Part 105

‘I am not going far,’ she said; ‘only to the next station. We often run down in summer time. Are you going far?’

‘I am going to a building further on; thence to Normandy by way of Cherbourg, to finish out my holiday.’

Miss De Stancy thought that would be very nice.

‘Well, I hope so. But I fear it won’t.’

After saying that Somerset asked himself why he should mince matters with so genuine and sympathetic a girl as Charlotte De Stancy? She could tell him particulars which he burned to know. He might never again have an opportunity of knowing them, since she and he would probably not meet for years to come, if at all.

‘Have the castle works progressed pretty rapidly under the new architect?’ he accordingly asked.

‘Yes,’ said Charlotte in her haste--then adding that she was not quite sure if they had progressed so rapidly as before; blushingly correcting herself at this point and that, in the tinkering manner of a nervous organization aiming at nicety where it was not required.

‘Well, I should have liked to carry out the undertaking to its end,’ said Somerset. ‘But I felt I could not consistently do so. Miss Power--’ (here a lump came into Somerset’s throat--so responsive was he yet to her image)--‘seemed to have lost confidence in me, and--it was best that the connection should be severed.’

There was a long pause. ‘She was very sorry about it,’ said Charlotte gently.

‘What made her alter so?--I never can think!’

Charlotte waited again as if to accumulate the necessary force for honest speaking at the expense of pleasantness. ‘It was the telegram that began it of course,’ she answered.

‘Telegram?’

She looked up at him in quite a frightened way--little as there was to be frightened at in a quiet fellow like him in this sad time of his life--and said, ‘Yes: some telegram--I think--when you were in trouble? Forgive my alluding to it; but you asked me the question.’

Somerset began reflecting on what messages he had sent Paula, troublous or otherwise. All he had sent had been sent from the castle, and were as gentle and mellifluous as sentences well could be which had neither articles nor pronouns. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Will you explain a little more--as plainly as you like--without minding my feelings?’

‘A telegram from Nice, I think?’

‘I never sent one.’

‘O! The one I meant was about money.’

Somerset shook his head. ‘No,’ he murmured, with the composure of a man who, knowing he had done nothing of the sort himself, was blinded by his own honesty to the possibility that another might have done it for him. ‘That must be some other affair with which I had nothing to do. O no, it was nothing like that; the reason for her change of manner was quite different!’

So timid was Charlotte in Somerset’s presence, that her timidity at this juncture amounted to blameworthiness. The distressing scene which must have followed a clearing up there and then of any possible misunderstanding, terrified her imagination; and quite confounded by contradictions that she could not reconcile, she held her tongue, and nervously looked out of the window.

‘I have heard that Miss Power is soon to be married,’ continued Somerset.

‘Yes,’ Charlotte murmured. ‘It is sooner than it ought to be by rights, considering how recently my dear father died; but there are reasons in connection with my brother’s position against putting it off: and it is to be absolutely simple and private.’

There was another interval. ‘May I ask when it is to be?’ he said.

‘Almost at once--this week.’

Somerset started back as if some stone had hit his face.

Still there was nothing wonderful in such promptitude: engagements broken in upon by the death of a near relative of one of the parties had been often carried out in a subdued form with no longer delay.

Charlotte’s station was now at hand. She bade him farewell; and he rattled on to the building he had come to inspect, and next to Budmouth, whence he intended to cross the Channel by steamboat that night.

He hardly knew how the evening passed away. He had taken up his quarters at an inn near the quay, and as the night drew on he stood gazing from the coffee-room window at the steamer outside, which nearly thrust its spars through the bedroom casements, and at the goods that were being tumbled on board as only shippers can tumble them. All the goods were laden, a lamp was put on each side the gangway, the engines broke into a crackling roar, and people began to enter. They were only waiting for the last train: then they would be off. Still Somerset did not move; he was thinking of that curious half-told story of Charlotte’s, about a telegram to Paula for money from Nice. Not once till within the last half-hour had it recurred to his mind that he had met Dare both at Nice and at Monte Carlo; that at the latter place he had been absolutely out of money and wished to borrow, showing considerable sinister feeling when Somerset declined to lend: that on one or two previous occasions he had reasons for doubting Dare’s probity; and that in spite of the young man’s impoverishment at Monte Carlo he had, a few days later, beheld him in shining raiment at Carlsruhe. Somerset, though misty in his conjectures, was seized with a growing conviction that there was something in Miss De Stancy’s allusion to the telegram which ought to be explained.

He felt an insurmountable objection to cross the water that night, or till he had been able to see Charlotte again, and learn more of her meaning. He countermanded the order to put his luggage on board, watched the steamer out of the harbour, and went to bed. He might as well have gone to battle, for any rest that he got. On rising the next morning he felt rather blank, though none the less convinced that a matter required investigation. He left Budmouth by a morning train, and about eleven o’clock found himself in Markton.