Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  As the footman opened the door, and ushered in Mrs. Granger, there was a faint rustling of silk behind the portière dividing Lady Laura’s room from the next apartment; but Clarissa was too agitated to notice this.

  Laura Armstrong received her with effusion.

  “My dearest girl,” she exclaimed, rising, and grasping both Clarissa’s hands, as the man closed the door, “how glad I am to see you! Do you know, something told me you would come to me? Yes, dear; I said to myself ever so many times, ‘That poor misguided child will come to me.’ O, Clary, Clary, what have you been doing! Your husband is like a rock. He was at Arden for a few days, about a fortnight ago, and I drove over to see him, and entreated him to confide in me; but he would tell nothing. My poor, poor child! how pale, how changed!”

  She had thrown back Clarissa’s veil, and was scrutinising the haggard face with very womanly tenderness.

  “Sit down, dear, and tell me everything. You know that you can trust me. If you had gone ever so wrong — and I don’t believe it is in you to do that — I would still be your friend.”

  Clarissa made a faint effort to speak, and then burst into tears. This loving welcome was quite too much to bear.

  “He told me he was going to take my boy away from me,” she sobbed, “so I ran away from him, with my darling — and now my angel is dying!”

  And then, with many tears, and much questioning and ejaculation from Lady Laura, she told her pitiful story — concealing nothing, not even her weak yielding to temptation, not even her love for George Fairfax.

  “I loved him always,” she said; “yes — always, always, always — from that first night when we travelled together! I used to dream of him sometimes, never hoping to see him again, till that summer day when he came suddenly upon me in Marley Wood. But I kept my promise; I was true to you, Lady Laura; I kept my promise.”

  “My poor Clary, how I wish I had never exacted that promise! It did no good; it did not save Geraldine, and it seems to have made you miserable. Good gracious me,” cried Lady Laura with sudden impetuosity, “I have no patience with the man! What is one man more than another, that there should be so much fuss about him?”

  “I must go home to Lovel,” Clarissa said anxiously. “I don’t know how long I have been away from him. I lost my head, almost; and I felt that I must come to you.”

  “Thank God you did come, you poor wandering creature! Wait a few minutes,

  Clary, while I send for a cab, and put on my bonnet. I am coming with you.”

  “You, Lady Laura?”

  “Yes, and I too,” said a calm voice, that Clarissa remembered very well; and looking up at the door of communication between the two rooms, she saw the portière pushed aside, and Geraldine Challoner on the threshold.

  “Let me come and nurse your baby, Mrs. Granger,” she said gently; “I have had a good deal of experience of that sort of thing.”

  “You do not know what an angel she is to the poor round Hale,” said Lady Laura; “especially to the children. And she nursed three of mine, Maud, Ethel, and Alick — no; Stephen, wasn’t it?” she asked, looking at her sister for correction—”through the scarlatina. Nothing but her devotion could have pulled them through, my doctor assured me. Let her come with us, Clary.”

  “O, yes, yes! God bless you, Lady Geraldine, for wanting to help my darling!”

  “Norris, tell Fosset to bring me my bonnet and shawl, and fetch a cab immediately; I can’t wait for the carriage.”

  Five minutes afterwards, the three women were seated in the cab, and on their way to Soho.

  “You have sent for Mr. Granger, of course,” said Lady Laura.

  “No, not yet. I trust in God there may be no necessity; my darling will get well; I know he will! Dr. Ormond is to see him to-morrow.”

  “What, Clarissa! you have not sent for your husband, although you say that his boy is in danger?”

  “If I let Mr. Granger know where I am, he will come and take my son away from me.”

  “Nonsense, Clary; he can’t do that. It is very shameful of you to keep him in ignorance of the child’s state.” And as well as she could, amidst the rattling of the cab, Lady Laura tried to awaken Clarissa to a sense of the wrong she was doing. Jane Target stared in amazement on seeing her mistress return with these two ladies.

  “O, ma’am, I’ve been, so frightened!” she exclaimed. “I couldn’t think what was come of you.”

