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The Lovels of Arden

by M. E. Braddon · English · Gutenberg #9475 · 1,045,252 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lovels of Arden

Author: M. E. Braddon


        
Release date: December 1, 2005 [eBook #9475]
                Most recently updated: June 9, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9475

Credits: Produced by Jonathan Ingram and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOVELS OF ARDEN ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram and PG Distributed Proofreaders









[Illustration: Henry French, del.

E. Evans, sc.

"Mr. Granger seated himself by his wife's side and bent
down to kiss his son without waking him."]


THE

LOVELS OF ARDEN

BY THE AUTHOR OF

"LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "AURORA FLOYD," "VIXEN," "ISHMAEL," ETC., ETC.,
ETC.

CHEAP UNIFORM EDITION OF MISS BRADDON'S NOVELS.

_Price 2s. picture boards; 2s. 6d. cloth gilt; 3s. 6d. half parchment or
half morocco; postage 4d._

MISS BRADDON'S NOVELS

INCLUDING

"LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN," "ISHMAEL," ETC.

"No one can be dull who has a novel by Miss Braddon in hand. The most
tiresome journey is beguiled, and the most wearisome illness is brightened,
by any one of her books."

"Miss Braddon is the Queen of the circulating libraries."--_The World._

N.B.--There are now 43 Novels always in print. For full list see back of
cover, or apply for a Catalogue, to be sent (post free).




CONTENTS

CHAP.

  I.       COMING HOME
  II.      BEGINNING THE WORLD
  III.     FATHER AND DAUGHTER
  IV.      CLARISSA IS "TAKEN UP"
  V.       AT HALE CASTLE
  VI.      AND THIS IS GEORGE FAIRFAX
  VII.     DANGEROUS GROUND
  VIII.    SMOULDERING FIRES
  IX.      LADY LAURA DIPLOMATISES
  X.       LADY LAURA'S PREPARATIONS
  XI.      DANIEL GRANGER
  XII.     MR. GRANGER IS INTERESTED
  XIII.    OPEN TREASON
  XIV.     THE MORNING AFTER
  XV.      CHIEFLY PATERNAL
  XVI.     LORD CHALDERWOOD IS THE CAUSE OF INCONVENIENCE
  XVII.    "'TIS DEEPEST WINTER IN LORD TIMON'S PURSE"
  XVIII.   SOMETHING FATAL
  XIX.     MR. GRANGER IS PRECIPITATE
  XX.      MODEL VILLAGERS
  XXI.     VERY FAR GONE
  XXII.    TAKING THE PLEDGE
  XXIII.   "HE'S SWEETEST FRIEND, OR HARDEST FOE"
  XXIV.    "IT MEANS ARDEN COURT"
  XXV.     WEDDING BELLS
  XXVI.    COMING HOME
  XXVII.   IN THE SEASON
  XXVIII.  MR. WOOSTER
  XXIX.    "IF I SHOULD MEET THEE--"
  XXX.     THE HEIR OF ARDEN
  XXXI.    THE NEAREST WAY TO CARLSRUHE
  XXXII.   AUSTIN
  XXXIII.  ONLY A PORTRAIT-PAINTER
  XXXIV.   AUSTIN'S PROSPECTS
  XXXV.    SISTERS-IN-LAW
  XXXVI.   "AND THROUGH THE LIFE HAVE I NOT WRIT MY NAME?"
  XXXVII.  STOLEN HOURS
  XXXVIII. "FROM CLARISSA"
  XXXIX.   THAT IS WHAT LOVE MEANS
  XL.      LYING IN WAIT
  XLI.     MR. GRANGER'S WELCOME HOME
  XLII.    CAUGHT IN A TRAP
  XLIII.   CLARISSA'S ELOPEMENT
  XLIV.    UNDER THE SHADOW OF ST. GUDULE
  XLV.     TEMPTATION
  XLVI.    ON THE WING
  XLVII.   IN TIME OF NEED
  XLVIII.  "STRANGERS YET"
  XLIX.    BEGINNING AGAIN
  L.       HOW SUCH THINGS END




CHAPTER I.

COMING HOME.


The lamps of the Great Northern Terminus at King's Cross had not long been
lighted, when a cab deposited a young lady and her luggage at the departure
platform. It was an October twilight, cold and gray, and the place had
a cheerless and dismal aspect to that solitary young traveller, to whom
English life and an English atmosphere were somewhat strange.

She had been seven years abroad, in a school near Paris; rather an
expensive seminary, where the number of pupils was limited, the masters and
mistresses, learned in divers modern accomplishments, numerous, and the
dietary of foreign slops and messes without stint.

Dull and gray as the English sky seemed to her, and dreary as was the
aspect of London in October, this girl was glad to return to her native
land. She had felt herself very lonely in the French school, forgotten and
deserted by her own kindred, a creature to be pitied; and hers was a nature
to which pity was a torture. Other girls had gone home to England for their
holidays; but vacation after vacation went by, and every occasion brought
Clarissa Lovel the same coldly worded letter from her father, telling her
that it was not convenient for him to receive her at home, that he had
heard with pleasure of her progress, and that experienced people with whom
he had conferred, had agreed with him that any interruption to the regular
course of her studies could not fail to be a disadvantage to her in the
future.

"They are all going home except me, papa," she wrote piteously on one
occasion, "and I feel as if I were different from them, somehow. Do let
me come home to Arden for this one year. I don't think my schoolfellows
believe me when I talk of home, and the gardens, and the dear old park. I
have seen it in their faces, and you cannot think how hard it is to bear.
And I want to see you, papa. You must not fancy that, because I speak of
these things, I am not anxious for that. I do want to see you very much.
By-and-by, when I am grown up, I shall seem a stranger to you."

To this letter, and to many such, letters, Mr. Lovel's reply was always the
same. It did not suit his convenience that his only daughter should return
to England until her education was completed. Perhaps it would have suited
him better could she have remained away altogether; but he did not say as
much as that; he only let her see very clearly that there was no pleasure
for him in the prospect of her return.

And yet she was glad to go back. At the worst it was going home. She told
herself again and again, in those meditations upon her future life which
were not so happy as a girl's reveries should be,--she told herself that
her father must come to love her in time. She was ready to love him so much
on her part; to be so devoted, faithful, and obedient, to bear so much from
him if need were, only to be rewarded with his affection in the end.

So at eighteen years of age Clarissa Lovel's education was finished, and
she came home alone from a quiet little suburban village just outside
Paris, and having arrived to-night at the Great Northern Station, King's
Cross, had still a long journey before her.

Mr. Lovel lived near a small town called Holborough, in the depths of
Yorkshire; a dreary little town enough, but boasting several estates of
considerable importance in its neighbourhood. In days gone by, the Lovels
had been people of high standing in this northern region, and Clarissa had
yet to learn how far that standing was diminished.

She had been seated about five minutes in a comfortable corner of a
first-class carriage, with a thick shawl over her knees, and all her little
girlish trifles of books and travelling bags gathered about her, and she
had begun to flatter herself with the pleasing fancy that she was to have
the compartment to herself for the first stage of the journey, perhaps for
the whole of the journey, when a porter flung open the door with a bustling
air, and a gentleman came in, with more travelling-rugs, canes, and
umbrellas, russia leather bags, and despatch boxes, than Clarissa had ever
before beheld a traveller encumbered with. He came into the carriage very
quietly, however, in spite of these impedimenta, arranged his belongings in
a methodical manner, and without the slightest inconvenience to Miss
Lovel, and then seated himself next the door, upon the farther side of the
carriage.

Clarissa looked at him rather anxiously, wondering whether they two were to
be solitary companions throughout the whole of that long night journey. She
had no prudish horror of such a position, only a natural girlish shyness in
the presence of a stranger.

The traveller was a man of about thirty, tall, broad-shouldered, with long
arms, and powerful-looking hands, ungloved, and bronzed a little by sun and
wind. There was the same healthy bronze upon his face, Clarissa perceived,
when he took off his hat, and hung it up above him; rather a handsome face,
with a long straight nose, dark blue eyes with thick brown eyebrows, a well
cut mouth and chin, and a thick thatch of crisp dark brown hair waving
round a broad, intelligent-looking forehead. The firm, full upper lip was
half-hidden by a carefully trained moustache; and in his dress and bearing
the stranger had altogether a military air: one could fancy him a cavalry
soldier. That bare muscular hand seemed made to grasp the massive hilt of a
sabre.

His expression was grave--grave and a little proud, Clarissa thought;
and, unused as she was to lonely wanderings in this outer world, she felt
somehow that this man was a gentleman, and that she need be troubled by no
fear that he would make his presence in any way unpleasant to her, let
their journey together last as long as it would.

She sank back into her corner with a feeling of relief. It would have been
more agreeable for her to have had the carriage to herself; but if she must
needs have a companion, there was nothing obnoxious in this one.

For about an hour they sped on in silence. This evening train was not
exactly an express, but it was a tolerably quick train, and the stoppages
were not frequent. The dull gray twilight melted into a fair tranquil
night. The moon rose early; and the quiet English landscape seemed very
fair to Clarissa Lovel in that serene light. She watched the shadowy fields
flitting past; here and there a still pool, or a glimpse of running water;
beyond, the sombre darkness of wooded hills; and above that dark background
a calm starry sky. Who shall say what dim poetic thoughts were in her mind
that night, as she looked at these things? Life was so new to her, the
future such an unknown country--a paradise perhaps, or a drear gloomy
waste, across which she must travel with bare bleeding feet. How should she
know? She only knew that she was going home to a father who had never loved
her, who had deferred the day of her coming as long as it was possible for
him decently to do so.

The traveller in the opposite corner of the carriage glanced at Miss Lovel
now and then as she looked out of the window. He could just contrive to
see her profile, dimly lighted by the flickering oil lamp; a very perfect
profile, he thought; a forehead that was neither too high nor too low, a
small aquiline nose, a short upper lip, and the prettiest mouth and chin in
the world. It was just a shade too pensive now, the poor little mouth, he
thought pityingly; and he wondered what it was like when it smiled. And
then he began to arrange his lines for winning the smile he wanted so much
to see from those thoughtful lips. It was, of course, for the gratification
of the idlest, most vagabond curiosity that he was eager to settle this
question: but then on such a long dreary journey, a man may be forgiven for
a good deal of idle curiosity.

He wondered who his companion was, and how she came to be travelling alone,
so young, so pretty, so much in need of an escort. There was nothing in her
costume to hint at poverty, nor does poverty usually travel in first-class
carriages. She might have her maid lurking somewhere in the second-class,
he said to himself. In any case, she was a lady. He had no shadow of doubt
about that.

She was tall, above the ordinary height of women. There was a grace in the
long flowing lines of her figure more striking than the beauty of her face.
The long slim throat, the sloping shoulder, not to be disguised even by
the clumsy folds of a thick shawl--these the traveller noted, in a lazy
contemplative mood, as he lolled in his corner, meditating an easy opening
for a conversation with his fair fellow-voyager.

He let some little time slip by in this way, being a man to whom haste was
almost unknown. This idle artistic consideration of Miss Lovel's beauty was
a quiet kind of enjoyment for him. She, for her part, seemed absorbed
in watching the landscape--a very commonplace English landscape in the
gentleman's eyes--and was in no way disturbed by his placid admiration.

He had a heap of newspapers and magazines thrown pell-mell into the empty
seat next him; and arousing himself with a faint show of effort presently,
he began to turn these over with a careless hand.

The noise of his movements startled Clarissa; she looked across at him, and
their eyes met. This was just what he wanted. He had been curious to see
her eyes. They were hazel, and very beautiful, completing the charm of her
face.

"May I offer you some of these things?" he said. "I have a reading lamp
in one of my bags, which I will light for you in a moment. I won't pledge
myself for your finding the magazines very amusing, but anything is better
than the blankness of a long dreary journey."

"Thank you, you are very kind; but I don't care about reading to-night; I
could not give you so much trouble."

"Pray don't consider that. It is not a question of a moment's trouble. I'll
light the lamp, and then you can do as you like about the magazines."

He stood up, unlocked one of his travelling-bags, the interior of which
glittered like a miniature arsenal, and took out a lamp, which he lighted
in a rapid dexterous manner, though without the faintest appearance of
haste, and fixed with a brass apparatus of screws and bolts to the arm
of Clarissa's seat. Then he brought her a pile of magazines, which she
received in her lap, not a little embarrassed by this unexpected attention.
He had called her suddenly from strange vague dreams of the future, and it
was not easy to come altogether back to the trivial commonplace present.

She thanked him graciously for his politeness, but she had not smiled yet.

"Never mind," the traveller said to himself; "that will come in good time."

He had the easiest way of taking all things in life, this gentleman; and
having established Clarissa with her lamp and books, sank lazily back into
his corner, and gave himself up to a continued contemplation of the fair
young face, almost as calmly as if it had been some masterpiece of the
painter's art in a picture gallery.

The magazines were amusing to Miss Lovel. They beguiled her away from those
shapeless visions of days to come. She began to read, at first with very
little thought of the page before her, but, becoming interested by degrees,
read on until her companion grew tired of the silence.

He looked at his watch--the prettiest little toy in gold and enamel, with
elaborate monogram and coat of arms--a watch that looked like a woman's
gift. They had been nearly three hours on their journey.

"I do not mean to let you read any longer," he said, changing his seat to
one opposite Clarissa. "That lamp is very well for an hour or so, but after
that time the effect upon one's eyesight is the reverse of beneficial. I
hope your book is not very interesting."

"If you will allow me to finish this story," Clarissa pleaded, scarcely
lifting her eyes from the page. It was not particularly polite, perhaps,
but it gave the stranger an admirable opportunity for remarking the dark
thick lashes, tinged with the faintest gleam of gold, and the perfect curve
of the full white eyelids.

"Upon my soul, she is the loveliest creature I ever saw," he said to
himself; and then asked persistently, "Is the story a long one?"

"Only about half-dozen pages more; O, do please let me finish it!"

"You want to know what becomes of some one, or whom the heroine marries, of
course. Well, to that extent I will be a party to the possible injury of
your sight."

He still sat opposite to her, watching her in the old lazy way, while she
read the last few pages of the magazine story. When she came to the end,
a fact of which he seemed immediately aware, he rose and extinguished the
little reading lamp, with an air of friendly tyranny.

"Merciless, you see," he said, laughing. "O, _la jeunesse_, what a
delicious thing it is! Here have I been tossing and tumbling those
unfortunate books about for a couple of hours at a stretch, without being
able to fix my attention upon a single page; and here are you so profoundly
absorbed in some trivial story, that I daresay you have scarcely been
conscious of the outer world for the last two hours. O, youth and
freshness, what pleasant things they are while we can keep them!"

"We were not allowed to read fiction at Madame Marot's," Miss Lovel
answered simply. "Anything in the way of an English story is a treat when
one has had nothing to read but Racine and Telemaque for about six years of
one's life."

"The Inimical Brothers, and Iphigenia; Athalie, as performed before Louis
Quatorze, by the young ladies of St. Cyr, and so on. Well, I confess
there are circumstances under which even Racine might become a bore; and
Telemaque has long been a synonym for dreariness and dejection of mind.
You have not seen Rachel? No, I suppose not. She was a great creature, and
conjured the dry bones into living breathing flesh. And Madame Marot's
establishment, where you were so hardly treated, is a school, I conclude?"

"Yes, it is a school at Belforet, near Paris. I have been there a long
time, and am going home now to keep house for papa."

"Indeed! And is your journey a long one? Are we to be travelling companions
for some time to come?"

"I am going rather a long way--to Holborough."

"I am very glad to hear that, for I am going farther myself, to the outer
edge of Yorkshire, where I believe I am to do wonderful execution upon the
birds. A fellow I know has taken a shooting-box yonder, and writes me most
flourishing accounts of the sport. I know Holborough a little, by the way.
Does your father live in the town?"

"O, no; papa could never endure to live in a small country town. Our house
is a couple of miles away--Arden Court; perhaps you know it?"

"Yes, I have been to Arden Court," the traveller answered, with rather a
puzzled air. "And your papa lives at Arden?--I did not know he had any
other daughter," he added in a lower key, to himself rather than to his
companion. "Then I suppose I have the pleasure of speaking to Miss--"

"My name is Lovel My father is Marmaduke Lovel, of Arden Court."

The traveller looked at her with a still more puzzled air, as if singularly
embarrassed by this simple announcement. He recovered himself quickly,
however, with a slight effort.

"I am proud and happy to have made your acquaintance, Miss Lovel," he said;
"your father's family is one of the best and oldest in the North Riding."

After this, they talked of many things; of Clarissa's girlish experiences
at Belforet; of the traveller's wanderings, which seemed to have extended
all over the world.

He had been a good deal in India, in the Artillery, and was likely to
return thither before long.

"I had rather an alarming touch of sunstroke a year ago," he said, "and was
altogether such a shattered broken-up creature when I came home on sick
leave, that my mother tried her hardest to induce me to leave the service;
but though I would do almost anything in the world to please her, I could
not bring myself to do that; a man without a profession is such a lost
wretch. It is rather hard upon her, poor soul; for my elder brother died
not very long ago, and she has only my vagabond self left. 'He was the only
son of his mother, and she was a widow.'"

"I have no mother," Clarissa said mournfully; "mine died when I was quite a
little thing. I always envy people who can speak of a mother."

"But, on the other hand, I am fatherless, you see," the gentleman said,
smiling. But Clarissa's face did not reflect his smile.

"Ah, that is a different thing," she said softly.

They went on talking for a long while, talking about the widest range of
subjects; and their flight across the moonlit country, which grew darker
by-and-by, as that tender light waned, seemed swifter than Clarissa could
have imagined possible, had the train been the most desperate thing in the
way of an express. She had no vulgar commonplace shyness, mere school-girl
as she was, and she had, above all, a most delightful unconsciousness of
her own beauty; so she was quickly at home with the stranger, listening to
him, and talking to him with a perfect ease, which seemed to him a natural
attribute of high breeding.

"A Lovel," he said to himself once, in a brief interval of silence; "and so
she comes of that unlucky race. It is scarcely strange that she should be
beautiful and gifted. I wonder what my mother would say if she knew that my
northern journey had brought me for half-a-dozen hours _tete-a-tete_ with
a Lovel? There would be actual terror for her in the notion of such an
accident. What a noble look this girl has!--an air that only comes after
generations of blue blood untainted by vulgar admixture. The last of such
a race is a kind of crystallisation, dangerously, fatally brilliant, the
concentration of all the forces that have gone before."

