A Laodicean: A Story of To-Day

A Laodicean: A Story of To-Day



by


Thomas Hardy






Web-Books.Com



















A Laodicean: A Story of To-Day



PREFACE 3

BOOK THE FIRST: George Somerset 4

BOOK THE SECOND: Dare And Havill 103

BOOK THE THIRD: De Stancy 147

BOOK THE FOURTH: Somerset, Dare And De Stancy 216

BOOK THE FIFTH: De Stancy And Paula 240

BOOK THE SIXTH: Paula 319
PREFACE

The changing of the old order in country manors and mansions may be slow or
sudden, may have many issues romantic or otherwise, its romantic issues being
not necessarily restricted to a change back to the original order; though this
admissible instance appears to have been the only romance formerly recognized
by novelists as possible in the case. Whether the following production be a
picture of other possibilities or not, its incidents may be taken to be fairly well
supported by evidence every day forthcoming in most counties.
The writing of the tale was rendered memorable to two persons, at least, by a
tedious illness of five months that laid hold of the author soon after the story was
begun in a well-known magazine; during which period the narrative had to be
strenuously continued by dictation to a predetermined cheerful ending.
As some of these novels of Wessex life address themselves more especially to
readers into whose souls the iron has entered, and whose years have less
pleasure in them now than heretofore, so "A Laodicean" may perhaps help to
while away an idle afternoon of the comfortable ones whose lines have fallen to
them in pleasant places; above all, of that large and happy section of the reading
public which has not yet reached ripeness of years; those to whom marriage is
the pilgrim's Eternal City, and not a milestone on the way. T.H.
January 1896.


