A fine old Norman cathedral, by the side of a famous river—the one celebrated in history, the other a favourite with poets so long ago as Spenser.
The great grey cathedral, with its high pitched towers, and its crumbling walls, threw big dark shadows on the green turf of the college close, where half-a-dozen comfortable houses formed two sides of a square. In the centre grew a clump of venerable elms, the home of a colony of crows which were everlastingly calling to each other from above.
The other two sides of the square were filled in by the cathedral’s grey walls, and an old gateway.
The river flowed on without—the famous river with its sedgy banks. It flowed on outside the monastic-like square, noiselessly mostly, bearing lazy barges on its big brown bosom towards the sea. When the floods came down from the west it roared and whirled along in curls and eddies, the colour of coffee, like Kingsley’s salmon river in the “Water Babies.”
In the distance, from the upper windows of the cathedral close, on that side where Arthur lived, you could see the Linktown hills, with their graceful curving lines cut out against the sky; and if you had stood upon the Linktowns you might have seen another range of hills, which shut out Barton Hall from the rude world.
Arthur Phillips, as I have said, lived in this College Green, and his studio was at the top of one of those old houses, which had a glorious landscape before it, with the Linktowns for a background.
It was a curious old room, Arthur’s studio, with mullioned windows in it, and a wonderfully carved fireplace, with grinning heads cut in the mantelpiece. Several lay-figures were carelessly placed at one end of the room, and there were a couple of easels with half-finished pictures upon them. A few sketches in oil and in water-colours were hung about the room, and there was a guitar upon an old carved couch, and a large portfolio beside it. The artist wore a loose blouse, and looked at home in manner and appearance amongst his miscellaneous treasures.
Young Hammerton was a handsome fellow, one of a handsome stock. The Hammertons had been Earls of Verner for a century or more, and there was never known an ill-looking man or woman amongst them since the period when they came into the old island with the Norman Conqueror.
But there must have been much Saxon intermarrying in the family if one might judge from the fair skin and brown curly hair of Lionel Hammerton. And he was of sturdy make withal—a fine specimen of a handsome young Englishman, with a full hazel eye, and white regular teeth.
Lionel and Arthur had known each other for several years, the friendship commencing through a series of drawing lessons which Arthur Phillips had given Mr. Hammerton at Earl Verner’s residence.
The Earl, Lionel’s brother, was a man of great taste in the arts, and he had been Arthur’s first patron.
Arthur had exhibited several pictures unsuccessfully at the great Midland Counties Exhibition, when Earl Verner singled out a landscape with figures in the foreground, by Mr. Phillips, as the best, the most conscientiously painted picture of that year.
This was Arthur’s first start; the Earl purchased the picture, and the papers spoke of it in high terms of praise. The Art Journal, in a brief sketch of the Exhibition, noticed this painting as the work of one of the most promising artists of the day; and next season two works of Arthur’s were hung at the Royal Academy, and Success came unto him, and marked him for her own.
Earl Verner gave him several commissions, and placed Lionel Hammerton under him as a pupil, and this was how their friendship began.
He was a contrast to Arthur Phillips, who often noticed it, and drew little caricature sketches to illustrate it, which Lionel laughed at, and threatened to send to Punch as character studies.
Lionel had, indeed, once sent one of Arthur’s funny bits to Punch, which brought a polite note from the editor of that famous periodical, soliciting a closer acquaintance with the artist; but Mr. Phillips was a lazy fellow, and his pencil only cut funny capers when Earl Verner’s brother stirred him up, and suggested comical subjects.
“By Jove! if I were not to come in now and then, and laugh at you, you’d die of melancholy,” said Lionel Hammerton, on one of his recent visits to Arthur’s studio.
“No, I don’t think that,” said Arthur, lighting the cigar which his friend handed to him; “but your society is fatal to dulness. I am too poor a companion to reciprocate the pleasure which your society gives me.”
“Nay, dear boy, you are wrong there; I have spent some of my happiest hours in this old studio of yours, Arthur. What is it that makes an artist’s den, as you call it, so free and easy, and yet so distingué?”