At one of their halting-places, Miss Lovel's companion insisted upon
bringing her a cup of coffee and a sponge-cake, and waited upon her with a
most brotherly attention. At Normanton they changed to a branch line, and
had to wait an hour and a half in that coldest dreariest period of the
night that comes before daybreak. Here the stranger established Clarissa in
a shabby little waiting-room, where he made up the fire with his own hands,
and poked it into a blaze with his walking-stick; having done which, he
went out into the bleak night and paced the platform briskly for nearly an
hour, smoking a couple of those cigars which would have beguiled his night
journey, had he been alone.

He had some thoughts of a third cigar, but put it back into his case, and
returned to the waiting-room.

"I'll go and have a little more talk with the prettiest woman I ever met in
my life," he said to himself. "It is not very likely that we two shall ever
see each other again. Let me carry away the memory of her face, at any
rate. And she is a Lovel! Will she be as unfortunate as the rest of her
race, I wonder? God forbid!"

Clarissa was sitting by the fire in the dingy little waiting-room, with one
elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her chin leaning on her hand, and
her eyes fixed thoughtfully upon a dull red chasm in the coals. She had
taken off her gray felt hat, and she looked older without it, the traveller
thought, in spite of her wealth of waving dark brown hair, gathered into a
great coil of plaits at the back of the graceful head. Perhaps it was that
thoughtful expression which made her look older than she had seemed to him
in the railway carriage, the gentleman argued with himself; a very grave
anxious expression for a girl's face. She had indeed altogether the
aspect of a woman, rather than of a girl who had just escaped from
boarding-school, and to whom the cares of life must needs be unknown.

She was thinking so deeply, that she did not hear the opening of the door,
or her fellow-traveller's light footstep as he crossed the room. He was
standing on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking down at her, before
she was aware of his presence. Then she raised her head with a start; and
he saw her blush for the first time. "You must have been absorbed in some
profound meditation, Miss Lovel," he said lightly.

"I was thinking of the future."

"Meaning your own future. Why, at your age the future ought to be a most
radiant vision."

"Indeed it is not that. It is all clouds and darkness. I do not see that
one must needs be happy because one is young. There has been very little
happiness in my life yet awhile, only the dreary monotonous routine of
boarding-school."

"But all that is over now, and life is just beginning for you. I wish I
were eighteen instead of eight-and-twenty."

"Would you live your life over again?"

The traveller laughed.

"That's putting a home question," he said. "Well, perhaps not exactly the
same life, though it has not been a bad one. But I should like the feeling
of perfect youth, the sense of having one's full inheritance of life lying
at one's banker's, as it were, and being able to draw upon the account a
little recklessly, indifferent as to the waste of a year or two. You see
I have come to a period of existence in which a man has to calculate his
resources. If I do not find happiness within the next five years, I am
never likely to find it at all. At three-and-thirty a man has done with a
heart, in a moral and poetic sense, and begins to entertain vague alarms on
the subject of fatty degeneration."

Clarissa smiled faintly, as if the stranger's idle talk scarcely beguiled
her from her own thoughts.

"You said you had been at Arden," she began rather abruptly; "then you must
know papa."

"No, I have not the honour to know Mr. Lovel," with the same embarrassed
air which he had exhibited before in speaking of Arden Court. "But I am
acquainted--or I was acquainted, rather, for he and I have not met for some
time--with one member of your family, a Mr. Austin Lovel."

"My brother," Clarissa said quickly, and with a sudden shadow upon her
face.

"Your brother; yes, I supposed as much."

"Poor Austin! It is very sad. Papa and he are ill friends. There was some
desperate quarrel between them a few years ago; I do not even know what
about; and Austin was turned out of doors, never to come back any more.
Papa told me nothing about it, though it was the common talk at Holborough.
It was only from a letter of my aunt's that I learnt what had happened; and
I am never to speak of Austin when I go home, my aunt told me."

"Very hard lines," said the stranger, with a sympathetic air. "He was wild,
I suppose, in the usual way. Your brother was in a line regiment when I
knew him; but I think I heard afterwards that he had sold out, and had
dropped away from his old set, had emigrated, I believe, or something of
that kind exactly the thing I should do, if I found myself in difficulties;
turn backwoodsman, and wed some savage woman, who should rear my dusky
race, and whose kindred could put me in the way to make my fortune by
cattle-dealing; having done which, I should, of course, discover that fifty
years of Europe are worth more than a cycle of Cathay, and should turn my
steps homeward with a convenient obliviousness upon the subject of the
savage woman."

He spoke lightly, trying to win Clarissa from her sad thoughts, and with
the common masculine idea, that a little superficial liveliness of this
kind can lighten the load of a great sorrow.

"Come, Miss Lovel, I would give the world to see you smile. Do you know
that I have been watching for a smile ever since I first saw your face, and
have not surprised one yet? Be sure your brother is taking life pleasantly
enough in some quarter of the globe. We worthless young fellows always
contrive to fall upon our feet."

"If I could believe that he was happy, if I could think that he was leading
an honourable life anywhere, I should not feel our separation so much," the
girl said mournfully; "but to be quite ignorant of his fate, and not to be
allowed to mention his name, that is hard to bear. I cannot tell you how
fond I was of him when we were children. He was seven years older than I,
and so clever. He wanted to be a painter, but papa would not hear of that.
Yet I think he might have been happier if he had been allowed to have his
own way. He had a real genius for art."

"And you too are fond of art, I suppose?" hazarded the traveller, more
interested in the young lady herself than in this reprobate brother of
hers.

"Yes, I am very fond of it. It is the only thing I really care for. Of
course, I like music to a certain extent; but I love painting with my whole
heart."

"Happy art, to be loved by so fair a votary! And you dabble with brushes
and colours, of course?"

"A little."

"A true young lady's answer. If you were a Raffaelle in glace silk and
crinoline, you would tell me no more than that. I can only hope that some
happy accident will one day give me an opportunity of judging for myself.
And now, I think, you had better put on your hat. Our train will be in
almost immediately."

She obeyed him; and they went out together to the windy platform, where
the train rumbled in presently. They took their places in a carriage, the
gentleman bundling in his rugs and travelling-bags and despatch boxes
with very little ceremony; but this time they were not alone. A plethoric
gentleman, of the commercial persuasion, was sleeping laboriously in one
corner.

The journey to Holborough lasted a little less than an hour. Miss Lovel
and her companion did not talk much during that time. She was tired and
thoughtful, and he respected her silence. As she drew nearer home, the
happiness she had felt in her return seemed to melt away somehow, leaving
vague anxieties and morbid forebodings in its stead. To go home to a father
who would only be bored by her coming. It was not a lively prospect for a
girl of eighteen.

The dull cold gray dawn was on the housetops of Holborough, as the train
stopped at the little station. The traveller alighted, and assisted
Clarissa's descent to the platform.

"Can I see about your luggage, Miss Lovel?" he asked; but looking up
at that moment, the girl caught sight of a burly gentleman in a white
neckcloth, who was staring in every direction but the right one.

"Thank you very much, no; I need not trouble you. My uncle Oliver is here
to meet me--that stout gentleman over there."

"Then I can only say good-bye. That tiresome engine is snorting with a
fiendish impatience to bear me away. Good-bye, Miss Lovel, and a thousand
thanks for the companionship that has made this journey so pleasant to me."

He lifted his hat and went back to the carriage, as the stout gentleman
approached Clarissa. He would fain have shaken hands with her, but
refrained from that unjustifiable familiarity. And so, in the bleak early
autumnal dawn, they parted.

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER II.

BEGINNING THE WORLD.


"Who on earth was that man you were talking to, Clary?" asked the Reverend
Mathew Oliver, when he had seen his niece's luggage carried off to a fly,
and was conducting her to that vehicle. "Is it any one you know?"

"O, no, uncle; only a gentleman who travelled in the same carriage with me
from London. He was very kind."

"You seemed unaccountably familiar with him," said Mr. Oliver with an
aggrieved air; "you ought to be more reserved, my dear, at your age. A
young lady travelling alone cannot be too careful. Indeed, it was very
wrong of your father to allow you to make this long journey alone. Your
aunt has been quite distressed about it."

Clarissa sighed faintly; but was not deeply concerned by the idea of her
aunt's distress. Distress of mind, on account of some outrage of propriety
on the part of her relatives, was indeed almost the normal condition of
that lady.

"I travelled very comfortably, I assure you, uncle Oliver," Clarissa
replied. "No one was in the least rude or unpleasant. And I am so glad to
come home--I can scarcely tell you how glad--though, as I came nearer and
nearer, I began to have all kinds of fanciful anxieties. I hope that all is
well--that papa is quite himself."

"O, yes, my dear; your papa is--himself," answered the parson, in a tone
that implied that he did not say very much for Mr. Lovel in admitting that
fact. "Your papa is well enough in health, or as well as he will ever
acknowledge himself to be. Of course, a man who neither hunts nor shoots,
and seldom gets out of bed before ten o'clock in the day, can't expect to
be remarkably robust. But your father will live to a good old age, child,
rely upon it, in spite of everything."

"Am I going straight home, uncle?"

"Well, yes. Your aunt wished you to breakfast at the Rectory; but there are
your trunks, you see, and altogether I think it's better for you to go home
at once. You can come and see us as often as you like."

"Thank you, uncle. It was very kind of you to meet me at the station. Yes,
I think it will be best for me to go straight home. I'm a little knocked up
with the journey. I haven't slept five minutes since I left Madame Marot's
at daybreak yesterday."

"You're looking rather pale; but you look remarkably well in spite of
that--remarkably well. These six years have changed you from a child into
a woman. I hope they gave you a good education yonder; a solid practical
education, that will stand by you."

"I think so, uncle. We were almost always at our studies. It was very hard
work."

"So much the better. Life is meant to be hard work. You may have occasion
to make use of your education some day, Clary."

"Yes," the girl answered with a sigh; "I know that we are poor."

"I suppose so; but perhaps you hardly know how poor."

"Whenever the time comes, I shall be quite ready to work for papa," said
Clarissa; yet she could not help wondering how the master of Arden Court
could ever bring himself to send out his daughter as a governess; and
then she had a vague childish recollection that not tens of pounds, but
hundreds, and even thousands, had been wanted to stop the gaps in her
father's exchequer.

They drove through Holborough High Street, where there was the faint stir
and bustle of early morning, windows opening, a housemaid kneeling on a
doorstep here and there, an occasional tradesman taking down his shutters.
They drove past the fringe of prim little villas on the outskirts of the
town, and away along a country road towards Arden; and once more Clarissa
saw the things that she had dreamed of so often in her narrow white bed in
the bleak dormitory at Belforet. Every hedge-row and clump of trees
from which the withered leaves were drifting in the autumn wind, every
white-walled cottage with moss-grown thatch and rustic garden, woke a faint
rapture in her breast. It was home. She remembered her old friends the
cottagers, and wondered whether goody Mason were still alive, and whether
Widow Green's fair-haired children would remember her. She had taught
them at the Sunday-school; but they too must have grown from childhood to
womanhood, like herself, and were out at service, most likely, leaving Mrs.
Green's cottage lonely.

She thought of these simple things, poor child, having so little else to
think about, on this, her coming home. She was not so foolish as to expect
any warm welcome from her father. If he had brought himself just to
tolerate her coming, she had sufficient reason to be grateful. It was only
a drive of two miles from Holborough to Arden. They stopped at a lodge-gate
presently; a little gothic lodge, which was gay with scarlet geraniums
and chrysanthemums, and made splendid by railings of bronzed ironwork.
Everything had a bright new look which surprised Miss Lovel, who was
not accustomed to see such, perfect order or such fresh paint about her
father's domain.

"How nice everything looks!" she said.

"Yes," answered her uncle, with a sigh; "the place is kept well enough
nowadays."

A woman came out to open the gates--a brisk young person, who was a
stranger to Clarissa, not the feeble old lodge-keeper she remembered in her
childhood. The change, slight as it was, gave her a strange chill feeling.

"I wonder how many people that I knew are dead?" she thought.

They drove into the park, and here too, even in this autumn season,
Clarissa perceived traces of care and order that were strange to her. The
carriage road was newly gravelled, the chaos of underwood among the old
trees had disappeared, the broad sweeps of grass were smooth and level as
a lawn, and there were men at work in the early morning, planting rare
specimens of the fir tribe in a new enclosure, which filled a space that
had been bared twenty years before by Mr. Lovel's depredations upon the
timber.

All this bewildered Clarissa; but she was still more puzzled, when, instead
of approaching the Court the fly turned sharply into a road leading across
a thickly wooded portion of the park, through which there was a public
right of way leading to the village of Arden.

"The man is going wrong, uncle!" she exclaimed.

"No, no, my dear; the man is right enough."

"But indeed, uncle Oliver, he is driving to the village."

"And he has been told to drive to the village."

"Not to the Court?"

"To the Court! Why, of course not. What should we have to do at the Court
at half-past seven in the morning?"

"But I am going straight home to papa, am I not?"

"Certainly."

And then, after staring at his niece's bewildered countenance for a few
moments, Mr. Oliver exclaimed,----

"Why, surely, Clary, your father told you----"

"Told me what, uncle?"

"That he had sold Arden."

"Sold Arden! O, uncle, uncle!"

She burst into tears. Of all things upon this earth she had loved the grand
old mansion where her childhood had been spent. She had so little else to
love, poor lonely child, that it was scarcely strange she should attach
herself to lifeless things. How fondly she had remembered the old place in
all those dreary years of exile, dreaming of it as we dream of some lost
friend. And it was gone from her for ever! Her father had bartered away
that most precious birthright.

"O, how could he do it! how could he do it!" she cried piteously.

"Why, my dear Clary, you can't suppose it was a matter of choice with him.
'Needs must when'--I daresay you know the vulgar proverb. Necessity has no
law. Come, come, my dear, don't cry; your father won't like to see you
with red eyes. It was very wrong of him not to tell you about the sale of
Arden--excessively wrong. But that's just like Marmaduke Lovel; always
ready to shirk anything unpleasant, even to the writing of a disagreeable
letter."

"Poor dear papa! I don't wonder he found it hard to write about such a
thing; but it would have been better for me to have known. It is such a
bitter disappointment to come home and find the dear old place gone from
us. Has it been sold very long?"

"About two years. A rich manufacturer bought it--something in the cloth
way, I believe. He has retired from business, however, and is said to be
overwhelmingly rich. He has spent a great deal of money upon the Court
already, and means to spend more I hear."

"Has he spoiled it--modernised it, or anything of that kind?"

"No; I am glad to say that he--or his architect perhaps--has had the good
taste to preserve the mediaeval character of the place. He has restored the
stonework, renewing all the delicate external tracery where it was lost or
decayed, and has treated the interior in the same manner. I have dined with
Mr. Granger once or twice since the work was finished, and I must say the
place is now one of the finest in Yorkshire--perhaps the finest, in its
peculiar way. I doubt if there is so perfect a specimen of gothic domestic
architecture in the county."

"And it is gone from us for ever!" said Clarissa, with a profound sigh.

"Well, my dear Clary, it is a blow, certainly; I don't deny that. But there
is a bright side to everything; and really your father could not afford to
live in the place. It was going to decay in the most disgraceful manner. He
is better out of it; upon my word he is."

Clarissa could not see this. To lose Arden Court seemed to her unmitigated
woe. She would rather have lived the dreariest, loneliest life in one
corner of the grand old house, than have occupied a modern palace. It was
as if all the pleasant memories of her childhood had been swept away from
her with the loss of her early home. This was indeed beginning the world;
and a blank dismal world it appeared to Clarissa Lovel, on this melancholy
October morning.

They stopped presently before a low wooden gate, and looking out of the
window of the fly, Miss Lovel saw a cottage which she remembered as a
dreary uninhabited place, always to let; a cottage with a weedy garden,
and a luxuriant growth of monthly roses and honeysuckle covering it from
basement to roof; not a bad sort of place for a person of small means and
pretensions, but O, what a descent from the ancient splendour of Arden
Court!--that Arden which had belonged to the Lovels ever since the land
on which it stood was given to Sir Warren Wyndham Lovel, knight, by his
gracious master King Edward IV., in acknowledgment of that warrior's
services in the great struggle between Lancaster and York.

There were old-fashioned casement windows on the upper story, and queer
little dormers in the roof. Below, roomy bows had been added at a much
later date than the building of the cottage. The principal doorway was
sheltered by a rustic porch, spacious and picturesque, with a bench on each
side of the entrance. The garden was tolerably large, and in decent order,
and beyond the garden was a fine old orchard, divided from lawn and
flower-beds only by a low hedge, full of bush-roses and sweet brier. It was
a very pretty place in summer, not unpicturesque even at this bleak season;
but Clarissa was thinking of lost Arden, and she looked at Mill Cottage
with mournful unadmiring eyes. There had been a mill attached to the place
once. The old building was there still, indeed, converted into a primitive
kind of stable; hence its name of Mill Cottage. The stream still ran
noisily a little way behind the house, and made the boundary which divided
the orchard from the lands of the lord of Arden. Mill Cottage was on the
very edge of Arden Court. Clarissa wondered that her father could have
pitched his tent on the borders of his lost heritage.

"I think I would have gone to the other end of the world, had I been in his
place," she said to herself.

An elderly woman-servant came out, in answer to the flyman's summons; and
at her call, a rough-looking young man emerged from the wooden gate opening
into a rustic-looking stable-yard, where the lower half of the old mill
stood, half-hidden by ivy and other greenery, and where there were
dovecotes and a dog-kennel.

Mr. Oliver superintended the removal of his niece's trunks, and then
stepped back into the fly.

"There's not the slightest use in my stopping to see your father, Clary,"
he said; "he won't show for a couple of hours at least. Good-bye, my dear;
make yourself as comfortable as you can. And come and see your aunt as soon
as you've recovered from your long journey, and keep up your spirits, my
dear.--Martha, be sure you give Miss Lovel a good breakfast.--Drive back to
the Rectory, coachman.--Good-bye, Clarissa;" and feeling that he had shown
his niece every kindness that the occasion required, Mr. Oliver bowled
merrily homewards. He was a gentleman who took life easily--a pastor of
the broad church--tolerably generous and good to his poor; not given to
abnormal services or daily morning prayer; content to do duty at Holborough
parish church twice on a Sunday, and twice more in the week; hunting a
little every season, in a black coat, for the benefit of his health, as he
told his parishioners; and shooting a good deal; fond of a good horse,
a good cellar, a good dinner, and well-filled conservatories and
glass-houses; altogether a gentleman for whom life was a pleasant journey
through a prosperous country. He had, some twenty years before, married
Frances Lovel; a very handsome woman--just a little faded at the time
of her marriage--without fortune. There were no children at Holborough
Rectory, and everything about the house and gardens bore that aspect of
perfect order only possible to a domain in which there are none of those
juvenile destroyers.

