A Laodicean : A Story of To-day

The sight of Paula in her graceful performance, which the judicious Dare had so carefully planned, led up to and heightened by subtle accessories, operated on De Stancy’s surprised soul with a promptness almost magical.

On the evening of the self-same day, having dined as usual, he retired to his rooms, where he found a hamper of wine awaiting him. It had been anonymously sent, and the account was paid. He smiled grimly, but no longer with heaviness. In this he instantly recognized the handiwork of Dare, who, having at last broken down the barrier which De Stancy had erected round his heart for so many years, acted like a skilled strategist, and took swift measures to follow up the advantage so tardily gained.

Captain De Stancy knew himself conquered: he knew he should yield to Paula – had indeed yielded; but there was now, in his solitude, an hour or two of reaction. He did not drink from the bottles sent. He went early to bed, and lay tossing thereon till far into the night, thinking over the collapse. His teetotalism had, with the lapse of years, unconsciously become the outward and visible sign to himself of his secret vows; and a return to its opposite, however mildly done, signified with ceremonious distinctness the formal acceptance of delectations long forsworn.

But the exceeding freshness of his feeling for Paula, which by reason of its long arrest was that of a man far under thirty, and was a wonder to himself every instant, would not long brook weighing in balances. He wished suddenly to commit himself; to remove the question of retreat out of the region of debate. The clock struck two: and the wish became determination. He arose, and wrapping himself in his dressing-gown went to the next room, where he took from a shelf in the pantry several large bottles, which he carried to the window, till they stood on the sill a goodly row. There had been sufficient light in the room for him to do this without a candle. Now he softly opened the sash, and the radiance of a gibbous moon riding in the opposite sky flooded the apartment. It fell on the labels of the captain’s bottles, revealing their contents to be simple aerated waters for drinking.

De Stancy looked out and listened. The guns that stood drawn up within the yard glistened in the moonlight reaching them from over the barrack-wall: there was an occasional stamp of horses in the stables; also a measured tread of sentinels – one or more at the gates, one at the hospital, one between the wings, two at the magazine, and others further off. Recurring to his intention he drew the corks of the mineral waters, and inverting each bottle one by one over the window-sill, heard its contents dribble in a small stream on to the gravel below.

He then opened the hamper which Dare had sent. Uncorking one of the bottles he murmured, ‘To Paula!’ and drank a glass of the ruby liquor.

‘A man again after eighteen years,’ he said, shutting the sash and returning to his bedroom.

The first overt result of his kindled interest in Miss Power was his saying to his sister the day after the surreptitious sight of Paula: ‘I am sorry, Charlotte, for a word or two I said the other day.’

‘Well?’

‘I was rather disrespectful to your friend Miss Power.’

‘I don’t think so – were you?’

‘Yes. When we were walking in the wood, I made a stupid joke about her… What does she know about me – do you ever speak of me to her?’

‘Only in general terms.’

‘What general terms?’

‘You know well enough, William; of your idiosyncrasies and so on – that you are a bit of a woman-hater, or at least a confirmed bachelor, and have but little respect for your own family.’

‘I wish you had not told her that,’ said De Stancy with dissatisfaction.

‘But I thought you always liked women to know your principles!’ said Charlotte, in injured tones; ‘and would particularly like her to know them, living so near.’

‘Yes, yes,’ replied her brother hastily. ‘Well, I ought to see her, just to show her that I am not quite a brute.’

‘That would be very nice!’ she answered, putting her hands together in agreeable astonishment. ‘It is just what I have wished, though I did not dream of suggesting it after what I have heard you say. I am going to stay with her again to-morrow, and I will let her know about this.’

‘Don’t tell her anything plainly, for heaven’s sake. I really want to see the interior of the castle; I have never entered its walls since my babyhood.’ He raised his eyes as he spoke to where the walls in question showed their ashlar faces over the trees.

‘You might have gone over it at any time.’

‘O yes. It is only recently that I have thought much of the place: I feel now that I should like to examine the old building thoroughly, since it was for so many generations associated with our fortunes, especially as most of the old furniture is still there. My sedulous avoidance hitherto of all relating to our family vicissitudes has been, I own, stupid conduct for an intelligent being; but impossible grapes are always sour, and I have unconsciously adopted Radical notions to obliterate disappointed hereditary instincts. But these have a trick of re-establishing themselves as one gets older, and the castle and what it contains have a keen interest for me now.’

