And these were the happy days of the courtship of Phœbe and Arthur. They came with the spring blossoms, opening up a bright new future to both.
Yes, happy days, perfectly happy. Philosophy says there is no perfect happiness. Mr. Williamson would smile with quiet amazement at your simplicity if you held that anybody had been perfectly happy, even for an hour. But then, you know, he had been hit in his early days, and the remembrance of his own transient approach to a sense of happiness may have embittered his later existence.
Arthur Phillips, a year ago, would have entered into an abstract argument with you upon the subject. He would have told you, with Guizot, that the study of art perhaps contained the highest elements of happiness; that, in the abstract, it was altogether unconnected with the struggles and contests of ordinary life. Although he would have told you that Guizot’s charming views about the study of art did not always apply to the practice of it, he would have defended his opinion of the unselfishness of a pure taste for the beautiful in art, and demonstrated to you that it brought into play and had the power of exciting the deepest emotions, gratifying both the nobler and softer parts of our nature,—the imagination and the judgment, love of emotion and power of reflection, the enthusiasm and the critical faculty, the senses and the reason;—but the painter would have sighed as he quoted this enthusiastic commendation of art, and thought how far short all this was from perfect happiness.
To ramble about that old cathedral, to think of that dear, sweet face, was happiness; yet it left so much to long for and regret, that sometimes the pain was greater than the happiness.
But as he sits beside that fair girl in the farmer’s parlour, what does he think of happiness now? The philosopher says perfect happiness was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of man, but that He has given us the power of an exceeding near approach to it. And we do not hesitate to say, that He does give to some mortals a foretaste of that perfect happiness which is to be the undying prize of the future day.
A wise lady, and a duchess, too, has said that our happiness in this world depends on the affection we are enabled to inspire. Let Phœbe and Arthur be judged by this standard, and they are to be envied indeed. To sit hand in hand, to walk and talk with freedom of their love, of the little incidents of past days, to recall their moments of doubt, and look back to times of utter hopelessness, to trace their little acts of sympathy from the first days of their love, to recall that grand festival beneath the cathedral roof, to think of the days when each loved the other in secret and in fear and dread and in solitude! Was not this perfect happiness?
Friend Greybeard, does not the old love break out afresh as you contemplate two lovers like these? Don’t you remember the old dream? If there is a picture in thy brain such as that of which sings the poet whose scrap of rhyme, with an American name at the bottom, has just attracted my attention in the corner of the county newspaper, do not shut it out.
Let the old dream nestle in thine heart; there is nothing else therein so beautiful. Don’t you remember what noble, unselfish things you would have done in those days? What were capital and interest, and shares at par or premium or discount to thee, except so far as money might concern her happiness? You have not seen that curl of hair, wrapped in faded paper, and put away in the dark corner of that old desk, for years. Take it out, old friend; there is nothing unmanly in thy tears, for it is manly to have loved, and it is better even “to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” It is something to have the memory of those happy times. You were happy, whatever you may say to the contrary, you know you were—ten times happier when she smiled and returned the pressure of your hand than you are now at the prosperous state of markets and the thrift of your firm. You may deny it; but the old times come back in the firelight, old friend, do they not, when the heart confesses its own bitterness? Don’t deny it, and don’t look ashamed at your own shadow in the glass, when you unfold that poor little curl.
The happiness of Arthur and Phœbe was something to look upon and be happy at. If Asmodeus had taken you to that model farm-house, that you might have been a calm spectator of the love that had folded his wings and settled down there beside that hearth, you would have been happier for the sight. For it was a catching happiness, that of Phœbe and Arthur; an epidemic of joy and bliss and peace. You could not possibly have come within a yard of its influence without feeling a certain delight. If you happened to be a young fellow, a slight touch of envy might, perhaps, have struggled into your heart and embittered the sight; for Phœbe might have struck you as the realisation of all your dreams of beauty, so soft, and gentle, and pulpy, and rosy, and innocent, and loving.
We only meet with those beauties in books, you say, and in pictures. But this is a common calumny upon English women. Such beauties as Phœbe Somerton are rare, no doubt; but there are tender, kitten-like, innocent, candid, pretty girls like her in many an English county. Ay, and girls as good and true and generous. If our friend Mr. Williamson were criticising this book for the Pyrotechnic, he would probably say at this point that so far as the heroines are concerned, the male novelist usually describes his characters as the perfection of beauty and goodness, impossibly lovely, impossibly true and generous; whilst the lady novelist combines beauty with devilry, and makes her charming women fiends beyond the imagination of men; and as Mr. W. has a smart epigrammatic way of writing, he would possibly say that whilst most men draw women as they ought to be, most women depict them as they ought not to be, and the public are waiting to see them painted as they are.
