Томас Харди (Гарди)
A Laodicean : A Story of To-day
‘Is it a new one? – Yes, I heard it.’
‘The old one was quite worn out; so Paula has put it in the cellar, and had this new one made, though it still strikes on the old bell. It tells the seconds, but the old one, which my very great grandfather erected in the eighteenth century, only told the hours. Paula says that time, being so much more valuable now, must of course be cut up into smaller pieces.’
‘She does not appear to be much impressed by the spirit of this ancient pile.’
Miss De Stancy shook her head too slightly to express absolute negation.
‘Do you wish to come through this door?’ she asked. ‘There is a singular chimney-piece in the kitchen, which is considered a unique example of its kind, though I myself don’t know enough about it to have an opinion on the subject.’
When they had looked at the corbelled chimney-piece they returned to the hall, where his eye was caught anew by a large map that he had conned for some time when alone, without being able to divine the locality represented. It was called ‘General Plan of the Town,’ and showed streets and open spaces corresponding with nothing he had seen in the county.
‘Is that town here?’ he asked.
‘It is not anywhere but in Paula’s brain; she has laid it out from her own design. The site is supposed to be near our railway station, just across there, where the land belongs to her. She is going to grant cheap building leases, and develop the manufacture of pottery.’
‘Pottery – how very practical she must be!’
‘O no! no!’ replied Miss De Stancy, in tones showing how supremely ignorant he must be of Miss Power’s nature if he characterized her in those terms. ‘It is GREEK pottery she means – Hellenic pottery she tells me to call it, only I forget. There is beautiful clay at the place, her father told her: he found it in making the railway tunnel. She has visited the British Museum, continental museums, and Greece, and Spain: and hopes to imitate the old fictile work in time, especially the Greek of the best period, four hundred years after Christ, or before Christ – I forget which it was Paula said… O no, she is not practical in the sense you mean, at all.’
‘A mixed young lady, rather.’
Miss De Stancy appeared unable to settle whether this new definition of her dear friend should be accepted as kindly, or disallowed as decidedly sarcastic. ‘You would like her if you knew her,’ she insisted, in half tones of pique; after which she walked on a few steps.
‘I think very highly of her,’ said Somerset.
‘And I! And yet at one time I could never have believed that I should have been her friend. One is prejudiced at first against people who are reported to have such differences in feeling, associations, and habit, as she seemed to have from mine. But it has not stood in the least in the way of our liking each other. I believe the difference makes us the more united.’
‘It says a great deal for the liberality of both,’ answered Somerset warmly. ‘Heaven send us more of the same sort of people! They are not too numerous at present.’
As this remark called for no reply from Miss De Stancy, she took advantage of an opportunity to leave him alone, first repeating her permission to him to wander where he would. He walked about for some time, sketch-book in hand, but was conscious that his interest did not lie much in the architecture. In passing along the corridor of an upper floor he observed an open door, through which was visible a room containing one of the finest Renaissance cabinets he had ever seen. It was impossible, on close examination, to do justice to it in a hasty sketch; it would be necessary to measure every line if he would bring away anything of utility to him as a designer. Deciding to reserve this gem for another opportunity he cast his eyes round the room and blushed a little. Without knowing it he had intruded into the absent Miss Paula’s own particular set of chambers, including a boudoir and sleeping apartment. On the tables of the sitting-room were most of the popular papers and periodicals that he knew, not only English, but from Paris, Italy, and America. Satirical prints, though they did not unduly preponderate, were not wanting. Besides these there were books from a London circulating library, paper-covered light literature in French and choice Italian, and the latest monthly reviews; while between the two windows stood the telegraph apparatus whose wire had been the means of bringing him hither.
These things, ensconced amid so much of the old and hoary, were as if a stray hour from the nineteenth century had wandered like a butterfly into the thirteenth, and lost itself there.
