The Lovels of Arden Part 4

"But I never could marry any one I did not esteem, if the match were ever such a brilliant one."

"Of course not. All schoolgirls talk like that; and in due course discover how very little esteem has to do with matrimony. If you mean that you would like to marry some penniless wretch of a curate, or some insolvent ensign, for love, I can only say that the day of your marriage will witness our final parting. I should not make any outrageous fuss or useless opposition, rely upon it. I should only wish you good-bye."

Clarissa smiled faintly at this speech. She expected so little from her father, that his hardest words did not wound her very deeply, nor did they extinguish that latent hope, "He will love me some day."

"I trust I may never be so imprudent as to lose you for ever, like that, papa. I must shut my heart resolutely against curates."

"If bad reading is an abomination to you, you have only to open your ears.

I have some confidence in you, Clary," Mr. Lovel went on, with a smile that was almost affectionate. "You look like a sensible girl; a little impulsive, I daresay; but knowledge of the world--which is an uncommonly hard world for you and me--will tone that down in good time. You are accomplished, I hope. Madame Marot wrote me a most flouris.h.i.+ng account of your attainments; but one never knows how much to believe of a schoolmistress's a.n.a.lysis."

"I worked very hard, papa; all the harder because I was so anxious to come home; and I fancied I might shorten my exile a little by being very industrious."

"Humph! You give yourself a good character. You sing and play, I suppose?"

"Yes, papa. But I am fonder of art than of music."

"Ah, art is very well as a profession; but amateur art--French plum-box art--is worse than worthless. However, I am glad you can amuse yourself somehow; and I daresay, if you have to turn governess by-and-by, that sort of thing will be useful. You have the usual smattering of languages, of course?"

"Yes, papa. We read German and Italian on alternate days at Madame Marot's."

"I _promessi Sposi_, and so on, no doubt. There is a n.o.ble Ta.s.so in the bookcase yonder, and a fine old Petrarch, with which you may keep up your Italian. You might read a little to me of an evening sometimes. I should not mind it much."

"And I should like it very much, papa," Clarissa answered eagerly.

She was anxious for anything that could bring her father and herself together--that might lessen the gulf between them, if by ever so little.

And in this manner Miss Lovel's life began in her new home. No warmth of welcome, no word of fatherly affection, attended this meeting between a father and daughter who had not met for six years. Mr. Lovel went back to his books as calmly as if there had been no ardent impetuous girl of eighteen under his roof, leaving Clarissa to find occupation and amus.e.m.e.nt as best she might. He was not a profound student; a literary trifler rather, caring for only a limited number of books, and reading those again and again. Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Southey's _Doctor_. Montaigne, and Swift, he read continually. He was a collector of rare editions of the Cla.s.sics, and would dawdle over a Greek play, edited by some learned German, for a week at a time, losing himself in the profundity of elaborate foot-notes. He was an ardent admirer of the lighter Roman poets, and believed the Horatian philosophy the only true creed by which a man should shape his existence. But it must not be supposed that books brought repose to the mind and heart of Marmaduke Lovel. He was a disappointed man, a discontented man, a man given to brooding over the failure of his life, inclined to cherish vengeful feelings against his fellow-men on account of that failure. Books to him were very much what they might have been to some fiery-tempered ambitious soldier of fortune buried alive in a prison, without hope of release,--some slight alleviation of his anguish, some occasional respite from his dull perpetual pain; nothing more.

Clarissa's first day at Mill Cottage was a very fair sample of the rest of her life. She found that she must manage to spend existence almost entirely by herself--that she must expect the smallest amount of companions.h.i.+p from her father.

"This is the room in which I generally sit," her father said to her that first morning after breakfast; "my books are here, you see, and the aspect suits me. The drawing-room will be almost entirely at your disposal. We have occasional callers, of course; I have not been able to make these impervious country people comprehend that I don't want society. They sometimes pester me with invitations to dinner, which no doubt they consider an amazing kindness to a man in my position; invitations which I make a point of declining. It will be different with you, of course; and if any eligible people--Lady Laura Armstrong or Mrs. Renthorpe for instance--should like to take you up, I shall not object to your seeing a little society. You will never find a rich husband at Mill Cottage."

"Please do not speak of husbands, papa. I don't want to be married, and I shouldn't care to go into society without you."

"Nonsense, child; you will have to do what is best for your future welfare.

