The Lovels of Arden by M. E. Braddon (page 8)

that had an especial fascination for the listener. It seemed as if she had scarcely lived in the dull interval between those charmed days at Hale Castle and these hours of perilous delight; as if she had been half-stifled by the atmosphere of common-sense which had pervaded her existence–crushed and borne down by the weight of Daniel Granger’s sober companionship. _This_ was fairyland–a region of enchantment, fall of bright thoughts and pleasant fancies; _that_ a dismal level drill-ground, upon which all the world marched in solid squares, to the monotonous cry of a serjeant-major’s word of command. One may ride through a world of weariness in a barouche-and-pair. Clarissa had not found her husband’s wealth by any means a perennial source of happiness, nor even the possession of Arden an unfailing consolation.

It was strange how this untidy painting-room of Austin’s, with its tawdry dilapidated furniture–all of which had struck her with a sense of shabbiness and dreariness at first–had grown to possess a charm for her. In the winter gloaming, when the low wood fire glowed redly on the hearth, and made a flickering light upon the walls, the room had a certain picturesque aspect. The bulky Flemish cabinets, with their coarse florid carving, stood boldly out from the background, with red gleams from the fire reflected on chubby cherub heads and mediaeval monsters. The faded curtains lost their look of poverty, and had only the sombre air of age; an old brass chandelier of the Louis Quatorze period, which Austin had hung in in the centre of his room, flashed and glittered in the uncertain, light; and those two figures–one leaning against the mantelpiece, the other prowling restlessly to and fro as he talked, carrying a mahl-stick, which he waved ever and anon like the rod of a magician–completed the picture. It was a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes in the great world of art, a peep into Bohemia; and O, how much brighter a region it seemed to Clarissa than that well-regulated world in which she dined every day at the same hour, with four solemn men watching the banquet, and wound up always with the game dismal quarter of an hour’s sitting in state at dessert!

Those stolen hours in Austin’s painting-room had too keen a fascination for her. Again and again she told herself that she would come no more, and yet she came. She was so secure of her own integrity, so fenced and defended by womanly pride, that she argued with herself there could be neither sin nor danger in these happy respites from the commonplace dreariness of her life. And yet, so inconsistent is human nature, there were times when this woman flung herself upon the ground beside her baby’s crib, and prayed God to pardon her iniquities.

Austin was much too careless to be conscious of his sister’s danger. George Fairfax had made an afternoon lounge of his rooms in the previous winter; it was no new thing for him to come there three or four times a week; and Austin did not for a moment suspect that Clarissa’s occasional presence had anything to do with these visits.

When the three portraits were finished, Mr. Granger expressed himself highly content with them, and gave Austin Lovel a cheque for three hundred pounds; a sum which, in the painter’s own words, ought to have set him upon his legs. Unhappily, Austin’s legs, from a financial point of view, afforded only the most insecure basis–were always slipping away from him, in fact. Three hundred pounds in solid cash did not suffice for even his most pressing needs. He saw nothing before him but the necessity of an ignominious flight from Paris. It was only a question of when and where he should fly; there was no question as to the fact.

He did not care to tell Clarissa this, however. It would be time enough when the thing was done, or just about to be done. All his life he had been in the habit of shirking unpleasant subjects, and he meant to shirk this as long as he could. He might have borrowed money of George Fairfax, no doubt; but unfortunately he was already in that gentleman’s debt, for money borrowed during the previous winter; so he scarcely cared to make any new appeal in that quarter.

So the unsubstantial Bohemian existence went on; and to Clarissa, for whom this Bohemia was an utterly new world, it seemed the only life worth living. Her brother had been pleased to discover the ripening of her artistic powers, and had given her some rough-and-ready lessons in the art she loved so well. Sometimes, on a bright wintry morning, when Mr. Granger was engaged out of doors, she brought her portfolio to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard, and painted there for an hour or so. At first this had been a secure hour for unreserved talk with her brother; but after she had been there two or three mornings in this way, Mr. Fairfax seemed mysteriously aware of her movements, and happened to drop in while she was taking her lesson.

It is not to be supposed that Clarissa could be so much away from home without attracting the attention of Miss Granger. Whether that young lady was at home or abroad, she contrived to keep herself always well informed as to the movements of her stepmother. She speculated, and wondered, and puzzled herself a good deal about these frequent outings; and finding Clarissa singularly reticent upon the subject, grew daily more curious and suspicious; until at last she could endure the burden of this perplexity no longer, without some relief in words, and was fain to take the judicious Warman into her confidence.

“Has Mrs. Granger been out again this afternoon, Warman?” she asked one evening, when the handmaiden was dressing her hair for dinner.

“Yes, miss. The carriage came home just now. I heard it Mrs. Granger went out almost directly after you did.”

“I wonder she can care to waste so much time in calls,” said Sophia.

“Yes, miss, it is odd; and almost always the same place too, as you may say. But I suppose Mrs. Granger was intimate with Mr. and Mrs. Austin before her marriage.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Austin! What do you mean, Warman?”

“Lor’, miss, I thought you would know where she went, as a matter of course. It seems only natural you should. I’ve heard Jarvis mention it at supper. Jarvis has his meals at _our_ table, you know, miss. ‘We’ve been to the Rue du Cavalier Barnard again to-day,’ he says, ‘which I suppose is French for Barnard’s-inn. Missus and them Austins must be very thick.’ Jarvis has no manners, you know, miss; and that’s just his uncultivated way of speaking. But from what I’ve heard him remark, I’m sure Mrs. Granger goes to call upon the Austins as much as three times a week, and seldom stops less than an hour.”

A deadly coldness had crept over Sophia Granger–a cold, blank feeling, which had never come upon her until that moment. He had a wife, then, that dashing young painter with the brilliant brown eyes–the only man who had ever aroused the faintest interest in her well-regulated soul. He was married, and any vague day-dream with which she had interwoven his image was the merest delusion and phantasmagoria. She was unspeakably angry with herself for this unworthy weakness. A painter–a person paid by her father–something less than a curate–if it was possible for any creature to seem less than Mr. Tillott in Sophia’s estimation. He was a married man–a base impostor, who had sailed under false colours–a very pirate. All those graceful airy compliments, those delicate attentions, which had exercised such a subtle influence over her narrow mind–had, indeed, awakened in her something that was almost sentiment–were worse than meaningless, were the wiles of an adventurer trading on her folly.

“He wanted to paint papa’s picture,” she thought, “and I suppose he fancied my influence might help him.”

But what of Clarissa’s visits to the painter’s lodgings? what possible reason could she have for going there? Miss Granger’s suspicions were shapeless and intangible as yet, but she did suspect. More than once–many times, in fact–during the painting of the portrait, she had seen, or had imagined she could see, signs and tokens of a closer intimacy between the painter and her father’s wife than was warranted by their ostensible acquaintance. The circumstances were slight enough in themselves, but these fragile links welded together made a chain which would have been good enough evidence in a criminal court, skilfully handled by an Old Bailey lawyer. Sophia Granger racked her brain to account for this suspected intimacy. When and where had these two been friends, lovers perhaps? Mr. Austin had been away from England for many years, if his own statement were to be believed. It must have been abroad, therefore, that Clarissa had known him–in her school-days. He had been drawing-master, perhaps, in the seminary at Belforet. What more likely?

Miss Granger cherished the peculiar British idea of all foreign schools, that they were more or less sinks of iniquity. A flirtation between drawing-master and pupil would be a small thing in such a pernicious atmosphere. Even amidst the Arcadian innocence of native academies such weeds have flourished This flirtation, springing up in foreign soil, would be of course ten times more desperate, secret, jesuitical in fact, than any purely English product.

Yes, Miss Granger decided at the end of every silent debate in which she argued this question with herself–yes, that was the word of the enigma. These two had been lovers in the days that were gone; and meeting again, both married, they were more than half lovers still.

Clarissa made some excuse to see her old admirer frequently. She was taking lessons in painting, perhaps. Miss Granger observed that she painted more than usual lately–merely for the sake of seeing him.

