by Thomas Hardy
‘And the consecration of this place does not extend further than the aisle wall.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ said De Stancy, as he mechanically played out his cards. ‘What became of that box of books I sent you with my last cheque?’
‘Well, as I hadn’t time to read them, and as I knew you would not like them to be wasted, I sold them to a bloke who peruses them from morning till night. Ah, now you have lost a fiver altogether — how queer! We’ll double the stakes. So, as I was saying, just at the time the books came I got an inkling of this important business, and literature went to the wall.’
‘Important business — what?’
‘The capture of this lady, to be sure.’
De Stancy sighed impatiently. ‘I wish you were less calculating, and had more of the impulse natural to your years!’
‘Game — by Jove! You have lost again, captain. That makes — let me see — nine pounds fifteen to square us.’
‘I owe you that?’ said De Stancy, startled. ‘It is more than I have in cash. I must write another cheque.’
‘Never mind. Make it payable to yourself, and our connection will be quite unsuspected.’
Captain De Stancy did as requested, and rose from his seat. Sir William, though further off, was still in the churchyard.
‘How can you hesitate for a moment about this girl?’ said Dare, pointing to the bent figure of the old man. ‘Think of the satisfaction it would be to him to see his son within the family walls again. It should be a religion with you to compass such a legitimate end as this.’
‘Well, well, I’ll think of it,’ said the captain, with an impatient laugh. ‘You are quite a Mephistopheles, Will — I say it to my sorrow!’
‘Would that I were in your place.’
‘Would that you were! Fifteen years ago I might have called the chance a magnificent one.’
‘But you are a young man still, and you look younger than you are. Nobody knows our relationship, and I am not such a fool as to divulge it. Of course, if through me you reclaim this splendid possession, I should leave it to your feelings what you would do for me.’
Sir William had by this time cleared out of the churchyard, and the pair emerged from the vestry and departed. Proceeding towards Markton by the same bypath, they presently came to an eminence covered with bushes of blackthorn, and tufts of yellowing fern. From this point a good view of the woods and glades about Stancy Castle could be obtained. Dare stood still on the top and stretched out his finger; the captain’s eye followed the direction, and he saw above the many-hued foliage in the middle distance the towering keep of Paula’s castle.
‘That’s the goal of your ambition, captain — ambition do I say? — most righteous and dutiful endeavour! How the hoary shape catches the sunlight — it is the raison d’etre of the landscape, and its possession is coveted by a thousand hearts. Surely it is an hereditary desire of yours? You must make a point of returning to it, and appearing in the map of the future as in that of the past. I delight in this work of encouraging you, and pushing you forward towards your own. You are really very clever, you know, but — I say it with respect — how comes it that you want so much waking up?’
‘Because I know the day is not so bright as it seems, my boy. However, you make a little mistake. If I care for anything on earth, I do care for that old fortress of my forefathers. I respect so little among the living that all my reverence is for my own dead. But manoeuvring, even for my own, as you call it, is not in my line. It is distasteful — it is positively hateful to me.’
‘Well, well, let it stand thus for the present. But will you refuse me one little request — merely to see her? I’ll contrive it so that she may not see you. Don’t refuse me, it is the one thing I ask, and I shall think it hard if you deny me.’
‘O Will!’ said the captain wearily. ‘Why will you plead so? No — even though your mind is particularly set upon it, I cannot see her, or bestow a thought upon her, much as I should like to gratify you.’
CHAPTER VI.
When they had parted Dare walked along towards Markton with resolve on his mouth and an unscrupulous light in his prominent black eye. Could any person who had heard the previous conversation have seen him now, he would have found little difficulty in divining that, notwithstanding De Stancy’s obduracy, the reinstation of Captain De Stancy in the castle, and the possible legitimation and enrichment of himself, was still the dream of his brain. Even should any legal settlement or offspring intervene to nip the extreme development of his projects, there was abundant opportunity for his glorification. Two conditions were imperative. De Stancy must see Paula before Somerset’s return. And it was necessary to have help from Havill, even if it involved letting him know all.
