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 coat-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.
A latent power in the man, or boy, was revealed by the circumstance that
Somerset did not feel, as he would ordinarily have done, that
it was a matter of profound indifference to him whether this
gentleman-photographer were a likeable person or no.
‘I have called by appointment; or rather, I left a card stating that
to-day would suit me, and no objection was made.’ Somerset recognized
the voice; it was that of the invisible stranger who had talked with the
landlord about the De Stancys. Mr. Dare then proceeded to explain his
business.
Somerset found from his inquiries that the man had unquestionably been
instructed by somebody to take the views he spoke of; and concluded that
Dare’s curiosity at the inn was, after all, naturally explained by his
errand to this place. Blaming himself for a too hasty condemnation of
the stranger, who though visually a little too assured was civil enough
verbally, Somerset proceeded with the young photographer to sundry
corners of the outer ward, and thence across the moat to the field,
suggesting advantageous points of view. The office, being a shadow of
his own pursuits, was not uncongenial to Somerset, and he forgot other
things in attending to it.
‘Now in our country we should stand further back than this, and so get a
more comprehensive coup d’oeil,’ said Dare, as Somerset selected a good
situation.
‘You are not an Englishman, then,’ said Somerset.
‘I have lived mostly in India, Malta, Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands,
and Canada. I there invented a new photographic process, which I am bent
upon making famous. Yet I am but a dilettante, and do not follow this
art at the base dictation of what men call necessity.’
‘O indeed,’ Somerset replied.
As soon as this business was disposed of, and Mr. Dare had brought up
his van and assistant to begin operations, Somerset returned to the
castle entrance. While under the archway a man with a professional look
drove up in a dog-cart and inquired if Miss Power were at home to-day.
‘She has not yet returned, Mr. Havill,’ was the reply.
Somerset, who had hoped to hear an affirmative by this time,
thought that Miss Power was bent on disappointing him in the flesh,
notwithstanding the interest she expressed in him by telegraph; and as
it was now drawing towards the end of the afternoon, he walked off in
the direction of his inn.
There were two or three ways to that spot, but the pleasantest was by
passing through a rambling shrubbery, between whose bushes trickled
a broad shallow brook, occasionally intercepted in its course by a
transverse chain of old stones, evidently from the castle walls, which
formed a miniature waterfall. The walk lay along the river-brink. Soon
Somerset saw before him a circular summer-house formed of short sticks
nailed to ornamental patterns. Outside the structure, and immediately
in the path, stood a man with a book in his hand; and it was presently
apparent that this gentleman was holding a conversation with some
person inside the pavilion, but the back of the building being towards
Somerset, the second individual could not be seen.
The speaker at one moment glanced into the interior, and at another
at the advancing form of the architect, whom, though distinctly enough
beheld, the other scarcely appeared to heed in the absorbing interest
of his own discourse. Somerset became aware that it was the Baptist
minister, whose rhetoric he had heard in the chapel yonder.
‘Now,’ continued the Baptist minister, ‘will you express to me any
reason or objection whatever which induces you to withdraw from our
communion? It was that of your father, and of his father before him. Any
difficulty you may have met with I will honestly try to remove; for
I need hardly say that in losing you we lose one of the most valued
members of the Baptist church in this district. I speak with all the
respect due to your position, when I ask you to realize how irreparable
is the injury you inflict upon the cause here by this lukewarm
backwardness.’
‘I don’t withdraw,’ said a woman’s low voice within.
‘What do you do?’
‘I decline to attend for the present.’
‘And you can give no reason for this?’
There was no reply.
‘Or for your refusal to proceed with the baptism?’
‘I have been christened.’
‘My dear young lady, it is well known that your christening was the work
of your aunt, who did it unknown to your parents when she had you in
her power, out of pure obstinacy to a church with which she was not in
sympathy, taking you surreptitiously, and indefensibly, to the font
of the Establishment; so that the rite meant and could mean nothing at
all.... But I fear that your new position has brought you into contact
with the Paedobaptists, that they have disturbed your old principles,
and so induced you to believe in the validity of that trumpery
ceremony!’
‘It seems sufficient.’
‘I will demolish the basis of that seeming in three minutes, give me but
that time as a listener.’
‘I have no objection.’
‘Very well.... First, then, I will assume that those who have influenced
you in the matter have not been able to make any impression upon one so
well grounded as yourself in our distinctive doctrine, by the stale old
argument drawn from circumcision?’
‘You may assume it.’
‘Good--that clears the ground. And we now come to the New Testament.’
The minister began to turn over the leaves of his little Bible, which it
impressed Somerset to observe was bound with a flap, like a pocket book,
the black surface of the leather being worn brown at the corners by long
usage. He turned on till he came to the beginning of the New Testament,
and then commenced his discourse. After explaining his position, the old
man ran very ably through the arguments, citing well-known writers on
the point in dispute when he required more finished sentences than his
own.
The minister’s earnestness and interest in his own case led him
unconsciously to include Somerset in his audience as the young man
drew nearer; till, instead of fixing his eyes exclusively on the person
within the summer-house, the preacher began to direct a good proportion
of his discourse upon his new auditor, turning from one listener to
the other attentively, without seeming to feel Somerset’s presence as
superfluous.
‘And now,’ he said in conclusion, ‘I put it to you, sir, as to her: do
you find any flaw in my argument? Is there, madam, a single text which,
honestly interpreted, affords the least foothold for the Paedobaptists;
in other words, for your opinion on the efficacy of the rite
administered to you in your unconscious infancy? I put it to you both as
honest and responsible beings.’ He turned again to the young man.
It happened that Somerset had been over this ground long ago. Born, so
to speak, a High-Church infant, in his youth he had been of a thoughtful
turn, till at one time an idea of his entering the Church had been
entertained by his parents. He had formed acquaintance with men of
almost every variety of doctrinal practice in this country; and, as
the pleadings of each assailed him before he had arrived at an age of
sufficient mental stability to resist new impressions, however badly
substantiated, he inclined to each denomination as it presented itself,
was
‘Everything by starts, and nothing long,’
till he had travelled through a great many beliefs and doctrines without
feeling himself much better than when he set out.
A study of fonts and their origin had qualified him in this particular
subject. Fully conscious of the inexpediency of contests on minor ritual
differences, he yet felt a sudden impulse towards a mild intellectual
tournament with the eager old man--purely as an exercise of his wits in
the defence of a fair girl.
‘Sir, I accept your challenge to us,’ said Somerset, advancing to the
minister’s side.