‘I am indisposed to answer you too clearly. Keep your heart strong: ‘tis
a censorious world.’
The vagueness there shown made Somerset peremptory, and he could not
help replying somewhat more impetuously than usual:-- ‘Why do you give
me so much cause for anxiety! Why treat me to so much mystification! Say
once, distinctly, that what I have asked is given.’
He awaited for the answer, one day, two days, a week; but none came. It
was now the end of March, and when Somerset walked of an afternoon
by the river and pool in the lower part of the grounds, his ear newly
greeted by the small voices of frogs and toads and other creatures who
had been torpid through the winter, he became doubtful and uneasy that
she alone should be silent in the awakening year.
He waited through a second week, and there was still no reply. It was
possible that the urgency of his request had tempted her to punish him,
and he continued his walks, to, fro, and around, with as close an ear to
the undertones of nature, and as attentive an eye to the charms of his
own art, as the grand passion would allow. Now came the days of battle
between winter and spring. On these excursions, though spring was to the
forward during the daylight, winter would reassert itself at night, and
not unfrequently at other moments. Tepid airs and nipping breezes met on
the confines of sunshine and shade; trembling raindrops that were still
akin to frost crystals dashed themselves from the bushes as he pursued
his way from town to castle; the birds were like an orchestra waiting
for the signal to strike up, and colour began to enter into the country
round.
But he gave only a modicum of thought to these proceedings. He rather
thought such things as, ‘She can afford to be saucy, and to find a
source of blitheness in my love, considering the power that wealth gives
her to pick and choose almost where she will.’ He was bound to own,
however, that one of the charms of her conversation was the complete
absence of the note of the heiress from its accents. That, other things
equal, her interest would naturally incline to a person bearing the name
of De Stancy, was evident from her avowed predilections. His original
assumption, that she was a personification of the modern spirit, who
had been dropped, like a seed from the bill of a bird, into a chink of
mediaevalism, required some qualification. Romanticism, which will
exist in every human breast as long as human nature itself exists, had
asserted itself in her. Veneration for things old, not because of any
merit in them, but because of their long continuance, had developed in
her; and her modern spirit was taking to itself wings and flying away.
Whether his image was flying with the other was a question which moved
him all the more deeply now that her silence gave him dread of an
affirmative answer.
For another seven days he stoically left in suspension all forecasts of
his possibly grim fate in being the employed and not the beloved. The
week passed: he telegraphed: there was no reply: he had sudden fears for
her personal safety and resolved to break her command by writing.
‘STANCY CASTLE, April
13.
‘DEAR PAULA,--Are you ill or in trouble? It is impossible in the very
unquiet state you have put me into by your silence that I should abstain
from writing. Without affectation, you sorely distress me, and I think
you would hardly have done it could you know what a degree of anxiety
you cause. Why, Paula, do you not write or send to me? What have I done
that you should treat me like this? Do write, if it is only to reproach
me. I am compelled to pass the greater part of the day in this castle,
which reminds me constantly of you, and yet eternally lacks your
presence. I am unfortunate indeed that you have not been able to find
half-an-hour during the last month to tell me at least that you are
alive.
‘You have always been ambiguous, it is true; but I thought I saw
encouragement in your eyes; encouragement certainly was in your eyes,
and who would not have been deluded by them and have believed them
sincere? Yet what tenderness can there be in a heart that can cause me
pain so wilfully!
‘There may, of course, be some deliberate scheming on the part of your
relations to intercept our letters; but I cannot think it. I know that
the housekeeper has received a letter from your aunt this very week, in
which she incidentally mentions that all are well, and in the same place
as before. How then can I excuse you?
‘Then write, Paula, or at least telegraph, as you proposed. Otherwise I
am resolved to take your silence as a signal to treat your fair words as
wind, and to write to you no more.’