"It would be the best chance for his redemption. A little womanly kindness and counsel from you to the wife might bring about a happier state of things in his home; and a man who can be happy at home is in a measure saved. It is hardly possible for your brother to mix much with the people amongst whom I saw him without injury to himself. They are people to whom dissipation is the very salt of life; people who breakfast at the Moulin Rouge at three o"clock in the afternoon, and eat ices at midnight to the music of the cascade in the Bois; people to be seen at every race-meeting; men who borrow money at seventy-five per cent to pay for opera-boxes and dinners at the Cafe Riche, and who manage the rest of their existence on credit."
"But what could my influence do against such friends as these?" asked Clarissa in a hopeless tone.
"Who can say? It might do wonders. I know your brother has a heart, and that you have power to touch it. Take my advice, Mrs. Granger, and try to be in Paris as soon as you can."
"I will," she answered fervently. "I would do anything to save him." She looked at her watch, and rose from the seat under the hawthorn. "It is nearly two o"clock," she said, "and I must go back to the house. You will come to luncheon, of course?"
"Thanks--no. I have an engagement that will take me back to the town immediately."
"But Mr. Granger will be surprised to hear that you have been here without calling upon him."
"Need Mr. Granger hear of my coming?" George Fairfax asked in a low tone.
Clarissa flushed scarlet.
"I have no secrets from my husband, Mr. Fairfax," she said, "even about trifles."
"Ten thousand pardons! I scarcely want to make my presence here a secret; but, in short, I came solely to speak to you about a subject in which I knew you were deeply interested, and I had not contemplated calling upon Mr. Granger."
They were walking slowly up the gra.s.sy slope as they talked; and after this there came a silence, during which Clarissa quickened her pace a little, George Fairfax keeping still by her side. Her heart beat faster than its wont; and she had a vague sense of danger in this man"s presence--a sense of a net being woven round her, a lurking suspicion that this apparent interest in her brother veiled some deeper feeling.
They came out of the hollow, side by side, into a short arcade of flowering limes, at the end of which there was a broad sweep of open gra.s.s. A man on a deep-chested strong-limbed gray horse was riding slowly towards them across the gra.s.s--Daniel Granger.
That picture of his wife walking in the little avenue of limes, with George Fairfax by her side, haunted Mr. Granger with a strange distinctness in days to come,--the slight white-robed figure against the background of sunlit greenery; the young man"s handsome head, uncovered, and stooping a little as he spoke to his companion.
The master of Arden Court dismounted, and led his horse by the bridle as he came forward to meet Mr. Fairfax. The two men shook hands; but not very warmly. The encounter mystified Daniel Granger a little. It was strange to find a man he had supposed to be at the other end of England strolling in the park with his wife, and that man the one about whom he had had many a dreary half-hour of brooding. He waited for an explanation, however, without any outward show of surprise. The business was simple and natural enough, no doubt, he told himself.
"Have you been to the house?" he asked; "I have been out all the morning."
"No; I was on my way there, when I came upon Mrs. Granger in the most romantic spot yonder. I felt that I was rather early for a morning-call even in the depths of the country, and had strolled out of the beaten path to get rid of an hour or so."
"I did not know you were in Yorkshire," said Mr. Granger, not in the most cordial tone. "You are staying at Hale, I suppose?"
"No; Lady Laura is away, you know."
"Ah--to be sure; I had forgotten."
"I am spending a few days with a bachelor friend in Holborough. I am off to Germany before the week is out."
Mr. Granger was not sorry to hear this. He was not jealous of George Fairfax. If anybody had suggested the possibility of his entertaining such a sentiment, that person would have experienced the full force of Daniel Granger"s resentment; but this was just the one man whom he fancied his wife might have cared for a little before her marriage. He was not a man given to petty jealousies; and of late, since the birth of his son, there had been growing up in his mind a sense of security in his wife"s fidelity--her affection even. The union between them had seemed very perfect after the advent of the child; and the master of Arden Court felt almost as if there were nothing upon this earth left for him to desire. But he was a little puzzled by the presence of George Fairfax, nevertheless.
Holborough was a small place; and he began to speculate immediately upon the ident.i.ty of this bachelor friend of Mr. Fairfax"s. It was not a garrison town. The young men of the place were for the most part small professional men--half-a-dozen lawyers and doctors, two or three curates, a couple of bankers" sons, an auctioneer or two, ranking vaguely between the trading and professional cla.s.ses, and the sons of tradesmen. Among them all Mr. Granger could remember no one likely to be a friend of George Fairfax.
It might possibly be one of the curates; but it seemed scarcely probable that Mr. Fairfax would come two hundred and fifty miles to abide three days with a curate. Nor was it the season of partridges. There was no shooting to attract Mr. Fairfax to the neighbourhood of Holborough. There was trout, certainly, to be found in abundance in brooks, and a river within a walk of the town; and Mr. Fairfax might be pa.s.sionately fond of fly-fishing.
"You will come in and have some luncheon, of course," Mr. Granger said, when they came to the gateway, where George Fairfax pulled up, and began to wish them good-bye. Not to ask the man to eat and drink would have seemed to him the most unnatural thing in the world.
"Thanks. I think I had better deny myself that pleasure," Mr. Fairfax said doubtfully. "The day is getting on, and--and I have an engagement for the afternoon." ("Trout, no doubt," thought Mr. Granger.) "I have seen you, that is the grand point. I could not leave Yorkshire without paying my respects to you and Mrs. Granger."
"Do you leave so soon?"
"To-morrow, I think."
"A hurried journey for trout," thought Mr. Granger.
