A Laodicean

Chapter 2

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:--

'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.