And how about George Fairfax? Well, that flirtation, of course, was of later date and a less serious affair. Jealousy–a new kind of jealousy, more bitter even than that which she had felt when Clarissa came between her and her father–sharpened Miss Granger’s suspicions in this case. She was jealous even of that supposed flirtation at Belforet, four or five years ago. She was angry with Clarissa for having once possessed this man’s heart; ready to suspect her of any baseness in the past, any treason in the present.

The Grangers were at Madame Caballero’s two or three evenings after this revelation of Warman’s, and Sophia had an opportunity of gleaning some scraps of information from the good-natured little lion-huntress. Madame had been asking her if Mr. Austin’s portraits had been a success.

“Yes; papa thinks they are excellent, and talks about having them exhibited in the salon. Mr. Austin is really very clever. Do you know, I was not aware that he was married, till the other day?” Sophia added, with a careless air.

“Indeed! Yes, there is a wife, I understand; but she never goes into society; no one hears of her. For my part I think him charming.”

“Has he been long in Paris?”

Madame Caballero shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have only known of his existence since he became famous–in a small way–a very small way, of course. He exhibited some military sketches, which attracted the attention of a friend of mine, who talked to me about him. I said at once, ‘Bring him here. I can appreciate every order of genius, from Ary Scheffer to Gavarni.’ The young man came, and I was delighted with him. I admitted him among my intimates; and he insisted on painting the picture which your papa was good enough to admire.”

“Do you know how he lived before he came into notice–if he has ever been a drawing-master, for instance?”

“I know that he has given lessons. I have heard him complain of the drudgery of teaching.”

This sustained Miss Granger’s theory. It seemed so likely. No other hypothesis presented itself to her mind.

Day by day she watched and waited and speculated, hearing of all Clarissa’s movements from the obsequious Warman, who took care to question Mrs. Granger’s coachman in the course of conversation, in a pleasant casual manner, as to the places to which he had taken his mistress. She waited and made no sign. There was treason going on. The climax and explosion would come in good time.

In the meanwhile, Clarissa seemed almost entirely free. Mr. Granger, after living for nearly fifty years of his life utterly unaffected by feminine influence, was not a man to hang upon his wife’s footsteps or to hold her bound to his side. If she had returned his affection with equal measure, if that sympathy for which he sighed in secret could have arisen between them, he might have been as devoted a slave as love could make an honest man. As it was, his married life at its best was a disappointment. Only in the fond hopes and airy visions which his son had inspired, did he find the happiness he had dreamt of when he first tried to win Clarissa for his wife. Here alone, in his love for his child, was there a pure and perfect joy. All other dreams ended in bitter waking. His wife had never loved him, never would love him. She was grateful for his affection, obedient, submissive; her grace and beauty gave him a reflected lustre in society. She was a creature to be proud of, and he was proud of her; but she did not love him. And with this thought there came always a sudden agony of jealousy. If not him, what other had she loved? Whose image reigned in the heart so closely shut against him? Who was that man, the mere memory of whom was more to her than the whole sum of her husband’s devotion?

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

“FROM CLARISSA.”

That jewel which Clarissa had given to Bessie Lovel was a treasure of price, the very possession whereof was almost an oppressive joy to the poor little woman, whose chief knowledge of life came from the experience of its debts and difficulties. That the massive gold locket with the diamond cross would be required of her sooner or later, to be handed into the ruthless paw of a clerk at the _mont de piete_, she had little doubt. Everything that she or her husband had ever possessed worth possessing had so vanished–had been not an absolute property, but a brief fleeting joy, a kind of supernal visitant, vanishing anon into nothingness, or only a pawnbroker’s duplicate. The time would come. She showed the trinket to her husband with a melancholy foreboding, and read his thoughts as he weighed it in his palm, by mere force of habit, speculating what it would fetch, if in his desperate needs this waif might serve him.

She was not surprised, therefore–only a little distressed–when Austin broached the subject one day at his late breakfast–that breakfast at which it needed nearly a bottle of claret to wash down three or four mouthfuls of savoury pie, or half a tiny cutlet. She had possessed the bauble more than a month, holding it in fear and trembling, and only astonished that it had not been demanded of her.

“O, by the way, Bess,” Austin Lovel said carelessly, “I was abominably unlucky last night, at Madame Caballero’s. I’m generally lugged in for a game or two at _ecarte there_, you know. One can’t refuse in a house of that kind. And I had been doing wonders. They were betting on my game, and I stood to win something handsome, when the luck changed all in a moment. The fellow I was playing against marked the king three times running; and, in short, I rose a considerable loser–considerable for me, that is to say. I told my antagonist I should send him the money to-day. He’s a kind of man I can’t afford to trifle with; and you know the Caballero connection is of too much use to be jeopardised. So I’ve been thinking, Bess, that if you’d let me have that gimcrack locket my sister gave you, I could raise a tenner on it. Clary can afford to give you plenty of such things, even if it were lost, which it need not be.”

Of course not. Mrs. Lovel had been told as much about the little Geneva watch which her husband had given her a few days after her marriage, and had taken away from her six weeks later. But the watch had never come back to her. She gave a faint sigh of resignation. It was not within the compass of her mind to oppose him.

“We shall never get on while you play cards, Austin,” she said sadly.

“My dear Bessie, a man may win as well as lose. You see when I go into society there are certain things expected of me; and my only chance of getting on is by making myself agreeable to the people whose influence is worth having.”

“But I can’t see that card-playing leads to your getting commissions for pictures, Austin, no more than horseracing nor billiards. It all seems to end the same–in your losing money.”

The painter pushed away his plate with an impatient gesture. He was taking his breakfast in his painting-room, hours after the family meal, Bessie waiting upon him, and cobbling some juvenile garment during the intervals of her attendance. He pushed his plate aside, and got up to pace the room in the restless way that was common to him on such occasions.

“My dear child, if you don’t want to give me the locket, say so,” he said, “but don’t treat me to a sermon. You can keep it if you like, though I can’t conceive what use the thing can be to you. It’s not a thing you can wear.”

“Not at home, dear, certainly; and I never go out,” the wife answered, with the faintest touch of reproachfulness. “I am very fond of it, though, for your sister’s sake. It was so kind of her to bring it to me, and such a new thing for me to have a present. But you are welcome to it, Austin, if you really want it.”

“If I really want it! Do you suppose I should be mean enough to ask you for it if I didn’t? I shouldn’t so much care about it, you see, only I am to meet the man to-morrow evening at dinner, and I can’t face him without the money. So if you’ll look the thing out some time to-day, Bess, I’ll take it down to the Quai between this and to-morrow afternoon, and get the business over.”

Thus it was that George Fairfax, strolling into Mrs. Lovel’s sitting-room that afternoon while Austin was out, happened to find her seated in a pensive attitude, with an open work-box before her and Clarissa’s locket in her hand. It was a shabby battered old box, but had been for years the repository of all Bessie’s treasures.

She had kept the locket there, looking at it very often, and wondering if she would ever be able to wear it–if Austin would take her to a theatre, for instance, or give a little dinner at home instead of abroad, for once in a way, to some of the men whose society absorbed so much of his time.

There was no hope of this now. Once gone from her hand; the treasure would return no more. She knew that very well and was indulging her grief by a farewell contemplation of the trinket, when Mr. Fairfax came into the room.

The flash of the diamonds caught his quick eye.

“What a pretty locket you’ve got there, Mrs. Austin!” he said, as he shook hands with her. “A new-year’s gift from Austin, I suppose.”

“No, it was my sister-in-law, Mrs. Granger, who gave it me,” Bessie answered, with a sigh.

He was interested in it immediately, but was careful not to betray his interest. Mrs. Lovel put it into his hands. She was proud of it even in this last hour of possession. “Perhaps you’d like to look at it,” she said. “It’s got her ‘air inside.”

Yes, there was a circlet of the dark brown hair he knew so well, and the two works, “From Clarissa.”

“Upon my word, it’s very handsome,” he said, looking at the diamond cross outside, but thinking of the love-lock within. “I never saw a locket I liked better. You are very fond of it, I daresay?” he added interrogatively.

“O, yes, I like it very much! I can’t bear to part with it.”

And here Bessie Lovel, not being gifted with the power of concealing her emotions, fairly broke down and cried like a child.

