by Thomas Hardy
‘It is my handkerchief,’ Somerset answered. ‘I fixed it there with a stone to attract attention, and forgot to take it away.’
All three looked up at the handkerchief with interest. ‘Why did you want to attract attention?’ said Paula.
‘O, I fell into the turret; but I got out very easily.’
‘O Paula,’ said Charlotte, turning to her friend, ‘that must be the place where the man fell in, years ago, and was starved to death!’
‘Starved to death?’ said Paula.
‘They say so. O Mr. Somerset, what an escape!’ And Charlotte De Stancy walked away to a point from which she could get a better view of the treacherous turret.
‘Whom did you think to attract?’ asked Paula, after a pause.
‘I thought you might see it.’
‘Me personally?’ And, blushing faintly, her eyes rested upon him.
‘I hoped for anybody. I thought of you,’ said Somerset.
She did not continue. In a moment she arose and went across to Miss De Stancy. ‘Don’t YOU go falling down and becoming a skeleton,’ she said — Somerset overheard the words, though Paula was unaware of it — after which she clasped her fingers behind Charlotte’s neck, and smiled tenderly in her face.
It seemed to be quite unconsciously done, and Somerset thought it a very beautiful action. Presently Paula returned to him and said, ‘Mr. Somerset, I think we have had enough architecture for to-day.’
The two women then wished him good-morning and went away. Somerset, feeling that he had now every reason for prowling about the castle, remained near the spot, endeavouring to evolve some plan of procedure for the project entertained by the beautiful owner of those weather-scathed walls. But for a long time the mental perspective of his new position so excited the emotional side of his nature that he could not concentrate it on feet and inches. As Paula’s architect (supposing Havill not to be admitted as a competitor), he must of necessity be in constant communication with her for a space of two or three years to come; and particularly during the next few months. She, doubtless, cherished far too ambitious views of her career to feel any personal interest in this enforced relationship with him; but he would be at liberty to feel what he chose: and to be the victim of an unrequited passion, while afforded such splendid opportunities of communion with the one beloved, deprived that passion of its most deplorable features. Accessibility is a great point in matters of love, and perhaps of the two there is less misery in loving without return a goddess who is to be seen and spoken to every day, than in having an affection tenderly reciprocated by one always hopelessly removed.
With this view of having to spend a considerable time in the neighbourhood Somerset shifted his quarters that afternoon from the little inn at Sleeping-Green to a larger one at Markton. He required more rooms in which to carry out Paula’s instructions than the former place afforded, and a more central position. Having reached and dined at Markton he found the evening tedious, and again strolled out in the direction of the castle.
When he reached it the light was declining, and a solemn stillness overspread the pile. The great tower was in full view. That spot of white which looked like a pigeon fluttering from the loophole was his handkerchief, still hanging in the place where he had left it. His eyes yet lingered on the walls when he noticed, with surprise, that the handkerchief suddenly vanished.
Believing that the breezes, though weak below, might have been strong enough at that height to blow it into the turret, and in no hurry to get off the premises, he leisurely climbed up to find it, ascending by the second staircase, crossing the roof, and going to the top of the treacherous turret. The ladder by which he had escaped still stood within it, and beside the ladder he beheld the dim outline of a woman, in a meditative attitude, holding his handkerchief in her hand.
Somerset softly withdrew. When he had reached the ground he looked up. A girlish form was standing at the top of the tower looking over the parapet upon him — possibly not seeing him, for it was dark on the lawn. It was either Miss De Stancy or Paula; one of them had gone there alone for his handkerchief and had remained awhile, pondering on his escape. But which? ‘If I were not a faint-heart I should run all risk and wave my hat or kiss my hand to her, whoever she is,’ he thought. But he did not do either.
So he lingered about silently in the shades, and then thought of strolling to his rooms at Markton. Just at leaving, as he passed under the inhabited wing, whence one or two lights now blinked, he heard a piano, and a voice singing ‘The Mistletoe Bough.’ The song had probably been suggested to the romantic fancy of the singer by her visit to the scene of his captivity.
