MR. GRANGER IS PRECIPITATE.
Clarissa had little sleep that night. The image of George Fairfax, and
of that dead soldier whom she pictured darkly like him, haunted her all
through the slow silent hours. Her mother's story had touched her to the
heart; but her sympathies were with her father. Here was a new reason why
she should shut her heart against Lady Geraldine's lover, if any reason
were wanted to strengthen that sense of honour which reigns supreme in a
girl's unsullied soul. In her conviction as to what was right she never
wavered. She felt herself very weak where this man was concerned--weak
enough to love him in spite of reason and honour; but she did not doubt
her power to keep that guilty secret, and to hide her weakness from George
Fairfax.
She had almost forgotten her engagement at Arden Court when her father came
down to his late breakfast, and found her sketching at a little table near
the window, with the affectionate Ponto nestling close at her side.
"I thought you would be dressing for your visit by this time, Clary," he
said very graciously.
"My visit, papa? O, yes, to the Court," she replied, with a faint sigh of
resignation. "I had very nearly forgotten all about it. I was to be there
between twelve and one, I think. I shall have plenty of time to give you
your breakfast. It's not eleven yet."
"Be sure you dress yourself becomingly. I don't want you to appear at a
disadvantage compared with the heiress."
"I'll put on my prettiest dress, if you like, papa; but I can't wear such
silks and laces as Miss Granger wears."
"You will have such things some day, I daresay, and set them off better
than Miss Granger. She is not a bad-looking young woman--good complexion,
fine figure, and so on--but as stiff as a poker."
"I think she is mentally stiff, papa; she is a sort of person I could never
get on with. How I wish you were coming with me this morning!"
"I couldn't manage it, Clarissa. The schools and the model villagers would
be more than I could stand. But at your age you ought to be interested in
that sort of thing; and you really ought to get on with Miss Granger."
It was half-past twelve when Miss Lovel opened the gate leading into Arden
Park--the first time that she had ever opened it; though she had stood
so often leaning on that rustic boundary, and gazing into the well-known
woodland, with fond sad looks. There was an actual pain at her heart as she
entered that unforgotten domain; and she felt angry with Daniel Granger for
having forced this visit upon her.
"I suppose he is determined that we shall pay homage to his wealth, and
admire his taste, and drink the bitter cup of humiliation to the very
dregs. If he had any real delicacy of feeling, he would understand our
reluctance to any intimacy with him."
While she was thinking of Mr. Granger in this unfriendly spirit, a step
sounded on the winding path before her, and looking up, she perceived the
subject of her thoughts coming quickly towards her. Was there ever such an
intrusive man? She blushed rosy red with vexation.
He came to her, with his hat in his hand, looking very big and stiff and
counting-house-like among the flickering shadows of forest trees; not
an Arcadian figure by any means, but with a certain formal
business-like dignity about him, for all that; not a man to be ridiculed or
despised.
"I am glad you have not forgotten your promise to come early, Miss Lovel,"
he said, in his strong sonorous voice. "I was just walking over to the
cottage to remind you. Sophia is quite ready to do the honours of her
schools. But I shall not let her carry you off till after luncheon; I want
to show you my improvements. I had set my heart on your seeing the Court
for the first time--since its restoration--under my guidance."
"Pompous, insufferable _parvenu_," thought Clarissa, to whom this desire on
Mr. Granger's part seemed only an odious eagerness to exhibit his wealth.
She little knew how much sentiment there was involved in this wish of
Daniel Granger's.
They came into the open part of the park presently, and she was fain to
confess, that whatever changes had been made--and the alterations here were
not many--had been made with a perfect appreciation of the picturesque.
Even the supreme neatness with which the grounds were now kept did not
mar their beauty. Fairy-like young plantations of rare specimens of the
coniferous tribe had arisen at every available point of the landscape,
wherever there had been barrenness before. Here and there the old timber
had been thinned a little, always judiciously. No cockney freaks of fancy
disfigured the scene. There were no sham ruins, no artificial waterfalls
poorly supplied with water, no Chinese pagodas, or Swiss cottages, or
gothic hermitages. At one point of the shrubbery where the gloom of cypress
and fir was deepest, they came suddenly on a Grecian temple, whose slender
marble columns might have gleamed amidst the sacred groves of Diana; and
this was the only indulgence Mr. Granger had allowed to an architect's
fancy, Presently, at the end of a wide avenue, a broad alley of turf
between double lines of unrivalled beeches, the first glimpse of the Court
burst upon Clarissa's sight--unchanged and beautiful. A man must have been
a Goth, indeed, who had altered the outward aspect of the place by a hair's
breadth.