“My dear Mrs. Austin,” exclaimed George Fairfax, “pray don’t distress yourself like that. Part with it? Why should you part with your locket?”

“O, Mr. Fairfax, I oughtn’t to have told you–Austin would be so angry if he knew–but he has been losing money at that horrid ecarty, and he says he must have ten pounds to-morrow; so my beautiful locket must go to the pawnbroker’s.”

George Fairfax paused. His first impulse was to lend the poor little woman the money–the veriest trifle, of course, to the lord of Lyvedon. But the next moment another idea presented itself to him. He had the locket lying in the open palm of his hand. It would be so sweet to possess that lock of hair–to wear so dear a token of his mistress. Even those two words, “From Clarissa,” had a kind of magic for him. It was a foolish weakness, of course; but then love is made up of such follies.

“If you really mean to part with this,” he said, “I should be very glad to have it. I would give you more than any pawnbroker–say, twenty instead of ten pounds, for instance–and a new locket for yourself into the bargain. I shouldn’t like to deprive you of an ornament you valued without some kind of compensation. I have taken a fancy to the design of the thing, and should really like to have it. What do you say now, Mrs. Austin–shall that be a transaction between you and me, without any reference to your husband, who might be angry with you for having let me into domestic secrets? You can tell him you got the money from the _mont de piete_. Look here, now; let’s settle the business at once.”

He opened his purse, and tumbled the contents out upon the table. Bessie Lovel thought what a blessed state of existence that must be in which people walked this world with all that ready money about them.

“There are just four-and-twenty pounds here,” he said cheerily; “so we’ll say four-and-twenty.”

He saw that she was yielding.

“And would you really give me a locket for myself,” she said, almost incredulously, “as well as this money?”

“Unquestionably. As good a one as I can find in the Rue de la Paix. This has diamonds, and that shall have diamonds. It’s the design, you see,” he added persuasively, “that has taken my fancy.”

“I’m sure you are very generous,” Bessie murmured, still hesitating.

“Generous! Pshaw, not at all. It’s a caprice; and I shall consider myself under an obligation to you if you gratify it.”

The temptation was irresistible. To obtain the money that was required–more than double the sum her husband had wanted–and to have another locket as well! Never, surely, had there been such a bargain since the famous magician offered new lamps for old ones. Of course, it was only Mr. Fairfax’s delicate way of doing them a kindness; his fancy for the locket was merely a benevolent pretence. What could he care for that particular trinket; he who might, so to speak, walk knee-deep in diamonds, if he pleased?

She took the twenty-four pounds–an English ten-pound note, and the rest in new glittering napoleons–and then began to speculate upon the possibility of giving Austin twenty pounds, and appropriating the balance to her own uses. The children wanted so many things–that perpetual want of the juvenile population above all, shoe-leather; and might she not even screw some cheap dress for herself out of the sum? while if it were all given to Austin, it would vanish, like smoke before the wind, leaving no trace behind.

So George Fairfax put the bauble in his waistcoat-pocket, and whatever sentimental pleasure might be derived from such a talisman was his. There are those among our disciples of modern magic who believe there is a subtle animal magnetism in such things; that the mere possession of such a token constitutes a kind of spiritual link between two beings. Mr. Fairfax had no such fancy; but it pleased him to have obtained that which no prayers of his could have won from Clarissa herself. Not at present, that is to say. It would all come in good time. She loved him; secure of that one fact, he believed all the rest a mere question of patience and constancy.

“And she is worth the winning,” he said to himself. “A man might serve for a longer slavery than Jacob’s, and yet be rewarded by such a conquest. I think, by the way, that Rachel must have been just a trifle faded when the patriarch was out of his time.”

He dawdled away an hour or so in Bessie’s salon–telling the poor little woman the news of the day, and playing with the two boys, who regarded him as a beneficent being, from whose hands flowed perpetual toys and sweetmeats. He waited as long as he could without making his motive obvious; waited, in the hope that Clarissa would come; and then, as there was no sign of her coming, and Austin was still out, he wished Bessie good-bye.

“I shan’t forget the locket,” he said, as he departed.

Austin came in five minutes afterwards. The boys had been scuttled off to take their evening meal in the kitchen–a darksome cupboard about eight feet square–where the tawdry servant was perpetually stewing savoury messes upon a small charcoal stove.

Bessie handed her husband the ten-pound note, and twelve bright napoleons.

“Why, what’s this?” he asked.

“The–the money for the locket, Austin. I thought you might be late home; so I ran round to the Quai with it myself. And I asked for twenty pounds, and the man gave it to me.”

“Why, that’s a brave girl!” cried Austin, kissing the pleading face uplifted to his. “I don’t believe they’d have given me as much. An English tenner, though; that’s odd!” he added carelessly, and then slipped the cash loose into his pocket, with the air of a man for whom money is at best a temporary possession.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THAT IS WHAT LOVE MEANS.

The Grangers and Mr. Fairfax went on meeting in society; and Daniel Granger, with whom it was a kind of habit to ask men to dinner, could hardly avoid inviting George Fairfax. It might have seemed invidious to do so; and for what reason should he make such a distinction? Even to himself Mr. Granger would not be willing to confess that he was jealous of this man. So Mr. Fairfax came with others of his species to the gorgeous caravanserai in the Rue de Morny, where the rooms never by any chance looked as if people lived in them, but rather as if they were waiting-rooms at some railway station got up with temporary splendour for the reception of royalty.

He came; and though Clarissa sometimes made feeble efforts to avoid him, it happened almost always, that before the evening was out he found some few minutes for unreserved talk with her. There is little need to record such brief stolen interviews–a few hurried words by the piano, a sentence or two in a lowered voice at parting. There was not much in the words perhaps–only very common words, that have done duty between thousands of men and women–a kind of signal code, as it were; and yet they had power to poison Clarissa’s life, to take the sweetness out of every joy, even a mother’s innocent idolatry of her child.

The words were spoken; but so carefully did George Fairfax play his part, that not even Sophia’s sharp eyes could perceive more than was correct in the conduct of her stepmother. No, she told herself, that other flirtation was the desperate one. Clarissa might have had some preference for George Fairfax; there had been occasional indications of such a feeling in her manner at Hale Castle; but the dark spot of her life, the secret of her girlhood, was a love affair with Mr. Austin.

By way of experiment, one day she asked her father’s wife a question about the painter.

“You seemed to admire Mr. Austin very much, Clarissa,” she said, “and I admit that he is remarkably clever; but he appears such a waif and stray. In all his conversation with us he never threw much light upon his own history. Do you know anything of his antecedents?”

Clarissa blushed in spite of herself. The deception she had sustained so long was unspeakably distasteful her. Again and again she had been tempted to hazard everything, and acknowledge Austin as her brother, whether he liked or not that she should do so. It was only his peremptory tone that had kept her silent.

“What should I know of his antecedents more than you, Sophy?” she said, avoiding a more direct reply. “It is quite enough for me to know that he has undeniable genius.”

The blush, and a certain warmth in her tone, seemed to Sophia conclusive evidence of her hidden regard for this man. Miss Granger’s heart beat a good deal faster than usual, and little jealous sparkles shone in her cold gray eyes. She had never admired any man so much as she had admired this brilliant young painter. Many men had paid her compliments; as the rich Mr. Granger’s sole daughter and heiress, she had been gratified with no meagre share of mankind’s worship; but no words ever spoken had sounded so sweet in her ears as those few civil speeches that Mr. Austin had found time to address to her during his visits to the Rue de Morny. And after having taken so much pleasure in his converse, and thought so much more about him than she would have considered it proper for any model villager to think about an individual of the opposite sex, it was a hard thing to find–first, that the base impostor had a wife; and secondly, that whatever illegitimate worship he might have to render, was to be offered at the shrine of Clarissa.

“Indeed!” she exclaimed, with an air of extreme surprise. “You seemed on such very friendly terms with him, that I fancied you must really have known each other before, and that you had some motive for concealing the fact from papa.”

Clarissa blushed a deeper crimson at this homethrust, and bent a little lower over her drawing-board. It seemed a fortunate thing that she happened to be painting when Miss Granger opened her guns upon her in this manner.

“He gives lessons, I believe; does he not?” asked Sophia.

