A Laodicean by Thomas HardyOr, The Castle of the De Stancys. A Story of To-Day. (page 5)

own. Her parents were the chief ornaments of the almost irreproachable court of Charles the First, and were not more distinguished by their politeness and honour than by the affections and virtues which constitute the great charm of private life.’

The stock verbiage of the family memoir was somewhat apparent in this effusion; but it much impressed his listeners; and he went on to point out that from the lady’s necklace was suspended a heart-shaped portrait–that of the man who broke his heart by her persistent refusal to encourage his suit. De Stancy then led them a little further, where hung a portrait of the lover, one of his own family, who appeared in full panoply of plate mail, the pommel of his sword standing up under his elbow. The gallant captain then related how this personage of his line wooed the lady fruitlessly; how, after her marriage with another, she and her husband visited the parents of the disappointed lover, the then occupiers of the castle; how, in a fit of desperation at the sight of her, he retired to his room, where he composed some passionate verses, which he wrote with his blood, and after directing them to her ran himself through the body with his sword. Too late the lady’s heart was touched by his devotion; she was ever after a melancholy woman, and wore his portrait despite her husband’s prohibition. ‘This,’ continued De Stancy, leading them through the doorway into the hall where the coats of mail were arranged along the wall, and stopping opposite a suit which bore some resemblance to that of the portrait, ‘this is his armour, as you will perceive by comparing it with the picture, and this is the sword with which he did the rash deed.’

‘What unreasonable devotion!’ said Paula practically. ‘It was too romantic of him. She was not worthy of such a sacrifice.’

‘He also is one whom they say you resemble a little in feature, I think,’ said Charlotte.

‘Do they?’ replied De Stancy. ‘I wonder if it’s true.’ He set down the candles, and asking the girls to withdraw for a moment, was inside the upper part of the suit of armour in incredibly quick time. Going then and placing himself in front of a low-hanging painting near the original, so as to be enclosed by the frame while covering the figure, arranging the sword as in the one above, and setting the light that it might fall in the right direction, he recalled them; when he put the question, ‘Is the resemblance strong?’

He looked so much like a man of bygone times that neither of them replied, but remained curiously gazing at him. His modern and comparatively sallow complexion, as seen through the open visor, lent an ethereal ideality to his appearance which the time-stained countenance of the original warrior totally lacked.

At last Paula spoke, so stilly that she seemed a statue enunciating: ‘Are the verses known that he wrote with his blood?’

‘O yes, they have been carefully preserved.’ Captain De Stancy, with true wooer’s instinct, had committed some of them to memory that morning from the printed copy to be found in every well-ordered library. ‘I fear I don’t remember them all,’ he said, ‘but they begin in this way:–

“From one that dyeth in his discontent, Dear Faire, receive this greeting to thee sent; And still as oft as it is read by thee, Then with some deep sad sigh remember mee!

O ’twas my fortune’s error to vow dutie, To one that bears defiance in her beautie! Sweete poyson, pretious wooe, infectious jewell– Such is a Ladie that is faire and cruell.

How well could I with ayre, camelion-like, Live happie, and still gazeing on thy cheeke, In which, forsaken man, methink I see How goodlie love doth threaten cares to mee.

Why dost thou frowne thus on a kneelinge soule, Whose faults in love thou may’st as well controule?– In love–but O, that word; that word I feare Is hateful still both to thy hart and eare!

. . . . .

Ladie, in breefe, my fate doth now intend The period of my daies to have an end: Waste not on me thy pittie, pretious Faire: Rest you in much content; I, in despaire!”‘

A solemn silence followed the close of the recital, which De Stancy improved by turning the point of the sword to his breast, resting the pommel upon the floor, and saying:–

‘After writing that we may picture him turning this same sword in this same way, and falling on it thus.’ He inclined his body forward as he spoke.

‘Don’t, Captain De Stancy, please don’t!’ cried Paula involuntarily.

‘No, don’t show us any further, William!’ said his sister. ‘It is too tragic.’

De Stancy put away the sword, himself rather excited–not, however, by his own recital, but by the direct gaze of Paula at him.

This Protean quality of De Stancy’s, by means of which he could assume the shape and situation of almost any ancestor at will, had impressed her, and he perceived it with a throb of fervour. But it had done no more than impress her; for though in delivering the lines he had so fixed his look upon her as to suggest, to any maiden practised in the game of the eyes, a present significance in the words, the idea of any such arriere-pensee had by no means commended itself to her soul.

At this time a messenger from Markton barracks arrived at the castle and wished to speak to Captain De Stancy in the hall. Begging the two ladies to excuse him for a moment, he went out.

While De Stancy was talking in the twilight to the messenger at one end of the apartment, some other arrival was shown in by the side door, and in making his way after the conference across the hall to the room he had previously quitted, De Stancy encountered the new-comer. There was just enough light to reveal the countenance to be Dare’s; he bore a portfolio under his arm, and had begun to wear a moustache, in case the chief constable should meet him anywhere in his rambles, and be struck by his resemblance to the man in the studio.

‘What the devil are you doing here?’ said Captain De Stancy, in tones he had never used before to the young man.

Dare started back in surprise, and naturally so. De Stancy, having adopted a new system of living, and relinquished the meagre diet and enervating waters of his past years, was rapidly recovering tone. His voice was firmer, his cheeks were less pallid; and above all he was authoritative towards his present companion, whose ingenuity in vamping up a being for his ambitious experiments seemed about to be rewarded, like Frankenstein’s, by his discomfiture at the hands of his own creature.

‘What the devil are you doing here, I say?’ repeated De Stancy.

‘You can talk to me like that, after my working so hard to get you on in life, and make a rising man of you!’ expostulated Dare, as one who felt himself no longer the leader in this enterprise.

‘But,’ said the captain less harshly, ‘if you let them discover any relations between us here, you will ruin the fairest prospects man ever had!’

‘O, I like that, captain–when you owe all of it to me!’

‘That’s too cool, Will.’

‘No; what I say is true. However, let that go. So now you are here on a call; but how are you going to get here often enough to win her before the other man comes back? If you don’t see her every day–twice, three times a day–you will not capture her in the time.’

‘I must think of that,’ said De Stancy.

‘There is only one way of being constantly here: you must come to copy the pictures or furniture, something in the way he did.’

‘I’ll think of it,’ muttered De Stancy hastily, as he heard the voices of the ladies, whom he hastened to join as they were appearing at the other end of the room. His countenance was gloomy as he recrossed the hall, for Dare’s words on the shortness of his opportunities had impressed him. Almost at once he uttered a hope to Paula that he might have further chance of studying, and if possible of copying, some of the ancestral faces with which the building abounded.

Meanwhile Dare had come forward with his portfolio, which proved to be full of photographs. While Paula and Charlotte were examining them he said to De Stancy, as a stranger: ‘Excuse my interruption, sir, but if you should think of copying any of the portraits, as you were stating just now to the ladies, my patent photographic process is at your service, and is, I believe, the only one which would be effectual in the dim indoor lights.’

‘It is just what I was thinking of,’ said De Stancy, now so far cooled down from his irritation as to be quite ready to accept Dare’s adroitly suggested scheme.

On application to Paula she immediately gave De Stancy permission to photograph to any extent, and told Dare he might bring his instruments as soon as Captain De Stancy required them.

‘Don’t stare at her in such a brazen way!’ whispered the latter to the young man, when Paula had withdrawn a few steps. ‘Say, “I shall highly value the privilege of assisting Captain De Stancy in such a work.”‘

Dare obeyed, and before leaving De Stancy arranged to begin performing on his venerated forefathers the next morning, the youth so accidentally engaged agreeing to be there at the same time to assist in the technical operations.

III.

As he had promised, De Stancy made use the next day of the coveted permission that had been brought about by the ingenious Dare. Dare’s timely suggestion of tendering assistance had the practical result of relieving the other of all necessity for occupying his time with the proceeding, further than to bestow a perfunctory superintendence now and then, to give a colour to his regular presence in the fortress, the actual work of taking copies being carried on by the younger man.

The weather was frequently wet during these operations, and Paula, Miss De Stancy, and her brother, were often in the house whole mornings together. By constant urging and coaxing the latter would induce his gentle sister, much against her conscience, to leave him opportunities for speaking to Paula alone. It was mostly before some print or painting that these conversations occurred, while De Stancy was ostensibly occupied with its merits, or in giving directions to his photographer how to proceed. As soon as the dialogue began, the latter would withdraw out of earshot, leaving Paula to imagine him the most deferential young artist in the world.

‘You will soon possess duplicates of the whole gallery,’ she said on one of these occasions, examining some curled sheets which Dare had printed off from the negatives.

‘No,’ said the soldier. ‘I shall not have patience to go on. I get ill-humoured and indifferent, and then leave off.’

‘Why ill-humoured?’