  Clarissa ran to the bed.

  “He has been no worse?” she asked eagerly.

  “No, ma’am. I do think, if there’s any change, it is for the better.”

  “O thank God, thank God!” cried Clarissa hysterically, falling on her knees by the bed. “Death shall not rob me of him! Nobody shall take him from me!” And then, turning to Laura Armstrong, she said, “I need not send for my husband, you see; my darling will recover.”

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER XLVIII.

  “STRANGERS YET.”

  Lady Laura went back to Portland-place in an hour; but Geraldine Challoner stayed all night with the sick child. God was very merciful to Clarissa; the angel of death passed by. In the night the fever abated, if only ever so little; and Dr. Ormond’s report next day was a cheering one. He did not say the little one was out of danger; but he did say there was hope.

  Lady Geraldine proved herself an accomplished nurse. The sick child seemed more tranquil in her arms than even in his mother’s. The poor mother felt a little pang of jealousy as she saw that it was so; but bore the trial meekly, and waited upon Geraldine with humble submission.

  “How good you are!” she murmured once, as she watched the slim white hands that had played chess with George Fairfax adjusting poultices—”how good you are!”

  “Don’t say that, my dear Mrs. Granger. I would do as much for any cottager’s child within twenty miles of Hale; it would be hard if I couldn’t do it for my sister’s friend.”

  “Have you always been fond of the poor?” Clarissa asked wonderingly.

  “Yes,” Geraldine answered, with a faint blush; “I was always fond of them. I can get on with poor people better than with my equals sometimes, I think; but I have visited more amongst them lately, since I have gone less into society — since papa’s death, in fact. And I am particularly fond of children; the little things always take to me.”

  “My baby does, at any rate.”

  “Have you written or telegraphed to Mr. Granger?” Lady Geraldine asked gravely.

  “No, no, no; there can be no necessity now. Dr. Ormond says there is hope.”

  “Hope, yes; but these little lives are so fragile. I implore you to send to him. It is only right.”

  “I will think about it, by and by, perhaps, if he should grow any worse; but I know he is getting better. O, Lady Geraldine, have some pity upon me! If my husband finds out where I am, he will rob me of my child.”

  The words were hardly spoken, when there was a loud double-knock at the door below, a delay of some two minutes, and then a rapid step on the stair — a step that set Clarissa’s heart beating tumultuously. She sat down by the bed, clinging to it like an animal at bay, guarding her cub from the hunter.

  The door was opened quickly, and Daniel Granger came into the room. He went straight to the bed, and bent down to look at his child.

  The boy had been light-headed in the night, but his brain was clear enough now. He recognised his father, and smiled — a little wan smile, that went to the strong man’s heart.

  “My God, how changed he is!” exclaimed Mr. Granger. “How long has he been ill?”

  “Very little more than a week, sir,” Jane Target faltered from the background.

  “More than a week! and I am only told of his illness to-day, by a telegram from Lady Laura Armstrong! I beg your pardon, Lady Geraldine; I did not see you till this moment. I owe it to your sister’s consideration that I am here in time to see my boy before he dies.”

  “We have every hope of saving him,” said Geraldine.


  “And what a place I find him in! He has had some kind of doctor attending him, I suppose?”

  “He has had a surgeon from the neighbourhood, who seems both kind and clever, and Dr. Ormond.”

  Mr. Granger seated himself at the foot of the bed, a very little way from

  Clarissa, taking possession of his child, as it were.

  “Do you know, Mrs. Granger, that I have scarcely rested night or day since you left Paris, hunting for my son?” he said. And this was the first time he acknowledged his wife’s presence by word or look.

  Clarissa was silent. She had been betrayed, she thought — betrayed by her own familiar friend; and Daniel Granger had come to rob her of her child. Come what might, she would not part with him without a struggle.