The house was surrounded by a moat, and there was a massive stone gateway,
of older date than the Court itself--though that was old--dividing a small
prim garden from the park; this gatehouse was a noble piece of masonry, of
the purest gothic, rich with the mellow tint of age, and almost as perfect
as in the days when some wandering companionship of masons gave the last
stroke of their chisels to the delicate tracery of window and parapet.
The Court formed three sides of a quadrangle. A dear old place, lovable
rather than magnificent, yet with all the grandeur of the middle ages; a
place that might have stood a siege perhaps, but had evidently been built
for a home. The garden originally belonging to the house was simplicity
itself, and covered scarcely an acre. All round the inner border of the
moat there ran a broad terrace-walk, divided by a low stone balustrade from
a grassy bank that sloped down to the water. The square plot of ground
before the house was laid out in quaint old flower-beds, where the roses
seemed, to Clarissa at least, to flourish as they flourished nowhere else.
The rest of the garden consisted of lawn and flower-beds, with more roses.
There were no trees near the house, and the stables and out-offices, which
made a massive pile of building, formed a background to the grave old
gothic mansion.
Without, at least, Mr. Granger had respected the past. Clarissa felt
relieved by this moderation, and was inclined to think him a little less
hateful. So far he had said nothing which could seem to betray a boastful
spirit. He had watched her face and listened to her few remarks with a kind
of deferential eagerness, as if it had been a matter of vital importance
to him that she should approve what he had done. A steward, who had been
entrusted with the conduct of alterations and renovations during the
absence of his master, could scarcely have appeared more anxious as to the
result of his operations.
The great iron gates under the gothic archway stood wide open just as they
had been wont to do in Mr. Lovel's time, and Clarissa and her companion
passed into the quiet garden. How well she remembered the neglected air of
the place when last she had seen it--the mossgrown walks, the duckweed in
the moat, the straggling rose-bushes, everything out of order, from the
broken weathercock on one of the gateway towers, to the scraper by the
half-glass door in one corner of the quadrangle, which had been, used
instead of the chief entrance! It seems natural to a man of decayed fortune
to shut up his hall-door and sneak in and out of his habitation by some
obscure portal.
Now all was changed; a kind of antique primness, which had no taint of
cockney stiffness, pervaded the scene. One might have expected to see Sir
Thomas More or Lord Bacon emerge from the massive gothic porch, and stroll
with slow step and meditative aspect towards the stone sun-dial that stood
in the centre of that square rose-garden. The whole place had an air of
doublet and hose. It seemed older to Clarissa than when she had seen
it last--older and yet newer, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty,
restored, after a century of decay, to all its original grandeur.
The door under the porch stood open; but there were a couple of men in a
sober livery waiting in the hall--footmen who had never been reared
in those Yorkshire wilds--men with powdered hair, and the stamp of
Grosvenor-square upon them. Those flew to open inner doors, and Clarissa
began with wonder to behold the new glories of the mansion. She followed
Mr. Granger in silence through dining and billiard-rooms, saloon and
picture-gallery, boudoir and music-room, in all of which the Elizabethan
air, the solemn grace of a departed age, had been maintained with a
marvellous art. Money can do so much; above all, where a man has no
bigoted belief in his own taste or capacity, and will put his trust in the
intelligence of professional artists. Daniel Granger had done this. He had
said to an accomplished architect, "I give you the house of my choice; make
it what it was in its best days. Improve wherever you can, but alter as
little as possible; and, above all, no modernising."
