The Lovels of Arden Part 15

"Yes, it may have been so. But there is no use in thinking of that. Even if papa were rich enough to buy it, Mr. Granger would never sell the Court."

"Sell it!" repeated Lady Laura, meditatively; "well, perhaps not. One could hardly expect him to do that--a place for which he has done so much. But one never knows what may happen; I have really seen such wonderful changes come to pa.s.s among friends and acquaintances of mine, that scarcely anything would astonish me--no, Clary, not if I were to see you mistress of Arden Court."

And then Lady Laura kissed her protegee once more with effusion, and anon dipped her brush in the carmine, and went on with the manipulation of a florid initial in her Missal--a fat gothic M, interlaced with ivy-leaves and holly.

"You haven't asked me who the people are that I am expecting this afternoon," she said presently, with a careless air.

"My dear Lady Laura, if you were to tell me their names, I don't suppose I should be any wiser than I am now. I know so few people."

"But you do know these--or at least you know all about them. My arrivals to-day are Mr. and Miss Granger."

Clarissa gave a faint sigh, and bent a little lower over her work.

"Well, child, are you not surprised? have you nothing to say?" cried Lady Laura, rather impatiently.

"I--I daresay they are very nice people," Clarissa answered, nervously.

"But the truth is--I know you must despise me for such folly--I cannot help a.s.sociating them with our loss, and I have a kind of involuntary dislike of them. I have never so much as seen them, you know--not even at church; for they go to the gothic chapel which Mr. Granger has built in his model village, and never come to our dear little church at Arden; and it is very childish and absurd of me, no doubt, but I don't think I ever could like them."

"It is very absurd of you, Clary," returned my lady; "and if I could be angry with you for anything, it certainly would be for this unjust prejudice against people I want you to like. Think what a nice companion Miss Granger would be for you when you are at home--so near a neighbour, and really a very superior girl."

"I don't want a companion; I am used to being alone."

"Well, well, when you come to know her, you will like her very much, I daresay, in spite of yourself; that will be my triumph. I am bent upon bringing about friendly relation, between your father and Mr. Granger."

"You will never do that, Lady Laura."

"I don't know. I have a profound faith in my own ideas."

CHAPTER XI.

DANIEL GRANGER.

After luncheon that day, Clarissa lost sight of Lady Laura. The Castle seemed particularly quiet on this afternoon. Nearly every one was out of doors playing croquet; but Clarissa had begun to find croquet rather a wearisome business of late, and had excused herself on the plea of letters to write. She had not begun her letter-writing yet, however, but was wandering about the house in a purposeless way--now standing still for a quarter of an hour at a time, looking out of a window, without being in the least degree conscious of the landscape she was looking at, and then pacing slowly up and down the long picture gallery with a sense of relief in being alone.

At last she roused herself from this absent dreamy state.

"I am too idle to write this afternoon," she thought. "I'll go to the library and get a book."

The Hale library was Clarissa's delight. It was a n.o.ble collection gathered by dead-and-gone owners of the Castle, and filled up with all the most famous modern works at the bidding of Mr. Armstrong, who gave his bookseller a standing order to supply everything that was proper, and rarely for his own individual amus.e.m.e.nt or instruction had recourse to any shelf but one which contained neat editions of the complete works of the Druid and Mr. Apperley, the _Life of a.s.sheton Smith_, and all the volumes of the original _Sporting Magazine_ bound in crimson russia. These, with _Ruff's Guide_, the _Racing Calendar_, and a few volumes on farriery, supplied Mr. Armstrong's literary necessities. But to Clarissa, for whom books were at once the pleasure and consolation of life, this library seemed a treasure-house of inexhaustible delights. Her father's collection was of the choicest, but limited. Here she found everything she had ever heard of, and a whole world of literature she had never dreamed of. She was not by any means a pedant or a blue-stocking, and it was naturally amongst the books of a lighter cla.s.s she found the chief attraction; but she was better read than most girls of her age, and better able to enjoy solid reading.

To-day she was out of spirits, and came to the library for some relief from those vaguely painful thoughts that had oppressed her lately. The room was so little affected by my lady's b.u.t.terfly guests that she made sure of having it all to herself this afternoon, when the voices and laughter of the croquet-players, floating in at the open windows, told her that the sport was still at its height.

She went into the room, and stopped suddenly a few paces from the doorway.

A gentleman was standing before the wide empty fireplace, where there was a great dog-stove of ironwork and bra.s.s which consumed about half a ton of coal a day in winter; a tall, ponderous-looking man, with his hands behind him, glancing downward with cold gray eyes, but not in the least degree inclining his stately head to listen to Lady Laura Armstrong, who was seated on a sofa near him, fanning herself and prattling gaily after her usual vivacious manner.

Clarissa started and drew back at sight of this tall stranger.

"Mr. Granger," she thought, and tried to make her escape without being seen.

The attempt was a failure. Lady Laura called to her.

"Who is that in a white dress? Miss Lovel, I am sure.--Come here, Clary--what are you running away for? I want to introduce my friend Mr.

Granger to you.--Mr. Granger, this is Miss Lovel, the Miss Lovel whose birthplace fortune has given to you."

Mr. Granger bowed rather stiffly, and with the air of a man to whom a bow was a matter of business.

"I regret," he said, "to have robbed Miss Lovel of a home to which she was attached. I regret still more that she will not avail herself of my desire to consider the park and grounds entirely at her disposal on all occasions.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see her use the place as if it were her own."

"And nothing could be kinder than such a wish on your part." exclaimed my lady approvingly.