“Yes–I–I believe–I have heard so.”

“Do you know, I took it into my head that he might have been your drawing-master at Belforet.”

Clarissa laughed aloud at this suggestion. Miss Granger’s persistent curiosity amused her a little, dangerous as the ground was.

“Oh dear no, he was not our master at Belforet,” she said. “We had a little old Swiss–such an ancient, ancient man–who took snuff continually, and was always talking about his _pays natal_ and Jean Jacques Rousseau. I think he had known Rousseau; and I am sure he was old enough to remember the night they locked him out of Geneva.”

Sophia was fairly posed; she had been on a false scent evidently, and yet she was sure there was something. That is how she shaped her doubts in her own mind–there was _something_. Warman thought so, she knew; and Warman was gifted with no ordinary amount of penetration.

So Mrs. Granger went her way, with suspicion around and about her, and danger ahead. Whatever peace had been hers in the brief period of her married life–and the quiet spring-time and summer that came after her baby’s birth had been very peaceful–had vanished now. A cloud of fear encompassed her; a constant melancholy possessed her; a pleading voice, which she ought never to have heard, was always in her ears–a voice that charged her with the burden of a broken life–a voice that told her it was only by some sacrifice of her own she could atone for the sacrifice that had been made for her–a too persuasive voice, with a perilous charm in its every accent.

She loved him. That she could ever be weak enough, or vile enough, to sink into that dread abyss, whereto some women have gone down for the love of man, was not within the compass of her thought. But she knew that no day in her life was sinless now; that no pure and innocent joys were left to her; that her every thought of George Fairfax was a sin against her husband.

And yet she went on loving him. Sometimes, when the dense of her guilt was strongest, she would fain have asked her husband to take her back to Arden; which must needs be a kind of sanctuary, as it were, she thought. Nay, hardly so; for even in that tranquil retreat Temple Fairfax had contrived to pursue her mother, with the poison of his influence and his presence. Very often she felt inclined to ask her husband this favour; but she could not do so without running some risk of betraying herself–Heaven knows how much she might betray–unawares. Again, their sojourn in the Rue de Morny was not to endure for ever. Already Mr. Granger had expressed himself somewhat tired of Paris; indeed, what denizen of that brilliant city does not become a little weary of its brightness, sooner or later, and fall sick of the Boulevard-fever–a harassing sense of all-pervading glare and confusion, a sensation of Paris on the brain?

There was some talk of returning to Arden at the end of a month. They were now at the close of January; by the first of March Mr. Granger hoped to be at the Court. His architect and his head-bailiff were alike eager for his return; there were more pullings down and reconstructions required on the new estate; there were all manner of recondite experiments to be tried in scientific farming: there were new leases to be granted, and expiring leases, the covenants whereof must be exacted.

Since they were likely to leave Paris so soon, it would be foolish to excite wonder by asking to leave sooner, Mrs. Granger thought. It mattered so little, after all, she told herself sometimes. It mattered this much only–that day by day her feet were straying farther from the right road.

O those happy winter afternoons in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard! Such innocent happiness, too, in all seeming–only a little animated rambling talk upon all manner of subjects, from the loftiest problems in philosophy to the frothiest gossip of the Faubourg St. Honore; only the presence of two people who loved each other to distraction. A dim firelit room; a little commonplace woman coming in and out; two young men disputing in the dusk; and Clarissa in her low chair by the fire, listening to the magical voice that was now the only music of her dreams. If it could have gone on for ever thus–a sweet sentimental friendship like that which linked Madame Roland and Brissot, Madame Recamier and Chateaubriand–there would surely have been no harm, Clarissa sometimes argued with herself. She was married to a man whom she could respect for many qualities of his heart and mind, against whom she could never seriously offend. Was it so great a sin if the friendship of George Fairfax was dear to her? if the few happy hours of her life were those she spent in his company? But such special pleading as this was the poorest sophistry; at heart she was conscious that it was so. A woman has a double conscience, as it were–a holy of holies within the temple of her mind, to which falsehood cannot enter. She may refuse to lift the screen, and meet the truth face to face; but it is there–not to be extinguished–eternal, immutable; the divine lamp given for her guidance, if only she will not withdraw herself from its light.

Just a little less than a month before his intended departure, Mr. Granger had a letter from that exacting bailiff, entreating his return. Something in the scientific farming had gone wrong, some great sewage question was at issue, and none but the lord of the soil himself could settle the matter. Very dear to Daniel Granger were those lands of Arden, that Arden-Court estate which he had made to spread itself so far over the face of the county. Sweet are ancestral domains, no doubt; dear by association, made holy by the pride of the race; but perhaps sweeter to the soul of man are those acres he has won by the work of his own strong hand, or his own steadfast brain. Next to his wife and children, in Mr. Granger’s regard, were the lands of Arden: the farms and homesteads, in valleys and on hill-tops; the cottages and school-houses, which he had built for the improvement of his species; the bran-new slack-baked gothic church in an outlying village, where the church had never been before his coming.

He was very sorry to leave his wife; but the question at stake was an important one. If he could have carried his household away with him at an hour’s notice, he would gladly have done so; but to move Clarissa and the nurse, and the baby, and Miss Granger, would be rather a formidable business–in fact, not to be done without elaborate preparation. He had the apartments in the Rue du Morny on his hands, too, until the beginning of March; and even a millionaire seldom cares to waste such a rental as Parisian proprietors exact for houseroom in a fashionable quarter. So he decided upon going to Arden at once–which was essential–and returning directly he had adjusted matters with his bailiff, and done a morning’s work with his architect.

He told Clarissa of his intention one evening when they had returned from a dinner-party, and she was seated before her dressing-table, taking off her jewels in a slow, absent way. She looked up with a start as her husband came into the room, and planted himself on the white sheepskin rug, with his back against the mantelpiece.

“I am obliged to go back to Yorkshire, Clary,” he said.

She thought he meant they were all going back–that it was an interposition of Providence, and she was to be taken away from sin and danger. But O, how hard it seemed to go–never again to look forward to those stolen twilights in her brother’s painting-room!

“I am glad!” she exclaimed. “I shall be very glad to go back to Arden.”

“You, my dear!” said her husband; “it is only I who am going. There is some hitch in our experiments on the home farm, and Forley knows how anxious I am about making a success this year. So he wants me to run over and see to things; he won’t accept the responsibility of carrying on any longer without me. I needn’t be away above two or three days, or a week at most. You can get on very well without me.”

Clarissa was silent, looking down at a bracelet which she was turning idly round her arm. Get on without him! Alas, what part had Daniel Granger played in her life of late beyond that of some supernumerary king in a stage-play?–a person of importance by rank and title in the play-bill, but of scarcely any significance to the story. Her guilty heart told her how little he had ever been to her; how, day by day, he had been growing less and less. And while he was away, she might go to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard every day. There would be nothing to prevent her so doing if she pleased. The carriage was nominally and actually hers. There was a brougham at Miss Granger’s disposal; but the landau was essentially Clarissa’s carriage.

“You can get on very well without me,” repeated Mr. Granger. “I do not think my presence or absence makes very much difference to you, Clarissa,” he added, in a grave displeased tone.

It was almost his first hint of a reproach. To his wife’s guilty heart it struck sharply home, like an unexpected blow. She looked up at him with a pale conscience-stricken face, in which he might have read much more than he did read there. He only thought that he had spoken a shade too severely–that he had wounded her.

“I–I don’t know what you mean by that,” she faltered helplessly, “I always try to please you.”

“Try to please me!” he repeated passionately. “Yes, Clary, as a child tries to please a schoolmaster. Do you know, that when I married you I was mad enough to hope the day would come when you would love me–that you loved me a little even then? Do you know how I have waited for that day, and have learned to understand, little by little, that it never can dawn for me upon this earth? You are my wife, and the mother of my child; and yet, God knows, you are no nearer to me than the day I first saw you at Hale Castle–a slim, girlish figure in a white dress, coming in at the door of the library. Not a whit nearer,” he went on, to himself rather than to Clarissa; “but so much more dear.”

