BEGINNING THE WORLD.
"Who on earth was that man you were talking to, Clary?" asked the Reverend
Mathew Oliver, when he had seen his niece's luggage carried off to a fly,
and was conducting her to that vehicle. "Is it any one you know?"
"O, no, uncle; only a gentleman who travelled in the same carriage with me
from London. He was very kind."
"You seemed unaccountably familiar with him," said Mr. Oliver with an
aggrieved air; "you ought to be more reserved, my dear, at your age. A
young lady travelling alone cannot be too careful. Indeed, it was very
wrong of your father to allow you to make this long journey alone. Your
aunt has been quite distressed about it."
Clarissa sighed faintly; but was not deeply concerned by the idea of her
aunt's distress. Distress of mind, on account of some outrage of propriety
on the part of her relatives, was indeed almost the normal condition of
that lady.
"I travelled very comfortably, I assure you, uncle Oliver," Clarissa
replied. "No one was in the least rude or unpleasant. And I am so glad to
come home--I can scarcely tell you how glad--though, as I came nearer and
nearer, I began to have all kinds of fanciful anxieties. I hope that all is
well--that papa is quite himself."
"O, yes, my dear; your papa is--himself," answered the parson, in a tone
that implied that he did not say very much for Mr. Lovel in admitting that
fact. "Your papa is well enough in health, or as well as he will ever
acknowledge himself to be. Of course, a man who neither hunts nor shoots,
and seldom gets out of bed before ten o'clock in the day, can't expect to
be remarkably robust. But your father will live to a good old age, child,
rely upon it, in spite of everything."
"Am I going straight home, uncle?"
"Well, yes. Your aunt wished you to breakfast at the Rectory; but there are
your trunks, you see, and altogether I think it's better for you to go home
at once. You can come and see us as often as you like."
"Thank you, uncle. It was very kind of you to meet me at the station. Yes,
I think it will be best for me to go straight home. I'm a little knocked up
with the journey. I haven't slept five minutes since I left Madame Marot's
at daybreak yesterday."
"You're looking rather pale; but you look remarkably well in spite of
that--remarkably well. These six years have changed you from a child into
a woman. I hope they gave you a good education yonder; a solid practical
education, that will stand by you."
"I think so, uncle. We were almost always at our studies. It was very hard
work."
"So much the better. Life is meant to be hard work. You may have occasion
to make use of your education some day, Clary."
"Yes," the girl answered with a sigh; "I know that we are poor."
"I suppose so; but perhaps you hardly know how poor."
"Whenever the time comes, I shall be quite ready to work for papa," said
Clarissa; yet she could not help wondering how the master of Arden Court
could ever bring himself to send out his daughter as a governess; and
then she had a vague childish recollection that not tens of pounds, but
hundreds, and even thousands, had been wanted to stop the gaps in her
father's exchequer.
They drove through Holborough High Street, where there was the faint stir
and bustle of early morning, windows opening, a housemaid kneeling on a
doorstep here and there, an occasional tradesman taking down his shutters.
They drove past the fringe of prim little villas on the outskirts of the
town, and away along a country road towards Arden; and once more Clarissa
saw the things that she had dreamed of so often in her narrow white bed in
the bleak dormitory at Belforet. Every hedge-row and clump of trees
from which the withered leaves were drifting in the autumn wind, every
white-walled cottage with moss-grown thatch and rustic garden, woke a faint
rapture in her breast. It was home. She remembered her old friends the
cottagers, and wondered whether goody Mason were still alive, and whether
Widow Green's fair-haired children would remember her. She had taught
them at the Sunday-school; but they too must have grown from childhood to
womanhood, like herself, and were out at service, most likely, leaving Mrs.
Green's cottage lonely.
She thought of these simple things, poor child, having so little else to
think about, on this, her coming home. She was not so foolish as to expect
any warm welcome from her father. If he had brought himself just to
tolerate her coming, she had sufficient reason to be grateful. It was only
a drive of two miles from Holborough to Arden. They stopped at a lodge-gate
presently; a little gothic lodge, which was gay with scarlet geraniums
and chrysanthemums, and made splendid by railings of bronzed ironwork.
