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

porter's comprehensive vision surveyed the things that might be--the house fallen into evil repute by reason of this crime, and bereft of lodgers. The porter was an elderly man, and did not care to shift his household gods.

"What have they come to do up there?" he asked. "I think I had better fetch the _sergent de ville_."

"You are quite at liberty to do that, provided you bring a doctor along with him," replied Daniel Granger coolly, and then turned on his heel and walked upstairs again.

He roamed through the empty rooms with a candle in his hand until he found a bottle of water, some portion of which he dashed into his enemy's face, kneeling by his side to do it, but with a cool off-hand air, as if he were reviving a dog, and that a dog upon, which he set no value.

George Fairfax opened his eyes, very slowly, and groaned aloud.

"O God, my head!" he said. "What a blow!"

He had a sensation of lying at the bottom of a steep hill--on a sharp inclined plane, as it were, with his feet uppermost--a sense of suffocation, too, as if his throat had been full of blood. There seemed to him to be blood in his eyes also; and he could only see things in a dim cloudy way--a room--what room he could not remember--one candle flaring on the mantelpiece, and the light of an expiring fire.

Of the things that had happened to him immediately before that struggle and that fall, he had, for the time being, no memory. But by slow degrees it dawned upon him that this was Austin Lovel's painting-room.

"Where the devil are you, Austin?" he asked impatiently.

"Can't you pick a fellow up?"

A grasp stronger than ever Austin Lovel's had been, dragged him to his feet, and half led, half pushed him into the nearest chair. He sat there, staring blankly before him. Clarissa had moved away from him, and stood amid the deep shadows at the other end of the studio, waiting for her doom. It seemed to her to matter very little what that doom should be. Perfect ruin had come upon her. The porter came in presently with a doctor--a little old grey-headed man, who wore spectacles, and had an ancient doddering manner not calculated to inspire beholders with any great belief in his capacity.

He bowed to Mr. Granger in on old-fashioned ceremonious way, and went over to the patient.

"A fall, I believe you say, monsieur!" he said.

"Yes, a fall. He struck his head against the angle of that doorway."

Mr. Granger omitted to state that it was a blow between the eyes from his clenched fist which had felled George Fairfax--a blow sent straight out from the powerful shoulder.

"There was no seizure--no fit of any kind, I hope?"

"No."

The patient had recovered himself considerably by this time, and twitched his wrist rather impatiently from the little doctor's timid grasp.

"I am well enough now," he said in a thick voice. "There was no occasion to send for a medical man. I stumbled at the doorway yonder, and knocked my head in falling--that's all."

The Frenchman was manipulating Mr. Fairfax's cranium with cautious fingers.

"There is a considerable swelling at the back of the skull," he said. "But there appears to have been another blow on the forehead. There is a puffiness, and a slight abrasion of the skin."

Mr. Fairfax extricated his head from this investigation by standing up suddenly out of reach of the small doctor. He staggered a little as he rose to his feet, but recovered himself after a moment or so, and stood firmly enough, with his hand resting on the back of the chair.

"If you will be good enough to accept this by way of fee," he said, slipping a napoleon into the doctor's hand, "I need give you no farther trouble."

The old man looked rather suspiciously from Mr. Fairfax to Mr. Granger and then back again. There was something queer in the business evidently, but a napoleon was a napoleon, and his fees were neither large nor numerous. He coughed feebly behind his hand, hesitated a little, and then with a sliding bow slipped from the room.

The porter lingered, determined to see the end of the romance, at any rate.

It was not long.

"Are you ready to come away?" Daniel Granger asked his wife, in a cold stern voice. And then, turning to George Fairfax, he said, "You know where to find me, sir, when you wish to settle the score between us."

"I shall call upon you to-morrow morning, Mr. Granger."

Clarissa looked at George Fairfax piteously for a moment, wondering if he had been much hurt--if there were any danger to be feared from the effects or that crushing fall. Never for an instant of her life had she meant to be false to her husband; but she loved this man; and her secret being discovered now, she deemed that the bond between her and Daniel Granger was broken. She looked at George Fairfax with that brief yearning look, just long enough to see that he was deadly pale; and then left the room with her husband, obeying him mechanically They went down the darksome staircase, which had grown so familiar to Clarissa, out into the empty street. There was a hackney carriage waiting near the archway--the carriage that had brought Mr. Granger. He put his wife into it without a word, and took his seat opposite to her; and so they drove home in profound silence.