The door between this ante-chamber and the sleeping-room stood open. Without venturing to cross the threshold, for he felt that he would be abusing hospitality to go so far, Somerset looked in for a moment. It was a pretty place, and seemed to have been hastily fitted up. In a corner, overhung by a blue and white canopy of silk, was a little cot, hardly large enough to impress the character of bedroom upon the old place. Upon a counterpane lay a parasol and a silk neckerchief. On the other side of the room was a tall mirror of startling newness, draped like the bedstead, in blue and white. Thrown at random upon the floor was a pair of satin slippers that would have fitted Cinderella. A dressing-gown lay across a settee; and opposite, upon a small easy-chair in the same blue and white livery, were a Bible, the Baptist Magazine, Wardlaw on Infant Baptism, Walford’s County Families, and the Court Journal. On and over the mantelpiece were nicknacks of various descriptions, and photographic portraits of the artistic, scientific, and literary celebrities of the day.
A dressing-room lay beyond; but, becoming conscious that his study of ancient architecture would hardly bear stretching further in that direction, Mr. Somerset retreated to the outside, obliviously passing by the gem of Renaissance that had led him in.
‘She affects blue,’ he was thinking. ‘Then she is fair.’
On looking up, some time later, at the new clock that told the seconds, he found that the hours at his disposal for work had flown without his having transferred a single feature of the building or furniture to his sketch-book. Before leaving he sent in for permission to come again, and then walked across the fields to the inn at Sleeping-Green, reflecting less upon Miss De Stancy (so little force of presence had she possessed) than upon the modern flower in a mediaeval flower-pot whom Miss De Stancy’s information had brought before him, and upon the incongruities that were daily shaping themselves in the world under the great modern fluctuations of classes and creeds.
Somerset was still full of the subject when he arrived at the end of his walk, and he fancied that some loungers at the bar of the inn were discussing the heroine of the chapel-scene just at the moment of his entry. On this account, when the landlord came to clear away the dinner, Somerset was led to inquire of him, by way of opening a conversation, if there were many Baptists in the neighbourhood.
The landlord (who was a serious man on the surface, though he occasionally smiled beneath) replied that there were a great many – far more than the average in country parishes. ‘Even here, in my house, now,’ he added, ‘when volks get a drop of drink into ‘em, and their feelings rise to a zong, some man will strike up a hymn by preference. But I find no fault with that; for though ‘tis hardly human nature to be so calculating in yer cups, a feller may as well sing to gain something as sing to waste.’
‘How do you account for there being so many?’
‘Well, you zee, sir, some says one thing, and some another; I think they does it to save the expense of a Christian burial for ther children. Now there’s a poor family out in Long Lane – the husband used to smite for Jimmy More the blacksmith till ‘a hurt his arm – they’d have no less than eleven children if they’d not been lucky t’other way, and buried five when they were three or four months old. Now every one of them children was given to the sexton in a little box that any journeyman could nail together in a quarter of an hour, and he buried ‘em at night for a shilling a head; whereas ‘twould have cost a couple of pounds each if they’d been christened at church… Of course there’s the new lady at the castle, she’s a chapel member, and that may make a little difference; but she’s not been here long enough to show whether ‘twill be worth while to join ‘em for the profit o’t or whether ‘twill not. No doubt if it turns out that she’s of a sort to relieve volks in trouble, more will join her set than belongs to it already. “Any port in a storm,” of course, as the saying is.’
‘As for yourself, you are a Churchman at present, I presume?’
‘Yes; not but I was a Methodist once – ay, for a length of time. ‘Twas owing to my taking a house next door to a chapel; so that what with hearing the organ bizz like a bee through the wall, and what with finding it saved umbrellas on wet Zundays, I went over to that faith for two years – though I believe I dropped money by it – I wouldn’t be the man to say so if I hadn’t. Howsomever, when I moved into this house I turned back again to my old religion. Faith, I don’t zee much difference: be you one, or be you t’other, you’ve got to get your living.’
‘The De Stancys, of course, have not much influence here now, for that, or any other thing?’
‘O no, no; not any at all. They be very low upon ground, and always will be now, I suppose. It was thoughted worthy of being recorded in history – you’ve read it, sir, no doubt?’
‘Not a word.’
‘O, then, you shall. I’ve got the history zomewhere. ‘Twas gay manners that did it. The only bit of luck they have had of late years is Miss Power’s taking to little Miss De Stancy, and making her her company-keeper. I hope ‘twill continue.’
