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 see
How 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 feare
Is hateful still both to thy hart and eare!
. . . . .
Ladie, in breefe, my fate doth now intend
The 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:--
‘After writing that we may picture him turning this same sword in this
same way, and falling on it thus.’ He inclined his body forward as he
spoke.
‘Don’t, Captain De Stancy, please don’t!’ cried Paula involuntarily.
‘No, don’t show us any further, William!’ said his sister. ‘It is too
tragic.’
De Stancy put away the sword, himself rather excited--not, however, by
his own recital, but by the direct gaze of Paula at him.
This Protean quality of De Stancy’s, by means of which he could assume
the shape and situation of almost any ancestor at will, had impressed
her, and he perceived it with a throb of fervour. But it had done no
more than impress her; for though in delivering the lines he had so
fixed his look upon her as to suggest, to any maiden practised in the
game of the eyes, a present significance in the words, the idea of any
such arriere-pensee had by no means commended itself to her soul.
At this time a messenger from Markton barracks arrived at the castle and
wished to speak to Captain De Stancy in the hall. Begging the two ladies
to excuse him for a moment, he went out.
While De Stancy was talking in the twilight to the messenger at one end
of the apartment, some other arrival was shown in by the side door, and
in making his way after the conference across the hall to the room he
had previously quitted, De Stancy encountered the new-comer. There was
just enough light to reveal the countenance to be Dare’s; he bore a
portfolio under his arm, and had begun to wear a moustache, in case the
chief constable should meet him anywhere in his rambles, and be struck
by his resemblance to the man in the studio.
‘What the devil are you doing here?’ said Captain De Stancy, in tones he
had never used before to the young man.
Dare started back in surprise, and naturally so. De Stancy, having
adopted a new system of living, and relinquished the meagre diet and
enervating waters of his past years, was rapidly recovering tone. His
voice was firmer, his cheeks were less pallid; and above all he was
authoritative towards his present companion, whose ingenuity in vamping
up a being for his ambitious experiments seemed about to be rewarded,
like Frankenstein’s, by his discomfiture at the hands of his own
creature.
‘What the devil are you doing here, I say?’ repeated De Stancy.
‘You can talk to me like that, after my working so hard to get you on in
life, and make a rising man of you!’ expostulated Dare, as one who felt
himself no longer the leader in this enterprise.
‘But,’ said the captain less harshly, ‘if you let them discover any
relations between us here, you will ruin the fairest prospects man ever
had!’
‘O, I like that, captain--when you owe all of it to me!’
‘That’s too cool, Will.’
‘No; what I say is true. However, let that go. So now you are here on a
call; but how are you going to get here often enough to win her before
the other man comes back? If you don’t see her every day--twice, three
times a day--you will not capture her in the time.’
‘I must think of that,’ said De Stancy.
‘There is only one way of being constantly here: you must come to copy
the pictures or furniture, something in the way he did.’
‘I’ll think of it,’ muttered De Stancy hastily, as he heard the voices
of the ladies, whom he hastened to join as they were appearing at the
other end of the room. His countenance was gloomy as he recrossed
the hall, for Dare’s words on the shortness of his opportunities had
impressed him. Almost at once he uttered a hope to Paula that he might
have further chance of studying, and if possible of copying, some of the
ancestral faces with which the building abounded.
Meanwhile Dare had come forward with his portfolio, which proved to be
full of photographs. While Paula and Charlotte were examining them he
said to De Stancy, as a stranger: ‘Excuse my interruption, sir, but if
you should think of copying any of the portraits, as you were stating
just now to the ladies, my patent photographic process is at your
service, and is, I believe, the only one which would be effectual in the
dim indoor lights.’
‘It is just what I was thinking of,’ said De Stancy, now so far cooled
down from his irritation as to be quite ready to accept Dare’s adroitly
suggested scheme.
On application to Paula she immediately gave De Stancy permission to
photograph to any extent, and told Dare he might bring his instruments
as soon as Captain De Stancy required them.
‘Don’t stare at her in such a brazen way!’ whispered the latter to the
young man, when Paula had withdrawn a few steps. ‘Say, “I shall highly
value the privilege of assisting Captain De Stancy in such a work.”’
Dare obeyed, and before leaving De Stancy arranged to begin performing
on his venerated forefathers the next morning, the youth so accidentally
engaged agreeing to be there at the same time to assist in the technical
operations.