Whether Havill already knew all was a nice question for Mr. Dare’s luminous mind. Havill had had opportunities of reading his secret, particularly on the night they occupied the same room. If so, by revealing it to Paula, Havill might utterly blast his project for the marriage. Havill, then, was at all risks to be retained as an ally.
Yet Dare would have preferred a stronger check upon his confederate than was afforded by his own knowledge of that anonymous letter and the competition trick. For were the competition lost to him, Havill would have no further interest in conciliating Miss Power; would as soon as not let her know the secret of De Stancy’s relation to him.
Fortune as usual helped him in his dilemma. Entering Havill’s office, Dare found him sitting there; but the drawings had all disappeared from the boards. The architect held an open letter in his hand.
‘Well, what news?’ said Dare.
‘Miss Power has returned to the castle, Somerset is detained in London, and the competition is decided,’ said Havill, with a glance of quiet dubiousness.
‘And you have won it?’
‘No. We are bracketed — it’s a tie. The judges say there is no choice between the designs — that they are singularly equal and singularly good. That she would do well to adopt either. Signed So-and-So, Fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The result is that she will employ which she personally likes best. It is as if I had spun a sovereign in the air and it had alighted on its edge. The least false movement will make it tails; the least wise movement heads.’
‘Singularly equal. Well, we owe that to our nocturnal visit, which must not be known.’
‘O Lord, no!’ said Havill apprehensively.
Dare felt secure of him at those words. Havill had much at stake; the slightest rumour of his trick in bringing about the competition, would be fatal to Havill’s reputation.
‘The permanent absence of Somerset then is desirable architecturally on your account, matrimonially on mine.’
‘Matrimonially? By the way — who was that captain you pointed out to me when the artillery entered the town?’
‘Captain De Stancy — son of Sir William De Stancy. He’s the husband. O, you needn’t look incredulous: it is practicable; but we won’t argue that. In the first place I want him to see her, and to see her in the most love-kindling, passion-begetting circumstances that can be thought of. And he must see her surreptitiously, for he refuses to meet her.’
‘Let him see her going to church or chapel?’
Dare shook his head.
‘Driving out?’
‘Common-place!’
‘Walking in the gardens?’
‘Ditto.’
‘At her toilet?’
‘Ah — if it were possible!’
‘Which it hardly is. Well, you had better think it over and make inquiries about her habits, and as to when she is in a favourable aspect for observation, as the almanacs say.’
Shortly afterwards Dare took his leave. In the evening he made it his business to sit smoking on the bole of a tree which commanded a view of the upper ward of the castle, and also of the old postern-gate, now enlarged and used as a tradesmen’s entrance. It was half-past six o’clock; the dressing-bell rang, and Dare saw a light-footed young woman hasten at the sou
nd across the ward from the servants’ quarter. A light appeared in a chamber which he knew to be Paula’s dressing-room; and there it remained half-an-hour, a shadow passing and repassing on the blind in the style of head-dress worn by the girl he had previously seen. The dinner-bell sounded and the light went out.
As yet it was scarcely dark out of doors, and in a few minutes Dare had the satisfaction of seeing the same woman cross the ward and emerge upon the slope without. This time she was bonneted, and carried a little basket in her hand. A nearer view showed her to be, as he had expected, Milly Birch, Paula’s maid, who had friends living in Markton, whom she was in the habit of visiting almost every evening during the three hours of leisure which intervened between Paula’s retirement from the dressing-room and return thither at ten o’clock. When the young woman had descended the road and passed into the large drive, Dare rose and followed her.
‘O, it is you, Miss Birch,’ said Dare, on overtaking her. ‘I am glad to have the pleasure of walking by your side.’
‘Yes, sir. O it’s Mr. Dare. We don’t see you at the castle now, sir.’
‘No. And do you get a walk like this every evening when the others are at their busiest?’
‘Almost every evening; that’s the one return to the poor lady’s maid for losing her leisure when the others get it — in the absence of the family from home.’
‘Is Miss Power a hard mistress?’
‘No.’
‘Rather fanciful than hard, I presume?’
