The Lovels of Arden | Page 5

by the way. Does your father live in the town?"
"O, no; papa could never endure to live in a small country town. Our
house is a couple of miles away--Arden Court; perhaps you know it?"
"Yes, I have been to Arden Court," the traveller answered, with rather a
puzzled air. "And your papa lives at Arden?--I did not know he had any
other daughter," he added in a lower key, to himself 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