MR. GRANGER IS INTERESTED.
When Clarissa went to the great drawing-room dressed for dinner, she found
Lizzie Fermor talking to a young lady whom she at once guessed to be Miss
Granger. Nor was she allowed to remain in any doubt of the fact; for the
lively Lizzie beckoned her to the window by which they were seated, and
introduced the two young ladies to each other.
"Miss Granger and I are quite old friends," she said, "and I mean you to
like each other very much."
Miss Granger bowed stiffly, but pledged herself to nothing. She was a tall
young woman of about two-and-twenty, with very little of the tender grace
of girlhood about her; a young woman who, by right of a stately carriage
and a pair of handsome shoulders, might have been called fine-looking.
Her features were not unlike her father's; and those eyes and eyebrows of
Daniel Granger's, which would have looked so well under a judicial wig,
were reproduced in a modified degree in the countenance of his daughter.
She had what would be generally called a fine complexion, fair and florid;
and her hair, of which she had an abundant quantity, was of an insipid
light brown, and the straightest Clarissa had ever seen. Altogether, she
was a young lady who, invested with all the extraneous charms of her
father's wealth, would no doubt be described as attractive, and even
handsome. She was dressed well, with a costly simplicity, in a dark-blue
corded silk, relieved by a berthe of old point lace, and the whiteness of
her full firm throat was agreeably set off by a broad band of black velvet,
from which there hung a Maltese cross of large rubies.
The two young ladies went on with their talk, which was chiefly of gaieties
they had each assisted at since their last meeting, and people they had
met.
Clarissa, being quite unable to assist in this conversation, looked on
meekly, a little interested in Miss Granger, who was, like herself, an
only daughter, and about whose relations with her father she had begun to
wonder. Was he very fond of this only child, and in this, as in all else,
unlike her own father? He had spoken of her that afternoon several times,
and had even praised her, but somewhat coldly, and with a practical
matter-of-course air, almost as Mr. Lovel might have spoken of his daughter
if constrained to talk of her in society.
Miss Granger said a good deal about the great people she had met that year.
They seemed all to be more or less the elect of the earth: but she pulled
herself up once or twice to protest that she cared very little for society;
she was happier when employed with her schools and poor people--_that_ was
her real element.
"One feels all the other thing to be so purposeless and hollow," she said
sententiously. "After a round of dinners and dances and operas and concerts
in London, I always have a kind of guilty feeling. So much time wasted, and
nothing to show for it. And really my poor are improving so wonderfully.
If you could see my cottages, Miss Fermor!" (she did not say, "their
cottages.") "I give a prize for the cleanest floors and windows, an
illuminated ticket for the neatest garden-beds. I don't suppose you could
get a sprig of groundsel for love or money in Arden village. I have
actually to cultivate it in a corner of the kitchen-garden for my canaries.
I give another prize at Christmas for the most economical household
management, accorded to the family which has dined oftenest without meat
in the course of the year; and I give a premium of one per cent upon all
investments in the Holborough savings-bank--one and a half in the case of
widows; a complete suit of clothes to every woman who has attended morning
and evening service without missing one Sunday in the year, the consequence
of which has been to put a total stop to cooking on the day of rest. I
don't believe you could come across so much as a hot potato on a Sunday in
one of my cottages."
"And do the husbands like the cold dinners?" Miss Fermor asked rather
flippantly.
"I should hope that spiritual advantage would prevail over temporal luxury,
even in their half-awakened minds," replied Miss Granger. "I have never
inquired about their feelings on the subject. I did indeed hear that the
village baker, who had driven a profitable trade every Sunday morning
before my improvements, made some most insolent comments upon what I had
done. But I trust I can rise superior to the impertinence of a village
baker. However, you must come to Arden and see my cottages, and judge for
yourself; and if you could only know the benighted state in which I found
these poor creatures----"
Lizzie Fermor glanced towards Clarissa, and then gave a little warning
look, which had the effect of stopping Miss Granger's disquisition.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Lovel," she said; "I forgot that I was talking of
your own old parish. But you were a mere child, I believe, when you
left the Court, and of course could not be capable of effecting much
improvement."
"We were too poor to do much, or to give prizes," Clarissa answered; "but
we gave what we could, and--and I think the people were fond of us."
Miss Granger looked as if this last fact were very wide from the question.
"I have never studied how to make the people fond of me," she said. "My
constant effort has been to make them improve themselves and their own
condition. All my plans are based upon that principle. 'If you want a new
gown, cloak, and bonnet at Christmas,' I tell the women, 'you must
earn them by unfailing attendance at church. If you wish to obtain the
money-gift I wish to give you, you must first show me something saved by
your own economy and self-sacrifice.' To my children I hold out similar
inducements--a prize for the largest amount of plain needlework, every
stitch of which I make it my duty to examine through a magnifying glass; a
prize for scrupulous neatness in dress; and for scripture knowledge. I
have children in my Sunday-schools who can answer any question upon the
Old-Testament history from Genesis to Chronicles."