That the two daughters of these antipodean families should be such intimate friends was a situation which pleased Somerset as much as it did the landlord. It was an engaging instance of that human progress on which he had expended many charming dreams in the years when poetry, theology, and the reorganization of society had seemed matters of more importance to him than a profession which should help him to a big house and income, a fair Deiopeia, and a lovely progeny. When he was alone he poured out a glass of wine, and silently drank the healths of the two generous-minded young women who, in this lonely district, had found sweet communion a necessity of life, and by pure and instinctive good sense had broken down a barrier which men thrice their age and repute would probably have felt it imperative to maintain. But perhaps this was premature: the omnipotent Miss Power’s character – practical or ideal, politic or impulsive – he as yet knew nothing of; and giving over reasoning from insufficient data he lapsed into mere conjecture.
V
The next morning Somerset was again at the castle. He passed some interval on the walls before encountering Miss De Stancy, whom at last he observed going towards a pony-carriage that waited near the door.
A smile gained strength upon her face at his approach, and she was the first to speak. ‘I am sorry Miss Power has not returned,’ she said, and accounted for that lady’s absence by her distress at the event of two evenings earlier.
‘But I have driven over to my father’s – Sir William De Stancy’s – house this morning,’ she went on. ‘And on mentioning your name to him, I found he knew it quite well. You will, will you not, forgive my ignorance in having no better knowledge of the elder Mr. Somerset’s works than a dim sense of his fame as a painter? But I was going to say that my father would much like to include you in his personal acquaintance, and wishes me to ask if you will give him the pleasure of lunching with him to-day. My cousin John, whom you once knew, was a great favourite of his, and used to speak of you sometimes. It will be so kind if you can come. My father is an old man, out of society, and he would be glad to hear the news of town.’
Somerset said he was glad to find himself among friends where he had only expected strangers; and promised to come that day, if she would tell him the way.
That she could easily do. The short way was across that glade he saw there – then over the stile into the wood, following the path till it came out upon the turnpike-road. He would then be almost close to the house. The distance was about two miles and a half. But if he thought it too far for a walk, she would drive on to the town, where she had been going when he came, and instead of returning straight to her father’s would come back and pick him up.
It was not at all necessary, he thought. He was a walker, and could find the path.
At this moment a servant came to tell Miss De Stancy that the telegraph was calling her.
‘Ah – it is lucky that I was not gone again!’ she exclaimed. ‘John seldom reads it right if I am away.’
It now seemed quite in the ordinary course that, as a friend of her father’s, he should accompany her to the instrument. So up they went together, and immediately on reaching it she applied her ear to the instrument, and began to gather the message. Somerset fancied himself like a person overlooking another’s letter, and moved aside.
‘It is no secret,’ she said, smiling. ‘“Paula to Charlotte,” it begins.’
‘That’s very pretty.’
‘O – and it is about – you,’ murmured Miss De Stancy.
‘Me?’ The architect blushed a little.
She made no answer, and the machine went on with its story. There was something curious in watching this utterance about himself, under his very nose, in language unintelligible to him. He conjectured whether it were inquiry, praise, or blame, with a sense that it might reasonably be the latter, as the result of his surreptitious look into that blue bedroom, possibly observed and reported by some servant of the house.
‘“Direct that every facility be given to Mr. Somerset to visit any part of the castle he may wish to see. On my return I shall be glad to welcome him as the acquaintance of your relatives. I have two of his father’s pictures.”’
‘Dear me, the plot thickens,’ he said, as Miss De Stancy announced the words. ‘How could she know about me?’
‘I sent a message to her this morning when I saw you crossing the park on your way here – telling her that Mr. Somerset, son of the Academician, was making sketches of the castle, and that my father knew something of you. That’s her answer.’
‘Where are the pictures by my father that she has purchased?’
‘O, not here – at least, not unpacked.’
Miss de Stancy then left him to proceed on her journey to Markton (so the nearest little town was called), informing him that she would be at her father’s house to receive him at two o’clock. Just about one he closed his sketch-book, and set out in the direction she had indicated. At the entrance to the wood a man was at work pulling down a rotten gate that bore on its battered lock the initials ‘W. De S.’ and erecting a new one whose ironmongery exhibited the letters ‘P. P.’
