see me, whether you wish or not. Good-night. There is nine striking. You will be in time to pour out papa’s tea.”

He let go the little hand which he had held till now, and went away. When Clarissa came to the gate, she found it open, and her father standing by it. She drew back with a guilty start.

“Pray come in,” said Mr. Lovel, in his most ceremonious tone. “I am very glad that a happy accident has enabled me to become familiar with your new habits. Have you learnt to give clandestine meetings to your lovers at Hale Castle? Have I to thank Lady Laura for this novel development of your character?”

“I don’t know what you mean, papa. I was sitting in the churchyard just now, sketching, when Mr. Fairfax rode up to me. He stopped talking a little, and then insisted on seeing me home. That is all.”

“That is all. And so it was George Fairfax–the bridegroom that was to have been–who kissed your hand just now, in that loverlike fashion. Pray come indoors; I think this is a business that requires to be discussed between us quietly.”

“Believe me you have no reason to be angry, papa,” pleaded Clarissa; “nothing could have been farther from my thoughts than the idea of meeting Mr. Fairfax to-night.”

“I have heard that kind of denial before, and know what it is worth,” answered her father coldly. “And pray, if he did not come here to meet you, may I ask what motive brought Mr. Fairfax to Arden to-night? His proper place would have been at Hale Castle, I should have supposed.”

“I don’t know, papa. He may have come to Arden for a ride. Everything is in confusion at the Castle, I scarcely think he would be wanted there.”

“You scarcely think! And you encourage him to follow you here–this man who was to have been married to Lady Geraldine Challoner to-day–and you let him kiss your hand, and part from you with the air of a lover. I am ashamed of you, Clarissa. This business is odious enough in itself to provoke the anger of any father, if there were not circumstances in the past to make it trebly hateful to me.”

They had passed in at the open window by this time, and were standing in the lamp-lit parlour, which had a pretty air of home comfort, with its delicate tea-service and quaintly shaped silver urn. Mr. Lovel sank into his arm-chair with a faint groan, and looking at him in the full light of the lamp, Clarissa saw that he was deadly pale.

“Do you know that the father of that man was my deadliest foe?” he exclaimed.

“How should I know that, papa?”

“How should you know it!–no. But that you should choose that man for your secret lover! One would think there was some hereditary curse upon your mother’s race, binding her and hers with that hateful name. I tell you, Clarissa, that if there had been no such creature as Temple Fairfax, my life might have been as bright a one as any man need hope for. I owe every misery of my existence to that man.”

“Did he injure you so deeply, papa?”

“He did me the worst wrong that one man can do to another. He came between me and the woman I loved; he stole your mother’s heart from me, Clarissa, and embittered both our lives.”

He stopped, and covered his face with his hand. Clarissa could see that the hand trembled. She had never seen her father so moved before. She too was deeply moved. She drew a chair close to him, and sat down by his side, but dared not speak.

“It is just as well that you should hear the story from me,” he said, after a long pause. “You may hear hints and whispers about it from other people by-and-by perhaps, if you go more into society; for it was known to several. It is best you should know the truth. It is a common story enough in the history of the world; but whenever it happens, it is enough to make the misery of one man’s life. I was not always what you have known me, Clarissa,–a worn-out machine, dawdling away the remnant of a wasted existence. I once had hopes and passions like the rest of mankind–perhaps more ardent than the most. Your mother was the loveliest and most fascinating woman I ever met, and from the hour of our first meeting I had but one thought–how I should win her for my wife. It was not a prudent marriage. She was my equal by birth; but she was the daughter of a ruined spendthrift, and had learnt extravagance and recklessness in her very nursery. She thought me much richer than I was, and I did not care to undeceive her. Later, when we were married, and I could see that her extravagant habits were hastening my ruin, I was still too much a moral coward to tell her the naked truth. I could not bear to come between her and caprices that seemed a natural accompaniment to her charms. I was weakness itself in all that concerned her.”

“And she loved you, papa?” said Clarissa softly. “I am sure she must have loved you.”

“That is a question that I have never answered with any satisfaction to myself. I thought she loved me. She liked me well enough, I believe, till that man crossed her path, and might have learnt to like me better as she grew older and wiser, and rose above the slavery of frivolous pleasures. But, in the most evil hour of her life, she met Temple Fairfax, and from that hour her heart was turned from me. We were travelling, trying to recover from the expenses of a house perpetually full of my wife’s set; and it was at Florence that we first encountered the Colonel. He had just returned from India, had been doing great things there, and was considered rather a distinguished person in Florentine society. I need not stop to describe him. His son is like him. He and I became friends, and met almost daily. It was not till a year afterwards that I knew how pitiful a dupe of this man’s treachery I had been from the very first. We were still in Italy when I made my first discovery; it was one that let in the light upon his character, but did not seriously involve my wife. We fought, and I was wounded. When I recovered, I brought my wife home to Arden. Our year’s retrenchment had left me poorer than when I left home. Your mother’s beauty was a luxury not to be maintained more cheaply at Florence than in Yorkshire.”

There was another pause, and then Marmaduke Lovel went on, in the same bitter tone:

“Within a short time of our return your brother was born. There are things that I can’t even hint to you, Clarissa; but there have been times when the shadow of that man has come between me and my children. Passion has made me unjust. I know that in her worst sin against my love–for I went on loving her to the last–your mother remained what the world calls innocent. But years after I had believed there was an end of all communion between those two, I discovered letters, even stolen meetings–rare, I confess, and never without witnesses, but no less a treason against me. Colonel Fairfax had friends at Holborough, by whose aid he contrived to see my wife. That he urged her to leave me, I know, and that she was steadfast in her refusal to do me that last wrong. But I know too that she loved him. I have read the confession of that which she called her ‘madness’ under her own hand.”

“O, papa, papa, how sad! how dreadful!”

