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A Laodicean : A Story of To-day

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #3258 · 801,122 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Laodicean : A Story of To-day

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: June 1, 2002 [eBook #3258]
                Most recently updated: October 14, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3258

Credits: Produced by Les Bowler, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LAODICEAN : A STORY OF TO-DAY ***




Produced by Les Bowler





A LAODICEAN: A STORY OF TO-DAY


By Thomas Hardy


CONTENTS.

   PREFACE                                          CHAPTERS
   BOOK THE FIRST.   GEORGE SOMERSET.               I - XV.
   BOOK THE SECOND.  DARE AND HAVILL.               I - VII.
   BOOK THE THIRD.   DE STANCY.                     I - XI.
   BOOK THE FOURTH.  SOMERSET, DARE, AND DE STANCY. I - V.
   BOOK THE FIFTH.   DE STANCY AND PAULA.           I - XIV.
   BOOK THE SIXTH.   PAULA.                         I - V.




PREFACE.

The changing of the old order in country manors and mansions may be
slow or sudden, may have many issues romantic or otherwise, its romantic
issues being not necessarily restricted to a change back to the original
order; though this admissible instance appears to have been the only
romance formerly recognized by novelists as possible in the case.
Whether the following production be a picture of other possibilities or
not, its incidents may be taken to be fairly well supported by evidence
every day forthcoming in most counties.

The writing of the tale was rendered memorable to two persons, at least,
by a tedious illness of five months that laid hold of the author soon
after the story was begun in a well-known magazine; during which
period the narrative had to be strenuously continued by dictation to a
predetermined cheerful ending.

As some of these novels of Wessex life address themselves more
especially to readers into whose souls the iron has entered, and whose
years have less pleasure in them now than heretofore, so “A Laodicean”
 may perhaps help to while away an idle afternoon of the comfortable ones
whose lines have fallen to them in pleasant places; above all, of that
large and happy section of the reading public which has not yet reached
ripeness of years; those to whom marriage is the pilgrim’s Eternal City,
and not a milestone on the way. T.H.

January 1896.




BOOK THE FIRST. GEORGE SOMERSET.


I.

The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half-an-hour of its
setting; but the sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring
and copying the chevroned doorway--a bold and quaint example of a
transitional style of architecture, which formed the tower entrance to
an English village church. The graveyard being quite open on its western
side, the tweed-clad figure of the young draughtsman, and the tall mass
of antique masonry which rose above him to a battlemented parapet,
were fired to a great brightness by the solar rays, that crossed the
neighbouring mead like a warp of gold threads, in whose mazes groups of
equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly.

He was so absorbed in his pursuit that he did not mark the brilliant
chromatic effect of which he composed the central feature, till it was
brought home to his intelligence by the warmth of the moulded stonework
under his touch when measuring; which led him at length to turn his head
and gaze on its cause.

There are few in whom the sight of a sunset does not beget as much
meditative melancholy as contemplative pleasure, the human decline and
death that it illustrates being too obvious to escape the notice of
the simplest observer. The sketcher, as if he had been brought to this
reflection many hundreds of times before by the same spectacle, showed
that he did not wish to pursue it just now, by turning away his face
after a few moments, to resume his architectural studies.

He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced the old
workers whose trick he was endeavouring to acquire six hundred years
after the original performance had ceased and the performers passed into
the unseen. By means of a strip of lead called a leaden tape, which
he pressed around and into the fillets and hollows with his finger and
thumb, he transferred the exact contour of each moulding to his drawing,
that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant; where were also a
sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and other mathematical
instruments. When he had marked down the line thus fixed, he returned to
the doorway to copy another as before.

It being the month of August, when the pale face of the townsman and the
stranger is to be seen among the brown skins of remotest uplanders,
not only in England, but throughout the temperate zone, few of the
homeward-bound labourers paused to notice him further than by a
momentary turn of the head. They had beheld such gentlemen before, not
exactly measuring the church so accurately as this one seemed to be
doing, but painting it from a distance, or at least walking round the
mouldy pile. At the same time the present visitor, even exteriorly, was
not altogether commonplace. His features were good, his eyes of the dark
deep sort called eloquent by the sex that ought to know, and with that
ray of light in them which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of
all kinds,--in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature. Though he
would have been broadly characterized as a young man, his face bore
contradictory testimonies to his precise age. This was conceivably
owing to a too dominant speculative activity in him, which, while it
had preserved the emotional side of his constitution, and with it the
significant flexuousness of mouth and chin, had played upon his forehead
and temples till, at weary moments, they exhibited some traces of being
over-exercised. A youthfulness about the mobile features, a mature
forehead--though not exactly what the world has been familiar with
in past ages--is now growing common; and with the advance of juvenile
introspection it probably must grow commoner still. Briefly, he had more
of the beauty--if beauty it ought to be called--of the future human type
than of the past; but not so much as to make him other than a nice young
man.

His build was somewhat slender and tall; his complexion, though a little
browned by recent exposure, was that of a man who spent much of his time
indoors. Of beard he had but small show, though he was as innocent as
a Nazarite of the use of the razor; but he possessed a moustache
all-sufficient to hide the subtleties of his mouth, which could thus be
tremulous at tender moments without provoking inconvenient criticism.

Owing to his situation on high ground, open to the west, he remained
enveloped in the lingering aureate haze till a time when the eastern
part of the churchyard was in obscurity, and damp with rising dew.
When it was too dark to sketch further he packed up his drawing, and,
beckoning to a lad who had been idling by the gate, directed him to
carry the stool and implements to a roadside inn which he named, lying a
mile or two ahead. The draughtsman leisurely followed the lad out of the
churchyard, and along a lane in the direction signified.



The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching mediaeval
details in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has come over the study of
English Gothic architecture, through a re-awakening to the art-forms of
times that more nearly neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact
that George Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a man
of independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously, and
perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents
of thought than with the general tide of opinion. When quite a lad, in
the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to the
great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and
other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire what
was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean, Queen
Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles began to be popular, he
purchased such old-school works as Revett and Stuart, Chambers, and the
rest, and worked diligently at the Five Orders; till quite bewildered
on the question of style, he concluded that all styles were extinct, and
with them all architecture as a living art. Somerset was not old enough
at that time to know that, in practice, art had at all times been as
full of shifts and compromises as every other mundane thing; that ideal
perfection was never achieved by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and
never would be; and thus he was thrown into a mood of disgust with
his profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly
abandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical
literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every
conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian
sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall
of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these
inspired works were not jumped at by the publishers with all the
eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a severe hint
from his father that unless he went on with his legitimate profession he
might have to look elsewhere than at home for an allowance. Mr. Somerset
junior then awoke to realities, became intently practical, rushed back
to his dusty drawing-boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a view
of regularly starting in practice on the first day of the following
January.

It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone in which
the soaring of a young man into the empyrean, and his descent again, is
always narrated. But as has often been said, the light and the truth may
be on the side of the dreamer: a far wider view than the wise ones
have may be his at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to common
measure be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation called
lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and round
a horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder grows dizzy in
looking at them, is a very unhappy one for the animal concerned. During
its progress the colt springs upward, across the circle, stops, flies
over the turf with the velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts of
graceful antics; but he always ends in one way--thanks to the knotted
whipcord--in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity of a
horizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his character of the
bold contours which the fine hand of Nature gave it. Yet the process is
considered to be the making of him.

Whether Somerset became permanently made under the action of the
inevitable lunge, or whether he lapsed into mere dabbling with the
artistic side of his profession only, it would be premature to say; but
at any rate it was his contrite return to architecture as a calling that
sent him on the sketching excursion under notice. Feeling that something
still was wanting to round off his knowledge before he could take his
professional line with confidence, he was led to remember that his own
native Gothic was the one form of design that he had totally neglected
from the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisome
iteration at the opening of his career. Now it had again returned to
silence; indeed--such is the surprising instability of art ‘principles’
as they are facetiously called--it was just as likely as not to sink
into the neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in Georgian times.
This accident of being out of vogue lent English Gothic an additional
charm to one of his proclivities; and away he went to make it the
business of a summer circuit in the west.

The quiet time of evening, the secluded neighbourhood, the unusually
gorgeous liveries of the clouds packed in a pile over that quarter of
the heavens in which the sun had disappeared, were such as to make
a traveller loiter on his walk. Coming to a stile, Somerset mounted
himself on the top bar, to imbibe the spirit of the scene and hour. The
evening was so still that every trifling sound could be heard for miles.
There was the rattle of a returning waggon, mixed with the smacks of the
waggoner’s whip: the team must have been at least three miles off. From
far over the hill came the faint periodic yell of kennelled hounds;
while from the nearest village resounded the voices of boys at play in
the twilight. Then a powerful clock struck the hour; it was not from
the direction of the church, but rather from the wood behind him; and he
thought it must be the clock of some mansion that way.

But the mind of man cannot always be forced to take up subjects by the
pressure of their material presence, and Somerset’s thoughts were often,
to his great loss, apt to be even more than common truants from the
tones and images that met his outer senses on walks and rides. He would
sometimes go quietly through the queerest, gayest, most extraordinary
town in Europe, and let it alone, provided it did not meddle with him
by its beggars, beauties, innkeepers, police, coachmen, mongrels, bad
smells, and such like obstructions. This feat of questionable utility he
began performing now. Sitting on the three-inch ash rail that had been
peeled and polished like glass by the rubbings of all the small-clothes
in the parish, he forgot the time, the place, forgot that it was
August--in short, everything of the present altogether. His mind flew
back to his past life, and deplored the waste of time that had resulted
from his not having been able to make up his mind which of the many
fashions of art that were coming and going in kaleidoscopic change
was the true point of departure from himself. He had suffered from the
modern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man
of his own age. Dozens of his fellows in years and experience, who had
never thought specially of the matter, but had blunderingly applied
themselves to whatever form of art confronted them at the moment of
their making a move, were by this time acquiring renown as new lights;
while he was still unknown. He wished that some accident could have
hemmed in his eyes between inexorable blinkers, and sped him on in a
channel ever so worn.

Thus balanced between believing and not believing in his own future,
he was recalled to the scene without by hearing the notes of a familiar
hymn, rising in subdued harmonies from a valley below. He listened more
heedfully. It was his old friend the ‘New Sabbath,’ which he had never
once heard since the lisping days of childhood, and whose existence,
much as it had then been to him, he had till this moment quite
forgotten. Where the ‘New Sabbath’ had kept itself all these years--why
that sound and hearty melody had disappeared from all the cathedrals,
parish churches, minsters and chapels-of-ease that he had been
acquainted with during his apprenticeship to life, and until his ways
had become irregular and uncongregational--he could not, at first,
say. But then he recollected that the tune appertained to the old
west-gallery period of church-music, anterior to the great choral
reformation and the rule of Monk--that old time when the repetition of
a word, or half-line of a verse, was not considered a disgrace to an
ecclesiastical choir.

Willing to be interested in anything which would keep him out-of-doors,
Somerset dismounted from the stile and descended the hill before him, to
learn whence the singing proceeded.



II.

He found that it had its origin in a building standing alone in a field;
and though the evening was not yet dark without, lights shone from the
windows. In a few moments Somerset stood before the edifice. Being just
then en rapport with ecclesiasticism by reason of his recent occupation,
he could not help murmuring, ‘Shade of Pugin, what a monstrosity!’

Perhaps this exclamation (rather out of date since the discovery that
Pugin himself often nodded amazingly) would not have been indulged in
by Somerset but for his new architectural resolves, which caused
professional opinions to advance themselves officiously to his
lips whenever occasion offered. The building was, in short, a
recently-erected chapel of red brick, with pseudo-classic ornamentation,
and the white regular joints of mortar could be seen streaking its
surface in geometrical oppressiveness from top to bottom. The roof was
of blue slate, clean as a table, and unbroken from gable to gable;
the windows were glazed with sheets of plate glass, a temporary iron
stovepipe passing out near one of these, and running up to the height of
the ridge, where it was finished by a covering like a parachute. Walking
round to the end, he perceived an oblong white stone let into the wall
just above the plinth, on which was inscribed in deep letters:--

               Erected 187-,

          AT THE SOLE EXPENSE OF

          JOHN POWER, ESQ., M.P.

The ‘New Sabbath’ still proceeded line by line, with all the emotional
swells and cadences that had of old characterized the tune: and the body
of vocal harmony that it evoked implied a large congregation within, to
whom it was plainly as familiar as it had been to church-goers of a past
generation. With a whimsical sense of regret at the secession of his
once favourite air Somerset moved away, and would have quite withdrawn
from the field had he not at that moment observed two young men with
pitchers of water coming up from a stream hard by, and hastening with
their burdens into the chapel vestry by a side door. Almost as soon as
they had entered they emerged again with empty pitchers, and proceeded
to the stream to fill them as before, an operation which they repeated
several times. Somerset went forward to the stream, and waited till the
young men came out again.

‘You are carrying in a great deal of water,’ he said, as each dipped his
pitcher.

One of the young men modestly replied, ‘Yes: we filled the cistern this
morning; but it leaks, and requires a few pitcherfuls more.’

‘Why do you do it?’

‘There is to be a baptism, sir.’

Somerset was not sufficiently interested to develop a further
conversation, and observing them in silence till they had again vanished
into the building, he went on his way. Reaching the brow of the hill he
stopped and looked back. The chapel was still in view, and the shades
of night having deepened, the lights shone from the windows yet more
brightly than before. A few steps further would hide them and the
edifice, and all that belonged to it from his sight, possibly for ever.
There was something in the thought which led him to linger. The chapel
had neither beauty, quaintness, nor congeniality to recommend it: the
dissimilitude between the new utilitarianism of the place and the scenes
of venerable Gothic art which had occupied his daylight hours could not
well be exceeded. But Somerset, as has been said, was an instrument
of no narrow gamut: he had a key for other touches than the purely
aesthetic, even on such an excursion as this. His mind was arrested by
the intense and busy energy which must needs belong to an assembly that
required such a glare of light to do its religion by; in the heaving of
that tune there was an earnestness which made him thoughtful, and the
shine of those windows he had characterized as ugly reminded him of the
shining of the good deed in a naughty world. The chapel and its shabby
plot of ground, from which the herbage was all trodden away by busy
feet, had a living human interest that the numerous minsters and
churches knee-deep in fresh green grass, visited by him during the
foregoing week, had often lacked. Moreover, there was going to be a
baptism: that meant the immersion of a grown-up person; and he had
been told that Baptists were serious people and that the scene was most
impressive. What manner of man would it be who on an ordinary plodding
and bustling evening of the nineteenth century could single himself out
as one different from the rest of the inhabitants, banish all shyness,
and come forward to undergo such a trying ceremony? Who was he that
had pondered, gone into solitudes, wrestled with himself, worked up his
courage and said, I will do this, though few else will, for I believe it
to be my duty?

Whether on account of these thoughts, or from the circumstance that
he had been alone amongst the tombs all day without communion with his
kind, he could not tell in after years (when he had good reason to think
of the subject); but so it was that Somerset went back, and again stood
under the chapel-wall.

Instead of entering he passed round to where the stove-chimney came
through the bricks, and holding on to the iron stay he put his toes on
the plinth and looked in at the window. The building was quite full of
people belonging to that vast majority of society who are denied the
art of articulating their higher emotions, and crave dumbly for a
fugleman--respectably dressed working people, whose faces and forms were
worn and contorted by years of dreary toil. On a platform at the end
of the chapel a haggard man of more than middle age, with grey whiskers
ascetically cut back from the fore part of his face so far as to be
almost banished from the countenance, stood reading a chapter. Between
the minister and the congregation was an open space, and in the floor of
this was sunk a tank full of water, which just made its surface visible
above the blackness of its depths by reflecting the lights overhead.

Somerset endeavoured to discover which one among the assemblage was to
be the subject of the ceremony. But nobody appeared there who was at all
out of the region of commonplace. The people were all quiet and settled;
yet he could discern on their faces something more than attention,
though it was less than excitement: perhaps it was expectation. And as
if to bear out his surmise he heard at that moment the noise of wheels
behind him.

His gaze into the lighted chapel made what had been an evening scene
when he looked away from the landscape night itself on looking back;
but he could see enough to discover that a brougham had driven up to
the side-door used by the young water-bearers, and that a lady in
white-and-black half-mourning was in the act of alighting, followed by
what appeared to be a waiting-woman carrying wraps. They entered the
vestry-room of the chapel, and the door was shut. The service went on as
before till at a certain moment the door between vestry and chapel was
opened, when a woman came out clothed in an ample robe of flowing white,
which descended to her feet. Somerset was unfortunate in his position;
he could not see her face, but her gait suggested at once that she
was the lady who had arrived just before. She was rather tall than
otherwise, and the contour of her head and shoulders denoted a girl in
the heyday of youth and activity. His imagination, stimulated by this
beginning, set about filling in the meagre outline with most attractive
details.

She stood upon the brink of the pool, and the minister descended the
steps at its edge till the soles of his shoes were moistened with the
water. He turned to the young candidate, but she did not follow him:
instead of doing so she remained rigid as a stone. He stretched out his
hand, but she still showed reluctance, till, with some embarrassment, he
went back, and spoke softly in her ear.

She approached the edge, looked into the water, and turned away shaking
her head. Somerset could for the first time see her face. Though humanly
imperfect, as is every face we see, it was one which made him think that
the best in woman-kind no less than the best in psalm-tunes had gone
over to the Dissenters. He had certainly seen nobody so interesting
in his tour hitherto; she was about twenty or twenty-one--perhaps
twenty-three, for years have a way of stealing marches even upon
beauty’s anointed. The total dissimilarity between the expression of
her lineaments and that of the countenances around her was not a little
surprising, and was productive of hypotheses without measure as to
how she came there. She was, in fact, emphatically a modern type of
maidenhood, and she looked ultra-modern by reason of her environment: a
presumably sophisticated being among the simple ones--not wickedly so,
but one who knew life fairly well for her age. Her hair, of good
English brown, neither light nor dark, was abundant--too abundant for
convenience in tying, as it seemed; and it threw off the lamp-light in
a hazy lustre. And though it could not be said of her features that this
or that was flawless, the nameless charm of them altogether was only
another instance of how beautiful a woman can be as a whole without
attaining in any one detail to the lines marked out as absolutely
correct. The spirit and the life were there: and material shapes could
be disregarded.

Whatever moral characteristics this might be the surface of, enough
was shown to assure Somerset that she had some experience of things far
removed from her present circumscribed horizon, and could live, and was
even at that moment living, a clandestine, stealthy inner life which had
very little to do with her outward one. The repression of nearly every
external sign of that distress under which Somerset knew, by a sudden
intuitive sympathy, that she was labouring, added strength to these
convictions.

‘And you refuse?’ said the astonished minister, as she still stood
immovable on the brink of the pool. He persuasively took her sleeve
between his finger and thumb as if to draw her; but she resented this by
a quick movement of displeasure, and he released her, seeing that he had
gone too far.

‘But, my dear lady,’ he said, ‘you promised! Consider your profession,
and that you stand in the eyes of the whole church as an exemplar of
your faith.’

‘I cannot do it!’

‘But your father’s memory, miss; his last dying request!’

‘I cannot help it,’ she said, turning to get away.

‘You came here with the intention to fulfil the Word?’

‘But I was mistaken.’

‘Then why did you come?’

She tacitly implied that to be a question she did not care to answer.
‘Please say no more to me,’ she murmured, and hastened to withdraw.

During this unexpected dialogue (which had reached Somerset’s ears
through the open windows) that young man’s feelings had flown hither and
thither between minister and lady in a most capricious manner: it had
seemed at one moment a rather uncivil thing of her, charming as she was,
to give the minister and the water-bearers so much trouble for
nothing; the next, it seemed like reviving the ancient cruelties of the
ducking-stool to try to force a girl into that dark water if she had not
a mind to it. But the minister was not without insight, and he had seen
that it would be useless to say more. The crestfallen old man had to
turn round upon the congregation and declare officially that the baptism
was postponed.

She passed through the door into the vestry. During the exciting
moments of her recusancy there had been a perceptible flutter among the
sensitive members of the congregation; nervous Dissenters seeming to be
at one with nervous Episcopalians in this at least, that they heartily
disliked a scene during service. Calm was restored to their minds by the
minister starting a rather long hymn in minims and semibreves, amid the
singing of which he ascended the pulpit. His face had a severe and
even denunciatory look as he gave out his text, and Somerset began to
understand that this meant mischief to the young person who had caused
the hitch.