Remember that my death will leave you utterly unprovided for--absolutely penniless."

"I hope you may live till I am almost an old woman, papa."

"Not much chance of that; and even if I did, I should not care to have you on my hands all that time. A good marriage is the natural prospect of a good-looking young woman, and I shall be much disappointed if you do not marry well, Clarissa."

The pale cold blue eyes looked at her with so severe a glance, as Mr. Lovel said this, that the girl felt she must expect little mercy from her father if her career in life did not realise his hopes.

"In short," he continued, "I look to you to redeem our fallen fortunes. I don't want the name of Lovel to die out in poverty and obscurity. I look to you to prevent that, Clarissa."

"Papa," said Clarissa, almost trembling as she spoke, "it is not to me you should look for that. What can a girl do to restore a name that has fallen into obscurity? Even if I were to marry a rich man, as you say, it would be only to take another name, and lose my own ident.i.ty in that of my husband.

It is only a son who can redeem his father's name. There is some one else to whom you must look----"

"What!" cried her father vehemently, "have you not been forbidden to mention that name in my hearing? Unlucky girl, you seem to have been born on purpose to outrage and pain me."

"Forgive me, papa; it shall be the last time. But O, is there no hope that you will ever pardon----"

"Pardon," echoed Mr. Lovel, with a bitter laugh; "it is no question of pardon. I have erased that person's image from my mind. So far as I am concerned, there is no such man in the world. Pardon! You must induce me to reinstate him in my memory again, before you ask me to pardon."

"And that can never be, papa?"

"Never!"

The tone of that one word annihilated hope in Clarissa's mind. She had pushed the question to its utmost limit, at all hazards of offending her father. What was it that her brother Austin had done to bring upon himself this bitter sentence of condemnation? She remembered him in his early manhood, handsome, accomplished, brilliant; the delight and admiration of every one who knew him, except her father. Recalling those days, she remembered that between her father and Austin there had never been any show of affection. The talents and brilliant attributes that had won admiration from others seemed to have no charm in the father's eye. Clarissa could remember many a sneering speech of Mr. Lovel's, in which he had made light of his son's cleverness, denouncing his varied accomplishments as trivial and effeminate, and asking if any Englishman ever attained an honourable distinction by playing the piano, or modelling in clay.

"I would rather have my son the dullest plodder that ever toiled at the bar, or droned bald plat.i.tudes from a pulpit, than the most brilliant drawing-room idler, whose amateur art and amateur music ever made him the fas.h.i.+on of a single season, to leave him forgotten in the next. I utterly despise an accomplished man."

Austin Lovel had let such speeches as this go by him with a languid indifference, that testified at once to his easy temper and his comfortable disregard of his father's opinion. He was fond of his little sister Clary, in rather a careless way, and would suffer her companions.h.i.+p, juvenile as she was at that time, with perfect good nature, allowing her to spoil his drawing paper with her untutored efforts, and even to explore the sacred mysteries of his colour-box. In return for this indulgence, the girl loved him with intense devotion, and believed in Him as the most brilliant of mankind.

Clarissa Lovel recalled those departed days now with painful tenderness.

How kind and gracious Austin had been to her! How happy they had been together! sometimes wandering for a whole day in the park and woods of Arden, he with his sketching apparatus, she with a volume of Sir Walter Scott, to read aloud to him while he sketched, or to read him to sleep with very often. And then what delight it had been to sit by his side while he lay at full length upon the mossy turf, or half-buried in fern--to sit by him supremely happy, reading or drawing, and looking up from her occupation every now and then to glance at the sleeper's handsome face in loving admiration.

Those days had been the happiest of her life. When Austin left Arden, he seemed always to carry away the brightness of her existence with him; for without him her life was very lonely--a singularly joyless life for one so young. Then, in an evil hour, as she thought, there came their final parting. How well she remembered her brother loitering on the broad terrace in front of Arden Court, in the dewy summer morning, waiting to bid her good-bye! How pa.s.sionately she had clung to him in that farewell embrace, unable to tear herself away, until her father's stern voice summoned her to the carriage that was to take her on the first stage of her journey!

"Won't you come to the station with us, Austin?" she pleaded.

"No, Clary," her brother answered, with a glance at her father. "_He_ does not want me."