“Within a year or two of your birth she began to fade. From my heart I believe it was this struggle between passion and the last remnant of honour that killed her. I need not tell you the details of my discoveries, some of them made not very long before her death. They led to bitter scenes between us; but I thank God I did believe her protestations of innocence, and that I kept her under my own roof. There were others not so merciful. Colonel Fairfax’s wife was told of his devotion to mine at Florence, and the duel which ended our acquaintance. She found out something of his subsequent meetings with your mother, and her jealousy brought about a separation. It was managed quietly enough, but not without scandal; and nothing but my determination to maintain my wife’s position could have saved her from utter disgrace. Yes, Clarissa, I loved her to the last, but the misery of that last year was something that no words can tell. She died in my arms, and in her latest hours of consciousness thanked me for what she called my generosity. I went straight from her funeral to London, with a bundle of letters in my pocket, to find Temple Fairfax. What might have happened between us, had we met, I can scarcely guess; but there were no scruples on my side. Fortune favoured him, however; he had sailed for India a few weeks before, in command of his regiment. I had some thoughts of following him even there, but abandoned the notion. My wrongs would keep. I waited for his return, but that never happened. He was killed in Afghanistan, and carried to his Indian grave the reputation of one of the worst men and best soldiers who ever bore the king’s commission.”

This was all. To speak of these things had profoundly agitated Marmaduke Lovel; but a sudden impulse had moved this man, who was apt to be so silent about himself and his own feelings, and he had been in a manner constrained to tell this story.

“You can understand now, I suppose, Clarissa,” he said coldly, after another pause, “why this young man, George Fairfax, is hateful to me.”

“Yes, papa. It is only natural that you should be prejudiced against him. Does he know, do you think—-” she faltered and stopped, with a bitter sense of shame.

“Does he know what?”

“About the past?”

“Of course he must know. Do you suppose his mother has not told him her grievances?”

Clarissa remembered Mrs. Fairfax’s cold manner, and understood the reason of that tacit avoidance which had wounded her so deeply. She too, no doubt, was hateful; as hateful to the injured wife of Colonel Fairfax as his son could be to her father.

“And now, Clarissa,” said Mr. Lovel, “remember that any acquaintance between you and George Fairfax is most repugnant to me. I have told you this story in order that there may be no possibility of any mistake between us. God only knows what it costs a man to open old wounds as I have opened mine to-night. Only this afternoon you affected a considerable regard for me, which I promised to return to the best of my power. All that is a dead letter if you hold any communion with this man. Choose him for your friend, and renounce me for your father. You cannot have both.”

“He is not my friend, papa; he is nothing to me. Even it there were no such thing as this prejudice on your part, I am not so dishonourably as to forget that Mr. Fairfax is engaged to Lady Geraldine.”

“And you promise that there shall be no more meetings, no repetition of the kind of thing I saw to-night?”

“I promise, papa, that of my own free will I will never see him again. Our meeting to-night was entirely accidental.”

“On your part, perhaps; but was it so on his?”

“I cannot tell that, papa.”

Mr. Lovel felt himself obliged to be satisfied with this answer. It seemed to him a hard thing that the son of his enemy should arise thus to torment him–an accident that might have tempted a superstitious man to think that an evil fate brooded over his house; and Marmaduke Lovel’s mind, being by no means strongly influenced by belief, was more or less tainted with superstition. Looked at from any point of view, it was too provoking that this man should cross Clarissa’s pathway at the very moment when it was all-important to her destiny that her heart should be untouched, her fancy unfettered.

“If nothing comes of this Granger business I shall take her abroad,” Mr. Lovel said to himself; “anything to get her out of the way of a Fairfax.”

He drank his tea in silence, meditating upon that little scene in the moonlight, and stealing a look at his daughter every now and then, as she sat opposite to him pretending to read. He could see that the open book was the merest pretence, and that Clarissa was profoundly agitated. Was it her mother’s story that had moved her so deeply, or that other newer story which George Fairfax might have been whispering to her just now in the lonely moonlit road? Mr. Lovel was disturbed by this question, but did not care to seek any farther explanation from his daughter. There are some subjects that will not bear discussion.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIX.

MR. GRANGER IS PRECIPITATE.

Clarissa had little sleep that night. The image of George Fairfax, and of that dead soldier whom she pictured darkly like him, haunted her all through the slow silent hours. Her mother’s story had touched her to the heart; but her sympathies were with her father. Here was a new reason why she should shut her heart against Lady Geraldine’s lover, if any reason were wanted to strengthen that sense of honour which reigns supreme in a girl’s unsullied soul. In her conviction as to what was right she never wavered. She felt herself very weak where this man was concerned–weak enough to love him in spite of reason and honour; but she did not doubt her power to keep that guilty secret, and to hide her weakness from George Fairfax.

She had almost forgotten her engagement at Arden Court when her father came down to his late breakfast, and found her sketching at a little table near the window, with the affectionate Ponto nestling close at her side.

“I thought you would be dressing for your visit by this time, Clary,” he said very graciously.

“My visit, papa? O, yes, to the Court,” she replied, with a faint sigh of resignation. “I had very nearly forgotten all about it. I was to be there between twelve and one, I think. I shall have plenty of time to give you your breakfast. It’s not eleven yet.”

“Be sure you dress yourself becomingly. I don’t want you to appear at a disadvantage compared with the heiress.”

“I’ll put on my prettiest dress, if you like, papa; but I can’t wear such silks and laces as Miss Granger wears.”

“You will have such things some day, I daresay, and set them off better than Miss Granger. She is not a bad-looking young woman–good complexion, fine figure, and so on–but as stiff as a poker.”

“I think she is mentally stiff, papa; she is a sort of person I could never get on with. How I wish you were coming with me this morning!”

“I couldn’t manage it, Clarissa. The schools and the model villagers would be more than I could stand. But at your age you ought to be interested in that sort of thing; and you really ought to get on with Miss Granger.”

It was half-past twelve when Miss Lovel opened the gate leading into Arden Park–the first time that she had ever opened it; though she had stood so often leaning on that rustic boundary, and gazing into the well-known woodland, with fond sad looks. There was an actual pain at her heart as she entered that unforgotten domain; and she felt angry with Daniel Granger for having forced this visit upon her.

“I suppose he is determined that we shall pay homage to his wealth, and admire his taste, and drink the bitter cup of humiliation to the very dregs. If he had any real delicacy of feeling, he would understand our reluctance to any intimacy with him.”

