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

nothing so much as to be kissed.

After a good deal of that sweet baby-talk, there was a little discussion between the mistress and maid; and then the child was wrapped up as carefully as if destruction were in the breath of the softest June zephyr. Mr. Fairfax was afraid the mother was going away with the child, and that his chance would be lost; but it was not so. The maid tripped off with the infant, after it had been brought back two or three times to be half smothered with kisses--kisses which it seemed to relish in its own peculiar way, opening its mouth to receive them, as if they had been something edible. The baby was carried away at last, and Clarissa took up a book and began to read.

George Fairfax waited till the maid had been gone about ten minutes, and then came slowly down the hollow to the spot where Clarissa was seated. The rustle of the fern startled her; she looked up, and saw him standing by her side. It was just a year since he had surprised her in Mr. Wooster's garden at Henley. She had thought of him very much in that time, but less since the birth of her boy. She turned very pale at sight of him; and when she tried to speak, the words would not come: her lips only moved tremulously.

"I hope I did not alarm you very much," he said, "by the suddenness of my appearance. I thought I heard your voice just now, speaking to some one"--he had not the heart to mention her baby--"and came down here to look for you. What a charming spot it is!"

She had recovered her self-possession by this time, and was able to answer him quite calmly. "Yes, it is very pretty. It was a favourite spot of Austin's. I have at least a dozen sketches of it done by him. But I did not know you were in Yorkshire, Mr. Fairfax."

She wondered whether he was staying at Hale; and then it flashed upon her that there had been a reconciliation between him and Lady Geraldine.

"I have not been long in Yorkshire. I am merely here _en passant_, in short. My only excuse for approaching you lies in the fact that I have come to talk to you about your brother."

"About Austin!" exclaimed Clarissa, with a look of alarm. "There is nothing wrong--he is well, I hope?"

"Pray don't alarm yourself. Yes, he is tolerably well, I believe; and there is nothing wrong--nothing that need cause you any immediate concern at least. I am going to Paris, and I thought you might be glad to send some message."

"You are very kind to think of that; yes, I shall be glad to send to him. He is not a good correspondent, and I get very anxious about him sometimes. What you said just now seemed to imply that there was something wrong. Pray be candid with me, Mr. Fairfax."

He did not answer her immediately; in fact, for the moment he scarcely was conscious of her words. He was looking at the beautiful face--looking at it with a repressed passion that was deeper and more real than any he had ever felt in his life. His thoughts wandered away from Austin Level. He was thinking what he would have given, what peril he would have dared, to call this woman his own. All this lower world seemed nothing to him when weighed against her; and in such a moment a man of his stamp rarely remembers any other world.

"There is something wrong," repeated Clarissa with increasing anxiety. "I entreat you to tell me the truth!"

"Yes, there is something wrong," he answered vaguely; and then, wrenching his mind away from those wild speculations as to what he would or would not do to win Daniel Granger's wife, he went on in another tone: "The truth is, my dear Mrs. Granger, I was in Paris last winter, and saw something of your brother's mode of life; and I cannot say that I consider it a satisfactory one. You have sent him a good deal of money since I saw you last, I daresay? Pray understand that there is nothing intrusive or impertinent in my question. I only wish to be some use to you, if I can."

"I am sure of that. Yes; I have sent him what I could--about four hundred pounds--since last June; and he has been very grateful, poor fellow! He ought to know that he is welcome to every shilling I have. I could send him much more, of course, if I cared to ask my husband for money."

"It is wiser to trust to your own resources. And I doubt if the command of much money would be a positive benefit to your brother. You have asked me to be candid; and I shall obey you, even at the hazard of giving you pain. There is a kind of constitutional weakness in your brother's nature. He is a man open to every influence, and not always governed by the best influences. I saw a good deal of him when I was last in Paris, and I saw him most in the fastest society, amongst people who petted him for the sake of his genius and vivacity, but who would turn their backs upon him to-morrow if he were no longer able to amuse them; the set into which an artist is so apt to fall when his home influences are not strong enough to keep him steady, and when he has that lurking disposition to Bohemianism which has been the bane of your brother's life. I speak entirely without reserve, you see."

"I am grateful to you for doing so. Poor Austin! if he had only chosen more wisely! But his wife is fond of him, you say?"

