Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’ll remember it,’ said Somerset.

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

  ‘I am looking for it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘And off went the baronet to Myrtle Villa?’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘But ‘tis not?’

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

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

  CHAPTER VI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘How would she be likely to come?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘I could not see her.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘No, ma’am.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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