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HISTORICAL
URBAN
LANDSCAPE
GÁBOR SONKOLY
Historical Urban Landscape
 Gábor Sonkoly

Historical Urban
Landscape
Gábor Sonkoly
Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest
Budapest, Hungary

ISBN 978-3-319-49165-3    ISBN 978-3-319-49166-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49166-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930215

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image © Nick Norman / National Geographic / Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

My research was hosted by institutions to which I am extremely grateful,

and enriched by friends and colleagues to whom I am greatly indebted. It
was at the Institut d’Études Avancées of Paris, an ideal haven for study and
writing, that I could commence this book, and my home university, the
Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, granted me a sabbatical semester
to accomplish it. Without those peaceful periods, it would have been very
hard indeed to realize this analysis. Thanks to my fellow professors at the
Atelier Department for European Social Sciences and Historiography I
could enjoy the certainty that everybody is replaceable, which is a most
reassuring feeling. I express my gratitude to Olivier Bouin for coaching me
with care, friendship, and wisdom.
During the years of my research, I received a great deal of intellectual
inspiration and support in the somewhat loosely defined fields connecting
Social Sciences and Cultural Heritage, for which I would like to offer my
sincere thanks to Isabelle Anatole-Gabriel, Isabelle Backouche, Maria Elena
Barral, Ana Carolina Bierrenbach, Dorothee Brantz, Esteban Buch, Christina
Cameron, Gábor Czoch, Péter Erdősi, Tamás Fejérdy, Ana Fernandes,
François Hartog, Dominique Ionga-Prat, Rohit Jigyasu, Bruno Karsenti,
Luda Klusaková, Zoltán Krasznai, Sabina Loriga, Melania Nucifora, Marie-
Vic Ozouf-Marignier, Jacek Purchla, Kapil Raj, Jacques Revel, Joan Roca,
Mechtild Rössler, Gino Satta, Gábor Soós, Philipp Ther, Laurier Turgeon,
Nicole Valois, Nicolas Verdier, and Rosemary Wakeman. My thanks also go
to Christopher Ryan for his valuable suggestions regarding the language of
the text, and especially to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Kristin Purdy
and Jessie Wheeler, for having steered me through the production process.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

2 The History of Historic Urban Landscape   9

3 Vienna and The Vienna Memorandum  77

4 History and Cultural Heritage   123

5 Conclusion 145

References169

Index183

vii
 List of Abbreviations

CDC Community-driven Conservation

CLUSHT Community-led Urban Strategies in Historic Town
CUD Comprehensive (Urban) Development
HUL Historic Urban Landscape
IUCH Intangible Urban Cultural Heritage
IUCHMP Integrated (Urban) Cultural Heritage Management Plan
LUH Living (Urban) Heritage
SC Sustainable City
VI Visual Integrity

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Number of recognitions of World Heritage Sites in the

Europe and North America Unit of UNESCO in periods
of five years 80
Fig. 3.2 Number of UNESCO World Heritage Commission reports
on the seven cities per year (reports on Vienna in dark grey)88
Fig. 3.3 Number of threats mentioned in UNESCO World Heritage
Commission reports on the seven cities per year (threats to
Vienna in dark grey)89
Fig. 3.4 Urban programs (“practices”) acknowledged by the
UN-Habitat Programme in Vienna per year 97

xi
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Opposing History and cultural heritage by perception of time 131
Table 4.2 Opposing History and cultural heritage by their ideological/
theoretical content 132
Table 4.3 Opposing History and cultural heritage by the role of
the historian/expert 133
Table 4.4 Parallel evolution of History and cultural heritage 135
Table 5.1 Contemporary urban heritage conservation and
management notions 154

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Historic urban landscape (HUL) is the most recently codified1 notion

of international urban heritage conservation; it was conceived to cover
the various forms of “contemporary interventions in and around (urban)
World Heritage sites,”2 whose number is growing considerably, while
those responsible for their management must face the symptoms of urban
development as well as the integration of the conceptual novelties of cul-
tural heritage preservation (intangible heritage, cultural diversity, and sus-
tainability). HUL is more than a simple category of heritage preservation:
its creators and its earliest proponents and leading proponents define it as
an “approach,”3 and claim that it represents a milestone in the history of
cultural heritage preservation and a paradigm shift in urban planning.
As an urban historian, I was intrigued by the unconventional denomi-
nation of this notion. “Historic” and “urban landscape” make an unusual
compound, which lends itself to a great variety of interpretations. This
may suit the diverse ambitions behind it, but it can also raise doubts about
the possibility of their practical realization. Already, the adjective “his-
toric” marks a significant stage in the continuous conceptual expansion
of the notion of cultural heritage. It is the first time that one of its offi-
cial denominations has evoked History. Although there is quite a clear
difference between “historic” and “historical” in English, this notion—
as an international term—functions in many other languages, including
the other official languages of the United Nations Educational Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in which this distinction cannot
be expressed. The French historique, the Russian исторический, or the

© The Author(s) 2017 1

G. Sonkoly, Historical Urban Landscape,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49166-0_1
2 G. SONKOLY

Spanish histórico refers to both “historic” and “historical”; therefore, the

original distinction is easily blurred in translation, and consequently in
international debates.
Thus, the title of this book, Historical Urban Landscape, is intended to
convey the idea that a critical analysis is necessary if we are to understand
the significance and the utility of such a compound. Moreover, HUL as
an “approach” reveals academic aspirations, openly manifested in the two
published volumes on the subject, that can arouse the interest of scholars
involved in urban studies—specialists in urban planning and architecture,
as well as social scientists and historians alike. HUL is part of the cultural
heritage discourse, which suggests that these aspirations can be associated
with the enormous number of academic initiatives that share the title of
heritage studies. This shows that after approximately five decades the con-
ceptualization of cultural heritage has reached the point of independent
academic institutionalization. Whereas ethnologists and anthropologists
widely discuss the effects on their own disciplines of intangible cultural
heritage, codified only two years before HUL,4 historians and the repre-
sentatives of other social sciences and the humanities are more reluctant to
assess the effects of this recent development of cultural heritage on their
respective disciplines. Nevertheless, they need to become more aware of
the growing importance of cultural heritage in social, political, and even
economic discourse. This is particularly true of historians, since many non-­
professional social actors and decision-makers confuse the two domains
because they both refer to the past to construct present identities.
Like any international concept codified in standard-setting instru-
ments, HUL is expected to achieve various tasks: it should (1) provide
a conceptual framework for contemporary urban heritage conservation,
(2) provide guidelines for urban heritage management, and (3) serve as a
regulatory instrument implemented by different levels of political authori-
ties. Accordingly, its analysis requires a methodological approach which
considers these functions simultaneously, as well as the conceptual chal-
lenges and the societal novelties which created the need for the wording of
the new instrument. The relatively short history of HUL is situated in the
longer history of international urban heritage protection, as well as in the
even longer history of urban planning. It can be considered as a manifesta-
tion of a new regime in both of these two partially interrelated processes.
The expression “regime” is an often recurring denominator in contempo-
rary social sciences in History, especially in relationship to the history of
cultural heritage, since the term is considered to be suitable to frame the
 INTRODUCTION 3

periodization of cultural and social changes in relationship to the levels

of the political Establishment from universal to local. In their Heritage
Regimes and the State, the editors define “regime” as “a set of norms and
rules regulating the relationship between a state-government and society,
international regimes come about through negotiations among actors on
an international level.”5 Due to the recent expansion of the notion of cul-
tural heritage, its current regime can be characterized by means of inter-
sections between heritage-making and “culture’s resource potential and
the ensuing questions of ownership rights and responsibilities.”6 Thus,
the first level of the HUL analysis is to regard this notion as the out-
come of international debates about how to solve the current challenges
of urban heritage management, as well as its impact on the different levels
of governance of urban heritage. In this context, urban heritage appears
not merely in its tangible form but also as a resource for development, as
well as for local identity-construction, which questions the meaning of
authenticity, the original decisive criterion for the selection of Cultural
World Heritage Sites. This modification leads to the redefinition of urban
heritage sites, which demands a new functional standard of authenticity
suitable for the new regime.7 The original definition of urban cultural heri-
tage sites—and the maintenance of their authenticity—is not only que-
ried because of urban development and related governance issues but also
due to the current complexity of the notion of World Cultural Heritage
since the ratification of two crucial conventions in the early 2000s.8 These
conventions represent the integration of more political voices into the
universal definition of cultural heritage, but this diversity inevitably results
in a less coherent and a more open-ended conceptualization. HUL was
intended to channel this current complexity of cultural heritage, as well as
to mediate between urban conservation and development. As we shall see
later, it is not the only notion to fulfill this complicated mission. Moreover,
it is in competition with the others, which makes it possible to identify
diverse personal, professional, and group interests in contemporary urban
heritage management. Among these concurrent approaches and concepts,
HUL has proved to be one of the most appropriate to “find a balance
between urban heritage conservation, socio-economic development and
sustainability” according to Sophia Labadi and William Logan, who dedi-
cated their recent volume to these three interrelated aspects of heritage
cities and to their governance challenges between international and local
levels.9 From this practical point of view, HUL is a toolkit designed to
achieve sustainable heritage cities.10
4 G. SONKOLY

