"Who is that in a white dress? Miss Lovel, I am sure.—Come here,
Clary—what are you running away for? I want to introduce my friend Mr.
Granger to you.—Mr. Granger, this is Miss Lovel, the Miss Lovel whose
birthplace fortune has given to you."
Mr. Granger bowed rather stiffly, and with the air of a man to whom a bow was a matter of business.
"I regret," he said, "to have robbed Miss Lovel of a home to which she was attached. I regret still more that she will not avail herself of my desire to consider the park and grounds entirely at her disposal on all occasions. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see her use the place as if it were her own."
"And nothing could be kinder than such a wish on your part." exclaimed my lady approvingly.
Clarissa lifted her eyes rather shyly to the rich man's face. He was not a connoisseur in feminine loveliness, but they struck him at once as very fine eyes. He was a connoisseur in pictures, and no mean judge of them, and those brilliant hazel eyes of Clarissa's reminded him of a portrait by Velasquez, of which he was particularly proud.
"You are very kind," she murmured; "but—but there are some associations too painful to bear. The park would remind me so bitterly of all I have lost since I was a child."
She was thinking of her brother, and his disgrace—or misfortune; she did not even know which of these two it was that had robbed her of him. Mr. Granger looked at her wonderingly. Her words and manner seemed to betray a deeper feeling than he could have supposed involved in the loss of an estate. He was not a man of sentiment himself, and had gone through life affected only by its sternest realities. There was something rather too Rosa-Matildaish for his taste in this faltered speech of Clarissa's; but he thought her a very pretty girl nevertheless, and was inclined to look somewhat indulgently upon a weakness he would have condemned without compunction in his daughter. Mr. Granger was a man who prided himself upon his strength of mind, and he had a very poor idea of the exclusive recluse whose early extravagances had made him master of Arden Court. He had not seen Mr. Lovel half-a-dozen times in his life, for all business between those two that could be transacted by their respective lawyers had been so transacted; but what he had seen of that pale careworn face, that fragile figure, and somewhat irritable manner, had led the ponderous, strong-minded Daniel Granger to consider Marmaduke Lovel a very poor creature.
He was interested in this predecessor of his nevertheless. A man must be harder than iron who can usurp another man's home, and sit by another man's hearthstone, without giving some thought to the exile he has ousted. Daniel Granger was not so hard as that, and he did profoundly pity the ruined gentleman he had deposed. Perhaps he was still more inclined to pity the ruined gentleman's only daughter, who must needs suffer for the sins and errors of others.
"Now, pray don't run away, Clary," cried Lady Laura, seeing Clarissa moving towards the door, as if still anxious to escape. "You came to look for some books, I know.—Miss Lovel is a very clever young lady, I assure you, Mr. Granger, and has read immensely.—Sit down, Clary; you shall take away an armful of books by-and-by, if you like."
Clarissa seated herself near my lady's sofa with a gracious submissive air, which the owner of Arden Court thought a rather pretty kind of thing, in its way. He had a habit of classifying all young women in a general way with his own daughter, as if in possessing that one specimen of the female race he had a key to the whole species. His daughter was obedient—it was one of her chief virtues; but somehow there was not quite such a graceful air in her small concessions as he perceived in this little submission of Miss Lovel's.