"Poor girl," Mr. Oliver muttered to himself, as he jogged comfortably
homewards, wondering whether his people would have the good sense to cook
'those grouse' for breakfast. "Poor Clary, it was very hard upon her; and
just Like Marmaduke not to tell her."

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER III.

FATHER AND DAUGHTER.


While Mr. Oliver went back to the Rectory, cheered by the prospect of
possible grouse, Clarissa entered her new home, so utterly strange to her
in its insignificance. The servant, Martha, who was a stranger to her, but
who had a comfortable friendly face, she thought, led her into a room at
the back of the cottage, with a broad window opening on to a lawn, beyond
which Clarissa saw the blue mill-stream. It was not a bad room at all:
countrified-looking and old-fashioned, with a low ceiling and wainscoted
walls. Miss Lovel recognised the ponderous old furniture from the
breakfast-room at Arden--high-backed mahogany chairs of the early Georgian
era, with broad cushioned seats covered with faded needlework; a curious
old oval dining-table, capable of accommodating about six; and some slim
Chippendale coffee-tables and cheffoniers, upon which there were a few
chipped treasures of old Battersea and Bow china. The walls were half-lined
with her father's books--rare old books in handsome bindings. His
easy-chair, a most luxurious one, stood in a sheltered corner of the
hearth, with a crimson silk banner-screen hanging from the mantelpiece
beside it, and a tiny table close at hand, on which there were a noble
silver-mounted meerschaum, and a curious old china jar for tobacco. The
oval table was neatly laid for breakfast, and a handsome brown setter lay
basking in the light of the fire. Altogether, the apartment had a very
comfortable and home-like look.

"The tea's made, miss," said the servant; "and I've a savoury omelette
ready to set upon the table. Perhaps you'd like to step upstairs and take
off your things before you have your breakfast? Your papa begged you
wouldn't wait for him. He won't be down for two hours to come."

"He's quite well, I hope?"

"As well as he ever is, miss. He's a bit of an invalid at the best of
times."

Remembering what Mr. Oliver had said, Clarissa was not much disturbed by
this intelligence. She was stooping to caress the brown setter, who had
been sniffing at her dress, and seemed anxious to inaugurate a friendship
with her.

"This is a favourite of papa's, I suppose?" she said.

"O Lord, yes, miss. Our master do make a tremenjous fust about Ponto. I
think he's fonder of that dumb beast than any human creature. Eliza shall
show you your room, miss, while I bring in the teapot and such-like.
There's only me and Eliza, who is but a bit of a girl; and John Thomas, the
groom, that brought your boxes in just now. It's a change for your pa from
the Court, and all the servants he had there; but he do bear it like a true
Christian, if ever there was one."

Clarissa Lovel might have wondered a little to hear this--Christianity not
being the dominant note in her father's character; but it was only like her
father to refrain from complaint in the hearing of such a person as honest
Martha. A rosy-faced girl of about fifteen conducted Miss Lovel to a
pleasant bedroom, with three small windows; one curiously placed in
an angle of the room, and from which--above a sweep of golden-tinted
woodland--Clarissa could see the gothic chimneys of Arden Court. She stood
at this window for nearly ten minutes, gazing out across those autumnal
woods, and wondering how her father had nerved himself for the sacrifice.

She turned away from the little casement at last with a heavy sigh, and
began to take off her things. She bathed her face and head in cold
water, brushed out her long dark hair, and changed her thick merino
travelling-dress for a fresher costume. While she was doing these things,
her thoughts went back to her companion of last night's journey; and, with
a sudden flush of shame, she remembered his embarrassed look when she had
spoken of her father as the owner of Arden Court. He had been to Arden, he
had told her, yet had not seen her father. She had not been particularly
surprised by this, supposing that he had gone to the Court as an ordinary
sight-seer. Her father had never opened the place to the public, but he had
seldom refused any tourist's request to explore it.

But now she understood that curious puzzled look of the stranger's, and
felt bitterly ashamed of her error. Had he thought her some barefaced
impostor, she wondered? She was disturbed in these reflections by the trim
rosy-cheeked house-maid, who came to tell her that breakfast had been on
the table nearly a quarter of an hour. But in the comfortable parlour
downstairs, all the time she was trying to do some poor justice to
Martha's omelette, her thoughts dwelt persistently upon the unknown of the
railway-carriage, and upon the unlucky mistake which she had made as to her
father's position.

"He could never guess the truth," she said to herself. "He could never
imagine that I was going home, and yet did not know that my birthplace had
been sold."

He was so complete a stranger to her--she did not even know his name--so it
could surely matter very little whether he thought well or ill of her.
And yet she could not refrain from torturing herself with all manner of
annoying suppositions as to what he might think. Miss Lovel's character was
by no means faultless, and pride was one of the strongest ingredients in
it. A generous and somewhat lofty nature, perhaps, but unschooled and
unchastened as yet.

After a very feeble attempt at breakfast, Clarissa went out into the
garden, closely attended by Ponto, who seemed to have taken a wonderful
fancy to her. She was very glad to be loved by something on her return
home, even a dog. She went out through the broad window, and explored
garden and orchard, and wandered up and down by the grassy bank of the
stream. She was fain to own that the place was pretty: and she fancied how
well she might have loved it, if she had been born here, and had never been
familiar with the broad terraces and verdant slopes of Arden Court. She
walked in the garden till the village-church clock struck ten, and then
went hastily in, half-afraid lest her father should have come down to the
parlour in her absence, and should be offended at not finding her ready to
receive him.

She need not have feared this. Mr. Lovel was rarely offended by anything
that did not cause him physical discomfort.

"How do you do, my dear?" he said, as she came into the room, in very much
the same tone he might have employed had they seen each other every day for
the last twelve months. "Be sure you never do that again, if you have the
faintest regard for me."

"Do what, papa?"

"Leave that window open when you go out. I found the room a perfect
ice-house just now. It was very neglectful of Martha to allow it. You'd
better use the door at the end of the passage in future, when you go into
the garden. It's only a little more trouble, and I can't stand open windows
at this time of year."

"I will be sure to do so, papa," Clarissa answered meekly. She went up to
her father and kissed him, the warmth and spontaneity of their greeting a
little diminished by this reproof about the window; but Clarissa had not
expected a very affectionate reception, and was hardly disappointed. She
had only a blank hopeless kind of feeling; a settled conviction that there
was no love for her here, and that there had never been any.

"My dear father," she began tenderly, "my uncle told me about the sale of
Arden. I was so shocked by the news--so sorry--for your sake."

"And for your own sake too, I suppose," her father answered bitterly. "The
less this subject is spoken of between us in future, the better we shall
get on together, Clarissa."

"I will keep silence, papa."

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

"O, papa, papa!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And that can never be, papa?"

"Never!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER IV.

CLARISSA IS "TAKEN UP."


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was bright midsummer weather, a glorious prolific season, with the
thermometer ranging between seventy and eighty, when Lady Laura Armstrong
did at last make her appearance at Mill Cottage. The simple old-fashioned
garden was all aglow with roses; the house half-hidden beneath the
luxuriance of foliage and flowers, a great magnolia on one side climbing up
to the dormer windows, on the other pale monthly roses, and odorous golden
and crimson tinted honeysuckle. Lady Laura was in raptures with the place.
She found Clarissa sitting in a natural arbour made by a group of old
hawthorns and a wild plum-tree, and placed herself at once upon a footing
of perfect friendliness and familiarity with the girl. Mr. Lovel was out--a
rare occurrence. He had gone for a stroll through the village with Ponto.

"And why are you not with him?" asked Lady Laura, who, like most of these
clever managing women, had a knack of asking questions. "You must be a
better companion than Ponto."

"Papa does not think so. He likes walking alone. He likes to be quite free
to dream about his books, I fancy, and it bores him rather to have to
talk."

"Not a very lively companion for you, I fear. Why, child, how dismal your
life must be!"

"O, no; not dismal. It is very quiet, of course; but I like a quiet life."

"But you go to a good many parties, I suppose, in Holborough and the
neighbourhood? I know the Holborough people are fond of giving parties, and
are quite famous for Croquet."

"No, Lady Laura; papa won't let me visit any one at Holborough, except my
uncle and aunt, the Olivers."

"Yes; I know the Olivers very well indeed. Remarkably pleasant people."

"And I don't even know how to play croquet."

"Why, my poor benighted child, in what a state of barbarism this father of
yours is bringing you up! How are you ever to marry and take your place
in the world? And with your advantages, too! What can the man be dreaming
about? I shall talk to him very seriously. We are quite old friends, you
know, my dear, and I can venture to say what I like to him. You must come
to me immediately. I shall have a houseful of people in a week or two,
and you shall have a peep at the gay world. Poor little prison flower! no
wonder you look thoughtful and pale. And now show me your garden, please,
Miss Lovel. We can stroll about till your father comes home; I mean to talk
to him _at once_."

Energy was one of the qualities of her own character for which Laura
Armstrong especially valued herself. She was always doing something or
other which she was not actually called upon by her own duty or by the
desire of other people to do, and she was always eager to do it "at once."
She had come to Mill Cottage intending to show some kindness to Clarissa
Lovel, whose father and her own father, the Earl of Calderwood, had been
firm friends in the days when the master of Arden entertained the county;
and Clarissa's manner and appearance having impressed her most favourably,
she was eager to do her immediate service, to have her at the Castle, and
show her to the world, and get her a rich husband if possible.

In honest truth, this Lady Laura Armstrong was a kindly disposed,
sympathetic woman, anxious to make the best of the opportunities which
Providence had given her with so lavish a hand, and to do her duty towards
her less fortunate neighbours. The office of Lady Bountiful, the position
of patroness, suited her humour. Her active frivolous nature, which spurned
repose, and yet never rose above trifles, found an agreeable occupation in
the exercise of this kind of benign influence upon other people's lives.
Whether she would have put herself seriously out of the way for the benefit
of any of these people to whom she was so unfailingly beneficent, was a
question which circumstances had never yet put to the test. Her benevolence
had so far been of a light, airy kind, which did not heavily tax her bodily
or mental powers, or even the ample resources of her purse.

She was a handsome woman, after a fair, florid, rather redundant style
of beauty, and was profoundly skilled in all those arts of costume and
decoration by which such beauty is improved. A woman of middle height, with
a fine figure, a wealth of fair hair, and an aquiline nose of the true
patrician type, her admirers said. The mouth was rather large, but redeemed
by a set of flashing teeth and a winning smile; the chin inclined to be of
that order called "double;" and indeed a tendency to increasing stoutness
was one of the few cares which shadowed Lady Laura's path. She was
five-and-thirty, and had only just begun to tell herself that she was no
longer a girl. She got on admirably with Clarissa, as she informed her
husband afterwards when she described the visit.

The girl was fascinated at once by that frank cordial manner, and was quite
ready to accept Lady Laura for her friend, ready to be patronised by her
even, with no sense of humiliation, no lurking desire to revolt against the
kind of sovereignty with which her new friend took possession of her.

Mr. Lovel came strolling in by-and-by, with his favourite tan setter,
looking as cool as if there were no such thing as blazing midsummer
sunshine, and found the two ladies sauntering up and down the grassy walk
by the mill-stream, under the shadow of gnarled old pear and quince trees.
He was charmed to see his dear Lady Laura. Clarissa had never known him
so enthusiastic or so agreeable. It was quite a new manner which he put
on--the manner of a man who is still interested in life. Lady Laura began
almost at once with her reproaches. How could he be so cruel to this dear
child? How could he be so absurd as to bury her alive in this way?

"She visits no one, I hear," cried the lady; "positively no one."

"Humph! she has been complaining, has she?" said Mr. Lovel, with a sharp
glance at his daughter.

"Complaining! O no, papa! I have told Lady Laura that I do not care about
gaiety, and that you do not allow me to visit."

"_Aut Caesar aut nullus_--the best or nothing. I don't want Clarissa to be
gadding about to all the tea-drinkings in Holborough; and if I let her go
to one house, I must let her go to all."

"But you will let her come to me?"

"That is the best, my dear Lady Laura. Yes, of course she may come to you,
whenever you may please to be troubled with her."

"Then I please to be troubled with her immediately. I should like to carry
her away with me this afternoon, if it were possible; but I suppose that
can't be--there will be a trunk to be packed, and so on. When will you
come to me, Miss Lovel? Do you know, I am strongly tempted to call you
Clarissa?"

"I should like it so much better," the girl answered, blushing.

"What! may I? Then I'm sure I will. It's such a pretty name, reminding one
of that old novel of Richardson's, which everybody quotes and no one ever
seems to have read. When will you come, Clarissa?"

"Give her a week," said her father; "she'll want a new white muslin gown, I
daresay; young women always do when they are going visiting."

"Now, pray don't let her trouble herself about anything of that kind; my
maid shall see to all that sort of thing. We will make her look her best,
depend upon it. I mean this visit to be a great event in her life, Mr.
Lovel, if possible."

"Don't let there be any fuss or trouble about her. Every one knows that I
am poor, and that she will be penniless when I am gone. Let her wear her
white muslin gown, and give her a corner to sit in. People may take her for
one of your children's governesses, if they choose; but if she is to see
society, I am glad for her to see the best."

"People shall not take her for one of my governesses; they shall take her
for nothing less than Miss Lovel of Arden. Yes, of Arden, my dear sir;
don't frown, I entreat you. The glory of an old house like that clings to
those who bear the old name, even though lands and house are gone--Miss
Lovel, of Arden. By the way, how do you get on with your neighbour, Mr.
Granger?"

"I do not get on with him at all. He used to call upon me now and then,
but I suppose he fancied, or saw somehow or other--though I am sure I was
laboriously civil to him--that I did not care much for his visits; at any
rate, he dropped them. But he is still rather obtrusively polite in sending
me game and hot-house fruit and flowers at odd times, in return for which
favours I can send him nothing but a note of thanks--'Mr. Lovel presents
his compliments to Mr. Granger, and begs to acknowledge, with best thanks,
&c.'--the usual formula."

"I am so sorry you have not permitted him to know you," replied Lady Laura.
"We saw a good deal of him last year--such a charming man! what one may
really call a typical man--the sort of person the French describe as
solid---_Carre par la base_--a perfect block of granite; and then, so
_enormously_ rich!"

Lady Laura glanced at Clarissa, as if she were inspired with some sudden
idea. She was subject to a sudden influx of ideas, and always fancied her
ideas inspirations. She looked at Clarissa, and repeated, with a meditative
air, "So _enormously_ rich!"

"There is a grown-up daughter, too," said Mr. Lovel; "rather a
stiff-looking young person. I suppose she is solid, too."

"She is not so charming as her father," replied Lady Laura, with whom that
favourite adjective served for everything in the way of praise. To her the
Pyramids and Niagara, a tropical thunderstorm, a mazourka by Chopin, and a
Parisian bonnet, were all alike charming. "I suppose solidity isn't so nice
in a girl," she went on, laughing; "but certainly Sophia Granger is not
such a favourite with me as her father is. I suppose she will make a
brilliant marriage, however, sooner or later, unattractive as she may be;
for she'll have a superb fortune,--unless, indeed, her father should take
it into his head to marry again."

"Scarcely likely that, I should think, after seventeen years of widowhood.
Why, Granger must be at least fifty."

"My dear Mr. Lovel, I hope you are not going to call that a great age."

"My dear Lady Laura, am I likely to do so, when my own fiftieth birthday
is an event of the past? But I shouldn't suppose Granger to be a marrying
man," he added meditatively; "such an idea has never occurred to me
in conjunction with him." And here he glanced ever so slightly at his
daughter. "That sort of granite man must take a great deal of thawing."

"There are suns that will melt the deepest snows," answered the lady,
laughing. "Seriously, I am sorry you will not suffer him to know you. But
I must run away this instant; my unfortunate ponies will be wondering
what has become of me. You see this dear girl and I have got on so well
together, that I have been quite unconscious of time; and I had ever so
many more calls to make, but those must be put off to another day. Let
me see; this is Tuesday, I shall send a carriage for you, this day week,
Clarissa, soon after breakfast, so that I may have you with me at luncheon.
Good-bye."

Lady Laura kissed her new _protegee_ at parting. She was really fond of
everything young and bright and pretty; and having come to Mr. Lovel's
house intending to perform a social duty, was delighted to find that the
duty was so easy and pleasant to her. She was always pleased with new
acquaintances, and was apt to give her friendship on the smallest
provocation. On the other hand, there came a time when she grew just a
little weary of these dear sweet friends, and began to find them less
charming than of old; but she was never uncivil to them; they always
remained on her list, and received stray gleams from the sunlight of her
patronage.

"Well," said Mr. Lovel interrogatively, when the mistress of Hale Castle
had driven off, in the lightest and daintiest of phaetons, with a model
groom and a pair of chestnut cobs, which seemed perfection, even in
Yorkshire, where every man is a connoisseur in horseflesh. "Well, child, I
told you that you might go into society if Lady Laura Armstrong took you
up, but I scarcely expected her to be as cordial as she has been to-day.
Nothing could have been better than the result of her visit; she seemed
quite taken with you, Clary."

It was almost the first time her father had ever called her Clary. It was
only a small endearment, but she blushed and sparkled into smiles at
the welcome sound. He saw the smile and blush, but only thought she was
delighted with the idea of this visit to the Castle. He had no notion
that the placid state of indifference which he maintained towards her was
otherwise than agreeable to her feelings. He was perfectly civil to her,
and he never interfered with her pursuits or inclinations. What more could
she want from a father?