Clarissa lifted her eyes rather shyly to the rich man's face. He was not a connoisseur in feminine loveliness, but they struck him at once as very fine eyes. He was a connoisseur in pictures, and no mean judge of them, and those brilliant hazel eyes of Clarissa's reminded him of a portrait by Velasquez, of which he was particularly proud.

"You are very kind," she murmured; "but--but there are some a.s.sociations too painful to bear. The park would remind me so bitterly of all I have lost since I was a child."

She was thinking of her brother, and his disgrace--or misfortune; she did not even know which of these two it was that had robbed her of him. Mr.

Granger looked at her wonderingly. Her words and manner seemed to betray a deeper feeling than he could have supposed involved in the loss of an estate. He was not a man of sentiment himself, and had gone through life affected only by its sternest realities. There was something rather too Rosa-Matildaish for his taste in this faltered speech of Clarissa's; but he thought her a very pretty girl nevertheless, and was inclined to look somewhat indulgently upon a weakness he would have condemned without compunction in his daughter. Mr. Granger was a man who prided himself upon his strength of mind, and he had a very poor idea of the exclusive recluse whose early extravagances had made him master of Arden Court. He had not seen Mr. Lovel half-a-dozen times in his life, for all business between those two that could be transacted by their respective lawyers had been so transacted; but what he had seen of that pale careworn face, that fragile figure, and somewhat irritable manner, had led the ponderous, strong-minded Daniel Granger to consider Marmaduke Lovel a very poor creature.

He was interested in this predecessor of his nevertheless. A man must be harder than iron who can usurp another man's home, and sit by another man's hearthstone, without giving some thought to the exile he has ousted. Daniel Granger was not so hard as that, and he did profoundly pity the ruined gentleman he had deposed. Perhaps he was still more inclined to pity the ruined gentleman's only daughter, who must needs suffer for the sins and errors of others.

"Now, pray don't run away, Clary," cried Lady Laura, seeing Clarissa moving towards the door, as if still anxious to escape. "You came to look for some books, I know.--Miss Lovel is a very clever young lady, I a.s.sure you, Mr.

Granger, and has read immensely.--Sit down, Clary; you shall take away an armful of books by-and-by, if you like."

Clarissa seated herself near my lady's sofa with a gracious submissive air, which the owner of Arden Court thought a rather pretty kind of thing, in its way. He had a habit of cla.s.sifying all young women in a general way with his own daughter, as if in possessing that one specimen of the female race he had a key to the whole species. His daughter was obedient--it was one of her chief virtues; but somehow there was not quite such a graceful air in her small concessions as he perceived in this little submission of Miss Lovel's.

Mr. Granger was rather a silent man; but my lady rattled on gaily in her accustomed style, and while that perennial stream of small talk flowed on, Clarissa had leisure to observe the usurper.

He was a tall man, six feet high perhaps, with a powerful and somewhat bulky frame, broad shoulders, a head erect and firmly planted as an obelisk, and altogether an appearance which gave a general idea of strength. He was not a bad-looking man by any means. His features were large and well cut, the mouth firm as iron, and unshadowed by beard or moustache; the eyes gray and clear, but very cold. Such a man could surely be cruel, Clarissa thought, with an inward shudder. He was a man who would have looked grand in a judge's wig; a man whose eyes and eyebrows, lowered upon some trembling delinquent, might have been almost as awful as Lord Thurlow's. Even his own light-brown hair, faintly streaked with grey, which he wore rather long, had something of a leonine air.

He listened to Lady Laura's trivial discourse with a manner which was no doubt meant to be gracious, but with no great show of interest. Once he went so far as to remark that the Castle gardens were looking very fine for so advanced a season, and attended politely to my lady's rather diffuse account of her triumphs in the orchid line.

"I don't pretend to understand much about those things," he said, in his stately far-off way, as if he lived in some world quite remote from Lady Laura's, and of a superior rank in the catalogue of worlds. "They are pretty and curious, no doubt. My daughter interests herself considerably in that sort of thing. We have a good deal of gla.s.s at Arden--more than I care about. My head man tells me that I must have grapes and pines all the year round: and since he insists upon it, I submit. But I imagine that a good many more of his pines and grapes find their way to Covent Garden than to my table."

Clarissa remembered the old kitchen-gardens at the Court in her father's time, when the whole extent of "gla.s.s" was comprised by a couple of dilapidated cuc.u.mber-frames, and a queer little greenhouse in a corner, where she and her brother had made some primitive experiments in horticulture, and where there was a particular race of spiders, the biggest specimens of the spidery species it had ever been her horror to encounter.

"I wonder whether the little greenhouse is there still?" she thought. "O, no, no; battered down to the ground, of course, by this pompous man's order. I don't suppose I should know the dear old place, if I were to see it now."

"You are fond of botany, I suppose, Miss Lovel?" Mr. Granger asked presently, with a palpable effort. He was not an adept in small talk, and though in the course of years of dinner-eating and dinner-giving he had been frequently called upon to address his conversation to young ladies, he never opened his lips to one of the cla.s.s without a sense of constraint and an obvious difficulty. He had all his life been most at home in men's society, where the talk was of grave things, and was no bad talker when the question in hand was either commercial or political. But as a rich man cannot go through life without being cultivated more or less by the frivolous herd, Mr. Granger had been compelled to conform himself somehow to the requirements of civilised society, and to talk in his stiff bald way of things which he neither understood nor cared for.

"I am fond of flowers," Clarissa answered, "but I really know nothing of botany. I would always rather paint them than anatomise them."

"Indeed! Painting is a delightful occupation for a young lady. My daughter sketches a little, but I cannot say that she has any remarkable talent that way. She has been well taught, of course."