A white, wet, grovelling mist; with a long, black procession creeping through it; and the solemn tolling of a village bell; nodding plumes and draped horses; a small group of well-dressed farmers, the tenants of the late Mr. Tallant.
There was something weird and miserable about the whole thing, as Arthur Phillips viewed it at a distance; something that chilled him and bowed him down.
He followed the mourners into the church; the solemn village church, with its high-backed pews, brass monuments, and marble effigies; the solemn little church, with the ivy nodding round the porch, and the damp making big blotches on the pavement.
The mourners shuffled into their seats, and the villagers came peering in with vacant looks.
“In the midst of life we are in death.” The words were repeated back again from the walls, and the kneeling effigies in stone seemed to take up the text and say it over again with the echoes.
The great black coffin stood in the chancel, and Arthur could not help picturing the dead face of the merchant.
How changed everything was. How sad, how hopeless! And yet Arthur’s own deep love, for a moment, lit up his thoughts with a hope that had scarcely had a place in his heart before; but he banished the thought in a moment as selfish.
Richard Tallant was there amongst the mourners, loudest in his Amens, and apparently most moved, as he should be, at the pathetic solemnity of the church service.
Arthur quietly walked over the fields to the Somertons, whilst the coffin was being laid in the grave.
A faint streak or two of sunlight struggled through the mist here and there, but with little or no influence on the soddened, damp atmosphere, which penetrated everything.
Arthur found Mrs. Somerton alone in a high-backed chair by the fire. He knew that he was no favourite with the bailiff’s wife; but he bade her “Good-morning” with a quiet courtesy peculiarly his own, and she was evidently not displeased at the visit.
“You have been ill, I fear,” said Arthur, noticing the unusual wrappers about the arm-chair, and Mrs. Somerton’s rather pale face.
“Yes, sir, very ill,” she said, in a subdued voice.
“I am sorry to hear it; but hope I may congratulate you upon having got over the worst of it.”
“I don’t know that there is much to congratulate about,” she said, looking at him with a sad expression in her big eyes; “but I have got over the worst of it, they say, thank you.”
“I was very much shocked to hear of Mr. Tallant’s death. I only heard of it yesterday,” said Arthur.
“What has become of you lately?—you have not been in this neighbourhood for a long time,” said Mrs. Somerton, evidently only attending to her own thoughts.
“I have been engaged on an important work, which has occupied me almost night and day for several months past,” Arthur said.
“Will you not sit down, sir?” Mrs. Somerton asked. “I am sorry I can’t get about to offer you a seat.”
Arthur sat down beside the neat bright fireplace, and looked into the burning coals with a variety of curious feelings: he longed to ask all kinds of questions, but feared to do so.
“Many strange things may occur in a few months,” said Mrs. Somerton; “the purpose of a life-time is easily upset.”
Arthur said nothing, but looked curiously up at the speaker.
“We all think we are very clever, and we go on planning and planning; but things are not to be as we like: there is a Power above us.”
“True,” said Arthur, “we must all bend to the decrees of Providence.”
“Ah! if we only knew that, at the beginning, Mr. Phillips,” said Mrs. Somerton earnestly, “if we could be content to learn that from other people’s experience: ‘better learn from your neighbour’s scathe than from your own;’ but we learn from our own, Mr. Phillips, we learn from our own.”
Arthur had upon a former occasion been struck with the snatches of moral and proverbial philosophy which characterised Mrs. Somerton’s conversations; but he had thought her a clever cynical countrywoman before, and had disliked her: now he rapidly felt himself beginning to take a deep interest in her.
“Folks that do wrong have generally plenty of excuses; but I have none worth the name of excuse, though they say a bad excuse is better than none. You are surprised at my talk: you will not be so before the night is over.”
“Surely nothing has happened that does not appear to me. Poor Mr. Tallant is dead, and you have been ill; is there anything else?” Arthur asked as calmly as he could.
“I won’t torture you,—I know your secret, sir. Miss Phœbe is well, though, poor soul, she is sadly cut up; but misery is no respecter of persons. Ambition and pride are the ruin of most people. You would hardly think I had been an ambitious, scheming woman, with plans far above the station I hold?” she went on excitedly.
“I have often thought that you would worthily fill a much higher position,” said Arthur.
“Ah, well, it is a long story, and I will not weary you with it; everybody thinks their own stories interesting to everybody else; but, there, mine need not be told. I have been an ambitious, scheming woman ever since I was a woman, and I have always been foiled. Half my life has been spent in studying how I should play the ace without knowing whether I held it or not, and in the other half I have been learning the truth of the proverb that wine poured out is not wine swallowed. Lincolnshire women have a way of talking in proverbs, Mr. Phillips: one can say a good deal like that without seeming to.”
Arthur was altogether at a loss to understand Mrs. Somerton; but he boded ill from all this apparent mystery, and yet a voice seemed to whisper hope all through it.
“You are in love with Miss Phœbe,” said Mrs. Somerton at length, and with singular abruptness; “I know it. I have not watched and watched with a mother’s eye for nothing, and I think the young lady loves you in return—if there is such a thing as love—and I begin to think there may be, or something better than love, something better than love.”
The woman repeated these latter words with unaffected tenderness as she remembered how kindly, how generously, how tenderly, her husband, Luke Somerton, had nursed her in her illness; how when he knew all, he had not upbraided her; how he had pitied her and bade her be of good heart, for that a wrong atoned for was a wrong undone; how in the early watches of the night she had seen him by her bedside wakeful and gentle, but yet manly, as she remembered him when he was young in the grand old Lincolnshire wolds.