We need not take the trouble to convince the Pyrotechnic that Phœbe Somerton is drawn to the life, if the Pyrotechnic thinks otherwise; but let us tell you, friendly reader, who has accompanied us, paper-knife in hand, that Phœbe Somerton was all we have described her in beauty and in gentleness and truth. And no wonder that she had been attracted by Arthur Phillips, with his big, black, melancholy eyes, and his fine intellectual face. One good nature speedily detects its counterpart in another, and it was a testimonial of high and noble character to be loved by a woman like Phœbe. Love perpetrates strange, mad freaks, but it would have been next to impossible for a pure nature like Phœbe’s to have allied itself with another that was unworthy.
Luke Somerton and his wife grew quite genial in the presence of the radiating love-beams that seemed to shine about the lovers; and the bailiff thought about his young days in the great Lincolnshire fens and wolds. He and his elder brother had quarrelled when they were boys, about Sarah Howard, his present wife. Luke had loved her passionately, and had been persistent in his attentions towards her; but Sarah played her cards to win the elder brother, who would come in for the great bulk of the property. She was worldly, as you have seen, and had fixed upon doing great things if she married the elder Somerton. But it was only Luke who really loved her; his brother flirted with her, and eventually married a rich widow, whereupon Sarah Howard was fain to be content with Luke, who had quarrelled with his brother, not because his brother loved Sarah, but because he did not. For Luke, like a great, fond Lincolnshire lad as he was, on learning that Miss Howard liked his elder brother better than himself, had actually given her up, and called upon his brother to marry her. And now Luke looked back to these days, and remembered the time when Sarah had professed to return his love, and when they walked to the church through the meadows, and over the bridge that spanned the sparkling beck; and he heard the half-a-dozen bells ringing afterwards,—heard them now after all those years: and he was happier in these memories because he knew that these two lovers really loved each other, both of them as truly as he had loved Sarah Howard.
Mrs. Somerton would now and then become quite cheerful, and tell Arthur in fun how she had disliked him once, because she could see he was after Amy; and this would start conversations and confessions that gave the greatest pleasure to all concerned.
Arthur would bring Phœbe bundles of newspapers and magazines in which his pictures were criticised. And Phœbe would blush with delight over the praises there bestowed upon her lover, and look dreadfully astonished when any critic threw in some adverse suggestion or observation. The Pyrotechnic said Arthur Phillips was at the head of his profession; no previous artist had combined landscape and figure painting with the success which had crowned his efforts: he was Salvator Rosa and Wilkie in one. Happily the higher class journals and the art magazines were more judicious in their commendations than this, but they all agreed that Mr. Phillips had a genius for painting, and knew how to put that genius into his pictures; so the artist was not only on the high-road to lasting fame, but to monetary competence. He therefore talked to Phœbe of their future with confidence, and Mrs. Somerton was not a little pleased to learn that after all her daughter would be the wife of a thriving man.
There was something prophetic, Arthur thought, in his title of that picture which had given the finishing touch to his professional reputation; and Phœbe pressed his arm as he said so whilst they were walking up to the summer-house on those dear Berne Hills. Something quite prophetic! That gleam of inspiration which had fallen upon him in connection with those poor emigrants could only have been a stroke of Destiny: the tide was at the flood, and Fate pointed in the right direction. “Seeking New Homes!” It was the key-note to all the recent events in their history. They were all on the eve of seeking new homes: Mr. Somerton, Mrs. Somerton, Paul Somerton, Miss Tallant, and Phœbe, and himself. New homes! What a pleasant, happy ring there was in the words! Arthur drew all sorts of imaginary word-pictures of their home in the future; and it was a paradise indeed, with such a studio, where Phœbe should have an easel, too,—such a home, the home of Love and Art!
If Arthur grew enthusiastically poetic in the contemplation of this future, who could feel surprised? Walking abroad with Phœbe Somerton hanging on his arm, betrothed to him, almost mated like the birds that were building their nests all round about them. Was it not a poetic time? Is there any period of the year more eloquent to lovers, more fairy-like, more hopeful than Spring?
And Spring in that Berne Hill country! Alike in every other season you saw all the special beauties of the time in the neighbourhood of Barton Hall. Standing near the summer-house (where Richard Tallant played the eaves-dropper to that naïve conversation, of which he reminded his sister so recently), Arthur and Phœbe may well feel that their lines have been cast in pleasant places; that Heaven is dealing tenderly with them; that the future will be a blessed time like this. The sky above them is full of blue and white,—great silver mountains piled upon each other in an azure sea. A lark is mounting upwards, with a cheery song that is answered by a thousand wood-notes in the grove beneath. Far away on every side stretch the green fields dotted with homesteads and villages, past which winds the river sparkling in the sun. Old church towers and steeples peep over the tree-tops in quiet glades, and white wreaths of smoke in the distance mark the course of railway trains hurrying on their way to London. A misty cloud, half-penetrated by the sun, hangs over the Linktown Hills, and envelopes the sharp outlines that come out here and there in undulating curves, picturesque indications of their graceful lines of beauty. How eloquently Arthur dwelt upon the glories of this great picture of Nature’s own painting!