While she was thinking of Mr. Granger in this unfriendly spirit, a step sounded on the winding path before her, and looking up, she perceived the subject of her thoughts coming quickly towards her. Was there ever such an intrusive man? She blushed rosy red with vexation.

He came to her, with his hat in his hand, looking very big and stiff and counting-house like among the flickering shadows of forest trees; not an Arcadian figure by any means, but with a certain formal business-like-dignity about him, for all that; not a man to be ridiculed or despised.

“I am glad you have not forgotten your promise to come early, Miss Lovel,” he said, in his strong sonorous voice. “I was just walking over to the cottage to remind you. Sophia is quite ready to do the honours of her schools. But I shall not let her carry you off till after luncheon; I want to show you my improvements. I had set my heart on your seeing the Court for the first time–since its restoration–under my guidance.”

“Pompous, insufferable _parvenu_,” thought Clarissa, to whom this desire on Mr. Granger’s part seemed only an odious eagerness to exhibit his wealth. She little knew how much sentiment there was involved in this wish of Daniel Granger’s.

They came into the open part of the park presently, and she was fain to confess, that whatever changes had been made–and the alterations here were not many–had been made with a perfect appreciation of the picturesque. Even the supreme neatness with which the grounds were now kept did not mar their beauty. Fairy-like young plantations of rare specimens of the coniferous tribe had arisen at every available point of the landscape, wherever there had been barrenness before. Here and there the old timber had been thinned a little, always judiciously. No cockney freaks of fancy disfigured the scene. There were no sham ruins, no artificial waterfalls poorly supplied with water, no Chinese pagodas, or Swiss cottages, or gothic hermitages. At one point of the shrubbery where the gloom of cypress and fir was deepest, they came suddenly on a Grecian temple, whose slender marble columns might have gleamed amidst the sacred groves of Diana; and this was the only indulgence Mr. Granger had allowed to an architect’s fancy, Presently, at the end of a wide avenue, a broad alley of turf between double lines of unrivalled beeches, the first glimpse of the Court burst upon Clarissa’s sight–unchanged and beautiful. A man must have been a Goth, indeed, who had altered the outward aspect of the place by a hair’s breadth.

The house was surrounded by a moat, and there was a massive stone gateway, of older date than the Court itself–though that was old–dividing a small prim garden from the park; this gatehouse was a noble piece of masonry, of the purest gothic, rich with the mellow tint of age, and almost as perfect as in the days when some wandering companionship of masons gave the last stroke of their chisels to the delicate tracery of window and parapet.

The Court formed three sides of a quadrangle. A dear old place, lovable rather than magnificent, yet with all the grandeur of the middle ages; a place that might have stood a siege perhaps, but had evidently been built for a home. The garden originally belonging to the house was simplicity itself, and covered scarcely an acre. All round the inner border of the moat there ran a broad terrace-walk, divided by a low stone balustrade from a grassy bank that sloped down to the water. The square plot of ground before the house was laid out in quaint old flower-beds, where the roses seemed, to Clarissa at least, to flourish as they flourished nowhere else. The rest of the garden consisted of lawn and flower-beds, with more roses. There were no trees near the house, and the stables and out-offices, which made a massive pile of building, formed a background to the grave old gothic mansion.

Without, at least, Mr. Granger had respected the past. Clarissa felt relieved by this moderation, and was inclined to think him a little less hateful. So far he had said nothing which could seem to betray a boastful spirit. He had watched her face and listened to her few remarks with a kind of deferential eagerness, as if it had been a matter of vital importance to him that she should approve what he had done. A steward, who had been entrusted with the conduct of alterations and renovations during the absence of his master, could scarcely have appeared more anxious as to the result of his operations.

The great iron gates under the gothic archway stood wide open just as they had been wont to do in Mr. Lovel’s time, and Clarissa and her companion passed into the quiet garden. How well she remembered the neglected air of the place when last she had seen it–the mossgrown walks, the duckweed in the moat, the straggling rose-bushes, everything out of order, from the broken weathercock on one of the gateway towers, to the scraper by the half-glass door in one corner of the quadrangle, which had been, used instead of the chief entrance! It seems natural to a man of decayed fortune to shut up his hall-door and sneak in and out of his habitation by some obscure portal.

Now all was changed; a kind of antique primness, which had no taint of cockney stiffness, pervaded the scene. One might have expected to see Sir Thomas More or Lord Bacon emerge from the massive gothic porch, and stroll with slow step and meditative aspect towards the stone sun-dial that stood in the centre of that square rose-garden. The whole place had an air of doublet and hose. It seemed older to Clarissa than when she had seen it last–older and yet newer, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, restored, after a century of decay, to all its original grandeur.

The door under the porch stood open; but there were a couple of men in a sober livery waiting in the hall–footmen who had never been reared in those Yorkshire wilds–men with powdered hair, and the stamp of Grosvenor-square upon them. Those flew to open inner doors, and Clarissa began with wonder to behold the new glories of the mansion. She followed Mr. Granger in silence through dining and billiard-rooms, saloon and picture-gallery, boudoir and music-room, in all of which the Elizabethan air, the solemn grace of a departed age, had been maintained with a marvellous art. Money can do so much; above all, where a man has no bigoted belief in his own taste or capacity, and will put his trust in the intelligence of professional artists. Daniel Granger had done this. He had said to an accomplished architect, “I give you the house of my choice; make it what it was in its best days. Improve wherever you can, but alter as little as possible; and, above all, no modernising.”

Empowered by this _carte blanche_, the architect had given his soul to dreams of mediaeval splendour and had produced a place which, in its way, was faultless. No matter that some of the carved-oak furniture was fresh from the chisel of the carver, while other things were the spoil of old Belgian churches; that the tapestry in one saloon was as old as the days of its designer, Boucher, and that in the adjoining chamber made on purpose for Arden Court at the Gobelins manufactory of his Imperial Majesty Napoleon III. No matter that the gilt-leather hangings in one room had hung there in the reign of Charles I., while those in another were supplied by a West-end upholsterer. Perfect taste had harmonised every detail; there was not so much as a footstool or a curtain that could have been called an anachronism. Clarissa looked at all these things with a strange sense of wandering somewhere in a dream. It was, and yet was not her old home. There was nothing incongruous. The place scarcely seemed new to her, though everything was altered. It was only as it ought to have been always.

