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 Somerset to be genuinely grieved at what he had done. Paula seemed so good and honourable at that moment that he could have laid down his life for her.
‘When I was dressed, I came in here to ask you to reconsider your decision,’ she continued; ‘or to meet us in the drawing-room if you could not possibly be ready for dinner. But you were gone.’
‘And you sat down in that chair, didn’t you, darling, and remained there a long time musing!’ he thought. But that he did not say.
‘I am very sorry,’ he murmured.
‘Will you make amends by coming to our garden party? I ask you the very first.’
‘I will,’ replied Somerset. To add that it would give him great pleasure, etc., seemed an absurdly weak way of expressing his feelings, and he said no more.
‘It is on the nineteenth. Don’t forget the day.’
He met her eyes in such a way that, if she were woman, she must have seen it to mean as plainly as words: ‘Do I look as if I could forget anything you say?’
She must, indeed, have understood much more by this time – the whole of his open secret. But he did not understand her. History has revealed that a supernumerary lover or two is rarely considered a disadvantage by a woman, from queen to cottage-girl; and the thought made him pause.
XIV
When she was gone he went on with the drawing, not calling in Dare, who remained in the room adjoining. Presently a servant came and laid a paper on his table, which Miss Power had sent. It was one of the morning newspapers, and was folded so that his eye fell immediately on a letter headed ‘Restoration or Demolition.’
The letter was professedly written by a dispassionate person solely in the interests of art. It drew attention to the circumstance that the ancient and interesting castle of the De Stancys had unhappily passed into the hands of an iconoclast by blood, who, without respect for the tradition of the county, or any feeling whatever for history in stone, was about to demolish much, if not all, that was interesting in that ancient pile, and insert in its midst a monstrous travesty of some Greek temple. In the name of all lovers of mediaeval art, conjured the simple-minded writer, let something be done to save a building which, injured and battered in the Civil Wars, was now to be made a complete ruin by the freaks of an irresponsible owner. Her sending him the paper seemed to imply that she required his opinion on the case; and in the afternoon, leaving Dare to measure up a wing according to directions, he went out in the hope of meeting her, having learnt that she had gone to the village. On reaching the church he saw her crossing the churchyard path with her aunt and Miss De Stancy. Somerset entered the enclosure, and as soon as she saw him she came across.
‘What is to be done?’ she asked.
‘You need not be concerned about such a letter as that.’
‘I am concerned.’
‘I think it dreadful impertinence,’ spoke up Charlotte, who had joined them. ‘Can you think who wrote it, Mr. Somerset?’
Somerset could not.
‘Well, what am I to do?’ repeated Paula.
‘Just as you would have done before.’
‘That’s what I say,’ observed Mrs. Goodman emphatically.
‘But I have already altered – I have given up the Greek court.’
‘O – you had seen the paper this morning before you looked at my drawing?’
‘I had,’ she answered.
Somerset thought it a forcible illustration of her natural reticence that she should have abandoned the design without telling him the reason; but he was glad she had not done it from mere caprice.
She turned to him and said quietly, ‘I wish YOU would answer that letter.’
‘It would be ill-advised,’ said Somerset. ‘Still, if, after consideration, you wish it much, I will. Meanwhile let me impress upon you again the expediency of calling in Mr. Havill – to whom, as your father’s architect, expecting this commission, something perhaps is owed – and getting him to furnish an alternative plan to mine, and submitting the choice of designs to some members of the Royal Institute of British Architects. This letter makes it still more advisable than before.’
‘Very well,’ said Paula reluctantly.
‘Let him have all the particulars you have been good enough to explain to me – so that we start fair in the competition.’
She looked negligently on the grass. ‘I will tell the building steward to write them out for him,’ she said.
The party separated and entered the church by different doors. Somerset went to a nook of the building that he had often intended to visit. It was called the Stancy aisle; and in it stood the tombs of that family. Somerset examined them: they were unusually rich and numerous, beginning with cross-legged knights in hauberks of chain-mail, their ladies beside them in wimple and cover-chief, all more or less coated with the green mould and dirt of ages: and continuing with others of later date, in fine alabaster, gilded and coloured, some of them wearing round their necks the Yorkist collar of suns and roses, the livery of Edward the Fourth. In scrutinizing the tallest canopy over these he beheld Paula behind it, as if in contemplation of the same objects.