‘Just so, sir.’
‘And she likes to appear to advantage, no doubt.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Milly, laughing. ‘We all do.’
‘When does she appear to the best advantage? When riding, or driving, or reading her book?’
‘Not altogether then, if you mean the very best.’
‘Perhaps it is when she sits looking in the glass at herself, and you let down her hair.’
‘Not particularly, to my mind.’
‘When does she to your mind? When dressed for a dinner-party or ball?’
‘She’s middling, then. But there is one time when she looks nicer and cleverer than at any. It is when she is in the gymnasium.’
‘O — gymnasium?’
‘Because when she is there she wears such a pretty boy’s costume, and is so charming in her movements, that you think she is a lovely young youth and not a girl at all.’
‘When does she go to this gymnasium?’
‘Not so much as she used to. Only on wet mornings now, when she can’t get out for walks or drives. But she used to do it every day.’
‘I should like to see her there.’
‘Why, sir?’
‘I am a poor artist, and can’t afford models. To see her attitudes would be of great assistance to me in the art I love so well.’
Milly shook her head. ‘She’s very strict about the door being locked. If I were to leave it open she would dismiss me, as I should deserve.’
‘But consider, dear Miss Birch, the advantage to a poor artist the sight of her would be: if you could hold the door ajar it would be worth five pounds to me, and a good deal to you.’
‘No,’ said the incorruptible Milly, shaking her head. ‘Besides, I don’t always go there with her. O no, I couldn’t!’
Milly remained so firm at this point that Dare said no more.
When he had left her he returned to the castle grounds, and though there was not much light he had no difficulty in discovering the gymnasium, the outside of which he had observed before, without thinking to inquire its purpose. Like the erections in other parts of the shrubberies it was constructed of wood, the interstices between the framing being filled up with short billets of fir nailed diagonally. Dare, even when without a settled plan in his head, could arrange for probabilities; and wrenching out one of the billets he looked inside. It seemed to be a simple oblong apartment, fitted up with ropes, with a little dressing-closet at one end, and lighted by a skylight or lantern in the roof. Dare replaced the wood and went on his way.
Havill was smoking on his doorstep when Dare passed up the street. He held up his hand.
‘Since you have been gone,’ said the architect, ‘I’ve hit upon something that may help you in exhibiting your lady to your gentleman. In the summer I had orders to design a gymnasium for her, which I did; and they say she is very clever on the ropes and bars. Now — ’
‘I’ve discovered it. I shall contrive for him to see her there on the first wet morning, which is when she practises. What made her think of it?’
‘As you may have heard, she holds advanced views on social and other matters; and in those on the higher education of women she is very strong, talking a good deal about the physical training of the Greeks, whom she adores, or did. Every philosopher and man of science who ventilates his theories in the monthly reviews has a devout listener in her; and this subject of the physical development of her sex has had its turn with other things in her mind. So she had the place built on her very first arrival, according to the latest lights on athletics, and in imitation of those at the new colleges for women.’
‘How deuced clever of the girl! She means to live to be a hundred!’
CHAPTER VII.
The wet day arrived with all the promptness that might have been expected of it in this land of rains and mists. The alder bushes behind the gymnasium dripped monotonously leaf upon leaf, added to this being the purl of the shallow stream a little way off, producing a sense of satiety in watery sounds. Though there was drizzle in the open meads, the rain here in the thicket was comparatively slight, and two men with fishing tackle who stood beneath one of the larger bushes found its boughs a sufficient shelter.
‘We may as well walk home again as study nature here, Willy,’ said the taller and elder of the twain. ‘I feared it would continue when we started. The magnificent sport you speak of must rest for to-day.’
The other looked at his watch, but made no particular reply.
‘Come, let us move on. I don’t like intruding into other people’s grounds like this,’ De Stancy continued.
‘We are not intruding. Anybody walks outside this fence.’ He indicated an iron railing newly tarred, dividing the wilder underwood amid which they stood from the inner and well-kept parts of the shrubbery, and against which the back of the gymnasium was built.
