The Lovels of Arden Part 46

"No," replied Sophia, "you have only had papa. I shouldn't think he would be very much flattered if he heard you preferred baby."

"I did not say that I preferred baby, Sophia. What a habit you have of misrepresenting me!"

The nurse appeared at this moment, carrying the heir of the Grangers, gloriously arrayed in blue velvet, and looking fully conscious of his magnificence.

"But I do like to have a drive with my pet-lamb, don't I, darling?" said the mother, stooping to kiss the plump rosy cheek. And then there followed some low confidential talk, in the fond baby language peculiar to young mothers.

"I should have thought you would have been glad to get a morning alone, for once in a way," remarked Sophia, coming over to the baby, and giving him a stately kiss. She liked him tolerably well in her own way, and was not angry with him for having come into the world to oust her from her proud position as sole heiress to her father's wealth. The position had been very pleasant to her, and she had not seen it slip away from her without many a pang; but, however she might dislike Clarissa, she was not base enough to hate her father's child. If she could have had the sole care and management of him, physicked and dieted him after her own method, and developed the budding powers of his infant mind by her favourite forcing system--made a model villager of him, in short--she might have grown even to love him. But these privileges being forbidden to her--her wisdom being set at naught, and her counsel rejected--she could not help regarding Lovel Granger as more or less an injury.

"I should have thought you would have been glad of a morning at home, Clarissa," she repeated.

"Not such a fine morning as this, Sophy. It would be such a pity for baby to lose the sunshine; and I have really nothing to do."

"If I had known a little sooner that you were going, I would have gone with you," said Miss Granger.

Clarissa's countenance fell. She could not help that little troubled look, which told Miss Granger that her society would not have been welcome.

"You would have had no objection to my coming with you, I suppose?" the fair Sophia said sharply. "Baby is not quite a monopoly."

"Of course not. If you'll put on your things now, Sophia, I'll wait for you."

It was a hard thing for Clarissa to make the offer, when she had been waiting so anxiously for this opportunity of seeing her brother. To be in the same city with him, and not see him, was more painful than to be divided from him by half the earth, as she had been. It was harder still to have to plot and plan and stoop to falsehood in order to compa.s.s a meeting.

But she remembered the stern cold look in her husband's face when she had spoken of Austin, and she could not bring herself to degrade her brother by entreating Daniel Granger's indulgence for his past misdeeds, or Daniel Granger's interest in his future fortunes.

Happily Sophia had made elaborate preparations for the Gothic texts, and was not inclined to waste so much trouble.

"I have got my colours all ready," she said, "and have put everything out, you see. No, I don't think I'll go to-day. But another time, if you'll be so kind as to let me know _beforehand_, I shall be pleased to go with my brother. I suppose you know there's an east wind to-day, by-the-bye."

The quarter whence the wind came, was a subject about which Clarissa had never concerned herself. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue.

"We have plenty of wraps," she said, "and we can have the carriage closed if we are cold."

"It is not a day upon which _I_ should take an infant out," Miss Granger murmured, dipping her brush in some Prussian-blue; "but of course you know best."

"O, we shall take care of baby, depend upon it. Good-bye, Sophy."

And Clarissa departed, anxious to avoid farther remonstrance on the part of her step-daughter. She told the coachman to drive to the Luxembourg Gardens, intending to leave the nurse and baby to promenade that favourite resort, while she made her way on foot to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. She remembered that George Fairfax had described her brother's lodging as near the Luxembourg.

They drove through the gay Parisian streets, past the pillar in the Place Vendome, and along the Rue de la Paix, all shining with jewellers' ware, and the Rue de Rivoli, where the chestnut-trees in the gardens of the Tuileries were shedding their last leaves upon the pavement, past the airy tower of St. Jacques, and across the bridge into that unknown world on the other side of the Seine. The nurse, who had seen very little of that quarter of the town, wondered what obscure region she was traversing, and wondered still more when they alighted at the somewhat shabby-looking gardens.

"These are the Luxembourg Gardens," said Clarissa. "As you have been to the Tuileries every day, I thought it would be a change for you to come here."

