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

inquiries at the villa, and wandered into the wood in quest of his only son. The mother's face, with its soft smile of ineffable love, lips half parted, breathing that fragment of a tender song, reminded him of a picture by Raffaelle. She was nothing to him now; but he could not the less appreciate her beauty, spiritualised by sorrow, and radiant with the glory of the evening sunlight.

He came towards the little group silently, his footfall making no sound upon the moss-grown earth. He did not approach quite near, however, in silence, afraid of startling her, but stopped a little way off, and said gently,--

"They told me I should most likely find you somewhere about here, with Lovel."

His wife gave a little cry, and looked up aghast.

"Have you come to take him away from me?" she asked, thinking that her dreams had been prophetic.

"No, no, I am not going to do that; though you told me he was to be at my disposal, remember, and I mean to claim him sometimes. I can't allow him to grow up a stranger to me.--God bless him, how well he is looking! Pray don't look so frightened," he went on, in an assuring voice, alarmed by the dead whiteness of Clarissa's face; "I have only come to see my boy before----. The fact is, I have some thoughts of travelling for a year or two. There is a rage for going to Africa nowadays, and I am not without interest in that sort of thing."

Clarissa looked at him wonderingly. This sudden passion for foreign wanderings seemed to her very strange in him. She had been accustomed to suppose his mind entirely absorbed by new systems of irrigation, and model-village building, and the extension of his estate. His very dreams, she had fancied, were of the hedgerows that bounded his lands--boundaries that vanished day by day, as the lands widened, with now a whole farm added, and now a single field. Could he leave Arden, and the kingdom that he had created for himself, to roam in sandy deserts, and hob-and-nob with Kaffir chiefs under the tropic stars?

Mr. Granger seated himself upon the timber by his wife's side, and bent down to look at his son, and to kiss him gently without waking him. After that fond lingering kiss upon the little one's smooth cheek, he sat for some minutes in silence, looking at his wife.

It was only her profile he could see; but he saw that she was looking ill, worse than she had looked when they parted at Ventnor. The sight of the pale face, with a troubled look about the mouth, touched him keenly. Just in that moment he forgot that there was such a being as George Fairfax upon this earth; forgot the sin that his wife had sinned against him; longed to clasp her to his breast; was only deterred by a kind of awkward shyness--to which such strong men as he are sometimes liable--from so doing.

"I am sorry to see that you are not looking very well," he said at last, with supreme stiffness, and with that peculiarly unconciliating air which an Englishman is apt to put on, when he is languishing to hold out the olive-branch.

"I have not been very well; but I daresay I shall soon be better, now we are going to travel."

"Going to travel!"

"Yes, papa has made up his mind to move at last. We go to Cologne to-morrow. I thought they would have told you that at the house."

"No; I only waited to ask where you--where the boy was to be found. I did not even stop to see your father."

After this there came a dead silence--a silence that lasted for about five minutes, during which they heard the faint rustle of the pine branches stirred ever so lightly by the evening wind. The boy slept on, unconscious and serene; the mother watching him, and Daniel Granger contemplating both from under the shadow of his eyebrows.

The silence grew almost oppressive at last, and Mr. Granger was the first to break it.

"You do not ask me for any news of Arden," he said.

Clarissa blushed, and glanced at him with a little wounded look. It was hard to be reminded of the paradise from which she had been exiled.

"I--I beg your pardon. I hope everything is going on as you wish; the home farm, and all that kind of thing. Miss Granger--Sophia--is well, I hope?"

"Sophia is quite well, I believe. I have not seen her since I left Ventnor."

"She has been away from Arden, then?"

"No; it is I who have not been there. Indeed, I doubt if I shall ever go there again--without you, Clarissa. The place is hateful to me."

Again and again, with infinite iteration, Daniel Granger had told himself that reconciliation with his wife was impossible. Throughout his journey by road and rail--and above all things is a long journey conductive to profound meditation--he had been firmly resolved to see his boy, and then go on his way at once, with neither delay nor wavering. But the sight of that pale pensive face to-night had well-nigh unmanned him. Was this the girl whose brightness and beauty had been the delight of his life? Alas, poor child, what sorrow his foolish love had brought upon her! He began all at once to pity her, to think of her as a sacrifice to her father's selfishness, his own obstinacy.