CHAPTER XI.
The identity of the lady whom he had seen on the tower and afterwards heard singing was established the next day.
‘I have been thinking,’ said Miss Power, on meeting him, ‘that you may require a studio on the premises. If so, the room I showed you yesterday is at your service. If I employ Mr. Havill to compete with you I will offer him a similar one.’
Somerset did not decline; and she added, ‘In the same room you will find the handkerchief that was left on the tower.’
‘Ah, I saw that it was gone. Somebody brought it down?’
‘I did,’ she shyly remarked, looking up for a second under her shady hat-brim.
‘I am much obliged to you.’
‘O no. I went up last night to see where the accident happened, and there I found it. When you came up were you in search of it, or did you want me?’
‘Then she saw me,’ he thought. ‘I went for the handkerchief only; I was not aware that you were there,’ he answered simply. And he involuntarily sighed.
It was very soft, but she might have heard him, for there was interest in her voice as she continued, ‘Did you see me before you went back?’
‘I did not know it was you; I saw that some lady was there, and I would not disturb her. I wondered all the evening if it were you.’
Paula hastened to explain: ‘We understood that you would stay to dinner, and as you did not come in we wondered where you were. That made me think of your accident, and after dinner I went up to the place where it happened.’
Somerset almost wished she had not explained so lucidly.
And now followed the piquant days to which his position as her architect, or, at worst, as one of her two architects, naturally led. His anticipations were for once surpassed by the reality. Perhaps Somerset’s inherent unfitness for a professional life under ordinary circumstances was only proved by his great zest for it now. Had he been in regular practice, with numerous other clients, instead of having merely made a start with this one, he would have totally neglected their business in his exclusive attention to Paula’s.
The idea of a competition between Somerset and Havill had been highly approved by Paula’s solicitor, but she would not assent to it as yet, seeming quite vexed that Somerset should not have taken the good the gods provided without questioning her justice to Havill. The room she had offered him was prepared as a studio. Drawing-boards and Whatman’s paper were sent for, and in a few days Somerset began serious labour. His first requirement was a clerk or two, to do the drudgery of measuring and figuring; but for the present he preferred to sketch alone. Sometimes, in measuring the outworks of the castle, he ran against Havill strolling about with no apparent object, who bestowed on him an envious nod, and passed by.
‘I hope you will not make your sketches,’ she said, looking in upon him one day, ‘and then go away to your studio in London and think of your other buildings and forget mine. I am in haste to begin, and wish you not to neglect me.’
‘I have no other building to think of,’ said Somerset, rising and placing a chair for her. ‘I had not begun practice, as you may know. I have nothing else in hand but your castle.’
‘I suppose I ought not to say I am glad of it; but it is an advantage to have an architect all to one’s self. The architect whom I at first thought of told me before I knew you that if I p
laced the castle in his hands he would undertake no other commission till its completion.’
‘I agree to the same,’ said Somerset.
‘I don’t wish to bind you. But I hinder you now — do pray go on without reference to me. When will there be some drawing for me to see?’
‘I will take care that it shall be soon.’
He had a metallic tape in his hand, and went out of the room to take some dimension in the corridor. The assistant for whom he had advertised had not arrived, and he attempted to fix the end of the tape by sticking his penknife through the ring into the wall. Paula looked on at a distance.
‘I will hold it,’ she said.
She went to the required corner and held the end in its place. She had taken it the wrong way, and Somerset went over and placed it properly in her fingers, carefully avoiding to touch them. She obediently raised her hand to the corner again, and stood till he had finished, when she asked, ‘Is that all?’
‘That is all,’ said Somerset. ‘Thank you.’ Without further speech she looked at his sketch-book, while he marked down the lines just acquired.