‘In the third chapter of Revelation and the fifteenth and following
verses, you will find these words:--

‘“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou
wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold
nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.... Thou sayest, I am rich,
and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that
thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”’

The sermon straightway began, and it was soon apparent that the
commentary was to be no less forcible than the text. It was also
apparent that the words were, virtually, not directed forward in
the line in which they were uttered, but through the chink of the
vestry-door, that had stood slightly ajar since the exit of the young
lady. The listeners appeared to feel this no less than Somerset did, for
their eyes, one and all, became fixed upon that vestry door as if they
would almost push it open by the force of their gazing. The preacher’s
heart was full and bitter; no book or note was wanted by him; never
was spontaneity more absolute than here. It was no timid reproof of
the ornamental kind, but a direct denunciation, all the more vigorous
perhaps from the limitation of mind and language under which the speaker
laboured. Yet, fool that he had been made by the candidate, there was
nothing acrid in his attack. Genuine flashes of rhetorical fire
were occasionally struck by that plain and simple man, who knew what
straightforward conduct was, and who did not know the illimitable
caprice of a woman’s mind.

At this moment there was not in the whole chapel a person whose
imagination was not centred on what was invisibly taking place within
the vestry. The thunder of the minister’s eloquence echoed, of course,
through the weak sister’s cavern of retreat no less than round the
public assembly. What she was doing inside there--whether listening
contritely, or haughtily hastening to put on her things and get away
from the chapel and all it contained--was obviously the thought of each
member. What changes were tracing themselves upon that lovely face: did
it rise to phases of Raffaelesque resignation or sink so low as to flush
and frown? was Somerset’s inquiry; and a half-explanation occurred when,
during the discourse, the door which had been ajar was gently pushed to.

Looking on as a stranger it seemed to him more than probable that this
young woman’s power of persistence in her unexpected repugnance to the
rite was strengthened by wealth and position of some sort, and was
not the unassisted gift of nature. The manner of her arrival, and her
dignified bearing before the assembly, strengthened the belief. A woman
who did not feel something extraneous to her mental self to fall back
upon would be so far overawed by the people and the crisis as not to
retain sufficient resolution for a change of mind.

The sermon ended, the minister wiped his steaming face and turned down
his cuffs, and nods and sagacious glances went round. Yet many, even of
those who had presumably passed the same ordeal with credit, exhibited
gentler judgment than the preacher’s on a tergiversation of which they
had probably recognized some germ in their own bosoms when in the lady’s
situation.

For Somerset there was but one scene: the imagined scene of the girl
herself as she sat alone in the vestry. The fervent congregation rose
to sing again, and then Somerset heard a slight noise on his left hand
which caused him to turn his head. The brougham, which had retired
into the field to wait, was back again at the door: the subject of his
rumination came out from the chapel--not in her mystic robe of white,
but dressed in ordinary fashionable costume--followed as before by the
attendant with other articles of clothing on her arm, including the
white gown. Somerset fancied that the younger woman was drying her eyes
with her handkerchief, but there was not much time to see: they quickly
entered the carriage, and it moved on. Then a cat suddenly mewed, and
he saw a white Persian standing forlorn where the carriage had been. The
door was opened, the cat taken in, and the carriage drove away.

The stranger’s girlish form stamped itself deeply on Somerset’s soul. He
strolled on his way quite oblivious to the fact that the moon had just
risen, and that the landscape was one for him to linger over, especially
if there were any Gothic architecture in the line of the lunar rays. The
inference was that though this girl must be of a serious turn of mind,
wilfulness was not foreign to her composition: and it was probable that
her daily doings evinced without much abatement by religion the unbroken
spirit and pride of life natural to her age.

The little village inn at which Somerset intended to pass the night
lay a mile further on, and retracing his way up to the stile he rambled
along the lane, now beginning to be streaked like a zebra with the
shadows of some young trees that edged the road. But his attention was
attracted to the other side of the way by a hum as of a night-bee,
which arose from the play of the breezes over a single wire of telegraph
running parallel with his track on tall poles that had appeared by the
road, he hardly knew when, from a branch route, probably leading from
some town in the neighbourhood to the village he was approaching. He did
not know the population of Sleeping-Green, as the village of his search
was called, but the presence of this mark of civilization seemed to
signify that its inhabitants were not quite so far in the rear of their
age as might be imagined; a glance at the still ungrassed heap of earth
round the foot of each post was, however, sufficient to show that it was
at no very remote period that they had made their advance.

Aided by this friendly wire Somerset had no difficulty in keeping his
course, till he reached a point in the ascent of a hill at which the
telegraph branched off from the road, passing through an opening in the
hedge, to strike across an undulating down, while the road wound round
to the left. For a few moments Somerset doubted and stood still. The
wire sang on overhead with dying falls and melodious rises that invited
him to follow; while above the wire rode the stars in their courses, the
low nocturn of the former seeming to be the voices of those stars,

     ‘Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim.’

Recalling himself from these reflections Somerset decided to follow the
lead of the wire. It was not the first time during his present tour that
he had found his way at night by the help of these musical threads which
the post-office authorities had erected all over the country for quite
another purpose than to guide belated travellers. Plunging with it
across the down he came to a hedgeless road that entered a park or
chase, which flourished in all its original wildness. Tufts of rushes
and brakes of fern rose from the hollows, and the road was in places
half overgrown with green, as if it had not been tended for many years;
so much so that, where shaded by trees, he found some difficulty in
keeping it. Though he had noticed the remains of a deer-fence further
back no deer were visible, and it was scarcely possible that there
should be any in the existing state of things: but rabbits were
multitudinous, every hillock being dotted with their seated figures till
Somerset approached and sent them limping into their burrows. The road
next wound round a clump of underwood beside which lay heaps of faggots
for burning, and then there appeared against the sky the walls and
towers of a castle, half ruin, half residence, standing on an eminence
hard by.

Somerset stopped to examine it. The castle was not exceptionally large,
but it had all the characteristics of its most important fellows.
Irregular, dilapidated, and muffled in creepers as a great portion of it
was, some part--a comparatively modern wing--was inhabited, for a light
or two steadily gleamed from some upper windows; in others a reflection
of the moon denoted that unbroken glass yet filled their casements. Over
all rose the keep, a square solid tower apparently not much injured by
wars or weather, and darkened with ivy on one side, wherein wings could
be heard flapping uncertainly, as if they belonged to a bird unable
to find a proper perch. Hissing noises supervened, and then a hoot,
proclaiming that a brood of young owls were residing there in the
company of older ones. In spite of the habitable and more modern wing,
neglect and decay had set their mark upon the outworks of the pile,
unfitting them for a more positive light than that of the present hour.

He walked up to a modern arch spanning the ditch--now dry and
green--over which the drawbridge once had swung. The large door under
the porter’s archway was closed and locked. While standing here the
singing of the wire, which for the last few minutes he had quite
forgotten, again struck upon his ear, and retreating to a convenient
place he observed its final course: from the poles amid the trees
it leaped across the moat, over the girdling wall, and thence by
a tremendous stretch towards the keep where, to judge by sound, it
vanished through an arrow-slit into the interior. This fossil of
feudalism, then, was the journey’s-end of the wire, and not the village
of Sleeping-Green.

There was a certain unexpectedness in the fact that the hoary memorial
of a stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas, the monument of hard
distinctions in blood and race, of deadly mistrust of one’s neighbour in
spite of the Church’s teaching, and of a sublime unconsciousness of
any other force than a brute one, should be the goal of a machine which
beyond everything may be said to symbolize cosmopolitan views and the
intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind. In that light the little
buzzing wire had a far finer significance to the student Somerset than
the vast walls which neighboured it. But the modern fever and fret which
consumes people before they can grow old was also signified by the wire;
and this aspect of to-day did not contrast well with the fairer side
of feudalism--leisure, light-hearted generosity, intense friendships,
hawks, hounds, revels, healthy complexions, freedom from care, and such
a living power in architectural art as the world may never again see.

Somerset withdrew till neither the singing of the wire nor the hisses of
the irritable owls could be heard any more. A clock in the castle struck
ten, and he recognized the strokes as those he had heard when sitting
on the stile. It was indispensable that he should retrace his steps and
push on to Sleeping-Green if he wished that night to reach his lodgings,
which had been secured by letter at a little inn in the straggling line
of roadside houses called by the above name, where his luggage had by
this time probably arrived. In a quarter of an hour he was again at the
point where the wire left the road, and following the highway over a
hill he saw the hamlet at his feet.



III.

By half-past ten the next morning Somerset was once more approaching
the precincts of the building which had interested him the night before.
Referring to his map he had learnt that it bore the name of Stancy
Castle or Castle de Stancy; and he had been at once struck with its
familiarity, though he had never understood its position in the county,
believing it further to the west. If report spoke truly there was
some excellent vaulting in the interior, and a change of study from
ecclesiastical to secular Gothic was not unwelcome for a while.

The entrance-gate was open now, and under the archway the outer ward was
visible, a great part of it being laid out as a flower-garden. This was
in process of clearing from weeds and rubbish by a set of gardeners, and
the soil was so encumbered that in rooting out the weeds such few hardy
flowers as still remained in the beds were mostly brought up with them.
The groove wherein the portcullis had run was as fresh as if only cut
yesterday, the very tooling of the stone being visible. Close to this
hung a bell-pull formed of a large wooden acorn attached to a vertical
rod. Somerset’s application brought a woman from the porter’s door, who
informed him that the day before having been the weekly show-day for
visitors, it was doubtful if he could be admitted now.

‘Who is at home?’ said Somerset.

‘Only Miss de Stancy,’ the porteress replied.

His dread of being considered an intruder was such that he thought at
first there was no help for it but to wait till the next week. But
he had already through his want of effrontery lost a sight of many
interiors, whose exhibition would have been rather a satisfaction to the
inmates than a trouble. It was inconvenient to wait; he knew nobody
in the neighbourhood from whom he could get an introductory letter: he
turned and passed the woman, crossed the ward where the gardeners were
at work, over a second and smaller bridge, and up a flight of stone
stairs, open to the sky, along whose steps sunburnt Tudor soldiers and
other renowned dead men had doubtless many times walked. It led to the
principal door on this side. Thence he could observe the walls of
the lower court in detail, and the old mosses with which they were
padded--mosses that from time immemorial had been burnt brown every
summer, and every winter had grown green again. The arrow-slit and the
electric wire that entered it, like a worm uneasy at being unearthed,
were distinctly visible now. So also was the clock, not, as he had
supposed, a chronometer coeval with the fortress itself, but new and
shining, and bearing the name of a recent maker.

The door was opened by a bland, intensely shaven man out of livery,
who took Somerset’s name and politely worded request to be allowed to
inspect the architecture of the more public portions of the castle. He
pronounced the word ‘architecture’ in the tone of a man who knew and
practised that art; ‘for,’ he said to himself, ‘if she thinks I am a
mere idle tourist, it will not be so well.’

No such uncomfortable consequences ensued. Miss De Stancy had great
pleasure in giving Mr. Somerset full permission to walk through whatever
parts of the building he chose.

He followed the butler into the inner buildings of the fortress, the
ponderous thickness of whose walls made itself felt like a physical
pressure. An internal stone staircase, ranged round four sides of a
square, was next revealed, leading at the top of one flight into a
spacious hall, which seemed to occupy the whole area of the keep. From
this apartment a corridor floored with black oak led to the more modern
wing, where light and air were treated in a less gingerly fashion.

Here passages were broader than in the oldest portion, and upholstery
enlisted in the service of the fine arts hid to a great extent the
coldness of the walls.

Somerset was now left to himself, and roving freely from room to room
he found time to inspect the different objects of interest that abounded
there. Not all the chambers, even of the habitable division, were in use
as dwelling-rooms, though these were still numerous enough for the wants
of an ordinary country family. In a long gallery with a coved ceiling
of arabesques which had once been gilded, hung a series of paintings
representing the past personages of the De Stancy line. It was a
remarkable array--even more so on account of the incredibly neglected
condition of the canvases than for the artistic peculiarities they
exhibited. Many of the frames were dropping apart at their angles, and
some of the canvas was so dingy that the face of the person depicted was
only distinguishable as the moon through mist. For the colour they had
now they might have been painted during an eclipse; while, to judge by
the webs tying them to the wall, the spiders that ran up and down their
backs were such as to make the fair originals shudder in their graves.

He wondered how many of the lofty foreheads and smiling lips of this
pictorial pedigree could be credited as true reflections of their
prototypes. Some were wilfully false, no doubt; many more so by
unavoidable accident and want of skill. Somerset felt that it required a
profounder mind than his to disinter from the lumber of conventionality
the lineaments that really sat in the painter’s presence, and to
discover their history behind the curtain of mere tradition.

The painters of this long collection were those who usually appear in
such places; Holbein, Jansen, and Vandyck; Sir Peter, Sir Geoffrey, Sir
Joshua, and Sir Thomas. Their sitters, too, had mostly been sirs; Sir
William, Sir John, or Sir George De Stancy--some undoubtedly having
a nobility stamped upon them beyond that conferred by their robes and
orders; and others not so fortunate. Their respective ladies hung by
their sides--feeble and watery, or fat and comfortable, as the case
might be; also their fathers and mothers-in-law, their brothers and
remoter relatives; their contemporary reigning princes, and their
intimate friends. Of the De Stancys pure there ran through the
collection a mark by which they might surely have been recognized as
members of one family; this feature being the upper part of the nose.
Every one, even if lacking other points in common, had the special
indent at this point in the face--sometimes moderate in degree,
sometimes excessive.

While looking at the pictures--which, though not in his regular line of
study, interested Somerset more than the architecture, because of their
singular dilapidation, it occurred to his mind that he had in his youth
been schoolfellow for a very short time with a pleasant boy bearing a
surname attached to one of the paintings--the name of Ravensbury. The
boy had vanished he knew not how--he thought he had been removed from
school suddenly on account of ill health. But the recollection was
vague, and Somerset moved on to the rooms above and below. In addition
to the architectural details of which he had as yet obtained but
glimpses, there was a great collection of old movables and other
domestic art-work--all more than a century old, and mostly lying as
lumber. There were suites of tapestry hangings, common and fine; green
and scarlet leather-work, on which the gilding was still but little
injured; venerable damask curtains; quilted silk table-covers,
ebony cabinets, worked satin window-cushions, carved bedsteads, and
embroidered bed-furniture which had apparently screened no sleeper for
these many years. Downstairs there was also an interesting collection of
armour, together with several huge trunks and coffers. A great many
of them had been recently taken out and cleaned, as if a long dormant
interest in them were suddenly revived. Doubtless they were those which
had been used by the living originals of the phantoms that looked down
from the frames.

This excellent hoard of suggestive designs for wood-work, metal-work,
and work of other sorts, induced Somerset to divert his studies from
the ecclesiastical direction, to acquire some new ideas from the objects
here for domestic application. Yet for the present he was inclined
to keep his sketch-book closed and his ivory rule folded, and devote
himself to a general survey. Emerging from the ground-floor by a small
doorway, he found himself on a terrace to the north-east, and on the
other side than that by which he had entered. It was bounded by a
parapet breast high, over which a view of the distant country met the
eye, stretching from the foot of the slope to a distance of many miles.
Somerset went and leaned over, and looked down upon the tops of the
bushes beneath. The prospect included the village he had passed through
on the previous day: and amidst the green lights and shades of the
meadows he could discern the red brick chapel whose recalcitrant inmate
had so engrossed him.

Before his attention had long strayed over the incident which
romanticized that utilitarian structure, he became aware that he was not
the only person who was looking from the terrace towards that point of
the compass. At the right-hand corner, in a niche of the curtain-wall,
reclined a girlish shape; and asleep on the bench over which she leaned
was a white cat--the identical Persian as it seemed--that had been taken
into the carriage at the chapel-door.

Somerset began to muse on the probability or otherwise of the
backsliding Baptist and this young lady resulting in one and the same
person; and almost without knowing it he found himself deeply hoping for
such a unity. The object of his inspection was idly leaning, and
this somewhat disguised her figure. It might have been tall or short,
curvilinear or angular. She carried a light sunshade which she fitfully
twirled until, thrusting it back over her shoulder, her head was
revealed sufficiently to show that she wore no hat or bonnet. This token
of her being an inmate of the castle, and not a visitor, rather damped
his expectations: but he persisted in believing her look towards the
chapel must have a meaning in it, till she suddenly stood erect, and
revealed herself as short in stature--almost dumpy--at the same time
giving him a distinct view of her profile. She was not at all like the
heroine of the chapel. He saw the dinted nose of the De Stancys outlined
with Holbein shadowlessness against the blue-green of the distant wood.
It was not the De Stancy face with all its original specialities: it
was, so to speak, a defective reprint of that face: for the nose tried
hard to turn up and deal utter confusion to the family shape.

As for the rest of the countenance, Somerset was obliged to own that it
was not beautiful: Nature had done there many things that she ought not
to have done, and left undone much that she should have executed. It
would have been decidedly plain but for a precious quality which no
perfection of chiselling can give when the temperament denies it, and
which no facial irregularity can take away--a tender affectionateness
which might almost be called yearning; such as is often seen in the
women of Correggio when they are painted in profile. But the plain
features of Miss De Stancy--who she undoubtedly was--were rather
severely handled by Somerset’s judgment owing to his impression of the
previous night. A beauty of a sort would have been lent by the flexuous
contours of the mobile parts but for that unfortunate condition the poor
girl was burdened with, of having to hand on a traditional feature with
which she did not find herself otherwise in harmony.

She glanced at him for a moment, and showed by an imperceptible movement
that he had made his presence felt. Not to embarrass her Somerset
hastened to withdraw, at the same time that she passed round to the
other part of the terrace, followed by the cat, in whom Somerset could
imagine a certain denominational cast of countenance, notwithstanding
her company. But as white cats are much alike each other at a distance,
it was reasonable to suppose this creature was not the same one as that
possessed by the beauty.



IV.

He descended the stone stairs to a lower story of the castle, in which
was a crypt-like hall covered by vaulting of exceptional and massive
ingenuity:

          ‘Built ere the art was known,
     By pointed aisle and shafted stalk
     The arcades of an alleyed walk
           To emulate in stone.’

It happened that the central pillar whereon the vaults rested, reputed
to exhibit some of the most hideous grotesques in England upon its
capital, was within a locked door. Somerset was tempted to ask a
servant for permission to open it, till he heard that the inner room
was temporarily used for plate, the key being kept by Miss De Stancy, at
which he said no more. But afterwards the active housemaid redescended
the stone steps; she entered the crypt with a bunch of keys in one hand,
and in the other a candle, followed by the young lady whom Somerset had
seen on the terrace.

‘I shall be very glad to unlock anything you may want to see. So few
people take any real interest in what is here that we do not leave it
open.’

Somerset expressed his thanks.

Miss De Stancy, a little to his surprise, had a touch of rusticity in
her manner, and that forced absence of reserve which seclusion from
society lends to young women more frequently than not. She seemed glad
to have something to do; the arrival of Somerset was plainly an event
sufficient to set some little mark upon her day. Deception had been
written on the faces of those frowning walls in their implying the
insignificance of Somerset, when he found them tenanted only by this
little woman whose life was narrower than his own.

‘We have not been here long,’ continued Miss De Stancy, ‘and that’s why
everything is in such a dilapidated and confused condition.’

Somerset entered the dark store-closet, thinking less of the ancient
pillar revealed by the light of the candle than what a singular remark
the latter was to come from a member of the family which appeared to
have been there five centuries. He held the candle above his head, and
walked round, and presently Miss De Stancy came back.

‘There is another vault below,’ she said, with the severe face of a
young woman who speaks only because it is absolutely necessary. ‘Perhaps
you are not aware of it? It was the dungeon: if you wish to go
down there too, the servant will show you the way. It is not at all
ornamental: rough, unhewn arches and clumsy piers.’

Somerset thanked her, and would perhaps take advantage of her kind
offer when he had examined the spot where he was, if it were not causing
inconvenience.

‘No; I am sure Paula will be glad to know that anybody thinks it
interesting to go down there--which is more than she does herself.’

Some obvious inquiries were suggested by this, but Somerset said, ‘I
have seen the pictures, and have been much struck by them; partly,’ he
added, with some hesitation, ‘because one or two of them reminded me of
a schoolfellow--I think his name was John Ravensbury?’

