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

he was."

Clarissa shivered. Send to Miss Granger! suffer those cold eyes to see the depth of her humiliation! That would be hard to endure. Yet what did anything in the world matter to her when her boy was in jeopardy?

"We shall save him, Jane," she said with a desperate hopefulness, clasping her hands and bending down to kiss the troubled little one, who had brief snatches of sleep now and then in weary hours of restlessness. "We shall save him. The doctor said so."

"God grant we may, mum! But the doctor didn't say for certain--he only said he _hoped_; and it would be so much better to send for master. It seems a kind of crime not to let him know; and if the poor dear should grow worse--"

"He will not grow worse!" cried Clarissa hysterically. "What, Jane! are you against me? Do you want me to be robbed of him, as his father would rob me without mercy? No, I will keep him, I will keep him! Nothing but death shall take him from me."

Later in the evening, restless with the restlessness of a soul tormented by fear, Clarissa began to grow uneasy about her letter to Dr. Ormond. It might miscarry in going through the postoffice. She was not quite sure that it had been properly directed, her mind had been so bewildered when she wrote it. Or Dr. Ormond might have engagements next morning, and might not be able to come. She was seized with a nervous anxiety about this."

"If there were any one I could send with another note," she said.

Jane shook her head despondently. In that house there was no messenger to be procured. The landlady was elderly, and kept no servant--employing only a mysterious female of the charwoman species, who came at daybreak, dyed herself to the elbows with blacking or blacklead before breakfast, and so remained till the afternoon, when she departed to "do for" a husband and children--the husband and children passing all the earlier part of the day in a desolate and un-"done-for" condition.

"There's no one to take a letter, mum," said Jane, looking wistfully at her mistress, who had been watching without rest or slumber for three days and three nights. "But why shouldn't you go yourself, mum? Cavendish Square isn't so very far. Don't you remember our going there one morning with baby? It's a fine evening, and a little fresh air would do you good."

Clarissa was quite willing to go on the errand herself. It would be doing something at least. She might see the physician, and obtain his promise to come to her early next day; and beside that sick-bed she was of so little use. She could only hold her darling in her lap, when he grew weary of his bed, or carry him up and down the room sometimes. Jane, whose nerves were as steady as a rock, did all the rest.

She looked at the bed. It was hard to leave that tender little sufferer even for half an hour.

"If he should grow worse while I am away?" she said doubtfully.

"No fear of that," replied Jane. "He's sleeping better now than he has slept for ever so long. God grant he's upon the turn!"

"God grant it! And you won't forget the medicine at half-past eight?"

"Lor', mum, as if I should forget!"

"Then I'll go," said Clarissa.

She put on her bonnet and shawl, startled a little by the white face that looked at her from the glass. The things she had worn when she left Paris were the darkest and plainest in her wardrobe. They had grown shabby by this time, and had a very sombre look. Even in these garments the tall slim figure had a certain elegance; but it was not a figure to be remarked at nightfall, in the London streets. The mistress of Arden Court might have been easily mistaken for a sempstress going home from her work.

Just at first the air made her giddy, and she tottered a little on the broad pavement of the quiet _cul-de-sac_. It seemed as if she had not been out of doors for a month. But by degrees she grew more accustomed to the keen March atmosphere and the noise of Oxford-street, towards which she was hastening, and so hurried on, thinking only of her errand. She made her way somehow to Cavendish-square. How well she remembered driving through it in the summer gloaming, during the brief glory of her one season, on her way to a commercial magnate's Tusculum in the Regent's-park! It had seemed remote and out of the world after Mayfair--a locality which one might be driven by reverse of fortune to inhabit, not otherwise. But to-night the grave old square had an alarming stateliness of aspect after slipshod Soho.

She found Dr. Ormond's house, and saw his butler, a solemn bald-headed personage, who looked wise enough to prescribe for the most recondite diseases of humanity. The doctor himself was dining out, but the butler pledged himself for his master's appearance at Clarissa's lodgings between eleven and two to-morrow.

"He never disappints; and he draws no distinctions," said the official, with an evident reference to the humility of the applicant's social status. "There's not many like him in the medical perfession."

"And you think he is sure to come?" urged Clarissa anxiously.

"Don't you be afraid, mum. I shall make a particular pint of it myself. You may be quite easy about his comin'."

Clarissa thanked the man, and surprised him with half-a-crown gently slipped into his fat palm. She had not many half-crowns now; but the butler seemed to pity her, and might influence his master to come to her a little sooner than he would come in the ordinary way.