Clarissa gave a faint sigh, almost appalled by these wonders. She
remembered the girls' Sunday-school in her early girlhood, and her own
poor little efforts at instruction, in the course of which she had seldom
carried her pupils out of the Garden of Eden, or been able to get over the
rivers that watered that paradise, as described by the juvenile inhabitants
of Arden, without little stifled bursts of laughter on her own part; while,
in the very midst of her most earnest endeavours, she was apt to find her
brother Austin standing behind her, tempting the juvenile mind by the
surreptitious offer of apples or walnuts. The attempts at teaching
generally ended in merry laughter and the distribution of nuts and apples,
with humble apologies to the professional schoolmistress for so useless an
intrusion.
Miss Granger had no time to enlarge farther upon her manifold improvements
before dinner, to which she was escorted by one of the officers from
Steepleton, the nearest garrison town, who happened to be dining there that
day, and was very glad to get an innings with the great heiress. The master
of Arden Court had the honour of escorting Lady Laura; but from his post
by the head of the long table he looked more than once to that remote spot
where Clarissa sat, not far from his daughter. My lady saw those curious
glances, and was delighted to see them. They might mean nothing, of course;
but to that sanguine spirit they seemed an augury of success for the scheme
which had been for a long time hatching in the matron's busy brain.
"What do you think of my pet, Mr. Granger?" she asked presently.
Mr. Granger glanced at the ground near my lady's chair with rather a
puzzled look, half expecting to see a Maltese spaniel or a flossy-haired
Skye terrier standing on its hind legs.
"What do you think of my pet and _protegee_, Miss Lovel?"
"Miss Lovel! Well, upon my word, Lady Laura, I am so poor a judge of the
merits of young ladies in a general way; but she really appears a very
amiable young person."
"And is she not lovely?" asked Lady Laura, contemplating the distant
Clarissa in a dreamy way through her double eye-glass. "I think it is the
sweetest face I ever saw."
"She is certainly very pretty," admitted Mr. Granger. "I was struck by her
appearance this afternoon in the library. I suppose there is something
really out of the common in her face, for I am generally the most
unobservant of men in such matters."
"Out of the common!" exclaimed Lady Laura. "My dear sir, it is such a face
as you do not see twice in a lifetime. Madame Recamier must have been
something like that, I should fancy--a woman who could attract the eyes
of all the people in the great court of the Luxembourg, and divide public
attention with Napoleon."
Mr. Granger did not seem interested in the rather abstract question of
Clarissa's possible likeness to Madame Recamier.
"She is certainly very pretty," he repeated in a meditative manner; and
stared so long and vacantly at a fricandeau which a footman was just
offering him, that any less well-trained attendant must have left him in
embarrassment.
The next few days were enlivened by a good deal of talk about the ball, in
which event Miss Granger did not seem to take a very keen interest.
"I go to balls, of course," she said; "one is obliged to do so: for it
would seem so ungracious to refuse one's friends' invitations; but I really
do not care for them. They are all alike, and the rooms are always hot."
"I don't think you will be able to say that here," replied Miss Fermor.
"Lady Laura's arrangements are always admirable; and there is to be an
impromptu conservatory under canvas the whole length of the terrace, in
front of the grand saloon where we are to dance, so that the six windows
can be open all the evening."
"Then I daresay it will be a cold night," said Miss Granger, who was not
prone to admire other people's cleverness. "I generally find that it is so,
when people take special precautions against heat."
Clarissa naturally found herself thrown a good deal into Sophia Granger's
society; but though they worked, and drove, and walked together, and played
croquet, and acted in the same charades, it is doubtful whether there was
really much more sympathy between these two than between Clarissa and Lady
Geraldine. There was perhaps less; for Clarissa Lovel had been interested
in Geraldine Challoner, and she was not in the faintest degree interested
in Miss Granger. The cold and shining surface of that young lady's
character emitted no galvanic spark. It was impossible to deny that she was
wise and accomplished; that she did everything well that she attempted;
that, although obviously conscious of her own supreme advantages as the
heiress to a great fortune, she was benignly indulgent to the less blessed
among her sex,--it was impossible to deny all this; and yet it was not any
more easy to get on with Sophia Granger than with Lady Geraldine.
One day, after luncheon, when a bevy of girls were grouped round the piano
in the billiard-room, Lizzie Fermor--who indulged in the wildest latitude
of discourse--was audacious enough to ask Miss Granger how she would like
her father to marry again.
The faultless Sophia elevated her well-marked eyebrows with a look of
astonishment that ought to have frozen Miss Fermor. The eyebrows were as
hard and as neatly pencilled as the shading in Miss Granger's landscapes.
"Marry again!" she repeated, "papa!--if you knew him better, Miss Fermor,
you would never speculate upon such a thing. Papa will never marry again."
"Has he promised you that?" asked the irrepressible Lizzie.