‘I scarcely know–more than that I acquire a general sense of my own family’s want of merit through seeing how meritorious the people are around me. I see them happy and thriving without any necessity for me at all; and then I regard these canvas grandfathers and grandmothers, and ask, “Why was a line so antiquated and out of date prolonged till now?”‘

She chid him good-naturedly for such views. ‘They will do you an injury,’ she declared. ‘Do spare yourself, Captain De Stancy!’

De Stancy shook his head as he turned the painting before him a little further to the light.

‘But, do you know,’ said Paula, ‘that notion of yours of being a family out of date is delightful to some people. I talk to Charlotte about it often. I am never weary of examining those canopied effigies in the church, and almost wish they were those of my relations.’

‘I will try to see things in the same light for your sake,’ said De Stancy fervently.

‘Not for my sake; for your own was what I meant, of course,’ she replied with a repressive air.

Captain De Stancy bowed.

‘What are you going to do with your photographs when you have them?’ she asked, as if still anxious to obliterate the previous sentimental lapse.

‘I shall put them into a large album, and carry them with me in my campaigns; and may I ask, now I have an opportunity, that you would extend your permission to copy a little further, and let me photograph one other painting that hangs in the castle, to fittingly complete my set?’

‘Which?’

‘That half-length of a lady which hangs in the morning-room. I remember seeing it in the Academy last year.’

Paula involuntarily closed herself up. The picture was her own portrait. ‘It does not belong to your series,’ she said somewhat coldly.

De Stancy’s secret thought was, I hope from my soul it will belong some day! He answered with mildness: ‘There is a sort of connection–you are my sister’s friend.’

Paula assented.

‘And hence, might not your friend’s brother photograph your picture?’

Paula demurred.

A gentle sigh rose from the bosom of De Stancy. ‘What is to become of me?’ he said, with a light distressed laugh. ‘I am always inconsiderate and inclined to ask too much. Forgive me! What was in my mind when I asked I dare not say.’

‘I quite understand your interest in your family pictures–and all of it,’ she remarked more gently, willing not to hurt the sensitive feelings of a man so full of romance.

‘And in that ONE!’ he said, looking devotedly at her. ‘If I had only been fortunate enough to include it with the rest, my album would indeed have been a treasure to pore over by the bivouac fire!’

‘O, Captain De Stancy, this is provoking perseverance!’ cried Paula, laughing half crossly. ‘I expected that after expressing my decision so plainly the first time I should not have been further urged upon the subject.’ Saying which she turned and moved decisively away.

It had not been a productive meeting, thus far. ‘One word!’ said De Stancy, following and almost clasping her hand. ‘I have given offence, I know: but do let it all fall on my own head–don’t tell my sister of my misbehaviour! She loves you deeply, and it would wound her to the heart.’

‘You deserve to be told upon,’ said Paula as she withdrew, with just enough playfulness to show that her anger was not too serious.

Charlotte looked at Paula uneasily when the latter joined her in the drawing-room. She wanted to say, ‘What is the matter?’ but guessing that her brother had something to do with it, forbore to speak at first. She could not contain her anxiety long. ‘Were you talking with my brother?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ returned Paula, with reservation. However, she soon added, ‘He not only wants to photograph his ancestors, but MY portrait too. They are a dreadfully encroaching sex, and perhaps being in the army makes them worse!’

‘I’ll give him a hint, and tell him to be careful.’

‘Don’t say I have definitely complained of him; it is not worth while to do that; the matter is too trifling for repetition. Upon the whole, Charlotte, I would rather you said nothing at all.’

De Stancy’s hobby of photographing his ancestors seemed to become a perfect mania with him. Almost every morning discovered him in the larger apartments of the castle, taking down and rehanging the dilapidated pictures, with the assistance of the indispensable Dare; his fingers stained black with dust, and his face expressing a busy attention to the work in hand, though always reserving a look askance for the presence of Paula.

Though there was something of subterfuge, there was no deep and double subterfuge in all this. De Stancy took no particular interest in his ancestral portraits; but he was enamoured of Paula to weakness. Perhaps the composition of his love would hardly bear looking into, but it was recklessly frank and not quite mercenary. His photographic scheme was nothing worse than a lover’s not too scrupulous contrivance. After the refusal of his request to copy her picture he fumed and fretted at the prospect of Somerset’s return before any impression had been made on her heart by himself; he swore at Dare, and asked him hotly why he had dragged him into such a hopeless dilemma as this.

‘Hopeless? Somerset must still be kept away, so that it is not hopeless. I will consider how to prolong his stay.’

Thereupon Dare considered.

The time was coming–had indeed come–when it was necessary for Paula to make up her mind about her architect, if she meant to begin building in the spring. The two sets of plans, Somerset’s and Havill’s, were hanging on the walls of the room that had been used by Somerset as his studio, and were accessible by anybody. Dare took occasion to go and study both sets, with a view to finding a flaw in Somerset’s which might have been passed over unnoticed by the committee of architects, owing to their absence from the actual site. But not a blunder could he find.

He next went to Havill; and here he was met by an amazing state of affairs. Havill’s creditors, at last suspecting something mythical in Havill’s assurance that the grand commission was his, had lost all patience; his house was turned upside-down, and a poster gleamed on the front wall, stating that the excellent modern household furniture was to be sold by auction on Friday next. Troubles had apparently come in battalions, for Dare was informed by a bystander that Havill’s wife was seriously ill also.

Without staying for a moment to enter his friend’s house, back went Mr. Dare to the castle, and told Captain De Stancy of the architect’s desperate circumstances, begging him to convey the news in some way to Miss Power. De Stancy promised to make representations in the proper quarter without perceiving that he was doing the best possible deed for himself thereby.

He told Paula of Havill’s misfortunes in the presence of his sister, who turned pale. She discerned how this misfortune would bear upon the undecided competition.

‘Poor man,’ murmured Paula. ‘He was my father’s architect, and somehow expected, though I did not promise it, the work of rebuilding the castle.’

Then De Stancy saw Dare’s aim in sending him to Miss Power with the news; and, seeing it, concurred: Somerset was his rival, and all was fair. ‘And is he not to have the work of the castle after expecting it?’ he asked.

Paula was lost in reflection. ‘The other architect’s design and Mr. Havill’s are exactly equal in merit, and we cannot decide how to give it to either,’ explained Charlotte.

‘That is our difficulty,’ Paula murmured. ‘A bankrupt, and his wife ill–dear me! I wonder what’s the cause.’

‘He has borrowed on the expectation of having to execute the castle works, and now he is unable to meet his liabilities.’

‘It is very sad,’ said Paula.

‘Let me suggest a remedy for this dead-lock,’ said De Stancy.

‘Do,’ said Paula.

‘Do the work of building in two halves or sections. Give Havill the first half, since he is in need; when that is finished the second half can be given to your London architect. If, as I understand, the plans are identical, except in ornamental details, there will be no difficulty about it at all.’

Paula sighed–just a little one; and yet the suggestion seemed to satisfy her by its reasonableness. She turned sad, wayward, but was impressed by De Stancy’s manner and words. She appeared indeed to have a smouldering desire to please him. In the afternoon she said to Charlotte, ‘I mean to do as your brother says.’

A note was despatched to Havill that very day, and in an hour the crestfallen architect presented himself at the castle. Paula instantly gave him audience, commiserated him, and commissioned him to carry out a first section of the buildings, comprising work to the extent of about twenty thousand pounds expenditure; and then, with a prematureness quite amazing among architects’ clients, she handed him over a cheque for five hundred pounds on account.

When he had gone, Paula’s bearing showed some sign of being disquieted at what she had done; but she covered her mood under a cloak of saucy serenity. Perhaps a tender remembrance of a certain thunderstorm in the foregoing August when she stood with Somerset in the arbour, and did not own that she loved him, was pressing on her memory and bewildering her. She had not seen quite clearly, in adopting De Stancy’s suggestion, that Somerset would now have no professional reason for being at the castle for the next twelve months.

But the captain had, and when Havill entered the castle he rejoiced with great joy. Dare, too, rejoiced in his cold way, and went on with his photography, saying, ‘The game progresses, captain.’

‘Game? Call it Divine Comedy, rather!’ said the soldier exultingly.

‘He is practically banished for a year or more. What can’t you do in a year, captain!’

Havill, in the meantime, having respectfully withdrawn from the presence of Paula, passed by Dare and De Stancy in the gallery as he had done in entering. He spoke a few words to Dare, who congratulated him. While they were talking somebody was heard in the hall, inquiring hastily for Mr. Havill.

‘What shall I tell him?’ demanded the porter.

‘His wife is dead,’ said the messenger.

Havill overheard the words, and hastened away.

‘An unlucky man!’ said Dare.

‘That, happily for us, will not affect his installation here,’ said De Stancy. ‘Now hold your tongue and keep at a distance. She may come this way.’

Surely enough in a few minutes she came. De Stancy, to make conversation, told her of the new misfortune which had just befallen Mr. Havill.

