by Thomas Hardy
Somerset turned and left him without replying, Dare following his receding figure with a look of ripe resentment, not less likely to vent itself in mischief from the want of moral ballast in him who emitted it. He then fixed a nettled and unsatisfied gaze upon the gaming-rooms, and in another minute or two left the Casino also.
Dare and Somerset met no more that day. The latter returned to Nice by the evening train and went straight to the hotel. He now thanked his fortune that he had not precipitately given up his room there, for a telegram from Paula awaited him. His hand almost trembled as he opened it, to read the following few short words, dated from the Grand Hotel, Genoa: —
‘Letter received. Am glad to hear of your journey. We are not returning to Nice, but stay here a week. I direct this at a venture.’
This tantalising message — the first breaking of her recent silence — was saucy, almost cruel, in its dry frigidity. It led him to give up his idea of following at once to Genoa. That was what she obviously expected him to do, and it was possible that his non-arrival might draw a letter or message from her of a sweeter composition than this. That would at least be the effect of his tardiness if she cared in the least for him; if she did not he could bear the worst. The argument was good enough as far as it went, but, like many more, failed from the narrowness of its premises, the contingent intervention of Dare being entirely undreamt of. It was altogether a fatal miscalculation, which cost him dear.
Passing by the telegraph-office in the Rue Pont-Neuf at an early hour the next morning he saw Dare coming out from the door. It was Somerset’s momentary impulse to thank Dare for the information given as to Paula’s whereabouts, information which had now proved true. But Dare did not seem to appreciate his friendliness, and after a few words of studied civility the young man moved on.
And well he might. Five minutes before that time he had thrown open a gulf of treachery between himself and the architect which nothing in life could ever close. Before leaving the telegraph-office Dare had despatched the following message to Paula direct, as a set-off against what he called Somerset’s ingratitude for valuable information, though it was really the fruit of many passions, motives, and desires: —
‘G. Somerset, Nice, to Miss Power, Grand Hotel, Genoa.
‘Have lost all at Monte Carlo. Have learnt that Captain D. S. returns here to-morrow. Please send me one hundred pounds by him, and save me from disgrace. Will await him at eleven o’clock and four, on the Pont-Neuf.’
CHAPTER V.
Five hours after the despatch of that telegram Captain De Stancy was rattling along the coast railway of the Riviera from Genoa to Nice. He was returning to England by way of Marseilles; but before turning northwards he had engaged to perform on Miss Power’s account a peculiar and somewhat disagreeable duty. This was to place in Somerset’s hands a hundred and twenty-five napoleons which had been demanded from her by a message in Somerset’s name. The money was in his pocket — all in gold, in a canvas bag, tied up by Paula’s own hands, which he had observed to tremble as she tied it.
As he leaned in the corner of the carriage he was thinking over the events of the morning which had culminated in that liberal response. At ten o’clock, before he had gone out from the hotel where he had taken up his quarters, which was not the same as the one patronized by Paula and her friends, he had been summoned to her presence in a manner so unexpected as to imply that something serious was in question. On entering her room he had been struck by the absence of that saucy independence usually apparent in her bearing towards him, notwithstanding the persistency with which he had hovered near her for the previous month, and gradually, by the position of his sister, and the favour of Paula’s uncle in intercepting one of Somerset’s letters and several of his telegrams, established himself as an intimate member of the travelling party. His entry, however, this time as always, had had the effect of a tonic, and it was quite with her customary self-possession that she had told him of the object of her message.
‘You think of returning to Nice this afternoon?’ she inquired.
De Stancy informed her that such was his intention, and asked if he could do anything for her there.
Then, he remembered, she had hesitated. ‘I have received a telegram,’ she said at length; and so she allowed to escape her bit by bit the information that her architect, whose name she seemed reluctant to utter, had travelled from England to Nice that week, partly to consult her, partly for a holiday trip; that he had gone on to Monte Carlo, had there lost his money and got into difficulties, and had appealed to her to help him out of them by the immediate advance of some ready cash. It was a sad case, an unexpected case, she murmured, with her eyes fixed on the window. Indeed she could not comprehend it.
To De Stancy there appeared nothing so very extraordinary in Somerset’s apparent fiasco, except in so far as that he should have applied to Paula for relief from his distresses instead of elsewhere. It was a self-humiliation which a lover would have avoided at all costs, he thought. Yet after a momentary reflection on his theory of Somerset’s character, it seemed sufficiently natural that he should lean persistently on Paula, if only with a view of keeping himself linked to her memory, without thinking too profoundly of his own dignity. That the esteem in which she had held Somerset up to that hour suffered a tremendous blow by his apparent scrape was clearly visible in her, reticent as she was; and De Stancy, while pitying Somerset, thanked him in his mind for having gratuitously given a rival an advantage which that rival’s attentions had never been able to gain of themselves.
After a little further conversation she had said: ‘Since you are to be my messenger, I must tell you that I have decided to send the hundred pounds asked for, and you will please to deliver them into no hands but his own.’ A curious little blush crept over her sobered face — perhaps it was a blush of shame at the conduct of the young man in whom she had of late been suspiciously interested — as she added, ‘He will be on the Pont-Neuf at four this afternoon and again at eleven tomorrow. Can you meet him there?’