“One gets out of the world, and a little nearer the better land, in a room consecrated to art, even if the prophet be but a dotard, perhaps,” said Arthur.
“And its perfect freedom—the absence of conventionality—the Bohemian character of the class called artists—their opposition to the forms and ceremonies, eh?”
“The artist only worships one goddess, I suppose; and she permits smoking, loose garments, unwashed hands, and slippers. Light your cigar,” Arthur went on, carelessly, offering his friend a fusee.
“What a grand thing it is, too, the painter’s art; of all arts the most delightful, the most satisfying! He is not like the writer, who must be read and studied before his audience can understand and enjoy what he has done. The effect of the artist’s work on the beholder is instantaneous, the reward of his genius is immediate; to say nothing of his own personal delight and satisfaction. But I’m getting prosy, Arthur. Have you been into the Berne neighbourhood lately?”
“Yes, I was there during several days in last week,” said Arthur.
“Well, any news, mon ami: are your friends all well?”
Arthur looked at Mr. Hammerton with a curious smile, as he replied, “Do not my views of Avonworth Valley give additional charms to my studio, Lionel?”
“News or views—which did you say? views, of course—well, so they do, and so they will continue to do, as long as you find such lovely bits of nature there,” said Lionel, laughing.
“Which do you prefer—the landscape or the figure studies?” Arthur inquired, still smiling, though a little sadly.
“I like them both; but there was a head which you were going to finish when I was here last. I don’t see it anywhere,” said Lionel, whose eyes had been wandering into every corner of the room.
“Here it is,” said Arthur. “I have been making a double study of heads;” and he brought out of a small case, from a cupboard by the window, two water-colour sketches, and looked curiously into Lionel’s face as his handsome friend examined them.
The first was something like that picture which appeared in the Strand shops some years afterwards.
Mr. Phillips had drawn the face full, and thrown the hair backwards in wavy folds. The lips were parted, and the eyes looked you in the face, full of hope and trust, and innocence.
Lionel laid this first study down, after a hasty glance or two at it, and then fairly “devoured” the second one.
A smothered sigh of relief escaped from Arthur as he noticed this, and a happy smile moved his lips as he watched the expression of approval which lit up Lionel’s face whilst gazing at the darker beauty.
“By Jove,” said Lionel, after a long pause, “it is exquisite! What a head! Talk of blood, why this head has all the character of a high-bred racehorse.”
Arthur smiled, and puffed out a long thin wreath of smoke.
“What eyes! what a neck! And the hair bound tightly to the head, setting off those little ears! And the chin!—why, all the lines of beauty are exhausted here,” Lionel went on; and Arthur almost trembled with delight.
“Give me your hand,” he said at length, no longer able to control his feelings. “Give me your hand, Lionel Hammerton.”
“With all my heart,” said Lionel, looking as much astonished as he had previously been delighted. “But what, in the name of all the Arts and Sciences, is the matter with you? I’m not praising the painter, but the subject. You have not suddenly become vain, Arthur?”
“No, no,” said the artist, pushing back his long black hair; “it is because you are praising the subject that I am delighted, Lionel. You love Amy Somerton.”
“Stop, stop, not so fast, friend Arthur,” said Lionel, colouring a little, and appearing still more surprised at the artist’s unusual excitement.
“If you are in love at all, it is not with—with Miss Tallant?” Arthur went on, his big piercing eyes fixed intently on his friend.
“Oh, oh!” said Lionel, putting his hand upon Arthur’s shoulder, and laying down Amy Somerton’s portrait. “Oh, oh! Have I caught you in your own trap, my poor little friend?” said Lionel. “It is you who are in love! Nay, man, don’t look so woe-begone about it.”
“And you?” said Arthur, hanging his head like a schoolboy.
“May be some day, friend Arthur,” said Lionel; “but not with Miss Tallant—not with Miss Tallant.”
“Thank God for that!” said the artist, sitting down and fixing his eyes upon the distant hills, which the sun was making golden.
Lionel’s manner of meeting Arthur’s half confession of love for Miss Tallant and fear of rivalry, did not for the moment please the artist, whose sensitive nature revolted at the apparently cool and critical treatment of his friend.