"Thank you, ma'am," replied Mrs. Brobson, the chief nurse; "but I don't think as these gardings is anyways equal to the Tooleries--nor to Regent's Park even. When I were in Paris with Lady Fitz-Lubin we took the children to the Tooleries or the Bore de Boulong every day--but, law me! the Bore de Boulong were a poor place in those days to what it is now."

Clarissa took a couple of turns along one of the walks with Mrs. Brobson, and then, as they were going back towards the gate, she said, as carelessly as she could manage to say: "There is a person living somewhere near here whom I want to see, Mrs. Brobson. I'll leave you and baby in the gardens for half an hour or so, while I go and pay my visit."

Mrs. Brobson stared. It was not an hour in the day when any lady she had ever served was wont to pay visits; and that Mrs. Granger of Arden Court should traverse a neighbourhood of narrow streets and tall houses, on foot and alone, to call upon her acquaintance at eleven o'clock in the morning, seemed to her altogether inexplicable.

"You'll take the carriage, won't you, ma'am?" she said, with undisguised astonishment.

"No, I shall not want the carriage; it's very near. Be sure you keep baby warm, Mrs. Brobson."

Clarissa hurried out into the street. The landau, with its pair of Yorkshire-bred horses, was moving slowly up and down, to the admiration of juvenile Paris, which looked upon Mr. Granger's deep-chested, strong-limbed bays almost as a new order in the animal creation. Mrs. Granger felt that the eyes of coachman and footman were upon her as she turned the first corner, thinking of nothing for the moment, but how to escape the watchfulness of her own servants. She walked a little way down the street, and then asked a sleepy-looking waiter, who was sweeping the threshold of a very dingy restaurant, to direct her to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. It was _tous pres_, the man said; only a turn to the right, at that corner yonder, and the next turning was the street she wanted. She thanked him, and hurried on, with her heart beating faster at every step. Austin might be out, she thought, and her trouble wasted; and there was no knowing when she might have another opportunity. Even if he were at home, their interview must needs be brief: there was the nurse waiting and wondering; the baby exposed to possible peril from east winds.

The Rue du Chevalier Bayard was a street of tall gaunt houses that had seen better days--houses with _porte-cocheres_, exaggerated iron knockers, and queer old lamps; dreary balconies on the first floor, with here and there a plaster vase containing some withered member of the palm tribe, or a faded orange-tree; everywhere and in everything an air of dilapidation and decay; faded curtains, that had once been fine, flapping in the open windows; Venetian shutters going to ruin; and the only glimpse of brightness or domestic comfort confined to the humble parlour of the portress, who kept watch and ward over one of the dismal mansions, and who had a birdcage hanging in her window, an Angora cat sunning itself on the stone sill, and a row of scarlet geraniums in the little iron balcony.

But this model portress did not preside over the house inhabited by Austin Lovel. There Clarissa found only a little deaf old man, who grinned and shook his head helplessly when she questioned him, and shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the staircase--a cavernous stone staircase, with an odour as of newly opened graves. She went up to the first-floor, past the _entresol_, where the earthy odour was subjugated by a powerful smell of cooking, in which garlic was the prevailing feature. One tall door on the first-floor was painted a pale pink, and had still some dingy indications of former gilding upon its mouldings. On this pink door was inscribed the name of Mr. Austin, Painter.

Clarissa rang a bell, and a tawdry-looking French servant, with big earrings and a dirty muslin cap, came to answer her summons. Mr. Austin was at home; would madame please to enter. Madame, having replied in the affirmative, was shown into a small sitting-room, furnished with a heterogeneous collection of cabinets, tables, and sofas, every one of which bore the stamp of the broker's shop--things which had been graceful and pretty in their day, but from which the ormolu-moulding had been knocked off here, and the inlaid-wood chipped away there, and the tortoisesh.e.l.l cracked in another place, until they seemed the very emblems of decay. It was as if they had been set up as perpetual monitors--monuments of man's fragility. "This is what life comes to," they said in their silent fashion.