She remembered the bare rooms, the scanty shabby furniture of the Georgian era, the patches and glimpses of faded splendour here and there, the Bond-street prettinesses and fripperies in her mother’s boudoir, which, even in her early girlhood, had grown tawdry and _rococo_, the old pictures rotting in their tarnished frames; everything with that sordid air of poverty and decay upon it.”

“Well, Miss Lovel,” Daniel Granger said at last, when they had gone through all the chief rooms almost in silence, “do you approve of what has been done?”

“It is beautiful,” Clarissa answered, “most beautiful; but–but it breaks my heart to see it.”

The words were wrung from her somehow. In the next moment she was ashamed of them–it seemed like the basest envy.

“O, pray, pray do not think me mean or contemptible, Mr. Granger,” she said; “it is not that I envy you your house, only it was my home so long, and I always felt its neglect so keenly; and to see it now so beautiful, as I could have only pictured it in my dreams–and even in them I could not fancy it so perfect.”

“It may be your home again, Clarissa, if you care to make it so,” said Mr. Granger, coming very close to her, and with a sudden passion in his voice. “I little thought when I planned this place that it would one day seem worthless to me without one lovely mistress. It is all yours, Clarissa, if you will have it–and the heart of its master, who never thought that it was in his nature to feel what he feels for you.”

He tried to take her hand; but she shrank away from him, trembling a little, and with a frightened look in her face.

“Mr. Granger, O, pray, pray don’t—-“

“For God’s sake don’t tell me that this seems preposterous or hateful to you–that you cannot value the love of a man old enough to be your father. You do not know what it is for a man of my age and my character to love for the first time. I had gone through life heart-whole, Clarissa, till I saw you. Between my wife and me there was never more than liking. She was a good woman, and I respected her, and we got on very well together. That was all. Clarissa, tell me that there is some hope. I ought not to have spoken so soon; I never meant to be such a fool–but the words came in spite of me. O, my dearest, don’t crush me with a point-blank refusal. I know that all this must seem strange to you. Let it pass. Think no more of anything I have said till you know me better–till you find my love is worth having. I believe I fell in love with you that first afternoon in the library at Hale. From that time forth your face haunted me–like some beautiful picture–the loveliest thing I had ever seen, Clarissa.”

“I cannot answer you, Mr. Granger,” she said in a broken voice; “you have shocked and surprised me so much, I—-“

“Shocked and surprised you! That seems hard.”

In that very moment it flashed upon her that this was what her father and Lady Laura Armstrong had wished to bring about. She was to win back the lost heritage of Arden Court–win it by the sacrifice of every natural feeling of her heart, by the barter of her very self.

How much more Mr. Granger might have said there is no knowing–for, once having spoken, a man is loth to leave such a subject as this unexhausted–but there came to Clarissa’s relief the rustling sound of a stiff silk dress, announcing the advent of Miss Granger, who sailed towards them through a vista of splendid rooms, with a stately uncompromising air that did not argue the warmest possible welcome for her guest.

“I have been hunting for you everywhere, papa,” she said in an aggrieved tone. “Where have you been hiding Miss Lovel?”

And then she held out her hand and shook hands with Clarissa in the coldest manner in which it was possible for a human being to perform that ceremony. She looked at her father with watchful suspicious eyes as he walked away to one of the windows, not caring that his daughter should see his face just at that moment. There was something, evidently, Sophia thought,–something which it concerned her to discover.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XX.

MODEL VILLAGERS.

They went to luncheon in a secondary dining room–a comfortable apartment, which served pleasantly for all small gatherings, and had that social air so impossible in a stately banqueting-chamber–a perfect gem of a room, hung with gilt leather, relieved here and there by a choice picture in a frame of gold and ebony. Here the draperies were of a dark crimson cut velvet, which the sunshine brightened into ruby. The only ornaments in this room were a pair of matchless Venetian girandoles on the mantelpiece, and a monster Palissy dish, almost as elaborate in design as the shield of Achilles, on the oaken buffet.

The luncheon was not a very genial repast; Miss Granger maintained a polite sulkiness; Clarissa had not yet recovered from the agitation which Mr. Granger’s most unexpected avowal had occasioned; and even the strong man himself felt his nerves shaken, and knew that he was at a disadvantage, between the daughter who suspected him and the woman who had all but refused his hand. He did his utmost to seem at his ease, and to beguile his daughter into a more cordial bearing; but there was a gloom upon that little party of three which was palpably oppressive. It seemed in vain to struggle against the dismal influence. Mr. Granger felt relieved when, just at the close of the meal, his butler announced that Mr. Tillott was in the drawing-room. Mr. Tillott was a mild inoffensive young man of High-church tendencies, the curate of Arden.

“I asked Tillott to go round the schools with us this afternoon,” Mr. Granger said to his daughter in an explanatory tone. “I know what an interest he takes in the thing, and I thought it would be pleasanter.”

“You are very kind, papa,” Miss Granger replied, with implacable stiffness; “but I really don’t see what we want with Mr. Tillott, or with you either. There’s not the least reason that we should take you away from your usual occupations; and you are generally so busy of an afternoon. Miss Lovel and I can see everything there is to be seen, without any escort; and I have always heard you complain that my schools bored you.”

“Well, perhaps I may have had rather an overdose of the philanthropic business occasionally, my dear,” answered Mr. Granger, with a good-humoured laugh. “However, I have set my heart upon seeing how all your improvements affect Miss Lovel. She has such a peculiar interest in the place, you see, and is so identified with the people. I thought you’d be pleased to have Tillott. He’s really a good fellow, and you and he always seem to have so much to talk about.”

On this they all repaired to the drawing-room, where Mr. Tillott the curate was sitting at a table, turning over the leaves of an illuminated psalter, and looking altogether as if he had just posed himself for a photograph.