There was a passion in his words which touched his wife. If it had only been possible for her to love him! If gratitude and respect, joined together, could have made up the sum of love; but they could not. She knew that George Fairfax was in all moral qualities this man’s inferior; yet, for some indefinable charm, some trick of tone or manner, some curious magic in a smile or a glance, she loved him.

She was silent. Perhaps the sense of her guilt came more fully home to her in this moment than it had ever done before. What words could she speak to bring comfort to her husband’s soul–she whose whole life was a lie?

Daniel Granger wandered up and down the room for some minutes in a vague restless way, and then came to his wife’s chair, and looked down at her very tenderly.

“My dear, I do wrong to worry you with reproaches,” he said. “The mistake has been mine. From first to last, I have been to blame. I suppose in the wisest life there must always be some folly. Mine has been the hope that I could win your love. It has gone now, Clarissa; it is quite gone. Not even my child has given me a place in your heart.”

She looked up at him again, with that look which expressed such a depth of remorse.

“I am very wicked,” she said, “I am utterly unworthy of all you have done for me. It would have been better for you never to have seen my face.”

“Wicked! no, Clary. Your only sin has been to have disappointed a foolish fancy. What right had I to suppose you loved me? Better never to have seen your face?–yes, perhaps that might have been better. But, once having seen you, I would rather be wretched with you than happy with any other woman in the world. That is what love means, Clary.”

He stooped down to kiss her.

“Say no more, dear,” he said, “I never meant to speak as I have spoken to-night. I love you for ever.”

The day came when she remembered those words, “I love you for ever.”

If she could have thrown herself upon his breast and acknowledged all her weakness, beseeching him to shield her from herself in obedience to the impulse of that moment, what a world of anguish might have been spared to these two! But she let the impulse pass, and kept silence.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XL.

LYING IN WAIT.

Mr. Granger went back to Yorkshire; and Clarissa’s days were at her own disposal. They were to leave Paris at the beginning of March. She knew it was only for a very short time that she would be able to see her brother. It was scarcely natural, therefore, that she should neglect such an opportunity as this. There was so much in Austin’s life that caused her uneasiness; he seemed in such sore need of wiser counsel than his poor empty-headed little wife could give him; and Clarissa believed that she had some influence with him: that if he would be governed by the advice of any creature upon earth, that counsellor was herself.

So she spent her mornings in baby-worship, and went every afternoon to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard, where it happened curiously that Mr. Fairfax came even oftener than usual just at this time. In the evening she stayed at home–not caring to keep her engagements in society without her husband’s escort–and resigned herself to the edifying companionship of Miss Granger, who was eloquent upon the benighted condition of the Parisian poor as compared with her model villagers. She described them sententiously as a people who put garlic in everything they ate, and never read their Bibles.

“One woman showed me a book with little pictures of saints printed upon paper with lace edges,” said Sophia, “as if there were any edification to be derived from lace edges; and such a heathen book too–Latin on one side and French on the other. And there the poor forsaken creatures sit in their churches, looking at stray pictures and hearing a service in an unknown tongue.”

Daniel Granger had been away nearly a week; and as yet there was no announcement of his return; only brief business-like letters, telling Clarissa that the drainage question was a complicated one, and he should remain upon the spot till he and Forley could see their way out of the difficulty. He had been away nearly a week, when George Fairfax went to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard at the usual hour, expecting to find Austin Lovel standing before his easel with a cigar in his mouth, and Clarissa sitting in the low chair by the fire, in the attitude he knew so well, with the red glow of the embers lighting up gleams of colour in her dark velvet dress, and shining on the soft brown hair crowned with a coquettish little seal-skin hat–a _toque_, as they called it on that side of the Channel.

What was his astonishment to find a pile of trunks and portmanteaus on the landing, Austin’s easel roughly packed for removal, and a heap of that miscellaneous lumber without which even poverty cannot shift its dwelling! The door was open; and Mr. Fairfax walked straight into the sitting-room, where the two boys were eating some extemporised meal at a side-table under their mother’s supervision; while Austin lounged with his back against the chimney-piece, smoking. He was a man who would have smoked during the culminating convulsions of an earthquake.

“Why, Austin, what the–I beg your pardon, Mrs. Austin–what _does_ this mean?”

“It means Brussels by the three-fifteen train, my dear Fairfax, that’s all.”

“Brussels? With those children and that luggage? What, in Heaven’s name, induces you to carry your family off like this, at an hour’s notice?”

“It is not an hour’s notice; they’ve had an hour and three-quarters. As to my reasons for this abrupt hegira–well, that involves rather a long story; and I haven’t time to tell it to-day. One thing is pretty clear–I can’t live in Paris. Perhaps I may be able to live in Brussels. I can’t very well do worse than I’ve done here–that’s _one_ comfort.”

At this Bessie Lovel began to cry–in a suppressed kind of way, like a woman who is accustomed to cry and not to be taken much notice of. George Fairfax flung himself into a chair with an impatient gesture. He was at once sorry for this man and angry with him; vexed to see any man go to ruin with such an utter recklessness, with such a deliberate casting away of every chance that might have redeemed him.

“You have got into some scrape, I suppose,” he said presently.

“Got into a scrape!” cried Austin with a laugh, tossing away the end of one cigar and preparing to light another. “My normal condition is that of being in a scrape. Egad! I fancy I must have been born so.–For God’s sake don’t whimper, Bessie, if you want to catch the three-fifteen train! _I_ go by that, remember, whoever stays behind.–There’s no occasion to enter into explanations, Fairfax. If you could help me I’d ask you to do it, in spite of former obligations; but you can’t. I have got into a difficulty–pecuniary, of course; and as the law of liability in this city happens to be a trifle more stringent than our amiable British code, I have no alternative but to bid good-bye to the towers of Notre Dame. I love the dear, disreputable city, with her lights and laughter, and music and mirth; but she loves not me.–When those boys have done gorging themselves, Bessie, you had better put on your bonnet.”

“His wife cast an appealing glance at George Fairfax, as if she felt she had a friend in him who would sustain her in any argument with her husband. Her face was very sad, and bore the traces of many tears.

“If you would only tell me why we are going, Austin,” she pleaded, “I could bear it so much better.”

“Nonsense, child! Would anything I could tell you alter the fact that we are going? Pshaw, Bessie! why make a fuss about trifles? The packing is over: that was the grand difficulty, I thought. I told you we could manage that.”

“It seems so hard–running away like criminals.”

Austin Lovel’s countenance darkened a little.

“I can go alone,” he said.

“No, no,” cried the wife piteously: “I’ll go with you. I don’t want to vex you, Austin. Haven’t I shared everything with you–everything? I would go with you if it was to prison–if it was to death. You know that.”

“I know that we shall lose the three-fifteen train if you don’t put on your bonnet.”

“Very well, Austin; I’m going. And Clarissa–what will she think of us? I’m so sorry to leave her.”

“O, by the way, George,” said Austin, “you might manage that business for me. My sister was to be here at five o’clock this afternoon. I’ve written her a letter telling her of the change in my plans. She was in some measure prepared for my leaving Paris; but not quite so suddenly as this. I was going to send the letter by a commissionnaire; but if you don’t mind taking it to the Rue de Morny, I’d rather trust it to you. I don’t want Clary to come here and find empty rooms.”

He took a sealed letter from the mantelpiece and handed it to George Fairfax, who received it with somewhat of a dreamy air, as of a man who does not quite understand the mission that is intrusted to him. It was a simple business enough, too–only the delivery of a letter.

Mrs. Lovel came out of the adjoining room dressed for the journey, and carrying a collection of wraps for the children. It was wonderful to behold what comforters, and scarves, and gaiters, and muffetees those juvenile individuals required for their equipment.

“Such a long cold journey!” the anxious mother exclaimed, and went on winding up the two children in woollen stuffs, as if they had been royal mummies. She pushes little papers of sandwiches into their pockets–sandwiches that would hardly be improved by the squeezing and sitting upon they must need undergo in the transit.

When this was done, and the children ready, she looked into the painting-room with a melancholy air.

“Think of all the furniture, Austin,” she exclaimed; “the cabinets and things!”

“Yes; there’s a considerable amount of money wasted there Bess; for I don’t suppose we shall ever see the things again, but there’s a good many of them not paid for. There’s comfort in that reflection.”