‘Yes,’ she said, almost eagerly. ‘He was my cousin!’

‘So that we are not quite strangers?’

‘But he is dead now.... He was unfortunate: he was mostly spoken of
as “that unlucky boy.”... You know, I suppose, Mr. Somerset, why the
paintings are in such a decaying state!--it is owing to the peculiar
treatment of the castle during Mr. Wilkins’s time. He was blind; so one
can imagine he did not appreciate such things as there are here.’

‘The castle has been shut up, you mean?’

‘O yes, for many years. But it will not be so again. We are going to
have the pictures cleaned, and the frames mended, and the old pieces of
furniture put in their proper places. It will be very nice then. Did you
see those in the east closet?’

‘I have only seen those in the gallery.’

‘I will just show you the way to the others, if you would like to see
them?’

They ascended to the room designated the east closet. The paintings
here, mostly of smaller size, were in a better condition, owing to the
fact that they were hung on an inner wall, and had hence been kept free
from damp. Somerset inquired the names and histories of one or two.

‘I really don’t quite know,’ Miss De Stancy replied after some thought.
‘But Paula knows, I am sure. I don’t study them much--I don’t see the
use of it.’ She swung her sunshade, so that it fell open, and turned it
up till it fell shut. ‘I have never been able to give much attention to
ancestors,’ she added, with her eyes on the parasol.

‘These ARE your ancestors?’ he asked, for her position and tone were
matters which perplexed him. In spite of the family likeness and other
details he could scarcely believe this frank and communicative country
maiden to be the modern representative of the De Stancys.

‘O yes, they certainly are,’ she said, laughing. ‘People say I am like
them: I don’t know if I am--well, yes, I know I am: I can see that, of
course, any day. But they have gone from my family, and perhaps it
is just as well that they should have gone.... They are useless,’ she
added, with serene conclusiveness.

‘Ah! they have gone, have they?’

‘Yes, castle and furniture went together: it was long ago--long before
I was born. It doesn’t seem to me as if the place ever belonged to a
relative of mine.’

Somerset corrected his smiling manner to one of solicitude.

‘But you live here, Miss De Stancy?’

‘Yes--a great deal now; though sometimes I go home to sleep.’

‘This is home to you, and not home?’

‘I live here with Paula--my friend: I have not been here long, neither
has she. For the first six months after her father’s death she did not
come here at all.’

They walked on, gazing at the walls, till the young man said: ‘I fear
I may be making some mistake: but I am sure you will pardon my
inquisitiveness this once. WHO is Paula?’

‘Ah, you don’t know! Of course you don’t--local changes don’t get talked
of far away. She is the owner of this castle and estate. My father sold
it when he was quite a young man, years before I was born, and not long
after his father’s death. It was purchased by a man named Wilkins, a
rich man who became blind soon after he had bought it, and never lived
here; so it was left uncared for.’

She went out upon the terrace; and without exactly knowing why, Somerset
followed.

‘Your friend--’

‘Has only come here quite recently. She is away from home to-day.... It
was very sad,’ murmured the young girl thoughtfully. ‘No sooner had
Mr. Power bought it of the representatives of Mr. Wilkins--almost
immediately indeed--than he died from a chill caught after a warm bath.
On account of that she did not take possession for several months; and
even now she has only had a few rooms prepared as a temporary residence
till she can think what to do. Poor thing, it is sad to be left alone!’

Somerset heedfully remarked that he thought he recognized that name
Power, as one he had seen lately, somewhere or other.

‘Perhaps you have been hearing of her father. Do you know what he was?’

Somerset did not.

She looked across the distant country, where undulations of dark-green
foliage formed a prospect extending for miles. And as she watched, and
Somerset’s eyes, led by hers, watched also, a white streak of steam,
thin as a cotton thread, could be discerned ploughing that green
expanse. ‘Her father made THAT,’ Miss De Stancy said, directing her
finger towards the object.

‘That what?’

‘That railway. He was Mr. John Power, the great railway contractor. And
it was through making the railway that he discovered this castle--the
railway was diverted a little on its account.’

‘A clash between ancient and modern.’

‘Yes, but he took an interest in the locality long before he purchased
the estate. And he built the people a chapel on a bit of freehold he
bought for them. He was a great Nonconformist, a staunch Baptist up to
the day of his death--a much stauncher one,’ she said significantly,
‘than his daughter is.’

‘Ah, I begin to spot her!’

‘You have heard about the baptism?’

‘I know something of it.’

‘Her conduct has given mortal offence to the scattered people of the
denomination that her father was at such pains to unite into a body.’

Somerset could guess the remainder, and in thinking over the
circumstances did not state what he had seen. She added, as if
disappointed at his want of curiosity--

‘She would not submit to the rite when it came to the point. The water
looked so cold and dark and fearful, she said, that she could not do it
to save her life.’

‘Surely she should have known her mind before she had gone so far?’
Somerset’s words had a condemnatory form, but perhaps his actual feeling
was that if Miss Power had known her own mind, she would have not
interested him half so much.

‘Paula’s own mind had nothing to do with it!’ said Miss De Stancy,
warming up to staunch partizanship in a moment. ‘It was all undertaken
by her from a mistaken sense of duty. It was her father’s dying wish
that she should make public profession of her--what do you call it--of
the denomination she belonged to, as soon as she felt herself fit to
do it: so when he was dead she tried and tried, and didn’t get any more
fit; and at last she screwed herself up to the pitch, and thought she
must undergo the ceremony out of pure reverence for his memory. It was
very short-sighted of her father to put her in such a position: because
she is now very sad, as she feels she can never try again after such a
sermon as was delivered against her.’

Somerset presumed that Miss Power need not have heard this Knox or
Bossuet of hers if she had chosen to go away?

‘She did not hear it in the face of the congregation; but from the
vestry. She told me some of it when she reached home. Would you believe
it, the man who preached so bitterly is a tenant of hers? I said,
“Surely you will turn him out of his house?”--But she answered, in her
calm, deep, nice way, that she supposed he had a perfect right to preach
against her, that she could not in justice molest him at all. I wouldn’t
let him stay if the house were mine. But she has often before allowed
him to scold her from the pulpit in a smaller way--once it was about an
expensive dress she had worn--not mentioning her by name, you know; but
all the people are quite aware that it is meant for her, because only
one person of her wealth or position belongs to the Baptist body in this
county.’

Somerset was looking at the homely affectionate face of the little
speaker. ‘You are her good friend, I am sure,’ he remarked.

She looked into the distant air with tacit admission of the impeachment.
‘So would you be if you knew her,’ she said; and a blush slowly rose
to her cheek, as if the person spoken of had been a lover rather than a
friend.

‘But you are not a Baptist any more than I?’ continued Somerset.

‘O no. And I never knew one till I knew Paula. I think they are very
nice; though I sometimes wish Paula was not one, but the religion of
reasonable persons.’

They walked on, and came opposite to where the telegraph emerged from
the trees, leapt over the parapet, and up through the loophole into the
interior.

‘That looks strange in such a building,’ said her companion.

‘Miss Power had it put up to know the latest news from town. It costs
six pounds a mile. She can work it herself, beautifully: and so can
I, but not so well. It was a great delight to learn. Miss Power was
so interested at first that she was sending messages from morning till
night. And did you hear the new clock?’

‘Is it a new one?--Yes, I heard it.’

‘The old one was quite worn out; so Paula has put it in the cellar, and
had this new one made, though it still strikes on the old bell. It tells
the seconds, but the old one, which my very great grandfather erected in
the eighteenth century, only told the hours. Paula says that time,
being so much more valuable now, must of course be cut up into smaller
pieces.’

‘She does not appear to be much impressed by the spirit of this ancient
pile.’

Miss De Stancy shook her head too slightly to express absolute negation.

‘Do you wish to come through this door?’ she asked. ‘There is a singular
chimney-piece in the kitchen, which is considered a unique example of
its kind, though I myself don’t know enough about it to have an opinion
on the subject.’

When they had looked at the corbelled chimney-piece they returned to the
hall, where his eye was caught anew by a large map that he had conned
for some time when alone, without being able to divine the locality
represented. It was called ‘General Plan of the Town,’ and showed
streets and open spaces corresponding with nothing he had seen in the
county.

‘Is that town here?’ he asked.

‘It is not anywhere but in Paula’s brain; she has laid it out from her
own design. The site is supposed to be near our railway station, just
across there, where the land belongs to her. She is going to grant cheap
building leases, and develop the manufacture of pottery.’

‘Pottery--how very practical she must be!’

‘O no! no!’ replied Miss De Stancy, in tones showing how supremely
ignorant he must be of Miss Power’s nature if he characterized her in
those terms. ‘It is GREEK pottery she means--Hellenic pottery she tells
me to call it, only I forget. There is beautiful clay at the place,
her father told her: he found it in making the railway tunnel. She has
visited the British Museum, continental museums, and Greece, and Spain:
and hopes to imitate the old fictile work in time, especially the Greek
of the best period, four hundred years after Christ, or before Christ--I
forget which it was Paula said.... O no, she is not practical in the
sense you mean, at all.’

‘A mixed young lady, rather.’

Miss De Stancy appeared unable to settle whether this new definition of
her dear friend should be accepted as kindly, or disallowed as decidedly
sarcastic. ‘You would like her if you knew her,’ she insisted, in half
tones of pique; after which she walked on a few steps.

‘I think very highly of her,’ said Somerset.

‘And I! And yet at one time I could never have believed that I should
have been her friend. One is prejudiced at first against people who are
reported to have such differences in feeling, associations, and habit,
as she seemed to have from mine. But it has not stood in the least in
the way of our liking each other. I believe the difference makes us the
more united.’

‘It says a great deal for the liberality of both,’ answered Somerset
warmly. ‘Heaven send us more of the same sort of people! They are not
too numerous at present.’

As this remark called for no reply from Miss De Stancy, she took
advantage of an opportunity to leave him alone, first repeating her
permission to him to wander where he would. He walked about for some
time, sketch-book in hand, but was conscious that his interest did not
lie much in the architecture. In passing along the corridor of an
upper floor he observed an open door, through which was visible a room
containing one of the finest Renaissance cabinets he had ever seen. It
was impossible, on close examination, to do justice to it in a hasty
sketch; it would be necessary to measure every line if he would bring
away anything of utility to him as a designer. Deciding to reserve this
gem for another opportunity he cast his eyes round the room and blushed
a little. Without knowing it he had intruded into the absent Miss
Paula’s own particular set of chambers, including a boudoir and sleeping
apartment. On the tables of the sitting-room were most of the popular
papers and periodicals that he knew, not only English, but from Paris,
Italy, and America. Satirical prints, though they did not unduly
preponderate, were not wanting. Besides these there were books from a
London circulating library, paper-covered light literature in French and
choice Italian, and the latest monthly reviews; while between the two
windows stood the telegraph apparatus whose wire had been the means of
bringing him hither.

These things, ensconced amid so much of the old and hoary, were as if
a stray hour from the nineteenth century had wandered like a butterfly
into the thirteenth, and lost itself there.

The door between this ante-chamber and the sleeping-room stood open.
Without venturing to cross the threshold, for he felt that he would be
abusing hospitality to go so far, Somerset looked in for a moment. It
was a pretty place, and seemed to have been hastily fitted up. In a
corner, overhung by a blue and white canopy of silk, was a little cot,
hardly large enough to impress the character of bedroom upon the old
place. Upon a counterpane lay a parasol and a silk neckerchief. On the
other side of the room was a tall mirror of startling newness, draped
like the bedstead, in blue and white. Thrown at random upon the floor
was a pair of satin slippers that would have fitted Cinderella. A
dressing-gown lay across a settee; and opposite, upon a small easy-chair
in the same blue and white livery, were a Bible, the Baptist Magazine,
Wardlaw on Infant Baptism, Walford’s County Families, and the Court
Journal. On and over the mantelpiece were nicknacks of various
descriptions, and photographic portraits of the artistic, scientific,
and literary celebrities of the day.

A dressing-room lay beyond; but, becoming conscious that his study
of ancient architecture would hardly bear stretching further in that
direction, Mr. Somerset retreated to the outside, obliviously passing by
the gem of Renaissance that had led him in.

‘She affects blue,’ he was thinking. ‘Then she is fair.’

On looking up, some time later, at the new clock that told the seconds,
he found that the hours at his disposal for work had flown without his
having transferred a single feature of the building or furniture to his
sketch-book. Before leaving he sent in for permission to come again, and
then walked across the fields to the inn at Sleeping-Green, reflecting
less upon Miss De Stancy (so little force of presence had she possessed)
than upon the modern flower in a mediaeval flower-pot whom Miss De
Stancy’s information had brought before him, and upon the incongruities
that were daily shaping themselves in the world under the great modern
fluctuations of classes and creeds.

Somerset was still full of the subject when he arrived at the end of
his walk, and he fancied that some loungers at the bar of the inn were
discussing the heroine of the chapel-scene just at the moment of his
entry. On this account, when the landlord came to clear away the dinner,
Somerset was led to inquire of him, by way of opening a conversation, if
there were many Baptists in the neighbourhood.

The landlord (who was a serious man on the surface, though he
occasionally smiled beneath) replied that there were a great many--far
more than the average in country parishes. ‘Even here, in my house,
now,’ he added, ‘when volks get a drop of drink into ‘em, and their
feelings rise to a zong, some man will strike up a hymn by preference.
But I find no fault with that; for though ‘tis hardly human nature to be
so calculating in yer cups, a feller may as well sing to gain something
as sing to waste.’

‘How do you account for there being so many?’

‘Well, you zee, sir, some says one thing, and some another; I think they
does it to save the expense of a Christian burial for ther children. Now
there’s a poor family out in Long Lane--the husband used to smite for
Jimmy More the blacksmith till ‘a hurt his arm--they’d have no less than
eleven children if they’d not been lucky t’other way, and buried five
when they were three or four months old. Now every one of them children
was given to the sexton in a little box that any journeyman could nail
together in a quarter of an hour, and he buried ‘em at night for a
shilling a head; whereas ‘twould have cost a couple of pounds each if
they’d been christened at church.... Of course there’s the new lady
at the castle, she’s a chapel member, and that may make a little
difference; but she’s not been here long enough to show whether ‘twill
be worth while to join ‘em for the profit o’t or whether ‘twill not. No
doubt if it turns out that she’s of a sort to relieve volks in trouble,
more will join her set than belongs to it already. “Any port in a
storm,” of course, as the saying is.’

‘As for yourself, you are a Churchman at present, I presume?’

‘Yes; not but I was a Methodist once--ay, for a length of time. ‘Twas
owing to my taking a house next door to a chapel; so that what with
hearing the organ bizz like a bee through the wall, and what with
finding it saved umbrellas on wet Zundays, I went over to that faith for
two years--though I believe I dropped money by it--I wouldn’t be the man
to say so if I hadn’t. Howsomever, when I moved into this house I turned
back again to my old religion. Faith, I don’t zee much difference: be
you one, or be you t’other, you’ve got to get your living.’

‘The De Stancys, of course, have not much influence here now, for that,
or any other thing?’

‘O no, no; not any at all. They be very low upon ground, and always
will be now, I suppose. It was thoughted worthy of being recorded in
history--you’ve read it, sir, no doubt?’

‘Not a word.’

‘O, then, you shall. I’ve got the history zomewhere. ‘Twas gay manners
that did it. The only bit of luck they have had of late years is
Miss Power’s taking to little Miss De Stancy, and making her her
company-keeper. I hope ‘twill continue.’

That the two daughters of these antipodean families should be such
intimate friends was a situation which pleased Somerset as much as it
did the landlord. It was an engaging instance of that human progress
on which he had expended many charming dreams in the years when poetry,
theology, and the reorganization of society had seemed matters of more
importance to him than a profession which should help him to a big house
and income, a fair Deiopeia, and a lovely progeny. When he was alone he
poured out a glass of wine, and silently drank the healths of the two
generous-minded young women who, in this lonely district, had found
sweet communion a necessity of life, and by pure and instinctive good
sense had broken down a barrier which men thrice their age and repute
would probably have felt it imperative to maintain. But perhaps this was
premature: the omnipotent Miss Power’s character--practical or ideal,
politic or impulsive--he as yet knew nothing of; and giving over
reasoning from insufficient data he lapsed into mere conjecture.



V.

The next morning Somerset was again at the castle. He passed some
interval on the walls before encountering Miss De Stancy, whom at last
he observed going towards a pony-carriage that waited near the door.

A smile gained strength upon her face at his approach, and she was the
first to speak. ‘I am sorry Miss Power has not returned,’ she said, and
accounted for that lady’s absence by her distress at the event of two
evenings earlier.

‘But I have driven over to my father’s--Sir William De Stancy’s--house
this morning,’ she went on. ‘And on mentioning your name to him, I found
he knew it quite well. You will, will you not, forgive my ignorance in
having no better knowledge of the elder Mr. Somerset’s works than a dim
sense of his fame as a painter? But I was going to say that my father
would much like to include you in his personal acquaintance, and wishes
me to ask if you will give him the pleasure of lunching with him to-day.
My cousin John, whom you once knew, was a great favourite of his, and
used to speak of you sometimes. It will be so kind if you can come. My
father is an old man, out of society, and he would be glad to hear the
news of town.’

Somerset said he was glad to find himself among friends where he had
only expected strangers; and promised to come that day, if she would
tell him the way.

That she could easily do. The short way was across that glade he saw
there--then over the stile into the wood, following the path till it
came out upon the turnpike-road. He would then be almost close to the
house. The distance was about two miles and a half. But if he thought it
too far for a walk, she would drive on to the town, where she had been
going when he came, and instead of returning straight to her father’s
would come back and pick him up.

It was not at all necessary, he thought. He was a walker, and could find
the path.

At this moment a servant came to tell Miss De Stancy that the telegraph
was calling her.

‘Ah--it is lucky that I was not gone again!’ she exclaimed. ‘John seldom
reads it right if I am away.’

It now seemed quite in the ordinary course that, as a friend of her
father’s, he should accompany her to the instrument. So up they went
together, and immediately on reaching it she applied her ear to the
instrument, and began to gather the message. Somerset fancied himself
like a person overlooking another’s letter, and moved aside.

‘It is no secret,’ she said, smiling. ‘“Paula to Charlotte,” it begins.’

‘That’s very pretty.’

‘O--and it is about--you,’ murmured Miss De Stancy.

‘Me?’ The architect blushed a little.

She made no answer, and the machine went on with its story. There was
something curious in watching this utterance about himself, under his
very nose, in language unintelligible to him. He conjectured whether it
were inquiry, praise, or blame, with a sense that it might reasonably
be the latter, as the result of his surreptitious look into that blue
bedroom, possibly observed and reported by some servant of the house.

‘“Direct that every facility be given to Mr. Somerset to visit any
part of the castle he may wish to see. On my return I shall be glad to
welcome him as the acquaintance of your relatives. I have two of his
father’s pictures.”’

‘Dear me, the plot thickens,’ he said, as Miss De Stancy announced the
words. ‘How could she know about me?’

‘I sent a message to her this morning when I saw you crossing the park
on your way here--telling her that Mr. Somerset, son of the Academician,
was making sketches of the castle, and that my father knew something of
you. That’s her answer.’

‘Where are the pictures by my father that she has purchased?’

‘O, not here--at least, not unpacked.’

Miss de Stancy then left him to proceed on her journey to Markton (so
the nearest little town was called), informing him that she would be
at her father’s house to receive him at two o’clock. Just about one he
closed his sketch-book, and set out in the direction she had indicated.
At the entrance to the wood a man was at work pulling down a rotten gate
that bore on its battered lock the initials ‘W. De S.’ and erecting a
new one whose ironmongery exhibited the letters ‘P. P.’

The warmth of the summer noon did not inconveniently penetrate the dense
masses of foliage which now began to overhang the path, except in spots
where a ruthless timber-felling had taken place in previous years for
the purpose of sale. It was that particular half-hour of the day in
which the birds of the forest prefer walking to flying; and there being
no wind, the hopping of the smallest songster over the dead leaves
reached his ear from behind the undergrowth. The track had originally
been a well-kept winding drive, but a deep carpet of moss and leaves
overlaid it now, though the general outline still remained to show that
its curves had been set out with as much care as those of a lawn walk,
and the gradient made easy for carriages where the natural slopes were
great. Felled trunks occasionally lay across it, and alongside were the
hollow and fungous boles of trees sawn down in long past years.

