Thomas D'Arcy McGee - "A Popular History of Ireland V2"

Durant Drake - "Problems of Conduct"

Edmund Goldsmid - "Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry"

Mary Roberts Rinehart - "K"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: A Laodicean

T >> Thomas Hardy >> A Laodicean



This etext was produced from the 1907 Macmillan and Co. edition by
Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.





A LAODICEAN: A STORY OF TO-DAY

by Thomas Hardy




CONTENTS.

PREFACE CHAPTERS
BOOK THE FIRST. GEORGE SOMERSET. I - XV.
BOOK THE SECOND. DARE AND HAVILL. I - VII.
BOOK THE THIRD. DE STANCY. I - XI.
BOOK THE FOURTH. SOMERSET, DARE, AND DE STANCY. I - V.
BOOK THE FIFTH. DE STANCY AND PAULA. I - XIV.
BOOK THE SIXTH. PAULA. I - V.




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.

I.

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 discern on their faces something more than attention,
though it was less than excitement: perhaps it was
expectation. And as if to bear out his surmise he heard at
that moment the noise of wheels behind him.

His gaze into the lighted chapel made what had been an evening
scene when he looked away from the landscape night itself on
looking back; but he could see enough to discover that a
brougham had driven up to the side-door used by the young
water-bearers, and that a lady in white-and-black half-
mourning was in the act of alighting, followed by what
appeared to be a waiting-woman carrying wraps. They entered
the vestry-room of the chapel, and the door was shut. The
service went on as before till at a certain moment the door
between vestry and chapel was opened, when a woman came out
clothed in an ample robe of flowing white, which descended to
her feet. Somerset was unfortunate in his position; he could
not see her face, but her gait suggested at once that she was
the lady who had arrived just before. She was rather tall
than otherwise, and the contour of her head and shoulders
denoted a girl in the heyday of youth and activity. His
imagination, stimulated by this beginning, set about filling
in the meagre outline with most attractive details.

She stood upon the brink of the pool, and the minister
descended the steps at its edge till the soles of his shoes
were moistened with the water. He turned to the young
candidate, but she did not follow him: instead of doing so
she remained rigid as a stone. He stretched out his hand, but
she still showed reluctance, till, with some embarrassment, he
went back, and spoke softly in her ear.

She approached the edge, looked into the water, and turned
away shaking her head. Somerset could for the first time see
her face. Though humanly imperfect, as is every face we see,
it was one which made him think that the best in woman-kind no
less than the best in psalm-tunes had gone over to the
Dissenters. He had certainly seen nobody so interesting in
his tour hitherto; she was about twenty or twenty-one--perhaps
twenty-three, for years have a way of stealing marches even
upon beauty's anointed. The total dissimilarity between the
expression of her lineaments and that of the countenances
around her was not a little surprising, and was productive of
hypotheses without measure as to how she came there. She was,
in fact, emphatically a modern type of maidenhood, and she
looked ultra-modern by reason of her environment: a
presumably sophisticated being among the simple ones--not
wickedly so, but one who knew life fairly well for her age.
Her hair, of good English brown, neither light nor dark, was
abundant--too abundant for convenience in tying, as it seemed;
and it threw off the lamp-light in a hazy lustre. And though
it could not be said of her features that this or that was
flawless, the nameless charm of them altogether was only
another instance of how beautiful a woman can be as a whole
without attaining in any one detail to the lines marked out as
absolutely correct. The spirit and the life were there: and
material shapes could be disregarded.

Whatever moral characteristics this might be the surface of,
enough was shown to assure Somerset that she had some
experience of things far removed from her present
circumscribed horizon, and could live, and was even at that
moment living, a clandestine, stealthy inner life which had
very little to do with her outward one. The repression of
nearly every external sign of that distress under which
Somerset knew, by a sudden intuitive sympathy, that she was
labouring, added strength to these convictions.