“Something better than love,” she continued—“friendship, benevolence, charity, sympathy—I know not what you call it; but perhaps it may be love, after all,” she went on; “and I don’t think there is any wrong ambition about you, Mr. Phillips, if you will forgive me for saying so. A man who can sit in the sun painting pictures and all that sort of thing, and be content with it, can’t very well be much wrong, except that he is only a painter after all. Don’t be angry, sir; we never thought much of painters in Lincolnshire; we used to look at them the same as we did poets and such like; but I have heard that some of them make money, and can keep up a good house. However, I will say no more about that; but somehow, sir, I think you will find things going favourably, so far as Phœbe is concerned. We shall see; if such should be the case, Mr. Phillips, no matter what you hear of me, you will not forget that I was the first to give you hope—that will be something to think of, perhaps some little consolation to me.”
Arthur was too much agitated to ask any questions. He thanked Mrs. Somerton as well as he could for what she had said, and he began to look out into the future with hope.
We never know how unexpectedly Hope may pay us a gorgeous visit; how often she comes when we least expect her. With death barring his way, and funeral plumes crossing his path, Arthur Phillips could hardly have expected Hope to come by his side and whisper so confidently of happiness almost beyond his most sanguine thoughts. Once or twice in the darkness, once or twice between the acts of the day’s solemn drama, a faint whisper had lighted up his soul as we have seen; but here he stood at last almost in the full blaze of hope, and the light had come from the darkest of all places, in his own estimation.
And so Arthur sat and pondered, and Mrs. Somerton quietly regarding him, dosed off into a quiet slumber, induced by the fatigue of thought and conversation which Arthur’s visit had occasioned.
Far away amongst the Lincolnshire meadows, where the long, lazy river flowed by the corn-fields and lingered amongst the reeds and rushes; far away in the green and golden fields, and over the brown and loamy furrows; hemmed in by short hedges, and dotted here and there with ricks of hay and straw and stray clumps of trees; far away amongst Lincolnshire homesteads, and mills with their swinging sails, and square-towered churches, and broad lanes, and long teams of horses dragging well-stocked waggons; far away in the past the mind of the bailiff’s wife was wandering, and the dream was a happy one, for it dealt with childhood only.
Arthur stole out whilst she slept. The mists had crept about the valley and were hovering over the hill-tops.
He started off to visit some of the familiar scenes where he had sat in the long summer days, wondering and hoping and painting in hazy romantic dreams which were not all happiness.
His thoughts were strangely mixed and intricate now: a host of anxious feelings had been awakened which he could not control, and which he could hardly understand.
“Gone—are you gone?” said Mrs. Somerton, awaking from her brief sleep.
“No, I am here,” said her husband, removing a crape hatband from his hat and laying it upon the table.
“Ah, it’s you, Luke; I have had Mr. Phillips, the painter, here.”
“Yes,” said Luke—“yes; and what has he to say for himself?” asked the bailiff.
“Not much; I think I have done all the talking, Luke. And so you have buried the poor gentleman?” she went on, mournfully.
“Yes, poor fellow; not many better men ever were buried than he,” said Luke.
“And now—now they are going to read the will, I suppose?”
“They were all going into the dining-room as I came past. The lawyer asked me to come in; but I thought you’d be lonely, Sarah, and so I came home.”
Mrs. Somerton could not help thinking that Luke had better have stayed and heard the will read; but she was too considerate now, to say so.
“You are very kind, Luke; but how shall we know all about it?”
“Oh, I forgot that; I’ll go back,” said Luke.
“Do; I should like to hear it all from your own lips, Luke.”
And the bailiff returned just in time to hear the various clauses read.
When he was gone, Arthur Phillips came back again to the bailiff’s house, determined to learn why he had so suddenly filled himself with hopes that excited him beyond description. He would not be content with vague hints and proverbial sayings, and he would not conceal his own feelings with regard to Miss Tallant. Mrs. Somerton could evidently help him in some way or another; she knew more than she chose to tell; she knew what he ought to know, and he would endeavour to learn what she did know.
Mrs. Somerton did not need much persuasion to reveal her secret. She knew that in a few hours Arthur would know it, and it was a satisfactory sort of penance to tell him herself, and to confess all her plotting and meannesses; to disclose to him her feelings with regard to herself; to show how jealous she was of her daughter; and to point some of her moral aphorisms with illustrations from this last phase of the failure of her schemes.
It was indeed a new light this to Arthur. He had dreamed of all sorts of contingencies which might bring Phœbe nearer to him, and his only hope was in the production of some great work that should open up a golden vista which the merchant might comprehend; for Arthur had always regarded Mr. Tallant as the wealthy commoner who gauged men and things by money, and this had disheartened him even more than the thoughts of his own shortcomings and the beauty of her whom he had been rash enough to go on loving without daring even to hint at his passion.
And now fate had decreed that this difficulty should disappear. Did he blame Phœbe’s mother? No. He sat before her stupified with amazement.
His first thought, now that the great barrier of all was cleared away, was of his own unworthiness; but he had courage enough to tell Mrs. Somerton that she had excited hopes which had never before dared to mount so high. He had heard her story with the greatest surprise, and, but that his own heart hoped and desired its truth, it was almost too extraordinary for belief.
Supposing he dared to hope that Phœbe loved him, had he her mother’s consent to ask her the question?
Mrs. Somerton replied in the affirmative. There were many ways in which amends might be made towards wiping out great wrongs, and it seemed as if God had spared her life that she might have time to repair nearly all the injury she had done.