Paula was very sorry to hear it, and remarked that it gave her great satisfaction to have appointed him as architect of the first wing before he learnt the bad news. ‘I owe you best thanks, Captain De Stancy, for showing me such an expedient.’

‘Do I really deserve thanks?’ asked De Stancy. ‘I wish I deserved a reward; but I must bear in mind the fable of the priest and the jester.’

‘I never heard it.’

‘The jester implored the priest for alms, but the smallest sum was refused, though the holy man readily agreed to give him his blessing. Query, its value?’

‘How does it apply?’

‘You give me unlimited thanks, but deny me the tiniest substantial trifle I desire.’

‘What persistence!’ exclaimed Paula, colouring. ‘Very well, if you WILL photograph my picture you must. It is really not worthy further pleading. Take it when you like.’

When Paula was alone she seemed vexed with herself for having given way; and rising from her seat she went quietly to the door of the room containing the picture, intending to lock it up till further consideration, whatever he might think of her. But on casting her eyes round the apartment the painting was gone. The captain, wisely taking the current when it served, already had it in the gallery, where he was to be seen bending attentively over it, arranging the lights and directing Dare with the instruments. On leaving he thanked her, and said that he had obtained a splendid copy. Would she look at it?

Paula was severe and icy. ‘Thank you–I don’t wish to see it,’ she said.

De Stancy bowed and departed in a glow of triumph; satisfied, notwithstanding her frigidity, that he had compassed his immediate aim, which was that she might not be able to dismiss from her thoughts him and his persevering desire for the shadow of her face during the next four-and-twenty-hours. And his confidence was well founded: she could not.

‘I fear this Divine Comedy will be slow business for us, captain,’ said Dare, who had heard her cold words.

‘O no!’ said De Stancy, flushing a little: he had not been perceiving that the lad had the measure of his mind so entirely as to gauge his position at any moment. But he would show no shamefacedness. ‘Even if it is, my boy,’ he answered, ‘there’s plenty of time before the other can come.’

At that hour and minute of De Stancy’s remark ‘the other,’ to look at him, seemed indeed securely shelved. He was sitting lonely in his chambers far away, wondering why she did not write, and yet hoping to hear–wondering if it had all been but a short-lived strain of tenderness. He knew as well as if it had been stated in words that her serious acceptance of him as a suitor would be her acceptance of him as an architect– that her schemes in love would be expressed in terms of art; and conversely that her refusal of him as a lover would be neatly effected by her choosing Havill’s plans for the castle, and returning his own with thanks. The position was so clear: he was so well walled in by circumstances that he was absolutely helpless.

To wait for the line that would not come–the letter saying that, as she had desired, his was the design that pleased her- -was still the only thing to do. The (to Somerset) surprising accident that the committee of architects should have pronounced the designs absolutely equal in point of merit, and thus have caused the final choice to revert after all to Paula, had been a joyous thing to him when he first heard of it, full of confidence in her favour. But the fact of her having again become the arbitrator, though it had made acceptance of his plans all the more probable, made refusal of them, should it happen, all the more crushing. He could have conceived himself favoured by Paula as her lover, even had the committee decided in favour of Havill as her architect. But not to be chosen as architect now was to be rejected in both kinds.

IV.

It was the Sunday following the funeral of Mrs. Havill, news of whose death had been so unexpectedly brought to her husband at the moment of his exit from Stancy Castle. The minister, as was his custom, improved the occasion by a couple of sermons on the uncertainty of life. One was preached in the morning in the old chapel of Markton; the second at evening service in the rural chapel near Stancy Castle, built by Paula’s father, which bore to the first somewhat the relation of an episcopal chapel-of-ease to the mother church.

The unscreened lights blazed through the plate-glass windows of the smaller building and outshone the steely stars of the early night, just as they had done when Somerset was attracted by their glare four months before. The fervid minister’s rhetoric equalled its force on that more romantic occasion: but Paula was not there. She was not a frequent attendant now at her father’s votive building. The mysterious tank, whose dark waters had so repelled her at the last moment, was boarded over: a table stood on its centre, with an open quarto Bible upon it, behind which Havill, in a new suit of black, sat in a large chair. Havill held the office of deacon: and he had mechanically taken the deacon’s seat as usual to-night, in the face of the congregation, and under the nose of Mr. Woodwell.

Mr. Woodwell was always glad of an opportunity. He was gifted with a burning natural eloquence, which, though perhaps a little too freely employed in exciting the ‘Wertherism of the uncultivated,’ had in it genuine power. He was a master of that oratory which no limitation of knowledge can repress, and which no training can impart. The neighbouring rector could eclipse Woodwell’s scholarship, and the freethinker at the corner shop in Markton could demolish his logic; but the Baptist could do in five minutes what neither of these had done in a lifetime; he could move some of the hardest of men to tears.

Thus it happened that, when the sermon was fairly under way, Havill began to feel himself in a trying position. It was not that he had bestowed much affection upon his deceased wife, irreproachable woman as she had been; but the suddenness of her death had shaken his nerves, and Mr. Woodwell’s address on the uncertainty of life involved considerations of conduct on earth that bore with singular directness upon Havill’s unprincipled manoeuvre for victory in the castle competition. He wished he had not been so inadvertent as to take his customary chair in the chapel. People who saw Havill’s agitation did not know that it was most largely owing to his sense of the fraud which had been practised on the unoffending Somerset; and when, unable longer to endure the torture of Woodwell’s words, he rose from his place and went into the chapel vestry, the preacher little thought that remorse for a contemptibly unfair act, rather than grief for a dead wife, was the cause of the architect’s withdrawal.

When Havill got into the open air his morbid excitement calmed down, but a sickening self-abhorrence for the proceeding instigated by Dare did not abate. To appropriate another man’s design was no more nor less than to embezzle his money or steal his goods. The intense reaction from his conduct of the past two or three months did not leave him when he reached his own house and observed where the handbills of the countermanded sale had been torn down, as the result of the payment made in advance by Paula of money which should really have been Somerset’s.

The mood went on intensifying when he was in bed. He lay awake till the clock reached those still, small, ghastly hours when the vital fires burn at their lowest in the human frame, and death seizes more of his victims than in any other of the twenty-four. Havill could bear it no longer; he got a light, went down into his office and wrote the note subjoined.

‘MADAM,–The recent death of my wife necessitates a considerable change in my professional arrangements and plans with regard to the future. One of the chief results of the change is, I regret to state, that I no longer find myself in a position to carry out the enlargement of the castle which you had so generously entrusted to my hands.

‘I beg leave therefore to resign all further connection with the same, and to express, if you will allow me, a hope that the commission may be placed in the hands of the other competitor. Herewith is returned a cheque for one-half of the sum so kindly advanced in anticipation of the commission I should receive; the other half, with which I had cleared off my immediate embarrassments before perceiving the necessity for this course, shall be returned to you as soon as some payments from other clients drop in.–I beg to remain, Madam, your obedient servant, JAMES HAVILL.’

Havill would not trust himself till the morning to post this letter. He sealed it up, went out with it into the street, and walked through the sleeping town to the post-office. At the mouth of the box he held the letter long. By dropping it, he was dropping at least two thousand five hundred pounds which, however obtained, were now securely his. It was a great deal to let go; and there he stood till another wave of conscience bore in upon his soul the absolute nature of the theft, and made him shudder. The footsteps of a solitary policeman could be heard nearing him along the deserted street; hesitation ended, and he let the letter go.

When he awoke in the morning he thought over the circumstances by the cheerful light of a low eastern sun. The horrors of the situation seemed much less formidable; yet it cannot be said that he actually regretted his act. Later on he walked out, with the strange sense of being a man who, from one having a large professional undertaking in hand, had, by his own act, suddenly reduced himself to an unoccupied nondescript. From the upper end of the town he saw in the distance the grand grey towers of Stancy Castle looming over the leafless trees; he felt stupefied at what he had done, and said to himself with bitter discontent: ‘Well, well, what is more contemptible than a half-hearted rogue!’

That morning the post-bag had been brought to Paula and Mrs. Goodman in the usual way, and Miss Power read the letter. His resignation was a surprise; the question whether he would or would not repay the money was passed over; the necessity of installing Somerset after all as sole architect was an agitation, or emotion, the precise nature of which it is impossible to accurately define.

However, she went about the house after breakfast with very much the manner of one who had had a weight removed either from her heart or from her conscience; moreover, her face was a little flushed when, in passing by Somerset’s late studio, she saw the plans bearing his motto, and knew that his and not Havill’s would be the presiding presence in the coming architectural turmoil. She went on further, and called to Charlotte, who was now regularly sleeping in the castle, to accompany her, and together they ascended to the telegraph- room in the donjon tower.

‘Whom are you going to telegraph to?’ said Miss De Stancy when they stood by the instrument.

‘My architect.’

‘O–Mr. Havill.’

‘Mr. Somerset.’

Miss De Stancy had schooled her emotions on that side cruelly well, and she asked calmly, ‘What, have you chosen him after all?’