To this mild young man Miss Granger was in a manner compelled to relax the austerity of her demeanour. She even smiled in a frosty way as she shook hands with him; but she had no less a sense of the fact that her father had out-manoeuvred her, and that this invitation to Mr. Tillott was a crafty design whereby he intended to have Clarissa all to himself during that afternoon.

“I am sorry you could not come to luncheon with us, Tillott,” said Mr. Granger in his hearty way. “Or are you sure, by the bye, that you have taken luncheon? We can go back to the dining-room and hear the last news of the parish while you wash down some game-pie with a glass or two of the old madeira.”

“Thanks, you are very good; but I never eat meat on Wednesdays or Fridays. I had a hard-boiled egg and some cocoa at half-past seven this morning, and shall take nothing more till sunset. I had duties at Swanwick which detained me till within the last half-hour, or I should have been very happy to have eaten a biscuit with you at your luncheon.”

“Upon my word, Tillott, you are the most indefatigable of men; but I really wish you High-church people had not such a fancy for starving yourselves. So much expenditure of brain-power must involve a waste of the coarser material. Now, Sophy, if you and Miss Lovel are ready, we may as well start.”

They went out into the sunny quadrangle, where the late roses were blooming with all their old luxuriance. How well Clarissa remembered them in those days when they had been the sole glory of the neglected place! In spite of Sophia, who tried her hardest to prevent the arrangement, Mr. Granger contrived that he and Clarissa should walk side by side, and that Mr. Tillott should completely absorb his daughter. This the curate was by no means indisposed to do; for, if the youthful saint had a weakness, it lay in the direction of vanity. He sincerely admired the serious qualities of Miss Granger’s mind, and conceived that, blest with such a woman and with the free use of her fortune, he might achieve a rare distinction for his labours in tins fold, to say nothing of placing himself on the high-road to a bishopric. Nor was he inclined to think Miss Granger indifferent to his own merits, or that the conquest would be by any means an impossible one. It was a question of time, he thought; the sympathy between them was too strong not to take some higher development. He thought of St. Francis de Sales and Madame de Chantal, and fancied himself entrusted with the full guidance of Miss Granger’s superior mind.

They walked across the park to a small gothic gateway, which had been made since the close of Marmaduke Lovel’s reign. Just outside this stood the chapel of Mr. Granger’s building, and the new schools, also gothic, and with that bran-new aspect against which architecture can do nothing. They would be picturesque, perhaps, ten years hence. To-day they had the odour of the architect’s drawing-board.

Beyond the schools there were some twenty cottages, of the same modern gothic, each habitation more or less borne down and in a manner extinguished by its porch and chimney. If the rooms had been in reasonable proportion to the chimneys, the cottages would have been mansions; but gothic chimneys are pleasing objects, and the general effect was good. These twenty cottages formed the beginning of Mr. Granger’s model village–a new Arden, which was to arise on this side of the Court. They were for the most part inhabited by gardeners and labourers more or less dependent on Arden Court, and it had been therefore an easy matter for Miss Granger to obtain a certain deference to her wishes from the tenants.

The inspection of the schools and cottages was rather a tedious business. Sophia would not let her companions off with an iota less than the whole thing. Her model pupils were trotted out and examined in the Scriptures–always in Kings and Chronicles–and evinced a familiarity with the ways of Jezebel and Rehoboam that made Clarissa blush at the thought of her own ignorance. Then there came an exhibition of plain needlework, excruciatingly suggestive of impaired eyesight; then fancy-work, which Miss Granger contemplated with a doubtful air, as having a frivolous tendency; and then the school mistress’s parlour and kitchen were shown, and displayed so extreme a neatness that made one wonder where she lived; and then the garden, where the heels of one’s boots seemed a profanation; and then, the schools and schoolhouses being exhausted, there came the cottages.

How Clarissa’s heart bled for the nice clean motherly women who were put through their paces for Miss Granger’s glorification, and were fain to confess that their housekeeping had been all a delusion and a snare till that young lady taught them domestic economy! How she pitied them as the severe Sophia led the way into sacred corners, and lifted the lids of coppers and dustholes, and opened cupboard-doors, and once, with an aspect of horror, detected an actual cobweb lurking in an angle of the whitewashed wall! Clarissa could not admire things too much, in order to do away with some of the bitterness of that microscopic survey. Then there was such cross-examination about church-going, and the shortcomings of the absent husbands were so ruthlessly dragged into the light of day. The poor wives blushed to own that these unregenerate spirits had still a lurking desire for an occasional social evening at the Coach and Horses, in spite of the charms of a gothic chimney, and a porch that was massive enough for the dungeon of a mediaeval fortress. Miss Granger and the curate played into each other’s hands, and between the two the model villagers underwent a kind of moral dissection. It was dreary work altogether; and Daniel Granger had been guilty of more than one yawn before it was all over, even though he had the new delight of being near Clarissa all the time. It was finished at last. One woman, who in her benighted state had known Miss Lovel, had shown herself touched by the sight of her.

“You never come anigh me now, miss,” she said tenderly, “though I’ve knowed you ever since you was a little girl; and it would do my heart good to see your sweet face here once in a way.”

“You’ve better friends now, you see, Mrs. Rice,” Clarissa answered gently. “I could do so little for you. But I shall be pleased to look in upon you now and then.”

“Do’ee, now, miss; me and my master will be right down glad to see you. However kind new friends may be,” this was said with a conciliatory curtsey to Miss Granger, “we can’t forget old friends. We haven’t forgot your goodness when my boy Bill was laid up with the fever, miss, and how you sat beside his bed and read to him.”