‘It contains Paula.’

De Stancy’s pulse, which had been beating languidly for many years, beat double at the sound of that name.

‘I meant furniture and pictures for the moment,’ he said; ‘but I don’t mind extending the meaning to her, if you wish it.’

‘She is the rarest thing there.’

‘So you have said before.’

‘The castle and our family history have as much romantic interest for her as they have for you,’ Charlotte went on. ‘She delights in visiting our tombs and effigies and ponders over them for hours.’

‘Indeed!’ said De Stancy, allowing his surprise to hide the satisfaction which accompanied it. ‘That should make us friendly… Does she see many people?’

‘Not many as yet. And she cannot have many staying there during the alterations.’

‘Ah! yes – the alterations. Didn’t you say that she has had a London architect stopping there on that account? What was he – old or young?’

‘He is a young man: he has been to our house. Don’t you remember you met him there?’

‘What was his name?’

‘Mr. Somerset.’

‘O, that man! Yes, yes, I remember… Hullo, Lottie!’

‘What?’

‘Your face is as red as a peony. Now I know a secret!’ Charlotte vainly endeavoured to hide her confusion. ‘Very well – not a word! I won’t say more,’ continued De Stancy good-humouredly, ‘except that he seems to be a very nice fellow.’

De Stancy had turned the dialogue on to this little well-preserved secret of his sister’s with sufficient outward lightness; but it had been done in instinctive concealment of the disquieting start with which he had recognized that Somerset, Dare’s enemy, whom he had intercepted in placing Dare’s portrait into the hands of the chief constable, was a man beloved by his sister Charlotte. This novel circumstance might lead to a curious complication. But he was to hear more.

‘He may be very nice,’ replied Charlotte, with an effort, after this silence. ‘But he is nothing to me, more than a very good friend.’

‘There’s no engagement, or thought of one between you?’

‘Certainly there’s not!’ said Charlotte, with brave emphasis. ‘It is more likely to be between Paula and him than me and him.’

De Stancy’s bare military ears and closely cropped poll flushed hot. ‘Miss Power and him?’

‘I don’t mean to say there is, because Paula denies it; but I mean that he loves Paula. That I do know.’

De Stancy was dumb. This item of news which Dare had kept from him, not knowing how far De Stancy’s sense of honour might extend, was decidedly grave. Indeed, he was so greatly impressed with the fact, that he could not help saying as much aloud: ‘This is very serious!’

‘Why!’ she murmured tremblingly, for the first leaking out of her tender and sworn secret had disabled her quite.

‘Because I love Paula too.’

‘What do you say, William, you? – a woman you have never seen?’

‘I have seen her – by accident. And now, my dear little sis, you will be my close ally, won’t you? as I will be yours, as brother and sister should be.’ He placed his arm coaxingly round Charlotte’s shoulder.

‘O, William, how can I?’ at last she stammered.

‘Why, how can’t you, I should say? We are both in the same ship. I love Paula, you love Mr. Somerset; it behoves both of us to see that this flirtation of theirs ends in nothing.’

‘I don’t like you to put it like that – that I love him – it frightens me,’ murmured the girl, visibly agitated. ‘I don’t want to divide him from Paula; I couldn’t, I wouldn’t do anything to separate them. Believe me, Will, I could not! I am sorry you love there also, though I should be glad if it happened in the natural order of events that she should come round to you. But I cannot do anything to part them and make Mr. Somerset suffer. It would be TOO wrong and blamable.’

‘Now, you silly Charlotte, that’s just how you women fly off at a tangent. I mean nothing dishonourable in the least. Have I ever prompted you to do anything dishonourable? Fair fighting allies was all I thought of.’

Miss De Stancy breathed more freely. ‘Yes, we will be that, of course; we are always that, William. But I hope I can be your ally, and be quite neutral; I would so much rather.’

‘Well, I suppose it will not be a breach of your precious neutrality if you get me invited to see the castle?’

‘O no!’ she said brightly; ‘I don’t mind doing such a thing as that. Why not come with me tomorrow? I will say I am going to bring you. There will be no trouble at all.’

