V.

The cheering message from Paula to Somerset sped through the loophole

of Stancy Castle keep, over the trees, along the railway, under bridges,

across four counties--from extreme antiquity of environment to sheer

modernism--and finally landed itself on a table in Somerset’s chambers

in the midst of a cloud of fog. He read it and, in the moment of

reaction from the depression of his past days, clapped his hands like a

child.

Then he considered the date at which she wanted to see him. Had she

so worded her despatch he would have gone that very day; but there was

nothing to complain of in her giving him a week’s notice. Pure maiden

modesty might have checked her indulgence in a too ardent recall.

Time, however, dragged somewhat heavily along in the interim, and on the

second day he thought he would call on his father and tell him of his

success in obtaining the appointment.

The elder Mr. Somerset lived in a detached house in the north-west part

of fashionable London; and ascending the chief staircase the young

man branched off from the first landing and entered his father’s

painting-room. It was an hour when he was pretty sure of finding the

well-known painter at work, and on lifting the tapestry he was not

disappointed, Mr. Somerset being busily engaged with his back towards

the door.

Art and vitiated nature were struggling like wrestlers in that

apartment, and art was getting the worst of it. The overpowering gloom

pervading the clammy air, rendered still more intense by the height of

the window from the floor, reduced all the pictures that were standing

around to the wizened feebleness of corpses on end. The shadowy parts

of the room behind the different easels were veiled in a brown vapour,

precluding all estimate of the extent of the studio, and only subdued

in the foreground by the ruddy glare from an open stove of Dutch tiles.

Somerset’s footsteps had been so noiseless over the carpeting of the

stairs and landing, that his father was unaware of his presence; he

continued at his work as before, which he performed by the help of a

complicated apparatus of lamps, candles, and reflectors, so arranged as

to eke out the miserable daylight, to a power apparently sufficient for

the neutral touches on which he was at that moment engaged.

The first thought of an unsophisticated stranger on entering that room

could only be the amazed inquiry why a professor of the art of colour,

which beyond all other arts requires pure daylight for its exercise,

should fix himself on the single square league in habitable Europe to

which light is denied at noonday for weeks in succession.

‘O! it’s you, George, is it?’ said the Academician, turning from the

lamps, which shone over his bald crown at such a slant as to reveal

every cranial irregularity. ‘How are you this morning? Still a dead

silence about your grand castle competition?’

Somerset told the news. His father duly congratulated him, and added

genially, ‘It is well to be you, George. One large commission to attend

to, and nothing to distract you from it. I am bothered by having a dozen

irons in the fire at once. And people are so unreasonable.--Only this

morning, among other things, when you got your order to go on with your

single study, I received a letter from a woman, an old friend whom I

can scarcely refuse, begging me as a great favour to design her a set of

theatrical costumes, in which she and her friends can perform for some

charity. It would occupy me a good week to go into the subject and do

the thing properly. Such are the sort of letters I get. I wish, George,

you could knock out something for her before you leave town. It is

positively impossible for me to do it with all this work in hand, and

these eternal fogs to contend against.’

‘I fear costumes are rather out of my line,’ said the son. ‘However,

I’ll do what I can. What period and country are they to represent?’

His father didn’t know. He had never looked at the play of late years.

It was ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ ‘You had better read it for yourself,’ he

said, ‘and do the best you can.’

During the morning Somerset junior found time to refresh his memory of

the play, and afterwards went and hunted up materials for designs to

suit the same, which occupied his spare hours for the next three days.

As these occupations made no great demands upon his reasoning faculties

he mostly found his mind wandering off to imaginary scenes at Stancy

Castle: particularly did he dwell at this time upon Paula’s lively

interest in the history, relics, tombs, architecture,--nay, the very

Christian names of the De Stancy line, and her ‘artistic’ preference

for Charlotte’s ancestors instead of her own. Yet what more natural

than that a clever meditative girl, encased in the feudal lumber of

that family, should imbibe at least an antiquarian interest in it?