‘You said the other day,’ she observed, ‘that early Gothic work might be known by the under-cutting, or something to that effect. I have looked in Rickman and the Oxford Glossary, but I cannot quite understand what you meant.’
It was only too probable to her lover, from the way in which she turned to him, that she HAD looked in Rickman and the Glossary, and was thinking of nothing in the world but of the subject of her inquiry.
‘I can show you, by actual example, if you will come to the chapel?’ he returned hesitatingly.
‘Don’t go on purpose to show me — when you are there on your own account I will come in.’
‘I shall be there in half-an-hour.’
‘Very well,’ said Paula. She looked out of a window, and, seeing Miss De Stancy on the terrace, left him.
Somerset stood thinking of what he had said. He had no occasion whatever to go into the chapel of the castle that day. He had been tempted by her words to say he would be there, and ‘half-an-hour’ had come to his lips almost without his knowledge. This community of interest — if it were not anything more tender — was growing serious. What had passed between them amounted to an appointment; they were going to meet in the most solitary chamber of the whole solitary pile. Could it be that Paula had well considered this in replying with her friendly ‘Very well?’ Probably not.
Somerset proceeded to the chapel and waited. With the progress of the seconds towards the half-hour he began to discover that a dangerous admiration for this girl had risen within him. Yet so imaginative was his passion that he hardly knew a single feature of her countenance well enough to remember it in her absence. The meditative judgment of things and men which had been his habit up to the moment of seeing her in the Baptist chapel seemed to have left him — nothing remained but a distracting wish to be always near her, and it was quite with dismay that he recognized what immense importance he was attaching to the question whether she would keep the trifling engagement or not.
The chapel of Stancy Castle was a silent place, heaped up in corners with a lumber of old panels, framework, and broken coloured glass. Here no clock could be heard beating out the hours of the day — here no voice of priest or deacon had for generations uttered the daily service denoting how the year rolls on. The stagnation of the spot was sufficient to draw Somerset’s mind for a moment from the subject which absorbed it, and he thought, ‘So, too, will time triumph over all this fervour within me.’
Lifting his eyes from the floor on which his foot had been tapping nervously, he saw Paula standing at the other end. It was not so pleasant when he also saw that Mrs. Goodman accompanied her. The latter lady, however, obligingly remained where she was resting, while Paula came forward, and, as usual, paused without speaking.
‘It is in this little arcade that the example occurs,’ said Somerset.
‘O yes,’ she answered, turning to look at it.
‘Early piers, capitals, and mouldings, generally alternated with deep hollows, so as to form strong shadows. Now look under the abacus of this capital; you will find the stone hollowed out wonderfully; and also in this arch-mould. It is often difficult to understand how it could be done without cracking off the stone. The difference between this and late work can be felt by the hand even better than it can be seen.’ He suited the action to the word and placed his hand in the hollow.
She listened attentively, then stretched up her own hand to test the cutting as he had done; she was not quite tall enough; she would step upon this piece of wood. Having done so she tried again, and succeeded in putting her finger on the spot. No; she could not understand it through her glove even now. She pulled off her glove, and, her hand resting in the stone channel, her eyes became abstracted in the effort of realisation, the ideas derived through her hand passing into her face.
‘No, I am not sure now,’ she said.
Somerset placed his own hand in the cavity. Now their two hands were close together again. They had been close together half-an-hour earlier, and he had sedulously avoided touching hers. He dared not let such an accident happen now. And yet — surely she saw the situation! Was the inscrutable seriousness with which she applied herself to his lesson a mockery? There was such a bottomless depth in her eyes that it was impossible to guess truly. Let it be that destiny alone had ruled that their hands should be together a second time.
All rumination was cut short by an impulse. He seized her forefinger between his own finger and thumb, and drew it along the hollow, saying, ‘That is the curve I mean.’
Somerset’s hand was hot and trembling; Paula’s, on the contrary, was cool and soft as an infant’s.