"Too fond of him, perhaps; for she is very much given to torment him with jealous outbreaks; and he is not a man to take that sort of thing pleasantly. She does not go into society with him: indeed, I doubt if half-a-dozen out of the people whom he lives amongst know that he has a wife. I found his social position considerably improved; thanks to your remittances, no doubt. He was still in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard--as, of course, you know--but had moved a stage lower down, and had furnished a painting-room in the stereotyped style--Flemish carved buffets, dingy tapestry from a passage behind the Rue Richelieu, and a sprinkling of bric-a-brac from the Quai Voltaire. The poor little woman and her children were banished; and he had a room full of visitors chattering round him while he painted. You know his wonderful facility. The atmosphere was cloudy with tobacco-smoke; and the men were drinking that abominable concoction of worm-wood with which young France cultivates madness and early doom."

"It is not a pleasant picture," said Clarissa with a profound sigh.

"No, my dear Mrs. Granger; but it is a faithful one. Mr. Lovel had won a certain reputation for his airy style of art, and was beginning to get better prices for his pictures; but I fancy he has a capacity for spending money, and an inability to save it, which would bring him always to the same level of comparative insolvency. I have known so many men like that; and a man who begins in that way so rarely ends in any other way."

"What am I to do!" exclaimed Clarissa piteously; "what can I do to help him?"

"I am almost at a loss to suggest anything. Perhaps if you were on the spot, your influence might do something. I know he loves you, and is more moved by the mention of your name than by any sermon one could preach to him. But I suppose there is no chance of your being in Paris."

"I don't know. Mr. Granger talked some time ago of spending the autumn abroad, and asked me if I should like to see a New-Year's day in Paris. I think, if I were to express a wish about it, he would take me there; and it would be such happiness to me to see Austin!" And then Mrs. Granger thought of her baby, and wondered whether the atmosphere of Paris would be favourable to that rare and beauteous blossom; whether the tops-and-bottoms of the French capital would agree with his tender digestive machinery, and if the cowkeepers of the Faubourg St. Honoré were an honest and unadulterating race. The very notion of taking the treasure away from his own nurseries, his own cow, his own goat-chaise, was enough to make her shudder.

"It would be the best chance for his redemption. A little womanly kindness and counsel from you to the wife might bring about a happier state of things in his home; and a man who can be happy at home is in a measure saved. It is hardly possible for your brother to mix much with the people amongst whom I saw him without injury to himself. They are people to whom dissipation is the very salt of life; people who breakfast at the Moulin Rouge at three o'clock in the afternoon, and eat ices at midnight to the music of the cascade in the Bois; people to be seen at every race-meeting; men who borrow money at seventy-five per cent to pay for opera-boxes and dinners at the Café Riche, and who manage the rest of their existence on credit."

"But what could my influence do against such friends as these?" asked Clarissa in a hopeless tone.

"Who can say? It might do wonders. I know your brother has a heart, and that you have power to touch it. Take my advice, Mrs. Granger, and try to be in Paris as soon as you can."

"I will," she answered fervently. "I would do anything to save him." She looked at her watch, and rose from the seat under the hawthorn. "It is nearly two o'clock," she said, "and I must go back to the house. You will come to luncheon, of course?"

"Thanks--no. I have an engagement that will take me back to the town immediately."

"But Mr. Granger will be surprised to hear that you have been here without calling upon him."

"Need Mr. Granger hear of my coming?" George Fairfax asked in a low tone.

Clarissa flushed scarlet.

"I have no secrets from my husband, Mr. Fairfax," she said, "even about trifles."

"Ten thousand pardons! I scarcely want to make my presence here a secret; but, in short, I came solely to speak to you about a subject in which I knew you were deeply interested, and I had not contemplated calling upon Mr. Granger."

They were walking slowly up the grassy slope as they talked; and after this there came a silence, during which Clarissa quickened her pace a little, George Fairfax keeping still by her side. Her heart beat faster than its wont; and she had a vague sense of danger in this man's presence--a sense of a net being woven round her, a lurking suspicion that this apparent interest in her brother veiled some deeper feeling.

They came out of the hollow, side by side, into a short arcade of flowering limes, at the end of which there was a broad sweep of open grass. A man on a deep-chested strong-limbed gray horse was riding slowly towards them across the grass--Daniel Granger.

That picture of his wife walking in the little avenue of limes, with George Fairfax by her side, haunted Mr. Granger with a strange distinctness in days to come,--the slight white-robed figure against the background of sunlit