Human nature at bottom is romantic rather than ascetic, and the local

habitation which accident had provided for Paula was perhaps acting as

a solvent of the hard, morbidly introspective views thrust upon her in

early life.

Somerset wondered if his own possession of a substantial genealogy

like Captain De Stancy’s would have had any appreciable effect upon her

regard for him. His suggestion to Paula of her belonging to a worthy

strain of engineers had been based on his content with his own

intellectual line of descent through Pheidias, Ictinus and Callicrates,

Chersiphron, Vitruvius, Wilars of Cambray, William of Wykeham, and

the rest of that long and illustrious roll; but Miss Power’s marked

preference for an animal pedigree led him to muse on what he could show

for himself in that kind.

These thoughts so far occupied him that when he took the sketches to

his father, on the morning of the fifth, he was led to ask: ‘Has any one

ever sifted out our family pedigree?’

‘Family pedigree?’

‘Yes. Have we any pedigree worthy to be compared with that of

professedly old families? I never remember hearing of any ancestor

further back than my great-grandfather.’

Somerset the elder reflected and said that he believed there was a

genealogical tree about the house somewhere, reaching back to a very

respectable distance. ‘Not that I ever took much interest in it,’ he

continued, without looking up from his canvas; ‘but your great uncle

John was a man with a taste for those subjects, and he drew up such a

sheet: he made several copies on parchment, and gave one to each of

his brothers and sisters. The one he gave to my father is still in my

possession, I think.’

Somerset said that he should like to see it; but half-an-hour’s search

about the house failed to discover the document; and the Academician

then remembered that it was in an iron box at his banker’s. He had used

it as a wrapper for some title-deeds and other valuable writings which

were deposited there for safety. ‘Why do you want it?’ he inquired.

The young man confessed his whim to know if his own antiquity would bear

comparison with that of another person, whose name he did not mention;

whereupon his father gave him a key that would fit the said chest, if he

meant to pursue the subject further. Somerset, however, did nothing in

the matter that day, but the next morning, having to call at the bank on

other business, he remembered his new fancy.

It was about eleven o’clock. The fog, though not so brown as it had been

on previous days, was still dense enough to necessitate lights in the

shops and offices. When Somerset had finished his business in the

outer office of the bank he went to the manager’s room. The hour being

somewhat early the only persons present in that sanctuary of balances,

besides the manager who welcomed him, were two gentlemen, apparently

lawyers, who sat talking earnestly over a box of papers. The manager,

on learning what Somerset wanted, unlocked a door from which a flight

of stone steps led to the vaults, and sent down a clerk and a porter for

the safe.

Before, however, they had descended far a gentle tap came to the door,

and in response to an invitation to enter a lady appeared, wrapped up in

furs to her very nose.

The manager seemed to recognize her, for he went across the room in

a moment, and set her a chair at the middle table, replying to some

observation of hers with the words, ‘O yes, certainly,’ in a deferential

tone.

‘I should like it brought up at once,’ said the lady.

Somerset, who had seated himself at a table in a somewhat obscure

corner, screened by the lawyers, started at the words. The voice

was Miss Power’s, and so plainly enough was the figure as soon as he

examined it. Her back was towards him, and either because the room

was only lighted in two places, or because she was absorbed in her own

concerns, she seemed to be unconscious of any one’s presence on the

scene except the banker and herself. The former called back the clerk,

and two other porters having been summoned they disappeared to get

whatever she required.

Somerset, somewhat excited, sat wondering what could have brought Paula

to London at this juncture, and was in some doubt if the occasion were

a suitable one for revealing himself, her errand to her banker being

possibly of a very private nature. Nothing helped him to a decision.

Paula never once turned her head, and the progress of time was marked

only by the murmurs of the two lawyers, and the ceaseless clash of

gold and rattle of scales from the outer room, where the busy heads

of cashiers could be seen through the partition moving about under the

globes of the gas-lamps.