‘There is no choice in it–read that,’ said Paula, handing Havill’s letter, as if she felt that Providence had stepped in to shape ends that she was too undecided or unpractised to shape for herself.

‘It is very strange,’ murmured Charlotte; while Paula applied herself to the machine and despatched the words:–

‘Miss Power, Stancy Castle, to G. Somerset, Esq., F.S.A., F.R.I.B.A., Queen Anne’s Chambers, St. James’s.

‘Your design is accepted in its entirety. It will be necessary to begin soon. I shall wish to see and consult you on the matter about the 10th instant.’

When the message was fairly gone out of the window Paula seemed still further to expand. The strange spell cast over her by something or other–probably the presence of De Stancy, and the weird romanticism of his manner towards her, which was as if the historic past had touched her with a yet living hand–in a great measure became dissipated, leaving her the arch and serene maiden that she had been before.

About this time Captain De Stancy and his Achates were approaching the castle, and had arrived about fifty paces from the spot at which it was Dare’s custom to drop behind his companion, in order that their appearance at the lodge should be that of master and man.

Dare was saying, as he had said before: ‘I can’t help fancying, captain, that your approach to this castle and its mistress is by a very tedious system. Your trenches, zigzags, counterscarps, and ravelins may be all very well, and a very sure system of attack in the long run; but upon my soul they are almost as slow in maturing as those of Uncle Toby himself. For my part I should be inclined to try an assault.’

‘Don’t pretend to give advice, Willy, on matters beyond your years.’

‘I only meant it for your good, and your proper advancement in the world,’ said Dare in wounded tones.

‘Different characters, different systems,’ returned the soldier. ‘This lady is of a reticent, independent, complicated disposition, and any sudden proceeding would put her on her mettle. You don’t dream what my impatience is, my boy. It is a thing transcending your utmost conceptions! But I proceed slowly; I know better than to do otherwise. Thank God there is plenty of time. As long as there is no risk of Somerset’s return my situation is sure.’

‘And professional etiquette will prevent him coming yet. Havill and he will change like the men in a sentry-box; when Havill walks out, he’ll walk in, and not a moment before.’

‘That will not be till eighteen months have passed. And as the Jesuit said, “Time and I against any two.” . . . Now drop to the rear,’ added Captain De Stancy authoritatively. And they passed under the walls of the castle.

The grave fronts and bastions were wrapped in silence; so much so, that, standing awhile in the inner ward, they could hear through an open window a faintly clicking sound from within.

‘She’s at the telegraph,’ said Dare, throwing forward his voice softly to the captain. ‘What can that be for so early? That wire is a nuisance, to my mind; such constant intercourse with the outer world is bad for our romance.’

The speaker entered to arrange his photographic apparatus, of which, in truth, he was getting weary; and De Stancy smoked on the terrace till Dare should be ready. While he waited his sister looked out upon him from an upper casement, having caught sight of him as she came from Paula in the telegraph- room.

‘Well, Lottie, what news this morning?’ he said gaily.

‘Nothing of importance. We are quite well.’ . . . . She added with hesitation, ‘There is one piece of news; Mr. Havill–but perhaps you have heard it in Markton?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Mr. Havill has resigned his appointment as architect to the castle.’

‘What?–who has it, then?’

‘Mr. Somerset.’

‘Appointed?’

‘Yes–by telegraph.’

‘When is he coming?’ said De Stancy in consternation.

‘About the tenth, we think.’

Charlotte was concerned to see her brother’s face, and withdrew from the window that he might not question her further. De Stancy went into the hall, and on to the gallery, where Dare was standing as still as a caryatid.

‘I have heard every word,’ said Dare.

‘Well, what does it mean? Has that fool Havill done it on purpose to annoy me? What conceivable reason can the man have for throwing up an appointment he has worked so hard for, at the moment he has got it, and in the time of his greatest need?’

Dare guessed, for he had seen a little way into Havill’s soul during the brief period of their confederacy. But he was very far from saying what he guessed. Yet he unconsciously revealed by other words the nocturnal shades in his character which had made that confederacy possible.

‘Somerset coming after all!’ he replied. ‘By God! that little six-barrelled friend of mine, and a good resolution, and he would never arrive!’

‘What!’ said Captain De Stancy, paling with horror as he gathered the other’s sinister meaning.

Dare instantly recollected himself. ‘One is tempted to say anything at such a moment,’ he replied hastily.

‘Since he is to come, let him come, for me,’ continued De Stancy, with reactionary distinctness, and still gazing gravely into the young man’s face. ‘The battle shall be fairly fought out. Fair play, even to a rival–remember that, boy. . . . Why are you here?–unnaturally concerning yourself with the passions of a man of my age, as if you were the parent, and I the son? Would to heaven, Willy, you had done as I wished you to do, and led the life of a steady, thoughtful young man! Instead of meddling here, you should now have been in some studio, college, or professional man’s chambers, engaged in a useful pursuit which might have made one proud to own you. But you were so precocious and headstrong; and this is what you have come to: you promise to be worthless!’

‘I think I shall go to my lodgings to-day instead of staying here over these pictures,’ said Dare, after a silence during which Captain De Stancy endeavoured to calm himself. ‘I was going to tell you that my dinner to-day will unfortunately be one of herbs, for want of the needful. I have come to my last stiver.–You dine at the mess, I suppose, captain?’

De Stancy had walked away; but Dare knew that he played a pretty sure card in that speech. De Stancy’s heart could not withstand the suggested contrast between a lonely meal of bread-and-cheese and a well-ordered dinner amid cheerful companions. ‘Here,’ he said, emptying his pocket and returning to the lad’s side. ‘Take this, and order yourself a good meal. You keep me as poor as a crow. There shall be more to-morrow.’

The peculiarly bifold nature of Captain De Stancy, as shown in his conduct at different times, was something rare in life, and perhaps happily so. That mechanical admixture of black and white qualities without coalescence, on which the theory of men’s characters was based by moral analysis before the rise of modern ethical schools, fictitious as it was in general application, would have almost hit off the truth as regards Captain De Stancy. Removed to some half-known century, his deeds would have won a picturesqueness of light and shade that might have made him a fascinating subject for some gallery of illustrious historical personages. It was this tendency to moral chequer-work which accounted for his varied bearings towards Dare.

Dare withdrew to take his departure. When he had gone a few steps, despondent, he suddenly turned, and ran back with some excitement.

‘Captain–he’s coming on the tenth, don’t they say? Well, four days before the tenth comes the sixth. Have you forgotten what’s fixed for the sixth?’

‘I had quite forgotten!’

‘That day will be worth three months of quiet attentions: with luck, skill, and a bold heart, what mayn’t you do?’

Captain De Stancy’s face softened with satisfaction.

‘There is something in that; the game is not up after all. The sixth–it had gone clean out of my head, by gad!’

V.

The cheering message from Paula to Somerset sped through the loophole of Stancy Castle keep, over the trees, along the railway, under bridges, across four counties–from extreme antiquity of environment to sheer modernism–and finally landed itself on a table in Somerset’s chambers in the midst of a cloud of fog. He read it and, in the moment of reaction from the depression of his past days, clapped his hands like a child.

Then he considered the date at which she wanted to see him. Had she so worded her despatch he would have gone that very day; but there was nothing to complain of in her giving him a week’s notice. Pure maiden modesty might have checked her indulgence in a too ardent recall.

Time, however, dragged somewhat heavily along in the interim, and on the second day he thought he would call on his father and tell him of his success in obtaining the appointment.

The elder Mr. Somerset lived in a detached house in the north- west part of fashionable London; and ascending the chief staircase the young man branched off from the first landing and entered his father’s painting-room. It was an hour when he was pretty sure of finding the well-known painter at work, and on lifting the tapestry he was not disappointed, Mr. Somerset being busily engaged with his back towards the door.

Art and vitiated nature were struggling like wrestlers in that apartment, and art was getting the worst of it. The overpowering gloom pervading the clammy air, rendered still more intense by the height of the window from the floor, reduced all the pictures that were standing around to the wizened feebleness of corpses on end. The shadowy parts of the room behind the different easels were veiled in a brown vapour, precluding all estimate of the extent of the studio, and only subdued in the foreground by the ruddy glare from an open stove of Dutch tiles. Somerset’s footsteps had been so noiseless over the carpeting of the stairs and landing, that his father was unaware of his presence; he continued at his work as before, which he performed by the help of a complicated apparatus of lamps, candles, and reflectors, so arranged as to eke out the miserable daylight, to a power apparently sufficient for the neutral touches on which he was at that moment engaged.

The first thought of an unsophisticated stranger on entering that room could only be the amazed inquiry why a professor of the art of colour, which beyond all other arts requires pure daylight for its exercise, should fix himself on the single square league in habitable Europe to which light is denied at noonday for weeks in succession.

‘O! it’s you, George, is it?’ said the Academician, turning from the lamps, which shone over his bald crown at such a slant as to reveal every cranial irregularity. ‘How are you this morning? Still a dead silence about your grand castle competition?’