He insisted upon the visitor coming in to luncheon. George Fairfax was not very obdurate. It was so sweet to be near the woman he loved, and he had not the habit of refusing himself the things that were sweet to him. They went into the small dining-room. The luncheon bell had rung a quarter of an hour ago, and Miss Granger was waiting for her parents, with an air of placid self-abnegation, by an open window.
There was a good deal of talk during luncheon, but the chief talker was George Fairfax. Clarissa was grave and somewhat absent. She was thinking of her brother Austin, and the gloomy account of him which she had just heard.
It was hardly a surprise to her. His letters had been few and far between, and they had not been hopeful, or, at the best, brightened by only a flash of hopefulness, which was more like bravado, now and then. His necessity for money, too, had seemed without limit. She was planning her campaign.
Come what might, she must contrive some means of being in Paris before long. Mr. Fairfax was going on to Carlsruhe, that was an advantage; for something in his manner to-day had told her that he must always be more or less than her friend. She had a vague sense that his eagerness to establish a confidence between her and himself was a menace of danger to her.
"If I can only go to Austin myself," she thought, "there need be no intermediary."
Luncheon was over, and still Mr. Fairfax lingered--strangely indifferent to the waning of an afternoon which seemed peculiarly advantageous for fly-fishing, Mr. Granger thought. They went into the drawing-room, and Mr.
Fairfax dawdled an hour away talking of Lyvedon, and giving a serio-comic description of himself in the novel character of a country gentleman.
It was not till Mr. Granger had looked at his watch once or twice in a surrept.i.tious manner, thinking of an engagement to meet his architect for the inspection of some dilapidated cottages on the newest part of his estate, that the visitor rose to depart. Daniel Granger had quite warmed to him by this time. His manner was so natural in its pleasant airiness: it was not easy to think there could be any lurking evil beneath such a show of candour.
"Can"t you stay and dine with us?" asked Mr. Granger; "or will you go back to Holborough and fetch your friend? We shall be very glad to know him, if we don"t know him already."
If a blush had been possible to George Fairfax, this friendly speech would have raised it; but the capacity had departed from him before he left Eton.
He did feel ashamed of himself, nevertheless.
"You are more than good," he said, "but my friend seldom goes anywhere.
Good-bye."
He made his adieux with an agreeable abruptness, not caring to prolong the dinner question. Such men as he tell lies without stint upon occasion; but the men are few to whom it is actually congenial to lie. He was glad to get away even from the woman he loved, and the sense of shame was strong upon him as he departed.
If his mother, who was anxiously awaiting a letter from Paris or Carlsruhe, could have known of his presence here in this place, to which his father had come years ago to betray her! If she who loved him so fondly, and was so full of prayers and hopes for his future, could have seen him so utterly on the wrong road, what bitter shame and lamenting there would have been in the halls of Lyvedon that day--those deserted halls in which the lady sat alone among the sombre old-world grandeurs of oak and tapestry, and sighed for her absent son!
Instead of going straight back to the Holborough high-road, Mr. Fairfax struck across the woods by that path which led to the mill-stream and the orchard, where he had parted from Clarissa on that cheerless October night nearly three years ago. He knew that Mr. Lovel was away, and the cottage only tenanted by servants, and he had a fancy for looking at the place where he had been so angry and so miserable--the scene of that one rejection which had stung him to the very quick, the single humiliation of his successful career. It was only the morbid fancy of an idle man, who had an afternoon to dispose of somehow.
Half-way between the Court and the cottage, he heard the jingling of bells, and presently, flashing and gleaming among the trees, he saw a gaily-painted carriage drawn by a pair of goats, with plated harness that shone in the sun. Mixed with the joyous jingle of the bells, there came the sound of an infant"s laughter. It was the baby taking his after-dinner airing, attended by a couple of nurses. A turn in the path brought George Fairfax and the heir of Arden face to face.
A sudden impulse seized him--a sudden impulse of tenderness for _her_ child. He took the little bundle of rosy babyhood and lace and muslin in his arms, and kissed the soft little face as gently as a woman, and looked into the innocent blue eyes, dilated to an almost impossible extent in a wondering stare, with unspeakable love and melancholy in his own. Great Heaven! if Clarissa had been his wife, this child his son, what a happy man he might have been, what a new charm there would have been in the possession of a fine estate, what a new zest in life, the savour of which seemed to have departed altogether of late!
He put the little one back into his cushioned seat in the goat-chaise with supreme care and gentleness, not ruffling so much as a plume in his dainty white satin hat.
"A fine boy, Mrs. Nurse," he said, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for bacsheesh; to which proposition the portly head-nurse, who had stared at him, aghast with horror, while he handled the infant, a.s.sented with enthusiasm.
"I never nursed a finer, sir; and I was head-nurse to Lady Fitz-Lubin, which my lady had five boys, and not a girl between them; and Mrs. Granger does dote on him so. I never see a ma that rapt up in her child."
Mr. Fairfax gave her half-a-sovereign, stooped down to kiss the baby again--it is doubtful if he had ever kissed a baby before--and then walked on, wondering at the new sensation. Such a little soft thing, that opened its mouth to be kissed, like a petted bird! And yet he could contemplate a future in which he should come between Clarissa and this child; he could dream of a possibility which should make its mother"s name a shame to this little one.
Mr. Granger kept his appointment with the architect, and came to the natural conclusion of a rich roan upon the subject of dilapidated buildings. After inspecting the lop-sided old cottages, with their deep roomy chimneys, in which the farm labourer loved to sit of a night, roasting his ponderous boots, and smoking the pipe of meditation, and their impossible staircases, which seemed to have been designed with a deliberate view to the breaking of legs and endangerment of spines, Mr. Granger made a wry face, and ordered that rubbish to be swept away.