"I do not require any promise from him. I know him too well to have the
slightest doubt upon the subject. Papa might have married brilliantly,
again and again, since I was a little thing." (It was rather difficult to
fancy Miss Granger a "little thing" in any stage of her existence.) "But
nothing has ever been more remote from his ideas than a second marriage. I
have heard people regret it."
"_You_ have not regretted it, of course."
"I hope I know my duty too well, to wish to stand between papa and his
happiness. If it had been for his happiness to marry--a person of a
suitable age and position, of course--I should not have considered my own
feelings in the matter."
"Well, I suppose not," replied Lizzie, rather doubtfully; "still it is nice
to have one's father all to oneself--to say nothing of being an heiress.
And the worst of the business is, that when a widower of your papa's age
does take it into his head to marry, he is apt to fall in love with some
chit of a girl."
Miss Granger stared at the speaker with a gaze as stony as Antigone herself
could have turned upon any impious jester who had hinted that Oedipus, in
his blindness and banishment, was groping for some frivolous successor to
Jocasta.
"My father in love with a girl!" she exclaimed. "What a very false idea you
must have formed of his character, Miss Fermor, when you can suggest such
an utter absurdity!"
"But, you see, I wasn't speaking of Mr. Granger, only of widowers in
general. I have seen several marriages of that kind--men of forty or fifty
throwing themselves away, I suppose one ought to say, upon girls scarcely
out of their teens. In some cases the marriage seems to turn out well
enough; but of course one does sometimes hear of things not going on quite
happily."
Miss Granger was grave and meditative after this--perhaps half disposed to
suspect Elizabeth Fermor of some lurking design on her father. She had
been seated at the piano during this conversation, and now resumed her
playing--executing a sonata of Beethoven's with faultless precision and the
highest form of taught expression; so much emphasis upon each note--careful
_rallentando_ here, a gradual _crescendo_ there; nothing careless or
slapdash from the first bar to the last. She would play the same piece a
hundred times without varying the performance by a hair's-breadth. Nor did
she affect anything but classical music. She was one of those young ladies
who, when asked for a waltz or a polka, freeze the impudent demander by
replying that they play no dance music--nothing more frivolous than Mozart.
The day for the ball came, but there was no George Fairfax. Lady Geraldine
had arrived at the Castle on the evening before the festival, bringing an
excellent account of her father's health. He had been cheered by her visit,
and was altogether so much improved, that his doctors would have given him
permission to come down to Yorkshire for his daughter's wedding. It was
only his own valetudinarian habits and extreme dread of fatigue which had
prevented Lady Geraldine bringing him down in triumph.
Lady Laura was loudly indignant at Mr. Fairfax's non-appearance; and for
the first time Clarissa heard Lady Geraldine defend her lover with some
natural and womanly air of proprietorship.
"After pledging his word to me as he did!" exclaimed my lady, when it had
come to luncheon-time and there were still no signs of the delinquent's
return.
"But really, Laura, there is no reason he should not keep his word,"
Geraldine answered, with her serene air. "You know men like to do these
things in a desperate kind of way--as if they were winning a race. I
daresay he has made his plans so as not to leave himself more than
half-an-hour's margin, and will reach the Castle just in time to dress."
"That is all very well; but I don't call that keeping his promise to me,
to come rushing into the place just as we are beginning to dance; after
travelling all night perhaps, and knocking himself up in all sorts of
ways, and with no more animation or vivacity left in him than a man who is
walking in his sleep. Besides, he ought to consider our anxiety."
"Your anxiety, if you please, Laura. I am not anxious. I cannot see that
George's appearance at the ball is a matter of such vital importance."
"But, my deal Geraldine, it would seem so strange for him to be away.
People would wonder so."
"Let them wonder," Lady Geraldine replied, with a little haughty backward
movement of her head, which was natural to her.
Amongst the cases and packages which had been perpetually arriving from
London during the last week or so, there was one light deal box which
Lady Laura's second maid brought to Clarissa's room one morning with
her mistress's love. The box contained the airiest and most girlish of
ball-dresses, all cloudlike white tulle, and the most entrancing wreath of
wild-roses and hawthorn, such a wreath as never before had crowned Miss
Lovel's bright-brown hair. Of course there was the usual amount of thanks
and kissing and raptures.
"I am responsible to your father for your looking your best, you see,
Clary," Lady Laura said, laughing; "and I intend you to make quite a
sensation to-night. The muslin you meant to wear is very pretty, and will
do for some smaller occasion; but to-night is a field-night. Be sure you
come to me when you are dressed. I shall be in my own rooms till the people
begin to arrive; and I want to see you when Fosset has put her finishing
touches to your dress."
Clarissa promised to present herself before her kind patroness. She was
really pleased with her dress, and sincerely grateful to the giver. Lady
Laura was a person from whom it was easy to accept benefits. There was
something bounteous and expansive in her nature, and her own pleasure in
the transaction made it impossible for any but the most churlish recipient
to feel otherwise than pleased.
* * * * *