BOOK THE FIRST: George Somerset


The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half-an-hour of its setting; but
the sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring and copying the
chevroned doorway a bold and quaint example of a transitional style of
architecture, which formed the tower entrance to an English village church. The
graveyard being quite open on its western side, the tweed-clad figure of the
young draughtsman, and the tall mass of antique masonry which rose above him
to a battlemented parapet, were fired to a great brightness by the solar rays, that
crossed the neighbouring mead like a warp of gold threads, in whose mazes
groups of equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly.
He was so absorbed in his pursuit that he did not mark the brilliant chromatic
effect of which he composed the central feature, till it was brought home to his
intelligence by the warmth of the moulded stonework under his touch when
measuring; which led him at length to turn his head and gaze on its cause.
There are few in whom the sight of a sunset does not beget as much meditative
melancholy as contemplative pleasure, the human decline and death that it
illustrates being too obvious to escape the notice of the simplest observer. The
sketcher, as if he had been brought to this reflection many hundreds of times
before by the same spectacle, showed that he did not wish to pursue it just now,
by turning away his face after a few moments, to resume his architectural
studies.
He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced the old workers
whose trick he was endeavouring to acquire six hundred years after the original
performance had ceased and the performers passed into the unseen. By means
of a strip of lead called a leaden tape, which he pressed around and into the
fillets and hollows with his finger and thumb, he transferred the exact contour of
each moulding to his drawing, that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant;
where were also a sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and other
mathematical instruments. When he had marked down the line thus fixed, he
returned to the doorway to copy another as before.
It being the month of August, when the pale face of the townsman and the
stranger is to be seen among the brown skins of remotest uplanders, not only in
England, but throughout the temperate zone, few of the homeward-bound
labourers paused to notice him further than by a momentary turn of the head.
They had beheld such gentlemen before, not exactly measuring the church so
accurately as this one seemed to be doing, but painting it from a distance, or at
least walking round the mouldy pile. At the same time the present visitor, even
exteriorly, was not altogether commonplace. His features were good, his eyes of
the dark deep sort called eloquent by the sex that ought to know, and with that
ray of light in them which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of all kinds,
in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature. Though he would have been broadly
characterized as a young man, his face bore contradictory testimonies to his
precise age. This was conceivably owing to a too dominant speculative activity in
him, which, while it had preserved the emotional side of his constitution, and with
it the significant flexuousness of mouth and chin, had played upon his forehead
and temples till, at weary moments, they exhibited some traces of being over-
exercised. A youthfulness about the mobile features, a mature forehead though
not exactly what the world has been familiar with in past ages is now growing
common; and with the advance of juvenile introspection it probably must grow
commoner still. Briefly, he had more of the beauty if beauty it ought to be called-
-of the future human type than of the past; but not so much as to make him other
than a nice young man.
His build was somewhat slender and tall; his complexion, though a little browned
by recent exposure, was that of a man who spent much of his time indoors. Of
beard he had but small show, though he was as innocent as a Nazarite of the
use of the razor; but he possessed a moustache all-sufficient to hide the
subtleties of his mouth, which could thus be tremulous at tender moments
without provoking inconvenient criticism.
Owing to his situation on high ground, open to the west, he remained enveloped
in the lingering aureate haze till a time when the eastern part of the churchyard
was in obscurity, and damp with rising dew. When it was too dark to sketch
further he packed up his drawing, and, beckoning to a lad who had been idling by
the gate, directed him to carry the stool and implements to a roadside inn which
he named, lying a mile or two ahead. The draughtsman leisurely followed the lad
out of the churchyard, and along a lane in the direction signified.
The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching mediaeval details in
these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has come over the study of English Gothic
architecture, through a re-awakening to the art-forms of times that more nearly
neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact that George Somerset, son of the
Academician of that name, was a man of independent tastes and excursive
instincts, who unconsciously, and perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in
floating in lonely currents of thought than with the general tide of opinion. When
quite a lad, in the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded
to the great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and
other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire what was
good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean, Queen Anne, and
kindred accretions of decayed styles began to be popular, he purchased such
old-school works as Revett and Stuart, Chambers, and the rest, and worked
diligently at the Five Orders; till quite bewildered on the question of style, he
concluded that all styles were extinct, and with them all architecture as a living
art. Somerset was not old enough at that time to know that, in practice, art had at
all times been as full of shifts and compromises as every other mundane thing;
that ideal perfection was never achieved by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and
never would be; and thus he was thrown into a mood of disgust with his
profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly abandoning