After a walk of three-quarters of an hour he came to another gate, where
the letters ‘P. P.’ again supplanted the historical ‘W. De S.’ Climbing
over this, he found himself on a highway which presently dipped down
towards the town of Markton, a place he had never yet seen. It appeared
in the distance as a quiet little borough of a few thousand inhabitants;
and, without the town boundary on the side he was approaching, stood
half-a-dozen genteel and modern houses, of the detached kind usually
found in such suburbs. On inquiry, Sir William De Stancy’s residence was
indicated as one of these.

It was almost new, of streaked brick, having a central door, and a small
bay window on each side to light the two front parlours. A little
lawn spread its green surface in front, divided from the road by iron
railings, the low line of shrubs immediately within them being coated
with pallid dust from the highway. On the neat piers of the neat
entrance gate were chiselled the words ‘Myrtle Villa.’ Genuine roadside
respectability sat smiling on every brick of the eligible dwelling.

Perhaps that which impressed Somerset more than the mushroom modernism
of Sir William De Stancy’s house was the air of healthful cheerfulness
which pervaded it. He was shown in by a neat maidservant in black gown
and white apron, a canary singing a welcome from a cage in the shadow
of the window, the voices of crowing cocks coming over the chimneys from
somewhere behind, and the sun and air riddling the house everywhere.

A dwelling of those well-known and popular dimensions which allow the
proceedings in the kitchen to be distinctly heard in the parlours, it
was so planned that a raking view might be obtained through it from the
front door to the end of the back garden. The drawing-room furniture
was comfortable, in the walnut-and-green-rep style of some years ago.
Somerset had expected to find his friends living in an old house with
remnants of their own antique furniture, and he hardly knew whether he
ought to meet them with a smile or a gaze of condolence. His doubt
was terminated, however, by the cheerful and tripping entry of Miss De
Stancy, who had returned from her drive to Markton; and in a few more
moments Sir William came in from the garden.

He was an old man of tall and spare build, with a considerable stoop,
his glasses dangling against his waistcoat-buttons, and the front
corners of his coat-tails hanging lower than the hinderparts, so that
they swayed right and left as he walked. He nervously apologized to his
visitor for having kept him waiting.

‘I am so glad to see you,’ he said, with a mild benevolence of tone,
as he retained Somerset’s hand for a moment or two; ‘partly for your
father’s sake, whom I met more than once in my younger days, before he
became so well-known; and also because I learn that you were a friend of
my poor nephew John Ravensbury.’ He looked over his shoulder to see if
his daughter were within hearing, and, with the impulse of the solitary
to make a confidence, continued in a low tone: ‘She, poor girl, was
to have married John: his death was a sad blow to her and to all of
us.--Pray take a seat, Mr. Somerset.’

The reverses of fortune which had brought Sir William De Stancy to
this comfortable cottage awakened in Somerset a warmer emotion than
curiosity, and he sat down with a heart as responsive to each speech
uttered as if it had seriously concerned himself, while his host gave
some words of information to his daughter on the trifling events that
had marked the morning just passed; such as that the cow had got out of
the paddock into Miss Power’s field, that the smith who had promised
to come and look at the kitchen range had not arrived, that two wasps’
nests had been discovered in the garden bank, and that Nick Jones’s baby
had fallen downstairs. Sir William had large cavernous arches to his
eye-sockets, reminding the beholder of the vaults in the castle he
once had owned. His hands were long and almost fleshless, each knuckle
showing like a bamboo-joint from beneath his coat-sleeves, which were
small at the elbow and large at the wrist. All the colour had gone from
his beard and locks, except in the case of a few isolated hairs of the
former, which retained dashes of their original shade at sudden points
in their length, revealing that all had once been raven black.

But to study a man to his face for long is a species of ill-nature which
requires a colder temperament, or at least an older heart, than the
architect’s was at that time. Incurious unobservance is the true
attitude of cordiality, and Somerset blamed himself for having fallen
into an act of inspection even briefly. He would wait for his host’s
conversation, which would doubtless be of the essence of historical
romance.

‘The favourable Bank-returns have made the money-market much easier
to-day, as I learn?’ said Sir William.

‘O, have they?’ said Somerset. ‘Yes, I suppose they have.’

‘And something is meant by this unusual quietness in Foreign stocks
since the late remarkable fluctuations,’ insisted the old man. ‘Is the
current of speculation quite arrested, or is it but a temporary lull?’

Somerset said he was afraid he could not give an opinion, and entered
very lamely into the subject; but Sir William seemed to find sufficient
interest in his own thoughts to do away with the necessity of acquiring
fresh impressions from other people’s replies; for often after putting a
question he looked on the floor, as if the subject were at an end. Lunch
was now ready, and when they were in the dining-room Miss De Stancy,
to introduce a topic of more general interest, asked Somerset if he had
noticed the myrtle on the lawn?

Somerset had noticed it, and thought he had never seen such a full-blown
one in the open air before. His eyes were, however, resting at the
moment on the only objects at all out of the common that the dining-room
contained. One was a singular glass case over the fireplace, within
which were some large mediaeval door-keys, black with rust and age; and
the others were two full-length oil portraits in the costume of the end
of the last century--so out of all proportion to the size of the room
they occupied that they almost reached to the floor.

‘Those originally belonged to the castle yonder,’ said Miss De Stancy,
or Charlotte, as her father called her, noticing Somerset’s glance at
the keys. ‘They used to unlock the principal entrance-doors, which were
knocked to pieces in the civil wars. New doors were placed afterwards,
but the old keys were never given up, and have been preserved by us ever
since.’

‘They are quite useless--mere lumber--particularly to me,’ said Sir
William.

‘And those huge paintings were a present from Paula,’ she continued.
‘They are portraits of my great-grandfather and mother. Paula would give
all the old family pictures back to me if we had room for them; but they
would fill the house to the ceilings.’

Sir William was impatient of the subject. ‘What is the utility of
such accumulations?’ he asked. ‘Their originals are but clay now--mere
forgotten dust, not worthy a moment’s inquiry or reflection at this
distance of time. Nothing can retain the spirit, and why should we
preserve the shadow of the form?--London has been very full this year,
sir, I have been told?’

‘It has,’ said Somerset, and he asked if they had been up that season.
It was plain that the matter with which Sir William De Stancy least
cared to occupy himself before visitors was the history of his own
family, in which he was followed with more simplicity by his daughter
Charlotte.

‘No,’ said the baronet. ‘One might be led to think there is a fatality
which prevents it. We make arrangements to go to town almost every year,
to meet some old friend who combines the rare conditions of being
in London with being mindful of me; but he has always died or gone
elsewhere before the event has taken place.... But with a disposition to
be happy, it is neither this place nor the other that can render us the
reverse. In short each man’s happiness depends upon himself, and his
ability for doing with little.’ He turned more particularly to Somerset,
and added with an impressive smile: ‘I hope you cultivate the art of
doing with little?’

Somerset said that he certainly did cultivate that art, partly because
he was obliged to.

‘Ah--you don’t mean to the extent that I mean. The world has not yet
learned the riches of frugality, says, I think, Cicero, somewhere; and
nobody can testify to the truth of that remark better than I. If a man
knows how to spend less than his income, however small that may
be, why--he has the philosopher’s stone.’ And Sir William looked in
Somerset’s face with frugality written in every pore of his own, as much
as to say, ‘And here you see one who has been a living instance of those
principles from his youth up.’

Somerset soon found that whatever turn the conversation took, Sir
William invariably reverted to this topic of frugality. When luncheon
was over he asked his visitor to walk with him into the garden, and no
sooner were they alone than he continued: ‘Well, Mr. Somerset, you are
down here sketching architecture for professional purposes. Nothing can
be better: you are a young man, and your art is one in which there are
innumerable chances.’

‘I had begun to think they were rather few,’ said Somerset.

‘No, they are numerous enough: the difficulty is to find out where they
lie. It is better to know where your luck lies than where your talent
lies: that’s an old man’s opinion.’

‘I’ll remember it,’ said Somerset.

‘And now give me some account of your new clubs, new hotels, and new
men.... What I was going to add, on the subject of finding out where
your luck lies, is that nobody is so unfortunate as not to have a lucky
star in some direction or other. Perhaps yours is at the antipodes; if
so, go there. All I say is, discover your lucky star.’

‘I am looking for it.’

‘You may be able to do two things; one well, the other but
indifferently, and yet you may have more luck in the latter. Then stick
to that one, and never mind what you can do best. Your star lies there.’

‘There I am not quite at one with you, Sir William.’

‘You should be. Not that I mean to say that luck lies in any one place
long, or at any one person’s door. Fortune likes new faces, and your
wisdom lies in bringing your acquisitions into safety while her favour
lasts. To do that you must make friends in her time of smiles--make
friends with people, wherever you find them. My daughter has
unconsciously followed that maxim. She has struck up a warm friendship
with our neighbour, Miss Power, at the castle. We are diametrically
different from her in associations, traditions, ideas, religion--she
comes of a violent dissenting family among other things--but I say to
Charlotte what I say to you: win affection and regard wherever you can,
and accommodate yourself to the times. I put nothing in the way of their
intimacy, and wisely so, for by this so many pleasant hours are added to
the sum total vouchsafed to humanity.’

It was quite late in the afternoon when Somerset took his leave. Miss
De Stancy did not return to the castle that night, and he walked through
the wood as he had come, feeling that he had been talking with a man
of simple nature, who flattered his own understanding by devising
Machiavellian theories after the event, to account for any spontaneous
action of himself or his daughter, which might otherwise seem eccentric
or irregular.

Before Somerset reached the inn he was overtaken by a slight shower, and
on entering the house he walked into the general room, where there was a
fire, and stood with one foot on the fender. The landlord was talking to
some guest who sat behind a screen; and, probably because Somerset
had been seen passing the window, and was known to be sketching at the
castle, the conversation turned on Sir William De Stancy.

‘I have often noticed,’ observed the landlord, ‘that volks who have come
to grief, and quite failed, have the rules how to succeed in life more
at their vingers’ ends than volks who have succeeded. I assure you that
Sir William, so full as he is of wise maxims, never acted upon a wise
maxim in his life, until he had lost everything, and it didn’t matter
whether he was wise or no. You know what he was in his young days, of
course?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said the invisible stranger.

‘O, I thought everybody knew poor Sir William’s history. He was the
star, as I may zay, of good company forty years ago. I remember him in
the height of his jinks, as I used to zee him when I was a very little
boy, and think how great and wonderful he was. I can seem to zee now
the exact style of his clothes; white hat, white trousers, white silk
handkerchief; and his jonnick face, as white as his clothes with keeping
late hours. There was nothing black about him but his hair and his
eyes--he wore no beard at that time--and they were black as slooes. The
like of his coming on the race-course was never seen there afore nor
since. He drove his ikkipage hisself; and it was always hauled by four
beautiful white horses, and two outriders rode in harness bridles. There
was a groom behind him, and another at the rubbing-post, all in livery
as glorious as New Jerusalem. What a ‘stablishment he kept up at that
time! I can mind him, sir, with thirty race-horses in training at
once, seventeen coach-horses, twelve hunters at his box t’other side of
London, four chargers at Budmouth, and ever so many hacks.’

‘And he lost all by his racing speculations?’ the stranger observed;
and Somerset fancied that the voice had in it something more than the
languid carelessness of a casual sojourner.

‘Partly by that, partly in other ways. He spent a mint o’ money in
a wild project of founding a watering-place; and sunk thousands in a
useless silver mine; so ‘twas no wonder that the castle named after him
vell into other hands.... The way it was done was curious. Mr. Wilkins,
who was the first owner after it went from Sir William, actually sat
down as a guest at his table, and got up as the owner. He took off, at
a round sum, everything saleable, furniture, plate, pictures, even the
milk and butter in the dairy. That’s how the pictures and furniture
come to be in the castle still; wormeaten rubbish zome o’ it, and hardly
worth moving.’

‘And off went the baronet to Myrtle Villa?’

‘O no! he went away for many years. ‘Tis quite lately, since his
illness, that he came to that little place, in zight of the stone walls
that were the pride of his forefathers.’

‘From what I hear, he has not the manner of a broken-hearted man?’

‘Not at all. Since that illness he has been happy, as you see him: no
pride, quite calm and mild; at new moon quite childish. ‘Tis that makes
him able to live there; before he was so ill he couldn’t bear a zight of
the place, but since then he is happy nowhere else, and never leaves
the parish further than to drive once a week to Markton. His head won’t
stand society nowadays, and he lives quite lonely as you zee, only
zeeing his daughter, or his son whenever he comes home, which is not
often. They say that if his brain hadn’t softened a little he would ha’
died--‘twas that saved his life.’

‘What’s this I hear about his daughter? Is she really hired companion to
the new owner?’

‘Now that’s a curious thing again, these two girls being so fond of one
another; one of ‘em a dissenter, and all that, and t’other a De Stancy.
O no, not hired exactly, but she mostly lives with Miss Power, and goes
about with her, and I dare say Miss Power makes it wo’th her while.
One can’t move a step without the other following; though judging by
ordinary volks you’d think ‘twould be a cat-and-dog friendship rather.’

‘But ‘tis not?’

‘’Tis not; they be more like lovers than maid and maid. Miss Power is
looked up to by little De Stancy as if she were a god-a’mighty, and Miss
Power lets her love her to her heart’s content. But whether Miss Power
loves back again I can’t zay, for she’s as deep as the North Star.’

The landlord here left the stranger to go to some other part of the
house, and Somerset drew near to the glass partition to gain a glimpse
of a man whose interest in the neighbourhood seemed to have arisen so
simultaneously with his own. But the inner room was empty: the man had
apparently departed by another door.



VI.

The telegraph had almost the attributes of a human being at Stancy
Castle. When its bell rang people rushed to the old tapestried chamber
allotted to it, and waited its pleasure with all the deference due to
such a novel inhabitant of that ancestral pile. This happened on the
following afternoon about four o’clock, while Somerset was sketching in
the room adjoining that occupied by the instrument. Hearing its call, he
looked in to learn if anybody were attending, and found Miss De Stancy
bending over it.

She welcomed him without the least embarrassment. ‘Another message,’ she
said.--‘“Paula to Charlotte.--Have returned to Markton. Am starting for
home. Will be at the gate between four and five if possible.”’

Miss De Stancy blushed with pleasure when she raised her eyes from the
machine. ‘Is she not thoughtful to let me know beforehand?’

Somerset said she certainly appeared to be, feeling at the same time
that he was not in possession of sufficient data to make the opinion of
great value.

‘Now I must get everything ready, and order what she will want, as Mrs.
Goodman is away. What will she want? Dinner would be best--she has had
no lunch, I know; or tea perhaps, and dinner at the usual time. Still,
if she has had no lunch--Hark, what do I hear?’

She ran to an arrow-slit, and Somerset, who had also heard something,
looked out of an adjoining one. They could see from their elevated
position a great way along the white road, stretching like a tape amid
the green expanses on each side. There had arisen a cloud of dust,
accompanied by a noise of wheels.

‘It is she,’ said Charlotte. ‘O yes--it is past four--the telegram has
been delayed.’

‘How would she be likely to come?’

‘She has doubtless hired a carriage at the inn: she said it would be
useless to send to meet her, as she couldn’t name a time.... Where is
she now?’

‘Just where the boughs of those beeches overhang the road--there she is
again!’

Miss De Stancy went away to give directions, and Somerset continued to
watch. The vehicle, which was of no great pretension, soon crossed the
bridge and stopped: there was a ring at the bell; and Miss De Stancy
reappeared.

‘Did you see her as she drove up--is she not interesting?’

‘I could not see her.’

‘Ah, no--of course you could not from this window because of the trees.
Mr. Somerset, will you come downstairs? You will have to meet her, you
know.’

Somerset felt an indescribable backwardness. ‘I will go on with my
sketching,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she will not be--’

‘O, but it would be quite natural, would it not? Our manners are easier
here, you know, than they are in town, and Miss Power has adapted
herself to them.’

A compromise was effected by Somerset declaring that he would hold
himself in readiness to be discovered on the landing at any convenient
time.

A servant entered. ‘Miss Power?’ said Miss De Stancy, before he could
speak.

The man advanced with a card: Miss De Stancy took it up, and read
thereon: ‘Mr. William Dare.’

‘It is not Miss Power who has come, then?’ she asked, with a
disappointed face.

‘No, ma’am.’

She looked again at the card. ‘This is some man of business, I
suppose--does he want to see me?’

‘Yes, miss. Leastwise, he would be glad to see you if Miss Power is not
at home.’

Miss De Stancy left the room, and soon returned, saying, ‘Mr. Somerset,
can you give me your counsel in this matter? This Mr. Dare says he is a
photographic amateur, and it seems that he wrote some time ago to Miss
Power, who gave him permission to take views of the castle, and promised
to show him the best points. But I have heard nothing of it, and
scarcely know whether I ought to take his word in her absence. Mrs.
Goodman, Miss Power’s relative, who usually attends to these things, is
away.’

‘I dare say it is all right,’ said Somerset.

‘Would you mind seeing him? If you think it quite in order, perhaps you
will instruct him where the best views are to be obtained?’

Thereupon Somerset at once went down to Mr. Dare. His coming as a sort
of counterfeit of Miss Power disposed Somerset to judge him with as much
severity as justice would allow, and his manner for the moment was not
of a kind calculated to dissipate antagonistic instincts. Mr. Dare was
standing before the fireplace with his feet wide apart, and his hands
in the pockets of his coat-tails, looking at a carving over the
mantelpiece. He turned quickly at the sound of Somerset’s footsteps, and
revealed himself as a person quite out of the common.

His age it was impossible to say. There was not a hair on his face which
could serve to hang a guess upon. In repose he appeared a boy; but his
actions were so completely those of a man that the beholder’s first
estimate of sixteen as his age was hastily corrected to six-and-twenty,
and afterwards shifted hither and thither along intervening years as
the tenor of his sentences sent him up or down. He had a broad forehead,
vertical as the face of a bastion, and his hair, which was parted in
the middle, hung as a fringe or valance above, in the fashion sometimes
affected by the other sex. He wore a heavy ring, of which the gold
seemed fair, the diamond questionable, and the taste indifferent. There
were the remains of a swagger in his body and limbs as he came forward,
regarding Somerset with a confident smile, as if the wonder were, not
why Mr. Dare should be present, but why Somerset should be present
likewise; and the first tone that came from Dare’s lips wound up his
listener’s opinion that he did not like him.

A latent power in the man, or boy, was revealed by the circumstance that
Somerset did not feel, as he would ordinarily have done, that
it was a matter of profound indifference to him whether this
gentleman-photographer were a likeable person or no.

‘I have called by appointment; or rather, I left a card stating that
to-day would suit me, and no objection was made.’ Somerset recognized
the voice; it was that of the invisible stranger who had talked with the
landlord about the De Stancys. Mr. Dare then proceeded to explain his
business.

Somerset found from his inquiries that the man had unquestionably been
instructed by somebody to take the views he spoke of; and concluded that
Dare’s curiosity at the inn was, after all, naturally explained by his
errand to this place. Blaming himself for a too hasty condemnation of
the stranger, who though visually a little too assured was civil enough
verbally, Somerset proceeded with the young photographer to sundry
corners of the outer ward, and thence across the moat to the field,
suggesting advantageous points of view. The office, being a shadow of
his own pursuits, was not uncongenial to Somerset, and he forgot other
things in attending to it.

‘Now in our country we should stand further back than this, and so get a
more comprehensive coup d’oeil,’ said Dare, as Somerset selected a good
situation.

‘You are not an Englishman, then,’ said Somerset.

‘I have lived mostly in India, Malta, Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands,
and Canada. I there invented a new photographic process, which I am bent
upon making famous. Yet I am but a dilettante, and do not follow this
art at the base dictation of what men call necessity.’

‘O indeed,’ Somerset replied.

As soon as this business was disposed of, and Mr. Dare had brought up
his van and assistant to begin operations, Somerset returned to the
castle entrance. While under the archway a man with a professional look
drove up in a dog-cart and inquired if Miss Power were at home to-day.

‘She has not yet returned, Mr. Havill,’ was the reply.

Somerset, who had hoped to hear an affirmative by this time,
thought that Miss Power was bent on disappointing him in the flesh,
notwithstanding the interest she expressed in him by telegraph; and as
it was now drawing towards the end of the afternoon, he walked off in
the direction of his inn.

