The Lovels of Arden | Page 5

rather than to his companion. "Then I suppose I have the pleasure of speaking to Miss--"
"My name is Lovel My father is Marmaduke Level, of Arden Court."
The traveller looked at her with a still more puzzled air, as if singularly embarrassed by this simple announcement. He recovered himself quickly, however, with a slight effort.
"I am proud and happy to have made your acquaintance, Miss Lovel," he said; "your father's family is one of the best and oldest in the North Riding."
After this, they talked of many things; of Clarissa's girlish experiences at Belforêt; of the traveller's wanderings, which seemed to have extended all over the world.
He had been a good deal in India, in the Artillery, and was likely to return thither before long.
"I had rather an alarming touch of sunstroke a year ago," he said, "and was altogether such a shattered broken-up creature when I came home on sick leave, that my mother tried her hardest to induce me to leave the service; but though I would do almost anything in the world to please her, I could not bring myself to do that; a man without a profession is such a lost wretch. It is rather hard upon her, poor soul; for my elder brother died not very long ago, and she has only my vagabond self left. 'He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.'"
"I have no mother," Clarissa said mournfully; "mine died when I was quite a little thing. I always envy people who can speak of a mother."
"But, on the other hand, I am fatherless, you see," the gentleman said, smiling. But Clarissa's face did not reflect his smile.
"Ah, that is a different thing," she said softly.
They went on talking for a long while, talking about the widest range of subjects; and their flight across the moonlit country, which grew darker by-and-by, as that tender light waned, seemed swifter than. Clarissa could have imagined possible, had the train been the most desperate thing in the way of an express. She had no vulgar commonplace shyness, mere school-girl as she was, and she had, above all, a most delightful unconsciousness of her own beauty; so she was quickly at home with the stranger, listening to him, and talking to him with a perfect ease, which seemed to him a natural attribute of high breeding.
"A Lovel," he said to himself once, in a brief interval of silence; "and so she comes of that unlucky race. It is scarcely strange that she should be beautiful and gifted. I wonder what my mother would say if she knew that my northern journey had brought me for half-a-dozen hours _tête-à-tête_ with a Lovel? There would be actual terror for her in the notion of such an accident. What a noble look this girl has!--an air that only comes after generations of blue blood untainted by vulgar admixture. The last of such a race is a kind of crystallisation, dangerously, fatally brilliant, the concentration of all the forces that have gone before."
At one of their halting-places, Miss Lovel's companion insisted upon bringing her a cup of coffee and a sponge-cake, and waited upon her with a most brotherly attention. At Normanton they changed to a branch line, and had to wait an hour and a half in that coldest dreariest period of the night that comes before daybreak. Here the stranger established Clarissa in a shabby little waiting-room, where he made up the fire with his own hands, and poked it into a blaze with his walking-stick; having done which, he went out into the bleak night and paced the platform briskly for nearly an hour, smoking a couple of those cigars which would have beguiled his night journey, had he been alone.
He had some thoughts of a third cigar, but put it back into his case, and returned to the waiting-room.
"I'll go and have a little more talk with the prettiest woman I ever met in my life," he said to himself. "It is not very likely that we two shall ever see each other again. Let me carry away the memory of her face, at any rate. And she is a Lovel! Will she be as unfortunate as the rest of her race, I wonder? God forbid!"
Clarissa was sitting by the fire in the dingy little waiting-room, with one elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her chin leaning on her hand, and her eyes fixed thoughtfully upon a dull red chasm in the coals. She had taken off her gray felt hat, and she looked older without it, the traveller thought, in spite of her wealth of waving dark brown hair, gathered into a great coil of plaits at the back of the graceful head. Perhaps it was that thoughtful expression which