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

do them more credit; and if there was a chair to be had not covered with red velvet, it would be a comfort. Luxury is luxury; but you may overdo it."

This complaint, murmured in a confidential tone, passed unnoticed by Daniel Granger.

"Thursday morning, then, Mrs. Brobson, remember; the train leaves at seven. You'll have to be very early."

"It can't be too early for me."

"I'm glad to hear that; I'll go in and take a look at the child--asleep, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir; fast asleep."

He went into the dimly-lighted chamber, not expecting to see that kneeling figure by the cot. He gave a little start at seeing it, and stood aloof, as if there had been infection that way. Whatever he might feel or think, he could scarcely order his wife away from her son's bedside. Her son! Yes, there was the sting. However he might put her away from himself, he could not utterly sever _that_ bond. He would do his best; but in the days to come his boy might revolt against him, and elect to follow that guilty mother.

He had loved her so fondly, he had trusted her so completely; and his anger against her was so much the stronger because of this. He could not forgive her for having made him so weak a dupe. Her own ignominy--and he deemed her the most shameful of women--was not so deep as his disgrace.

He stood aloof, looking at his sleeping boy, looking across the kneeling figure as if not seeing it, but with a smouldering anger in his eyes that betrayed his consciousness of his wife's presence. She raised her haggard eyes to his face. The time would come when she would have to tell him her story--to make some attempt to justify herself--to plead for his pardon; but not yet. There was time enough for that. She felt that the severance between them was utter. He might believe, he might forgive her; but he would never give her his heart again. She felt that this was so, and submitted to the justice of the forfeiture. Nor had she loved him well enough to feel this loss acutely. Her one absorbing agony was the fear of losing her child.

Daniel Granger stood for a little while watching his son's placid slumber, and then left the room without a word. What could he say to his wife? His anger was much too great for words; but there was something more than anger: there was a revulsion of feeling, that made the woman he had loved seem hateful to him--hateful in her fatal beauty, as a snake is hateful in its lithe grace and silvery sheen. She had deceived him so completely; there was something to his mind beyond measure dastardly in her stolen meetings with George Fairfax; and he set down all her visits to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard to that account. She had smiled in his face, and had gone every other day to meet her lover.

Clarissa stayed with her child all that night. The servants would wonder and speculate, no doubt. She knew that; but she could not bring herself to leave him. She had all manner of fantastic fears about him. They would steal him from her in the night, perhaps. That order of Daniel Granger's about Thursday morning might be only a ruse. She laid herself down upon a sofa near the cot, and pretended to sleep, until the nurse had gone to bed, after endless fussings and rustlings and movings to and fro, that were torture to Mrs. Granger's nerves; and then listened and watched all the night through.

No one came. The wintry morning dawned, and found her child still slumbering sweetly, the rosy lips ever so slightly parted, golden-tinted lashes lying on the round pink cheeks. She smiled at her own folly, as she sat watching him in that welcome daylight. What had she expected? Daniel Granger was not an ogre. He could not take her child from her.

_Her_ child! The thought that the boy was _his_ child very rarely presented itself to her. Yet it had been suggested rather forcibly by those bitter words of her husband's: "Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night?"

For Daniel Granger and herself there might be parting, an eternal severance; but there could be no creature so cruel as to rob her of her child.

She stayed with him during his morning ablutions; saw him splash and kick in the water with the infantine exuberance that mothers love to behold, fondly deeming that no baby ever so splashed or so kicked before; saw him arrayed in his pretty blue-braided frock, and dainty lace-bedizened cambric pinafore. What a wealth of finery and prettiness had been lavished upon the little mortal, who would have been infinitely happier dressed in rags and making mud-pies in a gutter, than in his splendid raiment and well-furnished nursery; an uninteresting nursery, where there were no cupboards full of broken wagons and head-less horses, flat-nosed dolls and armless grenadiers, the cast-off playthings of a flock of brothers and sisters--a very chaos of rapture for the fingers of infancy! Only a few expensive toys from a fashionable purveyor--things that went by machinery, darting forward a little way with convulsive jerks and unearthly choking noises, and then tumbling ignominiously on one side.

Clarissa stayed with the heir of Arden until the clock in the day-nursery struck nine, and then went to her dressing-room, looking very pale and haggard after her sleepless night. In the corridor she met her husband. He bent his head gravely at sight of her, as he might have saluted a stranger whom he encountered in his own house.