these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical literature. For two
whole years he did nothing but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on
every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-
kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-
and-twenty that these inspired works were not jumped at by the publishers with
all the eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a severe hint
from his father that unless he went on with his legitimate profession he might
have to look elsewhere than at home for an allowance. Mr. Somerset junior then
awoke to realities, became intently practical, rushed back to his dusty drawing-
boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a view of regularly starting in
practice on the first day of the following January.
It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone in which the soaring of
a young man into the empyrean, and his descent again, is always narrated. But
as has often been said, the light and the truth may be on the side of the dreamer:
a far wider view than the wise ones have may be his at that recalcitrant time, and
his reduction to common measure be nothing less than a tragic event. The
operation called lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and round
a horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder grows dizzy in looking at
them, is a very unhappy one for the animal concerned. During its progress the
colt springs upward, across the circle, stops, flies over the turf with the velocity of
a bird, and indulges in all sorts of graceful antics; but he always ends in one way-
-thanks to the knotted whipcord in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity
of a horizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his character of the bold
contours which the fine hand of Nature gave it. Yet the process is considered to
be the making of him.
Whether Somerset became permanently made under the action of the inevitable
lunge, or whether he lapsed into mere dabbling with the artistic side of his
profession only, it would be premature to say; but at any rate it was his contrite
return to architecture as a calling that sent him on the sketching excursion under
notice. Feeling that something still was wanting to round off his knowledge before
he could take his professional line with confidence, he was led to remember that
his own native Gothic was the one form of design that he had totally neglected
from the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisome iteration at
the opening of his career. Now it had again returned to silence; indeed such is
the surprising instability of art 'principles' as they are facetiously called it was
just as likely as not to sink into the neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in
Georgian times. This accident of being out of vogue lent English Gothic an
additional charm to one of his proclivities; and away he went to make it the
business of a summer circuit in the west.
The quiet time of evening, the secluded neighbourhood, the unusually gorgeous
liveries of the clouds packed in a pile over that quarter of the heavens in which
the sun had disappeared, were such as to make a traveller loiter on his walk.
Coming to a stile, Somerset mounted himself on the top bar, to imbibe the spirit
of the scene and hour. The evening was so still that every trifling sound could be
heard for miles. There was the rattle of a returning waggon, mixed with the
smacks of the waggoner's whip: the team must have been at least three miles
off. From far over the hill came the faint periodic yell of kennelled hounds; while
from the nearest village resounded the voices of boys at play in the twilight. Then
a powerful clock struck the hour; it was not from the direction of the church, but
rather from the wood behind him; and he thought it must be the clock of some
mansion that way.
But the mind of man cannot always be forced to take up subjects by the pressure
of their material presence, and Somerset's thoughts were often, to his great loss,
apt to be even more than common truants from the tones and images that met
his outer senses on walks and rides. He would sometimes go quietly through the
queerest, gayest, most extraordinary town in Europe, and let it alone, provided it
did not meddle with him by its beggars, beauties, innkeepers, police, coachmen,
mongrels, bad smells, and such like obstructions. This feat of questionable utility
he began performing now. Sitting on the three-inch ash rail that had been peeled
and polished like glass by the rubbings of all the small-clothes in the parish, he
forgot the time, the place, forgot that it was August in short, everything of the
present altogether. His mind flew back to his past life, and deplored the waste of
time that had resulted from his not having been able to make up his mind which
of the many fashions of art that were coming and going in kaleidoscopic change
was the true point of departure from himself. He had suffered from the modern
malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man of his own age.
Dozens of his fellows in years and experience, who had never thought specially
of the matter, but had blunderingly applied themselves to whatever form of art
confronted them at the moment of their making a move, were by this time
acquiring renown as new lights; while he was still unknown. He wished that some
accident could have hemmed in his eyes between inexorable blinkers, and sped
him on in a channel ever so worn.
Thus balanced between believing and not believing in his own future, he was
recalled to the scene without by hearing the notes of a familiar hymn, rising in
subdued harmonies from a valley below. He listened more heedfully. It was his
old friend the 'New Sabbath,' which he had never once heard since the lisping
days of childhood, and whose existence, much as it had then been to him, he
had till this moment quite forgotten. Where the 'New Sabbath' had kept itself all
these years why that sound and hearty melody had disappeared from all the
cathedrals, parish churches, minsters and chapels-of-ease that he had been
acquainted with during his apprenticeship to life, and until his ways had become
irregular and uncongregational he could not, at first, say. But then he
recollected that the tune appertained to the old west-gallery period of church-
music, anterior to the great choral reformation and the rule of Monk that old time