Her errand being done, she turned away from the house with a strange sinking at the heart. An ever-present fear of his illness coming to a fatal end, and a guilty sense of the wrong she was doing to Daniel Granger, oppressed her. She walked in a purposeless way, took the wrong turning after coming out of the square, and so wandered into Portland-place. She came to a full stop suddenly in that wide thoroughfare, and looking about her like an awakened sleep-walker, perceived that she had gone astray--recognised the place she was in, and saw that she was within a few doors of Lady Laura Armstrong's house.

Although the London season had begun, there was an air of stillness and solitude in this grave habitation of splendours that have for the most part vanished. At one door there was a carriage waiting; here and there lighted windows shone out upon the night; but the general aspect was desolation. If there were gaiety and carousing anywhere, closed shutters hid the festival from the outer world. The underground world of Egypt could scarcely have seemed more silent than Portland-place.

Clarissa went on to the familiar corner house, which was made conspicuous to the stranger by encaustic tiled balconies, or glass fern and flower cases at every available window, and by a certain colour and glitter which seemed almost a family likeness to Lady Laura herself. There were lights burning dimly in the two last windows on the drawing-room floor looking into the side street. Clarissa remembered the room very well--it was Lady Laura's own especial sanctum, the last and smallest of four drawing-rooms--a nest lined with crimson silk, and crowded with everything foolish in the way of ebony and ormolu, Venetian glass and Sèvres china, and with nothing sensible in it except three or four delicious easy-chairs of the _pouff_ species, immortalised by Sardou. Alas for that age of pouff which he satirised with such a caustic pen! To what dismal end has it come! End of powder and petroleum, and instead of beauty, burning!

The lonely wanderer, so sorely oppressed with cares and perplexities, looked wistfully up at those familiar windows. How often she had loitered away the twilight with Lady Laura, talking idly in that flower-laden balcony! As she looked at it to-night, there came into her mind a foolish wonder that life could have had any interest for her in those days, before the birth of her son.

"If I were to lose him now, I should be no poorer than I was then," she thought; and then, after a moment's reflection, "O yes, yes, a thousand times poorer, once having had him."

She walked a little way down the street, and then came back again and lingered under those two-windows, with an unspeakable yearning to cast herself upon her friend in this hour of shipwreck. She had such bitter need of sympathy from some one nearer her own level than the poor honest faithful Yorkshire girl.

"She was once my friend," she said to herself, still hovering there irresolute, "and seemed very fond of me. She could advise me, knowing the world so well as she does; and I do not think she would betray me. She owes me something, too. But for my promise to her, I might have been George Fairfax's wife, and all this trouble might have been avoided."

George Fairfax's wife! What a strange dreamlike fancy it seemed! And yet it might have been; it had needed only one little word from herself to make the dream a fact.

"I tried to do my duty," she thought, "and yet ruin and sorrow have come upon me." And then the small still voice whispered, "Tried to do your duty, but not always; sometimes you left off trying, and dared to be happy in your own way. Between the two roads of vice and virtue, you tried to make a devious pathway of your own, not wholly on one side or the other."

Once having seen that light, feeling somehow that there was sympathy and comfort near, she could not go away without making some attempt to see her friend. She thought with a remorseful pang of times and seasons during her wedded life when Laura Armstrong's too solicitous friendship had seemed to her something of a bore. How different was it with her now!

She summoned up resolution at last, and in a half desperate mood, went round to the front door and knocked--a tremulous conscience-stricken knock, as of some milliner's apprentice bringing home a delayed bonnet. The man who opened the door; looked involuntarily for her basket.

"What is it?" he asked dubiously, scenting a begging-letter writer in the tall slim figure and closely-veiled face, and being on principle averse from gentility that did not ride in its carriage. "What is it, young woman?"

"Can I see Lady Laura Armstrong? I want to see her very particularly."

"Have you got an appointment?"

"No; but I wish to see her."

"You're from Madame Lecondre's, I suppose. You can see my lady's maid; but it's quite out of the question for you to see my lady herself, at this time of night."

"Will you take a message to her, on a slip of paper? I am almost sure she will see me." And again Clarissa opened her slender purse, and slipped a florin into the man's hand, by way of bribe.

He was somewhat melted by this, but yet had an eye to the portable property in the hall.

"You can come in," he said, pointing with a lofty air to a table whereon were pens and paper, "and write your message." And then rang an electric bell, which summons brought a second powdered footman, who was, as it were, a Corsican Brother or Siamese Twin, without the ligature, to the first.

Clarissa scrawled a few hasty