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

used, I think--more congenial home."

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

"Clarissa's visits to Austin! What, in heaven's name, do you mean?"

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

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

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

"I don't believe it. What motive could she have for cultivating such people?"

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

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

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

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

"Who told you of these visits? Clarissa herself?"

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

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

He looked at his watch meditatively.

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

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

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

Miss Granger shook her head doubtfully.

"I should hardly think that," she said.

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

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

"What did you say the address was?"

"The Rue du Chevalier Bayard, Number 7."

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

"Has Mrs. Granger's carriage come back, Saunders?" he asked.

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

"Where is Mrs. Granger? In her own rooms?"

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

"Mr. Fairfax--in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard!"

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

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

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

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

* * * * *


CHAPTER XLII.


CAUGHT IN A TRAP.

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

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

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

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

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

"Good-evening, Mr. Fairfax," she said. "Isn't Austin here?"

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

"And Bessie?" Clarissa asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Left Paris!"

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

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

"Do you know where they have