The trees were clothed with delicate verdant tints, through which the graceful shapes of the budding branches were seen, and the white birch did indeed stand out like the fair lady of the woods, nodding her pretty head and shaking her tresses to the music of the birds. Phœbe hushed Arthur’s voice at the piping of a nightingale in a copse hard by, and the artist recalled old Izaak Walton’s exclamation, “Lord, what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth!”
Whether it was the associations of the place with former times or the words “bad men” that set Phœbe thinking of the time when the wickedness of Richard Tallant was first strongly put before her, listeth not; but she began to talk of Amy and of Lionel Hammerton.
“Do you think Mr. Hammerton was really fond of Amy?” she asked.
“I do, indeed,” said Arthur.
“Were they engaged to be married?”
“Oh no, I think not; there was nothing so serious between them as that.”
“So serious!” repeated Phœbe, archly.
“So sweet,” said Arthur, promptly and tenderly—“serious is the conventional phrase.”
“Why did he neglect her? Did he speak of her unkindly when he left England?”
“He said something about Paul—her brother in those days, you know, when you were Miss Tallant—something about prying into his affairs.”
“Indeed!”
“Paul had followed him to the club, and warned him against some persons who were conspiring to win his money at cards.”
“Oh yes, I remember something of it; but I was not aware that the surveillance had gone so far. Mr. Hammerton was being deceived, I think, Amy said. There was a plot against him, she thought; but, poor girl, she was so deeply in love with him.”
“He felt annoyed that she had interfered in his private doings,” said Arthur; “he thought it was officious, I suppose.”
“Was that all?” asked Phœbe. “Then he did not love her.”
Arthur had too much regard for his old friend even now to hint that Lionel thought Amy was influenced by mere worldly motives.
“And you think he really loves Amy now?” said Phœbe, half-aloud, half to herself.
“Not as I love you,” said Arthur; “but our love, dearest, is a love apart from any other love; it seems to me that nobody in the whole world is blessed like I am with a love so generous, so noble. What have I done that I should deserve so much happiness?”
“Dear Arthur!” was all Phœbe could say, and then for a time they forgot all the world but themselves and the trees and flowers and grasses and the distant hills and the spring sky above them, with the hopeful lark in the sunshine, and the nightingale singing in the shade.
What a delightful path it was, that old familiar way by which they returned to the farm! Wood-sorrel, buttercups, sweet woodroof, primroses, and violets bespangled and scented the way; green grasses and ferns shot out like emerald spikes and crooks from amongst dead leaves that autumn winds had left in out-of-the-way corners. The lake in the shadow of the hills shone here and there through the trees like glints of silver, and the sunbeams sparkled white and shimmery on the windows of Barton Hall. At length the lovers stopped beside a rustic stile near the foot of the hills—one of those old-fashioned, moss-grown, lichen-coloured stiles, which give such additional charms to straggling hedge-rows, with great clumps of flowering hawthorn here and there at the top, and patches of red and brown and amber in the old roots at the bottom. Beneath a bending branch of budding May-flowers Arthur pointed out the spot where he had sat for hours to paint and think of her in the summer-time, and she saw that the place commanded a full view of the room where she mostly sat.
Oh, what a happy time it was! The spring wind went about the woods in gentle murmurs, as if it were saying so in every nook and corner. “How are you, old friend?” it seemed to say every now and then, as it rustled the young leaves of an oak or an elm—“glad to see you looking so well—pleasant day;” and the trees seemed to nod and look happy, and congratulate each other that the south wind had come again, and the ash trees shook their jangling locks with delight. Everything seemed to say the winter is over, and we are glad of it and sure of it. The frogs croaked by the margin of the lake, and the crows replied as they winged their way over them up into the elms that glassed themselves in the deep. Bees hummed musically in the air, and darted into the midst of great yellow buttercups as if in very wantonness of joy. What a happy time it was! Everything seemed to say so—birds and trees and hills and fields. There was a general jubilation of Nature, such as the Psalmist might have had in his mind when he sang, “Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord.”
Happy days! Why do we dwell upon them? It is not easy to close any page which has spring sunshine in it. We have all of us so many dear, treasured associations with it, bringing us back to the spring-time of life when the world looked so hopeful and charming—when there were flowers of love and friendship in our paths, and we knew nothing of the thorns that lurked beneath them.