Perhaps she assumed a new value in his eyes from the time of that visit of
Lady Laura's. He was certainly kinder to her than usual, the girl
thought, as they sat on the lawn in the balmy June evening, sipping their
after-dinner coffee, while the moon rose fair and pale above the woods of
Arden Court. He contemplated her with a meditative air now and then, when
she was not looking his way. He had always known that she was beautiful,
but her beauty had acquired a new emphasis from Lady Laura Armstrong's
praises. A woman of the world of that class was not likely to be deceived,
or to mistake the kind of beauty likely to influence mankind; and in the
dim recesses of his mind there grew up a new hope--very vague and shadowy;
he despised himself for dwelling upon it so weakly--a hope that made him
kinder to his daughter than he had ever been yet--a hope which rendered her
precious to him all at once. Not that he loved her any better than of old;
it was only that he saw how, if fortune favoured him, this girl might
render him the greatest service that could be done for him by any human
creature.

She might marry Daniel Granger, and win back the heritage he had lost.
It was a foolish thought, of course; Mr. Lovel was quite aware of the
supremity of folly involved in it. This Granger might be the last man in
the world to fall in love with a girl younger than his daughter; he might
be as impervious to beauty as the granite to which Laura Armstrong had
likened him. It was a foolish fancy, a vain hope; but it served to brighten
the meditations of Marmaduke Lovel--who had really very few pleasant
subjects to think about--with a faint rosy glow.

"It is the idlest dream," he said to himself. "When did good luck ever come
my way? But O, to hold Arden Court again--by any tie--to die knowing that
my race would inherit the old gray walls!"

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER V.

AT HALE CASTLE.


Mr. Lovel gave his daughter twenty pounds; a stretch of liberality which
did not a little astonish her. She was very grateful for this unexpected
kindness; and her father was fain to submit to be kissed and praised for
his goodness more than was entirely agreeable to him. But he had been
kinder to her ever since Lady Laura's visit, and her heart was very light
under that genial influence. She thought he was beginning to love her, and
that belief made her happy.

Nor was there anything but unqualified pleasure for her in the possession
of twenty pounds--the largest sum she had ever had at her disposal.
Although the solitude of her life and the troubles that overshadowed it had
made her thoughtful beyond her years, she was still young enough to be able
to put aside all thought, and to live in the present. It was very pleasant
to go into Holborough, with those four crisp new five-pound notes in her
purse, to ask her aunt's advice about her purchases. Mrs. Oliver was
enraptured to hear of the visit to the Castle, but naturally a little
despondent about the circumstances under which the visit was to be paid.
That Clarissa should go to Lady Laura's without a maid was eminently
distressing to her aunt.

"I really think you ought to take Peters," Mrs. Oliver said meditatively.
"She is a most reliable person; and of course nobody need know that she is
not your own maid. I can fully rely upon her discretion for not breathing a
word upon the subject to any of the Castle servants."

Peters was a prim middle-aged spinster, with a small waist and a painfully
erect figure, who combined the office of parlour-maid at the Rectory with
that of personal attendant upon the Rector's wife--a person whom Clarissa
had always regarded with a kind of awe--a lynx-eyed woman, who could see at
a glance the merest hint of a stray hair-pin in a massive coil of plaits,
or the minutest edge of a muslin petticoat, visible below the hem of a
dress.

"O no, aunt; please don't think of such a thing!" the girl cried eagerly.
"I could not go with a borrowed servant; and I don't want a maid at all; I
am used to do everything for myself Besides, Lady Laura did not ask me to
bring a maid."

"She would take that for granted. She would never expect Mr. Lovel's
daughter to travel without a maid."

"But papa told her how poor he was."

"Very unnecessary, and very bad taste on his part, I think. But of course
she would not suppose him to be too poor to maintain a proper establishment
in a small way. People of that kind only understand poverty in the broadest
sense."

Mrs. Oliver consented to forego the idea of sending Peters to the Castle,
with a regretful sigh; and then the two ladies went out shopping--Clarissa
in high spirits; her aunt depressed by a conviction, that she would not
make her first entrance into society with the surroundings that befitted a
Lovel of Arden Court.

There seemed so many things indispensable for this all-important visit.
The twenty pounds were nearly gone by the time Miss Lovel's shopping was
finished. A white muslin dress for ordinary occasions, some white gauzy
fabric for a more important toilette, a golden-brown silk walking or dinner
dress, a white areophane bonnet, a gray straw hat and feather, gloves,
boots, slippers, and a heap of feminine trifles. Considerable management
and discretion were required to make the twenty pounds go far enough: but
Mrs. Oliver finished her list triumphantly, leaving one bright golden
sovereign in Clarissa's purse. She gave the girl two more sovereigns at
parting with her.

"You will want as much as that for the servants when you are coming away,
Clary," she said imperatively, as Clarissa protested against this gift. "I
don't suppose you will be called upon to spend a shilling for anything else
during your visit, unless there should happen to be a charity sermon while
you are at Hale. In that case, pray don't put less than half-a-crown in
the plate. Those things are noticed so much. And now, good-bye, my dear. I
don't suppose I shall see you again between this, and Tuesday. Miss
Mallow will come to you to try-on the day after to-morrow at one o'clock,
remember; be sure you are at home. She will have hard work to get your
things ready in time; but I shall look in upon her once or twice, to keep
her up to the mark. Pray do your best to secure Lady Laura's friendship.
Such an acquaintance as that is all-important to a girl in your position."

Tuesday came very quickly, as it seemed to Clarissa, who grew a little
nervous about this visit among strangers, in a great strange house, as it
came nearer. She had seen the outside of the Castle very often: a vast
feudal pile it seemed, seen across the bright river that flowed beneath
its outward wall--a little darksome and gloomy at the best, Clarissa had
thought, and something too grand to make a pleasant habitation. She
had never seen the inner quadrangle, in all its splendour of modern
restoration--sparkling freestone, fresh from the mason's chisel; gothic
windows, glowing with rare stained glass; and the broad fertile gardens,
with their terraces and banks of flowers, crowded together to make a feast
of colour, sloping down to the setting sun.

It was still the same bright midsummer weather--a blue sky without a cloud,
a look upon earth and heaven as if there would never be rain again, or
anything but this glow and glory of summer. At eleven o'clock the
carriage came from the Castle; Clarissa's trunks and travelling-bag were
accommodated somehow; and the girl bade her father good-bye.

"I daresay I shall be asked to dinner while you are there," he said, as
they were parting, "and I may possibly come; I shall be curious to see how
you get on."

"O, pray do come, papa; I'm sure it will do you good."

And then she kissed him affectionately, emboldened by that softer manner
which he had shown towards her lately; and the carriage drove off. A
beautiful drive past fertile fields, far stretching towards that bright
river, which wound its sinuous way through all this part of the country;
past woods that shut in both sides of the road with a solemn gloom even at
midday--woods athwart which one caught here and there a distant glimpse of
some noble old mansion lying remote within the green girdle of a park.

It was something less than an hour's drive from Arden to Hale: the
village-church clock and a great clock in the Castle stables were both
striking twelve as the carriage drove under a massive stone arch, above
which the portcullis still hung grimly. It was something like going into
a prison, Clarissa thought; but she had scarcely time for the reflection,
when the carriage swept round a curve in the smooth gravel road, and she
saw the sunny western front of the Castle, glorious in all its brightness
of summer flowers, and with a tall fountain leaping and sparkling up
towards the blue sky.

She gave a little cry of rapture at sight of so much brightness and beauty,
coming upon her all at once with a glad surprise. There were no human
creatures visible; only the glory of fountain and flowers. It might have
been the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, deep in the heart of the woodlands,
for any evidence to the contrary, perceptible to Clarissa in this drowsy
noontide; but presently, as the carriage drove up to the hall door, a
dog barked, and then a sumptuous lackey appeared, and anon another, who,
between them, took Miss Lovel's travelling-bag and parasol, prior to
escorting her to some apartment, leaving the heavier luggage to meaner
hands.

"The saloon, or my lady's own room, miss?" one of the grandiose creatures
demanded languidly.

"I would rather see Lady Laura alone at first, if you please."

The man bowed, and conducted her up a broad staircase, lined with darksome
pictures of battles by land and sea, along a crimson-carpeted corridor
where there were many doors, to one particular portal at the southern end.

He opened this with a lofty air, and announced "Miss Lovel."

It was a very large room--all the rooms in this newly-restored part of the
Castle were large and lofty (a great deal of the so-called "restoration"
had indeed been building, and many of these splendid rooms were new, newer
even than the wealth of Frederick Armstrong)--a large room, furnished with
chairs and tables and cabinets of satin wood, with oval medallions of pale
blue Wedgwood let into the panelled doors of the cabinets, and a narrow
beading of lustreless gold here and there; a room with pale blue
silken hangings, and a carpet of white wood-anemones scattered on a
turquoise-coloured ground. There were no pictures; art was represented only
by a few choice bronzes and a pair of Venetian mirrors.

Lady Laura was busy at a writing-table, filling in the blanks in some notes
of invitation. She was always busy. On one table there were an easel and
the appliances of illumination; a rare old parchment Missal lying open, and
my lady's copy of a florid initial close beside it. On a small reading-desk
there was an open Tasso with a couple of Italian dictionaries near at
hand. Lady Laura had a taste for languages, and was fond of reviving her
acquaintance with foreign classics. She was really the most indefatigable
of women. It was a pity, perhaps, that her numerous accomplishments and
her multifarious duties towards society at large left her so very little
leisure to bestow upon her own children; but then, they had their foreign
governesses, and maids--there was one poor English drudge, by the way, who
seemed like a stranger in a far land--gifted in many tongues, and began
to imbibe knowledge from their cradles. To their young imaginations the
nursery wing of Hale Castle must have seemed remarkably like the Tower of
Babel.

The lady of the Castle laid down her pen, and received Clarissa with warm
affection. She really liked the girl. It was only a light airy kind of
liking, perhaps, in unison with her character; but, so far as it went, it
was perfectly sincere.

"My dear child, I am so glad to have you here," she said, placing Miss
Lovel beside her on a low sofa. "You will find me dreadfully busy
sometimes, I daresay; but you must not think me neglectful if I cannot be
very much with you downstairs. You are to come in and out of this room
whenever you please. It is not open to the world at large, you know, and I
am supposed to be quite inaccessible here; but it is open to my favourites,
and I mean you to be one of them, Clarissa."

"You are very good, dear Lady Laura."

"No, I am not good; I daresay I am the most selfish creature in
Christendom; but when I like people, I like them with all my heart. And now
tell me what you think of Hale."

"It is lovely--it is like fairyland."

"Yes, it is pretty, isn't it, this new side? It has all been done in my
time--it has all been my doing, indeed, I may venture to say; for Fred
would have gone on living contentedly in the old rooms till his dying day.
You can't imagine the trouble I took. I read no end of books upon the
domestic architecture of the middle ages, went all over England hunting for
model houses, and led the poor architect a fine life. But I think, between
us, we succeeded in carrying out a very fine idea at last. The crenellated
roof, with its machicolations, is considered a great success. There was a
time when one was obliged to get a license from the sovereign to build that
kind of thing; but it is all changed now. The sovereign is not afraid of
rebellion, and the machicolations are only for ornament. You have not seen
the old hall yet. That is splendid--a real original bit of the Castle, you
know, which has never been tampered with, as old as Edward III., with a
raised platform at the upper end, where the lord of the castle used to sit
while his vassals ate below him; and with a stone hearth in the centre,
where they used to make their wood fires, all the smoke going through an
opening in the roof--rather pleasant for my lord and his vassals, I should
think! Take off your hat, Clarissa; or perhaps you would rather go to your
room at once. Yes, you shall, dear; and I'll finish my letters, and we can
meet at luncheon."

Lady Laura rang a bell twice; which particular summons produced a very
smart-looking maid, into whose charge my lady confided Clarissa, with a
pretty little wave of her hand, and "_a bientot_, dear child."

The maid conducted Miss Lovel to a charming chintz-curtained bedroom on the
second floor, looking westward over those gorgeous flower-banks; a bedroom
with a bright-looking brass bedstead, and the daintiest chintz-patterned
carpet, and nothing medieval about it except the stone-framed gothic
window.

"I will send a person to unpack your trunks, miss," the maid said, when she
had listened with a deferential air to Clarissa's praise of the room. "I
am very glad you like your rooms; my lady was most anxious you should be
pleased. I'll send Fosset miss; she is a very handy young person, and will
be always at your service to render you any assistance you may require."

"Thank you--I am not likely to trouble her often; there is so very little
assistance I ever want. Sometimes, when I am putting on an evening dress, I
may ask for a little help perhaps--that is all."

"She will be quite at your service, miss: I hope you will not scruple to
ring for her," the chief of the maids replied, and then made a dignified
exit.

The maid of inferior degree, Fosset, speedily appeared; a
pale-complexioned, meek-looking young woman, who set about unpacking
Clarissa's trunks with great skill and quickness, and arranged their
contents in the capacious maple wardrobe, while their owner washed her face
and hands and brushed the dust of her brief journey out of her dark brown
hair. A clamorous bell rang out the summons to the midday meal presently,
and Clarissa went down to the hall, where a watchful footman took her in
charge.

"Luncheon is served in the octagon room, miss," he said, and straightway
led her away to an apartment in an angle of the Castle: a room with a
heavily-carved oak ceiling, and four mullioned windows overlooking the
river; a room hung with gilt and brown stamped leather, and furnished in
the most approved mediaeval style. There was an octagon table, bright with
fruit and flowers, and a good many ladies seated round it, with only here
and there a gentleman.

There was one of these gentlemen standing near Lady Laura's chair as
Clarissa went into the room, tall and stout, with a very fair good-natured
countenance, light blue eyes, and large light whiskers, whom, by reason
of some careless remarks of her father's, she guessed at once to be Mr.
Armstrong; a gentleman of whom people were apt to say, after the shortest
acquaintance, that there was not much in him, but that he was the best
fellow in the world--an excellent kind of person to be intrusted with the
disposal of a large fortune, a man by whom his neighbours could profit
without a too painful sense of obligation, and who was never so happy as
when a crowd of people were enjoying life at his expense. Friends who meant
to say something very generous of Frederick Armstrong were wont to observe,
that he was not such a fool as he looked. Nor, in the ordinary attributes
of a country gentleman, was the master of Hale Castle behind his compeers.
He rode like Assheton Smith, never missed his bird in the open, and had a
manly scorn of battues; was great in agriculture, and as good a judge of
a horse as any man in Yorkshire. His literary attainments were, perhaps,
limited to a comprehensive knowledge of the science of farriery, a profound
study of _Buff's Guide_, and a familiar acquaintance with _Bell's Life_ and
two or three weekly newspapers devoted to the agricultural interest; but
as he had the happiness to live amongst a race which rather cultivates the
divine gift of ignorance, his shortcomings awakened no scorn.

When he was known to have made a bad book for the Leger or the Great Ebor,
his friends openly expressed their contempt for his mental powers; but no
one despised him because an expensive university training had made him
nothing more than a first-rate oarsman, a fair billiard-player, and a
distinguished thrower of the hammer. He was just what a country gentleman
should be in the popular idea--handsome, broad-shouldered, long-limbed,
with the fist and biceps of a gladiator, and a brain totally unburdened by
the scholiast's dry-as-dust rubbish: sharp and keen enough where the things
that interested him were in question, and never caring to look beyond them.

To this gentleman Lady Laura introduced Clarissa.

"Fred, this is Miss Lovel--Clarissa Lovel--and you and she are to like each
other very much, if you please. This is my husband, Clarissa, who cares
more for the cultivation of short-horns--whatever kind of creatures those
brutes may be--and ugly little shaggy black Highland cattle, than for my
society, a great deal; so you will see very little of him, I daresay, while
you are at the Castle. In London he is obliged to be shut-up with me now
and then; though, as he attends nearly all the race-meetings, I don't see
very much of him even there; but here he escapes me altogether."

"Upon my word, Laura--upon my word, you know, Miss Lovel, there's not a
syllable of truth in it," exclaimed the gentleman with the light whiskers.
"My wife's always illuminating old Missals, or rending Italian, or
practising the harmonium, or writing out lists of things for her Dorcas
club, or something of that sort; and a fellow only feels himself in the way
if he's hanging about her. She's the busiest woman in the world. I don't
believe the prime minister gets through more work or receives more letters
than she does. And she answers 'em all too, by Jove; she's like the great
Duke of Wellington."

"Do you happen to take a lively interest in steam-ploughs and
threshing-machines, and that kind of thing, Clarissa?" asked Lady Laura.

"I'm afraid not. I never even saw a steam-plough; and I believe if I were
to see one, I should think it a most unpicturesque object."

"I am sorry to hear that. Fred would have been so delighted with you,
if you'd shown agricultural proclivities. We had a young lady from
Westmoreland here last year who knew an immense deal about farming. She
was especially great upon pigs, I believe, and quite fascinated Fred by
tramping about the home farm with him in thick boots. I was almost jealous.
But now let me introduce you to some of my friends, Clarissa."

Hereupon Miss Lovel had to bow and simper in response to the polite bows
and simpers of half a dozen ladies. Mrs. Weldon Dacre and three Miss
Dacres, Rose, Grace, and Amy, tall and bony damsels, with pale reddish
hair, and paler eyebrows and eyelashes, and altogether more "style" than
beauty; Mrs. Wilmot, a handsome widow, whom Frederick Armstrong and his
masculine friends were wont to call "a dasher;" Miss Fermor, a rather
pretty girl, with a piquant nose and sparkling hazel eyes; and Miss
Barbara Fermor, tall and slim and dark, with a romantic air. The gentlemen
were a couple of officers--Major Mason, stout, dark, hook-nosed, and
close-shaven; Captain Westleigh, fair, auburn-moustached and whiskered--and
a meek-looking gentleman, of that inoffensive curate race, against
which Clarissa had been warned by her father.

She found herself very quickly at home among these people. The Miss Fermors
were especially gifted in the art of making themselves delightful to
strangers; they had, indeed, undergone such training in a perpetual career
of country-house visiting, that it would have gone hard with them had they
not acquired this grace. The three tall pale Dacres, Rose, Grace, and Amy,
were more conventional, and less ready to swear alliance with the stranger;
but they were not disagreeable girls, and improved considerably after a
few days' acquaintance, showing themselves willing to take the bass in
pianoforte duets, sing a decent second, exhibit their sketch-books and
photographic collections in a friendly manner, and communicate new stitches
and patterns in _point de Russe_ or _point d'Alencon_.