The number of heritage cities is growing exponentially not only

among World Heritage Sites but also at lower levels of cultural heritage
protection. It is not obvious, however, how HUL cities could be identi-
fied among them. Though this book cannot venture to identify all the
specific characteristics of HUL cities and evaluate the degree to which
they succeed in meeting the expectations of urban heritage conservation,
development, and sustainability, some theoretical attempts will be made
to determine their group. The first obvious choice of a HUL city must
be Vienna, which hosted the conference where the notion was worded in
2005. Subsequently, HUL moved to Asia, more specifically to Shanghai,
and its World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for the Asia and
the Pacific Region (WHITRAP) built up a system of pilot cities. These 11
cities could be currently regarded as the applications of the HUL prin-
ciples.11 This is especially true of the Australian city of Ballarat, which
not only published its own realization of the HUL approach in order to
offer a model,12 but is also included in the previously mentioned book by
Labadi and Logan to illustrate the application of HUL in a local context.13
Since this book enumerates most of the recent concepts of urban heritage
management with corresponding examples, it is also useful to distinguish
HUL cities—such as Ballarat or Vancouver—from other heritage cities
determined and managed according to different concepts. Another pos-
sible way to define HUL cities is by derivation from the World Heritage
Lists. Since HUL is also expected to link and unite the tangible and intan-
gible aspects of urban heritage, cities which appear concurrently on both
lists could be considered as fitting sites for research into the challenges
related to HUL. According to a non-exhaustive survey, six such cities can
be tentatively identified (Beijing, Bruges, Cordova, Marrakesh, Palermo,
and most recently Vienna), out of which the proximity of the two kinds of
heritage is the most obvious and best studied in Marrakesh.
The great variety of possible definitions of HUL cities makes it clear that
the dozen years which have passed since the first announcement of HUL
in 2004 do not provide sufficient historical distance to assess either the
degree of success of its reception (in comparison to its peer concepts) or its
utility to accomplish its original objectives. Its critical history within that
of the conceptual development of international urban heritage protection,
however, will differentiate the regimes of urban heritage and demonstrate
its current specificities through the study of the genesis of HUL. These
regimes not only serve to narrate the conceptual history of urban heri-
tage, or cultural heritage in general, but also to p­ osition it in relationship
 INTRODUCTION 5

to History by applying the theory of Regimes of Historicity. Thus, the

history of international urban heritage protection summarized through
the emergence of HUL will be integrated into an evolution with a much
wider scope. This book uses the example of HUL to demonstrate how the
history of cultural heritage can be constructed as a historical problem, as
well as why it is necessary to demarcate History from cultural heritage and
what consequences the increasing popularity of the latter has for History.
First, the conceptual history of urban heritage preservation—based on
the standard-setting instruments of international organizations—reveals
the fundamental elements of the current conception of urban heritage
(Chap. 2). Second, this conception, as worded in the HUL approach, is
investigated through the analysis of Vienna, which played a crucial role in
the establishment of HUL (Chap. 3). Third, to complete the Historical
Urban Landscape approach, a parallel history of historical science and
cultural heritage will be constructed in order to establish a periodiza-
tion which makes it possible to integrate the Cultural Heritage Regimes
into a broader historical context (Chap. 4). The three analyses are linked
together with the theory of presentism—an integral part of the Regimes
of Historicity—according to which our period can be differentiated from
the previous one by a new perception of time: future-­oriented modernism
has gradually been replaced by a present-based mentality, whose uncritical
obsession with the past is exhibited in a set of fuzzy concepts, of which
cultural heritage is the most influential and the best established. The par-
ticular methodology of each chapter is demonstrated in such a way as to
show how it can be used in education, and each chapter is intended to
trigger further debate and research about the relationship between social
sciences and cultural heritage.

Notes
1. The following two standard-setting instruments of UNESCO
defined the HUL: Declaration on the Conservation of the Historic
Urban Landscapes (UNESCO, 2005b), Recommendation on the
Historic Urban Landscape. A New International Instrument
(UNESCO, 2011).
2. UNESCO (2005c) 36.
3. The two begetters of HUL published two volumes to explain the
intentions underlying the use of this term. The first is a general
introduction, and the second edited volume is a description of its
6 G. SONKOLY

elements by various authors. Francesco Bandarin and Ron van

Oers (2012) The Historic Urban Landscape. Managing Heritage in
an Urban Century (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell); Francesco Bandarin
and Ron van Oers (2015) Reconnecting the City. The Historic
Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).
4. Among several publications, the following volumes offer a com-
prehensive view on the problem: Regina F. Bendix, Aditya Eggert,
Arnika Peselmann (eds.) (2012) Heritage Regimes and the State
(Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen); Chiara Bortolotto
(ed.) (2011) Le patrimoine culturel immatériel. Enjeux d’une nou-
velle catégorie (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de
l’homme); Daniel Fabre, Anna Iuso (eds.) (2009) Les monuments
sont habités (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme);
Dominique Poulot (ed.) (1998) Patrimoine et modernité (Paris:
L’Harmattan) 265–308; Laurajane Smith, Natsuko Akagawa (eds)
(2009) Intangible Heritage (London: Routledge); and a special
issue of the Flemish Volkskunde review entitled Brokers, Facilitators
and Mediation. Critical Success (F)Actors for the Safeguarding of
Intangible Cultural Heritage, Volkskunde 2014: 3.
5. Bendix et al. (2012) 12–13.
6. Ibid., 13.
7. Lucie K. Morriset attempts to describe this constant redefinition of
heritage objects/sites according to her methodology determined
by the “Regimes of Authenticity.” In her approach, these are the
distinctive periods of the ongoing process of heritagization.
Morriset, Lucie K. (2009) Des régimes d’authenticité. Essai sur la
mémoire patrimoniale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes)
23–30.
8. These conventions are the Convention for the Safeguarding of the
Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the
Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression
(2005a).
9. Labadi, S., Logan.W. (eds.) (2016) Urban Heritage, Development
and Sustainability. International frameworks, national and local
governance (London-New York: Routledge) 7–8.
10. Bandarin, van Oers (2015) 203–316.
11. Because of the regional vocation of the WHITRAP, its 11 pilot cit-
ies are mainly in Asia (eight cities), while two are in the Pacific and
1one in Latin America. HUL (2015).
 INTRODUCTION 7

12. Ballarat (2013) Ballarat and UNESCO’s historic urban landscape

approach (Ballarat: City of Ballarat).
13. Buckley, K., Cooke, S., Fayad, S. (2016) Using the Historic Urban
Landscape to re-imagine Ballarat: the local context in Labadi, S.,
Logan.W. (eds.) (2016) Urban Heritage, Development and
Sustainability. International frameworks, national and local gover-
nance (London-New York: Routledge) 93–113.

References
Bandarin, Francesco, van Oers, Ron (2012) The Historic Urban Landscape.
Managing Heritage in an Urban Century (Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell).
Bandarin, Francesco, van Oers, Ron (eds.) (2015) Reconnecting the City. The
Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage
(Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell).
Bendix, R. F., Eggert, A., Peselmann., A. (eds.) (2012) Heritage Regimes and the
State (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen).
Bortolotto, Chiara (ed.) (2011) Le patrimoine culturel immatériel. Enjeux d’une
nouvelle catégorie (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme).
‘Brokers, Facilitators and Mediation. Critical Success (F)Actors for the Safeguarding
of Intangible Cultural Heritage’ Volkskunde 2014:3. (Special issue).
Fabre, D., Iuso, A. (eds.) (2009) Les monuments sont habités (Paris: Éditions de la
Maison des sciences de l’homme).
HUL (2015), http://www.historicurbanlandscape.com/index.php?classid=6043,
date accessed 15 August 2015.
Labadi, S., Logan, W. (eds.) (2016) Urban Heritage, Development and
Sustainability. International Frameworks, National and Local Governance
(London-New York: Routledge).
Morriset, Lucie K. (2009) Des régimes d’authenticité. Essai sur la mémoire patrimo-
niale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes).
Poulot, Dominique (ed.) (1998) Patrimoine et modernité (Paris: L’Harmattan).
Smith, L., Akagawa, N. (eds.) (2009) Intangible Heritage (London: Routledge).
UNESCO (2003) Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_ID=17716&URL_
DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, date accessed 7 January
2016.
UNESCO (2005a) Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of
Cultural Expressions, ­http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_
ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, letöltve
2014.7.27.
UNESCO (2005b) Declaration on the Conservation of the Historic Urban
Landscapes, http://whc.unesco.org/document/6812, date accessed 7 January
2016.
8 G. SONKOLY

UNESCO (2005c) Vienna Memorandum on World Heritage and Contemporary

Architecture—Managing the Historic Urban Landscape (http://whc.unesco.
org/document/6814/, date accessed 7 January 2016.
UNESCO (2011) Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. A New
International Instrument, Including a Glossary of Definitons, http://portal.
unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_ID=48857&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201.html, date accessed 7 January 2016.
 CHAPTER 2

The History of Historic Urban Landscape

Introduction
The concept of HUL has become an indispensable concept of cultural her-
itage preservation in the past decade. It not only represents a new stage in
the ever-expanding notion of cultural heritage (from the tangible through
landscape to the intangible), but it also means that the notion of cultural
heritage is no longer a mere concept of preservation but is also conceived
as an institutionalized form of knowledge to interpret and manage the
social, economic, and cultural realties engendered by its own evolution
over several decades. This form of knowledge describes and manages
social and cultural realities according to the discourse of international—
primarily UNESCO and International Council on Monuments and Sites
(ICOMOS)—legal texts of an administrative nature. These texts reveal a
process which started with The Athens Charter in the 1930s and became
increasingly intensive as time went by up to the last ten years, during
which new instruments have emerged that do not simply attempt to find
the most adequate ways to conserve urban heritage but are intended to
frame all the aspects of the generated heritage cities and heritage quarters.
Since HUL is the first officially defined notion with this purpose, its
historical analysis could contribute to an understanding of why its defini-
tion is necessary, how it is rooted in the roughly eight decades of inter-
national heritage preservation, and whether it is sufficient to achieve its
original objective, namely, to match the expectations related to the expan-
sion of cultural heritage—as intangible heritage or as an organic element

