THE HEIR OF ARDEN.
Clarissa wrote to her brother--a long letter full of warmth and tenderness,
with loving messages for his children, and even for the wife who was so
much beneath him. She enclosed three ten-pound notes, all that remained
to her of a quarter's pin-money; and O, how bitterly she regretted the
frivolous extravagances that had reduced her exchequer to so low a
condition! Toward the close of her letter she came to a standstill. She had
begged Austin to write to her, to tell her all he could about himself,
his hopes, his plans for the future; but when it came to the question of
receiving a letter from him she was puzzled. From the first day of her
married life she had made a point of showing all her letters to her
husband, as a duty, just as she had shown them to her father; who had very
rarely taken the trouble to read them, by the way. But Daniel Granger did
read his wife's letters, and expected that they should be submitted to him.
It would be impossible to reserve from him any correspondence that came to
her in the common way. So Clarissa, though not given to secrecy, was on
this occasion fain to be secret. After considerable deliberation, she told
her brother to write to her under cover to her maid, Jane Target, at Arden
Court. The girl seemed a good honest girl, and Mrs. Granger believed that
she could trust her.
They went back to Arden a day or two afterwards; and Miss Granger returned
with rapture to her duties as commander-in-chief of the model villagers. No
martinet ever struck more terror into the breasts of rank and file than
did this young lady cause in the simple minds of her prize cottagers,
conscience-stricken by the knowledge that stray cobwebs had flourished
and dust-bins run to seed during her absence. There was not much room for
complaint, however, when she did arrive. The note of warning had been
sounded by the servants of the Court, and there had been a general
scrubbing and cleansing in the habitations of New Arden--that particular
Arden which Mr. Granger had built for himself, and the very bricks whereof
ought to have been stamped with his name and titles, as in the case of
Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon. For a week before
Miss Granger's coming there had been heard the splashing of innumerable
pails of water, and the scrubbing of perpetual scrubbing-brushes; windows
had been polished to the highest degree of transparency; tin tea-kettles
had been sandpapered until they became as silver; there had been quite a
run upon the village chandler for mottled soap and hearthstone.
So, after a rigorous inspection, Miss Granger was obliged to express her
approval--not an unqualified approval, by any means. Too much praise would
have demoralized the Ardenites, and lowered the standard of perfection.
"I like to be able to say that my papa's village is the cleanest village in
England," she said; "not one of the cleanest, but _the_ cleanest. Why have
you turned the back of that tea-kettle to the wall, Mrs. Binks? I'm afraid
it's smoky. Now there never need be a smoky kettle. Your place looks very
nice, Mrs. Binks; but from the strong smell of soap, I fancy it must have
been cleaned _very lately_. I hope you have not been neglecting things
while I've been away. That sort of thing would militate against your
obtaining my prize for domestic cleanliness next Christmas."
Mrs. Binks did not know what "militate" meant, unless it might be something
in connection with the church militant, of which she had heard a great
deal; but she was not a mild-tempered woman, and she grew very red in the
face at this reproof.
"Well, miss, if to toil and scrub early and late, with a husband and five
children to do for, and to keep the place pretty much as you see it now,
though I don't say as it ain't a little extry perhaps, in honour of your
coming back--if that ain't hard work and cleanliness, and don't deserve
a prize of two pound at the year's end, I don't know what do. It's
hard-earned money, Miss Granger, when all's said and done."
Sophia turned the eyes of reproof upon Mrs. Binks.
"I did not think it was the money you cared for," she said; "I thought it
was the honour you valued most."
She pointed to a card framed and glazed over the mantelpiece--a card upon
which, with many nourishes and fat initial letters in red ink, the model
schoolmaster had recorded the fact, that Mrs. Binks, at the preceding
Christmas distributions, had obtained Miss Granger's annual reward for
domestic cleanliness.
"Well, of course, miss, I set store by the card. It's nice to see one's
name wrote out like that, and any strangers as chance to come in the summer
time, they takes notice; but to a hard-working man's wife two pound is a
consideration. I'm sure I beg your parding humbly, miss, if I spoke a bit
short just now; but it is trying, when one has worked hard, to have one's
work found fault with."