Somerset told the news. His father duly congratulated him, and added genially, ‘It is well to be you, George. One large commission to attend to, and nothing to distract you from it. I am bothered by having a dozen irons in the fire at once. And people are so unreasonable.–Only this morning, among other things, when you got your order to go on with your single study, I received a letter from a woman, an old friend whom I can scarcely refuse, begging me as a great favour to design her a set of theatrical costumes, in which she and her friends can perform for some charity. It would occupy me a good week to go into the subject and do the thing properly. Such are the sort of letters I get. I wish, George, you could knock out something for her before you leave town. It is positively impossible for me to do it with all this work in hand, and these eternal fogs to contend against.’

‘I fear costumes are rather out of my line,’ said the son. ‘However, I’ll do what I can. What period and country are they to represent?’

His father didn’t know. He had never looked at the play of late years. It was ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ ‘You had better read it for yourself,’ he said, ‘and do the best you can.’

During the morning Somerset junior found time to refresh his memory of the play, and afterwards went and hunted up materials for designs to suit the same, which occupied his spare hours for the next three days. As these occupations made no great demands upon his reasoning faculties he mostly found his mind wandering off to imaginary scenes at Stancy Castle: particularly did he dwell at this time upon Paula’s lively interest in the history, relics, tombs, architecture,– nay, the very Christian names of the De Stancy line, and her ‘artistic’ preference for Charlotte’s ancestors instead of her own. Yet what more natural than that a clever meditative girl, encased in the feudal lumber of that family, should imbibe at least an antiquarian interest in it? Human nature at bottom is romantic rather than ascetic, and the local habitation which accident had provided for Paula was perhaps acting as a solvent of the hard, morbidly introspective views thrust upon her in early life.

Somerset wondered if his own possession of a substantial genealogy like Captain De Stancy’s would have had any appreciable effect upon her regard for him. His suggestion to Paula of her belonging to a worthy strain of engineers had been based on his content with his own intellectual line of descent through Pheidias, Ictinus and Callicrates, Chersiphron, Vitruvius, Wilars of Cambray, William of Wykeham, and the rest of that long and illustrious roll; but Miss Power’s marked preference for an animal pedigree led him to muse on what he could show for himself in that kind.

These thoughts so far occupied him that when he took the sketches to his father, on the morning of the fifth, he was led to ask: ‘Has any one ever sifted out our family pedigree?’

‘Family pedigree?’

‘Yes. Have we any pedigree worthy to be compared with that of professedly old families? I never remember hearing of any ancestor further back than my great-grandfather.’

Somerset the elder reflected and said that he believed there was a genealogical tree about the house somewhere, reaching back to a very respectable distance. ‘Not that I ever took much interest in it,’ he continued, without looking up from his canvas; ‘but your great uncle John was a man with a taste for those subjects, and he drew up such a sheet: he made several copies on parchment, and gave one to each of his brothers and sisters. The one he gave to my father is still in my possession, I think.’

Somerset said that he should like to see it; but half-an- hour’s search about the house failed to discover the document; and the Academician then remembered that it was in an iron box at his banker’s. He had used it as a wrapper for some title- deeds and other valuable writings which were deposited there for safety. ‘Why do you want it?’ he inquired.

The young man confessed his whim to know if his own antiquity would bear comparison with that of another person, whose name he did not mention; whereupon his father gave him a key that would fit the said chest, if he meant to pursue the subject further. Somerset, however, did nothing in the matter that day, but the next morning, having to call at the bank on other business, he remembered his new fancy.

It was about eleven o’clock. The fog, though not so brown as it had been on previous days, was still dense enough to necessitate lights in the shops and offices. When Somerset had finished his business in the outer office of the bank he went to the manager’s room. The hour being somewhat early the only persons present in that sanctuary of balances, besides the manager who welcomed him, were two gentlemen, apparently lawyers, who sat talking earnestly over a box of papers. The manager, on learning what Somerset wanted, unlocked a door from which a flight of stone steps led to the vaults, and sent down a clerk and a porter for the safe.

Before, however, they had descended far a gentle tap came to the door, and in response to an invitation to enter a lady appeared, wrapped up in furs to her very nose.

The manager seemed to recognize her, for he went across the room in a moment, and set her a chair at the middle table, replying to some observation of hers with the words, ‘O yes, certainly,’ in a deferential tone.

‘I should like it brought up at once,’ said the lady.

Somerset, who had seated himself at a table in a somewhat obscure corner, screened by the lawyers, started at the words. The voice was Miss Power’s, and so plainly enough was the figure as soon as he examined it. Her back was towards him, and either because the room was only lighted in two places, or because she was absorbed in her own concerns, she seemed to be unconscious of any one’s presence on the scene except the banker and herself. The former called back the clerk, and two other porters having been summoned they disappeared to get whatever she required.

Somerset, somewhat excited, sat wondering what could have brought Paula to London at this juncture, and was in some doubt if the occasion were a suitable one for revealing himself, her errand to her banker being possibly of a very private nature. Nothing helped him to a decision. Paula never once turned her head, and the progress of time was marked only by the murmurs of the two lawyers, and the ceaseless clash of gold and rattle of scales from the outer room, where the busy heads of cashiers could be seen through the partition moving about under the globes of the gas-lamps.

Footsteps were heard upon the cellar-steps, and the three men previously sent below staggered from the doorway, bearing a huge safe which nearly broke them down. Somerset knew that his father’s box, or boxes, could boast of no such dimensions, and he was not surprised to see the chest deposited in front of Miss Power. When the immense accumulation of dust had been cleared off the lid, and the chest conveniently placed for her, Somerset was attended to, his modest box being brought up by one man unassisted, and without much expenditure of breath.

His interest in Paula was of so emotional a cast that his attention to his own errand was of the most perfunctory kind. She was close to a gas-standard, and the lawyers, whose seats had intervened, having finished their business and gone away, all her actions were visible to him. While he was opening his father’s box the manager assisted Paula to unseal and unlock hers, and he now saw her lift from it a morocco case, which she placed on the table before her, and unfastened. Out of it she took a dazzling object that fell like a cascade over her fingers. It was a necklace of diamonds and pearls, apparently of large size and many strands, though he was not near enough to see distinctly. When satisfied by her examination that she had got the right article she shut it into its case.

The manager closed the chest for her; and when it was again secured Paula arose, tossed the necklace into her hand-bag, bowed to the manager, and was about to bid him good morning. Thereupon he said with some hesitation: ‘Pardon one question, Miss Power. Do you intend to take those jewels far?’

‘Yes,’ she said simply, ‘to Stancy Castle.’

‘You are going straight there?’

‘I have one or two places to call at first.’

‘I would suggest that you carry them in some other way–by fastening them into the pocket of your dress, for instance.’

‘But I am going to hold the bag in my hand and never once let it go.’

The banker slightly shook his head. ‘Suppose your carriage gets overturned: you would let it go then.’

‘Perhaps so.’

‘Or if you saw a child under the wheels just as you were stepping in; or if you accidentally stumbled in getting out; or if there was a collision on the railway–you might let it go.’

‘Yes; I see I was too careless. I thank you.’

Paula removed the necklace from the bag, turned her back to the manager, and spent several minutes in placing her treasure in her bosom, pinning it and otherwise making it absolutely secure.

‘That’s it,’ said the grey-haired man of caution, with evident satisfaction. ‘There is not much danger now: you are not travelling alone?’

Paula replied that she was not alone, and went to the door. There was one moment during which Somerset might have conveniently made his presence known; but the juxtaposition of the bank-manager, and his own disarranged box of securities, embarrassed him: the moment slipped by, and she was gone.

In the meantime he had mechanically unearthed the pedigree, and, locking up his father’s chest, Somerset also took his departure at the heels of Paula. He walked along the misty street, so deeply musing as to be quite unconscious of the direction of his walk. What, he inquired of himself, could she want that necklace for so suddenly? He recollected a remark of Dare’s to the effect that her appearance on a particular occasion at Stancy Castle had been magnificent by reason of the jewels she wore; which proved that she had retained a sufficient quantity of those valuables at the castle for ordinary requirements. What exceptional occasion, then, was impending on which she wished to glorify herself beyond all previous experience? He could not guess. He was interrupted in these conjectures by a carriage nearly passing over his toes at a crossing in Bond Street: looking up he saw between the two windows of the vehicle the profile of a thickly mantled bosom, on which a camellia rose and fell. All the remainder part of the lady’s person was hidden; but he remembered that flower of convenient season as one which had figured in the bank parlour half-an-hour earlier to-day.

Somerset hastened after the carriage, and in a minute saw it stop opposite a jeweller’s shop. Out came Paula, and then another woman, in whom he recognized Mrs. Birch, one of the lady’s maids at Stancy Castle. The young man was at Paula’s side before she had crossed the pavement.

VI.