After luncheon Miss Lovel went off with Captain Westleigh and Miss
Fermor--Lizzie, the elder and livelier of the two sisters--to take her
first lesson in croquet. The croquet-ground was a raised plateau to the
left of the Italian garden, bounded on one side by a grassy slope and the
reedy bank of the river, and on the other by a plantation of young firs; a
perfect croquet-ground, smooth as an ancient bowling-green, and unbroken
by invading shrub or flower-bed. There were some light iron seats on the
outskirts of the ground here and there, and that was all.

Clarissa received her lesson, and (having been lucky enough to send her
ball through the hoop now and then) was pronounced to have a natural genius
for croquet. It was a pleasant, idle afternoon, passed amidst so bright and
fair a scene, that the beauty of her surroundings alone was enough to give
Clarissa's life a new zest--a day which the mind recalls in the stormier
periods of after-life, wondering at its gracious peace, its utter freedom
from care or thought. Too soon came the time when there could be no more of
such girlish happiness for Clarissa, such perfect respite from thought of
to-morrow, or regret for yesterday.

By-and-by came dressing for dinner, and then an assemblage of visitors
in the drawing-room--county people from neighbouring parks and halls and
courts--mingling pleasantly with the Castle guests, and then dinner in the
great dining-room; a splendid chamber, with a music-gallery at one end, and
with the earliest crystal chandeliers ever used in England, and given by
Queen Elizabeth to the Lord of Hale, for its chief decorations. At eight
o'clock these crystal chandeliers glittered with the light of many
wax-candles, though there was still the soft glow of sunset in the gardens
beyond the great gothic windows.

That first visit to a great country house was like a new page in life to
Clarissa. She had not wearied of her quiet existence at Mill Cottage, her
books, her art, her freedom from the monotonous tasks and dull restraints
of school; but she felt that if life could always be like this, it would be
something very sweet and joyous. Captain Westleigh had contrived to take
her in to dinner.

"I was determined to do it," he told her confidentially, as they sat down;
"so I made a rush across to you when I saw Lady Laura's eye upon you,
with a malicious intention of billeting you upon young Halkin, the great
cloth-manufacturer's son. I know Lady Laura so well; she will be trying to
plant all those rich manufacturing fellows upon you; she has quite a mania
for that sort of people."

The Captain made himself very pleasant all through that long ceremonial of
dinner. If the brilliant things which he said were not quite the newest in
the world, they were at least new to Clarissa, who rewarded his efforts to
please her by seeming very much amused, and flattered, and stimulated him
to new flights by her appreciation. He told her all about the people round
her, making her feel less like a stranger in a foreign country; and that
pageant-like dinner, long as it was, did not seem at all too long to be
pleasant.

After dinner there was a little music and singing at one end of the
drawing-room, to which people listened or not, as they pleased; a
friendly whist-table established at the other end, at which four elderly,
grey-whiskered, and bald-headed country gentlemen played gravely for an
hour or so; and a good deal of desultory strolling out through the open
windows to the terrace for the contemplation of the moonlit gardens, with
perhaps a spice of flirtation. Lady Laura was never quite happy unless she
saw something like flirtation going on among her younger visitors. She was
pleased to see Captain Westleigh's attention to Clarissa, though she would
rather that James Halkin had occupied the ground. But, alas! Mr. Halkin,
stiff and solemn as a policeman on duty, was standing by the chair of the
very palest and least beautiful of the Miss Dacres, mildly discussing a
collection of photographs of Alpine scenery. They had both been over the
same country, and were quite enthusiastic when they came to peaks and
mountain gorges that they remembered.

"I was there with another fellow, and he nearly slipped just on that edge
there. It was as near as a----" Mr. Halkin was going to say "a toucher,"
but it occurred to him that that vague expression was scarcely permissible
in conversation with a lady--"the nearest thing you ever saw in your life,
in fact. If it hadn't been for his alpen-stock, it would have been all over
with him; and the guides told us there'd been a fellow killed there the
year before. We stopped at Rigot's--I think the dearest hotel I was ever
at; but they gave us some very fair still champagne--very fair indeed."

Lady Laura took occasion to warn Clarissa against the Captain when they
separated for the night, in the corridor upon which my lady's rooms opened.

"Very nice, isn't he, dear? Come into my dressing-room for a few minutes'
talk;" and my lady led Clarissa into another charming chamber, all blue
silk and satin-wood, like the morning room. "Yes, he is very nice, and he
really seemed quite _epris_. Poor Herbert Westleigh! I've known him for
years. He belongs to one of the oldest families in Somersetshire, and is a
capital fellow, as my husband says; but a person not to be thought of by
you, Clarissa. There are a crowd of brothers, and I doubt if Herbert has
a hundred a year beyond his pay. Did you notice that Mr. Halkin, a rather
sandy-haired young man with a long nose? That young fellow will come into
thirty thousand a year by-and-by."

"Yes, Lady Laura, I did notice him a little when he was talking to one of
the Miss Dacres. He seemed very stupid."

"Stupid, my dear Clarissa! Why, I have been told that young man made a
good deal of character at Oxford. But I daresay you are taken by Herbert
Westleigh's rattling way. Now remember, my dear, I have warned you."

"There is no occasion for any warning, Lady Laura. Believe me, I am in no
danger. I thought Captain Westleigh was very kind, and I liked him because
he told me all about the other people; that is all."

"Very well, dear. You will see a good many people here; there is an
advantage in that--one influence neutralises another. But I should really
like you to take some notice of that Mr. Halkin. He will be a good deal
here, I daresay. His family live at Selbrook Hall, only four miles off. The
father and mother are the plainest, homeliest people, but very sensible;
live in a quiet unpretending style, and can't spend a quarter of their
income. When I speak of thirty thousand a year, I don't reckon the
accumulations that young man will inherit. He is the only son. There is a
sister; but she is lame and a confirmed invalid--not likely to live many
years, I think."

Clarissa smiled at Lady Laura's earnestness.

"One would think you were in league with papa, dear Lady Laura. He says I
am bound to marry a rich man."

"Of course; it is a solemn duty when a girl is handsome and not rich. Look
at me: what would my life have been without Fred, Clarissa? There were five
of us, child: five daughters to be married, only think of that; and there
are still three unmarried. One of my sisters is coming here to-morrow. I do
so hope you will get on with her; but she is rather peculiar. I am glad to
say she is engaged at last--quite an old affair, and I think an attachment
on both sides for some time past; but it has only lately come to a definite
engagement. The gentleman's prospects were so uncertain; but that is all
over now. The death of an elder brother quite alters his position, and he
will have a very fine estate by-and-by. He is coming here, too, in a few
days, and I'm sure I hope the marriage will take place soon. But I must not
keep you here chattering, at the risk of spoiling your fresh looks."

And with a gracious good-night Lady Laura dismissed her new _protegee_.

Yes, it was a pleasant life, certainly; a life that drifted smoothly onward
with the tide, and to all seeming unshadowed by one sorrowful thought or
care. And yet, no doubt, with but a few youthful exceptions, every guest at
Hale Castle had his or her particular burden to carry, and black Care sat
behind the gentlemen as they rode to small country meetings or primitive
cattle-fairs. To Clarissa Lovel the state of existence was so new, that it
was scarcely strange she should be deluded by the brightness and glitter of
it, and believe that these people could have known no sorrow.

She found herself looking forward with unwonted interest to the arrival of
Lady Laura's sister, Lady Geraldine Challoner. To a girl who has never had
a lover--to whom the whole science of love is yet a profound inscrutable
mystery--there is apt to be something especially interesting in the idea
of an engagement. To her the thought of betrothal is wondrously solemn.
A love-match too, and an attachment of long standing--there were the
materials for a romance in these brief hints of Lady Laura's. And then,
again, her sister described this Lady Geraldine as a peculiar person, with
whom it was rather doubtful whether Clarissa would be able to get on. All
this made her so much the more anxious to see the expected guest; and in
the morning's drive, and the afternoon's croquet, she thought more of Lady
Geraldine than of the landscape or the game.

Croquet was over--Clarissa had taken part in a regular game this
afternoon--and the players were strolling about the gardens in couples, in
an idle half-hour before the first dinner-bell, when Miss Lovel met Lady
Laura with another lady. They were sauntering slowly along one of the
sunny gravel walks--there was every charm in this Italian garden except
shade--and stopped on seeing Clarissa.

"Now, Geraldine, I shall be able to introduce you to my favourite, Clarissa
Lovel," said Lady Laura; "Captain Westleigh you know of old."

The Captain and Lady Geraldine shook hands, declaring that they were quite
old friends--had known each other for ages, and so on; and Clarissa had a
few moments' pause, in which to observe the young lady.

She was tall and slim, her sister's junior by perhaps five years, but not
more; very fair, with bright auburn hair--that golden-tinted hair, of which
there seems to be so much more nowadays than was to be seen twenty years
ago. She was handsome--very handsome--Clarissa decided at once; but it
seemed to her rather a cold, hard style of beauty; the straight nose, the
mouth, and chin chiselled with a clearness and distinctness that was almost
sharpness; the large luminous blue eyes, which did not seem to possess much
capacity for tenderness.

Lady Laura was very proud of this sister, and perhaps just a little afraid
of her; but of course that latter fact was not obvious to strangers;
she was only a shade less volatile than usual in Geraldine's presence.
Geraldine was the beauty of the Challoner family, and her career had been
a failure hitherto; so that there was much rejoicing, in a quiet way,
now that Lady Geraldine's destiny was apparently decided, and in an
advantageous manner.

She was sufficiently gracious to Clarissa, but displayed none of that
warmth which distinguished Lady Laura's manner to her new friend; and when
the sisters had turned aside into another path, and were out of hearing,
Geraldine asked rather sharply why "that girl" was here?

"My dear Geraldine, she is perfectly charming. I have taken the greatest
fancy to her."

"My dear Laura, when will you leave off those absurd fancies for
strangers?"

"Clarissa Lovel is not a stranger; you must remember how intimate papa used
to be with her father."

"I only remember that Mr. Lovel was a very selfish person, and that he has
lost his estate and gone down in the world. Why should you trouble yourself
about his daughter? You can only do the girl harm by bringing her here; she
will have to go out as a governess, I daresay, and will be writing to you
whenever she is out of a situation to ask some favour or other, and boring
you to death. I cannot think how you can be so inconsiderate as to entangle
yourself with that kind of acquaintance."

"I don't mean Clarissa to be a governess; I mean her to make a good
marriage."

"O, of course it is very easy to say that," exclaimed Lady Geraldine
scornfully; "but you have not been so fortunate as a match-maker hitherto.
Look at Emily and Louisa."

"Emily and Louisa were so intractable and difficult to please, that I could
do nothing for them; and now I look upon them as confirmed old maids. But
it is a different thing with Clarissa. She is very sensible; and I do not
think she would stand in her own light if I could bring about what I wish.
And then she is so lovely. Emily and Louisa were good-looking enough half a
dozen years ago, but this girl is simply perfect. Come, Geraldine, you can
afford to praise her. Is she not lovely?"

"Yes, I suppose she is handsome," the other answered icily.

"You suppose she is handsome! It is really too bad of you to be prejudiced
against a girl I wanted you to like. As if this poor little Clarissa could
do anybody any harm! But never mind, she must do without your liking. And
now tell me all about George Fairfax. I was so glad to hear your news,
dear, so thoroughly rejoiced."

"There is no occasion for such profound gladness. I could have gone on
existing very well as Geraldine Challoner."

"Of course; but I had much rather see you well married, and your own
mistress; and this is such a good match."

"Yes; from a worldly point of view, I suppose, the affair is
unexceptionable," Geraldine Challoner answered, with persistent
indifference; simulated indifference, no doubt, but not the less provoking
to her sister. "George will be rich by-and-by, and he is well enough off
now. We shall be able to afford a house in one of the streets out of Park
Lane--I have a rooted detestation for both Belgravia and Tyburnia--and a
carriage, and so on; and I shall not be worried as I have been about my
milliner's bills."

"And then you are very fond of him, Geraldine," Lady Laura said, softly.

There were still little romantic impulses in the matron's heart, and this
studied coldness of her sister's tone wounded her.

"Yes, of course that is the beginning of the business. We like each other
very well," Lady Geraldine replied, still with the same unenthusiastic air.
"I think there has always been some kind of liking between us. We suit each
other very well, you see; have the same way of thinking about most things,
take the same view of life, and so on."

Lady Laura gave a faint sigh of assent. She was disappointed by her
sister's tone; for in the time past she had more than once suspected that
Geraldine Challoner loved George Fairfax with a passionate half-despairing
love, which, if unrequited, might make the bane of her life. And, lo! here
was the same Geraldine discussing her engagement as coolly as if the match
had been the veriest marriage of convenience ever planned by a designing
dowager. She did not understand how much pride had to do with this
reticence, or what volcanic depths may sometimes lie beneath the Alpine
snows of such a nature as Geraldine Challoner's.

In the evening Lady Geraldine was the centre of a circle of old friends and
admirers; and Clarissa could only observe her from a distance, and wonder
at her brilliancy, her power to talk of anything and everything with an air
of unlimited wisdom and experience, and the perfect ease with which she
received the homage offered to her beauty and wit. The cold proud face
lighted up wonderfully at night, and under the softening influence of so
much adulation; and Lady Geraldine's smiles, though wanting in warmth
at the best, were very fascinating. Clarissa wondered that so radiant a
creature could have been so long unmarried, that it could be matter for
rejoicing that she was at last engaged. It must have been her own fault,
of course; such a woman as this could have been a duchess if she pleased,
Clarissa thought.

Lizzy Fermor came up to her while she was admiring the high-bred beauty.

"Well, Miss Lovel, what do you think of her?"

"Lady Geraldine? I think she is wonderfully handsome--and fascinating."

"Do you? Then I don't think you can know the meaning of the word
'fascination.' If I were a man, that woman would be precisely the last
in the world to touch my heart. O yes, I admit that she is very
handsome--classic profile, bright blue eyes, complexion of lilies and
roses, real golden hair--not dyed, you know--and so on; but I should as
soon think of falling in love with a statue of snow as with Lady Geraldine
Challoner. I think she has just about as much heart as the statue would
have."

"Those people with cold manners have sometimes very warm hearts," Clarissa,
remonstrated, feeling that gratitude to Lady Laura made it incumbent on her
to defend Lady Laura's sister.

"Perhaps; but that is not the case with her. She would trample upon a
hecatomb of hearts to arrive at the object of her ambition. I think she
might have made more than one brilliant marriage since she has been
out--something like ten years, you know--only she was too cold, too
obviously mercenary. I am very sorry for George Fairfax."

"Do you know him?"

"Yes, and he is a very noble fellow. He has been rather wild, I believe;
but of course we are not supposed to know anything about that; and I have
heard that he is the most generous-hearted of men. I know Lady Geraldine
has contrived to keep him dangling about her whenever he was in England
for the last six or eight years; but I thought it was one of those old
established flirtations that would never come to anything--a kind of
institution. I was quite surprised to hear of their engagement--and very
sorry."

"But Lady Geraldine is very much attached to him, is she not?"

"O yes, I daresay she likes him; it would be almost difficult for any
one to avoid liking him. She used to do her utmost to keep him about her
always, I know; and I believe the flirtation has cost her more than one
chance of a good marriage. But I doubt if we should have ever heard of this
engagement if Reginald Fairfax had not died, and left his brother the heir
of Lyvedon."

"Is Lyvedon a very grand place?"

"It is a fine estate, I believe; a noble old house in Kent, with
considerable extent of land attached to it. The place belongs now to Sir
Spencer Lyvedon, an old bachelor, whose only sister is George Fairfax's
mother. The property is sure to come to Mr. Fairfax in a few years. He is
to be here to-morrow, they say; and you will see him, and be able to judge
for yourself whether Lady Geraldine is worthy of him."

There was a little excursion proposed and planned that evening for the next
day--a drive to Marley Wood, a delicious bit of forest about seven miles
from the Castle, and a luncheon in the open air. The party was made up
on the spot. There were ladies enough to fill two carriages; a couple
of servants were to go first with the luncheon in a waggonette, and the
gentlemen were to ride. Everybody was delighted with the idea. It was one
of those unpremeditated affairs which are sure to be a success.

"I am glad to have something to do with myself," said Lady Geraldine. "It
is better than dawdling away one's existence at croquet."

"I hope you are not going to be dull here, Geraldine," replied Lady Laura.
"There are the Helston races next week, and a flower-show at Holborough."

"I hate small country race-meetings and country flower-shows; but of course
I am not going to be dull, Laura. The Castle is very nice; and I shall hear
all about your last new _protegees_, and your Dorcas societies, and your
model cottages, and your architect, and your hundred-and-one schemes for
the benefit of your fellow-man. It is not possible to be dull in the
presence of so much energy."

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER VI.

AND THIS IS GEORGE FAIRFAX.


The next day was lovely. There seemed, indeed, no possibility of variation
in the perfection of this summer weather; and Clarissa Lovel felt her
spirits as light as if the unknown life before her had been all brightness,
unshadowed by one dread or care. The party for Marley Wood started about an
hour after breakfast--Lady Laura, Mrs. Dacre, Barbara Fermor, and Clarissa,
in one carriage; two Miss Dacres, Lady Geraldine, and Mrs. Wilmot in the
other; Lizzy Fermor and Rose Dacre on horseback; with a small detachment of
gentlemen in attendance upon them. There were wide grassy waste lands
on each side of the road almost all the way to the wood, on which the
equestrian party could disport themselves, without much inconvenience
from the dust of the two carriages. Once arrived at the wood, there were
botanising, fern-hunting, sketching, and flirtation without limit. Lady
Laura was quite happy, discussing her Dorcas societies and the ingratitude
of her model cottagers, with Mrs. Dacre; Lady Geraldine sat at the foot
of a great shining beech, with her white dress set off by a background of
scarlet shawl, and her hat lying on the grass beside her. She seemed
too listless to ramble about with the rest of the party, or to take the
faintest interest in the conversation of any of the gentlemen who tried to
talk to her. She amused herself in a desultory way with a drawing-book and
a volume of a novel, and did not appear to consider it incumbent on her to
take notice of any one.

Clarissa and Barbara Fermor wandered away into the heart of the wood,
attended by the indefatigable Captain Westleigh, and sketched little bits
of fern and undergrowth in their miniature sketch-books, much to the
admiration of the Captain, who declared that Clarissa had a genius for
landscape. "As you have for croquet and for everything else, I think," he
said; "only you are so quiet about your resources. But I am very glad you
have not that grand sultana manner of Lady Geraldine Challoner's. I really
can't think how any man can stand it, especially such a man as George
Fairfax."