"I ought to have taken my answer that day at the Court, when I first told her my secret," he said to himself. "That look of pained surprise, which came into her face when I spoke, might surely have been enough for me. Yet I persisted, and was not man enough to face the question boldly--whether she had any heart to give me."

Clarissa rose, with the child still in her arms.

"I am afraid the dew is beginning to fall," she said; "I had better take Lovel home."

"Let me carry him," exclaimed Mr. Granger; and in the next moment the boy was in his father's strong arms, the flaxen head nestling in the paternal waistcoat.

"And so you are going to begin your travels to-morrow morning," he said, as they walked slowly homeward side by side.

"Yes, the train leaves at seven. But you would like to see more of Lovel, perhaps, having come so far to see him. We can defer our journey for a day or two."

"You are very good. Yes, I should like you to do that."

"And with regard to what you were saying just now," Clarissa said, in a low voice, that was not quite steady, "I trust you will not let the memory of any pain I may have given you influence your future life, or disgust you with a place to which you were so much attached as I know you were to Arden. Pray put me out of your thoughts. I am not worthy to be regretted by you. Our marriage was a sad mistake on your part--a sin upon mine. I know now that it was so."

"A mistake--a sin! O, Clary, Clary, I could have been so happy, if you had only loved me a little--if you had only been true to me.

"I never was deliberately false to you. I was very wicked; yes, I acknowledge that. I did trifle with temptation. I ought to have avoided the remotest chance of any meeting with George Fairfax. I ought to have told you the truth, told you all my weakness; but--but I had not the courage to do that. I went to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard to see my brother."

"Was that honest, Clarissa, to allow me to be introduced to your brother as a stranger?"

"That was Austin's wish, not mine. He would not let me tell you who he was; and I was so glad for you to be kind to him, poor fellow! so glad to be able to see him almost daily; and when the picture was finished, and Austin had no excuse for coming to us any more, I went to see him very often, and sometimes met Mr. Fairfax in his painting-room; but I never went with any deliberate intention of meeting him."

"No," interjected Mr. Granger bitterly; "you only went, knowing that he was likely to be there!"

"And on that unhappy day when you found me there," Clarissa went on, "I had gone to see my brother, having no idea that he had left Paris. I wanted to come away at once; but Mr. Fairfax detained me. I was very angry with him."

"Yes, it appeared so, when he was asking you to run away with him. It is a hard thing for a man to believe in his wife's honour, when things have come to such a pass as that, Clarissa."

"I have told you the truth," she answered gravely; "I cannot say any more."

"And the locket--the locket I gave you, which I found on that man's breast?"

"I gave that locket to my sister-in-law, Bessie Lovel. I wished to give her something, poor soul; and I had given Austin all my money. I had so many gifts of yours, Daniel"--that sudden sound of his Christian name sent a thrill through Mr. Granger's veins--"parting with one of them seemed not to matter very much."

There was a pause. They were very near the villa by this time. Mr. Granger felt as if he might never have an opportunity for speaking to his wife again, if he lost his chance now.

"Clarissa," he said earnestly, "if I could forget all that happened in Paris, and put it out of my mind as if it had never been, could you forget it too?"

"With all my heart," she answered.

"Then, my darling, we will begin the world again--we will begin life over again, Clarissa!"

So they went home together reconciled. And Mr. Lovel, looking up from Aimé Martin's edition of Molière, saw that what he had anticipated had come to pass. His policy had proved as successful as it had been judicious. In less than three months Daniel Granger had surrendered. This was what came of Mr. Granger's flying visit to his boy.

* * * * *


CHAPTER L.


HOW SUCH THINGS END.

After that reconciliation, which brought a wonderful relief and comfort to Clarissa's mind--and who shall say how profoundly happy it made her husband?--Mr. and Mrs. Granger spent nearly a year in foreign travel. For his own part, Daniel Granger would have been glad to go back to Arden, now that the dreary burden was lifted off his mind, and his broken life pieced together again; but he did not want county society to see his wife till the bloom and brightness had come back to her face, nor to penetrate the mystery of their brief severance. To remain away for some considerable time was the surest way of letting the scandal, if any had ever arisen, die out.

He wrote to his daughter, telling her briefly that he and his wife had arranged all their little differences--little differences! Sophia gave a shrill scream of indignation as she went over this sentence in her father's letter, scarcely able to believe her eyes at first--and they were going through Germany together with the intention of