The Lovels of Arden | Page 9

exclaimed.
"No, no, my dear; the man is right enough."
"But indeed, uncle Oliver, he is driving to the village."
"And he has been told to drive to the village."
"Not to the Court?"
"To the Court! Why, of course not. What should we have to do at the Court at half-past seven in the morning?"
"But I am going straight home to papa, am I not?"
"Certainly."
And then, after staring at his niece's bewildered countenance for a few moments, Mr. Oliver exclaimed,----
"Why, surely, Clary, your father told you----"
"Told me what, uncle?"
"That he had sold Arden."
"Sold Arden! O, uncle, uncle!"
She burst into tears. Of all things upon this earth she had loved the grand old mansion where her childhood had been spent. She had so little else to love, poor lonely child, that it was scarcely strange she should attach herself to lifeless things. How fondly she had remembered the old place in all those dreary years of exile, dreaming of it as we dream of some lost friend. And it was gone from her for ever! Her father had bartered away that most precious birthright.
"O, how could he do it! how could he do it!" she cried piteously.
"Why, my dear Clary, you can't suppose it was a matter of choice with him. 'Needs must when'--I daresay you know the vulgar proverb. Necessity has no law. Come, come, my dear, don't cry; your father won't like to see you with red eyes. It was very wrong of him not to tell you about the sale of Arden--excessively wrong. But that's just like Marmaduke Lovel; always ready to shirk anything unpleasant, even to the writing of a disagreeable letter."
"Poor dear papa! I don't wonder he found it hard to write about such a thing; but it would have been better for me to have known. It is such a bitter disappointment to come home and find the dear old place gone from us. Has it been sold very long?"
"About two years. A rich manufacturer bought it--something in the cloth way, I believe. He has retired from business, however, and is said to be overwhelmingly rich. He has spent a great deal of money upon the Court already, and means to spend more I hear."
"Has he spoiled it--modernised it, or anything of that kind?"
"No; I am glad to say that he--or his architect perhaps--has had the good taste to preserve the mediaeval character of the place. He has restored the stonework, renewing all the delicate external tracery where it was lost or decayed, and has treated the interior in the same manner. I have dined with Mr. Granger once or twice since the work was finished, and I must say the place is now one of the finest in Yorkshire--perhaps the finest, in its peculiar way. I doubt if there is so perfect a specimen of gothic domestic architecture in the county."
"And it is gone from us for ever!" said Clarissa, with a profound sigh.
"Well, my dear Clary, it is a blow, certainly; I don't deny that. But there is a bright side to everything; and really your father could not afford to live in the place. It was going to decay in the most disgraceful manner. He is better out of it; upon my word he is."
Clarissa could not see this. To lose Arden Court seemed to her unmitigated woe. She would rather have lived the dreariest, loneliest life in one corner of the grand old house, than have occupied a modern palace. It was as if all the pleasant memories of her childhood had been swept away from her with the loss of her early home. This was indeed beginning the world; and a blank dismal world it appeared to Clarissa Lovel, on this melancholy October morning.
They stopped presently before a low wooden gate, and looking out of the window of the fly, Miss Lovel saw a cottage which she remembered as a dreary uninhabited place, always to let; a cottage with a weedy garden, and a luxuriant growth of monthly roses and honeysuckle covering it from basement to roof; not a bad sort of place for a person of small means and pretensions, but O, what a descent from the ancient splendour of Arden Court!--that Arden which had belonged to the Lovels ever since the land on which it stood was given to Sir Warren Wyndham Lovel, knight, by his gracious master King Edward IV., in acknowledgment of that warrior's services in the great struggle between Lancaster and York.
There were old-fashioned casement windows on the upper story, and queer little dormers in the roof. Below, roomy bows had been added at a much later date than the building of the cottage. The principal doorway was sheltered by a rustic porch, spacious and picturesque, with a bench on each side of the entrance. The garden was tolerably