This faded rubbish in buhl and marqueterie was useful enough to Mr. Lovel, however; and on his canvas the faded furniture glowed and sparkled with all its original brightness, fresh as the still-life of Meissonier. There were a child's toys scattered on the floor; and Clarissa heard a woman's voice talking to a child in an adjoining room, on the other side of a pair of tall pink folding-doors. Then she heard her brother's voice saying something to the servant; and at the sound she felt as if she must have fallen to the ground. Then one of the doors was opened, and a woman came in; a pretty, faded-looking woman, dressed in a light-blue morning wrapper that might very well have been cleaner; a woman with a great deal of dyed hair in an untidy ma.s.s at the back of her head; a woman whom Clarissa felt it must be a difficult thing to like.

This was her brother's wife, of course. There was a boy of four or five years old clinging to his mother's gown, and Clarissa's heart yearned to the child. He had Austin's face. It would be easy to love _him_, she thought.

"Mr. Austin is in his paintin'-room, madame," said the wife, putting on a kind of company manner. "Did you wish to see him about a picture? Je parle tres poo de Francais, mais si----"

"I am English," Clarissa answered, smiling; "if you will kindly tell Mr.

Austin a lady from England wishes to see him. What a dear little boy! May I shake hands with him?"

"Give the lady your hand, Henery," said the mother. "Not that one," as the boy, after the invariable custom of childhood, offered his left--"the right hand."

Clarissa took the sticky little paw tenderly in her pearl-gray glove. To think that her brother Austin Lovel should have married a woman who could call her son "Henery," and who had such an unmistakable air of commonness!

The wife went back to the painting-room; and returned the next minute to beg the visitor to "step this way, if you please, ma'am." She opened one of the folding-doors wide as she spoke, and Clarissa went into a large room, at the other end of which there stood a tall slim young man, in a short velvet coat, before a small easel.

It was her brother Austin; pale and a trifle haggard, too old in looks for his years, but very handsome--a masculine edition of Clarissa herself, in fact: the same delicate clearly-cut features, the same dark hazel eyes, shaded by long brown lashes tinged with gold. This was what Mrs. Granger saw in the broad noonday sunshine; while the painter, looking up from his easel, beheld a radiant creature approaching him, a woman in pale-gray silk, that it would have been rapture to paint; a woman with one of the loveliest faces he had ever seen, crowned with a broad plait of dark-brown hair, and some delicate structure of point-lace and pink roses, called by courtesy a bonnet.

He laid down his mahl-stick, and came to meet her, with a puzzled look on his face. Her beauty seemed familiar to him somehow, and yet he had no recollection of ever having seen her before. He saw the faded counterpart of that bright face every morning in his looking-gla.s.s.

She held out both her hands.

"Austin, don't you know me?"

He gave a cry of pleased surprise, and caught her in his arms.

"Clarissa!" he exclaimed; "why, my darling, how lovely you have grown! My dear little Clary! How well I remember the sweet young face, and the tears, and kisses, and the slender little figure in its childish dress, that day your father carried you off to school! My own little Clary, what a happiness to see you! But you never told me you were coming to Paris."

"No, dear, I kept that for a surprise. And are you really glad to see me, Austin?"

"Really glad! Is there any one in the world could make me gladder?"

"I am so happy to hear that. I was almost afraid you had half forgotten me.

Your letters were so few, and so short."

"Letters!" cried Austin Lovel, with a laugh; "I never was much of a hand at letter-writing; and then I hadn't anything particularly pleasant to write about. You mustn't gauge my affection by the length of my letters, Clary.

And then I have to work deucedly hard when I am at home, and have very little time for scribbling."

Clarissa glanced round the room while he was speaking. Every detail in her brother's surroundings had an interest for her. Here, as in the drawing-room, there was an untidy air about everything--a want of harmony in all the arrangements. There were Flemish carved-oak cabinets, and big j.a.pan vases; a mantelpiece draped with dusty crimson velvet, a broken Venetian gla.s.s above it, and a group of rusty-looking arms on each side; long limp amber curtains to the three tall windows, with festooned valances in an advanced state of disarrangement and dilapidation. There were some logs burning on the hearth, a pot of chocolate simmering among the ashes, and breakfast laid for one person upon a little table by the fire--the remnant of a perigord pie, flanked by a stone bottle of curacoa.