It was at this juncture that Sophia espied another cobweb, after which the little party left this the last of the cottages, and walked back to the park, Daniel Granger still by Clarissa’s side. He did not make the faintest allusion to that desperate avowal of the morning. He was indeed cruelly ashamed of his precipitation, feeling that he had gone the very way to ruin his cause. All that afternoon, while his daughter had been peering into coppers and washing-tubs and dustholes, he had been meditating upon the absurdity of his conduct, and hating himself for his folly. He was not a man who suffered from a mean opinion of his own merits. On the contrary, in all the ordinary commerce of life he fancied himself more than the equal of the best among his fellow-men. He had never wished himself other than what he was, or mistrusted his own judgment, or doubted that he, Daniel Granger, was a very important atom in the scheme of creation. But in this case it was different. He knew himself to be a grave middle-aged man, with none of those attributes that might have qualified him to take a young woman’s heart by storm; and as surely as he knew this, he also knew himself to be passionately in love. All the happiness of his future life depended on this girl who walked by his side, with her pale calm face and deep hazel eyes. If she should refuse him, all would be finished. He had dreamed his dream, and life could never any more be what it had been for him. The days were past in which, he himself had been all-sufficient for his own happiness. But, though he repented that hasty betrayal of his feelings, he did not altogether despair. It is not easy to reduce a man of his age and character to the humble level of a despairing lover. He had so much to bestow, and could not separate himself in his own mind from those rich gifts of fortune which went along with him. No, there was every chance of ultimate success, he thought, in spite of his rashness of that morning. He had only to teach himself patience–to bide his time.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXI.

VERY FAR GONE.

It was a little after six when they came to the gateway of the Court, at which point Mr. Tillott made his adieux. Mr. Granger would have been very glad to ask him to dinner, had he not promised Mr. Lovel that they would be quite alone; so he made up for any apparent inhospitality towards the curate by a hearty invitation for the following Sunday.

There was nearly an hour and a half before dinner; but Sophia carried off her guest to her own rooms at once, for the revision of her toilet, and detained her in those upper regions until just before the ringing of the second bell, very much to the aggravation of Mr. Granger, who paced the long drawing-room in dismal solitude, waiting for Mr. Lovel’s arrival.

In her own rooms Miss Granger became a shade more gracious to Clarissa. The exhibition of her _sanctum sanctorum_ was always pleasing to her. It was the primmest of apartments, half study, half office; and Sophia, one of whose proudest boasts was of her methodical habits, here displayed herself in full force. It seemed as if she had inherited all the commercial faculties of her father, and having no other outlet for this mercantile genius, was fain to expend her gifts upon the petty details of a woman’s life. Never had Clarissa seen such a writing-table, with so many pigeon-holes for the classification of documents, and such ranges of drawers with Brahma locks. Miss Granger might have carried on a small banking business with less paraphernalia than she employed in the conduct of her housekeeping and philanthropy.

“I am my own housekeeper,” she told Clarissa triumphantly, “and know the consumption of this large establishment to an ounce. There is no stint of anything, of course. The diet in the servant’s hall is on the most liberal scale, but there is no waste. Every cinder produced in the house is sifted; every candle we burn has been in stock a twelvemonth. I could not pretend to teach my cottagers economy if I did not practise it myself. I rule everything by the doctrine of averages–so much consumed in one month, so much necessarily required in another; and I reduce everything to figures. Figures cannot deceive, as I tell Mrs. Plumptree, my cook, when she shows me a result that I cannot understand or accept. And there are my books.”

Miss Granger waved her hand towards a row of most uncompromising-looking volumes of the ledger or day-book species. The delight which she displayed in these things was something curious to behold. Every small charity Miss Granger performed, every shortcoming of the recipients thereof, was recorded in those inexorable volumes. She had a book for the record of the church-going, a book for the plain needlework, and was wont to freeze the young blood of her school-children by telling them at the end of the year how many inches of cambric frilling they had hemmed, and how many times they had missed afternoon service. To them she appeared a supernatural creature–a kind of prophetess, sent upon earth for their correction and abasement.

On a solid ecclesiastical-looking oak table in one of the windows Miss Granger had a row of brass-bound money-boxes, inscribed, “For the Home Mission,” “For the Extra Curate Society,” and so on–boxes into which Miss Granger’s friends and visitors were expected to drop their mite. Clarissa felt that if she had been laden down with shillings, she could not for her very life have approached those formidable boxes to drop one in under Miss Granger’s ken; but, of course, this was a morbid fancy. On another table there were little piles of material for plain work; so prim, so square, so geometrically precise, that Clarissa thought the flannel itself looked cold–a hard, fibrous, cruel fabric, that could never be of use to mortal flesh except as an irritant.

Miss Granger’s bedroom and dressing-room were like Miss Granger’s morning-room. No frivolous mediaevalism here, no dainty upholsterer’s work in many-coloured woods, but solid mahogany, relieved by solemn draperies of drab damask, in a style which the wise Sophia called unpretentious. The chief feature in one room was a sewing-machine that looked like a small church organ, and in the other a monster medicine-chest, from the contents of which Miss Granger dealt out doses of her own concoction to her parishioners. Both of these objects she showed to Clarissa with pride, but the medicine-chest was evidently the favourite.

Having improved the time after this manner till twenty minutes past seven, with a very brief interval devoted to the duties of the toilet, the two young ladies went down to the drawing-room, where the lamps were lighted, and Mr. Lovel just arrived.

That gentleman had the honour of taking Miss Granger in to dinner, and did his utmost to render himself agreeable to her in a quiet undemonstrative way, and to take the gauge of her mental powers. She received his attentions graciously enough–indeed it would not have been easy for any one to be ungracious to Marmaduke Lovel when he cared to please–but he could see very clearly that she suspected the state of affairs, and would be, to the last degree, antagonistic to his own and his daughter’s interests. He saw how close a watch she kept upon her father all through the dinner, and how her attention was distracted every now and then when he was talking to Clarissa.

“It is only natural that she should set her face against the business,” he said to himself; “no woman in her position could be expected to act otherwise; but it strikes me that Granger is not a man likely to be influenced by domestic opposition. He is the kind of man to take his own way, I fancy, in defiance of an opposing universe–a very difficult man to govern. He seems over head and ears in love, however, and it will be Clarissa’s own fault if she doesn’t do what she likes with him. Heaven grant she may prove reasonable! Most women would be enchanted with such an opportunity, but with a raw school-girl there is no knowing. And that fellow Fairfax’s influence may work against us, in spite of her protestations last night.”

This was the gist of Mr. Level’s disjointed musings during the progress of the dinner; but he took care not to neglect Miss Granger even for a moment, and he gave her very little time to listen to her father’s conversation with Clarissa.

