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 t
here 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.
* * * * *
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE NEAREST WAY TO CARLSRUHE.
A great event befell George Fairfax in the spring of the new year. He received a summons to Lyvedon, and arrived there only in time to attend his uncle’s death bed. The old man died, and was buried in the tomb of his forefathers — a spacious vaulted chamber beneath Lyvedon church — and George Fairfax reigned in his stead. Since his brother’s death he had known that this was to be, and had accepted the fact as a matter of course. His succession caused him very little elation. He was glad to have unlimited ready-money, but, in the altered aspect of his life, he did not care much for the estate. With Geraldine Challoner for his wife, the possession of such a place as Lyvedon would have been very agreeable to him. He could have almost resigned himself to the ordinary country gentleman’s life: to be a magnate in the county; to attend at petty sessions, and keep himself well posted in parochial questions; to make himself a terror to the soul of poachers, and to feel that his youth was over. But now it was different. He had no wife, nor any prospect of a wife. He had no definite plans for his future. For a long time he had been going altogether the wrong way; leading a roving, desultory kind of existence; living amongst men whose habits and principles were worse than his own.
He sent for his mother, and installed her as mistress of Lyvedon. The place and the position suited her to admiration. He spent a month in dawdling about the neighbourhood, taking stock of his new possessions, now and then suggesting some alteration or improvement, but always too lazy to carry it out; strolling in the park with a couple of dogs and a cigar, or going fly-fishing along the bank of a little winding river; driving in an open carriage with his mother; yawning over a book or a newspaper all the evening, and then sitting up till late into the night, writing letters which might just as easily have been written in the day. His manner made his mother anxious. Once, with a sigh, she ventured to say how much she regretted the breaking-off his engagement to Lady Geraldine.
“You were so admirably adapted for each other,” she said.
“Yes, mother, admirably adapted, no doubt; but you see we did not love each other.” He felt a little pang of remorse as he said this, for it misgave him that Geraldine had loved him. “It would have been like those chestnut ponies you drive; they go very well together, and look superb, but they are always snapping at each other’s heads. I don’t mean to say that Geraldine and I would have quarrelled — one might as well try to quarrel with a rock — but we shouldn’t have got on. In short, I have a prejudice in favour of marrying a woman I could love.”
“And yet I thought you were so much attached to her.”
“I was — in the way of friendship. Her society had become a kind of habit with me. I do really like her, and shall always consider her one of the handsomest and cleverest women I know; but it was a mistake to ask her to marry me, and might have been a fatal one. You will say, of course, that a man ought not to make that kind of mistake. I quite agree with you there; but I made it, and I think it infinitely better to pull up even at an awkward point than to make two lives miserable.”
Mrs. Fairfax sighed, and shook her head doubtfully.
“O, George, George, I’m afraid there was some newer fancy — some secret reason for your conduct to poor Geraldine,” she said in a reproachful tone.
“My dear mother, I have a dozen fancies in a month, and rarely know my own mind for a week at a stretch; but I do know that I never really loved Geraldine Challoner, and that it is better for me to be free from an ill-advised engagement.”
Mrs. Fairfax did not venture to press the question any farther. She had her suspicions, and her suspicions pointed to Clarissa. But Clarissa now being married and fairly out of the way, she had some faint hope that her son would return to his old allegiance, and that she might even yet have Geraldine Challoner for her daughter. In the meantime she was fain to be patient, and to refrain from any irritating persistence upon a subject that was very near to her heart.
So far as her own interests were concerned, it would have been a pleasant thing for Mrs. Fairfax that her son should remain a bachelor. The sovereignty of Lyvedon was a pure and perfect delight to her. The place was the home of her childhood; and there was not a thicket in the park, or a flower-bed in the garden, that was not familiar and dear to her. Every corner of the sombre old rooms — in which the furniture had been unchanged for a century — had its tender associations. All the hopes and dreams of her long-vanished youth came back to her, faint and pale, like faded flowers shut in the leaves of a book. And in the event of her son’s marriage, she must of course resign all this — must make a new home for herself outside the walls of Lyvedon; for she was not a woman to accept a secondary place in any household. Considering the question merely from a selfish point of view, she had every reason to be satisfied with the existing state of things; but it was not of herself she thought. She saw her son restless and unsettled, and had a secret conviction that he was unhappy. There had been much in the history of his past life that had troubled her; and for his future her chief hope had been in the security of a judicious marriage. She was a woman of strong religious feeling, and had shed many bitter tears and prayed many prayers on account of this beloved son.
The beloved son in the meanwhile dawdled away life in a very unsatisfactory manner. He found the roads and lanes about Lyvedon remarkable for nothing but their dust. There were wild flowers, of course — possibly nightingales and that sort of thing; but he preferred such imported bouquets, grow
n on the flowery slopes of the Mediterranean, as he could procure to order at Covent Garden; and the song of nightingales in the dusky after dinner-time made him melancholy. The place was a fine old place and it was undoubtedly a good thing to possess it; but George Fairfax had lived too wild a life to find happiness in the simple pleasures of a Kentish squire. So, after enduring the placid monotony of Lyvedon for a couple of months, he grew insufferably weary all at once, and told his mother that he was going to the Black Forest.
“It’s too early to shoot capercailzies,” he said; “but I daresay I shall find something to do. I am nothing but a bore to you here, mother; and you can amuse yourself, while I’m gone, in carrying out any of the improvements we’ve discussed.”
Mrs. Fairfax assured her son that his presence was always a delight to her, but that, of course, there was nothing in the world she desired so much as his happiness, and that it had been a pain to her to see him otherwise than happy.
“I had hoped that the possession of this place would have given you so much occupation,” she said, “that you would have gone into parliament and made a position for yourself.”
“My dear mother, I never had any affection for politics; and unless a man could be a modern Pitt, I don’t see the use of that kind of thing. Every young Englishman turns his face towards the House of Commons, as the sunflower turns to the sun-god; and see what a charming level of mediocrity we enjoy in consequence thereof.”
“Anything that would occupy your mind, George,” remonstrated Mrs. Fairfax.
“The question is, whether I have any mind to be occupied, mother,” replied the young man with a laugh. “I think the average modern intellect, when it knows its own capacity, rarely soars above billiards. That is a science; and what can a man be more than scientific?”
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