But when young Hammerton said, “Arthur, my boy, don’t fear me, go in and win,” the artist forgot his momentary displeasure, and smiled half sadly, half comically, at his friend; and then told him how he had been unable to struggle against his admiration for Miss Tallant, and how it had ripened into love.
Lionel promising not to betray Arthur’s confidence, laughed at the artist’s notion that he was indulging in an utterly hopeless and futile passion.
“I suppose you will be at the Festival of the Three Choirs to-morrow,” said Mr. Hammerton by-and-by, when they had changed the subject and he had lighted his last cigar.
“I shall be in some part of the building,” Arthur said. “I have the entrée you know by certain private doors; I am rather a favourite with the Dean and Chapter. I look down upon you from arches high up aloft, I listen to the music at various points. I should be too restless to sit all the time squeezed up amongst the audience.”
Severntown, you must know, was celebrated for its Festival Concerts in the cathedral, which had been originated as early as 1724, resulting in noble collections for charitable purposes, and of which the local journalist a hundred years ago exclaimed, “May God grant that all charitable undertakings may be carried on with that becoming zeal and Ardency of Affection which Matters of such allow’d Importance must always very justly claim!” Newspaper writers in those days, you see, said what they had to say briefly, and tersely, and to the point.
I mention these Severntown Festivals not with any intention of describing one of them, but simply because of the train of thought which the mention of the event by Mr. Hammerton excited in the mind of Arthur Phillips.
It was at the Festival, three years previously, that Arthur had first seen Phœbe Tallant, a mere girl, but of such striking beauty that the image was fixed in his mind, as if it belonged to the glorious music,—sanctified by the time, and the place, and the holy strains.
And he had gone on the following day, and peered out amongst the throng to see the same face again, but he saw it not; so he went quietly alone into the Lady Chapel to think of it, and build up the image in a picture of angels which he had thought, more than once, of painting. He never forgot the varied sensations which had been excited within him by that solitary ramble through private corridors into the Lady Chapel.
Shakspeare, Milton, and Pope have sung the delights of “hidden music.” Who has not stood at night in some quiet churchyard with his thoughts reverentially turned to heaven by the solemn strains of an evening hymn rippling out through the half-open doorway? Who has not sat without the precincts of cathedral choirs and felt the power of religious strains move him more deeply than when in the presence of the choristers? Is it that the mind likes to fall back upon itself now and then, to wed the music to its own hopes and aspirations?
The Lady Chapel was quite shut out from the choir, nave, and aisles. As Arthur stood there the whole of the auditory and performers were completely away from view. The altar-screen was between him and the gay parterre of bonnets, hemmed in by the surrounding margin of baize and matting. Around him were decaying monuments, themselves needing memorials (as Crabbe puts it in “The Borough”); half-finished slabs fresh from the hands of the restorer, and other evidences of the struggle of the present to preserve the past.
Subdued morning beams came in through tiers of lancet lights; and mounting up, echoing along the fretted roof of the nave, the strains of the chorus came streaming in upon him over the screen, filling the little chapel with exquisite harmonies which seemed to die away in mysterious vaults and corridors. In pianissimo passages of solo or chorus the music receded, and died away in the west, like faint memories of former strains.
This was a memory worth cherishing; but it was fixed in the artist’s mind as much by the association of the previous day as it was by its own intrinsic sublimity.
Six months afterwards it was that Arthur was introduced to Phœbe Tallant, and then that dear memory came back to him, softened into a kind of religious tint, as if it came through a painted window of the mind.
“This girl is my destiny,” thought Arthur at once; for the face was always in his mind, and somehow it was mixed up with thoughts that were above the world, mixed up with dreamy pictures of cathedral aisles, and with memories of swelling anthems.
For a time, after he knew Phœbe, Arthur feared he was drifting into morbid sensibility. He had led a sober, monkish kind of life for years, and with this new image in his mind he had at first given himself up to wanderings about the old cathedral, and a sort of fascinating unreal saint-worship which he carried out for a time on canvas; but as time wore on he grew out of these morbid habits and once more there was a healthy glow in his conversation and in his pictures. But he was desperately, madly in love, nevertheless.