‘You came to the church to sketch these monuments, I suppose, Mr. Somerset?’ she asked, as soon as she saw him.
‘No. I came to speak to you about the letter.’
She sighed. ‘Yes: that letter,’ she said. ‘I am persecuted! If I had been one of these it would never have been written.’ She tapped the alabaster effigy of a recumbent lady with her parasol.
‘They are interesting, are they not?’ he said. ‘She is beautifully preserved. The gilding is nearly gone, but beyond that she is perfect.’
‘She is like Charlotte,’ said Paula. And what was much like another sigh escaped her lips.
Somerset admitted that there was a resemblance, while Paula drew her forefinger across the marble face of the effigy, and at length took out her handkerchief, and began wiping the dust from the hollows of the features. He looked on, wondering what her sigh had meant, but guessing that it had been somehow caused by the sight of these sculptures in connection with the newspaper writer’s denunciation of her as an irresponsible outsider.
The secret was out when in answer to his question, idly put, if she wished she were like one of these, she said, with exceptional vehemence for one of her demeanour —
‘I don’t wish I was like one of them: I wish I WAS one of them.’
‘What – you wish you were a De Stancy?’
‘Yes. It is very dreadful to be denounced as a barbarian. I want to be romantic and historical.’
‘Miss De Stancy seems not to value the privilege,’ he said, looking round at another part of the church where Charlotte was innocently prattling to Mrs. Goodman, quite heedless of the tombs of her forefathers.
‘If I were one,’ she continued, ‘I should come here when I feel alone in the world, as I do to-day; and I would defy people, and say, “You cannot spoil what has been!”’
They walked on till they reached the old black pew attached to the castle – a vast square enclosure of oak panelling occupying half the aisle, and surmounted with a little balustrade above the framework. Within, the baize lining that had once been green, now faded to the colour of a common in August, was torn, kicked and scraped to rags by the feet and hands of the ploughboys who had appropriated the pew as their own special place of worship since it had ceased to be used by any resident at the castle, because its height afforded convenient shelter for playing at marbles and pricking with pins.
Charlotte and Mrs. Goodman had by this time left the building, and could be seen looking at the headstones outside.
‘If you were a De Stancy,’ said Somerset, who had pondered more deeply upon that new wish of hers than he had seemed to do, ‘you would be a churchwoman, and sit here.’
‘And I should have the pew done up,’ she said readily, as she rested her pretty chin on the top rail and looked at the interior, her cheeks pressed into deep dimples. Her quick reply told him that the idea was no new one with her, and he thought of poor Mr. Woodwell’s shrewd prophecy as he perceived that her days as a separatist were numbered.
‘Well, why can’t you have it done up, and sit here?’ he said warily.
Paula shook her head.
‘You are not at enmity with Anglicanism, I am sure?’
‘I want not to be. I want to be – what – ’
‘What the De Stancys were, and are,’ he said insidiously; and her silenced bearing told him that he had hit the nail.
It was a strange idea to get possession of such a nature as hers, and for a minute he felt himself on the side of the minister. So strong was Somerset’s feeling of wishing her to show the quality of fidelity to paternal dogma and party, that he could not help adding —
‘But have you forgotten that other nobility – the nobility of talent and enterprise?’
‘No. But I wish I had a well-known line of ancestors.’
‘You have. Archimedes, Newcomen, Watt, Telford, Stephenson, those are your father’s direct ancestors. Have you forgotten them? Have you forgotten your father, and the railways he made over half Europe, and his great energy and skill, and all connected with him as if he had never lived?’
She did not answer for some time. ‘No, I have not forgotten it,’ she said, still looking into the pew. ‘But, I have a predilection d’artiste for ancestors of the other sort, like the De Stancys.’
Her hand was resting on the low pew next the high one of the De Stancys. Somerset looked at the hand, or rather at the glove which covered it, then at her averted cheek, then beyond it into the pew, then at her hand again, until by an indescribable consciousness that he was not going too far he laid his own upon it.
‘No, no,’ said Paula quickly, withdrawing her hand. But there was nothing resentful or haughty in her tone – nothing, in short, which makes a man in such circumstances feel that he has done a particularly foolish action.