Light footsteps upon a gravel walk could be heard on the other side of the fence, and a trio of cloaked and umbrella-screened figures were for a moment discernible. They vanished behind the gymnasium; and again nothing resounded but the river murmurs and the clock-like drippings of the leafage.
‘Hush!’ said Dare.
‘No pranks, my boy,’ said De Stancy suspiciously. ‘You should be above them.’
‘And you should trust to my good sense, captain,’ Dare remonstrated. ‘I have not indulged in a prank since the sixth year of my pilgrimage. I have found them too damaging to my interests. Well, it is not too dry here, and damp injures your health, you say. Have a pull for safety’s sake.’ He presented a flask to De Stancy.
The artillery officer looked down at his nether garments.
‘I don’t break my rule without good reason,’ he observed.
‘I am afraid that reason exists at present.’
‘I am afraid it does. What have you got?’
‘Only a little wine.’
‘What wine?’
‘Do try it. I call it “the blushful Hippocrene,” that the poet describes as
“Tasting of Flora and the country green;
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth.”‘
De Stancy took the flask, and drank a little.
‘It warms, does it not?’ said Dare.
‘Too much,’ said De Stancy with misgiving. ‘I have been taken unawares. Why, it is three parts brandy, to my taste, you scamp!’
Dare put away the wine. ‘Now you are to see something,’ he said.
‘Something — what is it?’ Captain De S
tancy regarded him with a puzzled look.
‘It is quite a curiosity, and really worth seeing. Now just look in here.’
The speaker advanced to the back of the building, and withdrew the wood billet from the wall.
‘Will, I believe you are up to some trick,’ said De Stancy, not, however, suspecting the actual truth in these unsuggestive circumstances, and with a comfortable resignation, produced by the potent liquor, which would have been comical to an outsider, but which, to one who had known the history and relationship of the two speakers, would have worn a sadder significance. ‘I am too big a fool about you to keep you down as I ought; that’s the fault of me, worse luck.’
He pressed the youth’s hand with a smile, went forward, and looked through the hole into the interior of the gymnasium. Dare withdrew to some little distance, and watched Captain De Stancy’s face, which presently began to assume an expression of interest.
What was the captain seeing? A sort of optical poem.
Paula, in a pink flannel costume, was bending, wheeling and undulating in the air like a gold-fish in its globe, sometimes ascending by her arms nearly to the lantern, then lowering herself till she swung level with the floor. Her aunt Mrs. Goodman, and Charlotte De Stancy, were sitting on camp-stools at one end, watching her gyrations, Paula occasionally addressing them with such an expression as — ’Now, Aunt, look at me — and you, Charlotte — is not that shocking to your weak nerves,’ when some adroit feat would be repeated, which, however, seemed to give much more pleasure to Paula herself in performing it than to Mrs. Goodman in looking on, the latter sometimes saying, ‘O, it is terrific — do not run such a risk again!’
It would have demanded the poetic passion of some joyous Elizabethan lyrist like Lodge, Nash, or Constable, to fitly phrase Paula’s presentation of herself at this moment of absolute abandonment to every muscular whim that could take possession of such a supple form. The white manilla ropes clung about the performer like snakes as she took her exercise, and the colour in her face deepened as she went on. Captain De Stancy felt that, much as he had seen in early life of beauty in woman, he had never seen beauty of such a real and living sort as this. A recollection of his vow, together with a sense that to gaze on the festival of this Bona Dea was, though so innocent and pretty a sight, hardly fair or gentlemanly, would have compelled him to withdraw his eyes, had not the sportive fascination of her appearance glued them there in spite of all. And as if to complete the picture of Grace personified and add the one thing wanting to the charm which bound him, the clouds, till that time thick in the sky, broke away from the upper heaven, and allowed the noonday sun to pour down through the lantern upon her, irradiating her with a warm light that was incarnadined by her pink doublet and hose, and reflected in upon her face. She only required a cloud to rest on instead of the green silk net which actually supported her reclining figure for the moment, to be quite Olympian; save indeed that in place of haughty effrontery there sat on her countenance only the healthful sprightliness of an English girl.