"I am not aware that I found fault with your work, Mrs. Binks," Sophia
replied with supreme dignity; "I merely remarked that it appeared to have
been done hastily. I don't approve of spasmodic industry."
And with this last crushing remark, Miss Granger sailed out of the cottage,
leaving the luckless Mrs. Binks to repent her presumption at leisure, and
to feel that she had hazarded her hopes of Christmas bounties, and enhanced
the chances of her detested rival of three doors off, Mrs. Trotter, a
sanctimonious widow, with three superhuman children, who never had so much
as a spot on their pinafores, and were far in advance of the young Binkses
in Kings and Chronicles; indeed the youngest Trotter had been familiar with
all the works of Hezekiah before the eldest Binks had grasped the abstract
idea of Saul.
For Clarissa the change to Arden Court was a pleasant one. That incessant
succession of London gaieties had wearied her beyond measure. Here, for a
little time before her visitors began to arrive, she lived her own life,
dreaming away a morning over a sketch-book, or reading some newly-published
volume in a favourite thicket in the park. There was a good deal of time,
of course, that she was obliged to devote to her husband, walking or
driving or riding with him, in rather a ceremonial manner, almost as she
might have done had she belonged to that charmed circle whose smallest walk
or drive is recorded by obsequious chroniclers in every journal in the
united kingdom. Then came six brilliant weeks in August and September,
when Arden Court was filled with visitors, and Clarissa began to feel how
onerous are the duties of a chatelaine. She had not Lady Laura Armstrong's
delight in managing a great house. She was sincerely anxious that her
guests might be pleased, but somewhat over-burdened by the responsibility
of pleasing them. It was only after some experience that she found there
was very little to be done, after all. With a skilful combination of
elements, the result was sure to be agreeable. Morning after morning the
cheerful faces gathered round the breakfast-table; and morning after
morning vast supplies of dried salmon, fresh trout, grilled fowl, and
raised pie--to say nothing of lighter provender, in the way of omelets,
new-laid eggs, hot buttered cakes of various descriptions, huge wedges of
honeycomb, and jars of that Scotch marmalade, so dear to the hearts of
boating-men--vanished like smoke before a whirlwind. Whatever troubles
these nomads may have had were hidden in their hearts for the time being.
A wise custom prevailed in Mr. Granger's establishment with regard to the
morning letters, which were dealt out to each guest with his or her early
cup of tea, and not kept back for public distribution, to the confusion of
some luckless recipient, who feels it difficult to maintain an agreeable
smirk upon his countenance while he reads, that unless such or such an
account is settled immediately, proceedings will be taken without delay.
Lady Laura came, as she had promised, and gave her dearest Clarissa lessons
in the art of presiding over a large establishment, and did her utmost
to oust Miss Granger from her position of authority in the giving out of
stores and the ordering of grocery. This, however, was impossible. Sophia
clung to her grocer's book as some unpopular monarch tottering on his
insecure throne might cling to his sceptre. If she could not sit in the
post of honour at her father's dinner-table, as she had sat so long, it
was something to reign supreme in the store-room; if she found herself a
secondary person in the drawing-room, and that unpunctilious callers were
apt to forget the particular card due to her, she could at least hold on
by the keys of those closets in which the superfine china services for Mr.
Granger's great dinners were stored away, with chamois leather between all
the plates and dishes. She had still the whip-hand of the housekeeper, and
could ordain how many French plums and how many muscatel raisins were to
be consumed in a given period. She could bring her powers of arithmetic to
bear upon wax-candles, and torment the souls of hapless underlings by the
precision of her calculations. She had an eye to the preserves; and if
awakened suddenly in the dead of the night could have told, to a jar, how
many pots of strawberry, and raspberry, and currant, and greengage were
ranged on the capacious shelves of that stronghold of her power, the
store-room.
Even Lady Laura's diplomacy failed here. The genius of a Talleyrand would
not have dislodged Miss Granger.
