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

the wife and little ones must starve.'"

"Poor fellow! poor fellow! Did you tell him that I was rich, that I could help him?"

"Yes," answered Mr. Fairfax, with an unmistakable bitterness in his tone; "I told him that you had married the rich Mr. Granger."

"How can I best assist him?" asked Clarissa eagerly. "Every penny I have in the world is at his disposal. I can give him three or four hundred a year. I have five hundred quite in my own control, and need not spend more than one. I have been rather extravagant since my marriage, and have not much money by me just now, but I shall economise from henceforward; and I do not mind asking Mr. Granger to help my brother."

"If you will condescend to take my advice, you will do nothing of that kind. Even my small knowledge of your brother's character is sufficient to make me very certain that an appeal to Mr. Granger is just the very last thing to be attempted in this case."

"But why so? my husband is one of the most generous men in the world, I think."

"To you, perhaps, that is very natural. To a man of Mr. Granger's wealth a few thousands more or less are not worth consideration; but where there is a principle or a prejudice at stake, that kind of man is apt to tighten his purse-strings with a merciless hand. You would not like to run the risk of a refusal?"

"I do not think there is any fear of that."

"Possibly not; but there is your brother to be considered in this matter. Do you think it would be pleasant for him to know that his necessities were exposed to such a--to a brother-in-law whom he had never seen?"

"I do not know," said Clarissa thoughtfully; "I fancied that he would be glad of any helping hand that would extricate him from his difficulties. I should be so glad to see him restored to his proper position in the world."

"My dear Mrs. Granger, it is better not to think of that. There is a kind of morass from which no man can be extricated. I believe your brother has sunk into that lower world of Bohemianism from which a man rarely cares to emerge. The denizens of that nethermost circle lose their liking for the upper air, can scarcely breathe it, in fact. No, upon my word, I would not try to rehabilitate him; least of all through the generosity of Mr. Granger."

"If I could only see him," said Clarissa despondingly.

"I doubt whether he would come to England, even for the happiness of seeing you. If you were in Paris, now, I daresay it might be managed. We could bring about a meeting. But I feel quite sure that your brother would not care to make himself known to Mr. Granger, or to meet your father. There is a deadly feud between those two; and I should think it likely Mr. Lovel has prejudiced your husband against his son."

Clarissa was fain to admit that it was so. More than once she had ventured to speak of her brother to Daniel Granger, and on each occasion had quickly perceived that her husband had some fixed opinion about Austin, and was inclined to regard her love for him as an amiable weakness that should be as far as possible discouraged.

"Your father has told me the story of his disagreement with his son, my dear Clarissa," Daniel Granger had said in his gravest tone, "and after what I have heard, I can but think it would be infinitely wise in you to forget that you had ever had a brother."

This was hard; and Clarissa felt her husband's want of sympathy in this matter as keenly as she could have felt any overt act of unkindness.

"Will you give me Austin's address" she asked, after a thoughtful pause. "I can write to him, at least, and send him some money, without consulting any one. I have about thirty pounds left of my last quarter's money, and even that may be of use to him."

"Most decidedly. The poor fellow told me he had been glad to get ten napoleons for half-a-dozen sketches: more than a fortnight's hard work. Would it not be better, by the way, for you to send your letter to me, and allow me to forward it to your brother? and if you would like to send him fifty pounds, or a hundred, I shall be only too proud to be your banker."

Clarissa blushed crimson, remembering that scene in the orchard, and her baffled lover's menaces. Had he forgiven her altogether, and was this kind interest in her affairs an unconscious heaping of coals of fire on her head? Had he forgiven her so easily? Again she argued with herself, as she had so often argued before, that his love had never been more than a truant fancy, a transient folly, the merest vagabondage of an idle brain.

"You are very good," she said, with a tinge of hauteur, "but I could not think of borrowing money, even to help my brother. If you will kindly tell me the best method of remitting money to Paris."

Here, Mr. Fairfax said, there was a difficulty; it ought to be remitted through a banker, and Mrs. Granger might find this troublesome to arrange, unless she had an account of her own. Clarissa said she had no account, but met the objection by suggesting bank notes; and Mr. Fairfax was compelled to own that notes upon the Bank of England could be converted into French coin at any Parisian money-changer's.

He gave Clarissa the address, 13, Rue du Chevalier Bayard, near the Luxembourg.

"I will write to him to-night," she said, and then rose from the rustic bench among the laurels. "I think I must go and look for my husband now. I left him some time ago on account of a headache. I wanted to get away from the noise and confusion on the river-bank."

