Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Mr. Austin patted the plump young cheeks without any feeling of enmity.

  “Poor little beggar! What ghosts will haunt him in the old rooms by-and-by,

  I wonder?” he said to himself, smiling down at the child.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  AUSTIN’S PROSPECTS.

  The picture made rapid progress. For his very life — though the finishing of his work had been the signal of his doom, and the executioner waiting to make a sudden end of him when the last touch was laid upon the canvas, Austin Lovel could not have painted slowly. The dashing offhand brush was like a young thoroughbred, that could not be pulled, let the jockey saw at his mouth as he might. And yet the painter would have liked much to prolong this easy intercourse with his sister. But after Clarissa’s portrait was finished, there was Miss Granger to be painted; and then they would want a picture of that unapproachable baby, no doubt; and after that, perhaps, Mr. Granger might consent to have his massive features perpetuated. Austin considered that the millionaire should be good for three hundred guineas or so; he had promised two hundred, and the painter was spending the money by anticipation as fast as he could.

  He came every other morning to the Rue de Morny, and generally stayed to luncheon; and those mornings spent in his company were very pleasant to Clarissa — as pleasant as anything could be which involved deception; there was always the sting of that fact. Miss Granger was rarely absent for ten minutes together on these occasions; it was only some lucky chance which took her from the room to fetch some Berlin wool, or a forgotten skein of floss silk for the perennial spaniels, and afforded the brother and sister an opportunity for a few hurried words. The model villagers almost faded out of Miss Granger’s mind in this agreeable society. She found herself listening to talk about things which were of the earth earthy, and was fain to confess herself interested in the conversation. She dressed as carefully to receive the painter as if he had been, to use her particular phraseology, “a person in her own sphere;” and Mr. Tillott would have thought his chances of success at a very low point, if he could have seen her in Austin Lovel’s presence.

  That gentleman himself was not slow to perceive the impression he had made.

  “It’s rather a pity I’m married, isn’t it, Clary?” he said to his sister one day, when Sophia, whose habits had not been quite so methodical of late, had gone in search of some white beads for the spaniels, some of which were of a beady nature. “It would have been a great chance for me, wouldn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, Austin?”

  “Miss Granger,” answered the painter, without looking up from his work, “I think she rather likes me, do you know; and I suppose her father will give her fifty thousand or so when she marries, in spite of young Lovel. He seems to have no end of money. It would have been an uncommonly good thing, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it’s any use talking of it, Austin, however good it might have been; and I don’t think Sophia would have suited you as a wife.”

  “Not suited me — bosh! Any woman with fifty thousand pounds would have suited me. However, you’re right — there’s no good in talking of that. I’m booked. Poor little woman, she’s a good wife to me; but it’s rather a pity. You don’t know how many chances I might have had but for that entanglement.”

  “I wish, Austin, for your poor wife’s sake, you’d let me tell my husband who you are. This concealment seems so hard upon her, as well as a kind of wrong to Daniel. I can do so little to serve her, and I might do so much, if I could own her as my sister-in-law. I don’t think Daniel could help liking you, if he knew everything.”

  “Drop that, if you please, Clarissa,” said Austin, with a darkening countenance. “I have told you that your husband and I can never be friends, and I mean it. I don’t want to be degraded by any intercession of yours. That’s a little too much even for me. It suits my purpose well enough to accept Mr. Granger’s commissions; and of course it’s very agreeable to see you; but the matter must end there.”

  Miss Granger returned at this moment; but had she stayed away for an hour, Clarissa could scarcely have pressed the question farther. In the old days when they had been boy and girl together, Austin seven years her senior, Clarissa had always been just a little afraid of her brother; and she was afraid of him now.

  The very fact of his somewhat dependent position made her more fearful of offending him. She was anxious about his future; anxious too about his present mode of life; but she dared not question closely upon either subject. Once, when she had ventured to ask him about his plan of life, he answered in his careless off-hand way, —

  “My dearest Clary, I have no plans. I like Paris; and if I am not particularly successful here, I don’t suppose I should be more successful anywhere else. I mean to stay here as long as I can hold out. I know a good many people, and sometimes get a stroke of luck.”