A quick arrested expression in her two sapphirine eyes, accompanied by a little, a very little, blush which loitered long, was all the outward disturbance that the sight of her lover caused. The habit of self-repression at any new emotional impact was instinctive with her always. Somerset could not say more than a word; he looked his intense solicitude, and Paula spoke.

She declared that this was an unexpected pleasure. Had he arranged to come on the tenth as she wished? How strange that they should meet thus!–and yet not strange–the world was so small.

Somerset said that he was coming on the very day she mentioned–that the appointment gave him infinite gratification, which was quite within the truth.

‘Come into this shop with me,’ said Paula, with good-humoured authoritativeness.

They entered the shop and talked on while she made a small purchase. But not a word did Paula say of her sudden errand to town.

‘I am having an exciting morning,’ she said. ‘I am going from here to catch the one-o’clock train to Markton.’

‘It is important that you get there this afternoon, I suppose?’

‘Yes. You know why?’

‘Not at all.’

‘The Hunt Ball. It was fixed for the sixth, and this is the sixth. I thought they might have asked you.’

‘No,’ said Somerset, a trifle gloomily. ‘No, I am not asked. But it is a great task for you–a long journey and a ball all in one day.’

‘Yes: Charlotte said that. But I don’t mind it.’

‘You are glad you are going. Are you glad?’ he said softly.

Her air confessed more than her words. ‘I am not so very glad that I am going to the Hunt Ball,’ she replied confidentially.

‘Thanks for that,’ said he.

She lifted her eyes to his for a moment. Her manner had suddenly become so nearly the counterpart of that in the tea- house that to suspect any deterioration of affection in her was no longer generous. It was only as if a thin layer of recent events had overlaid her memories of him, until his presence swept them away.

Somerset looked up, and finding the shopman to be still some way off, he added, ‘When will you assure me of something in return for what I assured you that evening in the rain?’

‘Not before you have built the castle. My aunt does not know about it yet, nor anybody.’

‘I ought to tell her.’

‘No, not yet. I don’t wish it.’

‘Then everything stands as usual?’

She lightly nodded.

‘That is, I may love you: but you still will not say you love me.’

She nodded again, and directing his attention to the advancing shopman, said, ‘Please not a word more.’

Soon after this, they left the jeweller’s, and parted, Paula driving straight off to the station and Somerset going on his way uncertainly happy. His re-impression after a few minutes was that a special journey to town to fetch that magnificent necklace which she had not once mentioned to him, but which was plainly to be the medium of some proud purpose with her this evening, was hardly in harmony with her assertions of indifference to the attractions of the Hunt Ball.

He got into a cab and drove to his club, where he lunched, and mopingly spent a great part of the afternoon in making calculations for the foundations of the castle works. Later in the afternoon he returned to his chambers, wishing that he could annihilate the three days remaining before the tenth, particularly this coming evening. On his table was a letter in a strange writing, and indifferently turning it over he found from the superscription that it had been addressed to him days before at the Lord-Quantock-Arms Hotel, Markton, where it had lain ever since, the landlord probably expecting him to return. Opening the missive, he found to his surprise that it was, after all, an invitation to the Hunt Ball.

‘Too late!’ said Somerset. ‘To think I should be served this trick a second time!’

After a moment’s pause, however, he looked to see the time of day. It was five minutes past five–just about the hour when Paula would be driving from Markton Station to Stancy Castle to rest and prepare herself for her evening triumph. There was a train at six o’clock, timed to reach Markton between eleven and twelve, which by great exertion he might save even now, if it were worth while to undertake such a scramble for the pleasure of dropping in to the ball at a late hour. A moment’s vision of Paula moving to swift tunes on the arm of a person or persons unknown was enough to impart the impetus required. He jumped up, flung his dress clothes into a portmanteau, sent down to call a cab, and in a few minutes was rattling off to the railway which had borne Paula away from London just five hours earlier.

Once in the train, he began to consider where and how he could most conveniently dress for the dance. The train would certainly be half-an-hour late; half-an-hour would be spent in getting to the town-hall, and that was the utmost delay tolerable if he would secure the hand of Paula for one spin, or be more than a mere dummy behind the earlier arrivals. He looked for an empty compartment at the next stoppage, and finding the one next his own unoccupied, he entered it and changed his raiment for that in his portmanteau during the ensuing run of twenty miles.

Thus prepared he awaited the Markton platform, which was reached as the clock struck twelve. Somerset called a fly and drove at once to the town-hall.

The borough natives had ascended to their upper floors, and were putting out their candles one by one as he passed along the streets; but the lively strains that proceeded from the central edifice revealed distinctly enough what was going on among the temporary visitors from the neighbouring manors. The doors were opened for him, and entering the vestibule lined with flags, flowers, evergreens, and escutcheons, he stood looking into the furnace of gaiety beyond.

It was some time before he could gather his impressions of the scene, so perplexing were the lights, the motions, the toilets, the full-dress uniforms of officers and the harmonies of sound. Yet light, sound, and movement were not so much the essence of that giddy scene as an intense aim at obliviousness in the beings composing it. For two or three hours at least those whirling young people meant not to know that they were mortal. The room was beating like a heart, and the pulse was regulated by the trembling strings of the most popular quadrille band in Wessex. But at last his eyes grew settled enough to look critically around.

The room was crowded–too crowded. Every variety of fair one, beauties primary, secondary, and tertiary, appeared among the personages composing the throng. There were suns and moons; also pale planets of little account. Broadly speaking, these daughters of the county fell into two classes: one the pink- faced unsophisticated girls from neighbouring rectories and small country-houses, who knew not town except for an occasional fortnight, and who spent their time from Easter to Lammas Day much as they spent it during the remaining nine months of the year: the other class were the children of the wealthy landowners who migrated each season to the town-house; these were pale and collected, showed less enjoyment in their countenances, and wore in general an approximation to the languid manners of the capital.

A quadrille was in progress, and Somerset scanned each set. His mind had run so long upon the necklace, that his glance involuntarily sought out that gleaming object rather than the personality of its wearer. At the top of the room there he beheld it; but it was on the neck of Charlotte De Stancy.

The whole lucid explanation broke across his understanding in a second. His dear Paula had fetched the necklace that Charlotte should not appear to disadvantage among the county people by reason of her poverty. It was generously done–a disinterested act of sisterly kindness; theirs was the friendship of Hermia and Helena. Before he had got further than to realize this, there wheeled round amongst the dancers a lady whose tournure he recognized well. She was Paula; and to the young man’s vision a superlative something distinguished her from all the rest. This was not dress or ornament, for she had hardly a gem upon her, her attire being a model of effective simplicity. Her partner was Captain De Stancy.

The discovery of this latter fact slightly obscured his appreciation of what he had discovered just before. It was with rather a lowering brow that he asked himself whether Paula’s predilection d’artiste, as she called it, for the De Stancy line might not lead to a predilection of a different sort for its last representative which would be not at all satisfactory.

The architect remained in the background till the dance drew to a conclusion, and then he went forward. The circumstance of having met him by accident once already that day seemed to quench any surprise in Miss Power’s bosom at seeing him now. There was nothing in her parting from Captain De Stancy, when he led her to a seat, calculated to make Somerset uneasy after his long absence. Though, for that matter, this proved nothing; for, like all wise maidens, Paula never ventured on the game of the eyes with a lover in public; well knowing that every moment of such indulgence overnight might mean an hour’s sneer at her expense by the indulged gentleman next day, when weighing womankind by the aid of a cold morning light and a bad headache.

While Somerset was explaining to Paula and her aunt the reason of his sudden appearance, their attention was drawn to a seat a short way off by a fluttering of ladies round the spot. In a moment it was whispered that somebody had fallen ill, and in another that the sufferer was Miss De Stancy. Paula, Mrs. Goodman, and Somerset at once joined the group of friends who were assisting her. Neither of them imagined for an instant that the unexpected advent of Somerset on the scene had anything to do with the poor girl’s indisposition.

She was assisted out of the room, and her brother, who now came up, prepared to take her home, Somerset exchanging a few civil words with him, which the hurry of the moment prevented them from continuing; though on taking his leave with Charlotte, who was now better, De Stancy informed Somerset in answer to a cursory inquiry, that he hoped to be back again at the ball in half-an-hour.

When they were gone Somerset, feeling that now another dog might have his day, sounded Paula on the delightful question of a dance.

Paula replied in the negative.

‘How is that?’ asked Somerset with reproachful disappointment.

‘I cannot dance again,’ she said in a somewhat depressed tone; ‘I must be released from every engagement to do so, on account of Charlotte’s illness. I should have gone home with her if I had not been particularly requested to stay a little longer, since it is as yet so early, and Charlotte’s illness is not very serious.’

If Charlotte’s illness was not very serious, Somerset thought, Paula might have stretched a point; but not wishing to hinder her in showing respect to a friend so well liked by himself, he did not ask it. De Stancy had promised to be back again in half-an-hour, and Paula had heard the promise. But at the end of twenty minutes, still seeming indifferent to what was going on around her, she said she would stay no longer, and reminding Somerset that they were soon to meet and talk over the rebuilding, drove off with her aunt to Stancy Castle.