The warmth of the summer noon did not inconveniently penetrate the dense masses of foliage which now began to overhang the path, except in spots where a ruthless timber-felling had taken place in previous years for the purpose of sale. It was that particular half-hour of the day in which the birds of the forest prefer walking to flying; and there being no wind, the hopping of the smallest songster over the dead leaves reached his ear from behind the undergrowth. The track had originally been a well-kept winding drive, but a deep carpet of moss and leaves overlaid it now, though the general outline still remained to show that its curves had been set out with as much care as those of a lawn walk, and the gradient made easy for carriages where the natural slopes were great. Felled trunks occasionally lay across it, and alongside were the hollow and fungous boles of trees sawn down in long past years.
After a walk of three-quarters of an hour he came to another gate, where the letters ‘P. P.’ again supplanted the historical ‘W. De S.’ Climbing over this, he found himself on a highway which presently dipped down towards the town of Markton, a place he had never yet seen. It appeared in the distance as a quiet little borough of a few thousand inhabitants; and, without the town boundary on the side he was approaching, stood half-a-dozen genteel and modern houses, of the detached kind usually found in such suburbs. On inquiry, Sir William De Stancy’s residence was indicated as one of these.
It was almost new, of streaked brick, having a central door, and a small bay window on each side to light the two front parlours. A little lawn spread its green surface in front, divided from the road by iron railings, the low line of shrubs immediately within them being coated with pallid dust from the highway. On the neat piers of the neat entrance gate were chiselled the words ‘Myrtle Villa.’ Genuine roadside respectability sat smiling on every brick of the eligible dwelling.
Perhaps that which impressed Somerset more than the mushroom modernism of Sir William De Stancy’s house was the air of healthful cheerfulness which pervaded it. He was shown in by a neat maidservant in black gown and white apron, a canary singing a welcome from a cage in the shadow of the window, the voices of crowing cocks coming over the chimneys from somewhere behind, and the sun and air riddling the house everywhere.
A dwelling of those well-known and popular dimensions which allow the proceedings in the kitchen to be distinctly heard in the parlours, it was so planned that a raking view might be obtained through it from the front door to the end of the back garden. The drawing-room furniture was comfortable, in the walnut-and-green-rep style of some years ago. Somerset had expected to find his friends living in an old house with remnants of their own antique furniture, and he hardly knew whether he ought to meet them with a smile or a gaze of condolence. His doubt was terminated, however, by the cheerful and tripping entry of Miss De Stancy, who had returned from her drive to Markton; and in a few more moments Sir William came in from the garden.
He was an old man of tall and spare build, with a considerable stoop, his glasses dangling against his waistcoat-buttons, and the front corners of his coat-tails hanging lower than the hinderparts, so that they swayed right and left as he walked. He nervously apologized to his visitor for having kept him waiting.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ he said, with a mild benevolence of tone, as he retained Somerset’s hand for a moment or two; ‘partly for your father’s sake, whom I met more than once in my younger days, before he became so well-known; and also because I learn that you were a friend of my poor nephew John Ravensbury.’ He looked over his shoulder to see if his daughter were within hearing, and, with the impulse of the solitary to make a confidence, continued in a low tone: ‘She, poor girl, was to have married John: his death was a sad blow to her and to all of us. – Pray take a seat, Mr. Somerset.’
The reverses of fortune which had brought Sir William De Stancy to this comfortable cottage awakened in Somerset a warmer emotion than curiosity, and he sat down with a heart as responsive to each speech uttered as if it had seriously concerned himself, while his host gave some words of information to his daughter on the trifling events that had marked the morning just passed; such as that the cow had got out of the paddock into Miss Power’s field, that the smith who had promised to come and look at the kitchen range had not arrived, that two wasps’ nests had been discovered in the garden bank, and that Nick Jones’s baby had fallen downstairs. Sir William had large cavernous arches to his eye-sockets, reminding the beholder of the vaults in the castle he once had owned. His hands were long and almost fleshless, each knuckle showing like a bamboo-joint from beneath his coat-sleeves, which were small at the elbow and large at the wrist. All the colour had gone from his beard and locks, except in the case of a few isolated hairs of the former, which retained dashes of their original shade at sudden points in their length, revealing that all had once been raven black.
