Book The Fifth. De Stancy And Paula - Chapter 1

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_ CHAPTER I

Miss Power was reclining on a red velvet couch in the bedroom of an old-fashioned red hotel at Strassburg, and her friend Miss De Stancy was sitting by a window of the same apartment. They were both rather wearied by a long journey of the previous day. The hotel overlooked the large open Kleber Platz, erect in the midst of which the bronze statue of General Kleber received the rays of a warm sun that was powerless to brighten him. The whole square, with its people and vehicles going to and fro as if they had plenty of time, was visible to Charlotte in her chair; but Paula from her horizontal position could see nothing below the level of the many dormered house-tops on the opposite side of the Platz. After watching this upper storey of the city for some time in silence, she asked Charlotte to hand her a binocular lying on the table, through which instrument she quietly regarded the distant roofs.

'What strange and philosophical creatures storks are,' she said. 'They give a taciturn, ghostly character to the whole town.'

The birds were crossing and recrossing the field of the glass in their flight hither and thither between the Strassburg chimneys, their sad grey forms sharply outlined against the sky, and their skinny legs showing beneath like the limbs of dead martyrs in Crivelli's emaciated imaginings. The indifference of these birds to all that was going on beneath them impressed her: to harmonize with their solemn and silent movements the houses beneath should have been deserted, and grass growing in the streets.

Behind the long roofs thus visible to Paula over the window- sill, with their tiers of dormer-windows, rose the cathedral spire in airy openwork, forming the highest object in the scene; it suggested something which for a long time she appeared unwilling to utter; but natural instinct had its way.

'A place like this,' she said, 'where he can study Gothic architecture, would, I should have thought, be a spot more congenial to him than Monaco.'

The person referred to was the misrepresented Somerset, whom the two had been gingerly discussing from time to time, allowing any casual subject, such as that of the storks, to interrupt the personal one at every two or three sentences.

'It would be more like him to be here,' replied Miss De Stancy, trusting her tongue with only the barest generalities on this matter.

Somerset was again dismissed for the stork topic, but Paula could not let him alone; and she presently resumed, as if an irresistible fascination compelled what judgment had forbidden: 'The strongest-minded persons are sometimes caught unawares at that place, if they once think they will retrieve their first losses; and I am not aware that he is particularly strong-minded.'

For a moment Charlotte looked at her with a mixed expression, in which there was deprecation that a woman with any feeling should criticize Somerset so frigidly, and relief that it was Paula who did so. For, notwithstanding her assumption that Somerset could never be anything more to her than he was already, Charlotte's heart would occasionally step down and trouble her views so expressed.

Whether looking through a glass at distant objects enabled Paula to bottle up her affection for the absent one, or whether her friend Charlotte had so little personality in Paula's regard that she could commune with her as with a lay figure, it was certain that she evinced remarkable ease in speaking of Somerset, resuming her words about him in the tone of one to whom he was at most an ordinary professional adviser. 'It would be very awkward for the works at the castle if he has got into a scrape. I suppose the builders were well posted with instructions before he left: but he ought certainly to return soon. Why did he leave England at all just now?'

'Perhaps it was to see you.'

'He should have waited; it would not have been so dreadfully long to May or June. Charlotte, how can a man who does such a hare-brained thing as this be deemed trustworthy in an important work like that of rebuilding Stancy Castle?'

There was such stress in the inquiry that, whatever factitiousness had gone before, Charlotte perceived Paula to be at last speaking her mind; and it seemed as if Somerset must have considerably lost ground in her opinion, or she would not have criticized him thus.

'My brother will tell us full particulars when he comes: perhaps it is not at all as we suppose,' said Charlotte. She strained her eyes across the Platz and added, 'He ought to have been here before this time.'

While they waited and talked, Paula still observing the storks, the hotel omnibus came round the corner from the station. 'I believe he has arrived,' resumed Miss De Stancy; 'I see something that looks like his portmanteau on the top of the omnibus. . . . Yes; it is his baggage. I'll run down to him.'

De Stancy had obtained six weeks' additional leave on account of his health, which had somewhat suffered in India. The first use he made of his extra time was in hastening back to meet the travelling ladies here at Strassburg. Mr. Power and Mrs. Goodman were also at the hotel, and when Charlotte got downstairs, the former was welcoming De Stancy at the door.

Paula had not seen him since he set out from Genoa for Nice, commissioned by her to deliver the hundred pounds to Somerset. His note, stating that he had failed to meet Somerset, contained no details, and she guessed that he would soon appear before her now to answer any question about that peculiar errand.

Her anticipations were justified by the event; she had no sooner gone into the next sitting-room than Charlotte De Stancy appeared and asked if her brother might come up. The closest observer would have been in doubt whether Paula's ready reply in the affirmative was prompted by personal consideration for De Stancy, or by a hope to hear more of his mission to Nice. As soon as she had welcomed him she reverted at once to the subject.

'Yes, as I told you, he was not at the place of meeting,' De Stancy replied. And taking from his pocket the bag of ready money he placed it intact upon the table.

De Stancy did this with a hand that shook somewhat more than a long railway journey was adequate to account for; and in truth it was the vision of Dare's position which agitated the unhappy captain: for had that young man, as De Stancy feared, been tampering with Somerset's name, his fate now trembled in the balance; Paula would unquestionably and naturally invoke the aid of the law against him if she discovered such an imposition.