© The Author(s) 2017 9

G. Sonkoly, Historical Urban Landscape,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49166-0_2
10 G. SONKOLY

of ­sustainable development—with those of concerned social actors, most

notably heritage conservation experts and local decision-makers. Seeing
that the story of HUL covers the last decade, the methodological question
also arises: can such a recent and unfinished period be chosen as an object
of contemporary history?
We started our analysis with the presupposition that history should not
ignore the evolution of cultural heritage and its analysis requires the devel-
opment of a special methodology that takes account of its contemporary
nature. This evolution is a continuous expansion, in which increasingly
wide sectors of the environment and of society are interpreted as heri-
tage while the number of preserved sites is also growing spectacularly. At
the beginning of the 2010s, World Heritage sites already numbered more
than 1000, more than 500 of which are in urban settings: either entire
towns and quarters or historic monuments in an urban environment. In
addition to these World Heritage sites, there is a growing number of cities
and towns under regional, national, or local protection, on which inter-
national regulations are often imposed, whether directly or indirectly. In
this sense, the current concept of HUL, which was created to handle these
entities, can be understood as an object of conceptual history, which is
part of the longer history of urban heritage preservation and of cultural
heritage conservation in general.
The choice of the conceptual history approach for the analysis of HUL
can be explained by the fact that HUL belongs to the notion of cultural
heritage, which is also the result of a long evolution and represents the
most institutionalized member of the presentist quartet of fuzzy notions
that will be discussed in Chap. 4. This approach is especially beneficial
when clear concepts are missing, as is the case with contemporary cultural
heritage.1 Furthermore, this approach is also useful to discern significant
elements of a concept which can be traced back synchronically in time to
comprehend its otherwise overwhelming complexity. This overwhelming
complexity is reduced through the analysis of HUL in order to make it
intelligible for research by (1) identifying the crucial events and personali-
ties related to it; (2) distinguishing its specificities against other—mainly
scientific—definitions of urban landscape; (3) discerning appropriate sig-
nificant elements to effectively place its conceptual history into longer and
wider contexts of modern and contemporary social and cultural develop-
ments; and (4) establishing a database of the most important standard-­
setting instruments of international urban heritage preservation in order
to reveal those developments.
 THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC URBAN LANDSCAPE 11

The chronology of the genesis of HUL will be examined in detail in

Chap. 3, in which we analyze the confluence of different social levels and
scales of the reception of the novelties of cultural heritage preservation. As
we have already mentioned in Chap. 1, the initiators of HUL, Francesco
Bandarin and Ron van Oers, can be identified more easily than those of
any other earlier concepts of cultural heritage preservation. Bandarin, an
architect of Venetian origin, the former director of UNESCO’s World
Heritage Centre (2000–2011) and assistant director-general for Culture
(2010–2014), was already one of its proponents during the wording of
The Vienna Memorandum in 2005. Van Oers, a Dutch urban planner, was
responsible for the Programme of World Heritage Cities between 2005
and 2009, and he was the deputy director of the World Heritage Training
and Research Institute for the Asia-Pacific Region in China (2009–2015),
which was established to propagate the HUL concept in that region.
Bandarin and van Oers published an explicative volume on the concept of
HUL soon after the UNESCO Recommendation on HUL of 2011 and
co-edited a second one to prove the relevance of the concept a few years
later.2 These two volumes and the great number of scientific events related
to HUL since its first official wording in 2005 serve not only to indi-
cate the noteworthy efforts of the UNESCO administrators to bring this
notion close to the academic public but also to show that this public was
receptive to this notion because of the earlier proliferation of the notion
of urban landscape in their respective disciplines.

The Emergence of the Notion of Urban Landscape

Though the notion of HUL was not a conceptual invention of any scien-
tific discipline dealing with the city, several such disciplines (mainly urban
geography, urban studies, monument and heritage protection studies, his-
tory of art) applied the notion of landscape from the 1970s onward to
understand and analyze the modifications of urban territory and society.
After The Vienna Memorandum, these attempts multiplied, and reflections
on this new notion were partially linked to the numerous scientific debates
on the renewed notion of landscape. It is probably no exaggeration to say
that by the 2000s landscape had become the notion most frequently used
to examine the relationship between territory and identity. Michael Jakob,
for example, starts his concise essay on the landscape with the expres-
sion of omnipaysage3 to express that the landscape is omnipresent “from
journalism, through scientific publications to the screens … and to our
12 G. SONKOLY

thoughts.”4 From the 1990s onward, the notion of landscape has become
an integral part of both administrative and scientific heritage protection,
and, consequently, since then it has also affected the evolution of the
notion of cultural landscape, which was the first attempt at UNESCO to
bridge the inner division—cultural and natural—of World Heritage, which
is often judged as non-universal because of its primarily Western origins.5
Current cultural heritage protection uses the notion of (cultural) land-
scape to determine and protect territories which are examples of tradi-
tional co-existence between nature and human society and which are
threatened by modernization and/or by globalization.6 Associating land-
scape with tradition, however, is quite surprising in view of its longue durée
conceptual history because the notion of landscape appeared in those
Western European languages which later became the official languages of
UNESCO7 only from the sixteenth century onward. It is generally classi-
fied as part of the vocabulary of modernization inasmuch as it is part of a
new, objectivizing, and disenchanted approach8 in which nature emerges
as landscape.9 Accordingly, the landscape did not appear originally to con-
serve the traditional perception of the world and space, but resulted in the
abandonment of this perception in the ateliers of the increasingly indi-
vidualistic arts and in the studios of ever-more professional science and
administration.
Both the emergence and the prevalence of the notion of landscape par-
ticular to a given era usually indicate two important modifications: (1) the
interpretation of nature and the relationship between nature and society
are undergoing changes and (2) one—normally privileged—social group
must face unavoidable consequences. All the three landscape-oriented
periods in Western history (the Renaissance; the “Golden Age” between
1750 and 1860,10 and the current period starting in the 1970s) are good
examples of this double principle. The Renaissance elite’s new interpreta-
tion of nature can best be grasped in the artilisation in situ and in visu11
of their regard. Our era tries to abandon the artificial separation between
culture and nature through the notion of landscape, which can serve as
a proper territorial reference for the ineluctable concept of sustainabil-
ity. These interpretations of landscape, specific to the two endpoints of
modernity, are linked by the Romantic definition of landscape, which
is strongly connected to nineteenth-century nation-building and to the
related mapping of national territories as well as to sciences dedicated to
that mission. Owing to these activities, the preceding essentially artistic
interpretations of landscape were becoming scientific. Obviously, other
 THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC URBAN LANDSCAPE 13

significant ­differences could be mentioned about the interpretations of

landscape in the three periods, but just now similarities are more impor-
tant, since they can reveal continuities and shared principles in the history
of landscape. For our present study, the most indicative continuous charac-
teristic is probably that landscape is usually the construction of a—mainly
urban—elite, which instrumentalizes this notion to express a threatened
or already lost credibility and, consequently, to protect itself against
unavoidable changes. Thus, urban/regional development in the form of
landscape management does not have exclusively economic purposes, but
also manifests moral and ideological contents. These contents are closely
related to the role which landscape and landscape design “play as grand
mnemonic devices.”12 From this point of view, current architectural usage
of urban landscape is determined more by “memory-laden projects such as
New Urbanism, postmodern historicism, site remediation, activist historic
preservation, ecological re-creation,” which partially bring back the emu-
lative characteristic of classicism and renounce the modernist “repudiation
of externalized memory”13 in the practice of “architects and landscape
architects.” Ecological recreation or ecological considerations in general
extend the scale of memory from human/cultural to environmental/
climatic. Consequently, the contemporary definition of urban landscape
meets the current tendencies to identify landscape with cultural landscape
due to the heritagization of nature. According to François Walter, the
latter process already begins in the nineteenth century when the protec-
tion of the fatherland and the natural environment are linked through
landscape conservation, and, in consequence, both mutually convey each
other’s memory.14 Though the protection of the natural environment was
largely freed from its earlier ideological contents after the Second World
War, it was still carried out according to aesthetic, later ecological and
economic, considerations until the emergence of the principle of sustain-
ability, which emphasized the organic reconciliation of nature and culture.
In the early modern Europe, the notion of landscape had different con-
notations in Germanic languages, in which it referred to territory, and in
Romance languages, in which it referred both to the image and to the
entity which was represented by the image.15 This bygone dichotomy is
integrated into contemporary languages in such a way that all the origi-
nal three meanings (territory, image, and representation) co-exist, though
their significance may vary from one language to the other. The history of
urban landscape depends on the language(s) which we take into consider-
ation for its analysis. From the viewpoint of our current ­investigation, we
14 G. SONKOLY