There were two or three ways to that spot, but the pleasantest was by
passing through a rambling shrubbery, between whose bushes trickled
a broad shallow brook, occasionally intercepted in its course by a
transverse chain of old stones, evidently from the castle walls, which
formed a miniature waterfall. The walk lay along the river-brink. Soon
Somerset saw before him a circular summer-house formed of short sticks
nailed to ornamental patterns. Outside the structure, and immediately
in the path, stood a man with a book in his hand; and it was presently
apparent that this gentleman was holding a conversation with some
person inside the pavilion, but the back of the building being towards
Somerset, the second individual could not be seen.

The speaker at one moment glanced into the interior, and at another
at the advancing form of the architect, whom, though distinctly enough
beheld, the other scarcely appeared to heed in the absorbing interest
of his own discourse. Somerset became aware that it was the Baptist
minister, whose rhetoric he had heard in the chapel yonder.

‘Now,’ continued the Baptist minister, ‘will you express to me any
reason or objection whatever which induces you to withdraw from our
communion? It was that of your father, and of his father before him. Any
difficulty you may have met with I will honestly try to remove; for
I need hardly say that in losing you we lose one of the most valued
members of the Baptist church in this district. I speak with all the
respect due to your position, when I ask you to realize how irreparable
is the injury you inflict upon the cause here by this lukewarm
backwardness.’

‘I don’t withdraw,’ said a woman’s low voice within.

‘What do you do?’

‘I decline to attend for the present.’

‘And you can give no reason for this?’

There was no reply.

‘Or for your refusal to proceed with the baptism?’

‘I have been christened.’

‘My dear young lady, it is well known that your christening was the work
of your aunt, who did it unknown to your parents when she had you in
her power, out of pure obstinacy to a church with which she was not in
sympathy, taking you surreptitiously, and indefensibly, to the font
of the Establishment; so that the rite meant and could mean nothing at
all.... But I fear that your new position has brought you into contact
with the Paedobaptists, that they have disturbed your old principles,
and so induced you to believe in the validity of that trumpery
ceremony!’

‘It seems sufficient.’

‘I will demolish the basis of that seeming in three minutes, give me but
that time as a listener.’

‘I have no objection.’

‘Very well.... First, then, I will assume that those who have influenced
you in the matter have not been able to make any impression upon one so
well grounded as yourself in our distinctive doctrine, by the stale old
argument drawn from circumcision?’

‘You may assume it.’

‘Good--that clears the ground. And we now come to the New Testament.’

The minister began to turn over the leaves of his little Bible, which it
impressed Somerset to observe was bound with a flap, like a pocket book,
the black surface of the leather being worn brown at the corners by long
usage. He turned on till he came to the beginning of the New Testament,
and then commenced his discourse. After explaining his position, the old
man ran very ably through the arguments, citing well-known writers on
the point in dispute when he required more finished sentences than his
own.

The minister’s earnestness and interest in his own case led him
unconsciously to include Somerset in his audience as the young man
drew nearer; till, instead of fixing his eyes exclusively on the person
within the summer-house, the preacher began to direct a good proportion
of his discourse upon his new auditor, turning from one listener to
the other attentively, without seeming to feel Somerset’s presence as
superfluous.

‘And now,’ he said in conclusion, ‘I put it to you, sir, as to her: do
you find any flaw in my argument? Is there, madam, a single text which,
honestly interpreted, affords the least foothold for the Paedobaptists;
in other words, for your opinion on the efficacy of the rite
administered to you in your unconscious infancy? I put it to you both as
honest and responsible beings.’ He turned again to the young man.

It happened that Somerset had been over this ground long ago. Born, so
to speak, a High-Church infant, in his youth he had been of a thoughtful
turn, till at one time an idea of his entering the Church had been
entertained by his parents. He had formed acquaintance with men of
almost every variety of doctrinal practice in this country; and, as
the pleadings of each assailed him before he had arrived at an age of
sufficient mental stability to resist new impressions, however badly
substantiated, he inclined to each denomination as it presented itself,
was

     ‘Everything by starts, and nothing long,’

till he had travelled through a great many beliefs and doctrines without
feeling himself much better than when he set out.

A study of fonts and their origin had qualified him in this particular
subject. Fully conscious of the inexpediency of contests on minor ritual
differences, he yet felt a sudden impulse towards a mild intellectual
tournament with the eager old man--purely as an exercise of his wits in
the defence of a fair girl.

‘Sir, I accept your challenge to us,’ said Somerset, advancing to the
minister’s side.



VII.

At the sound of a new voice the lady in the bower started, as he could
see by her outline through the crevices of the wood-work and creepers.
The minister looked surprised.

‘You will lend me your Bible, sir, to assist my memory?’ he continued.

The minister held out the Bible with some reluctance, but he allowed
Somerset to take it from his hand. The latter, stepping upon a large
moss-covered stone which stood near, and laying his hat on a flat beech
bough that rose and fell behind him, pointed to the minister to seat
himself on the grass. The minister looked at the grass, and looked up
again at Somerset, but did not move.

Somerset for the moment was not observing him. His new position had
turned out to be exactly opposite the open side of the bower, and now
for the first time he beheld the interior. On the seat was the woman
who had stood beneath his eyes in the chapel, the ‘Paula’ of Miss De
Stancy’s enthusiastic eulogies. She wore a summer hat, beneath which
her fair curly hair formed a thicket round her forehead. It would be
impossible to describe her as she then appeared. Not sensuous enough
for an Aphrodite, and too subdued for a Hebe, she would yet, with the
adjunct of doves or nectar, have stood sufficiently well for either
of those personages, if presented in a pink morning light, and with
mythological scarcity of attire.

Half in surprise she glanced up at him; and lowering her eyes again,
as if no surprise were ever let influence her actions for more than a
moment, she sat on as before, looking past Somerset’s position at the
view down the river, visible for a long distance before her till it was
lost under the bending trees.

Somerset turned over the leaves of the minister’s Bible, and began:--

‘In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the seventh chapter and the
fourteenth verse--‘.

Here the young lady raised her eyes in spite of her reserve, but it
being, apparently, too much labour to keep them raised, allowed her
glance to subside upon her jet necklace, extending it with the thumb of
her left hand.

‘Sir!’ said the Baptist excitedly, ‘I know that passage well--it is the
last refuge of the Paedobaptists--I foresee your argument. I have met
it dozens of times, and it is not worth that snap of the fingers! It
is worth no more than the argument from circumcision, or the
Suffer-little-children argument.’

‘Then turn to the sixteenth chapter of the Acts, and the thirty-third--’

‘That, too,’ cried the minister, ‘is answered by what I said before! I
perceive, sir, that you adopt the method of a special pleader, and not
that of an honest inquirer. Is it, or is it not, an answer to my proofs
from the eighth chapter of the Acts, the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh
verses; the sixteenth of Mark, sixteenth verse; second of Acts,
forty-first verse; the tenth and the forty-seventh verse; or the
eighteenth and eighth verse?’

‘Very well, then. Let me prove the point by other reasoning--by the
argument from Apostolic tradition.’ He threw the minister’s book upon
the grass, and proceeded with his contention, which comprised a fairly
good exposition of the earliest practice of the Church and inferences
therefrom. (When he reached this point an interest in his off-hand
arguments was revealed by the mobile bosom of Miss Paula Power, though
she still occupied herself by drawing out the necklace.) Testimony from
Justin Martyr followed; with inferences from Irenaeus in the expression,
‘Omnes enim venit per semetipsum salvare; omnes inquam, qui per eum
renascuntur in Deum, INFANTES et parvulos et pueros et juvenes.’ (At the
sound of so much seriousness Paula turned her eyes upon the speaker with
attention.) He next adduced proof of the signification of ‘renascor’
in the writings of the Fathers, as reasoned by Wall; arguments
from Tertullian’s advice to defer the rite; citations from Cyprian,
Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and Jerome; and briefly summed up the whole
matter.

Somerset looked round for the minister as he concluded. But the old man,
after standing face to face with the speaker, had turned his back upon
him, and during the latter portions of the attack had moved slowly away.
He now looked back; his countenance was full of commiserating reproach
as he lifted his hand, twice shook his head, and said, ‘In the Epistle
to the Philippians, first chapter and sixteenth verse, it is written
that there are some who preach in contention and not sincerely. And
in the Second Epistle to Timothy, fourth chapter and fourth verse,
attention is drawn to those whose ears refuse the truth, and are turned
unto fables. I wish you good afternoon, sir, and that priceless gift,
SINCERITY.’

The minister vanished behind the trees; Somerset and Miss Power being
left confronting each other alone.

Somerset stepped aside from the stone, hat in hand, at the same moment
in which Miss Power rose from her seat. She hesitated for an instant,
and said, with a pretty girlish stiffness, sweeping back the skirt of
her dress to free her toes in turning: ‘Although you are personally
unknown to me, I cannot leave you without expressing my deep sense of
your profound scholarship, and my admiration for the thoroughness of
your studies in divinity.’

‘Your opinion gives me great pleasure,’ said Somerset, bowing, and
fairly blushing. ‘But, believe me, I am no scholar, and no theologian.
My knowledge of the subject arises simply from the accident that some
few years ago I looked into the question for a special reason. In the
study of my profession I was interested in the designing of fonts and
baptisteries, and by a natural process I was led to investigate the
history of baptism; and some of the arguments I then learnt up still
remain with me. That’s the simple explanation of my erudition.’

‘If your sermons at the church only match your address to-day, I shall
not wonder at hearing that the parishioners are at last willing to
attend.’

It flashed upon Somerset’s mind that she supposed him to be the new
curate, of whose arrival he had casually heard, during his sojourn at
the inn. Before he could bring himself to correct an error to which,
perhaps, more than to anything else, was owing the friendliness of her
manner, she went on, as if to escape the embarrassment of silence:--

‘I need hardly say that I at least do not doubt the sincerity of your
arguments.’

‘Nevertheless, I was not altogether sincere,’ he answered.

She was silent.

‘Then why should you have delivered such a defence of me?’ she asked
with simple curiosity.

Somerset involuntarily looked in her face for his answer.

Paula again teased the necklace. ‘Would you have spoken so eloquently on
the other side if I--if occasion had served?’ she inquired shyly.

‘Perhaps I would.’

Another pause, till she said, ‘I, too, was insincere.’

‘You?’

‘I was.’

‘In what way?

‘In letting him, and you, think I had been at all influenced by
authority, scriptural or patristic.’

‘May I ask, why, then, did you decline the ceremony the other evening?’

‘Ah, you, too, have heard of it!’ she said quickly.

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘I saw it.’

She blushed and looked down the river. ‘I cannot give my reasons,’ she
said.

‘Of course not,’ said Somerset.

‘I would give a great deal to possess real logical dogmatism.’

‘So would I.’

There was a moment of embarrassment: she wanted to get away, but did
not precisely know how. He would have withdrawn had she not said, as if
rather oppressed by her conscience, and evidently still thinking him
the curate: ‘I cannot but feel that Mr. Woodwell’s heart has been
unnecessarily wounded.’

‘The minister’s?’

‘Yes. He is single-mindedness itself. He gives away nearly all he has
to the poor. He works among the sick, carrying them necessaries with his
own hands. He teaches the ignorant men and lads of the village when
he ought to be resting at home, till he is absolutely prostrate from
exhaustion, and then he sits up at night writing encouraging letters
to those poor people who formerly belonged to his congregation in the
village, and have now gone away. He always offends ladies, because he
can’t help speaking the truth as he believes it; but he hasn’t offended
me!’

Her feelings had risen towards the end, so that she finished quite
warmly, and turned aside.

‘I was not in the least aware that he was such a man,’ murmured
Somerset, looking wistfully after the minister.... ‘Whatever you may
have done, I fear that I have grievously wounded a worthy man’s heart
from an idle wish to engage in a useless, unbecoming, dull, last-century
argument.’

‘Not dull,’ she murmured, ‘for it interested me.’

Somerset accepted her correction willingly. ‘It was ill-considered of
me, however,’ he said; ‘and in his distress he has forgotten his Bible.’
He went and picked up the worn volume from where it lay on the grass.

‘You can easily win him to forgive you, by just following, and returning
the book to him,’ she observed.

‘I will,’ said the young man impulsively. And, bowing to her, he
hastened along the river brink after the minister. He at length saw his
friend before him, leaning over the gate which led from the private
path into a lane, his cheek resting on the palm of his hand with every
outward sign of abstraction. He was not conscious of Somerset’s presence
till the latter touched him on the shoulder.

Never was a reconciliation effected more readily. When Somerset said
that, fearing his motives might be misconstrued, he had followed to
assure the minister of his goodwill and esteem, Mr. Woodwell held out
his hand, and proved his friendliness in return by preparing to have
the controversy on their religious differences over again from the
beginning, with exhaustive detail. Somerset evaded this with alacrity,
and once having won his companion to other subjects he found that the
austere man had a smile as pleasant as an infant’s on the rare moments
when he indulged in it; moreover, that he was warmly attached to Miss
Power.

‘Though she gives me more trouble than all the rest of the Baptist
church in this district,’ he said, ‘I love her as my own daughter. But
I am sadly exercised to know what she is at heart. Heaven supply me with
fortitude to contest her wild opinions, and intractability! But she has
sweet virtues, and her conduct at times can be most endearing.’

‘I believe it!’ said Somerset, with more fervour than mere politeness
required.

‘Sometimes I think those Stancy towers and lands will be a curse to her.
The spirit of old papistical times still lingers in the nooks of those
silent walls, like a bad odour in a still atmosphere, dulling the
iconoclastic emotions of the true Puritan. It would be a pity indeed
if she were to be tainted by the very situation that her father’s
indomitable energy created for her.’

‘Do not be concerned about her,’ said Somerset gently. ‘She’s not a
Paedobaptist at heart, although she seems so.’

Mr. Woodwell placed his finger on Somerset’s arm, saying, ‘If she’s
not a Paedobaptist, or Episcopalian; if she is not vulnerable to the
mediaeval influences of her mansion, lands, and new acquaintance, it
is because she’s been vulnerable to what is worse: to doctrines beside
which the errors of Paaedobaptists, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, are
but as air.’

‘How? You astonish me.’

‘Have you heard in your metropolitan experience of a curious body of New
Lights, as they think themselves?’ The minister whispered a name to his
listener, as if he were fearful of being overheard.

‘O no,’ said Somerset, shaking his head, and smiling at the minister’s
horror. ‘She’s not that; at least, I think not.. .. She’s a woman;
nothing more. Don’t fear for her; all will be well.’

The poor old man sighed. ‘I love her as my own. I will say no more.’

Somerset was now in haste to go back to the lady, to ease her apparent
anxiety as to the result of his mission, and also because time seemed
heavy in the loss of her discreet voice and soft, buoyant look. Every
moment of delay began to be as two. But the minister was too earnest
in his converse to see his companion’s haste, and it was not till
perception was forced upon him by the actual retreat of Somerset that he
remembered time to be a limited commodity. He then expressed his wish
to see Somerset at his house to tea any afternoon he could spare, and
receiving the other’s promise to call as soon as he could, allowed the
younger man to set out for the summer-house, which he did at a smart
pace. When he reached it he looked around, and found she was gone.

Somerset was immediately struck by his own lack of social dexterity. Why
did he act so readily on the whimsical suggestion of another person, and
follow the minister, when he might have said that he would call on
Mr. Woodwell to-morrow, and, making himself known to Miss Power as the
visiting architect of whom she had heard from Miss De Stancy, have had
the pleasure of attending her to the castle? ‘That’s what any other man
would have had wit enough to do!’ he said.

There then arose the question whether her despatching him after the
minister was such an admirable act of good-nature to a good man as it
had at first seemed to be. Perhaps it was simply a manoeuvre for getting
rid of himself; and he remembered his doubt whether a certain light
in her eyes when she inquired concerning his sincerity were innocent
earnestness or the reverse. As the possibility of levity crossed
his brain, his face warmed; it pained him to think that a woman so
interesting could condescend to a trick of even so mild a complexion as
that. He wanted to think her the soul of all that was tender, and noble,
and kind. The pleasure of setting himself to win a minister’s goodwill
was a little tarnished now.



VIII.

That evening Somerset was so preoccupied with these things that he left
all his sketching implements out-of-doors in the castle grounds. The
next morning he hastened thither to secure them from being stolen or
spoiled. Meanwhile he was hoping to have an opportunity of rectifying
Paula’s mistake about his personality, which, having served a very good
purpose in introducing them to a mutual conversation, might possibly be
made just as agreeable as a thing to be explained away.

He fetched his drawing instruments, rods, sketching-blocks and other
articles from the field where they had lain, and was passing under the
walls with them in his hands, when there emerged from the outer archway
an open landau, drawn by a pair of black horses of fine action and
obviously strong pedigree, in which Paula was seated, under the shade of
a white parasol with black and white ribbons fluttering on the summit.
The morning sun sparkled on the equipage, its newness being made all the
more noticeable by the ragged old arch behind.

She bowed to Somerset in a way which might have been meant to express
that she had discovered her mistake; but there was no embarrassment in
her manner, and the carriage bore her away without her making any sign
for checking it. He had not been walking towards the castle entrance,
and she could not be supposed to know that it was his intention to enter
that day.

She had looked such a bud of youth and promise that his disappointment
at her departure showed itself in his face as he observed her. However,
he went on his way, entered a turret, ascended to the leads of the great
tower, and stepped out.

From this elevated position he could still see the carriage and the
white surface of Paula’s parasol in the glowing sun. While he watched
the landau stopped, and in a few moments the horses were turned, the
wheels and the panels flashed, and the carriage came bowling along
towards the castle again.

Somerset descended the stone stairs. Before he had quite got to the
bottom he saw Miss De Stancy standing in the outer hall.

‘When did you come, Mr. Somerset?’ she gaily said, looking up surprised.
‘How industrious you are to be at work so regularly every day! We didn’t
think you would be here to-day: Paula has gone to a vegetable show at
Markton, and I am going to join her there soon.’

‘O! gone to a vegetable show. But I think she has altered her--’

At this moment the noise of the carriage was heard in the ward, and
after a few seconds Miss Power came in--Somerset being invisible from
the door where she stood.

‘O Paula, what has brought you back?’ said Miss De Stancy.

‘I have forgotten something.’

‘Mr. Somerset is here. Will you not speak to him?’

Somerset came forward, and Miss De Stancy presented him to her friend.
Mr. Somerset acknowledged the pleasure by a respectful inclination of
his person, and said some words about the meeting yesterday.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Power, with a serene deliberateness quite noteworthy in
a girl of her age; ‘I have seen it all since. I was mistaken about you,
was I not? Mr. Somerset, I am glad to welcome you here, both as a friend
of Miss De Stancy’s family, and as the son of your father--which is
indeed quite a sufficient introduction anywhere.’

‘You have two pictures painted by Mr. Somerset’s father, have you not?
I have already told him about them,’ said Miss De Stancy. ‘Perhaps Mr.
Somerset would like to see them if they are unpacked?’

As Somerset had from his infancy suffered from a plethora of those
productions, excellent as they were, he did not reply quite so eagerly
as Miss De Stancy seemed to expect to her kind suggestion, and Paula
remarked to him, ‘You will stay to lunch? Do order it at your own time,
if our hour should not be convenient.’

Her voice was a voice of low note, in quality that of a flute at
the grave end of its gamut. If she sang, she was a pure contralto
unmistakably.

‘I am making use of the permission you have been good enough to grant
me--of sketching what is valuable within these walls.’

‘Yes, of course, I am willing for anybody to come. People hold these
places in trust for the nation, in one sense. You lift your hands,
Charlotte; I see I have not convinced you on that point yet.’

Miss De Stancy laughed, and said something to no purpose.

Somehow Miss Power seemed not only more woman than Miss De Stancy, but
more woman than Somerset was man; and yet in years she was inferior to
both. Though becomingly girlish and modest, she appeared to possess a
good deal of composure, which was well expressed by the shaded light of
her eyes.

‘You have then met Mr. Somerset before?’ said Charlotte.

‘He was kind enough to deliver an address in my defence yesterday. I
suppose I seemed quite unable to defend myself.’

‘O no!’ said he. When a few more words had passed she turned to Miss De
Stancy and spoke of some domestic matter, upon which Somerset withdrew,
Paula accompanying his exit with a remark that she hoped to see him
again a little later in the day.