  After this, there came a weary time of anxious care and watching. The little life trembled in the balance; there were harassing fluctuations, a fortnight of unremitting care, before a favourable issue could be safely calculated upon. And during all that time Daniel Granger watched his boy with only the briefest intervals for rest or refreshment. Clarissa watched too; nor did her husband dispute her right to a place in the sick-room, though he rarely spoke to her, and then only with the coldest courtesy.

  Throughout this period of uncertainty, Geraldine Challoner was faithful to the duty she had undertaken; spending the greatest part of her life at Clarissa’s lodgings, and never wearying of the labours of the sick-room. The boy grew daily fonder of her; but, with a womanly instinct, she contrived that it should be Clarissa who carried him up and down the room when he was restless — Clarissa’s neck round which the wasted little arm twined itself.

  Daniel Granger watched the mother and child sometimes with haggard eyes, speculating on the future. If the boy lived, who was to have him? The mother, whose guilt or innocence was an open question — who had owned to being at heart false to her husband — or the father, who had done nothing to forfeit the right to his keeping? And yet to part them was like plucking asunder blossom and bud, that had grown side by side upon one common stem. In many a gloomy reverie the master of Arden Court debated this point.

  He could never receive his wife again — upon that question there seemed to him no room for doubt. To take back to his home and his heart the woman who had confessed her affection for another man, was hardly in Daniel Granger’s nature. Had he not loved her too much already — degraded himself almost by so entire a devotion to a woman who had given him nothing, who had kept her heart shut against him?

  “She married Arden Court, not me,” he said to himself; “and then she tried to have Arden Court and her old lover into the bargain. Would she have run away with him, I wonder, if he had had time to persuade her that day? Can any woman be pure, when a man dares ask her to leave her husband?”

  And then the locket that man wore—”From Clarissa” — was not that damning evidence?

  He thought of these things again and again, with a weary iteration — thought of them as he watched the mother walking slowly to and fro with her baby in her arms. That picture would surely live in his mind for ever, he thought. Never again, never any more, in all the days to come, could he take his wife back to his heart; but, O God, how dearly he had loved her, and how desolate his home would be without her! Those two years of their married life seemed to be all his existence; looking back beyond that time, his history seemed, like Viola’s, “A blank, my lord.” And he was to live the rest of his life without her. But for that ever-present anxiety about the child, which was in some wise a distraction, the thought of these things might have driven him mad.

  At last, after those two weeks of uncertainty, there came a day when Dr. Ormond pronounced the boy out of danger — on the very high-road to recovery, in fact.

  “I would say nothing decided till I could speak with perfect certainty,” he said. “You may make yourselves quite happy now.”

  Clarissa knelt down and kissed the good old doctor’s hand, raining tears upon it in a passion of gratitude. He seemed to her in that moment something divine, a supernal creature who, by the exercise of his power, had saved her child.

  Dr. Ormond lifted her up, smiling at her emotion.

  “Come, come, my dear soul, this is hysterical,” he said, in his soothing paternal way, patting her shoulder gently as he spoke; “I always meant to save the little fellow; though it has been a very severe bout, I admit, and we have had a tussle for it. And now I expect to see your roses come back again. It has been a hard time for you as well as for baby.”

  When Mr. Granger went out of the room with the physician presently, Dr.

  Ormond said gravely, —

  “The little fellow is quite safe, Mr. Granger; but you must look to your wife now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She has a nasty little hacking cough — a chest cough — which I don’t like; and there’s a good deal of incipient fever about her.”

  “If there is anything wrong, for God’s sake see to her at once!” cried

  Daniel Granger. “Why didn’t you speak of this before?”

  “There was no appearance of fever until to-day. I didn’t wish to worry her with medicines while she was anxious about the child; indeed, I thought the best cure for her would be the knowledge of his safety. But the cough is worse to-day; and I should certainly like to prescribe for her, if you will ask her to come in here and speak to me for a few minutes.”

  So Clarissa went into the dingy lodging-house sitting-room to see the doctor, wondering much that any one could be interested in such an insignificant matter as her health, now that her treasure was safe. She went reluctantly, murmuring that she was well enough — quite well now; and had hardly tottered into the room, when she sank down upon the sofa in a dead faint.