do not analyze the national histories of urban landscape, but the period
in which different national conventions are being conflated due to the
intensification of the internationalization of urban planning and, later,
because of UNESCO regulations of universal scope worded in English
and French. The birth of HUL prompts scholars to understand this new
notion in the context of the conceptual evolution of urban landscape.
Hardly a year after the Vienna Conference, two scientific conferences were
organized in March 2006 as an attempt at a comparative analysis of the
emergence of HUL. The first conference was organized at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris in order to give an interdisciplin-
ary definition of urban landscape reflecting on its “current importance.”16
The other bilingual conference took place in Montreal with the aim of
bringing together scholars and specialists in heritage protection to inter-
pret the newly defined notion of HUL.17 These two conferences reveal
many similarities and complementary considerations, which provide an
excellent starting point for the attempt to understand the complexity of
the HUL.
Having analyzed the relevant scientific literature, Jannière and Pousin
differentiate between two possible approaches to the interpretation of the
urban landscape (paysage urbain): the first defines urban landscape within
the general notion of landscape, whereas the second starts from urban
materiality (matérialité urbaine).18 The first group includes approaches
which use the notion of urban landscape to (1) determine urban territo-
ries by a gaze; (2) integrate different (architectural, geological, botanical,
etc.) perceptions of cities following the practice of landscape architecture;
and (3) understand the city aesthetically as a perceived (not just seen, but
detected by other senses) entity, which is determined by the language.
The second group incorporates approaches which regard the city as (1) an
object of infrastructural development; (2) an expanding megapolis, which
requires appropriate urban planning; and (3) a site of constant transfor-
mations, which need to be archived by means of photography. All these
approaches share an inner tension because their definition of urban land-
scape encompasses reality and its perception, that is, both the referent and
the representation.19
Different disciplines arrive at the definition of the townscape, the
predecessor of urban landscape, loaded with this inner tension, more or
less simultaneously. Though this notion served as early as the late nine-
teenth century to describe historical cities and quarters, it became wide-
spread in England after the Second World War, when it was used in the
 THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC URBAN LANDSCAPE 15

newly founded The Architectural Review to refer to developments in the

eighteenth-­century rural domains as an alternative to the modernist archi-
tectural movements for urban reconstruction.20 In the 1960s, the notion
of urban landscape emerged in French urban planning and geography with
a similar meaning, but with far more politicized connotations.21 In the two
historically most urbanized regions of Europe, in Italy and Belgium, urban
conservation initiatives already applied this term to the protection of his-
torical cities in the 1880s and in the 1900s, respectively. The consequently
aestheticized cities and urban landscapes, which become frequent in inter-
war history of art, are depicted as the “face of the patria,”22 as a significant
representative element of national or regional identities.
The replacement of townscape by landscape, anticipating the emer-
gence of HUL, is less evident in French since both terms are translated by
paysage urbain. In English, however, it is easily detectable in the 1990s,
and it suggests the gradual integration of approaches characterized by
the notion of townscape into urban planning and (cultural) geography,
which would lead to the new notion of urban heritage protection in the
2000s. Landscape urbanism, for example, first meant only the planning
and management of green urban territories in the 1990s. Then, it progres-
sively acquired environmental and ecological implications until it reached
a point where it covered the whole of urban planning, regarded as a means
of social mediation used to change the perception of the functioning of
the city.23 Thus, the evolution of the notion of urban landscape is becom-
ing crucial from “the perspectives of ecology, social co-existence (both
social and symbolic) and those of the access to resources.”24 Similarly,
the notion of “megaform” emerging from Kenneth Frampton’s critical
regionalism based on his “landscape form,” in which the notion of land-
scape is required to perform at least three tasks: (1) to make cities greener;
(2) to integrate different approaches, social and cultural perceptions, and
so on; (3) to facilitate more comprehension and participation than the
previous architectural paradigms.25
Some participants at the Montreal conference implicitly doubted
whether the new notion of HUL defined in The Vienna Memorandum
truly reflects the contemporary modifications of the notion of urban land-
scape. Comparably to the arguments of the Parisian conference, Gérard
Beaudet emphasized that HUL should be determined by the gaze and not
by the urban materiality, as the ICOMOS definition presumed. In conse-
quence, HUL and the notion of cultural landscape would become incom-
patible, and this might lead to conceptual confusions.26 HUL’s definition
16 G. SONKOLY

by the gaze could seemingly conclude with the subsequent definition of

the notion of visual integrity (VI).27 According to Gordon Bennett28 and
Julia Gersovitz,29 the main challenge stemming from HUL, however, is not
its operational implementation for heritage protection but its inbuilt out-
dated “modernist” view of urban planning. This idea is developed further
by Julian Smith through an analytical framework based on a dichotomy
between twentieth-century modern (object-observation-visuality-based)
and twenty-first-century postmodern (rituals-experience-empathy-based)
architectural paradigms.30 Smith concludes that The Vienna Memorandum
implied a transfer between the two and, consequently, is characterized by
both. The intention of keeping HUL within a modernist register can be
detected from the fact that its definition focusses on the development of
VI instead of concentrating on the establishment of the participative and
cultural role of the heritage architect. Smith explains this by the defensive
reactions of modernist architects. The identification of professional inter-
ests in the definition of HUL is an important result of his analytical frame-
work. Smith’s approach, linking the definition of HUL to a paradigm shift
in architecture, helps to comprehend its genesis and conceptual evolution
within the history of heritage architecture and urban planning, the most
significant disciplines in the management of urban heritage.

The Analytical Framework of the Conceptual

History of Historic Urban Landscape
Bandarin and van Oers define the HUL approach as “a new approach to
urban conservation,”31 which belongs to “the urban development pro-
cess.”32 In the process of urban development and in the related urban
planning, urban conservation appears as a “modern utopia” threatened
by “the rise of gentrification, tourism uses and real-estate pressures.”33
Accordingly, the concept of HUL is to be understood as part of the his-
tory of urban planning, formulated to solve its current problems in a form
of a “modern utopia.” It is not surprising that the two architects define
their concept as a utopia.
Already in the long prehistory of institutionalized urban planning, ever
since Antiquity, the representation of an ideal society normally took the
form of an ideal settlement—usually a city. The utopian thinkers of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inherited this tradition and infused
it into the progressive institutionalization of urban planning,34 which
brought together the practical needs of the central authorities and mod-
 THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC URBAN LANDSCAPE 17

ernist utopian ideologies aiming at a brighter future. As urban planning

became more institutionalized, the forms and images of the ideal urban
settlement which represented the ideal society became more systematic,
and the number of trained experts, who were expected to apply these
forms and images during mass urbanization and successive industrial-­
technical revolutions, grew exponentially. Similarly to the applied ideol-
ogies, the professionalization of urban planning did not, however, lead
to the establishment of ideal societies in the planned cities and urban
quarters. As a result, the schemes of previous generations were regularly
frustrated, and the distance between the horizon of expectations and the
historical experience grew continually. Consequently, urban planning had
to undergo its own paradigm shifts, to the point where, from the 1970s
onward, the link between the targeted society and the appropriate urban
space was determined less and less by the original modernist ideologies
and increasingly by the intention to grasp local identities and to comply
with participative principles.35 As Fredric Jameson summarizes, “the fact is
that traditional, or perhaps we might better say modernist, urbanism is at
a dead end.”36 The phrase “modern utopia” is meant to express the idea
that HUL is a new phase in the evolution of urban planning (“utopia”)
because its recent paradigm shift corresponds to the current principles of
urban conservation (“modern”).
Nevertheless, “modern” as a qualifier reveals a telling contradiction
within HUL. On the one hand, it refers to the kind of urban conserva-
tion which befits the abovementioned new paradigm within urban plan-
ning; that is, it means “postmodern” or, rather, “contemporary.” On the
other hand, this “modern” places urban conservation into the history of
previously progressive urban planning in order to free it from the fre-
quent criticism of hindering urban development by over-regulation in the
name of heritage conservation. This latter is explained by Bandarin and
van Oers as the replacement of static monument conservation by dynamic
preservation, which is essential to the HUL approach.37 Here again, this
“modern” designates a significant shift from monument-based conserva-
tion, which is very much embedded in the temporality of modernization
based on a distancing rupture in the past. Moreover, although this “mod-
ern utopia” refers to a shift in urban planning as well as in urban con-
servation, the authors emphasize that their approach “is not designed to
replace existing doctrines or conservation approaches, but rather is envis-
aged as a tool to integrate policies and practices of conservation of the
built ­environment.”38 The inner contradictions related to the temporality
18 G. SONKOLY

of the definition of HUL are to be solved by attributing the same sig-

nificance to the past (“urban conservation”) and to the future (“urban
development”),39 which endows the present with the prerogative of being
the constant arbitrator between the two. Hence, HUL as a “modern uto-
pia” implicitly conveys a presentist approach. This recognition helps to
comprehend its inner contradictions—being explicitly modern, implicitly
presentist—and, consequently, to interpret the dilemma of contemporary
urban heritage preservation oscillating between heritage conservation and
urban development by the model of the Regimes of Historicity.
The inner contradictions of the “modern utopia of HUL” stem from
the position of utopia in contemporary, or we might say presentist, urban
planning and architecture. Utopia has always been an integral part of
urban planning theories because of its ability to project the experienced
reality into an ideal and imagined future through the propagation of the
image of the latter. Current tendencies in urban planning, however, often
blur the traditional distinction between reality and its fictitious representa-
tion. The most frequently cited examples are Edward Soja’s scamscapes,
in which “image and reality become spectacularly confused, the difference
between true and false, fact and fiction not only disappears, but becomes
totally and preternaturally irrelevant”40 or the Disneyfication of cities,
which is no longer “an American singleton”41 but rather a globalized phe-
nomenon. In this context, rehabilitated historical urban centers are due
to turn into elegant and/or touristic shopping areas, in other words, into
spaces of consumption. As Rem Kolhaas notes, “to be saved, downtowns
have had to be given the suburbian kiss of death.”42 The fading borderline
between experienced reality and imagined ideals in contemporary urban
environment does not only manifest itself in the unstoppable spreading
of consumer spaces but also change the scale of reference of the ideals.
Traditional utopias are based on a community or, later, on a society and,
accordingly, project these entities onto an idealized future. Nevertheless, a
presentist utopia must take into account responsibilities on individual and
universal levels. The former is expressed in Soja’s thirdspace epistemolo-
gies, in which he judges that “the provocative shift back from epistemology
to ontology and specifically to the ontological trialectic of Spatiality–
Historicality-Sociality is the starting-point for a strategic re-opening and
re-thinking of new possibilities.”43 In other words, urban space appears
through its practitioners’ practice, which is like a “lived space …, where
all histories and geographies, all times and spaces are immanently present
and repeated.”44 On the other hand, the reference to the universal level is
 THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC URBAN LANDSCAPE 19