"Why 'especially'?" asked Miss Fermor, curiously.

"Well, I don't know exactly how to explain my meaning to a lady--because
he has knocked about the world a good deal--seen a great deal of life, in
short. _Il a vecu_, as the French say. He is not the kind of man to be any
woman's slave, I should think; he knows too much of the sex for that. He
would take matters with rather a high hand, I should fancy. And then Lady
Geraldine, though she is remarkably handsome, and all that kind of thing,
is not in the first freshness of her youth. She is nearly as old as
George, I should say; and when a woman is the same age as a man, it is
her misfortune to seem much older. No, Miss Fermor, upon my word, I don't
consider them fairly matched."

"The lady has rank," said Barbara Fermor.

"Yes, of course. It will be Mr. and Lady Geraldine Fairfax. There are some
men who care for that kind of thing; but I don't suppose George is one of
them. The Fairfaxes are of a noble old Scotch family, you know, and hold
themselves equal to any of our nobility."

"When is Mr. Fairfax expected at the Castle?"

"Not till to-night. He is to come by the last train, I believe. You may
depend Lady Geraldine would not be here if there were any chance of his
arriving in the middle of the day. She will keep him up to collar, you
maybe sure. I shouldn't like to be engaged to a woman armed with the
experience of a decade of London seasons. It must be tight work!"

A shrill bell, pealing gaily through the wood, summoned them to luncheon;
a fairy banquet spread upon the grass under a charmed circle of beeches;
chicken-pies and lobster-salads, mayonaise of salmon and daintily-glazed
cutlets in paper frills, inexhaustible treasure of pound-cake and
strawberries and cream, with a pyramid of hothouse pines and peaches in
the centre of the turf-spread banquet. And for the wines, there were no
effervescent compounds from the laboratory of the wine-chemist--Lady
Laura's guests were not thirsty cockneys, requiring to be refreshed by
"fizz"--but delicate amber-tinted vintages of the Rhineland, which seemed
too ethereal to intoxicate, and yet were dangerous. And for the more
thirsty souls there were curiously compounded "cups:" hock and seltzer;
claret and soda-water, fortified with curacoa and flavoured artistically
with burrage or sliced pine-apple.

The banquet was a merry one; and it was nearly four o'clock when the ladies
had done trifling with strawberries and cream, and the gentlemen had
suspended their homage to the Rhineland. Then came a still more desultory
wandering of couples to and fro among the shadowy intricacies of the
wood; and Clarissa having for once contrived to get rid of the inevitable
Captain, who had been beguiled away to inspect some remote grotto under
convoy of Barbara Fermor, was free to wander alone whither she pleased. She
was rather glad to be alone for a little. Marley Wood was not new to her.
It had been a favourite spot of her brother Austin's, and the two had spent
many a pleasant day beneath the umbrage of those old forest-trees; she,
sitting and reading, neither of them talking very much, only in a spasmodic
way, when Austin was suddenly moved by some caprice to pour out his
thoughts into the ear of his little sister--strange bitter thoughts they
were sometimes; but the girl listened as to the inspirations of genius.
Here he had taught her almost all that she had ever learned of landscape
art. She had only improved by long practice upon those early simple
lessons. She was glad to be alone, for these old memories were sad ones.
She wandered quite away from the rest, and, sitting down upon a bank that
sloped towards a narrow streamlet, began to sketch stray tufts and clusters
of weedy undergrowth--a straggling blackberry-branch, a bit of ivy creeping
sinuously along the uneven ground--in an absent desultory way, thinking of
her brother and the days gone by. She had been alone like this about half
an hour, when the crackling of the brambles near her warned her of an
approaching footstep. She looked up, and saw a stranger approaching her
through the sunlight and shadows of the wood--a tall man, in a loose, gray
overcoat.

A stranger? No. As he came nearer to her, the face seemed very familiar;
and yet in that first moment she could not imagine where she had seen him.
A little nearer, and she remembered all at once. This was her companion
of the long railway journey from London to Holborough. She blushed at
the recollection, not altogether displeased to see him again, and yet
remembering bitterly that cruel mistake she had made about Arden Court. She
might be able to explain her error now, if he should recognise her and stop
to speak; but that was scarcely likely. He had forgotten her utterly, no
doubt, by this time.

She went on with her sketching--a trailing spray of Irish ivy, winding away
and losing itself in a confusion of bramble and fern, every leaf sharply
defined by the light pencil touches, with loving pre-Raphaelite care--she
went on, trying to think that it was not the slightest consequence to
her whether this man remembered their brief acquaintance of the
railway-carriage. And yet she would have been wounded, ever so little,
if he had forgotten her. She knew so few people, that this accidental
acquaintance seemed almost a friend. He had known her brother, too; and
there had been something in his manner that implied an interest in her
fate.

She bent a little lower over the sketch-book, doing her uttermost not to be
seen, perhaps all the more because she really did wish for the opportunity
of explaining that mistake about Arden Court. Her face was almost hidden
under the coquettish gray hat, as she bent over her drawing; but the
gentleman came on towards her with evident purpose. It was only to make an
inquiry, however.

"I am looking for a picnic party," he said. "I discovered the _debris_ of a
luncheon yonder, but no human creature visible. Perhaps you can kindly
tell me where the strayed revellers are to be found; you are one of them,
perhaps?"

Clarissa looked up at him, blushing furiously, and very much ashamed of
herself for the weakness, and then went on with her drawing in a nervous
way, as she answered him,--

"Yes, I am with Lady Laura Armstrong's party; but I really cannot tell you
where to look for them all. They are roaming about in every direction, I
believe."

"Good gracious me!" cried the gentleman, coming a good deal
nearer--stepping hastily across the streamlet, in fact, which had divided
him from Clarissa hitherto. "Have I really the pleasure of speaking to
Miss Lovel? This is indeed a surprise. I scarcely expected ever to see you
again."

"Nor I to see you," Clarissa answered, recovering herself a little by this
time, and speaking with her accustomed frankness. "And I have been very
anxious to see you again."

"Indeed!" cried the gentleman eagerly.

"In order to explain a mistake I made that night in the railway-carriage,
in speaking of Arden Court. I talked of the place as if it had still
belonged to papa; I did not know that he had sold it, and fancied I was
going home there. It was only when I saw my uncle that I learnt the truth.
You must have thought it very strange."

"I was just a little mystified, I confess, for I had dined at the Court
with Mr. Granger."

"Papa had sold the dear old place, and, disliking the idea of writing such
unpleasant news, had told me nothing about the sale. It was not wise, of
course; but he felt the loss of Arden so keenly, I can scarcely wonder that
he could not bring himself to write about it."

"It would have been better to have spared you, though," the unknown
answered gravely. "I daresay you were as fond of the old home as ever your
father could have been?"

"I don't think it would be possible for any one to love Arden better than
I. But then, of course, a man is always prouder than a woman--"

"I am not so sure of that," the stranger muttered parenthetically.

"--And papa felt the degradation involved in the loss."

"I won't admit of any degradation in the case. A gentleman is none the less
a gentleman for having spent his fortune rather recklessly, and the old
blood is no less pure without the old acres. If your father were a wise
man, he might be happier now than he has ever been. The loss of a great
estate is the loss of a bundle of cares."

"I daresay that is very good philosophy," Clarissa answered, smiling,
beguiled from painful thoughts by the lightness of his tone; "but I doubt
if it applies to all cases--not to papa's, certainly."

"You were sketching, I see, when I interrupted you. I remember you told me
that night of your fondness for art. May I see what you were doing?"

"It is hardly worth showing you. I was only amusing myself, sketching at
random--that ivy straggling along there, or anything that caught my eye."

"But that sort of thing indicates so much. I see you have a masterly touch
for so young an artist. I won't say anything hackneyed about so fair a one;
for women are showing us nowadays that there are no regions of art closed
against them. Well, it is a divine amusement, and a glorious profession."

There was a little pause after this, during which Clarissa looked at her
watch, and finding it nearly five o'clock, began to put up her pencils and
drawing-book.

"I did not think that you knew Lady Laura Armstrong," she said; and then
blushed for the speech, remembering that, as she knew absolutely nothing
about himself or his belongings, the circumstance of her ignorance on this
one point was by no means surprising.

"No; nor did I expect to meet you here," replied the gentleman. "And yet I
might almost have done so, knowing that you lived at Arden. But, you see,
it is so long since we met, and I----"

"Had naturally forgotten me."

"No, I had not forgotten you, Miss Lovel, nor would it have been natural
for me to forget you. I am very glad to meet you again under such agreeable
auspices. You are going to stay at the Castle a long time, I hope. I am
booked for an indefinite visit."

"O no, I don't suppose I shall stay very long. Lady Laura is extremely
kind; but this is my first visit, and she must have many friends who have a
greater claim upon her hospitality."

"Hale Castle is a large place, and I am sure Lady Laura has always room for
agreeable guests."

"She is very, very kind. You have known her a long time, perhaps?"

"Yes. I have been intimate with the Challoners ever since I was a boy.
Lady Laura was always charming; but I think her marriage with Fred
Armstrong--who worships the ground she walks on--and the possession of Hale
Castle have made her absolutely perfect."

"And you know her sister, Lady Geraldine, of course?"

"O yes, I know Geraldine."

"Do you know Mr. Fairfax, the gentleman to whom she is engaged?"

"Well, yes; I am supposed to have some knowledge of that individual."

Something in his smile, and a certain significance in his tone, let in a
sudden light upon Clarissa's mind.

"I am afraid I am asking very foolish questions," she said. "You are Mr.
Fairfax?"

"Yes, I am George Fairfax. I forgot that I had omitted to tell you my
name that night."

"And I had no idea that I was speaking to Mr. Fairfax. You were not
expected till quite late this evening."

"No; but I found my business in London easier to manage than I had supposed
it would be; so, as in duty bound, I came down here directly I found myself
free. When I arrived at the Castle, I was told of this picnic, and rode off
at once to join the party."

"And I am keeping you here, when you ought to be looking for your friends."

"There is no hurry. I have done my duty, and am here; that is the grand
point. Shall we go and look for them together?"

"If you like. I daresay we shall be returning to the Castle very soon."

They sauntered slowly away, in and out among the trees, towards a grassy
glade, where there was more open space for walking, and where the afternoon
sun shone warmly on the smooth turf.

"I hope you get on very well with Geraldine?" Mr. Fairfax said presently.

It was almost the same phrase Lady Laura had used about her sister.

"I have seen so little of her yet," Clarissa answered, rather embarrassed
by this inquiry. "I should like to know her very much; but she only arrived
yesterday, and we have scarcely spoken half-a-dozen words to each other
yet."

"You will hardly like her at first, perhaps," Mr. Fairfax went on,
doubtfully. "People who don't know much of her are apt to fancy her cold
and proud; but to those whom she really likes she is all that is charming,
and I don't think she can fail to like you."

"You are very kind to say so. I hope she may like me. Do you know, I have
been so much interested in Lady Geraldine from the first, before I saw her
even--partly, perhaps, because her sister told me about her engagement. You
will think that very romantic and silly, I daresay."

"Not at all; a young lady is bound to be interested in that kind of thing.
And I hope your interest in Lady Geraldine was not lessened when you did
see her."

"It could scarcely be that. No one could help admiring her."

"Yes, she is very handsome, there is no question about that; she has been
an acknowledged beauty ever since she came out. I think I can catch a
glimpse of her yonder among the trees; I see a white dress and a scarlet
shawl. Geraldine always had a penchant for scarlet draperies."

"Yes, that is Lady Geraldine."

They hastened their steps a little, and came presently to the circle of
beeches where they had lunched, and where most of the party were now
assembled, preparing for the return journey. Lady Geraldine was sauntering
to and fro with Major Mason, listening with a somewhat indifferent air to
that gentleman's discourse.

She caught sight of her lover the moment he appeared; and Clarissa saw the
statuesque face light up with a faint flush of pleasure that brightened it
wonderfully. But however pleased she might be, Lady Geraldine Challoner was
the last of women to demonstrate her pleasure in her lover's arrival by any
overt act. She received him with the tranquil grace of an empress, who sees
only one courtier more approach the steps of her throne. They shook hands
placidly, after Mr. Fairfax had shaken hands and talked for two or three
minutes with Lady Laura Armstrong, who welcomed him with considerable
warmth.

The major dropped quietly away from Lady Geraldine's side, and the plighted
lovers strolled under the trees for a little, pending the signal for the
return.

"So you know Miss Lovel?" Geraldine said, with an icy air of surprise, as
soon as she and George Fairfax were alone.

"I can hardly say that I know her; our acquaintance is the merest
accident," answered Mr. Fairfax; and then proceeded to relate his railway
adventure.

"How very odd that she should travel alone!"

"Scarcely so odd, when you remember the fact of her father's poverty. He
could not be supposed to find a maid for his daughter."

"But he might be supposed to take some care of her. He ought not to have
allowed her to travel alone--at night too."

"It was careless and imprudent, no doubt. Happily she came to no harm. She
was spared from any encounter with a travelling swell-mobsman, who would
have garotted her for the sake of her watch and purse, or an insolent
bagman, who would have made himself obnoxiously agreeable on account of her
pretty face."

"I suppose she has been in the habit of going about the world by herself.
That accounts for her rather strong-minded air."

"Do you find her strong-minded? I should have thought her quite gentle and
womanly."

"I really know nothing about her; and I must not say anything against her.
She is Laura's last _protegee_; and you know, when my sister takes any one
up, it is always a case of rapture."

After this the lovers began to talk about themselves, or rather George
Fairfax talked about himself, giving a detailed account of his proceedings
since last they had met.

"I went down to see my uncle," he said, "the day before yesterday. He is at
Lyvedon, and I had a good look at the old house. Really it is the dearest
old place in the world, Geraldine, and I should like above all things to
live there by-and-by, when the estate is ours. I don't think we are likely
to wait very long. The poor old man is awfully shaky. He was very good to
me, dear old boy, and asked all manner of kind questions about you. I think
I have quite won his heart by my engagement; he regards it as a pledge of
my reform."

"I am glad he is pleased," replied Lady Geraldine, in a tone that was just
a shade more gracious than that in which she had spoken of Clarissa.

The summons to the carriages came almost immediately. Mr. Fairfax conducted
his betrothed to her seat in the barouche, and then mounted his horse to
ride back to the Castle beside her. He rode by the side of the carriage
all the way, indifferent to dust; but there was not much talk between the
lovers during that homeward progress, and Clarissa fancied there was a
cloud upon Mr. Fairfax's countenance.

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER VII.

DANGEROUS GROUND.


Life was very pleasant at Hale Castle. About that one point there could be
no shadow of doubt. Clarissa wondered at the brightness of her new
existence; began to wonder vaguely by-and-by what it was that made it seem
brighter every day. There was the usual round of
amusements--dinner-parties, amateur concerts, races, flower-shows,
excursions to every point of interest within a day's drive, a military ball
at the garrison-town twenty miles off, perennial croquet, and gossip, and
afternoon tea-drinking in arbours or marquees in the gardens, and unlimited
flirtation. It was impossible for the most exacting visitor to be dull.
There was always something.

And to Clarissa all these things possessed the charm of freshness. She was
puzzled beyond measure by the indifference, real or simulated, of the girls
who had seen half-a-dozen London seasons; the frequent declarations that
these delights only bored them, that this or that party was a failure.
George Fairfax watched her bright face sometimes, interested in spite of
himself by her freshness.

"What a delicious thing youth is!" he said to himself. "Even if that girl
were less completely lovely than she is, she would still be most charming.
If Geraldine were only like that--only fresh and candid and pure, and
susceptible to every new emotion! But there is an impassable gulf of ten
years between them. Geraldine is quite as handsome--in her own particular
style--and she talks much better than Clarissa Lovel, and is more clever,
no doubt; and yet there are some men who would be bewitched by that girl
before they knew where they were."

Very often after this Mr. Fairfax fell a-musing upon those apocryphal men
who might be subjugated by the charms of Miss Lovel.

When did he awaken to the fatal truth that those charms were exercising a
most potent influence upon his own mind? When did he open his eyes for the
first time to behold his danger?

Not yet. He was really attached to Geraldine Challoner. Her society had
been a kind of habit with him for several years of his life. She had been
more admired than any woman he knew, and it was, in some sort, a triumph to
have won her. That he never would have won her but for his brother's death
he knew very well, and accepted the fact as a matter of course; a mere
necessity of the world in which they lived, not as evidence of a mercenary
spirit in the lady. He knew that no woman could better discharge the duties
of an elevated station, or win him more social renown. To marry Geraldine
Challoner was to secure for his house the stamp of fashion, for every
detail of his domestic life a warrant of good taste. She had a kind of
power over him too, an influence begun long ago, which had never yet been
oppressive to him. And he took these things for love. He had been in love
with other women during his long alliance with Lady Geraldine, and had
shown more ardour in the pursuit of other flames than he had ever evinced
in his courtship of her; but these more passionate attachments had come,
for the most part, to a sorry end; and now he told himself that Geraldine
suited him better than any other woman in the world.

"I have outgrown all foolish notions," he said to himself, believing that
the capacity was dead within him for that blind unreasoning passion which
poets of the Byronic school have made of love. "What I want is a wife; a
wife of my own rank, or a little above me in rank; a wife who will be true
and loyal to me, who knows the world well enough to forgive my antecedents,
and to be utterly silent about them, and who will help me to make a
position for myself in the future. A man must be something in this world.
It is a hard thing that one cannot live one's own life; but it seems
inevitable somehow."

His mother had helped not a little to the bringing about of this
engagement. She knew that her son's bachelor life had been at best a wild
one; not so bad as it was supposed to be, of course, since nothing in this
world ever is so bad as the rest of the world supposes it; and she was very
anxious to see him safely moored in the sheltered harbour of matrimony. She
was a proud woman, and she was pleased that her son should have an earl's
daughter for his wife; and beyond this there was the fact that she liked
Lady Geraldine. The girl who had been too proud to let the man she loved
divine the depth of her feeling, had not been too proud to exhibit her
fondness for his mother. There had grown up a warm friendship between these
two women; and Mrs. Fairfax's influence had done much, almost unknown
to her son, to bring about this result of his chronic flirtation with
Geraldine Challoner.