But to study a man to his face for long is a species of ill-nature which requires a colder temperament, or at least an older heart, than the architect’s was at that time. Incurious unobservance is the true attitude of cordiality, and Somerset blamed himself for having fallen into an act of inspection even briefly. He would wait for his host’s conversation, which would doubtless be of the essence of historical romance.
‘The favourable Bank-returns have made the money-market much easier to-day, as I learn?’ said Sir William.
‘O, have they?’ said Somerset. ‘Yes, I suppose they have.’
‘And something is meant by this unusual quietness in Foreign stocks since the late remarkable fluctuations,’ insisted the old man. ‘Is the current of speculation quite arrested, or is it but a temporary lull?’
Somerset said he was afraid he could not give an opinion, and entered very lamely into the subject; but Sir William seemed to find sufficient interest in his own thoughts to do away with the necessity of acquiring fresh impressions from other people’s replies; for often after putting a question he looked on the floor, as if the subject were at an end. Lunch was now ready, and when they were in the dining-room Miss De Stancy, to introduce a topic of more general interest, asked Somerset if he had noticed the myrtle on the lawn?
Somerset had noticed it, and thought he had never seen such a full-blown one in the open air before. His eyes were, however, resting at the moment on the only objects at all out of the common that the dining-room contained. One was a singular glass case over the fireplace, within which were some large mediaeval door-keys, black with rust and age; and the others were two full-length oil portraits in the costume of the end of the last century – so out of all proportion to the size of the room they occupied that they almost reached to the floor.
‘Those originally belonged to the castle yonder,’ said Miss De Stancy, or Charlotte, as her father called her, noticing Somerset’s glance at the keys. ‘They used to unlock the principal entrance-doors, which were knocked to pieces in the civil wars. New doors were placed afterwards, but the old keys were never given up, and have been preserved by us ever since.’
‘They are quite useless – mere lumber – particularly to me,’ said Sir William.
‘And those huge paintings were a present from Paula,’ she continued. ‘They are portraits of my great-grandfather and mother. Paula would give all the old family pictures back to me if we had room for them; but they would fill the house to the ceilings.’
Sir William was impatient of the subject. ‘What is the utility of such accumulations?’ he asked. ‘Their originals are but clay now – mere forgotten dust, not worthy a moment’s inquiry or reflection at this distance of time. Nothing can retain the spirit, and why should we preserve the shadow of the form? – London has been very full this year, sir, I have been told?’
‘It has,’ said Somerset, and he asked if they had been up that season. It was plain that the matter with which Sir William De Stancy least cared to occupy himself before visitors was the history of his own family, in which he was followed with more simplicity by his daughter Charlotte.
‘No,’ said the baronet. ‘One might be led to think there is a fatality which prevents it. We make arrangements to go to town almost every year, to meet some old friend who combines the rare conditions of being in London with being mindful of me; but he has always died or gone elsewhere before the event has taken place… But with a disposition to be happy, it is neither this place nor the other that can render us the reverse. In short each man’s happiness depends upon himself, and his ability for doing with little.’ He turned more particularly to Somerset, and added with an impressive smile: ‘I hope you cultivate the art of doing with little?’
Somerset said that he certainly did cultivate that art, partly because he was obliged to.
‘Ah – you don’t mean to the extent that I mean. The world has not yet learned the riches of frugality, says, I think, Cicero, somewhere; and nobody can testify to the truth of that remark better than I. If a man knows how to spend less than his income, however small that may be, why – he has the philosopher’s stone.’ And Sir William looked in Somerset’s face with frugality written in every pore of his own, as much as to say, ‘And here you see one who has been a living instance of those principles from his youth up.’
Somerset soon found that whatever turn the conversation took, Sir William invariably reverted to this topic of frugality. When luncheon was over he asked his visitor to walk with him into the garden, and no sooner were they alone than he continued: ‘Well, Mr. Somerset, you are down here sketching architecture for professional purposes. Nothing can be better: you are a young man, and your art is one in which there are innumerable chances.’