necessary since environmental concerns channel every urban development

project to the global scope of urbanization, which requires appropriate
actions and precautions to avoid the threats of climate change, and the
concomitant recognition of social, economic, and natural factors under
the auspices of sustainability. The traditional zoning of urban planning
is becoming less relevant, thanks to the recognition of the influence of
personal use of urban territory as well as through the redefinition of urban
space as a unity of built and natural components. The privileged status of
the historical center, however, is the “nodality never disappears.”45 The
current tendencies of urban planning can be quite easily identified by the
conceptual novelties of cultural heritage protection: the appreciation of
personal use of urban space may be associated with the prerogative of
knowledge transmission embodied in the notion of intangible cultural
heritage; the integration of the built and natural urban environment in
a unified urban territory from the point of view of urban development
relates to the notion of cultural landscape—uniting cultural and natural
entities—as well as to the definition of cultural heritage as an intrinsic ele-
ment of sustainability. Thus, the unifying directive of HUL in the field of
urban cultural heritage conservation can be recognized in the complexities
of contemporary urban planning. In this sense, the definition of HUL as
a presentist utopia can not only reveal its place in current cultural heritage
preservation but also shed light on the role of urban heritage in contem-
porary urban development.
As we will discuss in detail in Chap. 4, the model of the Regimes of
Historicity allows a positive—presentist—definition to cultural heritage
and, consequently, enables us to interpret its inner contradictions (“fuzzi-
ness”) in an evolution of historical mentalities expressed in the chang-
ing perception of time. In this sense, the evolution of cultural heritage
protection is simultaneously characterized by a shift from the modernist
monumental period to the dynamic presentist approaches as well as by
the continuity of the fear of a future loss, which must be prevented in the
present. The former—the changing perception of time—can be used as
an essential criterion for the conceptual history of HUL. The latter—the
commitment to secure continuity—serves to overcome the dichotomy
between modernism and presentism by applying a proper theory of mod-
ernization, based on a new characteristic of modernization which so far
can be interpreted and observed as a relentless professionalization.
The principle of security in Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower seems
to fulfill this requirement. Foucault started his series of lectures entitled
20 G. SONKOLY

