Architects -- Fiction; Castles -- Conservation and restoration -- Fiction; Love stories; Wessex (England) -- Fiction
‘I thought you had gone to the Hotoie Promenade,’ she said hastily. ‘I
am going to the cathedral;’ (obviously uttered lest it should seem that
she had seen him from the hotel windows, and entered the square for his
company).
‘Of course: there is nothing else to go to here--even for Roundheads.’
‘If you mean ME by that, you are very much mistaken,’ said she testily.
‘The Roundheads were your ancestors, and they knocked down my ancestors’
castle, and broke the stained glass and statuary of the cathedral,’
said De Stancy slily; ‘and now you go not only to a cathedral, but to a
service of the unreformed Church in it.’
‘In a foreign country it is different from home,’ said Paula
in extenuation; ‘and you of all men should not reproach me for
tergiversation--when it has been brought about by--by my sympathies
with--’
‘With the troubles of the De Stancys.’
‘Well, you know what I mean,’ she answered, with considerable anxiety
not to be misunderstood; ‘my liking for the old castle, and what it
contains, and what it suggests. I declare I will not explain to you
further--why should I? I am not answerable to you!’
Paula’s show of petulance was perhaps not wholly because she had
appeared to seek him, but also from being reminded by his criticism that
Mr. Woodwell’s prophecy on her weakly succumbing to surroundings was
slowly working out its fulfilment.
She moved forward towards the gate at the further end of the square,
beyond which the cathedral lay at a very short distance. Paula did not
turn her head, and De Stancy strolled slowly after her down the Rue du
College. The day happened to be one of the church festivals, and people
were a second time flocking into the lofty monument of Catholicism at
its meridian. Paula vanished into the porch with the rest; and, almost
catching the wicket as it flew back from her hand, he too entered
the high-shouldered edifice--an edifice doomed to labour under the
melancholy misfortune of seeming only half as vast as it really is, and
as truly as whimsically described by Heine as a monument built with the
strength of Titans, and decorated with the patience of dwarfs.
De Stancy walked up the nave, so close beside her as to touch her dress;
but she would not recognize his presence; the darkness that evening had
thrown over the interior, which was scarcely broken by the few candles
dotted about, being a sufficient excuse if she required one.
‘Miss Power,’ De Stancy said at last, ‘I am coming to the service with
you.’
She received the intelligence without surprise, and he knew she had been
conscious of him all the way.
Paula went no further than the middle of the nave, where there was
hardly a soul, and took a chair beside a solitary rushlight which looked
amid the vague gloom of the inaccessible architecture like a lighthouse
at the foot of tall cliffs.
He put his hand on the next chair, saying, ‘Do you object?’
‘Not at all,’ she replied; and he sat down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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