‘Certainly,’ De Stancy replied.
She then asked him, rather anxiously, how he could account for Mr. Somerset knowing that he, Captain De Stancy, was about to return to Nice?
De Stancy informed her that he left word at the hotel of his intention to return, which was quite true; moreover, there did not lurk in his mind at the moment of speaking the faintest suspicion that Somerset had seen Dare.
She then tied the bag and handed it to him, leaving him with a serene and impenetrable bearing, which he hoped for his own sake meant an acquired indifference to Somerset and his fortunes. Her sending the architect a sum of money which she could easily spare might be set down to natural generosity towards a man with whom she was artistically co-operating for the improvement of her home.
She came back to him again for a moment. ‘Could you possibly get there before four this afternoon?’ she asked, and he informed her that he could just do so by leaving almost at once, which he was very willing to do, though by so forestalling his time he would lose the projected morning with her and the rest at the Palazzo Doria.
‘I may tell you that I shall not go to the Palazzo Doria either, if it is any consolation to you to know it,’ was her reply. ‘I shall sit indoors and think of you on your journey.’
The answer admitted of two translations, and conjectures thereon filled the gallant soldier’s mind during the greater part of the journey. He arrived at the hotel they had all stayed at in succession about six hours after Somerset had left it for a little excursion to San Remo and its neighbourhood, as a means of passing a few days till Paula should write again to inquire why he had not come on. De Stancy saw no one he knew, and in obedience to Paula’s commands he promptly set off on foot for the Pont-Neuf.
Though opposed to the architect as a lover, De Stancy felt for him as a poor devil in need of money, having had experiences of that sort himself, and he was really anxious that the needful supply entrusted to him should reach Som
erset’s hands. He was on the bridge five minutes before the hour, and when the clock struck a hand was laid on his shoulder: turning he beheld Dare.
Knowing that the youth was loitering somewhere along the coast, for they had frequently met together on De Stancy’s previous visit, the latter merely said, ‘Don’t bother me for the present, Willy, I have an engagement. You can see me at the hotel this evening.’
‘When you have given me the hundred pounds I will fly like a rocket, captain,’ said the young gentleman. ‘I keep the appointment instead of the other man.’
De Stancy looked hard at him. ‘How — do you know about this?’ he asked breathlessly.
‘I have seen him.’
De Stancy took the young man by the two shoulders and gazed into his eyes. The scrutiny seemed not altogether to remove the suspicion which had suddenly started up in his mind. ‘My soul,’ he said, dropping his arms, ‘can this be true?’
‘What?’
‘You know.’
Dare shrugged his shoulders; ‘Are you going to hand over the money or no?’ he said.
‘I am going to make inquiries,’ said De Stancy, walking away with a vehement tread.
‘Captain, you are without natural affection,’ said Dare, walking by his side, in a tone which showed his fear that he had over-estimated that emotion. ‘See what I have done for you. You have been my constant care and anxiety for I can’t tell how long. I have stayed awake at night thinking how I might best give you a good start in the world by arranging this judicious marriage, when you have been sleeping as sound as a top with no cares upon your mind at all, and now I have got into a scrape — as the most thoughtful of us may sometimes — you go to make inquiries.’
‘I have promised the lady to whom this money belongs — whose generosity has been shamefully abused in some way — that I will deliver it into no hands but those of one man, and he has not yet appeared. I therefore go to find him.’
Dare laid his hand upon De Stancy’s arm. ‘Captain, we are both warm, and punctilious on points of honour; this will come to a split between us if we don’t mind. So, not to bring matters to a crisis, lend me ten pounds here to enable me to get home, and I’ll disappear.’
In a state bordering on distraction, eager to get the young man out of his sight before worse revelations should rise up between them, De Stancy without pausing in his walk gave him the sum demanded. He soon reached the post-office, where he inquired if a Mr. Somerset had left any directions for forwarding letters.
It was just what Somerset had done. De Stancy was told that Mr. Somerset had commanded that any letters should be sent on to him at the Hotel Victoria, San Remo.
It was now evident that the scheme of getting money from Paula was either of Dare’s invention, or that Somerset, ashamed of his first impulse, had abandoned it as speedily as it had been formed. De Stancy turned and went out. Dare, in keeping with his promise, had vanished. Captain De Stancy resolved to do nothing in the case till further events should enlighten him, beyond sending a line to Miss Power to inform her that Somerset had not appeared, and that he therefore retained the money for further instructions.
BOOK THE FIFTH. DE STANCY AND PAULA.
CHAPTER I.
Miss Power was reclining on a red velvet couch in the bedroom of an old-fashioned red hotel at Strassburg, and her friend Miss De Stancy was sitting by a window of the same apartment. They were both rather wearied by a long journey of the previous day. The hotel overlooked the large open Kleber Platz, erect in the midst of which the bronze statue of General Kleber received the rays of a warm sun that was powerless to brighten him. The whole square, with its people and vehicles going to and fro as if they had plenty of time, was visible to Charlotte in her chair; but Paula from her horizontal position could see nothing below the level of the many dormered house-tops on the opposite side of the Platz. After watching this upper storey of the city for some time in silence, she asked Charlotte to hand her a binocular lying on the table, through which instrument she quietly regarded the distant roofs.