Just at present he was very well satisfied with the fact of his engagement,
believing that he had taken the best possible means for securing his future
happiness; an equable, quiet sort of happiness, of course--he was nearly
thirty, and had outlived the possibility of anything more than that. It
would have bored him to suppose that Geraldine expected more from him
than this tranquil kind of worship. Perhaps the lady understood this, and
schooled herself to a colder tone than was even natural to her, rather than
be supposed for one moment to be the more deeply attached of the two.

Thus it happened that Mr. Fairfax was not severely taxed in his capacity of
plighted lover. However exacting Lady Geraldine may have been by nature,
she was too proud to demand more exclusive attention than her betrothed
spontaneously rendered; indeed, she took pains to let him perceive that he
was still in full enjoyment of all his old bachelor liberty. So the days
drifted by very pleasantly, and George Fairfax found himself in Clarissa
Lovel's society perhaps a little oftener than was well for either of those
two.

He was very kind to her; he seemed to understand her better than other
people, she thought; and his companionship was more to her than that of
any one else--a most delightful relief after Captain Westleigh's incessant
frivolity, or Mr. Halkin's solemn small-talk. In comparison with these
men, he appeared to such wonderful advantage. Her nature expanded in his
society, and she could talk to him as she talked to no one else.

He used to wonder at her eloquence sometimes, as the beautiful face glowed,
and the dark hazel eyes brightened; he wondered not a little also at the
extent of her reading, which had been wide and varied during that quiet
winter and spring-time at Mill Cottage.

"What a learned lady you are!" he said, smiling at her enthusiasm one day,
when they had been talking of Italy and Dante; "your close knowledge of the
poet puts my poor smattering to shame. Happily, an idler and a worldling
like myself is not supposed to know much. I was never patient enough to be
a profound reader; and if I cannot tear the heart out of a book, I am apt
to throw it aside in disgust. But you must have read a great deal; and yet
when we met, less than a year ago, you confessed to being only a schoolgirl
fresh from grinding away at Corneille and Racine."

"I have had the advantage of papa's help since then," answered Clarissa,
"and he is very clever. He does not read many authors, but those he does
care for he reads with all his heart. He taught me to appreciate Dante, and
to make myself familiar with the history of his age, in order to understand
him better."

"Very wise of him, no doubt. And that kind of studious life with your papa
is very pleasant to you, I suppose, Miss Lovel?"

"Yes," she answered thoughtfully; "I have been quite happy with papa. Some
people might fancy the life dull, perhaps, but it has scarcely seemed so to
me. Of course it is very different from life here; but I suppose one would
get tired of such a perpetual round of pleasure as Lady Laura provides for
us."

"I should imagine so. Life in a country house full of delightful people
must be quite intolerable beyond a certain limit. One so soon gets tired of
one's best friends. I think that is why people travel so much nowadays. It
is the only polite excuse for being alone."

The time came when Clarissa began to fancy that her visit had lasted long
enough, and that, in common decency, she was bound to depart; but on
suggesting as much to Lady Laura, that kindly hostess declared she could
not possibly do without her dearest Clarissa for ever so long.

"Indeed, I don't know how I shall ever get on without you, my dear," she
said; "we suit each other so admirably, you see. Why, I shall have no one
to read Tasso with--no one to help me with my Missal when you are gone."

Miss Lovel's familiar knowledge of Italian literature, and artistic tastes,
had been altogether delightful to Lady Laura; who was always trying to
improve herself, as she called it, and travelled from one pursuit to
another, with a laudable perseverance, but an unhappy facility for
forgetting one accomplishment in the cultivation of another. Thus by
a vigorous plunge into Spanish and Calderon this year, she was apt to
obliterate the profound impression created by Dante and Tasso last year.
Her music suffered by reason of a sudden ardour for illumination; or art
went to the wall because a London musical season and an enthusiastic
admiration of Halle had inspired her with a desire to cultivate a more
classic style of pianoforte-playing. So in her English reading, each new
book blotted out its predecessor. Travels, histories, essays, biographies,
flitted across the lady's brain like the coloured shadows of a
magic-lantern, leaving only a lingering patch of picture here and there.
To be versatile was Lady Laura's greatest pride, and courteous friends had
gratified her by treating her as an authority upon all possible subjects.
Nothing delighted her so much as to be appealed to with a preliminary,
"Now, you who read so much, Lady Laura, will understand this;" or, "Dear
Lady Laura, you who know everything, must tell me why," etc.; or to be told
by a painter, "You who are an artist yourself can of course see this, Lady
Laura;" or to be complimented by a musician as a soul above the dull mass
of mankind, a sympathetic spirit, to whom the mysteries of harmony are a
familiar language.

In that luxurious morning-room of Lady Laura's Clarissa generally spent the
first two hours after breakfast. Here the children used to come with French
and German governesses, in all the freshness of newly-starched cambric and
newly-crimped tresses, to report progress as to their studies and general
behaviour to their mother; who was apt to get tired of them in something
less than a quarter of an hour, and to dispatch them with kisses and
praises to the distant schoolrooms and nurseries where these young exotics
were enjoying the last improvements in the forcing system.

Geraldine Challoner would sometimes drop into this room for a few minutes
at the time of the children's visit, and would converse not unkindly with
her nephews and nieces; but for her sister's accomplishments she displayed
a profound indifference, not to say contempt. She was not herself given to
the cultivation of these polite arts--nothing could ever induce her to sing
or play in public. She read a good deal, but rarely talked about books--it
was difficult indeed to say what Lady Geraldine did talk about--yet in
the art of conversation, when she chose to please, Geraldine Challoner
infinitely surpassed the majority of women in her circle. Perhaps this may
have been partly because she was a good listener; and, in some measure, on
account of that cynical, mocking spirit in which she regarded most things,
and which was apt to pass for wit.

Clarissa had been a month at Hale Castle already; but she stayed on at the
urgent desire of her hostess, much too happy in that gay social life to
oppose that lady's will.

"If you really, really wish to have me, dear Lady Laura," she said; "but
you have been so kind already, and I have stayed so long, that I begin to
feel myself quite an intruder."

"You silly child! I do really, really wish to have you. I should like to
keep you with me always, if I could. You suit me so much better than any of
my sisters; they are the most provoking girls in the world, I think, for
being uninterested in my pursuits. And your Italian is something wonderful.
I have not opened my dictionary since we have been reading together. And
beyond all that, I have a very particular reason for wishing you to be here
next month."

"Why next month, Lady Laura?"

"I am not going to tell you that."

"But you quite mystify me."

"I mean to mystify you. No, it's not the least use asking questions, Clary;
but mind, you must not tease me any more about running away: that is
understood."

In all this time Clarissa had not found herself any nearer to that desired
result of getting on well with Geraldine Challoner. That lady seemed quite
as far away from her after a month's acquaintance as she had seemed at the
very first. It was not that Lady Geraldine was uncivil. She was polite,
after her manner, to Clarissa, but never cordial; and yet she could not
fail to see that George Fairfax admired and liked Miss Lovel, and she might
have been supposed to wish to think well of any one he liked.

Was she jealous of Clarissa? Well, no, it scarcely seemed possible to
associate the fever of jealousy with that serene temperament. She had an
air of complete security in all her intercourse with George Fairfax, which
was hardly compatible with doubt or the faintest shadow of suspicion.

If ever she did speak of Miss Lovel to her lover, or to any one else, she
talked of her as a pretty country girl, and seemed to consider her as far
removed, by reason of her youth and obscure position, from herself, as if
they had been inhabitants of two separate worlds.

Mr. Lovel had been invited to several dinner-parties at the Castle during
his daughter's visit, but was not to be drawn from his seclusion. He had no
objection, however, that Clarissa should stay as long as Lady Laura cared
to retain her, and wrote very cordially to that effect.

What a pleasant, idle, purposeless life it was, and how rapidly it drifted
by for Clarissa! She wondered to find herself so happy; wondered what the
charm was which made life so new and sweet, which made her open her eyes on
the morning sunshine with such a glad eagerness to greet the beginning
of another day, and filled up every hour with such a perfect sense of
contentment.

She wondered at this happiness only in a vague dreamy way, not taking much
trouble to analyse her feelings. It was scarcely strange that she should be
completely happy in a life so different from her dull existence at home.
The freshness and beauty of all these pleasant things would be worn off in
time, no doubt, and she would become just like those other young women,
with their experience of many seasons, and their perpetual complaint of
being bored; but just now, while the freshness lasted, everything delighted
her.

Clarissa had been more than six weeks at the Castle, while other visitors
had come and gone, and the round of country-house gaieties had been
unbroken. The Fermors still lingered on, and languidly deprecated the
length of their visit, without any hint of actual departure. Captain
Westleigh had gone back to his military duties, very much in love with
Miss Lovel. He plaintively protested, in his confidences with a few chosen
friends, against a Providence which had made them both penniless.

"I don't suppose I shall ever meet such a girl again," he would declare
piteously. "More than once I was on the point of making her an offer; the
words were almost out, you know; for I don't go in for making a solemn
business of the thing, with a lot of preliminary palaver. If a fellow
really likes a girl, he doesn't want to preach a sermon in order to let her
know it; and ever so many times, when we've been playing croquet, or when
I've been hanging about the piano with her of an evening, I've been on the
point of saying, 'Upon my word, Miss Lovel, I think we two are eminently
suited to each other, don't you?' or something plain and straightforward
of that kind; and then I've remembered that her father can't give her a
sixpence, which, taken in conjunction with my own financial condition,
would mean starvation!"

"And do you think she liked you?" a curious friend would perhaps inquire.

"Well, I don't know. She might do worse, you see. As a rule, girls
generally do like me. I don't see why there should be any difference in her
case."

Nor did the Captain for a moment imagine that Clarissa would have rejected
him, had he been in a position to make an offer of his hand.

Lady Geraldine was a fixture at Hale. She was to stay there till her
marriage, with the exception, perhaps, of a brief excursion to London for
millinery purposes, Lady Laura told Clarissa. But the date of the marriage
had not yet been settled--had been, indeed, only discussed in the vaguest
manner, and the event seemed still remote.

"It will be some time this year, I suppose," Lady Laura said; "but beyond
that I can really say nothing. Geraldine is so capricious; and perhaps
George Fairfax may not be in a great hurry to give up his bachelor
privileges. He is very different from Fred, who worried me into marrying
him six weeks after he proposed. And in this case a long engagement seems
so absurd, when you consider that they have known each other for ten years.
I shall really be very glad when the business is over, for I never feel
quite sure of Geraldine."

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER VIII.

SMOULDERING FIRES.


With the beginning of August there came a change in the weather. High
winds, gloom, and rain succeeded that brilliant cloudless summer-time,
which had become, as it were, the normal condition of the universe;
and Lady Laura's guests were fain to abandon their picnics and forest
excursions, their botanical researches and distant race-meetings--nay, even
croquet itself, that perennial source of recreation for the youthful mind,
had to be given up, except in the most fitful snatches. In this state
of things, amateur concerts and acted charades came into fashion. The
billiard-room was crowded from breakfast till dinner time. It was
a charmingly composite apartment--having one long wall lined with
bookshelves, sacred to the most frivolous ephemeral literature, and a grand
piano in an arched recess at one end of the room--and in wet weather was
the chosen resort of every socially-disposed guest at Hale. Here Clarissa
learned to elevate her pretty little hand into the approved form of bridge,
and acquired some acquaintance with the mysteries of cannons and pockets.
It was Mr. Fairfax who taught her billiards. Lady Geraldine dropped into
the room now and then, and played a game in a dashing off-hand way with her
lover, amidst the admiring comments of her friends; but she did not come
very often, and Mr. Fairfax had plenty of time for Clarissa's instruction.

Upon one of these wet days he insisted upon looking over her portfolio of
drawings; and in going through a heap of careless sketches they came upon
something of her brother Austin's. They were sitting in the library,--a
very solemn and splendid chamber, with a carved oak roof and deep mullioned
windows,--a room that was less used than any other apartment in the Castle.
Mr. Fairfax had caught Miss Lovel here, with her portfolio open on the
table before her, copying a drawing of Piranesi's; so there could be no
better opportunity for inspecting the sketches, which she had hitherto
refused to show him.

That sketch of Austin's--a group of Arab horsemen done in pen and ink--set
them talking about him at once; and George Fairfax told Clarissa all he
could tell about his intercourse with her brother.

"I really liked him so much," he said gently, seeing how deeply she was
moved by the slightest mention of that name. "I cannot say that I ever knew
him intimately, that I can claim to have been his friend; but I used at
one time to see a good deal of him, and I was very much impressed by
his genius. I never met a young man who gave me a stronger notion of
undisciplined genius; but, unhappily, there was a recklessness about him
which I can easily imagine would lead him into dangerous associations. I
was told that he had quarrelled with his family, and meant to sell out, and
take to painting as a profession,--and I really believe that he would have
made his fortune as a painter; but when I heard of him next, he had gone
abroad--to the colonies, some one said. I could never learn anything more
precise than that."

"I would give the world to know where he is," said Clarissa mournfully;
"but I dare not ask papa anything about him, even if he could tell me,
which I doubt very much. I did try to speak of him once; but it was no
use--papa would not hear his name."

"That seems very hard; and yet your father must have been proud of him and
fond of him once, I should think."

"I am not sure of that. Papa and Austin never seemed to get on quite well
together. There was always something--as if there had been some kind of
hidden resentment, some painful feeling in the mind of each. I was too
young to be a competent judge, of course; but I know, as a child, I had
always a sense that there was a cloud between those two, a shadow that
seemed to darken our lives."

They talked for a long time of this prodigal son; and this kind of
conversation seemed to bring them nearer to each other than anything else
that had happened within the six weeks of their acquaintance.

"If ever I have any opportunity of finding out your brother's whereabouts,
Miss Lovel, you may be sure that I will use every effort to get you some
tidings of him. I don't want to say anything that might lead to your being
disappointed; but when I go to town again, I will hunt up a man who used to
be one of his friends, and try to learn something. Only you must promise me
not to be disappointed if I fail."

"I won't promise that; but I promise to bear my disappointment quietly, and
to be grateful to you for your goodness," Clarissa answered, with a faint
smile.

They went on with the inspection of the drawings, in which Mr. Fairfax
showed himself deeply interested. His own manipulative powers were of the
smallest, but he was an excellent critic.

"I think I may say of you what I said of your brother just now--that you
might make a fortune, if you were to cultivate art seriously."

"I wish I could make a fortune large enough to buy back Arden Court,"
Clarissa answered eagerly.

"You think so much of Arden?"

"O yes, I am always thinking of it, always dreaming of it; the dear old
rooms haunt me sleeping and waking. I suppose they are all altered now. I
think it would almost break my heart to see them different."

"Do you know, I am scarcely in a position to understand that fervent love
for one's birthplace. I may be said to have no birthplace myself. I
was born in lodgings, or a furnished house--some temporary ark of that
kind--the next thing to being born on board ship, and having Stepney for
one's parish. My father was in a hard-working cavalry regiment, and the
early days of my mother's married life were spent in perpetual wanderings.
They separated, when I was about eight years old, for ever--a sad story,
of course--something worse than incompatibility of temper on the husband's
side; and from that time I never saw him, though he lived for some years.
So, you see, the words 'home' and 'father' are for me very little more than
sentimental abstractions. But with my mother I have been quite happy. She
has indeed been the most devoted of women. She took a house at Eton when
my brother and I were at school there, and superintended our home studies
herself; and from that time to this she has watched my career with
unchanging care. It is the old story of maternal kindness and filial
shortcomings. I have given her a world of trouble; but I am not the less
fond of her, or the less grateful to her." He stopped for a few moments,
with something like a sigh, and then went on in a lighter tone: "You can
see, however, that having no ancestral home of my own, I am hardly able to
understand the depth of your feeling for Arden Court. There is an old place
down in Kent, a fine old castellated mansion, built in the days of Edward
VI., which is to be mine by-and-by; but I doubt if I shall ever value it as
you do your old home. Perhaps I am wanting in the poetic feeling necessary
for the appreciation of these things."

"O no, it is not that," Clarissa answered eagerly; "but the house you
speak of will not have been your home. You won't have that dim, dreamy
recollection of childhood spent in the old rooms; another life, the life of
another being almost, it seems, as one looks back to it. I have only
the faintest memory of my mother; but it is very sweet, and it is all
associated with Arden Court. I cannot conjure up her image for a moment
without that background. Yes, I do wish for fortune, for that one reason. I
would give the world to win back Arden."

She was very much in earnest. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened
with those eager words. Never perhaps had she looked lovelier than at that
moment. George Fairfax paused a little before he answered her, admiring the
bright animated face; admiring her, he thought, very much as he might have
admired some beautiful wayward child. And then he said gravely:

"It is dangerous to wish for anything so intensely. There are wishes the
gratification whereof is fatal. There are a dozen old stories in the
classics to show that; to say nothing of all those mediaeval legends in
which Satan is complaisant to some eager wisher."

"But there is no chance of my wish being gratified. If I could work my
fingers to the bone in the pursuit of art or literature, or any of the
professions by which women win money, I should never earn the price of
Arden; nor would that hateful Mr. Granger be disposed to sell a place which
gives him his position in the county. And I suppose he is fond of it,
after a fashion. He has spent a fortune upon improvements. Improvements!"
repeated Clarissa contemptuously; "I daresay he has improved away the very
spirit of the place."

"You cherish a strong dislike for this gentleman, it seems, Miss Lovel."

"I am wicked enough to dislike him for having robbed us of Arden. Of course
you will say that any one else might have bought the place. But then I can
only reply, that I should have disliked any other purchaser just the same;
a little less though, perhaps, if he had been a member of some noble old
family--a man with a great name. It would have been some consolation to
think that Arden was promoted."

"I am afraid there is a leaven of good old Tory spirit in your composition,
Miss Lovel."

"I suppose papa is a Tory. I know he has a profound contempt for what he
calls new people--very foolish, of course, I quite feel that; but I think
he cannot help remembering that he comes of a good old race which has
fallen upon evil days."

"You remember my telling you that I had been to Arden Court. Mr. Granger
gave a state dinner once while I was staying here, and I went with Fred and
Lady Laura. I found him not by any means a disagreeable person. He is just
a little slow and ponderous, and I should scarcely give him credit for
a profound or brilliant intellect; but he is certainly sensible,
well-informed, and he gave me the idea of being the very essence of truth."