  “But you are ruining your health. Austin, I fear, with — late hours, and — and — parties.”

  “Who told you I keep late hours? The Parisians, as a rule, don’t go to bed at curfew. I don’t suppose I’m worse than my neighbours. If I didn’t go out, Clary, and keep myself in the minds of my patrons, I might rot in a garret. You don’t know how soon a man is forgotten — even a man who has made his mark more positively than I have; and then you see, my dear, I like society, and have no taste for the domestic hearth, except for variety, once in a way, like dining on a bouillon after a week’s high feeding. Yes, come what may, I shall stay in Paris — as long as I can.”

  There was something in the tone of the last words that alarmed Clarissa.

  “You — you — are not in debt, are you, Austin?” she asked timidly.

  “No — no — I’m not in debt; but I owe a good deal of money.”

  Clarissa looked puzzled.

  “That is to say, I have no vulgar debts — butcher and baker, and so on; but there are two or three things, involving some hundreds, which I shall have to settle some of these days or else — —”

  “Or else what, Austin?”

  “Cut Paris, Clary, that’s all.”

  Clarissa turned pale. Austin began to whistle a popular café-chantant air, as he bent over his palette, squeezing little dabs of Naples yellow out of a leaden tube. Some hundreds! — that was a vague phrase, which might mean a great deal of money; it was a phrase which alarmed Clarissa; but she was much more alarmed by the recklessness of her brother’s tone.

  “But if you owe money, you must pay it, Austin,” she said; “you can’t leave a place owing money.”

  The painter shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s not an agreeable thing to do,” he said, “but it has been done. Of the two, it’s pleasanter than staying in a place where you owe money.”

  “Of course I shall do all I can to help you, dear,” said his sister. “There will be a hundred and twenty-five pounds due to me at Christmas, and I’ll give you the hundred.”

  “You’re a first-rate girl, Clary, but I think that fellow Granger might give you more pin-money. Five hundred a year is a beggarly pittance for a man of his means.”

  “It is more than I fancied I could ever want; and Daniel allows papa five hundred a year, you know Austin.”

  “Humph! that makes a thousand — no great things for a millionaire. A pretty girl, married to a man of that stamp, ought to have unlimited command of money,” replied her brother. “It’s the only compensation,” he said to himself afterwards.

  “I don’t like to hear you say these things, Austin. My husband is very kind to me. I’m afraid I’m not half as grateful as I ought to be.”

  “Gratitude be —— !” He did not finish the ejaculation.

  “Gratitude from a Lovel of twenty to a Granger of fifty! My dear Clary, that’s too good a joke! The man is well enough — better than I expected to find him: but such a girl as you is a prize for which such a man could not pay too highly.”

  It was rarely they had the opportunity for s
o long a conversation as this; and Austin was by no means sorry that it was so. He had very pressing need of all the money his sister could give him; but he did not care to enter into explanations about the state of his affairs.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  SISTERS-IN-LAW.

  Clarissa did not forget the existence of the poor little wife in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard; and on the very first afternoon which she had to herself, Mr. Granger having gone to see some great cattle-fair a few miles from Paris, and Miss Granger being afflicted with a headache, she took courage to order her coachman to drive straight to the house where her brother lived.

  “It is much better than making a mystery of it,” she thought.

  “The man will think that I have come to see a milliner or some one of that kind.”

  The footman would fain have escorted Mrs. Granger the way she should go, and held himself in readiness to accompany her into the house; but she waved him aside on the threshold of the darksome porte-cochère, out of which no coach ever came nowadays.

  “I shan’t want you, Trotter,” she said. “Tell Jarvis to walk the horses gently up and down. I shall not be very long.”