De Stancy readily agreed. The effect upon him of the information now acquired was to intensify his ardour tenfold, the stimulus being due to a perception that Somerset, with a little more knowledge, would hold a card which could be played with disastrous effect against himself – his relationship to Dare. Its disclosure to a lady of such Puritan antecedents as Paula’s, would probably mean her immediate severance from himself as an unclean thing.

‘Is Miss Power a severe pietist, or precisian; or is she a compromising lady?’ he asked abruptly.

‘She is severe and uncompromising – if you mean in her judgments on morals,’ said Charlotte, not quite hearing. The remark was peculiarly apposite, and De Stancy was silent.

He spent some following hours in a close study of the castle history, which till now had unutterably bored him. More particularly did he dwell over documents and notes which referred to the pedigree of his own family. He wrote out the names of all – and they were many – who had been born within those domineering walls since their first erection; of those among them who had been brought thither by marriage with the owner, and of stranger knights and gentlemen who had entered the castle by marriage with its mistress. He refreshed his memory on the strange loves and hates that had arisen in the course of the family history; on memorable attacks, and the dates of the same, the most memorable among them being the occasion on which the party represented by Paula battered down the castle walls that she was now about to mend, and, as he hoped, return in their original intact shape to the family dispossessed, by marriage with himself, its living representative.

In Sir William’s villa were small engravings after many of the portraits in the castle galleries, some of them hanging in the dining-room in plain oak and maple frames, and others preserved in portfolios. De Stancy spent much of his time over these, and in getting up the romances of their originals’ lives from memoirs and other records, all which stories were as great novelties to him as they could possibly be to any stranger. Most interesting to him was the life of an Edward De Stancy, who had lived just before the Civil Wars, and to whom Captain De Stancy bore a very traceable likeness. This ancestor had a mole on his cheek, black and distinct as a fly in cream; and as in the case of the first Lord Amherst’s wart, and Bennet Earl of Arlington’s nose-scar, the painter had faithfully reproduced the defect on canvas. It so happened that the captain had a mole, though not exactly on the same spot of his face; and this made the resemblance still greater.

He took infinite trouble with his dress that day, showing an amount of anxiety on the matter which for him was quite abnormal. At last, when fully equipped, he set out with his sister to make the call proposed. Charlotte was rather unhappy at sight of her brother’s earnest attempt to make an impression on Paula; but she could say nothing against it, and they proceeded on their way.

It was the darkest of November weather, when the days are so short that morning seems to join with evening without the intervention of noon. The sky was lined with low cloud, within whose dense substance tempests were slowly fermenting for the coming days. Even now a windy turbulence troubled the half-naked boughs, and a lonely leaf would occasionally spin downwards to rejoin on the grass the scathed multitude of its comrades which had preceded it in its fall. The river by the pavilion, in the summer so clear and purling, now slid onwards brown and thick and silent, and enlarged to double size.

II

Meanwhile Paula was alone. Of anyone else it would have been said that she must be finding the afternoon rather dreary in the quaint halls not of her forefathers: but of Miss Power it was unsafe to predicate so surely. She walked from room to room in a black velvet dress which gave decision to her outline without depriving it of softness. She occasionally clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of a window; but she more particularly bent her footsteps up and down the Long Gallery, where she had caused a large fire of logs to be kindled, in her endeavour to extend cheerfulness somewhat beyond the precincts of the sitting-rooms.

The fire glanced up on Paula, and Paula glanced down at the fire, and at the gnarled beech fuel, and at the wood-lice which ran out from beneath the bark to the extremity of the logs as the heat approached them. The low-down ruddy light spread over the dark floor like the setting sun over a moor, fluttering on the grotesque countenances of the bright andirons, and touching all the furniture on the underside.

She now and then crossed to one of the deep embrasures of the windows, to decipher some sentence from a letter she held in her hand. The daylight would have been more than sufficient for any bystander to discern that the capitals in that letter were of the peculiar semi-gothic type affected at the time by Somerset and other young architects of his school in their epistolary correspondence. She was very possibly thinking of him, even when not reading his letter, for the expression of softness with which she perused the page was more or less with her when she appeared to examine other things.

She walked about for a little time longer, then put away the letter, looked at the clock, and thence returned to the windows, straining her eyes over the landscape without, as she murmured, ‘I wish Charlotte was not so long coming!’