"I like to feel that I am of _some_ use to papa," she remarked very often,
with the air of a household Antigone. "He has new outlets for his money
now, and it is more than ever my duty as a daughter to protect him from the
wastefulness of servants. With all my care, there are some things in Mrs.
Plumptree's management which I do not understand. I'm sure what becomes of
all the preserved-ginger and crystallized apricots that I give out, is a
mystery that no one could fathom. Who ever eats preserved-ginger? I have
taken particular notice, and could never see any one doing it. The things
are not eaten; _they disappear_."
Lady Laura suggested that, with such a fortune as Mr. Granger's, a little
waste more or less was hardly worth thinking of.
"I cannot admit that," Miss Granger replied solemnly. "It is the abstract
sinfulness of waste which I think of. An under-butler who begins by wasting
preserved-ginger may end by stealing his master's plate."
The summer went by. Picnics and boating parties, archery meetings and
flower-shows, and all the familiar round of country pleasures repeated
themselves just as they had done at Hale Castle two years ago; and Clarissa
wondered at the difference in her own mind which made these things so
different. It was not that all capacity for enjoyment was dead in her.
Youth is too bright a thing to be killed so easily. She could still delight
in a lovely landscape, in exquisite flowers, in that art which she had
loved from her childhood--she could still enjoy good music and pleasant
society; but that keen sense of happiness which she had felt at Hale, that
ardent appreciation of small pleasures, that eager looking forward to the
future--these were gone. She lived in the present. To look back to the past
was to recall the image of George Fairfax, who seemed somehow interwoven
with her girlhood; to look forward to the future was to set her face
towards a land hidden in clouds and darkness. She had positively nothing to
hope for.
Mr. Granger took life very calmly. He knew that his wife did not love him;
and he was too proud a man to lay himself out to win her love, even if he
had known how to set about a task so incongruous with the experience of his
life. He was angry with himself for having ever been weak enough to think
that this girlish creature--between whom and himself there stretched a gulf
of thirty years--could by any possibility be beguiled into loving him. Of
course, she had married him for his money. There was not one among his
guests who would not have thought him a fool for supposing that it could be
otherwise, or for expecting more from her than a graceful fulfilment of the
duties of her position.
He had little ground for complaint. She was gentle and obedient,
deferential in her manner to him before society, amiable always; he only
knew that she did not love him--that was all. But Daniel Granger was a
proud man, and this knowledge was a bitter thing to him. There were hours
in his life when he sat alone in his own room--that plainly-furnished
chamber which was half study, half dressing-room--withdrawing himself from
his guests under pretence of having business-letters to write to his people
at Bradford and Leeds; sat with his open desk before him, and made no
attempt to write; sat brooding over thoughts of his young wife, and
regretting the folly of his marriage.
Was it true that she had never cared for any one else? He had her father's
word for that; but he knew that Marmaduke Lovel was a selfish man, who
would be likely enough to say anything that would conduce to his own
advantage. Had her heart been really true and pure when he won her for his
wife? He remembered those sketches of George Fairfax in the portfolio, and
one day when he was waiting for Clarissa in her morning-room he took the
trouble to look over her drawings. There were many that he recollected
having seen that day at Mill Cottage, but the portraits of Mr. Fairfax were
all gone. He looked through the portfolio very carefully, but found none of
those careless yet life-like sketches which had attracted the attention of
Sophia Granger.
"She has destroyed them, I suppose," he said to himself; and the notion of
her having done so annoyed him a little. He did not care to question her
about them. There would have been an absurdity in that, he thought: as
if it could matter to him whose face she chose for her unstudied
sketches--mere vagabondage of the pencil.
Upon rare occasions Marmaduke Lovel consented to take a languid share in
the festivities at Arden. But although he was very well pleased that his
daughter should be mistress of the house that he had lost, he did not
relish a secondary position in the halls of his forefathers; nor had the
gaieties of the place any charm for him. He was glad to slip away quietly
at the beginning of September, and to go back to Spa, where the waters
agreed with his rheumatism--that convenient rheumatism which was an excuse
for anything he might choose to do.
