He turned again to the crumbling stone work and passed his hand idly over it. This old house, how many women's hearts had it not imprisoned and stilled! What stories of woman's love and passion could it not unfold if these rotting stones might speak? Many a Di Vernon had gone forth from secret doors to meet her lover; many a one had lived and died with her girlish secret unspoken. Study in those records and the true story of Evelyn, my Lord of Melbourne's daughter, would be read. A brave girl, a lonely girl, full of the stuff of which dreams are made, such he believed her to be. And she had come suddenly into his life, bidding him turn from his work to gaze after her, impotently as a man may look upon a precious thing he may never possess. For even if she loved him, what right had he to speak to her; what position or name had he to give her? He was a worker in clay. Bricks and mortar were not the tokens in which a woman's imagination deals.
"If I built a cathedral," he said to himself ironically, "she would merely say, 'How draughty!' It is necessary to be a brigand or a musician to reach the heart of her desires."
So the work went on a little savagely. He had the scaffold shifted to the tower of the chapel where the clock face records the deeds of that Lord of Melbourne who fell with Picton's troop at Waterloo. "Time passed above his head but will turn to look at him..." the inscription went. Gavin was cleaning the dust of the century from it when he heard a voice upon the parapet above, and looking up he perceived my Lady Evelyn there, standing by the battlement and watching him curiously.
"Is not that dreadfully dangerous?" she asked him, indicating the frail scaffold upon which he stood.
He answered at once by another question.
"Do you refer to Time? If so, yes, it is always dangerous. Time never sleeps, remember."
She laughed and leaned over, a little afraid of the height, but desiring, she knew not why, to hear him talk.
"You will not look Time in the face, then?" she said; "or does the bell of Time speak to you? I know people in France who always cross themselves when the clock chimes the hour."
"The bells chime eternity—oh, yes. Time rarely laughs if it is not ironically. Here's a clock which tries to tell all the world how a brave man died. Time passed him by, but returns twice a day to have a look at him. The dirt of nearly a hundred years is cast upon his monument by Time. The ages used to be cleaner, Lady Evelyn. Nowadays we trample mud on every tomb. There is always an 'if' for the best of our friends."
"Meaning that some disappointment has made a cynic of you, Mr. Ord?"