Somerset retired to the chambers of antique lumber, keeping an eye
upon the windows to see if she re-entered the carriage and resumed her
journey to Markton. But when the horses had been standing a long time
the carriage was driven round to the stables. Then she was not going to
the vegetable show. That was rather curious, seeing that she had only
come back for something forgotten.

These queries and thoughts occupied the mind of Somerset until the bell
was rung for luncheon. Owing to the very dusty condition in which he
found himself after his morning’s labours among the old carvings he was
rather late in getting downstairs, and seeing that the rest had gone in
he went straight to the dining-hall.

The population of the castle had increased in his absence. There were
assembled Paula and her friend Charlotte; a bearded man some years older
than himself, with a cold grey eye, who was cursorily introduced to him
in sitting down as Mr. Havill, an architect of Markton; also an
elderly lady of dignified aspect, in a black satin dress, of which she
apparently had a very high opinion. This lady, who seemed to be a mere
dummy in the establishment, was, as he now learnt, Mrs. Goodman by
name, a widow of a recently deceased gentleman, and aunt to Paula--the
identical aunt who had smuggled Paula into a church in her helpless
infancy, and had her christened without her parents’ knowledge. Having
been left in narrow circumstances by her husband, she was at present
living with Miss Power as chaperon and adviser on practical matters--in
a word, as ballast to the management. Beyond her Somerset discerned
his new acquaintance Mr. Woodwell, who on sight of Somerset was for
hastening up to him and performing a laboured shaking of hands in
earnest recognition.

Paula had just come in from the garden, and was carelessly laying down
her large shady hat as he entered. Her dress, a figured material in
black and white, was short, allowing her feet to appear. There was
something in her look, and in the style of her corsage, which reminded
him of several of the bygone beauties in the gallery. The thought for a
moment crossed his mind that she might have been imitating one of them.

‘Fine old screen, sir!’ said Mr. Havill, in a long-drawn voice across
the table when they were seated, pointing in the direction of the
traceried oak division between the dining-hall and a vestibule at the
end. ‘As good a piece of fourteenth-century work as you shall see in
this part of the country.’

‘You mean fifteenth century, of course?’ said Somerset.

Havill was silent. ‘You are one of the profession, perhaps?’ asked the
latter, after a while.

‘You mean that I am an architect?’ said Somerset. ‘Yes.’

‘Ah--one of my own honoured vocation.’ Havill’s face had been not
unpleasant until this moment, when he smiled; whereupon there instantly
gleamed over him a phase of meanness, remaining until the smile died
away.

Havill continued, with slow watchfulness:--

‘What enormous sacrileges are committed by the builders every day, I
observe! I was driving yesterday to Toneborough where I am erecting a
town-hall, and passing through a village on my way I saw the workmen
pulling down a chancel-wall in which they found imbedded a unique
specimen of Perpendicular work--a capital from some old arcade--the
mouldings wonderfully undercut. They were smashing it up as filling-in
for the new wall.’

‘It must have been unique,’ said Somerset, in the too-readily
controversial tone of the educated young man who has yet to learn
diplomacy. ‘I have never seen much undercutting in Perpendicular
stone-work; nor anybody else, I think.’

‘O yes--lots of it!’ said Mr. Havill, nettled.

Paula looked from one to the other. ‘Which am I to take as guide?’ she
asked. ‘Are Perpendicular capitals undercut, as you call it, Mr. Havill,
or no?’

‘It depends upon circumstances,’ said Mr. Havill.

But Somerset had answered at the same time: ‘There is seldom or never
any marked undercutting in moulded work later than the middle of the
fourteenth century.’

Havill looked keenly at Somerset for a time: then he turned to Paula:
‘As regards that fine Saxon vaulting you did me the honour to consult me
about the other day, I should advise taking out some of the old stones
and reinstating new ones exactly like them.’

‘But the new ones won’t be Saxon,’ said Paula. ‘And then in time to
come, when I have passed away, and those stones have become stained like
the rest, people will be deceived. I should prefer an honest patch to
any such make-believe of Saxon relics.’

As she concluded she let her eyes rest on Somerset for a moment, as if
to ask him to side with her. Much as he liked talking to Paula, he
would have preferred not to enter into this discussion with another
professional man, even though that man were a spurious article; but he
was led on to enthusiasm by a sudden pang of regret at finding that the
masterly workmanship in this fine castle was likely to be tinkered and
spoilt by such a man as Havill.

‘You will deceive nobody into believing that anything is Saxon here,’ he
said warmly. ‘There is not a square inch of Saxon work, as it is called,
in the whole castle.’

Paula, in doubt, looked to Mr. Havill.

‘O yes, sir; you are quite mistaken,’ said that gentleman slowly. ‘Every
stone of those lower vaults was reared in Saxon times.’

‘I can assure you,’ said Somerset deferentially, but firmly, ‘that there
is not an arch or wall in this castle of a date anterior to the year
1100; no one whose attention has ever been given to the study of
architectural details of that age can be of a different opinion.’

‘I have studied architecture, and I am of a different opinion. I have
the best reason in the world for the difference, for I have history
herself on my side. What will you say when I tell you that it is a
recorded fact that this was used as a castle by the Romans, and that it
is mentioned in Domesday as a building of long standing?’

‘I shall say that has nothing to do with it,’ replied the young man.
‘I don’t deny that there may have been a castle here in the time of
the Romans: what I say is, that none of the architecture we now see was
standing at that date.’

There was a silence of a minute, disturbed only by a murmured dialogue
between Mrs. Goodman and the minister, during which Paula was looking
thoughtfully on the table as if framing a question.

‘Can it be,’ she said to Somerset, ‘that such certainty has been reached
in the study of architectural dates? Now, would you really risk anything
on your belief? Would you agree to be shut up in the vaults and fed upon
bread and water for a week if I could prove you wrong?’

‘Willingly,’ said Somerset. ‘The date of those towers and arches is
matter of absolute certainty from the details. That they should have
been built before the Conquest is as unlikely as, say, that the
rustiest old gun with a percussion lock should be older than the date of
Waterloo.’

‘How I wish I knew something precise of an art which makes one so
independent of written history!’

Mr. Havill had lapsed into a mannerly silence that was only sullenness
disguised. Paula turned her conversation to Miss De Stancy, who had
simply looked from one to the other during the discussion, though she
might have been supposed to have a prescriptive right to a few remarks
on the matter. A commonplace talk ensued, till Havill, who had not
joined in it, privately began at Somerset again with a mixed manner of
cordiality, contempt, and misgiving.

‘You have a practice, I suppose, sir?’

‘I am not in practice just yet.’

‘Just beginning?’

‘I am about to begin.’

‘In London, or near here?’

‘In London probably.’

‘H’m.... I am practising in Markton.’

‘Indeed. Have you been at it long?’

‘Not particularly. I designed the chapel built by this lady’s late
father; it was my first undertaking--I owe my start, in fact, to Mr.
Power. Ever build a chapel?’

‘Never. I have sketched a good many churches.’

‘Ah--there we differ. I didn’t do much sketching in my youth, nor have I
time for it now. Sketching and building are two different things, to my
mind. I was not brought up to the profession--got into it through sheer
love of it. I began as a landscape gardener, then I became a builder,
then I was a road contractor. Every architect might do worse than have
some such experience. But nowadays ‘tis the men who can draw pretty
pictures who get recommended, not the practical men. Young prigs win
Institute medals for a pretty design or two which, if anybody tried
to build them, would fall down like a house of cards; then they get
travelling studentships and what not, and then they start as architects
of some new school or other, and think they are the masters of us
experienced ones.’

While Somerset was reflecting how far this statement was true, he heard
the voice of Paula inquiring, ‘Who can he be?’

Her eyes were bent on the window. Looking out, Somerset saw in the mead
beyond the dry ditch, Dare, with his photographic apparatus.

‘He is the young gentleman who called about taking views of the castle,’
said Charlotte.

‘O yes--I remember; it is quite right. He met me in the village and
asked me to suggest him some views. I thought him a respectable young
fellow.’

‘I think he is a Canadian,’ said Somerset.

‘No,’ said Paula, ‘he is from the East--at least he implied so to me.’

‘There is Italian blood in him,’ said Charlotte brightly. ‘For he spoke
to me with an Italian accent. But I can’t think whether he is a boy or a
man.’

‘It is to be earnestly hoped that the gentleman does not prevaricate,’
said the minister, for the first time attracted by the subject. ‘I
accidentally met him in the lane, and he said something to me about
having lived in Malta. I think it was Malta, or Gibraltar--even if he
did not say that he was born there.’

‘His manners are no credit to his nationality,’ observed Mrs. Goodman,
also speaking publicly for the first time. ‘He asked me this morning to
send him out a pail of water for his process, and before I had turned
away he began whistling. I don’t like whistlers.’

‘Then it appears,’ said Somerset, ‘that he is a being of no age, no
nationality, and no behaviour.’

‘A complete negative,’ added Havill, brightening into a civil sneer.
‘That is, he would be, if he were not a maker of negatives well known in
Markton.’

‘Not well known, Mr. Havill,’ answered Mrs. Goodman firmly. ‘For I lived
in Markton for thirty years ending three months ago, and he was never
heard of in my time.’

‘He is something like you, Charlotte,’ said Paula, smiling playfully on
her companion.

All the men looked at Charlotte, on whose face a delicate nervous blush
thereupon made its appearance.

‘’Pon my word there is a likeness, now I think of it,’ said Havill.

Paula bent down to Charlotte and whispered: ‘Forgive my rudeness, dear.
He is not a nice enough person to be like you. He is really more like
one or other of the old pictures about the house. I forget which, and
really it does not matter.’

‘People’s features fall naturally into groups and classes,’ remarked
Somerset. ‘To an observant person they often repeat themselves; though
to a careless eye they seem infinite in their differences.’

The conversation flagged, and they idly observed the figure of the
cosmopolite Dare as he walked round his instrument in the mead and
busied himself with an arrangement of curtains and lenses, occasionally
withdrawing a few steps, and looking contemplatively at the towers and
walls.



IX.

Somerset returned to the top of the great tower with a vague
consciousness that he was going to do something up there--perhaps sketch
a general plan of the structure. But he began to discern that this
Stancy-Castle episode in his studies of Gothic architecture might be
less useful than ornamental to him as a professional man, though it was
too agreeable to be abandoned. Finding after a while that his drawing
progressed but slowly, by reason of infinite joyful thoughts more allied
to his nature than to his art, he relinquished rule and compass, and
entered one of the two turrets opening on the roof. It was not the
staircase by which he had ascended, and he proceeded to explore its
lower part. Entering from the blaze of light without, and imagining the
stairs to descend as usual, he became aware after a few steps that
there was suddenly nothing to tread on, and found himself precipitated
downwards to a distance of several feet.

Arrived at the bottom, he was conscious of the happy fact that he had
not seriously hurt himself, though his leg was twisted awkwardly. Next
he perceived that the stone steps had been removed from the turret, so
that he had dropped into it as into a dry well; that, owing to its being
walled up below, there was no door of exit on either side of him; that
he was, in short, a prisoner.

Placing himself in a more comfortable position he calmly considered
the best means of getting out, or of making his condition known. For
a moment he tried to drag himself up by his arm, but it was a hopeless
attempt, the height to the first step being far too great.

He next looked round at a lower level. Not far from his left elbow, in
the concave of the outer wall, was a slit for the admission of light,
and he perceived at once that through this slit alone lay his chance of
communicating with the outer world. At first it seemed as if it were to
be done by shouting, but when he learnt what little effect was produced
by his voice in the midst of such a mass of masonry, his heart failed
him for a moment. Yet, as either Paula or Miss De Stancy would probably
guess his visit to the top of the tower, there was no cause for terror,
if some for alarm.

He put his handkerchief through the window-slit, so that it fluttered
outside, and, fixing it in its place by a large stone drawn from the
loose ones around him, awaited succour as best he could. To begin this
course of procedure was easy, but to abide in patience till it should
produce fruit was an irksome task. As nearly as he could guess--for his
watch had been stopped by the fall--it was now about four o’clock, and
it would be scarcely possible for evening to approach without some
eye or other noticing the white signal. So Somerset waited, his eyes
lingering on the little world of objects around him, till they all
became quite familiar. Spiders’-webs in plenty were there, and one in
particular just before him was in full use as a snare, stretching across
the arch of the window, with radiating threads as its ribs. Somerset
had plenty of time, and he counted their number--fifteen. He remained
so silent that the owner of this elaborate structure soon forgot the
disturbance which had resulted in the breaking of his diagonal ties,
and crept out from the corner to mend them. In watching the process,
Somerset noticed that on the stonework behind the web sundry names and
initials had been cut by explorers in years gone by. Among these antique
inscriptions he observed two bright and clean ones, consisting of the
words ‘De Stancy’ and ‘W. Dare,’ crossing each other at right angles.
From the state of the stone they could not have been cut more than a
month before this date, and, musing on the circumstance, Somerset passed
the time until the sun reached the slit in that side of the tower,
where, beginning by throwing in a streak of fire as narrow as a
corn-stalk, it enlarged its width till the dusty nook was flooded with
cheerful light. It disclosed something lying in the corner, which on
examination proved to be a dry bone. Whether it was human, or had come
from the castle larder in bygone times, he could not tell. One bone was
not a whole skeleton, but it made him think of Ginevra of Modena, the
heroine of the Mistletoe Bough, and other cribbed and confined wretches,
who had fallen into such traps and been discovered after a cycle of
years.

The sun’s rays had travelled some way round the interior when Somerset’s
waiting ears were at last attracted by footsteps above, each tread being
brought down by the hollow turret with great fidelity. He hoped that
with these sounds would arise that of a soft voice he had begun to like
well. Indeed, during the solitary hour or two of his waiting here he had
pictured Paula straying alone on the terrace of the castle, looking
up, noting his signal, and ascending to deliver him from his painful
position by her own exertions. It seemed that at length his dream had
been verified. The footsteps approached the opening of the turret;
and, attracted by the call which Somerset now raised, began to descend
towards him. In a moment, not Paula’s face, but that of a dreary footman
of her household, looked into the hole.

Somerset mastered his disappointment, and the man speedily fetched a
ladder, by which means the prisoner of two hours ascended to the roof
in safety. During the process he ventured to ask for the ladies of the
house, and learnt that they had gone out for a drive together.

Before he left the castle, however, they had returned, a circumstance
unexpectedly made known to him by his receiving a message from
Miss Power, to the effect that she would be glad to see him at his
convenience. Wondering what it could possibly mean, he followed the
messenger to her room--a small modern library in the Jacobean wing of
the house, adjoining that in which the telegraph stood. She was alone,
sitting behind a table littered with letters and sketches, and looking
fresh from her drive. Perhaps it was because he had been shut up in that
dismal dungeon all the afternoon that he felt something in her presence
which at the same time charmed and refreshed him.

She signified that he was to sit down; but finding that he was going
to place himself on a straight-backed chair some distance off she said,
‘Will you sit nearer to me?’ and then, as if rather oppressed by her
dignity, she left her own chair of business and seated herself at
ease on an ottoman which was among the diversified furniture of the
apartment.

‘I want to consult you professionally,’ she went on. ‘I have been much
impressed by your great knowledge of castellated architecture. Will you
sit in that leather chair at the table, as you may have to take notes?’

The young man assented, expressed his gratification, and went to the
chair she designated.

‘But, Mr. Somerset,’ she continued, from the ottoman--the width of the
table only dividing them--‘I first should just like to know, and I trust
you will excuse my inquiry, if you are an architect in practice, or only
as yet studying for the profession?’

‘I am just going to practise. I open my office on the first of January
next,’ he answered.

‘You would not mind having me as a client--your first client?’ She
looked curiously from her sideway face across the table as she said
this.

‘Can you ask it!’ said Somerset warmly. ‘What are you going to build?’

‘I am going to restore the castle.’

‘What, all of it?’ said Somerset, astonished at the audacity of such an
undertaking.

‘Not the parts that are absolutely ruinous: the walls battered by the
Parliament artillery had better remain as they are, I suppose. But we
have begun wrong; it is I who should ask you, not you me.... I fear,’
she went on, in that low note which was somewhat difficult to catch at
a distance, ‘I fear what the antiquarians will say if I am not very
careful. They come here a great deal in summer and if I were to do the
work wrong they would put my name in the papers as a dreadful person.
But I must live here, as I have no other house, except the one in
London, and hence I must make the place habitable. I do hope I can trust
to your judgment?’

‘I hope so,’ he said, with diffidence, for, far from having much
professional confidence, he often mistrusted himself. ‘I am a Fellow
of the Society of Antiquaries, and a Member of the Institute of British
Architects--not a Fellow of that body yet, though I soon shall be.’

‘Then I am sure you must be trustworthy,’ she said, with enthusiasm.
‘Well, what am I to do?--How do we begin?’

Somerset began to feel more professional, what with the business
chair and the table, and the writing-paper, notwithstanding that these
articles, and the room they were in, were hers instead of his; and an
evenness of manner which he had momentarily lost returned to him. ‘The
very first step,’ he said, ‘is to decide upon the outlay--what is it to
cost?’

He faltered a little, for it seemed to disturb the softness of their
relationship to talk thus of hard cash. But her sympathy with his
feeling was apparently not great, and she said, ‘The expenditure shall
be what you advise.’

‘What a heavenly client!’ he thought. ‘But you must just give some
idea,’ he said gently. ‘For the fact is, any sum almost may be spent
on such a building: five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty
thousand, a hundred thousand.’

‘I want it done well; so suppose we say a hundred thousand? My father’s
solicitor--my solicitor now--says I may go to a hundred thousand without
extravagance, if the expenditure is scattered over two or three years.’

Somerset looked round for a pen. With quickness of insight she knew
what he wanted, and signified where one could be found. He wrote down in
large figures--

     100,000.

It was more than he had expected; and for a young man just beginning
practice, the opportunity of playing with another person’s money to that
extent would afford an exceptionally handsome opening, not so much
from the commission it represented, as from the attention that would be
bestowed by the art-world on such an undertaking.

Paula had sunk into a reverie. ‘I was intending to intrust the work
to Mr. Havill, a local architect,’ she said. ‘But I gathered from
his conversation with you to-day that his ignorance of styles might
compromise me very seriously. In short, though my father employed him
in one or two little matters, it would not be right--even a morally
culpable thing--to place such an historically valuable building in his
hands.’

‘Has Mr. Havill ever been led to expect the commission?’ he asked.

‘He may have guessed that he would have it. I have spoken of my
intention to him more than once.’

Somerset thought over his conversation with Havill. Well, he did not
like Havill personally; and he had strong reasons for suspecting that in
the matter of architecture Havill was a quack. But was it quite generous
to step in thus, and take away what would be a golden opportunity to
such a man of making both ends meet comfortably for some years to come,
without giving him at least one chance? He reflected a little longer,
and then spoke out his feeling.

‘I venture to propose a slightly modified arrangement,’ he said.
‘Instead of committing the whole undertaking to my hands without better
proof of my ability to carry it out than you have at present, let there
be a competition between Mr. Havill and myself--let our rival plans for
the restoration and enlargement be submitted to a committee of the Royal
Institute of British Architects--and let the choice rest with them,
subject of course to your approval.’

‘It is indeed generous of you to suggest it.’ She looked thoughtfully
at him; he appeared to strike her in a new light. ‘You really recommend
it?’ The fairness which had prompted his words seemed to incline her
still more than before to resign herself entirely to him in the matter.

‘I do,’ said Somerset deliberately.

‘I will think of it, since you wish it. And now, what general idea have
you of the plan to adopt? I do not positively agree to your suggestion
as yet, so I may perhaps ask the question.’

Somerset, being by this time familiar with the general plan of the
castle, took out his pencil and made a rough sketch. While he was doing
it she rose, and coming to the back of his chair, bent over him in
silence.

‘Ah, I begin to see your conception,’ she murmured; and the breath of
her words fanned his ear. He finished the sketch, and held it up to her,
saying--

‘I would suggest that you walk over the building with Mr. Havill and
myself, and detail your ideas to us on each portion.’

‘Is it necessary?’

‘Clients mostly do it.’

‘I will, then. But it is too late for me this evening. Please meet me
to-morrow at ten.’



X.

At ten o’clock they met in the same room, Paula appearing in a straw hat
having a bent-up brim lined with plaited silk, so that it surrounded
her forehead like a nimbus; and Somerset armed with sketch-book,
measuring-rod, and other apparatus of his craft.