Everything had a bright new look which surprised Miss Lovel, who was
not accustomed to see such, perfect order or such fresh paint about her
father's domain.
"How nice everything looks!" she said.
"Yes," answered her uncle, with a sigh; "the place is kept well enough
nowadays."
A woman came out to open the gates--a brisk young person, who was a
stranger to Clarissa, not the feeble old lodge-keeper she remembered in her
childhood. The change, slight as it was, gave her a strange chill feeling.
"I wonder how many people that I knew are dead?" she thought.
They drove into the park, and here too, even in this autumn season,
Clarissa perceived traces of care and order that were strange to her. The
carriage road was newly gravelled, the chaos of underwood among the old
trees had disappeared, the broad sweeps of grass were smooth and level as
a lawn, and there were men at work in the early morning, planting rare
specimens of the fir tribe in a new enclosure, which filled a space that
had been bared twenty years before by Mr. Lovel's depredations upon the
timber.
All this bewildered Clarissa; but she was still more puzzled, when, instead
of approaching the Court the fly turned sharply into a road leading across
a thickly wooded portion of the park, through which there was a public
right of way leading to the village of Arden.
"The man is going wrong, uncle!" she exclaimed.
"No, no, my dear; the man is right enough."
"But indeed, uncle Oliver, he is driving to the village."
"And he has been told to drive to the village."
"Not to the Court?"
"To the Court! Why, of course not. What should we have to do at the Court
at half-past seven in the morning?"
"But I am going straight home to papa, am I not?"
"Certainly."
And then, after staring at his niece's bewildered countenance for a few
moments, Mr. Oliver exclaimed,----
"Why, surely, Clary, your father told you----"
"Told me what, uncle?"
"That he had sold Arden."
"Sold Arden! O, uncle, uncle!"
She burst into tears. Of all things upon this earth she had loved the grand
old mansion where her childhood had been spent. She had so little else to
love, poor lonely child, that it was scarcely strange she should attach
herself to lifeless things. How fondly she had remembered the old place in
all those dreary years of exile, dreaming of it as we dream of some lost
friend. And it was gone from her for ever! Her father had bartered away
that most precious birthright.
"O, how could he do it! how could he do it!" she cried piteously.
"Why, my dear Clary, you can't suppose it was a matter of choice with him.
'Needs must when'--I daresay you know the vulgar proverb. Necessity has no
law. Come, come, my dear, don't cry; your father won't like to see you
with red eyes. It was very wrong of him not to tell you about the sale of
Arden--excessively wrong. But that's just like Marmaduke Lovel; always
ready to shirk anything unpleasant, even to the writing of a disagreeable
letter."
"Poor dear papa! I don't wonder he found it hard to write about such a
thing; but it would have been better for me to have known. It is such a
bitter disappointment to come home and find the dear old place gone from
us. Has it been sold very long?"
"About two years. A rich manufacturer bought it--something in the cloth
way, I believe. He has retired from business, however, and is said to be
overwhelmingly rich. He has spent a great deal of money upon the Court
already, and means to spend more I hear."
"Has he spoiled it--modernised it, or anything of that kind?"
"No; I am glad to say that he--or his architect perhaps--has had the good
taste to preserve the mediaeval character of the place. He has restored the
stonework, renewing all the delicate external tracery where it was lost or
decayed, and has treated the interior in the same manner. I have dined with
Mr. Granger once or twice since the work was finished, and I must say the
place is now one of the finest in Yorkshire--perhaps the finest, in its
peculiar way. I doubt if there is so perfect a specimen of gothic domestic
architecture in the county."
"And it is gone from us for ever!" said Clarissa, with a profound sigh.
"Well, my dear Clary, it is a blow, certainly; I don't deny that. But there
is a bright side to everything; and really your father could not afford to
live in the place. It was going to decay in the most disgraceful manner. He
is better out of it; upon my word he is."
