Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (361 page)

‘I suppose I ought not to say I am glad of it; but it is an advantage to have an architect all to one’s self. The architect whom I at first thought of told me before I knew you that if I placed the castle in his hands he would undertake no other commission till its completion.’

‘I agree to the same,’ said Somerset.

‘I don’t wish to bind you. But I hinder you now — do pray go on without reference to me. When will there be some drawing for me to see?’

‘I will take care that it shall be soon.’

He had a metallic tape in his hand, and went out of the room to take some dimension in the corridor. The assistant for whom he had advertised had not arrived, and he attempted to fix the end of the tape by sticking his penknife through the ring into the wall. Paula looked on at a distance.

‘I will hold it,’ she said.

She went to the required corner and held the end in its place. She had taken it the wrong way, and Somerset went over and placed it properly in her fingers, carefully avoiding to touch them. She obediently raised her hand to the corner again, and stood till he had finished, when she asked, ‘Is that all?’

‘That is all,’ said Somerset. ‘Thank you.’ Without further speech she looked at his sketch-book, while he marked down the lines just acquired.

‘You said the other day,’ she observed, ‘that early Gothic work might be known by the under-cutting, or something to that effect. I have looked in Rickman and the Oxford Glossary, but I cannot quite understand what you meant.’

It was only too probable to her lover, from the way in which she turned to him, that she HAD looked in Rickman and the Glossary, and was thinking of nothing in the world but of the subject of her inquiry.

‘I can show you, by actual example, if you will come to the chapel?’ he returned hesitatingly.

‘Don’t go on purpose to show me — when you are there on your own account I will come in.’

‘I shall be there in half-an-hour.’

‘Very well,’ said Paula. She looked out of a window, and, seeing Miss De Stancy on the terrace, left him.

Somerset stood thinking of what he had said. He had no occasion whatever to go into the chapel of the castle that day. He had been tempted by her words to say he would be there, and ‘half-an-hour’ had come to his lips almost without his knowledge. This community of interest — if it were not anything more tender — was growing serious. What had passed between them amounted to an appointment; they were going to meet in the most solitary chamber of the whole solitary pile. Could it be that Paula had well considered this in replying with her friendly ‘Very well?’ Probably not.

Somerset proceeded to the chapel and waited. With the progress of the seconds towards the half-hour he began to discover that a dangerous admiration for this girl had risen within him. Yet so imaginative was his passion that he hardly knew a single feature of her countenance well enough to remember it in her absence. The meditative judgment of things and men which had been his habit up to the moment of seeing her in the Baptist chapel seemed to have left him — nothing remained but a distracting wish to be always near her, and it was quite with dismay that he recognized what immense importance he was attaching to the question whether she would keep the trifling engagement or not.

The chapel of Stancy Castle was a silent place, heaped up in corners with a lumber of old panels, framework, and broken coloured glass. Here no clock could be heard beating out the hours of the day — here no voice of priest or deacon had for generations uttered the daily service denoting how the year rolls on. The stagnation of the spot was sufficient to draw Somerset’s mind for a moment from the subject which absorbed it, and he thought, ‘So, too, will time triumph over all this fervour within me.’

Lifting his eyes from the floor on which his foot had been tapping nervously, he saw Paula standing at the other end. It was not so pleasant when he also saw that Mrs. Goodman accompanied her. The latter lady, however, obligingly remained where she was resting, while Paula came forward, and, as usual, paused without speaking.

‘It is in this little arcade that the example occurs,’ said Somerset.

‘O yes,’ she answered, turning to look at it.

‘Early piers, capitals, and mouldings, generally alternated with deep hollows, so as to form strong shadows. Now look under the abacus of this capital; you will find the stone hollowed out wonderfully; and also in this arch-mould. It is often difficult to understand how it could be done without cracking off the stone. The difference between this and late work can be felt by the hand even better than it can be seen.’ He suited the action to the word and placed his hand in the hollow.