“Security, territory, population”46 at the Collège de France in the late

1970s with the explication of the significance of these three concepts in
his theory of biopower.47 Foucault puts emphasis on the new “mechanism
of power” through which the increasingly centralized authorities take con-
trol over the society, which is reinterpreted and reframed by the authori-
ties themselves in the early modern and modern periods. This extremely
complex evolution is described by three processes—corresponding to the
three concepts in the title, which begin successively and continue simul-
taneously. It is important to note that these processes do not replace each
other; rather, the earlier ones contribute to the complexities of the later
ones, that is, to the professionalization of security.
To summarize in simple terms, the first and earliest process is the terri-
torial projection of the sovereignty of the authorities, that is, the construc-
tion of the legally unified territory of the modern state. This is followed
by the introduction of discipline into more and more domains of social
existence. The third process is the gradual imposition of security as a
guiding principle and as an ultimate goal. Sovereignty functions in the
territory, discipline functions in the body, and security functions in the
population. The three processes determine a certain historicity, which is
revealed in the successive techniques of the management of space: for the
sovereign, the selection, and the development of the exemplary capital is
the most important, whereas discipline constructs new, mainly segregated
territories and hierarchizes the territory of the state; finally, security lays
its territorial systems onto already existing ones (channels, transportation,
administrative hierarchies, etc.),48 by rendering serial indicators to these
elements to be able to measure them and to decide on their eventual
modifications. The management of security is based on the definition and
the modeling of serial indicators, and their confluence can be measured
in a special territorial unit. This unit is called the milieu, a term which is
supposed to express an organic relationship between natural and human
elements, which are investigated by the bureaucrats of the central authori-
ties in order to produce better plans for the future and by researchers to
produce better “data”49 for scientific analysis.
Thus, the ongoing professionalization of activities related to secu-
rity provides a significant element of continuity between modernity and
“beyond,” as well as between administrative and scientific domains. The
idea of security and the history of its ever-growing complexity connect
the considerations of the early modern and modern central authorities
described by Foucault to the current obsession with preservation to avoid
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which belongs to the night, when there are no sounds of busy life, no
distractions of bright light and vivid color to divert the attention, she
saw both the dangers on the one hand, the attractions on the other,
of a deeper dive into the mystery which surrounded her. For a few
seconds the impulses struggled against each other, and then
curiosity and youthful daring carried the day.
Throwing open the door, which had not been relocked, and in
which there was no key, Mabin, considering this circumstance as she
went, dashed through in pursuit.
It was indeed a daring thing to do, for she was not even mistress
of the topography of the house. The room in which she now found
herself she had never been in before, and the only light to guide her
footsteps came through the window and was obscured by a yellow-
white blind. It was by this light that Mabin knew that the dawn had
come, and the knowledge gave her more courage. She could follow
the intruder with greater security now that she knew that, if she
chased him to the place where he had entered the house, she would
see his face in the daylight.
As she entered the room the man was in the act of opening a door
on the left which led into the corridor. Mabin saw him for a moment,
against the brighter light which came through the windows on the
east side of the house; and then this door closed between her and
him as the other had done.
By the time she had got into the corridor in her turn, she saw the
man disappear down the stairs at the end. She followed still. He
reached the hall; he went down the four steps to the drawing-room,
through the doorway of which he again passed out of her sight.
In the midst of the excitement which hurried her on to the drawing-
room door, the young girl felt a chill in her blood as she remembered
Mrs. Dale’s description of the gloom of the deserted apartment. She
had described it as “a damp and mouldy mausoleum.” Mabin would
have avoided the room if she could. The meeting with her mysterious
visitor would be more uncanny there than in the warmer, more
habitable parts of the house.
But she went on. Dashing into the room with impetuosity all the
greater for her vague fears, Mabin found herself in a very long, wide,
low-ceilinged room, the roof of which was supported by two rows of
pillars, and the air of which struck a chill into her.
There were three large windows, two on the right hand, and one at
the end of the room, in front of her. Above the shutters of those on
her right the gray rays of the morning were creeping, making the
marble of the heavy old mantelpiece look livid, and showing the
stains of damp on the white and gold wall-paper.
This was all that the girl had time to notice when suddenly the
shutters of the window at the end of the room were thrown back with
a clatter of wood and a clang of iron, and she saw the green of the
trees outside, and the man of whom she was in pursuit standing in
the opening he had made. And then she saw that the French window
was open, and knew that this was the way by which he had entered
the house.
The word “Stop!” was on her lips when suddenly he seemed to
stagger, and she heard him gasp and struggle for his breath. Surely
this was no burglar, this man with the thin white hands, who could
not run a distance of a hundred yards without inconvenience.
She tumbled over a footstool, and as she drew herself up again,
she saw that she was alone in the room.
Running lightly and quickly to the window she looked out into the
garden. The fresh morning breeze blew the open window against the
wooden shutter with a loud crash. At the same moment she caught
sight of the figure of which she had been in pursuit so long, under
the trees to the right. At the noise of the crashing window the man
turned quickly round, and in the pale light of the dawn Mabin saw his
face distinctly.
In a moment the last trace of fear of him which had lingered in her
heart disappeared. Almost as pale as a mask of the dead, the face
she saw was that of a man on whom every form of suffering seemed
to have left its mark. The hollow eyes were full of unspeakable
sadness; the deep lines about the mouth were those of illness or
sorrow rather than of age; while even the thick sprinkling of gray
hairs among the brown which Mabin detected in the searching cold
light of the morning told the same tale of weight of grief rather than of
years.
 All these things the girl’s quick young eyes saw in one brief look.
Then, instinctively, she took a step forward into the garden, with
some vague intention of asking him a question. But the moment she
moved he turned; and disappearing from her sight behind the trees
and shrubs which grew between the lawn and the spot where she
stood, left her in a state of surprise and bewilderment from which it
took her some minutes to recover.
It was the physical fact that she began to shiver violently in the
keen morning air which at last roused her from the dazed condition
into which the chase and its end had thrown her. She got into the
house again, shut the window, fastened the shutter carefully,
wondering by what magical means it had been opened from the
outside, and stumbled along the musty drawing-room in the half-light
until she reached the door.
Opening it quickly, she caught sight of Annie, the housemaid,
rapidly turning the corner of the staircase above. With suspicion in
her mind, she called the girl; but Annie disappeared into the upper
regions of the house, paying no attention to her.
Uneasy, interested, puzzled, Mabin went slowly upstairs, started
violently when the tall clock on the stairs struck four close to her ear,
and stood before the open door of the room through which the
intruder had passed on his way to and from hers.
Who was this man with the grave, sad, handsome face, who got
into the house by night, and stole his way to the very bed-chamber of
Mrs. Dale? In what relation did he stand to the lovely widow?
No honest man, whether relation, friend, or lover, would pay his
mysterious visits like these! And yet there was something in his face
so attractive, so interesting, that Mabin would fain have believed that
there was some reason, some excuse, for his strange conduct. And
the one excuse which she unwillingly had to find was this: the man
must be mad.
This began to show a way out of the mystery; but it was by no
means cleared up. Was he the man who had taken her father’s
house as “Mr. Banks”? This seemed probable, and at any rate this
could be easily ascertained. If so, and if “Mr. Banks” was a madman,
why was he unattended by any keeper?
 And what, “Mr. Banks” or no “Mr. Banks,” was the meaning of
these stealthy nocturnal visits? That they were so unexpected, so
unwelcome, as to be inconceivable on the part of Mrs. Dale, had
been abundantly proved by the fact that she had believed the visitor
to be a vision of her imagination only, and not a human being. For
Mabin could not doubt that the appearance which Mrs. Dale had
taken for a horrible dream had been in reality the living man she had
just seen.
Who then could he be, and what could he want? Was the refined,
sensitive face, with its sad eyes and worn mouth, the mask and not
the index of the man?
The more Mabin thought, the clearer it seemed to grow to her that
the man was either a relation or a lover, who had gone out of his
mind, and whose insanity had taken this strange form of nocturnal
persecution.
But then, again, if he had been insane, would not Mrs. Dale have
heard of it? And was it not rather the act of a sane man than of a
madman to assume a name not his own in order to hide his identity
from the woman he meant to harass? Again, was the intruder the
tenant of “Stone House” at all?
Even of this she was not sure; and Mabin decided that this
question must be answered definitely before she could think herself
on the road to the discovery of the mystery.
In the mean time, the door of the room through which she had
passed in pursuit of the intruder being still open, she entered, and
instinctively looked round, to see if he had left any trace of his
presence.
She drew up the blind and let the daylight stream into the corners.
The room was like the rest of the house, shabby and furnished
with little taste. It had perhaps been a study or a school-room, for in
front of the one window there was a large leather-covered writing-
table, much splashed with ink. The rest of the furniture consisted of a
couple of small ottomans and half a dozen chairs, all covered with
green rep, and trimmed with green worsted fringe, and of a
mahogany bookcase which stood near the door.
Mabin, with one glance round, had satisfied herself that nothing in
the room betrayed the recent presence of an intruder, when her
attention was suddenly arrested by a picture on the wall to her left.
It was a portrait in oils of a man, very young, very handsome, and
bearing, as she saw at once, a great resemblance to the man she
had seen a quarter of an hour before escaping from the house.
A great resemblance, that was all; it did not occur to her for some
minutes that the man in the picture and the man she had seen could
be the same person. But as her fascinated eyes pored over the
painting, studying each feature, it grew upon her gradually that the
likeness between it and the man was that of a face in happiness to a
face in sorrow, and she saw the possibility that they were one and
the same person.
As this thought crossed her mind, she stepped back startled by
her own discovery. The light, growing stronger every moment, began
to bathe the picture in the brightness of a summer morning, and she
noticed then with what care it had been preserved. A tiny rod ran
along the top of the picture, and from it hung two curtains, now
drawn aside, of dark blue satin, hung with bullion fringe, and
embroidered richly in shades of blue and gold.
Mabin’s eyes, attracted by the beautiful colors, were fixed upon
this handsome hanging, when a piercing cry, uttered by a voice she
did not recognize, but which thrilled her by its wild grief, made her
start and turn round.
Just within the door by which she had entered the room Mrs. Dale
was lying prone, motionless, on the floor.
Mabin, trembling from head to foot, went down on her knees
beside her friend, and found that she had fainted. Not wishing to call
the servants, she ran into the adjoining bedroom, fetched some
water, and sprinkled it on the face of the unconscious woman. But at
first Mrs. Dale gave no sign of life, and Mabin had time to reflect on
the course she had better take.
And as, she thought, Mrs. Dale’s sudden loss of consciousness
must be in some way connected with the picture, it would be better
that she should find herself, on recovering, in another room.
Mabin was so much taller than Mrs. Dale that she found it a
comparatively easy task to drag the little, slenderly made creature
into the adjoining bedroom, and when she got her upon the sofa at
the foot of the bed she found that the pink color was returning to her
patient’s cheeks, that her hands and eyelids were moving slightly,
and that a sigh was struggling up to her lips.
“Do you feel better now, dear?” asked Mabin rather tremulously.
For she had some doubts as to the scene which might be
impending.
Mrs. Dale opened her eyes, but made no answer. She did not
seem to hear Mabin; she seemed to be listening, trying to remember.
“Would you like a little water?” went on Mabin, rather frightened by
the silence, and betraying her feelings in her tone and in the
expression of her face. Then Mrs. Dale sat up, and the rather vacant
look on her face grew into one of weary sadness.
“No, dear, thank you. I am not thirsty; and I—and I—am quite
well.”
As she said this she rose, and glanced anxiously round the room.
Then she looked at the door which communicated with the adjoining
apartment, and suddenly sprang toward it.
“Don’t, don’t go in there!” cried Mabin, quickly, imploringly.
Mrs. Dale, with a deadly white face, stopped short, turned and
looked at her.
“Why not?” she asked abruptly, in a whisper.
“Why, because—because—” stammered the girl, “it was in there
you fainted. Don’t you remember?”
She took one of Mrs. Dale’s ice-cold hands in her own, in the hope
of communicating the warmth of her own young blood to her terror-
stricken friend.
“I—I remember. I found you looking——”
She broke off suddenly, snatched her hand from the girl’s, and ran
into the next room. Mabin followed hesitatingly, and found her
standing in front of the picture, with her eyes fixed upon it. Mabin
said nothing, afraid lest by some unlucky word she should increase
the mental distress of the unhappy woman. She uttered a cry as Mrs.
Dale, turning upon her fiercely, asked in a tone which she had never
used to her before:
“Why did you come in here? And what made you draw back the
curtains?” Then evidently regretting her violence of manner when
she saw how strong an effect it had upon the girl, she added with an
abrupt change to apologetic gentleness, and with tears of penitence
in her eyes: “I beg your pardon, dear; but—but it is not like you to be
so curious.”
Mabin hesitated. She did not dare to tell Mrs. Dale what it was that
had brought her into the room. For, she argued to herself, if the mere
sight of this man’s portrait, and the belief that she had only dreamed
she saw him, had such an effect upon the little woman, what might
not the result be of finding that he had been there in the flesh?
“The door was open,” she said at last.
And she felt quite glad that Mrs. Dale evidently doubted her word,
and looked again in a puzzled manner at the portrait.
“What made you draw back the curtains?” was her next question.
“I didn’t. I found the picture like that. I haven’t touched it,”
answered Mabin quickly and rather indignantly.
But her transitory anger passed away when she saw the change to
deep trouble which instantly took place in Mrs. Dale’s face. Putting
up her handkerchief with shaking fingers to her wet, white face, the
little lady clung with the other hand to the old writing-table, by which
she was standing. She was in a state of great agitation, but Mabin
did not know whether she ought to appear to be conscious of the fact
or not. At last Mrs. Dale asked, in a hoarse whisper:
“That noise—I heard a noise in the house—and Annie, I saw
Annie running upstairs—What was it?”
“The drawing-room window had been left open and it banged
against the shutter,” replied Mabin. “I went down and shut it, and
Annie went down too.”
She was ashamed to have to make this equivocal answer, but she
dared not tell the whole truth—yet. She must have more of her
friend’s confidence first, she must know more. And again she asked
herself whether this man was some old lover of Mrs. Dale’s, who had
been shut up on account of insanity, and of whose confinement Mrs.
Dale had heard. She thought she would make an attempt to find out.
“What a handsome face this is!” she said, controlling her own
nervous agitation as well as she could, and fixing her gaze upon the
picture. “I don’t think I ever saw a face I admired so much.”
There was a pause, and Mabin, without looking round, heard her
companion draw a deep breath. Presently, however, the latter
recovered her self-possession sufficiently to ask, with an assumption
of her usual playful tone:
“Not—Rudolph’s?”
Mabin was taken completely off her guard. Her mind filled with the
story of her friend, she had for the time forgotten her own.
“Oh, that is a different type of face, quite different,” she replied,
relapsing at once into the formal tone of the shy school-girl.
“But not without its good points?” suggested Mrs. Dale, coming
behind the girl and putting her little hands on her waist.
Mabin, with an inspiration of astuteness, thought she received a
short cut to her friend’s confidence, a confidence which would clear
the ground for further discoveries, further enlightenments.
“Haven’t you ever felt that one—person—was outside everything
else? And not to be measured by standards at all?” she asked in a
soft, shy voice.
Mrs. Dale’s answer, the answer, too, of a widow, came upon her
like a thunderbolt.
“No, dear. I have had no such experience myself. I have never
cared for a man in all my life.”
And she spoke with the accents of sincerity.
 CHAPTER X.
THE PICKING UP OF SOME SILVER THREADS.

