Somerset, will you allow me to have the Greek court I mentioned?’ she asked tentatively, after a long break in their discourse, as she scanned the green stones along the base of the arcade, with a conjectural countenance as to his reply.
‘Will your own feeling for the genius of the place allow you?’
‘I am not a mediaevalist: I am an eclectic.’
‘You don’t dislike your own house on that account.’
‘I did at first – I don’t so much now… I should love it, and adore every stone, and think feudalism the only true romance of life, if – ’
‘What?’
‘If I were a De Stancy, and the castle the long home of my forefathers.’
Somerset was a little surprised at the avowal: the minister’s words on the effects of her new environment recurred to his mind. ‘Miss De Stancy doesn’t think so,’ he said. ‘She cares nothing about those things.’
Paula now turned to him: hitherto her remarks had been sparingly spoken, her eyes being directed elsewhere: ‘Yes, that is very strange, is it not?’ she said. ‘But it is owing to the joyous freshness of her nature which precludes her from dwelling on the past – indeed, the past is no more to her than it is to a sparrow or robin. She is scarcely an instance of the wearing out of old families, for a younger mental constitution than hers I never knew.’
‘Unless that very simplicity represents the second childhood of her line, rather than her own exclusive character.’
Paula shook her head. ‘In spite of the Greek court, she is more Greek than I.’
‘You represent science rather than art, perhaps.’
‘How?’ she asked, glancing up under her hat.
‘I mean,’ replied Somerset, ‘that you represent the march of mind – the steamship, and the railway, and the thoughts that shake mankind.’
She weighed his words, and said: ‘Ah, yes: you allude to my father. My father was a great man; but I am more and more forgetting his greatness: that kind of greatness is what a woman can never truly enter into. I am less and less his daughter every day that goes by.’
She walked away a few steps to rejoin the excellent Mrs. Goodman, who, as Somerset still perceived, was waiting for Paula at the discreetest of distances in the shadows at the farther end of the building. Surely Paula’s voice had faltered, and she had turned to hide a tear?
She came back again. ‘Did you know that my father made half the railways in Europe, including that one over there?’ she said, waving her little gloved hand in the direction whence low rumbles were occasionally heard during the day.
‘Yes.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Miss De Stancy told me a little; and I then found his name and doings were quite familiar to me.’
Curiously enough, with his words there came through the broken windows the murmur of a train in the distance, sounding clearer and more clear. It was nothing to listen to, yet they both listened; till the increasing noise suddenly broke off into dead silence.
‘It has gone into the tunnel,’ said Paula. ‘Have you seen the tunnel my father made? the curves are said to be a triumph of science. There is nothing else like it in this part of England.’
‘There is not: I have heard so. But I have not seen it.’
‘Do you think it a thing more to be proud of that one’s father should have made a great tunnel and railway like that, than that one’s remote ancestor should have built a great castle like this?’
What could Somerset say? It would have required a casuist to decide whether his answer should depend upon his conviction, or upon the family ties of such a questioner. ‘From a modern point of view, railways are, no doubt, things more to be proud of than castles,’ he said; ‘though perhaps I myself, from mere association, should decide in favour of the ancestor who built the castle.’ The serious anxiety to be truthful that Somerset threw into his observation, was more than the circumstance required. ‘To design great engineering works,’ he added musingly, and without the least eye to the disparagement of her parent, ‘requires no doubt a leading mind. But to execute them, as he did, requires, of course, only a following mind.’
His reply had not altogether pleased her; and there was a distinct reproach conveyed by her slight movement towards Mrs. Goodman. He saw it, and was grieved that he should have spoken so. ‘I am going to walk over and inspect that famous tunnel of your father’s,’ he added gently. ‘It will be a pleasant study for this afternoon.’
She went away. ‘I am no man of the world,’ he thought. ‘I ought to have praised that father of hers straight off. I shall not win her respect; much less her love!’
Somerset did not forget what he had planned, and when lunch was over he walked away through the trees. The tunnel was more difficult of discovery than he had anticipated, and it was only after considerable winding among green lanes, whose deep ruts were like canyons of Colorado in miniature, that he reached the slope in the distant upland where the tunnel began. A road stretched over its crest, and thence along one side of the railway-cutting.
He there unexpectedly saw standing Miss Power’s carriage; and on drawing nearer he found it to contain Paula herself, Miss De Stancy, and Mrs. Goodman.
‘How singular!’ exclaimed Miss De Stancy gaily.
‘It is most natural,’ said Paula instantly. ‘In the morning two people discuss a feature in the landscape, and in the afternoon each has a desire to see it from what the other has said of it. Therefore they accidentally meet.’
Now Paula had distinctly heard Somerset declare that he was going to walk there; how then could she say this so coolly? It was with a pang at his heart that he returned to his old thought of her being possibly a finished coquette and dissembler. Whatever she might be, she was not a creature starched very stiffly by Puritanism.
Somerset looked down on the mouth of the tunnel. The popular commonplace that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous, was not proven at this spot. On either slope of the deep cutting, green with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway which ran along the bottom, its thin steel rails gleaming like silver threads in the depths. The vertical front of the tunnel, faced with brick that had once been red, was now weather-stained, lichened, and mossed over in harmonious rusty-browns, pearly greys, and neutral greens, at the very base appearing a little blue-black spot like a mouse-hole – the tunnel’s mouth.
The carriage was drawn up quite close to the wood railing, and Paula was looking down at the same time with him; but he made no remark to her.
Mrs. Goodman broke the silence by saying, ‘If it were not a railway we should call it a lovely dell.’
Somerset agreed with her, adding that it was so charming that he felt inclined to go down.
‘If you do, perhaps Miss Power will order you up again, as a trespasser,’ said Charlotte De Stancy. ‘You are one of the largest shareholders in the railway, are you not, Paula?’
Miss Power did not reply.
‘I suppose as the road