"I shall be glad to speak to you for a quarter of an hour, by and by," he said. "What time would suit you best?" "Whenever you please. I shall be in my dressing-room," she answered quietly; and then, growing desperate in her desire to know her fate, she exclaimed, "But O, Daniel, are we really to go back to Arden to-morrow?"

"We are not," he said, with a repelling look. "My children are going back to-morrow. I contemplate other arrangements for you."

"You mean to separate my baby and me?" she cried incredulously.

"This is neither the place nor the time for any discussion about that. I will come to your dressing-room by and by."

"I will not be parted from my child!"

"That is a question which I have to settle."

"Do not make any mistake, Mr. Granger," Clarissa said firmly, facing him with a dauntless look that surprised him a little--yet what cannot a woman dare, if she can betray the man who has loved and trusted her? "You may do what you please with me; but I will not submit to have my child taken from me."

"I do not like talking in passages," said her husband; "if you insist upon discussing this matter now, we had better go into your room."

They were close to the dressing-room door. He opened it, and they went in. The fire was burning brightly, and the small round table neatly laid for breakfast. Clarissa had been in the habit of using this apartment as her morning-room. There were books and drawing-materials, a table with a drawing-board upon it, and a half-finished sketch.

She sank down into a chair near the fire, too weak to stand. Her husband stood opposite to her. She noticed idly that he was dressed with his usual business-like neatness, and that there was no sign of mental anguish in his aspect. He seemed very cold and hard and cruel as he stood before her, strong in his position as an injured man.

"I am not going to talk about last night any more than I am positively obliged," he said; "nothing that I or you could say would alter the facts of the case, or my estimation of them. I have made my plans for the future. Sophia and Lovel will go back to Yorkshire to-morrow. You will go with me to Spa, where I shall place you under your father's protection. Your future life will be free from the burden of my society."

"I am quite willing to go back to my father," replied Clarissa, in a voice that trembled a little. She had expected him to be very angry, but not so hard and cold as this--not able to deal with her wrong-doing in such a business-like manner, to dismiss her and her sin as coolly as if he had been parting with a servant who had offended him.

"I am ready to go to my father," she repeated, steadying her voice with an effort; "but I will go nowhere without my child."

"We will see about that," said Mr. Granger, "and how the law will treat your claims; if you care to advance them--which I should suppose unlikely. I have no compunction about the justice of my decision. You will go nowhere without your child, you say? Did you think of that last night when your lover was persuading you to leave Paris?"

"What!" cried Clarissa aghast. "Do you imagine that I had any thought of going with him, or that I heard him with my free will?"

"I do not speculate upon that point; but to my mind the fact of his asking you to run away with him argues a foregone conclusion. A man rarely comes to that until he has established a right to make the request. All I know is, that I saw you on your knees by your lover, and that you were candid enough to acknowledge your affection for him. This knowledge is quite sufficient to influence my decision as to my son's future--it must not be spent with Mr. Fairfax's mistress."

Clarissa rose at the word, with a shrill indignant cry. For a few moments she stood looking at her accuser, magnificent in her anger and surprise.

"You dare to call me _that_!" she exclaimed.

"I dare to call you what I believe you to be. What! I find you in an obscure house, with locked doors; you go to meet your lover alone; and I am to think nothing!"

"Never alone until last night, and then not with my consent, I went to see Mr. and Mrs. Austin--I did not know they had left Paris."

"But their departure was very convenient, was it not? It enabled your lover to plead his cause, to make arrangements for your flight. You were to have three days' start of me. Pshaw! why should we bandy words about the shameful business? You have told me that you love him--that is enough."

"Yes," she said, with the anger and defiance gone out of her face and manner, "I have been weak and guilty, but not as guilty as you suppose. I have done nothing to forfeit my right to my son. You shall not part us!"

"You had better tell your maid you are going on a journey to-morrow. She will have to pack your things--your jewels, and all you care to take."

"I shall tell her nothing. Remember what I have said--I will not be separated from Lovel!"

"In that case, I must give the necessary orders myself," said Mr. Granger coolly, and saying this he left the room to look for his wife's maid.

Jane Target, the maid, came in presently. She was the young woman chosen for Clarissa's service by Mrs. Oliver; a girl whose childhood had been spent at Arden, and to whose childish imagination the Levels of Arden Court had always seemed the greatest people in the world.