“Mabin!”
“Oh!”
A single syllable hardly conveys the amount of alarm, of horror, of
paralyzing fright which Mabin puts into the exclamation.
And yet the occasion was an ordinary one enough. It had simply
happened that she had taken her work to the old seat at the edge of
the plantation, where the primitive picnics used to take place in the
old days, and that Rudolph had come up softly over the fields without
her hearing his footsteps on the yielding grass.
“I frightened you?”
“N—no, not exactly, but you made me drop my needle. I thought
you were at Portsmouth!”
“So I was. But that isn’t five thousand miles off. I came back this
morning.”
Mabin said nothing. She had not seen him for a fortnight,—not, in
fact, since the morning when he had met her on the seashore, and
when he had applauded her resolution of sleeping in the room in
which Mrs. Dale had had her bad dream. He had been called away
suddenly on the following day, and had therefore heard nothing of
Mabin’s adventure.
“Haven’t you got any news for me? I had rather expected a
budget.”
Now Mabin had a budget for him, and had been looking forward
most anxiously for his return, that she might confide in him some of
the suspicions, the surmises, which filled her brain by day, and even
kept her awake at night. But as usual with events long looked
forward to, this return of Rudolph’s had not taken place as she
expected, and she found herself in a state of unreadiness to meet
him.
In the first place, she felt so ridiculously excited, so absurdly glad,
that all the things she had been storing up in her mind to tell him
dwindled into sudden insignificance. What did they matter, what did
anything matter just now, except that Rudolph had come back, and
that she must try not to let him guess how glad she was?
“Yes,” she said deliberately, after a short pause, looking across the
clover field to the sea, and carefully choosing another needle, “I have
plenty to tell you. I had it all ready, but—but you came up so
suddenly that you have scattered all the threads of the story, and
now I don’t remember where to begin.”
“I’m so awfully sorry. First you say I make you lose your needle,
and then I scatter your threads. I’m afraid you think me in the way.”
No answer.
“Must I go?”
Rudolph got up and drew back a step, standing in the long, rank
grass which bordered the clover field in the shade of the trees of the
plantation.
“If I say yes, I suppose you will say I’m being rude again!” said
Mabin, as she threw up at him, from under her big shady hat, a shy
glance so full of attraction in its unconscious coquetry that Rudolph
also forgot the budget, and thought he had never seen any girl look
half so pretty as she did.
“I should say,” said he, bending his head as he spoke, and looking
with great apparent interest at the work in her hands, “that you were
unkind.”
There was another pause. Never before, even in the days of her
wooden shyness, had Mabin found speech with him so difficult. A
lump seemed to rise in her throat whenever she had a remark ready,
and for fear of betraying the fact she remained silent altogether.
It was odd, too, that Rudolph, who had always been so fluent of
speech himself, and had made her seem so dull, had now become
infected with her own stupid reticence.
“You are a long time finding one,” said he at last.
“Yes. I—I seem to have lost all the fine ones,” replied Mabin,
bending her head still lower than before over her needle case.
“Let me help you. Give me the work first, so that I can judge what
size you want.”
“How can you tell—a man?” asked Mabin with indignation.
And in her contempt she looked up at him again.
 “Oh-ho, madam! Don’t you know that we sailors can use a needle
as well as any woman. Here let me show you.”
This was an admirable opportunity for seating himself on the
bench beside her; and Rudolph, who had felt a strange hesitation
about doing so before, now took the plunge, and placed himself on
the end of the wooden seat.
“What is this? An antimacassar?”
“No. A cooking apron.”
“How interesting! Ladies ought not to make such things. They
should do things that want lots of bundles of silks of all sorts of
colors. This isn’t sufficiently decorative.”
“You mean fancy-work!” exclaimed Mabin with an expression of
horror. “I hate fancy-work!”
“Girls who do fancy-work can always give a fellow things they
have made themselves to remember them by. I have a heap of
tobacco pouches, all very pretty and too good to use. Now you
couldn’t give a fellow a cooking apron, to remember you by, could
you?”
“I shouldn’t want anybody to remember me—with a lot of other
girls!” retorted Mabin fiercely.
And then she felt the blood rush to her cheeks, and she thrust the
needle-case quickly into his hands.
“Find one now, find one!” cried she imperiously, “and let me see
what you can do. I believe you are only boasting when you say you
can sew.”
Rudolph took the apron from her, and the needle-case, found a
needle of the size he wanted in half the time she had spent in
searching for one, and took up her hem where she had left off,
working with fine, even stitches which called forth her unwilling
admiration.
“Why,” she cried, in great surprise, “you do it beautifully! It’s better
than mine!”
“Of course it is,” remarked Rudolph calmly. “Whatever the superior
sex does bears, of course, the mark of superiority. The only thing
that women can do really well is to receive prettily the attentions of
the sex, it is useless for them to try to emulate. You used to do it very
well once. I am hoping you haven’t lost the knack.”
 “You haven’t lost your old knack of conceit, I see.”
“Oh, no. I have just the same opinion of myself and just the same
opinion of you as when you used to send me wading into the pools
between the rocks to get little crabs for you, and into the hedges for
bird’s eggs, one from each nest, don’t you remember? And when
you used to make me so proud by saying I found them quicker than
anybody else. And then—do you remember what you used to do
then?”
“Break them on the way home, I suppose,” said she, trying to look
as if she had forgotten.
“Come, don’t you really remember any better than that?”
He had finished his needleful of thread, and handed her back the
apron. So that he was at leisure to watch her face as she folded the
big piece of holland, and collected the odds and ends of her work-
bag. And it was quite clear to him that her memory was as true as
his.
“Don’t you remember that you always gave me a kiss when I found
a robin’s nest?”
“No, indeed, I don’t.”
But she did. Eyes, cheeks, and mouth all betrayed the
scandalizing recollection.
“And used to promise to marry me when you grew up? Now, do
you mean to say you’ve forgotten that?”
Evidently loss of memory was no protection with this person.
Mabin blushed, and tried another sort of answer.
“Yes, I remember. What funny things children say!”
“Was it—funny?”
“Why, yes, I can’t help laughing at the idea now!”
And Mabin began to laugh hysterically, unnaturally, but withal so
prettily, with so much of maidenly confusion and subdued happiness
mingling with her amusement, that Rudolph threw his arm round her
in the midst of her mirth, and cut it short by snatching a kiss.
“Oh!”
The monosyllable was meant to express astonishment and
indignation, but it was a poor little protest after all, and one of which
Rudolph did not feel bound to take much notice.
 “Are you angry?” said he, not withdrawing his arm. “Are you very
angry, Mabin? Don’t you think you will ever be able to forgive me?”
“I am angry, certainly,” answered she, trying to release herself. “I
hope you are going to apologize for—for forgetting that I am not nine
now.”
“How old are you, Mabin?”
“Nineteen.”
“Quite old enough to take up the promises you made ten years
ago. Quite old enough to marry me.”
“Rudolph! What nonsense!”
“Oh, is it nonsense? If you think I’m going to allow my feelings to
be trifled with by a chit of a girl who used to go halves with me in
bull’s eyes, you’re very much mistaken! Now then, are you willing to
ratify your promise, or am I to bring an action for breach?”
But Mabin, trembling with excitement and happiness so great as to
be bewildering, felt dimly that there was too much levity about this
abrupt settlement of the affairs of two lifetimes. This sudden proposal
did not accord with her serious disposition, with her sense of the
fitness of things. She looked at him with eyes pathetically full of
something like terror.
“Rudolph!” she whispered, in a voice which was unsteady with
strong emotion, “how can you talk like this? How can you? Don’t you
know that it hurts?”
“Hurts, little one? What do you mean by that?”
His tone was tender enough to satisfy the most exacting damsel,
but Mabin was struck with fresh terror on remarking that instead of
releasing her he tightened the grasp in which he held her.
“Why, I mean—I mean—that you are in play, that, it is amusement,
fun, to you; while to me—”
And then she saw in his eyes something new, something of the
earnestness, the seriousness which she had longed for, but which
she had not before detected in the light-hearted sailor.
“While to you—? Why, little one, do you think it is anything to you,
this promise that I am to have you to guard and to keep near my
heart for our lives, more than it is to me? Do you think one must
meet one’s happiness with a sour face, Mabin, and ask a girl to love
you from the other side of a stone wall? Oh, my little sweetheart, with
the shy eyes and the proud heart, you have a great deal to learn;
and the very first thing is to trust me, and not to think my love of no
account because I can woo you with a light heart.”
Every word seemed to echo in the young girl’s heart. She was
taken off her feet, lifted high into an enchanted region where words
were music, and a touch of the fingers ecstasy, and she hardly dared
to speak, to move, to draw breath lest the spell should be broken,
and she should wake up to commonplace life again. She listened,
hardly speaking, to her lover as he told her how she had always
remained in his mind as the childish figure that foreshadowed his
womanly ideal; how her cold reserve had piqued him, made him
study her the more; and finally how quickly these feelings had given
place to warmer ones when he and she became friends once more.
They did not know how the time went. The sun rose high, the
shadows shifted gradually, the dew dried on the long grass. At last a
bell, ringing loudly in the garden behind the plantation, startled
Mabin, and made her spring up.
“That’s for luncheon, it must be for luncheon!” she cried in blushing
confusion. “I’d forgotten—forgotten everything!”
Rudolph laughed gently, and picked up her bag and her work.
“I won’t come in,” said he. “But I’ll go through the plantation with
you to carry these.”
Across Mabin’s face there came a cloud.
“You must see Mrs. Dale,” she said. “She will want to see you, and
yet——”
“And yet what?”
“I’m jealous.”
“Are you? For shame, for shame! Can’t you trust me?”
“I will say yes, of course, but——”
“But you mean no. Well, I can promise not to break your heart.”
And he laughed at her and teased her, and told her that Mrs. Dale
was too well off to trouble her head about a poor lieutenant.
But Mabin was only half comforted; she remembered how well
they had got on together on that memorable evening when a
misunderstanding had caused her to sulk, and she was too diffident
to believe that her own charms could compete with brilliant Mrs.
Dale’s.
 As soon as they came out of the plantation, and within sight of the
house, they saw across the lawn the young housemaid, Annie,
shading her eyes with her hand, as if watching for some one. Mabin,
thinking the girl was looking out for her, sprang away from Rudolph,
calling out a last “Good-by” as she hurried over the lawn.
“Tell Mrs. Dale that I am coming to call upon her this afternoon, to
ask her to give me some tea. And please remind her that she
promised me peaches next time I came,” called out Rudolph after
her as she ran.
Mabin merely waved her hand to imply that she heard, and ran on
toward the house. Annie, instead of retreating into the hall at the
approach of the young lady, stepped out into the garden. And when
Rudolph, after skirting the plantation, reached the gravelled space on
his way to the gate, he found the young housemaid holding it open
for him. He saw, before he came up, by the girl’s look and manner
that she had something to say to him.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” she said in a low voice, as soon as he was
near enough to hear, “but I hope you won’t mind me taking the liberty
of speaking to you.”
The girl was a bright-looking young person, with intelligent eyes
and an open, pleasant face.
“Well, what is the portentous secret?” asked Rudolph, smiling,
much amused by her assumed airs of mystery and importance.
“Well, sir, it is a secret,” she retorted, rather nettled by his
amusement. “It’s a warning I have to give you, sir.”
“A warning! Come, this begins to be interesting.”
“It isn’t a joke at all, sir,” said the housemaid, half offended, yet
with increasing earnestness. “I saw you coming over the field this
morning, sir, when I was out speaking to the gardener about the
salad. And I thought you was most likely coming here, sir, and I’ve
been on the lookout for you ever since.”
“Much obliged to you, I’m sure. But have you been told to warn me
off the premises?”
The girl drew herself up.
“Well, I can tell you, sir, that you’d better not come about the place
more than you can help, for if you do there’s some one that will find it
out and maybe do you a mischief. Hoping you’ll excuse the liberty,
sir; but I know something nobody else does, and I shouldn’t like you
to come to any harm, sir.”
And leaving Rudolph in a state of mingled incredulity, amusement,
and surprise, the girl shut the gate, through which he had by this
time passed, ran back quickly and disappeared through the back
door into the house.
It was with a shock that Mabin remembered, when she met Mrs.
Dale, that in the excitement of her own happiness she had neglected
to tell Rudolph the story of her midnight adventure. This
remembrance filled the girl with compunction. She reproached
herself with thinking of no one but herself, and was as miserable
over her omission as she had been happy while with her lover. As it
was in the dining-room that she met Mrs. Dale, the presence of the
parlormaid prevented her from confiding to her friend’s ear the
events of the morning. She said with a hot blush that she had met
Rudolph and gave his message; but although Mrs. Dale received the
intelligence with an arch smile she did not guess how extremely
interesting the interview had proved.
And as after luncheon Mrs. Dale sent her into Seagate for
peaches, while she wrote some letters, Mabin kept the secret of her
engagement, saving it up until Rudolph should himself break the
news.
The young girl felt an odd shyness about confessing her
happiness. She was quite glad of the excuse circumstances afforded
of keeping it all to herself for a few hours longer. It was a joy so far
above all other joys that it seemed to her its bloom would not bear
the rough touch of arch words and looks which would certainly follow
the announcement of it.
Hugging her happiness to her heart, she went quickly to Seagate
and back, not heeding the scorching heat of the sun, or the glare of
the chalky roads, or the dust made by the vehicles which passed her
on the way. And when she reached “The Towers” again, finding that
Mrs. Dale had not yet come downstairs, she put on her hat and went
back to the seat where Rudolph had sat with her that morning, to live
over again the golden time they had spent there together.
But she could not free her mind from the self-reproach she felt at
having forgotten, in the pleasure of the meeting with Rudolph, the
affairs of her friend. There was just this excuse for her, that it was
now a whole fortnight since the strange night adventure had
happened, and during all that time nothing had occurred at “The
Towers” to recall the visit of the intruder whom Mabin had chased out
of the house. After that strange confidence of Mrs. Dale’s, following
the incident of the picture, no word more had been exchanged by the
two ladies on the subject. It was this new but unavoidable reserve
between them which had made Mabin so shy of mentioning her new
happiness. If Mrs. Dale had, as she averred, never been in love
herself, what sympathy could she be expected to have for Mabin?
With these thoughts in her mind Mabin had at last got up from the
seat, and sauntered along the narrow path through the plantation in
the direction of her father’s house. Crossing the lane which
separated the grounds of the two houses, she found herself, without
thinking how she came there, on the path which ran along outside
the wall at the bottom of her father’s garden.
She had gone about ten yards when she heard a slight noise on
the inner side of the wall. She stopped. There flashed quickly into
her mind the old forgotten question: Was her father’s tenant the man
who had got into “The Towers” at night a fortnight ago?
Coming noiselessly close to the wall, she reached the top of it by a
sudden spring, and saw, between the bushes of the border, the bent
figure of a gentleman, sauntering along slowly with the aid of a stick.
The cry she uttered made him look up.
And the face she saw was the face of the picture in the shut-up
room, the face of the man she had pursued through the house,
whose thin, worn features she had seen a fortnight ago in the pale
light of the morning.
 CHAPTER XI.
AN INTERVIEW WITH MR. BANKS.