As for his daughter, he washed his hands of all responsibility in
connection with her. He felt as if he had provided for her in a most
meritorious manner by the diplomacy which had brought about her marriage.
Whether she was happy in her new life, was a question which he had never
asked himself; but if any one else had propounded such a question, he would
have replied unhesitatingly in the affirmative. Of course Clarissa was
happy. Had she not secured for herself all the things that women most
value? could she not run riot in the pleasures for which women will imperil
their souls? He remembered his own wife's extravagance, and he argued with
himself, that if she could have had a perennial supply of fine dresses, and
a perpetual round of amusement, she would speedily have forgotten Colonel
Fairfax. It was the dulness of her life, and the dismal atmosphere of
poverty, that had made her false.
So he went back to Spa, secure in the thought that he could make his home
at Arden whenever he pleased. Perhaps at some remote period of old age,
when his senses were growing dim, he might like to inhabit the familiar
rooms, and feel no sting in the thought that he was a guest, and not the
master. It would be rather pleasant to be carried to his grave from Arden
Court, if anything about a man's burial could be pleasant. He went back to
Spa and led his own life, and in a considerable measure forgot that he had
ever had a son and a daughter.
With September and October there came guests for the shooting, but George
Fairfax was not among them. Mr. Granger had not renewed that careless
invitation of his in Clarges-street. After supervising Clarissa's existence
for two or three weeks, Lady Laura had returned to Hale, there to reign in
all her glory. Mr. and Mrs. Granger dined at the castle twice in the course
of the autumn, and Clarissa saw Lady Geraldine for the first time since
that fatal wedding-day.
There was very little alteration in the fair placid face. Geraldine
Challoner was not a woman to wear the willow in any obvious manner. She
was still coldly brilliant, with just a shade more bitterness, perhaps, in
those little flashes of irony and cynicism which passed for wit. She talked
rather more than of old, Clarissa thought; she was dressed more elaborately
than in the days of her engagement to George Fairfax, and had altogether
the air of a woman who means to shine in society. To Mrs. Granger she was
polite, but as cold as was consistent with civility.
After a fortnight's slaughter of the pheasants, there was a lull in the
dissipations of Arden Court. Visitors departed, leaving Mr. Granger's
gamekeepers with a plethora of sovereigns and half-sovereigns in their
corduroy pockets, and serious thoughts of the Holborough Savings Bank, and
Mr. Granger's chief butler with views that soared as high as Consols.
All the twitter and cheerful confusion of many voices in the rooms and
corridors of the grand old house dwindled and died away, until Mr. Granger
was left alone with his wife and daughter. He was not sorry to see his
visitors depart, though he was a man who, after his own fashion, was fond
of society. But before the winter was over, an event was to happen at Arden
which rendered quiet indispensable.
Late in December, while the villagers were eating Mr. Granger's beef, and
warming themselves before Mr. Granger's coals, and reaping the fruit of
laborious days in the shape of Miss Granger's various premiums for humble
virtue--while the park and woodland were wrapped in snow, and the Christmas
bells were still ringing in the clear crisp air, God gave Clarissa a
son--the first thing she had ever held in her arms which she could and
might love with all her heart.
It was like some strange dream to her, this holy mystery of motherhood. She
had not looked forward to the child's coming with any supreme pleasure, or
supposed that her life would be altered by his advent. But from the moment
she held him in her arms, a helpless morsel of humanity, hardly visible to
the uninitiated amidst his voluminous draperies, she felt herself on the
threshold of a new existence. With him was born her future--it was a most
complete realization of those sweet wise words of the poet,--
"a child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts."
Mr. Granger was enraptured. For him, too, even more than for his wife, this
baby represented the future. Often and often, after some brilliant stroke
of business which swelled the figures upon the left side of his bank-book
to an abnormal amount, he had felt a dismal sense of the extinction that
must befall his glory by-and-by. There was no one but Sophia. She would
inherit a fortune thrice as large as any woman need desire, and would
in all likelihood marry, and give her wealth to fill the coffers of a
stranger, whose name should wipe out the name of Granger--or preserve it
in a half-and-half way in some inane compound, such, as Granger-Smith,
or Jones-Granger, extended afterwards into Jones-Granger-Jones, or
Granger-Smith-Granger.