Somerset stood looking after the retreating carriage till it was enveloped in shades that the lamps could not disperse. The ball-room was now virtually empty for him, and feeling no great anxiety to return thither he stood on the steps for some minutes longer, looking into the calm mild night, and at the dark houses behind whose blinds lay the burghers with their eyes sealed up in sleep. He could not but think that it was rather too bad of Paula to spoil his evening for a sentimental devotion to Charlotte which could do the latter no appreciable good; and he would have felt seriously hurt at her move if it had not been equally severe upon Captain De Stancy, who was doubtless hastening back, full of a belief that she would still be found there.

The star of gas-jets over the entrance threw its light upon the walls on the opposite side of the street, where there were notice-boards of forthcoming events. In glancing over these for the fifth time, his eye was attracted by the first words of a placard in blue letters, of a size larger than the rest, and moving onward a few steps he read:–

STANCY CASTLE.

By the kind permission of Miss Power,

A PLAY

Will shortly be performed at the above CASTLE,

IN AID OF THE FUNDS OF THE

COUNTY HOSPITAL,

By the Officers of the

ROYAL HORSE ARTILLERY,

MARKTON BARRACKS,

ASSISTED BY SEVERAL

LADIES OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.

The cast and other particulars will be duly announced in small
bills. Places will be reserved on application to Mr. Clangham,
High Street, Markton, where a plan of the room may be seen.

N.B–The Castle is about twenty minutes’ drive from Markton Station,
to which there are numerous convenient trains from all parts of the
county.

In a profound study Somerset turned and re-entered the ball- room, where he remained gloomily standing here and there for about five minutes, at the end of which he observed Captain De Stancy, who had returned punctually to his word, crossing the hall in his direction.

The gallant officer darted glances of lively search over every group of dancers and sitters; and then with rather a blank look in his face, he came on to Somerset. Replying to the latter’s inquiry for his sister that she had nearly recovered, he said, ‘I don’t see my father’s neighbours anywhere.’

‘They have gone home,’ replied Somerset, a trifle drily. ‘They asked me to make their apologies to you for leading you to expect they would remain. Miss Power was too anxious about Miss De Stancy to care to stay longer.’

The eyes of De Stancy and the speaker met for an instant. That curious guarded understanding, or inimical confederacy, which arises at moments between two men in love with the same woman, was present here; and in their mutual glances each said as plainly as by words that her departure had ruined his evening’s hope.

They were now about as much in one mood as it was possible for two such differing natures to be. Neither cared further for elaborating giddy curves on that town-hall floor. They stood talking languidly about this and that local topic, till De Stancy turned aside for a short time to speak to a dapper little lady who had beckoned to him. In a few minutes he came back to Somerset.

‘Mrs. Camperton, the wife of Major Camperton of my battery, would very much like me to introduce you to her. She is an old friend of your father’s, and has wanted to know you for a long time.’

De Stancy and Somerset crossed over to the lady, and in a few minutes, thanks to her flow of spirits, she and Somerset were chatting with remarkable freedom.

‘It is a happy coincidence,’ continued Mrs. Camperton, ‘that I should have met you here, immediately after receiving a letter from your father: indeed it reached me only this morning. He has been so kind! We are getting up some theatricals, as you know, I suppose, to help the funds of the County Hospital, which is in debt.’

‘I have just seen the announcement–nothing more.’

‘Yes, such an estimable purpose; and as we wished to do it thoroughly well, I asked Mr. Somerset to design us the costumes, and he has now sent me the sketches. It is quite a secret at present, but we are going to play Shakespeare’s romantic drama, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ and we hope to get Miss Power to take the leading part. You see, being such a handsome girl, and so wealthy, and rather an undiscovered novelty in the county as yet, she would draw a crowded room, and greatly benefit the funds.’

‘Miss Power going to play herself?–I am rather surprised,’ said Somerset. ‘Whose idea is all this?’

‘O, Captain De Stancy’s–he’s the originator entirely. You see he is so interested in the neighbourhood, his family having been connected with it for so many centuries, that naturally a charitable object of this local nature appeals to his feelings.’

‘Naturally!’ her listener laconically repeated. ‘And have you settled who is to play the junior gentleman’s part, leading lover, hero, or whatever he is called?’

‘Not absolutely; though I think Captain De Stancy will not refuse it; and he is a very good figure. At present it lies between him and Mr. Mild, one of our young lieutenants. My husband, of course, takes the heavy line; and I am to be the second lady, though I am rather too old for the part really. If we can only secure Miss Power for heroine the cast will be excellent.’

‘Excellent!’ said Somerset, with a spectral smile.

VII.

When he awoke the next morning at the Lord-Quantock-Arms Hotel Somerset felt quite morbid on recalling the intelligence he had received from Mrs. Camperton. But as the day for serious practical consultation about the castle works, to which Paula had playfully alluded, was now close at hand, he determined to banish sentimental reflections on the frailties that were besieging her nature, by active preparation for his professional undertaking. To be her high-priest in art, to elaborate a structure whose cunning workmanship would be meeting her eye every day till the end of her natural life, and saying to her, ‘He invented it,’ with all the eloquence of an inanimate thing long regarded–this was no mean satisfaction, come what else would.

He returned to town the next day to set matters there in such trim that no inconvenience should result from his prolonged absence at the castle; for having no other commission he determined (with an eye rather to heart-interests than to increasing his professional practice) to make, as before, the castle itself his office, studio, and chief abiding-place till the works were fairly in progress.

On the tenth he reappeared at Markton. Passing through the town, on the road to Stancy Castle, his eyes were again arrested by the notice-board which had conveyed such startling information to him on the night of the ball. The small bills now appeared thereon; but when he anxiously looked them over to learn how the parts were to be allotted, he found that intelligence still withheld. Yet they told enough; the list of lady-players was given, and Miss Power’s name was one.

That a young lady who, six months ago, would scarcely join for conscientious reasons in a simple dance on her own lawn, should now be willing to exhibit herself on a public stage, simulating love-passages with a stranger, argued a rate of development which under any circumstances would have surprised him, but which, with the particular addition, as leading colleague, of Captain De Stancy, inflamed him almost to anger. What clandestine arrangements had been going on in his absence to produce such a full-blown intention it were futile to guess. Paula’s course was a race rather than a march, and each successive heat was startling in its eclipse of that which went before.

Somerset was, however, introspective enough to know that his morals would have taken no such virtuous alarm had he been the chief male player instead of Captain De Stancy.

He passed under the castle-arch and entered. There seemed a little turn in the tide of affairs when it was announced to him that Miss Power expected him, and was alone.

The well-known ante-chambers through which he walked, filled with twilight, draughts, and thin echoes that seemed to reverberate from two hundred years ago, did not delay his eye as they had done when he had been ignorant that his destiny lay beyond; and he followed on through all this ancientness to where the modern Paula sat to receive him.

He forgot everything in the pleasure of being alone in a room with her. She met his eye with that in her own which cheered him. It was a light expressing that something was understood between them. She said quietly in two or three words that she had expected him in the forenoon.

Somerset explained that he had come only that morning from London.

After a little more talk, in which she said that her aunt would join them in a few minutes, and Miss De Stancy was still indisposed at her father’s house, she rang for tea and sat down beside a little table.

‘Shall we proceed to business at once?’ she asked him.

‘I suppose so.’

‘First then, when will the working drawings be ready, which I think you said must be made out before the work could begin?’

While Somerset informed her on this and other matters, Mrs. Goodman entered and joined in the discussion, after which they found it would be necessary to adjourn to the room where the plans were hanging. On their walk thither Paula asked if he stayed late at the ball.

‘I left soon after you.’

‘That was very early, seeing how late you arrived.’

‘Yes. . . . I did not dance.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I moped, and walked to the door; and saw an announcement.’

‘I know–the play that is to be performed.’

‘In which you are to be the Princess.’

‘That’s not settled,–I have not agreed yet. I shall not play the Princess of France unless Mr. Mild plays the King of Navarre.’

This sounded rather well. The Princess was the lady beloved by the King; and Mr. Mild, the young lieutenant of artillery, was a diffident, inexperienced, rather plain-looking fellow, whose sole interest in theatricals lay in the consideration of his costume and the sound of his own voice in the ears of the audience. With such an unobjectionable person to enact the part of lover, the prominent character of leading young lady or heroine, which Paula was to personate, was really the most satisfactory in the whole list for her. For although she was to be wooed hard, there was just as much love-making among the remaining personages; while, as Somerset had understood the play, there could occur no flingings of her person upon her lover’s neck, or agonized downfalls upon the stage, in her whole performance, as there were in the parts chosen by Mrs. Camperton, the major’s wife, and some of the other ladies.

‘Why do you play at all!’ he murmured.