Clarissa could not see this. To lose Arden Court seemed to her unmitigated
woe. She would rather have lived the dreariest, loneliest life in one
corner of the grand old house, than have occupied a modern palace. It was
as if all the pleasant memories of her childhood had been swept away from
her with the loss of her early home. This was indeed beginning the world;
and a blank dismal world it appeared to Clarissa Lovel, on this melancholy
October morning.
They stopped presently before a low wooden gate, and looking out of the
window of the fly, Miss Lovel saw a cottage which she remembered as a
dreary uninhabited place, always to let; a cottage with a weedy garden,
and a luxuriant growth of monthly roses and honeysuckle covering it from
basement to roof; not a bad sort of place for a person of small means and
pretensions, but O, what a descent from the ancient splendour of Arden
Court!--that Arden which had belonged to the Lovels ever since the land
on which it stood was given to Sir Warren Wyndham Lovel, knight, by his
gracious master King Edward IV., in acknowledgment of that warrior's
services in the great struggle between Lancaster and York.
There were old-fashioned casement windows on the upper story, and queer
little dormers in the roof. Below, roomy bows had been added at a much
later date than the building of the cottage. The principal doorway was
sheltered by a rustic porch, spacious and picturesque, with a bench on each
side of the entrance. The garden was tolerably large, and in decent order,
and beyond the garden was a fine old orchard, divided from lawn and
flower-beds only by a low hedge, full of bush-roses and sweet brier. It was
a very pretty place in summer, not unpicturesque even at this bleak season;
but Clarissa was thinking of lost Arden, and she looked at Mill Cottage
with mournful unadmiring eyes. There had been a mill attached to the place
once. The old building was there still, indeed, converted into a primitive
kind of stable; hence its name of Mill Cottage. The stream still ran
noisily a little way behind the house, and made the boundary which divided
the orchard from the lands of the lord of Arden. Mill Cottage was on the
very edge of Arden Court. Clarissa wondered that her father could have
pitched his tent on the borders of his lost heritage.
"I think I would have gone to the other end of the world, had I been in his
place," she said to herself.
An elderly woman-servant came out, in answer to the flyman's summons; and
at her call, a rough-looking young man emerged from the wooden gate opening
into a rustic-looking stable-yard, where the lower half of the old mill
stood, half-hidden by ivy and other greenery, and where there were
dovecotes and a dog-kennel.
Mr. Oliver superintended the removal of his niece's trunks, and then
stepped back into the fly.
"There's not the slightest use in my stopping to see your father, Clary,"
he said; "he won't show for a couple of hours at least. Good-bye, my dear;
make yourself as comfortable as you can. And come and see your aunt as soon
as you've recovered from your long journey, and keep up your spirits, my
dear.--Martha, be sure you give Miss Lovel a good breakfast.--Drive back to
the Rectory, coachman.--Good-bye, Clarissa;" and feeling that he had shown
his niece every kindness that the occasion required, Mr. Oliver bowled
merrily homewards. He was a gentleman who took life easily--a pastor of
the broad church--tolerably generous and good to his poor; not given to
abnormal services or daily morning prayer; content to do duty at Holborough
parish church twice on a Sunday, and twice more in the week; hunting a
little every season, in a black coat, for the benefit of his health, as he
told his parishioners; and shooting a good deal; fond of a good horse,
a good cellar, a good dinner, and well-filled conservatories and
glass-houses; altogether a gentleman for whom life was a pleasant journey
through a prosperous country. He had, some twenty years before, married
Frances Lovel; a very handsome woman--just a little faded at the time
of her marriage--without fortune. There were no children at Holborough
Rectory, and everything about the house and gardens bore that aspect of
perfect order only possible to a domain in which there are none of those
juvenile destroyers.
"Poor girl," Mr. Oliver muttered to himself, as he jogged comfortably
homewards, wondering whether his people would have the good sense to cook
'those grouse' for breakfast. "Poor Clary, it was very hard upon her; and
just Like Marmaduke not to tell her."
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