‘Now the arch-mould,’ continued he. ‘There — the depth of that cavity is tremendous, and it is not geometrical, as in later work.’ He drew her unresisting fingers from the capital to the arch, and laid them in the little trench as before.
She allowed them to rest quietly there till he relinquished them. ‘Thank you,’ she then said, withdrawing her hand, brushing the dust from her finger-tips, and putting on her glove.
Her imperception of his feeling was the very sublimity of maiden innocence if it were real; if not, well, the coquetry was no great sin.
‘Mr. Somerset, will you allow me to have the Greek court I mentioned?’ she asked tentatively, after a long break in their discourse, as she scanned the green stones along the base of the arcade, with a conjectural countenance as to his reply.
‘Will your own feeling for the genius of the place allow you?’
‘I am not a mediaevalist: I am an eclectic.’
‘You don’t dislike your own house on that account.’
‘I did at first — I don’t so much now.... I should love it, and adore every stone, and think feudalism the only true romance of life, if — ’
‘What?’
‘If I were a De Stancy, and the castle the long home of my forefathers.’
Somerset was a little surprised at the avowal: the minister’s words on the effects of her new environment recurred to his mind. ‘Miss De Stancy doesn’t think so,’ he said. ‘She cares nothing about those things.’
Paula now turned to him: hitherto her remarks had been sparingly spoken, her eyes being directed elsewhere: ‘Yes, that is very strange, is it not?’ she said. ‘But it is owing to the joyous freshness of her nature which precludes her from dwelling on the past — indeed, the past is no more to her than it is to a sparrow or robin. She is scarcely an instance of the wearing out of old families, for a younger mental constitution than hers I never knew.’
‘Unless that very simplicity represents the second childhood of her line, rather than her own exclusive character.’
Paula shook her head. ‘In spite of the Greek court, she is more Greek than I.’
‘You represent science rather than art, perhaps.’
‘How?’ she asked, glancing up under her hat.
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sp; ‘I mean,’ replied Somerset, ‘that you represent the march of mind — the steamship, and the railway, and the thoughts that shake mankind.’
She weighed his words, and said: ‘Ah, yes: you allude to my father. My father was a great man; but I am more and more forgetting his greatness: that kind of greatness is what a woman can never truly enter into. I am less and less his daughter every day that goes by.’
She walked away a few steps to rejoin the excellent Mrs. Goodman, who, as Somerset still perceived, was waiting for Paula at the discreetest of distances in the shadows at the farther end of the building. Surely Paula’s voice had faltered, and she had turned to hide a tear?
She came back again. ‘Did you know that my father made half the railways in Europe, including that one over there?’ she said, waving her little gloved hand in the direction whence low rumbles were occasionally heard during the day.
‘Yes.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Miss De Stancy told me a little; and I then found his name and doings were quite familiar to me.’
Curiously enough, with his words there came through the broken windows the murmur of a train in the distance, sounding clearer and more clear. It was nothing to listen to, yet they both listened; till the increasing noise suddenly broke off into dead silence.
‘It has gone into the tunnel,’ said Paula. ‘Have you seen the tunnel my father made? the curves are said to be a triumph of science. There is nothing else like it in this part of England.’
‘There is not: I have heard so. But I have not seen it.’
‘Do you think it a thing more to be proud of that one’s father should have made a great tunnel and railway like that, than that one’s remote ancestor should have built a great castle like this?’
What could Somerset say? It would have required a casuist to decide whether his answer should depend upon his conviction, or upon the family ties of such a questioner. ‘From a modern point of view, railways are, no doubt, things more to be proud of than castles,’ he said; ‘though perhaps I myself, from mere association, should decide in favour of the ancestor who built the castle.’ The serious anxiety to be truthful that Somerset threw into his observation, was more than the circumstance required. ‘To design great engineering works,’ he added musingly, and without the least eye to the disparagement of her parent, ‘requires no doubt a leading mind. But to execute them, as he did, requires, of course, only a following mind.’