  The man bowed and obeyed, wondering what business his mistress could have in such a dingy street, “on the Surrey side of the water, too,” as he said to his comrade.

  Austin was out, but Mrs. Lovel was at home, and it was Mrs. Lovel whom Clarissa had come chiefly to see. The same tawdrily-dressed maid admitted her to the same untidy sitting-room, a shade more untidy to-day, where Bessie Lovel was dozing in an easy-chair by the fire, while the two boys played and squabbled in one of the windows.

  Mrs. Granger, entering suddenly, radiant in golden-brown moiré and sables, seemed almost to dazzle the eyes of Austin’s wife, who had not seen much of the brighter side of existence. Her life before her marriage had been altogether sordid and shabby, brightness or luxury of any kind for her class being synonymous with vice; and Bessie Stanford the painter’s model had never been vicious. Her life since her marriage had been a life of trouble and difficulty, with only occasional glimpses of a spurious kind of brilliancy. She lived outside her husband’s existence, as it were, and felt somehow that she was only attached to him by external links, as a dog might have been. He had a certain kind of affection for her, was conscious of her fidelity, and grateful for her attachment; and there an end. Sympathy between them there was none; nor had he ever troubled himself to cultivate her tastes, or attempted in the smallest degree to bring her nearer to him. To Bessie Lovel, therefore, this sister of her husband’s, in all the glory of her fresh young beauty and sumptuous apparel, seemed a creature of another sphere, something to be gazed upon almost in fear and trembling.

  “I beg your parding!” she faltered, rubbing her eyes. She was apt, when agitated, to fall back upon the pronunciation of her girlhood, before Austin Lovel had winced and ejaculated at her various mutilations of the language. “I was just taking forty winks after my bit of dinner.”

  “I am so sorry I disturbed you,” said Clarissa, in her gracious way. “You were tired, I daresay.”

  “O, pray don’t mention it! I’m sure I feel it a great compliment your comin’. It must seem a poor place to you after your beautiful house in the Roo de Morny. Austin told me where you lived; and I took the liberty of walking that way one evening with a lady friend. I’m sure the houses are perfect palaces.”

  “I wish you could come to my house as my sister-in-law ought,” replied Clarissa. “I wanted to confide in my husband, to bring about a friendship between him and my brother, if I could; but Austin tells me that is impossible. I suppose he knows best. So, you see, I am obliged to act in this underhand way, and to come to see you by stealth, as it were.”

  “It’s very good of you to come at all,” answered the wife with a sigh. “It isn’t many of Austin’s friends take any notice of me. I’m sure most of ’em treat me as if I was a cipher. Not that I mind that, provided he could get on; but it’s dinners there, and suppers here, and never no orders for pictures, as you may say. He had next to nothing to do all the autumn; Paris being so dull, you know, with all the high people away at the sea. He painted Madame Caballero for nothing, just to get himself talked of among her set; and if it wasn’t for Mr. Granger’s orders, I don’t know where we should be. — Come and speak to your aunt, Henery and Arthur, like good boys.”

  This to the olive-branches in the window, struggling for the possession of a battered tin railway-engine with a crooked chimney.

  “She ain’t my aunt,” cried the eldest hope. “I haven’t got no aunt.”

  “Yes, this is your aunt Clarissa. You’ve heard papa talk of her.”

  “Yes, I remember,” said the boy sharply. “I remember one night when he talked of Arden Court and Clarissa, and thumped his forehead on the mantelpiece like that;” and the boy pantomimed the action of despair.

  “He has fits of that kind sometimes,” said Bessie Lovel, “and goes on about having wasted his life, and thrown away his chances, and all that. He used to go on dreadful when we were in Australia, till he made me that nervous I didn’t know what to do, thinking he’d go and destroy himself some day. But he’s been better since we’ve been in Paris. The gaiety suits him. He says he can’t live without society.”