As Charlotte continued to keep away, Paula became less reasonable in her desires, and proceeded to wish that Somerset would arrive; then that anybody would come; then, walking towards the portraits on the wall, she flippantly asked one of those cavaliers to oblige her fancy for company by stepping down from his frame. The temerity of the request led her to prudently withdraw it almost as soon as conceived: old paintings had been said to play queer tricks in extreme cases, and the shadows this afternoon were funereal enough for anything in the shape of revenge on an intruder who embodied the antagonistic modern spirit to such an extent as she. However, Paula still stood before the picture which had attracted her; and this, by a coincidence common enough in fact, though scarcely credited in chronicles, happened to be that one of the seventeenth-century portraits of which De Stancy had studied the engraved copy at Myrtle Villa the same morning.

Whilst she remained before the picture, wondering her favourite wonder, how would she feel if this and its accompanying canvases were pictures of her own ancestors, she was surprised by a light footstep upon the carpet which covered part of the room, and turning quickly she beheld the smiling little figure of Charlotte De Stancy.

‘What has made you so late?’ said Paula. ‘You are come to stay, of course?’

Charlotte said she had come to stay. ‘But I have brought somebody with me!’

‘Ah – whom?’

‘My brother happened to be at home, and I have brought him.’

Miss De Stancy’s brother had been so continuously absent from home in India, or elsewhere, so little spoken of, and, when spoken of, so truly though unconsciously represented as one whose interests lay wholly outside this antiquated neighbourhood, that to Paula he had been a mere nebulosity whom she had never distinctly outlined. To have him thus cohere into substance at a moment’s notice lent him the novelty of a new creation.

‘Is he in the drawing-room?’ said Paula in a low voice.

‘No, he is here. He would follow me. I hope you will forgive him.’

And then Paula saw emerge into the red beams of the dancing fire, from behind a half-drawn hanging which screened the door, the military gentleman whose acquaintance the reader has already made.

‘You know the house, doubtless, Captain De Stancy?’ said Paula, somewhat shyly, when he had been presented to her.

‘I have never seen the inside since I was three weeks old,’ replied the artillery officer gracefully; ‘and hence my recollections of it are not remarkably distinct. A year or two before I was born the entail was cut off by my father and grandfather; so that I saw the venerable place only to lose it; at least, I believe that’s the truth of the case. But my knowledge of the transaction is not profound, and it is a delicate point on which to question one’s father.’

Paula assented, and looked at the interesting and noble figure of the man whose parents had seemingly righted themselves at the expense of wronging him.

‘The pictures and furniture were sold about the same time, I think?’ said Charlotte.

‘Yes,’ murmured De Stancy. ‘They went in a mad bargain of my father with his visitor, as they sat over their wine. My father sat down as host on that occasion, and arose as guest.’

He seemed to speak with such a courteous absence of regret for the alienation, that Paula, who was always fearing that the recollection would rise as a painful shadow between herself and the De Stancys, felt reassured by his magnanimity.

De Stancy looked with interest round the gallery; seeing which Paula said she would have lights brought in a moment.

‘No, please not,’ said De Stancy. ‘The room and ourselves are of so much more interesting a colour by this light!’

As they moved hither and thither, the various expressions of De Stancy’s face made themselves picturesquely visible in the unsteady shine of the blaze. In a short time he had drawn near to the painting of the ancestor whom he so greatly resembled. When her quick eye noted the speck on the face, indicative of inherited traits strongly pronounced, a new and romantic feeling that the De Stancys had stretched out a tentacle from their genealogical tree to seize her by the hand and draw her in to their mass took possession of Paula. As has been said, the De Stancys were a family on whom the hall-mark of membership was deeply stamped, and by the present light the representative under the portrait and the representative in the portrait seemed beings not far removed. Paula was continually starting from a reverie and speaking irrelevantly, as if such reflections as those seized hold of her in spite of her natural unconcern.

When candles were brought in Captain De Stancy ardently contrived to make the pictures the theme of conversation. From the nearest they went to the next, whereupon Paula as hostess took up one of the candlesticks and held it aloft to light up the painting. The candlestick being tall and heavy, De Stancy relieved her of it, and taking another candle in the other hand, he imperceptibly slid into the position of exhibitor rather than spectator. Thus he walked in advance holding the two candles on high, his shadow forming a gigantic figure on the neighbouring wall, while he recited the particulars of family history pertaining to each portrait, that he had learnt up with such eager persistence during the previous four-and-twenty-hours. ‘I have often wondered what could have been the history of this lady, but nobody has ever been able to tell me,’ Paula observed, pointing to a Vandyck which represented a beautiful woman wearing curls across her forehead, a square-cut bodice, and a heavy pearl necklace upon the smooth expanse of her neck.