She listened attentively, then stretched up her own hand to test the cutting as he had done; she was not quite tall enough; she would step upon this piece of wood. Having done so she tried again, and succeeded in putting her finger on the spot. No; she could not understand it through her glove even now. She pulled off her glove, and, her hand resting in the stone channel, her eyes became abstracted in the effort of realisation, the ideas derived through her hand passing into her face.

‘No, I am not sure now,’ she said.

Somerset placed his own hand in the cavity. Now their two hands were close together again. They had been close together half-an-hour earlier, and he had sedulously avoided touching hers. He dared not let such an accident happen now. And yet — surely she saw the situation! Was the inscrutable seriousness with which she applied herself to his lesson a mockery? There was such a bottomless depth in her eyes that it was impossible to guess truly. Let it be that destiny alone had ruled that their hands should be together a second time.

All rumination was cut short by an impulse. He seized her forefinger between his own finger and thumb, and drew it along the hollow, saying, ‘That is the curve I mean.’

Somerset’s hand was hot and trembling; Paula’s, on the contrary, was cool and soft as an infant’s.

‘Now the arch-mould,’ continued he. ‘There — the depth of that cavity is tremendous, and it is not geometrical, as in later work.’ He drew her unresisting fingers from the capital to the arch, and laid them in the little trench as before.

She allowed them to rest quietly there till he relinquished them. ‘Thank you,’ she then said, withdrawing her hand, brushing the dust from her finger-tips, and putting on her glove.

Her imperception of his feeling was the very sublimity of maiden innocence if it were real; if not, well, the coquetry was no great sin.

‘Mr. Somerset, will you allow me to have the Greek court I mentioned?’ she asked tentatively, after a long break in their discourse, as she scanned the green stones along the base of the arcade, with a conjectural countenance as to his reply.

‘Will your own feeling for the genius of the place allow you?’

‘I am not a mediaevalist: I am an eclectic.’

‘You don’t dislike your own house on that account.’

‘I did at first — I don’t so much now.... I should love it, and adore every stone, and think feudalism the only true romance of life, if — ’

‘What?’

‘If I were a De Stancy, and the castle the long home of my forefathers.’

Somerset was a little surprised at the avowal: the minister’s words on the effects of her new environment recurred to his mind. ‘Miss De Stancy doesn’t think so,’ he said. ‘She cares nothing about those things.’

Paula now turned to him: hitherto her remarks had been sparingly spoken, her eyes being directed elsewhere: ‘Yes, that is very strange, is it not?’ she said. ‘But it is owing to the joyous freshness of her nature which precludes her from dwelling on the past — indeed, the past is no more to her than it is to a sparrow or robin. She is scarcely an instance of the wearing out of old families, for a younger mental constitution than hers I never knew.’

‘Unless that very simplicity represents the second childhood of her line, rather than her own exclusive character.’

Paula shook her head. ‘In spite of the Greek court, she is more Greek than I.’

‘You represent science rather than art, perhaps.’

‘How?’ she asked, glancing up under her hat.

‘I mean,’ replied Somerset, ‘that you represent the march of mind — the steamship, and the railway, and the thoughts that shake mankind.’

She weighed his words, and said: ‘Ah, yes: you allude to my father. My father was a great man; but I am more and more forgetting his greatness: that kind of greatness is what a woman can never truly enter into. I am less and less his daughter every day that goes by.’

She walked away a few steps to rejoin the excellent Mrs. Goodman, who, as Somerset still perceived, was waiting for Paula at the discreetest of distances in the shadows at the farther end of the building. Surely Paula’s voice had faltered, and she had turned to hide a tear?

She came back again. ‘Did you know that my father made half the railways in Europe, including that one over there?’ she said, waving her little gloved hand in the direction whence low rumbles were occasionally heard during the day.

‘Yes.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Miss De Stancy told me a little; and I then found his name and doings were quite familiar to me.’

Curiously enough, with his words there came through the broken windows the murmur of a train in the distance, sounding clearer and more clear. It was nothing to listen to, yet they both listened; till the increasing noise suddenly broke off into dead silence.