‘And Mr. Havill?’ said the young man.

‘I have not decided to employ him: if I do he shall go round with me
independently of you,’ she replied rather brusquely.

Somerset was by no means sorry to hear this. His duty to Havill was
done.

‘And now,’ she said, as they walked on together through the passages, ‘I
must tell you that I am not a mediaevalist myself; and perhaps that’s a
pity.’

‘What are you?’

‘I am Greek--that’s why I don’t wish to influence your design.’

Somerset, as they proceeded, pointed out where roofs had been and
should be again, where gables had been pulled down, and where floors had
vanished, showing her how to reconstruct their details from marks in the
walls, much as a comparative anatomist reconstructs an antediluvian from
fragmentary bones and teeth. She appeared to be interested, listened
attentively, but said little in reply. They were ultimately in a long
narrow passage, indifferently lighted, when Somerset, treading on a
loose stone, felt a twinge of weakness in one knee, and knew in a moment
that it was the result of the twist given by his yesterday’s fall. He
paused, leaning against the wall.

‘What is it?’ said Paula, with a sudden timidity in her voice.

‘I slipped down yesterday,’ he said. ‘It will be right in a moment.’

‘I--can I help you?’ said Paula. But she did not come near him; indeed,
she withdrew a little. She looked up the passage, and down the passage,
and became conscious that it was long and gloomy, and that nobody was
near. A curious coy uneasiness seemed to take possession of her. Whether
she thought, for the first time, that she had made a mistake--that to
wander about the castle alone with him was compromising, or whether
it was the mere shy instinct of maidenhood, nobody knows; but she said
suddenly, ‘I will get something for you, and return in a few minutes.’

‘Pray don’t--it has quite passed!’ he said, stepping out again.

But Paula had vanished. When she came back it was in the rear of
Charlotte De Stancy. Miss De Stancy had a tumbler in one hand, half full
of wine, which she offered him; Paula remaining in the background.

He took the glass, and, to satisfy his companions, drank a mouthful or
two, though there was really nothing whatever the matter with him beyond
the slight ache above mentioned. Charlotte was going to retire, but
Paula said, quite anxiously, ‘You will stay with me, Charlotte, won’t
you? Surely you are interested in what I am doing?’

‘What is it?’ said Miss De Stancy.

‘Planning how to mend and enlarge the castle. Tell Mr. Somerset what I
want done in the quadrangle--you know quite well--and I will walk on.’

She walked on; but instead of talking on the subject as directed,
Charlotte and Somerset followed chatting on indifferent matters. They
came to an inner court and found Paula standing there.

She met Miss De Stancy with a smile. ‘Did you explain?’ she asked.

‘I have not explained yet.’ Paula seated herself on a stone bench, and
Charlotte went on: ‘Miss Power thought of making a Greek court of this.
But she will not tell you so herself, because it seems such dreadful
anachronism.

‘I said I would not tell any architect myself,’ interposed Paula
correctingly. ‘I did not then know that he would be Mr. Somerset.’

‘It is rather startling,’ said Somerset.

‘A Greek colonnade all round, you said, Paula,’ continued her less
reticent companion. ‘A peristyle you called it--you saw it in a book,
don’t you remember?--and then you were going to have a fountain in the
middle, and statues like those in the British Museum.’

‘I did say so,’ remarked Paula, pulling the leaves from a young
sycamore-tree that had sprung up between the joints of the paving.

From the spot where they sat they could see over the roofs the upper
part of the great tower wherein Somerset had met with his misadventure.
The tower stood boldly up in the sun, and from one of the slits in the
corner something white waved in the breeze.

‘What can that be?’ said Charlotte. ‘Is it the fluff of owls, or a
handkerchief?’

‘It is my handkerchief,’ Somerset answered. ‘I fixed it there with a
stone to attract attention, and forgot to take it away.’

All three looked up at the handkerchief with interest. ‘Why did you want
to attract attention?’ said Paula.

‘O, I fell into the turret; but I got out very easily.’

‘O Paula,’ said Charlotte, turning to her friend, ‘that must be the
place where the man fell in, years ago, and was starved to death!’

‘Starved to death?’ said Paula.

‘They say so. O Mr. Somerset, what an escape!’ And Charlotte De Stancy
walked away to a point from which she could get a better view of the
treacherous turret.

‘Whom did you think to attract?’ asked Paula, after a pause.

‘I thought you might see it.’

‘Me personally?’ And, blushing faintly, her eyes rested upon him.

‘I hoped for anybody. I thought of you,’ said Somerset.

She did not continue. In a moment she arose and went across to Miss
De Stancy. ‘Don’t YOU go falling down and becoming a skeleton,’
she said--Somerset overheard the words, though Paula was unaware of
it--after which she clasped her fingers behind Charlotte’s neck, and
smiled tenderly in her face.

It seemed to be quite unconsciously done, and Somerset thought it a
very beautiful action. Presently Paula returned to him and said, ‘Mr.
Somerset, I think we have had enough architecture for to-day.’

The two women then wished him good-morning and went away. Somerset,
feeling that he had now every reason for prowling about the castle,
remained near the spot, endeavouring to evolve some plan of
procedure for the project entertained by the beautiful owner of those
weather-scathed walls. But for a long time the mental perspective of his
new position so excited the emotional side of his nature that he could
not concentrate it on feet and inches. As Paula’s architect (supposing
Havill not to be admitted as a competitor), he must of necessity be in
constant communication with her for a space of two or three years to
come; and particularly during the next few months. She, doubtless,
cherished far too ambitious views of her career to feel any personal
interest in this enforced relationship with him; but he would be at
liberty to feel what he chose: and to be the victim of an unrequited
passion, while afforded such splendid opportunities of communion with
the one beloved, deprived that passion of its most deplorable features.
Accessibility is a great point in matters of love, and perhaps of the
two there is less misery in loving without return a goddess who is to
be seen and spoken to every day, than in having an affection tenderly
reciprocated by one always hopelessly removed.

With this view of having to spend a considerable time in the
neighbourhood Somerset shifted his quarters that afternoon from the
little inn at Sleeping-Green to a larger one at Markton. He required
more rooms in which to carry out Paula’s instructions than the former
place afforded, and a more central position. Having reached and dined
at Markton he found the evening tedious, and again strolled out in the
direction of the castle.

When he reached it the light was declining, and a solemn stillness
overspread the pile. The great tower was in full view. That spot of
white which looked like a pigeon fluttering from the loophole was his
handkerchief, still hanging in the place where he had left it. His
eyes yet lingered on the walls when he noticed, with surprise, that the
handkerchief suddenly vanished.

Believing that the breezes, though weak below, might have been strong
enough at that height to blow it into the turret, and in no hurry to get
off the premises, he leisurely climbed up to find it, ascending by
the second staircase, crossing the roof, and going to the top of the
treacherous turret. The ladder by which he had escaped still stood
within it, and beside the ladder he beheld the dim outline of a woman,
in a meditative attitude, holding his handkerchief in her hand.

Somerset softly withdrew. When he had reached the ground he looked up.
A girlish form was standing at the top of the tower looking over the
parapet upon him--possibly not seeing him, for it was dark on the lawn.
It was either Miss De Stancy or Paula; one of them had gone there alone
for his handkerchief and had remained awhile, pondering on his escape.
But which? ‘If I were not a faint-heart I should run all risk and wave
my hat or kiss my hand to her, whoever she is,’ he thought. But he did
not do either.

So he lingered about silently in the shades, and then thought of
strolling to his rooms at Markton. Just at leaving, as he passed under
the inhabited wing, whence one or two lights now blinked, he heard a
piano, and a voice singing ‘The Mistletoe Bough.’ The song had probably
been suggested to the romantic fancy of the singer by her visit to the
scene of his captivity.



XI.

The identity of the lady whom he had seen on the tower and afterwards
heard singing was established the next day.

‘I have been thinking,’ said Miss Power, on meeting him, ‘that you may
require a studio on the premises. If so, the room I showed you yesterday
is at your service. If I employ Mr. Havill to compete with you I will
offer him a similar one.’

Somerset did not decline; and she added, ‘In the same room you will find
the handkerchief that was left on the tower.’

‘Ah, I saw that it was gone. Somebody brought it down?’

‘I did,’ she shyly remarked, looking up for a second under her shady
hat-brim.

‘I am much obliged to you.’

‘O no. I went up last night to see where the accident happened, and
there I found it. When you came up were you in search of it, or did you
want me?’

‘Then she saw me,’ he thought. ‘I went for the handkerchief only; I was
not aware that you were there,’ he answered simply. And he involuntarily
sighed.

It was very soft, but she might have heard him, for there was interest
in her voice as she continued, ‘Did you see me before you went back?’

‘I did not know it was you; I saw that some lady was there, and I would
not disturb her. I wondered all the evening if it were you.’

Paula hastened to explain: ‘We understood that you would stay to dinner,
and as you did not come in we wondered where you were. That made me
think of your accident, and after dinner I went up to the place where it
happened.’

Somerset almost wished she had not explained so lucidly.

And now followed the piquant days to which his position as her
architect, or, at worst, as one of her two architects, naturally led.
His anticipations were for once surpassed by the reality. Perhaps
Somerset’s inherent unfitness for a professional life under ordinary
circumstances was only proved by his great zest for it now. Had he been
in regular practice, with numerous other clients, instead of having
merely made a start with this one, he would have totally neglected their
business in his exclusive attention to Paula’s.

The idea of a competition between Somerset and Havill had been highly
approved by Paula’s solicitor, but she would not assent to it as yet,
seeming quite vexed that Somerset should not have taken the good the
gods provided without questioning her justice to Havill. The room she
had offered him was prepared as a studio. Drawing-boards and Whatman’s
paper were sent for, and in a few days Somerset began serious labour.
His first requirement was a clerk or two, to do the drudgery of
measuring and figuring; but for the present he preferred to sketch
alone. Sometimes, in measuring the outworks of the castle, he ran
against Havill strolling about with no apparent object, who bestowed on
him an envious nod, and passed by.

‘I hope you will not make your sketches,’ she said, looking in upon him
one day, ‘and then go away to your studio in London and think of your
other buildings and forget mine. I am in haste to begin, and wish you
not to neglect me.’

‘I have no other building to think of,’ said Somerset, rising and
placing a chair for her. ‘I had not begun practice, as you may know. I
have nothing else in hand but your castle.’

‘I suppose I ought not to say I am glad of it; but it is an advantage
to have an architect all to one’s self. The architect whom I at first
thought of told me before I knew you that if I placed the castle in his
hands he would undertake no other commission till its completion.’

‘I agree to the same,’ said Somerset.

‘I don’t wish to bind you. But I hinder you now--do pray go on without
reference to me. When will there be some drawing for me to see?’

‘I will take care that it shall be soon.’

He had a metallic tape in his hand, and went out of the room to take
some dimension in the corridor. The assistant for whom he had advertised
had not arrived, and he attempted to fix the end of the tape by sticking
his penknife through the ring into the wall. Paula looked on at a
distance.

‘I will hold it,’ she said.

She went to the required corner and held the end in its place. She had
taken it the wrong way, and Somerset went over and placed it properly in
her fingers, carefully avoiding to touch them. She obediently raised
her hand to the corner again, and stood till he had finished, when she
asked, ‘Is that all?’

‘That is all,’ said Somerset. ‘Thank you.’ Without further speech she
looked at his sketch-book, while he marked down the lines just acquired.

‘You said the other day,’ she observed, ‘that early Gothic work might be
known by the under-cutting, or something to that effect. I have looked
in Rickman and the Oxford Glossary, but I cannot quite understand what
you meant.’

It was only too probable to her lover, from the way in which she
turned to him, that she HAD looked in Rickman and the Glossary, and was
thinking of nothing in the world but of the subject of her inquiry.

‘I can show you, by actual example, if you will come to the chapel?’ he
returned hesitatingly.

‘Don’t go on purpose to show me--when you are there on your own account
I will come in.’

‘I shall be there in half-an-hour.’

‘Very well,’ said Paula. She looked out of a window, and, seeing Miss De
Stancy on the terrace, left him.

Somerset stood thinking of what he had said. He had no occasion whatever
to go into the chapel of the castle that day. He had been tempted by her
words to say he would be there, and ‘half-an-hour’ had come to his lips
almost without his knowledge. This community of interest--if it were not
anything more tender--was growing serious. What had passed between them
amounted to an appointment; they were going to meet in the most solitary
chamber of the whole solitary pile. Could it be that Paula had well
considered this in replying with her friendly ‘Very well?’ Probably not.

Somerset proceeded to the chapel and waited. With the progress of the
seconds towards the half-hour he began to discover that a dangerous
admiration for this girl had risen within him. Yet so imaginative was
his passion that he hardly knew a single feature of her countenance well
enough to remember it in her absence. The meditative judgment of things
and men which had been his habit up to the moment of seeing her in
the Baptist chapel seemed to have left him--nothing remained but a
distracting wish to be always near her, and it was quite with dismay
that he recognized what immense importance he was attaching to the
question whether she would keep the trifling engagement or not.

The chapel of Stancy Castle was a silent place, heaped up in corners
with a lumber of old panels, framework, and broken coloured glass. Here
no clock could be heard beating out the hours of the day--here no
voice of priest or deacon had for generations uttered the daily
service denoting how the year rolls on. The stagnation of the spot was
sufficient to draw Somerset’s mind for a moment from the subject which
absorbed it, and he thought, ‘So, too, will time triumph over all this
fervour within me.’

Lifting his eyes from the floor on which his foot had been tapping
nervously, he saw Paula standing at the other end. It was not so
pleasant when he also saw that Mrs. Goodman accompanied her. The latter
lady, however, obligingly remained where she was resting, while Paula
came forward, and, as usual, paused without speaking.

‘It is in this little arcade that the example occurs,’ said Somerset.

‘O yes,’ she answered, turning to look at it.

‘Early piers, capitals, and mouldings, generally alternated with deep
hollows, so as to form strong shadows. Now look under the abacus of this
capital; you will find the stone hollowed out wonderfully; and also in
this arch-mould. It is often difficult to understand how it could be
done without cracking off the stone. The difference between this and
late work can be felt by the hand even better than it can be seen.’ He
suited the action to the word and placed his hand in the hollow.

She listened attentively, then stretched up her own hand to test the
cutting as he had done; she was not quite tall enough; she would step
upon this piece of wood. Having done so she tried again, and succeeded
in putting her finger on the spot. No; she could not understand it
through her glove even now. She pulled off her glove, and, her hand
resting in the stone channel, her eyes became abstracted in the effort
of realization, the ideas derived through her hand passing into her
face.

‘No, I am not sure now,’ she said.

Somerset placed his own hand in the cavity. Now their two hands were
close together again. They had been close together half-an-hour earlier,
and he had sedulously avoided touching hers. He dared not let such an
accident happen now. And yet--surely she saw the situation! Was the
inscrutable seriousness with which she applied herself to his lesson
a mockery? There was such a bottomless depth in her eyes that it was
impossible to guess truly. Let it be that destiny alone had ruled that
their hands should be together a second time.

All rumination was cut short by an impulse. He seized her forefinger
between his own finger and thumb, and drew it along the hollow, saying,
‘That is the curve I mean.’

Somerset’s hand was hot and trembling; Paula’s, on the contrary, was
cool and soft as an infant’s.

‘Now the arch-mould,’ continued he. ‘There--the depth of that cavity is
tremendous, and it is not geometrical, as in later work.’ He drew her
unresisting fingers from the capital to the arch, and laid them in the
little trench as before.

She allowed them to rest quietly there till he relinquished them. ‘Thank
you,’ she then said, withdrawing her hand, brushing the dust from her
finger-tips, and putting on her glove.

Her imperception of his feeling was the very sublimity of maiden
innocence if it were real; if not, well, the coquetry was no great sin.

‘Mr. Somerset, will you allow me to have the Greek court I mentioned?’
she asked tentatively, after a long break in their discourse, as
she scanned the green stones along the base of the arcade, with a
conjectural countenance as to his reply.

‘Will your own feeling for the genius of the place allow you?’

‘I am not a mediaevalist: I am an eclectic.’

‘You don’t dislike your own house on that account.’

‘I did at first--I don’t so much now.... I should love it, and adore
every stone, and think feudalism the only true romance of life, if--’

‘What?’

‘If I were a De Stancy, and the castle the long home of my forefathers.’

Somerset was a little surprised at the avowal: the minister’s words on
the effects of her new environment recurred to his mind. ‘Miss De Stancy
doesn’t think so,’ he said. ‘She cares nothing about those things.’

Paula now turned to him: hitherto her remarks had been sparingly spoken,
her eyes being directed elsewhere: ‘Yes, that is very strange, is it
not?’ she said. ‘But it is owing to the joyous freshness of her nature
which precludes her from dwelling on the past--indeed, the past is
no more to her than it is to a sparrow or robin. She is scarcely an
instance of the wearing out of old families, for a younger mental
constitution than hers I never knew.’

‘Unless that very simplicity represents the second childhood of her
line, rather than her own exclusive character.’

Paula shook her head. ‘In spite of the Greek court, she is more Greek
than I.’

‘You represent science rather than art, perhaps.’

‘How?’ she asked, glancing up under her hat.

‘I mean,’ replied Somerset, ‘that you represent the march of mind--the
steamship, and the railway, and the thoughts that shake mankind.’

She weighed his words, and said: ‘Ah, yes: you allude to my father. My
father was a great man; but I am more and more forgetting his greatness:
that kind of greatness is what a woman can never truly enter into. I am
less and less his daughter every day that goes by.’

She walked away a few steps to rejoin the excellent Mrs. Goodman, who,
as Somerset still perceived, was waiting for Paula at the discreetest
of distances in the shadows at the farther end of the building. Surely
Paula’s voice had faltered, and she had turned to hide a tear?

She came back again. ‘Did you know that my father made half the railways
in Europe, including that one over there?’ she said, waving her little
gloved hand in the direction whence low rumbles were occasionally heard
during the day.

‘Yes.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Miss De Stancy told me a little; and I then found his name and doings
were quite familiar to me.’

Curiously enough, with his words there came through the broken windows
the murmur of a train in the distance, sounding clearer and more clear.
It was nothing to listen to, yet they both listened; till the increasing
noise suddenly broke off into dead silence.

‘It has gone into the tunnel,’ said Paula. ‘Have you seen the tunnel my
father made? the curves are said to be a triumph of science. There is
nothing else like it in this part of England.’

‘There is not: I have heard so. But I have not seen it.’

‘Do you think it a thing more to be proud of that one’s father should
have made a great tunnel and railway like that, than that one’s remote
ancestor should have built a great castle like this?’

What could Somerset say? It would have required a casuist to decide
whether his answer should depend upon his conviction, or upon the family
ties of such a questioner. ‘From a modern point of view, railways are,
no doubt, things more to be proud of than castles,’ he said; ‘though
perhaps I myself, from mere association, should decide in favour of the
ancestor who built the castle.’ The serious anxiety to be truthful that
Somerset threw into his observation, was more than the circumstance
required. ‘To design great engineering works,’ he added musingly, and
without the least eye to the disparagement of her parent, ‘requires
no doubt a leading mind. But to execute them, as he did, requires, of
course, only a following mind.’

His reply had not altogether pleased her; and there was a distinct
reproach conveyed by her slight movement towards Mrs. Goodman. He saw
it, and was grieved that he should have spoken so. ‘I am going to walk
over and inspect that famous tunnel of your father’s,’ he added gently.
‘It will be a pleasant study for this afternoon.’

She went away. ‘I am no man of the world,’ he thought. ‘I ought to have
praised that father of hers straight off. I shall not win her respect;
much less her love!’



XII.

Somerset did not forget what he had planned, and when lunch was over
he walked away through the trees. The tunnel was more difficult of
discovery than he had anticipated, and it was only after considerable
winding among green lanes, whose deep ruts were like canyons of Colorado
in miniature, that he reached the slope in the distant upland where the
tunnel began. A road stretched over its crest, and thence along one side
of the railway-cutting.

He there unexpectedly saw standing Miss Power’s carriage; and on drawing
nearer he found it to contain Paula herself, Miss De Stancy, and Mrs.
Goodman.

‘How singular!’ exclaimed Miss De Stancy gaily.

‘It is most natural,’ said Paula instantly. ‘In the morning two people
discuss a feature in the landscape, and in the afternoon each has a
desire to see it from what the other has said of it. Therefore they
accidentally meet.’

