It was a fine afternoon of late summer, nearly three months subsequent
to the death of Sir William De Stancy and Paula’s engagement to
marry his successor in the title. George Somerset had started on a
professional journey that took him through the charming district which
lay around Stancy Castle. Having resigned his appointment as architect
to that important structure--a resignation which had been accepted by
Paula through her solicitor--he had bidden farewell to the locality
after putting matters in such order that his successor, whoever he might
be, should have no difficulty in obtaining the particulars necessary
to the completion of the work in hand. Hardly to his surprise this
successor was Havill.
Somerset’s resignation had been tendered in no hasty mood. On returning
to England, and in due course to the castle, everything bore in upon
his mind the exceeding sorrowfulness--he would not say humiliation--of
continuing to act in his former capacity for a woman who, from seeming
more than a dear friend, had become less than an acquaintance.
So he resigned; but now, as the train drew on into that once beloved
tract of country, the images which met his eye threw him back in point
of emotion to very near where he had been before making himself a
stranger here. The train entered the cutting on whose brink he had
walked when the carriage containing Paula and her friends surprised him
the previous summer. He looked out of the window: they were passing the
well-known curve that led up to the tunnel constructed by her father,
into which he had gone when the train came by and Paula had been alarmed
for his life. There was the path they had both climbed afterwards,
involuntarily seizing each other’s hand; the bushes, the grass, the
flowers, everything just the same:
‘-----Here was the pleasant place,
And nothing wanting was, save She, alas!’
When they came out of the tunnel at the other end he caught a glimpse of
the distant castle-keep, and the well-remembered walls beneath it. The
experience so far transcended the intensity of what is called mournful
pleasure as to make him wonder how he could have miscalculated himself
to the extent of supposing that he might pass the spot with controllable
emotion.
On entering Markton station he withdrew into a remote corner of the
carriage, and closed his eyes with a resolve not to open them till the
embittering scenes should be passed by. He had not long to wait for
this event. When again in motion his eye fell upon the skirt of a lady’s
dress opposite, the owner of which had entered and seated herself so
softly as not to attract his attention.
‘Ah indeed!’ he exclaimed as he looked up to her face. ‘I had not a
notion that it was you!’ He went over and shook hands with Charlotte De
Stancy.
‘I am not going far,’ she said; ‘only to the next station. We often run
down in summer time. Are you going far?’
‘I am going to a building further on; thence to Normandy by way of
Cherbourg, to finish out my holiday.’
Miss De Stancy thought that would be very nice.
‘Well, I hope so. But I fear it won’t.’
After saying that Somerset asked himself why he should mince matters
with so genuine and sympathetic a girl as Charlotte De Stancy? She could
tell him particulars which he burned to know. He might never again have
an opportunity of knowing them, since she and he would probably not meet
for years to come, if at all.
‘Have the castle works progressed pretty rapidly under the new
architect?’ he accordingly asked.
‘Yes,’ said Charlotte in her haste--then adding that she was not quite
sure if they had progressed so rapidly as before; blushingly correcting
herself at this point and that, in the tinkering manner of a nervous
organization aiming at nicety where it was not required.
‘Well, I should have liked to carry out the undertaking to its end,’
said Somerset. ‘But I felt I could not consistently do so. Miss Power--’
(here a lump came into Somerset’s throat--so responsive was he yet to
her image)--‘seemed to have lost confidence in me, and--it was best that
the connection should be severed.’
There was a long pause. ‘She was very sorry about it,’ said Charlotte
gently.
‘What made her alter so?--I never can think!’
Charlotte waited again as if to accumulate the necessary force for
honest speaking at the expense of pleasantness. ‘It was the telegram
that began it of course,’ she answered.
‘Telegram?’
She looked up at him in quite a frightened way--little as there was
to be frightened at in a quiet fellow like him in this sad time of his
life--and said, ‘Yes: some telegram--I think--when you were in trouble?
Forgive my alluding to it; but you asked me the question.’
Somerset began reflecting on what messages he had sent Paula, troublous
or otherwise. All he had sent had been sent from the castle, and were
as gentle and mellifluous as sentences well could be which had neither
articles nor pronouns. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Will you explain
a little more--as plainly as you like--without minding my feelings?’
‘A telegram from Nice, I think?’
‘I never sent one.’
‘O! The one I meant was about money.’
Somerset shook his head. ‘No,’ he murmured, with the composure of a man
who, knowing he had done nothing of the sort himself, was blinded by his
own honesty to the possibility that another might have done it for him.
‘That must be some other affair with which I had nothing to do. O no,
it was nothing like that; the reason for her change of manner was quite
different!’
So timid was Charlotte in Somerset’s presence, that her timidity at this
juncture amounted to blameworthiness. The distressing scene which
must have followed a clearing up there and then of any possible
misunderstanding, terrified her imagination; and quite confounded by
contradictions that she could not reconcile, she held her tongue, and
nervously looked out of the window.
‘I have heard that Miss Power is soon to be married,’ continued
Somerset.