Mabin had only just time to recognize the face of the man who had
got into “The Towers” at night as Mr. Banks, her father’s tenant,
when he turned abruptly and hurried away toward the house.
Mabin’s first thought was to get over the wall, a proceeding to
which, it must be admitted, she was not unaccustomed, and pursue
him, as she had done upon a recent and well-remembered occasion.
But she felt a certain natural shyness about such a bold course, and
decided that she would proceed in more orthodox fashion by going
round to the front door and asking for him.
It was not without fears that she would be unsuccessful that she
made her way, slowly and with the slight limp which still remained
from her bicycle accident, along the lane to the front of the house.
This was the first time she had been inside her father’s gates since
the morning the family went away, and it struck her with a sense of
strangeness that she had lived a great deal faster than ever before
since that memorable day. Mrs. Dale’s mysterious story; the visit of
the old lady with the cruel tongue; the midnight intrusion of Mr.
Banks; last, and chief of all, Rudolph’s confession of love—these
things had opened a wide abyss between the child Mabin and the
woman. She felt that she was not the shy girl who had had a nervous
dread of leaving home mingling with the thoughts of coming
pleasure. And she told herself that when the family came back they
would find, not the angular girl they had left, but a woman, a full-
fledged woman.
Perhaps she congratulated herself prematurely upon the
enormous advance she had made; at any rate, when she rang the
bell, she found her heart beating very fast, and a curious feeling
rising in her throat which threatened to affect the steadiness of her
voice.
It was Langford who opened the door. The old servant had not
seen Mabin since the day she had left the house, and her face broke
out into smiles as she greeted her.
“Bless me, Miss Mabin, I never thought of its being you! But I am
glad to see you. And how have you been getting on? And have you
heard from Mrs. Rose lately?”
“I’m getting on splendidly, and I heard from mamma two days ago.
Ethel’s got the mumps, but the rest are all right. I’ll talk to you
another time. Come round and see me some evening. Can’t you get
away? I’m in a hurry now; I want to see Mr. Banks.”
Langford shook her head emphatically.
“It’s no use wanting that, Miss Mabin. Mr. Banks never sees
anybody, not even his lawyer if he can help it. He’s a character, he is.
Is it a message you’ve got for him from Mr. Rose?”
“Oh, no. It’s something very important, much more important than
that. And I must see him; I tell you I must! And if you won’t help me, I
shall go to work in a way of my own, and give the poor man a fright.”
“Oh, no, Miss Mabin, you won’t do that, I’m sure! You don’t know
how delicate the poor gentleman is; more than once since he’s been
here he has given me a fright, and made me think he was going to
die. And he’s so peculiar; he won’t let one send for a doctor, not if it’s
ever so, he won’t. I’m sure one morning, a fortnight ago, when I
found him lying on the floor in the hall with the back garden door
open, I thought he was dead, that I did. But when I’d brought him to
—for he’d fainted, just like a woman—he wouldn’t hear of my getting
any one to come and see him——”
“Ah!” exclaimed Mabin. “Was that on a Tuesday night—I mean
Wednesday morning?”
“Yes, so it was.”
Mabin smiled.
“Well, I know the reason of that attack. And perhaps I’ll tell you
some day, if you’ll manage to let me see him now. And first tell me
what you think of him. Is he mad, do you think, or what? You
remember, when he first came, you thought he was.”
Langford shook her head dubiously.
“Well, really, Miss Mabin, I can’t rightly tell you what I do think
about him. Sometimes I do think he’s off his head altogether; he
marches up and down the drawing-room—that’s the room he has
taken to himself—by the hour together, going faster and faster, till I
listen outside the door wondering if anything is going to happen, and
whether he’s going to break out like and do himself a mischief. But if
I make an excuse to go in, though his eyes are wide and glaring, so
that at the first look he frightens one, yet he always speaks to me
quite gently, and says he doesn’t want anything. Of course I pretend
not to notice anything, and I think he likes the way I take him. For,
though he’s always civil-spoken to every one, he doesn’t let the two
girls come near him, if he can help it. If they come up from the
kitchen or out of a room when he’s by, he just turns his back and
waits till they’ve gone past.”
Mabin listened with deep interest, and without interrupting by a
question. But when Langford paused for breath, the young girl asked
suddenly:
“Does he have any letters? It isn’t just curiosity that makes me
ask, I needn’t tell you.”
“No, Miss Mabin. He doesn’t have any letters sent here except
under cover from his lawyer. They come in big envelopes, with the
address stamped on the back, so I know. It looks as if he was in
hiding or something, doesn’t it?” she added in a discreet whisper.
Mabin thought that it did, and the fact added to the fascination of
the mystery.
“You don’t think he’s a detective, do you?” she whispered close to
Langford’s ear.
“No, I’m quite sure he isn’t. Detectives aren’t gentlemen, and Mr.
Banks is a gentleman, if ever there was one.”
“It’s very strange,” murmured Mabin vaguely, pondering on the
fresh facts.
“You may well say that, Miss Mabin. I don’t know what to think
myself. Some days he’ll sit all day long with his head in his hands
without moving scarcely. Or he’ll sit poring over what looks like old
letters and bits of things that I think must have been a woman’s
somehow. But there, I feel like a sneak telling these things even to
you; for it’s only by chance that I know anything about them myself,
and for certain Mr. Banks didn’t think I should chatter about what I
saw.”
“Ah, well, I know more than you do as it is,” said Mabin softly.