The dinner ceremonial was performed in a manner which seemed perfection, even to the fastidious taste of Marmaduke Lovel. There was not the faintest indication of ostentation. Daniel Granger’s father had been rich before him; he had been born in the commercial purple, as it were, and none of these things were new to him. Before the Arden Court days he had occupied a handsome modern country house southward, near Doncaster. He had only expanded his style of living after the purchase of the Court, that was all. He had good taste too, and a keen sense of the incongruous. He did not affect the orchids and frivolous floral decorations, the fragile fairy-like glass, with which Lady Laura Armstrong brightened her dinner-table; but, on the other hand, his plate, of which he exhibited no vulgar profusion, was in the highest art, the old Indian china dinner-service scarcely less costly than solid silver, and the heavy diamond-cut glass, with gold emblazonment of crest and monogram, worthy to be exhibited behind the glazed doors of a cabinet. There was no such abomination as gas in the state chambers of Arden Court. Innumerable candles, in antique silver candelabra, gave a subdued brightness to the dining-room. More candles, in sconces against the walls, and two pairs of noble moderator-lamps, on bronze and ormolu pedestals six feet high, lighted the drawing-room. In the halls and corridors there was the same soft glow of lamplight. Only in kitchens and out-offices and stables was the gas permitted to blaze merrily for the illumination of cooks and scullions, grooms and helpers.

Miss Granger only lingered long enough to trifle with a cluster of purple grapes before giving the signal for withdrawal Her father started up to open the dining-room door, with a little sudden sigh. He had had Clarissa all to himself throughout the dinner, and had been very happy, talking about things that were commonplace enough in themselves, but finding a perfect contentment in the fact that he was talking to her, that she listened to him and smiled upon him graciously, with a sweet self-possession which put him quite at his ease. She had recovered from that awkward scene of the morning, and had settled in her own mind that the business was rather absurd than serious. She had only to take care that Mr. Granger never had any second opportunity for indulging in such folly.

He held the door open as Clarissa and his daughter went out of the room–held it till that slim girlish figure had vanished at the end of the corridor, and then came back to his seat with another sigh.

“Very far gone,” Mr. Lovel thought, smiling ever so little, as he bent over his claret-glass, pretending to admire the colour of the wine.

It was really wonderful. That vague dream which had grown out of Lady Laura’s womanly hints, that pleasant phantom which she had conjured up in Mr. Lovel’s mental vision a month or two ago, in the midsummer afternoon, had made itself into a reality so quickly as to astound a man too Horatian in his philosophy to be easily surprised. The fish was such a big one to be caught so easily–without any exercise of those subtle manoeuvres and Machiavellian artifices in which the skilful angler delights–nay, to pounce open-eyed upon the hook, and swallow it bodily!

Mr. Granger filled his glass with such a nervous hand, that half the claret he poured out ran upon the shining oak table. He wiped up the spilt wine clumsily enough, with a muttered denunciation of his own folly, and then made a feeble effort to talk about indifferent things.

It was of no use; with every appearance of courtesy and interest Mr. Lovel contrived _not_ to help him. One subject after another fell flat: the state of the Conservative party, the probability of a war–there is always a probability of war somewhere, according to after-dinner politicians–the aspect of the country politically and agriculturally, and so on. No, it was no use; Daniel Granger broke down altogether at last, and thought it best to unbosom himself.

“There is something that I think you have a right to know, Mr. Lovel,” he said, in an awkward hesitating way; “something which I should scarcely like you to learn from your daughter’s lips, should she think it worth her while to mention it, before you have heard it from mine. The fact is, in plain English”–he was playing with his dessert-knife as he spoke, and seemed to be debating within himself whereabouts upon the dinning-table he should begin to carve his name–“the fact is, I made an abject fool of myself this morning. I love your daughter–and told her so.”

Mr. Lovel gave a little start, the faintest perceptible movement, expressive of a gentle astonishment.

“I need hardly tell you that you have taken me entirely by surprise,” he said in his quietest tone.

“Of course not. People always are surprised when a man of my age presumes to fall in love with a beautiful girl of eighteen or twenty. If I were to marry some worn-out woman of fashion, some battered widow, steeped to the lips in worldly wisdom, every one would call the match the most suitable thing possible. But if a man of fifty ventures to dream a brighter dream, he is condemned at once for a fool.”

“Pardon me, my dear Granger; I have no idea of looking at things in that light. I only remark that you surprise me, as you no doubt surprised my daughter by any avowal you may have made this morning.”

“Yes; and, I fear, disgusted her still more. I daresay I did my cause all the harm that it was possible to do it.”

“I must own that you were precipitate,” Mr. Lovel answered, with his quiet smile. He felt as if he had been talking to a schoolboy. In his own words the man was so “very far gone.”

“I shall know how to be more careful in future, if not wiser; but I suffered myself to be carried away by impulse this morning. It was altogether unworthy of–of my time of life.” This was said rather bitterly. “Frankly, now, Mr. Lovel: if in the future I were able to gain some hold upon your daughter’s affection–without that I would do nothing, no, so help me heaven, however passionately I might love her; if I could–if, in spite of the difference of our ages, I could win her heart–would you be in any way antagonistic to such a marriage?”

“On the contrary, my dear Granger.” Mr. Lovel had already something of the tone of a father-in-law. “Slight as our actual acquaintance has been, I think I know the estimable qualities of your character well enough from other sources to be able to say that such a marriage would be eminently pleasing to me. Nor is this all. I mean to be perfectly candid with you, Granger. My daughter and myself have both an almost romantic attachment to this place, and I freely own that it would be very delightful to me to see her mistress of her old home. But, at the same time, I give you my honour that nothing would induce me to govern her choice by the smallest exercise of parental influence. If you can win her, win her, and my best wishes shall go with your wooing; but I will utter no word to persuade her to be your wife.”

“I respect you for that resolution; I think I should have asked you to be neutral, if you hadn’t said as much. I couldn’t stand the idea of a wife driven into my arms by fatherly coercion. I suppose such things are done in modern society. No, I must win my treasure myself, or not at all. I have everything against me, no doubt, except a rival. There is no fear of _that_, is there, Lovel?”