‘What strange and philosophical creatures storks are,’ she said. ‘They give a taciturn, ghostly character to the whole town.’
The birds were crossing and recrossing the field of the glass in their flight hither and thither between the Strassburg chimneys, their sad grey forms sharply outlined against the sky, and their skinny legs showing beneath like the limbs of dead martyrs in Crivelli’s emaciated imaginings. The indifference of these birds to all that was going on beneath them impressed her: to harmonize with their solemn and silent movements the houses beneath should have been deserted, and grass growing in the streets.
Behind the long roofs thus visible to Paula over the window-sill, with their tiers of dormer-windows, rose the cathedral spire in airy openwork, forming the highest object in the scene; it suggested something which for a long time she appeared unwilling to utter; but natural instinct had its way.
‘A place like this,’ she said, ‘where he can study Gothic architecture, would, I should have thought, be a spot more congenial to him than Monaco.’
The person referred to was the misrepresented Somerset, whom the two had been gingerly discussing from time to time, allowing any casual subject, such as that of the storks, to interrupt the personal one at every two or three sentences.
‘It would be more like him to be here,’ replied Miss De Stancy, trusting her tongue with only the barest generalities on this matter.
Somerset was again dismissed for the stork topic, but Paula could not let him alone; and she presently resumed, as if an irresistible fascination compelled what judgment had forbidden: ‘The strongest-minded persons are sometimes caught unawares at that place, if they once think they will retrieve their first losses; and I am not aware that he is particularly strong-minded.’
For a moment Charlotte looked at her with a mixed expression, in which there was deprecation that a woman with any feeling should criticize Somerset so frigidly, and relief that it was Paula who did so. For, notwithstanding her assumption that Somerset could never be anything more to her than he was already, Charlotte’s heart would occasionally step down and trouble her views so expressed.
Whether looking through a glass at distant objects enabled Paula to bottle up her affection for the absent one, or whether her friend Charlotte had so little personality in Paula’s regard that she could commune with her as with a lay figure, it was certain that she evinced remarkable ease in speaking of Somerset, resuming her words about him in the tone of one to whom he was at most an ordinary professional adviser. ‘It would be very awkward for the works at the castle if he has got into a scrape. I suppose the builders were well posted with instructions before he left: but he ought certainly to return soon. Why did he leave England at all just now?’
‘Perhaps it was to see you.’
‘He should have waited; it would not have been so dreadfully long to May or June. Charlotte, how can a man who does such a hare-brained thing as this be deemed trustworthy in an important work like that of rebuilding Stancy Castle?’
There was such stress in the inquiry that, whatever factitiousness had gone before, Charlotte perceived Paula to be at last speaking her mind; and it seemed as if Somerset must have considerably lost ground in her opinion, or she would not have criticized him thus.
‘My brother will tell us full particulars when he comes: perhaps it is not at all as we suppose,’ said Charlotte. She strained her eyes across the Platz and added, ‘He ought to have been here before this time.’
While they waited and talked, Paula still observing the storks, the hotel omnibus came round the corner from the station. ‘I believe he has arrived,’ resumed Miss De Stancy; ‘I see something that looks like his portmanteau on the top of the omnibus.... Yes; it is his baggage. I’ll run down to him.’
De Stancy had obtained six weeks’ additional leave on account of his health, which had somewhat suffered in India. The first use he made of his extra time was in hastening back to meet th
e travelling ladies here at Strassburg. Mr. Power and Mrs. Goodman were also at the hotel, and when Charlotte got downstairs, the former was welcoming De Stancy at the door.
Paula had not seen him since he set out from Genoa for Nice, commissioned by her to deliver the hundred pounds to Somerset. His note, stating that he had failed to meet Somerset, contained no details, and she guessed that he would soon appear before her now to answer any question about that peculiar errand.
Her anticipations were justified by the event; she had no sooner gone into the next sitting-room than Charlotte De Stancy appeared and asked if her brother might come up. The closest observer would have been in doubt whether Paula’s ready reply in the affirmative was prompted by personal consideration for De Stancy, or by a hope to hear more of his mission to Nice. As soon as she had welcomed him she reverted at once to the subject.
‘Yes, as I told you, he was not at the place of meeting,’ De Stancy replied. And taking from his pocket the bag of ready money he placed it intact upon the table.
De Stancy did this with a hand that shook somewhat more than a long railway journey was adequate to account for; and in truth it was the vision of Dare’s position which agitated the unhappy captain: for had that young man, as De Stancy feared, been tampering with Somerset’s name, his fate now trembled in the balance; Paula would unquestionably and naturally invoke the aid of the law against him if she discovered such an imposition.
‘Were you punctual to the time mentioned?’ she asked curiously.
De Stancy replied in the affirmative.
‘Did you wait long?’ she continued.
‘Not very long,’ he answered, his instinct to screen the possibly guilty one confining him to guarded statements, while still adhering to the literal truth.