‘I don’t think anybody knows,’ Charlotte said.

‘O yes,’ replied her brother promptly, seeing with enthusiasm that it was yet another opportunity for making capital of his acquired knowledge, with which he felt himself as inconveniently crammed as a candidate for a government examination. ‘That lady has been largely celebrated under a fancy name, though she is comparatively little known by her own. Her parents were the chief ornaments of the almost irreproachable court of Charles the First, and were not more distinguished by their politeness and honour than by the affections and virtues which constitute the great charm of private life.’

The stock verbiage of the family memoir was somewhat apparent in this effusion; but it much impressed his listeners; and he went on to point out that from the lady’s necklace was suspended a heart-shaped portrait – that of the man who broke his heart by her persistent refusal to encourage his suit. De Stancy then led them a little further, where hung a portrait of the lover, one of his own family, who appeared in full panoply of plate mail, the pommel of his sword standing up under his elbow. The gallant captain then related how this personage of his line wooed the lady fruitlessly; how, after her marriage with another, she and her husband visited the parents of the disappointed lover, the then occupiers of the castle; how, in a fit of desperation at the sight of her, he retired to his room, where he composed some passionate verses, which he wrote with his blood, and after directing them to her ran himself through the body with his sword. Too late the lady’s heart was touched by his devotion; she was ever after a melancholy woman, and wore his portrait despite her husband’s prohibition. ‘This,’ continued De Stancy, leading them through the doorway into the hall where the coats of mail were arranged along the wall, and stopping opposite a suit which bore some resemblance to that of the portrait, ‘this is his armour, as you will perceive by comparing it with the picture, and this is the sword with which he did the rash deed.’

‘What unreasonable devotion!’ said Paula practically. ‘It was too romantic of him. She was not worthy of such a sacrifice.’

‘He also is one whom they say you resemble a little in feature, I think,’ said Charlotte.

‘Do they?’ replied De Stancy. ‘I wonder if it’s true.’ He set down the candles, and asking the girls to withdraw for a moment, was inside the upper part of the suit of armour in incredibly quick time. Going then and placing himself in front of a low-hanging painting near the original, so as to be enclosed by the frame while covering the figure, arranging the sword as in the one above, and setting the light that it might fall in the right direction, he recalled them; when he put the question, ‘Is the resemblance strong?’

He looked so much like a man of bygone times that neither of them replied, but remained curiously gazing at him. His modern and comparatively sallow complexion, as seen through the open visor, lent an ethereal ideality to his appearance which the time-stained countenance of the original warrior totally lacked.

At last Paula spoke, so stilly that she seemed a statue enunciating: ‘Are the verses known that he wrote with his blood?’

‘O yes, they have been carefully preserved.’ Captain De Stancy, with true wooer’s instinct, had committed some of them to memory that morning from the printed copy to be found in every well-ordered library. ‘I fear I don’t remember them all,’ he said, ‘but they begin in this way: —

“From one that dyeth in his discontent,Dear Faire, receive this greeting to thee sent;And still as oft as it is read by thee,Then with some deep sad sigh remember mee!O ‘twas my fortune’s error to vow dutie,To one that bears defiance in her beautie!Sweete poyson, pretious wooe, infectious jewell —Such is a Ladie that is faire and cruell.How well could I with ayre, camelion-like,Live happie, and still gazeing on thy cheeke,In which, forsaken man, methink I seeHow goodlie love doth threaten cares to mee.Why dost thou frowne thus on a kneelinge soule,Whose faults in love thou may’st as well controule? —In love – but O, that word; that word I feareIs hateful still both to thy hart and eare!…Ladie, in breefe, my fate doth now intendThe period of my daies to have an end:Waste not on me thy pittie, pretious Faire:Rest you in much content; I, in despaire!”’

A solemn silence followed the close of the recital, which De Stancy improved by turning the point of the sword to his breast, resting the pommel upon the floor, and saying: —