The Lovels of Arden by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (ebook offline reader txt) 📕

let some little time slip by in this way, being a man to whom haste was almost unknown. This idle artistic consideration of Miss Level'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 moments 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 Télémaque 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 Télémaque 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 Belforêt, 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 Level, 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 Belforêt; 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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