And so they had parted; never to meet any more upon this earth perhaps, Clarissa said to herself, in her dismal reveries to-day. "That stranger in the railway-carriage spoke of his having emigrated. He will live and die far away, perhaps on the other side of the earth, and I shall never see his bright face again. O, Austin, Austin, is this the end of all our summer days in Arden woods long ago!"

CHAPTER IV.

CLARISSA IS "TAKEN UP."

For some time there was neither change nor stir in Clarissa Lovel's new life. It was not altogether an unpleasant kind of existence, perhaps, and Miss Lovel was inclined to make the best of it. She was very much her own mistress, free to spend the long hours of her monotonous days according to her own pleasure. Her father exacted very little from her, and received her dutiful attentions with an air of endurance which was not particularly encouraging. But Clarissa was not easily disheartened. She wanted to win her father's affection; and again and again, after every new discouragement, she told herself that there was no reason why she should not ultimately succeed in making herself as dear to him as an only daughter should be. It was only a question of time and patience. There was no reason that he should not love her, no possible ground for his coldness. It was his nature to be cold, perhaps; but those cold natures have often proved capable of a single strong attachment. What happiness it would be to win this victory of love!

"We stand almost alone in the world," she said to herself. "We had need be very dear to each other."

So, though the time went by, and she made no perceptible progress towards this happy result, Clarissa did not despair. Her father tolerated her, and even this was something; it seemed a great deal when she remembered her childhood at Arden, in which she had never known what it was to be in her father's society for an hour at a time, and when, but for chance meetings in corridors and on staircases, she would very often have lived for weeks under the same roof with him without seeing his face or hearing his voice.

Now it was all different; she was a woman now, and Mill Cottage was scarcely large enough to accommodate two separate existences, even had Mr.

Lovel been minded to keep himself aloof from his daughter. This being so, he tolerated her, treating her with a kind of cold politeness, which might have been tolerably natural in some guardian burdened with the charge of a ward he did not care for. They rarely met until dinner-time, Clarissa taking her breakfast about three hours before her father left his room. But at seven they dined together, and spent the long winter evenings in each other's company, Clarissa being sometimes permitted to read aloud in German or Italian, while her father lay back in his easy-chair, smoking his meerschaum, and taking the amber mouthpiece from his lips now and then to correct an accent or murmur a criticism on the text. Sometimes, too, Mr.

Lovel would graciously expound a page or two of a Greek play, or dilate on the subtilty of some learned foot-note, for his daughter's benefit, but rather with the air of one gentleman at his club inviting the sympathy of another gentleman than with the tone of a father instructing his child.

Sometimes, but very rarely, they had company. Mr. Oliver and his wife would dine with them occasionally, or the Vicar of Arden, a grave bachelor of five-and-thirty, would drop in to spend an hour or two of an evening. But besides these they saw scarcely any one. The small professional men of Holborough Mr. Lovel held in supreme contempt, a contempt of which those gentlemen themselves were thoroughly aware; the country people whom he had been accustomed to receive at Arden Court he shrank from with a secret sense of shame, in these days of his fallen fortunes. He had therefore made for himself a kind of hermit life at Mill Cottage; and his acquaintance had come, little by little, to accept this as his established manner of existence. They still called upon the recluse occasionally, and sent him cards for their state dinners, averse from any neglect of a man who had once occupied a great position among them; but they were no longer surprised when Mr. Lovel pleaded his feeble health as a reason for declining their hospitality. A very dull life for a girl, perhaps; but for Clarissa it was not altogether an unhappy life. She was at an age when a girl can make an existence for herself out of bright young fancies and vague deep thoughts. There was that in her life just now which fades and perishes with the pa.s.sing of years; a subtle indescribable charm, a sense of things beyond the common things of daily life. If there had been a closer bond of union between her father and herself, if there had not been that dark cloud upon her brother's life, she might have made herself entirely happy; she might almost have forgotten that Arden was sold, and a vulgar mercantile stranger lord of those green slopes and broad ancient terraces she loved so well.

As it was, the loneliness of her existence troubled her very little. She had none of that eager longing for "society" or "fas.h.i.+on" wherewith young ladies who live in towns are apt to inoculate one another. She had no desire to s.h.i.+ne, no consciousness of her own beauty; for the French girls at Madame Marot's had been careful not to tell her that her pale patrician face was beautiful. She wished for nothing but to win her father's love, and to bring about some kind of reconciliation between him and Austin.