Perhaps those wintry days that began the new year were the purest, happiest
of Daniel Granger's life. He forgot that his wife did not love him. She
seemed so much more his wife, seated opposite to him beside that quiet
hearth, with her baby in her arms. She made such a lovely picture, bending
over the child in her unconscious beauty. To sit and watch the two was an
all-sufficient delight for him--sometimes withdrawing his mind from the
present, to weave the web of his boy's future.
"I shall send him to Westminster, Clary," he said--it was a long time, by
the way, since he had called his wife Clary, though she herself was hardly
aware of the fact. "I shall certainly send him to Westminster. A provincial
public school is all very well--my father sent me to one--but it's not
_quite_ up to the mark. I should like him to be a good classical scholar,
which I never was, though I was a decent mathematician. I used to do my
Virgil with a crib--a translation, you know--and I never could get on with
Greek. I managed to struggle through the New Testament, but stuck in the
first book of Thucydides. What dreary work it was! I was glad when it was
all over, and my father let me come into his office. But with this fellow
it will be different. He will have no occasion to soil his hands with
trade. He will be a country gentleman, and may distinguish himself in the
House of Commons. Yes, Clary, there may be the material for a great man in
him," Mr. Granger concluded, with an almost triumphant air, as he touched
the soft little cheek, and peered curiously into the bright blue eyes. They
were something like his own eyes, he thought; Clarissa's were hazel.
The mother drew the soft mass of muslin a little nearer to her heart. She
did not care to think of her baby as a man, addressing a noisy constituency
in Holborough market-place, nor even, as a Westminster boy, intent upon
Virgil and cricket, Euclid and football. She liked to think of him as he
was now, and as he would be for the next few years--something soft and warm
and loving, that she could hold in her arms; beside whose bed she could
watch and pray at night. Her future was bounded by the years of her son's
childhood. She thought already, with a vague pang, of the time when he
should go out into the world, and she be no longer necessary to him.
The day came when she looked back to that interval of perfect quiet--the
dimly-lighted rooms, the low wood fire, and her husband's figure seated by
the hearth--with a bitter sense of regret. Daniel Granger was so good to
her in those days--so entirely devoted, in a quiet unobtrusive way--and she
was so selfishly absorbed by the baby as to be almost unconscious of his
goodness at the time. She was inclined to forget that the child belonged to
any one but herself; indeed, had the question been brought home to her, she
would have hardly liked to admit his father's claim upon him. He was her
own--her treasure beyond all price--given to her by heaven for her comfort
and consolation.
Not the least among the tranquil pleasures of that period of
retirement--which Clarissa spun out until the spring flowers were blooming
in the meadows about Arden--was a comparative immunity from the society of
Miss Granger. That young lady made a dutiful call upon her stepmother
every morning, and offered a chilling forefinger--rather a strong-minded
forefinger, with a considerable development of bone--to the infant. On the
child not receiving this advance with rapture, Miss Granger was wont to
observe that he was not so forward in taking notice as some of her model
children; at which the young mother flamed up in defence of her darling,
declaring that he did take notice, and that it was a shame to compare him
to "nasty village children."
"The 'nasty village children' have immortal souls," Sophia replied
severely.
"So they may; but they don't take notice sooner than my baby. I would never
believe that. He knows me, the precious darling;" and the little soft warm
thing in voluminous muslin was kissed and squeezed about to extinction.
Miss Granger was great upon the management of infancy, and was never tired
of expounding her ideas to Clarissa. They were of a Spartan character, not
calculated to make the period of babyhood a pleasant time to experience or
to look back upon. Cold water and nauseous medicines formed a conspicuous
part of the system, and where an ordinary nurse would have approached
infancy with a sponge, Miss Granger suggested a flesh-brush. The hardest,
most impracticable biscuits, the huskiest rusks, constituted Miss Granger's
notion of infant food. She would have excluded milk, as bilious, and would
have forbidden sugar, as a creator of acidity; and then, when the little
victim was about one and a half, she would have seated it before the most
dry-as-dust edition of the alphabet, and driven it triumphantly upon the
first stage on the high-road to Kings and Chronicles.