“You take everything go lightly,” she said with a hopeless sigh.

“There’s nothing between that and the Morgue, my dear. You’d scarcely like to see me framed and glazed _there_, I think.”

“O, Austin!”

“Precisely. So let me take things lightly, while I can. Now, Bess, the time is up. Good-bye, George.”

“I’ll come downstairs with you,” said Mr. Fairfax, still in a somewhat dreamy state. He had put Austin’s letter into his pocket, and was standing at a window looking down into the street, which had about as much life or traffic for a man to stare at as some of the lateral streets in the Bloomsbury district–Caroline-place, for instance, or Keppel-street.

There was a great struggling and bumping of porters and coachman on the stairs, with a good deal more exclamation than would have proceeded from stalwart Englishmen under the same circumstances; and then Austin went down to the coach with his wife and children, followed by George Fairfax. The painter happened not to be in debt to his landlord–a gentleman who gave his tenants small grace at any time; so there was no difficulty about the departure.

“I’ll write to Monsieur Meriste about my furniture,” he said to the guardian of the big dreary mansion. “You may as well come to the station with us, George,” he added, looking at Mr. Fairfax, who stood irresolute on the pavement, while Bessie and the boys were being packed into the vehicle, the roof of which was laden with portmanteaus and the painter’s “plant.”

“Well–no; I think not. There’s this letter to be delivered, you see. I had better do that at once.”

“True; Clarissa might come. She said five o’clock, though; but it doesn’t matter. Good-bye, old fellow. I hope some of these days I may be able to make things square with you. Good-bye, Tell Clary I shall write to her from Brussels, under cover to the maid as usual.”

He called out to the coachman to go on; and the carriage drove off, staggering under its load. George Fairfax stood watching it till it was out of sight, and then turned to the porter.

“Those rooms up-stairs will be to let, I suppose?” he said.

“But certainly, monsieur.”

“I have some thoughts of taking them for–for a friend. I’ll just take another look round them now they’re empty. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind my writing a letter up-stairs–eh?”

He slipped a napoleon into the man’s hand–by no means the first that he had given him. New-Year’s day was not far past; and the porter remembered that Mr. Fairfax had tipped him more liberally than some of the lodgers in the house. If monsieur had a legion of letters to write, he was at liberty to write them. The rooms up yonder were entirely at his disposal; the porter laid them at his feet, as it were. He might have occupied them rent-free for the remainder of his existence, it would have been supposed from the man’s manner.

“If madame, the sister of Monsieur Austin, should come by-and-by, you will permit her to ascend,” said Mr. Fairfax. “I have a message for her from her brother.”

“Assuredly, monsieur.”

The porter retired into his den to meditate upon his good fortune. It was a rendezvous, of course, cunningly arranged on the day of the painter’s departure. It seemed to him like a leaf out of one of those flabby novels on large paper, with a muddy wood-cut on every sixteenth page, which he thumbed and pored over now and then of an evening.

George Fairfax went up-stairs. How supremely dismal the rooms looked in their emptiness, with the litter of packing lying about!–old boots and shoes in one corner; a broken parasol in another; battered fragments of toys everywhere; empty colour-tubes; old newspapers and magazines; a regiment of empty oil-flasks and wine-bottles in the den of a kitchen–into which Mr. Fairfax peered curiously, out of very weariness. It was only half-past three; and there was little hope of Clarissa’s arrival until five. He meant to meet her there. In the moment that Austin put the letter in his hand some such notion flashed into his mind. He had never intended to deliver the letter. How long he had waited for this chance–to see her alone, free from all fear of interruption, and to be able to tell his story and plead his cause, as he felt that he could plead!

He walked up and down the empty painting-room, thinking of her coming, meditating what he should say, acting the scene over in his brain. He had little fear as to the issue. Secure as she seemed in the panoply of her woman’s pride, he knew his power, and fancied that it needed only time and opportunity to win her. This was not the first time he had counted his chances and arranged his plan of action. In the hour he first heard of her marriage he had resolved to win her. Outraged love transformed itself into a passion that was something akin to revenge. He scarcely cared how low he might bring her, so long as he won her for his own. He did not stop to consider whether hers was a mind which could endure dishonour. He knew that she loved him, and that her married life had been made unhappy because of this fatal love.

“I will open the doors of her prison-house,” he said to himself, “poor fettered soul! She shall leave that dreary conventional life, with its forms and ceremonies of pleasure; and we will wander all over the earth together, only to linger wherever this world is brightest. What can she lose by the exchange? Not wealth. For the command of all that makes life delightful, I am as rich a man as Daniel Granger, and anything beyond that is a barren surplus. Not position; for what position has she as Mrs. Granger? I will take her away from all the people who ever knew her, and guard her jealously from the hazard of shame. There will only be a couple of years in her life which she will have to blot out–only a leaf torn out of her history.”

And the child? the blue-eyed boy that George Fairfax had stopped to kiss in Arden Park that day? It is one thing to contemplate stealing a wife from her husband–with George Fairfax’s class there is a natural antipathy to husbands, which makes that seem a fair warfare, like fox-hunting–but it is another to rob a child of its mother. Mr. Fairfax’s meditations came to a standstill at this point–the boy blocked the line.

There was only one thing to be done; put on the steam, and run down the obstacle, as Isambard Brunel did in the Box-tunnel, when he saw a stray luggage-truck between him and the light.

“Let her bring the boy with her, and he shall be my son,” he thought.

Daniel Granger would go in for a divorce, of course. Mr. Fairfax thought of everything in that hour and a half of solitary reflection. He would try for a divorce, and there would be no end of scandal–leading articles in some of the papers, no doubt, upon the immorality of the upper middle classes; a full-flavoured essay in the Saturday, proving that Englishwomen were in the habit of running away from their husbands. But she should be far away from the bruit of that scandal. He would make it the business of his life to shield her from the lightest breath of insult. It could be done. There were new worlds, in which men and women could begin a fresh existence, under new names; and if by chance any denizen of the old world should cross their path untimely–well, such unwelcome wanderers are generally open to negotiation. There is a good deal of charity for such offenders among the travelled classes, especially when the chief sinner is lord of such an estate as Lyvedon.

Yet, varnish the picture how one will, dress up the story with what flowers of fancy one may, it is at best but a patched and broken business. The varnish brings out dark spots in the picture; the flowers have a faded meretricious look, not the bloom and dew of the garden; no sophistry can overcome the inherent ugliness of the thing–an honest man’s name dishonoured; two culprits planning a future life, to be spent in hiding from the more respectable portion of their species; two outcasts, trying to make believe that the wildernesses beyond Eden are fairer than that paradise itself.

His mother–what would she feel when she came to know what he had done with his life? It would be a disappointment to her, of course; a grief, no doubt; but she would have Lyvedon. He had gone too far to be influenced by any consideration of that kind; he had gone so far that life without Clarissa seemed to him unendurable. He paced the room, contemplating this crisis of his existence from every point of view, till the gray winter sky grew darker, and the time of Clarissa’s coming drew very near. There had been some logs smouldering on the hearth when he came, and these he had replenished from time to time. The glow of the fire was the only thing that relieved the dreariness of the room.

Nothing could be more fortunate, he fancied, than the accident which had brought about this meeting. Daniel Granger was away. The flight, which was to be the preface of Clarissa’s new existence, could not take place too soon; no time need be wasted on preparations, which could only serve to betray. Her consent once gained, he had only to put her into a hackney-coach and drive to the Marseilles station. Why should they not start that very night? There was a train that left Paris at seven, he knew; in three days they might be on the shores of the Adriatic.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XLI.

MR. GRANGER’S WELCOME HOME.

Clarissa left the Rue de Morny at three o’clock that day. She had a round of calls to make, and for that reason had postponed her visit to her brother’s painting-room to a later hour than usual. The solemn dinner, which she shared with Miss Granger in stately solitude, took place at half-past seven, until which hour she considered her time at her own disposal.

Sophia spent that particular afternoon at home, illuminating the new gothic texts for her schoolrooms at Arden. She had been seated at her work about an hour after Clarissa’s departure, when the door opened behind her, and her father walked into the room.