'Were you punctual to the time mentioned?' she asked curiously.

De Stancy replied in the affirmative.

'Did you wait long?' she continued.

'Not very long,' he answered, his instinct to screen the possibly guilty one confining him to guarded statements, while still adhering to the literal truth.

'Why was that?'

'Somebody came and told me that he would not appear.'

'Who?'

'A young man who has been acting as his clerk. His name is Dare. He informed me that Mr. Somerset could not keep the appointment.'

'Why?'

'He had gone on to San Remo.'

'Has he been travelling with Mr. Somerset?'

'He had been with him. They know each other very well. But as you commissioned me to deliver the money into no hands but Mr. Somerset's, I adhered strictly to your instructions.'

'But perhaps my instructions were not wise. Should it in your opinion have been sent by this young man? Was he commissioned to ask you for it?'

De Stancy murmured that Dare was not commissioned to ask for it; that upon the whole he deemed her instructions wise; and was still of opinion that the best thing had been done.

Although De Stancy was distracted between his desire to preserve Dare from the consequences of folly, and a gentlemanly wish to keep as close to the truth as was compatible with that condition, his answers had not appeared to Paula to be particularly evasive, the conjuncture being one in which a handsome heiress's shrewdness was prone to overleap itself by setting down embarrassment on the part of the man she questioned to a mere lover's difficulty in steering between honour and rivalry.

She put but one other question. 'Did it appear as if he, Mr. Somerset, after telegraphing, had--had--regretted doing so, and evaded the result by not keeping the appointment?'

'That's just how it appears.' The words, which saved Dare from ignominy, cost De Stancy a good deal. He was sorry for Somerset, sorry for himself, and very sorry for Paula. But Dare was to De Stancy what Somerset could never be: and 'for his kin that is near unto him shall a man be defiled.'

After that interview Charlotte saw with warring impulses that Somerset slowly diminished in Paula's estimate; slowly as the moon wanes, but as certainly. Charlotte's own love was of a clinging, uncritical sort, and though the shadowy intelligence of Somerset's doings weighed down her soul with regret, it seemed to make not the least difference in her affection for him.

In the afternoon the whole party, including De Stancy, drove about the streets. Here they looked at the house in which Goethe had lived, and afterwards entered the cathedral. Observing in the south transept a crowd of people waiting patiently, they were reminded that they unwittingly stood in the presence of the popular clock-work of Schwilgue.

Mr. Power and Mrs. Goodman decided that they would wait with the rest of the idlers and see the puppets perform at the striking. Charlotte also waited with them; but as it wanted eight minutes to the hour, and as Paula had seen the show before, she moved on into the nave.

Presently she found that De Stancy had followed. He did not come close till she, seeing him stand silent, said, 'If it were not for this cathedral, I should not like the city at all; and I have even seen cathedrals I like better. Luckily we are going on to Baden to-morrow.'

'Your uncle has just told me. He has asked me to keep you company.'

'Are you intending to?' said Paula, probing the base-moulding of a pier with her parasol.

'I have nothing better to do, nor indeed half so good,' said De Stancy. 'I am abroad for my health, you know, and what's like the Rhine and its neighbourhood in early summer, before the crowd comes? It is delightful to wander about there, or anywhere, like a child, influenced by no fixed motive more than that of keeping near some friend, or friends, including the one we most admire in the world.'

'That sounds perilously like love-making.'

''Tis love indeed.'

'Well, love is natural to men, I suppose,' rejoined the young lady. 'But you must love within bounds; or you will be enervated, and cease to be useful as a heavy arm of the service.'

'My dear Miss Power, your didactic and respectable rules won't do for me. If you expect straws to stop currents, you are sadly mistaken! But no--let matters be: I am a happy contented mortal at present, say what you will. . . . You don't ask why? Perhaps you know. It is because all I care for in the world is near me, and that I shall never be more than a hundred yards from her as long as the present arrangement continues.'

'We are in a cathedral, remember, Captain De Stancy, and should not keep up a secular conversation.'

'If I had never said worse in a cathedral than what I have said here, I should be content to meet my eternal judge without absolution. Your uncle asked me this morning how I liked you.'

'Well, there was no harm in that.'

'How I like you! Harm, no; but you should have seen how silly I looked. Fancy the inadequacy of the expression when my whole sense is absorbed by you.'

'Men allow themselves to be made ridiculous by their own feelings in an inconceivable way.'

'True, I am a fool; but forgive me,' he rejoined, observing her gaze, which wandered critically from roof to clerestory, and then to the pillars, without once lighting on him. 'Don't mind saying Yes.--You look at this thing and that thing, but you never look at me, though I stand here and see nothing but you.'

'There, the clock is striking--and the cock crows. Please go across to the transept and tell them to come out this way.'

De Stancy went. When he had gone a few steps he turned his head. She had at last ceased to study the architecture, and was looking at him. Perhaps his words had struck her, for it seemed at that moment as if he read in her bright eyes a genuine interest in him and his fortunes. _

Read next: Book The Fifth. De Stancy And Paula: Chapter 2

Read previous: Book The Fourth. Somerset, Dare And De Stancy: Chapter 5

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