Clarissa went straight to her room--the dressing-room in which Daniel Granger had talked to her the night before ha went to England. How well she remembered his words, and her own inclination to tell him everything! If she had only obeyed that impulse--if she had only confessed the truth--the shame and ignominy of to-night would have been avoided. There would have been no chance of that fatal meeting with George Fairfax; her husband would have sheltered her from danger and temptation--would have saved her from herself.

Vain regrets. The horror of that scene was still present with her--must remain so present with her till the end of her life, she thought. Those two men grappling each other, and then the fall--the tall figure crashing down with the force of a descending giant, as it had seemed to that terror-stricken spectator. For a long time she sat thinking of that awful moment--thinking of it with a concentration which left no capacity for any other thought in her mind. Her maid had come to her, and removed her out-of-door garments, and stirred the fire, and had set out a dainty little tea-tray on a table close at hand, hovering about her mistress with a sympathetic air, conscious that there was something amiss. But Clarissa had been hardly aware of the girl's presence. She was living over again the agony of that moment in which she thought George Fairfax was dead.

This could not last for ever. She awoke by and by to the thought of her child, with her husband's bitter words ringing in her ears,--

"Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night?"

"Perhaps they will shut me out of my nursery," she thought.

The rooms sacred to Lovel Granger were on the same floor as her own--she had stipulated that it should be so. She went out into the corridor from which all the rooms opened. All was silent. The boy had gone to bed, of course, by this time; very seldom had she been absent at the hour of his retirement. It had been her habit to spend a stolen half-hour in the nursery just before dressing for dinner, or to have her boy brought to her dressing-room--one of the happiest half-hours in her day. No one barred her entrance to the nursery. Mrs. Brobson was sitting by the fire, making-believe to be busy at needlework, with the under-nurse in attendance--a buxom damsel, whose elbows rested on the table as she conversed with her superior. Both looked up in some slight confusion at Clarissa's entrance. They had been talking about her, she thought, but with a supreme indifference. No petty household slander could trouble her in her great sorrow. She went on towards the inner room, where her darling slept, the head-nurse following obsequiously with a candle. In the night-nursery there was only the subdued light of a shaded lamp.

"Thank you, Mrs. Brobson, but I don't want any more light," Clarissa said quietly. "I am going to sit with baby for a little while. Take the candle away, please; it may wake him."

It was the first time she had spoken since she had left the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. Her own voice sounded strange to her; and yet its tone could scarcely have betrayed less agitation.

"The second dinner-bell has rung, ma'am," Mrs. Brobson said, with a timorously-suggestive air; "I don't know whether you are aware."

"Yes, I know, but I am not going down to dinner; I have a wretched headache. You can tell Target to say so, if they send for me."

"Yes, ma'am; but you'll have something sent up, won't you?"

"Not yet; by and by, perhaps, I'll take a cup of tea in my dressing-room. Go and tell Target, please, Mrs. Brobson; Mr. Granger may be waiting dinner."

She was so anxious to get rid of the woman, to be alone with her baby. She sat down by the cot. O, inestimable treasure! had she held him so lightly as to give any other a place in her heart? To harbour any guilty thought was to have sinned against this white-souled innocent. If those clear eyes, which looked up from her breast sometimes with such angelic tenderness, could have read the secrets of her sinful heart, how could she have dared to meet their steadfast gaze? To-night that sleeping baby seemed something more to her than her child; he was her judge.

"O, my love, my love, I am not good enough to have you for my son!" she murmured, sobbing, as she knelt by his side, resting her tired head upon his pillow, thinking idly how sweet it would be to die thus, and make an end of all this evil.

She stayed with her child for more than an hour undisturbed, wondering whether there would be any attempt to take him away from her--whether there was any serious meaning in those pitiless words of Daniel Granger's. Could he think for a moment that she would surrender him? Could he suppose that she would lose this very life of her life, and live?

At a little after nine o'clock, she heard the door of the outer nursery open, and a masculine step in the room--her husband's. The door between the two nurseries was half open. She could hear every word that was spoken; she could see Daniel Granger's figure, straight and tall and ponderous, as he stood by the table talking to Mrs. Brobson.

"I am going back to Arden the day after to-morrow, Brobson," he said; "you will have everything ready, if you please."

"O, certainly, sir; we can be ready. And I'm sure I shall rejoice to see our own house again, after all the ill-conveniences of this place." And Mrs. Brobson looked round the handsomely-furnished apartment as if it had been a hovel. "Frenchified ways don't suit me," she remarked. "If, when they was furnishing their houses, they laid out more money upon water-jugs and wash-hand basins, and less upon clocks and candelabras, it would