There had been no word of his return in his latest letter; he had only said generally in a previous epistle, that he should come back directly the business that had called him to Yorkshire was settled.

“Good gracious me, papa, how you startled me!” cried Miss Granger, dabbing at a spot of ultramarine which had fallen upon her work. It was not a very warm welcome; but when she had made the best she could of that unlucky blue spot, she laid down her brush and came over to her father, to whom she offered a rather chilly kiss. “You must be very tired, papa,” she remarked, with striking originality.

“Well, no; not exactly tired. We had a very fair passage; but the journey from Calais is tedious. It seems as if Calais oughtn’t to be any farther from Paris than Dover is from London. There’s something lop-sided in it. I read the papers all the way. Where’s Clarry?”

“Clarissa has gone to pay some visits.”

“Why didn’t you go with her?”

“I rarely do go with her, papa. Our sets are quite different; and I have other duties.”

“Duties, pshaw! Messing with those paint-brushes; you don’t call that duty, I hope? You had much better have gone out with your stepmother.”

“I was not wanted, papa. Mrs. Granger has engagements which do not in the least concern me. I should only be in the way.”

“What do you mean by that, Sophia?” asked her father sternly. “And what do you mean by calling my wife Mrs. Granger?”

“There are some people so uncongenial to each other, papa, that any pretence of friendship can be only the vilest hypocrisy,” replied Sophia, turning very pale, and looking her father full in the face, like a person prepared to do battle.

“I am very sorry to hear this, Sophia,” said Mr. Granger. “for if this is really the case, it will be necessary for you to seek some other home. I will have no one in my house who cannot value my wife.”

“You would turn me out of doors, papa?”

“I should certainly endeavour to provide you with a more congenial–congenial, that was the word you used, I think–more congenial home.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed Sophia. “Then I suppose you quite approve of all my stepmother’s conduct–of her frequent, almost daily visits to such a person as Mr. Austin?”

“Clarissa’s visits to Austin! What, in heaven’s name, do you mean?”

“What, papa! is it possible you are ignorant of the fact? I thought that, though my stepmother never talked to _me_ of her visits to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard, you of course knew all about them. Though I hardly supposed you would encourage such an intimacy.”

“Encourage such an intimacy! You must be dreaming, girl. My wife visit a portrait-painter–a single man?”

“He is not a single man, papa. There is a wife, I understand; though he never mentioned her to us. And Clarissa visits them almost every day.”

“I don’t believe it. What motive could she have for cultivating such people?”

“I can’t imagine–except that she is fond of that kind of society, and of painting. She may have gone to take lessons of Mr. Austin. He teaches, I know.”

Daniel Granger was silent. It was not impossible; and it would have been no crime on his wife’s part, of course. But the idea that Clarissa could have done such a thing without his knowledge and approval, offended him beyond measure. He could hardly realize the possibility of such an act.

“There is some misapprehension on your part, Sophia, I am convinced,” he said. “If Clarissa had wished to take drawing lessons from Austin, she would have told me so.”

“There is no possibility of a mistake on my part, papa. I am not in the habit of making statements which I cannot support.”

“Who told you of these visits? Clarissa herself?”

“O dear, no; Clarissa is not in the habit of telling me her affairs. I heard it from Warman; not in reply to any questioning of mine, I can assure you. But the thing has been so frequent, that the servants have begun to talk about it. Of course, I always make a point of discouraging any speculations upon my stepmother’s conduct.”

The servants had begun to talk; his wife’s intimacy with people of whom he knew scarcely anything had been going on so long as to provoke the gossip of the household; and he had heard nothing of it until this moment! The thought stung him to the quick. That domestic slander should have been busy with her name already; that she should have lived her own life so entirely without reference to him! Both thoughts were alike bitter. Yet it was no new thing for him to know that she did not love him.

He looked at his watch meditatively.

“Has she gone there this afternoon, do you think?” he asked.

“I think it is excessively probable. Warman tells me she has been there every afternoon during your absence.”

“She must have taken a strange fancy to these people. Austin’s wife is some old schoolfellow of Clary’s perhaps.”

Miss Granger shook her head doubtfully.

“I should hardly think that,” she said.

“There must be some reason–something that we cannot understand. She may have some delicacy about talking to me of these people; there may be something in their circumstances to–“

“Yes,” said Miss Granger, “there is _something_, no doubt. I have been assured of that from the first.”

“What did you say the address was?”

“The Rue du Chevalier Bayard, Number 7.”

Mr. Granger left the room without another word. He was not a man to remain long in doubt upon any question that could be solved by prompt investigation. He went out into the hall, where a footman sat reading _Galignani_ in the lamplight.

“Has Mrs. Granger’s carriage come back, Saunders?” he asked.

“Yes, sir; the carriage has been back a quarter of an hour. I were out with my mistress.”

“Where is Mrs. Granger? In her own rooms?”

“No, sir; Mrs. Granger didn’t come home in the carriage. We drove her to the Shangs Elysy first, sir, and afterwards to the Rue du Cavalier Baynard; and Mr. Fairfax, he came down and told me my mistress wouldn’t want the carriage to take her home.”

“Mr. Fairfax–in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard!”

“Yes, sir; he’s an intimate friend of Mr. Hostin’s, I believe. Leastways, we’ve seen him there very often.”

George Fairfax! George Fairfax a frequent guest of those people whom she visited! That slumbering demon, which had been sheltered in Daniel Granger’s breast so long, arose rampant at the sound of this name. George Fairfax, the man he suspected in the past; the man whom he had done his best to keep out of his wife’s pathway in the present, but who, by some fatality, was not be avoided. Had Clarissa cultivated an intimacy with this Bohemian painter and his wife only for the sake of meeting George Fairfax without her husband’s knowledge? To suppose this was to imagine a depth of depravity in the heart of the woman he loved. And he had believed her so pure, so noble a creature. The blow was heavy. He stood looking at his servant for a moment or so, paralysed; but except that one blank gaze, he gave no sign of his emotion. He only took up his hat, and went quietly out. “His looks was orful!” the man said afterwards in the servants’ hall.

Sophia came out of the drawing-room to look for her father, just a little disturbed by the thought of what she had done. She had gone too far, perhaps. There had been something in her father’s look when he asked her for that address that had alarmed her. He was gone; gone _there_, no doubt, to discover his wife’s motives for those strange visits. Miss Granger’s heart was not often fluttered as it was this evening. She could not “settle to anything,” as she said herself, but wandered up into the nursery, and stood by the dainty little cot, staring absently at her baby brother as he slept.

“If anything should happen,” she thought–and that event which she vaguely foreshadowed was one that would leave the child motherless–“I should make it _my_ duty to superintend his rearing. No one should have power to say that I was jealous of the brother who has robbed me of my heritage.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER XLII.

CAUGHT IN A TRAP.

It was dusk when Clarissa’s carriage drove into the Rue du Chevalier Bayard–the dull gray gloaming of February–and the great bell of Notre Dame was booming five. She had been paying visits of duty, talking banalities in fashionable drawing-rooms, and she was weary. She seemed to breathe a new life as she approached her brother’s dwelling. Here there would be the free reckless utterance of minds that harmonised, of souls that sympathised:–instead of stereotyped little scraps of gossip about the great world, or arid discussion of new plays and famous opera-singers.

She did not stop to ask any questions of the complacent porter. It was not her habit to do so. She had never yet failed to find Austin, or Austin’s wife, at home at this hour. She went swiftly up the darksome staircase, where never a lamp was lighted to illumine the stranger, only an occasional candle thrust out of a doorway by some friendly hand. In the dusk of this particular evening there was not so much as a glimmer.

The outer door was ajar–not such an uncommon thing as to occasion any surprise to Clarissa. She pushed it open and went in, across a dingy lobby some four feet square, on which abutted the kitchen, and into the salon. This was dark and empty; but one of the folding-doors leading into the painting-room was open, and she saw the warm glow of the fire shining on the old Flemish cabinets and the brazen chandelier. That glow of firelight had a comfortable look after the desolation and darkness of the salon.