Now Paula had distinctly heard Somerset declare that he was going to
walk there; how then could she say this so coolly? It was with a pang
at his heart that he returned to his old thought of her being possibly
a finished coquette and dissembler. Whatever she might be, she was not a
creature starched very stiffly by Puritanism.

Somerset looked down on the mouth of the tunnel. The popular commonplace
that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous,
was not proven at this spot. On either slope of the deep cutting, green
with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other
flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway
which ran along the bottom, its thin steel rails gleaming like silver
threads in the depths. The vertical front of the tunnel, faced with
brick that had once been red, was now weather-stained, lichened, and
mossed over in harmonious rusty-browns, pearly greys, and neutral
greens, at the very base appearing a little blue-black spot like a
mouse-hole--the tunnel’s mouth.

The carriage was drawn up quite close to the wood railing, and Paula was
looking down at the same time with him; but he made no remark to her.

Mrs. Goodman broke the silence by saying, ‘If it were not a railway we
should call it a lovely dell.’

Somerset agreed with her, adding that it was so charming that he felt
inclined to go down.

‘If you do, perhaps Miss Power will order you up again, as a
trespasser,’ said Charlotte De Stancy. ‘You are one of the largest
shareholders in the railway, are you not, Paula?’

Miss Power did not reply.

‘I suppose as the road is partly yours you might walk all the way to
London along the rails, if you wished, might you not, dear?’ Charlotte
continued.

Paula smiled, and said, ‘No, of course not.’

Somerset, feeling himself superfluous, raised his hat to his companions
as if he meant not to see them again for a while, and began to descend
by some steps cut in the earth; Miss De Stancy asked Mrs. Goodman to
accompany her to a barrow over the top of the tunnel; and they left the
carriage, Paula remaining alone.

Down Somerset plunged through the long grass, bushes, late summer
flowers, moths, and caterpillars, vexed with himself that he had come
there, since Paula was so inscrutable, and humming the notes of some
song he did not know. The tunnel that had seemed so small from the
surface was a vast archway when he reached its mouth, which emitted,
as a contrast to the sultry heat on the slopes of the cutting, a cool
breeze, that had travelled a mile underground from the other end. Far
away in the darkness of this silent subterranean corridor he could see
that other end as a mere speck of light.

When he had conscientiously admired the construction of the massive
archivault, and the majesty of its nude ungarnished walls, he looked up
the slope at the carriage; it was so small to the eye that it might
have been made for a performance by canaries; Paula’s face being still
smaller, as she leaned back in her seat, idly looking down at him. There
seemed something roguish in her attitude of criticism, and to be no
longer the subject of her contemplation he entered the tunnel out of her
sight.

In the middle of the speck of light before him appeared a speck of
black; and then a shrill whistle, dulled by millions of tons of earth,
reached his ears from thence. It was what he had been on his guard
against all the time,--a passing train; and instead of taking the
trouble to come out of the tunnel he stepped into a recess, till the
train had rattled past and vanished onward round a curve.

Somerset still remained where he had placed himself, mentally balancing
science against art, the grandeur of this fine piece of construction
against that of the castle, and thinking whether Paula’s father had
not, after all, the best of it, when all at once he saw Paula’s form
confronting him at the entrance of the tunnel. He instantly went forward
into the light; to his surprise she was as pale as a lily.

‘O, Mr. Somerset!’ she exclaimed. ‘You ought not to frighten me
so--indeed you ought not! The train came out almost as soon as you had
gone in, and as you did not return--an accident was possible!’

Somerset at once perceived that he had been to blame in not thinking of
this.

‘Please do forgive my thoughtlessness in not reflecting how it would
strike you!’ he pleaded. ‘I--I see I have alarmed you.’

Her alarm was, indeed, much greater than he had at first thought: she
trembled so much that she was obliged to sit down, at which he went up
to her full of solicitousness.

‘You ought not to have done it!’ she said. ‘I naturally thought--any
person would--’

Somerset, perhaps wisely, said nothing at this outburst; the cause of
her vexation was, plainly enough, his perception of her discomposure. He
stood looking in another direction, till in a few moments she had risen
to her feet again, quite calm.

‘It would have been dreadful,’ she said with faint gaiety, as the colour
returned to her face; ‘if I had lost my architect, and been obliged to
engage Mr. Havill without an alternative.’

‘I was really in no danger; but of course I ought to have considered,’
he said.

‘I forgive you,’ she returned good-naturedly. ‘I knew there was no
GREAT danger to a person exercising ordinary discretion; but artists and
thinkers like you are indiscreet for a moment sometimes. I am now going
up again. What do you think of the tunnel?’

They were crossing the railway to ascend by the opposite path, Somerset
keeping his eye on the interior of the tunnel for safety, when suddenly
there arose a noise and shriek from the contrary direction behind the
trees. Both knew in a moment what it meant, and each seized the other as
they rushed off the permanent way. The ideas of both had been so centred
on the tunnel as the source of danger, that the probability of a train
from the opposite quarter had been forgotten. It rushed past them,
causing Paula’s dress, hair, and ribbons to flutter violently, and
blowing up the fallen leaves in a shower over their shoulders.

Neither spoke, and they went up several steps, holding each other by the
hand, till, becoming conscious of the fact, she withdrew hers; whereupon
Somerset stopped and looked earnestly at her; but her eyes were averted
towards the tunnel wall.

‘What an escape!’ he said.

‘We were not so very near, I think, were we?’ she asked quickly. ‘If we
were, I think you were--very good to take my hand.’

They reached the top at last, and the new level and open air seemed to
give her a new mind. ‘I don’t see the carriage anywhere,’ she said, in
the common tones of civilization.

He thought it had gone over the crest of the hill; he would accompany
her till they reached it.

‘No--please--I would rather not--I can find it very well.’ Before he
could say more she had inclined her head and smiled and was on her way
alone.

The tunnel-cutting appeared a dreary gulf enough now to the young man,
as he stood leaning over the rails above it, beating the herbage with
his stick. For some minutes he could not criticize or weigh her conduct;
the warmth of her presence still encircled him. He recalled her face as
it had looked out at him from under the white silk puffing of her black
hat, and the speaking power of her eyes at the moment of danger. The
breadth of that clear-complexioned forehead--almost concealed by
the masses of brown hair bundled up around it--signified that if her
disposition were oblique and insincere enough for trifling, coquetting,
or in any way making a fool of him, she had the intellect to do it
cruelly well.

But it was ungenerous to ruminate so suspiciously. A girl not an actress
by profession could hardly turn pale artificially as she had done,
though perhaps mere fright meant nothing, and would have arisen in her
just as readily had he been one of the labourers on her estate.

The reflection that such feeling as she had exhibited could have no
tender meaning returned upon him with masterful force when he thought of
her wealth and the social position into which she had drifted. Somerset,
being of a solitary and studious nature, was not quite competent
to estimate precisely the disqualifying effect, if any, of her
nonconformity, her newness of blood, and other things, among the old
county families established round her; but the toughest prejudices, he
thought, were not likely to be long invulnerable to such cheerful beauty
and brightness of intellect as Paula’s. When she emerged, as she was
plainly about to do, from the seclusion in which she had been living
since her father’s death, she would inevitably win her way among her
neighbours. She would become the local topic. Fortune-hunters would
learn of her existence and draw near in shoals. What chance would there
then be for him?

The points in his favour were indeed few, but they were just enough
to keep a tantalizing hope alive. Modestly leaving out of count his
personal and intellectual qualifications, he thought of his family. It
was an old stock enough, though not a rich one. His great-uncle had
been the well-known Vice-admiral Sir Armstrong Somerset, who served his
country well in the Baltic, the Indies, China, and the Caribbean Sea.
His grandfather had been a notable metaphysician. His father, the Royal
Academician, was popular. But perhaps this was not the sort of reasoning
likely to occupy the mind of a young woman; the personal aspect of the
situation was in such circumstances of far more import. He had come as a
wandering stranger--that possibly lent some interest to him in her eyes.
He was installed in an office which would necessitate free communion
with her for some time to come; that was another advantage, and would be
a still greater one if she showed, as Paula seemed disposed to do,
such artistic sympathy with his work as to follow up with interest the
details of its progress.

The carriage did not reappear, and he went on towards Markton,
disinclined to return again that day to the studio which had been
prepared for him at the castle. He heard feet brushing the grass behind
him, and, looking round, saw the Baptist minister.

‘I have just come from the village,’ said Mr. Woodwell, who looked worn
and weary, his boots being covered with dust; ‘and I have learnt that
which confirms my fears for her.’

‘For Miss Power?’

‘Most assuredly.’

‘What danger is there?’ said Somerset.

‘The temptations of her position have become too much for her! She is
going out of mourning next week, and will give a large dinner-party on
the occasion; for though the invitations are partly in the name of
her relative Mrs. Goodman, they must come from her. The guests are
to include people of old cavalier families who would have treated her
grandfather, sir, and even her father, with scorn for their religion
and connections; also the parson and curate--yes, actually people who
believe in the Apostolic Succession; and what’s more, they’re coming.
My opinion is, that it has all arisen from her friendship with Miss De
Stancy.’

‘Well,’ cried Somerset warmly, ‘this only shows liberality of feeling on
both sides! I suppose she has invited you as well?’

‘She has not invited me!... Mr. Somerset, not withstanding your
erroneous opinions on important matters, I speak to you as a friend, and
I tell you that she has never in her secret heart forgiven that sermon
of mine, in which I likened her to the church at Laodicea. I admit
the words were harsh, but I was doing my duty, and if the case arose
to-morrow I would do it again. Her displeasure is a deep grief to me;
but I serve One greater than she.... You, of course, are invited to this
dinner?’

‘I have heard nothing of it,’ murmured the young man.

Their paths diverged; and when Somerset reached the hotel he was
informed that somebody was waiting to see him.

‘Man or woman?’ he asked.

The landlady, who always liked to reply in person to Somerset’s
inquiries, apparently thinking him, by virtue of his drawing implements
and liberality of payment, a possible lord of Burleigh, came forward and
said it was certainly not a woman, but whether man or boy she could not
say. ‘His name is Mr. Dare,’ she added.

‘O--that youth,’ he said.

Somerset went upstairs, along the passage, down two steps, round the
angle, and so on to the rooms reserved for him in this rambling edifice
of stage-coach memories, where he found Dare waiting. Dare came forward,
pulling out the cutting of an advertisement.

‘Mr. Somerset, this is yours, I believe, from the Architectural World?’

Somerset said that he had inserted it.

‘I think I should suit your purpose as assistant very well.’

‘Are you an architect’s draughtsman?’

‘Not specially. I have some knowledge of the same, and want to increase
it.’

‘I thought you were a photographer.’

‘Also of photography,’ said Dare with a bow. ‘Though but an amateur in
that art I can challenge comparison with Regent Street or Broadway.’

Somerset looked upon his table. Two letters only, addressed in initials,
were lying there as answers to his advertisement. He asked Dare to
wait, and looked them over. Neither was satisfactory. On this account he
overcame his slight feeling against Mr. Dare, and put a question to
test that gentleman’s capacities. ‘How would you measure the front of a
building, including windows, doors, mouldings, and every other feature,
for a ground plan, so as to combine the greatest accuracy with the
greatest despatch?’

‘In running dimensions,’ said Dare.

As this was the particular kind of work he wanted done, Somerset thought
the answer promising. Coming to terms with Dare, he requested the
would-be student of architecture to wait at the castle the next day, and
dismissed him.

A quarter of an hour later, when Dare was taking a walk in the country,
he drew from his pocket eight other letters addressed to Somerset in
initials, which, to judge by their style and stationery, were from men
far superior to those two whose communications alone Somerset had seen.
Dare looked them over for a few seconds as he strolled on, then tore
them into minute fragments, and, burying them under the leaves in the
ditch, went on his way again.



XIII.

Though exhibiting indifference, Somerset had felt a pang of
disappointment when he heard the news of Paula’s approaching
dinner-party. It seemed a little unkind of her to pass him over, seeing
how much they were thrown together just now. That dinner meant more
than it sounded. Notwithstanding the roominess of her castle, she was at
present living somewhat incommodiously, owing partly to the stagnation
caused by her recent bereavement, and partly to the necessity for
overhauling the De Stancy lumber piled in those vast and gloomy
chambers before they could be made tolerable to nineteenth-century
fastidiousness.

To give dinners on any large scale before Somerset had at least set
a few of these rooms in order for her, showed, to his thinking, an
overpowering desire for society.

During the week he saw less of her than usual, her time being to
all appearance much taken up with driving out to make calls on her
neighbours and receiving return visits. All this he observed from the
windows of his studio overlooking the castle ward, in which room he
now spent a great deal of his time, bending over drawing-boards and
instructing Dare, who worked as well as could be expected of a youth of
such varied attainments.

Nearer came the Wednesday of the party, and no hint of that event
reached Somerset, but such as had been communicated by the Baptist
minister. At last, on the very afternoon, an invitation was handed into
his studio--not a kind note in Paula’s handwriting, but a formal printed
card in the joint names of Mrs. Goodman and Miss Power. It reached him
just four hours before the dinner-time. He was plainly to be used as a
stop-gap at the last moment because somebody could not come.

Having previously arranged to pass a quiet evening in his rooms at the
Lord Quantock Arms, in reading up chronicles of the castle from
the county history, with the view of gathering some ideas as to the
distribution of rooms therein before the demolition of a portion of the
structure, he decided off-hand that Paula’s dinner was not of sufficient
importance to him as a professional man and student of art to justify
a waste of the evening by going. He accordingly declined Mrs. Goodman’s
and Miss Power’s invitation; and at five o’clock left the castle and
walked across the fields to the little town.

He dined early, and, clearing away heaviness with a cup of coffee,
applied himself to that volume of the county history which contained the
record of Stancy Castle.

Here he read that ‘when this picturesque and ancient structure was
founded, or by whom, is extremely uncertain. But that a castle stood on
the site in very early times appears from many old books of charters. In
its prime it was such a masterpiece of fortification as to be the wonder
of the world, and it was thought, before the invention of gunpowder,
that it never could be taken by any force less than divine.’

He read on to the times when it first passed into the hands of ‘De
Stancy, Chivaler,’ and received the family name, and so on from De
Stancy to De Stancy till he was lost in the reflection whether Paula
would or would not have thought more highly of him if he had accepted
the invitation to dinner. Applying himself again to the tome, he learned
that in the year 1504 Stephen the carpenter was ‘paid eleven pence for
necessarye repayrs,’ and William the mastermason eight shillings ‘for
whyt lyming of the kitchen, and the lyme to do it with,’ including ‘a
new rope for the fyer bell;’ also the sundry charges for ‘vij crockes,
xiij lytyll pans, a pare of pot hookes, a fyer pane, a lanterne, a
chafynge dyshe, and xij candyll stychs.’

Bang went eight strokes of the clock: it was the dinner-hour.

‘There, now I can’t go, anyhow!’ he said bitterly, jumping up, and
picturing her receiving her company. How would she look; what would she
wear? Profoundly indifferent to the early history of the noble
fabric, he felt a violent reaction towards modernism, eclecticism, new
aristocracies, everything, in short, that Paula represented. He even
gave himself up to consider the Greek court that she had wished for, and
passed the remainder of the evening in making a perspective view of the
same.

The next morning he awoke early, and, resolving to be at work betimes,
started promptly. It was a fine calm hour of day; the grass slopes were
silvery with excess of dew, and the blue mists hung in the depths of
each tree for want of wind to blow them out. Somerset entered the
drive on foot, and when near the castle he observed in the gravel the
wheel-marks of the carriages that had conveyed the guests thither the
night before. There seemed to have been a large number, for the road
where newly repaired was quite cut up. Before going indoors he was
tempted to walk round to the wing in which Paula slept.

Rooks were cawing, sparrows were chattering there; but the blind of her
window was as closely drawn as if it were midnight. Probably she was
sound asleep, dreaming of the compliments which had been paid her by
her guests, and of the future triumphant pleasures that would follow in
their train. Reaching the outer stone stairs leading to the great hall
he found them shadowed by an awning brilliantly striped with red
and blue, within which rows of flowering plants in pots bordered the
pathway. She could not have made more preparation had the gathering been
a ball. He passed along the gallery in which his studio was situated,
entered the room, and seized a drawing-board to put into correct drawing
the sketch for the Greek court that he had struck out the night before,
thereby abandoning his art principles to please the whim of a girl. Dare
had not yet arrived, and after a time Somerset threw down his pencil and
leant back.

His eye fell upon something that moved. It was white, and lay in the
folding chair on the opposite side of the room. On near approach he
found it to be a fragment of swan’s-down fanned into motion by his own
movements, and partially squeezed into the chink of the chair as though
by some person sitting on it.

None but a woman would have worn or brought that swan’s-down into his
studio, and it made him reflect on the possible one. Nothing interrupted
his conjectures till ten o’clock, when Dare came. Then one of the
servants tapped at the door to know if Mr. Somerset had arrived.
Somerset asked if Miss Power wished to see him, and was informed that
she had only wished to know if he had come. Somerset sent a return
message that he had a design on the board which he should soon be glad
to submit to her, and the messenger departed.

‘Fine doings here last night, sir,’ said Dare, as he dusted his
T-square.

‘O indeed!’

‘A dinner-party, I hear; eighteen guests.’

‘Ah,’ said Somerset.

‘The young lady was magnificent--sapphires and opals--she carried as
much as a thousand pounds upon her head and shoulders during that three
or four hour. Of course they call her charming; Compuesta no hay muger
fea, as they say at Madrid.’

‘I don’t doubt it for a moment,’ said Somerset, with reserve.

Dare said no more, and presently the door opened, and there stood Paula.

Somerset nodded to Dare to withdraw into an adjoining room, and offered
her a chair.

‘You wish to show me the design you have prepared?’ she asked, without
taking the seat.

‘Yes; I have come round to your opinion. I have made a plan for
the Greek court you were anxious to build.’ And he elevated the
drawing-board against the wall.

She regarded it attentively for some moments, her finger resting lightly
against her chin, and said, ‘I have given up the idea of a Greek court.’

He showed his astonishment, and was almost disappointed. He had been
grinding up Greek architecture entirely on her account; had wrenched his
mind round to this strange arrangement, all for nothing.

‘Yes,’ she continued; ‘on reconsideration I perceive the want of harmony
that would result from inserting such a piece of marble-work in a
mediaeval fortress; so in future we will limit ourselves strictly to
synchronism of style--that is to say, make good the Norman work by
Norman, the Perpendicular by Perpendicular, and so on. I have informed
Mr. Havill of the same thing.’

Somerset pulled the Greek drawing off the board, and tore it in two
pieces.

She involuntarily turned to look in his face, but stopped before she had
quite lifted her eyes high enough. ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked with
suave curiosity.

‘It is of no further use,’ said Somerset, tearing the drawing in the
other direction, and throwing the pieces into the fireplace. ‘You have
been reading up orders and styles to some purpose, I perceive.’ He
regarded her with a faint smile.

‘I have had a few books down from town. It is desirable to know a little
about the architecture of one’s own house.’

She remained looking at the torn drawing, when Somerset, observing on
the table the particle of swan’s-down he had found in the chair, gently
blew it so that it skimmed across the table under her eyes.

‘It looks as if it came off a lady’s dress,’ he said idly.

‘Off a lady’s fan,’ she replied.

‘O, off a fan?’

‘Yes; off mine.’

At her reply Somerset stretched out his hand for the swan’s-down, and
put it carefully in his pocket-book; whereupon Paula, moulding her
cherry-red lower lip beneath her upper one in arch self-consciousness at
his act, turned away to the window, and after a pause said softly as she
looked out, ‘Why did you not accept our invitation to dinner?’

It was impossible to explain why. He impulsively drew near and
confronted her, and said, ‘I hope you pardon me?’

‘I don’t know that I can quite do that,’ answered she, with ever so
little reproach. ‘I know why you did not come--you were mortified at not
being asked sooner! But it was purely by an accident that you received
your invitation so late. My aunt sent the others by post, but as
yours was to be delivered by hand it was left on her table, and was
overlooked.’

Surely he could not doubt her words; those nice friendly accents were
the embodiment of truth itself.

‘I don’t mean to make a serious complaint,’ she added, in injured tones,
showing that she did. ‘Only we had asked nearly all of them to meet
you, as the son of your illustrious father, whom many of my friends know
personally; and--they were disappointed.’

It was now time for Somerse

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