  Daniel Granger looked on aghast while they revived her.

  “What can have caused this?” he asked.

  “My dear sir, you are surely not surprised,” said Dr. Ormond. “Your wife has been sitting up with her child every night for nearly a month — the strain upon her, bodily and mental, has been enormous, and the reaction is of course trying. She will want a good deal of care, that is all. Come now,” he went on cheerfully, as Clarissa opened her eyes, to find her head lying on Jane Target’s shoulder, and her husband standing aloof regarding her with affrighted looks—”come now, my dear Mrs. Granger, cheer up; your little darling is safely over his troubles.”

  She burst into a flood of tears.

  “They will take him away from me!” she sobbed.

  “Take him away from you — nonsense! What are you dreaming of?”

  “Death has been merciful; but you will be more cruel,” she cried, looking at her husband. “You will take him away.”

  “Come, come, my dear lady, this is a delusion; you really must not give way to this kind of thing,” murmured the doctor, rather complacently. He had a son-in-law who kept a private madhouse at Wimbledon, and began to think Mrs. Granger was drifting that way. It was sad, of course, a sweet young woman like that; but patients are patients, and Daniel Granger’s wife would be peculiarly eligible.

  He looked at Mr. Granger, and touched his forehead significantly. “The brain has been sorely taxed,” he murmured, confidentially; “but we shall set all that right by-and-by.” This with as confident an air as if the brain had been a clock.

  Daniel Granger went over to his wife, and took her hand — it was the first time those two hands had met since the scene in Austin’s painting-room — looking down at her gravely.

  “Clarissa,” he said, “on my word of honour, I will not attempt to separate you from your son.”

  She gave a great cry — a shriek, that rang through the room — and cast herself upon her husband’s breast.

  “O, God bless you for that!” she sobbed; “God bless—” and stopped, strangled by her sobs.

  Mr. Granger put her gently back into her faithful hand-maiden’s arms. That was different. He might respect her rights as a mother; he could never again acc
ept her as his wife.

  But a time came now in which all thought of the future was swept away by a very present danger. Before the next night, Clarissa was raving in brain-fever; and for more than a month life was a blank to her — or not a blank, an age of confused agony rather, to be looked back upon with horror by-and-by.

  They dared not move her from the cheerless rooms in Soho. Lovel was sent down to Ventnor with Lady Geraldine and a new nurse. It could do no harm to take him away from his mother for a little while, since she was past the consciousness of his presence. Jane Target and Daniel Granger nursed her, with a nursing sister to relieve guard occasionally, and Dr. Ormond in constant attendance.

  The first thing she saw, when sense came back to her, was her husband’s figure, sitting a little way from the bed, his face turned towards her, gravely watchful. Her first reasonable words — faintly murmured in a wondering tone — moved him deeply; but he was strong enough to hide all emotion.

  “When she has quite recovered, I shall go back to Arden,” he said to himself; “and leave her to plan her future life with the help of Lady Geraldine’s counsel. That woman is a noble creature, and the best friend my wife can have. And then we must make some fair arrangement about the boy — what time he is to spend with me, and what with his mother. I cannot altogether surrender my son. In any case he is sure to love her best.”

  When Clarissa was at last well enough to be moved, her husband took her down to Ventnor, where the sight of her boy, bright and blooming, and the sound of his first syllables — little broken scraps of language, that are so sweet to mothers’ ears — had a better influence than all Dr. Ormond’s medicines. Here, too, came her father, from Nice, where he had been wintering, having devoted his days to the pleasing duty of taking care of himself. He would have come sooner, immediately on hearing of Clarissa’s illness, he informed Mr. Granger; but he was a poor frail creature, and to have exposed himself to the north-cast winds of this most uncertain climate early in April would have been to run into the teeth of danger. It was the middle of May now, and May this year had come without her accustomed inclemency.