Empowered by this _carte blanche_, the architect had given his soul to
dreams of mediaeval splendour and had produced a place which, in its way,
was faultless. No matter that some of the carved-oak furniture was fresh
from the chisel of the carver, while other things were the spoil of old
Belgian churches; that the tapestry in one saloon was as old as the days of
its designer, Boucher, and that in the adjoining chamber made on purpose
for Arden Court at the Gobelins manufactory of his Imperial Majesty
Napoleon III. No matter that the gilt-leather hangings in one room had hung
there in the reign of Charles I., while those in another were supplied by a
West-end upholsterer. Perfect taste had harmonised every detail; there was
not so much as a footstool or a curtain that could have been called an
anachronism. Clarissa looked at all these things with a strange sense of
wandering somewhere in a dream. It was, and yet was not her old home. There
was nothing incongruous. The place scarcely seemed new to her, though
everything was altered. It was only as it ought to have been always.
She remembered the bare rooms, the scanty shabby furniture of the Georgian
era, the patches and glimpses of faded splendour here and there, the
Bond-street prettinesses and fripperies in her mother's boudoir, which,
even in her early girlhood, had grown tawdry and _rococo_, the old pictures
rotting in their tarnished frames; everything with that sordid air of
poverty and decay upon it.
"Well, Miss Lovel," Daniel Granger said at last, when they had gone through
all the chief rooms almost in silence, "do you approve of what has been
done?"
"It is beautiful," Clarissa answered, "most beautiful; but--but it breaks
my heart to see it."
The words were wrung from her somehow. In the next moment she was ashamed
of them--it seemed like the basest envy.
"O, pray, pray do not think me mean or contemptible, Mr. Granger," she
said; "it is not that I envy you your house, only it was my home so long,
and I always felt its neglect so keenly; and to see it now so beautiful, as
I could have only pictured it in my dreams--and even in them I could not
fancy it so perfect."
"It may be your home again, Clarissa, if you care to make it so," said Mr.
Granger, coming very close to her, and with a sudden passion in his voice.
"I little thought when I planned this place that it would one day seem
worthless to me without one lovely mistress. It is all yours, Clarissa, if
you will have it--and the heart of its master, who never thought that it
was in his nature to feel what he feels for you."
He tried to take her hand; but she shrank away from him, trembling a
little, and with a frightened look in her face.
"Mr. Granger, O, pray, pray don't----"
"For God's sake don't tell me that this seems preposterous or hateful to
you--that you cannot value the love of a man old enough to be your father.
You do not know what it is for a man of my age and my character to love for
the first time. I had gone through life heart-whole, Clarissa, till I saw
you. Between my wife and me there was never more than liking. She was a
good woman, and I respected her, and we got on very well together. That was
all. Clarissa, tell me that there is some hope. I ought not to have spoken
so soon; I never meant to be such a fool--but the words came in spite of
me. O, my dearest, don't crush me with a point-blank refusal. I know that
all this must seem strange to you. Let it pass. Think no more of anything I
have said till you know me better--till you find my love is worth having.
I believe I fell in love with you that first afternoon in the library
at Hale. From that time forth your face haunted me--like some beautiful
picture--the loveliest thing I had ever seen, Clarissa."
"I cannot answer you, Mr. Granger," she said in a broken voice; "you have
shocked and surprised me so much, I----"
"Shocked and surprised you! That seems hard."
In that very moment it flashed upon her that this was what her father and
Lady Laura Armstrong had wished to bring about. She was to win back the
lost heritage of Arden Court--win it by the sacrifice of every natural
feeling of her heart, by the barter of her very self.
How much more Mr. Granger might have said there is no knowing--for,
once having spoken, a man is loth to leave such a subject as this
unexhausted--but there came to Clarissa's relief the rustling sound of a
stiff silk dress, announcing the advent of Miss Granger, who sailed towards
them through a vista of splendid rooms, with a stately uncompromising air
that did not argue the warmest possible welcome for her guest.
"I have been hunting for you everywhere, papa," she said in an aggrieved
tone. "Where have you been hiding Miss Lovel?"
And then she held out her hand and shook hands with Clarissa in the coldest
manner in which it was possible for a human being to perform that ceremony.
She looked at her father with watchful suspicious eyes as he walked away to
one of the windows, not caring that his daughter should see his face just
at that moment. There was something, evidently, Sophia thought,--something
which it concerned her to discover.
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