A Laodicean: A Story of To-day | Page 4

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