"I daresay he is very nice," Clarissa answered with a subdued sigh. "He has
always been kind and attentive to papa, sending game and hothouse fruit,
and that kind of thing; and he has begged that we would use the park as if
it were our own; but I have never crossed the boundary that divides my new
home from my old one. I couldn't bear to see the old walks now."

They talked for a good deal longer, till the clanging of the Castle bell
warned Clarissa that it was time to dress for dinner. It is amazing how
rapidly time will pass in such serious confidential talk. George Fairfax
looked at his watch with an air of disbelief in that supreme authority the
Castle bell, which was renowned for its exact observance of Greenwich time.
That blusterous rainy August afternoon had slipped away so I quickly.

"It is a repetition of my experience during that night journey to
Holborough," Mr. Fairfax said, smiling. "You have a knack of charming away
the hours, Miss Lovel."

It was the commonest, most conventional form of compliment, no doubt; but
Clarissa blushed a little, and bent rather lower over the portfolio, which
she was closing, than she had done before. Then she put the portfolio under
her arm, murmured something about going to dress, made George Fairfax a
gracious curtsey, and left him.

He did not hurry away to make his own toilet, but walked up and down the
library for some minutes, thinking.

"What a sweet girl she is!" he said to himself; "and what a pity her
position is not a better one! With a father like that, and a brother who
has stamped himself as a scapegrace at the beginning of life, what is to
become of her? Unless she marries well, I see no hopeful prospect for her
future. But of course such a girl as that is sure to make a good marriage."

Instead of being cheered by this view of the case, Mr. Fairfax's brow grew
darker, and his step heavier.

"What does it matter to me whom she chooses for her husband?" he asked
himself; "and yet no man would like to see such a girl throw herself away
for mercenary reasons. If I had known her a few months ago! If! What is the
history of human error but a succession of 'ifs'? Would it have been better
for me or for her, that we had learned to know each other while I was free?
The happiest thing for _me_ would have been never to have met her at all.
I felt myself in some kind of danger that night we met in the
railway-carriage. Her race is fatal to mine, I begin to think. Any
connection in that quarter would have galled my mother to the quick--broken
her heart perhaps; and I am bound to consider her in all I do. Nor am I a
schoolboy, to fancy that the whole colour of my life is to be governed by
such an influence as this. She is only a pretty woman, with a low sweet
voice, and gentle winning ways. Most people would call Geraldine the
handsomer of the two. Poor child! She ought to seem no more than a child to
me. I think she likes me, and trusts me. I wish Geraldine were kinder to
her; I wish-----"

He did not particularise that last wish, even to himself, but went away to
dress, having wasted the first quarter of the three-quarters that elapsed
between the first and second bell at Hale Castle.

Throughout that evening, which was an unusually quiet and domestic evening
for Hale, he did not talk any more to Clarissa. It might even have been
thought that he scrupulously, and of a fixed purpose, avoided her.
He devoted himself to chess with Lady Geraldine; a game he played
indifferently, and for which he cherished a profound aversion. But chess
was one of Geraldine Challoner's strong points; and that aristocratic
beauty never looked more regal than when she sat before a chess-table, with
one thin white hand hovering gently above the carved ivory pieces.

Mr. Fairfax lost four or five games in succession, excusing his own
careless play every time by some dexterous compliment to his betrothed.
More than once he stifled a yawn--more than once his glances wandered away
to the group near the piano, amidst which Clarissa was seated, listening to
Lizzy Fermor's brilliant waltzes and mazurkas, with an open music-book
on her lap, turning over the leaves now and then, with rather a listless
pre-occupied air, Mr. Fairfax thought.

That evening did certainly seem very dreary to Clarissa, in spite of Miss
Fermor's dashing music and animated chatter. She missed that other talk,
half playful, half earnest, with which George Fairfax had been wont to
beguile some part of every evening; finding her out, as if by a subtle
instinct, in whatever corner of the room she happened to be, and always
devoting one stray half-hour of the evening to her society. To-night all
things came to an end: matrons and misses murmured their good-nights and
sailed away to the corridor, where there was a regiment of small silver
candlesticks, emblazoned with the numerous quarterings of Armstrong and
Challoner; and George Fairfax only rose from the chess-table as Lady
Laura's guests abandoned the drawing-room. Geraldine bade her lover
good-night with her most bewitching smile--a smile in which there was even
some faint ray of warmth.

"You have given me some very easy victories," she said, as they shook
hands, "and I won't flatter you by saying you have played well. But it was
very good of you to sit so long at a game which I know you detest, only to
please me."

"A very small sacrifice, surely, my dear Geraldine. We'll play chess every
night, if you like. I don't care much for the game in the abstract, I
admit; but I am never tired of admiring your judicious play, or the
exquisite shape of your hands."

"No, no; I don't want to try you with such severe training. I saw how tired
you were more than once to-night, and how your eyes wandered away to those
noisy girls by the piano, like an idle boy who is kept at his lessons when
his companions are at play."

Mr. Fairfax's sunburnt countenance reddened a little at this reproof.

"Was I inattentive?" he asked; "I did not know that. I was quite aware of
my bad play, and I really believe I was conscientious."

And so they wished each other good-night and parted. Geraldine Challoner
did not go at once to her own room. She had to pass her sister's quarters
on her way, and stopped at the door of the dressing-room.

"Are you quite alone, Laura?" she asked, looking in.

"Quite alone."

A maid was busy unweaving a splendid pyramid of chestnut plaits which had
crowned the head of her mistress; but she of course counted for nothing,
and could be dismissed at any moment.

"And there will not be half-a-dozen people coming in to gossip?" Lady
Geraldine asked in rather a fretful tone, as she flung herself into an
arm-chair near the dressing-table.

"Not a soul; I have wished every one good-night. I was rather tired, to
tell the truth, and not inclined for talk. But of course I am always glad
of a chat with you, Geraldine.--You may go, Parker; I can finish my hair
myself."

The maid retired, as quietly as some attendant spirit.

Lady Laura took up a big ivory brush and began smoothing the long chestnut
locks in a meditative way, waiting for her sister to speak. But Lady
Geraldine seemed scarcely in the mood for lively conversation; her fingers
were twisting themselves in and out upon the arm of her chair in a nervous
way, and her face had a thoughtful, not to say moody, expression.

Her sister watched her for some minutes silently.

"What is the matter, Geraldine?" she inquired at last. "I can see there is
something wrong."

"There is very much that is wrong," the other answered with a kind of
suppressed vehemence. "Upon my word, Laura, I believe it is your destiny
to stand in my light at every stage of my life, or you would scarcely have
happened to have planted that girl here just at this particular time."

"What girl?" cried Lady Laura, amazed at this sudden accusation.

"Clarissa Lovel."

"Good gracious me, Geraldine! what has my poor Clarissa done to offend
you?"

"Your poor Clarissa has only set her cap at George Fairfax; and as she
happens to be several years younger than I am, and I suppose a good deal
prettier, she has thoroughly succeeded in distracting his attention--his
regard, perhaps--from myself."

Laura Armstrong dropped the hair-brush, in profound consternation.

"My dear Geraldine, this is the merest jealous folly on your part. Clarissa
is the very last girl in the world who would be guilty of such meanness as
to try and attract another woman's lover. Besides, I am sure that George's
attachment to yourself--"

"Pray, don't preach about that, Laura!" her sister broke in impatiently. "I
must be the best judge of his attachment; and you must be the very blindest
of women, if you have not seen how your newest pet and _protegee_ has
contrived to lure George to her side night after night, and to interest him
by her pretty looks and juvenile airs and graces."

"Why, I don't believe George spoke to Miss Lovel once this evening; he was
playing chess with you from the moment he came to the drawing-room after
dinner."

"To-night was an exceptional case. Mr. Fairfax was evidently on duty. His
manner all the evening was that of a man who has been consciously culpable,
and is trying to atone for bad behaviour. And your favourite was wounded by
his desertion--I could see that."

"She did seem a little depressed, certainly," Lady Laura answered
thoughtfully; "I observed that myself. But I know that the girl has a noble
nature, and if she has been so foolish as to be just a little attracted by
George Fairfax, she will very quickly awake to a sense of her folly. Pray
don't give yourself the faintest uneasiness, Geraldine. I have my plans for
Clarissa Lovel, and this hint of yours will make me more anxious to put
them into execution. As for George, it is natural to men to flirt; there's
no use in being angry with them. I'm sure that wretched Fred of mine has
flirted desperately, in his way."

Lady Geraldine gave her shoulders a contemptuous shrug, expressive of a
most profound indifference to the delinquencies of Mr. Armstrong.

"Your husband and George Fairfax are two very different people," she said.

"But you don't for a moment suppose there is anything serious in this
business?" Laura asked anxiously.

"How can I tell? I sometimes think that George has never really cared for
me; that he proposed to me because he thought his mother would like the
marriage, and because our names had often been linked together, and our
marriage was in a manner expected by people, and so on. Yes, Laura, I have
sometimes doubted if he ever loved me--I hate to talk of these things, even
to you; but there are times when one must confide in some one--and I have
been sorely tempted to break off the engagement."

She rose from her chair, and began to pace up and down the room in a quick
impatient way.

"Upon my honour, I believe it would be the happiest thing for both of us,"
she said.

Lady Laura looked at her sister with perfect consternation.

"My dearest Geraldine, you would surely never be so mad!" she exclaimed.
"You could not be so foolish as to sacrifice the happiness of your future
life to a caprice of the moment--a mere outbreak of temper. Pray, let there
be an end of such nonsense. I am sure George is sincerely attached to you,
and I am very much mistaken in you if you do not like him--love him--better
than you can ever hope to love any other man in this world."

"O yes; I like him well enough," said Geraldine Challoner impatiently; "too
well to endure anything less than perfect sincerity on his part."

"But, my dearest, I am sure that he is sincere," Laura answered soothingly.
"Now, my own Geraldine, do pray be reasonable, and leave this business to
me. As for Clarissa, I have plans for her, the realization of which would
set your mind quite at ease; but if I cannot put them into execution
immediately, the girl shall go. Of course you are the first consideration.
With regard to George, if you would only let me sound him, I am sure I
should get at the real state of his feelings and find them all we can
wish----"

"Laura!" cried Geraldine indignantly, "if you dare to interfere, in the
smallest degree, with this business, I shall never speak to you again."

"My dear Geraldine!"

"Remember that, Laura, and remember that I mean what I say. I will not
permit so much as the faintest hint of anything I have told you."

"My dearest girl, I pledge myself not to speak one word," protested Lady
Laura, very much, alarmed by her sister's indignation.

Geraldine left her soon after this, vexed with herself for having betrayed
so much feeling, even to a sister; left her--not to repose in peaceful,
slumbers, but to walk up and down her room till early morning, and look
out at daybreak on the Castle gardens and the purple woods beyond, with a
haggard face and blank unseeing eyes.

George Fairfax meanwhile had lain himself down to take his rest in
tolerable good-humour with himself and the world in general.

"I really think I behaved very well," he said to himself; "and having
made up my mind to stop anything like a flirtation with that perilously
fascinating Clarissa, I shall stick to my resolve with the heroism of an
ancient Roman; though the Romans were hardly so heroic in that matter, by
the way--witness the havoc made by that fatal Egyptian, a little bit of a
woman that could be bundled up in a carpet--to say nothing of the general
predilection for somebody else's wife which prevailed in those days, and
which makes Suetonius read like a modern French novel. I did not think
there was so much of the old leaven left in me. My sweet Clarissa! I fancy
she likes me--in a sisterly kind of way, of course--and trusts me not a
little. And yet I must seem cold to her, and hold myself aloof, and wound
the tender untried heart a little perhaps. Hard upon both of us, but I
suppose only a common element in the initiatory ordinances of matrimony."

And so George Fairfax closed his eyes and fell asleep, with the image of
Clarissa before him in that final moment of consciousness, whereby the same
image haunted him in his slumbers that night, alternately perplexing or
delighting him; while ever and anon the face of his betrothed, pale and
statue-like, came between him and that other face; or the perfect hand he
had admired at chess that night was stretched out through the darkness to
push aside the form of Clarissa Lovel.

That erring dreamer was a man accustomed to take all things lightly; not a
man of high principle--a man whose best original impulses had been weakened
and deadened not a little by the fellowship he had kept, and the life he
had led; a man unhappily destined to exercise an influence over others
disproportionate to the weight of his own character.

Lady Laura was much disturbed by her sister's confidence; and being of a
temperament to which the solitary endurance of any mental burden is almost
impossible, immediately set to work to do the very things which would have
been most obnoxious to Geraldine Challoner. In the first place she awakened
her husband from comfortable slumbers, haunted by no more awful forms than
his last acquisition in horseflesh, or the oxen he was fattening for the
next cattle-show; and determinedly kept him awake while she gave him a
detailed account of the distressing scene she had just had with "poor
Geraldine."

Mr. Armstrong, whose yawns and vague disjointed replies were piteous to
hear, thought there was only one person in question who merited the epithet
"poor," and that person himself; but he made some faint show of being
interested nevertheless.

"Silly woman! silly woman!" he mumbled at last. "I've always thought she
rides the high horse rather too much with Fairfax. Men don't like that sort
of thing, you know. Geraldine's a very fine woman, but she can't twist a
man round her fingers as you can, Laura. Why don't you speak to George
Fairfax, and hurry on the marriage somehow? The sooner the business is
settled the better, with such a restive couple as these two; uncommonly
hard to drive in double harness--the mare inclined to jib, and the other
with a tendency to shy. You're such a manager, Laura, you'd make matters
square in no time."

If Lady Laura prided herself on one of her attributes more than
another--and she did cherish a harmless vanity about many things--it was in
the idea that she was a kind of social Talleyrand. So on this particular
occasion, encouraged by simple Fred Armstrong, who had a rooted belief that
there never had existed upon this earth such a wonderful woman as his wife,
my lady resolved to take the affairs of her sister under her protection,
and to bring all things to a triumphant issue. She felt very little
compunction about breaking her promise to Geraldine.

"All depends upon the manner in which a thing is done," she said to herself
complacently, as she composed herself for slumber; "of course I shall act
with the most extreme delicacy. But it would never do for my sister's
chances in life to be ruined for want of a little judicious intervention."

       *       *       *       *       *




CHAPTER IX.

LADY LAURA DIPLOMATISES.


The weather was fine next day, and the Castle party drove ten miles to
a rustic racecourse, where there was a meeting of a very insignificant
character, but interesting to Mr. Armstrong, to whom a horse was a source
of perennial delight, and a fair excuse for a long gay drive, and a picnic
luncheon in carriages and on coach-boxes.

Amongst Lady Laura's accomplishments was the polite art of driving. To-day
she elected to drive a high phaeton with a pair of roans, and invited
George Fairfax to take the seat beside her. Lady Geraldine had a headache,
and had not appeared that morning; but had sent a message to her sister,
to request that her indisposition, which was the merest trifle, might not
prevent Mr. Fairfax going to the races.

Mr. Fairfax at first seemed much inclined to remain at home, and perform
garrison duty.

"Geraldine will come downstairs presently, I daresay," he said to Lady
Laura, "and we can have a quiet stroll in the gardens, while you are all
away. I don't care a straw about the Mickleham races. Please leave me at
home, Lady Laura."

"But Geraldine begs that you will go. She'll keep her room all day, I've no
doubt; she generally does, when she has one of her headaches. Every one
is going, and I have set my heart on driving you. I want to hear what you
think of the roans. Come, George, I really must insist upon it."

She led him off to the phaeton triumphantly; while Frederick Armstrong was
fain to find some vent for his admiration of his gifted wife's diplomacy
in sundry winks and grins to the address of no one in particular, as he
bustled to and fro between the terrace and the hall, arranging the mode and
manner of the day's excursion--who was to be driven by whom, and so on.

Clarissa found herself bestowed in a landau full of ladies, Barbara Fermor
amongst them; and was very merry with these agreeable companions, who gave
her no time to meditate upon that change in Mr. Fairfax's manner last
night, which had troubled her a little in spite of her better sense. He was
nothing to her, of course; an accidental acquaintance whom she might never
see again after this visit; but he had known her brother, and he had been
kind and sympathetic--so much so, that she would have been glad to think
that he was really her friend. Perhaps, after all, there was very little
cause that she should be perplexed or worried on account of his quiet
avoidance of her that one evening; but then Clarissa Lovel was young and
inexperienced, and thus apt to be hypersensitive, and easily disturbed
about trifles.

Having secured a comfortable _tete-a-tete_ with Mr. Fairfax, Lady Laura
lost no time in improving the occasion. They were scarcely a mile from the
Castle before she began to touch upon the subject of the intended marriage,
lightly, and with an airy gaiety of manner which covered her real
earnestness.

"When is it to be, George?" she asked. "I really want to know something
positive, on account of my own engagement and Fred's, which must all hinge
more or less on this important business. There's no use in my talking to
Geraldine, for she is really the most impracticable of beings, and I can
never get her to say anything definite."

"My dear Lady Laura, I am almost in the same position. I have more than
once tried to induce her to fix the date for her marriage, but she has
always put the subject aside somehow or other. I really don't like to bore
her, you see; and no doubt things will arrange themselves in due course."

Lady Laura gave a little sigh of relief. He did not avoid the
question--that was something; nor did her interference seem in any manner
unpleasant to him. Indeed, nothing could be more perfect than his air of
careless good-humour, Lady Laura thought.

But she did not mean the subject to drop here; and after a little graceful
manipulation of the reins, a glance backward to see how far behind they had
left the rest of the caravan, and some slight slackening of the pace at
which they had been going, she went on.

"No doubt things would arrange themselves easily enough, if nothing
happened to interfere with our plans. But the fact is, my dear George, I am
really most uneasy about the state of poor papa's health. He has been so
sadly feeble for the last three or four years, and I feel that we may lose
him at any moment. At his age, poor dear soul, it is a calamity for which
we must be prepared, but of course such an event would postpone our
marriage for a long time, and I should really like to see my sister happily
settled before the blow fell upon her. She has been so much with him, you
see, and is so deeply attached to him--it will be worse for her than for
any of us."

"I--I conclude so," Mr. Fairfax replied rather doubtfully. He could not
help wondering a little how his betrothed cared to leave a beloved father
in so critical a condition; but he knew that his future sister-in-law was
somewhat given to exaggeration, a high col

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