Footsteps were heard upon the cellar-steps, and the three men previously

sent below staggered from the doorway, bearing a huge safe which nearly

broke them down. Somerset knew that his father’s box, or boxes, could

boast of no such dimensions, and he was not surprised to see the chest

deposited in front of Miss Power. When the immense accumulation of dust

had been cleared off the lid, and the chest conveniently placed for her,

Somerset was attended to, his modest box being brought up by one man

unassisted, and without much expenditure of breath.

His interest in Paula was of so emotional a cast that his attention

to his own errand was of the most perfunctory kind. She was close to

a gas-standard, and the lawyers, whose seats had intervened, having

finished their business and gone away, all her actions were visible to

him. While he was opening his father’s box the manager assisted Paula to

unseal and unlock hers, and he now saw her lift from it a morocco case,

which she placed on the table before her, and unfastened. Out of it she

took a dazzling object that fell like a cascade over her fingers. It

was a necklace of diamonds and pearls, apparently of large size and many

strands, though he was not near enough to see distinctly. When satisfied

by her examination that she had got the right article she shut it into

its case.

The manager closed the chest for her; and when it was again secured

Paula arose, tossed the necklace into her hand-bag, bowed to the

manager, and was about to bid him good morning. Thereupon he said with

some hesitation: ‘Pardon one question, Miss Power. Do you intend to take

those jewels far?’

‘Yes,’ she said simply, ‘to Stancy Castle.’

‘You are going straight there?’

‘I have one or two places to call at first.’

‘I would suggest that you carry them in some other way--by fastening

them into the pocket of your dress, for instance.’

‘But I am going to hold the bag in my hand and never once let it go.’

The banker slightly shook his head. ‘Suppose your carriage gets

overturned: you would let it go then.’

‘Perhaps so.’

‘Or if you saw a child under the wheels just as you were stepping in; or

if you accidentally stumbled in getting out; or if there was a collision

on the railway--you might let it go.’

‘Yes; I see I was too careless. I thank you.’

Paula removed the necklace from the bag, turned her back to the manager,

and spent several minutes in placing her treasure in her bosom, pinning

it and otherwise making it absolutely secure.

‘That’s it,’ said the grey-haired man of caution, with evident

satisfaction. ‘There is not much danger now: you are not travelling

alone?’

Paula replied that she was not alone, and went to the door. There

was one moment during which Somerset might have conveniently made his

presence known; but the juxtaposition of the bank-manager, and his own

disarranged box of securities, embarrassed him: the moment slipped by,

and she was gone.

In the meantime he had mechanically unearthed the pedigree, and, locking

up his father’s chest, Somerset also took his departure at the heels of

Paula. He walked along the misty street, so deeply musing as to be quite

unconscious of the direction of his walk. What, he inquired of himself,

could she want that necklace for so suddenly? He recollected a remark

of Dare’s to the effect that her appearance on a particular occasion

at Stancy Castle had been magnificent by reason of the jewels she

wore; which proved that she had retained a sufficient quantity of those

valuables at the castle for ordinary requirements. What exceptional

occasion, then, was impending on which she wished to glorify herself

beyond all previous experience? He could not guess. He was interrupted

in these conjectures by a carriage nearly passing over his toes at a

crossing in Bond Street: looking up he saw between the two windows of

the vehicle the profile of a thickly mantled bosom, on which a camellia

rose and fell. All the remainder part of the lady’s person was hidden;

but he remembered that flower of convenient season as one which had

figured in the bank parlour half-an-hour earlier to-day.

Somerset hastened after the carriage, and in a minute saw it stop

opposite a jeweller’s shop. Out came Paula, and then another woman, in

whom he recognized Mrs. Birch, one of the lady’s maids at Stancy Castle.

The young man was at Paula’s side before she had crossed the pavement.