Among the model villagers Miss Granger had ample opportunity of offering
advice of this kind, and fondly believed that her counsel was acted upon.
Obsequious matrons, with an eye to Christmas benefactions, pretended to
profit by her wisdom; but it is doubtful whether the model infants were
allowed to suffer from a practical exposition of her Spartan theories.
Clarissa had her own ideas about the heir of the Grangers. Not a crumpled
rose-leaf--had rose-leaves been flying about just then--must roughen her
darling's bed. The softest lawn, the downiest, most delicate woollens, were
hardly good enough to wrap her treasure. She had solemn interviews with a
regiment of nurses before she could discover a woman who seemed worthy to
be guardian of this infant demigod. And Mr. Granger showed himself scarcely
less weak. It almost seemed as if this boy was his first child. He had
been a busy man when Sophia was born--too entirely occupied by the grave
considerations of commerce to enter into the details of the nursery--and
the sex of the child had been something of a disappointment to him. He
was rich enough even then to desire an heir to his wealth. During the few
remaining years of his first wife's life, he had hoped for the coming of a
son; but no son had been given to him. It was now, in his sober middle age,
that the thing he had longed for was granted to him, and it seemed all the
more precious because of the delay. So Daniel Granger was wont to sit and
stare at the infant as if it had been something above the common clay of
which infancy is made. He would gaze at it for an hour together, in a dumb
rapture, fully believing it to be the most perfect object in creation; and
about this child there sprung up between his wife and himself a sympathy
that had never been before. Only deep in Clarissa's heart there was a vague
jealousy. She would have liked her baby to be hers alone. The thought of
his father's claim frightened her. In the time to come her child might grow
to love his father better than her.
Finding her counsel rejected, Miss Granger would ask in a meek voice if she
might be permitted to kiss the baby, and having chilled his young blood by
the cool and healthy condition of her complexion, would depart with an air
of long-suffering; and this morning visit being over, Clarissa was free of
her for the rest of the day. Miss Granger had her "duties." She devoted her
mornings to the regulation of the household, her afternoons to the drilling
of the model villagers. In the evening she presided at her father's dinner,
which seemed rather a chilling repast to Mr. Granger, in the absence of
that one beloved face. He would have liked to dine off a boiled fowl in
his wife's room, or to have gone dinnerless and shared Clarissa's
tea-and-toast, and heard the latest wonders performed by the baby, but he
was ashamed to betray so much weakness.
So he dined in state with Sophia, and found it hard work to keep up a
little commonplace conversation with her during the solemn meal--his heart
being elsewhere all the time.
That phase of gloom and despondency, through which, his mind had passed
during the summer that was gone, had given place to brighter thoughts. A
new dawn of hope had come for him with the birth of his child.
He told himself again, as he had so often told himself in the past, that
his wife would grow to love him--that time would bring him the fruition
of his desires. In the meanwhile he was almost entirely happy in the
possession of this new blessing. All his life was coloured by the existence
of this infant. He had a new zest in the driest details of his position
as the master of a great estate. He had bought some two thousand acres of
neighbouring land at different times since his purchase of Arden Court; and
the estate, swollen by these large additions, was fast becoming one of the
finest in the county.
There was not a tree he planted in the beginning of this new year which
he did not consider with reference to his boy; and he made extensive
plantations on purpose that he might be able to point to them by-and-by
and say, "These trees were planted the year my son was born." When he went
round his stables, he made a special survey of one particularly commodious
loose-box, which would do for his boy's pony. He fancied the little fellow
trotting by his side across farms and moorlands, or deep into the woods to
see the newly-felled timber, or to plan a fresh clearing.
It was a pleasant day dream.
* * * * *