The flower on her bosom rose and fell somewhat more than usual as she added, ‘I am going away now – I will leave you here.’ Without waiting for a reply she adroitly swept back her skirts to free her feet and went out of the church blushing.
Somerset took her hint and did not follow; and when he knew that she had rejoined her friends, and heard the carriage roll away, he made towards the opposite door. Pausing to glance once more at the alabaster effigies before leaving them to their silence and neglect, he beheld Dare bending over them, to all appearance intently occupied.
He must have been in the church some time – certainly during the tender episode between Somerset and Paula, and could not have failed to perceive it. Somerset blushed: it was unpleasant that Dare should have seen the interior of his heart so plainly. He went across and said, ‘I think I left you to finish the drawing of the north wing, Mr. Dare?’
‘Three hours ago, sir,’ said Dare. ‘Having finished that, I came to look at the church – fine building – fine monuments – two interesting people looking at them.’
‘What?’
‘I stand corrected. Pensa molto, parla poco, as the Italians have it.’
‘Well, now, Mr. Dare, suppose you get back to the castle?’
‘Which history dubs Castle Stancy… Certainly.’
‘How do you get on with the measuring?’
Dare sighed whimsically. ‘Badly in the morning, when I have been tempted to indulge overnight, and worse in the afternoon, when I have been tempted in the morning!’
Somerset looked at the youth, and said, ‘I fear I shall have to dispense with your services, Dare, for I think you have been tempted to-day.’
‘On my honour no. My manner is a little against me, Mr. Somerset. But you need not fear for my ability to do your work. I am a young man wasted, and am thought of slight account: it is the true men who get snubbed, while traitors are allowed to thrive!’
‘Hang sentiment, Dare, and off with you!’ A little ruffled, Somerset had turned his back upon the interesting speaker, so that he did not observe the sly twist Dare threw into his right eye as he spoke. The latter went off in one direction and Somerset in the other, pursuing his pensive way towards Markton with thoughts not difficult to divine.
From one point in her nature he went to another, till he again recurred to her romantic interest in the De Stancy family. To wish she was one of them: how very inconsistent of her. That she really did wish it was unquestionable.
XV
It was the day of the garden-party. The weather was too cloudy to be called perfect, but it was as sultry as the most thinly-clad young lady could desire. Great trouble had been taken by Paula to bring the lawn to a fit condition after the neglect of recent years, and Somerset had suggested the design for the tents. As he approached the precincts of the castle he discerned a flag of newest fabric floating over the keep, and soon his fly fell in with the stream of carriages that were passing over the bridge into the outer ward.
Mrs. Goodman and Paula were receiving the people in the drawing-room. Somerset came forward in his turn; but as he was immediately followed by others there was not much opportunity, even had she felt the wish, for any special mark of feeling in the younger lady’s greeting of him.
He went on through a canvas passage, lined on each side with flowering plants, till he reached the tents; thence, after nodding to one or two guests slightly known to him, he proceeded to the grounds, with a sense of being rather lonely. Few visitors had as yet got so far in, and as he walked up and down a shady alley his mind dwelt upon the new aspect under which Paula had greeted his eyes that afternoon. Her black-and-white costume had finally disappeared, and in its place she had adopted a picturesque dress of ivory white, with satin enrichments of the same hue; while upon her bosom she wore a blue flower. Her days of infestivity were plainly ended, and her days of gladness were to begin.
His reverie was interrupted by the sound of his name, and looking round he beheld Havill, who appeared to be as much alone as himself.
Somerset already knew that Havill had been appointed to compete with him, according to his recommendation. In measuring a dark corner a day or two before, he had stumbled upon Havill engaged in the same pursuit with a view to the rival design. Afterwards he had seen him receiving Paula’s instructions precisely as he had done himself. It was as he had wished, for fairness’ sake: and yet he felt a regret, for he was less Paula’s own architect now.
‘Well, Mr. Somerset,’ said Havill, ‘since we first met an unexpected rivalry has arisen between us! But I dare say we shall survive the contest, as it is not one arising out of love. Ha-ha-ha!’ He spoke in a level voice of fierce pleasantry, and uncovered his regular white teeth.