when the repetition of a word, or half- line of a verse, was not considered a
disgrace to an ecclesiastical choir.
Willing to be interested in anything which would keep him out- of-doors,
Somerset dismounted from the stile and descended the hill before him, to learn
whence the singing proceeded.
II.
He found that it had its origin in a building standing alone in a field; and though
the evening was not yet dark without, lights shone from the windows. In a few
moments Somerset stood before the edifice. Being just then en rapport with
ecclesiasticism by reason of his recent occupation, he could not help murmuring,
'Shade of Pugin, what a monstrosity!'
Perhaps this exclamation (rather out of date since the discovery that Pugin
himself often nodded amazingly) would not have been indulged in by Somerset
but for his new architectural resolves, which caused professional opinions to
advance themselves officiously to his lips whenever occasion offered. The
building was, in short, a recently-erected chapel of red brick, with pseudo-classic
ornamentation, and the white regular joints of mortar could be seen streaking its
surface in geometrical oppressiveness from top to bottom. The roof was of blue
slate, clean as a table, and unbroken from gable to gable; the windows were
glazed with sheets of plate glass, a temporary iron stovepipe passing out near
one of these, and running up to the height of the ridge, where it was finished by a
covering like a parachute. Walking round to the end, he perceived an oblong
white stone let into the wall just above the plinth, on which was inscribed in deep
letters:
Erected 187-,
AT THE SOLE EXPENSE OF
JOHN POWER, ESQ., M.P.
The 'New Sabbath' still proceeded line by line, with all the emotional swells and
cadences that had of old characterized the tune: and the body of vocal harmony
that it evoked implied a large congregation within, to whom it was plainly as
familiar as it had been to church-goers of a past generation. With a whimsical
sense of regret at the secession of his once favourite air Somerset moved away,
and would have quite withdrawn from the field had he not at that moment
observed two young men with pitchers of water coming up from a stream hard
by, and hastening with their burdens into the chapel vestry by a side door. Almost
as soon as they had entered they emerged again with empty pitchers, and
proceeded to the stream to fill them as before, an operation which they repeated
several times. Somerset went forward to the stream, and waited till the young
men came out again.
'You are carrying in a great deal of water,' he said, as each dipped his pitcher.
One of the young men modestly replied, 'Yes: we filled the cistern this morning;
but it leaks, and requires a few pitcherfuls more.'
'Why do you do it?'
'There is to be a baptism, sir.'
Somerset was not sufficiently interested to develop a further conversation, and
observing them in silence till they had again vanished into the building, he went
on his way. Reaching the brow of the hill he stopped and looked back. The
chapel was still in view, and the shades of night having deepened, the lights
shone from the windows yet more brightly than before. A few steps further would
hide them and the edifice, and all that belonged to it from his sight, possibly for
ever. There was something in the thought which led him to linger. The chapel
had neither beauty, quaintness, nor congeniality to recommend it: the
dissimilitude between the new utilitarianism of the place and the scenes of
venerable Gothic art which had occupied his daylight hours could not well be
exceeded. But Somerset, as has been said, was an instrument of no narrow
gamut: he had a key for other touches than the purely aesthetic, even on such an
excursion as this. His mind was arrested by the intense and busy energy which
must needs belong to an assembly that required such a glare of light to do its
religion by; in the heaving of that tune there was an earnestness which made him
thoughtful, and the shine of those windows he had characterized as ugly
reminded him of the shining of the good deed in a naughty world. The chapel and
its shabby plot of ground, from which the herbage was all trodden away by busy
feet, had a living human interest that the numerous minsters and churches knee-
deep in fresh green grass, visited by him during the foregoing week, had often
lacked. Moreover, there was going to be a baptism: that meant the immersion of
a grown-up person; and he had been told that Baptists were serious people and
that the scene was most impressive. What manner of man would it be who on an
ordinary plodding and bustling evening of the nineteenth century could single
himself out as one different from the rest of the inhabitants, banish all shyness,
and come forward to undergo such a trying ceremony? Who was he that had
pondered, gone into solitudes, wrestled with himself, worked up his courage and
said, I will do this, though few else will, for I believe it to be my duty?
Whether on account of these thoughts, or from the circumstance that he had
been alone amongst the tombs all day without communion with his kind, he could
not tell in after years (when he had good reason to think of the subject); but so it
was that Somerset went back, and again stood under the chapel- wall.
Instead of entering he passed round to where the stove-chimney came through
the bricks, and holding on to the iron stay he put his toes on the plinth and looked
in at the window. The building was quite full of people belonging to that vast
majority of society who are denied the art of articulating their higher emotions,
and crave dumbly for a fugleman respectably dressed working people, whose
faces and forms were worn and contorted by years of dreary toil. On a platform at
the end of the chapel a haggard man of more than middle age, with grey
whiskers ascetically cut back from the fore part of his face so far as to be almost
banished from the countenance, stood reading a chapter. Between the minister
and the congregation was an open space, and in the floor of this was sunk a tank
full of water, which just made its surface visible above the blackness of its depths
by reflecting the lights overhead.
Somerset endeavoured to discover which one among the assemblage was to be
the subject of the ceremony. But nobody appeared there who was at all out of the
region of commonplace. The people were all quiet and settled; yet he could

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