"Is it wise to return to the noise and confusion so soon?" asked Mr. Fairfax, who had no idea of bringing this interview to so sudden a close.

He had been waiting for such a meeting for a long time; waiting with a kind of sullen patience, knowing that it must some sooner or later, without any special effort of his; waiting with a strange mixture of feelings and sentiments--disappointed passion, wounded pride, mortified vanity, an angry sense of wrong that had been done to him by Clarissa's marriage, an eager desire to see her again, which was half a lover's yearning, half an enemy's lust of vengeance.

He was not a good man. Such a life as he had led is a life that no man can lead with impunity. To say that he might still be capable of a generous action or unselfish impulse, would be to say much for him, given the story of his manhood. A great preacher of to-day has declared, that he could never believe the man who said he had never been tempted. For George Fairfax life had been crowded with temptations; and he had not made even the feeblest stand against the tempter. He had been an eminently fortunate man in all the trifles which make up the sum of a frivolous existence; and though his successes had been for the most part small social triumphs, they had not been the less agreeable. He had never felt the sting of failure until he stood in the Yorkshire orchard that chill October evening, and pleaded in vain to Clarissa Lovel. She was little more than a schoolgirl, and she rejected him. It was us if Lauzun, after having played fast-and-loose with that eldest daughter of France who was afterwards his wife, had been flouted by some milliner's apprentice, or made light of by an obscure little soubrette in Molière's troop of comedians. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven this slight; and mingled with that blind unreasoning passion, which he had striven in vain to conquer, there was an ever-present sense of anger and wrong.

When Clarissa rose from the bench, he rose too, and laid his hand lightly on her arm with a detaining gesture.

"If you knew how long; I have been wishing for this meeting, you would not be so anxious to bring it to a close," he said earnestly.

"It was very good of you to wish to tell me about poor Austin," she said, pretending to misunderstand him, "and I am really grateful. But I must not stay any longer away from my party."

"Clarissa--a thousand pardons--Mrs. Granger"--there is no describing the expression he gave to the utterance of that last name--a veiled contempt and aversion that just stopped short of actual insolence, because it seemed involuntary--"why are you so hard upon me? You have confessed that you wanted to escape the noise yonder, and yet to avoid me you would go back to that. Am I so utterly obnoxious to you?"

"You are not at all obnoxious to me; but I am really anxious to rejoin my party. My husband will begin to wonder what has become of me. Ah, there is my stepdaughter coming to look for me."

Yes, there was Miss Granger, slowing advancing towards them. She had been quite in time to see George Fairfax's entreating gestures, his pleading air. She approached them with a countenance that would have been quite as appropriate to a genteel funeral--where any outward demonstration of grief would be in bad taste--as it was to Mr. Wooster's fête, a countenance expressive of a kind of dismal resignation to the burden of existence in a world that way unworthy of her.

"I was just coming back to the river, Sophia," Mrs. Granger said, not without some faint indications of embarrassment. "I'm afraid Mr.--I'm afraid Daniel must have been looking for me."

"Papa _has_ been looking for you," Miss Granger replied, with unrelenting stiffness.--"How do you do, Mr. Fairfax?" shaking hands with him in a frigid manner.--"He quite lost the last race. When I saw that he was growing really anxious, I suggested that he should go one way, and I the other, in search of you. That is what brought me here."

It was as much as to say, Pray understand that I have no personal interest in your movements.

"And yet I have not been so very long away," Clarissa said, with a deprecating smile.

"You may not have been conscious of the lapse of time You have been long. You said you would go and rest for a quarter of an hour or so; and you have been resting more than an hour."

"I don't remember saying that; but you are always so correct, Sophia."

"I make a point of being exact in small things. We had better go round the garden to look for papa.--Good-afternoon, Mr. Fairfax."

"Good-afternoon, Miss Granger."

George Fairfax shook hands with Clarissa.

"Good-bye, Mrs. Granger."

That was all, but the words were accompanied by a look and a pressure of the hand that brought the warm blood into Clarissa's cheeks. She had made for herself that worst enemy a woman can have--a disappointed lover.

While they were shaking hands, Mr. Granger came in sight at the other end of the walk; so it was only natural that Mr. Fairfax, who had been tolerably intimate with him at Hale Castle, should advance to meet him. There were the usual salutations between the two men, exchanged with that stereotyped air of heartiness which seems common to Englishmen.

"I think we had