“Not the slightest. Clarissa is the merest school-girl. Her visit to Lady Laura Armstrong was her first glimpse of the world. No, Granger, you have the field all before you. And you strike me as a man not likely to be vanquished by small difficulties.”

“I never yet set myself to do a thing which I didn’t accomplish in the long run,” answered Mr. Granger; “but then I never set myself to win a woman’s heart. My wife and I came together easily enough–in the way of business, as I may say–and liked each other well enough, and I regretted her honestly when she was gone, poor soul! but that was all. I was never ‘in love’ till I knew your daughter; never understood the meaning of the phrase. Of all the accidents that might have happened to me, this is the most surprising to myself. I can never cease to wonder at my own folly.”

“I do not know why you should call it a folly. You are only in the very middle of a man’s life; you have a fortune that exempts you from all care and labour, and of course at the same time leaves you more or less without occupation. Your daughter will marry and leave you in a year or two, no doubt. Without some new tie your future existence must needs be very empty.”

“I have felt that; but only since I have loved your daughter.”

This was all. The men came in with coffee, and put an end to all confidential converse; after which Mr. Granger seemed very glad to go back to the drawing-room, where Clarissa was playing a mazurka; while Sophia sat before a great frame, upon which some splendid achievement in Berlin woolwork, that was to be the glory of an approaching charity bazaar, was rapidly advancing towards completion. The design was a group of dogs, after Landseer, and Miss Granger was putting in the pert black nose of a Skye-terrier as the gentlemen entered. The two ladies were as far apart as they well could be in the spacious room, and had altogether an inharmonious air, Mr. Granger thought; but then he was nervously anxious that these two should become friends.

He went straight to the piano, and seated himself near Clarissa, almost with the air of having a right to take that place.

“Pray go on playing,” he said; “that seems very pretty music. I am no judge, and I don’t pretend to care for that classical music which every one talks about nowadays, but I know what pleases me.”

The evening was not an especially gay one; but it seemed pleasant enough to Mr. Granger, and he found himself wondering at its brevity. He showed Clarissa some of his favourite pictures. His collection of modern art was a fine one–not large, but very perfect in its way, and he was delighted to see her appreciation of his treasures. Here at least was a point upon which they might sympathise. He had been a good deal worried by Sophia’s obtuseness upon all artistic matters.

Mr. Lovel was not very sorry when the fly from the Arden Inn was announced, and it was time to go home. The pictures were fine, no doubt, and the old house was beautiful in its restored splendour; but the whole business jarred upon Marmaduke Lovel’s sensitive nerves just a little, in spite of the sudden realization of that vague dream of his. This place might be his daughter’s home, and he return to it: but not as its master. The day of his glory was gone. He was doubtful if he should even care to inhabit that house as his daughter’s guest. He had to remind himself of the desperate condition of his own circumstances before he could feel duly grateful to Providence for his daughter’s subjugation of Daniel Granger.

He was careful to utter no word about her conquest on the way home, or during the quarter of an hour Clarissa spent with him before going to her room.

“You look pale and tired, my child,” he said, with a sympathetic air, turning over the leaves of a book as he spoke.

“The day was rather fatiguing, papa,” his daughter answered listlessly, “and Miss Granger is a tiring person. She is so strong-minded, that she makes one feel weak and helpless by the mere force of contrast.”

“Yes, she is a tiring person, certainly; but I think I had the worst of her at dinner and in the evening.”

“But there was all the time before dinner, papa. She showed us her cottages–O, how I pitied the poor people! though I daresay she is kind to them, in her way; but imagine any one coming in here and opening all our cupboards, and spying out cobwebs, and giving a little shriek at the discovery of a new loaf in our larder. She found out that one of her model cottagers had been eating new bread. She said it gave her quite a revulsion of feeling. And then when we went home she showed me her account-books and her medicine-chest. It was very tiring.”

“Poor child! and this young woman will have Arden Court some day–unless her father should marry again.”

Clarissa’s pale face flamed with sudden crimson.

“Which he is pretty sure to do, sooner or later,” continued Mr. Lovel, with an absent meditative air, as of a man who discusses the most indifferent subject possible. “I hope he may. It would be a pity for such a place to fall into such hands. She would make it a phalanstery, a nest for Dorcas societies and callow curates.”

“But if she does good with her money, papa, what more could one wish?”

“I don’t believe that she would do much good. There is a pinched hard look about the lower part of her face which makes me fancy she is mean. I believe she would hoard her money, and make a great talk and fuss about nothing. Yes, I hope Granger will marry again. The house is very fine, isn’t it, since its renovation?”

“It is superb, papa. Dearly as I love the place, I did not think it could be made so beautiful.”

“Yes, and everything has been done in good taste, too,” Mr. Lovel went on, in rather a querulous tone. “I did not expect to see that. But of course a man of that kind has only to put himself into the hands of a first-class architect, and if he is lucky enough to select an architect with an artistic mind, the thing is done. All the rest is merely a question of money. Good heavens, what a shabby sordid hole this room looks, after the place we have come from!”

The room was not so bad as to merit that look of angry disgust with which Mr. Lovel surveyed it. Curtains and carpet were something the worse for wear, the old-fashioned furniture was a little sombre; but the rich binding of the books and a rare old bronze here and there redeemed it from commonness–poor jetsam and flotsam from the wreck of the great house, but enough to give some touch of elegance to meaner things.

“O, papa,” Clarissa cried reproachfully, “the room is very nice, and we have been peaceful and happy in it. I don’t suppose all the splendour of Arden would have made us much happier. Those external things make so little difference.”

She thought of those evenings at Hale Castle, when George Fairfax had abandoned her to pay duty to his betrothed, and of the desolation of spirit that had come upon her in the midst of those brilliant surroundings.

Her father paced the little room as if it had been a den, and answered her philosophic remonstrance with an exclamation of contempt.

“That’s rank nonsense, Clarissa–copybook morality, which nobody in his heart ever believes. External things make all the difference–except when a man is writhing in physical pain perhaps. External things make the