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.