Part 55

‘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:--

“From one that dyeth in his discontent, Dear Faire, receive this greeting to thee sent; And still as oft as it is read by thee, Then with some deep sad sigh remember mee!

O ‘twas my fortune’s error to vow dutie, To one that bears defiance in her beautie! Sweete poyson, pretious wooe, infectious jewell-- Such is a Ladie that is faire and cruell.

How well could I with ayre, camelion-like, Live happie, and still gazeing on thy cheeke, In which, forsaken man, methink I see How goodlie love doth threaten cares to mee.

Why dost thou frowne thus on a kneelinge soule, Whose faults in love thou may’st as well controule?-- In love--but O, that word; that word I feare Is hateful still both to thy hart and eare!

. . . . .

Ladie, in breefe, my fate doth now intend The period of my daies to have an end: Waste not on me thy pittie, pretious Faire: Rest you in much content; I, in despaire!”’

A solemn silence followed the close of the recital, which De Stancy improved by turning the point of the sword to his breast, resting the pommel upon the floor, and saying:--

‘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.