‘What a question! How could I refuse for such an excellent purpose? They say that my taking a part will be worth a hundred pounds to the charity. My father always supported the hospital, which is quite undenominational; and he said I was to do the same.’

‘Do you think the peculiar means you have adopted for supporting it entered into his view?’ inquired Somerset, regarding her with critical dryness. ‘For my part I don’t.’

‘It is an interesting way,’ she returned persuasively, though apparently in a state of mental equipoise on the point raised by his question. ‘And I shall not play the Princess, as I said, to any other than that quiet young man. Now I assure you of this, so don’t be angry and absurd! Besides, the King doesn’t marry me at the end of the play, as in Shakespeare’s other comedies. And if Miss De Stancy continues seriously unwell I shall not play at all.’

The young man pressed her hand, but she gently slipped it away.

‘Are we not engaged, Paula!’ he asked. She evasively shook her head.

‘Come–yes we are! Shall we tell your aunt?’ he continued. Unluckily at that moment Mrs. Goodman, who had followed them to the studio at a slower pace, appeared round the doorway.

‘No,–to the last,’ replied Paula hastily. Then her aunt entered, and the conversation was no longer personal.

Somerset took his departure in a serener mood though not completely assured.

VIII.

His serenity continued during two or three following days, when, continuing at the castle, he got pleasant glimpses of Paula now and then. Her strong desire that his love for her should be kept secret, perplexed him; but his affection was generous, and he acquiesced in that desire.

Meanwhile news of the forthcoming dramatic performance radiated in every direction. And in the next number of the county paper it was announced, to Somerset’s comparative satisfaction, that the cast was definitely settled, Mr. Mild having agreed to be the King and Miss Power the French Princess. Captain De Stancy, with becoming modesty for one who was the leading spirit, figured quite low down, in the secondary character of Sir Nathaniel.

Somerset remembered that, by a happy chance, the costume he had designed for Sir Nathaniel was not at all picturesque; moreover Sir Nathaniel scarcely came near the Princess through the whole play.

Every day after this there was coming and going to and from the castle of railway vans laden with canvas columns, pasteboard trees, limp house-fronts, woollen lawns, and lath balustrades. There were also frequent arrivals of young ladies from neighbouring country houses, and warriors from the X and Y batteries of artillery, distinguishable by their regulation shaving.

But it was upon Captain De Stancy and Mrs. Camperton that the weight of preparation fell. Somerset, through being much occupied in the drawing-office, was seldom present during the consultations and rehearsals: until one day, tea being served in the drawing-room at the usual hour, he dropped in with the rest to receive a cup from Paula’s table. The chatter was tremendous, and Somerset was at once consulted about some necessary carpentry which was to be specially made at Markton. After that he was looked on as one of the band, which resulted in a large addition to the number of his acquaintance in this part of England.

But his own feeling was that of being an outsider still. This vagary had been originated, the play chosen, the parts allotted, all in his absence, and calling him in at the last moment might, if flirtation were possible in Paula, be but a sop to pacify him. What would he have given to impersonate her lover in the piece! But neither Paula nor any one else had asked him.

The eventful evening came. Somerset had been engaged during the day with the different people by whom the works were to be carried out and in the evening went to his rooms at the Lord- Quantock-Arms, Markton, where he dined. He did not return to the castle till the hour fixed for the performance, and having been received by Mrs. Goodman, entered the large apartment, now transfigured into a theatre, like any other spectator.

Rumours of the projected representation had spread far and wide. Six times the number of tickets issued might have been readily sold. Friends and acquaintances of the actors came from curiosity to see how they would acquit themselves; while other classes of people came because they were eager to see well-known notabilities in unwonted situations. When ladies, hitherto only beheld in frigid, impenetrable positions behind their coachmen in Markton High Street, were about to reveal their hidden traits, home attitudes, intimate smiles, nods, and perhaps kisses, to the public eye, it was a throwing open of fascinating social secrets not to be missed for money.

The performance opened with no further delay than was occasioned by the customary refusal of the curtain at these times to rise more than two feet six inches; but this hitch was remedied, and the play began. It was with no enviable emotion that Somerset, who was watching intently, saw, not Mr. Mild, but Captain De Stancy, enter as the King of Navarre.

Somerset as a friend of the family had had a seat reserved for him next to that of Mrs. Goodman, and turning to her he said with some excitement, ‘I understood that Mr. Mild had agreed to take that part?’

‘Yes,’ she said in a whisper, ‘so he had; but he broke down. Luckily Captain De Stancy was familiar with the part, through having coached the others so persistently, and he undertook it off-hand. Being about the same figure as Lieutenant Mild the same dress fits him, with a little alteration by the tailor.’

It did fit him indeed; and of the male costumes it was that on which Somerset had bestowed most pains when designing them. It shrewdly burst upon his mind that there might have been collusion between Mild and De Stancy, the former agreeing to take the captain’s place and act as blind till the last moment. A greater question was, could Paula have been aware of this, and would she perform as the Princess of France now De Stancy was to be her lover?

‘Does Miss Power know of this change?’ he inquired.

‘She did not till quite a short time ago.’

He controlled his impatience till the beginning of the second act. The Princess entered; it was Paula. But whether the slight embarrassment with which she pronounced her opening words,

‘Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise,’

was due to the newness of her situation, or to her knowledge that De Stancy had usurped Mild’s part of her lover, he could not guess. De Stancy appeared, and Somerset felt grim as he listened to the gallant captain’s salutation of the Princess, and her response.

De S. Fair Princess, welcome to the court of Navarre. Paula. Fair, I give you back again: and welcome, I have not yet.

Somerset listened to this and to all that which followed of the same sort, with the reflection that, after all, the Princess never throughout the piece compromised her dignity by showing her love for the King; and that the latter never addressed her in words in which passion got the better of courtesy. Moreover, as Paula had herself observed, they did not marry at the end of the piece, as in Shakespeare’s other comedies. Somewhat calm in this assurance, he waited on while the other couples respectively indulged in their love-making, and banter, including Mrs. Camperton as the sprightly Rosaline. But he was doomed to be surprised out of his humour when the end of the act came on. In abridging the play for the convenience of representation, the favours or gifts from the gentlemen to the ladies were personally presented: and now Somerset saw De Stancy advance with the necklace fetched by Paula from London, and clasp it on her neck.

This seemed to throw a less pleasant light on her hasty journey. To fetch a valuable ornament to lend it to a poorer friend was estimable; but to fetch it that the friend’s brother should have something magnificent to use as a lover’s offering to herself in public, that wore a different complexion. And if the article were recognized by the spectators as the same that Charlotte had worn at the ball, the presentation by De Stancy of what must seem to be an heirloom of his house would be read as symbolizing a union of the families.

De Stancy’s mode of presenting the necklace, though unauthorized by Shakespeare, had the full approval of the company, and set them in good humour to receive Major Camperton as Armado the braggart. Nothing calculated to stimulate jealousy occurred again till the fifth act; and then there arose full cause for it.

The scene was the outside of the Princess’s pavilion. De Stancy, as the King of Navarre, stood with his group of attendants awaiting the Princess, who presently entered from her door. The two began to converse as the play appointed, De Stancy turning to her with this reply–

‘Rebuke me not for that which you provoke; The virtue of your eye must break my oath.’

So far all was well; and Paula opened her lips for the set rejoinder. But before she had spoken De Stancy continued–

‘If I profane with my unworthy hand (Taking her hand)
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this– My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.’

Somerset stared. Surely in this comedy the King never addressed the Princess in such warm words; and yet they were Shakespeare’s, for they were quite familiar to him. A dim suspicion crossed his mind. Mrs. Goodman had brought a copy of Shakespeare with her, which she kept in her lap and never looked at: borrowing it, Somerset turned to ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and there he saw the words which De Stancy had introduced as gag, to intensify the mild love-making of the other play. Meanwhile De Stancy continued–

‘O then, dear Saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take. Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purg’d!’

Could it be that De Stancy was going to do what came next in the stage direction–kiss her? Before there was time for conjecture on that point the sound of a very sweet and long- drawn osculation spread through the room, followed by loud applause from the people in the cheap seats. De Stancy withdrew from bending over Paula, and she was very red in the face. Nothing seemed clearer than that he had actually done the deed. The applause continuing, Somerset turned his head. Five hundred faces had regarded the act, without a consciousness that it was an interpolation; and four hundred and fifty mouths in those faces were smiling. About one half of them were tender smiles; these came from the women. The other half were at best humorous, and mainly satirical; these came from the men. It was a profanation without parallel, and his face blazed like a coal.

The play was now nearly at an end, and Somerset sat on, feeling what he could not express. More than ever was he assured that there had been collusion between the two artillery officers to bring about this end. That he should have been the unhappy man to design those picturesque dresses in which his rival so audaciously played the lover to his, Somerset’s, mistress, was an added point to the satire. He could hardly go so far as to assume that Paula was a consenting party to this startling interlude; but her otherwise unaccountable wish that his own love should be