‘It has gone into the tunnel,’ said Paula. ‘Have you seen the tunnel my father made? the curves are said to be a triumph of science. There is nothing else like it in this part of England.’

‘There is not: I have heard so. But I have not seen it.’

‘Do you think it a thing more to be proud of that one’s father should have made a great tunnel and railway like that, than that one’s remote ancestor should have built a great castle like this?’

What could Somerset say? It would have required a casuist to decide whether his answer should depend upon his conviction, or upon the family ties of such a questioner. ‘From a modern point of view, railways are, no doubt, things more to be proud of than castles,’ he said; ‘though perhaps I myself, from mere association, should decide in favour of the ancestor who built the castle.’ The serious anxiety to be truthful that Somerset threw into his observation, was more than the circumstance required. ‘To design great engineering works,’ he added musingly, and without the least eye to the disparagement of her parent, ‘requires no doubt a leading mind. But to execute them, as he did, requires, of course, only a following mind.’

His reply had not altogether pleased her; and there was a distinct reproach conveyed by her slight movement towards Mrs. Goodman. He saw it, and was grieved that he should have spoken so. ‘I am going to walk over and inspect that famous tunnel of your father’s,’ he added gently. ‘It will be a pleasant study for this afternoon.’

She went away. ‘I am no man of the world,’ he thought. ‘I ought to have praised that father of hers straight off. I shall not win her respect; much less her love!’

CHAPTER XII.

Somerset did not forget what he had planned, and when lunch was over he walked away through the trees. The tunnel was more difficult of discovery than he had anticipated, and it was only after considerable winding among green lanes, whose deep ruts were like canyons of Colorado in miniature, that he reached the slope in the distant upland where the tunnel began. A road stretched over its crest, and thence along one side of the railway-cutting.

He there unexpectedly saw standing Miss Power’s carriage; and on drawing nearer he found it to contain Paula herself, Miss De Stancy, and Mrs. Goodman.

‘How singular!’ exclaimed Miss De Stancy gaily.

‘It is most natural,’ said Paula instantly. ‘In the morning two people discuss a feature in the landscape, and in the afternoon each has a desire to see it from what the other has said of it. Therefore they accidentally meet.’

Now Paula had distinctly heard Somerset declare that he was going to walk there; how then could she say this so coolly? It was with a pang at his heart that he returned to his old thought of her being possibly a finished coquette and dissembler. Whatever she might be, she was not a creature starched very stiffly by Puritanism.

Somerset looked down on the mouth of the tunnel. The popular commonplace that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous, was not proven at this spot. On either slope of the deep cutting, green with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway which ran along the bottom, its thin steel rails gleaming like silver threads in the depths. The vertical front of the tunnel, faced with brick that had once been red, was now weather-stained, lichened, and mossed over in harmonious rusty-browns, pearly greys, and neutral greens, at the very base appearing a little blue-black spot like a mouse-hole — the tunnel’s mouth.

The carriage was drawn up quite close to the wood railing, and Paula was looking down at the same time with him; but he made no remark to her.

Mrs. Goodman broke the silence by saying, ‘If it were not a railway we should call it a lovely dell.’

Somerset agreed with her, adding that it was so charming that he felt inclined to go down.

‘If you do, perhaps Miss Power will order you up again, as a trespasser,’ said Charlotte De Stancy. ‘You are one of the largest shareholders in the railway, are you not, Paula?’

Miss Power did not reply.

‘I suppose as the road is partly yours you might walk all the way to London along the rails, if you wished, might you not, dear?’ Charlotte continued.

Paula smiled, and said, ‘No, of course not.’

Somerset, feeling himself superfluous, raised his hat to his companions as if he meant not to see them again for a while, and began to descend by some steps cut in the earth; Miss De Stancy asked Mrs. Goodman to accompany her to a barrow over the top of the tunnel; and they left the carriage, Paula remaining alone.