She went into the painting-room. There was a tall figure standing by one of the windows, looming gigantic through the dusk–a figure she knew very well, but not Austin’s. She looked quickly round the room, expecting to see her brother lounging by the chimney-piece, or wandering about somewhere in his desultory way; but there was no one else, only that tall figure by the window.

The silence and emptiness of the place, and _his_ presence, startled her a little.

“Good-evening, Mr. Fairfax,” she said. “Isn’t Austin here?”

“Not at this moment. How do you do, Mrs. Granger?” and they shook hands. So commonplace a meeting might almost have disappointed the sentimental porter.

“And Bessie?” Clarissa asked.

“She too is out of the way for the moment,” replied George Fairfax, glancing out of the window. “You came in your carriage, I suppose, Mrs. Granger? If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll just ran and see if–if Austin has come in again.”

He went quickly out of the room and downstairs, not to look for Austin Lovel, who was on his way to Brussels by this time, but to tell Mrs. Granger’s coachman she had no farther use for the carriage, and would not be home to dinner. The man looked a little surprised at this order, but Mr. Fairfax’s tone was too peremptory to be unauthorised; so he drove homeward without hesitation.

Clarissa was seated in her favourite easy-chair, looking pensively at the wood-fire, when George Fairfax came back. She heard his returning footsteps, and the sharp click of a key turning in the outer door. This sound set her wondering. What door was that being locked, and by whom?

Mr. Fairfax came into the painting-room. It was the crisis of his life, he told himself. If he failed to obtain some promise from her to-night–some definite pledge of his future happiness–he could never hope to succeed.

“Time and I against any two,” he had said to himself sometimes in relation to this business. He had been content to bide his time; but the golden opportunity had come at last. If he failed to-night, he failed forever.

“Is he coming?” Clarissa asked, rather anxiously. There was something ominous in the stillness of the place, and the absence of any sign of life except George Fairfax’s presence.

“Not immediately. Don’t alarm yourself,” he said hurriedly, as Clarissa rose with a frightened look. “There is nothing really wrong, only there are circumstances that I felt it better to break to you gently. Yet I fear I am an awkward hand at doing that, at the best. The fact is, your brother has left Paris.”

“Left Paris!”

“Yes, only a couple of hours ago.” And then Mr. Fairfax went on to tell the story of Austin’s departure, making as light of it as he could, and with no word of that letter which had been given him to deliver.

The news was a shock to Clarissa. Very well did she remember what her brother had told her about the probability of his being compelled to “cut Paris.” It had come, then, some new disgrace, and banished him from the city he loved–the city in which his talents had won for him a budding reputation, that might have blossomed into fame, if he had only been a wiser and a better man. She heard George Fairfax in silence, her head bowed with shame. This man was her brother, and she loved him so dearly.

“Do you know where they have gone?” she asked at last.

“To Brussels. He may do very well there, no doubt, if he will only keep himself steady–turn his back upon the rackety society he is so fond of–and work honestly at his art. It is a place where they can live more cheaply, too, than they could here.”

“I am so sorry they are gone without a word of parting. It must have been very sudden.”

“Yes. I believe the necessity for the journey arose quite suddenly; or it may have been hanging over your brother for a long time, and he may have shut his eyes to the fact until the last moment. He is such a fellow for taking things easily. However, he did not enter into explanations with me.”

“Poor Austin! What a wretched life!”

Clarissa rose and moved slowly towards the folding-doors. George Fairfax stopped her at the threshold, and quietly closed the door.

“Don’t go yet, Clarissa. I want to speak to you.”

His tone told her what was coming–the scene in the conservatory was to be acted over again. This was the first time they had been actually alone since that too-well-remembered night.

She drew herself up haughtily. A woman’s weakness makes her desperate in such a case as this.

“I have no time to talk now, Mr. Fairfax. I am going home.”

“Not yet, Clarissa. I have waited a long time for this chance. I am determined to say my say.”

“You will not compel me to listen to you?”

“Compel is a very hard word. I beseech you to hear me. My future life depends on what I have to say, and on your answer.”

“I cannot hear a word! I will not remain a moment!”

“The door yonder is locked, Clarissa, and the key in my pocket. Brutal, you will say. The circumstances of our lives have left me no option. I have watched and waited for such an opportunity as this; and now, Clarissa, you shall hear me. Do you remember that night in the orchard, when you drove me away by your coldness and obstinacy? And yet you loved me! You have owned it since. Ah, my darling, how I have hated myself for my dulness that night!–hated myself for not having seized you in my arms, if need were, and carried you off to the end of the world to make you my wife. What a fool and craven I must have been to be put off so easily!”

“Nothing can be more foolish than to discuss the past, Mr. Fairfax,” replied Clarissa, in a low voice that trembled a little. “You have made me do wrong more than once in my life. There must be an end of this. What would my husband think, if he could hear you? what would he think of me for listening to you? Let me pass, if you please; and God grant that we may never meet again after to-night!”

“God grant that we may never part, Clarissa! O, my love, my love, for pity’s sake be reasonable! We are not children to play fast and loose with our lives. You love me, Clary. No sweet-spoken pretences, no stereotyped denials, will convince me. You love me, my darling, and the world is all before us. I have mapped-out our future; no sorrow or discredit shall ever come nigh you–trust a lover’s foresight for that. Whatever difficulties may lie in our pathway are difficulties that I will face and conquer–alone. You have only to forget that you have ever been Daniel Granger’s wife, and leave Paris with me to-night.”

“Mr. Fairfax! are you mad?”

“Never more reasonable–never so much in earnest. Come with me, Clarissa. It is not a sacrifice that I ask from you: I offer you a release. Do you think there is any virtue or beauty in your present life, or any merit in continuing it? From first to last, your existence is a lie. Do you think a wedding-ring redeems the honour of a woman who sells herself for money? There is no slavery more degrading than the bondage of such an alliance.”

“Open the door, Mr. Fairfax, and let me go!”

His reproaches stung her to the quick; they were so bitterly true.

“Not till you have heard me, my darling–not till you have heard me out.”

His tone changed all at once, softening into ineffable tenderness. He told her of his love with words of deeper passion than he had ever spoken yet–words that went home to the heart that loved him. For a moment, listening to that impassioned pleading, it seemed to Clarissa that this verily was life indeed–that to be so loved was in itself alone the perfect joy and fulness of existence, leaving nothing more to be desired, making shame as nothing in the balance. In that one moment the guilty heart was well-nigh yielding; the bewildered brain could scarcely maintain the conflict of thought and feeling. Then suddenly this mental agony changed to a strange dulness, a mist rose between Clarissa and the eager face of her lover. She was nearer fainting than she had ever been in her life before.

George Fairfax saw her face whiten, and the slender figure totter ever so slightly. In a moment a strong arm was round her. The weary head sank on his shoulder.

“My darling,” he whispered, “why not leave Paris to-night? It cannot be too soon. Your husband is away. We shall have a start of two or three days, and avoid all risk of pursuit.”

“Not quite,” said a voice close behind him; and looking round, George Fairfax saw one of the folding-doors open, and Daniel Granger standing on the threshold. The locked outer door had availed the traitor nothing. Mr. Granger had come upstairs with the porter, who carried a bunch of duplicate keys in his pocket.

Clarissa gave a sudden cry, which rose in the next instant to a shrill scream. Two men were struggling in the doorway, grappling each other savagely for one dreadful minute of confusion and agony. Then one fell heavily, his head crashing against the angle of the doorway, and lay at full length, with his white face looking up to the ceiling.

This was George Fairfax.

Clarissa threw herself upon her knees beside the prostrate figure.

“George! George!” she cried piteously.

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

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

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

“You have killed him,” she said.

“I hope I have.”

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

“Yes,” he said, “I hope I have killed your lover.”

“My lover!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can’t you pick a fellow up?”

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

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

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

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

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

“There was no seizure–no fit of any kind, I hope?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, ma’am; but you’ll have something sent up, won’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It can’t be too early for me.”

“I’m glad to hear that; I’ll go in and take a look at the child–asleep, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir; fast asleep.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will not be parted from my child!”

“That is a question which I have to settle.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarissa rose at the word, with a shrill indignant cry. For a few moments she stood looking at her accuser, magnificent in her anger and surprise.