‘I had begun to think they were rather few,’ said Somerset.
‘No, they are numerous enough: the difficulty is to find out where they lie. It is better to know where your luck lies than where your talent lies: that’s an old man’s opinion.’
‘I’ll remember it,’ said Somerset.
‘And now give me some account of your new clubs, new hotels, and new men… What I was going to add, on the subject of finding out where your luck lies, is that nobody is so unfortunate as not to have a lucky star in some direction or other. Perhaps yours is at the antipodes; if so, go there. All I say is, discover your lucky star.’
‘I am looking for it.’
‘You may be able to do two things; one well, the other but indifferently, and yet you may have more luck in the latter. Then stick to that one, and never mind what you can do best. Your star lies there.’
‘There I am not quite at one with you, Sir William.’
‘You should be. Not that I mean to say that luck lies in any one place long, or at any one person’s door. Fortune likes new faces, and your wisdom lies in bringing your acquisitions into safety while her favour lasts. To do that you must make friends in her time of smiles – make friends with people, wherever you find them. My daughter has unconsciously followed that maxim. She has struck up a warm friendship with our neighbour, Miss Power, at the castle. We are diametrically different from her in associations, traditions, ideas, religion – she comes of a violent dissenting family among other things – but I say to Charlotte what I say to you: win affection and regard wherever you can, and accommodate yourself to the times. I put nothing in the way of their intimacy, and wisely so, for by this so many pleasant hours are added to the sum total vouchsafed to humanity.’
It was quite late in the afternoon when Somerset took his leave. Miss De Stancy did not return to the castle that night, and he walked through the wood as he had come, feeling that he had been talking with a man of simple nature, who flattered his own understanding by devising Machiavellian theories after the event, to account for any spontaneous action of himself or his daughter, which might otherwise seem eccentric or irregular.
Before Somerset reached the inn he was overtaken by a slight shower, and on entering the house he walked into the general room, where there was a fire, and stood with one foot on the fender. The landlord was talking to some guest who sat behind a screen; and, probably because Somerset had been seen passing the window, and was known to be sketching at the castle, the conversation turned on Sir William De Stancy.
‘I have often noticed,’ observed the landlord, ‘that volks who have come to grief, and quite failed, have the rules how to succeed in life more at their vingers’ ends than volks who have succeeded. I assure you that Sir William, so full as he is of wise maxims, never acted upon a wise maxim in his life, until he had lost everything, and it didn’t matter whether he was wise or no. You know what he was in his young days, of course?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said the invisible stranger.
‘O, I thought everybody knew poor Sir William’s history. He was the star, as I may zay, of good company forty years ago. I remember him in the height of his jinks, as I used to zee him when I was a very little boy, and think how great and wonderful he was. I can seem to zee now the exact style of his clothes; white hat, white trousers, white silk handkerchief; and his jonnick face, as white as his clothes with keeping late hours. There was nothing black about him but his hair and his eyes – he wore no beard at that time – and they were black as slooes. The like of his coming on the race-course was never seen there afore nor since. He drove his ikkipage hisself; and it was always hauled by four beautiful white horses, and two outriders rode in harness bridles. There was a groom behind him, and another at the rubbing-post, all in livery as glorious as New Jerusalem. What a ‘stablishment he kept up at that time! I can mind him, sir, with thirty race-horses in training at once, seventeen coach-horses, twelve hunters at his box t’other side of London, four chargers at Budmouth, and ever so many hacks.’
‘And he lost all by his racing speculations?’ the stranger observed; and Somerset fancied that the voice had in it something more than the languid carelessness of a casual sojourner.
‘Partly by that, partly in other ways. He spent a mint o’ money in a wild project of founding a watering-place; and sunk thousands in a useless silver mine; so ‘twas no wonder that the castle named after him vell into other hands… The way it was done was curious. Mr. Wilkins, who was the first owner after it went from Sir William, actually sat down as a guest at his table, and got up as the owner. He took off, at a round sum, everything saleable, furniture, plate, pictures, even the milk and butter in the dairy. That’s how the pictures and furniture come to be in the castle still; wormeaten rubbish zome o’ it, and hardly worth moving.’