  Clarissa sighed. Little as she knew of her brother’s life, she knew enough to be very sure that love of society had been among the chief causes of his ruin. She took one of her nephews on her lap, and talked to him, and let him play with the trinkets on her chain. Both the children were bright and intelligent enough, but had that air of premature sharpness which comes from constant intercourse with grown-up people, and an early initiation in the difficulties of existence.

  She could only stay half an hour with her sister-in-law; but she could see that her visit of duty had gratified the poor little neglected wife. She had not come empty-handed, but had brought an offering for Bessie Lovel which made the tired eyes brighten with something of their old light — a large oval locket of massive dead gold, with a maltese cross of small diamonds upon it; one of the simplest ornaments which Daniel Granger had given her, and which she fancied herself justified in parting with. She had taken it to a jeweller in the Palais Royal, who had arranged a lock of her dark-brown hair, with a true-lover’s knot of brilliants, inside the locket, and had engraved the words “From Clarissa” on the back.

  Mrs. Lovel clasped her hands in rapture as Clarissa opened the morocco case and showed her this jewel.

  “For me!” she cried. “I never had anything half as beautiful in my life. And your ‘air, too!” She said “‘air” in her excitement. “How good of you to give it to me! I don’t know how to thank you.”

  And the poor little woman made a rapid mental review of her wardrobe, wondering if she had any gown good enough to wear with that splendid jewel. Her purple silk — the one silk dress she possessed — was a little shiny and shabby by daylight, but looked very well by candle-light still, she thought. She was really delighted with the locket. In all her life she had had so few presents; and this one gift was worth three times the sum of them. But Clarissa spoke of it in the lightest, most careless way.

  “I wanted to bring you some little souvenir,” she said, “and I thought you might like this. And now I must say good-bye, Bessie. I may call you Bessie, mayn’t I? And remember, you must call me Clarissa. I am sorry I am obliged to hurry away like this; but I expect Mr. Granger back rather early, and I want to be at home when he returns. Good-bye, dear!”

  She kissed her brother’s wife, who clung to her affectionately, touched by her kindness; kissed the two little nephews also, one of whom caught hold of her dress and said, —

  “You gave me that money for toys the other day, didn’t you, aunt Clarissa?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “But I didn’t have it to spend, though. Pa said he’d lay it out for me; and he brought me home a cart from the Boulevard; but it didn’t cost two napoleons. It
was a trumpery cart, that went smash the first time Arthur and I stood in it.”

  “You shouldn’t stand in a toy-cart, dear. I’ll bring you some toys the next time I come to see mamma.”

  They were out on the landing by this time. Clarissa disengaged herself from the little fellow, and went quickly down the darksome staircase.

  “Will that be soon?” the boy called over the banisters.

  “I do hope I shall be able to keep it,” said Bessie Lovel presently, as she stood in the window gloating over her locket; whereby it will be seen that Austin’s wife did not feel so secure as she might have done in the possession of her treasure.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  “AND THROUGH THY LIFE HAVE I NOT WRIT MY NAME?”

  Mid-Winter had come, and the pleasures and splendours of Paris were at their apogee. The city was at its gayest — that beautiful city, which we can never see again as we have seen it; which we lament, as some fair and radiant creature that has come to an untimely death. Paris the beautiful, Paris the beloved, imperial Paris, with her air of classic splendour, like the mistress of a Caesar, was in these days overshadowed by no threatening thundercloud, forerunner of the tempest and earthquake to come. The winter season had begun; and all those wanderers who had been basking through the autumn under the blue skies that roof the Pyrenees, or dawdling away existence in German gambling-saloons, or climbing Alpine peaks, or paddling down the Danube, flocked back to the central city of civilization in time to assist at Patti’s reappearance in the Rue Lepelletier, or to applaud a new play of Sardou’s at the Gymnase.

  Amongst this flock of returning pilgrims came George Fairfax, very much the worse for two or three months spent in restless meanderings between Baden and Hombourg, with the consciousness of a large income at his disposal, and a certain reckless indifference as to which way his life drifted, that had grown upon him of late years.