BEING BUT ONE OF THE CONSIDERATE PAUSES IN A LONG JOURNEY,
CHARITABLY AFFORDED TO THE READER.
Colonel Morley found Mr. Poole at home, just returned from his office; he stayed with that gentleman nearly an hour, and then went straight to Darrell. As the time appointed to meet the French acquaintance, who depended on his hospitalities for a dinner, was now nearly arrived, Alban’s conference with his English friend was necessarily brief and hurried, though long enough to confirm one fact in Mr. Poole’s statement, which had been unknown to the Colonel before that day, and the admission of which inflicted on Guy Darrell a pang as sharp as ever wrenched confession from the lips of a prisoner in the cells of the Inquisition. On returning from Greenwich, and depositing his Frenchman in some melancholy theatre, time enough for that resentful foreigner to witness theft and murder committed upon an injured countryman’s vaudeville, Alban hastened again to Carlton Gardens. He found Darrell alone, pacing his floor to and fro, in the habit he had acquired in earlier life, perhaps when meditating some complicated law case, or wrestling with himself against some secret sorrow. There are men of quick nerves who require a certain action of the body for the better composure of the mind; Darrell was one of them.
During these restless movements, alternated by abrupt pauses, equally inharmonious to the supreme quiet which characterised his listener’s tastes and habits, the haughty gentleman disburdened himself of at least one of the secrets which he had hitherto guarded from his early friend. But as that secret connects itself with the history of a Person about whom it is well that the reader should now learn more than was known to Darrell himself, we will assume our privilege to be ourselves the narrator, and at the cost of such dramatic vivacity as may belong to dialogue, but with the gain to the reader of clearer insight into those portions of the past which the occasion permits us to reveal—we will weave into something like method the more imperfect and desultory communications by which Guy Darrell added to Alban Morley’s distasteful catalogue of painful subjects. The reader will allow, perhaps, that we thus evince a desire to gratify his curiosity, when we state that of Arabella Crane Darrell spoke but in one brief and angry sentence, and that not by the name in which the reader as yet alone knows her; and it is with the antecedents of Arabella Crane that our explanation will tranquilly commence.
CHAPTER IX.
GRIM ARABELLA CRANE.
Once on a time there lived a merchant named Fossett, a widower with three children, of whom a daughter, Arabella, was by some years the eldest. He was much respected, deemed a warm man, and a safe—attended diligently to his business—suffered no partner, no foreman, to dictate or intermeddle—liked his comforts, but made no pretence to fashion. His villa was at Clapham, not a showy but a solid edifice, with lodge, lawn, and gardens chiefly notable for what is technically called glass—viz. a range of glass-houses on the most improved principles, the heaviest pines, the earliest strawberries. “I’m no judge of flowers,” quoth Mr. Fossett, meekly. “Give me a plain lawn, provided it be close-shaven. But I say to my gardener: ‘Forcing is my hobby—a cucumber with my fish all the year round!’” Yet do not suppose Mr Fossett ostentatious—quite the reverse. He would no more ruin himself for the sake of dazzling others, than he would for the sake of serving them. He liked a warm house, spacious rooms, good living, old wine, for their inherent merits: He cared not to parade them to public envy. When he dined alone, or with a single favoured guess, the best Lafitte, the oldest sherry!—when extending the rites of miscellaneous hospitality to neighbours, relations, or other slight acquaintances—for Lafitte, Julien; and for sherry, Cape!—Thus not provoking vanity, nor courting notice, Mr. Fossett was without an enemy, and seemed without a care. Formal were his manners, formal his household, formal even the stout cob that bore him from Cheapside to Clapham, from Claphain to Cheapside. That cob could not even prick up its ears if it wished to shy—its ears were cropped, so were its mane and its tail.
Arabella early gave promise of beauty, and more than ordinary power of intellect and character. Her father be stowed on her every advantage of education. She was sent to a select boarding-school of the highest reputation; the strictest discipline, the best masters, the longest bills. At the age of seventeen she had become the show pupil of the seminary. Friends wondered somewhat why the prim merchant took such pains to lavish on his daughter the worldly accomplishments which seemed to give him no pleasure, and of which he never spoke with pride. But certainly, if she was so clever—first-rate musician, exquisite artist, accomplished linguist, “it was very nice in old Fossett to bear it so meekly, never crying her up, nor showing her off to less fortunate parents—very nice in him—good sense—greatness of mind.”
“Arabella,” said the worthy man one day, a little time after his eldest daughter had left school for good; “Arabella,” said he, “Mrs. ———-,” naming the head teacher in that famous school, “pays you a very high compliment in a letter I received from her this morning. She says it is a pity you are not a poor man’s daughter—that you are so steady and so clever that you could make a fortune for yourself as a teacher.”
Arabella at that age could smile gaily, and gaily she smiled at the notion conveyed in the compliment.