‘Yes,’ Charlotte murmured. ‘It is sooner than it ought to be by rights,
considering how recently my dear father died; but there are reasons in
connection with my brother’s position against putting it off: and it is
to be absolutely simple and private.’
There was another interval. ‘May I ask when it is to be?’ he said.
‘Almost at once--this week.’
Somerset started back as if some stone had hit his face.
Still there was nothing wonderful in such promptitude: engagements
broken in upon by the death of a near relative of one of the parties had
been often carried out in a subdued form with no longer delay.
Charlotte’s station was now at hand. She bade him farewell; and he
rattled on to the building he had come to inspect, and next to Budmouth,
whence he intended to cross the Channel by steamboat that night.
He hardly knew how the evening passed away. He had taken up his quarters
at an inn near the quay, and as the night drew on he stood gazing from
the coffee-room window at the steamer outside, which nearly thrust its
spars through the bedroom casements, and at the goods that were being
tumbled on board as only shippers can tumble them. All the goods were
laden, a lamp was put on each side the gangway, the engines broke into
a crackling roar, and people began to enter. They were only waiting for
the last train: then they would be off. Still Somerset did not move;
he was thinking of that curious half-told story of Charlotte’s, about
a telegram to Paula for money from Nice. Not once till within the last
half-hour had it recurred to his mind that he had met Dare both at Nice
and at Monte Carlo; that at the latter place he had been absolutely out
of money and wished to borrow, showing considerable sinister feeling
when Somerset declined to lend: that on one or two previous occasions he
had reasons for doubting Dare’s probity; and that in spite of the young
man’s impoverishment at Monte Carlo he had, a few days later, beheld
him in shining raiment at Carlsruhe. Somerset, though misty in his
conjectures, was seized with a growing conviction that there was
something in Miss De Stancy’s allusion to the telegram which ought to be
explained.
He felt an insurmountable objection to cross the water that night, or
till he had been able to see Charlotte again, and learn more of her
meaning. He countermanded the order to put his luggage on board, watched
the steamer out of the harbour, and went to bed. He might as well have
gone to battle, for any rest that he got. On rising the next morning he
felt rather blank, though none the less convinced that a matter required
investigation. He left Budmouth by a morning train, and about eleven
o’clock found himself in Markton.
The momentum of a practical inquiry took him through that ancient
borough without leaving him much leisure for those reveries which had
yesterday lent an unutterable sadness to every object there. It was just
before noon that he started for the castle, intending to arrive at a
time of the morning when, as he knew from experience, he could speak to
Charlotte without difficulty. The rising ground soon revealed the old
towers to him, and, jutting out behind them, the scaffoldings for the
new wing.
While halting here on the knoll in some doubt about his movements he
beheld a man coming along the road, and was soon confronted by his
former competitor, Havill. The first instinct of each was to pass with a
nod, but a second instinct for intercourse was sufficient to bring them
to a halt. After a few superficial words had been spoken Somerset said,
‘You have succeeded me.’
‘I have,’ said Havill; ‘but little to my advantage. I have just heard
that my commission is to extend no further than roofing in the wing that
you began, and had I known that before, I would have seen the castle
fall flat as Jericho before I would have accepted the superintendence.
But I know who I have to thank for that--De Stancy.’
Somerset still looked towards the distant battlements. On the
scaffolding, among the white-jacketed workmen, he could discern one
figure in a dark suit.
‘You have a clerk of the works, I see,’ he observed.
‘Nominally I have, but practically I haven’t.’
‘Then why do you keep him?’
‘I can’t help myself. He is Mr. Dare; and having been recommended by a
higher power than I, there he must stay in spite of me.’
‘Who recommended him?’
‘The same--De Stancy.’
‘It is very odd,’ murmured Somerset, ‘but that young man is the object
of my visit.’
‘You had better leave him alone,’ said Havill drily.
Somerset asked why.
‘Since I call no man master over that way I will inform you.’ Havill
then related in splenetic tones, to which Somerset did not care to
listen till the story began to advance itself, how he had passed the
night with Dare at the inn, and the incidents of that night, relating
how he had seen some letters on the young man’s breast which long had
puzzled him. ‘They were an E, a T, an N, and a C. I thought over them
long, till it eventually occurred to me that the word when filled out
was “De Stancy,” and that kinship explains the offensive and defensive
alliance between them.’
‘But, good heavens, man!’ said Somerset, more and more disturbed. ‘Does
she know of it?’
‘You may depend she does not yet; but she will soon enough. Hark--there
it is!’ The notes of the castle clock were heard striking noon. ‘Then it
is all over.’
‘What?--not their marriage!’
‘Yes. Didn’t you know it was the wedding day? They were to be at the
church at half-past eleven. I should have waited to see her go, but it
was no sight to hinder business for, as she was only going to drive over
in her brougham with Miss De Stancy.’
‘My errand has failed!’ said Somerset, turning on his heel. ‘I’ll walk
back to the town with you.’
However he did not walk far with Havill; society was too much at that
moment. As soon as opportunity offered he branched from the road by
a path, and avoiding the town went by railway to Budmouth, whence he
resumed, by the night steamer, his journey to Normandy.